Sweetpea

by C. J. Skuse

  My breasts still ache and I can’t lie on my front, which is one of my favourite things to do in the world. I’ve bought another pregnancy test but I’m scared to do it in case it really is positive this time. I’m on the Pill for Christ’s sake, I thought that was supposed to be 100 per cent effective?

  Oh, I’ve just googled it. Only 99 per cent effective. Ridiculous.

  If I am up the stick, that’s basically it, isn’t it? I then become a fully fledged PICSO – one of that large group of saggy-uddered knackered females trudging along with pushchairs the size of small cars, shouting at their kids and pretending they enjoy going to Jungle Gyms and Little Flippers swimming classes and wanging on about Junior’s chickenpox and how many times they got up in the night. I’ll have to baby-proof the flat and get rid of all the dangly blind cords and baby-proof the cupboards and put the bleach up high and ugggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh…

  No, no way. Baby Criannon is Not. Happening.

  Hang on – I’m a fucking serial killer, aren’t I? I’ll just flush it out. I’ll up my gin intake and take more hot baths. Or I’ll go to the doctor and order an aborsh. Easy-peasy. Why the hell am I panicking? I’m not panicking, no, I’m angry. That fucking pill should have worked. Maybe it has. Maybe I’m angry over nothing.

  Wouldn’t be the first time.

  Daisy Chan treated me to lunch. Pizza at La Vela down by the harbour side. Her blouse today was an off-the-charts atrocity – some black and diamond tight number that I imagine Jessie J wearing if she fell down a mineshaft. I learned Daisy has a husband who’s recently become the store manager for Carphone Warehouse. They have two kids – can’t remember either of their names – and she had several miscarriages in between each one.

  Quid Pro Quo – I then had to tell her about Me. She is a journalist after all – I was never going to get away with ‘Oh, I just live with Craig and we have a dog’ thing. She wanted dirt. She wanted Priory Gardens, the celebrity years, the reason there’s a whole file on my dad in the filing system at the Gazette offices, the lot.

  ‘How’s your face today?’

  ‘Oh, fine, thanks. Arnica cream – magic.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard a few people say that actually. So have you always lived round here or…?’

  ‘No, we lived in Bristol until a couple of years after Priory Gardens then we moved down. My mum died when I was in my teens but Dad lived there till the last week of his life.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Me and my sister are selling it. I started looking into Inheritance Tax laws this week. Boy, is she going to be pissed when I tell her how much we’ve got to cough up.’

  ‘How does a family get over something like that? Priory Gardens, I mean.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I said. ‘In our case it just slowly falls apart. My mum and dad did the celebrity thing for a while, made a shitload of money doing public appearances. TV shows. Charity events raising money for brain injured kids. I don’t really remember going but I’ve seen the YouTube clips so I know I was there.’

  ‘I remember you on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.’

  ‘Yeah. My mum did most of the talking but I got presents and met Ryan Gosling so that was cool.’

  ‘You said you and your sister are selling their house?’

  ‘Yeah. Our parents are both dead now – Dad died two years ago this summer – so we have to get rid of it. She wants her cut.’

  A woman on an opposite table started having a coughing fit due to ‘a tickle in her throat’. It took every bit of willpower to not walk over there and strangle it out of her. I hate being interrupted.

  Daisy sipped her Coke. ‘I was looking through the files yesterday, actually, for something completely unrelated, when I came across one for your dad, Tommy.’

  ‘Oh, you must know all about him then.’

  ‘No, I didn’t read it. Not yet. I just wondered…’

  I was in a good mood so I helped her out. ‘He used to fight for the county, before he became a builder, so he’s quite well known around these parts.’

  ‘He was a soldier?’

  ‘No, a boxer. Middleweight. Couldn’t go into a pub or a supermarket in this town without someone calling out to him or shaking his hand.’

  ‘Wow. Bit of a hero then?’

  I nodded. ‘Priory Gardens changed him. He’d pick a fight with anyone. He blamed himself, cos he was the one who’d dropped me off.’

