The Boy in the Park: The gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by A J Grayson

  ‘The old man’s?’

  Joseph’s voice is catching now. He can’t seem to get proper lungfuls of air. His words are short. The moisture in Pauline’s eyes has crested her lids, two saline drops sliding down her makeup-less cheeks as she relives the moment anew.

  ‘It … it, it wasn’t him.’ As Joseph tries to breathe in, the sound of his lower lip fluttering against his teeth just makes it onto the recording.

  ‘Whose eyes did you see?’ Pauline asks, her voice now even softer. In this instant, it sounds almost as sorrowful as his.

  The sob comes. Joseph can’t hold it back any longer. It can be clearly heard, mournful and agonizing, choking in his throat.

  ‘I saw hers,’ he forces out around it.

  ‘The woman’s,’ Pauline offers.

  ‘I’d been so overcome, oh God,’ Joseph sobs. ‘I didn’t know I was doing it. But I’d killed them both. All that blood, it wasn’t just his. I wanted it to be his, in that moment, but I’d done, done that, to both of them. She didn’t deserve it! God, she didn’t deserve anything!’ Joseph’s voice is little more than a howl now, mournful and broken. The cassette struggles to relay the agonizing mixture of sounds. ‘But it was her eyes that were staring up at me,’ he finally adds, ‘not his. The eyes of the only woman I’d ever loved.’

  ‘Whose eyes were they?’ Pauline asks. Her voice has drawn in close. It is tense. Talk to me.

  ‘We used to be so happy. When it was just the two of us, with no one else around. Like we were the only two people on the planet. The sun and the stars and the moon would disappear, and there was just her and me.’

  Joseph’s voice is changing, now. It’s slipping as his mind drifts into a memory, and the words come as if he’s reading them from a page.

  ‘She’d take me on walks. She’d hold my hand in hers. And we’d sit together on a big blanket and have picnics.’

  ‘Whose eyes were they?’ Pauline asks again, urgent. She can’t let him lose this momentum. Come on, Joseph. Take the step!

  ‘And she would make me the most amazing treats.’ Joseph doesn’t seem to notice her. ‘We never had cash flowing out of our pockets, but she’d make the most perfect sweets. And little presents, and all the pain would go away.’

  ‘Tell me who she was.’

  ‘And she’d look into my eyes, and I’d look into hers, and the universe would just melt away.’

  ‘Whose eyes, Joseph?’

  ‘Hers, bitch! I told you!’ The rage is back. A fist slams on the table. The man is pure fury, howling like a lion again. ‘The woman’s!’

  ‘Which woman, Joseph? Whose eyes?’

  ‘My mother’s eyes!’ he yells out. His roar is bestial. Fists slam on the metal table over and over again. A chair slides away and ankle restraints can be heard clanking against their bolt in the floor. ‘My mother’s fucking eyes!’

  And then the recording is only sobs and tortured, moaning gasps for breath, and Pauline’s voice, further away from the microphone now, saying to unnamed others, ‘It’s okay, don’t come in. The situation is under control. Leave us be.’

  Eventually the howling subsides and the breathing slows. There is only a whisper, repeated over and over again until the cassette clicks to its end.

  ‘I saw my mother’s eyes.’

  58

  Conference Room 4C

  California Medical Facility

  The committee chairman peers across the room at Pauline. Her explanation has been as compelling as thorough. They’ve read all the documentation and listened to all the cassettes.

  ‘So the inmate did finally acknowledge that he had killed his own family, that night twenty-eight years ago?’ he asks.

  Pauline nods. ‘He was beginning to understand. The details weren’t full in his memory yet, but yes. He’d started to accept it. The transition from denial to invention to honesty was in motion. The woman he’d admitted killing before, when he’d convinced himself he’d murdered his wife – he had become aware that this was actually his mother.’

  ‘And his father?’

