The Boy Who Could See Demons (34 page)

My dad’s voice whispered in my head again.
She’s dying, Alex. Your mother is dying
.

‘Please let my mum be OK,’ I whispered to Ruen, because I knew he was angry that Michael was getting through the door and I was doing nothing to stop him. He had changed his appearance and was Ghost Boy now, standing opposite me with his hands by his sides and his eyes all black and angry, and his clothes were exactly like mine, as if I was looking into a mirror.

Michael was still banging on the glass, shouting, and there were lots of people behind him now. Then someone hit the glass with a hammer and started trying to break it. A big crack formed across the glass in the shape of a W.

I looked down at Anya, and for a moment it wasn’t Anya lying there – it was the policeman lying on the ground, his right arm bent and covering his face, his left arm turned in a way that didn’t look right. I wanted to reach down and fix Anya’s arm to make sure she was comfortable. But before I could do anything there was a gigantic crash and I screamed. The glass in the door smashed and scattered to the floor.

‘Alex! What’s wrong with Anya?’

Michael reached through the broken glass and swept away all the shards with his hand before pushing the chair away from the door. I saw there was blood on his hand but he didn’t notice. Then Ruen tightened his grip around me and I started to yell because it hurt a lot.

The only way to save her is to kill yourself
, he said.
You’re nothing. You don’t deserve this life. You are unlovable
.

I bent down and lifted the glass handle from the floor. My mind was playing the image of Mum over and over, her hand on the bed opening loosely like a petal.

You’re so like your dad, Alex. You’re so like your dad
.

I knew what Ruen was telling me.

I was going to grow up to be just like my dad. And that was a bad thing, because my dad was a murderer. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. But I was already doing it. I was hurting me. I was hurting Anya. And I was never going to be free of him.

But Ruen had lied. He said I was unlovable. But the other day, Auntie Bev said she loved me. And Anya liked me, too.

And then I remembered something else. Ruen had told me that if a demon failed in his task he got chained in a deep pit a million miles under the sun for a hundred years. Ruen would be so bored, I had thought. Now I reckoned it would serve him right.

‘I’m not nothing,’ I told Ruen. ‘I’m Alex. Alexander the Great. And I can be anything I want to be.’

I lifted the glass jug handle higher, but instead of hurting myself I brought it down over the thick black link between me and Ruen, and Ruen roared as the shadow shattered and every vein in my body felt like it was going to explode.

Someone grabbed my arms and Michael shouted, ‘He’s going!’ and then there was nothing but blackness.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of
those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human
breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to
come through the struggle unscathed
.

Sigmund Freud

28

THE ANSWERS

Anya

I woke up two days later in the intensive care unit at Belfast City Hospital, a venue in which I had never spent any time during the thirty years I lived here but which was now startlingly familiar. I was in a ward with two other women, my arm hooked up to a drip. A heart monitor bleeped steadily beside me. A bunch of red roses sat in a vase close to the bed. I sat for a few minutes in a blank daze as the wheels of thought warmed up again, wondering how long I’d been out for and – deep in the roots of my suspicions – if I really was alive. Gradually a series of aches and throbs announced themselves all over my body – my throat, my neck and shoulders, my stomach – and I realised with relief that I
was
alive. A young black-haired nurse walked past and threw me a smile, then doubled-back as it occurred to her that I had surfaced. She checked my vitals, read my chart.

‘Well, well,’ she said brightly. ‘Back in the land of the living. How are you feeling?’

I tried to sit upright but the sudden exertion made my heart monitor bleep warningly. The nurse rushed over and pushed a cushion behind my back, supporting me.

‘Where’s Alex?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘Michael,’ I corrected myself, figuring she would probably be a stranger to the situation. Michael would know about Alex. ‘Michael Jones, he must have brought me in. Is he around?’

She considered this while strapping a blood pressure gauge around my right bicep.

‘I think he’s just popped out, actually. Is that his coat?’

I followed her gaze to the chair by my bed, where a brown wool jacket was slung neatly over the back.

‘I think so.’

The nurse flipped open my notes and scribbled a figure in a column. ‘I’ll arrange for you to get some soup.’

Just then, a set of footsteps made their way towards my bed. I looked up and saw Michael standing there, his face a mixture of astonishment and relief as he saw me sitting upright. The nurse glanced at me.

‘This is who you meant?’

I gave her a nod. Michael had fresh silver stubble on his jaw, his eyes puffy with sleeplessness.

‘How are you?’ he said.

I hesitated, my mind a fog. Slowly the memory of what happened came creeping back like a slow tide: Alex’s face, raw with tears and grief. The upended plastic tub. The trickle of beige dust on my espresso cup. The sensation of drowning.

‘Where’s Alex?’ I whispered.

Michael’s smile fell. He ran his fingers through his long hair, visibly reluctant to tell me. I felt my heart race.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

He swallowed and looked away. Then he pulled up a chair close to me and took my hand. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said. I shook my head.

And he told me.

