The Boy Who Could See Demons (24 page)

William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

19

ESCAPE

Alex

Dear Diary,

There’s two fish in a tank. One turns to the other and says, ‘Do you know how to drive this thing?’

I guess I don’t need to write jokes any more as I won’t be playing Horatio again because I’m in hospital and the doctors say there’s
absolutely no way
I can get out to perform in the shows for the rest of the week. Though Auntie Bev told me something this morning that made me feel a wee bit better. She turned up wearing a blue headband and a thin blue vest with a Superman logo on the front which I thought was weird for a girl to wear. Her face was pink and sweaty and she was drinking from a lime-green water bottle.

‘Have you been wall climbing?’ I asked. She gave me a look that said she felt guilty.

‘Sorry, Alex,’ she said, and she sat so close to me I could smell sweat. ‘I know you’d love to go. I’ll take you once you get out.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Do you want to come and have lunch with me?’

‘They’re letting me go?’ I said excitedly.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said, lifting my shoes from under the bed. ‘But we can go to the canteen just down the corridor. Would you like that?’

I said I would and stood up. I felt wobbly on my feet still but she held my elbow and helped me put my shoes on.

‘I met the casting director before the show started,’ Auntie Bev said as we walked slowly to the canteen.
‘Roz,’
she said. ‘That’s her name. Turns out Roz has very bad sinusitis.’ I looked up and saw Auntie Bev pull a face like she’d something really cool to tell me.

‘What’s sinusitis?’

‘It’s this horrible yucky illness that makes you feel like you’ve been punched in the face for about a week.’

I was horrified. ‘You punched Roz in the face?’

Auntie Bev made that hooting sound that meant she was laughing.

‘No,’
she said, pushing a square silver button that made the doors open into the canteen. ‘It means that she has an illness that falls into my area of expertise.’

We stood in the doorway, looking over the empty tables and chairs. I was glad it was really empty and the food on the shelves of the open fridge looked a lot nicer than the food they brought me on a tray. Auntie Bev took my arm and walked me to a table in a corner beneath a big clock with a picture of an ice cream on it.

‘I told Roz all about you, you know,’ Auntie Bev told me. ‘I said you’re a star in the making. That Quentin Tara-whatever-his-name-is would be glad to have you.’ She sat down in the steel chair opposite me and clicked her tongue. ‘And that I’d send her a top-of-the-range sinus irrigator free of charge.’

She winked. I didn’t really get it but the way she was smiling made my heart beat really fast. I felt like I could breathe deeper than I ever had before. She flipped open the plastic menu and had a good long look.

‘What do you fancy, Alex? A jacket potato with beans and cheese? Or what about a nice omelette? You can get it with bacon and peppers.’

I shook my head. ‘Onions on toast, please.’

Auntie Bev lowered the menu and stared at me as if she felt sick. ‘Really, Alex?’

I nodded and she looked sad.

‘I know you and your mum don’t have much money, but while I’m here let me spoil you. I love you. Honest, I’ll get you anything you want on this menu.’

‘Onions on toast,’ I said, nodding. ‘It’s the best thing ever.’ And just then my stomach gave a big growl.

Auntie Bev’s smile came back and she set down the menu. ‘Well, maybe I’m missing out, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll have that too, shall I?’

She got up to tell the lady behind the counter what we wanted and I felt glad that Auntie Bev was going to eat the same as me. When she sat back down she smiled and said, ‘Good thing I keep after dinner mints in my bag.’

When she left I felt good for a while but then I started to feel bad. I think I’ve upset Anya and I don’t really know how or why. I tried to explain to her that the questions were Ruen’s but I was stupid to expect that she would believe me when
no one
believes me at all. I don’t even know why I ever told anyone about him in the first place. I don’t know why Ruen told me that I hurt myself when I didn’t. When all the doctors and nurses talk to me now they speak to me like I’m either really stupid or like I’m carrying a knife or something. When I ask about Mum they don’t look at my eyes and they say things like, ‘Oh, don’t you be worrying about your mother,’ and, ‘Now, Alex, just you be patient while your mum pulls herself round. Why don’t you get some sleep?’ I just want to get out of here and check that she’s OK.

