Monday, 12 March 2035 #2
I waited outside the head’s office for an age. Nothing but a bunch of fake flowers draped in cobwebs, a well-thumbed school prospectus with a spud of chewing gum inside the back cover, and that sketchy-ass Magritte to pass the time. I listened in to the call Mr Christensen made to Heather.
The long and the short of it was the school thought I was ‘too much of a distraction’.
That it was ‘such an awkward time’, what with all my ‘grieving’ and the whole Mr Andrews investigation.
The ‘rumours aren’t helping anyone, least of all Ivy’.
He had decided that I should take some study leave ‘on compassionate grounds’ and that my teachers would send me work so I could keep up.
Heather was stuck in meetings all day, so couldn’t pick me up.
I said I’d get a cab but I didn’t wait for it.
In lieu of my own copy of the first Sweetpea book which had been confiscated, I hopped on the first e-bus into town and grabbed another from the town library, then walked to the beach.
I stayed there all day. Wandering lonely as a cloud.
The sun was low but the air was cold. Nothing and no one to distract me.
Rhiannon wasn’t at all like Claudia had told me she was.
Claudia said she was rude and mean and evil and all these other bad things.
But she was funny too, and she was loyal, and she was even scared at times.
The author, Freddie Litton-Cheney, released Rhiannon’s memoirs as if they were his own work, but in the foreword he makes it clear that everything in the books – ‘every confession, every detail’ – comes from Rhiannon herself as told to him.
‘I am very much the messenger whom she didn’t shoot. ’
Then I got to the most astonishing part of all: when she found out she was pregnant with me.
I was a mistake – Claudia had impressed on me from an early age that AJ and Rhiannon had a fling and that it meant nothing to her and that she didn’t even love him.
But I got to the part in her diary where she went to the doctor to book an abortion. And she couldn’t do it:
‘It’s about the size of a poppy seed.’ Oh, why did he have to say that?
Why did he have to use those words? … My hand was shaking …
‘I don’t want the abortion.’ … I started to calm down.
My butterflies began to fly away … the relief that washed over me was tremendous …
I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t see myself with a kid either but I definitely couldn’t see myself killing one …
I started to cry. Me, Ivy, aged sixteen – not me, Ivy, the unborn amorphous fertilised cell. I continued to read through watery vision.
I walked out of there into the sunlight.
Shock. Fear. Feelings; so many feeeeeelings!
A ‘mass of cells’, he’d said. No, it wasn’t just a mass of cells.
It was my mass of cells. My poppy seed. My family …
but how can someone like me be responsible for a baby?
… I don’t know what this feeling is but if it’s love, I can see why I’ve kept it at bay for so long. It hurts …
She’d wanted me, right from the start. Right from when I was just a poppy seed stuck to her womb lining. Claudia never told me that. She had me adopted to protect me from herself.
‘Wow.’ I stopped reading and looked out at the dying sunset beyond the water.
I needed a moment to breathe, to watch the sparkling light on the waves, and cry behind my sunglasses.
I don’t know how much longer I sat there reading, trying to understand this woman who’d grown me inside her – liking her, hating her, but she was the car crash I couldn’t look away from.
‘It’s a good book that,’ said a voice above me. Some bloke walking his dog who just had to come up and have a good nose at the book cover. ‘Have you got to the bit where she cuts the guy’s todger off by the canal?’
I didn’t answer. Instead, I stopped reading and stared up at him.
He just laughed and walked on by. To everyone else, what Rhiannon did was some big joke.
Entertainment. True crime tittle tattle they could eat with their TV dinners.
But his comment left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Well, it would, wouldn’t it? I tried to refocus on the story, but he had completely jumped my tracks and derailed my train of thought, so I put the book away.
I grabbed some chips and a vegan sausage roll and wandered along the seafront.
I played in the arcades for a bit and won some more tickets for my collection.
I got on the last e-bus to Axminster and continued reading the book.
There were roadworks and traffic jams all the way back.
