C.J. Skuse - Sweetpea - The most unique and gripping thriller of 2017

What I should do is leave him. I should make him a dog-shit sandwich or cut all the crotches out of his Levis and hit the road. But it’s complicated. Craig worked for my dad and took over his building firm when he died. I like having that link. And it’s his flat and he pays most of the bills. And he puts up with all my kinks – my need to not have sudden, repetitive or loud noises, my need for quiet periods of time alone and for no one to touch my doll’s house. What other guy would put up with me?

Regarding the sex, there were ‘mixed reviews’.

When it’s good, it’s OK. No intense orgasms but nothing to complain about. And when it’s bad it’s brief. He comes, he goes to sleep. We’ve tried kinky stuff (he’s worn my knickers, gone down on me on a night bus, and I keep nakes of him in my phone) and sometimes if we’re at his mum and dad’s and they’re asleep in front of Antiques Roadshow, we’ll creep upstairs and do it on their bed. Then it’s not bad at all because there’s an element of risk, I suppose. But his general repertoire in the sack had become as predictable as EastEnders . I know where his tongue’s going next, when he wants me on top, how many thrusts it’s going to take. It’s all become a bit yadda yadda. I’ve tried introducing different positions to the event but, you try turning tricks like Simone Biles when you’ve only got an average of four minutes thirty-seven seconds to do it in.

I once mooted dogging as a possibility. He thought I was joking.

‘What are you, a pervert or something?’

Why’s everything so complex? Half the time, I admit, I crave normality, domesticity: a family, other heartbeats around, a comfy sofa of an evening and little pots of floral happiness growing silently on the balcony. The other half of the time, I want nothing more than to kill. To watch.

This sort of tallied with my BuzzFeed results.

Do you rarely connect on an emotional level with other people?

No, of course I don’t. I never meet anyone on my emotional level. A part of me wants to know what love feels like again. I know I must have felt it once. I wonder if it’s the same feeling I get when I take a life; when all your nerve endings feel like they’re reanimating. The thinking about it all the time at work. The craving to do it again and barely managing not to. I keep replaying the night of Canal Man in my head – the parting of the skin as the knife sliced through his penis. Him struggling beneath my hands. The trickling blood. Him beating at my head with his fists. Cutting through the layers – skin to flesh to muscle. Standing on the bridge, waiting for the water to calm and for his body to upend and float. The anxious gnawing in my chest has diminished.

Was that what love was? Did I ‘love’ to kill? I don’t know. All I do know is that I want to do it again. And, next time, I want it to last longer.

Our kleptomaniac neighbour Mrs Whittaker knocked on our door at 9.30 p.m., back from visiting her sister in Maidstone. She asked if we needed her to look after Tink tomorrow. Craig told her that he was only working a half-day so he could take her with him. I stayed on the sofa, pretending to be asleep but I saw her through a crack in the cushion, scanning the living room from the doorway, probably eager to get further inside and nick more of our decorative pebbles or an unguarded stapler. She’s in the first flush of Alzheimer’s so it’s not as though we can complain.

Drove over to Mum and Dad’s house around 8 p.m., under the guise of ‘seeing the PICSOs for a drink’. Julia wasn’t happy to see me. I only left two of the three chocolate treats I’d intended to leave from my selection box – a Drifter and a Crunchie. The state the room was in, she definitely didn’t deserve the Revels.

I’m so looking forward to killing her.

Ventured a look at the scales before bed – I’ve put on five pounds over Christmas and today’s starvation has done nothing. I am so having a bagel for breakfast.

1. Derek Scudd

2. Wesley Parsons

3. People who eat with their mouth open – e.g. Craig

4. The first Kardashian – maybe if I figure out how to go back in time I can kill him then we can stop all the rest

5. Septuagenarians who chat in clusters inside shop doorways

6. Celebrities who bang on and on about loving your body and being comfortable in your own skin, then lose a boatload of weight and release a fitness DVD. Just. Fuck. Off. You. Cunting. Hypocrites.

Had another Dad dream, the third since Bonfire Night. Woke up in a bath of sweat, even though the temperature was, like, -2 degrees. It’s always the same dream: that last day in hospital, his dry little face staring up at me from the pillow, eyes pleading with words his brain couldn’t send to his mouth.

Still, this week’s front page was more enjoyable:

LOCAL FAMILY MAN’S BODY FOUND IN GRISLY CANAL DREDGE

A MAN whose body was discovered in a local stretch of canal on New Year’s Day has been named.

A passer-by made the grim find at around 8.30 a.m. on New Year’s morning and police were called to the waterside at the roving bridge near the library. The body has been named as that of 32-year-old Daniel John Wells, an electrician who had been out socialising the night before.

Mr Wells worked as an electrician for Wells & Son Electricals and has two daughters from previous relationships, Tyffannee-Miley, 3[I shit you not!] and Izabella-Mai, 18 months[similarly, the fuck?].

Police have yet to rule whether or not there are suspicious circumstances surrounding Mr Wells’s death and are appealing for witnesses.

Nothing was mentioned about his jeans being around his ankles. Or his drunken state. Or his tendencies to opportunistic rape. Or his missing appendage. I guess ‘socialising’ is the umbrella term to cover all that.

Work was dull. I swear that Chinese kid who was locked in a cage for twenty years wouldn’t swap for my life at the moment. We have a new kid in, called AJ – Claudia’s nephew from Australia. I say ‘kid’ but he’s actually eighteen and on a gap year and working as a ‘Part-time Hourly Paid’ assistant for the next six months. His top half dresses like he’s going to the beach; his bottom half has just come back from Glastonbury. I don’t know what the A or the J stand for but, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who goes about calling themselves by their initials is just begging for a slap.

He’s actually very good-looking, tall and tanned, covered in friendship bracelets, and he smiles all the time. I don’t normally get drawn towards cheerful people – the urge to hurt them becomes too strong – but I think he does allow for modest gusset dribble. Bit eager to impress Claudia. He’s staying with her. Maybe I can besmirch him somehow; that would get right up her bunghole. You know when people say a smile ‘can light up a room’? I know what they’re talking about now. AJ has a smile that does that.

Not my room, though, obviously.

I nodded off typing up seventeen letters pertaining to dredging on the Somerset Levels and the steep rise in recycling fees for garden waste. The miserable Home and Properties sub, ironically called Joy, commented on how much weight I’d put on over the holidays. Joy is censorious by her nature to all of us but today it pissed me off more than usual. She thinks she’s being helpful, pointing out our insecurities – my weight, Lana’s breakdown, Claudia’s moles, Jeff’s limp and, worst of all, Mike Heath’s impotence (she’d noticed a bag he brought back from the chemist one lunchtime). I think Joy once weighed about fifty stone but lost it all and had the NHS cut off the slack. Now she considers it her duty to verbally maim everyone.