In Bloom. C.J. Skuse
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Monday, 23rd July – 11 weeks, 1 day
Jim asked if there have been any Airbnb bookings for the Well House.
‘No, not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure there will be, any day now.’ Of course there won’t be. Not now I’ve buried AJ in one of the flower beds up there.
I can’t stop thinking about that old sow Huggins. You’d think that dismembering a body in a bathtub would leave me sated for murder for a long time but it hasn’t. What if the ‘serial killer cycle’ is shorter when you’re preggers? What if the feeling of balance and completion doesn’t last so long when you’re killing for two? There’s nothing in the pregnancy books on it, of course, and Google is next to useless on the subject. Though my in utero Jiminy Cricket is putting the kybosh on all those sort of shenanigans via tiredness, heartburn and nausea, I want it so bad. I want her so damn bad.
Plymouth Star guy is back on the doorstep but he hasn’t knocked. He’s just sitting there, looking all handsome and fed up. I wonder if he wants my body? The state it’s in right now, he can have it.
I went downstairs and peeked through the net curtains – there was a bunch of flowers next to him on the step. I opened the door.
‘What’s this?’ I said, startling him into standing up.
‘Hi,’ he said, picking up the flowers – yellow and white roses – and handing them to me. ‘To apologise for hassling you.’
‘You’re apologising for hassling me by hassling me. Are they bugged?’
He laughed, biting his lip.
‘They are, aren’t they?’
‘No no, they’re not bugged I assure you.’
‘Be a waste of time if they were bugged anyway. We don’t talk about the case at home.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
I pretended to zip my mouth. ‘You’re not getting in that way either, Sneak. I know your game.’ I smelled the roses. They didn’t carry any scent at all – mass-cultivated supermarket crap. Ugh. I handed them back to him.
‘You’re going to have to try harder than that.’
‘What do you like then?’ he said as I was closing the door. ‘Tell me and I’ll get it for you. Anything.’
‘Not bribing me, are you?’
‘No, but—’
‘Cos if you are, maybe try doughnuts. Krispy Kreme for preference.’
*
That evening, Elaine dragged me along to her monthly WOMBAT meeting. They’re a Christian women’s group who go on outings, raise money for various different charities, eat cake and pray. Tonight’s meeting featured their new ‘Kindness Circle’.
Yes, it’s just as dull as it sounds.
WOMBAT stands for the Women of Monks Bay and Temperley and Elaine says it’s ‘full of characters’. There’s Big-Headed Edna, Morbid Marge, Poll Potts, who dresses like a sister-wife, Pincushion-Face Grace, Erica the Overfriendly Troll, Bea Moore the Colossal Bore, Wheelchair Pat, Wheelchair Mary, Rita Who Sits By the Heater, Elephant Vadge Madge, Jean Coker the Strokey Smoker, whose palsy makes her look like she’s constantly trying to eat her own neck, Black Nancy and White Nancy. Black Nancy calls me ‘Bab’ and is covered in dog hairs. She’s knitting a cardigan for the baby, whether I want her to or not. I’ve only exchanged brief ‘Hellos’ with White Nancy but as far as I can tell she’s a twat.
This is what I do now. This is what I have become. I meet up once a month with a group of women I don’t want to know. We gossip, we pray and we eat cake. My life will return to normal when the baby’s out in the open, of that I am sure, but while he’s gestating, I’m stagnating. I’m a freak on a leash.
It feels odd. Not wrong exactly, just nothing seems to fit. Everything’s too small. Too mundane. I’m a square peg and every damn hole is round. Yeah sure Baby Bear might be contented but Momma’s getting grizzly.
Erica the WOMBAT secretary had the idea to incorporate Kindness Circle into the meetings and tonight’s is the first one. Spurred on by ISIS and our world leaders basically all being megalomaniacal shits, she thought people needed to ‘make time to be kind’. Everyone breaks off into groups like they’re in the damn Brownies and partakes of kind activities – organising collections for the food bank, creating cross-stitch patterns for underprivileged traffic wardens or sitting around talking about how lovely everything is.
I heard the word ‘lovely’ precisely 126 times this evening. I want to hurt the word ‘lovely’. I want to beat lovely to within an inch of its life, tie lovely in a sack and fucking drown it.
Erica, I should mention, is also responsible for the ‘lovely’ rhymes in the church hall kitchenette:
Wash, wash, wash your plates
Gently down the drain
Rinse rinse, rinse them clean
Then dry them up again
And on the fridge door there’s
Welcome welcome, one and all,
To our communal milk and tea,
But if you use the last of them,
A refill’s nice to see!
And don’t get me started on If you’re happy and you know it wash your hands…
They’re so goddamn twee they make me want to gnaw concrete. Erica was all abuzz this evening having announced that the ‘church hall fund has agreed to splash out on hanging baskets for the smokers’ area’. You know, so people can admire the pansies while their tumours metastasize.
So I’m sitting there at Clit-Lickers Monthly and we have to go around the circle and say happy things. I’m with Erica, Tight Bun Doreen, Debbie Does Donkeys, One Armed Joyce and Rita Who Sits By the Heater. Erica’s rattling through a long list of contentments, which surprises me as she has a face that would make a blind child cry. Then it’s my turn.
‘Uh, I have nothing,’ I said.
‘Come on,’ said Debbie Does Donkeys. ‘There must be something.’
‘It’s a bit hard to think of anything right now. There’s a lot of bad happening in the world.’
‘Yes but we choose love,’ said Rita. ‘We might have to look a bit harder to find it but it is always there. Happy thoughts, you must have some.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any. I’m not a happy-go-lucky person.’
Tight Bun Doreen pipes up. ‘Well perhaps if you were you’d find it easier to come up with something?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, heartburn biting. Inside my head she is flat on her back beneath a hydraulic drill press. My finger’s on the button.
Doreen’s lips pursed. ‘Maybe you need to change your world view?’
‘Maybe I do,’ I said.
‘So? Do you have a happy thought now?’ she asked.
‘What, because you tell me I have to have one? Yes, all right then, I do.’
Doreen frowned and waited. ‘Well? What is it?’
I continued to stare at her, smiling. ‘Can’t say else it won’t come true.’
Later, Debbie Does Donkeys read the lesson – a passage from Luke about Jesus anointing a sinful woman – the lesson being that one who has sinned deserves a second chance because ‘she has faith in the Lord’.
You can tell an evening has been a washout when the best part is being given a Bible. I was given my own Good News