Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

  ‘Through the dining room, towards that far door.’

  Daniel nodded and continued his weighted walk from one side of the house to the other. On arriving at the closed door he turned to angle the ball of his shoulder against the wood; he heaved his weight against it then struggled to keep upright as the door gave way beneath him with considerable ease. A stampede of sounds followed his entrance and just as I was beginning to imagine a cavalcade of meat and vegetables making their escape across the floor, I heard a not entirely convincing, ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Is it safe to come in?’

  ‘Absolutely, GT, abso-bloody-lutely.’

  Inside the room there was a picture of calm that left me wondering whether the previous crashes and bangs had been theatrical. The kitchen work surface was now a display of disorganised colour as Daniel had carefully removed each vegetable and arranged them in a system that failed to make sense to me, but almost certainly made sense to him.

  ‘You haven’t jumped ship to vegetarianism or anything drastic like that, have you?’ he asked, still busying himself with preparations.

  ‘No, definitely not.’

  ‘Marvellous. Because, Gillian Thompson, you are about to have the best bit of meat that you can get in this town. And trust me, I’ve done the legwork to find the best bit of meat today, I can promise you that much. I kept asking around for a butcher – a town like this must have a butcher – but everyone kept mentioning the same shutdown shop, like that’s any use. Something about the owner dying?’

  Daniel was concentrating on the piece of meat, manoeuvring it around in the limited space between the hot tap and the kitchen sink. He was facing away from me while doing this, so he couldn’t have seen my facial expression. He couldn’t know that shop now technically belonged to me and my mother. I didn’t know whether, in light of recent revelations, I was now obliged to tell him.

  ‘That’s my father’s shop. Sorry – it was.’

  The meat hit the metal sink with an unappetising thud.

  ‘Oh, arses.’ He turned to look at me; his hands dripped blood-tinged water on to the floor. ‘Gillian, I–’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Daniel banished me from the kitchen after that. My involvement in the preparation was limited to locating the necessary pots and pans and preparing the dinner table; the latter being a job that I couldn’t remember being given the responsibility of before. I set out place settings and crept into the kitchen to find the necessary cutlery. I could hear my mother’s voice throughout the whole process. This dining table will be kept for the best, love – only for very special occasions. The words had been riddled with pride and admiration for the beautiful table and accompanying chairs. She said them without a hint of irony or humour, as if she hadn’t realised that the best actually wasn’t yet to come.

  Somehow nearly forty minutes had passed by in this nostalgia when the sound of Daniel kicking his way out of the kitchen interrupted me. He wandered into the room with an air of confidence that didn’t fit him, a food-laden plate precariously balanced on each hand. He set one plate down in front of me and took the other to his own place setting at the opposite end of the room. He stood at the head of the table with one hand pressed against his chest and his head cocked slightly towards the ceiling; he released a dramatic cough before he began speaking, in an accent that didn’t belong to him. ‘’Ere we have le pork, salted and seasoned on a bed of peppered vegetablay mash accompanied by twice roasteed potatoes. Bon appétit, madam!’

  He made what I thought was meant to be a kissing sound before collapsing into his chair and grabbing his cutlery. His cheeks were red and his hair more dishevelled.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he said.

  His voice had reverted to the default sound, but I had to ask: ‘Why were you talking like that?’

  ‘Because the best chefs are French, oui?’

  ‘Are you one of the best chefs?’

  ‘I’ve given you twice roasteed potatoes; how can you even ask me that?’ He finished the sentence with a wink that I hadn’t seen him use before, but I thought that it suited him. After that we ate, we laughed, and the potatoes really were delicious.

  It was the closest that the house and its inhabitants had ever come to hosting a conventionally normal evening – with a guest too! As we began to clean up from dinner I wondered whether my mother would be proud of the evening’s performance. Look, Mum, I’m a real live girl; isn’t this what you wanted?

  ‘You should stay sitting while I fetch dessert,’ I said, thinking that this was a successful attempt at being an exemplary host.

  I had purchased two sizeable cinnamon swirls, which I served alongside a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It had taken longer than I had expected to decide on an appropriate dessert. I hadn’t realised before that I cared quite so much about the distinct differences between plaits and swirls. Daniel seemed to enjoy my choice. He delivered a series of overdramatised ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahhs’ before leaning back and rubbing his stomach.

  ‘Was that homemade?’

  ‘They told me that it was when I bought it.’

  Daniel released a small chuckle. ‘Gillian Thompson, you do make me laugh.’

  ‘I don’t mean to.’

  ‘I think that’s precisely the reason why you do.’

  ‘So you’re really just laughing at me?’

  ‘Yes, Gillian, but in a very kind way.’

  ‘I don’t think that I understand.’

  ‘I don’t think that you need to.’

