Sweetpea: The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017. C.J. Skuse
and the editors, darling, not the receptionist.’
‘I’m not the receptionist any more, I’m the editorial assistant,’ I mewed, wiping my brow on my jacket cuff. ‘Ron said…’
‘That’s Mr Pondicherry to you, Rhiannon,’ said Claudia, barely looking up from her screen.
‘Mr Pondicherry,’ I corrected, ‘said that becoming a Junior means researching more of my own stories. So I thought I’d take some initiative. You never know when something will go down, he said – a fight, a car crash, a child being kidnapped.’
AJ looked up from his pile of stapled pages and smiled at me, surfboard graveyard a gogo.
‘That’s not your job though, is it?’ Claudia returned with a vicious eye-bat. ‘Leave it to the professionals, hmm, sweetpea?’
That ‘hmm’ was supremely irritating. I’d like to rip out every hmmm in her throat. But I just smiled sweetly, like a sweetpea would.
‘Mr Pondicherry said that if I showed enough willing, he might put me forward for NCTJ funding. So I can get my diploma.’
‘Ahh, that’d be way cool,’ said AJ, mid-clickety clack. I acknowledged his support and turned to Linus, as though the endorsement of a cross-legged Australian boy was all I needed.
Linus opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small box of toothpicks. ‘Probably won’t ever come to anything, Reet Petite. He usually takes trainees straight from journalism school. Never sent a receptionist for training before.’
‘I’m one up from a receptionist though, aren’t I? Could you just take a look at the pictures? Please?’
‘Is he picking on you, Rhee?’ chipped in Lana Rowntree, mincing through on her way into Reception. She always called me Rhee, even though there had never been a conversation where I’d said she could. She stank of cheap scent and lack of ambition and spent her work days selling advertising space, shrieking fake laughter down the phone and rubbing buttockly past desks in pencil skirts as tight as fish skins. Linus had clearly smelled her coming as he’d popped in an Airwave.
‘Nah, it’s just a bit of fun, isn’t it?’ he said, leaning back in his chair and giving Lana the full legs-open-trouser-throb pose.
‘You wanna watch him,’ said Lana, nudging me like we were besties, despite the fact she didn’t actually care, she just wanted to trade sex air with Sixgill. Her nudge still stung my arm, even as the door closed behind her.
Linus watched her leave and sighed dreamily. ‘She might be batshit but she’s got one hell of a set of alloys on her, that girl.’
‘Don’t be disgusting, Linus,’ sneered Claudia over her telephone.
‘What do you mean?’ I said. But Linus and Claudia just threw each other a look and ignored me as usual.
I’d run through various scenarios in my mind about how I would eventually kill Linus Sixgill. I could anally violate him with his Mont Blanc, then there was the strapping-him-to-hisswivel-chair-and-deep-throating-his-cock-until-I-bit-it-off-atthe-hilt method. I could smash the glass on the Emergency Fire Axe and chop his head off, kicking it across the carpet into the recycling bin. Or I could just stick up my middle finger and yell, ‘TWAT!’ and run out of the room. None of these were ideal, I grant you, seeing as I, a) didn’t want to go to prison, b) did want promotion and c) Linus’s wife Kira is the editor-in-chief’s daughter.
And then there was the third and most sensible option – proving myself. Getting a stunning picture or writing a brilliantly insightful story, making front page news and being recommended for NCTJ funding and rising to the position of junior reporter. The title of ‘junior’ as opposed to ‘chief’ or ‘senior’ did still smack of nursery school – like I should be sitting in the middle of the office floor in my playpen, sucking on Linus’s moob – but it would open a doorway for me.
Claudia looked up. ‘What photos did you get then, Rhiannon? Anything we could use in the Friday round-ups?’ She said it with a sigh, like a mother asking her kid what drawings they had done, despite the fact they’d be going in the bin.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe you could use one of them for next week’s front page? You know, kind of like a “Riot Night Special”-type thing?’
Claudia looked at me with such utter contempt it was like her pupils were glued to her eyelids. ‘Derek Scudd’s our lead story for next week.’
They had a good picture for it too. We’d been shown it at the last Triple M. One of the photographers had caught him lighting a cigarette as he’d come out of court – a grizzly stare straight down the lense. The heading was to be EVIL BACK ON OUR STREETS. Derek Scudd’s evilness was the one thing Claudia and I actually agreed on, though I still wanted to ram the bitch’s head through the cross-shredder.
I handed her the disk from my camera and she shoved it into her hard drive – an action about as close to penetrative sex as she got now her husband had left her. Claudia didn’t like me and that was fine. The day I needed validation from a veiny-footed shrew with permanent coffee breath and a Napoleon complex was the day I watched Geordie Shore without breaking out in hives. But I still had to stay on her good side. I had to think of the end game – promotion. A diploma. A career. She could give me all that if she wanted to.
My slides flashed up – all one hundred and eight of them. A lot were dark with flashes in the middle. Fireworks. Shadows of police. A police dog snarling. A wash of mild interest cleaned her face.
AJ got up off the floor with his pile of pages and studied the screen too. ‘Wow, you’re a really good photographer, Rhiannon.’ He beamed. ‘Are you trained?’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, before remembering to add ‘Thank you though.’
The phone rang on Claudia’s desk.
‘Good evening, Newsdesk, Claudia Gulper speaking… Ooh, yes, one moment please.’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Rhiannon, I need to take this, it’s about that warehouse fire. Show Linus, all right?’ There’s a good girl, she might as well added. Oh, you unutterable swampy bitch dog tramp licker from Hades.
She sent AJ on a new errand, then carried on with her phone call, laughing and hair-twizzling while the guy on the other end poured his heart out about the loss of his family’s sixty-year-old business. I ripped the disk from her hard drive.
‘Come on then, Rheepunzel, I’ll look at your happy snaps for you,’ said Linus, beckoning me over with his manicure. I gave him the disk and he put it in his machine instead. ‘Ooh. Nice one of the doggy. That’s… interesting,’ at my shot of a brick wall that had fallen down outside a playground. ‘Quality’s a bit muddy. What were you using for these, a Box Brownie?’
Outwardly, I shy-giggled like a twat. Inwardly, I was calling him a chinless fucktard and picturing him waking up in bed, screaming to the sight of his severed bollocks in a jar.
He scrolled past fireworks, shattered windows, a boy kicking at a front door.
Then he stopped talking. He was scrolling through more slowly now, checking each one. ‘Mmm, yes, some of these are quite picturesque, aren’t they? Violent delights. That’s a Shakespeare reference, by the way…’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘“These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume.” Romeo and Juliet.’
Linus said nothing. And then he stopped scrolling. He’d found the money shot – I’d taken several of the scene but only this one was in focus. The backdrop was of snarling dogs, pink smoke fireworks in mid-air bounce. Three police with riot shields tussling with bellicose protestors and behind them the flaming tree. In front of it all, lying on the ground in the middle of the melee, two teenagers: a boy and a girl, their hands on each other’s faces, as still and as perfect as a prayer.
‘Wow,’