The Deviants (24 page)

‘Aww, Maxy. ‘Why so sssssserious?' I pinched his cheek and he baulked away from me. ‘So what's her blow job game like? Maybe she could give me some tips.'

‘Stop it.'

‘What? I'm interested. Does she spit or swallow? Do you finger-bang her at the dinner table while Neil's carving the roast?' I dissolved into giggles. ‘Come on, gimme deets. Does she have that vibrator you wanted to get me from Ann Summers? The one that “goes from kitten lick to road drill at the touch of a button”?' I snorted like a pig. That made me laugh even more. I hadn't felt so happy in ages.

‘It wasn't some long affair, Ella, I swear to you.'

‘It's fine, Max. I don't feel bad you're having sex with your cousin. I don't feel anything. In fact, I feel so good, maybe
we
could try again now? Yeah, while I'm drunk! Let's go out to the car park and you can bend me over the Porsche. Your dad would love that, wouldn't he?' My hand crept to his crotch like a spider and started squeezing.

‘Christ's sake stop it.' He gripped my wrist and shoved me away.

‘I thought you wanted me to want this? Why are you acting like the Virgin Mary?'

Another tear fell down his cheek. ‘I've never seen you like this. It's not you.'

‘What – happy? I am funny when I'm drunk, aren't I? Go and ask the DJ to play a song for us. Maybe he's got that Taylor Swift one you pretend not to like.'

He blinked quickly. ‘We need to dry you out and get you home.'

‘Oh yeah, like
that's
a good idea.'

‘Your dad's going to kill me.'

‘I doubt it,' I said. ‘He only wants me to be happy. And I am now. I feel, like, freeeeeee. All that stuff I used to cry about, s'all gone. I don't even care about my baby any more.'

‘You don't have a baby.
Fallon
has a baby.'

‘No,
my
baby,' I shouted over the music. ‘My dead baby.'

Everything went to black. When I opened my eyes, I was
sitting on the floor, and my chair lay on the carpet beside me. ‘Ooh, what happened then?'

I could hear his voice but I didn't know where he was. ‘Why did you say that?'

‘Max?'

The room was spinning around and around and around, and everything swam past my face so quickly. I couldn't focus on anything. Nothing would stay still.

‘Why would you say that, Ella? Fallon's had a baby, not you.'

His face was spinning past me and coming back, spinning past and coming back. Something was bubbling up from deep inside. Something was going to happen.

‘God, stay still already. Ooh, I need to be sick,' I said, getting to my heeled feet.

I headed out through a mass of laughing, sequinned people, towards the fuzzy doorway and into the brightly lit reception area. Outside it was dark and cool. Two peacocks were pecking about the front entrance and I barged straight through them, breathing in the cold night air, vision swimming, stomach lurching. My body convulsed with the urge to vomit. I tottered across the gravel as quickly as I could, past the parked-up cars, making it over to a topiary version of Mr Toad, behind which I vommed as though it was an Olympic sport.

When I was sure I was done, I sat down on the low wall and shivered. The lights at the entrance shone like dazzling balls of sunshine and the whole world looked like it had been put inside a salad spinner. Closing my eyes did little to stop it. I shivered.

‘Ella, talk to me.' A voice somewhere above me. I opened my eyes.

‘I'm going to be sick again. I need to stay here.'

A warm covering fell around my shoulders – Max's jacket. He crouched down in front of me, putting his hands on my knees.

‘I don't know what I'm saying,' I cried. I puked again behind Mr Toad. I'd loved that book when my dad read it to me as a kid. My head banged like a church bell. ‘My head hurts.'

‘I know, but…'

‘I want my dad,' I said, awash with sadness. ‘Can you get my dad?'

‘Ella.' He was sobbing. Someone was slapping my cheek. ‘What baby?'

‘Ssh,' I said. ‘Get my dad. Please. I want my dad now.'

There was a long string of drool leading from my mouth to my hand. I needed to lie down. I lay on the cold wall, hitched my legs up and watched the world spin and spin and spin and go blacker before my eyes. I don't know what I said then. I don't know what else Max said, but I could still hear his voice. Then I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew, I was in someone's arms, being carried like a child. My right leg was freezing cold. I'd torn a big hole in my tights and I only had on one shoe. I heard a man shouting.

