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

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СКАЧАТЬ Rowntree – a kittenish 24-year-old sales rep in my office who wore tight skirts and chunky platforms and swished her hair like she was in a 24-hour L’Oréal advert. He’d met her at my works Christmas piss-up on 19 December – twelve days ago. The text confirmed the suspicions I’d had when I’d seen them together at the buffet: chatting, laughing, her fingering the serviette stack, him spooning out stuffing balls onto their plates, a hair swish here, a stubble scratch there. She was looking at him all night and he was just bathing in it.

      Then came the increase in ‘little jobs’ he had to do in town: a paint job here, a hardwood floor there, a partition wall that ‘proved trickier’ than he’d estimated. Who has any of that done the week before Christmas? Then there were the out-of-character extended trips to the bathroom and two Christmas shopping trips (without me) that were just so damn productive he spent all afternoon maxing out his credit card. I’ve seen his statement – all my presents were purchased online.

      So I’d been stewing about that all day and the last thing I needed that New Year’s night was enforced fun with a bunch of gussied-up pissheads. Unfortunately, that’s what I got.

      My ‘friends’ or, more accurately, the‘PICSOs’ – People I Can’t Shake Off – had arranged to meet at the Cote de Sirène restaurant on the harbour-side, dressed in Next Sale finery. Our New Years’ meal-slash-club-crawl had been planned for months – initially to include husbands and partners, but, one by one, they had all mysteriously dropped out as it became a New Years’ meal-slash-baby-shower-slash-club crawl for Anni. Despite its snooty atmosphere, the restaurant is in the centre of town, so there’s always yellow streaks up the outside walls and a sick puddle on the doormat come Sunday morning. The theme inside is black and silver with an added soupçon of French – strings of garlic, frescos of Parisian walkways and waiters who glare at you like you’ve murdered their mothers.

      The problem is, I need them. I need friends. I don’t want them; it’s not like they’re the Wilson to my skinny, toothless, homeward-bound Tom Hanks. But to keep up my façade of normality, they’re just necessary. To function properly in society, you have to have people around you. It’s annoying, like periods, but there is a point to it. Without friends, people start labelling you a ‘Loner’. They check your Internet history or start smelling bomb-making chemicals in your garage.

      But the PICSOs and I have little in common, this is true. I’m an editorial assistant at a local snooze paper, Imelda’s an estate agent, Anaïs is a nurse (currently on maternity leave), Lucille works in a bank, her sister Cleo is a university-PE-teachercum-personal-trainer and Pidge is a secondary-school teacher. We don’t even have the same interests. Well, me and Anni will message each other about the most recent episode of Peaky Blinders but I’d hardly call us bezzies.

      And it may look like I’m the quiet cuckoo in a nest of rowdy crows but I do perform some function within the group. Originally, when I first met them all in Sixth Form, I was a bit of a commodity. I’d been a bit famous as a child so I’d done the whole celebrity thing: met Richard and Judy; Jeremy Kyle gave me a Wendy house; been interviewed on one of those Countdown to Murder programmes. Nowadays, I’m just the Thoughtful Friend or the Designated Driver. Lately, I’m Chief Listener – I know all their secrets. People will tell you anything if you listen to them for long enough and pretend you’re interested.

      Anni, our resident Preggo, is due to drop sometime in March. The Witches Four – Lucille, Cleo, Imelda and Pidge – had spared no expense on the nappy cake, cards, streamers, balloons and booties to decorate the table. I’d brought a fruit basket, filled with exotic fruits like lychees and mangoes, starfruit and ambarella, as a nod to Anni’s Mauritian heritage. It had gone down like a whore on a Home Secretary. At least I wasn’t driving, so I could quaff as much Prosecco as my liver could cope with and snuggle my brain into believing I was having a good time while they were all clucking on about the usual.

      The PICSOs themselves like talking about five things above all others:

       1. Their partners (usually to slag them off)

       2. Their kids (conversations I can’t really join in with ’cos I don’t have any, so, unless, it’s cooing over school Nativity photos or laughing at Vines of them wiping poo up the walls, my contribution just isn’t called for)

       3. IKEA (usually because they’ve just been or are just going)

       4. Dieting – what works/what doesn’t, what’s filling/what isn’t, how many pounds they’ve lost/put on

       5. Imelda’s wedding – she only announced it in September but I can’t actually remember a time when it wasn’t on our conversation rota.

      In my head I’m usually thinking about five things above all others…

       1. Sylvanian Families

       2. My as-yet-unpublished novel, The Alibi Clock

       3. My little dog, Tink

       4. When I can go to the toilet and check my social-media feeds

       5. Ways I can kill people I don’t like… without getting caught

      Before too long a tray of drinks came over: Prosecco and a selection of slightly smudged glasses.

      ‘What’s this?’ Imelda asked.

      ‘Compliments of the gentlemen at the bar,’ said the waiter, and we looked over to see two types leaning against the counter, evidently looking to score with the nearest friendly vagina. The one wearing gold-hoop earrings and too much gel raised his pint in our direction – his other arm was in a sling. His friend in the Wales rugby shirt, and sporting tattooed forearms, a cut on his left eyebrow and a protruding beer gut, was unashamedly salivating over Lucille’s ridiculous breasts. She says she ‘doesn’t do it on purpose’. Yeah, and I don’t bleed from my crease every month.

      ‘How marvellous.’ She smiled, swooping into the bread basket. We each took a glass and ‘cheersed’ the men, before continuing our conversational merry-go-round – babies, boyfs, IKEA, and how draining it was just generally having tits.

      Anni opened her presents, all of which she thought were either ‘amazing’ or ‘so cute’. Of all of them, I found Anni the least annoying of the PICSOs. She always had an anecdote to share about someone brought into A&E, with a Barbie doll shoved up their arse or a motorcyclist with his head hanging off. This was at least mildly entertaining. Of course her baby would come soon and then there would be nothing left for us to talk about other than Babies and What Fun They Are and How I Wish I Had One. That’s how these things usually went.

      We all ordered steaks, in various sizes with various sauces, despite the rainbow of diets we are all on. Mel’s on the Dukan, or GI, I forget which one. Lucille’s on the 5:2, but today was a five day so she had three rolls and twenty breadsticks before her meal hit the tablecloth. Cleo ‘eats clean’, but she’s had Christmas and New Year off. I’m on the Eat Everything in Sight Until 1 January Then Starve Self to Death diet, so I ordered a 10oz sirloin in a béarnaise sauce with triple-cooked French fries – I asked for the meat to be so raw you didn’t know whether to eat it or feed it a carrot. The taste was unreal. I didn’t even care if the cow had suffered – his ass was delish.

      ‘I thought you were going veggie?’ said Lucille, tearing off another hunk of complimentary bread.

      ‘No,’ I said, ‘not any more.’ I couldn’t believe she remembered me saying that about eighty-five years ago. It was actually my GP who told me to give up red meat СКАЧАТЬ