Sweetpea: The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017. C.J. Skuse

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СКАЧАТЬ Tony to commit unauthorised body contact #2 – supportive forearm grab and accidental boob stroke. Ugh.

      ‘So our womb lady’s stuck on the bridge in Cardiff, which means her item’s been shifted to tomorrow. You’re on after the quiche but before the boy band, OK?’

      They ran through the in-depth questions they would ask me in the three-and-a-half-minute slot – there’s no time for tragedy when there’s a three-cheese quiche in the oven, after all – and I was parked in the Green Room, to sign release forms, have my microphone clipped on and await my fate. After a fidgety age, Jemimah Double-Barrelled came and got me and we walked down a purgatory of white corridors to the studio.

      The set looked more of a headachy pink and yellow colour in real life than it did in HD, like someone had puked Rainbow Skittles over it. The edges of the floor were covered with long snaking black wires and large portable cameras wheeled around back in the shadows and forth in a strange robotic dance. Carolyn and Tony were in situ and I was ushered to sit down opposite on the famous fuchsia-pink banquette. All I could smell was burnt cheese.

      ‘OK, Rhiannon,’ said Tony, ‘so we’ll run the competition trailer and then come to you, all right? Try not to fidget, stammer or sneeze and if you feel a cough coming on, there’s a carafe of water there and yours will be poured out. All right? And don’t swear or else we get shot by them upstairs.’ Heh heh heh.

      ‘Don’t say “fuck” or “bugger”,’ I mimicked.

      They looked at me like I’d doused them both with petrol and was about to strike a match.

      ‘Sorry. It’s OK, I won’t swear.’

      Before I knew what was happening, the lights were brighter, a chubby brunette with drawn-on eyebrows had run on to sweep my forehead with a fuzzy brush, the end of the competition whinnied away and a camera wheeled forward.

      ‘Welcome back,’ said Carolyn. ‘This month we’ve been meeting our contenders for Woman of the Century and, in the last instalment, we are profiling Rhiannon Lewis, the young survivor of the Priory Gardens attack. This year marks the twenty-first anniversary of the tragedy when a man entered childminder Allison Kingwell’s house in a small Bristol suburb and brutally murdered her, along with five of the children she was looking after.’

      Tony took over. ‘When police arrived at the house in Bradley Stoke, what they found was a scene of absolute horror. Not only did they find Ms Kingwell’s body, but also the tiny lifeless bodies of one-year-old Kimmy Lloyd, two-year-old Jack Mitchell, three-year-old twins George and David Archer and five-year-old Ashlea Riley-House. Also dead was the perpetrator, 37-year-old Antony Blackstone, the estranged husband of Ms Kingwell, who had taken his own life.’

      The baton went back to Carolyn. ‘Amazingly, one child, Rhiannon Lewis, survived against all odds, having been struck with a hammer. She lay silently beneath Ms Kingwell’s decapitated body for hours. Today, the house at Priory Gardens no longer stands as it did, replaced instead by a playground, and Rhiannon herself is now twenty-seven years old and fully recovered from her ordeal. And we’re delighted to welcome her into the studio today. Rhiannon, thanks so much for coming in.’

      ‘Thank you for having me.’

      I could see my face on the monitor on the edge of the floor. Jeez they’d put a lot of blusher on. I looked like I had red light bulbs stuffed in my cheeks.

      ‘Rhiannon, take us back to that day if you can. Do you remember anything about it?’

      ‘No, nothing before the attack,’ I said. ‘Only what people have told me and what the witnesses said.’

      They were both nodding, like they should be on a shelf in the back of a car. Tony’s legs opened like the gates to Jurassic Park. The T. rex bulged at the seam. It was All. I. Could. Look. At. I’d need a chainsaw to chop down that trunk.

      ‘So you don’t remember the moment Blackstone got into the house?’

      ‘No. Apparently, he knocked at the front door and Allison told him to get lost, and then a neighbour saw him go round the back and jump over the garden wall and try the lock on the patio doors. That’s when he smashed the glass.’

      ‘With hammers?’ said Tony.

      ‘Yeah, I guess.’

      Carolyn took over with a heavy sigh. ‘Let’s take a little look at this VT which might help shed some more light on that traumatic day.’

      They cut to the same old montage of people laying posies and teddies outside number 12 Priory Gardens, old women crying and holding tissues to their noses. The vox pop of two old men saying how it was such a close community, how ‘nothing like this has ever happened round here before’. The glistening red doormat. Wailing fathers. Sobbing mums. Three little stretchers. The policeman talking about the ‘unprecedented situation’. My limp body, wrapped in Peter Rabbit blankets.

      I was sweating through my Bare Minerals.

      Just before the VT finished, someone in the darkness beyond the psychedelic sofas called out: ‘And we’re back in three, two, one…’

      Carolyn and Tony’s faces were painted with a new expression of anguish.

      ‘Rhiannon, I can’t imagine how this must have affected you. Can you give us a flavour of what life’s been like for you since that tragic day?’

      Flavour? I thought. What? Like some days I’m smoky bacon, others a little more ready salted, that kind of thing? No, no time for facetiousness, this was important and sad and important.

      ‘Well, my parents did interviews with all the tabloids and I went on some talk shows. They flew me over for this American one and they gave us an all-expenses paid holiday to Disney World. You can still see the clip on YouTube. The whole audience is crying. I just sound like I’m broken.’

      ‘How long did it take for you to learn to walk and talk again?’

      ‘Um, I don’t think I was fully restored until my early teens. I virtually had to relearn everything. How to talk to people, how to move. How to be. I found it very hard. For the things I didn’t know, I developed a kind of act for them.’

      ‘In what sort of way?’

      ‘Well, my mum used to worry that I never cried when I fell over and I stopped hugging her. She’d say to me, “Why aren’t you more upset? Why aren’t you crying?” and then I’d try and remember that was what I was supposed to do for next time.’

      Carolyn reached forward to the coffee table and grabbed the tissue box, plucking one out to dab at her eye. ‘Rhiannon, I’m sorry, this story always gets to me.’

       Try starring in it, love.

      Tony leaned in to the rescue. ‘It was the front of your brain which was affected by the hammer blow, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Mmm, yeah, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Frontal lobe. I had a lot of surgery to repair my skull. I have this large zig-zaggy scar behind my hairline.’

      ‘Like Harry Potter?’

      ‘Not as neat as that.’

      Tony checked his script. ‘The police СКАЧАТЬ