Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘He’s married?’

  ‘Oh no, they finally divorced about a year ago. But it sent him into a spiral. We were worried we’d never get him back. Anyway, the asshole who slept with his wife happened to be his best friend and his lieutenant colonel.’

  ‘Oh. Shit.’

  ‘Raf beat up the guy pretty bad. Army kicked him straight back to San D. Cuntasaurus Rex left soon after. We were all glad to see the back of her.’

  ‘Where is she now?

  ‘Headless down a fuckin’ storm drain, I hope.’ I could tell me and Liv were going to get on like a house on fire. ‘But now he’s got no pension, no references, and he’s living back with Mom and Dad.’ She sipped her drink, like she was sipping the proverbial tea. ‘He’s desperate for someone in his life. Someone he can protect, look after. Do you really like him? Honestly?’

  ‘Yeah. I do. Honestly.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There’s no but.’

  ‘He said you wanna take things slow. We talk. He tells me stuff.’

  ‘I don’t… want him to let me down.’

  ‘You mean you’ve been fucked around before and you don’t want him to do the same thing to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, he has trust issues too. But I haven’t seen him this in love with someone since Cuntasaurus. And look how she treated him.’

  ‘I want to be better for him. I didn’t… handle the last break up well.’

  ‘Don’t let one bitch colour the whole scene,’ she said, her green-taloned hand emphatically slicing the air between us. ‘Don’t let it ruin you for all other relationships. Trust me, I’ve been there. I tried to find someone as devoted and loyal as my brothers for years and I thought: nah, they’re regular one-offs, like my dad. This was before I met Edouardo at Nico’s gym. I wanted to be better for him too. He helped me get down to my goal weight.’

  ‘You mean thinner,’ I muttered.

  Her husband climbed the pool steps and grabbed his towel from a sun-lounger and gave her a wink. They fist bumped.

  ‘Imma grab a cold one,’ he said.

  ‘OK. I’ll be in soon, babe.’

  ‘Don’t be long. And don’t drink too many cocktails – it’s empty calories.’ He blew her a kiss. She smacked her cheek with it.

  I could have smacked him sideways.

  Liv turned to me when he’d gone. ‘Since meeting you, Rafa’s actually smiled. I’d forgotten what his smile looked like! We’ve all seen the change in him. Sal says he comes down here all the time, looking for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  She put her arm behind her head again, a different arm, revealing another batch of bruises. She saw me looking at them and lowered it quickly to scratch her thigh. ‘Mosquito bites. Little shits can’t get enough of me.’

  My stomach flipped over.

  ‘So,’ she said, pointing a long green fingernail at me as she sat up on the edge of her lounger, ‘I’ll only say this once to you: if you break my brother’s heart or mess him around or act all demanding and shit – like, if you are Cuntasaurus 2: Reloaded – let it be known that I will take your life.’

  ‘Seems fair to me.’

  ‘Oh, I mean it, English Girl. And our mom? She’ll spit on your dead body and stamp her stiletto hard into your eye socket.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And our brother Nicolas? He’ll set your fuckin’ bones alight. And our uncles are cops and they’ll prolly help us hide your body.’

  I laughed. She didn’t. ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt him, Liv. Unless he hurts me. Then I’ll probably have to… I don’t know, cut off his dick, slice up his torso in a bathtub and bury the bastard in the flowerbeds.’

  She threw me a look which I couldn’t read before bursting into laughter which bounced off the hotel walls. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. ‘You get me, that’s a good start. You fuckin’ get me. Cuntasaurus never got my humour.’

  ‘You want to track down the old C-Rex and tie her to the back of a truck, maybe drag her around for a while?’ I suggested.

  She pursed her lips. ‘Gimme the keys, Thelma. Just gimme the keys.’

  Friday, 10 May – the beachfront, Rocas Calientes

  ‘Hey, try this,’ said Raf, handing me a bag with six warm dough balls inside it when I met him on the beachfront that morning. ‘Freshly baked.’

  And even though I was full, the warm ball was, indeed, all of the noms and a few hundred more. Chocolate oozed out of the centres.

