by Ben J Henry
Her eyes latched onto the stained-glass window high in the wall of the church. This large, circular window contained tiny pieces of glass, irregular in shape yet tessellating as though shattered and painstakingly reassembled. Each glass fragment, as diaphanous as the wings of a dragonfly, appeared to be a different colour, though this may have been a trick of the light that struck the window from behind. As she ran her eyes across it, she could discern no pattern.
Her mother would have spotted the pattern. Anna Harrington, devout believer in fate, would have understood what it all meant. She would have explained how each fragment had been assembled for a reason, fitting together to form one coherent whole. But all Alicia saw was chaos.
Noses were wiped. Eyes watered under heavy brows and trembling lips offered grave condolences: ‘I’m so sorry.’ Alicia remembered a time before David’s disappearance when there had been other words in their vocabularies.
‘Your mum is so weird!’ said a friend after Alicia’s mother burst into the bedroom to show them a ring she had purchased from a homeless man. Her friend had almost fallen off the bed, recoiling from the iron band as if it were a cockroach. Anna’s eyes, wild with enormous black pupils, darted between Alicia’s face and the ring as she pointed out marks on its surface: a faded pattern that she was managing to interpret as a story.
‘Don’t tell your father,’ Anna said with a wink when they asked how much she had paid for it. A week later, Alicia spotted a painting of the ring on her mother’s easel and asked her where it was. Anna’s smile had been devilish.
‘I snuck it back in his cap when he wasn’t looking,’ she had whispered, biting her lip at this devious trick.
Anna Harrington was weird. Not in a disturbing way, like Alicia’s biology teacher, who trimmed his fingernails into sharp points and drummed them on his desk when the students were not listening. Not in an irritating way, like Uncle Niall, who found it necessary to explain precisely why his jokes were funny when only Rory laughed. Anna chose not to behave as society prescribed. If there was a more interesting or amusing way of doing something, then that was the preferable option.
At eleven years old, when Alicia’s growing self-awareness manifested as acute self-consciousness, her mother’s unorthodox character became a point of contention.
‘Take it off,’ Alicia had hissed when Anna walked through the living room wearing a lime-green balaclava. Her mother had stopped with her hand on the front door and looked back at the sofa, where Alicia was reading to David.
‘It’s freezing outside,’ Anna had remarked.
‘People will think you look crazy.’
‘Yes, darling. And I will think that they look cold.’
It was not until the age of fifteen, and many such exchanges later, that Alicia realised an undeniable truth: almost everybody adored her mother. And those few that did not like Anna Harrington were awkward, angry characters who had forgotten how to smile.
‘Conformity isn’t her thing,’ Alicia remarked to her friends in class with a shrug. Mrs Harrington was a teacher who believed that, so long as you demonstrated creativity, it was all right—if not preferable—to be as noisy, messy and downright inappropriate as possible. Some of the parents found her subject matter a little mature; some of the governors were still sore from the Ofsted incident with the contraceptive balloon animals; and lazier students had suffered from her frank assessment when effort was lacking. But Mrs Harrington’s lessons were inspiring and had fostered a love for art in a school where the subject was compulsory.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Rory’s hand was so hot it burned Alicia’s skin. She stared at a patch of sky between the corner of the church and the tree beside it. This rectangle of blue was so sharp that it appeared to be in the foreground of her vision, with the tree and church behind it, like an optical illusion.
For three days, the world had presented itself to her in this manner. Look at this! Her mind had cried at the reflection in the glass as she brushed her teeth. Do you really think this is real?
She had once returned from a family holiday in Tokyo and it had taken two days after the flight for her ears to pop. She had not known that her hearing was diminished until her ears crackled and the subtle sounds of her surroundings flooded back. Since Vivador, something had popped. Her thoughts were no longer diminished, and her subconscious had a lot to say.
Not all these thoughts were welcome. Between the grey matter and the roof of her skull, a truth refused to sink in: her mother had fallen down the stairs at Melissa Lawson’s house and broken her neck.
But it was reality that had died.
