Sweetpea: The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017. C.J. Skuse
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Sunday, 14 April
1. Mrs Whittaker – neighbour, elderly, kleptomaniac
2. ‘Dillon’ on the checkout in Lidl – acne, wallet chain, who bangs my apples and is NEVER happy to help
3. The suited man in the blue Qashqai who roars out of Sowerberry Road every morning – grey suit, aviator shades, Donald Trump tan
4. Everyone I work with at the Gazette apart from Jeff
5. Craig
Well, my New Year has certainly gone off with a bang, I don’t know about yours. I was in a foul mood to begin with, partly due to the usual Christmas-Is-Over-Shit-It’s-Almost-Back-To-Work-Soon malaise and partly due to the discovery of a text on Craig’s phone while he was in the shower that morning. The text said:
Hope you’re thinking of me when ur soaping your cock – L.
Kiss. Kiss. Smiley face tongue emoji.
Oh, I thought. It’s a fact then. He really is shagging her.
L. was Lana 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