Sin (20 page)

As I dressed, with jeans that
fitted and a t-shirt that was much more my style, I pondered. Have
you ever pondered? Streams of consciousness ping-ponging around in
your head like some old arcade game, turning into snakes of thought
that twisted and coiled? My mind was like Spiderman swinging
through New York, slinging webs and swerving this way and that, his
direction entirely dependant on which skyscraper his web attached
itself to. I tried to focus, concentrate on one building in
particular, aim for the Empire State of my mind, but the Green
Goblin kept throwing exploding obstacles in my way, scattering my
thoughts and sending me spinning to the ground far below.

Something was different.

Something had changed.

I could... I couldn't control
it, but I could... feel it. I could rein it in. It started on its
own, creeping out like smoky fingers, grasping at their victims,
but I knew the fire had been lit, and I could extinguish it. I
could STOP it.

The boyfriend who was a bastard
and a bully. The former rapist and his wife and their fire, willing
to hand me over because of the possible danger to them and their
baby. I made it happen, but I made it stop.

Something was different. It had
changed.

Was it me? Was the battle
between good and evil, or at least grey and slightly darker grey,
inside me finally being won? Was Anakin resisting the pull of the
Dark Side? What? And possibly more importantly, how?

Could I hone it? Possibly gain
enough control to stop it altogether? It might be, though, that it,
whatever it was, had to be released occasionally - a safety vent to
stop me exploding. If that was the case, then maybe I could direct
it. Channel the force or the will or the power into something
harmless or something that wouldn't be missed. A fence post. A
round of toast. A politician. If I kept it inside, if I could keep
it inside, and I did go pop, I didn't know what I might take with
me. There could just be a puff of smoke with only my shoes left
behind, or I could take the entire street along for the ride into
death. Maybe not just the street. How about the town, or more.

I just didn't know. But
something
had
changed. And I could only think that it was
for the better. I could only hope it was for the better.

In a folder in a box on a shelf
in a cupboard under the stairs was an envelope. In the envelope in
the box blah-de-blah was my life. Credit card, bank card, passport,
the lot. My life, such as it had been, could be stored in an A5
sized brown envelope. The sum of me, carry the one. Beneath my
envelope was another belonging to Joy. It contained only her
passport and her driving license, the credit and bank cards long
since being defunct and cut up. These two items, though, I couldn't
dispose of as easily as I could her credit card. Was it because
they had her photograph on? Was it because, by virtue of being her
ID, they'd somehow become part of her? That, I think, was closer to
the truth. I'd lost her, but keeping these items, especially in
such close proximity to my own, somehow meant we were still
together on some plane.

I opened her passport and
smiled. She'd always hated the photo. False smile to match the fake
eyelashes. She was looking forward to renewing the passport and,
along with it, her photo. It still had almost a year to go when she
killed herself. I supposed, going by my dream the other night, she
could pretty much go anywhere she wanted now, so a passport was
somewhat redundant. And she didn't need to drive so ditto on the
license. Useful thing, death, then.

I slipped what remained of my
sister back into her envelope and put it away. Taking my own little
packet of Me, I went back upstairs to my room. The living room
would maybe have been a better place to kick back and think, but I
knew what I was like. I'd turn the TV on and watch inane programmes
try to sort out the lives of inane people, from those that couldn't
find a new home on their own to those that couldn't find
themselves. Reality television in its many forms would latch on to
me like a leech and suck the will to do anything from me until it
was full and bloated and dropped off. By then the stars would have
turned and the Doctor's friends would have come knocking, no
doubt.

So back to my room. Maybe a
short nap. Then lights, camera,
action
, with no need for a
stunt double.

It was dark when I awoke. Well,
night time anyway. A street lamp stood guard outside, lighting the
room with an anaemic glow that I would normally have blocked out
with a blackout blind. So much for a short nap. Sleep had fooled
me, hiding behind the curtain of my hyped up energy, sneaking out
when my back was turned and my eyes were closed to steal the day
from me.

Joy was sitting at the end of my
bed.

* * * *

"Hey there, sleepy head," she
said.

I smiled, yawned and stretched.
"Hey sis."

