Lily Poole

by Jack O'Donnell

  Williams shifted in his seat, his expression was difficult to read. John tried a different tack. ‘Before I fall asleep, I get this buzzing in my ears, angry voices and snatches of songs from some faraway place. I hear breathing and it comes closer and this fat squelchy thing sits on my face and chest. I can’t move, not even to brush a tear away from the corner of my eyes. Then I pull away, escape, but I’m still lying in bed.’

  Williams paid heed to what he had said, but waited for him to continue. ‘Although it’s dark, there’s enough light to see. I pull open the room door and steal into the hall. I can hear my da and his snoring.’ John grinned at the familiarity of home.

  ‘My ma is a light sleeper so I’ve got to sneak past their door.’

  ‘Why should that matter if you’re dreaming?’ the consultant asked.

  ‘I’m no’ sure.’ The memory made him screw his face up like he was chewing sour plums. ‘Anyway, I glide down the hall. Put my head against my sisters’ bedroom door. Listening.’

  Mr Williams held his hand up in a stop sign. ‘You said “glide” in your dreams. Have you got feet, do you walk?’

  ‘Aye,’ but when John thought about it for a few s­econds he had to admit, ‘I don’t know’.

  John stuttered and started the next part of his recollection, his face getting redder as he spoke. ‘I’m listening at the door. I’ve got to be careful. Once my mum caught me standing bollock naked in the kitchen, and it’s as if there’s a force goading me on and another holding me back. I try the handle, but it’s never locked. I slowly push it open. My sister Jo’s bed is nearest the windae. She turns over in her sleep, a bump of dark bedclothes and frizzy hair. Little Ally’s bed is nearest the wall. I stand at the end of her bed watching her. She moans, wriggles up out of her bedclothes. Her wee face seems fragile as a dandelion clock’s in the darkness. She sits bolt upright, looking straight at me, as if she’d been expecting me all along. I pad round her side of the bed and kiss her on the forehead. Whisper for her to shush. I slip under the covers beside her, as easy as slipping into a shallow pool of warm water. She turns her back and moves away, flat as plywood near the wall. There’s a draught between our stiff bodies. But she knows the drill. I shirk up her nightie and tug her pants down and she lifts her feet off the mattress so she can step out of them. I hook her pee-pee with a finger and reel her in close, let her writhe up against my chest. Clamp her knickers to her mouth so she doesn’t squeal too much. And if she’s good and she likes it—’

  ‘What do you mean by “pee-pee”?’ the psychiatrist asked.

  John looked at the top of the desk, and muttered with his chin tucked into his chest, ‘I think it means vagina.’ Sweat ran down his forehead and stained the underarms of his T-shirt.

  ‘Go on,’ Williams said.

  He found it more difficult to continue after he had been interrupted. ‘I ride her,’ he spoke as matter-of-factly as he could.

  ‘Go on,’ Williams said.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  The consultant’s fingers pawed around his chin. ‘What about Jo?’ he asked.

  ‘Whit about her?’

  ‘She’s in the next bed. Doesn’t she hear you?’

  ‘Nah.’ Then it occurred to John. ‘She’s too scared.’

  ‘What’s she scared of?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Why’s she scared of you?’

  John pushed his chair back and stood up. His voice wavered, on the brink of tears. ‘In case I do to her what I was doing to Ally.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Fuck her.’ Tears calved and splintered like blocks of ice in the back of his throat and he sniffed and gasped to hold them back.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yeh, I fucked her back and front.’

  John lost control of his body as he hunched howling over the desk. Williams watched him. He was so composed, sitting with one leg up over the other, clutching at his ankle, John felt a keen hatred towards him. It ­travelled like a bolt of forked lightning through his body and his tears dried. He thought the psychiatrist better watch out.

  John found his voice. ‘She wouldn’t listen. Said she was goin’ to tell. I had to kill her.’

  The chair creaked as Williams dropped his ankle and his fawn desert boot banged down and scuffed the floor. ‘Who?’

  ‘Little Ally,’ he said. He felt cleansed by tears and sat down, facing him. ‘She screeched, and I put a pillow over her face to stop her and she widnae stop. I had to press down harder and harder, until she did.’

