Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘Drop what?’ I snipped, looking up from my phone.

  ‘The rose petals. Thousands of red rose petals.’ Caro looked out across the square at the enormous grey monolith of the Pantheon. ‘The choir sang Veni Sancte Spiritus. And I wanted to kiss her. But we couldn’t do that of course. Instead she whispered it – she loved me. And I whispered it back.’

  AJ Thompson, the father of my baby. The Fortune Teller. Lana Rowntree. Patrick Edward Fenton. Troy Shearer, who’d molested Marnie on our night out in Cardiff. Tim Prendergast, Marnie’s husband.

  ‘It’s overwhelming when someone you love says they love you back,’ said Caro. ‘It is the most wonderful thing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It must be.’

  There was mention of the men I’d catfished, men I’d lured to cutting flower symbols into their skin, men I’d blackmailed about their pervy videos to the point of suicide. How I’d planted evidence to frame Craig.

  ‘It colours your world differently when you are loved like that,’ said Caro. ‘Nothing else matters when you have something so rich and true in your life.’ She smiled at me, broadly and unapologetically.

  ‘I can only imagine,’ I said.

  The area around the Pantheon crawled with police. Police in doorways. Milling among the crowds. Talking into CB radios. Brandishing guns. And it felt like each and every one of them was looking my way.

  ‘I’d never have let her go,’ I said. Caro sipped her piña colada, letting out a deep, lingering breath. ‘You’ll be loved like that someday.’

  I clicked onto a fan forum that had already been set up in my honour. We Love Rhiannon Lewis. There were seventy-eight members already. Seventy-eight people all purporting to love me. Caro said something I didn’t catch.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Pass me the menu.’ But before she could take it, she locked eyes with someone behind me. ‘Oh my word, there she is!’

  Two people – a boy in his early twenties, and an old woman in grey trousers, a flowing white blouse and a Fedora, were walking directly towards us. The woman had long grey hair streaked down her back and she walked with a stick like Caro, but a little faster. Caro was already on her feet, moving towards them as fast as Beatrice was moving towards us. Beatrice clocked Caro and handed her stick to Enzo, raising both hands to her mouth.

  Caro hobbled around the chairs to get to her. The second they made contact they embraced the years away and for minutes, all I could hear were the sounds of them both crying. When they pulled out of their hug, Beatrice held Caro’s face before her own and sobbed incoherently.

  ‘Oh, mia bella Carolina, ti ho aspettato così tanto tempo! Non ho mai smesso di amarti!’

  And they kissed, unashamedly, unhurriedly and unflinchingly like it hadn’t been sixty years without one another, merely a day or two apart.

  Three police officers started clapping and whistling. I looked at Enzo – he had tears in his eyes. Quite a few people around did. Two waitresses in the café were sobbing and a man in acid green shorts dried his eyes with his vest. The only one not crying or cheering was me. Because what I was seeing was not a love that I could ever experience. Love for me was brutal, strangulating and blood-spattered. Love had no heartbeat. It was cold and blue and dead.

  The two women broke away but continued to hold hands. Caro brought Beatrice over to our table, wiping her eyes. ‘Hilary, this is Beatrice…’

  I held out my hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Beatrice.’

  She shook mine with both of hers. ‘Grazie mille per avermi riportato la mia Carolina. Grazie, grazie.’ They couldn’t stop staring at each other. I didn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Or maybe I didn’t want to believe it. She and Enzo sat and a waitress brought over a lunch menu.

  They chit-chatted easily, in English and Italian, and not once did they stop holding hands. That damned parallel universe floated into view again – the one in which I persuaded Caro to stay in Rome with Beatrice and she asked me to live with them, to run errands, bake cakes, or mop floors. I was happy in this universe with my two new grannies. Grannies I actually liked.

  I was clinging onto something I could never have and knew I had to go. ‘Just nipping to the loo,’ I said.

  Caro looked up. ‘Do you want me to order for you?’

  ‘Yeah. Prawn linguine. And a beer. Thank you.’

  And I walked away from the table, watching her and Beatrice smiling and holding hands like the old friends and young lovers they once were. I wanted to stay. But I couldn’t.

