Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  Damian glared at me. ‘What’s she doing, Camille? And where’s Lou?’

  ‘He’s . . . he’s in the woods.’

  ‘Aw you haven’t dumped him already have you? I tell you, you could do a lot worse. All right, so he dresses like a tramp but his heart’s in the right place . . .’

  ‘I know it is.’ I stood firm, still clutching the hand behind me. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the twig.’

  Raaawrrrrrffff raaaaawwwff!

  ‘Bit of extracurricular Human Biology, is it? What is he, a teacher? That one who takes the girls for netball and does the knicker checks? I always thought there was something wrong with him.’ He glanced downwards and frowned. ‘What you got behind your back?’

  ‘Nothing. Just my bag,’ I said, lifting my arm ever so slightly so he just caught a glimpse of the hand, just a glimpse, not a full-on close-up.

  His eyebrows raised in a ‘Tell-me-or-die’ kind of way.

  ‘We’re . . . we are . . .’ I noticed the notice board and a pinned up flyer for the bring and buy sale, the cake stall. ‘We’re making a cake,’ I blurted out, ‘for the bring and buy.’

  ‘A cake?’ He frowned. ‘What, and he’s helping you, is he? Lying on his back on a table? Cobblers.’

  ‘No, he is the cake,’ I said, only just knowing where my mouth was taking this particular lie. ‘It’s a . . . man cake. A cake in the shape of a man.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true. Yeah, it’s in the shape of a man because the headmaster wanted us to do it, so we thought it should look like him. It’s made of sponge and soft pink icing and there’s jam and cream. And we’re going to paint on a suit . . . with grey food colouring. It’s ginormalous.’ My mouth was watering at the thought of jam and cream, until I remembered it didn’t actually exist.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ Damian frowned again.

  ‘Bins,’ I said, without thinking. The nearest bin was right the way up the other end of the corridor by the gym. I was gripping the rotten hand so hard behind my back that my fingers were starting to sink into its soft flesh. He said nothing. I said nothing. He didn’t know what to believe and I didn’t know what more I could say to make him believe me. A door clunked at the far end of the corridor and a figure dashed through it. It started running towards us, panting.

  ‘Dame! Damian!’ it called out.

  ‘What?’ Damian called back.

  Louis pointed at me as he slowed down, his Nikes pounding the floor, his fringe stuck to his forehead with sweat. ‘They’ve got body parts. They’ve cut off someone’s hand!’

  Damian looked at me. ‘Cake?’

  Louis turned to me, sweat glistening on his cheeks. ‘There is no sheep, is there? It’s body parts. It’s human, the thing you’re bringing to life. Isn’t it?’ He rubbed the top of his head. I looked from Louis to Damian and back again. ‘That’s what you’ve been doing. That’s why you were at the hospital and the funeral parlour that night. It all fits now. It’s not a sheep, is it? You are doing what her dad did. You’re Frankensteining, aren’t you?!’

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ said Damian.

  ‘Louis, please don’t hate me. Please!’ I begged, seeing no other way to go. ‘Just give me a chance to explain.’

  The boys were looking down at something. I was begging with three hands.

  Raaaaawwwwwrrrrrffff raaawwwffff raaaaawwwff!

  ‘Oh my God!’ Louis cried.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said.

  ‘WHA . . . ?’ Damian slammed his hand over his mouth.

  ‘It’s a boy!’ I cried. ‘We’ve built a boy!’

  Zoe was standing in the open doorway. ‘Well done, Camille. Do you want to take an advert out in the The Herald while you’re at it?’

  I was crying by this time. I thought maybe Louis might realise his tone was making me upset and put his arm around me or kiss away the tears that were rolling down my cheeks, or just be kind to me like he had been outside the funeral parlour that night. But he didn’t. He was looking mad. And Damian was looking confused. And Zoe was looking at me with snake eyes.

  ‘I had to, Zoe,’ I pleaded. ‘The hand . . .’ I waved it in the air to show her. ‘It fell out of the tree. What else was I supposed to say?’ She walked forward and I handed the hand to her and went to rescue Pee Wee from the locker. He was shivering with fright and immediately licked my chin in thanks.

  ‘You had all better come in, hadn’t you?’ said Zoe and held open the door as the three of us scuffed inside – me first, followed by Louis, and eventually Damian.

