Sweetpea

by C. J. Skuse

  He dropped his rucksack to the floor. ‘What do you mean, you know?’

  ‘I’ve known about it since Christmas. How did you find out?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter… you’ve known about this for six months?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He laughed. ‘And you still want him?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He shook his head. ‘Rhiannon, I’ve loved you since the first moment I met you. You’re all I think about. When I’m talking to other women, I’m comparing them to you.’

  ‘I see you talking to Lana and Daisy all the time at work. You flirt with both of them.’

  ‘It’s only talking, that’s all. Daisy’s just a mate. And Lana’s… well, she’s batshit.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not batshit?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m crazy about you. I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me about the baby. I want to be a dad.’

  ‘You want to travel, AJ. You told me once you never want to put down roots. The last thing you want is a ball and chain around your ankle.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘So what are you going to do then? Move permanently here and get a full-time office job? No more surfing, no more travelling. Gonna exchange your skateboard for a nice hatchback?’

  ‘I wish you loved me half as much as I love you. I wish you’d give me a chance.’

  ‘It’s a crush, that’s all. You don’t love me. I’m fundamentally unloveable. I’m happy with Craig. He lets me be me.’

  And then he got angry. I’d never seen AJ angry before. He kicked his rucksack across the wooden floor, sending it crashing against the occasional table and making the lamp wobble. ‘You won’t say it, will you? You never say it back.’

  ‘It’s just not the same for me.’

  ‘Where is he? Where’s Craig now?’

  ‘Holland. He’s watching all the England matches. Things run to their usual form, he’ll be home this time tomorrow.’

  ‘Right, well I’m gonna tell him I know. And make him tell you too.’

  ‘What will that achieve?’

  ‘It’ll get this out in the open. It’ll force him to make a choice.’

  ‘He has made a choice – me. He’s deleted her number from his phone. I checked. All this is pointless.’

  ‘I’ll tell him about the baby then. I’ll tell him it’s mine.’

  My chest tightened. I fixed my eyes on him. ‘No, you bloody won’t.’

  ‘I will. I swear I will.’

  ‘Have you told Claudia? About the baby?’

  ‘No, not yet. I wanted to wait for you. I wanted us to tell her together.’

  ‘Well that’s not happening.’

  ‘She’s got a good lawyer.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘No, of course not. I just know he’ll be able to tell me my rights, that’s all. I want to be involved.’

  ‘What if I don’t want you involved?’

  ‘You can’t just decide that. That baby is half mine.’

  ‘No, it’s all mine. It’s my poppy seed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just fuck off, AJ. And take your blackmail with you. I need a coffee.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. We have to talk this through. Wait – I thought you were off coffee?’ He lingered by the breakfast bar. ‘Look at me, Rhee.’ I looked at him. ‘We could be your family, me and Auntie Claude. She’d love it, you know how desperate she is to have a baby about the place. The nursery’s there, waiting. It’ll be perfect! It could work, I know it could.’

  I grabbed the kettle and filled it from the tap. ‘Yeah? How?’

  ‘When we’re done travelling, we can live with her.’

  ‘Live with the Gulp Monster? Christ, no.’ I unhooked a mug from the mug tree.

  ‘I love you, Rhiannon. I want you with me. I don’t know how many more times I can say it.’

  ‘Why do you love me?’

  ‘Huh? I don’t know, I just do. I can’t help it.’

  ‘Just go, just leave me be.’

  The kettle began to reach temperature. I could feel everything slipping away from me. My hands on the rope sliding. My feet kicking around for footholds but finding nothing but air. Craig meant Happiness. Craig meant Honey Cottage. Craig meant a future. And now there was this lanky Australian standing in front of it all, refusing to get out of the way, telling me I could come and live with him and The Gulp Monster, who’ll call me Sweetpea and be all micro-managing and ‘Oh, the baby looked like he needed a bath so I gave it one, hope that’s all right,’ and ‘Oh, the baby was crying so I thought I’d give it a breastfeed, hope that’s all right,’ and ‘Oh, I’ve enrolled the foetus at private school and measured her up for a uniform, hope that was all right.’

  UGH! No. No. No. No. No.

