by JG Alva
A small round table partially blocked the open back door to the garden. A grey cat sat licking and preening itself upon it, but bolted through the open back door as Felicity Scupero, Barry’s aunt, pulled out a chair to sit at it. Another grey cat was asleep on top of the cooker.
No tea, coffee or drinks of any kind were offered. It looked as if the thought never even crossed Felicity’s unhappy mind. All her focus instead was directed toward her distasteful nephew, and his unhealthy predilections, none of which she seemed particularly inclined to withhold.
They had told her the truth: that Angela had recently ended a relationship with him, and Barry could not accept that it was over. Felicity looked at Angela as if she had lost her mind.
“He was bad from the start,” the older woman said, fidgeting with something under the table. “Wouldn’t go to bed, wouldn’t be quiet. Complained about everything. Nothing was ever good enough. He couldn’t sit still for one minute. Near drove me to the brink of madness. He wasn’t much better at school. Always in trouble with his teachers. I don’t know how many times I picked him up from detention. What’s the matter with your face?”
The sudden change of topic disturbed Angela, embarrassed her, so to distract Felicity, Sutton said, “it sounds like he was a boisterous child.”
“Boisterous?” Felicity snorted. As quickly as that, Angela’s face was forgotten. “That’s one way to put it. Evil is another, better way. I could tell he wasn’t right, that there was something wrong with him. More than most. Do you know what I mean? He was responsible for his parent’s death, did you know that? It’s true. He got ill when they were in the south of France, so they rushed back to England to get him checked out and wallop! They rolled their car just outside of Lyon. He crawled out of the back with only a couple of scratches. But my sister and her husband were smashed to bits. Frannie lasted about a week in a hospital on a machine. Then she went into septic shock. Barry was in the next room, playing with his toys, happy as you like. I’ll tell you, the devil looks after his own.”
“But that’s not what really happened,” Sutton said. “Is it? That wasn’t how they died at all.”
Suddenly on the back foot, Felicity said, “what?”
“There was no car crash,” Sutton continued.
Now the aunt was angry.
“What do you know about it? Were you there? Are you a doctor? I don’t think so.”
“It was reported in Art Monthly, the Telegraph and even the Times. Your sister was something of a minor celebrity, and with the grisly nature of the crime…it made headlines.”
Felicity was silent for a moment.
Eventually, she said, “you seem to know a lot. Why are you bothering to talk to me?”
Angela said, “because we want to understand why he is the way he is. And you’re the best person to speak to about that.”
“There’s nothing to understand,” Felicity said. “He’s rotten. What could be simpler than that?”
“But is he rotten?” Sutton challenged her. “Really?”
“Are you saying I’m lying?” The Aunt said, her voice pitched high on the defensive.
Sutton said, “no. I’m saying you’re responsible.”
“I’m not –“
“He is the way he is because of what you told to him. We just want to know why you told him one story, when what really happened was another.”
Felicity shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“It was to protect him,” she said gruffly. “No one needs to hear that about their parents. It’s too disturbing.”
Sutton said, “but then why tell him he was responsible for their deaths?”
“Because he was!” Felicity said, her eyes flashing. “It was because of him that Stephen did what he did to Fran.”
“How so?”
Felicity sighed in exasperation, but she looked willing enough to tell the tale.
“Because Fran was getting a lot of attention, see? From the art world. From critics and the like. I never rated her sculptures much myself, but the toffs seemed to love them, and I was proud of her doing so well. But all of this attention meant she couldn’t look after Barry. She was going hither and yon, going to an exhibition here, having an interview with a magazine there, and so Stephen had to stay at home and look after the boy. Now, Steve was a sculptor too, but he wasn’t having the same sort of success as his wife was having. But it was as important to him as it was to her, and the way things were going, he was never going to make it big, not if he was at home with the boy all the time, not if he couldn’t keep working. I reckon that’s why he lost it. He was always highly strung in the first place. They’d been rowing a lot – that’s what Fran told me when she called, a week before she died – and he must have just snapped during the last one and stabbed her.” Felicity shrugged, neither surprised nor shocked, if she ever had been. Instead, she merely looked uncomfortable. “I suppose putting parts of her into his new sculpture was a way of getting her back.” Her face lay slack and vacant for a moment, her eyes far away, before she came back to the conversation. “I reckon, after it was all over and he’d calmed down, that he realised what he’d done and decided he couldn’t live with himself.”
“What did that word mean?” Sutton asked. “The one he wrote on the floor with his own blood? ‘Shenenenlonedme’?”
“I don’t know,” Felicity said. “It’s a word I’d never heard before. Nobody ever told me what it meant, so I just assumed it was his rambling, sick mind coughing up nonsense at the end.” She tried to look amused…and instead looked sick. “Not that it coughed up much sense in life.”
“So, with both parents gone, Barry came to you.”
