by Ben J Henry
Winter ran a tongue across her upper gums. Melissa lifted the pen and lowered her gaze to the organiser.
‘Now get out.’
Same mind, different problems
She came into this world with a brush in her hand; that girl was painting before she could talk: such things could not be said of Alicia. It was not until her thirteenth birthday that she expressed any interest in her mother’s creative pursuits. In her pre-teen years, it was not indifference that Alicia felt when she saw Anna at the canvas, but resentment. Though too young to articulate her frustration, Alicia understood her desire to leave the room when her mother was painting; to keep the crayons in their box unused and the gifts of slender brushes and tiny acrylic pots unopened. With a blind brother, she could think of nothing so inconsiderate as to spend her time generating images that he would never see. Had she the talent, she might have learned to play the piano and sing, filling his dark world with music. But before Alicia learned that she had inherited her mother’s keen eye, she had echoed her capacity for singing in tune. David’s ears were to be protected.
So, Alicia described the world to him. The rainbow sheen on puddles that marked the passage of an oily wheel; the manner in which raindrops chased one another down a pane of glass, drawn by unseen bonds. It was on her thirteenth birthday that Alicia realised why her mother painted. To capture the world in its entirety, you had to see the details that others overlooked. The act of painting was not a means to an end: the artist was not driven by the desire to create something new, but to uncover what might otherwise remain unseen. Alicia pulled the unused easel from the back of her cupboard and she painted. She searched for the smallest detail and lost herself in that delicate struggle to replicate it. And then she described these details to her brother, painting his world with every hidden beauty she could find.
On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Alicia braced herself for another style of painting: the erasing of a threatening message left for her mother. Some details were best left in the dark.
The floorboards under the carpet creaked as Rory carried the can of white paint towards his bedroom. Alicia dashed through the doorway and took it from his hands, along with the pair of brushes in his pocket.
‘I’ll take these, Dad. Last thing we need is paint on the floor!’
She said it lightly, as a joke, but his hazel eyes crinkled and he pushed his empty hands into the pockets of his pyjamas. The pyjamas, striped in shades of blue, had been a Christmas present from Anna three years ago. Rory and David had received matching sets and when this was described to David he insisted that they wear them at home during the day. Since his son’s disappearance, Rory had worn little else. His eyebrows twitched and the doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it,’ he said quickly and turned for the stairs. Biting down the urge to protest, Alicia carried the paint to the bedroom. Each time her father trundled up and down the carpeted steps a die was rolled. It was only a matter of time before it landed on the wrong number and his narcolepsy struck. Rory refused to move a bed downstairs like an invalid, and his nights on the sofa had become an unspoken compromise while Anna was away.
Alicia placed the can at the foot of the bed and heard two pairs of feet down the corridor. Rory stepped into the room followed by a boy of her age. The boy had one hand scratching his dark, scruffy hair and the other buried in the front pocket of his hooded jacket.
‘This is Gus Crow, the boy next door.’ Rory beamed as though he had found one of her childhood heroes in the street. ‘He’s offered to help with the painting.’ He clapped his hands together and shrugged. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then—we’ve only two brushes.’
Not remotely abashed that he was in his pyjamas, Rory winked at his daughter and left. There were a dozen brushes in a cupboard down the side alley and Alicia had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being set up.
‘Thought you might need a hand.’ Gus offered his and the pair greeted one another in a formal, awkward manner. His smile was playful, but with the dark lines under his eyes, he might have passed for an undead extra in a low-budget horror movie.
‘I was wondering if anyone would ever take that house,’ said Alicia. ‘You’ve just moved in, this weekend?’
Gus put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and nodded.
‘Green as they come.’
‘You’re Irish?’ said Alicia, gesturing as though to his voice box. ‘My dad, he’s—’
‘Dublin, yeah, he said. My mother’s from Galway, I grew up there. So to speak.’
‘I’ve never been. Dublin, or Galway—not to Ireland. If half of my dad’s university stories are true I doubt they’d let him back in the country.’
Gus smiled politely and folded his arms, never still for a moment.
‘You weren’t in school today?’
‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ Alicia answered.
‘I bet. Mum’s out searching for your brother, you’ve crazies writing messages on your walls, and your dad’s sleeping for the both of you!’
Alicia tensed, unaware that her mouth was open. He wasn’t being obtuse; she heard no malice or mockery in his tone. His expression was placid.
‘And what’s your excuse?’ she asked, cocking her head and mirroring his folded arms. ‘You look like you haven’t slept in a week.’
‘Weeks. Plural,’ he said, grinning. ‘Let’s call it insomnia.’
Alicia saw the details that others overlooked. Gus was confident, but his relaxed attitude was feigned. The self-consciousness in his eyes was reflected in his quick movements. He watched her with the manner of a lazy house cat that might leap into action at the hint of a threat.
‘What will you do about her?’ asked Gus, nodding vaguely at the wall.
‘Who?’
‘The artist. Winter.’
