Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

  ‘You aren’t due back for weeks yet,’ my mother said, arms folded as she leaned against the doorframe.

  Somewhere between her saying this and my finding a reply she moved over to my bed and sat down rigidly on the mattress.

  ‘You can never be too prepared, Mum. You taught me that.’

  ‘I’m glad that I managed to teach you something.’

  The words were chased out by a sigh as she began to survey the room around her.

  ‘You’ve taught me lots of things, Mum.’

  ‘Mm, like what?’

  I hadn’t been anticipating this. She eyed me for an uncomfortably long time and I suddenly became all too aware of how hot my face felt. I fumbled, searching for anything now.

  ‘You taught me how to tie my shoes, didn’t you?’

  She may have done. But I had a nagging feeling that it had been my grandfather from my father’s side who had actually done that for me.

  ‘Yes, Gillian, I did,’ she said, with a tint of amusement colouring her words. ‘Not much of a legacy, is it, as mother-daughter bonding goes? Shoe tying and preparedness.’

  ‘They haven’t made any developments, have they, about the Timothy Westburn murder?’ She changed the topic without skipping a beat and it unnerved me. I was sure she had put a heavy emphasis on murder, but felt unsure of why. ‘Have you heard anything about it?’ she continued.

  ‘Why would I have done?’ I snapped, the words sounding sharper than I had meant them to. I knew my mother would have noticed. I continued packing as I waited for her response, my eyes firmly averted.

  ‘The police seemed to think that you might have.’

  I dropped what I was holding. I can’t even tell you what it was, but I distinctly recall trying to make the action look deliberate.

  Everything that my mother said during the opening stretch of that conversation felt like a double entendre. But the indecent and amusing second meaning had been replaced by something accusatory and unsettling. Unsure of how to proceed, I blindly felt my way about the conversation that followed, breathing a sincere sigh of relief when my mother changed the subject to something I felt more able to discuss adequately.

  ‘How are things going with Daniel?’

  My stomach lurched. I had become accustomed to the feeling.

  ‘Things are going well, I think, thank you.’ Should I offer more information? I remember thinking. When my mother failed to pick the conversation up, I decided that yes, I probably should. ‘We’ve been discussing what will happen when I’m back at university, actually.’

  Two evenings prior to this Daniel had launched the conversation. We had just finished dinner and we were in the midst of tidying away cooking utensils when he said: ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  I turned, tea towel in hand and a puzzled expression on my face. ‘When?’

  ‘When you go back to university, idiot.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Daniel shuffled slightly, apparently waiting for something.

  ‘Do you…’ he started, paused, swallowed. Tried again. ‘Do you think that you’ll miss me, or – that’s dumb, right?’

  We hadn’t decided precisely what would happen when I returned to university but we had decided that we would attempt to stay together. As I repeated this conversation to my mother she raised her eyebrows at this but, again unsure of the meaning behind the expression, I pressed on with my retelling of the transcript. ‘Daniel mentioned moving to Bristol with me but I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Because then he would find out what I am, surely, I thought.

  ‘Because it all seems very fast,’ I said instead.

  My mother nodded, her eyes narrowed as though inspecting my expression for a nervous tick, or a tell.

  Our conversation continued in this vein as we leisurely wandered around the topic of Daniel, my relationship with him, and my plans to pursue that further. Still feeling about blindly, I was at least by now half-confident that I had constructed a convincing and reliable narrative to stretch out for the remainder of the conversation. But as the minutes rolled into a half-an-hour block of time, I realised that we would soon run out of Daniel-related chatter. My mother, though, had planned ahead. She had already decided what we would discuss next. Before I could find another foundation on which to steady a conversation, my mother, with an unexpected air of confidence, looked me in the eye and said: ‘And does Daniel know what he’s actually given you an alibi for, or have you managed to keep that from him so far?’

