Alex sits forward in his chair, wringing his hands. ‘I remembered some things about my dad,’ he says.
‘You did?’
He looks uncertain now, and I notice he has yet to make full eye contact. Accordingly, I pull my chair adjacent to him instead of directly opposite to show I’m on his side, not confronting him.
‘I mean, it’s nothing important.’
‘I think it is important. Can you tell me?’
His eyes drift back to the corner behind me. I resist from asking if he can see Ruen.
‘It happened one Saturday morning,’ he says slowly, his eyes gradually rising to my face. ‘Maybe a Sunday morning. Dad didn’t talk to any of our neighbours. In fact he’d usually come through the back door when he visited or he’d keep his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. I was sitting on the sofa watching something on TV and I remember Dad was looking straight out the front window and then he stood up and walked to the front door. I didn’t hear anyone knock. When I went after him I saw he was talking to Mrs Beaker from three doors up. She was on her way to the shops as usual. She was like a hundred years old and when she walked she was bent so far over she’s staring at her feet. It was raining really heavy outside but she couldn’t hold up an umbrella. So my dad said to her, “Where are you going?” And she said, “To do some shopping,” and Dad shook his head and smiled and told her to give him her shopping list and he’d do her shopping. Mrs Beaker went back into her house and me and Dad went and bought all her groceries. Dad wouldn’t even take the money off her. She was so happy she kissed him on both cheeks.’
His voice has raised several decibels and he is sitting upright. A few seconds pass. Suddenly his face crumples, his smile turning into a deep scowl. I notice he is holding something in his hand, hiding it between his legs. He must have picked up something when I opened the door to Michael.
‘It’s OK, Alex,’ I say gently. ‘It’s good to remember nice things about your dad. It shows you are forgiving him.’
He struggles to speak, his lips trembling. ‘But … but what would she have done … I mean, if she’d known …’
He doesn’t finish. I glance out the glass panels of the door to watch for Michael, hopeful that we can see Cindy soon. When I turn back to Alex I see he has covered his face with his hands and I go to reach out to him.
‘Alex,’ I begin to say. But I stop short, overwhelmed by a sensation of nausea so strong that I cover my mouth in case I throw up. Alex looks at me.
‘Are you all right?’ he says, sniffling.
I nod. ‘I think so. You were saying about your dad.’
‘Are you feeling sleepy?’ he whispers, and I shake my head. When I pull myself together he continues.
‘My dad could be really kind,’ he says, his teeth still chattering from the upset.
Just like you, I go to say, but then I feel a tingling in my mouth, a sensation of something creeping around my gums. I reach for my talisman on instinct, then realise with a stunned sense of horror that, for the first time ever, I’ve left it at home.
‘But what about when someone is also a murderer?’ Alex is saying. ‘How can they really be kind if they’re evil? How can anything that they did be true? It was all a lie, wasn’t it?’
As I open my mouth to respond my throat tightens, and I feel like I’m choking. I lean forward to recover and take a breath, but before I know it I have fallen on to my hands and knees by the table, gasping for air.
Alex stands up, his face frozen as he watches me. Still, I see him reach behind his back, hiding whatever he’s got in his hand from view. I know what is happening now, but I can’t explain why it’s happening. Anaphylactic shock, my mind screams, anaphylactic shock. But how? How is this happening? I keep my mind focused on taking short breaths, using what time I have left to think of a way to tell Alex what he needs to do.
‘Are you sleepy?’ I hear him say.
Why is he asking that?
Slowly I raise my head, watching him as he steps back against the doll’s house. He is sobbing loudly now, his eyes streaming with tears.
‘It’s OK,’ I whisper, and immediately it feels as if someone has put an invisible hand around my throat, squeezing tightly. I gag. ‘Help me,’ I tell him. ‘Michael. Get Michael.’
