In Bloom - C.J. Skuse

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in the first place. A human satnav of hideous betrayal. Her head is down. My throat aches.

      It’s all. Her. Fault.

      That’s my only thought as I watch her dish out papers and glide through the office towards the sales department, like nothing happened. Like her life hasn’t changed one bit. She doesn’t notice me.

      Doesn’t see me coming.

      The ache in my throat burns as I move closer to her, closer, closer –

      I’m.

      Not.

      That.

      Innocent.

      I’m reaching out, grabbing a fistful of blonde, pulling it backwards. A waft of Herbal Essences flies past my face as she goes down. I don’t hear what I say. I don’t know who pulls me off her. I’m pounding her face. Over and over.

      Oops, I did it again.

      And the next thing I know, Jim is buckling my seatbelt and the engine’s running and his and Ron’s voices carry through the crack in the passenger window. Hormones. Just needs some time. Knew it was too soon. Cameras click. Someone calls my name. Look up for me, Sweetpea.

      And I’m sitting there, picking flakes of her blood from my knuckles.

       1. People who tap dance – more unnecessary noise.

       2. People who present any TV programme before 6 p.m.

       3. Any of those design programmes about people who take a nice little abandoned barn and turn it into a soulless, four-storey gym with diamond encrusted swimming pool and a remote-control garden etc. Ugh.

      Jim’s on the phone to Ron now – Lana isn’t pressing charges. I listened through the bannisters. He’ll come up in a minute and tell me what was said, he’s that kinda guy. I’ve already heard what I needed, I’m that kinda gal.

      *

      I made the front page! Gripper Killer Girlfriend in Office Brawl. Jim has been trying to keep me away from the news but we walked into town earlier and stopped outside the newsagent so Elaine could go in and get her Woman’s Own. There was a stand of papers outside.

      ‘Come on,’ said Jim, taking my arm, leading me towards the seafront.

      I’m actually better at handling the attention than either of them gives me credit for, but of course I have to pretend it affects me deeply. It blew up the week I moved in. The angle then was PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IS SICK KILLER’S GIRL. Elaine has banned all news bulletins from the house – she doesn’t want to know. Jim craves news so he has to buy his daily paper and read it in a café on the seafront to get his fix. I saw him once. The headline on his paper was THROW AWAY THE KEY: WILKINS’ SICK AND DEPRAVED ACTS SHOCK NATION and there was a picture of Craig being led from a police van, grey blanket over his head.

      I preferred that one to

      GRIPPER’S GIRL IS CRECHE ATTACK SURVIVOR… and she’s UP THE DUFF! One paper is calling him this year’s ‘Hot Felon’.

      Photographers were outside the house most mornings, snapping away like a pack of North Face-clad alligators.

      ‘Oi, Priory Gardens!’

      ‘Oi, love, gissa quote, gissa smile!’

      ‘Hey Rhiannon, have you seen Craig Wilkins yet?’

      ‘Where are the other bodies, Rhiannon? Did he tell you?’

      ‘How’s he doing in prison?’

      ‘Did you know, Rhiannon?’

      ‘Did you help him?’

      ‘Wossit like living with a monster, Rhi Rhi?’

      That winky journalist is usually there in the throng and I noticed this morning his lanyard says the Plymouth Star. He has black hair, a square jaw and his smile is knicker-wettingly blinding. If I met him in a bar he’d be paying me child support.

      Some fucker should.

      ‘How are you, Rhiannon?’ he asked me.

      ‘I just want to get on with my life, thanks,’ I say, opening and closing the door once I’ve brought the milk in, flashing him some unsolicited leg through the dressing gown, as is my wont.

      ‘Is it true you and Craig were engaged?’ I hear as I flick the chain on.

      On the days, I’m feeling up to it, I don my Victoria Beckham sunglasses, sweep my hair to one side, prepare my downcast face (not difficult – I look like a ghost most days thanks to the vom) and sashay through the melee throwing out breadcrumbs like ‘I’m fine thanks’ and ‘I knew nothing’.

      I’m just giving them what they want – they see what they want to see. Not looking past what’s already been decreed – that Craig Wilkins, my boyfriend, did knowingly and wilfully murder three people in cold blood and masturbate over their corpses. That moi – Rhiannon Lewis – she of that terrible crèche massacre at Priory Gardens all those years ago, is just the naive girlfriend. Remember when they brought her out of that house, wrapped in blood-soaked Peter Rabbit blankets? How can one girl get so unlucky twice in one lifetime? It’s too tragic.

      When they can’t get a comment from you, they shove notes through the letterbox instead. Business cards, scrawled scraps of paper, all asking for me to get in touch. I could barely read the writing on some.

      One of the notes was barely legible, scrawled on a scrap of notepaper ‘To my Sweet Messy House’ it looked like and there was a phone number underneath. I’m thinking it could be the local mental case – he sometimes posts rants about the government and how they’re trying to kill us through our tap water on his way up to the war memorial to talk to dead soldiers.

      What I resent most of all about this kind of press intrusion is that all they’re interested in is Craig. How he did it. How he could rape that poor woman. What it was like for me living with a monster? How he’s feeling about being the most hated guy in the country right now.

      He’s not actually. There’s always paedophiles. And according to Twitter there’s a guy who sprinkled his girlfriend’s ashes on his Shreddies who’s way worse.

      I don’t know who I am now. It’s like one day I was in a couple with a flat and we had a baby on the way and the next I went into a phone box, spun around three times and now I’m Poor Little Murderer’s Preggo Girlfriend – I even come with accessories: eighteen-carat white-gold solitaire on my ring finger, meek smile, washed out Primark panda pyjamas, greasy hair and slight stomach protrusion.

      Jim and Elaine walk along the seafront every morning – it’s their ritual. And they’ve allowed me and Tink to join in too. We sit on a bench with a hot drink and a bun – iced for them, brown seeded for me – and we sip and chomp in silence. Everything is small here. Small and safe. From across the estuary at Temperley, Monks Bay looks like a bucket of tiny houses tipped down a hillside by a giant child. There’s no design to it at all – it’s a higgledy-piggledy mess of streets too narrow to drive a Fiesta down without cracking your wing mirrors, a funicular railway, a church and quaint little B+Bs and cottages called names like The Sloop and The Brigantine.

      For me, killing has been what makes life worth living. So at the moment, I’m not living, I’m merely existing. I’m like that polar bear I saw once at Bristol Zoo. Wandering back and forth, back and forth across his concrete. Safe, fed and secure but slowly going ever further out of my mind.

      ‘Go on, love, eat your roll,’ said Elaine. ‘You’ve got to keep your energy up. You didn’t eat your Protein Puffs this morning either.’

      I took one

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