Читать книгу Sweetpea: The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017 - C.J. Skuse, C. J. Skuse, C.J. Skuse - Страница 9

1. Derek Scudd

2. Wesley Parsons

3. People who eat with their mouth open – e.g. Craig

4. The first Kardashian – maybe if I figure out how to go back in time I can kill him then we can stop all the rest

5. Septuagenarians who chat in clusters inside shop doorways

6. Celebrities who bang on and on about loving your body and being comfortable in your own skin, then lose a boatload of weight and release a fitness DVD. Just. Fuck. Off. You. Cunting. Hypocrites.

Had another Dad dream, the third since Bonfire Night. Woke up in a bath of sweat, even though the temperature was, like, -2 degrees. It’s always the same dream: that last day in hospital, his dry little face staring up at me from the pillow, eyes pleading with words his brain couldn’t send to his mouth.

Still, this week’s front page was more enjoyable:

LOCAL FAMILY MAN’S BODY FOUND IN GRISLY CANAL DREDGE

A MAN whose body was discovered in a local stretch of canal on New Year’s Day has been named.

A passer-by made the grim find at around 8.30 a.m. on New Year’s morning and police were called to the waterside at the roving bridge near the library. The body has been named as that of 32-year-old Daniel John Wells, an electrician who had been out socialising the night before.

Mr Wells worked as an electrician for Wells & Son Electricals and has two daughters from previous relationships, Tyffannee-Miley, 3 [I shit you not!] and Izabella-Mai, 18 months [similarly, the fuck?].

Police have yet to rule whether or not there are suspicious circumstances surrounding Mr Wells’s death and are appealing for witnesses.

Nothing was mentioned about his jeans being around his ankles. Or his drunken state. Or his tendencies to opportunistic rape. Or his missing appendage. I guess ‘socialising’ is the umbrella term to cover all that.

Work was dull. I swear that Chinese kid who was locked in a cage for twenty years wouldn’t swap for my life at the moment. We have a new kid in, called AJ – Claudia’s nephew from Australia. I say ‘kid’ but he’s actually eighteen and on a gap year and working as a ‘Part-time Hourly Paid’ assistant for the next six months. His top half dresses like he’s going to the beach; his bottom half has just come back from Glastonbury. I don’t know what the A or the J stand for but, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who goes about calling themselves by their initials is just begging for a slap.

He’s actually very good-looking, tall and tanned, covered in friendship bracelets, and he smiles all the time. I don’t normally get drawn towards cheerful people – the urge to hurt them becomes too strong – but I think he does allow for modest gusset dribble. Bit eager to impress Claudia. He’s staying with her. Maybe I can besmirch him somehow; that would get right up her bunghole. You know when people say a smile ‘can light up a room’? I know what they’re talking about now. AJ has a smile that does that.

Not my room, though, obviously.

I nodded off typing up seventeen letters pertaining to dredging on the Somerset Levels and the steep rise in recycling fees for garden waste. The miserable Home and Properties sub, ironically called Joy, commented on how much weight I’d put on over the holidays. Joy is censorious by her nature to all of us but today it pissed me off more than usual. She thinks she’s being helpful, pointing out our insecurities – my weight, Lana’s breakdown, Claudia’s moles, Jeff’s limp and, worst of all, Mike Heath’s impotence (she’d noticed a bag he brought back from the chemist one lunchtime). I think Joy once weighed about fifty stone but lost it all and had the NHS cut off the slack. Now she considers it her duty to verbally maim everyone.

The irritating thing is, we can’t say ANYTHING back to Joy because she has a ton of disabilities. She’s one of those rotund, deeply ugly Cromwellian-faced women you see around who’ve dyed their hair bright pink or blue in an attempt to make themselves more appealing, but all they’ve done is accentuate their ugliness. So I can’t comment about her big left leg or her stutter or the Bell’s palsy that has caused her mouth to start sliding off her face because then I’d get done for disablism. Crazy. Wouldn’t you rather have someone like me working with you? Someone who did the decent thing and bitched about you behind your back, rather than right to your face?

I don’t particularly want to go to the effort of killing Joy but I do sometimes like to imagine her, stuffed and glazed, prostrate on a silver platter, surrounded by tufts of parsley with a big green apple wedged between her jaws.

The mayor came in at lunch to see Ron. She’s pleasant enough and she’s got a foster-care past, a disabled kid, and her husband keeps having heart attacks, so she’s clearly had to swallow several shitty spoonfuls from the Bowl of Life. I try not to get too close to her, though – she smells like a Glade PlugIn on full-whack. She is also gluten intolerant, which makes buying lunch intolerable. I have to go to that smelly deli on the corner, where the guy with black fingernails and dreadlocks shuffles around in a hummus-covered apron, twiddling his nose ring.