  Daniel sat opposite me, smiling, with a much more severe facial imbalance than I had seen before. The left side of his mouth was now tucked up in such a half-smile that his left eye was near to closing.

  ‘You look happy,’ I observed.

  ‘Oh, GT, I am much more than happy. I am content.’

  A Single Man. 2009. Colin Firth. ‘The dumbest creatures are always the happiest.’ I tried to smile as I shook the reference away; Daniel was hardly dumb, as far as I could gather.

  After this he offered to assist with the cleaning of pots, pans, and other utensils, but I was reluctant to let him after he had already given so much effort to the evening. Instead I pointed him in the direction of the living room.

  ‘It’ll take hours to do all of that on your own,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he was trying to reason with me.

  ‘You’re welcome to make yourself comfortable, or leave.’ It was the first time that I had been so aware of my own bluntness. ‘I didn’t mean that how I think it may have sounded.’ It was also the first time that I had felt a pang of guilt for it.

  ‘It’s okay, I understand what you meant.’

  We went our separate ways into the living room and the kitchen, and I was surprised to see that Daniel’s estimation of how long it would take to clean up was far from hyperbolic. I hadn’t even been aware that this amount of cooking paraphernalia inhabited our kitchen. It would be much more time-effective, I thought, for me to cook next time. Or perhaps next time we could go for dinner somewhere, given the relative success of our previous encounter at a restaurant. And sandwiched somewhere between those thoughts – and the uncharacteristic thoughts that followed – I realised that I had just decided that I would like to see Daniel again. It was an odd sensation, like heat spreading somewhere in my lower abdomen, and I had to drop the half-clean plate back into the bowl of water to properly concentrate on what I was feeling.

  Star Trek: Voyager. 1995. Jennifer Lien. ‘Romance is not a malfunction.’ Exhaling, I thought: so, this is romance then?

  Chapter 12

  After Daniel left the house, my mother called so promptly that I actually managed to convince myself she must have known he’d been there. She mentioned nothing, of course. But the human mind works in mysterious ways. She called to verify that I was coping – which I was – and to ask what I’d been doing with myself – not much. Three careful questions followed about my day-to-day life, and she skir
ted around the issue of whether I had been to my therapy appointment. Sifting through my experiments box while my mother worked up to this apparently impossible question, I eventually settled on a jarred heart, surrounded by tiny pieces of tissue. I shook the container from side to side and watched the flecks tumble down to the bottom as the liquid settled.

  ‘Louise is nice,’ I finally said. She sighed, which I took to be a marker of relief.

  ‘The appointment went okay, then?’ She tried to sound casual, like she hadn’t steered the conversation in this direction.

  I provided her with a brief overview of the meeting – strategically removing the discussion of my inadequate parents – and said yes, it had gone okay, and yes, I would see Louise again if she wanted me to.

  ‘Gillian, what’s that noise in the background?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘There’s a noise, like water or something.’

  With over-baked care I lowered the jar back into the box.

  ‘I can’t hear anything, Mum. It must just be interference on your end.’

  We said our farewells shortly after; the fabricated interference had given us both a good enough excuse. The next morning when she called again, it was to ask whether I would mind being left alone for another few days. I thought of the new man – men – in my life, of the time that I could freely spend with them.

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is you need.’

  It turned out that it wasn’t quite the unencumbered span of time I had expected it to be. My mother continued to call intermittently over the days that followed, at random intervals which made her intrusions impossible to predict, and I began to think she may be trying to catch me out on something. Throughout my adolescence she had always resisted asking questions – about my whereabouts, my after-school activities, any friends that I may have accumulated. She was always giving me space – perhaps too much space, in hindsight – to have my own privacy. Now it felt like she was somehow trying to compensate for that. It wasn’t until midway through our fourth impromptu phone call that I wondered why I didn’t just tell her about Daniel; why I had decided to make a secret of him. Listening to my inner adolescent – the one that observed and mimicked, rather than the one who poisoned animals – I decided: it was nice to have something that was just mine.

  Daniel and I saw each other every day during the week my mother was away. It didn’t even feel like a conscious decision – not on my part, at least – but rather something that just happened. It didn’t occur to me that eventually my mother would come home and could, quite easily, in fact, complicate our relationship – assuming that’s what Daniel and I had fallen into. So it was somewhat jarring when, following an afternoon with Daniel, I came home to find my mother perched on the edge of my father’s armchair in the living room. Her elbows were propped on her knees, allowing one hand to hang down somewhere between her thighs, while the other lingered about in the area of her neck. I watched her with curiosity as one hand drifted up to her chin, creating what looked like a parody of The Thinker.

  ‘Mum?’

  She looked away from whatever had been holding her attention and stared straight at me. ‘Love, where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been with Daniel.’

  The words fell out before I could censor them. I’d had no idea just how desperate I’d been to talk about him. And yet there his name was, perched on the tip of my tongue, just waiting for me to open my mouth.

