Dead Romantic Read online

  No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence . . . the agents and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. When I mingled with other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was.

  VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

  For my mum, Jen Skuse

  ‘Alone, bad. Friend, good.’

  The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

  Contents

  1

  The Girl in the Graveyard

  2

  So this is me, Camille

  3

  Monday Mourning

  4

  So this is the thing . . .

  5

  Weird Science

  6

  Pier Pressure

  7

  Spook Central

  8

  The Plan

  9

  We Want Your Body

  10

  Rest in pieces

  11

  Feet

  12

  Hospital car parks can be so romantic

  13

  High Hopes and Nightmares

  14

  Cue the Tinkly Suspensey Music

  15

  Love Makes You Do Crazy Things

  16

  Dead people can be so romantic

  17

  Nerves

  18

  So I totes have to catch a murderer

  19

  Me and a head that’s dead

  20

  Zoe Goes Spare

  21

  A what?

  22

  Call 999 for Mr DeLISH

  23

  Hooking Up

  24

  So Pee Wee had run off

  25

  Shizz

  26

  Shocks

  27

  Four teenagers in a stolen hearse wearing stolen Halloween masks

  28

  Fish can be so romantic

  29

  Big fat trouble

  30

  Reani-mates

  31

  So what happened to Sexy Dead Boy?

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for ROCKOHOLIC

  Praise for PRETTY BAD THINGS

  The Girl in the Graveyard

  It had been the worst night in the history of the world ever ever ever. A giant mistake, a BFG meets Hagrid kind of big mistake. I shouldn’t have even gone to the freshers’ party, full stop, let alone done what I did there. Ugh. The smell was making me feel sick. Every now and again as I walked along the dark streets from college it would hit me and for a split second I’d wonder where it was coming from. And then I’d remember. It was coming from me.

  I wanted to be by myself, so I took a short cut through the graveyard, still sobbing my heart out. My sobbing had been the only sound in the world until I rounded the corner of the church and heard a different one. A scraping sound.

  Scrape. Scrape. Huff. Scrape. Huff. Scrape. Huff. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

  I tried to ignore it at first, what with it being ten o’clock at night – prime time for old men dragging chains and floating women in wedding dresses. But it kept on.

  Scrape. Scrape. Huff. Scrape. Scrape. Huff. Huff. Scrape. Scrape.

  ‘Who is that?’ I shouted. It wasn’t like me to be so stroppy but on this occasion, I did have the right. After all, I was dripping with the poo of a thousand cows. I went to investigate, picking my way through the grass. And then, I saw a figure. There, by the wall. A figure digging.

  I went a bit further along the path where it was shaded from the moonlight, desperately trying to turn on some carrot-fuelled ability to see in the dark. I saw a girl digging.

  A girl my age, digging.

  She was wearing a hooded jacket and was partly hidden by the overhanging willow tree, but it was definitely a girl and that was definitely what she was doing. Digging.

  I thought I ought to tell her I was there, so I didn’t scare her.

  ‘Hiya.’

  She snapped her head around. ‘What?’

  I gulped. ‘Hi?’

  A headlight, like the kind miners wear, was strapped to her forehead and when she looked at me it shone into my eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she barked.

  ‘I . . . what? Nothing,’ I said, shielding myself from the glare. I said it like I was the one who should feel guilty. ‘I’m walking home. What are you doing?’

  She didn’t answer, just lowered her headlight and kept on digging. I noticed a Marks & Spencer’s cool bag beside her on the grass.

  Scrape. Huff. Scrape. Huff.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked her. ‘Do you work here or something?’

  ‘Too many questions and I don’t want to answer any of them,’ the girl huffed. She sounded posh. And intelligent. Intelliposh, I guessed.

  Scrape. Huff. Scrape.

