Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘If you went to the gym you could tighten all this,’ he said, seeing fit to drop behind me and play bongos on my buttocks. ‘You’d have more stamina. You’d be burning off fat, instead of, you know, a load of cakes.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I puffed. ‘And do you know what, I’m going to get on the treadmill when I get back to my hotel. I’ll use your body as my motivation.’

  He grinned widely. ‘Thanks!’

  We walked through the woods to where the trees thinned out but the ground was all sand and shards of bark. I kept losing my footing and he raced on ahead. I didn’t want us too out in the open.

  ‘Stop,’ I puffed. ‘Wait for me.’

  ‘Come on, slow coach. I can see the sea, it’s down there.’

  ‘Where?’ I said, coming up behind him.

  ‘Down there, look,’ he said, stopping and pointing down the slope. ‘See?’

  I withdrew the knife from my bag and plunged it into the back of his neck and he gargled and heaved. I pulled it out, then stuck it back in to sever his vocal cords and into his back again and again and again. It was like being back at school, being with my parents, being with Craig: normality. Safety. Not thrilling, just familiar. This is what I know. This is what I do.

  This is what Home is.

  I stabbed him seven times till he fell forward onto his knees. I was about to push him down when he scrabbled up and stumbled into the brush, faster than I could run.

  ‘Fuck!’ I cried out, dashing after him.

  He stumbled and grabbed out for something to keep him upright. His bloody fingerprints on every tree. He wouldn’t get far – his legs kept buckling. I slowed. He grabbed out for fallen branches, handfuls of sand and dry leaves, and he kept turning to find me, gaining on him. There were people on the beach below, families splashing. If one of them saw…

  Saw me coming at him again. Saw him stumbling. Saw me pushing him forwards, pinning him down and plunging the knife into him eight more times. Making certain that this time he wouldn’t get back up again.

  ‘That’s the thing… about fat girls, Conan,’ I puffed, dodging a spurt of aortic blood, ‘you can’t live with ’em, and you can’t… fight ’em off.’

  Soon all the struggle left him and he stopped, face down in the dirt. I turned him over, feeling a flicker of a pulse, sand stuck to his bloodied face, eyes fluttering. I couldn’t lie on top of him – there was too much blood – so I lay down beside and watched that last little light go out. Lying like a lover on the sand, waiting for her paramour to bring her to ecstasy.

  I prepared myself for the rippling; flames igniting my rocket to the stars.

  But there was no rippling. No flame. It was sex with no climax. In out, in out, in out – then just out and I left it dripping on the cool sand. He got his, I didn’t get mine. The disappointment was crushing. I lay beside his body for the longest time, nauseated. Agitated. I started digging.

  ‘What you doing?’ said a little voice.

  ‘What?’ I flicked around. A small girl had appeared, around five years old, in a pink-and-blue striped swimming costume, carrying a little yellow bucket and spade, scraping curls out of her face with a sandy hand.

  ‘Are you digging a hole?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No. Where are your parents?’

  ‘Mum’s down there. My dad’s playing football with my brother.’

  ‘Go to your mum.’ Conan’s brown leather wallet slid from his pocket.

  The girl dropped her bucket and some twigs fell out. I had her full attention. ‘Did you bury him?’ Conan’s foot was sticking out of the sand.

  ‘Yeah.’ I pushed a wall of sand over him to cover the foot and flicked some more over a dribble of blood which had seeped out from under him.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bye,’ she said picking up her bucket and the sticks and coming towards me, leaning over to see Conan’s face, but I got in the way to spare her from the full sight. She disappeared back where she’d come from, the breeze catching the slightest hint of coconut from her full head of curls.

  I didn’t know why she’d asked me if I was cold but I realised then I was shaking. It must have been shock. I’d felt the hate but I’d also the guilt, immediately, when she’d appeared. I kept seeing Ivy’s face on hers. Ivy seeing what I’d done to her dad. My Ivy. My baby. This was what I’d wanted to save her from.

