Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  But was I just horny? Like on the cruise when I’d fucked that steward? Had that made everything better? No. Because it wasn’t the sex I’d wanted – it was the afterwards. The cuddle and the kissing and comfort of knowing that person would still be there the next morning and the next, on into infinity.

  But people aren’t like that. They drift in and out. I like permanence and reliability and you don’t get that with humans unless they’re dead. That’s why AJ turned me on more when he was cold than he ever had warm. Coming home to him after that hen weekend to find him still blue in my bed was the most comforted I’d ever been by another person.

  But as I stood there, watching The Hottest Turtle walk away with those boxes, another voice invaded the stage. A voice that overrode Rhiannon.

  Give him a chance. You do deserve some happiness.

  Maybe it was the after-effects of the piña colada and I was actually channelling Caro from afar, but the voice grew louder.

  Don’t rely on him, but don’t suppress these feelings either. They’re trying to tell you something.

  It wasn’t Caro. And it wasn’t The Man in the Moon or Dad or Ivy in utero either. It was a girl’s voice. My voice. Maybe the Me I was in that parallel universe I’m always thinking about – the Me I should have been.

  ‘I don’t want him to get hurt,’ I muttered. ‘If he’s with me, that’s what will happen.’

  You’re a different person now. You won’t make those mistakes again.

  ‘It’s why I left Ivy. And why I’m glad I couldn’t go to Marnie either.’

  You’d never have hurt them. You can control yourself.

  ‘If he hurts me like Craig did…’

  Not all men… Go to him. If it’s meant to be, it will be. If not, you’ll be OK. You’ve got this far alone. You are strong.

  So I did it – I walked towards the van, face carefully hidden beneath the hat, and waited for him to come back.

  And he did come back – twenty minutes later – still half-naked, still sweaty but without the boxes and accompanied by a young blonde. She had flecks of white paint on her dungarees and an orange boob tube on underneath a loose-fitting fishnet vest – Fun Times at Guantánamo.

  They were holding hands.

  I edged around the van to the back, walking in the other direction towards the row of shops. When I got to the ice cream kiosk, I turned back to see her get in the passenger’s side and close the door. The van did a U-turn in the road and passed me by without a second glance. They were laughing.

  ‘Yeah. That’d be right,’ I said, turning and walking straight into a wall called Tenoch.

  ‘Hey, you ready for your ice cream?’ He reached into his trouser pocket for a wad of cash. At least one of the bills had spots of red on it.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, screwing up Rafael’s note and tossing it into the nearest trash can. It no longer sparked joy. ‘Rum ’n’ raisin, please. A fucking big one.’

  Monday, 18 February – Hacienda Santuario

  Men

  Men called Rafael

  Rafael’s mum for giving birth to the dickhead to begin with

  Rafael’s grandmother for being horny ever

  Women. For not being as fanciable for men

  The surgeries themselves, as Dr Gonzales had said, were all incremental, over the next few months and the best I can say about them was that at least the physical pain took my mind off the pain in my own head.

  LIPOSUCTION/TUMMY TUCK

  This was first and I was in bed for two full weeks after – swollen, grogged-up on pain meds and barely able to do anything but sleep and slurp soup. Ibuprofen and Tylenol were constant bed mates. I couldn’t walk properly so I’d have to shuffle like an 80-year-old with chronic spine curvature who’d crapped herself.

  Ironically, it was gridlock below. I became very constipated and when it did finally make an appearance, it was like excreting a concrete traffic cone.

  Paco revelled in all my discomfort, of course. The car journeys were almost as excruciating as the agony of each op.

  ‘Haha, chica, you wanna stop and get more painkillers, huh? You want a lil water to make those painkillers work faster? Is it burning, the pain? You wanna see your face in the mirror, all cut up?’

  ‘Either shut the fuck up or grow the fuck up, will you?’

  ‘Hoho, there she is! There’s my serial killer! Doesn’t take much to bring her out, does it?’