  ‘He’d totally written his father out of his memory, and I haven’t yet been able to bring him to recognize him, not fully, in the recollections of what he did. All he remembers, in flashes of recognition, is the hatred that he had for the man. But we know from the trial transcripts, from the testimony of neighbours, schoolteachers and others in the town that the father was extremely abusive, both mentally and physically. It’s no surprise he’s simply erased him from his memory.’

  ‘Why all the focus on his mother?’

  ‘That’s where his guilt comes from,’ Lavrentis answers. ‘He’d intended to act out towards the man, since his father had been the source of the abuse, but his rage got the better of him. It was a wild outburst. I’m not sure he even knew at the time what he was doing, and all these years later he has only flashes. Images. His rage became unfocused and he simply shot at everything. Hit everything. Attacked everything. You might say that his mother got caught in something akin to crossfire. But when he realized he’d killed her, the woman he was trying to protect, it broke him.’ She pauses, uncrosses and then re-crosses her legs, trying to find the right words to sum up. ‘For the longest time, his only defence against his guilt was to write the whole experience out of his memory. He was an innocent man. He’d never done anything wrong, certainly nothing like this. But his conscience was starting to bring him back to reality.’

  There is a heavy silence while the details are processed. The stenographer types the final syllables of Pauline’s comments into her keyboard.

  Finally, the warden leans forward, his elbows on the table.

  ‘This is compelling and helpful, but one question still remains unanswered. One that goes directly to his stability and mental fitness.’ The warden’s eyes bore directly into Pauline’s. ‘At any point since his arrival, Doctor, since your interactions with him began, has inmate #10481-91 ever acknowledged who he really is?’

  ‘In what sense do you mean, sir?’

  ‘I mean, in all your recordings, in all your notes, he consistently refers to himself as Joseph.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pauline answers. There is a firmness, an unnamed emotion that moves in her breast. ‘It’s the only name he’s ever used with me.’

  ‘Were you ever able to bring him to acknowledge that his real name is Tom Warrick?’

  Pauline Lavrentis leans back in her chair. For the first time, frustration glazes over her features.

  ‘No, sir. We never got that far.’

  PART FOUR

  ON THE ROAD

  59

  Wednesday

  It’s impossible to describe what it’s like to travel, day in and day out, hour after hour, down endless stretches of road with another person, and not be able to speak with them about the one thing that is the most pressing on both of your minds. It’s the strangest sensation, sustained and unwanted, to be having what must be the same thoughts about the same things, and yet not share a single word about them. But this is precisely how Joseph and I have been travelling for the past two-and-a-half days. It’s the most forced and awkward situation I’ve ever known, and the longer the trip continues the more impossible it becomes.

  The problem is that the journey to Nashville provides occasion for far more silence than is healthy for either of us. Nearly 2,400 miles of roadway at speeds that, in my little car, rarely top sixty. And since for reasons he hasn’t explained but which aren’t entirely mysterious to me, Joseph wants to avoid the major interstate freeways, it’s an even more circuitous route than it might otherwise be. A journey through the American heartland, which by car is mostly unending stripes of tarmac laid out over desert and plateau and not much else. All that time to not talk about the only thing that really needs discussing.

  We’ve occasionally clicked on the radio to try to break up the silence lingering between us, but so much of the stretch between California and Tennessee is made up of great patches of land that don’t o
ffer any radio reception to speak of – at least, not the kind either of us are interested in listening to. Political talk shows and zealous religious sermons aren’t high on either of our priority lists. So we sit, mile after mile. Apart from engine noise the car is almost always silent and the environment inside is constantly awkward.