But Alex turns away, facing the doll’s house. It is then I see something that should not strike me as odd, but which makes me use the last of my strength to hold my head up and look closer. A plastic tub on the floor, tipped on its side, the kind you’d buy from a vending machine. A jelly bean tub, maybe. Or … There is trail of dust pouring out of it, like sand. And amongst the sand is a pebble. No, not a pebble.
A peanut.
Quickly I force my eyes to my left, spying my coffee cup which has rolled beside the table leg. I have to look twice, but it’s there: on the rim of the cup is a small coating of the same beige dust.
My heart thuds in my chest, my mind racing in every direction.
Keep calm, breathe, breathe …
How did he do this? Just a minute ago, I wasn’t looking …
Did he pour peanut dust in my coffee? He must have …
Why is he doing this? Does he realise what he is doing?
Does he realise he is killing me?
Alex is speaking fast and loud, pouring out apologies and explanations. My arms give way, dropping my face to the floor, cheek to carpet, my arms splayed awkwardly by my sides, my knees bent. It is vital to keep my breathing shallow, my heartbeat as slow as possible. I can feel saliva building up in my throat, and I start to panic. It feels like I am drowning.
I strain to open an eye. Eventually, it rolls back enough to show Alex standing above me. He is pacing, his face screwed up in a mixture of terror and grief. I hear him mutter ‘Ruen,’ and I understand. Ruen is making him do this, or rather the belief he has invested subconsciously in his self-image as the child of a killer – as an inevitable killer in the making. I think back to the footage, of a five-year-old Alex in the corner of the frame, watching on. Suddenly it makes sense to me. He was too young to process the meaning of what he had seen. The media coverage afterwards – newspapers, television reports – would have stirred up negative feelings towards a man he looked up to. A man he loved. His father.
I want to shout out to him the headline I saw amongst the paintings he did for Karen Holland’s class. Ruend Peepels Lives. I want him to make the connection. Ruen is the embodiment of his conflict, a personification of his processing of what it means to be a murderer’s son. I need him to understand his own feelings. Before it’s too late.
My eyelid sags, plunging me into darkness. Nothing but the sound of my small little gasps. I hear Alex’s feet edge closer, his whimpers of fear. A muffled scraping sound. He is pushing my chair against the door, the top of it wedged neatly beneath the handle.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I hear him say. He is pleading with someone or something, shuffling back and forth in front of me. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’
I try to think of anything but the terrible alien feeling that has overwhelmed me, the thickness of my tongue in my mouth, the lulling urge to pass out. I mustn’t. Using all my strength, I lift my head and open my eyes a fraction, enough to see Alex above me. At last, I see what he was hiding before: a thick shard of broken glass.
‘Alex,’ I whisper, though it’s more of a gargle, phlegm and tears and saliva congregating in my throat. He bends down slightly, sobbing. The motion renews my strength, and the shivering that has overtaken me begins to calm. I feel my breaths get longer. I try. I try to tell him. It is all I can do to push back the blackness that laps at my consciousness. But I can’t speak.
The last thing I see is Alex raising the glass shard high above him, the light from the corridor striplight glinting on the sharp edge.
27
THE PIT
Alex
Dear Diary,
I looked at Anya on the floor and I wanted to tell her I’m sorry. I wanted t
o tell her not to be afraid. I wanted to tell her more about Ruen, about what he had asked me to do and why I was doing it. In my mind I could see Mum in the hospital bed, her face the colour of vanilla ice cream. Ruen was beside me in the small room. I didn’t expect Anya to get so sick. My hands were shaking and I thought, She should just be falling asleep so why does she look like she’s in pain? I was so confused.
When Anya fell on the floor I felt really scared. I looked at Ruen, and he frowned at me and said, ‘You know what you have to do, Alex.’ I nodded and I felt sick.
I didn’t understand. I had told him I would do it. I would kill myself.