  Whenever I complained to Tenoch about Paco, all he would say was ‘You have to ignore him. This is what he does – he will delight in upsetting you. It gives him a thrill. He does with Celestina too.’

  ‘And that makes it all right, does it?’

  ‘No, but you are going to come across people like Paco in your life and you cannot rise to their bait. If you do, you will be in prison before you know it. You need to work on your temper.’

  ‘Do I? I hadn’t thought of that! Wow, eureka moment or what – I need to WORK on my temper! Easy peasy, lemon fucking squeezy!’

  But of course he was right. I was my own worst enemy. And little by little I tried to divert my mind away from the vitriol that would bubble and brew inside it whenever Paco was around. And the more I tried to suppress it, the more depressed I became. I had noticed it properly the day Paco drove me back from my liposuction. I was lying down on the back seat, padded up in gauze and compression bandages, doped up on Percocet, tuning him out, focusing on the engine hum. It was working. He wasn’t getting to me at all.

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon, did you see all the fat they took out of your stomach? There was a lot, huh? They suck a lot of fat out of you? Did they suck it out of your ass? That’s where you got a lot of fat, yeah?’

  ‘Just drive, you absolute fist-magnet.’ I chained a few more painkillers and lost myself in sleep.

  I got lazy during that whole time. I think I only changed my leggings once in all the weeks I was laid up with my body wrapped in bandages – Aretha Franklin had her outfit changed four times when she was in her coffin.

  I spent more and more time in my room, in bed, with the door locked during my recovery. I couldn’t even find the will to pull out the weeds in the garden – I didn’t want to do anything but sleep.

  EAR PINNING

  My ears were pinned back next, and that was a stinging little bitch of a procedure as well, though not nearly as problematic as the nip and tuck, even though initially I did want to vomit out all my internal organs with the pain. Adding insult to injury, I had to wear a compression bandage wrapped around my face for twenty-four hours which made me look like that botched art restoration, Monkey Christ. The results were pretty instant though when the bandages came off – I stared at myself in the doctor’s hand mirror at a follow-up consultation, turning my head from right to left and back again.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘It’s working. I’m changing. Externally, at least.’

  MOLE AND SCAR REMOVAL/HAIRLINE LOWERING

  For these, I was in and out the same day – it was all lasers and cool cream application for the moles and scars. For the hairline, I was under the impression that they somehow magically transplanted new long hair to the front of my head and all of a sudden I’d have bangs like Camila Cabello but no, of course not. They first had to shave the back of my head, remove each tiny follicle individually and then transplant them, one at a time, to the front of my head which, between doses of pain medication, felt like I was being injected with poisonous ants. I’d have to wait weeks for the hair to grow out as well so no quick thrills there. In the meantime, I’d look like a Bedlam test case for a frontal lobotomy.

  But I guess if the cap fits…

  David, Saúl and Mátilda brought me gifts when I was recovering – drawings they’d done, friendship bracelets and bags of avocados, pomegranates and pecans they’d picked from one of the fields over the back. Sometimes they’d sit on the end of my bed – David telling me stories in Spanish to help me learn the language. Mátilda would play with my hair and paint my nails and Saúl would run
small cars up and down my blanketed legs. They were under strict instructions from Celestina to leave if I got too tired.

  Tenoch left all my meals on a tray outside my room. When he did come in to see me, he kept it brief.

  ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Meh.’

  ‘Your flowers need you. They need watering.’

  ‘Water them then.’

  ‘I think they would rather it was you. They like it when you talk to them and dance for them with your little radio on.’

  Cut to me, lying there, spent from a whole day’s doing nothing, trying to summon a fuck to give. In the end, I couldn’t. ‘Flowers don’t care who waters them. They’ll take it from anyone. They’re sluts. Like Lana.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Just water them, will you please?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Have you got any drugs? Like Prozac or anything? Xanax?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re ex-cartel and you can’t even cadge me a bit of Prozac?’

