by Alex Boast
The gods hold us in their brutal, clumsy hands.
That girl – whoever she was – was clearly wrong. Probably a first year, trying to impress an obvious third year like me with her textbook knowledge; there’s simply no way a statue to a Trojan princess, a famous priestess of Athena, no less – would be crumbling in the basement of this museum.
Instead, it is likely the beautiful mourner was a simple aristocrat. She doesn’t need a name, she still has a face, and she’s still going to help me pass my paper when I come back tomorrow.
If I come back tomorrow.
I’m already on the bus again, the events at the museum a collage of sinister senses floating in my mind.
Every time I forget to take my anti-anxiety meds, the memory is the first to go, and the paranoia is the last to leave.
But I can’t stop thinking about it: her ID badge.
Who was she?
Curiosity gets the better of me and I tear my smartphone from my pocket, typing “London Classical Studies Student News” into my search app.
There it is.
Eye floaters try to distract me and everything around my phone spins as the bus enters more traffic, but her name stays solid in front of me:
Classical Studies Student Cassandra Prim Dead Aged 18: Suicide.
The Declaration of Sin-Dependence:
“I guess there’s going to be another funeral,”
I reach through the open window and a cloud of smoke to snatch the keys from the ignition.
His long, dirty claws scratch at my own.
Smells of wine, tobacco and fear.
“I can’t remember what the sun looks like, Bradley,” he says.
“But it’s shining right now, look!”
“Not for me.”
Before I can stop him, the car has pulled away and sped off down a road darker than my thoughts.
History repeats.
The car feels heavy.
There’s something clinging to the bottom of it.
I speed up to try and knock it off.
60, 70, swerving round country lanes in the dark, my car must look as drunk as I feel.
The dark twigs and leaves forming a canvas over my head must hide the eyes.
Hundreds of eyes.
I try not to think about it and accelerate even harder as the lanes get tighter.
I love a challenge.
I check the side mirror.
Black and white.
Must be a badger.
Or the local school uniform?
Fuck.
Slam the brakes and take a deep breath, which doesn’t help when there’s a joint in your mouth.
Lose control of the wheels, slipping on the bumpy, neglected tarmac of the ancient road.
Something like anger but wetter spills from my eye as my windscreen vision approaches a thick tree trunk.
There’s no way my little car with its big speakers will survive this.
I say sorry to all the people who have left me behind, as I leave everyone behind.
It’s OK, I’m coming.
“I’m so sorry,” I announce to those gathered, placing my glass of warm water onto the mahogany table, careful not to spill any onto the sheepskin.
“He was never the same after the funeral. He said London was a place full of miserable people telling each other how to be less miserable, and he didn’t want to be part of its hypocrisy anymore… he turned to drugs as a way of coping I guess… he said he knew the secret,” I continue, as the family he left behind stare at me like what he did was my fault.
They look at me like I’m one of life’s victims, but all I am is a six-foot mirror.
Maybe it was my fault, I couldn’t stop him.
“I’m sorry.”
A mother, a father, a brother, a sister, and more, look at me with tear filled eyes. The only noise is the ticking of the grandfather clock in the long hall, and the silence.
They looked up to him. Tomorrow, they’ll look down, at the coffin as it enters the ground.
They think because I’m not crying that I don’t feel. That I’m a monster.
They don’t know I’d drown each of them, if I let it out.
They don’t know how guilty I am.
They don’t know I sold him the drugs.
They don’t know how much I hate them in this moment. They don’t know this isn’t the first friend we’ve buried. They don’t know that he knew: that a nice car, boyband good looks and a polite demeanour means that any old Surrey cop will let you off with a warning.
He knew that. He knew a lot of things.
He knew he was invincible, right up until his body burned like my eyes do at this moment, exploding in anger against that tree. I hope when I die, it’s in a fiery explosion of emotion and not in some Facebook misunderstanding.
I want to scream at them, shout and swear and curse in a rage they’ll never forget. If they hadn’t suffocated him with love, maybe he would have learned to love himself. If they hadn’t given him everything, maybe he would have learned the value of his own life.
But I have to remember: they lost him too.
It’s no wonder they grew so far apart, in this grand labyrinth of a house. The only things keeping them together in the end were love, blood and walls.
Now it’s all gone.
Nobody’s said anything in a while…
It isn’t long after that, that they ask me to leave. The flowers I’d brought are still in my hand, a little less plump than they used to be.