  They didn’t need me anymore. And as I melted into the crowds, for once grateful for the many people swarming and jostling around me, I was gone.

  I got a taxi to the airport and, thanks to all Merkel’s cordons, it arrived thirty minutes before the Alitalia desk closed. I bought the last return Business Class seat on the 20.40 flight. And that was it – that was most of my money gone. I had nothing else, apart from my Hilary Sharp passport, the clothes and bag on my back, my little pig dad, Richard E. Grunt, and the pink bunny I’d taken from Ivy’s incubator. It didn’t even smell of her anymore. It was a self-check-in desk, but when I scanned my boarding card and ran my passport through the scanner, it beeped and a red light came on.

  Please wait for assistance.

  ‘Oh fucking hell,’ I seethed, standing there like a complete twunt, my rucksack getting heavier by the second, my mouth completely dry. This was it. This was Hand on the Shoulder and ‘Come With Me, Miss’ time.

  A short shiny guy in a too-tight waistcoat slid on over. ‘Sorry, madam, let me help you there.’ He took the passport and flattened it out, running it through the scanner. He checked my boarding card. Another red light.

  ‘Sorry, it does this sometimes. New system.’

  I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste blood.

  He slid it through again. A choir of angels sang – a constant beeeeeep and a green light. My heart came out of arrhythmia. I couldn’t believe it.

  He handed them both back to me. ‘There you are, madam, sorry about that, you’re good to go. The lounge is up the escalators and first right. Please show your boarding pass at the gate and they will let you in to use the amenities. I hope you have a pleasant journey to Mexico City.’

  ‘Grazie mille,’ I said, trying the ‘th’ sound so I sounded Spanish.

  Luckily the security check was as effective as Epstein’s suicide watch, and once I was over the first hurdle there was no further passport check even when my underwire maternity bra set off the alarm. No pat downs. No eye contact. Almost like I’d requested it. Do terrorists never fly Business Class? They should – you get away with murder.

  Once inside the lounge, relief flooded into me like cool water. It was a welcome only the richest travellers got – trays of champagne, canapes, unobtrusive soft jazz on the PA system, air-conditioning, offers of foot massages, and the cleanest toilets I’ve ever seen. I felt sorry for the cattle schlepping along through the gates of Economy, mooing their dissatisfaction.

  On the way to the gate, there was a shop with a newspaper stand. The French and Spanish newspapers were all over it. Not so much the Italian ones. There wasn’t time to stop and take a closer look but I got the gist:

  ASESINATO EN SÉRIE OCULTOS EN EL MEDITERRÁNEO: La policía cree que ella escapó en un crucero desde Southampton

  Translation: SERIAL MURDER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: Police believe she escaped on a cruise from Southampton.

  I was waiting for it, always looking over my shoulder at the tooled-up police on the way to the gate, but nobody stopped me. There was a curt smile from the steward as I stepped aboard the plane and turned left.

  And soon I was reclining in my leather seat, sipping complimentary Krug, chowing finest pork sword in a delicate jus prepared by a Michelin-star chef and rifling through a travel kit of soft pyjamas, blindfold and Kiehls vanity case. It was only then that I could truly breathe out.

  I took one last look at the address Dannielle Fairly had supplied me: Tenoch. Espinoza
, Hacienda Santuario, Camino Cabo Este, Rocas Calientes… Mexico.

  Opposite me sat two honeymooners, holding hands in their recliners, reading the dinner menu. She leaned into him, butting her forehead playfully against his to make him laugh. Money could buy me all the freedom and luxury I wanted, apparently. But it couldn’t buy me that.

  It wasn’t until they turned the lights off that it dawned on me: when they came back on, I’d be the other side of the world. Chance to wipe the slate clean. Tenoch would arrange another passport and then there would be no more Hilary Sharp or Rhiannon Lewis. Nobody would know who the hell I was.

  Least of all, me.

  Part 2: Mexico

  Sunday, 13 January – Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez

  People who try to ram enormous carry-on bags into overhead lockers

  Everyone on planes who stands up the second the seatbelt sign bings. You honestly think your bag’s gonna be first off?