Clearly I was still asleep.
Maybe it wasn't actually night time and the street light wasn't
swathing the room in a sickly yellow. At least Joy's face was in
one piece - for now anyway. I could do without having to hand her
sections of skin while she spoke or flicking maggots that crawled
my way, even if it was only a dream. She looked good. Better than
the other night. Her smile was back to full power and her eyes
radiated a warmth that even the chill of a house left unheated for
years couldn't defeat. I pushed myself up and looked around.

It was a little disappointing.
My dream world bedroom was exactly the same as my waking world one.
I didn't have a four poster bed. There were no sumptuous carpets or
fitted wardrobes and a huge plasma screen TV wasn't hanging on the
wall opposite. It was the same impersonal (deliberately so, I know)
room I'd gone to bed in. You'd think my subconscious would
embellish things just a little wouldn't you? Just for fun?

Well, I suppose you could count
my dead sister as an embellishment.

"Cheers," she said. "I'm just
the best you could do next to a four poster bed, am I? A
decoration? An adornment? Thanks a bunch, boy."

I hated it when she called me
boy. Always had. She knew it, which was why she did it.

"Think of it as an enhancement,"
I told her. "An improvement. You're giving the room some
spirit!"

"You know," said Joy, "you
should be on stage. Sweeping it."

"I know, you said that," said I.
"I do have my moments."

"Unfortunately, that's all they
are - moments."

Touché, said the turtle.

"Anyway," she said. "Enough of
this frivolity. You'd sleep the world away, you know."

Would if I could. But oh-oh. I
knew that tone.

"You've got your business head
on."

Joy shook her head, her long
locks putting Pantene to shame. The Grim Reaper should open a
beauty salon. Death seemed to do Joy justice. She put her hands to
her ears.

"This isn't my business head,"
she said, suddenly performing a perfect Worzel Gummidge impression
by pulling up and separating her head from her body. While I stared
wide eyed, she laid it down on the bed next to another that had
somehow materialised. She picked up the new one, which was
identical to the first, and put it on the newly vacant space atop
her torso. "THIS is my business head."

I looked back on the bed but
there was nothing there. A pair of small dips, though, were proof
that something had been.

"Embellish
that
, boy,"
she said.

Well, that wasn't going to be
easy. It would be hard for me to top a trick such as
self-decapitation. Even I, the Mighty Me, couldn't out perform the
dream of a ghost of a sister.

"You win."

"Yes," she said. "I do. And stop
thinking of me as a dream, please! It's not good for one's ego, you
know?"

"Well you please stop reading my
thoughts, then."

"Hey," she prodded my arm.
"You're the one who's convinced I'm actually
in
your head,
so I’m bound to know what you're thinking if you're the one
thinking of me!"

Erm... Hold one. Let me figure
that out.

Right. Got it.

Hey, that proved me right,
didn't it?

"Not necessarily," she said with
a grin. "Being dead might just make me telepathic. I may be able to
really read your thoughts. I could be a psychic spirit."

Septic, more like, I thought, my
mind flashing back to her dripping facial features back in the
forest.

"Yes, very funny. Let me get you
that broom."

"So come on then," I said.
"Convince me. Show me I'm really awake and you're not just a
figment of my warped imagination. Prove to me you're the ghost of
my sister and not just a recurring dream I'm having because I'm
feeling alone now and need someone and you're all my mangled mind
can manage."

"God," Joy said, rolling her
eyes (but not literally out of her head this time). "The boy wants
a soapbox now! Maybe he should see a psychiatrist to sort out his
abandonment issues!"

"Stop..."

"...Calling you boy. I know, I
know. OK. It's just habit to tease you."

Well, that was true.

"Listen," she said, resting her
hand on mine. It was warm like before. Not chilled or clammy. Not
ghostly or zombie-fied. "Believe what you want to believe. It's up
to you. I don't have time,
you
don't have time for me to
prat about proving myself to you. If I'm real then listen to me, if
I'm not then still listen to me, because then you'd be listening to
yourself!"

OK, I get the point.

"OK," I said. "I'll listen."

