The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  I open my mouth to speak, but she is already standing up to leave. Howard smiles awkwardly and follows suit, pausing to pour himself a cold cup of coffee from the stainless steel jug at the end of the room. Michael stays seated, his eyes lowered, and so do I.

  He waits for Howard to slurp from his coffee cup and bustle noisily down the hall before raising his eyes.

  ‘Anya,’ he says quietly, ‘look … I just want to go easy on this family, OK? I appreciate that you’re a mover and a shaker, and we’re all just playing catch-up after years of too much shaking and not enough moving, you know?’

  I feel my cheeks burn. I remind myself that Alex’s case is not a battle of wills between me and my colleagues, and amidst the rush of blood in my ears I try and reason with myself that, maybe, waiting until Cindy is released is absolutely fine. But I am seized with an urgency to resolve this case and I hardly know why.

  Michael stands up, walks around the table and sits down in the chair beside me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he says then, and I see he looks worried. I raise a hand to my cheek and find, to my horror, I have started to cry.

  I nod and laugh and try and rein in whatever emotions have slipped out of my grasp without my noticing.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him, looking at my wet fingertips as if I expect them to announce the reason for their presence. ‘I suppose I’m just trying to find my feet in this place. We just arm-wrestled each other in review meetings in Edinburgh, played some poker. None of this debate stuff.’

  He smiles and I take the opportunity to run a finger under both eyes, mopping up the inevitable black smudge. Then I pull out the biro that’s been holding my hair up. I want it long, covering up my scar. He stops smiling and reads my face, glancing at my new hairstyle. At my jawline.

  ‘I don’t mean to be a hypocrite,’ he says carefully, ‘but I think you should be careful not to become too involved in this case.’

  ‘You think I’ve become involved?’

  ‘I’m worried that the real riddle that bothers you is Poppy. And that you see much of Poppy in Alex’s case.’

  He adds the word ‘case’ hastily. I frown. ‘I deal with dozens of kids with mental health issues all the time, what makes you think …?’

  He shakes his head firmly. ‘Not with Poppy’s illness, Anya. Not like this. You’re afraid, aren’t you? That he’s going to hurt himself like your daughter did?’

  I can feel the heat in my veins, and it is difficult to breathe, somehow. He is angered now, making claims out of agitation. I refuse to rise to it.

  I stand and gather up my files. ‘In the meantime,’ I say, ‘I intend on interviewing Alex’s school teachers and his aunt Beverly. If I do find proof that he’s self-harming or is a danger to others, I’m sure you’ll agree that I have no option but to bring him in.’

  To my surprise, Michael squeezes my hand and simply nods, before striding out of the room.

  *

  When I return to my office I find a new message in my inbox. I am relieved when I see it is from Alex’s schoolteacher, Karen Holland.

  To: A_molokova@macneicehouse.nhs.uk

  From: k.holland@stpaulsprimary.co.uk

  Date: 12/5/07 13.44 p.m.

  Dear Anya

  I would be more than happy to speak to you – indeed I recall Alex very clearly. I had concerns about him when I taught him and am pleased he seems to be receiving proper treatment at last. I have a couple of slots available for a meeting here at the school – next Thursday at 5 p.m., the following Tuesday at 4.30, or perhaps today at 4 p.m.? Do you need directions?

  Sincerely, KW.

  I email her straight back to take her up on the offer of an appointment that afternoon. I change my heeled shoes for running shoes and transfer Alex’s files from my briefcase to my backpack, then head off on foot, threading through the familiar streets around Queen’s University. Amongst layers of students’ advertisements pasted on lampposts and boarded-up buildings I spy a large, dazzling poster for Jojo’s company ‘Really Talented Kids’. HAMLET is spelled out in bullet-holes, and there are several pictures of nuns holding machine guns and kids doing gang signs with several movie-star endorsements beneath. I spy a small image of Alex during one of the rehearsals in his role as Horatio, and I smile at the thought of him attempting to concoct bad jokes for the part. Jojo had whispered to me that bad jokes were exactly was she was aiming for, though it was Alex’s confidence that was the real reward – he had transformed from a stage-shy, nervous kid who was barely audible in the front row to a boy who was beginning to command his presence and find his feet on stage. I make a mental note to invite Jojo to MacNeice House.