Felicity nodded.
“I didn’t want him. I’m not a kiddy person. And he was just naughty all the time. Some days it was like I couldn’t handle it. I’m surprised that I did. It felt like I was going insane, trying to deal with him – just like Steve. About the only way I could shut him up was to tell him he killed his Mum and Dad. Literally that was the only thing that would make him behave. It was like he knew he was responsible, like he knew he was guilty. I often wonder if he stabbed them himself. Maybe made it look like they did each other in. Maybe that’s what really happened.”
Listening to Felicity, Sutton had begun to get a sense of the dynamic between these two disparate family members; between unwilling guardian and willed orphan. Felicity didn’t want to look after him, that much was clear; what was also clear was, if she had a choice, she would have preferred him dead by her brother-in-law’s hands instead of her sister. So there was resentment, at the unwanted responsibility, and maybe a little guilt. It was obvious she blamed him for her sister’s death, but because the original story didn’t clearly implicate him enough, she had concocted another. Everyone tells stories to themselves, to improve their achievements, to soften their failures, and usually these inventions are benign. But when they are not, they can take big chunks out of the people to whose reality they define. Barry Sheffield was not a whole person, and it was hardly a surprise. He had been sold a terrible fantasy, in which he had been cast as the villain, when the truth was so much more banal.
At this last from Felicity, Angela gave Sutton a look of veiled incredulity. And it was incredulous. To his mind, the death of the semi-famous sister had caused a rift in Felicity’s own. These were not the ramblings of a wholly sane person.
“How old was he when they died?” Sutton asked.
“Six.” She nodded. “He was six years old.”
“No wonder he turned out like he did,” Angela said, angry on the abused child’s behalf.
“What?” Felicity looked shocked.
“You’re sick,” she said. Sutton noticed she was shaking.
“You think I’m making this up?” Felicity protested, outraged.
“You poisoned him.”
“He killed them both!” Felicity exclaimed, righteous in her beliefs. “I know it!”
“He was already corrupt –“
“I hope you rot in hell. Bitch.”
Felicity’s mouth fell open, and for fully ten seconds she could not speak.
When she finally did speak, all she could say was, “what!”
Sutton took hold of Angela’s arms and moved her to the door. This interview was over. No further good could come from its continuation.
As Sutton pulled her to the door, Angela said, “you sick bitch, you should be hung for what you did.”
*
Barry’s mother had been Francesca Scupero, a reasonably well known sculptor and artist…at least she had been reasonably well known twenty years ago. The family had been travelling in the south of France when the incident occurred; on this point Felicity had not lied. But somewhere outside of Lyon, in the small chateau they were staying in, Stephen Sheffield killed his wife, cut her up into little bits, and then put these little bits into a grisly, hastily constructed sculpture, something along the lines of a vaguely human shape…which he promptly displayed next to a busy road. He then went back to the chateau and killed himself in the bathroom by slicing his own throat. He had time to write something in his own blood on the tiles of the bathroom floor: the word shenenenlonedme. No one knew what it meant. It was something of a popular internet mystery; theories abounded.
A six year old Barry was contentedly watching TV in the main room when the gendarmes burst into the chateau, looking for Stephen.
“Are you okay now?” Sutton asked, impressed, of all things.
They were back at the car which, due to a lack of available spaces, they had been forced to park several streets away from where Felicity lived. Now Sutton was glad of it. The afternoon was turning sour, more than just the weather; big black clouds were moving in on all fronts.
Angela sat on the bonnet, but was bent forward at the waist, hands on her knees. She might have just completed a marathon.
“How are people like that allowed to exist?” She asked.
“They slip through the cracks,” Sutton said.
Angela squinted up at him, hair obscuring most of her face.
“She was ill, wasn’t she,” she said.
Sutton nodded.
“Probably not enough to register on any appreciable scale, but yes,” he said, sitting next to her on the bonnet. The metal popped under his weight. “Maybe a mild form of Aspergers. Maybe some kind of a breakdown in the past.”
“God.”
“She’s a functioning member of society, but she should never have been allowed to look after a child.”
“It makes me sick. Literally, sick to my stomach.”
“Things weren’t as organised back then as they are now.”
“I need a shower. I need to wash the smell of that house – that woman – off of me. And I need something to eat. And I need to be as far away from here as humanly possible.”
Sutton held up his car keys.
“I can do that,” he said.
*
CHAPTER 23
Understandably, she didn’t want to go into any restaurants.
She was also similarly disinclined to go into fast food places, or shops, or any other establishment that sold sustenance and that might permit a flotilla of human beings to migrate through its innards.
So Sutton parked in a darkened corner of the Membury Services car park and went inside to get his unsociable passenger some food.
