Dead Lovely (15 page)

While Krissie had been confessing to Chas in the close at Gardner Street, Sarah was arriving home in the car Kyle had left at the Kilmore Hotel. She’d managed to drive off without being seen and was in good spirits – in a covered-in-blood-and-shit,
mad-as-
a-snake kind of way. She found the spare key under the pot plant on the porch and opened the back door of her house.

Sarah had two missions – to get the bastard who’d fucked up her head, and to get Robbie. She had intended to leave Robbie till last, but then she got the call from the social worker, and realised she’d have to rearrange things a little.

Her initial plan to provide Robbie with the love and care he was so clearly lacking would have been
a challenge. She’d intended to steal Robbie by snatching him from his cot at night maybe, or better still, from right under Krissie’s nose when she had a pee or cleaned her teeth.

After Krissie’s controlled crying incident, she’d asked for a key to Krissie’s flat (‘Just in case!’), so it would have been easy. She could have snuck in, hidden in cupboards and corners and turned on lights and banged doors and scared the shit out of her, then taken the child that was rightfully hers.

But the challenge had been removed, so now all she had to do was meet an old duck at the Partick social work office and take it from there.

Sarah barely noticed the red and brown muck glugging its way down the shower drain. She was thinking hard. The irritating social worker with the nose-ring and the agonising weekend with the ginger runaway and the interminable waiting list had all been worthwhile. Now the social worker would know she was fit to take the boy, because it had been deemed that she was fit, on paper.

Before collecting Robbie, Sarah bandaged her ribs again and tended her wounds. She then packed two large suitcases with all the things that had been denied her on the camping trip – her straightening tongs, her Clarins cleanser and toner, and five pairs of shoes. Almost in a trance, she locked the house and drove to the social work office.

She arrived at the office as it was opening, then
waited in reception for five minutes before a beefy woman in her fifties came to the front desk and called her name. They sat for a few minutes in a depressing room that smelt of mental illness and drug addiction. Sarah explained how she’d hurt her head putting up a Safetots baby swing in the backyard and after a brief summary and a few
questions,
Sarah was given two addresses: one for the foster carer, and one for the Children’s Hearing, which she should bring Robbie to that night, at six. The social worker then rushed off on a child protection investigation.

Sarah threw one of the addresses in the bin before she clicked her car door open, and then looked at the other one.

Half an hour later she parked in front of a row of tenements that were boarded up. Opposite were terraced houses. Sarah found number twenty-one and pressed the buzzer. A middle-aged woman opened the door. The woman was a little disturbed by Sarah’s scratched forehead and swollen lip, but the social worker had called, so she was expecting Sarah.

Sarah was more than a little disturbed by the woman – did they really allow people with bad teeth and comedy accents to be foster carers? The house had all the trademarks of the underclass – flouncy pink curtains, too many perfectly matched velvet sofas, no doubt required to provide endless hours of comfort to the obligatory unemployable husband.

Sarah was bored within two seconds as the woman yakked on about medication and how Robbie slept at two for two hours and then at eight for nine and his favourite mashed veg seemed to be carrot and how his nappy size was a Maxi in Pampers but a Maxi-plus in Huggies.

Before the woman could get properly into how much he’d liked the
Thomas the Tank Engine
DVD she’d shown him, Sarah cut her off with: ‘We’ll be fine, thanks.’ Then she picked him and one of the bags up, and took him to the car.

Just as Sarah realised she had no car seat, the underclass frump walked out with one and strapped it in.

As the Land Rover screeched off, the foster carer realised Sarah had not taken the bag with Robbie’s medicine in it.

Sarah decided to go to Perth. No-one would trace her there, and Paul the Sainsbury’s man was
different.
He had listened to her, liked her, thought she was beautiful, and she could trust him. It would be the best place to collect her thoughts and work out the best way to complete the final, most
important
thing on her list.

It took Sarah over two hours to get to Perth. Normally it would have taken one and a half, but Robbie cried most of the way and this held them up. After half an hour, Sarah stopped the car and cuddled him. When she’d first spotted Robbie in
hospital, his eyes had entranced her, spoken to her. They were eyes that loved and understood her.