Joy smiled and I thought back to
when we were kids. She could always make me feel better. Whenever
I'd been the brunt of a particularly savage stream of abuse from
our father, Joy just had to look at me, hold my hand and smile. Dad
could shove it then as far as I was concerned. I realised, later of
course, just how and why she could make me feel that way. Joy was
joy and I was sin. Her curse had led her to her eventual death, but
it had been my salvation at the time.

She suddenly hugged me, hard.
When she pulled away she had tears in her eyes.

"Joy?"

"I'm OK," she said. "Just...
thanks for that, that's all."

"For what?"

"For making me feel that I did
something good. For making me feel like I wasn't a waste."

"A waste? Of course you weren't!
You helped so many people!"

"Yes, but you're my baby bro.
They don't matter. You do. And you had it harder when we were kids
than I did. So thanks."

I felt that I should have been
thanking her, not the other way around, but I didn't say so. She
would, it seemed, know what I was thinking anyway, so I didn't have
to.

"Let's walk," she said.

"Walk? Where?" I didn't like the
idea of leaving the house. I was like Quasimodo but without the
bell... or his hump. This was my Sanctuary. Joy was a sibling
version of Esmeralda. Going outside held me open to attack and
capture and all manner of unpleasantness.

"It'll be fine. Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"Seven Hills," she said.

The Seven Hills. Were there
seven? I didn't know. It was the name, locally at least - it
wouldn't appear on any map as that - for an area of waste ground
near our parents' house. Perhaps waste was a little too harsh.
Undeveloped was closer to the truth. They just hadn't managed to
get round to building on it, a fact that constantly surprised me.
They, the council, the developers or whoever, hadn't yet crammed
three hundred or so town houses into the little plot of land. It
wasn't so little but nor was it a vast expanse of unkempt and
untamed wilderness. It was an opportunity untapped for some
enterprising company, and that tap would be turned on full before
too long, I shouldn't wonder. Near to my house in Scunthorpe
there'd been a small area on the tight corner of a junction. You'd
have thought a couple of houses with smallish gardens would have
happily fitted on there. Nope. Forget the gardens. A communal
parking area surrounded by a claustrophobic collection of almost a
dozen dwellings that you'd be lucky enough to be able to swing a
cat in, if you were lucky enough to be able to fit yourself and a
cat in. On the Seven Hills you could probably slot a small town.
Maybe a Tetney sized village.

The Seven Hills. Reputed to be
inhabited by rats the size of small dogs that wouldn't so much as
nip at your ankles as take your leg off at the knee. Maybe that's
why it was left alone. Perhaps the Beast of Bodmin or the Hound of
the Baskervilles wandered loose and people were too afraid to set
foot in there. Or the dog-sized rats were a new, protected species,
and scientists wanted their natural habitat to remain untouched so
they could be studied. Nessie herself might be holidaying there,
taking a break from her Loch and from the unending stream of
tourists and investigators. Or maybe it was just that it would be
such a colossal project to level off the wildly uneven and wildly
wild ground that no-one had been bothered. I mean, who'd want a
house so off kilter the water wouldn't stay in the bath or you'd
open the front door to go to work in the morning and fall out? It
wasn't really a selling point, was it?

So the Hills, all Seven of them
remained. Not quite Rome, but good for roaming. I just hoped I
didn't become the Nero of this particular town. I couldn't play the
fiddle so maybe that was a plus for me.

Joy and I walked in almost
silence. I couldn't think what to say, because I knew I wouldn't be
able to stop myself asking questions she wouldn't be able to
answer. She might not believe it, but I did listen sometimes. She
couldn't say, that's what she'd told me the last time we met. The
words just didn't want to come out, like petulant children when
they were refused an ice cream. So questions such as "What's it
like to be dead?" or "Do you get cable TV?" were redundant. It
would be like talking to a brick wall, except the brick wall
wouldn't whinge at me for asking. Or if it did I wouldn't be able
to understand it, not being fluent in Brick. A smattering of
conversation stopped it becoming complete silence, but it was
mainly silly comments about nothing. Talking crap to avoid talking
sense. Still, it could have been uncomfortable, but it wasn't. We'd
spoken enough crap to each other over the years for this episode to
be less awkward than it might otherwise have been. I was sure all
would be revealed when we were finally in the domain of the giant
rat.