Alicia would never have told her father about the message. She would have painted over it herself while he was downstairs—made up some excuse about cracks in the wall. But she had screamed and he had woken. Rory had contacted the police immediately and the pair were surprised when their new neighbour appeared at the door two minutes later. Sergeant Crow had spoken in an irritable manner, his face reddening into his bald scalp as he informed them that he knew who was responsible. At the mention of Winter’s name, it was Alicia who had suggested that he contact Melissa Lawson. She’s the headmistress—she knows Winter—she’ll know what to do.
‘Well,’ said Alicia, following Gus’s gaze to where the letters lay invisible on the illuminated wall. ‘Winter likes to run at night. I was thinking about shaving her head, painting her scalp and giving the bats something to aim at.’
Gus laughed: a sudden burst of merriment, and Alicia’s cheeks flushed.
‘Winter has issues,’ she added softly. ‘Her boyfriend just died, so…’
‘Same mind, different problems,’ said Gus. ‘That’s what my father used to say.’
There was a curious look in his feline eyes, as though he was trying to discern the outline of the writing on the wall.
‘I’m sorry about what she did to his car,’ said Alicia.
‘That’s my uncle’s car.’
The curious look vanished in a blink and he stepped closer to the bed, feet either side of the can of paint, as he studied the painting of Rory and David.
‘So, the little lad just took off, eh?’
‘You’ve done your homework.’
‘Gotta know who’s living next door, right?’
Alicia nodded and turned to the portrait. With Gus in the room, she could not bring herself to meet her brother’s eyes. She let her gaze hover on his mouth: his lips slightly parted, as always, in anticipation of what was coming next.
‘David’s blind.’ Alicia spoke in a neutral manner, as though the two of them were assessing the evidence at a crime scene. ‘Dad had burned his hand on the radiator and Mum was applying some kind of salve. I was at the park, playing tennis. David was playing football in the garden—one of those ones with th
e bell inside? He was getting pretty good actually. Mum can’t remember when she heard the bell stop. The side gate was open. He was just… gone.’
‘I’m sorry’ hovered on Gus’s lips, but he knew how trite it sounded, having heard it countless times over the past year. Saying nothing, he crossed to the portrait of Alicia and her mother and picked up the book on the bedside table.
‘Lucid dreaming?’
Alicia shook her head. ‘Mum got into it when he disappeared.’
Gus read a line from the back of the book: ‘Wake up within the dream and meet your subconscious face to face.’
‘I guess everyone needs an escape from reality.’
Gus nodded. ‘Can I borrow this?’
Alicia grinned and shrugged. ‘Sure.’
Gus studied his neighbour. Dark hair framed a heart-shaped face and her porcelain skin was so white that it made her green eyes luminous, like the glowing roof of his uncle’s car. Alicia’s eyes were confident and her smile genuine. She was an open book, honest, and—given how readily she had accepted help with this sensitive task—terribly lonely.
Alicia registered pity in the boy’s eyes and nodded to the can at her feet.
‘We’d better get started. At least one of us might get a decent sleep tonight!’
Gus nodded to the paintings on the wall. ‘Let’s get these down.’
Alicia stiffened. She waited for Gus to reach out for the portrait of her and her mother before quickly lifting her father and David from the wall. She lowered the painting to the floor with one hand pressed against the posters concealed behind the canvas.
When Gus lifted Alicia’s portrait from the wall, something fell from behind it. A small book landed on the pillow with a soft thud. Gus froze with the painting in his hands: something hidden—something private—he fought an urge to look away, his eyes fixed on a symbol embossed on the black leather cover. Alicia stepped around the bed and lifted the book in both hands, tracing a nail across the chipped gold foil in its centre. An oval folded in on itself in the middle to create the image of an eye, and from the top of the inner circle a jagged line struck a bolt of lightning across the iris.
Something hidden, something private; before Alicia could give her rational mind a second to play with, she turned the cover. Scrawled upon the creased pages, in a cursive script that might befit a biblical scroll, names had been crossed out. Gus watched Alicia flick through the book, spanning dozens of names until they ended abruptly, over halfway through, and gave way to blank pages.
Alicia thumbed to the last marked page. Of the eight names, two were yet to be struck through. Her heartbeat found a new rhythm as her eyes locked upon the final name in her mother’s hidden book: Melissa Lawson.
The house next door
Unopened boxes surrounded the single bed. The white sheet slung across the mattress was untucked and the pillow had been stuffed inside a T-shirt, its pillowcase hidden within one of the boxes. The wardrobe door was open, revealing two wire coat-hangers draped in cobwebs. A hooded jacket and black jeans lay discarded in a crumpled pile by the door. Gus lifted the sash window to coax a breeze into his stuffy bedroom and collapsed back on his bed, dressed only in a pair of charcoal-grey sweatpants. Eager eyes roved the pages of the book in his hands, mining its content as though to unearth the secret to eternal life.
But it was not life that Gus was after. It was the chance to escape the waking world for a few hours each night, to break that interminable cycle before the rising sun cast long shadows, rolling out the carpet for a carbon copy of yesterday’s struggles. In the twelve months he had spent in the reluctant care of his father’s twin brother, Gus had been expelled from three public schools in Galway and subjected to a string of home tutors, each flummoxed by his attitude to learning. At seventeen, Gus could have found himself a job, or an internship, had he any motivation. Joe insisted that, while Gus deliberated, he might at least attempt to turn his grades around.
