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Monday, 1 January

1. Teen boy and girl in the park who kicked their black Labrador that time

2. Derek Scudd

3. Wesley Parsons

4. The guy with Tourette’s who sits in the Paddy Power doorway, shouting about spacecrafts and the time he got fisted by a priest

5. Craig and Lana. To save on bullets, I’m putting them both together here – one shot, right through both skulls

6. The man in the blue Qashqai who pulled out of Marsh Road and beeped when I didn’t walk fast enough. 'Stupid slow bitch,' that’s what he’d said. All the way round the block I was picturing his suited body hanging by its neck – wriggling and twitching and me standing beneath him, just watching

Did a BuzzFeed quiz this morning – How Psychopathic Are You? Turns out – very. I scored 82 per cent. They even accompanied my results with a picture of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Don’t know how I feel about that.

The quiz had been right about one thing, though.

Do you try to evade responsibility?

Well, yes, yes, I do. Remorse-wise, the canal incident has left little impression. I haven’t killed anyone for three years and I thought that when it happened again I’d feel bad, like an alcoholic taking a sip of whiskey. But, no, nothing. I had a blissful night’s sleep. Didn’t wake up at all and, for once, no bad dream either. This morning I feel balanced. Almost sane, for once.

*

Craig and I spent the first day of the New Year in front of the TV, eating pizza, the blue Quality Streets and watching ‘80s movies – Pretty in Pink, The Outsiders and that one where Demi Moore has a pink apartment and goes nuts at the end. He is an exceptional liar, I’ll give him that. I know he saw Lana today, under the pretence of ‘meeting Gary and Nigel down Wetherspoon’s’. He was vay convincing, to the untrained eye.

Sadly, my eye is hyper-trained – like an Olympic sprinter when it comes to rooting out bullshit.

We’d planned to do so much this week – stuff we never got round to do when we’re both at work: power-spraying the bird shit on the balcony, sorting out boxes for the mythical car-boot-sale-we’re-never-going-to-do, and Craig was going to clear out the mountain of rubbish and offcuts of wood from the back of his van and then paint the bathroom. We had one day left before we both went back to work and we’d done precious little. Craig had made a start on the wall above the toilet on Christmas Eve – a little surprise for me for when I got home from work, to keep me sweet before he mentioned he’d invited the boys around again to watch Boxing Day football on Sky. But when I’d seen the colour, I did not like the colour.

‘Mineral Mist, I said!’

‘I got Mineral Mist, see?’ He held up the tin. It said Morning Mist.

I took Tink for a walk at lunch as Craig was playing Streetfighter and making bacon sandwiches and the smell was making me dribble (I’m trying not to have bread because ass). I like looking in people’s gardens on our walks. I miss having a garden. There were all sorts of Christmas debris strewn about the pavements. Smashed baubles. Strings of tinsel. Half-chewed sweets. A carrier bag blew across the road out of somebody’s bin and Tink had a conniption, probably waking up half the country. Of all the things in this world my dog hated the most, sneezes, spaniels and rogue carrier bags flying at her as if from nowhere were definitely the Top Three.

Tried teaching her Shake a Paw again, the one trick she won’t do under any circumstances – still nothing.

Craig sorted out all his unwanted Blu-rays for the car-bootsale-we’re-never- going-to-do and pressure-washed the balcony with our new pressure washer, a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. I waxed my legs and drove over to my mum and dad’s house late afternoon. All quiet on the Western Front. Still can’t get the stains out of the bedroom carpet. Craig is still buying all my lies about ‘going to Cleo’s aerobics class’ and ‘working late; so I can go over there. It’s almost too easy.

Gave Tink a bath in the kitchen sink. She doesn’t like it but puts up with it because she always gets chicken bits afterwards. As I was trying to towel her off, she legged it round the flat like she had rabies. Craig laughed too, which broke the ice. Then he said he was ‘going over Homebase’ to get me the other paint. He said he needed some new wallpaper scissors for work as well.

I said, ‘Why don’t you just have my dad’s old wallpaper scissors from his toolkit? I was going over there tomorrow to sort out Mum’s filing cabinet. I can get them then.’

He said that meant a lot to him, like Dad was giving him his blessing from beyond the grave. The hallowed Tommy Lewis toolkit that Dad carried with him like an extra limb and Craig was never allowed to touch. I thought he was going to cry.

‘They’re just wallpaper scissors, Craig,’ I said. ‘It’s not an engagement ring.’

He nodded and left the room with a distinct clear of throat. I’m terrible with crying people. How do you make them stop? I deliberately caught the wrong bus once because a woman was blubbing in the bus shelter. Didn’t know what else to do.

Do I love him? I haven’t known what love is in a long time. He says he loves me but isn’t that just something that gets said? He told me on Christmas Eve that, coupled with the hand jobs and my excellent trifle, I’m almost the perfect girlfriend. I don’t nag him as much as his mates’ wives nag them either. I asked him what would make me perfect.

‘Anal,’ he said, no hesitation. ‘What would make me perfect?’ he asked.

Well, it’d be a start if you stopped shagging Lana Rowntree behind my back, I thought. Instead, I opted for the safer:

‘You can’t improve on perfection itself, can you, darling?’

He laughed and I flicked him a V sign behind the Radio Times.

Wednesday, 3 January

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s back to my shitty job I go. Actually, there is a dwarf where I work – he’s upstairs in the Accounts department. He’s the reason we had all our light switches moved to three feet above the ground. Madness.

Today went as all days at the Gazette go – long, coffee-stained and dull. The first half was me telling anyone who asked what a good Christmas I had and some dull-as-ditch tasks of inputting local schools’ thank-you letters to Santa, updating the website and making coffee in the new £5,000 (yes, that’s £5,000!) coffee machine. There were four new mugs in the staffroom – Christmas presents no one wanted at home but which everyone wants at work because they’re clean. I nabbed one with dinosaurs on and the words TEA-REX. Hardy har.

The usual New Year signs have gone up everywhere, unstained and laminated. Signs telling professional adults helpful things like IF YOU’RE LAST OUT OF AN EVENING, PLEASE TURN OFF ALL THE LIGHTS and PLEASE WASH YOUR OWN CROCKERY. The toilets are full of them: PLEASE ONLY FLUSH TOILET TISSUE DOWN THE TOILET. PLEASE REPLACE TOILET PAPER IF YOU USE THE LAST PIECE. PLEASE TURN OFF THE TAPS AFTER USE. There’s even one as you leave, saying, PLEASE LEAVE THESE FACILITIES AS YOU FIND THEM – THANK YOU.

I’d like to suggest some new signs for the office, specifically for my benefit and/or amusement:

PLEASE REMEMBER TO WIPE YOUR ASS AFTERWARDS FOR THE GOOD OF YOUR GUSSET.

PLEASE CLOSE ALL DOORS QUIETLY, STAY HOME IF YOU ARE SICK, OR AT LEAST TRY TO DIMINISH YOUR SNEEZES – NOISE-SENSITIVE PSYCHOPATH IN THE BUILDING.

PLEASE DO NOT WEAR CROCS TO WORK – THEY ARE AN INSULT TO FOOTWEAR (MIKE HEATH –T HIS MEANS YOU).

DON’T DRINK SO MUCH OF THE OFFICE MILK – MIKE HEATH THE MILK THIEF THIS MEANS YOU TOO, WHAT WITH YOUR DAILY OVERFLOWING BOWLS OF CEREAL AND SIX CAPPUCCINOS.

PLEASE DON’T EAT CHEESY NACHOS OR FRIED BREAKFASTS AT YOUR DESK – THE SMELL MAKES US ALL WANT TO VOM.

PLEASE DON’T TELL RHIANNON LEWIS WHAT YOU DID AT THE WEEKEND – SHE WAS ONLY BEING POLITE.

The Gulp Monster – aka, Claudia Gulper, our desk editor – is responsible for the signs. She puts pass ag labels on her food in the staff-room fridge with the same marker. I stayed late tonight to help her with her article on the mismanagement of power-station funds, which she hopes is going to win her some big journalism prize (it won’t). I asked her to look at my unsolicited article about the rise of drug-related crime and we talked about my theory that the ladies’ dress shop Paint the Town Red was the hub of distribution. I thought it could earn me some extra Brownie points.

More fool I.

I’d liked Claudia for about five minutes when I’d first started at the Gazette as a receptionist but, nowadays, she treats me like some kind of home help. She insisted on giving me endless boring ‘News in Brief’ snippets to type up or deaf Golden Wedding couples to interview, and once shouted at me in front of everyone for missing three semi-colons in the Fun Run results – not to mention a billion other reasons for me to want to jump through the fucking window. I long ago decided she was just a pubic louse on the vaginal wall of the cunt witch from Hell. I’m glad her third round of IVF failed and her husband left her. No spawn deserves that for a mother.

Craig was cooking when I got home (guilt food, obvs). Pasta from scratch with home-made pesto. Since I only had an apple and a black coffee for breakfast and just a salad for lunch, I allowed myself a troughing.

It’s safer to have than to have not, isn’t it? Even if the Have is crap. And if you’re not with someone, you get questions about it, All. The. Time. When you’re hooked up, that all stops. You feel embraced in the safety of having someone. And other people are contented because they don’t have to worry about setting you up on blind dates or going out in couples with a walking gooseberry bush.

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.

Friday, 5 January

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.

The irritating thing is, we can’t say ANYTHING back to Joy because she has a ton of disabilities. She’s one of those rotund, deeply ugly Cromwellian-faced women you see around who’ve dyed their hair bright pink or blue in an attempt to make themselves more appealing, but all they’ve done is accentuate their ugliness. So I can’t comment about her big left leg or her stutter or the Bell’s palsy that has caused her mouth to start sliding off her face because then I’d get done for disablism. Crazy. Wouldn’t you rather have someone like me working with you? Someone who did the decent thing and bitched about you behind your back, rather than right to your face?

I don’t particularly want to go to the effort of killing Joy but I do sometimes like to imagine her, stuffed and glazed, prostrate on a silver platter, surrounded by tufts of parsley with a big green apple wedged between her jaws.

The mayor came in at lunch to see Ron. She’s pleasant enough and she’s got a foster-care past, a disabled kid, and her husband keeps having heart attacks, so she’s clearly had to swallow several shitty spoonfuls from the Bowl of Life. I try not to get too close to her, though – she smells like a Glade PlugIn on full-whack. She is also gluten intolerant, which makes buying lunch intolerable. I have to go to that smelly deli on the corner, where the guy with black fingernails and dreadlocks shuffles around in a hummus-covered apron, twiddling his nose ring.

Lana smiled as she sashayed past my desk at lunchtime, robin’s-egg-blue blouse straining against the pressure of her sizeable assets. I’m pretty sure half the time she doesn’t need to walk past my desk – she could go the other way round – but she does it to look at me. Like a killer going back to the site where she dumped a body, just to marvel at the rate of decomposition or to fuck the remains. I smiled back anyway, for the sake of The Act, and we had a short chat. I smiled again when we were done. Cue the hair swish. Cue the giggle. Cue me imagining her pinned to a snooker table and stabbing her in each hole. I can see why all the men fancy her. She’s bubbly, easy-going, has tits like water balloons. Her last two boyfriends dumped her – I heard it on the staffroom grapevine. She had a breakdown after the first one. And, apparently, after the second one left, she tried to take her own life. I don’t know the severity of the attempt – whether it was a proper go or just a token pills-and-finger-straight-downthe-throat job – but it did explain Craig’s predilection for her. He likes them broken.

A lesbian couple whose kid had choked on a grape in Pizza Hut came in to chat to Mike Heath in the conference room, along with the waitress who’d done kiddy Heimlich and saved his life. I wrote up a press release on a student’s Kilimanjaro climb for moon bears and helped Jeff input the match report from the finals of the County Bowls Championships. There was a Kinder Egg on my desk when I got back from lunch.

Jeff Thresher is the newspaper’s chief sports editor. I think he’d been put in with the foundations. He sits at his desk in the corner all day; holey red cardigan, fingerless gloves, three back supports on his chair. I like Jeff. He holds the door open for me and laughs at my jokes. He’s an expert gardener too and enters all the country shows with his massive courgettes. He’s taught me some of the Latin names of my favourite flowers – Bellis perennis (daisy), Centaurea cyanus (cornflower) and Amaranthus caudatus (Love Lies Bleeding). If the office were flooded with shit, I’d definitely throw Jeff the other life raft.

Drove over to the house in my lunch break. Julia is not a happy camper. She’s broken a window at the back. It’s only a small hole but it made me mad. So, of course, she had to be taught another lesson. Back into the cupboard with you, Little Chip.

Met Craig for a Nando’s after work and he brought the carinsurance documents along so we could Compare the Meerkat ’cos the renewal price was too high. My chicken was tough. I didn’t complain though. Didn’t have it in me tonight.

Thank God for porn. The moment Craig mooted the possibility of sex that evening, I took myself off to the bedroom under the guise of ‘working on my novel’ and chowed down on every old favourite I could find to lubricate the old pink matter. When I think back to being a kid and sneaking off to read the dirty bits in my mum’s Jackie Collins or rewinding Dad’s Basic Instinct tape about six bloody times, I wonder how I survived. Now, it’s everywhere and not so titillating.

Chat rooms can be another source of titillation. I know modesty forbids me to say I’m brilliant at dirty talk but I am brilliant at dirty talk. How it works is you snare them in the chat rooms, get them begging for a private text chat in WhatsApp or Kik and then haul them in. Once they’re in the app, they’re in my trap.

Hee hee hee.

Admittedly, sexting gets a little annoying when predictive text spoils the fun – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said I wanted to ‘duck his vock’ or asked a guy to ‘cum in my wasp’ or ‘lick my Pudsey’. One guy offered to ‘suck my bipolars’. Some of them get quite demanding. Skyping works better but it involves shaving and losing weight and I just can’t be bothered at the moment. Chatting to three or four at once, it’s like working in Argos during the Christmas rush. One wants an ass shot, another wants a tit shot, some guy in Australia’s going to bed soon and needs to watch me cum on camera and one guy in Toronto wants to chat about suicidal thoughts he’s had since his brother’s death. Oh, yeah. I get all sorts.

Last time, me and one of my regulars were on about meeting up at a London hotel – he wanted to tie me up. Another said he’d meet me in a dark alleyway and do exactly what I said: grab me and tear at my clothes, grasp my neck like a nettle and bite my ear as he whispered nasty things into it – just like I wanted him to.

I stop short at asking if I can kill them after; if I can lie underneath them, dressed in their blood, while they emit their dying breaths on top of me.

Baby steps and all that.

But the best – the absolute best thrill of all – is going fishing. And I don’t mean for carp or tench. I mean big fish. Big, horny fish who only come out at night to prowl the streets, looking for female office workers walking home alone or pissed-up damsels in distress stumbling back from the clubs. I like to play said damsel from time to time. I like to play the victim. It’s so damn easy when you’ve got an eight-inch chef’s knife in your coat pocket.