by C. S. Barnes
This was the first opportunity that I’d had for such an uninhibited confession of feelings. I was all too aware of the bitter twist of irony cutting through it though: this outpouring, to my father no less. The first man I had known, loved, hurt – killed. Now I was talking to him like he was someone I trusted. I reached forward and ran my fingers over the lies hammered into his headstone. Palm flat against the surface, as though needing physical support, I confessed: ‘I think that there’s something wrong with Mum.’
Psycho. 1960. Anthony Perkins. ‘Mother – what’s the phrase? She isn’t quite herself today.’
‘She’s completely herself,’ I explained. ‘And I feel like she shouldn’t be.’ I relayed the last four days to my father; how my mother had helped me pack, cooked me meals, even offered to take me shopping – although shopping for what exactly, she couldn’t say: ‘I don’t know, Gillian, anything you might need.’ There were moments when I had felt that she was the one making up for something, while I felt confident that it should have been the other way around. ‘Mum thinks that you and she has something to do with what I did, said I never stood a chance, that you’d worked together to breed a little monster.’ A small laugh broke through; not quite the real live girl I had been hoping to portray. ‘She obviously thinks that you and I are quite similar in a lot of ways too.’ I paused here, noting how uncomfortable the thought was. ‘Funny, really, when it’s you and her who share similarities at the moment. You’ve both kept secrets for me now.’ I wondered whether my father would have kept this secret – and an unwelcome thought appeared then: could I really trust my mother to? I thought of her bustling about the kitchen, refusing to discuss what had happened.
‘Do you think I can trust her?’
My mind flicked to an image of my mother, hiding her best carving knives, asking herself a similar question. Maybe my mother and I weren’t that dissimilar after all.
‘She might think it still, but I’m nothing like you. I could never hurt her, or him. I’d hurt someone else first, always.’ I said the words boastfully, although I’m unsure now why I felt such pride. ‘And they’ll both protect me. That’s what I know now; that’s what I can really take away from all of this.’
I pressed my knuckles against the ground to help lever myself into a standing position. My knees were caked with damp mud that I tried to brush away before it had time to dry into the fabric.
‘Like I said before, you and I are different types of monsters.’ I leaned hard on the top of the stone. ‘You were an animal. You just couldn’t help yourself; I know that now. And I know that I’ll do this much better than you did. I can be better, kinder, normal. I can be a real person; Daniel will make me that.’
I ran my muddied hand over the top of the headstone and took a step closer to him; bending over at the waist, I lowered myself down until my lips were nearly touching the granite. When I inhaled against it I was overwhelmed by the blend of warm lager and raw meat that had always come home from work with him. I lowered my voice down to a whisper level before saying my goodbye.
‘In case you were wondering, Dad, I don’t regret you at all.’
I pressed my lips down on the stone, planting an abrupt kiss on its surface.
Now
It is Monday now, which means two things: I have a late seminar at university, and it is Daniel’s day to cook dinner. A month after Daniel moved in with me – four months after I moved back to Bristol – he pinned a cleaning and cooking rota to the door of my fridge, and we have mostly adhered to the timetable. When I return home carrying double the number of textbooks that I left the house with in the morning, Daniel is already busying himself in the kitchen. It isn’t until I thump the deadweight of academic literature down on our dining table that he even seems to notice that I’ve walked into the room.
‘Christ, GT, drop those any louder?’ he says, reaching out to turn down the radio before turning to look at me. ‘You could scare the hair off a cat.’
I try to hold in a flicker of something – intrigue? – prompted by his analogy.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump.’
He waves away the apology and smiles before returning to the chopping board in front of him. The radio is turned down to an inaudible level but the voices create something like a hum in the background.
‘What were you listening to?’ I ask.
‘This police panel show sort of thing. It wasn’t great, to be honest, but they’re talking about that kid – you know, the one who died round your area?’
I am jarred to hear Daniel’s flippancy on this topic, but I have, deep down, been waiting for this to come up. We are closing in on a year since Timothy Westburn’s murder and the police are yet to make an arrest for it – in fact, they are yet to even isolate a suspect. The closest they have come to something promising, something concrete, is a statement that was released six months after the incident.
