I have to make a confession here – a confession in addition to the one I have just made. I had intended only that Naomi’s death should look like a sex crime. It had never occurred to me that it should actually be one. But such was my limited self-knowledge at that age – twelve, going on thirteen – that the intensity of my sexual feelings towards this young female, this lookalike for my sister, took me by surprise.
As she lay there lifeless on the floor, I became immensely sexually excited. My first orgasm was spontaneous, and astonishingly voluminous – unlike anything I had experienced before, even with the aid of my wildest fantasies. I cleaned myself up with the silk scarf I removed from her neck (which was one of my mother’s and which I later burned; she never even noticed it was gone). Even so, I was forced to relieve myself twice more by masturbation (silk scarf again, and, luckily, spare handkerchief).
Looking back, of course, it was inevitable that a sexual element should have been part of what was happening. But things that are obvious to us in our maturity are less so in childhood and youth.
The crime was never solved. A couple of known sex offenders were pulled in and questioned, but released for lack of evidence. I myself never even came into the frame. Had I done so, my alibi would have been that I was home the whole evening with my mother. She had started to drink after my sister’s death, becoming withdrawn and increasingly uninterested in the world outside our front door. My father was frequently away on business, and it turned out later that he had been having an affair for some time. My mother doted on me as her only remaining child, and I did all I could to repay that affection – including the discreet disposal of her empty vodka bottles so that neither the housekeeper, gardener nor my father had any idea how much she was actually getting through. On occasion I even put her to bed when she fell asleep at the table as we had supper together, just the two of us. I had grown into a strong boy (hence more than a match for Naomi despite our age difference) and was quite able to help or even drag her upstairs when necessary.
On the night of Naomi’s death, my mother and I were alone in the house. Our housekeeper was visiting family in the suburbs, and my father was, as usual, away. I had mixed her earlier martinis a little more strongly than usual and kept her glass carefully topped up. It was not hard to persuade her to let me bring a tray up to her room with something to eat while she settled in bed to watch television. Thereafter, her evening passed in an alcoholic haze. Even if she had noticed that I was absent for almost two hours, she would not have remembered the morning after; and the unspoken pact that existed between us meant that no mention of her alcoholism would have been permitted to cloud her clear recollection of my presence at home with her that whole evening.
I was saddened when my parents divorced the following year, though to be honest the atmosphere between them had long since become unbearable. It was my sister’s last poisonous bequest to our family. First she had driven me to distraction; now, after the death she had brought upon herself, she had driven my mother to drink and my father from home.
As I said before, my sister was born a bitch, but grew triumphantly into evil over time.
48
After the divorce, in which my parents were awarded joint custody of me, I was sent away to boarding school. It was not the military academy I had once been threatened with, but a civilized enough place where I found I could fit in without too much trouble. There was discipline, plenty of it; but I liked that. I followed enough of the rules to keep the authorities happy, while rebelling just sufficiently to keep in with my fellow students. I became good at sports, taking up boxing and karate. Altogether, I was growing into a clean-cut, good-looking and personable young man: a credit, I used to hear people say, to my parents.
Most of my vacations were spent with my mother, despite the joint custody arrangement. My father had moved to Los Angeles and was married to his former mistress. They had a new baby. Whenever I went to stay they made me welcome, and my father always ensured that I had whatever I needed in material terms. But I didn’t much take to life in LA, preferring my old home and the city I’d grown up in.
My mother stopped drinking when I was fifteen. Frankly, it came as a shock to me. I got home from a school trip to Europe in the summer and found this stranger waiting for me. Well, not exactly a stranger: more like the mother I’d known when Cassie was alive. For a jarring moment it was like stepping back into the past; I felt a shiver down my spine. I don’t know if anything in particular had brought on this new sobriety, some incident in which she had hit rock bottom in the way that alcoholics are supposed to before they can recover. If so, she never spoke of it to me. However, she had checked herself into a clinic after Easter, and was now resuming her social life and involvement with the museum boards and charity committees that she had spent so much time cultivating in the past.
I have to say that in some ways this was bad timing for me. I don’t mean this selfishly. I was delighted for her, glad to see her back on her feet (literally) and finally getting over the trauma of my sister’s death and my father’s departure. It was just that on that trip to Europe, something had happened that had left me shaken and in need of drawing into myself – ‘cocooning’ – for a while. Instead, here was this brisk, sharp, witty and intelligent woman engaging me in conversation of a kind that had not taken place between us in ages. It was as though she felt obliged to show an interest in my life that she had not been able to recently. Which meant, inevitably, that she asked a lot of questions – and actually listened to the answers, so that I had to be very careful what I said.
There was no problem with talking about my life at school. The trouble started when she began to cross-examine me about the European trip. That was what I didn’t want to talk about. That was where the raw spot, the difficulty, was. I was still coming to terms with what had happened and did not want to be consciously reminded of it – at least not until I had fully absorbed its significance. The fact was that I had been brought face to face with an inescapable truth about myself. One that I could not talk about. One that I would never be able to talk about.