  I would love to give you details of the blind panic that followed; of the sensation of my mother’s words tickling at my amygdaloid nucleus, and how my brain promptly smashed neurotransmitters together by way of a response. But all I loosely remember from the seconds that came immediately after this well-crafted revelation was a distinct feeling of ‘Hm, so my mother knows’, as if she’d caught a younger me smoking outside a friend’s house, or engaging in sexual activities before my time. ‘Hm, so my mother knows’ was the best that my above-average mind could settle on.

  ‘You’ll have to say something eventually, Gillian.’

  She was too calm, too measured. This perturbed me more than the question itself had.

  ‘How are you so calm?’ I asked, leaning forward. I needed to see her face.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.’

  ‘How much time? I mean, how long have you thought this?’ I chose my words with care; I couldn’t – wouldn’t – admit to anything, not yet.

  My mother, her eyes closed now, mouthed illegible words and bounced her head lightly, presumably in time with her thoughts, as though she were attempting to give me an exact temporal measurement.

  ‘I’ve thought it since the police visited,’ she said, still in a measured tone. ‘Daniel doesn’t know when you left the house that night – he’s guessing. The shower drain was caked with something the morning after that boy died. I just didn’t know what it was. It’s clear what you and Daniel have been up to, so I thought, or I might have hoped, that it was something to do with that. But the bloody clothes hidden in your wardrobe gave me a better idea.’ Even through all of this my mother remained calm, on an intimidating level, and for the first time I entertained the possibility that perhaps not all of my psychological quirks had come from my father. ‘And let’s not forget the fact that you haven’t actually denied it,’ she concluded.

  But I haven’t admitted to it either, I thought.

  ‘A normal person would have denied it, Gillian.’ She paused and exhaled hard in an almost-laugh. ‘But then, a normal person wouldn’t have killed someone.’

  Forrest Gump. 1994. Sally Field. ‘What does normal mean, anyway?’

  Halloweentown. 1998. Debbie Reynolds. ‘Being normal is vastly overrated.’

  Carrie. 2013. Chloë Grace Moretz. ‘I want to be normal.’

  ‘Gillian?’

  ‘I’m trying to find something to say.’

  She let out another hard sigh. ‘I think anything would be good at this point, love.’

  ‘Are you going to tell anyone about this?’ I wasn’t sure whether this was an acceptable starting point, morally speaking, but it seemed like a logical one.

  My mother clearly had a plan – she had been sitting on this information for long enough to have developed a fairly detailed one – and I needed to know what my role in it would be. She let out a noise that would have been considered a sharp laugh, under different circumstances, and I thought then that perhaps she hadn’t meant it when she said anything would be a good thing to say.

  ‘I understand why you might feel disappointed in me, Gillian,’ she said. I thought this was a peculiar place to start. ‘I haven’t been good at all, especially not recently.’

  ‘Why would I be disappointed in you, Mum?’

  I was sure that it should be the other way around. I was standing in front of her then, meaning I caught the narrow-eyed glance that she threw in my direction like I had
just asked something stupid of her.

  She went back to avoiding eye contact before speaking again. ‘You are always meant to love your children.’ She spoke as if that were a complete explanation, but then added: ‘I know there must have been times when it seemed like I didn’t.’

  I nodded, although I didn’t feel like she’d answered my question.

  She started again. ‘Your father and I did this. You have to take responsibility, Gillian, of course. But we did this as well. I sometimes wonder whether you ever stood a chance with us.’

  I marvelled at her level tone, her measured presentation, as though reading each snippet from an autocue positioned somewhere beyond my bedroom.

  ‘You saw all of that violence for years. And it fed something.’

  My mother continued in this vein for longer than felt necessary, feeding snippets of my childhood to the case-hungry nature-versus-nurture debate, which my mother sat firmly in the centre of during her soliloquy. She shifted between believing there was something wrong with me and believing there was something wrong with my life, and she almost made a good case, I remember thinking. But it’s hard to be definitive one way or another with these things without a formal diagnosis of the participant in question – in this case, me.