  What the fuck had happened to me inside a week? I should have been jubilant – I’d rid the world of another predator. But where was the rush? Where was the orgasm I’d had after killing Sandra Huggins and had strode out of that farm shop feeling like the whole world was a marble in my fist?

  It was not there anymore.

  I’d reached the end. I couldn’t go forward or back. I had this overwhelming feeling of futility. I was a nothing. A spent force. A dead head.

  Keston Hoyle’s words as he’d pointed at my belly screamed into view.

  That’s your future in there. That’s the one good thing you have. You’ll realise that when she’s born.

  This was no life. And whatever it was, I didn’t want to live it anymore.

  I waited in the dunes for the little girl to come back with her mum or dad. For Trav or Ethan to come looking for Conan and find me, sitting beside his cold body with a bloody knife in my hand. For anyone to appear and ask what I was doing. Call the police. Call someone. Take me in.

  I was ready to tell them: I am Rhiannon Lewis. I have killed again. I will come quietly. I had never been more ready for anything.

  But nobody came. Nobody came looking.

  And eventually, as the clouds regrouped above me and the beach emptied, I buried Conan’s body in the sand with the knife. I walked down to a secluded part of the shore, tossing the phone and thumbing through the wallet, finding a student union ID, a debit card, a photo of some woman with her tits out and a small baggy of powder. I pocketed that and slung the rest.

  I don’t remember a single other thing that happened that day. I must have got back onto our bus because I got back onto the ship. I must have snorted the cocaine but I can’t remember when. The next thing I knew, I was waking up, in my own bed, in my own cabin.

  And all I could smell was shit.

  Monday, 7 January – Barcelona

  Christian rock bands

  People on social media warning others of triggering in news articles

  All those virtue-signalling Instacunts sipping cocktails but Sending Thoughts to those caught up in the Tenerife plane crash disaster

  Gamers so addicted they’d rather piss than pause

  Logan Paul

  I opened my crusty eyes to see Caro, sitting in the chair beside me, thumbing through a leaflet called ‘Olé For Barcelona’, and shaking her head.

  ‘Why does it stink of shit?’ I croaked.

  ‘Because you’ve shit yourself,’ she replied without hesitation.

  Apparently, I had passed Caro in the corridor outside my room where she’d been calling for me on and off all day long. She had noticed my nose was bleeding. Apparently she had followed me down into the gym where I had got on a treadmill and run seven kilometres.

  Apparently, I had bought myself the most expensive drink at the juice bar – the Sunshine Superfoods Smoothie – because I needed ‘to rid myself of my toxins and replenish my Hilary’ and she had followed me back to my cabin where I had promptly thrown it all up again in the sink and got into my bed and talked her ear off for hours until I’d fallen asleep.

  Apparently, at God knows what hour, I’d run out onto the deck and stood beside the railings deep-breathing until she had coaxed me back in and tucked me into bed. I remembered a sensation of being suffocated.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that I’d shit myself.

  I’d actually factually shitted myself. Myself, I had but shat.

  ‘Tell me you’re kidding,’ I croaked, picking off a rogue crusty bloo
d clod from my inner nostril.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ she said, pulling at a stray eyelash and flicking it to the floor. ‘It was one of the many fluids you covered yourself in over the course of last evening.’

  ‘Have you been here all night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I felt around the bed – no evidence of shit on my hand and yet I could still smell it on me. ‘I’ve never done that before. Ugh.’ My stomach lurched and my head banged. ‘Who cleaned me up?’

  ‘You managed to undress yourself and get into the shower and I monitored you. I asked your room steward to launder your clothes.’ She pointed to a clean pile of fresh laundry on the desk.

  ‘I don’t remember. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It was either that or incinerate them. I told him you had a milk intolerance and ate the wrong ice cream.’

  My hair was slightly damp. There was a bunched-up sodden towel behind my head that I’d been using as a pillow. ‘You saw me naked?’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice. It was either that or leave you lying foetal on the carpet stinking of your own excrement.’