  ‘Oh, my Christ. You could kill me right now and bury me inside a giant one of these and I’d probably wake up and thank you.’ We were sitting on the low wall separating the beach from the sidewalk and I kicked my feet against the concrete. I was like a kid again.

  Raf laughed, way more than people usually laugh at one of my jokes. He laughed at a lot of my jokes. This helped the fancying thing a lot.

  ‘How the hell do you eat so much and not put on weight?’ I asked.

  ‘I work out, not to excess just to trim off the extra. I enjoy it. My mom says, Si no estás comiendo, no eres feliz.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘If you’re not eating, you’re not happy. Food brings us together. We eat, we grow, we share, it makes us strong. It enriches us.’

  ‘She’s not a fan of dieting, I take it, your mum?’

  He frowned. ‘Ninguna perra flaca te va a complacer, mijo. Basically, don’t truck with skinny bitches, son. She never liked my ex-wife Tina so I guess she was right. Says they starve their brains like they starve their men.’

  ‘I like your mum.’

  ‘She likes you too,’ he said, feeding me one of the little doughnut things. ‘She wants you to come and celebrate with us in November, for Dia de los Muertos. We come down here for that to be close to our grandma, Dad’s mom. Then you’ll see us eat some food, holy shit. We eat like we’re about to go to the chair.’

  ‘What happens for that?’

  ‘We all meet at the hotel, we dress up, paint our faces, walk up to the graveyard with all the stuff. We sing, we dance, we get sad. We scatter petals on the ground, make flower garlands. And we stay with the ones we’ve lost, all night long. Big crowd of us.’

  ‘We don’t do anything like that in the UK.’

  ‘I think every culture has their own way of dealing with grief. We believe during the festival that our loved ones come back to us. We put pictures of them all over their tombs. Trinkets, bottles of perfume, stuff that belonged to them in their lifetimes. Tequila, cookies. To lure them.’

  ‘So, they come back and eat the cookies and drink the tequila?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he laughed, ‘it’s all to let them know we remember them. To let their spirits know they’re not alone.’

  I rested my head against his shoulder. ‘That’s so nice. I should do that. I miss my dad.’

  ‘He knows you do,’ he told me, stroking my hair. ‘He hears you. You’re not alone you know, not if you don’t want to be.’

  I held him around his waist and put my head on his shoulder. ‘You wait till I get crazy. I won’t see your ass for dust.’

  ‘So you’ll still be lookin’ at my ass, huh?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I sat up straight, wondering if I should quit while I was ahead – before I got closer to him than was healthy for either of us. ‘Maybe this is too good to be true. Or too true to be any good.’

  ‘Siento que atrapé un rayo. Pero tal vez ella no quiere ser atrapada.’

  ‘Translation?’

  ‘I caught a lightning bolt. But maybe she doesn’t want to be held.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I do want to be held. But I’m so bad for you, Raf.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me be the judge of that, huh?’ He started laughing. ‘What are you doing to me, girl? You got me lookin’ so crazy right now.’

  That pulled me up. ‘Did you just drop a Beyoncé lyric in there?’

  He was still laughing. ‘I may have done, yeah.’

  And t
hat was all I needed to hear. ‘Take me to bed. Right now.’

  The second he put the sign on the door handle outside his hotel room, we were tearing into one another. We didn’t think, we did what our bodies demanded. We were more or less fully-clothed the first time, I was desperate to feel him inside me as deep as he could go, and he came so quickly but it didn’t matter. Because we had the whole night to do it again.

  And again.

  And do it properly. To take in every section of each other, to allow our skin to bead with sweat and watch each other’s tongues and fingertips smooth it away. And weirdly, I liked hearing his heartbeats when I was on him. I thought I could only get that kind of comfort from a cold body. I’d only been turned on like that before by the lack of warmth, the certainty of death. But heartbeats, warmth, cuddles with Raf – that shit became addictive. I’ve never been made love to in that way before. I’ve had good orgasms with Craig and with AJ too – at least one while he was still alive – but this was brand new.

