In Bloom

‘Some people are experts at hiding what they are,’ says Géricault as they are leaving. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’ She nods and holds my stare.

It’s clear from this meeting that Craig’s in the frame. I’m a key witness at best; the pregnant, scared girlfriend of a man who was, by day, a mild-mannered builder – by night a vicious, apex predator. They’d got the bastard.

*Gordon Ramsay clap* DONE.

*

So, I guess now you want to know about the old choppy-choppy? Well, it was the messiest, most nauseating thing I’ve ever done. God, when I think how easy it was for murderers in the olden days. All you had to do was lace someone’s tobacco with arsenic or push them in the Thames. They rarely caught people like me back then – sudden death was usually down to ‘The Pox’. Now you’ve got to do all this dismembering and fingerprint-hiding shit.

First I had to make a list for Homebase –

• rubber gloves (1 box)

• plastic sheeting and/or cling film (lots)

• shovel (1)

• bleach (2 bottles, possibly 3)

• duct tape (3 rolls)

• cleaning sponges (several)

• electric power saw and/or bow saw (1 of each).

How did I know what to get? My dad was a vigilante – kids pick these things up.

Then I scrubbed out rubber gloves, bleach and sponges from the Homebase list and decided to get them in Lidl so it wouldn’t look like I was doing a supermarket sweep for dismembering tools. I also added Penguins, Kettle Chips, oil and elderflower pressé. Lies sandwiched between truths.

Annoyingly, Craig’s power saw – a bloody expensive one he’d bought with his Screwfix vouchers – was still in his van which is, as I write, being impounded by police in Amsterdam. I therefore had to buy a new one.

The guy I pounced upon in the masonry paint aisle at Homebase – Ranjit – was only too happy to help. I played my Dumbass Girly Girl role to the hilt, saying the saw was Hubby’s birthday gift and that he ‘wanted to get started on our decking pronto’. Ranjit had just the tool – a power saw. I chose the Makita FG6500S with dust guard and free goggles for two reasons:

1) it cut through wood like butter and

2) it was the quietest.

I bought my bits and pieces, got it all back to Whittaker’s flat and set everything up in her bathroom. It took ages. And then doubt crept in. What if someone heard the saw? What if Jonathan and his folks returned early from the zoo? What if one of Whittaker’s friends popped by just as I’m up to my elbows in Australian long pig? It was getting on for four o’clock. I needed to see what the situation was outside my own private abattoir.

I dressed in my most girly outfit, brushed my hair so it went all Doris Day and grabbed the spare set of Craig’s keys. Up and down the hallway I went like the fucking Avon lady, knocking on doors asking if they’d been dropped in the lift. Only three families were in on Whittaker’s floor – the gays with the cats, the couple in wheelchairs and Leafblower Ron and Shirley who were watching TV and eating haddock and mash judging by the smell.

It wasn’t ideal but I had to chance it. Saw and be damned.

You can do it, Mummy. I believe in you.

When I started, I kept seeing his face flash across my mind. His eyes. His smile. The moment he told me he loved me.

I had to keep telling myself ‘It’s only a dead pig. The pig was a bad, bad pig’ and threw a tea towel over its face when it was staring. ‘I don’t like being blackmailed by a lanky dead Australian pig.’

But all the while a little voice was telling me differently.

That’s not a pig though, Mummy. That’s my daddy.

I vomited until it was stringy water. I don’t know if it was pregnancy sickness kicking in or the pervading stink of bleach or the fact that on some level I’d appalled myself. The thigh bones were the worst – I used a hammer to drive the knife down deeper to break into them. I used the saw as sparingly as possible, French-trimming the bones before smashing down through them. I ended up with six pieces. Wrapping them took longer than cutting them.

The whole process was not to be repeated. By that evening each section was tightly wrapped in cling film – head, torso, arms, right thigh, left thigh and lower legs. I packaged them in two sports bags and took it all down to my car with my other stuff – clothes and Sylvanians. Nothing else mattered.

And it wasn’t just the body parts I had to dispose of either. I also had:

• the plastic sheeting from the bathroom

• the shower curtain

• all my bed linen

• all AJ’s possessions – including his rucksack, passport and phone

I’d have to burn as much of it as I could. Somehow. Somewhere.

