“I’m not your enemy,” was all the nurse could muster up the energy to say.
Edward nodded in agreement.
“You’re a statistic. Now don’t interrupt,” he replied coolly. He grabbed her by the hair, forcing her head backwards. It slammed into the wall and she cried out. “I could get the same effect with one stab in the heart. Or I could—” he held the knife against her exposed throat. “Go for the old slash ‘n’ burn.”
His arm twitched, but it was not of his own volition. The boy had lashed out from behind, taking Edward by surprise.
“You’re. A bad. Man,” he shouted as he landed punch after punch on Edward’s body. “Don’t. Hurt. The lady.”
The nurse flung her arms towards Edward; her hands caught the sharp side of the blade. She retracted her fingers and kicked his face, which was no longer protected by the aspirator.
Edward grunted and wrestled with the youngster, who was now joined by his older sister. The three hostages repelled Edward away from the door, towards the cracked window. The hostages were ready to flee when the door opened and Dr Wells entered.
“Edward!”
The hostages made the fateful mistake of assuming help had arrived, and they back-tracked to the far corner of the room, with their hands raised.
Edward stretched into his rucksack and brought out a new knife. Untainted with blood, it was more ferocious, verging on the satanical. Its ten-centimetre stainless steel blade was engraved with dragons and Japanese alpha-numeric characters. If the first knife could whittle a small shrub, this could hack the head clean off a medium-sized dog.
“Looks like you made it just in time,” Edward said.
“Go, go!” Dr Wells shouted at the three hostages. They froze for a split-second, a fraction too long to make it to the door before Edward beat them to it. Stamping a boot against the door frame, he forced Dr Wells to join them in the corner, close to the sink and a reclining chair.
“Help, Liz! Help us!” the boy pleaded.
“It’s OK, Gerard. You’re safe with me,” Dr Wells calmly told him.
“No! He shot Mal, he shot Mal!” Tears overflowed as raw emotion overwhelmed him.
Edward grabbed the boy’s arm. “You want me to show you the door, do you?” he snarled.
The boy’s sister was not strong enough to pull him away from the brute who held them prisoner. Dr Wells tried to convince Edward to let go. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. Edward opened the door and fed the terrified youngster’s outstretched fingers through a gap underneath the hinges. He wrenched the door shut, jamming Gerard’s fingers.
The boy yelped and dislodged his numb digits. His sister cocooned him in her arms and they retreated back to join the nurse. Dr Wells placed herself between them, arm extended towards Edward.
“This is Gerard,” Dr Wells explained. “He has high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. Edward, what do you say to us keeping him and his sister out of harm’s way?”
She pointed a thumb at the nurse, lying distressed on the floor, bravely tending to both her injuries and the damage caused to Gerard’s fingers. “Malhotra is one of the most popular nurses in the hospital. She’s only been working with us for eighteen months but she’s single-handedly kept us all going.”
“If I made an exception for them, I’d have to spare other medical staff and all patients and then all kids and before you know it, I’ll have no one left to kill.”
“That would be helpful,” Dr Wells said sarcastically.
“Don’t play with me. It’s the vulnerable ones that get me the most notoriety.”
“Sorry, Edward,” Dr Wells replied meekly.
“He’s been a bad man,” Gerard intervened, defiance written across his pained face. He stood up, with difficulty. In spite of his sister’s protestations, he limped over to confront Edward. Wads of tissue bandaged up his bruised middle three fingers, wrapped in place by his good hand. “You’re. A. Coward,” he said, accentuating each word and placing particular emphasis on the lattermost.
“Gerard, no, come on. Edward, please,” Dr Wells implored.
Surprised, Edward took a small step back and brandished his knife. Its point hovered perilously in front of Gerard’s sternum. The doctor and Gerard's sister gasped while the boy remained unmoved.
“Oh, you think I’m a coward? You think I am a coward, do you?” Edward repeated in a condescending tone, a deliberately slow drawl that one might employ to talk down to an infant.
