Dead Romantic (12 page)

‘They didn't go wrong,' I said. ‘The hamsters and Pee Wee are all alive and well thanks to you.'

‘Yes, but they're flawed. They're not perfect versions of their former selves.'

The van turned onto the seafront. ‘Pee Wee looks okay to me.'

‘Have you seen what the hamsters have done to the college? A hamster should not be able to chew through concrete walls, Camille. And normal little dogs don't behave like Pee Wee.'

I looked behind me. The curtain-wrapped body was jumping off the floor as we scaled each speed bump on the road. ‘Why, what's wrong with Pee Wee?'

‘You'll see,' said Zoe. ‘Maybe nothing's manifested itself
yet but it will. It always does. Did you ever hear about the cow that escaped up the High Street?'

And something did manifest when we got back to Zoe's house. Pee Wee was sitting on the doormat, like he was waiting for us, all sweet and smiley and panting.

And covered in blood. Again.

‘Oh my god, what's happened! Oh Pee Wee, my baby!' I cried, clamoring to get out of the van and see if he was okay.

‘
Raaaaarff raaaaahhf!'
he woofed at me as I lifted him up in my arms. I felt underneath him, all around his belly and his neck. Nothing. He hadn't been hurt, I thought, but it was so difficult to tell by moonlight. Zoe was standing on the grass when I looked back.

‘Over here,' she called and I went to join her on the grass, cuddling my poor bloody baby in close to my cheek.

‘Raaaaarff.'

‘His woof sounds funny,' I said.

‘It's not just his woof,' said Zoe. She pulled the torch from inside her coat pocket and shone it down on to the patch of grass in front of her. Black fur. And a collar. And mush. Red fleshy mush.

I could see what it was then. A dead dog!

‘What on earth . . . ?' I cried.

‘That's your poor bloody baby's dinner,' Zoe told me. ‘Suki. The poodle from two doors down.'

‘Ugh! That's disgusting!' I cried, putting Pee Wee down on the grass. ‘Ugh! Ugh. UGH!' He sniffed around the poodle mess and started licking it.

‘See what I mean now about electrocuting too quickly?
Come on; let's get this one in the chest freezer.'

Afterwards, Zoe dropped me and Pee Wee back at my house in the van and then drove on back up to her house. I wondered if we'd ever get the van back as I was pretty sure my mum was going to notice it was missing at some point. I didn't have time to worry about that too much at the time though, cos I had to get Pee Wee upstairs to my room before I ran into a parental.

I needn't have bothered. The next morning, I was just finishing up my shower in the en suite when I heard a scream. Pee Wee had escaped from my room, gone all the way downstairs, jumped out of the lounge window and mauled a passing sausage dog. I had a twenty-minute lecture from the parentals about how I was paying for therapy for the poor sausage dog's owner AND buying her a new sausage dog AND how selfish it was keeping a pet.

‘He's mad,' said Mum.

‘He's not staying here. And he'll poo everywhere and we've got to keep the place immaculate for the guests,' said Dad. ‘You know they're the most important people in this place.'

‘Yes, I know, but I'll look after him,' I said. ‘I'll train him, properly. And he might be able to catch that mouse that lives in room three, Dad, you never know.'

‘Bloody thing,' Dad muttered. At this point I think Dad was coming round to the idea. He'd been chasing that mouse with traps and cheese since we'd moved in.

Mum huffed. ‘You know who'll be looking after it, don't
you? Muggins. Muggins here will be buying the pet food and the kennel and the . . .'

‘He's not having a kennel and I'll buy all his food. I'll take him to the vet's and get him microchipped and everything.'

‘Damn right you will.'

‘And he can live in my room and sleep on my old baby blanket until I buy him a proper cosy bed.'

‘No, you're not keeping him,' said Mum. ‘We'll have to take him down the cop shop and see if anyone's reported him missing.'

‘Remember how upset you were when the gerbils died?' said Dad.