‘We’re looking for a man in his mid to late thirties. Short dark hair, dark eyes, of average body build, approximately six foot two in height. We have a witness who has placed him at the scene of the crime and it is imperative that we contact him as this investigation moves forward.’
I couldn’t remember seeing anyone who matched that description. Unlikely though it was, for a moment I wondered whether the police were desperate enough for a suspect that they would fabricate one entirely – but it was a poor effort, if that were the case. Not only were they looking for a make-believe monster, but their killer had been given the wrong height and build, not to mention genitalia.
‘It’s crazy though, right?’ Daniel says, pulling me back into the kitchen where he is now lifting a casserole dish into the open oven. I have hated casseroles since my father’s death, which prompted repeated deliveries of them, miraculously deposited on mine and my mother’s doorstep at seemingly random intervals. But it doesn’t feel right to mention this to Daniel after six months of him cooking them and my feigning enjoyment at eating them. ‘Don’t you think?’ Daniel picks up again, noting my extended silence.
‘What’s crazy?’
‘That they never found that kid’s killer.’
‘I don’t know. It happens, doesn’t it? You hear about it more often these days.’
Daniel considers this for a moment. ‘I still think it’s mental, GT. Someone out there is a murderer and, like, no one has any idea. He’s just walking around, living his life. Christ, he might even have family.’
He might even be a woman.
‘Do you think anyone knows?’ Daniel says, sounding more excited than I think he should.
I can’t talk about this any longer, I decide, not without things tightening in my chest, not without breathing becoming a little uncomfortable. I walk over to him and, tiptoeing slightly, I kiss the side of his temple.
‘I think you must have had a boring day at work to be so excited over this.’
Daniel laughs because he has learnt to take these comments light-heartedly, no matter how serious I appear when I say them. And given that he is working as a financial assistant again, boring is probably exactly what his day has been.
‘Fair point,’ he says, before kissing me back. ‘Casserole okay for dinner?’
He turns and so can’t see the twinge of a grimace that appears when he asks this. ‘Perfect. How long will it be?’
‘How long do you need?’
Daniel knows that there are nights when I need to escape for a while, and on these nights he thinks that I run. I am usually gone for anywhere up to an hour and while I do leave the house donning athletic attire, and I do return reasonably sweaty, the process isn’t quite as simple as I have allowed Daniel to believe for the last six months.
‘An hour?’ I say, already knowing that this is fine and that, if necessary, Daniel will halt dinner preparations and pick them up again when I’m home.
‘An hour is fine, GT, I’ve got some work to do anyway.’ He is still chopping at something when I move to the leave the kitchen, but I
halt when he throws a quick ‘Love you’ after me. Human or not, these moments still baffle me.
American Psycho. 2000. Christian Bale. ‘And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable…… I simply am not there.’
‘You too,’ I say, already halfway out the door.
When I leave the flat I am wearing loose-fitting jogging bottoms and an ill-fitting T-shirt that used to belong to Daniel. However, much like many of his other clothes, I have now adopted this too as part of my own wardrobe. I shout goodbye but he has already connected himself to a set of headphones that are wired into his laptop and so he doesn’t hear me leave.
The run to the storage centre used to take me half an hour on its own. But, as with all exercise, I have become more accustomed to the run over time and it now takes little more than fifteen minutes. I exchange pleasantries with the guard at the entrance – ‘How’s the family?’ I ask, as I do every time I walk through these gates – and head to my storage unit which is, as requested on initially signing the contract for it, one of the furthest from the main entrance. ‘I’m particular about proximity,’ I had said to the manager and he had shrugged, taken my money in exchange for the key and then disappeared, seemingly nonplussed by my request. Over the last ten months I have learnt that people are often too busy with their own unmentionables to go rummaging about in yours, unless they have a particularly good reason to.
‘What’s in storage, anyway?’ Daniel had asked, after accidentally opening an invoice for the space.
‘Boxes,’ I had replied. ‘University experiments, old clothes, you know.’ And that had pacified him entirely.
Inside my unit – number 034 – there are in fact five boxes.
Experiments.
Miscellaneous.
DG.
AT.
And the most recent addition: PW.