  ‘You raped and killed her?’ Williams asked.

  ‘Yes.’ John shook his head. ‘And no. When I lifted the pillow from her face, I knew immediately that she was deid, but it wisnae our Ally’s face. I put the pillow over her face again. Every time I pulled it away it was a different deid girl lying beneath me and looking up at me. But the last time I did it the girl’s eyes blinked opened, and I screamed, but she hooked her arms round my neck and forced the slug of her long tongue into my mouth to shut me up. She was only a wee thing, but I couldnae get her aff. Then I blacked out. Found myself bollocks naked outside, up Dalmuir Park, in the woods at the Golfie. That’s when I heard the wolves.’

  Somehow, in a short time, they had grown used to each other, or at least John had got used to Williams ­sitting listening to him. Telling him the next part was easier. ‘I was dying with the cold and it was pissing down. But you know what it’s like. Stars and clouds for company and I’d my hands down protecting my shrivelled cock and balls. To begin with I kept to the long grass, but it was too jaggy. Sore on my bare feet. I hopped, skipped and jumped onto the fairways. Something, or someone, was watching me. Rustling branches. Something in the bushes made me skedaddle sharpish. A gigantic crow, an evil looking thing, lifted its black cloak of feathers off the branch of a rowan and cawed, once, twice, three times, as if signalling, and circled overhead and flew higher and higher. In the murky light, I was shiteing myself. I hunted the verges for a big stick, or even a small crooked stick. I ran onto the nearest green taking the metal pin and flag out of the hole and waving it about. I wasn’t sure if that would be enough. Below the wee drop a ragged line of wolves padded to the edge of the thicket, or at least I think they were wolves. All I could see was the low orbs of their yellowish eyes, lit up, like slow blinking Very lights. Even though it was no good and I couldn’t escape, I sprinted away from them. But I could hear them gaining on me. Even as I felt the thump on my back, knocking me down and into the mud, my mind was trying to work out whether you played deid for bears and wolves, or was it just bears?’

  Williams kneaded his knuckles, waiting for him to say something more. ‘What makes you think they were wolves?’ he asked.

  John shrugged. ‘Dunno. I usually just wake up at that point.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Freud, of course, wrote about his treatment of a wolf man.’ His pink lips grimaced through facial hair and he sank backwards into his chair. ‘You do know who Freud is, don’t you?’

  ‘Course I do. Fat guy. Liberal MP. Good for nothing.’

  ‘Har har, good for you,’ he said in his plummy accent.

  John chuckled at having caught him out. They were silent for a few seconds. The psychiatrist fidgeted in his chair and John got the feeling that their chat was done for the day.

  ‘One more thing,’ Williams said. ‘It would be remiss of me not to ask, you do have sisters Ally and Jo?’

  ‘Yeh,’ he replied.

  He nodded as if he already knew that, then his phone rang. ‘You don’t mind if I get that, do you?’

  John was out of his chair before the psychiatrist picked up the receiver. Williams drew in his legs and shuffled the chair tight to his desk to let him pass. He hung onto the phone, waiting for him to leave, facing the frayed Post-it notes he had tacked up on the office wall. John clicked the door shut behind him.

  The ward looked the same, but he felt different, drain
ed, as if he had taken an oral examination in a subject he neglected, in a tongue he couldn’t speak. It was still early, but he needed to go and lie down on his bed. Nobody in the hallway even looked at him or tried to tap him for a fag. It felt like being a ghost in one of his dreams.

  He blundered in, not thinking. The curtains were closed, but there was enough light from outside to show that the patient who had been assigned his room must have been dozing. When he crashed through the door she sat up screaming and shrieking. He checked out the corridor and dashed outside to make his getaway. Janine was standing at her door smoking an Embassy King Size with an amused look on her face. Her elbow nudged the door to her room open and she gave a throaty laugh and motioned him inside.

  Janine closed the door behind them. He paced at the foot of her bed and eventually turned to her.

  ‘I didn’t do nothin’,’ he said, in a pleading tone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘That woman’s fuckin’ crazy.’