Took over an hour. Enough time to read all about my grandfather, Tommy, Rhiannon’s dad.
Ex-boxer. Ex-local hero. Vigilante paedophile killer.
How Tommy had allowed Rhiannon to watch him ‘at work’.
How he was the catalyst for everything. It was his fault!
‘THAT’S why I’m like this!’ I cried out. Thankfully, the bus was empty but for two deaf old women in the front.
But then I got to the murder of a completely innocent taxi driver in Birmingham and I decided, irrespective of Tommy, that had been all Rhiannon. And I hated her again, totally and completely.
‘Ugh,’ I said, looking out the window. ‘That man had three kids. He was getting you safely back to your hotel and you slaughtered him, for nothing! You bitch!’
My own mother had done that; murdered an innocent man just because she felt like it. And I was there, growing inside her! My blood was her blood and it ran cold.
And then I got to the bit where Rhiannon killed my dad. I was still in utero but he called round to her flat to fight for the right to see me when I was born. To fight for me. I scanned the lines unstoppably.
‘I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me about the baby. I want to be a dad.’
‘You want to travel, AJ. You told me once you never want to put down roots. The last thing you want is a ball and chain around your ankle.’
‘I’ve changed my mind … I wish you loved me half as much as I love you.’
‘It’s a crush, that’s all. You don’t love me. I’m fundamentally unlovable …’
I felt sorry for her again. No wonder she rejected him. No wonder she didn’t feel like she could love him. I understood!
And then he got angry. I’d never seen AJ angry before.
He kicked his rucksack across the wooden floor, sending it crashing against the occasional table and making the lamp wobble.
‘You won’t say it, will you? You never say it back…
. Where’s Craig now? … I’m gonna tell him …
about the baby. I’ll tell him it’s mine. ’
‘No, you bloody won’t.’
AJ wanted to be involved – he loved me straight away. I stopped reading to look out the window again. Outside it was drizzly and the moon glittered on the rain-spattered glass.
‘We could be your family, me and Auntie Claude. She’d love it, you know how desperate she is to have a baby about the place. The nursery’s there, waiting. It’ll be perfect! It could work, I know it could.’
I put the book down and took a breath. The two old ladies had got off the bus and the moon had vanished. It was just darkness now. Darkness and me on the driverless bus, alone. I picked it up again.
‘You know I only shagged you to keep your mouth shut, don’t you, AJ?’
‘What?’
‘So you wouldn’t blab what I told you …’ I opened the fridge to get the milk. I put it down beside the knife block.
‘Oh God,’ I gasped. ‘Oh, please don’t, don’t do it, please,’ I begged the remaining pages, even though it was inevitable. I tore through the rest of the scene.
The kettle clicked. The water boiled. The steam rose. My hand on the handle. ‘It was me,’ I said, lifting the kettle. ‘I killed them all.’ … I pulled off the lid and threw the water in his face.
And suddenly I hated her once again. She killed that poor taxi driver, Dean Bishopston, and Julia, her school bully, and my dad, right there on her kitchen floor, because he wanted me.
Burned him with boiling kettle water and stabbed him all over.
But THEN, oh my God, what she did next: she went to the hen weekend, killed a fortune teller who told her that her baby was in danger, and when she got back – MY DAD’S BODY WAS IN HER BED.
SHE SLEPT with my ACTUAL DAD’S BODY. HIS CORPSE!
And for the first time ever, I said it and I truly meant it. ‘I love you.’ I peeled off my shirt and lay down against him – our baby between us; my warmth becoming colder by the second. ‘I wish I could stay here forever.’ … I looked at AJ’s lifeless face.
My stomach rolled but I couldn’t close the book. ‘What the fuck? What the actual FUCK?’ I cried out.
And then came the voice.
‘You came back early to get rid of the body. So get rid of it.’ I looked along the side of the bed. I looked towards the door. Then I looked down at my own stomach. ‘Yeah, me, down here. I’m all you’ve got left now. You better start listening to me if you want to get out of this.’
