The Boy Who Could See Demons

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  Go back, now, she said. I love you.

  When I opened my eyes, Melinda was standing over me, slapping my face and shouting my name. I felt myself take an enormous breath as if I had just surfaced from the depths of the ocean. My legs and hands were numb and my head fizzed like a bad hangover. I caught a strong whiff of Melinda’s heavy patchouli perfume and landed back on Earth with a sharp thud. The look on her face melted from horror to sheer relief when I sat upright.

  ‘Oh, man – sweetie, I thought you were dead!’ she cried.

  I shook my head to confirm that, despite how I may have looked, I was pretty much alive. My body was tingling now, as if I’d just emerged from a warm bath or a day in the sun. ‘I saw her,’ I told Melinda. ‘I saw Poppy.’

  She threw me an odd look. I reached a trembling hand to my mouth.

  Melinda took off her cashmere cardigan and wrapped it around my shoulders. ‘It’s freezing in here,’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you open a window or something?’

  I shook my head, though the concern in her voice made me smile. It reassured me that I was safe. She laughed nervously.

  ‘You’ll never guess what,’ she said as I rose to my feet, leaning on the edge of the piano for balance.

  ‘What?’

  She folded her arms and grinned widely. ‘That piece you showed me. It’s one hundred per cent genuine.’

  I nodded in acknowledgement, glancing around the room.

  ‘That kid is a genius,’ she continued. ‘A total child prodigy!’

  I looked at the piano, then searched around the floor.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Melinda said, unfolding her arms.

  ‘It’s gone,’ I told her. ‘The music has gone.’

  23

  THE THINGS THAT ARE REAL

  Alex

  Dear Diary,

  What did Pope Julius II say to Michelangelo?

  ‘Sure, come on down, son, we’ll paper it.’

  I woke up really early today because today was a Saturday and I was going to see Mum at ten o’clock. It felt like Christmas morning. I set my alarm for seven so that I’d have time to get a shower before the others woke up and brush my teeth and clean out my ears and cut my nails. I was also afraid in case the laundry people forgot to wash my clothes so I made sure I’d have extra time to wash and dry them myself, but it was OK because when I checked my wardrobe my shirt and trousers and waistcoat were all there, really clean and nicely ironed.

  I woke well before my alarm, so took a long, long time in the shower. I spent about an hour polishing my shoes and then I sat with a black marker colouring in all the scuff marks so they’d look extra clean. By this time it was only eight o’clock. So I rearranged all the photographs and drawings of our new house that I’d stuck to the walls and spent a while imagining Mum and me living there, cooking together in the kitchen, sitting in the garden when it got sunny, hanging up pictures of lilies and dolphins.

  Then I drew Mum a picture and wrote a nice message inside. It said: ‘Mum, I hope you feel better soon because I love you, and if you felt as good as much as I love you, you would feel really good.’

  Mum was waiting for me in the living room that she shares with the other people in her ward. She was dressed in a pair of new jeans and a blue T-shirt. She had some make-up on, too, a pale pink on her eyelids and cheeks and her eyelashes were black. I was so glad to see her that I almost cried, and I felt she could see that I was upset and she almost cried, too.

  When she let go of me I sat opposite her and smiled.

  ‘How do you like this new school, then?’ she said, though she said it like she wasn’t glad I was going to a new school.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s only temporary, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘What’s this you’ve brought?’

  I was holding my sketchpad. ‘I’ve been doing lots of new drawings,’ I told her. ‘Anya said it’s good for my recovery. Shall I show you?’

  Mum gave a frozen kind of smile and nodded her head.