‘Do something useful, Max, open the damn door.'

I knew that voice. Oh God, was it Neil? I couldn't move my body. If Neil was taking me somewhere there was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. I would be his all over again.

I opened my eyes and the world was still whizzing past at fifty miles an hour. But I looked up and saw my dad's stubbly chin, and smelled the coffee smell of his bobbly green jumper. And I knew it was all right to go to sleep.

‘So that was when Max found out about your baby?'

20

A Mystery is Solved

Y
eah. The baby I lost.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Fallon was sleeping over – we'd been to the carnival the night before. David and Ollie were living at home then, so she was in my room on the fold-out bed. I woke up with the worst tummy ache. And then I felt the wet between my legs and I panicked because I thought I'd come on in the night. I hadn't had a period for ages so I knew it would be a lot of blood. I was worried about how the hell I was going to get to the bathroom without her seeing me. I pulled my hand out from under the duvet and it was red. Cherry red. Then Fallon woke up, and I just started sobbing uncontrollably.

‘Ella? Are you all right? What's that on your hand?'

And then I told her. I told her I'd come on and it was bad.

‘It's OK, it's OK,' she kept saying.

She was amazing, I never realised how much at the time. She told me she had heavy periods too and she'd seen it all before. She helped me strip away the duvet and got me loads of wet wipes and flannels without anyone else seeing. She cleaned it all up. And it was all fine. Until she saw it in the bed. This little tiny jellified shape, like one of those jelly
aliens we used to win on the grabbers at the Pier. It was about two inches long, almost see-through. Two stubby little arms. Legs like a baby bird's. A nub of a nose. Ears like the tiny Yorkshire puddings on my doll's house roast beef.

There were blood clots all around it on the bed but this was perfect.

‘Oh my God, Ella.'

Fallon started crying, and I started shaking violently all over. But she didn't say anything else, she just sort of… tidied it up. I sat on a folded-up bath towel as she changed the bed, kept me warm and made me a mug of sweet tea. She wrapped the thing in a thick coil of toilet paper and asked me if I wanted to bury it. She even gave the heavy period excuse to Dad – we had to tell him something. My mattress was ruined. The most embarrassing part of the whole thing for me was that Fallon didn't ask me whose baby it was – she just guessed.

‘It was Neil, wasn't it? That day we came to the island for Max's birthday. I knew you were weird that day. I knew he'd done something then.'

I didn't say a word. That way, it was still a secret. That way, I couldn't get into any trouble. But she just knew.

At school the following Monday, she sat beside me in English.

‘I won't tell anyone. I promise,' she said.

‘Do you swear?'

‘Yes, I swear.'

‘Let's not mention it again. Let's forget it ever happened. I don't want to think about it. It's gone. It won't happen again. I won't be so stupid.'

‘OK.'

I wanted to know what she'd done with it but I never asked her. And she never told me. Because that was the end
of it. The proof that anything had ever happened to me was dead. It didn't matter where it went. I assumed she'd flushed it down the toilet. That's what we'd always done with goldfish.

*

I opened my eyes to white light and clanking sounds. Blue curtains. People talking. Feet shuffling. Phones ringing. There was a strong stench of vomit and bleach. I definitely wasn't in my bedroom. I wasn't even at home. But Dad was sitting there beside me, looking at me the way he'd look at the mummified Stone Age baby in the museum.

‘Dad?' My throat was sore and my voice came out croaky, as though it had been dragged out of my throat, sandpapered, then shoved back down again.

‘Hello, darling,' he said. I felt his hand on my scalp, so gently. ‘How are you feeling?'

That was when I felt a strong pull in my stomach. I ached all over. ‘Horrible. Why am I at the hosp—' My voice broke in the middle of what I was saying. ‘Why can't I speak? Why does everything hurt?'

‘You've got alcohol poisoning,' said Dad. The words looked as though they hurt him to say them. ‘They had to pump out your stomach.'

I went to lift my arm but it was attached to something. I was on a drip. ‘Oh my God.' My legs were bare. My tights and shoes had gone. So had my dress. I was in a papery hospital gown. ‘Where's my clothes?'