I’m not going back to my old school for a while and when I leave hospital I am going to a new school at a place called MacNeice House. Just for a while and then Mum and I will move into our amazing new house. Anya showed me some pictures and kept saying I’d love it but I’m not so sure. It looks like a hospital on the inside but on the outside it looks like a posh house where you would expect servants and maids and things like that. I’ve been given homework until then but I feel like someone’s attached a vacuum cleaner to my skin and sucked out all the energy. When I sit up it feels like the whole room wobbles and my head feels like an enormous cannon ball so that I have to keep putting my hands around my cheeks to hold it in place.

When the nurse brings me lunch she asks me what I’m doing.

I look up and say, ‘My head is going to fall off.’

I think she might laugh but she actually runs out of the room, leaving my food tray too far away for me to reach, and I hear her shoes clacking all the way down the hall. When I look down, my bed is covered in vomit and my nails have blood in them from where I was scratching my neck. I don’t remember being sick or scratching myself.

I’m starting to feel very strange, not like me at all.

When I wake up again my bed is clean and I am dressed differently. I can see my shirt and trousers hanging in the open locker in the corner. It’s raining cats and dogs outside, Auntie Bev would say, and I imagine what it would be like if it really was chucking down kittens and Rottweilers.

I’m thinking of the RSPCA when someone comes into the room. I think it’s a nurse and am afraid to say anything in case she gets scared again, but then I look up and see it’s Ruen. He’s Ghost Boy. He glances out of the door and holds a finger to his lips to tell me, ‘Sshh.’ I nod and about a second later a doctor comes in. He is holding a clipboard.

‘How are you feeling, Alex?’ he says.

‘Fine,’ I say. He puts two fingers against my wrist and looks at his watch and says nothing for a while. Then he puts a stethoscope under my robe. It makes me shiver.

‘Any breathing problems?’ he asks. I shake my head.

A nurse comes in and wraps a piece of material around my arm then squeezes a small black ball until the material gets really tight. ‘One twenty over eighty,’ she tells the doctor, and he writes it down. He nods and asks, ‘Temperature?’ The nurse says something I can’t really hear but the doctor writes it down, too.

‘OK,’ the doctor says.

‘Can I go now?’ I ask.

This is apparently really funny.

‘No,’ the doctor says, handing me a cup with tablets in it. ‘You have to take two of these twice a day for the next wee while. We need you to stay here to make sure they’re doing their job.’

I frown at the round white tablets in the cup. ‘What are they for?’ I ask.

The doctor looks down at me through his glasses. The nurse says, ‘To help you sleep better, Alex.’

‘But I sleep fine,’ I say.

The nurse smiles and hands me a cup with some water. I hold both cups in my hands and stare up at the nurse and doctor. Finally, the nurse says: ‘Dr Molokova says you’ve to take them.’

She’s says it like I should already know this. ‘Who’s Dr Molokova?’

‘Anya?’

‘Oh.’

I put the tablets in my mouth and they taste very bitter so I drink the whole cup of water in one go. She hands me a tray of food. It looks like Woof vomited on my plate.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘Toad in the hole,’ the nurse says. ‘You want peanuts or chopped apple for your snack?’

‘Peanuts,’ Ruen says loudly, and I jump. I ask her for the peanuts and she looks at me funny, then she nods.

‘Dessert is either meringue or bread and butter pudding.’

I glance at Ruen. ‘Bread and butter pudding, please.’

The nurse slides the tray on to the table next to me and walks out, humming.

‘I don’t want to stay here,’ I tell Ruen.

‘I don’t blame you,’ he says, looking out the window.

I glare at him. ‘I’m not your friend, by the way.’

He looks quite shocked. ‘Whyever not?’

My face is very hot all of a sudden and my hands are shaking. When I blink everything looks blurred for a second. ‘Because you made me ask Anya those questions and she got very upset. I didn’t want to make her upset and it’s your fault.’

He smiles. ‘It is not my fault that she was emotional. I simply needed to discover a little more about her, that is all.’

Eventually my face goes cold again and my hands go still. It happened last time I took the tablets but then it went away after a few seconds. So I swing my legs round and put my feet on the floor.

‘Then why didn’t
you
ask her the questions, huh?’

‘She’s trying to get rid of me, Alex,’ he says, turning his head to the doorway. ‘She’s trying to convince you I’m not real.’