She ate in silence, clothed in shadows. Sutton cranked open his window. It wasn’t cold outside, and the car was starting to smell like a deep fat fryer. The storm clouds were thick, but there was no sign of rain. The world was quiet. At least in that moment.
“Why did we go there?” Angela asked, as she crumpled the paper bag her food had been delivered in into a ball. “What did we learn that we didn’t know already?”
“We needed to know why,” Sutton said. He was wiping his hands on a paper napkin.
“And how does that help us?”
“It tells us everything about him. All we need to know to break him.”
“It does?”
He nodded.
“He’s been made to look like the instrument of his parents’ demise. A device. A weapon. A thing, inherently evil. His aunt convinced him of that. But he isn’t. He’s just a person. So we have the human part of him, the biological part, reaching out, searching for a connection, as we are all wont to do…and then we have the more complex part, the frontal lobe, the higher learning, which has been so corrupted and distorted that he won’t allow himself to satisfy those same basic animal needs: friendship; human contact; affection. Love even. Because how could anyone love such a horrible thing? He’s not worthy.” Sutton nodded his head toward her. “And then you came along.”
A moment of silence.
“So I’m to be punished for my compassion?” Angela said.
“Not in any normal society. You should be commended for it. But then, Barry isn’t normal, is he. Felicity saw to that.”
“Oh God.” Angela squeezed her eyes shut. She looked bereft. “Torturing a child. Is there anything more terrible? I could have strangled that despicable old woman.”
“I thought you were going to,” Sutton said, amused.
“The world wouldn’t have mourned the loss of her.”
“No. But we should be grateful. Because she’s given us the one thing we need to stop him.”
Angela looked mildly shocked.
“She has?”
Sutton held up the small audio recorder that he had kept concealed in his jacket pocket. He rewound the taped, and played some of what he had recorded back.
It was her voice. Sutton felt his skin crawl upon hearing it again. He hadn’t realised she had affected him so…that, in his way, he had been as affected as Angela. And he thought he was so wise. He could tell by Angela’s face that she was having the same reaction to the strange staccato-like speech from the older woman. Such a reaction from such a small amount of contact…
Imagine a lifetime living under that rule.
Barry wasn’t an aberration; he was inevitable.
“…Steve was a sculptor too, but he wasn’t having the same sort of success as his wife…”
Sutton stopped the recording.
Angela made a face.
“God. Even her voice sends shivers down my spine.”
“Yes.”
“You recorded her.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I know someone who is good with voices.”
*
Unfortunately, as the day got later – and as they drew closer to Bristol – the time crept toward the dreaded rush hour.
So that when they finally hit the outskirts of Bristol, it was to a tangled, multi-coloured throng of cars all trying to get home at the same time – clotting the roads and bringing everything to a standstill.
The argument that had started ten miles ago – and even before that – had exhausted itself, so that now both of its players were silent. For Sutton’s part, he was prepared to forgive Angela. She wasn’t seeing things clearly. And it was a credit to her nature. But she was wrong; this he knew from practical experience.
The queue of traffic to which they had attached themselves moved forward ten feet. Car horns went off somewhere to their right, like a gun barrage, some fracas they couldn’t quite see in the gathering twilight.
“I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time,” Angela said, apropos of nothing, it seemed.
“You do?”
She nodded.
“I feel more sorry for someone else than I do for myself.”
Sutton did not respond.
“We have to save him,” she said again.
“It won’t work,” Sutton stubbornly insisted…not for the first time.
“Will you at least try?”
“Do you want h
im to stop bothering you or not? Because breaking him is the only way to do that.”
“We have a chance to heal him –“
“As if there is a chance of that. He’s too damaged. And too old to change. He’s a grown man, not a child. You want to save the child, you’re twenty years too late.”
“I still say we try. We can take this away from him. This…false hurt.”
“He did this to you,” Sutton said, momentarily losing his temper. He was pointing to her scarred face. “Him. No one else. Not his aunt. It was his choice to attack you. He wasn’t coerced. And he needs to pay for that. He doesn’t deserve to be saved. I’m sorry. I can’t. I’ll hate him forever for what he did to you. I agreed not to use violence. That’s what you wanted. Fine. But I won’t waste compassion on him.”
He was so angry he couldn’t look at her. Instead, he stared at the seemingly endless stream of static traffic in front of him.
He felt her hand on his arm then.
“Don’t be this person,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re better than this.”
He shook his head.
“Maybe I’m not.”
“Please. Be the person I know you are. The better person. The one I was in love with for all those years. That’s why I kept your photo in my purse all that time.” She paused. “But you already knew that.” Her eyes flashed with an echo of hurt. “You probably worked it out straight away.”
Almost against his will, Sutton felt his anger dissolving. The photo flashed into his mind briefly. He had been on the cusp of turning twenty one when it had been taken. Idealistic and hot-headed, convinced he could change the world, if only he applied a little effort to the task.