Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

  I took a tactical pause in the middle of the walkway, prompting a new noise. It was a scraping, a dragging. The sound that appears when something sodden is disturbed.

  I clutched the handle of the knife a little tighter, peeled away the protective fabric and held the object close to my chest, before taking a hesitant step forward. Somewhere behind me someone else took a step as well.

  My footsteps fell into a run, carrying me towards the streetlight at the edge of the walkway. As my pace increased I became aware of the steel rubbing against my jacket, creating a scrape with each movement. The metronome effect went some way towards pacifying me although I was still counting the seconds between the copycat footfalls. But then I settled under the blinking light. I circled around my safe space, looking for signs of life, maybe even an amused face. Look at the scared little girl – isn’t she funny?

  I crouched down, knowing that I needed to steady myself. The fingertips of my right hand stretched to the ground and bent uncomfortably under my weight. I inhaled – one, two, three – and exhaled – four, five, six – but I was no longer in a state to steady my breathing. The tacky mess of emotions in my stomach was accompanied by a pain inside my chest now. As I slowly resumed an upright position, I lay my palm flat across my forehead, hoping for a cooling sensation – hoping that I could find reminders of where I was going, and what I would do when I got there, but I was too far gone. The familiar clotting of out-of-control emotions was growing already now – and I could hear them: my mother’s accusations; my therapist’s optimism; now, perhaps worst of all, Daniel’s praise, his panting, his persistent moans of my name. They were too much, too loud, and only slightly broken down by the footsteps around me, somehow louder now as well.

  I changed my grip on the knife as the footsteps quickened into a run. With the implement angled upwards I turned and, as if they were a part of the same movement, raised the knife. I couldn’t have known the full force of my movement, nor the full force of his run into me; I couldn’t have known that our body differences were so conveniently matched that they left my hand level with his stomach; I couldn’t have known that it would be quite this easy.

  The Crow. 1994. Laurence Mason. ‘Let me tell you about murder. It’s fun, it’s easy, and you gonna learn all about it.’

  The boy collapsed forward onto me. My grip was still tight around the handle as I leaned my weight against him, and he stumbled backwards then, crying out as the other side of the implement was dragged out of him.

  He was a kid; six or perhaps seven years younger than me, with a generic hooded appearance that made him seem both unremarkable and indistinct. His eyes grew darker as I watched him, suddenly brimming with tears that might spill over at any minute. I recognised something in that.

  The pleas that followed were broken. Grimaces and gasps for air had disturbed the sentence but the meaning was still clear: ‘Help, please. Call someone.’

  The words were difficult to catch after that. His breathing was deteriorating at an impressive rate as he sank closer to the ground, his body a burst inflatable.

  ‘You should lie down,’ I told him. ‘If you fall then it might make it worse.’

  I pulled my phone from my front pocket.

  ‘Please, I know–’

  ‘I can’t get signal here so I need to leave you for a minute, okay? You need to lie flat on your back, I think, and take some deep breaths. Can you do that? And then I’ll come back when I’ve called someone.’

  As I moved past him he set a bloodied hand around my ankle. I swallowed the urge to kick him away.

  ‘Promise you’ll call for–’

  ‘I promise.’

  He loosened his grip. His body hit the ground.

  I walked out of the spotlight and into the shadows, my phone in one hand and the knife in the other, as if it had become part of my anatomy. I pressed down on the button at the top of my phone and waited for the screen to light up, in one last kick of life, before extinguishing entirely. I slipped it back into my pocket and looked over to the boy. From this distance he was just a shape, but I could see something sitting on his stomach – his hands, I thought. I imagined him applying pressure, just like the television shows had taught him.

  When I rushed back to him his eyes were tightly closed, making his face a grimace. I kneeled down next to him.

  ‘You came.’

  ‘I said that I would.’

  ‘Is someone…?’

  The effort that it took him to half-open his eyes was exhausting to observe. Each eyelid fluttered underneath the light like an excited moth. I rested my palm across his forehead, now drenched with sweat, and moved my hand down until it covered his eyes, closing them in one movement. His mouth was now a perfect O as he tried to breathe through the pain. The red patch on his abdomen was much larger than it had been to begin with, his clothing now sodden against his skin. His breathing was barely audible, each exhale somewhere between a light sigh and a wheeze. As he concentrated on getting air in and out of his body, I brushed stray damp hairs away from his forehead.

  ‘Is someone coming?’

  I ran my palm over his forehead again until the skin was clear of moisture and then I moved my hand back to his eyes. My palm sat there lightly to begin with, but then I applied pressure, forming a mask over the top half of his face. I felt his eyelashes flutter against my skin as I moved my hand down, slowly, to study the contours of his expression, before coming to a rest over his mouth. His eyes widened, tears tumbling out of their corners now. His arms moved to fight against me but there was hardly much fight left in him at all.