When I arrive home a little over an hour later I am already drafting an apology to Daniel who, I assume, will be readying dinner. When I walk through the front door though, I can see that Daniel is sitting in the living room, his elbows perched on his knees and his eyes fixed on something that is moving across the television screen.
‘Daniel?’ I raise my voice a little, pretending that I haven’t seen him.
‘In here, GT.’
When I walk into the living room I can see that it is a news report that has Daniel so transfixed. I brace myself for another police panel, or worse still a commemorative speech from The Mother of the Boy, but instead Daniel cuts through the broadcast to announce: ‘They found him.’
‘Who?’
‘That bloke. That Peter Whatshisname bloke.’
‘Wincher,’ I say.
‘Yes, that’s the bloke – that’s the bloke they’ve found.’ Daniel says this with a level of excitement that seems disproportionate for the announcement that he’s making. ‘You know the one who went missing last month? They’ve bloody found him.’
‘Where?’
‘His body was dumped at some running track or another. How they’ve only just found him, mind, on a track like that, I’ve got no idea.’
Probably because he was well hidden, I think, but I say nothing.
The interactions between the live feed and the studio fill our momentary silence.
‘And what have the police said about this so far, Claire?’ says the smart-looking middle-aged news anchor who is taking up the right half of our television screen.
‘The police have said very little, Philip, but we have heard some speculation that Peter Wincher’s case is markedly similar to those of David Green and Aaron Turner, which we saw earlier this year. The police, understandably so, don’t want to encourage rumour,’ the woman says, maintaining what feels like an intimidating level of eye contact with the camera. ‘But there is talk of this being a killing spree of sorts, potentially at the hands of one individual.’
The X Files. 1997. Gillian Anderson. ‘Psychologists often speak of the denial of an unthinkable evil… What we can’t possibly imagine ourselves capable of we can blame on the ogre, on the hunchback, on the lowly half-breed.’
On the unnamed, inhuman individual.
I turn the television off.
‘Why did you do that?’ Daniel asks, irked by the interruption.
‘Why do you want to watch that, Daniel? It’s gutter press.’
‘Gutter press? Gillian, there could be a bloody serial killer out there.’
‘Oh, Daniel, don’t be so absurd,’ I snap, biting harder at him than I mean to and he is visibly pained by my tone. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s scary, don’t you think?’
Living with Daniel has been invaluable to my developing how to talk to people. We had been living together for just six weeks when I had perfected this tone – this meek and vulnerable tone – that led to him offering me comfort for one thing or another, and that’s exactly what he does. Daniel stands from the sofa and wraps an arm around my shoulders. He plants a kiss near the crown of my head and says: ‘Sorry, GT. I know how stuff like that gets to you.’
And it does get to me, in ways that Daniel will never understand.
‘But hey, whoever it is that’s bumping these folks off, you obviously don’t need to worry,’ he says, and I give him a quizzical look. ‘Well, they’re all blokes, aren’t they?’ He winks, and it is clear that he is trying to be playful, so I smile in return.
We both walk to the kitchen and while Daniel continues with his preparations for dinner, I fabricate details of my run – ‘I really think I’m getting my time down now’ – in the hope that this will keep Daniel busy. I am talking and talking at a frantic pace but somewhere in the back of my head I am already replaying things.
Replaying Daniel. And when he places our plates on the dining table, I hear him, clear as day.
‘Someone out there is a murderer and, like, no one has any idea. She’s just walking around, living her life. Christ, she might even have family.’
‘You okay there, GT?’ Daniel asks.
‘Walking around, living my life, I’m doing okay,’ I say, before I tuck into my casserole.
A Note From Bloodhound Books
Thanks for reading Intention . We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads to help others find and enjoy this book too.
We make every effort to ensure that books are carefully edited and proofread, however occasionally mistakes do slip through. If you spot something, please do send details to [email protected] and we can amend it.
Bloodhound Books specialise in crime and thriller fiction. We regularly have special offers including free and discounted eBooks. To be the first to hear about these special offers, why not join our mailing list here? We won’t send you more than two emails per month and we’ll never pass your details on to anybody else.
Readers who enjoyed Intention will also enjoy
Ice Cold Alice by CP Wilson
34 Days by Anita Waller