  ‘Poor man. What did he go to prison for?’

  ‘You’ve seen his file. You must know.’

  A baby started crying somewhere else in the restaurant.

  She looked down at her watch – it was a nice watch, rose gold with crystals around the face. ‘Maybe we should start heading back.’

  ‘He picked me up from school one day,’ I told her. ‘How old was I – I dunno, I was walking again by then so I would have been maybe nine or ten, but still not talking very well. Said he had an errand to run before we went home and we could get an ice cream if I was good. We parked up in this back street and he told me to wait in the car. I watched him go through the back gate of this red-brick house.’

  ‘An affair?’

  I laughed. The crying baby was being jiggled about. ‘Not an affair. He was gone ages so I went over the road to see where he was. The back door of the house was unlocked and, as soon as I walked in the kitchen, I heard it. This thwacking sound, like a whip. I walked into this lounge-diner and at the end there was this man strapped to a chair. These four other men, maybe five, were standing around, taking it in turns to hit him, punch him. Gouge his eyes out. Stamp on his legs – I heard one of them snap like a thick stick. One of them had pliers and was pulling at his teeth. That was the first time I’d heard the C word. And the P word.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she gasped. ‘What’s the P word?’ Daisy frowned.

  ‘Paedophile,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know they existed till then. They kept saying it – “Dirty old paedo. Take that, ya paedo.” I recognised one of the men from my dad’s boxing club – I used to go and spar with the younger boys sometimes. Helped me get my aggression out. I struggled with that after Priory Gardens. Anyway, Dad saw me, and I turned and ran back out to the car. I sat in the passenger’s seat, waiting, terrified he was going to be mad at me. About five minutes later, he came back and sat in the driver’s seat and just looked at me. I remember his top lip was sweating and his pupils had blown.

  Daisy looked spellbound. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He just wanted to know what I’d seen. Dad was the only one who could get the odd word out of me. I asked him why they were hitting the man and he said they all had kids my age and that this man had hurt kids. He asked me not to tell anyone what I’d seen, not that I could, and he said he trusted me. I valued that. I valued being in his confidence. It made me feel powerful.’

  I left out the bit about asking Dad if I could go in and see the man’s body as he lay dying. And the way I saw Dad in a whole new light – like he was suddenly magical in my eyes. I was just about making a bridge across the river of my weirdness in her eyes and I feared that would cause a few of the planks to fall.

  ‘That must have affected you, seeing all that at such a young age.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, before realising that, yes, of course it must have affected a normal child. ‘Well, yeah, I wet the bed almost daily. Had nightmares, the usual.’

  ‘Poor thing. So you were a witness for the crime he went down for?’ she said.

  ‘No, he did time for a different guy’s beating, a few years later.’

  ‘This was a regular thing then?’

  ‘Yeah. They called it “sending the boys round”. If there was someone in your neighbourhood who needed a good kicking or warning off, that’s what you did, you sent the boys round. Nobody talked about it, it was just an understanding. The police tried to pin the disappearance of three other men on him, all with sex offences on their cards, but they had no evidence. No witnesses. Dad was pretty careful. He did four years but two
of his mates did life.’

  ‘Do you think he was a murderer?’

  I shrugged. Flashes of Dad’s sweating face as he dropped Pete McMahon head first into the hole crackled through my mind like lightning. The sight of his strong hands gripped around that guy’s neck in that warehouse. Stamping on that guy’s head in that back alley. ‘No idea.’ I smiled, slurping my banana milkshake.

  On the way back to the office, I realised what she was getting at with all the questions about Dad.

  ‘Daisy, if you think any of my dad’s friends is The Reaper, I can assure you that you’re barking up the wrong one.’

  ‘It was just something that occurred to me when I saw his file. One of the victims – a sex offender called Lyle Devaney – was thrown into the quarry. Like Julia Kidner. Like the men in the blue van.’

  ‘The guy who Dad knew at the quarry’s in jail now. Actually most of them are still in jail. They only let Dad out because he was dying.’