But I’ve heard it before. And I decide he’s got a big problem with being a demon and not being able to be seen. Which, I think, is
his
problem, because if I can see him surely other people can, too.

‘Why do you keep hiding from everybody?’ I say.

And then one second he is scowling at me at the other side of the room and the next he is crouching down beside me, his face close to mine, snarling with little bubbles in the corners of his mouth.

‘I
don’t
hide,’ he says. ‘Do you think I
want
to be invisible, you stupid boy? Do you think it’s
fun
not being seen for what you are or what you can do? How do you think …
Max Payne
would feel if all his heroic deeds went unnoticed, eh? Or Batman?’

He stands up and walks away. I frown at him.

‘Batman wears a costume,’ I say.

He turns. ‘What?’

‘Batman wears a costume. All the superheroes do, to hide their real identity. It’s part of why they’re superheroes. They don’t want the glory for all the stuff they do. They just want to do good things for people.’
Unlike you
, I think.

Ruen stares at me so long and with such wide eyes that I wonder if he’s actually died on the spot and is about to fall over.

‘Ruen?’ I say after a while.

He starts to grin. Then he starts to clap. And then – this is what really shocks me – he walks towards me, rubbing his hands, then he reaches out and ruffles my hair.

‘What a clever boy,’ he says, which is daft really because just then he’s a boy, too. Then he points at me and starts to laugh.

‘Why does everyone think I’m so funny today?’ I say. But Ruen is laughing so much he can’t speak. He walks up to the mirror above the sink and looks at himself. He straightens his back and looks dead chuffed with himself.

‘A costume,’ he says. ‘Or a proxy.’

‘What’s a proxy?’

He turns to face me, still grinning like an eejit.

‘You’re no good to me in here, are you?’

‘What?’

He shakes his head. ‘Never mind. How badly do you want to see your mum?’

‘
Very
badly,’ I say.

‘Right,’ Ruen says, and clasps his hands together. ‘Follow me.’

I get out of bed and immediately feel like I am on a ship. ‘Steady now,’ Ruen says, and I close my eyes and count the number of bones in an adult ribcage in my head and then I open my eyes and feel better.

‘Grab your clothes,’ Ruen tells me. I stagger to the open locker and pull on my shirt, trousers, shoes and blazer.

‘Ready,’ I say.

Ruen glances at my cap. ‘You might be needing that. And your scarf,’ he says. ‘You’ll catch your death outside. And then what would I do?’ He starts to laugh.

Everybody else on the ward is asleep. At the end of the corridor Ruen holds a finger to his lips and I stop in my tracks, then hide behind a door as a nurse wheels a boy in a chair past me. Ruen gives a slight wave with his hand and I tiptoe after him. Ahead, I see the EXIT sign. I point at it. He shakes his head and tells me to follow him through a yellow door marked STAFF ONLY. When we get through that door there is a kitchen to my left and a fire exit to my right.

‘Push,’ Ruen says.

I lean against the bar across the door and push. And, easy-peasy, I am outside.

It is pitch-black and the rain is so thick I can hardly see through it. This kind of rain is like chain metal, I think. From here I can see the building that Mum is in, a tall white building with a thin bit at the top that occasionally flashes a blue light at night. It’s about a ten-minute walk to Mum’s building and already I am soaked right through my clothes. I decide to run. I run through the car park and then I see a lady in a long white coat walking towards me, so I duck behind a hedge and take a shortcut through a really muddy patch of grass. I keep the blue light in sight. Then, when the wind makes the rain come down sideways, I take off my coat and hold it around my head.

When I get to the front entrance I am panting like a dog. Ruen appears beside the door.

‘You’ll never get past the front desk looking like that,’ he tells me. ‘Besides, visiting hours are over.’

I frown. I am cold and tired and feel like if I fell over I’d probably stay there until someone stood on me.

‘What should I do, then?’

Ruen shrugs and folds his arms like he couldn’t care less. ‘There is one thing,’ he says finally, inspecting his fingernails like they’re really interesting. ‘But you have to promise to do something for me first.’

I am shivering now and my hair is dripping into my eyes and I can hardly speak. I am so cross with him for telling me to escape and then making me promise to do something else for him.