Lana smiled as she sashayed past my desk at lunchtime, robin’s-egg-blue blouse straining against the pressure of her sizeable assets. I’m pretty sure half the time she doesn’t need to walk past my desk – she could go the other way round – but she does it to look at me. Like a killer going back to the site where she dumped a body, just to marvel at the rate of decomposition or to fuck the remains. I smiled back anyway, for the sake of The Act, and we had a short chat. I smiled again when we were done. Cue the hair swish. Cue the giggle. Cue me imagining her pinned to a snooker table and stabbing her in each hole. I can see why all the men fancy her. She’s bubbly, easy-going, has tits like water balloons. Her last two boyfriends dumped her – I heard it on the staffroom grapevine. She had a breakdown after the first one. And, apparently, after the second one left, she tried to take her own life. I don’t know the severity of the attempt – whether it was a proper go or just a token pills-and-finger-straight-downthe-throat job – but it did explain Craig’s predilection for her. He likes them broken.

A lesbian couple whose kid had choked on a grape in Pizza Hut came in to chat to Mike Heath in the conference room, along with the waitress who’d done kiddy Heimlich and saved his life. I wrote up a press release on a student’s Kilimanjaro climb for moon bears and helped Jeff input the match report from the finals of the County Bowls Championships. There was a Kinder Egg on my desk when I got back from lunch.

Jeff Thresher is the newspaper’s chief sports editor. I think he’d been put in with the foundations. He sits at his desk in the corner all day; holey red cardigan, fingerless gloves, three back supports on his chair. I like Jeff. He holds the door open for me and laughs at my jokes. He’s an expert gardener too and enters all the country shows with his massive courgettes. He’s taught me some of the Latin names of my favourite flowers – Bellis perennis (daisy), Centaurea cyanus (cornflower) and Amaranthus caudatus (Love Lies Bleeding). If the office were flooded with shit, I’d definitely throw Jeff the other life raft.

Drove over to the house in my lunch break. Julia is not a happy camper. She’s broken a window at the back. It’s only a small hole but it made me mad. So, of course, she had to be taught another lesson. Back into the cupboard with you, Little Chip.

Met Craig for a Nando’s after work and he brought the carinsurance documents along so we could Compare the Meerkat ’cos the renewal price was too high. My chicken was tough. I didn’t complain though. Didn’t have it in me tonight.

Thank God for porn. The moment Craig mooted the possibility of sex that evening, I took myself off to the bedroom under the guise of ‘working on my novel’ and chowed down on every old favourite I could find to lubricate the old pink matter. When I think back to being a kid and sneaking off to read the dirty bits in my mum’s Jackie Collins or rewinding Dad’s Basic Instinct tape about six bloody times, I wonder how I survived. Now, it’s everywhere and not so titillating.

Chat rooms can be another source of titillation. I know modesty forbids me to say I’m brilliant at dirty talk but I am brilliant at dirty talk. How it works is you snare them in the chat rooms, get them begging for a private text chat in WhatsApp or Kik and then haul them in. Once they’re in the app, they’re in my trap.

Hee hee hee.

Admittedly, sexting gets a little annoying when predictive text spoils the fun – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said I wanted to ‘duck his vock’ or asked a guy to ‘cum in my wasp’ or ‘lick my Pudsey’. One guy offered to ‘suck my bipolars’. Some of them get quite demanding. Skyping works better but it involves shaving and losing weight and I just can’t be bothered at the moment. Chatting to three or four at once, it’s like working in Argos during the Christmas rush. One wants an ass shot, another wants a tit shot, some guy in Australia’s going to bed soon and needs to watch me cum on camera and one guy in Toronto wants to chat about suicidal thoughts he’s had since his brother’s death. Oh, yeah. I get all sorts.

Last time, me and one of my regulars were on about meeting up at a London hotel – he wanted to tie me up. Another said he’d meet me in a dark alleyway and do exactly what I said: grab me and tear at my clothes, grasp my neck like a nettle and bite my ear as he whispered nasty things into it – just like I wanted him to.

I stop short at asking if I can kill them after; if I can lie underneath them, dressed in their blood, while they emit their dying breaths on top of me.

Baby steps and all that.

But the best – the absolute best thrill of all – is going fishing. And I don’t mean for carp or tench. I mean big fish. Big, horny fish who only come out at night to prowl the streets, looking for female office workers walking home alone or pissed-up damsels in distress stumbling back from the clubs. I like to play said damsel from time to time. I like to play the victim. It’s so damn easy when you’ve got an eight-inch chef’s knife in your coat pocket.