CJ SKUSE is the author of the YA novels The Deviants, Monster, Pretty Bad Things, Rockoholic and Dead Romantic. She was born in 1980 in Weston-super-Mare, England. She has First Class degrees in Creative Writing and Writing for Children and, aside from writing novels, lectures in Writing for Children at Bath Spa University, where she is planning to do her PhD. Sweetpea is her first novel for adults.

For my cousin, Emily Metcalf.

For the years I spent at your mansion while mine was being decorated.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Sunday, 31 December

Monday, 1 January

Wednesday, 3 January

Friday, 5 January

Sunday, 7 January

Thursday, 11 January

Friday, 12 January

Tuesday, 16 January

Sunday, 21 January

Friday, 26 January

Wednesday, 31 January

Thursday, 1 February

Friday, 2 February

Saturday, 3 February

Sunday, 4 February

Monday, 5 February

Tuesday, 6 February

Wednesday, 7 February

Monday, 12 February

Tuesday, 13 February

Wednesday, 14 February

Thursday, 15 February

Friday, 16 February

Monday, 19 February

Thursday, 22 February

Tuesday, 27 February

Friday, 1 March

Saturday, 2 March

Sunday, 3 March

Tuesday, 5 March

Thursday, 7 March

Friday, 8 March

Saturday, 9 March

Sunday, 10 March

Monday, 11 March

Thursday, 14 March

Friday, 15 March

Sunday, 17 March

Tuesday, 19 March

Thursday, 21 March

Saturday, 23 March

Monday, 25 March

Wednesday, 27 March

Friday, 29 March

Sunday, 31 March

Wednesday, 3 April

Friday, 5 April

Saturday, 6 April

Monday, 8 April

Wednesday, 10 April

Thursday, 11 April

Friday, 12 April

Saturday, 13 April

Sunday, 14 April

Monday, 15 April

Maundy Thursday, 18 April

Saturday, 20 April

Easter Sunday, 21 April

Thursday, 25 April

Friday, 26 April

Saturday, 27 April

Sunday, 28 April

Monday, 29 April

Wednesday, 1 May

Saturday, 4 May

Sunday, 5 May

Monday, 6 May

Tuesday, 7 May

Friday, 10 May

Sunday, 12 May

Monday, 13 May

Wednesday, 15 May

Thursday, 16 May

Friday, 17 May

Saturday, 18 May

Sunday, 19 May

Monday, 20 May

Thursday, 23 May

Friday, 24 May

Saturday, 25 May

Monday, 27 May

Tuesday, 28 May

Wednesday, 29 May

Thursday, 30 May

Saturday, 1 June

Monday, 3 June

Wednesday, 5 June

Thursday, 6 June

Friday, 14 June

Sunday, 16 June

Monday, 17 June

Tuesday, 18 June

Wednesday, 19 June

Friday, 21 June

Saturday, 22 June

Sunday, 23 June

Copyright

Sunday, 31 December

1. Mrs Whittaker – neighbour, elderly, kleptomaniac

2. ‘Dillon’ on the checkout in Lidl – acne, wallet chain, who bangs my apples and is NEVER happy to help

3. The suited man in the blue Qashqai who roars out of Sowerberry Road every morning – grey suit, aviator shades, Donald Trump tan

4. Everyone I work with at the Gazette apart from Jeff

5. Craig

Well, my New Year has certainly gone off with a bang, I don’t know about yours. I was in a foul mood to begin with, partly due to the usual Christmas-Is-Over-Shit-It’s-Almost-Back-To-Work-Soon malaise and partly due to the discovery of a text on Craig’s phone while he was in the shower that morning. The text said:

Hope you’re thinking of me when ur soaping your cock – L.

Kiss. Kiss. Smiley face tongue emoji.

Oh, I thought. It’s a fact then. He really is shagging her.

L. was Lana Rowntree – a kittenish 24-year-old sales rep in my office who wore tight skirts and chunky platforms and swished her hair like she was in a 24-hour L’Oréal advert. He’d met her at my works Christmas piss-up on 19 December – twelve days ago. The text confirmed the suspicions I’d had when I’d seen them together at the buffet: chatting, laughing, her fingering the serviette stack, him spooning out stuffing balls onto their plates, a hair swish here, a stubble scratch there. She was looking at him all night and he was just bathing in it.

Then came the increase in ‘little jobs’ he had to do in town: a paint job here, a hardwood floor there, a partition wall that ‘proved trickier’ than he’d estimated. Who has any of that done the week before Christmas? Then there were the out-of-character extended trips to the bathroom and two Christmas shopping trips (without me) that were just so damn productive he spent all afternoon maxing out his credit card. I’ve seen his statement – all my presents were purchased online.

So I’d been stewing about that all day and the last thing I needed that New Year’s night was enforced fun with a bunch of gussied-up pissheads. Unfortunately, that’s what I got.