  ‘I’ll tell,’ I threatened, not very threateningly though. I actually just wanted to watch what she was doing, thinking maybe at some point I’d see a body, but I folded my arms to look like I meant business, because that’s what you should do when you find someone doing something they’re not supposed to. Though it was pretty difficult to look like you meant business when you literally looked and smelled like crap. ‘You’re breaking a law. Probably.’

  The girl stuck her shovel into the dirt so it stood up straight. She shone her headlight at me again. ‘And who are you, the church warden?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have a vested interest in this particular plot?’

  ‘No, I . . .’

  ‘You’re the town sheriff? This town ain’t big enough for the both of us?’

  ‘No!’

  She turned down her headlight so I could actually open my eyes. ‘Then what does it matter what I’m doing?’

  I stepped closer. ‘I don’t know. Because it does. It’s weird.’

  She stood with a foot perched on her shovel, her gloved hands neatly folded on top. ‘And walking through a graveyard at night dressed as excrement isn’t?’

  Oh, she had noticed. Of course she had noticed. ‘I have an excuse,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to the freshers’ party at college.’

  ‘Figures,’ she said. ‘Some halfwit tried to hand me a flyer for that in the cafeteria on Wednesday lunchtime.’ She went back to digging.

  ‘You’ve started Hoydon College too?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she puffed. ‘I’m assuming you were forced to engage in one of the many . . . hilarious initiation ceremonies they like to put on for new students, just to see who’s the most . . . desperate to win friends.’ Scrape. Huff.

  ‘They made me do it,’ I said, slapping my soaking wet dress at the sides. My eyes stung and there was a pain in my throat as I remembered what I had just done. ‘They were all cheering and chanting and I felt so alive.’

  ‘I heard of one initiation rite called the Eat, Drink and Be Merry,’ the girl interrupted. ‘I believe it involves eating something disgusting, drinking something disgusting and jumping in something disgusting, usually a paddling pool full of —’

  ‘Poo,’ I finished.

  ‘Hmm. Apparently only the most desperate of “losers” will actually do it.’ The pain in my throat gave way to floods of so many tears. I never knew I had so much water in me. ‘I take it you were crowned this year’s Queen Loser.’

  Their words kept circling inside my brain like a whirlpool of diarrhoea.

  Camille will do it. You’ll do it, won’t you? Go on, eat it!

  Come on, Camille, eat it. Go on, drink it down, drink it all!

  Down it, down it, down it, down it! Wahey, she downed it all!

  Shove her in. Go on, Camille. Look
at the state of her!

  Stupid dares. Stupid A levels. Stupid friends. I actually big fat hated them all, and I didn’t big fat hate anything usually. Except hard-boiled eggs. And people who were mean to animals. And velvet.

  ‘I thought they’d think I was cool.’

  ‘I presume you were trying to impress some boy.’ Scrape. Huff.

  I nodded. ‘Damian. He’s in our Sociology class. He’s awesome. It was him doing the handbrake turns on the hockey pitch on the first day of term. And he can jump the train tracks in a Tesco trolley. He’s just the best.’

  ‘The best at what precisely?’ said the girl. ‘I think you should wake up and smell what you’re covered in.’

  I wiped my nose on the back of my pooey hand. ‘I saw him, Damian, when I was in the paddling pool. Stupid arm around Tamsin Double-Barrelled. Someone else was filming it for YouTube. Even Damian had his phone out. And I lost my cherry scrunchie. I loved that cherry scrunchie. It matched my new dress.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect anything less from that halfwit,’ I heard her mumble.

  ‘No, Damian’s different. He’s not a halfwit.’

  ‘Hmm, because only brain surgeons try to jump train tracks in a shopping trolley. This would be Damian de Jagger, I’m surmising?’

  ‘It’s pronounced Dee Yay Grrr actually,’ I said, pleased that she had got it wrong. ‘Do you know him?’

  She stared at me again. ‘Yes, I know him. The boy is bacteria.’

  The moonlight bounced off the gravestones, shimmering on the marble. I was cold. My poo coat was no longer keeping me warm. ‘How much longer will you be?’