  It was like a fog clearing in my mind. Once I’d decided, that was that.

  ‘You know I only shagged you to keep your mouth shut, don’t you, AJ?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t blab what I told you about Gavin White.’

  The smile began to disappear from his face. ‘Don’t say that. I told you I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘And how long will that secret last? Till the next time I piss you off?’ I opened the drawer and grabbed a teaspoon.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Do it. Tell the world, I don’t care. You can tell them about Dan Wells, too, if you like.’ I opened the fridge to get the milk. I put it down beside the knife block.

  ‘Who? The guy in the canal?’

  ‘Yeah. And Julia Kidner. And Derek Scudd. And the two men in the blue van. And my sister’s boyfriend…’

  ‘What?

  The kettle clicked. The water boiled. The steam rose. My hand on the handle.

  ‘It was me,’ I said, lifting the kettle. ‘I killed them all.’

  And then I pulled off the lid and threw the water in his face.

  *

  There’s never an Ebola outbreak going round when you want one, is there? It’s just turned 2.48 p.m. and they’ve opened the vodka and are singing ‘I Will Survive’ at a volume somewhere between church bell and AK-47. I’m pretending to join in and laugh along but mostly I’m checking ‘important emails for work’ as the ancient minibus Lucille has hired rattles along the motorway.

  Anni pulled out at the last minute, the bitch – Sam’s got a rash – so that’s my chance of intelligent conversation up the Swannee. I’m sitting beside a girl I’ve never met before called Gemma (or Jenna, I didn’t actually hear) and she is apparently Pidge’s best friend from Guides or Brownies or somewhere, again, I didn’t hear because the bus is old and clanky and there’s a deep-rooted smell of Chewits making me gag. Pidge is sat next to her. All the ‘bad girls’ are at the back flashing their tits at passing cars – Lucille’s sister Cleo, normally a clean-eating fitness freak but today on vodka lollies and shots, plus Mel’s work friends Bev and Sharon, two short, fat fifty-somethings with Imelda’s Gary Barlow fetish. Bev has her children’s names tattooed around her neck like a mayoral chain of office; Sharon has some West Ham symbol on her calf. Or it could be a swastika.

  Not one of them has mentioned my new hair colour, even though I have pointedly remarked on all their various straightenings and Kardashi-extensions. Blister-filled pus-warthogs from Hell.

  Cannot find the Happy in this situation. Not one bit of it.

  Imelda and Pidge’s Auntie Steph – who I surmise is in her early fifties but could easily pass for sixty – completes our throng. She’s thin, short and tanned to a crisp, owing to a lifelong obsession with sunbeds. Asleep, she looks like a corpse painted with wood stain. Her opening gambit when the bus picked her up from her house on Magdalene Street was ‘I had sex with twins last night. Brothers. It were magical.’ I despised her on sight.

  *

  The minibus has stopped at the services fo
r petrol (and a piss for me). Thanks to the Poppy Seed, I can’t even drink my troubles away so I’m swigging from a decoy bottle of Smirnoff filled with water. I’m just hoping nobody asks for some because then they’ll find out and I don’t want that conversation yet. I’m still not fully on board with this whole One-of-the-Gang thing. At least, not with this gang. I do not want not be here. I want to be home. The vodka lollies are out of the cool box now.

  God, I wish I could drink. Damn you, Poppy Seed! No, I didn’t mean that.

  *

  We’re on the road again. Just had to stop again at another services so I could have a piss and Cleo could violently expel six vodka ice lollies into a hedgerow.

  *

  A raucous Take That medley has started up at the back of the bus. And the smell of old Chewits and vodka barf is strong. And I can’t even open a bloody window because they’ve all had their hair done. I actually hope we crash.

  *

  Finally made it to Toppan’s Holiday Camp an hour later than scheduled, which meant that, tragically, we’d missed today’s Bucking Bronco (cue boos and hisses). Luckily, it’s on again tomorrow (cue cheers and applause).

  As I stepped down off the bus, one thing became clear – this was a wilderness and we were the fresh meat. All around us were snaking gravel paths with signposts that read TO THE FOOD or TO THE ARCADES or TO THE CLUB and along these paths walked large groups of men in England shirts, long shorts and flip-flops, wearing wrap-around shades, holding bottles and yelling romantic bon mots, such as ‘All right, gorgeous, get your tits out while the sun’s shining!’ and ‘Oi oi, the Bukkake Party’s here, lads!’.