  With clenched teeth I leaned forward and left one single kiss on the boy’s forehead; his skin was damp with sweat again. When I pulled away from him I allowed myself some time, just a few seconds, to look into his eyes. He breathed heavily against my palm as we watched each other and, quite suddenly, his struggle stopped. It’s inappropriate, I think, to think of one person when you’re with another, but as if by accident, I thought of Daniel. With this unconscious boy in front of me, and this feeling of complete fulfilment sitting at the base of gut, I thought of Daniel, of what I had done with Daniel, and I realised that this was what had been missing. I kissed the boy’s forehead again and, close to his ear, I promised that it would all be over soon. I had convinced myself that it mattered – the who, the when, the how. It didn’t. It just mattered that it got done.

  Chapter 26

  I folded my jeans into a square and placed the knife on top of them. Over the top of that I folded my jacket, also into a square, and then placed the sandwich of evidence in the bottom of my wardrobe. In the shower afterwards the water turned pink as it ran away from me. I

  shampooed and rinsed my hair three times to settle the concern that it still harboured a metallic smell, despite the actual levels of foreign iron molecules being barely perceptible after the second wash. When my hair was pinned into a bun I leaned back against the cold tiles and with some relief allowed my knees to buckle beneath me. I slipped down the wall then until I was sitting in the shower bowl, my knees pressed against my chest with my arms pulled tight around them. I tilted my head back, allowing my mass of conditioner-soaked hair to act as a cushion. With my eyes focused on the ceiling I concentrated on breathing, inhaling the steam until parts of me that were previously clogged began to ease open.

  Now would be a good time to try it, I remember thinking, and with droplets of water fleeing from the showerhead, I managed to half-convince myself that I’d already started to cry. I jerked my shoulders until they mimicked a heaving motion and I pulled my face into a new expression, too – scrunched-shut eyes and a theatrical frown. After performing these elements in isolation from each other I combined them with my newly, deliberately, laboured breathing, to conjure what I hoped would be an authentic and satisfactory outpouring of emotion.

  Half a minute passed before I admitted defeat. I let my fingertips reach up and study the imitated signs of emotion, to catch small balls of water betwee
n my thumb and index fingertip and to marvel at them, like they were something miraculous – like they were something I had made. I knew that they weren’t, you see, because try as I might when I thought about what I’d done to the boy, I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face.

  After that shower I slept sounder than I had in months. While tucked away inside my bedroom I was aware of the world now itching to stretch its arms and indulge in a morning yawn outside my window. With the beginnings of sunrise teasing me from behind my closed curtains, I turned, buried my face into my pillow, and slept dreamlessly for four and a half hours until my mother woke me. Her weight dropping onto the bed initially alerted me to her presence and although I had instantly made the decision to ignore her, the curl of her fingers around my upper arm and the gentle shake that followed made it challenging. With my eyes still closed I grumbled at her, feigning more tiredness than I felt in the hope that it would stifle her efforts.

  ‘Gillian?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Love, wake up for me a second.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Gillian,’ she snapped then, apparently losing patience.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  With both eyes wide open then, I readjusted my position, propped myself upright against my headboard and took a long look at my mother.

  ‘Is that why you woke me up?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said without any hesitation or hint that she might be lying. She held my gaze firmly while waiting for a reply but I found myself so stunned, momentarily, that I couldn’t actually provide one. ‘So? Are you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, I’m fine, thank you for asking,’ I replied after another beat of silence. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked then, thinking that was the right format to adhere to.

  She hesitated. There was a flicker of something across her face but I couldn’t decipher what feeling the expression was attached to.

  ‘A young boy was killed last night, not far from here. I thought…’ She paused, shook her head, then picked up her sentence in an entirely different place. ‘I just wanted to check you were okay, that’s all. I heard you come home late, or early, I can’t – either way, I just needed to check.’

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1981. David Dixon. ‘Don’t panic… Don’t panic.’

  I readjusted my position in bed, rubbed at my head and performed a number of other mundane and unnecessary actions to buy myself another second or two, to pull some thoughts together. I lazily settled on: ‘That’s terrible. Do you know what happened?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’ve heard it was a stabbing. Someone found him. In the park. First thing this morning. Some poor dog walker or another.’ With each snippet of information that she shared with me she took a glance at my expression, waiting for it to change. I nodded along and only briefly thought of Paul. A disproportionately smug section of my cranium had already edited him and Peaches into the discovery. ‘Anyway, as long you’re okay.’

  She phrased the statement in such a way that it sounded like a question and so I nodded again, giving her a tight smile as I did so.

  ‘I’m fine, just tired.’

  She excused herself after that, pulling the door closed behind her while still muttering a promise that she wouldn’t disturb me again – ‘You do look worn out, Gillian, best to get some rest today.’ I couldn’t rest after she’d gone. How could I sleep, given the announcement that my mother had just made? This was a living, breathing incident now; people would be discussing it, people would be talking. With my knees pulled up towards me I reached out to my bedside table and found my mobile phone.