She looked into Robbie’e eyes now and saw nothing of this understanding and love. They were ugly little screaming eyes and she started to wonder what Krissie had done to the child to make him this way. Her hugging stopped him howling momentarily, but when she took off again he started up with a wail that made her want to drive the car into oncoming traffic.

She started singing to him as she drove:

But this approach didn’t stop him. The only time he did stop crying was when he projectile puked all over Sarah’s Land Rover. A tornado of vomit hit the back of Sarah’s head. She screeched into the pretty village of Dunblane and ran into a pub.

‘Can I use your bathroom? It’s an emergency!’

‘There are public toilets at the tourist
information
office,’ said the barman.

Sarah jumped back in the car, where Robbie was screaming at full throttle, and drove round and round the town. Why a small village should have a
one-way system and fourteen contradictory signposts she would never understand. Finally, Sarah parked the car at the tourist information office, grabbed Robbie out of the seat, which she now realised required a PhD in physics to do and undo, and ran inside.

‘I need the toilets!’

The woman at the counter was talking to someone and asked her to wait a moment, but Sarah interrupted.

‘I need the toilets
now
!’

The woman and everyone in the room did some synchronised eyebrow raising and then Sarah saw the toilet sign outside. She ran back out and tried to open the door, but it was locked, so she kicked it a few times and yelled until the frightened assistant came out with the key.

After a makeshift wash, Sarah dried her hair with the hand dryer and looked herself over. She was feeling a little better and she was looking okay. She changed Robbie’s clothes and phoned Paul, the Sainsbury’s manager, for directions. She then drove off again. Robbie fell asleep and let her drive in peace, and he was still asleep when she arrived in the monoblock driveway of a small semi-detached, newly-built house on the outskirts of Perth. There were hundreds of houses in the street, all the same, all little boxes.

She parked and checked the address. This was no castle.

She knocked on the door and Paul opened it, smiling at her.

‘Why did you lie to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You wanted to impress me?’

Sarah had always been chaste and proper, always been respectable. But that was then. In the days before she died and came to life again.

Standing there on the doorstep of his house, she looked at Paul for a second, then knelt, undid his zip, took out his penis and licked it slowly, from top to bottom, in full view of all the little people in all their little boxes. He pulled her to her feet, looking around to see if anyone was watching, and then dragged her inside.

Sarah did not want to have the kind of sex that makes babies. The kind where the man puts his penis into the woman’s vagina and ejaculates. She had done this, to no avail, for years.

So when Paul tried to put his penis into her vagina after the wet kiss and the ripping off of clothes, she pushed him off the couch and onto the ground and stood over his head with her legs unashamedly wide apart.

‘Just look at me,’ she said, and he did, although it got a little boring after two minutes or so. He was about to take the reins and move this thing on when Robbie woke in the car and started to scream.

‘What’s that?’

‘Shit, it’s Robbie.’

‘Who?’

It’s not easy, being a mother, not being able to just do something spontaneous, Sarah thought to herself as she brought Robbie into the house, to
discover
that Paul the Sainsbury’s guy was looking at her very strangely indeed.

‘You have a child?’ he asked.

‘I do now.’

‘Do you want a coffee?’ he asked, as she put the Pampers Maxi in the bin. ‘That’d be great, thanks,’ said Sarah, as she fed Robbie some tinned mashed carrot.

‘You like it weird, hey?’ He was getting excited again. ‘You’re a dirty little bitch.’

Sarah paused for a moment and held eye contact with Paul. ‘Where does this go?’ she asked, drying the spoon she had used to feed Robbie his carrot.

He pointed to the cutlery drawer. ‘You can’t leave me like this, without satisfying me.’

‘Sure,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll just put him in the car.’

She put Robbie back into her Land Rover, angry that – yet again – she had been lied to. Yet again she had been let down. Paul didn’t love her, or like her. He thought she was a dirty little bitch. She’d thought Paul was different, but then she’d thought the same about her stepdad and her husband … None of them were different, she thought to herself as she came back into the house, her eyes mad, furious.