For three days, she had failed to dream lucidly. Following comprehensive internet research, her bedroom floor was littered with Post-it Notes scrawled with every dream she could recall: a process recommended to increase awareness of the dream state and trigger lucidity.
‘Am I dreaming?’ Alicia asked herself several times each day, a reality check that increased the likelihood of asking this question in a dream. When Rory had caught her asking her reflection in the kitchen sink, he had given her a curious look.
Her mind whirred in a futile effort to separate truth from fiction, reality from fantasy, and the longer she remained in the waking world, the more abstract her thoughts became. The fragments of dreams that lay strewn across her carpet echoed a rising paranoia: crows watching from the boughs of trees that tapped her bedroom window; Gus fighting through a crowd at the funeral with a book in his hand; Melissa Lawson dipping her quill in black ink and scribbling names on wrinkled parchment. She craved the static tranquillity of pine forests and the cool certainty of glacial eyes.
On the evening of the funeral, Alicia looked at the alarm clock, away and back again to find it obstinately glowing 20:42. She threw the clammy bedcovers aside, abandoning her latest attempt to find solace in the immaterial realm. Wearing only underwear and one of her mother’s old Bowie T-shirts, she walked to the bathroom. She washed her hands under the tap and wondered how each finger directed itself without her conscious attention. If she was not moving her fingers, then who was? She slunk back down the corridor and recognised the clipped tones of her headmistress.
‘—to at least consider it.’
‘I’m not sure, Melissa. It’s good for her to be at home…’
Her father’s voice was tired and troubled. Alicia’s bare feet padded down the carpeted steps. Through the banisters, she saw two untouched cups of tea on the table by the sofa. Rory’s round face was red and his eyes groggy, like a lost boy at a theme park, waiting for his parents to collect him.
‘Good for you, perhaps. But we should put her best interests at heart, and question which of the two of us can offer your daughter the support she needs.’
Melissa Lawson was sitting in an armchair with her back to Alicia. Her clipped tones carried up the stairs.
‘She has lost her brother and now her mother. Without intervention, I fear that she may lose her mind.’
Alicia descended the stairs with rigid, robotic steps as the blood in her temples thickened. Through the scream of insidious thoughts, memories surfaced, real and imaginary: Melissa’s kind smile as she prised the poster of David from Alicia’s blue fingers; Anna’s wild eyes as she was pushed down the stairs.
The head in the armchair turned her way and a shadow crossed Alicia’s vision. Melissa’s lips were parted, her grey eyes wide.
‘Get out,’ said Alicia.
Her father twitched, his eyes pleading.
Alicia opened her mouth and screamed those two words until her voice was hoarse. She clutched the banisters as Rory ushered the headmistress through the archway to the front door. Alicia’s ears were muffled as she drifted through the kitchen, out of the back door and into the garden, where smoke rose from the remnants of a barbecue on the patio. Blinking her eyes, she spotted her mobile phone on a garden chair.
Seventeen calls to her mother, unanswered.
Twenty-four messages from family and frien
ds, unread.
If you killed those people, don’t come back.
‘Am I dreaming?’ she whispered, placing her phone on the barbecue and returning to bed.
I am a Crow
Gus stepped beneath the shower head, turned the tap on and let ice-cold water envelop him. The frigid torrent drowned out his thoughts, numbing his face, his body and his mind. The pills had stolen him to a dreamless abyss from which he had arisen with a clear head and an abundance of energy. The clouds had lifted and the world lay before him, bare and exposed.
Once showered, he caught his reflection in the mirror above the sink: the dark rings had softened around his eyes. The clouds had lifted, but the storm remained; what had lain dormant, sequestered in the shadows of a sleep-deprived mind, now surged livid through his resurrected body.
I am a Crow.
Was this volatile anger the same pervasive emotion that had driven his great-grandparents to write the Murder Book? His parents hadn’t harboured such rage. Gus’s father had been passionate and driven by his work, but always in good spirits. His mother had been a peacemaker, hating only hate itself, namely racism and war. And poor tipping, since Sylvie had waited tables at a beachside café. ‘Skimp on clothes, but not tips,’ she had told him. ‘Nobody will judge you for a bargain at the charity shop, but give a bad tip and people talk.’