I didn’t allow myself to cry until I was in the car and half way up the motorway towards the coast. The rain lashed against the windows. I half-wished it would skid off the road as I drove. I could barely see through my tears or the windscreen at one point.

It was getting on for midnight by the time I turned up on Jim and Elaine’s doorstep in Monks Bay. I was sobbing, soaked and spent of energy. I fell into Jim’s cashmere arms, ready for him to take care of me. Ready for Elaine to wash my face and make me hot chocolate and dress me in warm, pyjamas and tuck me into their spare room on the second floor and tell me everything was going to be all right.

Ready for someone else to take the reins.

Monday, 25th June – 7 weeks, 1 day

1. People in washing powder adverts who are surprised when the washing powder gets the clothes clean, i.e. does its fucking job.

2. The first man who got the first woman pregnant. And the first woman who thought that was a good idea.

3. People who buy fake flowers.

4. People who make fake flowers.

5. Tourists in open-toe sandals – now that it’s summer there are suddenly yellowing, gnarly trotters everywhere. Now I know how the Nazis felt when the Ark of the Covenant opened.

6. Johnny Depp.

For just a moment the other day, I thought I was running out of items for my Kill Lists. But then lo, a new morning breaks and with it arrives a whole new bunch of thorns in my raw little side.

I gave Jim the Gazette’s switchboard number and left him to explain why I was off sick. I can take as long as I need. Bet they’re loving this. Nothing as newsworthy as this has ever happened in that town. I can see Linus Sixgill now, creaming his genius over his by-line:

PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IN SEX SLAYER SHOCK SHE USED TO MAKE OUR COFFEE!

or

GAZETTE GIRL’S BOYFRIEND IS GAY SEX SLAYER! WE ALWAYS THOUGHT HER COFFEE TASTED FUNNY!

or perhaps

GAZETTE JUNIOR LIVES WITH SICKO SEX FIEND: Did she make his coffee too?

I’ve felt sick all day. And thirsty. And dizzy, like I’ve been stuck in a revolving door for a decade. I’m also shivery, which Elaine says is ‘either a chill or pneumonia’. She is making me endless cups of tea and checking my temperature on the hour.

Either Jim or Elaine have come into my bedroom unannounced twelve times since I woke up with the doorbell at 9.58 a.m. Tink scampers in too. She hops up on my bed and makes a beeline for my face, licking it all over. She seems to love me again, even though Jim has taken over her care now.

God I feel awful. Perhaps I’m dying. Wouldn’t that be ironic? What if Elaine’s right and this is what pneumonia feels like? How the hell is a thing the size of a chickpea causing me so much discomfort?

You overdid it yesterday. You need to rest. I need to grow in peace.

FFS. It’s talking to me all the time now. Like Jiminy Cricket but without the musical interludes.

Elaine’s been in to change my sick bucket and bring in a two-litre bottle of water and a piece of dry toast. I wonder if this lot will stay down. Got no appetite at all. I don’t have a hunger for anything. It’s like Heil Foetus has invaded Womblandia and drenched that fire in amniotic fluid.

Ugh. I feel sick again. Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing his thigh meat all over my hands.

Thursday, 28th June – 7 weeks, 4 day

1. People who share Facebook posts like ‘Hey, put a star on your wall to support brain cancer’ or ‘Post this as your status if you have the best hubby/wife/dad/hamster ever.’ Stop with the whole global community thing. It ain’t gonna happen, not with me in the community anyway.

2. Tourists with their faces in their Greggs nosebags, who walk in human chains along pavements.

3. People who say ‘There are no words’ when there’s been some tragedy. There are always words. You’re just too lazy to form them into complete sentences.

Tink’s barking woke me up. Jim always answers the door to spare me and Elaine and today I heard a snippet – national press. How they found out I’m living here I don’t know, but one peek out of Jim and Elaine’s bedroom window shows they’re camped out for the duration.

I think about going all Tudor on their asses and tipping a bucket of piss over them but I guess I need them on my side, which is a shame because I have rather a lot of piss in me right now. And wind. And vomit.

Jim only announces callers when it’s a flower delivery – and we’ve had many. Sixteen in all. Jim will bring them in, vased, say who they’re from – their friends, the Gazette, one of the PICSOs (my old ‘friends’, the people I couldn’t scrape off), some random school friends – and set them down on my nightstand so I can see them as I’m drifting back to sleep. Then Elaine will come in, take my temperature, set down a plate of chopped banana and dry crackers and take the flowers out because ‘plants sap all the oxygen out of the room’. I don’t know where they go after that.