I would do it to save Mum, that’s what he said. He told me I had to do it in public, so everyone could see. In front of Anya. Why? I’d asked, but he wouldn’t say. He told me to give her the peanuts if it made me feel better, so she would fall asleep straight away and not see it all.
I felt relieved then, but scared. I didn’t want to die. At first I brought out the glass handle to show Anya, but then the black shadow trailed across the floor like a snake from Ruen and wrapped around me. He squeezed it and I knew what he was saying: if I didn’t do it, he would.
I looked at Ruen in the corner of the room, standing close to where Anya lay on the floor, her body shivering like she was really cold. He was Horn Head again, a big red horn jutting out of his faceless forehead, his body covered in hair and barbed wire. I thought, Maybe it would be better if I just went away, because then Ruen would come with me and the only person he would hurt is me. Mum, Anya, Michael, even Woof – they’d all be much, much happier if I went away.
I wrote Anya and Michael a note in advance explaining all this. It’s in my locker. I told them that Ruen showed me a film in my head of Mum hiding the tablets and then taking them out when she was sad and swallowing them. I told them that Ruen said the only way she would live was if I killed myself. And I told them why I thought he really wanted me to kill myself: he said I was nothing. He said I was like a maggot and I had nothing but a miserable life to look forward to and even if I did grow up to be big I would just end up hurting people like my dad.
I thought of Mum again, and the picture in my head was just like the first time I found her when she’d taken lots of pills. It was the morning Dad left, or the morning he got arrested for shooting those policemen. Mum knew he was going to be taken away for ever and she lost all hope. When I found her in her bed she was so limp and I thought she was already dead. It was what I feared more than anything, even her dying – seeing her again like that, making herself die. I couldn’t understand that.
Do it, Ruen whispered, his voice in my head. But it wasn’t his normal voice. It was a soft voice, not too deep and not too old and his accent wasn’t English any more; it was Irish. It took me about three and a half seconds to work out why the voice sounded so familiar, and when I realised whose voice it was I got shivers right up my spine. It was my dad’s voice. And when I looked at the red horn I thought of the policeman my dad shot in the head, the blood spurting out of it, and I felt sick.
‘Alex!’
I turned around to see Michael pounding on the door with his fists, his eyes all wide and scared. He pushed his hands against the glass and looked down at Anya, then looked up at me. He looked really cross.
‘Alex, open this door!’
I didn’t move or speak. I could see the chair that I had pressed against the door handle budge forward each time Michael slammed against it and I thought he’d kill me when he got in.
And maybe that would be OK.
My dad’s voice whispered in my head again. She’s dying, Alex. Your mother is dying.
‘Please let my mum be OK,’ I whispered to Ruen, because I knew he was angry that Michael was getting through the door and I was doing nothing to stop him. He had changed his appearance and was Ghost Boy now, standing opposite me with his hands by his sides and his eyes all black and angry, and his clothes were exactly like mine, as if I was looking into a mirror.
Michael was still banging on the glass, shouting, and there were lots of people behind him now. Then someone hit the glass with a hammer and started trying to break it. A big crack formed across the glass in the shape of a W.
I looked down at Anya, and for a moment it wasn’t Anya lying there – it was the policeman lying on the ground, his right arm bent and covering his face, his left arm turned in a way that didn’t look right. I wanted to reach down and fix Anya’s arm to make sure she was comfortable. But before I could do anything there was a gigantic crash and I screamed. The glass in the door smashed and scattered to the floor.
‘Alex! What’s wrong with Anya?’
Michael reached through the broken glass and swept away all the shards with his hand before pushing the chair away from the door. I saw there was blood on his hand but he didn’t notice. Then Ruen tightened his grip around me and I started to yell because it hurt a lot.
The only way to save her is to kill yourself, he said. You’re nothing. You don’t deserve this life. You are unlovable.
I bent down and lifted the glass handle from the floor. My mind was playing the image of Mum over and over, her hand on the bed opening loosely like a petal.
You’re so like your dad, Alex. You’re so like your dad.