  Zoe had cleaned him up from earlier when he had been burnt by the electric shocks. She must have serummed him up again. I had no idea how the boys were going to react. They were seeing what I’d seen when I first saw Sexy Dead Boy in one piece – a dead man. Just a dead man. Except I had known what was coming.

  The second Damian saw Sexy Dead Boy, he cried out. ‘He’s dead! He’s a dead man!’ He flinched and flung himself towards the store cupboard with such force, it was like a giant finger had poked him sharply in the ribs. He gripped the cupboard. ‘What the Christ is going on here? Oh Jeez, oh man that’s disgusting, that’s . . . Ugh, I’m gonna be sick. I’m gonna be sick.’ He retched and ran to the back of the room to actually be sick into the sink.

  ‘Oh yeah, he hates dead bodies, doesn’t he?’ I said with a nervous laugh, but Louis didn’t answer me. He just walked, dead slowly, over to the workbench.

  ‘Why is this here?’ he said, not taking his eyes off Sexy Dead Boy.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ said Zoe, standing beside him. ‘We stole the headless body of Luke Truss from your funeral parlour.’

  Louis looked at me. ‘You lied to me? You STOLE Luke Truss?’

  ‘Well, we stole his body, yes,’ said Zoe.

  ‘His whole body? No, you can’t have.’ Louis shook his head and laughed, even though nothing was funny. ‘We cremated him.’

  ‘Uh, no, you didn’t,’ said Zoe, tidying away her empty syringes. ‘You cremated his head. And a water-cooler bottle. And two large sacks of potatoes.’

  Louis looked like he had been turned to stone. ‘No.’

  Zoe sighed. ‘What do you want, diagrams?’

  Louis shook his head again. ‘This isn’t real. This is a joke.’

  Zoe adjusted her headlight and began injecting even more serum into the parts of Sexy Dead Boy she had singed earlier. ‘I don’t joke when it comes to science. We took a headless body, we found a new head and a brain and we connected them. We didn’t plan on replacing the hands and feet but they had begun to decompose.’

  By the look on Louis’ face, I could see a penny had dropped. He looked at me. I nodded. He looked down at Sexy Dead Boy’s arm. He picked it up and rubbed along the hand. ‘This isn’t his hand?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, we added the hands. Well, Zoe did. And the feet. And the head. And some of the organs. Cos they’d been donated.’

  Louis went to the head end of the bench and rubbed along the side of Sexy Dead Boy’s marble white neck with the very tip of his finger. ‘There’s no join.’

  ‘The serum,’ I said, pointing to the empty syringes. ‘That’s what it can do. That’s what I tried to tell you about in the graveyard.’

  Zoe explained to him about serum 651 and the battery and Pee Wee and the hamsters. She pointed at Pee Wee, who was washing himself under the workbench, having just polished off the rotten hand. ‘That dog was dead a fortnight ago. It now sits there, blood pulsing through its veins, synapses firing in its cranium. The serum accelerates tissue repair, you see. Add in a significant electrical surge and the only outcome is anabiosis. New life.’

  ‘Aw man that’s sick!’ cried Damian. ‘That’s sick! I’ve got to get out of here.’

  He made for the door but Louis stopped him and held his wrists. ‘Damian, calm down, you’re not locked in. Nothing’s going to hurt you, all right? Just . . . be quiet for a minute, please.’ Damian shut up. I didn’t think that was possible.<
br />
  I pointed to a hole in the skirting board. ‘The hamsters really were all dead, I told you. Zoe really did bring them all back to life in Biology. I didn’t lie about that.’

  Louis sat Damian down on a chair by the wall and made him put his head between his knees. Then he turned and glared at me. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Why?’ said Zoe, putting down her syringe. ‘Because science has progressed and if we don’t progress with it we may as well all be living in caves and chewing on mammoth femurs. And Camille wanted to be a part of that, didn’t you?’

  I nodded. Well, I half-nodded. ‘I really just wanted a date for the Halloween party,’ I said. ‘Zoe had the idea and I . . . went along with it.’

  ‘Bodysnatching for the sake of having a date for a party is not an excuse, Camille. How COULD you do this?’

  I frowned at him, not knowing whether I was on the verge of shouting back or crying my eyes out.

  ‘I made her do it,’ Zoe said suddenly.

  ‘Zoe, you didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘She was vulnerable. She’d done everything to impress this . . . person,’ she said, nodding at Damian’s hunched over back, ‘to no avail. She wanted a friend, a companion. Someone she could trust. Someone who wouldn’t just use her for their own entertainment. I struck while the humiliation was hot.’

  ‘That’s so warped,’ said Louis, clasping his hands behind his head and pacing the room. I felt sick with embarrassment. He’d fallen out of love with me, I knew it. I’d had it so good for, what, ten minutes? And now he hated me. Now he thought I was disgusting like all the other boys did. Tears came again.

  Damian jibbered as he felt his way along to the sink like he was going to be sick. ‘Nothing’s gonna hurt me,’ he was muttering. ‘Nothing’s gonna hurt me. I hate dead people. I hate ’em. But they’re not gonna hurt me.’

  Zoe ignored him and continued firing at Louis. ‘If someone in your family lost their legs but you could give them new ones and ensure they could walk again, would you stand aside and just say, “Well, it’s just one of those things that happens”?

  ‘Would you let something beautiful, something you love, die, even though you knew there was a chance it could live again in some other form?’

  He looked at me. He looked back at Zoe. ‘People die,’ he said. ‘If nothing died, the planet would be overrun. Death is just . . . nature. It’s horrible when it happens but it’s got to happen. That’s just how it has to be.’

  ‘That’s what your A level Philosophy teaches you, is it?’ Zoe snorted.

  Louis bit his lip. ‘No, it’s what I think. What’s the point in living if we don’t die? We’re put on this earth to make the most of the time we’ve got and then we have to leave and let the next generation come along.’

  ‘Come along and do what?’ Zoe snapped.

  He shrugged. ‘See if they can do any better than we did, I guess.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she hissed, her finger in the air. ‘Exactly what I’m doing. Improving on my father’s methods. I’m not insane. I’m not creating monsters. I’m giving a second chance of life!’

  ‘Your father was a psycho!’ Louis shouted.

  ‘He wasn’t, Louis!’ I shouted back.

  ‘He was! Everyone in this town knows he was killing people to make his . . . freaks. Monkeys with human arms. Fish with human feet. Dogs with fins . . .’

  ‘That never happened, Louis. He didn’t do any of that!’ I cried. ‘I’ve been to their house. I’ve seen the stuffed animals in the hallway. They’re animal mash-ups, that’s all. There’s nothing human about them. You’ve just heard rumours, that’s all.’

  But Louis wasn’t quite finished. He said slowly, ‘I warned you, Camille. And if this serum stuff is proven to work on humans, I’m telling you, it won’t be a good thing. Everyone will want a piece of it . . . a piece of that.’ He pointed to Sexy Dead Boy. ‘They’ll all want their loved ones brought back to life.’

  ‘I’m not talking about everyone!’ Zoe snapped. ‘I’m just talking about HIM!’

  Damian’s face was deathly white as he launched himself over to the sink again and retched. We all looked at Sexy Dead Boy in silence.

  ‘Well, you are talking about everyone, Zoe, aren’t you?’ I said.

  Zoe stared at me. ‘What?’

  I gulped. ‘You want everyone to know about this and the serum and your dad’s research so he’ll be syndicated a thousand times over. It’ll prove all his research was worth it and that he wasn’t mad.’

  ‘Vindicated,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So, then everyone will know about it. Everyone will know what an amazing scientist he was and they’ll want to try it then, won’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said sadly, sitting down on the teacher’s chair behind her.

  Louis looked at me, then back to Zoe. ‘You hadn’t even thought of that, had you? You’d be giving the world a walking talking reason to believe they can live forever. And we can’t. We get old and we die; that’s just how it’s supposed to be.’

  I suddenly became extremely cross with Louis. Even though less than an hour ago we had been in love with each other now I just wanted to shout at him. Louis stood in silence. I stomped over to the teacher’s table and tore two rubber gloves out of the box on the end. ‘Fine. This isn’t about anybody else anymore. This is just about Zoe now. And we’re going to finish him, whether you like it or not . . .’

  Damian squeaked over by the sink.

  Louis walked over to me. ‘I helped you,’ he said. ‘I let you in the funeral parlour while you were . . . crying over that body . . . I worried about you . . . at the hospital when you were taking . . . God knows what else. I thought it was my fault you were there, because of what I did to your nose.’ He stepped back from me. ‘I’m going to the police,’ he said. ‘You can’t do this, it’s not right. I’ve seen all the Frankenstein movies, Camille, it never ever ends well.’

  ‘Go away,’ I said, snapping on the gloves and not looking at him. I couldn’t believe how harsh I was being. I turned away and heard him walk towards the door. There was a second’s pause and then the lab door slammed. Footsteps from the sink area. Damian scuttled out behind him.

  I turned back to Sexy Dead Boy and picked up the teacher’s desk lamp, unwrapping the lead from round its stem. I switched it on.

  Zoe looked at me. ‘We can’t tell anyone about this, can we?’

  She was asking me? I thought. I shook my head. ‘No, he’s right. It would probably be pandemonium.’

  ‘I didn’t even think of that,’ she said softly. ‘All I could think of was proving them all wrong. And bringing him back.’

  ‘So come on,’ I said, ‘what does it matter? Let’s just bring him to life. Forget everyone else. This is just for you now. Come on. What are you waiting for? Crank up the battery, Zoe.’

  ‘That means my father’s reputation will always be as a mad man.’

  I shrugged. ‘Not to me it won’t. And now Louis and Damian know too,’ I said. ‘You can finish this, Zoe. And if you do, you can have your dad back. In a way. Won’t that be better than anything? And who knows what he might turn out to be?’

  Zoe smiled at me. ‘You’re a very bright person, Camille. You might hide it, but sometimes it just bursts out of you.’

  A tear had escaped from my eye. I hadn’t even known I was crying, I was so pumped full of that thing that athletes get. I only ever got it when I was cross or about to throw the discus.

  ‘So we can finish him?’ I said.

  ‘I can finish him,’ she said, checking the wires on her side of the body. ‘You go after Louis. You’re wobbling that light too much to be of any help here.’

  A pain gripped the middle of my body. I set the light down. ‘No. Not after what he said. Not after how he said it. And what he said about your dad.’

  Zoe picked up the light and shone it on the arm, injecting Sexy Dead Boy with the other hand.

  ‘Did he look sad when he le
ft?’ I asked her as a pain stabbed my throat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Did he look back at me?’ I said, as a tear fell down into Sexy Dead Boy’s hair.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, as determined as I could, wiping away my tear track. ‘We need to finish Sexy Dead Boy. If only to make him jealous, we have to finish him.’ I was firm. I knew what we had to do. I did the deep breath thing to blow out the pain, but it didn’t do any good. It still hurt. Zoe had stopped again and was staring at me.

  ‘What?’ I said, unable to catch my breath.

  ‘Go. After. Him.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to finish Sexy Dead Boy.’

  ‘You don’t want to lose him. Louis is the one who’s made for you, not this one,’ she said, looking down. ‘I can see that now. I can see it when you look at each other. You shine.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘Now go. And don’t come back until you’ve made things better.’

  My head still didn’t agree, but my feet did the thinking for me, and before I knew it I was heading towards the door and out the door and running down the empty banana-skin-stinking corridor and out onto the concrete at the front of college.

  And Louis was sitting there on the wall right outside the Science block.

  ‘I thought you were going to the police,’ I sniffed.

  He stood up and walked towards me. ‘Yeah, well I can’t, can I?’ he said. ‘You’d never speak to me again. And that would kill me . . .’ He looked back at Damian who was sitting right next to him, holding a cigarette with a shaking hand. I hadn’t noticed him until that moment. ‘Because I love you. I really, really love you. And I don’t want to do anything to ruin that.’

  I sort of squeaked and made an ‘Oh’ sound. It was all I could do. Once again my heart boomed into life.

  ‘Think I’m gonna puke again,’ Damian muttered, swaggering away blowing his smoke high up into the night air.

  ‘If being with you means I have to go along with this, then I’ll go along with this. I know it’s crazy but I’ll do it.’

  I’d never heard anything so romantic in my whole actual life ever. I reached out to hug him and immediately felt his arms around me and we hugged for the longest time. I’d seen a couple in a garden centre hugging like this at Christmas last year and I’d watched them for ages, until they’d caught me looking and flicked me a V sign.