  ‘Who’s Daniel?’

  ‘A friend, I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘It’s a hard question to answer, Mum.’

  ‘Only because you’re making it hard, Gillian.’

  She had brought a newfound confidence home with her, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it. ‘Can I go to the toilet before we have this conversation?’

  She sighed and nodded with some effort, as if I were asking her for something more inconvenient than the chance to empty my bladder. Dodging the bathroom, I instead headed to my bedroom – my safe haven – to buy myself enough time to process the updated mother sitting downstairs. But as soon as I stepped through the doorway I was hit by a smell that didn’t belong there. The acidity of vomit combined with an undercurrent of bleach.

  Back downstairs, I hoped to strike up a reasonably normal conversation.

  ‘How was your time with Jackie?’

  There was certainly something different about her. The trousers she wore – which I didn’t think belonged to her – were carefully pressed with designer creases, while her shirt – another garment that I didn’t recognise – was deliberately oversized in a way that made her frame look even more petite than it had done previously. Her hair, too, was different, cared for, and her make-up had a professional touch to it, although the colour distinction between her jawline and neck was enough to make me wince.

  She seemed uninterested in discussing her time with Jackie, and instead served up the bare minimum of details. It was nice, she said, to spend some time with her sister after being apart for so long, but she never seemed to venture further.

  ‘You must have enjoyed yourself to want to stay longer.’

  ‘Oh, I was fine while I was away, yes, love.’

  I ignored the implications of this, hoping that I could wedge another question into our dialogue before my mother could take hold of the conversation. But she beat me to the punch.

  ‘Now, tell me about this Daniel. When did you meet him?’

  ‘That evening that I went for a stroll, out to the park, before you left.’ I felt the need to keep adding to my explanation although I had nothing else to give her. ‘That’s when I met him.’

  ‘You didn’t mention it?’

  ‘It didn’t seem worth mentioning, really.’

  With pursed lips she nodded at this, before shifting her tongue around her mouth in a movement that made it look like she were physically chewing.

  ‘And what are your intentions with him?’

  ‘My intentions?’

  She pulled her mouth up at the corner as one eyebrow arched several millimetres higher than the other to make a new expression – one that seemed to suggest I should know exactly what she was talking about. I remained quiet for what my mother obviously thought was a beat too long and so she continued: ‘Gillian, you weren’t going to do anything to him, were you? Hurt him, I mean?’

  For a second I thought I had misheard the question. Or at the very least misunderstood her meaning.

  ‘I know people get hurt in relationships, Mum, but I don’t plan on hurting him, no.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, love.’ She rubbed at her forehead and then moved, shifting from the armchair to the sofa. She patted the spare seat and so I joined her. ‘We still haven’t talked about what happened with your father, and now there’s a new person around, I really think that we need to.’

  I couldn’t find the link.

  ‘What happened with Dad was just an accident, Mum.’

  ‘Was it though, Gillian?’

  The question hit me with force. She had accepted it all so easily; fabricated our cover story as if she’d had it ready for years. I had never imagined that we would arrive at a place where that was questioned. She had always seemed so safe. I had clearly underestimated her, and shame on me for that.

  I considered alterative responses to the query, but I couldn’t find anything that felt even remotely appropriate. And it felt much like my mother knew that would be the case.

  ‘Gillian?’ she pushed.

  I flicked through things as quickly as I could but I couldn’t find anything to give her. I hated her for being so neutral. I was panicked, unnerved, and I was sure that my mother should feel much the same. But there was no sign of it. Instead she was the picture of calm, as if this entire conversation had gone to plan; as if I had somehow become so predictable that she knew my moves before I had even thought to make them. The prospect made me hate her all the more.

  After nearly thirty seconds of s
ilence I think my mother intervened through pity alone. She pulled in a greedy amount of air before unleashing her words, throwing them out in such a rush that they were run-ons to each other, as if attached by connective tissue.

  ‘I know what you do, Gillian. I know what’s in the box upstairs.’

  Burn Notice. 2007. Jeffrey Donovan. ‘Sometimes the truth hurts. In these situations, I recommend lying.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied.

  Her mouth twitched into an almost-smile. I wondered whether she had expected that response.

  ‘You do know what I’m talking about. You’re not stupid enough to not know, love.’ There was a compliment in there somewhere, I thought. She sighed and then picked up her speech. ‘You thought that I didn’t know what you did to the pond when you were younger? You haven’t always been as good at covering your tracks as you are now, love, and even now you aren’t as careful as you think. When you came home with that box, that look on your face, I knew. I knew that there was something.’

  I flicked back to my bedroom and pulled in the memory of bleach, vomit. My mother hadn’t had the stomach for what she’d found. Abandoning my denial in favour of honesty was the only clear option that I could see now.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Things were always dying around you, Gillian. Always.’