Dead Romantic (2 page)

‘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.

 

 

 

 

T
here 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: scrambled 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.

And now I'd met another freak. In a graveyard, digging. And she was all I could think about.

 

 

 

 

M
y phone had been off all weekend. I didn't want to speak to Lynsey or Poppy, my two best friends. I didn't know what I would say to them after freshers' night, when they'd left me to stew in the poo with everyone laughing at me. The three of us had been so close all through school, and last summer had been the best. We'd met at the pool a few times a week to get fit and ogle the lifeguards, gone down to the Bracht to get tans and ogle the coastguards, and hung around the Asda cafe drinking iced teas and ogling the security guards. There was definitely something about men who guarded things.

Now, only two weeks into A levels, I could feel us growing apart. My mum said it was natural for friendships to ‘come unstitched at the seams as you get older'. But she
also said Johnny Depp had a house on the hill by our dentist's, so I wasn't sure what to believe. The fact was that we were all into pretty different things these days. Lynx, that's what Lynsey liked to be called these days, had her sights set on the Olympics. Poppy wanted to be a violinist. We were all taking Sociology together, but that was the last stitch really. We didn't have to be friends any more. We could branch out, be who we were supposed to be in life. I didn't know what I wanted to be yet. When I'd had my careers interview, I'd been told I came across as a ‘quite like'. I quite liked throwing the discus. I quite liked romance novels. I quite liked death. I'd asked if there was a job where I could throw the discus, read romance novels and study dead people, but they'd said there wasn't.

But that morning as I walked to college, I couldn't think about anything else but Digging Girl. The hems of my jeans were soaked and my bridesmaid's dress and pink coat were spattered with pretty, clear jewels of rain. Yeah, I still wore my first bridesmaid's dress. I'd had it since my mum's best friend's wedding when I was seven and it still fitted so now I wore it as a top. Poppy said it was a fashion statement. Lynx said it was a death wish. I didn't know what that meant.

That day I didn't care. I was all on fire looking for signs of Digging Girl. In every bus that passed me on the road, every girl I saw with her hood up. I even walked through the churchyard, just in case she was there. But she wasn't there.

The awful thought arrived that maybe she had been a ghost. Maybe it had been a dream? Maybe I was like that
bloke in that film who meets this mega-cool bloke who you think is just some mega-cool bloke who he gets to be best friends with but it turns out to be just a pigment of his imagination all along. An imaginary friend. I'd been quite drunk that night, thanks to Damian de Jager, who'd kept pouring this green stuff down my throat. I'd only let him to feel his fingers on the back of my neck as he was doing it. I'd liked that. But perhaps Digging Girl had been right. Perhaps Damian de Jager wasn't the one for me.