  I head on towards the school as the crow flies, cutting through the quad of Queen’s University, its new buildings gleaming alongside the old red-brick ones I remember. I find myself thinking back to the days I spent as a teenager on a rug with a group of friends – it takes me a moment or two to remember their names – Blondie on the radio, a picnic of jam sandwiches and cold tea.

  Was that really a quarter of a century ago?

  I pass a gleaming new building bearing the sign ‘The School of Music,’ its clean, spacious rooms visible through large windows. A couple of students walk past, one of them on a mobile phone, another holding a Starbucks cup. I continue on towards the botanical gardens, then stop in front of the dome of the hothouse, where two patches of white tulips have been grown to form a pair of wings. They are so real, so richly bright, that they almost seem to move and the petals ruffle distinctly like feathers. I stop walking and spend a long time staring at them, feeling moved by the way they had appeared so differently from a distance – shaped in the form of a dove’s wings, I realise, fanning outwards, the bird’s head rendered by a smaller patch, its beak by primroses. The symbol of peace.

  When Poppy was buried, I could not bear the thought of a tombstone. It seemed too final, too grim for my little girl. On her grave plot in Edinburgh, I had a craftsman cut a dove’s wings from Portland stone – a kind of stone which whitens with time. The man took care to ensure he chipped each wing with precision, the feathers so lifelike that they appeared to move in the sunlight. I had hoped to bring her peace. It is my own peace that I have never found.

  And I don’t know how.

  I arrived at St Paul’s Primary School at 3.45 p.m., fifteen minutes early. Housed in a converted chapel, the school had a distinctly religious air about it that continued inside in the form of child-crafted murals on saints and religious festivals. I took note of the scenes of angels and Jesus in the stained glass windows, their colours and pathos ripe in late afternoon sun. A sign directed me to reception, where I found a young man typing at a computer.

  ‘I’m here to see Karen Holland,’ I told him. He nodded and asked me to sign a register before taking me to the staff room.

  ‘Karen’s in a meeting,’ he said, nodding at the sink and coffee maker opposite a square of sofas. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  In the corner of the room was an old black upright piano, candelabra curved like cactuses in its front panel, lid open. Its keys were yellow and chipped, like the teeth of an old man. I looked up at the doorway to check no one was coming, then slid my fingers over the notes that formed the opening chord of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique. For a moment I was tempted to lean down, sound out the thick, hungry texture of that gorgeous chord, but I stopped short of pressing down on the keys. Slowly I lifted my hands and left the piano to its silence.

  When Poppy died, I sold her beloved baby grand for a tenth of its value just to be rid of the sound of it. It seemed that even when the lid was closed the wind would find its way inside, brush across the strings, and Poppy’s songs would rise up like ghosts. I had been playing since I was a child, tinkering on the old Yamaha at my school, then offered piano lessons by a teacher. It was important for me to teach her, to give her the same joy – but I had not anticipated how much the sound would dig deep into my veins after she’d gone. How much loneliness would sudde
nly infuse the music I had once loved.

  ‘Dr Molokova?’ a voice said. I turned around to see a short round woman in a rust-coloured wraparound dress standing in the doorway, her eyes hidden by tinted glasses. She had a helmet of thick amber-coloured hair, a ladder in her brown tights and hands that felt warm as toast when I returned her shake. She grinned broadly. ‘I’m Karen Holland, how do you do? Would you like to come to my classroom?’

  I nodded and followed her out of the room along a corridor lined with papier mâché mosaics of Africa and self-portraits sketched by thirty eight-year-olds. I searched for Alex’s face but it wasn’t there.

  ‘I dug something out of my archives to show you,’ Karen said when we were inside her classroom.

  ‘Archives?’

