Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

  ‘It hasn’t always been like this, and you know it,’ she started. ‘I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to marry him if he was already like he is now.’

  Perhaps not, but stupid enough to stay with him, I thought.

  ‘We were a good couple once, Gillian.’

  There was a long pause then. I wondered whether she was trying the sentence on for size, to see if she could somehow make it fit.

  ‘What changed?’ I asked.

  ‘Why is this something we need to talk about?’

  ‘I can always go in there and ask him.’

  ‘He’d beat you black and blue if you did.’

  ‘I’d end up killing him if he tried.’

  The answer startled the both of us.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Gillian.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like violence can fix problems, because it bloody can’t.’

  ‘No, violence just creates problems, doesn’t it?’ I matched her tone, pushing harder than I had during adolescence. She knew what I was asking her; I knew she wouldn’t answer. ‘Am I the reason you didn’t leave?’ I considered this a calculated risk. Statistically speaking, I was probably one of several reasons why she hadn’t left, but whatever detained her in the house now, it certainly wasn’t me. And the longer I spent away from our family, the stronger my desire grew to understand what had broken it.

  ‘Gillian, love, no, of course it wasn’t anything to do with you. All of this started long before we’d even decided to have you.’ I nodded; she hadn’t answered my question. ‘Gillian, what is it that you really want to know?’

  ‘Why you’re here. Why you don’t leave now.’

  ‘This is just life, love. The only way one of us will leave now is in a box.’ And at that she returned to the remainder of her dinner.

  Inside the sanctuary of my bedroom I perched on my bed and assessed my surroundings. The room hadn’t changed in as long as I could remember. The same pink paint, picked out by my mother, occupied the majority of the wall space, bar the occasional stretches of scab where my younger self had sought to peel away the colour. Now, as a twenty-two-year-old woman, I was still confined to a child’s bedroom, sleeping on a bed that was dressed up in a duvet cover I hardly even recognised. Opposite the bed there was a desk, the top space of which was dominated by a television so old that there was still a cuboid attached to the back of it.

  I allowed myself an indulgent dip into my experiments box. On my return home I’d stashed it inside my wardrobe, but the time had arrived now for me to fall back on it; between you and me, I was surprised that I’d lasted so long. Through the slightly open folds of cardboard I could see a circular, stained-silver lid, but I couldn’t decipher which jar it belonged to. With my eyes shut, I wrapped my fingers around the first container that they landed on. The liquid shifted noisily as I retrieved the jar. And there it was, as luck would have it: the rat. The first of my keepsakes.

  Before moving home, the contents of the box had reserved shelf space opposite my bed at university, where I could keep an eye on them. Lined up from the oldest – and therefore the favourite – to the most recent, there was a time when I said goodnight to each of them in turn before going to sleep. Claire – a fellow lover of animals and their anatomies who I encountered during my first year – had once gone to the effort of naming them all.

  ‘Where did you even get them from, Gillian?’ she asked one night, throwing a jar of small organs between her hands with such enthusiasm that they created something akin to a rattle.

  ‘I sort of put them together myself.’

  We hadn’t spoken since, although she did throw me the occasional glance, laden with judgement, when our paths crossed on campus. My first real lesson from university was censorship.

  Now, turning the container this way and that, I struggled to get the head and the body alongside each other in such a way that I could admire both. It had been four years, but it looked much the same as when I had first dropped both sections into the solution, although its eyes stared back a little duller than they used to. It was once just water, but the animal’s decomposition rate put a stop to that. The rat and I had moved along in preservation techniques since then. The cut had been clumsy, jagged, rushed; I remembered my analysis of it particularly well. But I suppose everyone remembers their first.

  This quick pull of a memory wasn’t as satisfying as a fresh experience but it was the best remedy I could get that evening. I stared into its eyes and lost myself there, until–

  ‘Gillian, I have to–’

  My mother entered the room without my even realising it. The jar slipped from between my fingers as she spoke; I pulled in a mouthful of air, as if filling my lungs would somehow soften the oncoming blow. The glass itself collided with the rug rather than the wood, creating a dull thud. She reached; I reached. Her hand grabbed the container before mine was even close. She couldn’t help but study the specimen then. The frown lines on her forehead were soon ironed away and replaced with wide eyes.

  ‘I’m interrupting you. I, ah, I’m sorry–’

  She settled the jar on the bed as she spoke, as if the duvet might be too hard a surface for it. She stepped back then, three small steps, before speaking again, as if the distance had given her the necessary space to continue.

  ‘I’m going out now. For his beer. I… would you like to come with me, or…?’

  I wondered how that sentence could possibly finish. Would you prefer to stay here? Spend some time with your father? Play around with your dead things?

  ‘I’ll stay here. I’ll keep an eye on him while you’re away, shall I? Make sure he doesn’t dehydrate, or choke on a ring pull?’

  ‘Oh, Gillian, it’s best to just keep out of his way,’ she whispered, like she was telling me something that I didn’t already know. ‘I’ll hardly be any time at all, and, well, I wouldn’t want there to be any trouble.’