I managed one trip downstairs today to get a biscuit mid-afternoon. Saw a pile of business cards and scraps of paper on the dresser. Notes from reporters, asking for ‘my side of the story.’ My life with Craig Wilkins – the most vicious serial killer the West Country’s ever seen. We only want the truth.

If only they knew the real truth. It should be my face on those front pages. My headlines. I did those things, not him. I want to stand on that doorstep and scream it: IT WAS ME. ME. ME. ME. FUCKING ME!

But then another tsunami of nausea sweeps my way, crashing out every other thought in my head other than ‘Get to the toilet, quick.’

Not today, Mummy. Back to bed.

I’m throwing up water now. Elaine says it ‘must be something in the bottles’. She’s read how pregnant women drinking from plastic bottles can pass on abnormalities.

‘One baby in India came out with two heads and they said that was because of bottled water.’

I don’t want to split my hoo-ha so I guess I’ll have to make the switch to filtered.

Sunday, 1st July – 8 weeks exactly

Ugh.

Monday, 2nd July – 8 weeks, 1 day

Double ugh. I opened the fridge to get some chilled water and screamed – on the bottom shelf was a dead baby tied up in a see-through bag. Turns out, Elaine had just bought a chicken for tea. Once seen, not forgotten.

I crawled back upstairs and into bed like the girl out of The Grudge.

My head is swimming and I can’t see the point of doing anything. Though one of the journalists on the doorstep did wink at me when I went out to bring the milk in. I must look like 180 pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag but still, it was a brief boost.

Wednesday, 4th July – 8 weeks, 3 days

1. Elaine – the way she loads the dishwasher is the stuff of nightmares. Okay so I’ve killed people but at least I don’t stack un-rinsed muesli bowls and leave them for days to dry out. It’s clean-dish SUICIDE.

2. The woman in the Vauxhall Meriva who cut us up on the motorway.

3. Yodel van drivers – they are out to kill us all.

I feel a bit better today so I’ve decided to go back into work before they sack me. Jim says they can’t do that or there’ll ‘be hell to pay’. Elaine said it’s ‘far too early’ but I was adamant and she made me a packed lunch – a superfoods salad with fresh lettuce ‘not bagged because bagged salads have listeria in them.’ Jim drove me, even offering to linger in town all day before driving me home again. I don’t deserve them. And they don’t deserve me.

As it turned out, Elaine was right. It was far too early. And I didn’t stay long. I made a huge, unplanned boo-boo.

I’m dropped off outside the Gazette offices and there are two paps on the doorstep as I swipe my key card. They snap away like it’s about to fall off, asking questions about Priory Gardens and Craig. The new receptionist greets me on the front desk. She has an accent – Spanish or Geordie – and looks like the President’s wife – far too glam to be a greeter. I give her three months.

I head into the main office. At first glance, everything’s the same. The same faces, same haircuts. Same plate of cakes on top of the filing cabinet. Same clink, tap, whir sounds and aromas of strong coffee and newsprint.

Ugh, coffee. What used to be my heroin is now my abhorrence. Heil Foetus does not like coffee.

I’m not a foetus yet. I’m still an embryo until next week. Mmm, doughnuts.

That artless piss drip Linus is on the phone, leaning back in his chair, fingering his bald patch with his Mont Blanc. The subs are meerkatting at me over the tops of their monitors. Bollocky Bill’s eating a doorstep sandwich, the postman’s leaving with an empty sack, Johnny the photographer is getting his list of jobs from Paul. Claudia Gulper, AJ’s aunt, is on her phone, but affords me the briefest of glances.

My daddy you mean. Auntie Claudia! Yoo hoo! She killed him, Auntie Claudie! You have to save me!

Anyway, nothing has changed.

Then I go to my desk.

Some five-year-old bobble head in a short skirt and a blouse that looks like it’s been torn down from a care home window is sitting in my chair. My things have all vanished – my stapler with the sparkly Chihuahua stickers, my Sylvanian pencil case, the gonk on my monitor that AJ bought me, the coffee rings next to my Queen of Fucking Everything coaster. Even the coaster. The ‘Rhiannon’ label on my in-tray has been messily torn off and replaced with a clean one saying ‘Katie’.