I throw them into the road as I climb into the back of my van.
What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?
Not to her.
Not to her.
I clamber over the empty paint cans and trays to the workbench I keep in the back. I keep it all in a small toolbox. Police never think to look there; they assume someone like me keeps the drugs close to hand. They assume the bottles of methylated spirits I keep next to the paint are full of exactly that.
Painter decorators aren’t that clever are they?
The taste ravaging my senses proves them wrong.
The weather takes a turn and a peal of thunder tears across the landscape.
I look out of the tiny windows at my surroundings.
His family’s drive is bigger than the floor-plan of my flat. I’ve heard the saying “what do you give the man who has everything?” Well, I’ll tell you: less.
You take away. Remove the choice, and hope the resulting rebellion is one of independence.
But it never is.
The thousands of little crunchy bits of gravel start to remind me of all my sins as the vodka and the rest of the drugs start to cloud my senses.
We’re on the top of a country hill, and the van is stationary, but I still feel like I’m falling. Rolling down the hill with Jordan like when we were kids. Only, when I open my eyes, I’m all covered in muddy paint and he’s just gone.
Gone.
Sorry buddy.
The tears start to freeze in my eyes as it gets later, colder. I go to check the time and it takes 30 seconds or so of looking at my wrist to realise I don’t own a watch. I’d look at the time on my phone but that’s gone too.
Threw it away after the funeral.
It must be getting late though. There’s almost no light left. I can only see because of the shining beacon that is Jordan’s house, casting some dark light through my vans tiny windows.
It takes effort, but I rise to peer through the glass at the stately home. Immaculate.
Flanked on either side by impressive garden sculptures and landscape architecture, it must stand three or four storeys of alabaster white.
In the centre window, if you look closely, you can see the library.
And, upon closer inspection, several faces glaring at me.
I don’t recognise any of them particularly; it is too far and I’m too gone, but the sheer malice I feel towards me is enough for me to cough a mouthful of fear and then swallow it d
own again.
I spill out of the back of the van, a liquid human, and feel the bite of the gravel into the fleshy palms of my hands as I land without grace.
“It’s ok, it’s less than I deserve,” I think, as I feel a slick of blood flow down my right wrist.
I rise with the stars, and feel my way around the edge of the van to the driver’s side door.
Finding form again, I slump in, clutching the wheel and burying my face in the horn.
It barks loudly into the night and I sob an apology to whoever will listen.
There’s a knock on the door.
History repeats.
“I guess there’s going to be another funeral”
I reach through the open window and a cloud of smoke to snatch the keys from the ignition.
His long, dirty claws scratch at my own.
Smells of piss, vomit, and a broken promise.
“I can’t remember what the sun looks like, Jordan,” he says.
“But it’s shining right now, look!”
“Not for me.”
Before I can stop him, the car has pulled away and sped off down a road darker than my thoughts.
History repeats.
“I guess there’s going to be another funeral.”
The Bird Feeders:
“See you in a week!” Mother shouts and slams the front door behind her, as 3 pairs of feet leave the building.
Finally.
Freedom.
“Oh, piss off!” I sigh, flicking the glass with a chipped nail.
The massive jackdaw fixes me with a dark steely gaze before pissing off into the night, leaving only a smudge of expensive teal nail polish on the dull glass of the huge sash window.
I shiver once.
Typical that the weather should be so shitty, whilst the rest of the family are soon to be enjoying the sun in Bermuda; their Facebook posts will be unbearable.
I’m stuck with my books, a house that creaks in the night, and worst of all, a slow internet connection.
Worth it though, to have this five bedroom house in the country to myself and enjoy a holiday of my own – Brad has just passed his driving test, and should be over soon.
School’s out, but privacy and some of mom’s sherry, are very much in.
He’s late though.
Roads are too wet and cold to drive on, he says in a text with no Xs at the end. Not happy.
I wouldn’t know, haven’t driven a car in any of my sixteen years.
All I’ve got for company is this bloody bird of prey, pecking at my window every eleven minutes.
Back already.
Nasty bastard, absolutely huge; there’s always something hanging out of his mouth.
God knows what this guy eats, but there’s something like a piece of spaghetti hanging from his black beak.
The plastic case at the end taps on the window, much like I did earlier.
It’s a shoelace.