My ‘friends’ or, more accurately, the‘PICSOs’ – People I Can’t Shake Off – had arranged to meet at the Cote de Sirène restaurant on the harbour-side, dressed in Next Sale finery. Our New Years’ meal-slash-club-crawl had been planned for months – initially to include husbands and partners, but, one by one, they had all mysteriously dropped out as it became a New Years’ meal-slash-baby-shower-slash-club crawl for Anni. Despite its snooty atmosphere, the restaurant is in the centre of town, so there’s always yellow streaks up the outside walls and a sick puddle on the doormat come Sunday morning. The theme inside is black and silver with an added soupçon of French – strings of garlic, frescos of Parisian walkways and waiters who glare at you like you’ve murdered their mothers.

The problem is, I need them. I need friends. I don’t want them; it’s not like they’re the Wilson to my skinny, toothless, homeward-bound Tom Hanks. But to keep up my façade of normality, they’re just necessary. To function properly in society, you have to have people around you. It’s annoying, like periods, but there is a point to it. Without friends, people start labelling you a ‘Loner’. They check your Internet history or start smelling bomb-making chemicals in your garage.

But the PICSOs and I have little in common, this is true. I’m an editorial assistant at a local snooze paper, Imelda’s an estate agent, Anaïs is a nurse (currently on maternity leave), Lucille works in a bank, her sister Cleo is a university-PE-teachercum-personal-trainer and Pidge is a secondary-school teacher. We don’t even have the same interests. Well, me and Anni will message each other about the most recent episode of Peaky Blinders but I’d hardly call us bezzies.

And it may look like I’m the quiet cuckoo in a nest of rowdy crows but I do perform some function within the group. Originally, when I first met them all in Sixth Form, I was a bit of a commodity. I’d been a bit famous as a child so I’d done the whole celebrity thing: met Richard and Judy; Jeremy Kyle gave me a Wendy house; been interviewed on one of those Countdown to Murder programmes. Nowadays, I’m just the Thoughtful Friend or the Designated Driver. Lately, I’m Chief Listener – I know all their secrets. People will tell you anything if you listen to them for long enough and pretend you’re interested.

Anni, our resident Preggo, is due to drop sometime in March. The Witches Four – Lucille, Cleo, Imelda and Pidge – had spared no expense on the nappy cake, cards, streamers, balloons and booties to decorate the table. I’d brought a fruit basket, filled with exotic fruits like lychees and mangoes, starfruit and ambarella, as a nod to Anni’s Mauritian heritage. It had gone down like a whore on a Home Secretary. At least I wasn’t driving, so I could quaff as much Prosecco as my liver could cope with and snuggle my brain into believing I was having a good time while they were all clucking on about the usual.

The PICSOs themselves like talking about five things above all others:

1. Their partners (usually to slag them off)

2. Their kids (conversations I can’t really join in with ’cos I don’t have any, so, unless, it’s cooing over school Nativity photos or laughing at Vines of them wiping poo up the walls, my contribution just isn’t called for)

3. IKEA (usually because they’ve just been or are just going)

4. Dieting – what works/what doesn’t, what’s filling/what isn’t, how many pounds they’ve lost/put on

5. Imelda’s wedding – she only announced it in September but I can’t actually remember a time when it wasn’t on our conversation rota.

In my head I’m usually thinking about five things above all others…

1. Sylvanian Families

2. My as-yet-unpublished novel, The Alibi Clock

3. My little dog, Tink

4. When I can go to the toilet and check my social-media feeds

5. Ways I can kill people I don’t like… without getting caught

Before too long a tray of drinks came over: Prosecco and a selection of slightly smudged glasses.

‘What’s this?’ Imelda asked.

‘Compliments of the gentlemen at the bar,’ said the waiter, and we looked over to see two types leaning against the counter, evidently looking to score with the nearest friendly vagina. The one wearing gold-hoop earrings and too much gel raised his pint in our direction – his other arm was in a sling. His friend in the Wales rugby shirt, and sporting tattooed forearms, a cut on his left eyebrow and a protruding beer gut, was unashamedly salivating over Lucille’s ridiculous breasts. She says she ‘doesn’t do it on purpose’. Yeah, and I don’t bleed from my crease every month.

‘How marvellous.’ She smiled, swooping into the bread basket. We each took a glass and ‘cheersed’ the men, before continuing our conversational merry-go-round – babies, boyfs, IKEA, and how draining it was just generally having tits.

Anni opened her presents, all of which she thought were either ‘amazing’ or ‘so cute’. Of all of them, I found Anni the least annoying of the PICSOs. She always had an anecdote to share about someone brought into A&E, with a Barbie doll shoved up their arse or a motorcyclist with his head hanging off. This was at least mildly entertaining. Of course her baby would come soon and then there would be nothing left for us to talk about other than Babies and What Fun They Are and How I Wish I Had One. That’s how these things usually went.

We all ordered steaks, in various sizes with various sauces, despite the rainbow of diets we are all on. Mel’s on the Dukan, or GI, I forget which one. Lucille’s on the 5:2, but today was a five day so she had three rolls and twenty breadsticks before her meal hit the tablecloth. Cleo ‘eats clean’, but she’s had Christmas and New Year off. I’m on the Eat Everything in Sight Until 1 January Then Starve Self to Death diet, so I ordered a 10oz sirloin in a béarnaise sauce with triple-cooked French fries – I asked for the meat to be so raw you didn’t know whether to eat it or feed it a carrot. The taste was unreal. I didn’t even care if the cow had suffered – his ass was delish.