  You have two new messages.

  Daniel: Okay so waking up on my own was a bit surprising. I hope you’re okay GT.

  Daniel: I hope last night was okay too. Maybe call me when you get this. I’m a bit worried. X

  Sorry, I couldn’t sleep. Everything is okay. Just can’t talk right now.

  I wasn’t ready for a conversation with Daniel, and that was the chief reason behind my response.

  The second reason was that text messages left a better trail than a phone call did.

  Daniel: So last night was okay then? Like. I didn’t do anything bad?

  Last night was one of the most special nights of my life.

  Daniel: I can say this over a text easier than to your face so don’t judge me okay? I’m so glad that it happened with you. A girl like you I mean. You’re pretty damn special.

  Daniel: I’m glad that you were my first. X

  Alexander Pichushkin, 2007, during his trial as the Chessboard Killer: ‘A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it.’

  I was glad that he was my first too.

  When the doorbell rang just over two hours later, I deliberately didn’t make a move to answer it. Upstairs in my bedroom, I remained tucked out of sight until I heard a muffled greeting emerge from my mother, and I moved to the top of the stairs then. Perched two steps down, I pulled my knees up towards me, tucked my T-shirt around them, and involuntarily held my breath as Daniel moved into sight. I took a glance at my watch. He was a little earlier than I’d told him to be.

  It was a calculated risk, yes, but a risk all the same. Perhaps that went some way towards explaining the abdominal flutter I felt on seeing Daniel, standing in my hallway, unknowingly holding the potential to crush what I had hoped would be my alibi for the previous evening. The plan was balanced delicately on two assumptions. The primary assumption being that my mother, unable to stifle her curiosity – or perhaps her suspicions – would not be able to resist asking Daniel whether I had stayed at his house the previous evening. The secondary assumption was that Daniel would be so prematurely embarrassed by the possibility of disclosing any details of our mutually shed virginities that he would confirm my whereabouts, yes, and then promptly change the subject completely. It might be crass to talk about them both as pawns, but I suppose I was just that confident about the moves that they would make.

  I was mostly indifferent about their conversational preamble, and instead found myself distracted, studying Daniel from this new view. He rubbed at the back of his neck with such vigour that the muscles in both his forearm and upper arm flexed. I wondered then whether his body shared the aches that my own felt that afternoon. At the sound of my name – ‘Sorry, Mrs Thompson, is Gillian actually home?’ – my attention snapped back around as Daniel tried to steer the conversation. From my vantage point I could see both of them clearly enough, so I held my tongue and watched my plans for an alibi come together.

  My mother laid her foundations masterfully. Yes, she told him, I was at home, resting, she thought, given that I was still hidden away upstairs, and I’d slept in much later than usual, so perhaps I’d had a poor night’s sleep.

  ‘I’d assumed that she’d be staying at yours when she didn’t come home,’ she said, a question without a question that saw Daniel’s face immediately redden into a blush that stretched around near his ears.

  ‘She did.’ Daniel spat out the confirmation so abruptly that even I thought my mother was right to look so taken aback by his tone. It seemed that the longer I watched Daniel, the harder I had to fight to blink away images of the boy who I had left him for the previous evening.

  When he spoke again his tone had softened. ‘She did have a restless night, I mean. I think she just decided that she’d be more comfortable here in the end.’

  My mother, lips thinned and arms folded, gave a careful nod before pushing forward with another question.

  ‘Nothing happened, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Daniel hurried the words out in a much higher octave than usual.

  He irregularly bounced on the balls of his feet and as I observed him, something both inconvenient and potentially problematic occurred to me: Daniel looked guilty. And from the expression that my mother wore in response to his outburst – one eyebrow arched, arms still firmly folded, a twist in her mouth that suggested she already didn’
t believe whatever Daniel was about to say – I was certain that she had noticed this as well.

  ‘You two didn’t have a fall-out?’ she offered.

  ‘Oh.’ Daniel’s shoulder dropped and his face gave way to a smile. ‘Nothing like that, no. The opposite, if anything; we had a really lovely evening together. That daughter of yours is something special.’

  I heard my mother’s non-committal – and frankly a little hurtful – ‘Hm’ as I padded back towards my bedroom. I tamed my hair into an over-stretched bobble, pulled on a too-rigid pair of jeans that hadn’t yet loosened following their latest wash, and seconds later I made a noisy display of walking down the stairs. The conversation instantly came to a halt when they saw me. My mother eyed me then, with an embarrassingly fake smile clawing at her mouth, while Daniel, by accident I assumed, dropped a small and nervous laugh in the hallway as he kneaded at the back of his neck.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Daniel?’ my mother asked, lazily looking for something to fill the silence that I had created.