  I looked around. The walls of the classroom were covered in paintings, progress charts, rules, and a small film about elephants played silently on the whiteboard on the far wall. Karen walked past me to her desk where I could see a handful of large, childish paintings had been spread out for me to view.

  ‘What are these?’ I asked, unable to make sense of what seemed to be a series of large, misspelled phrases and small profile pictures in old, cracked black paint.

  ‘I’m glad I kept these now,’ Karen said, removing her dark glasses and rubbing her eyes. I could see her eyes were small and intensely blue, screwed up against the soft light from the window.

  I turned my head to view the paintings from a different angle. ‘Are these newspaper headlines?’

  She put her glasses back on, sighing at the relief of dimming the light from her eyes. ‘Alex did these when he was about six years old for a class project. We were imagining how the sinking of the Titanic might have been captured in headlines and how to use language concisely … As you can see, Alex deviated from the task in a way that always struck me as significant.’

  I looked over the headlines. MONSTROUS CRIME, read one. Another bore a picture that looked like a swaddled baby Jesus and a title, ROT IN HELL. Then another: RUEND PEEPELS LIVES. I paused at the word ‘ruend’.

  ‘I’ve shown these to Alex’s consultants in the past but they didn’t see a link,’ Karen said.

  I glanced up at her. ‘Did you ask Alex why he’d done these paintings?’

  She nodded. ‘He didn’t seem to know why he’d done them.’

  ‘But the task was about the tragedy of the Titanic …’

  I scanned the paintings again, tracing my conversations with Alex in my mind. He must have read the headlines on a newspaper.

  ‘What was Alex like as a pupil?’

  Karen raised a hand to pat her thick hair down. ‘He was polite, quiet. An above average student. No friends, not really. I used to feel sad when he’d be the only boy in the class without an invite to so-and-so’s birthday – but it happens, you know? I think it was this sense of exclusion that contributed to his anger.’

  I stopped writing. ‘Anger?’

  She nodded, though I sensed some reluctance on her part to admit this. ‘He had … and they were occasional, mind you … explosive rages that would end with him in floods of tears.’

  I remembered what I’d read in the notes. ‘Alex hit you, didn’t he?’

  She sighed. ‘He lashed out, caught me full force in the chest with his fist. I think he was more shocked than I was. Still, I reported it to Alex’s consultant at the time. He was growing more and more wound up by the day, I thought it was in his interests …’

  ‘Did he ever hit another student?’

  She shook her head. ‘He never explained why he blew up, either. It was like a tantrum, but much worse. Cursing, shouting, threats.’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘Yes. To me, to the other children. But they were … what I would call blind threats. As if he could hardly see who was there. As if he didn’t recognise me or the people around him. As if he’d forgotten who we were.’ She paused, upset by the memory of it. ‘He would be completely devastated, an utterly different version of himself. When I spoke to his mother about it she seemed distressed, but refused to offer any suggestions.’ She sighed. ‘There’s only so much we can do at school. The buck stops at home, which is unfortunate in some cases.’

  When my page was filled with notes I thanked her for her time and began to close up my briefcase.

  She took off her glasses again, her eyes immediately disturbed by the light. ‘He isn’t a bad kid,’ she said. ‘And something I never told the other consultant was that Alex wrote me a little note after he hit me that time.’

  ‘Do you have it?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course I do. It’s at home. I kept it, as I do all the gifts I get from my kids. He’d drawn a little picture of me with the word “SORRY” in capital letters, then signed it with kisses and hugs. Not every kid would do that, you know?’

  I smiled at the thought of it, then wondered why no mention of that picture appeared in my notes about Alex.

  ‘Karen, you taught Alex on and off for several years, didn’t you? When would you say his behaviour changed?’

  ‘December sixteenth, 2001,’ she said briskly, and I looked up. She smiled sadly. ‘The day Alex told me his father died.’

  13

  THE UNBESTED FRIEND

  Alex

  Dear Diary,

  It’s three sleeps ’til we perform Hamlet at the Grand Opera House. I like it loads in there. It’s all red and I feel bigger when I’m on stage, like I’m a giant. I bet you could fit three of our house inside there. We had a rehearsal last night for Hamlet and for once everyone remembered their lines and Jojo’s make-up ran and she hugged Cian, who she doesn’t like normally, and then she made us all sit in a circle on the stage and talk about our Fears and Hopes for Opening Night.