  She edged past him, patting his bum, her long hair falling over her shoulders. Tipping her head to one side, she sat on the edge of the bed, glancing up at him, her blue eyes glistening. She arched her neck so that his eyes fell on her throat and drifted down. Her shoes were eased off with a slapping sound and she stabbed her fag out in an ashtray beneath the bed. Ashtrays dotted the room – on the window, on the bedside cabinet, under her bed.

  Her mouth broke into a cruel grin, showing a red lipstick mark on her lower canine. ‘All the women are crazy in here – specially me.’ She started screaming too, really going for it. She batted his hands away as he tried to shut her up. They rolled about her bed and she kept shrieking. He put his hand over her mouth and she bit him hard. He pulled his hand away and shook it to see if it was bleeding. Her yelping grew louder, more frenzied. He pinned her arms with his hands and used the weight of his legs to pin her torso to the bed, lying on top of her and shutting her up with his mouth on hers. Her hips writhed beneath him. He knew she would be wet, aching for sex.

  Myra burst into the room. They looked up at her. She looked over at them then quietly closed the door leaving him with the crazy woman.

  Janine found his zip and opened a library of the senses. They slapped and slid against each other, the bed springs squeaking faster and faster, their bodies sinking and falling and there was a shifting and a giving and taking.

  ‘Don’t come inside me,’ she whispered, through clenched teeth. ‘My jag’s overdue. I’m not on anything.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, too late. He did stop, dead, mid-thrust, her back arched and his insides stuck together like a box jellyfish. Something about the way her hair was lying, and the tang of sex reminded him of one of the girl’s faces he had seen squashed under the pillow in his dreams.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said.

  Day 40

  Outside it was getting dark and the children were still held captive in school. Mary shut her eyes, a Silk Cut dangling from her bottom lip. The kitchen stank of ­disinfectant and bleach. It was just a reflex to smoke between jobs and sometimes when she was hoovering, or washing the dishes, or making the bed, or peeling the spuds, a fag would find its way into her gob. It was as natural as breathing, but they were getting a bit pricey now, up to almost forty pence a pack. She promised herself that if they got any dearer she would stop. It was a stupid habit anyway, but it was the only thing that gave her enough energy to keep going. To show she meant business she turned and nipped it, stubbing burnt tobacco out in the overflowing clay-pot ashtray on the windowsill and leaving an acrid aftertaste. Something moved in the periphery of her vision.

  Wind whipped rain through the branches and boughs of the trees in the gardens below, the treetops a swishing and swirling net of spidery dark wood against the wire fence. A murder of crows lined up on the orange-tiled roofs, flapping and strutting, their beady black eyes darting from one thing to another. The one closest to the gable looked straight at her. It raised its oily slick shoulders, scolding the wind and rain, tightened its talons and took off. Glassy black pits of corvine eyes tracked her movements, and the sharp hook of its beak cut through the sound of the wind as it cawed and she stumbled backwards, away from the window.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Mary muttered to herself. ‘I thought that thing was coming straight through the window.’

  Cagily, she edged forward, craning her neck, peering up at the mottled whitewash on the ceiling as if she could look through walls and wood and metal and the roof of Daft Rab’s house above to see where it went. The front door banged open and shut, a quick one-two, and she heard Ally’s feet scuttling up the hall. She sighed, reaching into her apron pocket for her fag packet. When she glanced out, the sky was dark and empty, rooftops bare, the crows gone.

  ‘Happy birthday, Mum!’ Ally dropped her school satchel inside the kitchen door. She was breathless from running, strands of blonde hair plastered to her forehead. Her anorak was unzipped but snagged on the bottom rail of the metallic casing, half-on, half-off, and her sweaty blue shirt was tucked half-in and half-out of her grey skirt. Hurtling herself at her mum she flung her arms around her legs and waist and pressed the side of her face into her midriff.

  ‘Ally, I’m smoking.’ Mary flagged the hand holding the cigarette to one side as if wearing a plaster cast, and shoved her daughter’s head away from underneath her chest. Ally stumbled backwards, and Mary’s expression softened at the hurt in her daughter’s eyes.