  ‘I don’t think bringing Daniel into this is fair either, Gillian,’ she said, shifting topics.

  Analyze This. 1999. Robert De Niro. ‘What, are you gonna start moralizing on me?’

  I swallowed the quote. I knew that I couldn’t take that tone with her. I stood in front of her then, waiting for another nugget of something to fall from her mouth. With my hands tucked behind my back, I was a child waiting for their reprimand from a troubled parent. I’m sorry I stole the cookie, Mum. I’m sorry I killed the boy. My idle apologies may have worked when I was younger, but I felt I should keep them to myself now.

  ‘What if he finds out?’ she pushed.

  ‘He won’t,’ I snapped out, instantly realising how defensive I sounded.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You’re different.’

  ‘Because I’m your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’ I considered for a beat longer. ‘Because you’re my mother, you’re different.’

  She rubbed at her eyes and sighed then. A heavy, exhausted, emotional sigh. ‘Why, Gillian? Why him?’

  I remembered the footsteps, how the boy had been running towards me, and how, for a split second as he lay there, I thought that this could be self-defence. But that argument required reasonable force, which I suspected would be misplaced in a case of an armed versus unarmed individual. I could have called someone, though, I thought to myself then, not for the first time since it had happened. I could have called someone and I truly believed – or had to believe – that when I left to call for help, that was my honest intention. But I’ve heard the road to hell is paved with the best of those. And an honest intention doesn’t count for much at all when you have a knife buried to the hilt in someone’s abdomen.

  ‘Because he was there,’ I said eventually, somewhat ashamedly, giving her the most honest answer that I could lay my hands on.

  My mother didn’t speak for a while after that. I didn’t think to count how long, exactly, but it was definitely longer than a minute. I shuffled, I moved forward, only to move back to my original position seconds later, and I even tried to speak, just once, only for the first syllable to be met with a headshake from my mother who was now staring determinedly at the floor. When she did speak the sentiment was simple but the voice that uttered it sounded newly vulnerable: ‘I will protect you.’

  She paused to pull in a large mouthful of air, fuelling whatever was going to come from her next. ‘You won’t understand this until you have children, you know, Gillian. You’ll know that I’m doing this because I’m your mother but you’ll never understand. Not really.’ She spoke more to the floor than she did to me. ‘It will kill me as much as it killed that poor boy, Christ, and his poor mother.’ She paused for a shaky breath, stifling a sob. ‘It will kill me, but you are my daughter and… I can’t. I can’t do that. I won’t.’

  Dexter. 2006. James Remar. ‘Remember this forever – you are my son, you are not alone, and you are loved.’

  I sighed heavily and on hearing this sign of relief my mother picked up again: ‘But it needs to stop, Gillian. This whole bloody nightmare needs to stop.’

  And what if it doesn’t? I wanted to ask her. Her eyes snapped up at me as though I had said the query aloud. She stood up from the bed and stared at me with a determination that I had never seen my mother wear before.

  ‘I won’t do this for you again. If it doesn’t stop, then you’re on your own.’ And she left, pulling my bedroom door closed behind her.

  Chapter 29

  The thought that perhaps my mother was in part responsible – more responsible than she would ever admit, at least – for the less than savoury elements of my psychopathic make-up occurred with more frequency in the days that followed her big reveal. We spoke as normal from the morning after the event, and she addressed me with such ease that the whole thing felt almost anti-climactic. As though in the absence of explosions, accusations, and snide remarks, I was somehow now desperate for them. I had been intermittently reprimanded for various behaviours my entire life, and yet, somehow, the comeuppance for this one fell short of my expectations of how a normal mother should react. If indeed there is a normal reaction to discovering that your child is now a murderer.

  ‘How are you doing this?’ I finally asked her, in response to a question about whether I would be home for dinner or not.

  ‘Cooking?’