‘I thought you were going veggie?’ said Lucille, tearing off another hunk of complimentary bread.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not any more.’ I couldn’t believe she remembered me saying that about eighty-five years ago. It was actually my GP who told me to give up red meat to help with my mood swings. But the supplements were doing their job so I didn’t see the point of going full McCartney for the sake of a few bitch fits. Besides, I always find earwigs in broccoli and sprouts are the Devil’s haemorrhoids.

‘Did you get anything nice for Christmas?’ Cleo asked me as the waiters brought out a selection of lethal-looking steak knives.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the guy. I always made a point to thank waiting staff – you never knew what they were stirring your sauce with. ‘Some books, perfume, Netflix voucher, Waterstones voucher, Beyoncé tickets for Birmingham…’ I left out Sylvanian stuff – the only people who understand how I feel about Sylvanians are Imelda’s five-year-old twins.

‘Ooh, we’re seeing Beyoncé in London in April,’ said Pidge. ‘Oh, I know what it was I wanted to tell you guys…’

Pidge started this inexorably long speech about how she’d gone to six different pet stores before she found the right something for her house rabbits – Beyoncé and Solange. Pidge’s conversation starters were always somewhere between Tedious and Prepare the Noose; almost as dull as Anni’s midwife appointments or Lucille’s Tales of the Killer Mortgage. I zoned out, mentally redesigning the furniture in my Sylvanians’ dining room. I think they need more space to entertain.

Despite the ongoing gnawing fury in the centre of my chest, courtesy of Le Boyf, the meal was nice and I managed to keep it down. I noticed there were fake flowers in the vases on all the tables – which won’t please the Tripadvisor fairy – but as restaurants go, I’m glad I went. It was almost worth the two hours I’d spent crowbarring myself out of the pyjamas I’d lived in since Christmas Eve and dolling myself up. Well, it was until the subject of Imelda’s wedding came up. Lucille was the culprit.

‘So, you got your hair sorted out yet for the Big Day?’

Now this was the rare occasion when Imelda did hear what Lucille said – because she had asked about Imelda or weddings or Imelda’s actual wedding.

‘No,’ she whined. ‘I want something up at the crown but not spiky. French plaits for the bridesmaids, keep it simple. Did I tell you about our photographers? We’re having two. Jack found this guy from London and him and his partner – his work partner that is (cue chorus of unexplained laughs) – are coming down to see the church in May. He’s going to be at the back so that he can take pictures of everyone’s faces as I come down the aisle, and his mate’s going to be at the altar.’

‘No chance of anything being missed then?’ I added.

‘Exactly.’ Imelda smiled, seemingly ecstatic that I was taking an interest.

‘What you wearing for your night do? Did you decide?’ asked Anni, returning from a third toilet break.

‘Oh, the dress again, definitely.’

‘You’re going to have it on all day?’ said Cleo.

‘Yeah. It’s got to be something striking. It is my day and everyone will be coming to check me out so… and that way, the people who didn’t get invited to the day do will be able to see it then.’

‘Yeah, wouldn’t want them missing out on anything,’ I mumbled, checking my phone. And again she smiled, like I was right on her wavelength.

Anni nodded, biting her lower lip. ‘You’ll be stunning, Mel. It’s gonna be such a good bash. And I’ll be able to drink again by then, too!’

I cleaned off my steak knife with my napkin. There was an abundance of veins in my left wrist. I could have ended it all right then if I’d had the balls.

‘I won’t be stunning,’ said Imelda. ‘I’ll probably break both camera lenses!’

Lucille’s turn: ‘Babes, you’re gorgeous. You’ll be all princess-like and there’ll be flowers everywhere and with that amazing church… it’ll be like a proper fairy tale.’

‘Yeah,’ she scoffed. ‘If I can’t shift this bloody muffin top in the next six months it will be a fairy tale – Shrek!’

Cue the shrieks.

‘And June’s always sunny, so you’re bound to have the best weather for it,’ said Pidge, rubbing Imelda’s arm. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be wonderful.’

Enough?

‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right.’

(Note: I have cribbed this endless ego massage here but please understand, Dear Diary, that Imelda’s wedding takes up at least 90 per cent of every social occasion.)

Then she brought up the very thing I’ve been dreading since it was first mooted last September – the Weekend That Must Not Be Named.

‘You’re all coming to my hen weekend, aren’t you? No buts. You’ve got six months’ notice after all.’

Fuck it. In a fairly large bucket.

‘Oh, yeah, what are we doing again?’ asked Anni, swigging her orange juice.

‘Not sure yet – possibly Bath for a spa day or Lego Windsor. But it’s deffo Friday to Sunday.’

‘Rawther!’ Lucille giggled. She was matron of honour.