  And to my never-ending cringe, most of my party obliged. Auntie Steph had copped off with an eighteen-year-old who was leering in the back window before we’d even disembarked. I haven’t seen her since. They’re all worried. I hope she’s dead.

  *

  I’m in the toilet. I’ve just checked into Chalet 10, which I’m sharing with Pidge and Gemma/Jenna (note they’ve put the three quietest together.) It’s small, stinks of chlorine and the beds were clearly leftovers from a refurb at Wormwood Scrubs – hard, metal-framed, squeaky. I daren’t look at my mattress.

  You can’t move around here without some comment or a hand around your shoulder or your arse. And the worst part about it is the PICSOs are bloody loving it, which has properly highlighted how little I have in common with them – this place just isn’t me. It’s all them. I don’t do socialising, I don’t do drunken feel-ups and I don’t do noise and this place is a honeypot for all of that. Why do I keep up The Act again? Someone remind me? Oh, yeah, that’s right, I HAVE NO ONE.

  Imelda (who is now in her weekend outfit of short white dress, feather boa, cowboy hat with veil, thigh-high boots, L-plates and a Bride-to-Be sash) has snogged three blokes already (her first dare is to kiss as many as she can in two days) and the Ronseal Corpse Auntie Steph has emerged again, clamped to the lips of a nineteen-year-old plumber from Warrington, who is so short he looks like her little boy.

  If I were to do a Kill List here, it would be infinite. I would start with my friends.

  *

  Well, that was nice – afternoon cocktails in the bar accompanied by an impromptu Full Monty from a pack of ‘saucy butlers’ and a penis helicoptering four inches from my face. If only he knew what happened to the last guy who did that.

  Talking of windmills, there’s still no news from Craig.

  The one good/bad thing about being out with the PICSOs is that they don’t take much notice of anything I do so when they were ordering the drinks, I could go back to the barman and say, ‘Make my Bend Over Shirley Temple a virgin please, kind sir’ and they didn’t twig. So far, so sober.

  Bridezilla and the others had the most crude-sounding drinks on the menu – two Red-Headed Sluts for Bev and Sharon, Sex in a Glass for Lucille, a Leg Spreader for Cleo, Pidge and Gemma/Jenna had Golden Showers (they are loosening up by the minute) and Imelda went for a Tight Snatch and a Bang Me Senseless on the rocks. They’ve all gone over to the Laser Quest. I’ve said I feel sick from all the ‘vodka’ and I’m sitting on my squeaky bed wondering how easy it would be to fake my own death. How the hell does someone like me have fun in a place like this? Ugh.

  *

  I’m sitting beside the pool. All the others are in it and everyone’s got their tits out. It’s like a tit soup. I’m so done with these people. I’d walk out now if I wasn’t so bloody far from home. I have enough money for a cab. If I leave now, I could be home in time for… fuck, I’m being roped into a limbo competition. Pray for me.

  *

  It’s 7.27 p.m. and we’re all in our chalets getting ready for a night of drinking, dancing and Pass the Gonorrhoea. (I said I was on so I couldn’t go swimming.) We’ve presented Imelda with her surprise scrapbook and done some predictable Ann Summers-sponsored games – Who Can Eat the Chocolate Penis First (won by Lucille), Who Can Lick All the Whipped Cream Off the Random Bloke First (won by Mel) and Strip Twister – don’t know who won that. Don’t really care if my heart stops beating right fucking now actually.

  Apart from the odd ‘spoilsport’ comment from Imelda for not joining in much (I did limbo what more does she want?), I think The Act is intact but, to be honest, who cares? I’m now off out to do karaoke dressed up to gunnels in static fabrics which electrocute me every time I brush past someone woolly.

  Still haven’t heard from Craig. He’d have texted if he was out, wouldn’t he? Maybe they’ve charged him.