Gerard nodded, furrowing his eyebrows to exaggerate a stern reprimand, as an adult might express when telling off a child. Dr Wells tried to usher him away, keeping her slender body between them as a human shield.
“What do you know, ya little retard?” Edward taunted.
He dropped the large knife and picked up his smaller blade from the floor close by. Then, rolling up the sleeve on his arm, he cut away at his own forearm. There was an ‘I’, and an ‘m’. One by one, he gouged letters into his skin. Blood escaped and trickled down his limb. An ‘o’ and an ‘n’. Edward grimaced and stifled a guttural scream. He doubled over in agony, having lost much of the feeling in his right arm as he ran over his legacy scar, the relic from that crash so many years before. Even the numbness, even his narcotics and adrenaline, all failed to shield him from the pain he was unleashing on himself.
“Edward, no,” Dr Wells begged. “Put the knife down.”
A ‘y’ then followed. Edward held the knife halfway down the blade to maintain control of it.
“Like a fat fuckin’ chopstick,” he tittered. “Argh,” he winced as he nicked a vein, having cut a little too deep. Dizziness took its hold of him. Dr Wells seized the opportunity to prise the weapon from Edward’s possession.
“’I’m only half a coward’,” Edward murmured, nodding at his handiwork. “Would a coward have done that?”
“Maybe not, but a fool would have done, to try and prove a ridiculous point,” Dr Wells said in exasperation. She managed to draw stubborn Gerard away, then applied tissues and cloths to Edward’s shredded skin.
Through dreary eyes, Edward blinked. An out-of-body experience began to take hold, where he was no longer in control of his faculties. Like an alien suspended in an orb of clear plasma, he was on the precipice of unconsciousness. Impulses and sensations passed him by without registering in his brain.
Dr Wells had back-tracked to the basin, where the others were clustered. They talked to each other, but Edward could only make out incoherent dialogue. What they said, he had no idea. He gripped the makeshift bandages and went to the door. Slouching down in front of it, he made sure no one was getting past him without the fight of their lives.
After a minute of thick panting, the colour returned to his face. Adrenaline had kicked in, so Edward could only feel pins and needles emanating from his bloody, mangled forearm.
“How come you’re still holding a clinic even though I’d disappeared?” Edward asked weakly. “Wasn’t I important enough?”
Dr Wells did not reply at first. Her green eyes flitted between Gerard and the nurse, then returned to gazing crestfallen at the wet, bloodstained floor in front of her. Exhausted, perhaps regretting coming to find Edward.
“Stay strong for me, Gerard,” she whispered in his ear. He nursed his swollen, badly bruised fingers by licking them. Edward could not tell if his actions had drawn blood. Nor did he care, for he continued pestering his therapist.
“Shouldn’t you have dropped everything and joined the hunt for me? Like superwoman, coming to save the day. You’re a bit late for all that now, legging it up here.” He scoffed to himself, fixing his narrowed soulless eyes at his own splayed feet.
“Hush now Gerard, you’ll be safe with me.”
“Eh? Eh! Hey! Listen to me,” Edward demanded, struggling to raise himself off the lino flooring. His feet gave way beneath him and he landed on his belly. He cursed aloud and slammed his uninjured arm to the ground in frustration. “I’m talking to you.”
“I think you must hav
e over-estimated your sense of self-worth, Edward.”
“You reckon?” Edward hit back, lifting his soaking head to meet Dr Wells’ eyes.
“When you went missing, we treated you as a high-priority missing person. I arranged for the police and the mental health team and the press, I spoke to Helen and Michael and frien—” she stopped herself and held her tongue. “I spoke to a lot of people to try and find you.”
“Fat lot of good it did, huh?” mocked Edward.
Dr Wells threw her arms in the air and glanced around the room theatrically. “Look back on all of this, and what’s gone before it. Are you proud of yourself?”
Edward sneaked a peak across at Nurse Malhotra and the siblings. There was something in the way he looked at them which was seized on by Dr Wells. His darting eyes not wanting to hold contact with anyone. His lips arching into a short-lived frown.