‘Only when I found them lying on top of the rubbish in the bin cos you couldn't be bothered to bury them,' I snipped, cuddling Pee Wee tighter.

‘And when the kitten got run over?'

‘I wasn't upset then.'

‘And when Jasper had to be put down?' said Mum.

‘So the only reason I'm not allowed a pet is cos they die? You're both going to die one day, why don't I kick
you
out as well just to save me the grief?'

Mum gasped. ‘Camille!'

They both stared down at me. But I didn't care one jot. Well, maybe one jot, but I wasn't budging on the subject, no sir-ee. I decided to play the guilt card, which I only ever did when I absolutely positively had to.

‘Mum. Dad. You never gave me any brothers and sisters, and while I respect you for that, I'm lonely living in a house full of old people. I love you both lots but Pee
Wee is mine and I'm keeping him. If you want to chuck him out, you'll have to chuck me out too. So that means you'll have to get someone in to do the breakfasts.'

I was just about to turn on the tears when they finally stopped arguing and let me have my way. I think they finally realised that, actually, having a dog wasn't too much to ask. As daughters go, I'd been a bit of a breeze. Compared to Lynx, for instance. She'd put her mum and dad through all sorts of dramas before they split up: drinking in the park, nicking earrings, all that business with our P.E. teacher at school. Reminding them of Lynx actually did help my cause. I kept quiet about the whole eating other dogs business though. They didn't need to know they were living with a cannonball.

I had triple History before I could go and see the body in daylight, so Pee Wee and I had to hop, skip and jump it to college. Louis wasn't in History and I was a little annoyed that I'd made the effort and he hadn't. Class was uneventful – I ran out of ink, got shouted at for forgetting who Goebbels was and tripped over a runaway hamster in the corridor. Pretty average day really.

On the way back into town, I stopped at the pet shop and spent the last of my chambermaid wages on a collar and lead for Pee Wee, some chew toys and a bag of food, and then decided to treat myself to some fudge at the Fudge Shack as I'd had my eye on some strawberry short-cake flavour fudge since my last diet.

When I got to Clairmont House, Zoe was in the freezing-cold kitchen, standing beside the kitchen table,
upon which lay the naked, headless body of Luke the Lifeless Lifeguard. Only now he wasn't just headless. He was handless too. And footless. And organ-less: his torso was wide open and red and empty. He was a sorry sight really, like a car that'd had its engine stripped out and its wheels taken off.

‘Yes, he's a bit of a work-in-progress, I'm afraid,' said Zoe, wiping her hands on a blue tea towel.

I picked up Pee Wee and moved closer to the table to get a better look. ‘What . . . where are . . . why did you cut his hands off? And his feet?' Luke's wet suit was on the floor. Zoe had cut that off him as well.

‘Well, we have a problem,' she said.

I had a mouthful of fudge. ‘What problem?'

‘These . . . '

She held up a carrier bag and opened the top so I could peek inside it. There was a pair of blacky bluey feet, cut off at the ankle, lying at the bottom, on top of a pair of bluey blacky hands.

‘They rotted?' I said with a grimace I just couldn't control. The bag smell was utterly vile. If I'd had to describe it like my dad described wine, I'd have said there were notes of pork and blood and morning breath in it, and a rotting bin. I clamped my hand over my mouth.

‘'Fraid so,' said Zoe, putting the bag on the floor. ‘I noticed last night as I was putting the serum in that they were slightly blue so I took them off straight away. No sense in delaying the inevitable. At least we know now he wasn't embalmed.'

‘What's that?' I said, offering her my bag of fudge.

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes funeral parlours embalm bodies to preserve them longer for family viewings. It delays decomposition and keeps the body looking like it did in life for as long as possible.'

‘Grim.'

‘Saves me an awful lot of work actually. Problem was, not only did I have to remove his hands and feet, he was also missing several key organs. Lungs, heart and kidneys have all been removed. Bloody organ donor. Luckily I had spares so I was just going to transplant some over now.'

