Sweetpea: The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017

The irritating thing is, we can’t say ANYTHING back to Joy because she has a ton of disabilities. She’s one of those rotund, deeply ugly Cromwellian-faced women you see around who’ve dyed their hair bright pink or blue in an attempt to make themselves more appealing, but all they’ve done is accentuate their ugliness. So I can’t comment about her big left leg or her stutter or the Bell’s palsy that has caused her mouth to start sliding off her face because then I’d get done for disablism. Crazy. Wouldn’t you rather have someone like me working with you? Someone who did the decent thing and bitched about you behind your back, rather than right to your face?

I don’t particularly want to go to the effort of killing Joy but I do sometimes like to imagine her, stuffed and glazed, prostrate on a silver platter, surrounded by tufts of parsley with a big green apple wedged between her jaws.

The mayor came in at lunch to see Ron. She’s pleasant enough and she’s got a foster-care past, a disabled kid, and her husband keeps having heart attacks, so she’s clearly had to swallow several shitty spoonfuls from the Bowl of Life. I try not to get too close to her, though – she smells like a Glade PlugIn on full-whack. She is also gluten intolerant, which makes buying lunch intolerable. I have to go to that smelly deli on the corner, where the guy with black fingernails and dreadlocks shuffles around in a hummus-covered apron, twiddling his nose ring.

Lana smiled as she sashayed past my desk at lunchtime, robin’s-egg-blue blouse straining against the pressure of her sizeable assets. I’m pretty sure half the time she doesn’t need to walk past my desk – she could go the other way round – but she does it to look at me. Like a killer going back to the site where she dumped a body, just to marvel at the rate of decomposition or to fuck the remains. I smiled back anyway, for the sake of The Act, and we had a short chat. I smiled again when we were done. Cue the hair swish. Cue the giggle. Cue me imagining her pinned to a snooker table and stabbing her in each hole. I can see why all the men fancy her. She’s bubbly, easy-going, has tits like water balloons. Her last two boyfriends dumped her – I heard it on the staffroom grapevine. She had a breakdown after the first one. And, apparently, after the second one left, she tried to take her own life. I don’t know the severity of the attempt – whether it was a proper go or just a token pills-and-finger-straight-downthe-throat job – but it did explain Craig’s predilection for her. He likes them broken.

A lesbian couple whose kid had choked on a grape in Pizza Hut came in to chat to Mike Heath in the conference room, along with the waitress who’d done kiddy Heimlich and saved his life. I wrote up a press release on a student’s Kilimanjaro climb for moon bears and helped Jeff input the match report from the finals of the County Bowls Championships. There was a Kinder Egg on my desk when I got back from lunch.

Jeff Thresher is the newspaper’s chief sports editor. I think he’d been put in with the foundations. He sits at his desk in the corner all day; holey red cardigan, fingerless gloves, three back supports on his chair. I like Jeff. He holds the door open for me and laughs at my jokes. He’s an expert gardener too and enters all the country shows with his massive courgettes. He’s taught me some of the Latin names of my favourite flowers – Bellis perennis (daisy), Centaurea cyanus (cornflower) and Amaranthus caudatus (Love Lies Bleeding). If the office were flooded with shit, I’d definitely throw Jeff the other life raft.

Drove over to the house in my lunch break. Julia is not a happy camper. She’s broken a window at the back. It’s only a small hole but it made me mad. So, of course, she had to be taught another lesson. Back into the cupboard with you, Little Chip.

Met Craig for a Nando’s after work and he brought the carinsurance documents along so we could Compare the Meerkat ’cos the renewal price was too high. My chicken was tough. I didn’t complain though. Didn’t have it in me tonight.

Thank God for porn. The moment Craig mooted the possibility of sex that evening, I took myself off to the bedroom under the guise of ‘working on my novel’ and chowed down on every old favourite I could find to lubricate the old pink matter. When I think back to being a kid and sneaking off to read the dirty bits in my mum’s Jackie Collins or rewinding Dad’s Basic Instinct tape about six bloody times, I wonder how I survived. Now, it’s everywhere and not so titillating.

Chat rooms can be another source of titillation. I know modesty forbids me to say I’m brilliant at dirty talk but I am brilliant at dirty talk. How it works is you snare them in the chat rooms, get them begging for a private text chat in WhatsApp or Kik and then haul them in. Once they’re in the app, they’re in my trap.

Hee hee hee.

Admittedly, sexting gets a little annoying when predictive text spoils the fun – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said I wanted to ‘duck his vock’ or asked a guy to ‘cum in my wasp’ or ‘lick my Pudsey’. One guy offered to ‘suck my bipolars’. Some of them get quite demanding. Skyping works better but it involves shaving and losing weight and I just can’t be bothered at the moment. Chatting to three or four at once, it’s like working in Argos during the Christmas rush. One wants an ass shot, another wants a tit shot, some guy in Australia’s going to bed soon and needs to watch me cum on camera and one guy in Toronto wants to chat about suicidal thoughts he’s had since his brother’s death. Oh, yeah. I get all sorts.

Last time, me and one of my regulars were on about meeting up at a London hotel – he wanted to tie me up. Another said he’d meet me in a dark alleyway and do exactly what I said: grab me and tear at my clothes, grasp my neck like a nettle and bite my ear as he whispered nasty things into it – just like I wanted him to.

I stop short at asking if I can kill them after; if I can lie underneath them, dressed in their blood, while they emit their dying breaths on top of me.

Baby steps and all that.

But the best – the absolute best thrill of all – is going fishing. And I don’t mean for carp or tench. I mean big fish. Big, horny fish who only come out at night to prowl the streets, looking for female office workers walking home alone or pissed-up damsels in distress stumbling back from the clubs. I like to play said damsel from time to time. I like to play the victim. It’s so damn easy when you’ve got an eight-inch chef’s knife in your coat pocket.

Sunday, 7 January

1. Derek Scudd

2. Derek Scudd’s lawyer

3. Wesley Parsons

4. Our local whack job, Creepy Ed Sheeran, who hangs around Lidl car park, tearing the leaves off the bushes, sniffing them and chuckling

5. Anyone who buys, sells or creates Star Wars merchandise. I can’t even buy a Snickers without seeing a token for a sodding light sabre

Dreamed about Dad again last night. I asked him who his favourite child was, and he smiled and told me, ‘You, of course.’

I could talk to my dad about anything. There’s no one now. Craig’s pathetic – he’s always got one eye on the TV and, even if it’s turned off, I figure he’s mentally rerunning an old episode of Game of Thrones. I can’t talk to Seren, of course. She hasn’t been back to England since Dad’s funeral and, every time we talk on the phone, I get the impression she can’t wait to hang up.

And as for the PICSOs, when I want derogatory comments about my lack of kids or non-selling novel or my low-grade job, maybe their opinions will matter.

I don’t know what Mum or Dad would tell me to do if they were still around.

I didn’t grieve for them like an ordinary person would. Seren said it was ‘very unsettling’ seeing the way I grieved about Dad. She said it was like ‘looking through a window when it’s raining’ – the rain trickling down it and cold as ice. I didn’t know how to feel. I was just numb. I googled it once – WebMD said ‘bereavement numbness for the first few days is very common as your brain tries to process what has happened’. I couldn’t find anything about numbness that went on for years. Apparently, that wasn’t a thing.

The two seniors, Claudia and Linus, came back from court at lunch, to say that the paedophile Derek Scudd, sixty-eight, had got off with a three-year suspended sentence, a two-month rehab order and a place on the Sex Offenders’ Register. We’ve all been following the case for over a year. Un-fucking-believable! The man needs to be skinned alive and fried while he was still screaming.

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