  She sighed. ‘And you need to know that because?’

  ‘Because . . . I . . . one of my best friends lives at the vicarage and I won’t be able to sleep thinking about someone digging up the graves here.’

  ‘Where was your best friend tonight?’ said the girl.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where was your best friend while you were at the party?’

  I glared at her. ‘She was . . . there. Somewhere.’ I couldn’t remember seeing Poppy at the pool for the Be Merry. But she was definitely there for the Eat and Drink. She hadn’t been chanting or anything. She’d just been watching with everyone.

  ‘Seems to me that a best friend would have stepped in at some point and stopped you.’ Scrape, huff, scrape . . .

  ‘Look, can you stop doing that, please?’ I said louder, not quite shouting but still cross all the same. That’s what drink did to me. I became someone I didn’t like. Someone shouty. Someone who had realised they didn’t have a friend in the world.

  ‘If you’re so concerned about time, you could offer to help.’ The girl stopped and threw something over to me and it clattered on the footpath. A small spade.

  I stared at it. I stared back at her. ‘You want me to dig with you?’

  She sighed again, like I was really getting on her nerves. ‘I’m not digging. I’m filling in. Many hands make light work, don’t you know.’

  So I picked up the spade. And I walked over to where she was under the willow tree and I helped her shift the dirt into the hole. The hole was big and long. I still didn’t know exactly what she’d done there. I mean, people only carry shovels in graveyards for two reasons: to bury something or dig something up. Or someone.

  So there we both were. Scrape, scrape, huff, huff, scrape, scrape, huff, huff.

  ‘Have you been having a picnic?’ I asked, nodding towards the cool bag.

  ‘No,’ she said. I was waiting for her to say something else, but she just carried on digging. Well, filling in.

  ‘So what’s in the picnic bag then?’

  ‘I think I said I was finished with questions.’ She began kicking the earth to get more of it in the hole.

  ‘So you are doing something wrong,’ I said, copying the kicking thing.

  ‘Wrong in your book, maybe,’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ No answer. I brandished the spade. ‘If you’ve robbed a grave, it’s wrong in anyone’s book.’

  Scrape. Kick. Scrape. ‘Not in mine it’s not.’

  ‘So you have robbed it?’

  She looked at me. ‘I like to think of it as reclaimed.’

  ‘Ugh!’ I cried, and my cry echoed around the graveyard. ‘You can’t!’

  ‘You can,’ she said. ‘I can. Needs must.’

  ‘Needs must?’ I cried. ‘I know there’s been that crunchy thing where everyone’s lost their money but you can’t go around prising wedding rings off dead bodies, that’s just horrible! Ugh!’

  Before I could say another word, she took the spade from me, slung her shovel on top of the cool bag and left me, alone, standing there, stinking of poo and staring into the coal-black air. Well, the air wasn’t black, the sky was. Air is just air. Come to think of it, what is dark? The air’s not dark, cos if you trapped night air in a jar you wouldn’t have a dark jar. And the sky’s technically not dark either. But it felt dark.

  Everything felt very dark indeed that night. But in a really weird way, I kinda liked it.

  So this is me, Camille

  There were lots of things I was afraid of – one-man bands, balloons, hammocks, sharks, velvet – but death wasn’t one of them.

  At primary school, everyone had thought I was a freak because I kept dead insects in my locker. And because I was chubby. And because my parents were old. But mostly because of the dead insect thing. I used to bring roadkill inside when I was little too. I’d kept them as pets. Mum and Dad had bought me this kitten once but it got run over in the road. They’d been horrified when they found me in my Wendy house playing tea parties and wearing the flattened cat like a scarf.

