Wednesday, 7 March 2035 #2
It was sort of funny. ‘And the time you found that poo in the bath, and when your vase got broken – both times that was me, not the cat … Mum, can you tell me more about Rhiannon?’
I waited, convinced that at the sound of that name she’d at least open an eye or sit bolt upright and start shouting, DO NOT MENTION THAT BITCH’S NAME IN THIS HOUUUUUSE!
Either that or she would give me The Look.
The look that said, Oh, Christ, she’s turning into her.
Like when I was six and she caught me knocking the heads off dandelion clocks with a toy golf club.
She asked me why, and I proudly announced, ‘Because I’m an executioner.
’ Apparently she forbade me from going in the garden for weeks after, but I don’t remember that. I just remember The Look.
‘OH MY GOD, MUM, RHIANNON IS COMING UP THE DRIVE! SHE MUST HAVE ESCAPED FROM JAIL!’
She didn’t bat an eyelid, despite my best acting and loudest enraged voice. No Look, no nothing. I picked up her phone off the coffee table. And I googled Rhiannon’s name.
‘I’m looking her up, Mum. She’s my real mum, you know. I want to be just like her when I grow up …’
Still nothing.
Rhiannon’s mugshot came up and my heart pounded, like it usually did when I saw her online or on the news.
I checked Mum’s face again – still. I switched to YouTube on the TV and started to type in ‘Rhiannon Lewis, documentary’.
I didn’t need to type many letters before a host of videos popped up.
How she was caught in Thailand. Clips of her being led up some airplane steps.
Clips of her covered in a grey blanket being led into the back of a courthouse.
Some way-too-tanned journalist type, called Guy Majors, had done a load of videos on her.
Majors Presents: Craig’s Story – I Lived with a Serial Killer; Majors Presents: How Sweetpea’s Father Made a Monster; Majors Presents: The Bad Seeds – The Dark Fandom Behind the Sweetpea Killer.
I checked on Mum again; checked for the breath that wasn’t coming.
I clicked on The Bad Seeds video. The fans and their Spotify playlists, their Etsy-produced T-shirts and blood-spattered Converse.
The screaming throngs gathered outside the court where she was brought after she was extradited.
Each one had something to say to the reporters waiting for a glimpse of her:
She doesn’t belong in there. I don’t care what she did. They fear what they don’t understand. She was in control; that scares men.
I’m going to write to her every single week. We love you, Rhiannon!
She’s not evil. Read the books – she’s funny! She’s very misunderstood.
She took justice into her own hands. Isn’t that what we all want to do?
When I couldn’t take any more of the screeching devotion or Guy Majors posing outside various locations linked to Rhiannon, I clicked on another video presented by a writer called Freddie Litton-Cheney.
Like Majors, he’d written a bunch of books about Rhiannon, but his books were, according to him, biographical and not sensationalist like the Majors ones.
His videos were all personal appearances or him at book launches.
I clicked on the first one and watched. He seemed to adore her, but then he would. She’d made him a lot of money.
I stayed beside Mum for six hours, ordered a Deliveroo (which I was never allowed), and binged every video about Rhiannon I could find on YouTube: Born to Kill, World’s Deadliest Females, Evil Up Close, Why Psycho Bitches Kill, Murders That Shook Britain, Killer Fandoms, you name it.
By five o’clock, I was something of a Rhiannon expert.
But it was all sensationalised, and all the criminologists and serial killer experts who popped up to wax lyrical about her were there to make it very clear that they under no circumstances condoned what she did and thought she was evil personified.
But there was another side to her coming through. A saviour. A protector. An avenger.
I wished I could hear what she had to say for herself. Just one interview, but she’d never done one after being caught. The only person in the world whose opinion about my biological mother I hadn’t actually heard by the end of my Rhiannothon was Rhiannon herself.
I grabbed Mum’s phone again and clicked onto her app.
I typed ‘Freddie Litton-Cheney books’ into the search bar.
Three of his five books about her were on offer in a shrink-wrap deal, all paperbacks.
The e-books were cheaper but, for some reason, I wanted physical copies.
I looked across at Mum. I stared at the cursor flashing above the Buy Now button.
I looked at her again. And before I could think any more about it, I clicked.
Thank you for your order, Mrs Silverton.
It was only then that I felt bad. Not only for binge-eating greasy food, which gave me a stomach ache, but for binge-watching Rhiannon, and buying Rhiannon stuff on Mum’s credit card. Stuff she would never let me have. But she was gone now. And I was still here.
The phone rang. I let it go to answerphone.
It didn’t stop ringing, every few hours or so, for the next three days.
Three whole days I stayed in the house with Claudia’s dead body on the sofa.
It seemed like the only thing to do – the alternative was still too awful to face.
I watched our favourite films, watched our quiz, ate takeaways I knew she wouldn’t approve of, while poring over the first book in the Rhiannon pentalogy.
It arrived the morning after I ordered it.
And oh my God. It was clear to me straight away which tree this apple had fallen from. Book one, page one, Rhiannon had made a list. A list of all the people that day who had angered her. All the people she wanted to kill:
Mrs Whittaker – neighbour, elderly, kleptomaniac.
‘Dillon’ on the checkout in Lidl – acne, wallet chain, who bangs my apples and is NEVER happy to help.
The suited man in the blue Qashqai who roars out of Sowerberry Road every morning – grey suit, aviator shades, Donald Trump tan.
Everyone I work with at the Gazette apart from Jeff.
Craig [boyfriend].
‘Shit!’ I cried out. ‘Shit. It’s me – it’s me! I do that!’
I closed the book and shoved it down the side of the chair – the fear was real.
This was what Mum was keeping me from. Keeping me from knowing what I was spawned from; what I would turn into someday.
I knew from the documentaries Rhiannon made her first kill when she was eighteen.
That was only a couple of years away for me.
I tried to nestle in next to Mum on the sofa, but she was all hard and by Day Three she was starting to smell of something un-Mum. Her blue lips had parted slightly so I could see a glimpse of her teeth. Her skin was starting to shrink. I could see the skeleton she was going to become.
Maddox hopped into the lounge and I grabbed him and cuddled him in.
I suddenly didn’t want to be anywhere near her, but I didn’t want her to go either.
I was stuck, literally, on the threshold of two rooms and there was nobody to tell me what to do.
I looked outside at the front lawn – at the grass that needed mowing, at the dust on the hallway shelves, the list on the pin board of stuff Mum took care of.
I’d have to do everything now. I didn’t know where to begin.
I cuddled my rabbit and tried to choke down the breaths that kept coming.
Maddox squirmed so I put him back down on the floor.
I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there when I heard the key in the front door, and the rustling sound of a brolly being shaken off.
Heather was removing her coat and putting it on a hook.
‘Hiya,’ she trilled. ‘It’s tipping it down out there, sorry, I’ve dripped all over your doormat. I tried calling you but I didn’t get any answer; is everything all right? I’ve had a pig of a few days. Nonstop, it’s been. Anyway, how’s you? How’s your mum today?’
I didn’t have to say anything. Heather just knew.
Tears were already streaming down my cheeks.
Maddox had hopped out through the cat flap and I was stood there in my three-days dirty school uniform with the tie undone and socks wrinkled down, hugging myself.
She enveloped me in the warm hug I’d needed for three days.
She had on her chunky Arran so it was extra soft and she smelled of her usual perfume, Van Cleef I could’ve let it go, left it locked up with everything else and forgotten it for a while.
But I clutched it like a secret under my coat.
The story everybody had tried to shield me from all these years.
The bomb everyone was waiting to explode.