  People who studiously take note of the safety demo on flights – what good is a whistle and an oxygen mask when you’re crashing 500mph into a mountain?

  People at airports who hog any plug socket to charge their phones – a woman at Los Cabos found the plug to a departures board and removed it so she could juice up her Samsung

  Paris Hilton

  Crowded airports are concentrated Hell on Earth.

  After changing some money for Mexican pesos and paying a ridiculously high fee for the privilege, I had to wait six hours for my connecting Aeromexico flight to some tiny airport out in the super sticks – the nearest one to Rocas Calientes at the southern end of the Baja Peninsula. I spent most of this time eating, pissing and nodding off on an uncomfortable metal seat that had a small puddle of jizz beneath it.

  Then, quite suddenly, a miracle. A beam of sunlight speared through my malaise.

  ‘Hey,’ said a deep voice. ‘Is this seat taken?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said, taking out the book I’d bought from a newsstand to pass the time. I stole a glance at the guy who’d spoken to see the most beautiful face I’d ever seen. No book in the world could’ve torn me away.

  ‘Good book?’ he asked, sitting down and putting his feet up on his case.

  ‘Probably,’ I said, opening it up. ‘Shame I can’t understand a fucking word of it.’ I showed him page 1.

  He laughed. ‘You’re English and you can’t speak Spanish?’ The way his brows furrowed sent an arrow straight through me. ‘May I?’

  I handed the book to him and sneak-scratched my itchy extensions. He started reading.

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ I muttered, folding my arms and hate-watching the Paris Hilton interview twittering away on the overhead TV. After a time, the book plopped back down on my lap.

  ‘Yeah, you’re not missing much.’

  He cradled the back of his head in his hands, attempting to sleep despite the hurly-burly of the busy airport. He had closely cropped black hair, large brown eyes and looked like he’d stepped off a page in a calendar of Mexican Hunks. After a few brief exchanges with the people on the other side of him and opposite, I realised he was part of a huge Mexican-American family, going on to some party if the myriad gift bags of presents were anything to go by.

  ‘Can’t stand her,’ I said, nodding up at the TV as Hilton banged on about being so misunderstood by the media. ‘She’s so… meh. Like, you ever get that when someone is so overexposed you don’t even see them anymore?’

  He snorted, one unshaven cheek resting on his fist. ‘Yeah. She’s definitely on The List.’

  I snapped my head round to look at him. ‘You have a list?’

  ‘A metaphorical list. I’m not some maniac, I promise.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  ‘What, a maniac?’

  ‘Quite a big one.’

  ‘Cool,’ he sniffed. I swallowed, mouth arid. ‘That’s good. Maniacs tend to be the most interesting people.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Oh yeah. My aunt Salomé’s a maniac. She’s the most interesting person in the fam. She’s done time in jail, smokes weed, hates people, makes art.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound too cray.’

  ‘She uses her flujo menstrual in her art. You know, her period blood.’

  ‘Oh. Fairly batshit then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘She sold one of my pieces recently. Didn’t make much money but I was so amped somebody bought it.’

  ‘I won’t ask what you dipped your brush in.’

  A middle-aged woman in tight white jeans and a floaty top tottered over and gave him a passport and boarding card, barking at length to him in Spanish. He snipped back at her and took the passport, posting it in his jacket pocket. She threw me a curt glance, before rejoining the birthday party, all chit-chattering away over Paris’s sex-tape trauma.

  ‘My mom,’ he explained. ‘She thinks I’m still 13, not 33.’

  ‘I have a list too,’ I told him when she’d gone.

  ‘Really? Who’s on yours?’

  ‘Be quicker to tell you who isn’t.’

  He smiled again and Oh. My. God. His resting bitch face didn’t exactly do him a disservice but when he smiled, the overcrowded smelly Hell around us turned into Ko Samui, complete with cocktails, palm trees and cutely squeaking dolphins. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘San Diego. We got relatives in Rocas Calientes. We meet there a couple times a year for special occasions.’

  ‘What’s this occasion?’

  ‘My cousin’s twenty-first. What brings you here?’

  ‘Just visiting,’ I said. ‘My uncle lives in Rocas Calientas too.’