All eyes are on me but nobody says anything.

The handle yanks down on Ron’s office door and out he struts –greasy-shiny, Cuban heels, trousers crotch-tight. ‘Sweetpea! How are you?’

I don’t know how to answer. I’m struck dumb.

‘This is Katie Drucker, our new Editorial Manager. Katie’s been holding the fort while you’ve been away.’

Katie stands up from my chair and smiles. I smell her breath before she opens her mouth. Marmite. Huge yellow teeth. In my mind, she is gaffer-taped to my chair and I’m pulling out those massive gnashers with the biggest pliers you’ve ever seen. ‘Hi, how are you?’

‘Fine thanks,’ I say.

She glances at Ron who takes the proverbial ball and runs with it as fast as he can in his Cuban heels, specifically made for short-arses like him. ‘So how’s everything?’

‘Fine,’ I say again.

‘Did you get our flowers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You poor thing, Rhiannon,’ says Katie Drucker, Patronising Fucker.

‘Do you want to pop in my office and have a quick chat?’ asks Ron.

No, I’d like to pop into your office and see if your £500 shredder will accommodate more than five fingers at once.

And don’t be fooled by the breezy tone and friendly-sounding ‘pop’ and ‘quick’. ‘Pop’ in particular is a caped crusader and ‘quick’ its evil Boy Wonder. This wasn’t going to be some brief, cosy chinwag – this was going to be a rip-your-head-off-and-shit-down-your-neck-conversation, beginning with ‘we have to boot your arse out the door’ but ‘how about a think piece on Craig before you do?’ as a drizzle of honey on the festering shit heap.

Ron summons Claudia over because when you’re a boss who’s as powerful as a fart in a bag, you can’t face altercations on your own. She grabs a pad and sweeps over from her desk, affording me a bright smile on the way.

‘Hi Rhee, how are you, Sweetpea?’

‘I’m FINE,’ I say, louder, garnering two more meerkat subs to peer atop their monitors. And it’s then that time does a Matrixy thing. Katie’s phone pulses in her knock off Vuitton handbag beside my desk – old school Britney. The main door opens and in strides that malodorous slunt Lana Rowntree. Tight grey skirt, chunky platforms but less of a swish to her blonde hair than usual. The woman who shagged my man and sent me off down this road in the first place. A human satnav of hideous betrayal. Her head is down. My throat aches.

It’s all. Her. Fault.

That’s my only thought as I watch her dish out papers and glide through the office towards the sales department, like nothing happened. Like her life hasn’t changed one bit. She doesn’t notice me.

Doesn’t see me coming.

The ache in my throat burns as I move closer to her, closer, closer –

I’m.

Not.

That.

Innocent.

I’m reaching out, grabbing a fistful of blonde, pulling it backwards. A waft of Herbal Essences flies past my face as she goes down. I don’t hear what I say. I don’t know who pulls me off her. I’m pounding her face. Over and over.

Oops, I did it again.

And the next thing I know, Jim is buckling my seatbelt and the engine’s running and his and Ron’s voices carry through the crack in the passenger window. Hormones. Just needs some time. Knew it was too soon. Cameras click. Someone calls my name. Look up for me, Sweetpea.

And I’m sitting there, picking flakes of her blood from my knuckles.

Friday, 6th July – 8 weeks, 5 days

1. People who tap dance – more unnecessary noise.

2. People who present any TV programme before 6 p.m.

3. Any of those design programmes about people who take a nice little abandoned barn and turn it into a soulless, four-storey gym with diamond encrusted swimming pool and a remote-control garden etc. Ugh.

Jim’s on the phone to Ron now – Lana isn’t pressing charges. I listened through the bannisters. He’ll come up in a minute and tell me what was said, he’s that kinda guy. I’ve already heard what I needed, I’m that kinda gal.

*

I made the front page! Gripper Killer Girlfriend in Office Brawl. Jim has been trying to keep me away from the news but we walked into town earlier and stopped outside the newsagent so Elaine could go in and get her Woman’s Own. There was a stand of papers outside.

‘Come on,’ said Jim, taking my arm, leading me towards the seafront.