Could he attribute his anger entirely to the loss of his parents, or was it his birthright as a Crow?
For three days, he had taken his pills and escaped the unpalatable truths of the waking world. When the first pill wore off, he had woken to a remarkably lucid mind and was hounded by a barrage of questions concerning Anna’s death and the murder of his parents. Unwanted thoughts demanded his attention with the fervour of an abandoned dog. He had popped another pill and left his thoughts to chase their tails without him.
Joe had not protested against his nephew spending three days in bed. Gus had woken to glasses of water at his bedside and a tray of sandwiches presumably taken from the canteen at Joe’s office in Guildford. In that unconscious abyss, Gus was as safe as Joe could keep him without locking the bedroom door and swallowing the key. It also gave the police officer the opportunity to ransack his room.
At first, Gus had woken to find his belongings as he had left them: the pot of pills at his bedside, the pile of hooded jackets half-spewn from the nearest box, his clothes decorating the floor in their allocated spots. But through a subconscious spot-the-difference, Gus knew that his uncle had searched the room while he slept. Perhaps the socks had lain beneath the green vest; perhaps it had been the blue hoodie and not the grey with both arms hanging out the box.
When the second pill wore off, he woke to find that Joe had abandoned any attempt at subtlety. His possessions had erupted from the boxes and lay sprawled across the carpet, the collateral damage of his uncle’s impatience. While his shorts might have proven effective, they were not the most comfortable solution, so Gus had found another home for the Murder Book.
Presently, he dried himself with a towel and plodded down the corridor to peer inside his uncle’s bedroom. Joe was out, presumably at work, and the large room was empty. It could have accommodated a king-size bed, but there was a single bed tucked in the corner. As if determined to take up as little space as possible, Joe had positioned his bedside cabinet at the foot of the bed and his wardrobe in the corner beside it. From subtle invasions of his own, Gus knew the bedside cabinet contained five old badges, two broken phones, a severely creased photograph of Joe skiing with Benedict and Sylvie, and an illegal firearm. He had first come across the 9mm pistol at his uncle’s home in Galway, while searching for clues concerning the death of his parents.
Gus never entered the room to look at the photograph, but it always found its way into his hands. The trio were sitting on a chairlift, his father in the middle, taking the picture with both hands. Sylvie had her head on Benedict’s shoulder, snow lining the creases on her woollen hat. Joe’s grin was so broad he looked unrecognisable. If Sylvie had not become pregnant, would Benedict have left his brother alone with their insufferable mother? If Gus had never been born, perhaps Joe Crow would have a brighter disposition.
On the cabinet, facing the bed, Joe had placed an old television on top of an older VCR player. Stacked against the cabinet were a collection of VHS videos, mostly gritty detective dramas. One of the few exceptions was the Yoga-ta-get-fitta video that Sylvie had found in a charity shop and bought Joe as a Secret Santa present (a secret that would have been better kept had she not laughed hysterically the moment he tore the wrapping paper). Gus opened the box to check that the book was still inside. It was the last place his uncle would look.
He returned to his room with guilt weighing in his gut like a sack of ball-bearings. Deceiving his uncle was justifiable: Joe was keen to return the hit list to his homicidal family; Gus was not prepared to part with the evidence that his parents had died to extract. It was Alicia’s porcelain face that haunted the corners of his vision.
He pulled on his sweatpants and gazed out of the window to see the sun high in the sky. Patting his bare stomach, he distracted himself, trying to calculate when he had last eaten. He clocked that it was now Saturday afternoon: Anna Harrington’s funeral.
Alicia had opened up to him, sharing her secrets. He had followed in Winter’s footsteps, repaying her honesty with betrayal. He had needed the book; he had needed the truth, and his efforts had not been in vain. He had a right to know what happened to his parents.
As did she.