Then it was onto Man Bash Central – Woman Bash Central in Cleo’s case – how Rashan/Alex/Jack/Tom/Amy had stayed out all night on a job/booze run to France/coach trip to Belgium/job/pub crawl/austerity protest. How Rashan/Alex/Jack/Tom/Amy had got so unadventurous in bed these days. How big Rashan/Alex/Jack’s dicks were (Cleo and Pidge always carefully avoided this subject) and finally how Rashan/Alex/Jack/Tom/Amy had given them a Rolex/flowers/Hotel Chocolat salted-caramel puddles/a holiday/a hug just to say sorry after a row that Anni/Lucille/Imelda/Pidge/Cleo had instigated.

The only thing Craig ever gave me that meant anything was bacterial vaginosis, but I kept that to myself.

‘What’s Craig up to these days, Rhiannon?’ asked Anni. She always brought me into the conversation. Imelda sometimes did this when vying for the gold medal at the Passive Aggressive Olympics. She’d ask, ‘Any news on your junior-reporter thing yet, Rhee?’ or ‘Any sign of Baby Wilkins in that womb of yours yet, Rhee?’, when she knew full well I’d have mentioned it if I had news of huge job change (please, God) and/or womb invader (please, God, no).

‘Uh, the same,’ I said, sipping my fifth glass of Prosecco. ‘He’s fitting out that shop in the High Street that used to be a hairdresser’s. It’s going to be a charity shop.’

‘Thought there might be something sparkly waiting under the Christmas tree this year,’ said Imelda, loudly to the entire restaurant. ‘What’s it been now, three years?’

‘Four,’ I said, ‘and, no, he’s not that thoughtful.’

‘Would you say yes if he did propose, Rhiannon?’ said Pidge, her face full of wonder, like she was thinking about Hogwarts. (She and Tom were planning to get married at the Harry Potter Experience in Orlando soon – I shit you not.)

I hesitated, the gnawing in my chest biting down harder. Then I lied: ‘Yeah, of course–’ I was about to qualify that with an If he could stop taking Lana Rowntree up her aisle for five minutes long enough to walk me down one, but Lucille cut me off before I had chance:

‘Talking of charity shops, I bought this great vase in the one opposite Debenhams; such a bargain…’ she began, launching into a new topic of conversation and leaving me behind on my Island of Unfinished Sentences.

Not that I wanted to talk about Craig or Craig’s dull job. Neither were interesting subjects to talk about. He built things, ate pasties, smoked the odd spliff, liked football, played video games and couldn’t pass a pub without eating enough pork scratchings to fill Trafalgar Square. That was Craig – Gordon Ramsay clap – done.

So they were all wanging on about The Weekend That Must Not Be Named when a random bloke with bad neck zits appeared at our table, clutching a glass of lager.

‘All right, girls?’ said Random Bloke with Neck Zits. He produced a couple of red-wine bottles, emboldened by a six-strong gaggle of blokes with neck and chin zits at the bar. Surprisingly, the corks were still in the bottles so there was no danger of us being Rohipped and dragged to the nearest Premier Inn for a semi-conscious rape-fest. Yeah, I think of these things, another reason I’m a useful friend.

These weren’t the same guys who’d bought us Prosecco, this was a different lot. Younger. Louder. Zittier.

‘Mind if we join you?’ Winks and knowing looks all round.

Cue giggles and shrieks.

I had intended to order the double chocolate brownie with clotted cream for pudding but we were at the part of the evening where we all had to hold our stomachs in so I resisted, wondering if I could get home for some leftover Christmas tiramisu ice cream before the bongs signalled the death knell of fun-eating habits.

Imelda, Lucille and Cleo made the usual ribald comments, clearly turned on by the attention. Pidge started joining in too, once a sufficient amount of wine had been imbibed. She was always too Christian to participate in either tittage or bants before alcohol allowed her to. I wasn’t nearly pissed enough for either.

So the evening dragged on like a corpse tied to a donkey cart as the Seven Dorks squeezed onto our table and allowed their eggy breaths and chubby fingers to fog our air and tweak our knicker elastic. We had Grunty, Zitty, Shorty, Sleazy, Fatso, Gropey and Mute.

Guess which one I got stuck talking to. Or rather, at.

And, one by one, the PICSOs all left me. They each did the ‘you’re only young once’ speech and hooked up with the Dorks to go on to a club for a New Year’s foam party – can’t remember which one as I had no intention of following them.

‘You coming, Rhee?’ asked Anni, weighed down with gifted baby detritus. ‘Me and Pidge are just gonna shove this lot in the car and meet them there.’

I don’t know why she was so excited to be tagging along to a nightclub. She was the size of a barge and was on orange juice and bi-hourly toilet breaks. Nightclubs weren’t known for facilitating either.

‘Yeah, I just need the loo,’ I said, sinking my wine.

I was testing them now. Testing to see who would actually wait for me. Who was the true friend? But, as I expected, nobody waited. I paid my part of the bill, stood on the doormat of Cote de Sirène and watched them all waddling and cackling up the street with the Dorks circling them like sharks around chum. Not a second thought did I get.

So there I was, alone, in the centre of town, preparing to hike the two miles back to my flat, on New Year’s Eve.

But this is where my fun began.