  I’d deliberately avoided doing any more pictures of skeletons as they seemed to upset people, so I had drawn things like the flowers growing outside my bedroom window and a scene from my classroom and a portrait of Woof. When Mum saw the picture of Woof her smile dropped clean off her face. She touched the picture for a long time and held her hand up to her mouth.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  She took a long deep breath and then held one of my hands in both of hers. ‘Alex,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry, but Woof has had to be moved to a new home, too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  I didn’t hear all the words she said because my heart was thumping so loudly, like it was in my ears, but basically it sounded something like Woof had been placed in a home for dogs when Auntie Bev had gone back to Cork for a week or so because there was no one at home to feed or walk him and Auntie Bev couldn’t take him with her. When Mum said a home for dogs, I knew she meant the RSPCA. I thought of Woof being locked up there with all the other barking, miserable dogs, doing circles in a cage the size of our loo and wondering what he’d done wrong to end up in there.

  I must have been panting because all of a sudden Mum put her arms around me and said, ‘Oh, Alex. I’m so sorry, this is all my fault.’

  ‘Can’t we get him back?’ I asked.

  Mum hugged me tight and when she looked at me again her make-up was running down her face in wet black lines. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I won’t make promises to you any more that I can’t guarantee. So it’s a maybe. If he’s still there.’

  I wanted to ask whether she thought the people at the RSPCA might put Woof down, because I overheard someone say that they had to do that all the time because they had too many dogs. But I was afraid of upsetting Mum even more.

  ‘This is my fault,’ Mum said again. ‘If I hadn’t got myself in here we’d probably all still be at home.’

  At last I remembered my manners and pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket. I handed it to Mum and she smiled and dabbed her face.

  ‘When are you coming home?’ I asked.

  Mum looked away. ‘I don’t know.’

  I thought for a moment about what I could do or say to make Mum happy. Immediately I thought of Ruen saving my dad, but I didn’t want to tell her the part about Hell because she’d definitely, definitely think I was loony.

  So I said: ‘I know you miss my dad, Mum, and I know you’ve been very sad since he died. But I think that maybe someday we’ll be able to see him again. You know, in Heaven.’

  Mum lowered my handkerchief from her face very slowly. She looked angry. Oh no, I thought. I have made everything much, much worse.

  ‘Alex, what do you mean, died?’ she said. Her face was very twisted now.

  ‘I mean, when he died that morning that I found you in bed with all the pills, and Granny phoned the ambulance and …’

  I stopped talking cos she was looking at me as if I’d gone mad. Her mouth was opening and her forehead had a line into it that started to turn into a letter V.

  ‘Mum,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I’m sorry, I suppose I shouldn’t talk about it.’

  Then she lowered her hands and gave a sigh that was so big her shoulders stooped.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, which was her twenty-ninth apology since I arrived. ‘I thought you understood, Alex.’ She looked out the window again and the sun lit up her face and for a moment she looked young again. ‘Granny always said I treated you older than you were, that I expected too much of you. I suppose it was because you always seemed so much older. Did you know you were walking at ten months old?’

  My stomach was starting to turn into a knot.

  She was still talking as if someone else was in the room. ‘The health visitor said it was remarkable, said she’d never heard of a nineteen-month-old talk like that. Like a three-or four-year-old, she said, especially since boys are so much behind girls, usually.’ Her eyes smiled. ‘You made me so proud, Alex. I
felt so scared when you were born. Didn’t know how I’d feed you, look after you. Didn’t know how I’d manage. Didn’t know how I’d give you what you needed. But you surprised us all.’

  ‘Do you mean Dad isn’t dead?’ I demanded.

  ‘You already know this, Alex. He’s at Magilligan Prison, remember? I tried to take you to visit him but you said you didn’t want to …’

  I fell back as if she had just punched me in the face.

  ‘Alex?’ she said, leaning forward with her arms held out. I felt my head turn from side to side on my shoulders, as if someone was turning it for me.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she was saying, but then her mouth was opening and closing and I couldn’t hear anything because my heart was beating so hard and it was as if I had forgotten how to speak because I couldn’t get my feelings to come out as words. ‘He … but …’ Then: ‘Where’s Magilligan?’