It isn’t until a few hours later, after the sun and the rain have fallen, that I get a text message.
“NOT COMING”
And so, instead of Brad’s muscled wings wrapped around my waist whilst I sleep, I’ll lay in bed as the sun retreats, listening to the feathery flap of the jackdaw’s.
Several hours later, after a brief sleep in which I was tormented by the cries and jesting of invisible children, I awake with a dry mouth and an empty bed.
Making my way to the kitchen from my room on the third floor loft-conversion, I take note of the new house’s layout.
Brother and parents occupy the second floor, with the kitchen and lounge residing below.
An ancient and dusty carpet runs the length of the halls and stairs through the narrow centre of the tall house, whilst every other room features hard, cold wooden floorboards.
It occurs to me that the carpet might be hiding some old secrets. Far more than the bedrooms of this old Victorian “bargain” my parents recently inherited.
My toes sink into its warm embrace as I pad down the stairs, and it seems to sigh under my weight.
The air is cold and damp and deafeningly quiet for a summer morning when the birds should be singing....
The place is nice enough, I think as I pull one of Brad's thick woollen jumpers off the green leather sofa in our games room and onto my bare chest, breathing in his faint musk as I do so.
He should be here soon.
I spend the rest of the morning familiarising myself with my new surroundings, the long but thin garden and its pond in the shadow of a giant, looming tree, the road we now live on and how lonely it seems, the only area in the house with acceptable mobile phone signal... in my attic-cot by the window.
I try to keep myself from waiting by my phone as I watch for a sign that he might be coming. At least I'm not alone as I wait. The Jackdaw is back again, and struts on the other side of the sill, through the narrow glass, pausing occasionally to glare at me, then my phone as I press the button that lights up the screen – confirming 0 messages – and then back at me.
I think he lives in the tree at the end of the garden. As I was investigating earlier I saw that the previous occupant had hung not one or two but six bird-feeders from the low hanging branches of the grand beech. They swing in the dark, shrouded in shadow even during the bright sunlight of this summer day.
He flies off to peck at them sometimes, and I don't see any other birds around. The Jackdaw’s vast size seems to indicate that not only is he well fed, he's likely fought off any other winged intruders, claiming this – our – land as his own.
Something about the dark of his eyes unnerves me, and I go to check my phone again.
Hours have passed, and the thin ham sandwich I made myself for lunch sits stale on the sill next to my laptop.
I realise how tired I am from all the nothing I've been doing. Tired and thirsty. The air has lost its moisture and chill, feeling oppressively hot and dry instead, reminding me that I left my glass of water in the kitchen downstairs. It seems quite far away, as the shadows from the end of the garden reach up to stroke the house and climb in through my window.
I want, quite desperately, to leave the room.
I make it downstairs pretty fast for a weed-smoking non-athlete in her mid-teens, and can't help but cry out a little as the light evaporates from the long carpeted hallway on the ground floor leaving behind a brief impression of something in my mind’s eye before disappearing into the shadows of the encroaching night.
A couple of things have started to come easier to me recently: lying and pretending.
Lying to myself that there wasn't just a small pair of shoes with a lace missing by the front door, and pretending that I wouldn’t care even if there was.
Lying and pretending to myself that I’m not scared.
It’s easy to be the bossy older sister. Full of confidence and bravado.
But at the end of the day, the unknown scares me like it does anyone else, and this big old house in the country is full of lots of that and little old me.
That was the second night.
The dreams from the first returned: giggles and whispers in the dark, echoing through this cavernous castle I now call home. Four-foot shadows dart through my peripheral vision. Little hands touch mine inquisitively.
Many voices speak in unison, at once male and female, but I can't tell what they're saying.
Something about a metal man, but there's no man here.
I wish there was; I wished for Brad as I relented and lent my own cries to the others I could hear in each room of the house.
By the time the sun fought the shadows from my room and they untangled themselves from me, I couldn't remember where or who I was. I didn't know what day of the week it was, how long I'd been alone, or whether anyone was coming to save me.
The oppression in the air was heavier and more palpable now, and I'd have to climb out of the safety offered by my cot-bed in my cot-room to get some water, lest I perish of thirst.
As I traversed thi
s hostile, carpeted landscape, I saw I had closed every door in the house save my own and the kitchen on the ground floor. I had only the carpet for company and very little natural light despite the time of day as I moved slowly towards my refreshing goal.