  Ally sniffled. ‘I’ve got you a card.’ Clutched in her hand was a yellow piece of cardboard, folded over once, with gold and silver glitter and the word ‘Mum’ in red crayon with an orange smiley face and blue crayoned kisses surrounding it in the shape of a love heart. She held it up to show her mum, a shy smile flitting across her face. ‘Happey’ was spelled with an ‘e’, which had been scored through, and partially coloured over.

  ‘That’s nice.’ Mary nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Leave it on the table, I’ll get the dinner on and I’ll look at it later.’

  Ally’s head drooped like a winter daffodil. She turned her back and flung the card face down on the kitchen table, but it fell onto the chair and then the carefully cleaned floor. She left it lying as she trudged into the living room, flicking the switch to put the telly on, pulling her anorak hood up over her hair and standing before the dusty, dull screen, waiting for the set to warm up and the dot to tune into the voices of cheery children’s presenters. Turning her head, looking back into the bright light of the kitchen, she saw her mum bending, scooping the card up and opening it. She held her breath as the telly came on; her mum stood looking through at her with the card in her hand.

  ‘Turn that down a bit, will you, darlin’?’ Mary shouted, turning away to rinse a cloth in the sink.

  The card was still folded neatly in her hand when Mary came back and stood in the doorway. Ally had settled like sediment into the cushioned framework of the chair near the window, just a face and feet poking out. ‘Thanks for the card,’ said Mary.

  Ally scrambled out of the seat and, like a puppy begging for attention, rushed head first at her mum. ‘You really like it?’

  ‘Thanks. It’s great. The colours are so bright and you’re so clever. And there’s lots and lots of kisses. I’ll need to collect them all later.’ She made kissy-kissy noises with her pouted lips. ‘But one thing, darlin’.’ She held the card pinned between her thumb and fingers. ‘Who wrote on the inside of it and signed it with all these kisses?’

  ‘I signed it. I signed it,’ squealed Ally. Behind her mum the pots on the rings bubbled and one overflowed.

  ‘Give me a minute, darlin’?’ Mary placed the card on the seat. She turned, fiddling with the gauge on the rings with one hand and, with the other, manoeuvred a fork to joust with the pot lid and flip it.

  Ally tiptoed into the kitchen and stood looking at the open card and the crayoned unwavering lines, the consistent way letters were evenly spaced, the uprights of the letters not touching, writing, which was not her own. Her
shoulders heaved up and down, like newly hatched birds’ wings, as she cried. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she mumbled into her chest. She felt a warm hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ Mary said. ‘I’m just dead-beat all the time.’

  ‘Whit’s moany face greetin’ about now?’ Jo stood in the living room, peering in her short-sighted way first at her mum, then at Ally for an explanation. ‘Happy birthday, Mum,’ she shouted, without waiting for a reply. ‘How many dumps have I got to give you now?’

  Ally looked at Jo and they smiled complicity at each other.

  ‘Thirty-four,’ said Mary.

  ‘Jeez, you’re really old,’ said Jo, with a note of admiration. ‘That’s nearly as old as Dad. And he’s as old as the moon.’

  Mary unlatched the window and pushed it open, ­letting in fresh air which dissipated steam from the pots and took away the sour tang of over-boiled meat and veg.

  Jo sat at the kitchen table in the chair behind the door, a school book propped open, fork mid-air between dinner plate and mouth, a damp, blue cotton towel from the pulley above making a turban for her head. Her eyes scanned the pages of Little Women.

  Mary thought all books were homework and avoided asking questions and getting one of those know-it-all faces. Mary had effectively left school and started working at fourteen –Jo acted as if she was going on forty – but she was proud of her eldest daughter, reasoned that if she could stay away from boys, then she had a real chance, and might even stay on at school and get an O-Grade in something.

  Mary leaned across the burn of the cooker and stirred the mince. The tatties were simmering on the back ring with the lid on to keep them warm for Joey. He ate more than the three of them put together. He would be in soon. She knew he would stop off on his way home, go into Birell’s and buy her a box of Black Magic and a card for her birthday. She just hoped that he would avoid birthday cards with racing-car drivers or footballers on them. He was vain about his short-sightedness, so wouldn’t wear his specs, and had a tendency to pick up the first thing that came to hand, covering it all up with his war cry, ‘That’ll dae, that’ll dae’.