  ‘That’s not what you need. You need to get up and get busy. Breathe in some fresh air. Tend your garden. It will make you feel better.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Shall we practise your backstory again?’

  ‘No, not yet. Later. I can’t do anything right now.’

  ‘OK. Anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘Don’t let Paco up here to use the bathroom. He took a shit yesterday and it still stinks.’

  ‘That wasn’t him, it was Arturo. He is lactose intolerant. Paco force-fed him some heavy cream for a joke.’

  ‘Ugh. Keep him away from me. Keep all of them away.’

  ‘As you wish, gatita.’

  Wednesday, 6 March – Hacienda Santuario

  Plastic surgeons who say procedures will ‘sting a little’ or suggest ‘some slight discomfort’ will occur. The kind of ‘sting’ and ‘slight discomfort’ he’s going to feel when I boil his head in a vat of hot oil

  Nosy medical receptionists

  Paco and his three amigos for their constant eating of my Pop Tarts, laughing at unfunny TV shows and shitting in the upstairs toilet. The smell sticks to the walls.

  That blood pressure bitch nurse who squeezes my upper arm. Never an accurate reading, always has to try again. Sadist.

  People who do that cling film challenge thing to their dogs

  As time went on, with the help of painkillers, I ventured downstairs more, usually when Paco and the Chipmunks had left. I’d go out to see my flowers, water and deadhead them and stroke the leaves. Or I’d sit beside the pool listening to my radio, chucking monkey nuts at the rock squirrels who’d snuck in beneath the fencing. It brought me back to myself, a little bit more, each passing day. The smells of chlorine, lavender, the pozole cooking on the stove or Tenoch’s Deep Heat on his knees became the scents of my life.

  Still just temporary scents though. I was still on the conveyor belt ride to Fuck Knows Whereville.

  Paco was Tenoch’s eyes and ears on the cartel and, according to him, there were no more immediate threats to the Hacienda. So life became quite samey for a while. It gave me endless time to think. To wonder.

  Though Paco was still deathly irritating – goading me and laughing at me and poking me playfully in eye-wateringly painful places whenever Tenoch was out of the room – sometimes, I could glean useful information from him, like what part Tenoch had played in the cartel before life at the Hacienda.

  ‘They called him El Mago. The magician. He could make things disappear.’ He sat at the kitchen island when I was mixing a carrot cake one morning, dipping into the bowl of crushed walnuts for the decoration.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What do you think, chica?’

  ‘So what was your business in the cartel?’

  ‘I was a lieutenant.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I was a bad guy. We were bad people. Psychopaths. Actually, we make psychopaths look like pussycats.’

  He took the opportunity to stare at my pussy when he was saying that – he took most opportunities to stare at it, either as a threat or a promise. The only thing left for him to do was to grab it but maybe he wasn’t that much of a psychopath.

  ‘So what kind of things did you do?’ I said, taking a handful of crushed nuts myself and knocking them back.

  ‘Beatings, waterboarding, electric shocks to the genitals or tongue. Sometimes we would order a slaughter – several people. I’ve seen members of the cartel chainsaw a head clean off. You know what sound a head makes as you’re slicing it off? It squeal – like a pig.’

  ‘Yummy,’ I yawned.

  ‘We made bombs too. No mercy. I saw one guy – seriously crazy motherfucker – rip a beating heart right out of a cop’s chest.’

  Kind of put things in perspective for me, that conversation. The worst I ever did was stab someone and chop them up. Paco’s gleeful stories about his cartel made me realise there were worse people than me in the world. People even I couldn’t best. And a sort of depression set in.

  Between getting up and going back to bed, all I would do were three different things on a rota:

  Eat food, garden, watch TV.

  The next day: eat food, garden, watch TV.

  Some days there would be slight variations to it: maybe eat food, garden, take slow walk on treadmill, eat more food, watch YouTube video – My Life as a Truck Stop Stripper, google What is this dry patch on my ankle?