  ‘Did you… touch me?’

  ‘No. I did not.’

  ‘I don’t know why I asked that.’

  ‘Because I have intimated to you my preference for women,’ she sighed. ‘But trust me, anything naked covered in its own excrement does not excite. It bears as much allure as a farmyard animal.’

  Shame slithered over me like snakes. ‘I’m going to have another shower.’

  There came no argument from Caro. A shushing sound heralded the appearance of that day’s Cruise Letter and she got up, waddling over to the door to retrieve it. When I emerged from the bathroom, she was still there, sitting at the dressing table.

  ‘I’m clean,’ I mewed, standing beside my unmade bed like I was ready for a choirgirl audition. The room smelled slightly less shitty but a vague odour lingered like an embarrassing reminder.

  ‘Just in time to catch breakfast,’ said Caro, standing up.

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You can sit and watch me eat mine then.’

  We went up to the Diamond Deck breakfast room and I joined Caro at her usual table overlooking the garden. Still no signal on the iPhone, even though we had docked. A waiter came over to take our order.

  ‘Two freshly squeezed orange juices and some ham and cheese croissants, I think this morning, please, Martin.’

  ‘I said I didn’t want anything,’ I reminded her.

  ‘They’re not for you,’ she replied with a definite bat of eyelid. Martin poured out coffee into respective cups, taking the order to the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘For helping me last night. When I shat.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, sipping her coffee.

  ‘No, to me it’s something. I know I’m in a state. I know I need to sort myself out.’

  ‘You can’t think too clearly when you’re grieving,’ she said, buttering a breakfast roll for me and one for herself. My son died when he was 29.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The official cause was bacterial endocarditis. He was a heroin addict.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘We hadn’t been speaking. His body was found three weeks after he died by his landlord, who’d only troubled him for the rent. Not one caller, not even his mother. I’ve carried the guilt with me all around this world. And it will accompany me into the next. Whenever someone you love leaves you, or you leave them, it feels like they’ve taken a piece of you with them. And the place where that missing part is, it always hurts. I know an addict when I see one.’

  ‘Me? I’m not an addict.’

  ‘Oh, I think you are. You’re addicted to something.’

  ‘I’m not.’ I checked around, lowering my voice. ‘Before last night, I’d never touched hard drugs before. I met up with a guy in Porto Cristo and he… gave it to me. I’ve had a few spliffs but I’ve never snorted anything.’

  ‘So why last night?’ She batted her enormous eyes at me.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ I snapped. ‘We’re not family. You’re not my grandmother. I had two of them and they were both cunts.’

  ‘Strong word,’ she said, without batting a wrinkly eyelid.

  ‘They were always lecturing me too. I don’t need a lecture on how bad drugs are, OK? I know. I woke up and smelled the shit I was covered in.’

  ‘Drink your coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want coffee. I want green tea.’

  Within a heartbeat, Martin had been summoned to remove the offending cup and brought me a fresh pot of White Monkey Paw Green Tea, which he informed me was ‘hand-crafted using a 3,000-year-old scorching method in the Fujian Mountains’ and served with a tiny pot of heather honey.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said quietly, stirring my pot and leaving it to settle. There were so many elephants galloping about the room I could barely hear myself think. Caro said nothing. It said everything.

  I turned my attention back towards the garden through the window. An elderly man using an electric wheelchair was wheeling around, following the curve of the path, talking to the plants.

  ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone you loved and feel powerless over it,’ said Caro as Martin brought the croissants and juice. ‘I see you going through the same pain I was in, the same pain my son was in. And I want to help. That’s all.’

  A tear betrayed me, scuttling down my cheek before I could stop it. Caro reached across and dabbed it away with her napkin. The smell of Chanel Number 5 and the sudden heat of the dining room and sizzle of fresh bacon swilled around my head and instantly I grew nauseous and I had to get out. ‘I need some air.’