  From time to time we try to break up the monotony by starting conversations that, even as we begin them, neither of us believe are going to be particularly successful. As we passed the Grand Canyon Joseph turned to me and asked if I’d ever been there before, ever seen that great slash that cuts its way through the earth with such unparalleled grandeur. When I confessed that I hadn’t, that I’d only read about it in books but always been fascinated by it, this provided the occasion for fifteen or twenty minutes of Joseph narrating his experiences of having once been there as a child. The place sounded fabulous. In his description the Grand Canyon was far deeper than I’d imagined it could be, and far wider than seemed realistically possible, and a man could walk right up to the edge and dangle his toes over an abyss that might as well reach down into the belly of hell. Or he could hire a mule and trek down narrow pathways to the bottom of the gorge, a journey that drained every ounce of human energy on the descent and absolutely required the animal to make it back to the top. Or you could pay for a spot in a raft and brave the rapids that had cut the canyon out of solid rock, and were still cutting it deeper even today.

  Joseph’s words painted a beautiful picture – a portrait better than any photograph I’d ever seen, even though I vaguely recollected these features from the books I’d read. Joseph, I was learning, doesn’t talk at length that often, but when he does he has a remarkable way with words. His description of the canyon was almost surreal, too real for reality. But he did it with his eyes on the road, as if it were an ordinary feature of his life to think about such things, and in such terms.

  I found myself filled with longing. This teenager has been to the Grand Canyon and it has clearly affected him, yet here I am teetering on middle age, and I have so few experiences in my portfolio that relate or could compare. I wonder what it must be like to breathe the air of such a place, what it must be like to see those colours directly, foreign and strange and other-worldly.

  But this conversation, like all of those that we share, had a limit that was quickly reached. Before too long Joseph had said all that he had to say about his visit to the canyon. I had the feeling that he could go on, perhaps, if he were in the mood to wax reminiscent. But he was content simply to describe the crags and valleys and the shapes of the stone; and once that was done and all had been set forth he dropped back into a silence that I have come to understand is familiar and comfortable to him.

  We contemplated stopping at the Grand Canyon Visitors’ Centre and providing me with the opportunity to see it at last, but it was night-time as we neared and neither of us felt that staring into the darkness at a canyon’s edge was going to be particularly more awe-inspiring than staring into it from a car window. We kept driving.

  In due course, in turn, I asked him about San Francisco, the city that had become my home and to which I’ve taken such a liking. I asked whether Joseph had ever been there before. It seemed likely that he would have been, given that it’s such a short distance from Redding, whereas the Grand Canyon is so much further. But to my surprise, Joseph has never been down the road to the city, never seen the bridges, the islands. He hasn’t driven through the vineyards and farmlands that stand between the northern border of the state and the great bay in which San Francisco is perched on its little jetty of a peninsula. He hasn’t passed through the country towns, he hasn’t arrived in that many-hilled wonderland to ride on a trolley car or walk along the wharf and eat a crab out of its own shell, prepared in front of him on a sidewalk by a vendor from a little cart on wheels.

  In this, as in so many other things, Joseph’s life is a mystery to me. I hadn’t understood why it was that he had a shanty in the forest. That had been the first real surprise. Presumably he had been homeless, and so maybe he still was. He had offered no explanation for the situation, not then and not in the car since. But clearly if he was a homeless young man, he had come from a family that wasn’t entirely destitute. A family that had been able to give him trips to great canyons and distant states – the kind I’d only ever been able to dream about through books – even if it had deprived him of some of the more wonderful sights that sat essentially next door.

  Our conversation about San Francisco provided a chance for me to talk with him about some of the things that I loved, and it was cathartic for me to have the opportunity. I shared with him my impression of the colourful streets with their brightly painted houses all done up in rows, the most famous ones Victorian and elegant but the vast majority stucco and plaster, still quite beautiful but without the old-world charm. He asked what I did for work and I described my mundane life in the supplement shop. Joseph at first didn’t know what supplements were, and after I had spent ten or fifteen minutes describing the concept – powders made from plants and other natural substances that people think in some sense supplement a normal healthy life – he still didn’t seem fully to understand the concept.

  ‘Why supplement health, instead of just being healthy?’ he asked. It was a question I’d asked myself many times before.