‘Spares?' I cried. ‘Where did you get spares from?'

‘You're in luck – they're all good specimens. Healthy.'

The Marks & Spencer's cool bag I'd seen her with that night in the graveyard was on the draining board and she went over to it and unzipped the top. I looked inside. Five plastic packages. Two kidneys in one. Lungs in another. All marinating in deep red blood. And two separate packages of hands. I put Pee Wee down on the kitchen floor, reached into the bag and picked out the top package.

‘This is the heart, isn't it?' I said, squidging the parcel. ‘The thing he's going to love me with. His actual heart. I've got his heart in my hands.'

‘It's just a pump,' said Zoe, taking it from me and placing it carefully back in the cool bag. ‘It's just a means of getting his blood from one part of his body to the other, that's all.' She went back to the table.

I poked around in the cool bag to see the hands more clearly. They were as bloody as the organs but they didn't look like they had just come out of a butcher's window –
they really did look like someone's hands. There was even what looked like a little mole on one of the fingers. I snapped my own hand away pretty quickly, suddenly not wanting it to be anywhere near the bag.

‘The main problem is that his body is decaying much quicker than if he
had
been embalmed,' Zoe explained, going back to her syringe. ‘In the freezer at the funeral parlour, he was probably kept at between two and four degrees. Decomposition will still have continued to occur, though at a slower rate. I've set the chest freezer temperature to minus twenty to reduce it further but without a cryogenic freezing chamber, we can't retard it for long. That's why I'm injecting him now. It should slow it down for a few days.'

I turned to her. ‘I can't have a boyfriend with no feet, Zoe. I just can't!'

‘Well, yes, I realise that,' said Zoe, moving around to the other side of the body with the saw and pinching at the skin on the body's legs. ‘We will have to find some. I'll need some blood too. Where can we get eight pints of blood, Camille?'

‘Um, um, um . . . Could you take some out of me?'

‘I could only get one pint from you on a good day. Anyway you're A positive.'

‘A positive what?' I said.

‘No, your blood type is A positive. He's O negative. It's better to stick to the same blood type in any severed part to reduce the chance of rejection.'

‘Oh right.' Pee Wee squirmed to be put down so I let him. He immediately went over to the wet suit Zoe had
cut off Luke's body and started tearing it to pieces. ‘How about the hospital for the blood?'

‘Yes, good, now you're thinking like a scientist.'

I frowned. ‘How do you know I'm A positive? I didn't even know that.'

‘I tested it when you had your nosebleed. Just in case.'

‘Oh right,' I said, rustling in my fudge bag for, disappointingly, the last chunk.

‘You do still want this to go ahead, don't you?' asked Zoe. ‘To hold one of these perfect piano-player hands when he leads you into the gym on the night of this Halloween party? The perfect feet to trip the light fantastic with?'

I nodded eagerly. My mouth was too full of fudge to actually say the word yes, so I just said, ‘Yug.'

‘Right, help me get the body back in the freezer and then we'll take you to the hospital. Grab his arms . . .'

‘Me? I don't need to go to the hospital.' ‘You do.

You're going to have another nosebleed, I'm afraid.'

‘I am?' Her medical genius never failed to amaze me. ‘How do you know?'

She reached towards my face and gave my nose the quickest of tweaks. It crunched and the pain seared through my face like fire and the blood ran down my chin like rain.

 

 

 

 

S
o we left Pee Wee eating a Pot Noodle in the porch, locked in so he couldn't attack the stuffed animals like I knew he wanted to, and headed down to the hospital in the van.

It was very busy in A&E and my nose was still streaming. There were old people with broken arms, young people with broken collarbones, a couple of tombstoners who had fractured bones jumping into the sea off Madeira Cove, two pale-and-sweaties and a man with a beer gut who looked like he was fine, until he threw up black stuff all over the floor. Zoe knew what was wrong with all of them before they did. It was one of her talents, diagnosing any illness from a distance. She said it was why she never ate in public, even snacky foods.