I’m actually better at handling the attention than either of them gives me credit for, but of course I have to pretend it affects me deeply. It blew up the week I moved in. The angle then was PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IS SICK KILLER’S GIRL. Elaine has banned all news bulletins from the house – she doesn’t want to know. Jim craves news so he has to buy his daily paper and read it in a café on the seafront to get his fix. I saw him once. The headline on his paper was THROW AWAY THE KEY: WILKINS’ SICK AND DEPRAVED ACTS SHOCK NATION and there was a picture of Craig being led from a police van, grey blanket over his head.

I preferred that one to

GRIPPER’S GIRL IS CRECHE ATTACK SURVIVOR… and she’s UP THE DUFF! One paper is calling him this year’s ‘Hot Felon’.

Photographers were outside the house most mornings, snapping away like a pack of North Face-clad alligators.

‘Oi, Priory Gardens!’

‘Oi, love, gissa quote, gissa smile!’

‘Hey Rhiannon, have you seen Craig Wilkins yet?’

‘Where are the other bodies, Rhiannon? Did he tell you?’

‘How’s he doing in prison?’

‘Did you know, Rhiannon?’

‘Did you help him?’

‘Wossit like living with a monster, Rhi Rhi?’

That winky journalist is usually there in the throng and I noticed this morning his lanyard says the Plymouth Star. He has black hair, a square jaw and his smile is knicker-wettingly blinding. If I met him in a bar he’d be paying me child support.

Some fucker should.

‘How are you, Rhiannon?’ he asked me.

‘I just want to get on with my life, thanks,’ I say, opening and closing the door once I’ve brought the milk in, flashing him some unsolicited leg through the dressing gown, as is my wont.

‘Is it true you and Craig were engaged?’ I hear as I flick the chain on.

On the days, I’m feeling up to it, I don my Victoria Beckham sunglasses, sweep my hair to one side, prepare my downcast face (not difficult – I look like a ghost most days thanks to the vom) and sashay through the melee throwing out breadcrumbs like ‘I’m fine thanks’ and ‘I knew nothing’.

I’m just giving them what they want – they see what they want to see. Not looking past what’s already been decreed – that Craig Wilkins, my boyfriend, did knowingly and wilfully murder three people in cold blood and masturbate over their corpses. That moi – Rhiannon Lewis – she of that terrible crèche massacre at Priory Gardens all those years ago, is just the naive girlfriend. Remember when they brought her out of that house, wrapped in blood-soaked Peter Rabbit blankets? How can one girl get so unlucky twice in one lifetime? It’s too tragic.

When they can’t get a comment from you, they shove notes through the letterbox instead. Business cards, scrawled scraps of paper, all asking for me to get in touch. I could barely read the writing on some.

One of the notes was barely legible, scrawled on a scrap of notepaper ‘To my Sweet Messy House’ it looked like and there was a phone number underneath. I’m thinking it could be the local mental case – he sometimes posts rants about the government and how they’re trying to kill us through our tap water on his way up to the war memorial to talk to dead soldiers.

What I resent most of all about this kind of press intrusion is that all they’re interested in is Craig. How he did it. How he could rape that poor woman. What it was like for me living with a monster? How he’s feeling about being the most hated guy in the country right now.

He’s not actually. There’s always paedophiles. And according to Twitter there’s a guy who sprinkled his girlfriend’s ashes on his Shreddies who’s way worse.

I don’t know who I am now. It’s like one day I was in a couple with a flat and we had a baby on the way and the next I went into a phone box, spun around three times and now I’m Poor Little Murderer’s Preggo Girlfriend – I even come with accessories: eighteen-carat white-gold solitaire on my ring finger, meek smile, washed out Primark panda pyjamas, greasy hair and slight stomach protrusion.

Jim and Elaine walk along the seafront every morning – it’s their ritual. And they’ve allowed me and Tink to join in too. We sit on a bench with a hot drink and a bun – iced for them, brown seeded for me – and we sip and chomp in silence. Everything is small here. Small and safe. From across the estuary at Temperley, Monks Bay looks like a bucket of tiny houses tipped down a hillside by a giant child. There’s no design to it at all – it’s a higgledy-piggledy mess of streets too narrow to drive a Fiesta down without cracking your wing mirrors, a funicular railway, a church and quaint little B+Bs and cottages called names like The Sloop and The Brigantine.