Our group had spent two nights in Hamburg. The first day and most of the second we were marched through all the usual museums and sites of historical interest. Then, the night before we left, we were allowed a little time to ourselves. We were organized in groups of six, with an older boy in charge of each one. Visits to cafés and places of respectable amusement were permitted, bars and strip clubs ruled out. So, obviously, that was where we all immediately headed. We broke up into smaller groups of threes and twos, fixing a rendezvous for 9:45 so that we could all go back to the hotel together. The kid I was with, Lenny Rearden, started out in search of a porno shop, but got briefly side-tracked into an elaborate amusement arcade, where we quickly lost each other. It didn’t matter, because we both knew where we all had to meet.
Then I met this girl. She was called Hannah. I hadn’t even noticed her when I heard this voice: ‘Are you American?’
I turned, and caught my breath. If my sister and Naomi had been almost twins, this one would have made them triplets. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance; it was something from within, a look in the eyes, a physical self-confidence, an attitude.
‘Sure, I’m American,’ I said, flexing the muscles in my throat to stop my voice from rising to the squeaky pitch I’d felt it was about to. ‘What can I do for you?’
She was maybe a year younger than me, but she looked as though she knew her way around the city, and quite possibly the world. Her English was good. We talked a while about how she wanted to visit America, maybe live there. I could see she liked me. Either that, or she thought I might somehow help her get there.
Her self-assurance made me nervous. My stomach was churning and my heart beating fast, but I think I managed to hide it. At any rate, after talking for a while, she asked me if I wanted to come with her to her sister’s place. There was nobody there, she said; she had it to herself till the weekend.
It
was an offer I knew I would never forgive myself for refusing. Looking across the arcade, I saw that Lenny was engrossed in some game with flashing lights and explosions. He wouldn’t think twice if I disappeared, and would simply expect to see me at the rendezvous. Which gave me over an hour and a half.
Her sister’s apartment was up three flights of stairs. It was tiny, with clothing and magazines and cushions scattered everywhere. She asked me if I wanted a drink, and I had a beer which she got from a fridge in an alcove where there was also a sink and small stove. She put on a CD and said it was an American band. I had never heard of them but I pretended I had, and we began to dance.
After a while, we started to fool around. She didn’t object when I slipped my hand under her shirt. She moaned and squirmed a little, then took my hand and guided it down between her legs. The next thing I knew, she had her hand on me in the same place. But she stopped suddenly when she realized that I didn’t have an erection.
‘Brendan . . . ?’
I snapped out of my reverie at the sound of my mother’s voice. We were sitting opposite each other in our drawing room in Chicago. I had been telling her about my European trip, but my mind had been on the one aspect of it that I could not talk about. Now she had asked me a question, and I had no idea what it was.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You were miles away suddenly. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine. I’m sorry, I think I’ve still got a touch of jet lag.’
We talked about the boat trip that we’d taken down the Rhine, the visit to Cologne Cathedral, then on to Paris. But all the time my mind stayed focused on that night in Hamburg, almost as though by keeping it in the forefront of my consciousness I was somehow guarding against any word of it slipping out of my mouth.
Hannah had said it was all right, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t perform. I could tell she was disappointed and somewhat contemptuous of me. I wasn’t what she’d thought and hoped I was: I was just a boy on a school trip going home to his mother. She didn’t say any of this, but I knew it was what she was thinking. She stopped the music and looked at her watch, and said we should go now; she had to meet someone.
‘Who d’you have to meet?’ I said.
She shrugged. It was none of my business.
‘A boyfriend?’
This time she looked at me, a kind of upward flick of the eyes, as though I was some kind of curiosity that had just walked in and she was going to make a joke of later with her girlfriends. The way Naomi and my sister would have.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘why don’t we just go?’
She took my arm to steer me to the door. I pulled free and turned to face her, blocking her way out.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You’ve got some guy? Is that who you’re going to see?’
Her face tightened with anger. ‘I’ve got a man,’ she said, giving the word an emphasis that made perfectly clear what she meant. ‘So why don’t you get out of my fucking way before you get in fucking trouble – kid!’
She pronounced it ‘fockink’, which sounded funny and almost made me laugh. But her English was good, I had to admit that. Fluent, colloquial. I had already been impressed by how many foreigners in Europe spoke English.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘We’re not through here yet.’
‘Oh, yes, we fockink are!’
With that, she gave me a shove in the chest that startled me. It was a self-defence move; she had obviously learned how to take care of herself. Somebody else might have been intimidated by a blow like that, and she probably had other moves to follow it up. But I was already a brown belt in karate. I delivered two blows to her stomach and neck that sent her flying across the room. She landed in a corner. I watched as she struggled to clear her head and get to her feet. She wasn’t sure what had happened. She was stunned. But she was getting ready to fight back. Suddenly she was reaching for something concealed beneath the bed – a knife or even a gun, I guessed. I sprang on her before she got there, and my hands tightened around her throat.