  Time was when I’d needed sex and Craig hadn’t been home or hadn’t been up for it, I’d settle for porn and the biggest dildo in the LoveHoney catalogue. I’d feel better – sated but not loved.

  With Raf, I felt loved.

  He was worth all the dick pics, wolf-whistles, insults and crushingly awful Plenty of Fish, Match, Snatch, Bumble, Fumble and Tinder dates I’d ever yawned through. As he lay beside me, tracing the length of my body from my shoulder, down my arm, across my scar and back along, over my hip and down and back again, he said, ‘I love that part of you the best. It’s like a sculpture. Like you’re carved out of marble.’ I raked his hair back away from his sweaty forehead and he closed his eyes.

  ‘I’m sleepy.’

  ‘Me too. But I don’t wanna sleep.’

  We both started singing Aerosmith, right on cue.

  ‘We are so in sync!’ I chuckled and we kissed again. Meg Ryan Tier = level completed.

  ‘What’s turtle in Spanish?’ I asked.

  ‘Tortuga,’ he said, deeply, sending a little heartbeat to my nethers.

  ‘Oh, like the beach? What’s hot turtle?’

  He frowned. ‘Tortuga caliente.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondered.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what any right-minded maniac would wonder, I guess.’

  ‘Does that make me weird?’

  ‘Beautifully weird,’ he said, flicking my earlobe. I cuddled against his chest. He didn’t seem to want to be anywhere else. That was the best part.

  ‘Can I ask you another weird question?’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect anything less.’

  ‘Your sister. Those bruises on her arm—’

  He fell back against the pillow. ‘She says they’re mosquito bites.’

  ‘Can mossie bites give you bruises?’ I said, resting my head on his bicep.

  ‘Yeah, they can apparently. I looked it up.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘No. None of us do. But till she says otherwise, we gotta go with it. She defends him to the hilt. One time she came round for dinner – lip all swollen. Swore she’d tripped on a bathmat and smashed her face on the sink. She won’t say a word against him. She wouldn’t speak to Mom and Dad for months last time they accused him. Gotta play it real careful when it comes to Edouardo.’

  ‘I like Liv,’ I told him, stroking his arm up and down. ‘I’d hate to think of her being hurt. Makes me wanna – put Edouardo on our list.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ he said. ‘He’s king of the fucking list. Believe me, we’ve all said our piece to her on this and it never goes well. But we gotta follow her lead.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘For now.’ He pulled me in and kissed me again. ‘Hey, why don’t you come back to San Diego with us on Sunday?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come back with us. Stay for a while. See if you like it. Just be with me.’ He could tell I was squirmy. ‘It’s all right. Forget I said anything. I’ll settle for coming to see you every few weeks.’ He cuddled me in. ‘If you want me to.’

  ‘I want you to,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘But what?’

  I swallowed my answer – it’s what Rhiannon would have done, hiding her true self. But I didn’t want to do that – the new me had to be different. Well, as much as she could be.

  ‘I need to know I can be without you first.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re going home the day after tomorrow and I’m gonna miss you like mad. But I need to know I can handle that. I need to know I can be all right on my own. Do you know what I’m saying?’

  And the stupid idiot said the perfect thing:

  ‘Yeah. I think we both need that.’ His kisses were slow and gentle and I couldn’t get enough of them.

  I think I knew for sure how he felt about me the following day: the day he did the David Guetta Face.

  Lemme explain:

  The David Guetta Face is how I test whether someone is genuinely happy to see me or whether they want me to fuck off – it’s the face David Guetta pulls when he sees Kelly Rowland for the first time in the video for ‘When Love Takes Over’. Now, I’m not great at assessing people’s moods – sometimes people can be pissed off with me and I don’t see it. Sometimes people are scared but unless they tell me, ‘Hey, you know what? I’m pissing my pants right now,’ I wouldn’t get the hint. But I do know pure joy and I see it in David Guetta’s face when he sees Kelly in that video.