  ‘It’s about seventy miles from here. Just past the Giant’s Causeway.’ My mouth was full of spit. Mum sighed and rubbed her head.

  ‘I want to tell you something, Alex.’

  I got up and sat beside her but I felt like I was floating.

  ‘You didn’t deserve any of this,’ she said. ‘For a long, long time I’ve thought … well, that you didn’t deserve me. That you deserve a much better mother than me. And I thought that it was because of me that my foster parents abused me. That I deserved it all.’

  I nodded, even though I still wasn’t really sure what she was talking about. Didn’t ‘foster parents’ mean people who weren’t your parents?

  ‘But it takes time to feel good about yourself after feeling worthless your whole life.’

  ‘What do you mean by foster parents?’

  Mum frowned. ‘See, that’s the thing, Alex. I haven’t been truthful with either you or me. Granny wasn’t my real mum, you see. She adopted me when I was about your age.’

  I’m not sure what happened after Mum told me that. It was as if a huge glass tube suddenly came down from the ceiling and trapped me inside, the way people put upside-down jars over spiders and they can’t get out, and all I could hear inside the tube was my own heart sprinting and my own thoughts. Which were:

  Granny isn’t my granny?

  Auntie Bev isn’t my real auntie?

  Dad didn’t die?

  Who did Ruen get out of Hell, then?

  But I must’ve been making all the right noises because Mum kept talking. I think she was discussing the new house with me and all her plans for decorating when she got out of the hospital, because she kept saying things like ‘red paint, or maybe Tuscan orange’ and ‘lots of posh lamps’. And while she was saying all this, a thought clanked through my head like a midnight express train:

  Ruen is lying.

  Ruen is lying.

  He didn’t get my dad out of Hell.

  There was no massive building or dragons in the sky.

  And what was it he’d said? My dad wanted me to pay the debt?

  In other words, Ruen felt he could spin me a big fib and get some payback while he was at it.

  I stood up.

  Mum was talking mostly to herself now, going on and on about how she always wanted carpet on the stairs. She was wiping tears from her eyes but smiling at the same time.

  ‘Maybe we can make a fresh start,’ she said.

  I took her hand.

  ‘Mum, I love you,’ I said. ‘But there’s something I have to do.’

  And I went, right when she was deciding between pink and peach tiles for the bathroom.

  When I left Mum I got taken back to MacNeice House. As soon as we walked through the red front door there was a big smashing sound and a lady wearing a hairnet and an apron made me walk really slowly up the corridor in case I stood on any glass.

  ‘Butterfingers today,’ she said, holding up her fingers like she was surprised she had them on the ends of her hands. There were about eleven broken jugs all over the place and a big puddle of water. When I looked down in one of them I saw Ruen’s face smiling back, but he was nowhere to be seen. He knew I was angry with him.

  Miss Kells was waiting for me outside my bedroom. I walked up to her.

  ‘I want to go swimming,’ I told her.

  She looked at me very seriously and I noticed her eyes and mouth were exactly like Michael’s. I went to tell her this but then I thought she would only ask who Michael was so I shut up.

  ‘Alex,’ she said. ‘I’d like to talk to you about something really important.’

  ‘Right now?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ I said, but I didn’t say why.

  I didn’t say that I needed to have a chat with a nine-thousand-year-old demon who fibbed about busting his way into Hell and helping my father escape just so he could hold one over me. And that I needed somewhere quiet and private to do it, because if I started shouting in my bedroom they’d come in with restraints and more white pills.

  ‘I need to work on my butterfly crawl,’ I said, and I made a big show of looking at the sign for the swimming pool behind her.

  Miss Kells crouched down next to me and I thought of second-hand books with their yellow pages.

  ‘You know, Alex,’ she said, ‘you can tell me anything. That’s the beauty about having a personal tutor. Nothing you tell me can ever get you into trouble, understand?’

  I nodded. I didn’t understand, but when she told me this I felt the knot in my stomach turn to butter and a feeling of warmth flood over me.