  *

  It’s 2.03 a.m. Pidge is lying with her face in a plate of chips. I haven’t noticed it before but she’s ugly. It’s not even as though the nice person she is can make up for that either – she’s deeply fucking ugly. There’s nothing redeeming at all. Her nose is big, her eyes are piggy, her face is long. And her farts smell of roast pork.

  Gemma/Jenna is snoring her head off, her skin blue from getting off with a body-painted Smurf. I vanished midway through the Sing-a-Longa-Abba-Thon to sit by the pool, splashing my toes in the water and talking to the Poppy Seed. All I could hear was people shagging in the surrounding foliage. The slurp of a tongue, the odd rhythmic moan, the rapid slippery fingering of a sixty-year-old woman’s bucket fanny. It’s like being in a Renaissance painting here, it really is.

  *

  Oh, God, this is like a bloody nightmare. Only nightmares end and this just won’t. My so-called friends are loving it. I am not. I’m going to leave. Fuck The Act. I’d like to officially scrape off the People I Can’t Scrape Off this weekend. We’re moving to Wales soon anyway and then I’ll never see them again with any luck.

  Or maybe I’ll kill them all in their beds, one by one. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab stab stab. And an extra one for Auntie Steph, just she deserves it.

  Saturday, 22 June

  I chickened out of leaving. I’ve hardly slept due to bed squeak, strange smell in the bathroom and Gemma/Jenna vomiting in the sink most of the night. I tried doing my ‘It’s all right shh shh’ bit and rubbing her back but I was really phoning it in to be honest. Craig’s mobile is still switched off and I’ve had no messages in the night. Where the bloody hell is he? He knows I’m stressed out with this. So inconsiderate.

  Also, the Poppy Seed is six weeks old today, but, to my sadness, I can’t call him/her Poppy Seed any more because it’s not the size of a poppy seed any more – according to the app, it’s now as big as a grain of rice. So Happy Sixth Week of Growth Day, Grain of Rice.

  I’ve rung Jim and Elaine – they’re taking Tink to the beach today. Jim texted me a picture of the ball they’ve bought her which is about three times her size. They haven’t heard anything from Craig either. They don’t even know he was arrested.

  Everyone’s outside on the benches, muted in hangover, drinking Lambrini from paper cups and eating variety pack cereal from the boxes. We’ve brought half an off-licence with us but nobody remembered milk.

  *

  We’ve hit t
he beach. It’s crowded and full of screaming children who keep knocking over my sandcastles and peeing in my moat (OK, one of them peed in my moat) so I’ve resigned to sitting back and taking in the scenery under a parasol while making a few notes. God, I’m turning into Samuel What’s-his-face. Him who hid the cheese.

  *

  It’s mid-afternoon and I’m watching five grown women spring about on a bouncy castle on a soundtrack of Shania Twain.

  Auntie Steph has been back to the group, briefly, to say she’s on her ‘ninth shag and counting’. She nicked a couple of Lucille’s fags, asked Bev for some change for the condom machine and buggered off again.

  Still getting some serious side eye from Imelda and I’ve heard a me-related muttering about ‘wet blankets’, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to tell them all about Grain of Rice before too long. Dammit.

  *

  I’ve told them all about Grain of Rice. The reaction was as I expected:

  IMELDA: I knew it, didn’t I say she’d be preggers by my wedding day!

  LUCILLE: Oh, congratulations, babe! That’s amazing! You must be thrilled!

  CLEO: Don’t have a boy, for God’s sake. Girls are so much easier.

  BEV: It’s gonna change your life, love. Most important job a woman can do. Forget careers and money – family is everything. My Carl tore me from earhole to arsehole though, so, for Christ’s sake, have have any drugs on offer.

  SHARON: No, don’t have any drugs when you’re in labour, trust me, it’s so worth it. You don’t ever bond properly with your baby if you have pain relief. I had a Caesarean with my Kimberley. We’ve never bonded.

  GEMMA/JENNA: Aww, that’s so great! Congratulations! When’s it due?

  PIDGE: You’ll be an amazing mummy, Rhiannon. I’m so happy for you.

  It took a lot for Pidge to say that, so soon after losing hers. She put her arms around me and gave me a proper squeezing hug. Then she whispered in my ear…

  ‘You don’t have to feel bad about me. I’m so pleased for you, matey.’