  Kelly’s walking through the wind machine towards the beach party, looking boss, and Guetta’s pushing his trolley along, setting up his decks, plugging in his amps, and the wind whips up and the seagulls are all flocking around Kelly and she’s got her stilettos off and she’s parading up the sand in this stunning dress like the total qween she is and she’s walking through the water, hair all blowy, and it turns night time and Guetta’s decks are all set up and the music’s blasting out and he’s having it large and Kelly finally reaches him at the decks and David Guetta looks at her with this face –

  This I’m so damn happy to see you face.

  My point is I never get a David Guetta Face from anyone. And yeah, I know why, I’m a miserable beeyotch, is it any wonder, right? My mother hated me. Bullied at school. Colleagues all thought I was a weirdo. Craig couldn’t wait to bury his clam hammer in the nearest acre of blonde that wasn’t me. Nobody’s ever pleased to see me.

  But when I came down to breakfast at the hotel that following Saturday morning and I saw all his relatives in the dining room, and Raf helping himself to eggs, he turned to me and he did the David Guetta Face.

  And that was when I knew. I knew he was genuinely into me. And he made me believe I was something I never thought I could be: normal. I don’t think I stopped smiling all day.

  At least until I got on my bike and rode back up to the Hacienda after we’d said our ‘Goodbyes’ and ‘I’ll Miss Yous’. It was only then that the contentment started to ebb away from me and a new feeling slid into my DMs.

  The strangest, coldest feeling that I was being watched.

  Monday, 13 May – Hacienda Santuaria

  The creator of the #CutForRhiannon hashtag on Twitter – I’ll do the cutting, thanks.

  Guy who punched his dog to death in the latest animal abuse video doing the rounds. I’ll find you one day, Mark Cordero. You mark my words.

  That British comedian turned criminologist who tries to psychoanalyse me on his true crime podcast. Seems confident but you put me or any of the inhabitants of Monster Mansion in a room with him and you wait for the smell of pissed pants.

  Rafael’s brother-in-law Edouardo

  Edouardo again. He deserves to be on here twice.

  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.

  Sadness consumed me like a shroud all that day afte
r Raf had left for San Diego and I knew it would be a month until I saw him again. I kicked around the Hacienda, on my own for once as Tenoch and the Chipmunks were out, but I couldn’t even take advantage of that because there was nothing I wanted to do. After all my chores were done, I opened the lid of the office laptop, retreating to the affection-starved millennial’s equivalent of a cuddle – the internet.

  Is it possible for a serial killer to fall in love? was the first thing I googled. I learned a whole lot about hybristophiliacs – people who fall in love with serial killers purely because they are serial killers – but next to nothing about myself and what I was feeling.

  The hybristophiliac search led to recent articles about the Rhiannon Lewis stans who were still out there, still with me in spirit, still loving the Sweetpea Killer and all her darkly devious deeds. There were more interviews with names from my past – Lucille from the PICSOs, Daisy Chan from the Gazette, White Nancy from WOMBAT, the family of Troy Shearer, the rapist I killed in the alley in Cardiff. More think pieces on why I did what I did, what might have caused it and an updated documentary about Priory Gardens, skewed towards ‘the creation of a monster’.

  An ‘At Home With Freddie Litton-Cheney’ piece in Hello! mag.

  And a wedding announcement in The Times.

  Mr and Mrs P.D. Proudlove are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter Claudia Margaret Gulper to Mitchell Aaron Silverton. The marriage took place on Saturday, 27 April at Southwark Cathedral. The Proudloves are pleased to welcome Mitch into their family.

  This linked to a small news article:

  Sweetpea’s Baby Gets New Family Months After Killer Gave Up Child For Adoption.

  Claudia was married. Ivy was five months old and she had a family. A mum and a dad. There was no mention of her anywhere else and still no pictures online but this news gave me an uneasy realisation: a sense that my daughter really did belong to other people now. She had a daddy now too. I hoped he loved her like the one I took away from her. I couldn’t dwell on it for long – the gnawing in my chest grew the more I thought about it.