  Mum said I was into dead stuff because of my name. When she was fifty, she and Dad had gone on this old folks’ Mediterranean cruise and they’d been at this art gallery when I’d started kicking the hell out of her. She hadn’t even known she was up the duff, so I guess it was a bit of a shock when she suddenly found herself in some foreign chemist working out the Italian for ‘pregnancy test’. Anyway, at the time of my kick-fest Mum had been looking at this painting of all these dead mermaids on a beach by this Italian painter called Camille Posticcio. She’d thought Camille was a woman so that’s why she’d called me Camille. Posticcio was actually some crusty bloke with a white beard who was famous for painting dead things and being mad. He used to run naked through Florence feeling up nuns. But Mum hadn’t known that.

  So that was me, Camille. Named after a freaky bloke obsessed with dead things, and a little obsessed with dead things myself.

  Anyway, one morning a few months back, I’d met Death up close and personal for the first time ever.

  We lived in Hoydon’s Bracht (apparently, Bracht is an old English name for beach) and the town was famous for three things: its pier, a cafe called ‘Wonkies’ that leaned twenty degrees to the left, and an incident when a mad cow had run up the high street and killed three people. There was a sign on the road that said ‘Welcome to Hoydon’s Bracht – the Town Where a Smile’s Never a Frown.’ Last time I saw it, someone had crossed out the last bit and put ‘the Town They Forgot to Close Down’. It was twinned with a place in Belgium I couldn’t pronounce, and most of the stores were pound shops or sold those chairs that tipped old people up.

  My mum, Francine, used to be a nail artist and my grey-haired dad, Stephen, liked recycling. He was the only person I knew who at parties preferred the bit when you recycled the wrapping paper to opening the actual presents. They had run Sea View Guest House since the eighties, way before I was born. It was a four-storey town house, just off the seafront – handy for the beach and crazy golf, but annoying if you hated sand and seagulls. It was also a pain in the arse if you hated child labour, as I was called on at any moment to change beds or wait tables. Still, I had the whole third floor to myself, and my own shower, so that was nice.

  Anyway, one day, Mum had asked me if I would take breakfast up to Mrs Cleak in room six: scramb
led eggs, a pot of tea and the paper. I’d knocked three times on the door before I tried the handle. I’d gone inside, calling her name in case I caught her doing something old and saggy-butt naked that would scar me for life.

  ‘Mrs Cleak?’

  I’d known she was dead as soon as I saw her. She’d been completely still. Whenever she’d fallen asleep downstairs in the guests’ lounge, she’d been all twitchy and farty. But this had been something completely else. I’d put the tray down and gone and sat beside her chair and I’d watched her be dead. I’d touched her cheek. It had been hard. I’d touched her hand. It had been cold. It had been so peaceful, sitting there with her. But after a bit I’d realised that I wasn’t really sitting with Mrs Cleak, I was just sitting with her body, which she’d left behind like an old suitcase. Then Mum had come in and screamed the pictures off the walls.

  Ever since then, my fascination with death had got worse. I just thought it was awesome. Not awesome like roller coasters, but awesome like it filled me with awe. I wondered what it felt like, to breathe a last breath. I wondered if it hurt in that second when your heart stopped beating. I wondered what my final thought would be when I croaked. My thoughts just before going to sleep were usually about food or boys, so maybe it would be the ultimate thought – a boy made of chocolate or something.

  I wasn’t into ghosts, even though I thought Mrs Cleak was now haunting our airing cupboard. Every time I opened the door it squeaked, and it sounded like Mrs Cleak saying, ‘Oh hello, dear!’ No, I was more into real death. Actual bodies. It boggled my mind. Lots of things boggled my mind, but death did more than anything.

  I knew it was weird for a girl like me to be interested in that stuff. I was a big softie who got all squiggly over Christmas and liked cuddles and romance novels. I even had a dolls’ house that I still liked to poke my head inside and pretend I was small. Someone like me shouldn’t gawp at car accidents or peek through funeral parlour windows. She shouldn’t feel happy in graveyards or tape programmes on the world’s worst serial killers. But that’s just me, Camille Mabb. I was a freak.