As it turned out, walking across town went without incident. I’m not counting the tramp with a tinsel halo, pissing in streams down both legs, using NatWest as a walking aide. Or the couple shagging behind the wheely bins at the back of Boots’ car park. And I’m not counting the fight that broke out inside Pizza Express then spilled onto the pavement, during which a bald man in a striped shirt yelled, ‘I’M GONNA RAPE YOUR FUCKING SKULL, MATE!’

None of that was particularly noteworthy.

Whereas, what happened down by the canal, was.

It must have been about 11.30 p.m. by the time I reached the playing fields and took the short cut along the cycle path and down to the canal towpath, a mere five hundred feet from our flat. It was here that I heard footsteps behind me. And my breath shortened. And my heart began to thump.

I shoved my hands into my duffle-coat pockets and turned around to see a guy I recognised. He was the one in the Wales rugby shirt with the tattooed forearms who’d bought us the first lot of Prosecco at the restaurant.

‘Where you going then, baby?’

‘Home.’

‘Aww, can I come?’

‘No.’

‘Please? We can make each other happy tonight. Still got a bit of time before the bongs, ain’t we? You look sad.’

He sidestepped in front of me. I stepped away. He stepped back. He laughed.

‘You followed me, didn’t you?’ I said.

He leered, eyeing me from head to toe with a lingering look at my crotch area, which I’ll admit did look inviting in my too-tight skirt. ‘Just seeing where you were going, that’s all. Don’t be like that. I bought you a drink.’

‘I said thank you at the time.’ Like, of course that would be enough.

He put his hands on me.

‘Could you take your hands off me, please?’

‘Come on. You were giving me the eye.’

‘Don’t think I was. Get off.’ I wasn’t raising my voice. I didn’t need to. His molestation attempts were pathetic. A hand on my boob. A motion to his belt buckle.

‘How about you get your laughing gear round my old boy then? Just for ‘Auld Lang Syne’, eh?’

He was strong; a prop four or something. As well as the cut on his left eyebrow, he had the beginnings of a cauliflower ear. He slathered all over my face and I let him. Nobody else was around. Even if I screamed, the nearest people over in the Manette Court complex would take five minutes to get to me. And that’s if they even bothered. He’d have come in me and gone by then and I’d be another statistic, getting vaginal swabs and drinking tepid tea in some police waiting room.

No. That might be my sister but that would not be me.

‘Come in here,’ he gasped in my ear, taking my freezing hand inside his hot clammy one and pulling me towards the bush. An upended Lidl shopping trolley lay on its back.

I stayed rooted. ‘There’s no room in there.’

‘Yeah, there is.’ He tugged harder on my hand.

‘Pull your jeans down,’ I said.

He smirked like his ship had just come in – a ship with a massive hard-on. ‘Oh, yes, baby girl. I knew I could thaw you out.’

Unsteady on his feet, he fumbled at his belt. Then his zip. His over-washed jeans collapsed in a heap at his ankles. So did his boxers. There were little Homer Simpsons all over them. His cock sprung out like a small Samurai, ready to do battle.

Ba-doing!

It had a bend in it. I wasn’t sure whether he was pleased to see me or giving me directions to the bus station.

He stroked it upwards. Well, upwards and towards the bus station. ‘All yours,’ he said.

‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘lucky old me.’

The temptation to laugh was so strong but I choked it down and made it look as though I was starting to wriggle out of my knickers under my skirt. All keen.

‘Can you get on all fours?’ he panted.

‘Like a dog?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cos I wanna fuck you like a dog.’

I grew breathless. ‘But the ground’s hard.’

‘So’s my dick. Get down. Go on, don’t tease.’

‘I’ll suck you off but no more,’ I said.

‘That’s a start,’ he said, eyes lighting up. I crouched down and took his little warm Samurai in my grip.

‘Shall I finger myself as I’m sucking it?’ I asked, heart in my throat.

‘Fuck, yeah! Dirty bitch!’ he chuckled, growing harder and more veiny.

He waited for it – for my lips on his bell-end. I pulled on his dick as though about to milk it.

‘Knew you were a dirty bitch.’

I saw Craig’s face on his as I held the cock steady and, reaching into my pocket, I closed my fingers around the handle of the steak knife. Bringing it out slowly while stroking him into full submission, I waited until his eyes had closed and his chin tilted to the sky in ecstasy before I hacked down hard on it and started carving through the gristly meat. He screamed and swore and beat at my head with his fists but my grip was tight and I sawed at it through slipping, bloody fingers until I had yanked his penis from its roots and pushed him backwards into the murky green water. His forlorn manhood dropped to the cold canal towpath with a bloody slap.

The splash was loud and he was still screaming but, despite all the hullaballoo, no one was coming to either of our rescues.

‘Aaaaaaarrrgghhh! Aaaaarrrrrrgghh!’ he went, splashing around like a child at its first swimming class.

A little curl of steam rose up from the penis, lying dejectedly on the towpath. I found a spare dog poo bag in my coat and picked the severed member up, then ran towards the footbridge, my heart still banging like a bastard on a jail-cell wall. I lost my breath completely as I reached the top and looked down over the water.

‘Fucking… sick… bitch!’ he gargled, flopping about.