  I replied with the normal answer. The same one I would often give customers. ‘We all try to live healthy lives. We all try to eat well and take in the nutrients that we need. But life is busy and frenetic and hectic. We try, but we don’t always succeed. This is a way of supplementing those efforts with a little extra push, to give the body and the mind what they need.’

  I sighed satisfactorily when I had finished this spiel. It was well rehearsed and usually convincing, and very similar to the one I’d first encountered in the slew of books I’d read, which had built up my knowledge of the subject. But Joseph’s brow simply rose and his head shook slightly from left to right.

  ‘It seems a bit like make-believe. A fantasy,’ he answered me. ‘Pretend play time for adults.’

  I laughed, because this was about as good an analysis as I had ever heard, and fundamentally I supposed that I agreed with Joseph. All those books on supplemental health, all the conversations with others, and it still seemed as much a fantasy as anything close to a reality.

  And so we drove into the hours, into the rising of the sun and its setting, always through the night – never staying in hotels but keeping the wheels in motion – having these sorts of conversations that weren’t really conversations. More than small talk, but nothing which revealed the depths of our souls, one to another. And certainly nothing that ever touched on that great, terrible common experience that bound us together here in the car. That was a subject tacitly off limits, and we both seemed to know it.

  We couldn’t, however, escape it altogether. Words might be implicitly banned, but there were more physical dimensions that had to be dealt with. We’d left California covered in blood, and that certainly wasn’t a situation that could be maintained. In that first night it had to be taken care of, and the perfect opportunity presented itself in the form of a river that ran alongside the highway. We’d agreed to stop once we saw that there were various turn-outs that would allow easy access (in order ‘to get out and clean up a bit,’ we said to each other, carefully avoiding the word ‘blood’ in our description of just what needed cleaning, despite the obvious fact that it was caked over both of us), and as it was the dark of night and there was little traffic we pulled to the side of the road and went down into the water with all our clothes on. Cold as stepping into ice water, but that proved useful in its own way. In addition to washing the blood out of our clothes and off our faces and arms, it also well and truly woke us up – something needed after the adrenalin had retreated and exhaustion threatened the safety of our drive. I remember the moon had been back, that night. There’s a wonderful silver sparkle to a river in the moonlight. It almost dances. In that st
range darkness the clear water beneath the sparkles is black, so the blood streaming away from our bodies was invisible. The river didn’t judge us by changing colour, stained by our actions. It just received us dirty and handed us back pure.

  But that necessary act was about as far as our shared experience had been allowed to intrude into our journey. The rest of the time we pretended the memory wasn’t with us.

  Finally, though, I felt an urge to know something more about the young man next to me in the car. It was one of the periods in which I was behind the wheel and Joseph was sat knees-up in the passenger seat, his feet against the dash and shoes on the floor beneath him. The posture seemed to give Joseph a measure of calm. He appeared almost to be content in the moment, with some of the worry that hung over us leaving his features. Perhaps it was the scenery outside the window, which I recall at that moment had been especially beautiful, poignant. Perhaps it was the sunshine, now full and bright, but Joseph was almost cheerful. And in this spirit I thought I would take advantage of the moment and ask him something about himself that meant something – more than places he’d visited and things that he’d seen. Something that might tell me just who was this young man with whom I’d bloodied my hands.

  ‘You haven’t told me about your family,’ I said. I tried to keep my voice cheerful, since Joseph had appeared to be homeless when we’d been together in the forest, and that meant the question might be touchy. But it was also an ordinary enough sort of question between friends that I felt, with the right tone of voice, just might be accepted.

  Joseph shrugged. He didn’t answer, not immediately, but I couldn’t help noticing as I glanced at him across the car that a little of that bright spirit fled as soon as the question had been asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ he finally responded. ‘Not sure there’s really much to talk about. What can you really say about a family?’ He took a few seconds in silence, pondering his own question. ‘Family’s family. They just are what they are.’