  I opened my mouth. She nodded, encouraging me to speak. I wanted to tell her about Ruen. I wanted to ask her advice. So I said:

  ‘Miss Kells, what would you do if someone you really, really trusted told you a really horrible lie?’

  She smiled, and her eyes told me she knew why I was asking what I was asking, and I wondered if someone had lied to her the way I’d been lied to. She came close to me and said:

  ‘I would tell them I never wanted to see them again. Even if I loved them very much, I would never trust them again.’

  I nodded and she took my hand, only her hand felt like warm air. ‘Do you need my help, Alex?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but then I shook my head because I didn’t know how she could possibly help me with this one.

  ‘If you ever need my help in the future, all you have to do is ask,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and I went to ask her something else but when I looked again she was gone.

  I did a lot of laps up and down the pool, thumping my body into the ripples with each stroke, imagining I was fighting with Ruen. Occasionally I’d take a rest at the end of a lap, clinging on to the side and muttering orders under my breath for Ruen to show his horrible stony face. But he didn’t show.

  Finally, I dragged myself out and went into the sauna. All the other boys were off playing football and the lifeguard was at the side of the pool, so I had the whole place to myself. I went in, lay down on a bench and imagined pure hatred oozing out of my pores.

  A cough. I opened my eyes. On the other side of the room I could make out an old man through the steam. He was mean-looking and he had a piranha-fish smile and was wearing a suit that was threading at one side. And the thread snaked its way through the mist and ended at the hem of my towel.

  ‘You called?’ Ruen said.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ I shouted.

  ‘Oh?’ He didn’t seem bothered by the accusation, so I challenged him:

  ‘You told me that you got my dad out of Hell, and you didn’t.’

  ‘And how did you come to that conclusion?’

  I was standing now, pointing down at him as he sat on the bench opposite. ‘Mum told me my dad is alive and well in Magilligan Prison. So I don’t know who you dragged out of Hell, Ruen. In fact I don’t think you dragged anyone out. I think you made the whole thing up. And I think I don’t owe you anything.’

  He stood up and looked at me very crossly. For a moment I thought he was going to change shape an
d become a monster just to make me feel scared. But he just glanced at a spot in the corner. When I looked, I saw another demon sitting there, unfolding behind the mist. He was dressed in a tweed suit like Ruen’s but it looked new and he seemed younger and timid. He seemed to be writing stuff down in a leather notebook.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  The demon went to introduce himself but Ruen cut him off. ‘That’s Braze,’ he said. ‘He’s an intern. Ignore him.’

  I picked up my towel and made to leave. Just as I reached the door, Ruen said:

  ‘Your mother lied, Alex.’

  I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth and turned around slowly. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Your mother lied,’ Ruen said calmly.

  ‘Just who do you think you—’

  He held up a hand. ‘Please,’ he said.

  I was shaking with anger and my mouth felt tight as if I was really cold. He swept his hand from me to the bench, gesturing for me to sit down.

  ‘You’ve got ten seconds to explain.’ I didn’t sit down.

  Ruen sighed. ‘The man I saved was your real father,’ he said. ‘The man in Magilligan Prison is not. Nobody knows your father isn’t your real father. Not even your grandmother.’

  All of a sudden I remembered what Mum had said about Granny: She’s not your real granny. The memory and truth of it hit me so hard I had to blink back tears.

  ‘Why would Mum lie about who my dad is, huh?’ I yelled. ‘How dare you call my Mum a liar—’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Ruen said. ‘I said she lied. There’s a difference, dear boy. Your mother lied to protect you. Your mother lied because she loves you, and she knows all too well how much a revelation like this would hurt you. I only tell you now because you force me to.’

  He glanced over at the other demon, who was still writing.

  I couldn’t stop the tears now, nor could I stop my heart from racing or my whole body pouring with sweat, dripping down my face and arms and fingertips. I took a deep breath. A sob wormed its way out of me, and then hot tears.