He kept splashing, sinking under the murky water, then bobbing up again and spluttering. The last thing he must have seen in this world was my face, on the bridge, smiling in the moonlight.

Thanks to my cruel improvisation, I was feeling something I hadn’t felt for a long time. That same feeling you get when you’re a kid and you spy an adventure playground. Or when you poke your foot out of the bed on Christmas morning and feel your full stocking hanging there. It radiates out from a deeply exciting inner squiggle until your whole body feels electric all over. The best feeling in the world. It’s an exquisite privilege to watch someone die, knowing you caused it. Almost worth getting dolled up for.

Monday, 1 January

1. Teen boy and girl in the park who kicked their black Labrador that time

2. Derek Scudd

3. Wesley Parsons

4. The guy with Tourette’s who sits in the Paddy Power doorway, shouting about spacecrafts and the time he got fisted by a priest

5. Craig and Lana. To save on bullets, I’m putting them both together here – one shot, right through both skulls

6. The man in the blue Qashqai who pulled out of Marsh Road and beeped when I didn’t walk fast enough. 'Stupid slow bitch,' that’s what he’d said. All the way round the block I was picturing his suited body hanging by its neck – wriggling and twitching and me standing beneath him, just watching

Did a BuzzFeed quiz this morning – How Psychopathic Are You? Turns out – very. I scored 82 per cent. They even accompanied my results with a picture of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Don’t know how I feel about that.

The quiz had been right about one thing, though.

Do you try to evade responsibility?

Well, yes, yes, I do. Remorse-wise, the canal incident has left little impression. I haven’t killed anyone for three years and I thought that when it happened again I’d feel bad, like an alcoholic taking a sip of whiskey. But, no, nothing. I had a blissful night’s sleep. Didn’t wake up at all and, for once, no bad dream either. This morning I feel balanced. Almost sane, for once.

*

Craig and I spent the first day of the New Year in front of the TV, eating pizza, the blue Quality Streets and watching ‘80s movies – Pretty in Pink, The Outsiders and that one where Demi Moore has a pink apartment and goes nuts at the end. He is an exceptional liar, I’ll give him that. I know he saw Lana today, under the pretence of ‘meeting Gary and Nigel down Wetherspoon’s’. He was vay convincing, to the untrained eye.

Sadly, my eye is hyper-trained – like an Olympic sprinter when it comes to rooting out bullshit.

We’d planned to do so much this week – stuff we never got round to do when we’re both at work: power-spraying the bird shit on the balcony, sorting out boxes for the mythical car-boot-sale-we’re-never-going-to-do, and Craig was going to clear out the mountain of rubbish and offcuts of wood from the back of his van and then paint the bathroom. We had one day left before we both went back to work and we’d done precious little. Craig had made a start on the wall above the toilet on Christmas Eve – a little surprise for me for when I got home from work, to keep me sweet before he mentioned he’d invited the boys around again to watch Boxing Day football on Sky. But when I’d seen the colour, I did not like the colour.

‘Mineral Mist, I said!’

‘I got Mineral Mist, see?’ He held up the tin. It said Morning Mist.

I took Tink for a walk at lunch as Craig was playing Streetfighter and making bacon sandwiches and the smell was making me dribble (I’m trying not to have bread because ass). I like looking in people’s gardens on our walks. I miss having a garden. There were all sorts of Christmas debris strewn about the pavements. Smashed baubles. Strings of tinsel. Half-chewed sweets. A carrier bag blew across the road out of somebody’s bin and Tink had a conniption, probably waking up half the country. Of all the things in this world my dog hated the most, sneezes, spaniels and rogue carrier bags flying at her as if from nowhere were definitely the Top Three.

Tried teaching her Shake a Paw again, the one trick she won’t do under any circumstances – still nothing.

Craig sorted out all his unwanted Blu-rays for the car-bootsale-we’re-never- going-to-do and pressure-washed the balcony with our new pressure washer, a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. I waxed my legs and drove over to my mum and dad’s house late afternoon. All quiet on the Western Front. Still can’t get the stains out of the bedroom carpet. Craig is still buying all my lies about ‘going to Cleo’s aerobics class’ and ‘working late; so I can go over there. It’s almost too easy.

Gave Tink a bath in the kitchen sink. She doesn’t like it but puts up with it because she always gets chicken bits afterwards. As I was trying to towel her off, she legged it round the flat like she had rabies. Craig laughed too, which broke the ice. Then he said he was ‘going over Homebase’ to get me the other paint. He said he needed some new wallpaper scissors for work as well.

I said, ‘Why don’t you just have my dad’s old wallpaper scissors from his toolkit? I was going over there tomorrow to sort out Mum’s filing cabinet. I can get them then.’

He said that meant a lot to him, like Dad was giving him his blessing from beyond the grave. The hallowed Tommy Lewis toolkit that Dad carried with him like an extra limb and Craig was never allowed to touch. I thought he was going to cry.

‘They’re just wallpaper scissors, Craig,’ I said. ‘It’s not an engagement ring.’