  I didn’t think she was going to follow me out on deck but she did. I perched on the edge of a planter as the buzz of her wheelchair approached. The breeze whipped my hair extensions and blew them all around my head. I grabbed them by the handful and tucked them inside my T-shirt.

  I stroked the leaf of an agapanthus, only to find it had a serial number on the stem. ‘They’re fake. They’re fucking fake,’ I said, trying to tear off one of the leaves. ‘There’s no smell at all. Even the stems are plastic.’

  ‘Well, you can’t expect flowers to bloom all year round, can you?’

  ‘Why bother? Why bother to plant them at all?’

  ‘Because they make people happy. Some people anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, well. The boot that fits one always hurts another, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s misquoted – and it’s a shoe,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not a real garden. There’s nothing real here. It’s all fake. It’s all plastic.’

  ‘Some of the plants are real. Those are,’ she said, pointing to a palm with wide green fronds. I got up and went over to sit next to that instead. Stroked a leaf. Inhaled it. Tried to imagine I was somewhere else. Except there was nowhere else to go, even in my imagination.

  ‘Let’s go into Barcelona today,’ said Caro. ‘I’ll organise a car to take us round. We can go and find a real garden, one you’re not going to demolish, perhaps?’

  Dad used to do that, linger when I was in a strop, trying to find ways of making me smile, of bringing me back to life. He usually managed it with the promise of buying me a book or Sylvanians or taking me with him to watch him and his mates thump the crap out of a paedophile. But Caro wasn’t my dad or my mum or Seren. She didn’t really know me and owed me nothing.

  ‘I’m going back to bed.’

  ‘No you’re not. I won’t let you.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave me alone? You will eventually anyway.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘You’re going to die.’

  ‘Eventually, but not today.’

  ‘Trust me, I’m no company.’

  ‘Is that what you want? Solitude? To wallow in it?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want.’

  ‘Right. Let’s go into Barcelona.’

/>   ‘What for?’

  ‘To look at the sights, the architecture. And to eat until it fucking hurts.’

  And that’s what we did. I’d forgotten how much I love food – it’s my most favourite thing, official. And until men taste as good as carbs, ever thus shall be. Caro’s room steward organised a hire car to meet us outside the cruise terminal and it accompanied us the whole day, taking us into the city, giving us a guided tour from the comfort of an air-conditioned back seat, and dropping us off and picking us up as directed, mainly cafés that ‘looked nice’.

  We found a small café selling hot chocolate pots with churros and bought a fistful each. We sat outside and I ate seven of the buggers, savouring every mouthful, even the ones I downed so quickly they burned my tongue.

  ‘I act a whole different type of fat for Spanish pastry,’ I said, swinging my legs beneath my stool.

  ‘I noticed,’ she replied. There was chocolate on the tip of Caro’s nose. It amused me greatly not telling her.

  Finally with a full signal, I checked the iPhone for a Dannielle message. Nada. But after a while, I stopped looking and fell into Barcelona’s warm embrace. Me and Caro became tourists – taking pictures, strolling around ancient monuments and staring up open-mouthed into the clean blue sky at the nightmarish majesty of La Sagrada Família.

  ‘What a magnificent building,’ I said, staring up high into the sky at the lethal-looking spires.

  ‘Waste of bloody money,’ said Caro.

  That response was par for the course, as I soon learned. Things I found beautiful– Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, Park Güell – Caro found ugly or dull, and vice versa.

  But slowly, so slowly I barely noticed, I felt better. Diverted. Distracted. I bought a unicorn keyring and a fresh fruit smoothie and irritated Caro with my slurping noises. It made me laugh. It was like spending the day with Marnie when we’d gone shopping in Bristol and walked around the museum and had freak shakes. Being with a friend tipped my world back in the right direction. It reminded me of something Daisy Chan said to me once at the Gazette – in time, with love and patience from others, you do get better. She’d been talking about her anxiety and anorexia, but maybe it applied to me too.