  ‘No, being so normal.’

  She sighed. ‘Would you prefer me to outwardly hate you, Gillian?’

  I tried to decipher whether there was an implication that she now inwardly hated me.

  ‘We’ve discussed it. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives discussing it because frankly if we do then there’s every possibility that I’ll change my mind about what we’re doing here.’ She said the words with confidence, as if this were another normal conversational exchange to take part in while putting away the weekly shopping. ‘If you need to discuss it, genuinely need to, then we can, but I’d rather we didn’t, starting now.’ She slammed a kitchen cupboard closed, punctuating her point. ‘Now, are you home for dinner or not?’

  When I left the house thirty minutes later my mother didn’t even ask where I was going. She assumed that it was to Daniel’s, I suppose. A safe assumption to make on a normal day, but there was another man who required my attention that morning. I stopped en route to buy twelve yellow roses, and then I walked to meet him. The journey took less time than I had originally calculated, and before I’d had time to put together my perfect opener, I was in front of him, placing the flowers on the ground, and pinching at the knees of my trousers to loosen them before kneeling down.

  ‘Morning, Dad.’

  I reached out my fingertips towards the headstone in front of me and traced the letters one by one.

  In Loving Memory Of

  Joseph Thompson

  Beloved Husband, Father and Friend

  The longer I stared at the words the more I had to concentrate on stifling a small laugh. ‘That must have been written by a stranger. Unless she really does have a sense of humour after all.’

  I slapped the top of the headstone with the same vigour that my father had always used when punching my shoulder, usually when he had made a joke at my mother’s expense. ‘But you can’t be offended by a joke, so s’alright,’ I could hear him spitting into my ear.

  Half-sitting on my father’s bones now, I pushed the flowers a little closer to the headstone.

  ‘I bought you these, out of politeness, really.’

  The surrounding graves were littered with fresh flowers and sentimental trinkets; there were cards, laminated photographs, overwhelming markers of love and grief that I played voyeur to for a moment, before turning back to the headstone in front of
me. My father’s grave had gone unacknowledged since the afternoon that he had been flung into it.

  ‘You’ll remember all about keeping up appearances, won’t you?’

  I ran my palm flat across the face of the grave, brushing away small chunks of debris that had managed to attach themselves.

  ‘Maybe I should have come sooner, but I didn’t really know what I could say. I still don’t. Maybe I should apologise to you, but then…’ I shook the idea from my head. ‘You’d know that I didn’t mean it.’

  My hands dropped into my lap and I leaned back from the stone, putting an additional two inches between us. There was no rush, I reassured myself; I had ample time to decipher what I could and shouldn’t say. I heard Louise then, her coo of reassurance, her ‘This is a safe space, Gillian, there are no shoulds here – try and remember that.’ She was right, of course: this was a safe space now.

  ‘You’re about the only person I can be honest with, I suppose,’ I said, noting how dejected I sounded by the admission.

  A rustle of grass somewhere behind me bought me an additional minute of thinking time while one grieving relative tended to a dead one. From this angle, they probably thought that I was praying. When the silence had settled again I took a cautious glance around to verify that we really were alone. While I still hadn’t decided what I was about to divulge, I was sure that it wasn’t something that I would want anyone to overhear.

  ‘You’ve missed a lot,’ I started.

  I told him about Daniel, Mum, Emily. I span out the sordid tale of Emily, her request that Daniel help her to end her life and his eventual compliance with that. I explained the closeness – the need for closeness – with Daniel following his confession, and how what I had done to Timothy – what I had needed to do – had somehow become inextricably bound up in those feelings of closeness, like opening myself up to one set of emotions had made me vulnerable to experiencing others. One feeling leading to another seemed like a normal emotional reaction for a normal girl, just that one time. But a small laugh escaped me as I tried to squeeze into the label. If I listened carefully then I could catch my father’s curt ‘HA!’ as he joined in with the joke.