  ‘Oh cool.’ That was his chance to push the relationship up a gear; suggest we should hang out together, that he could show me around, grab a beer or a light supper, maybe rail me senseless up against some smooth-skinned variety of cactus. But he didn’t – he started watching Paris Hilton again and I lost him.

  I entered into a fantasy about that movie Cocktail – that was set in Mexico, wasn’t it? – where Tom Cruise works in a bar and meets that curly-haired chick. And before long they’re going on daytrips to waterfalls and banging by moonlight. That could be us, I thought. Me and Future Husband.

  Actually, it wasn’t set in Mexico at all that film, it was Jamaica.

  ‘There’s a cool art district in Rocas,’ said Future Husband. ‘That aunt I was telling you about owns Galería de Salomé Casta. You should check it out.’

  ‘Yeah, I will.’ If he’d said she owned the local museum of used tampons and turds I’d have promised to check it out.

  ‘There’s a cool rooftop bar, overlooking the art walk. And you have to do Campo A Mesa – it’s this organic restaurant surrounded by all the produce and livestock they use in their cooking. It’s up in the hills. I hang out mostly at Sal’s. Or at the hotel where we’re staying, the Holiday Inn. It’s the biggest one on the beachfront, you can’t miss it.’

  Was that a hint? I thought. Was he implying that’s where he’d be if I fancied seeing him again? He played his cards close to his magnificent broad chest. I couldn’t see it under his clothes but a girl can dream. And I did dream. I dreamed of doing unspeakable sexual athletics with that body in the forty-seven minutes we were sitting there, forearm hairs kissing.

  A guy who looked like him from Jersey Shore with the eyebrows and the ridiculous bling, took a seat on the other side of me with an oversized carry-on and rifled through the pockets. His movements were too loud for me and Future Husband to continue talking so we stopped and sort of looked at each other. He was fuming as much I was. After a while, it became funny and we were both smiling. Jersey Shore eventually found some gum and posted four pellets in his mouth, proceeding to chew and pop while texting.

  ‘Gum snappers,’ I sighed.

  Future Husband looked at me. ‘Huh?’

  ‘The list. People who snap gum.’

  The penny dropped, right into my pants. He gestured towards the woman on his left, not a relative,
some redhead. ‘People who sniff a lot.’

  I looked across at a couple of barefooted backpackers, flip-flops in hand, studying a departure board. ‘People who go barefoot on public transport.’

  He chuckled, nodding towards one an older male relative having a coughing fit. ‘People who cough without putting their hand over their mouth.’

  ‘People who do put their hand over their mouth but don’t disinfect it after.’

  He gestured towards a seated man opposite wearing a brown suit and mismatched green Crocs, doing a crossword. ‘People who wear those.’

  ‘People who barge in front of one another at the baggage carousel like if they don’t get to their suitcase first they’re gonna burst into flames.’

  ‘That dude picking his nose,’ he said, signalling towards another backpacker, also in Crocs, this time purple.

  ‘That leathery old twadge checking her lipstick,’ I said.

  ‘That dude hitting his kid.’

  ‘The dude who left the puddle of jizz under this seat.’

  He craned to look under my chair, bursting into laughter. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘No, it’s definitely jizz.’

  We found a multitude of irritants and tourists to bitch and laugh about – Woman With Hairspray, Woman With Eye Tick, Drake Lookalike Licking His Wife’s Neck, Noisy Blonde Fivesome, Teenagers Flicking Mike & Ikes at each other until the departure gates emptied and the people got less interesting.

  As I was imagining us strolling round IKEA, me wheeling the trolley with our twins in, him struggling all muscly with the sections of a Liatorp Console Table and a HAVSTA Cabinet With Plinth, an announcement came over the PA system and his party collected up their belongings. Of all the aeroplanes in all the airports and all the flights, he wasn’t on mine.

  ‘It was nice talking to you, Maniac.’

  ‘You too,’ I said, silently hoping he’d have a shit name – something stupidly-spelled like Jaysin or Dezzmond or a duff one like Keith, so to diminish his perfection even slightly. But he didn’t.

  He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘Rafael.’