by Allan Watson
There were more security men at the front doors of the hospital but no-one prevented me from leaving. I hailed another taxi and told the driver to take me to St Andrew’s. As we crossed the Tay Bridge, the early morning sunlight sparkled on the still waters like a necklace of shimmering gold. It was a beautiful sight. Even as I looked out from my shattered temple I could not fail to appreciate its beauty. Perhaps it was this sight that finally allowed me to weep as I left Denise’s mournful little ghost on the other side of the water.
CHAPTER 18
Breakfast was a solemn affair on the morning Grandfather Crone was due to return to hospital. If he had been leaving for good, it might have been a happy occasion, but I knew the hospital would deem his visit an outstanding success and send him back permanently next time. The old man sat across the breakfast table from me, his face smeared with scrambled egg and bits of soggy toast. James thought this hilarious and continually kicked my shin beneath the table trying to make me laugh, but humour was beyond me that morning. I had a secret that ruined my appetite. It stuck in my throat like a sharpened fish bone.
Mum was very quiet and I guessed she had a hangover. I was glad as I didn’t know if I would be able to feign any sort of conversation with her. My thoughts were as scrambled as the eggs on my plate. What I had heard the night before was beyond my comprehension. Mum and my grandfather committing a sexual act together. The knowledge of what they had done burned like a fever in my head. It was a swollen tumour pushing all my normal thoughts to one side, the way a baby cuckoo shoves its adopted brothers and sisters from the nest.
Even though I guessed mum had carried out the unspeakable act to protect James, Brenda and I, it still didn’t diminish the sense of gut churning shame. I was seeing my mother with different eyes. I was seeing her in the same light that I might view a prostitute. I tried to think of all the good things she had done for me over the years. She had worked hard ever since my dad died to keep us fed and clothed. She had kept a roof over our heads and ensured we never went without, when a little extra money was needed for school trips and stuff like that. But no matter how hard I tried to exemplify her for her crime, I knew she would be forever tarnished in my mind.
Grandfather Crone coughed and sprayed the table with tiny chunks of scrambled egg making James giggle. My brother’s mirth made the old man laugh too, causing more food to become airborne. I excused myself and left the table before I was tempted to stick my fork through his eyeball. In the privacy of my bedroom I threw myself onto the bed and cried a little. A fourteen year old boy is not designed to carry such a heavy load on his shoulders. I had lain on that same bed through the hours of darkness, unable to sleep, wondering just how bad the situation really was. I had tried to rationalise what mum had done. Was masturbating him any worse than having to wipe his arse after he went to the toilet? Or giving him a bath? The intimacy of both these duties would have meant her seeing his penis at close quarters. Perhaps in her mind it wasn’t such a big deal seeing to his sexual needs, especially if she knew she was keeping her children safe in the process.
Each time I made it sound better to myself, a maverick little voice in my head would stick a spanner in the works by whispering that maybe she hadn’t just masturbated him, maybe she had taken his penis into her mouth and sucked him off. My friend Alex had told me women did such things. Worse still, perhaps she had even allowed him to fuck her. I had a vivid image of mum lying on his bed with her legs spread wide open and the old man lying between them thrusting away to his heart’s content. The thought made me want to vomit.
I decided to wait in my room until the ambulance arrived to pick up Grandfather Crone. A plan was developing in my head. If I told the doctors that the old man had touched me sexually, surely they wouldn’t send him back. I was scared however that they might not believe me and call me a liar. Worse, they might decide boys who told lies of such a wicked nature might need a spell in hospital themselves. The idea was not an appealing one. I had heard they stuck electrodes to your head and fried your brain with electric shocks.
The sound of the telephone ringing downstairs interrupted my train of thought. I heard mum answer it, and although I strained to hear what was being said, I couldn’t make out the gist of the conversation. Eventually the telephone was hung back in its cradle and I tensed as mum’s footsteps came up the stairs. My room door opened and mum walked over to the bed, sitting on the end of it. For the first time I realised how pale her face was and how deep the shadows were beneath her eyes. She made no effort to meet my gaze and I suddenly wondered if she suspected I knew her dark secret. The thought was uncomfortable and lay like a greasy piece of food in my belly.
The heavy silence stretched out for a few moments before she finally said, ‘That was the hospital. The ambulance is going to be at least three hours late in picking up your Grandfather. I’m not feeling too well this morning, so maybe you could take him for a walk somewhere. It would give me the chance to lie down for a while.’
Without even waiting for an answer, she stood up and left the room. Moments later I heard her retching in the bathroom. The thought of taking Grandfather Crone for a walk would have horrified me under normal circumstances, but knowing what had transpired between him and mum made it all the worse. I had no choice however. If mum really did suspect that I knew more than I should about the special medicine she administered to her father, then my refusal would damn me as guilty. I would take the old man for a walk and with a bit of luck I might even manage to lose him somewhere dangerous, like down at the railway tracks or the abandoned quarry.
In the end, our walk took us to Springburn Park. When I trudged downstairs, Grandfather Crone was waiting for me with his jacket on and his black cane in his hand. Mum had cleaned him up but when he grinned insanely at me I noticed his false teeth were still furred with yellow egg. James had made himself scarce and Brenda still hadn’t returned home. I wondered what my sister would do when the old man came to lodge with us on a permanent basis. After all she could hardly stay at her friend’s house forever could she? At the time the thought made me smile, but I had no idea how close to the truth I was.
As if communicating with a domestic animal, I gestured for Grandfather Crone to follow me and led him from the house, acutely aware of how embarrassed I would be if any of my friends saw me. All the way along the long road to the park I walked in front of the old man in the hope that people wouldn’t know I was with him. As long as I could hear the tapping of his cane on the pavement I knew he was still following. When the sound became faint and agitated, I knew I was walking too fast for him and slowed down. Twice he stopped dead and both times I turned to find him grinning at thin air, seemingly enraptured by something not visible to human eyes. I wondered if his mental condition gave him access to parts of the spectrum I could not see, just like dogs can hear at higher frequencies than us. On these occasions I had to tug at his jacket sleeve before he moved along. I found touching him, even his clothes, distasteful and repulsive, and I did not bother to hide my feelings. Grandfather Crone was not sensitive to that sort of insulting behaviour from people. I think in fact he relished it in his own strange way.
By the time we reached the park, I was sweating from the hot sun overhead. I could feel the skin on my nose beginning to tingle and knew it would burn and peel if we didn’t get into the shade soon. I didn’t envy Grandfather Crone with his heavy jacket. He must have been boiling alive inside it. At least I hoped he was.
I kept to the main pathways of the park. If I had walked on the grass I wouldn’t have been able to hear the tapping of his cane. Maybe it was the heat, but my hatred of the old man grew as we walked. In my mind’s eye I saw him suddenly keel over from heat stroke, his puckered little face scraping painfully along the gravel path, his muscles jerking spastically as his heart gave out. I wanted it to happen so badly that every time he was a little slow bringing down his cane, my heart would flutter in excited expectation.
The heat began to bend my thoughts
in exotic ways. I suddenly wondered if mum had washed her hands between milking the old man and making my breakfast. One more thing to hate my Grandfather for. I wondered if Gran Crone had used the same method to pacify him when his testosterone levels soared. I tried to imagine her wrinkly old hands around his equally wrinkly old prick. Would she have passed the advice on to my mum before she died? One more piece of valuable information to go with the family recipes and old wives remedies. Priceless heirlooms passed from one generation to the next; chicken soup, poultices and the quickest way to wank off Grandfather Crone.
Back in those days, Springburn Park was a good place to go. It had an oval shaped boating pond with fibre glass boats you propelled along the water with hand pedals, and there was always a queue at least a mile long to get on them. There was a massive hot-house that gave the Botanical Gardens a decent run for its money. The park also had tennis courts and a good sized putting green. At the far end of the park there were a handful of football pitches and even a cricket green complete with changing pavilion. The park had two different duck ponds filled with baggie minnows and doc-fish, and there were islands in the middle of the ponds where ducks and swans made their nests. It also had a flag pole, the site of which was the highest natural spot in Glasgow. It was a place of magic and adventure.
These days the park is neglected and dowdy, the victim of budget trimming. All the little boats are gone and only crisp packets and used condoms sail on the high seas of its dirty water. Most of the swings have been uprooted and never replaced. The hot-house sits derelict like the bones of a huge dinosaur picked clean by vultures. It is still an officially listed building so the council can’t knock it down, but neither will they restore it, so they give the vandals a free hand in taking it apart piece by piece. The flag pole fell down one night in a gale and killed someone. It was sold for scrap. A visit to Springburn Park nowadays is like meeting an old friend you’ve not seen for a while, who is dying of cancer.
There is one more spot in the park that is now gone forever. The Garden of Remembrance. For such a busy public park, the garden of remembrance always seemed to be quiet and mostly empty. It was surrounded by tall hedges that blocked out all but the faintest sounds of city life. A small green rectangle that existed in its own secluded bubble of time. Although I never once saw a gardener at work in there, its flower beds were always the most colourful and well tended in the entire park. The turf was perpetually smooth enough for carpet bowls and even the wooden benches were clean and free of graffiti. I sometimes imagined that mysterious fairy gardeners came in the dead of night to tend to the garden’s needs, slipping away again before dawn.
The Garden of Remembrance is where I took Grandfather Crone. At the time I was thinking of a particular wooden bench that sat in the shade of an old beech tree. I had developed a headache in the heat and I felt queasy, probably caused by not eating my breakfast. I didn’t want to be in the park at all and I blamed Grandfather Crone for forcing me to be there. My resentment of him was reaching dangerous levels.
The Garden of Remembrance was empty as I had hoped, and I wandered over to the bench, sitting down on one end. Free at last of the sun’s tormenting touch, I put my head in my hands and leaned forward, closing my eyes. I was short on both sleep and sustenance. I could hear Grandfather Crone’s cane tapping along the path, getting closer and closer until he stopped a few feet away from me. I imagined I heard his bones creak as he sat down beside me. Then I dismissed Grandfather Crone and let my mind become blank for a time.