  ‘Your Craig worked with your dad, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. But he knows nothing about all that stuff. And, yes, before you find out from someone else, he worked at the quarry for a year before he joined my dad but I promise you, Craig’s not a vigilante. He’s not the type.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My mind just goes into overdrive sometimes. It’s such an interesting case, isn’t it? It’s keeping me awake at night.’

  I had to give Daisy her due – work never kept me awake at night. Maybe she had been the right woman for the junior editor job after all.

  Once that was cleared up, our conversation hit lighter notes – how things were going generally, how much she was loving the job, how much her kids were loving school, AJ’s crush on me, all the pranks we’d been pulling on Linus. Apparently, Linus was a lot quieter over on that side of the office these days and Daisy had an inkling it was down to us. God, she was perceptive. I thought we’d been discreet but she’d spotted it right from the blue ChapStick.

  We were passing the shoe shop when I saw her, walking in the other direction – the woman with the yellow scarf from Blue Van Men night. Except she didn’t have on a yellow scarf. She had on a peach cardigan and a grey skirt and she was carrying a white handbag on her forearm. My chest tightened at the sight of her. And it was definitely her but she looked utterly changed from the last time I’d seen her when she’d been all mascara-smudged, twiggy-hair and torn clothes. She looked sharp, hair all done, a vigour in her step. She saw me, I saw her, but neither of us said a word. As she passed, I afforded a look behind me. So did she.

  Neither of us said a word.

  And the police still had no witnesses. Apart from the cow rat, that is.

  Yay yay yay. So far, anyway.

  About 3 p.m., Linus Sixgill jumped away from his desk in a fit of absolute hysterics – there was a cockroach in his sandwich. AJ winked at me and Claudia saw. Sure enough, I came out of the Ladies’ around 4 p.m. and she was there waiting. I’d just done my second pregnancy test – another negative. She probably heard the choirs of angels in my ears.

  ‘Rhiannon, could I have a quick word, please?’

  And I don’t know where it came from but I started crying, right there in the corridor outside the lavs with the hand dryer still whirring inside and Krystle from Sales brushing past us ‘desperate for a pee pee’.

  ‘Oh, goodness. Hang on,’ said Claudia, ushering me along the corridor and up the stairs towards Conference Room B. The pitcher of water was still in the middle of the table, still with its film of dust on the surface, only this time accompanied by a plate of Fondant Fancies and chocolate fingers which someone had been fingering.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said, holding me by my forearms as I stood before her. But I didn’t have to say anything. She just guessed. Or rather, thought she had guessed. ‘Another negative? Oh, sweetpea, I am so, so sorry.’

  And she hugged me. She fucking hugged me! The veiny-footed shrew with permanent coffee breath who’d called me a freak and given me that pissing market report to type up every month held me as tightly as I’d ever been held and stroked my hair and cried along with me. ‘I know exactly what you’re going through.’

  She pulled back and gently held my head, like I was a flower and she had just inhaled my face. ‘It will happen, you’ve got to believe that,’ she said. ‘You still have plenty of time to get pregnant.’

  I nodded and sobbed again and she held me against her shoulder and rocked me. I felt her tears on the top of my head. ‘I wish I could take the pain away for you. Oh, darling. Is Craig upset as well?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I know, I know. Sssh.’

  She was saying all the right things, being the perfect understanding mother a child would need. Except she didn’t have a kid. Even I could see that was a shame.

  Once we’d both sniffed away our tears and had an stilted chat over a mint tea in the staffroom – she cleared everyone else out – we went back to work and she actually gave me some fun things to do for the afternoon – a follow-up story on the drugs bust at Paint the Town Red and an interview with the owner of a new sex shop in the town – Oh, Behave. AND I got praise for it. I got, ‘Well done, sweetpea.’

  It was the most enjoyable day I’d had at work since the day Ron caught his foot in Claudia’s handbag and headbutted his office door open.

  Saturday, 4 May

  1.Chemists who think they are doctors but are twice as patronising. Also, I KNOW you haven’t memorised every ‘three for two’ in the shop, I was just asking if you could check whether your offer on make-up applies to nail varnish as well, you dribbling, sour-faced cock socket

  2.YouTubers – any discernible talent to be found here? Anyone?