I knew what Ruen was telling me.
I was going to grow up to be just like my dad. And that was a bad thing, because my dad was a murderer. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. But I was already doing it. I was hurting me. I was hurting Anya. And I was never going to be free of him.
But Ruen had lied. He said I was unlovable. But the other day, Auntie Bev said she loved me. And Anya liked me, too.
And then I remembered something else. Ruen had told me that if a demon failed in his task he got chained in a deep pit a million miles under the sun for a hundred years. Ruen would be so bored, I had thought. Now I reckoned it would serve him right.
‘I’m not nothing,’ I told Ruen. ‘I’m Alex. Alexander the Great. And I can be anything I want to be.’
I lifted the glass jug handle higher, but instead of hurting myself I brought it down over the thick black link between me and Ruen, and Ruen roared as the shadow shattered and every vein in my body felt like it was going to explode.
Someone grabbed my arms and Michael shouted, ‘He’s going!’ and then there was nothing but blackness.
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of
those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human
breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to
come through the struggle unscathed.
Sigmund Freud
28
THE ANSWERS
Anya
I woke up two days later in the intensive care unit at Belfast City Hospital, a venue in which I had never spent any time during the thirty years I lived here but which was now startlingly familiar. I was in a ward with two other women, my arm hooked up to a drip. A heart monitor bleeped steadily beside me. A bunch of red roses sat in a vase close to the bed. I sat for a few minutes in a blank daze as the wheels of thought warmed up again, wondering how long I’d been out for and – deep in the roots of my suspicions – if I really was alive. Gradually a series of aches and throbs announced themselves all over my body – my throat, my neck and shoulders, my stomach – and I realised with relief that I was alive. A young black-haired nurse walked past and threw me a smile, then doubled-back as it occurred to her that I had surfaced. She checked my vitals, read my chart.
‘Well, well,’ she said brightly. ‘Back in the land of the living. How are you feeling?’
I tried to sit upright but the sudden exertion made my heart monitor bleep warningly. The nurse rushed over and pushed a cushion behind my back, supporting me.
‘Where’s Alex?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Michael,’ I corrected myself, figuring she would probably be a stranger to the situation. Michael would know about Alex. ‘Michael Jones, he must have brought me in.
Is he around?’
She considered this while strapping a blood pressure gauge around my right bicep.
‘I think he’s just popped out, actually. Is that his coat?’
I followed her gaze to the chair by my bed, where a brown wool jacket was slung neatly over the back.
‘I think so.’
The nurse flipped open my notes and scribbled a figure in a column. ‘I’ll arrange for you to get some soup.’
Just then, a set of footsteps made their way towards my bed. I looked up and saw Michael standing there, his face a mixture of astonishment and relief as he saw me sitting upright. The nurse glanced at me.
‘This is who you meant?’
I gave her a nod. Michael had fresh silver stubble on his jaw, his eyes puffy with sleeplessness.
‘How are you?’ he said.
I hesitated, my mind a fog. Slowly the memory of what happened came creeping back like a slow tide: Alex’s face, raw with tears and grief. The upended plastic tub. The trickle of beige dust on my espresso cup. The sensation of drowning.
‘Where’s Alex?’ I whispered.
Michael’s smile fell. He ran his fingers through his long hair, visibly reluctant to tell me. I felt my heart race.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
He swallowed and looked away. Then he pulled up a chair close to me and took my hand. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said. I shook my head.
And he told me.
When Michael had shattered the glass in the door and managed to open it, Alex collapsed to the ground. I was already unconscious, lying facedown by my chair with no immediate signs of what had happened. Ursula and Howard attended to Alex, who was also unconscious, while Michael tried to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He had noticed swelling around my throat, a small red rash gathering below my collarbone. Then he had remembered what I’d said about having a talisman. He rolled me on to my side and called an ambulance from his mobile phone.
The Boy Who Could See Demons Page 26