That was how it happened. But only then, after the event, did I realize that was what I’d needed all along: I just hadn’t admitted it to myself. I had even suppressed the fact that all of the erotic images I had been furiously conjuring up in my mind in order to get a hard-on had been of Naomi, and of the night I had gone over to the house where she was babysitting.
Suddenly, it was as though that whole thing was happening again. A perfect replay. I realized that not only was that what I needed: it was what I wanted. I was rock hard . . . and I went to work . . .
I must have left traces of myself everywhere . . . I lost all control, yet . . .
It was as though part of me remained detached from the whole thing, outside my own frenzy, looking on calmly, neither endorsing nor condemning what I observed. Even the pleasure being derived from the acts performed was somehow not mine. It was gratification at one remove, like having sex in a dream. It was odd, that sense of disconnection from oneself.
Only when it was over did the two parts of myself come back together, like the images in a stereoscopic viewer. And only then did I come to terms with the fact that this was my fate, and my future. This was as close as I would ever get to satisfaction. I would, through this other self who would periodically emerge from my being like some comic-book superhero, occasionally touch perfection; but I would become fully aware of it – sense, taste, touch and everything – only by absorbing that alter ego back into myself, making his experience and memories all mine.
My mother was looking at her watch. She had a meeting of the orchestra board at three. There would be friends for dinner – she hoped that was all right with me. Meanwhile, why didn’t I rest, get over my tiredness after the flight?
She kissed me on the cheek and left. My face, thank God, was dry; but my hands, clasped in my lap, were wet with perspiration. I ran to the small bathroom by the main stairs and washed them furiously, fearing that their clammy moisture would give away to anyone who noticed it, the things of which I could not speak.
49
It was hardly surprising that I didn’t sleep that last night in Hamburg. The following morning I hunted through the German newspapers we were encouraged to read as part of our study of the language. Sure enough, there she was. There was even a photograph in one of the papers – not of the corpse, but of her, I would have guessed, about a year earlier.
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep for several nights; I wasn’t entirely faking it when I told my mother I had a bad case of jet lag. True, I felt a huge sense of relief to be back on American soil, but I knew perfectly well that I was not yet free and clear. DNA profiling at that time wasn’t as precise as it is now, but if they ever connected that girl’s death with the fact that an American school tour had been in the city that night, and if they came after us to take blood samples or whatever, which they could conceivably do, then I would have a problem.
But as the days and weeks went by, I started to relax. I began to tell myself I’d got away with it. I felt as though some great weight had been lifted off me and I had been given a second chance at life. I swore to myself I would not waste it. I would put death behind me. I would go on as though Cassie, Naomi and Hannah had never happened. I realized how much I wanted to lead a normal life, and I made up my mind that I would try.
A few weeks later I met a girl called Karen. It was at a friend’s house, playing tennis. She was the one who took the initiative, making an excuse to leave at the same time as me so that we could walk home together. She told me she’d heard I was a hero. I didn’t understand at first. For a moment I thought she was making fun of me, then the penny dropped: she was talking about my sister. That of course was the version of events that the world had accepted: that I had almost lost my own life in bravely trying to save my sister’s. I shrugged the story off modestly, saying it was no more than anybody would have done. But she said she didn’t believe that; she thought I was special. She used the word twice.
Special. Perhaps more than twice. By the time we parted, I had made a date with her for the weekend – by admitting I had been invited to a dance she would be at, and not objecting when she suggested we go together.
I was flattered and excited. She had soft blonde hair falling to her shoulders, and a way of moving and talking that was both demure and full of breathy sexual promise. Physically, she could not have been less like my sister, or Naomi, or Hannah. At the same time I was afraid. What if I couldn’t manage the thing she was hoping for from me? Would I humiliate myself again? Worse – would I get angry and do what I had done in Hamburg?
There was no question about it: I could not go on as I was. I had to change, and I persuaded myself that I could. The problem was that like most boys of my age – sixteen, soon to be seventeen – my sexual experience was almost entirely confined to fantasy. Because, I supposed, of my unusual history, my imagination was dominated by memories of Naomi and the German girl and what I had found myself doing after their deaths. Even the memory of my sister and that look of utter disbelief and terror on her face as I stamped on her hands and she fell to her death could give me an extra charge sometimes. It was obvious to me that I needed a new and different experience in order to vary and enrich my inner life.
But that was where I found myself caught in a vicious circle. I began having sex with Karen in the way most teenagers do – necking, heavy petting, oral stimulation; and eventually, as confidence builds, cautious and protected penetration. She wasn’t a virgin, so the last part wasn’t so difficult; and frankly, her experience, limited though it was, proved a great help to me.
A Memory of Demons Page 19