  3.People who go on social media and bitch about people posting spoilers – just watch the fucking programme already!

  4.Grown women who wear pigtails

  5.People who say ‘May the Fourth Be With You’ every year on this day

  There’s a royal visit to the town pending – praise be! It’s not going to be one of the biggies: some duke who once shot a lion on safari but everyone seems to have forgotten that because he ran a marathon for bowel cancer. I’ve never been keen on the royals. I don’t like their policy on killing defenceless creatures. I know I’m one to talk but still.

  Saw a woman get knocked off her bike today in town. I laughed at first. Everyone around me acted as though it was the most shocking thing they’d ever seen.

  How do people do that shock/gasp thing with their faces? How do they look so stupefied? How do they do that with their eyebrows? I tried it, because everyone else around me was doing it, but I wasn’t shocked and I didn’t feel like gasping. It was all so forced, like when I had to give my mum a cuddle as a kid or when I was expected to cry but it just felt like rain trickling down a window. Someone else’s window.

  It’s like when Pidge WhatsApped us all yesterday to say she’d miscarried her baby. They ALL said they were ‘so sorry’; ‘Can’t believe it’; ‘Aww, hun, it’s not fair, is it?’ I wasn’t shocked at all. I don’t think I know what shock feels like. I sent her a ‘so sorry take care’ message but was I sorry? Did I want her to take care? It had nothing to do with me after all. It wasn’t my baby or my loss. I never feel the sorry I’m supposed to feel. The sorry that others feel.

  Had my hair cut – unfortunately I got the same stylist as last time who harps on about her crush on Benedict Cumberbatch and how she stalks him on film locations. Sometimes I google photos of real crime scenes while I’m in the chair, just to shut her up but today all I wanted to do was sleep.

  I did another psychopath quiz online, just to check a few things and I made a concerted effort to answer each and every question absolutely honestly this time.

  Do I often get others to pay for things for me? – Yes, namely Craig.

  Are you impatient? – Yes, very.

  Were you a problem child? – After Priory Gardens, yes, I suppose I was. Everyone had a problem with me not speaking and bi
ting other kids. And the whole hurting my sister thing didn’t go down too well either.

  Have you committed any crimes? – Yes. Lots.

  Do you believe you are exceptional? – I am exceptional so yes.

  Did you have imaginary friends growing up? – Several.

  Are you often bored and do you quickly lose interests in set tasks? – Have you seen my set tasks? Duh.

  Are you basically an honest person? – Inside my head, yes.

  Do you believe most people around you are stupid? – I don’t believe it, they are stupid.

  Do you enjoy manipulating the feelings of others? – Well, it’s so easy, isn’t it?

  Are your problems mostly the fault of other people? – Of course they are.

  RESULT: 92 per cent.

  Fucking hell – I’m getting worse!

  There was a picture of Ralph Fiennes dressed as Voldemort next to my percentage again. The advice from BuzzFeed was to ‘try to be more social (without kidnapping anyone), and see how you feel, you might like it!’

  They obviously don’t know me at all.

  Sunday, 5 May

  AJ WhatsApped me with a photograph of some pile cream and a question mark alongside it.

  I text back: No, I think we should call it a day on the Sixgill pranks, don’t you? It’s getting a bit childish. Also, your auntie’s on the warpath again. I put a little witch emoji at the end.

  He texted: Ugh, dammit followed by a puking emoji. But how else are we gonna pass the time at work?

  I said: We could murder him maybe? Cut off his head with the fire axe?

  He sent back a series of hysterical smiley emojis and: Good one. Maybe you’ll get your promotion then!

  I sent back Fat chance with an accompanying gif of Rebel Wilson dancing.

  He returned with a gif of Melissa McCarthy twerking and another succession of maniacal emojis.

  He’s not that bad really, for a toddler.

  Monday, 6 May

  1.People who don’t acknowledge you when you flash your lights to let them pull out of a side road