“I read your manifesto under your bed. You’re no different to countless other youngsters. Unfocused, anxious. Your head thinks you’re right. You think you know you’re right. Wanting to make your mark on the world, feeling invalidated by some, cast adrift by others, in the same boat as everyone else, but desperate to forge your own path. Here’s the thing Edward, you’re not special, not now, and I won’t stand here and bow down to your fallacies.”
Edward blinked, and in that instant his hardened veneer re-appeared.
“Don’t you ever switch off?” he whinged.
“I gave you every opportunity. You came to me when you were in need. We talked, I offered you so many types of therapy over the years – sensory techniques, talking, medication, death mindfulness. You didn’t want to know.” She waited, presumably for some form of reaction.
Nothing.
◆◆◆
Time was when Dr Wells had introduced Edward to numerous fanciful concepts in a bid to assuage his existential crises. That is to say, his crippling fear of all his memories, his experiences, his achievements, his abstract emotions, his interests and loves, his life, being rendered meaningless when he goes to sleep one day and never awakens. Or the day when an instantaneous blackness descends to steal him from this world. To never awaken.
When she – or, anyone for that matter – tried to help him, they invariably failed because they could not get into Edward’s head, couldn’t appreciate the gravity of what it is to experience this raw terror. Rather, they dismiss or deflect.
Such incorrigible, parasitic thoughts haunted him. The dire knowledge that he could do nothing to rectify his fear; it fed off any fleeting moments of contentment and left him dejected. Drugs did not help, not least owing to their unpleasant cumulative side effects; but mainly because the comedown after they worked their short-lived magic was often worse than the initial fears that precipitated inside him. The meditation didn’t succeed because it focussed his mind on what it meant to be alive, making the thought of losing it all so much more painful.
Once, Dr Wells had spoken of the Buddhist beliefs around death. Yes, he loathed religion in all its contemptable guises, but he’d been willing to try a form of death meditation called Maranasati. Predictably, it had been an abject failure. He had been asked to lie on the patterned rug in her office, with the lights off, blinds drawn, windows closed. To have a greater awareness of the self and realise that we are not dead in the present moment. Maranasati was different because it contradicted the West’s blasé narrative towards death, and it ran contrary to Christianity’s notion of an ‘eternal soul’. It had seemed pragmatic.
On Dr Wells’ floor, Edward kept himself in the present. All he had felt was the plush weave pressing against his hands and heels. He could only hear his doctor’s calm voice interspersed by the clock ticking on her wall. All he could see was the blackness projected off the inside of his eyelids. That, and—
Paramedics. Police. Firefighters. Things got intense then, because he felt the pressure of a rigid, moulded plastic spinal board beneath him. The reels of bandages staunching the flowing blood to the best of their ability. The same blood that languished around his tongue in his injured mouth, eliciting an acrid flavour; and circulated around his ears, stuffed as they were with wads of fabric. And the drip, infusing whatever into his veins, held aloft by that funny-looking figure in the orange overalls and oversized helmet with the tinted visor. Near as made no difference, it was what death had tasted like, had sounded like, had felt like, had looked like.
What had been a blur, brought forth in its golden clarity. The doctor’s rug, the doctor’s voice, taking him back to the day he lost his parents and came a hair’s breadth from realising that ultimate common destiny of mankind.
◆◆◆
Somehow this all led to the present. Slumped in a hospital consultation room, coated in his blood and others’. Four hostages dripping wet and tense with pain and their own existential fears. A military-style response outside. The world’s media bearing down. A legacy to cherish, you’re having a laugh.
Dr Wells continued to eye Edward reproachfully and continued as though nothing had happened. “Gerard here, he’s the same age as you when your accident happened. He’s come to my clinic every week for three years, with his family. You won’t believe the changes he’s made to improve his attitude towards life and widen his social circle.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to clients about the people you’re seeing. What’re you smiling about?” he said, craning his neck to glare at Gerard who beamed at this praise from Dr Wells.