  From my bedroom window I watched, waited. The front door slammed, the car engine coughed itself awake, and twenty seconds later I heard heavy footfalls, slowly increasing in volume. My father had just reached the top of the stairs when I pulled my bedroom door closed behind me. His bloodshot eyes tipped back in his head when he saw me, and I wondered who else he had been expecting to find up here. In the seconds of surveillance that followed, I saw that his shirt was buttoned up wrong, his belt only half held together by its buckle, and the bottle of lager in his right hand was half-empty – or half-full, depending on your perspective.

  ‘You’re a little undressed, Dad.’

  ‘For what? Slobbing about my own house?’

  I didn’t correct him. If slobbing was his primary concern then he was well-dressed for the occasion.

  ‘You’re the one who should be getting dressed up. Hitting the town, like a normal kid,’ he said, leaning heavily on the word ‘normal’, punctuating the sentence with a rough laugh.

  ‘Nothing about this house is normal.’

  There was every chance, I thought, that he either wouldn’t hear or wouldn’t properly process what I had said. But when his face snapped towards me with a deadpan expression, I knew that neither of those possibilities had come to fruition.

  ‘Nothing about this house is normal?’ he repeated, squinting, inspecting the appraisal. He appeared offended by the assessment. Taking an additional step away from the stairs, he moved closer to me.

  I could catch fragments of something downstairs. It was Thursday; we had eaten dinner nearly an hour ago, so it must have been either Coronation Street or EastEnders. I had lost track of the timetable since moving away. Over-dramatised bursts of ‘You’re not my mother’ and ‘And what a relief that is’ infiltrated our tension. Apparently my father and I were not the only individuals on the cusp of a family squabble.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, as if I had been the one to approach him. I glanced down and assessed myself; I didn’t appear to be doing anything. ‘Don’t get smart with me,’ he said, as though guessing
my reply. ‘You waltz in here, like you own the place. Eating our food, leaching off us. Putting thoughts in your mother’s head.’

  My mouth twitched into a smirk that I didn’t even try to suppress.

  ‘Don’t you bloody grin.’ He paused to swig from his bottle before lowering it back down; it was his first sip since this encounter had started. When he spoke again his voice was level, controlled. ‘I’ll get you out of here again before you know it,’ he said with a newfound measure of confidence, like there were a master plan sitting behind the threat. ‘And if you put ideas in her head about leaving, I’ll get rid of that problem as well.’

  Feelings and their titles often evaded me entirely but there was something – a tug, somewhere in my innards – when he said that.

  ‘Get rid of the problem? Is that me, or her?’

  ‘Think I’ll pop her under the patio; chop her up in the shop?’ At least I knew which one of us he was referring to now. But the good humour, the obvious enjoyment that went into the retort, was perturbing. He seemed proud. ‘Hey, let’s bond, kiddo. We can cut her up and feed her to those hungry strays that you’ve been picking off over the years; it’s about time we gave something back to them.’

  He extended an arm out to the banister behind him, leaning back against it triumphantly. ‘We’ve all got our bad habits, kid.’ He was smug now, chasing the words with another mouthful of alcohol. ‘Not so different after all, eh?’

  I needed to speak. But nothing was coming out. I couldn’t rationalise how we had arrived here; what had made my father so hungry for this, what had made him part with his ammunition so readily?

  ‘You were a mistake, you know?’ he started again. ‘A rotten mistake that your mother refused to take care of. Didn’t agree with abortion, didn’t think we could get rid; I reckoned we could, though. Reckoned a good hiding was what she needed.’

  If I was pushed, really pushed, to isolate the moment when I lost control, it would be then.

  Fact: studies have shown that women are slower to experience rage than men. He moved forward and, driven by biological instinct alone, I retreated. There was something simultaneously familiar yet alien about the way he padded towards me – a semi-tranquillised bear determined to catch its prey. As he made good progress at closing the distance between us, I saw his jaw tighten, eyes twitch, fists clench.

  ‘Eventually your mother will know what a mistake you were.’

  He punctuated his speech by throwing a clenched fist towards me, missing by mere centimetres each time; it was the difference between a drunk offence and a sober defence. My reaction times were quicker than his burning anger, but this only seemed to add force to his feelings. We paced about on the landing, both light-footed with eyes fixed on the other.

  Fact: the home is a much more dangerous environment than anywhere else for those living with domestic violence.

  Almost out of nowhere a palm collided with my cheek. My teeth clamped down on the inside of my mouth and my saliva became metallic.

  ‘I thought I’d ease you in,’ he said, a laugh disturbing his speech. ‘You’re hardly as

  experienced as your mum.’

  And then I pushed him; heard the misplaced, unsteady footfalls of a heavyweight drunk tipped off balance, with open hands clambering for something to hold on to.

  Fact: while very few women do resort to violence, when they do so it is usually as a response to violence that they have already received from a partner or parent.

  He landed awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs. A foot away from his head lay the beer bottle he had been holding; the glass had split into large chunks that were now doused in lager, trying to make an escape from the scene.

  Before I had even started down the stairs I knew that he was still breathing. He must have been, otherwise the whole thing would have been too easy, too simple, too straightforward.

  Women everywhere would have murdered their unmentionable men had it been this easy.