The sound of the old man’s cane rattling against concrete jerked me from the half doze I had fallen into. I squinted open my eyes to be blinded by an intense flash of argent light. It made me groan aloud and sent bolts of fire deep into my brain. The cane had rolled on to the pathway which was at the mercy of the sun, and the sun’s rays were reflecting from the silver handle. I reached out and grabbed at the ebony walking stick, dragging it back into the shaded. I wondered if the old man had knocked the cane over deliberately to annoy me. I knew he wasn’t as daft as he made out. Mental or not, his spite still held intelligence. I convinced myself that he had meant it. That was all the spark it needed to set off the tinder dry funeral pyre that my mind had become. It didn’t just burn. It blazed.
I raised my head and squinted into Grandfather Crone’s brightly flushed face, seeing with no small satisfaction that the sun was also troubling him. His eyes rolled wildly and the tip of his pink tongue constantly poked from his little O of a mouth. Seeing I was looking at him he began to whistle, filling the Garden of Remembrance with the sound of a strange undiscovered species of bird. A stunted, hunched bird that flies only at night over bloodied battlefields. It was a creepy sound.
I reached out and slapped Grandfather Crone hard across the cheek.
‘Stop that fucking whistling,’ I hissed softly.
The whistling halted immediately to be replaced by a low hooting. The old man’s tongue had stopped its roving and vanished inside his mouth. His eyes temporarily focused on me and his expression was one of curiosity. I had hoped for fear, and later I would not be disappointed, but right then I done nothing more than make Grandfather Crone pay attention. He looked like an animal whose food you have hidden. If he had stayed attentive, then what transpired between us in the next few minutes need never have happened. Grandfather Crone didn’t have the concentration span for such a feat however. After about ten seconds of intense eye balling, he began to laugh in that horrible hoo-hooing voice. The sound pumped the bellows that maintained the flames to my brain.
‘I hate you, you pathetic old bastard’
In the stillness of the gardens, my voice seemed overloud. I spoke more softly. ‘I’ve always hated you Grandfather Crone. You’re nothing but a worthless old piece of shite. I wish you’d die, everyone does. Even my mum.’
Grandfather Crone laughed all the harder, tears now brimming in his mirth filled eyes. He found it all very amusing. I got angrier.
‘You think this is a good laugh? See how funny you think this is then. I heard what my mum was doing to you last night, you diseased old fucking pervert. I’m going to tell the doctors at the hospital. They’ll never let you out again, you hear me? They’ll lock you away forever and throw away the key.’
I thought this would stop him laughing at me, but he continued as before - and worse - he began rubbing at his crotch with his hand. To my horror and disgust, the cheap material of his trousers was already tented with his erection. The hooting became excited gibbering and he started tugging at the zipper on his trousers. He was like a small boy who wanted desperately to show me what he had found beneath a stone in the garden. He actually thought I was praising him.
I picked up the cane and whipped it across the side of his head, the impact of the wood against his flesh making his ear bleed. Grandfather Crone stopped laughing and a bright whoop of pain leapt from his mouth. His hand, which had seconds before been caressing himself was now cupping his injured ear. For the first time he actually looked scared. I relished the power I was weilding. Getting to my feet I raised the cane and brought it down on his head. The blow was clumsy and badly timed, giving the old man a chance to bring his hands up to protect his face. I broke at least three of his fingers.
A new sound emerged from his mouth. A sound I had never head before. It was a cross between a mother mourning the death of her child and a dying dolphin. If nothing else, I had recaptured his attention. He held his injured hands out towards me as if trying to communicate to me that he did not like this game. This game hurt him. It was causing him pain. I took another swipe at his hands and broke some more of his fingers. Grandfather Crone threw himself down onto his knees, his crude intelligence letting him recall the one gesture of surrender that might save his life.
He knelt before me, his bald head exposed and completely vulnerable. I studied it for a moment seeing bumps and ridges I had never been aware of before. The cane felt smooth and perfect in my hand, the lustrous finish of the wood almo
st pleading to be put to work. I stared down again at Grandfather Crone’s bare, defenceless head.
And then I beat him to death, while the burning sun above me looked on as a silent witness.
CHAPTER 19
I paid the taxi driver with a twenty pound note and did not wait for my change. I would have no use for money where I was going. Prisons have their own currency. I watched the cab bump its way along the cobbled street before turning out of sight. With one last look along Market Street, I let myself into the flat and climbed the stairs. Teri was waiting for me in the living room. Beside her were two packed suitcases. Her face was etched harshly with lines of grief. I barely recognised her. She said nothing as I entered the room. Alice sat in a chair, her gaze reminiscent of the dying boy in Denise’s hospital bed. I don’t think she was even aware that I was there. She sat so completely still, like a mannequin made of porcelain. The springs and gears that had once propelled her so gaily through life now locked solid. Alice would never again be the darling Polter-child I had loved so dearly.
I looked again at the suitcases. ‘You’re going home then?’
Teri just continued staring at me. There was something in her stance that reminded me of DCI Moore. All that hatred and loathing, barely restrained by her self control which was close to breaking down. I could almost hear her flesh creak as it withstood the fury pushing against it from the inside.