He nodded and left the room with a distinct clear of throat. I’m terrible with crying people. How do you make them stop? I deliberately caught the wrong bus once because a woman was blubbing in the bus shelter. Didn’t know what else to do.

Do I love him? I haven’t known what love is in a long time. He says he loves me but isn’t that just something that gets said? He told me on Christmas Eve that, coupled with the hand jobs and my excellent trifle, I’m almost the perfect girlfriend. I don’t nag him as much as his mates’ wives nag them either. I asked him what would make me perfect.

‘Anal,’ he said, no hesitation. ‘What would make me perfect?’ he asked.

Well, it’d be a start if you stopped shagging Lana Rowntree behind my back, I thought. Instead, I opted for the safer:

‘You can’t improve on perfection itself, can you, darling?’

He laughed and I flicked him a V sign behind the Radio Times.

Wednesday, 3 January

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s back to my shitty job I go. Actually, there is a dwarf where I work – he’s upstairs in the Accounts department. He’s the reason we had all our light switches moved to three feet above the ground. Madness.

Today went as all days at the Gazette go – long, coffee-stained and dull. The first half was me telling anyone who asked what a good Christmas I had and some dull-as-ditch tasks of inputting local schools’ thank-you letters to Santa, updating the website and making coffee in the new £5,000 (yes, that’s £5,000!) coffee machine. There were four new mugs in the staffroom – Christmas presents no one wanted at home but which everyone wants at work because they’re clean. I nabbed one with dinosaurs on and the words TEA-REX. Hardy har.

The usual New Year signs have gone up everywhere, unstained and laminated. Signs telling professional adults helpful things like IF YOU’RE LAST OUT OF AN EVENING, PLEASE TURN OFF ALL THE LIGHTS and PLEASE WASH YOUR OWN CROCKERY. The toilets are full of them: PLEASE ONLY FLUSH TOILET TISSUE DOWN THE TOILET. PLEASE REPLACE TOILET PAPER IF YOU USE THE LAST PIECE. PLEASE TURN OFF THE TAPS AFTER USE. There’s even one as you leave, saying, PLEASE LEAVE THESE FACILITIES AS YOU FIND THEM – THANK YOU.

I’d like to suggest some new signs for the office, specifically for my benefit and/or amusement:

PLEASE REMEMBER TO WIPE YOUR ASS AFTERWARDS FOR THE GOOD OF YOUR GUSSET.

PLEASE CLOSE ALL DOORS QUIETLY, STAY HOME IF YOU ARE SICK, OR AT LEAST TRY TO DIMINISH YOUR SNEEZES – NOISE-SENSITIVE PSYCHOPATH IN THE BUILDING.

PLEASE DO NOT WEAR CROCS TO WORK – THEY ARE AN INSULT TO FOOTWEAR (MIKE HEATH –T HIS MEANS YOU).

DON’T DRINK SO MUCH OF THE OFFICE MILK – MIKE HEATH THE MILK THIEF THIS MEANS YOU TOO, WHAT WITH YOUR DAILY OVERFLOWING BOWLS OF CEREAL AND SIX CAPPUCCINOS.

PLEASE DON’T EAT CHEESY NACHOS OR FRIED BREAKFASTS AT YOUR DESK – THE SMELL MAKES US ALL WANT TO VOM.

PLEASE DON’T TELL RHIANNON LEWIS WHAT YOU DID AT THE WEEKEND – SHE WAS ONLY BEING POLITE.

The Gulp Monster – aka, Claudia Gulper, our desk editor – is responsible for the signs. She puts pass ag labels on her food in the staff-room fridge with the same marker. I stayed late tonight to help her with her article on the mismanagement of power-station funds, which she hopes is going to win her some big journalism prize (it won’t). I asked her to look at my unsolicited article about the rise of drug-related crime and we talked about my theory that the ladies’ dress shop Paint the Town Red was the hub of distribution. I thought it could earn me some extra Brownie points.

More fool I.

I’d liked Claudia for about five minutes when I’d first started at the Gazette as a receptionist but, nowadays, she treats me like some kind of home help. She insisted on giving me endless boring ‘News in Brief’ snippets to type up or deaf Golden Wedding couples to interview, and once shouted at me in front of everyone for missing three semi-colons in the Fun Run results – not to mention a billion other reasons for me to want to jump through the fucking window. I long ago decided she was just a pubic louse on the vaginal wall of the cunt witch from Hell. I’m glad her third round of IVF failed and her husband left her. No spawn deserves that for a mother.

Craig was cooking when I got home (guilt food, obvs). Pasta from scratch with home-made pesto. Since I only had an apple and a black coffee for breakfast and just a salad for lunch, I allowed myself a troughing.

It’s safer to have than to have not, isn’t it? Even if the Have is crap. And if you’re not with someone, you get questions about it, All. The. Time. When you’re hooked up, that all stops. You feel embraced in the safety of having someone. And other people are contented because they don’t have to worry about setting you up on blind dates or going out in couples with a walking gooseberry bush.