“I don’t consider you my client, Edward. Not anymore, not after all this.” She cast a downbeat gaze upon Malhotra’s leg. Reams of gauze and paper towels helped to compress the wound and stem the blood flow.
“The knives you’re threatening us with. Didn’t Simon brandish scissors in your face, terrifying you in that toilet all those years ago. You told me as much.”
“Fine, I’m a hypocrite. So what, times change, circumstances change.”
“One of your many quips in your manifesto says ‘Revenge relinquishes the soul.’ Have you got it? Have you got your revenge yet?”
Edward stared at her blankly for a few moments, then laughed. At length, with some considerable effort, he righted himself, using the door handle for support. He kept low, fearful of falling over again on account of his barely cogent state of mind. He staggered over to his backpack and rooted around one of the smaller compartments with his good hand.
“Yeah, I think I’ve got what I wanted.”
He retrieved his wallet and unzipped it, reaching in with his thumb and forefinger to pluck out two small, red items. On closer inspection, Dr Wells could see they were white objects, saturated in blood. Edward tossed them at her feet and they clinked upon landing on a dry patch of linoleum.
Dr Wells looked mortified, which was unusual given that precious little ever seemed to faze her.
“Your…yours?” she asked, aghast.
“Not likely. Tom and Simon each lent me one,” Edward said, turning his lips up into a wry grin. It made the gap in his own gums more prominent.
“It’s teeth,” Gerard pointed out. Subconsciously, he ran his tongue over the teeth in his upper jaw. Dr Wells closed in on them and tried to block his view of the blood smears and gory pieces of anatomy.
“Kid’s a genius,” Edward grumbled.
“What did you do to them?”
“I hunted Simon down like the dog he is. I made straight for the font of the assembly hall. He was up on stage, dressed smart for his little start-of-term speech. Made him suffer. Made him fear me. Everyone else in that hall was just fair game to me.” He sniggered.
“You snagged it from your childhood bully. Mission accomplished? Has it ‘relinquished your soul?’”
“I guessed he wouldn’t need it again. At least I made him smile in the end,” he added cryptically. Deliberate upward slashing gestures in the air with his knife highlighted his vulgar point.
Everyone sat in uneasy silence until Edward spoke again. “You knew about me hitting the Mar
tlets?” He narrowed his eyes and Dr Wells nodded. “How? I didn’t mention specific targets in my manifesto.”
“We’re the major receiving trauma centre for casualties. I was heading over to A&E to support the victims. That’s how I heard about it. We’re not a big city. You were a high-value missing person. It wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.” The doctor looked tired. Bags had puffed up under her eyes and her skin was gaunt under the sterile lighting. Her hair – previously voluptuous, now awry. Edward appeared no better but his eyes glimmered, perhaps with pride.
“Tell me what it’s like right now in your head. What are you feeling exactly?” she said, trying to deflect the current course of conversation.
“I feel,” Edward played her game. He stopped to think hard about what was going through his mind. “It’s like there’s a party, a rave in my head. And like everyone has been invited.”
“Your fear of death, that's coming to a climax now isn't it?”
“I've told you, it's irrational but I can’t escape it.”
“Mortality does not negate meaning. It creates meaning. And it's not how long you live that matters, it's how you live that counts.”
“You assume I won’t make it out of here.”
“Am I going to be proved wrong?”
Dr Wells turned to Malhotra, Gerard and his sister. Defiance substituted sadness. She nodded sternly and Gerard cried out, “Now!”
In a flash, the dynamics of the room changed.
XXXVI
Edward leaped up and dived towards them. Elizabeth side-stepped and body-checked him. They both sprawled to the ground. The antagonist clambered up to his feet but was caught in the face by the knife that Gerard threw his way. Nurse Malhotra was carried between the siblings. In seconds they had upped and exited through the door, beating a hasty retreat to safety.
“Leave them out of it, Edward,” Dr Wells said, choking on strands of her own hair that had fallen in front of her face. “It’s me you have issues with. Here I am.”
Screams of Thy Neighbour Page 24