  Other days: treadmill, eat, watch TV, learn Spanish, watch YouTube videos of tiny animals trying to climb stairs, do Buzzfeed quiz – Who’d Win in a Fist Fight – You or Mike Pence?

  And though I was back using the internet, I asked Tenoch to put a block on ‘Rhiannon Lewis’ so I wouldn’t be tempted to check what was happening in the outside world. I didn’t want to know. He had been right – the praise always inflated my ego and the negative stuff made me want to stick knives in things. The best thing for me was to stop looking altogether.

  The children still visited whenever Celestina was there and they were a massive help in the garden when I couldn’t bend down for stitches.

  ‘We will help you, señorita,’ said David, taking charge. ‘Saúl – you need to dig up the mint today. Don’t eat all the cilantro, Mátilda.’

  ‘I’m not eating all of it! Saúl ate some too.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, I only ate some mint. You got a big fat belly.’

  ‘No, you got a big fat belly!’

  Some mornings, when the gardening got too political, they would play in the pool instead, with Tenoch’s permission. I ordered some pool noodles and sat wrapped up in my compression bandages and dressing gown on a sun-lounger, watching them splash. It was hard not to feel left out.

  ‘They are so happy,’ said a voice behind me. Celestina had emerged, apron in her hand, finished for the morning. ‘Thank you for letting them use the pool.’

  ‘It was Tenoch, not me,’ I said.

  ‘No, you asked him if they could. I never like to outstay our welcome.’ She nodded towards the borders. ‘Your flowers are beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re really coming on.’ I followed her gaze to the purple and orange explosions along the far edge of the lawn. ‘They made you some things.’ I pointed to the assortment of pressed flower pictures and miniature bouquets in tin foil vases the kids had made her on the opposite sun-lounger.

  She smiled, gazing happily at her kids as they played happily in the pool. David was the first to spot her as the other two chased each other on their pool noodles.

  ‘We going home, Mama?’

  ‘When you are ready,’ she said, settling the pictures and bouquets on her lap and sitting on the sun-lounger. ‘You play for now.’

  David beamed up at her and showed off his latest trick – a handstand with pointed feet. She applauded when he bobbed back up.

  ‘Where is their dad?’ I asked.

  ‘Dead,’ she replied. ‘He used to work fo
r Tenoch as a taxi driver – his car was ambushed one night outside the town. He was taking some American tourists to a club. They bombed his car.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Just over a year ago. Emilio knew what he was getting into, but we needed the money. Tenoch has been very good to us, though. He always sees us right. He liked Emilio. And because of Mátilda—’

  She stopped short. Paco was sauntering across the terrace with his jacket over his shoulder and a filthy cigar dangling from his lip. He smiled broadly at us and walked into the house. Celestina couldn’t look at him.

  ‘She’s his,’ she told me, quieter than she had been speaking so I could barely hear her.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Mátilda. I will never tell her that. Tenoch knows – I told him, thinking he would help me out – he hates rapists like you do – but he needs Paco to do his dirty business for him so he tries to keep us both happy.’

  ‘You and Paco—’

  She shook her head. ‘Not by choice. He makes me feel sick.’

  I leaned in and lowered my voice. ‘You work in the same house as the guy who raped you? And you’ve done that for… years?’

  ‘Yes. We don’t all have family inheritances and kindly drug runners to bail us out, señorita. That’s why I come by so early, so I can avoid el hombre cerdo. The Pig Man.’ She oinked with gusto and Saúl heard her from the pool and chuckled.

  I glanced at the happy little girl on her pool noodle and couldn’t quite believe something so beautiful could have come from someone so vile. ‘Does he know?’

  ‘No. And he won’t ever know. He doesn’t deserve something so precious in his life. He should only have pain and mayhem. And he’s got it coming, señorita. You don’t know how many times I have looked at those crossed machetes above the fireplace and thought of his neck.’ She looked me straight on. ‘I will dance on that man’s grave.’