Paul had his little wobbler waiting, just sitting there pathetically with a drop of piss on its end. He sat on the couch trying to get it hard as she opened the cutlery drawer and put the spoon inside, eyeing a gleaming knife in the section next to the spoons.

She moved over to him and took her pants off.

‘As long as you do something for me at the same time,’ she said, and then placed herself directly on his face, waiting for him to do what Kyle had started doing that night in the hotel, when she had woken up and walloped him over the head. It felt good, actually.

And she did as Paul had so politely requested, but it was so goddamn boring, and so goddamn
irritating
when he asked her to lick his hairy balls. After wiping her tongue over the leathery sprouts and digging out a few blackies from her teeth, she brought out the gleaming knife that she had taken from the cutlery drawer and caressed it against his unsuspecting base. She enjoyed moving the sharp edge of the cold blade around and around as her mouth toyed up and down, but then it all seemed a bit clichéd really. She was more imaginative than that. She hid the knife under the sofa and worked on him spectacularly until he was almost ready to go, and then she called upon the skill she had learnt in the crevice, the skill that had seemed like a
weakness
at the time. She recalled the hours of holding on in excruciating pain, and recalled the blessed
release when she unclenched and unleashed the last scrap of her dignity.

Paul’s orgasm was nipped in the bud by Sarah’s, which was spectacular and multicoloured.

‘Aagh! Dirty slag!’

Sarah stood up, knife in hand, and nicked him on the leg.

‘Aaagh! No! Stop!’

She then held the knife against his neck and squashed her effort into his face, into his mouth, his nose, and his ears.

He was still in the bathroom gagging, wiping the sticky excrement from his hair, and scraping out the morsels that had merged with his insides when he heard her car toot its goodbye. The brown saliva spat out from his mouth as he yelled: ‘YOU FILTHY BITCH!’

That had gone well, Sarah thought to herself, rubbing her hands with baby wipes. She hadn’t got the relaxing rest she had anticipated, but it was invigorating and she felt energetic and inspired enough to complete the last thing on her list.

Kill Mike.

Mike bought one litre of milk, the
Times,
a can of tomato soup and three fresh rolls.

‘Haven’t seen you out running for a while, Mike,’ said the shopkeeper.

‘I’ve been too busy getting fat!’ said Mike, and they both laughed as he left the shop.

‘Morning,’ he called, waving to Netty, after
crossing
the road.

‘See you at eight-thirty!’ said Netty, who was supervising Isla and her friends as they fashioned a Guy for the bonfire out of rope and newspaper and wood.

The park was a huge success. It had taken days of intense labour, but Mike had organised it
beautifully.
Before the community knew it, a large wooden boat had materialised in the middle of the grass. Planks and ropes and hidey holes and chutes shot up
around and within it, and then kids appeared in droves, buzzing about as their parents and
grandparents
gossiped happily on the sidelines.

Mike watched the adults whispering on the bench in the park that he had created for them. What were they saying, those ladies and that boring comic man, Jim? And what were they covering in front of the bench? It was something odd, the size of a chair, and badly disguised with an old beach towel.

Mike opened the door to his building, and climbed the stairs to his flat. He read his paper, made some coffee, cleaned the kitchen and then sat at the computer. His office was well organised, with shelving all along one wall, full to the brim with videotapes.

Mike hadn’t been to his plot for a week. He had put it out of his mind like a diet gone wrong – it was no longer even a guilty niggle at the back of his mind. The plot, the change of life, the solitude and
wholesomeness,
it was withering somewhere in Ayrshire.

The plot in Ayrshire was just the last in a string of attempts to change his ways. He’d tried marriage – but the strain of an emotionally appropriate
relationship
was more than he could take. He’d tried alcohol several times, but this only helped him leap headfirst into his hobby. And he’d considered suicide, but had always chickened out. He wasn’t brave enough.