  Fact: it is not a foregone conclusion that someone will die from a broken neck, but it is easier to break the human neck when the muscles around it are relaxed.

  The rise and fall of his chest gave the impression of sleep.

  It’s not uncommon to hear of a household suffering from domestic violence. Nor is it uncommon to find the female members of the household striking back – and that doesn’t exclusively refer to the wife either, thankfully. The legal system will throw around ‘manslaughter’ and ‘cumulative rage’, perhaps even ‘cumulative terror’ depending on how much the occasion calls for it. Assuming, that is, that the whole thing isn’t just a terrible accident in the home, and in my father’s case it may well have been.

  I sat four steps above him. He had been unconscious for some thirty seconds.

  I couldn’t risk him waking up, or my mother coming home, before I’d finished.

  Fact: females are inclined towards strangulation. A ligature mark alone is not definitive evidence of this method. And with a soft enough ligature, there will be no mark left behind at all.

  Chapter 2

  I lost twelve minutes just looking at him, eyes unblinking, waiting for something like a punchline. At some point, although I couldn’t tell you when exactly, his eyes had opened. I repositioned myself on the stairs, four steps above him again, and noticed that the eyes had settled on me with impressive accuracy. The body lay at a peculiar angle, which I thought would be convincing in line with a fall at least, but simultaneously the whole scene looked staged. Like a red-band film poster for the latest home invasion thriller.

  I could almost hear the critics: ‘This latest image release from Thompson offers an interesting commentary on contemporary society. The alpha male, murdered in what appears to be his own home; doesn’t bode well, does it?’

  And then they’d all laugh.

  I laughed.

  The noise sounded alien.

  His eyes had died with a hint of disapproval in them. I couldn’t maintain contact with them and so allowed my own eyes to rest somewhere beneath his, like an embarrassed child caught doing something that they shouldn’t have done. Kicking their sibling, stealing a cookie, killing something. I was waiting for my reprimand; waiting for him to wake up; waiting for him to tell me just how much I’d fucked up this time.

  I laughed again, accidentally, like a belch that I couldn’t hold in.

  ‘Have you really died then?’

  This scenario had been constructed and reimagined repeatedly. And in amongst the idle planning from my childhood, my adult self had researched, hard, and catered to all options – accidental death, or perhaps manslaughter, pleaded down to self-defence.

  I swallowed another laugh.

  (Why couldn’t I stop laughing?)

  I flicked through a bank of reactions, trying to find something appropriate.

  Crying was a possibility.

  Some sort of hysteria, catatonia, even.

  Shock.

  (Was this shock?)

  An emotional breakdown of a non-specific nature. That’s what people did when someone died. You could see it everywhere: Casualty, Four Weddings and a Funeral, the lifestyle section of your average women’s magazine.

  There was an emotional fallout that was noticeably lacking from the experience, though. And I don’t just mean the one that I should have been feeling, but rather the one that I always felt. A feeling of fulfilment; a loosening of the stomach muscles and a drop of the shoulders as though taking a deep exhale. There was usually… something. On the surface it seemed like another thing to blame my father for: he hadn’t even managed to die in a satisfactory manner. The counterargument, though: I hadn’t even managed to kill him properly. I waited – hoped – for some recognition, for my brain to catch up with what my hands had just done, but my nerve endings were miscommunicating the actions – nothing connected, nothing stirred. I waited for my limbic system, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the latter of which should have some part to play given the possibility of incarceration now. I i
nhaled deeply, feeding my thalamus, but before the neurotransmitters could fire I heard my mother’s voice: ‘Oh God, Gillian, what have you done? Gillian? Gillian, what happened here? Did you do this, Gillian?’

  I felt concerned that she might wear my name out, in the same way that certain words stop looking like words when you write them too many times. But I didn’t say that; I didn’t say anything.

  My mother kicked her way through the collection of carrier bags that had landed around her. She dropped to the floor with a thud heavy enough to damage her knees. She slid herself closer towards us and sat, wedged between my father and the base of the stairs, unsure of who to turn to, unsure of which one of us needed her. I didn’t realise, until her fingers landed around my wrist, that she was shaking. She kept quiet, but I knew what she was thinking. What had happened? What had I done? How could this have happened? She’d hardly been gone any time at all. Why wouldn’t I answer?

  ‘Gillian!’

  I began to hate the sound of my own name.

  ‘Did it really happen, Mum?’

  It was tactical, right down to the ‘Mum’ strategically tagged on at the end. And when she wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders, leaving me grimacing with the taste of ripe affection in my mouth, I realised it was a tactic worth relying on again in the future.

  ‘We’ll fix this, baby, we’ll fix this.’

  She had never before and has never since referred to me as ‘baby’.

  I wanted to know what we were going to do, how exactly we were going to fix things –

  how far a mother would go to protect her child. But she didn’t explain. Instead, she bought herself three minutes of thinking time. We stayed in an unfamiliar embrace. My head rested on her shoulder at an uncomfortable angle, and I felt her fingers stroke at the back of my hair as we rocked. She cooed the occasional ‘Ssssh’ as we moved, as if I were an infant again.