What I should do is leave him. I should make him a dog-shit sandwich or cut all the crotches out of his Levis and hit the road. But it’s complicated. Craig worked for my dad and took over his building firm when he died. I like having that link. And it’s his flat and he pays most of the bills. And he puts up with all my kinks – my need to not have sudden, repetitive or loud noises, my need for quiet periods of time alone and for no one to touch my doll’s house. What other guy would put up with me?

Regarding the sex, there were ‘mixed reviews’.

When it’s good, it’s OK. No intense orgasms but nothing to complain about. And when it’s bad it’s brief. He comes, he goes to sleep. We’ve tried kinky stuff (he’s worn my knickers, gone down on me on a night bus, and I keep nakes of him in my phone) and sometimes if we’re at his mum and dad’s and they’re asleep in front of Antiques Roadshow, we’ll creep upstairs and do it on their bed. Then it’s not bad at all because there’s an element of risk, I suppose. But his general repertoire in the sack had become as predictable as EastEnders. I know where his tongue’s going next, when he wants me on top, how many thrusts it’s going to take. It’s all become a bit yadda yadda. I’ve tried introducing different positions to the event but, you try turning tricks like Simone Biles when you’ve only got an average of four minutes thirty-seven seconds to do it in.

I once mooted dogging as a possibility. He thought I was joking.

‘What are you, a pervert or something?’

Why’s everything so complex? Half the time, I admit, I crave normality, domesticity: a family, other heartbeats around, a comfy sofa of an evening and little pots of floral happiness growing silently on the balcony. The other half of the time, I want nothing more than to kill. To watch.

This sort of tallied with my BuzzFeed results.

Do you rarely connect on an emotional level with other people?

No, of course I don’t. I never meet anyone on my emotional level. A part of me wants to know what love feels like again. I know I must have felt it once. I wonder if it’s the same feeling I get when I take a life; when all your nerve endings feel like they’re reanimating. The thinking about it all the time at work. The craving to do it again and barely managing not to. I keep replaying the night of Canal Man in my head – the parting of the skin as the knife sliced through his penis. Him struggling beneath my hands. The trickling blood. Him beating at my head with his fists. Cutting through the layers – skin to flesh to muscle. Standing on the bridge, waiting for the water to calm and for his body to upend and float. The anxious gnawing in my chest has diminished.

Was that what love was? Did I ‘love’ to kill? I don’t know. All I do know is that I want to do it again. And, next time, I want it to last longer.

Our kleptomaniac neighbour Mrs Whittaker knocked on our door at 9.30 p.m., back from visiting her sister in Maidstone. She asked if we needed her to look after Tink tomorrow. Craig told her that he was only working a half-day so he could take her with him. I stayed on the sofa, pretending to be asleep but I saw her through a crack in the cushion, scanning the living room from the doorway, probably eager to get further inside and nick more of our decorative pebbles or an unguarded stapler. She’s in the first flush of Alzheimer’s so it’s not as though we can complain.

Drove over to Mum and Dad’s house around 8 p.m., under the guise of ‘seeing the PICSOs for a drink’. Julia wasn’t happy to see me. I only left two of the three chocolate treats I’d intended to leave from my selection box – a Drifter and a Crunchie. The state the room was in, she definitely didn’t deserve the Revels.

I’m so looking forward to killing her.

Ventured a look at the scales before bed – I’ve put on five pounds over Christmas and today’s starvation has done nothing. I am so having a bagel for breakfast.

Friday, 5 January

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.

Sunday, 7 January

1. Derek Scudd

2. Derek Scudd’s lawyer

3. Wesley Parsons

4. Our local whack job, Creepy Ed Sheeran, who hangs around Lidl car park, tearing the leaves off the bushes, sniffing them and chuckling

5. Anyone who buys, sells or creates Star Wars merchandise. I can’t even buy a Snickers without seeing a token for a sodding light sabre

Dreamed about Dad again last night. I asked him who his favourite child was, and he smiled and told me, ‘You, of course.’

I could talk to my dad about anything. There’s no one now. Craig’s pathetic – he’s always got one eye on the TV and, even if it’s turned off, I figure he’s mentally rerunning an old episode of Game of Thrones. I can’t talk to Seren, of course. She hasn’t been back to England since Dad’s funeral and, every time we talk on the phone, I get the impression she can’t wait to hang up.

And as for the PICSOs, when I want derogatory comments about my lack of kids or non-selling novel or my low-grade job, maybe their opinions will matter.

I don’t know what Mum or Dad would tell me to do if they were still around.

I didn’t grieve for them like an ordinary person would. Seren said it was ‘very unsettling’ seeing the way I grieved about Dad. She said it was like ‘looking through a window when it’s raining’ – the rain trickling down it and cold as ice. I didn’t know how to feel. I was just numb. I googled it once – WebMD said ‘bereavement numbness for the first few days is very common as your brain tries to process what has happened’. I couldn’t find anything about numbness that went on for years. Apparently, that wasn’t a thing.

The two seniors, Claudia and Linus, came back from court at lunch, to say that the paedophile Derek Scudd, sixty-eight, had got off with a three-year suspended sentence, a two-month rehab order and a place on the Sex Offenders’ Register. We’ve all been following the case for over a year. Un-fucking-believable! The man needs to be skinned alive and fried while he was still screaming.

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