The documentary he was doing about violence in schools was going really well. They had three
more days of filming left, and Mike had loads of work to do before tomorrow’s shoot. He had to ring the locations manager to make sure everything was okay for the classroom interviews the following day; he had to go over the rushes from the previous day’s interviews; and he had to think about Jane Malloy.

First things first. The locations manager assured Mike he’d organised everything for tomorrow, so Mike hung up and moved onto the next thing.

The rushes looked good. There’d been a slashing in the toilets a week earlier, one of many recent slashings of children by children, and Mike had managed a brilliant interview with the ten-year-old victim, Jane Malloy, and her pal, Beth. They spoke lucidly about the ordeal and about what they thought adults should be doing to make things better. Mike had given them twenty pounds each on top of their Channel Four fees, and also a PlayStation game, to thank them for their hard work. Jane’s mum was so chuffed with the feedback that she’d happily agreed to bring Jane back for a second interview at his flat the following day.

Which was today.

The rushes gave Mike the rush he was after – those kids in the toilets, that dirty changing room, the pure white flesh of Jane Malloy. It was better than some of the stuff he’d downloaded recently, more immediate, and it was getting harder and
harder to find exactly what he was looking for on the internet. There were perverts out there who liked boys, babies even, and sometimes he entered
portholes
that made him sick to the stomach.

Once or twice he’d procured for the perverts. This had brought problems. There was Marie Johnston’s brother, who wouldn’t piss off, for instance. He put up with the unpleasantness because the photos traded well.

Mike put his director’s hat on as he watched the rushes. If he tried this angle, that, used silk, maybe white, he could not only create hours of
entertainment
for himself, but also currency, which he could swap with other aficionados.

He had to turn the video and himself off when the doorbell rang.

Jane’s mum was typical. Excited by his resume and by his ability to make her daughter a star, she did as every other mum always did. After a coffee, she had no trouble at all buying the old line that the director would be there any minute and that Jane would interview better if she was left alone for a couple of hours.

So when Jane’s mum left, Mike played out the routine he had learnt and practised since he was in his twenties. He’d been in Los Angeles at the time – a high-flier even then – when he started to realise that it was no longer normal to be attracted to children, since he was by then a fully fledged adult.

But there had been fewer restrictions on his
behaviour
in Los Angeles. No role models – his parents had been dead since he was a baby, and all his in-the-business friends snorted coke and fucked whatever the hell they wanted to fuck. He would never have told his director and actor mates that he preferred girls under twelve, but if he had, they probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

He left LA when one kid’s mum started making accusations. Since then, he’d zigzagged around the UK. First he lived in London, where his recreational activities were regular and wonderful. Just thinking about a nine-year-old extra from series one of his sitcom made him itch, and when he visualised the girl he met at the park, sitting exactly as he asked in the bushes, it was almost painful.

Then he moved to Glasgow to be with Vivienne Morgan and her beautiful daughter, Sarah. But then Marie Johnston, a pal of Sarah’s, squealed to her mum.

He’d misjudged. The money and the soft toys weren’t enough. He went to court, and her little brother corroborated, but his lawyer got the charge down to a nice vague breach of the peace.

In those days, they didn’t watch out for sex offenders like they do now. There was no registering with the police, nothing, so he simply moved back to London and started over again. But some nutcase found out about him, so he headed north to
Drymlee, a quaint family-friendly village thirty minutes from Glasgow, which was far enough for him to avoid any unwanted confrontations with past acquaintances.

He was so pleased with Jane. She was pureness exemplified. He loved that she was giggling
flirtatiously
on the sofa while he made a pretend phone call to the director who he pretended could not come, and then did a pretend interview about the slashings which she could tell her mum about. Then he went into the kitchen and made some
preparations
and rubbed himself against the stainless steel fridge a few times while he decided if he should fight it. Everything was going so well for him – his job and his flat and his park and his old-dear neighbour with plants and a granddaughter – and he had been so careful over the last few months.

What the hell, he thought as he downed the rest of his whisky and picked a blank tape from his office, he deserved it. Today, he would spill the Ribena.