  Katie’s hand went up first. ‘I’m afraid my mum will go crazy,’ she said, and her voice was flat. Jojo’s smile came off her face and she asked Katie what she meant. Katie just shrugged and wouldn’t say anything after that but kept snapping the elastic on her wristband until I told her to stop it.

  I put my hand up. ‘I hope the audience shouts, “Encore!”,’ I said, and Terry and Sean sniggered.

  ‘I hope that, too,’ Jojo said, giving me a wink. ‘Though I think it’s more likely that they’ll applaud for a very long time if they like our performance.’

  Then she held up her two index fingers which is a sign for everyone to be quiet. ‘Now. Who thinks they understand why we’re doing this play?’

  We all looked at each other. Finally Bonnie Nicholls put her hand up. ‘Because we’re really talented kids?’

  Jojo gave her a big smile. ‘That’s definitely one reason, thanks, Bonnie. Anyone else?’

  ‘Because the play is famous?’ Liam said. Jojo said yes but she said maybe we needed a hint. ‘Where is this play set?’

  ‘Belfast,’ I said.

  ‘Correctamundo!’ Jojo said, and I felt proud. Then she looked serious and pressed a finger against her lips. ‘But where did Shakespeare set his play?’

  There was a lot of whispering. I saw Terry Google it on his mobile phone. ‘Denmark,’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’ shouted Jojo, pointing at Terry. ‘And what does Shakespeare say about Denmark?’

  ‘It’s rotten,’ I said quietly. And she opened her mouth to say correctamundo but I put my hand up again and she tilted her head.

  ‘Are you saying that Belfast is rotten?’ I asked.

  ‘It is rotten,’ said Terry, and everyone agreed.

  ‘All of it?’ Jojo said in a small voice. ‘Or just some of it?’

  Bonnie stretched her hand up high. ‘I like Mauds ice cream.’ You can’t buy Mauds ice cream anywhere but in Northern Ireland which makes me feel sorry for anyone not living in Northern Ireland.

  Queen Gertrude – actually her real name is Samantha but she makes us all call her Queen Gertrude – raised her hand. ‘I like Helen’s Bay.’ Helen’s Bay is a beach three miles from our house which I’ve never been to but Granny used to show me pictures and
it looked nice.

  ‘Good jogging,’ said Jojo in agreement, pointing at Samantha. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘I like it when nobody gets shot,’ I said, and Jojo turned her head to look at me. For a moment everyone was silent.

  ‘Hear hear!’ said Liam. Then Bonnie said it, then Katie, then Samantha and Terry and everyone else. Even Jojo.

  After a few minutes Jojo put her chin to her chest and folded her hands behind her back the way she does when she’s thinking. We all knew to stop talking and the stage went very quiet.

  ‘There’s a line at the end of this play that gives a message. A message of hope. Who can tell me what it is?’

  Hamlet wasn’t really about hope as far as I was concerned. It was about a boy whose dad haunted him and made him kill someone to get back at him but it only made things worse.

  ‘We defy augury,’ I said quietly, because I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but it was the final line of the play and Jojo had told us she chose that line for us all to end on because it meant that just because the future was predicted in one way didn’t mean we couldn’t choose a different path.

  ‘What was that?’ Jojo said, looking over us all.

  ‘He said, “We defy augury”,’ Katie piped up. ‘This play is about us saying that we don’t care what’s happened in the past cos we have a say in what happens to the future.’

  Jojo’s face lit up and she started to applaud and we all joined in, too. We clapped and cheered and then started chanting, ‘Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet!’ which gradually turned into, ‘Belfast, Belfast, Belfast, Belfast!’ Jojo waved her hand like she was conducting us and then, finally, when Liam and Gareth changed the chant to, ‘Celtic, Celtic, Celtic!’ she held up her index fingers again. We all fell silent.