‘What would I even say to her?’ Gus asked aloud, resenting his incessant conscience. He could find her at the funeral, find an opportune moment to pull her aside while they buried her mother, find the courage to admit that he had stolen the book hours before the murder. But it’s all right, he would say, she didn’t kill anybody. Actually, that was your great-grandparents—mine too, funnily enough. We’re second cousins, isn’t that—
Joe emerged from the front door of Alicia’s house. Glancing left and right, he marched down the empty driveway with a white package under his arm. Alicia was at her mother’s funeral and Joe was robbing her house.
The ball-bearings liquified.
Joe stepped through the doorway and made a beeline for the liquor globe. With the package tucked under his arm, he lifted a bottle from the southern hemisphere and turned at the sound of footsteps behind him. There was a violent fury on his nephew’s face and the Bushmills Single Malt hovered at a forty-five-degree angle in Joe’s hand. Gus snatched the bottle and hurled it against the wall by the front door. The glass shattered and amber liquid stained the wallpaper.
‘Did you throw her body down the stairs, Uncle?’ Gus bared his teeth, shoulders hunched, his nose two inches from Joe’s. ‘When you dropped me in my bed and went back to the house, did you and Melissa have to carry Anna Harrington’s dead body up the stairs and toss it back down to make it look convincing?’
Joe said nothing. He knew that any attempt to reason would only fuel the fire. Giving his nephew space to calm down, he crossed the living room and placed the white package on the stairs before picking shards of glass from the floor. A pool of whiskey remained in an unbroken corner of the bottle. Joe picked it up carefully and tipped it into his glass.
But Gus did not calm down. His thoughts were focused on his uncle ‘investigating’ the death of Alicia’s mother and fabricating the lies that would protect him.
‘Our family are murdering innocent people and you are letting them die. I’m heading to the police station,’ Gus stated, marching past his uncle to the front door. ‘If you want to shoot me with that gun of yours, please go ahead. If you can remember how to use it, that is. It’s kind of like drinking whiskey, really; except instead of hiding from things and letting them die, you kill them yourself.’
Gus opened the door and Joe grabbed him by the shoulders. He was slammed against the wall where the bottle had broken. His uncle’s hand pressed hard against his rib cage, gripping
his chest as though ready to tear out his heart.
‘You feel this?’ Joe hissed. ‘This is beating because of me. This is beating because I promised to stay out of it.’
There was the anger in his uncle’s eyes: evidence that Joe Crow was part of the family.
What do you fear?
Gus did not fear it; he found comfort in that consanguineous rage.
‘You’re hurting me,’ he hissed through gritted teeth. Joe relaxed and Gus’s feet crunched on the glass.
‘Oh, what fun,’ said a voice in the doorway. Both heads turned to see Rainn on the doorstep. She stood with her hands on her hips. There was a cheerful confidence in her blue eyes.
Before the second pill had returned him to the abyss, Gus had asked his uncle what he had seen when he went back to Melissa’s house that evening. Joe told him that he had found Melissa aghast, cowering over Anna’s body at the bottom of the stairs. Rainn was elsewhere.
Without invitation, the woman hitched up her long dress and crossed the threshold. She strode across the carpet and sat in Joe’s leather armchair. The police officer stood tall, blinking his small eyes. In her presence, he appeared to have shrunk.
‘But you haven’t really stayed out of it, have you, Joseph?’ said Rainn, crossing her legs and folding her arms. Her small mouth was pressed into a knowing smile. ‘Moving next door to Anna Harrington, keeping young Augustus from us all.’
Barely perceptibly, Joe shifted as if to step between Gus and the woman. Rainn leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her knees and hands clasped together as she directed the heat of her attention on Gus.
‘Hello again,’ she said. She looked to be in her early twenties, not many years older than him, yet she spoke as though addressing an infant. ‘Your great-grandparents send their regards.’
Gus felt cold whiskey on his back and shards of glass underfoot.
‘Was it you—’
‘Augustus!’ Joe protested, his eyes burning a hole into the floor. Gus swallowed his question. He did not know in what capacity this woman worked for his family, but Joe’s fear was enough to silence him.