‘They had to take them off. You wet yourself.'

‘I
what
?'

I hadn't wet myself since I was about six. My system flushed clean of alcohol, I felt everything again – embarrassment, shame, anger, all screaming inside my head like
a thousand clowns. How I'd acted. Falling off the chair. Puking behind the Mr Toad hedge. People all around watching and laughing. Max pleading. And what I'd said.

‘The drip's just to rehydrate you,' said Dad. ‘Nothing to worry about.'

I had a memory of Dad carrying me to the back seat of the car. He'd rested my head on the folded-up blanket we used to take on picnics when I was little. We'd taken it to the zoo the time Ollie had hidden a cricket in my pork pie. Why was I remembering that now?

‘I wish I was dead.'

Dad stood up to begin the lecture. ‘How could you be so silly? Why did you drink so much? Why were you drinking
at all
? What about your training?'

The stress vein had emerged on Dad's forehead. Oh God, I hated seeing him so worried about me. I coughed and then regretted it cos my throat was so raw. ‘Owww.'

‘It's all right, it's all right,' he said, but he kept rambling on about irresponsibility and why ‘the Rittmans hadn't looked after me' and how Mum used to ‘like a drink' so that must be where I got it from. I just lay there and looked at him through watery eyes.

‘Dad?' I said.

‘What?'

‘Could you just give me a hug, please?'

He looked as though he was about to say something more, but stopped himself and stood up, lifting me until I was in a sitting position. I closed my arms around him and cried and cried into his bobbly green jumper.

He stroked my hair again. ‘You worried me. We couldn't wake you up.'

‘I wish I hadn't,' I mumbled.

‘What was that?'

‘Nothing,' I sniffed, wiping my nose on his shoulder.

‘What's happened, eh? This isn't like you.'

Just then, the curtain rings clattered across the cubicle and a man nurse walked in, evidently in a great hurry. His badge said he was a staff nurse. His name was Jack.

‘There's a lad outside waiting to see you. Matt Rickman or something.'

Dad turned to him. ‘No, tell him to leave, please.'

‘Uh, sir, I'm a bit busy at the moment, perhaps that's something you could do?'

‘You either tell him to leave or I'll
make
him leave,' Dad shouted. I clung to him again as the nurse flounced back through the curtains with more than a hint of disgust.

Dad pulled away and looked at me. ‘Has Max done something?'

I shook my head. ‘No. I just drank too much, that's all.'

‘I mean it, Ella, tell me what he's done. Something must have happened for you to let yourself get in this state, and I know it's something to do with Max. Answer me.'

‘Dad, please just trust me. This isn't about Max, I swear.'

I heard Max's voice outside in the A & E.
I'm not going anywhere until I see her. You'll have to drag me out, mate.

‘Oh God,' I said.

‘I'll get rid of him,' said Dad, peeling away from me and getting up off the bed.

‘Dad, don't, please,' I croaked. ‘It's OK.'

The sound of some classical symphony started up in the pocket of Dad's trousers. He pulled out his phone. ‘Neil.' My heart squeezed. ‘He was worried about you. I said I'd let them know how you were. I better take it outside.' He swept through the curtains.

I lay back on the bed. I couldn't hear anything else but the usual bustling and beeping and trolleys clattering past.
When the curtain opened again, Max appeared – his navy suit all creased, tie missing, his white shirt stained with blood spots, his hand bloody too.

‘What the hell?'

‘Uncle Paul,' he replied, all nasal, like both his nostrils were blocked. ‘I kind of called Shelby a whore. It being her birthday and all that, he didn't take it too well.'

‘She's not a whore, though, is she?' I coughed. My neck ached. ‘Oww.'

He pulled the curtain across so we were semi-private, and sat down heavily on the chair. ‘I wanted to lash out. She was nearest. She said you trashed the present room.'

‘What…' It took me a second to realise what he was talking about and then I remembered what I had done. The red and brown sauce. The laptop smashing. The watches I'd stamped on. ‘Oh God.' Everything seemed so loud to me, all of a sudden.

‘I told her it was me.'