The baby – aka ME – had started speaking to her FROM THE WOMB. ‘What? Oh wow. She is full-on nuts!’
The book came to an end and I closed the book for the final time.
‘Oh my God,’ I kept saying. ‘Oh my GOD!’ This was one seriously messed-up woman, and I grew out of her.
She loved the idea of being a family with my dad and me but only when he was dead?
Because being dead meant you stayed. Being dead meant he wouldn’t leave. And that’s when I got it.
Because I’d done exactly the same with Mum’s body.
I’d lived with her corpse for three days. AJ had been left in Rhiannon’s flat for … three days.
Me and Rhiannon. Two peas in a pod.
At that moment, I desperately needed to speak to Rhiannon.
I needed to make sense of this because it felt like if I could, I could make sense of me.
I picked up my phone again and googled Haverfield Prison.
It came up in the results – Haverfield is a prison and young offender institution in Haverfield West, Bristol, for women aged 18 and over.
I clicked through the links on the government website until one of them caught my eye.
Keeping in touch with someone at Haverfield.
My heart thudded like great big boulders bouncing from a cliff face.
You can stay in touch with someone at Haverfield in a variety of ways: Some prisoners have phones in their cells. They are permitted to make their calls between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., either by audio call or video. Alternatively, you can use the ‘Email a Prisoner’ service on our app …
I could barely hear the bus thrumming along the potholey road for the sound of my own heart thumping as I clicked the hyperlink to the app and hit ‘Download’. I logged on to the ‘Contacting a Prisoner’ page. And hit ‘Send a Message’.
Please click on the link to the prisoner you wish to correspond with.
I scrolled to Prisoner #668664. Lewis, R.
My palms sweated. The cursor blinked. And I started to type.
SWEETPEA KILLER’S CUSHY LIFE BEHIND BARS
As live TV interview with the serial killer is announced, we take a peek behind the cell door at the comfortable conditions the murderess enjoys behind bars
13 March 2035 18:04pm
By Paul Hartley
AS A CATEGORY A prisoner at Haverfield Prison in Bristol, Rhiannon Lewis should be living in punishing conditions.
But this is far from the case. The serial killer fled the country on New Year’s Eve 2018 but was finally arrested in March 2030 on a beach in Thailand where she had been living alone for some time.
She will die behind bars for her sickening crimes which involved multiple stabbings, suffocation, arson, strangulation, and even necrophilia.
Despite her catalogue of vile deeds, Lewis, now 44, enjoys some rare prison privilege which the majority of the Haverfield population simply do not get, like an en suite bathroom in her cell, a desk and a TV with cable.
It is also rumoured that Lewis has her own allotment of land as well as access to yoga classes.
A source said last night: “Haverfield is privately funded, therefore prisoners can expect a slightly easier time of it than your average UK prisoner.” Governor Jolyon Lloyd-Atherton was unavailable for comment last night, but it’s thought the forthcoming TV interview with Lewis was obtained following a large bribe from journalist and influencer Guy Majors.
Lewis is a Category A prisoner of ‘restricted status’ which means she poses a high risk, but it is thought that since being behind bars the killer has been a model citizen.
“She has a few select friends,” said the source, “one of whom claims to be a witch who puts curses on those Lewis asks her to; another a Black Widow and one’s a terrorist. Everyone’s in awe of her.
She’s very popular.” But that’s not to say she’s popular with everyone.
“There is a price on her head as the Sweetpea Killer. She might be popular among the screws and cleaners and most of the inmates but there are still those who would off her, given the chance. To go down as the person who killed Sweetpea is a mighty big prize.”
Lewis is able to receive visitors, though these are rare, but she gets over 1,000 fan letters every month, and this isn’t including the digital messages she gets via the prison’s “Email a Prisoner” portal.
“It’s hardly like prison at all for her,” continues the source.
“She’s living the life of Riley in there but the same can’t be said for her victims and their families. ”