‘There’s something wrong with that boy,’ he had heard one tutor comment as she informed his uncle that it would be her final visit. ‘He’s got the ability, all right—he’s not lacking in that department. But I’ve never met a child with such a complete and utter disregard—’
‘Thank you for your time,’ his uncle had seen her out, having spotted Gus’s feet through the banisters at the top of the stairs. At school, it was his peers that had driven him to distraction: their relentless competition to determine who was the best at everything that could be measured, and then to lord this, consciously or otherwise, over everyone else. Had Gus known that he would be exchanging the tedious displays of his self-obsessed peers with the maddening silence of his tight-lipped uncle, he might have made more of an effort in class.
‘He doesn’t mean to be difficult,’ a counsellor had consoled the policeman during an exit interview at his previous school, speaking as though Gus was not lounging in the chair beside him. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind.’
That much was true, and Gus was certain that he would have a good deal less on his mind if he were able to process it; and in order to do that, he needed to sleep.
On the box of clothes that Gus was using as a bedside table sat an old lamp that he had found at the back of the wardrobe. The jagged glass rim of a broken shade was visible and the naked bulb glowed with a fervent brightness, straining to prove its value. Under the glare, a small white pot, unlabelled, contained the pills that Gus took each night before he climbed beneath the sheet. The pills promised eight hours of dreamless sleep, and this promise was a lie. His uncle had bent some rules and broken others to source the medication and insisted that they would work just fine if Gus tired himself out with exercise, rather than drifting around the house converting oxygen to carbon dioxide. Rarely one to follow his uncle’s instructions, Gus had started running at night in an effort to quiet his racing mind. Yet his mind raced on.
He was reading a chapter on the different ways to initiate a lucid dream, from both the waking and dreaming states, when he was disturbed by the sound of a car. Heaving leaden limbs from the bed, he dropped the book on the desk leaning against the wardrobe and pressed his forehead to the window. Midnight was approaching, and Sergeant Crow had finally returned from the station. The orange glare from a street light glanced off the policeman’s scalp as he ran a hand over the dent in the roof of the vehicle, muttered something inaudible and turned for the front door. A knot tightened in Gus’s stomach as he raised his eyes to the house next door. The master bedroom was dark, but light from the corridor spilled through the doorway. Someone was still up.
He had caught sight of the names on that last marked page before Alicia snapped the book shut and tossed it at the foot of the bed like something inconsequential. He had cleared his throat and proceeded to pry the lid from the can of paint, as if he had seen nothing of interest. And so began the charade, with both parties acting like there was nothing suspicious about a list of names hidden behind the painting of a woman accused of murder.
As the pair painted over Winter’s message, the air had been heavy with unspoken thoughts. Gus caught Alicia staring at the painted image of her mother, face-up on the floor. It was the only image of Anna Harrington that he had seen.
‘Is that your work?’ he asked, caught by the equine eyes on the canvas.
‘A few years back.’
‘You’ve some talent.’
Painting over the message had not taken long. Two minutes later, Alicia was thanking Gus for his help and—through an unconvincing smile—wishing the insomniac a good sleep. He had returned the smile and thanked her for the book on lucid dreaming before making his exit.
He reached home with a pounding heart, taking the stairs two at a time, his limbs thrumming with adrenaline. Eight names had been written on the page: six struck through and two remaining. He had recognised the name at the bottom of the page, having been in the headmistress’s office that afternoon. But it was the last name to be crossed out that had him pulling the phone from his po
cket. He keyed ‘Jack Henson’ into the internet browser.
The first hit, a news report from Surrey Speaks, showed a well-built blond boy of his age, smiling with hands gripping the shoulders of his teammates. Seventeen-year-old drowns in school pool: the headline was followed by details of the police investigation. Found by the art teacher, Anna Harrington. Gus swallowed, his throat dry, staring at the image for over a minute until all he saw was the absolute certainty in Winter’s eyes.
Now he looked through the window of Anna’s empty bedroom, through the open doorway to the lit corridor, wondering whether Alicia was speaking with her father. Were they talking about the boy next door, fearing what he had seen?
There was a single rap on the door behind him and Gus’s uncle stepped into the bedroom. Joe Crow was a heavyset man with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, half an inch shorter than his nephew but twice his mass. Wrinkles ran in lines from his small, dark eyes to the edges of his hairless scalp as he surveyed the scene before him.
His irritable gaze drifted from the pile of clothes at his feet to the unopened boxes before settling on the desk against the wall. Amongst the spoils of an upturned bag—mobile phone charger, micro-USB cable, half-finished pack of chewing gum, house keys—he spotted the cover of Anna’s book. Gus turned from the window as his uncle crossed the room in two strides. Keys slid, jangling to the floor, as Joe snatched the book from the desk.
‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked, eyeing Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner’s Guide as though it were a magazine filled with obscene material. Gus took a glance at the pristine, navy Surrey Police uniform and grinned, ready to be arrested for possession of dangerous goods. He sat on the bed with his legs crossed beneath him and his hands on his knees.
‘Alicia Harrington lent it to me.’