When Michael had shattered the glass in the door and managed to open it, Alex collapsed to the ground. I was already unconscious, lying facedown by my chair with no immediate signs of what had happened. Ursula and Howard attended to Alex, who was also unconscious, while Michael tried to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He had noticed swelling around my throat, a small red rash gathering below my collarbone. Then he had remembered what I’d said about having a talisman. He rolled me on to my side and called an ambulance from his mobile phone.

‘I thought you were dead,’ he said, his voice breaking. The paramedics gave me an epinephrine injection in my thigh, which, he told me, made me open my eyes and stare right at him for a few moments, before sinking back into deep unconsciousness. Ursula shouted something about Alex’s torso. She was leaning over him on the floor, raising his white shirt. There, garish on his pale skin, were several large burn marks on his chest.

‘He had a medical examination just this morning,’ Ursula had said. ‘These marks weren’t there.’ With Howard’s help, she tried to revive Alex, but to no avail.

‘Is his heart beating?’ Michael had asked.

Ursula nodded. ‘Very faint.’

The ambulance arrived a minute later. With an oxygen mask attached to my face, the paramedics carried both Alex and me on stretchers and loaded us into the ambulance as Michael and Ursula watched on behind. Ursula’s secretary Joshua came racing outside. He glanced at Michael before leaning close to Ursula to tell her about a phonecall, and despite Josh’s best efforts at being discreet, Michael heard him clearly: Cindy was dead.

I sat in silence as Michael broke the news of her passing to me. I watched the thin floral curtains shuffle gently against the windowsill on the far side of the room. I thought of Cindy, a moment from the time I had observed her meeting with Alex. It was when she had showed him her creation in the greenhouse, when she felt proud. Alex had made her laugh and she’d turned to me, her blonde hair flung up and lit golden by the sunlight, her smile wide and easy, her blue eyes young and bright.

I thought of something she’d asked me when we first met.
Do you think there’s ever a chance for a kid that starts out in life like me and Alex did
? Cindy’s life had been one long tumble from one foster home to another. Rape, neglect, violence – until she was adopted by Beverly’s mother at the age of fifteen. By then she was already pregnant with Alex, and her chances at a better life had been all but crushed.

But with Alex, I wasn’t so certain that his chances were up. If anything, I felt assured that, despite everything, Alex had every chance in the world.

No, not despite.
Because of
Cindy. Because she loved him, and he knew it.

Michael began to speak again, telling me the pieces of the puzzle he had been able to put together – a necessary act, I understood, for him to feel resourceful in a challenging situation.

‘The peanuts were from
this
hospital,’ he said angrily, pointing at the floor, as if somehow the City Hospital catering staff should have had some ability to detect the potential of peanuts to be used as deadly weapons. ‘Alex had stored them in his locker, then crushed them up,’ he said. He shrugged and shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I mean, how?
Why
would he do this?’

I knew Michael felt to blame for this. He believed he should have seen it coming, that he should have insisted on coming into the therapy room with me.

‘How would he have known you would go into shock?’ he said, shifting in his seat, restless with unresolved riddles. I spied traces of soil under his fingernails. His hands looked like he’d spent the last forty-eight hours sowing rhubarb.

‘I don’t think Alex intended to kill me,’ I said, my voice no more than a hoarse whisper. Michael looked up sharply.

‘It certainly looked like it to me.’

I shook my head, reaching for my throat. ‘It’s more complicated than that. He remembered what he had repressed so violently, the things he couldn’t understand about his father.’

I remembered that Michael had not seen the footage of the shooting – that, in fact, he had no idea who Alex’s father was. I would explain it to him, in time. But now, we needed to focus on the facts. Alex had lost his mother. His home. He had witnessed his father’s killing of two men. His psychosis had no doubt been triggered by this event, compounded by his mother’s suicide attempts. It was difficult for me to feel angry with Alex for what he had done. Instead, I needed to build a clear picture of
why
he had done it. Alex’s future depended on that picture.

‘Take me to him,’ I told Michael after several minutes had passed.

He glanced at a wheelchair on the other side of my bed. Without a word, he stepped forward and helped me settle into it, with the IV at my side, and pushed me to the paediatric unit.

Alex had been moved earlier that morning from intensive care into a sideroom in the paediatric unit. Another social worker I’d met briefly – Joanna Close, an English woman in her sixties; short, feathery black hair and a grey trouser suit – was sitting outside. She rose to her feet when she saw Michael and me approaching.

‘No lasting damage,’ I heard her tell Michael. ‘X-rays of his chest are clear. The doctor wants Alex kept in at least one more night for observation.’

I asked Michael to wait outside while I spoke with Alex alone. He made to grab my arm as I went inside, then stopped.

‘It’s OK,’ I told him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, glancing past me and into the room. ‘Just, after last time …’

‘He’s just been moved from intensive care. I don’t think he poses a risk, do you?’

He sighed and glanced inside the room. Finally, he relented. ‘I’ll be right here.’

Alex was sitting upright in bed attached to a drip, his torso covered in bandages. As soon as he saw me he melted into deep, shuddering tears. I wheeled myself close, noticing at once the photograph beside his bed of him and his mother some years before: a tight embrace, their arms wrapped right around each other, both of them pulling a face. He saw me glance at it and wiped his eyes with his palms.

‘Auntie Bev brought it,’ he said when he’d recovered.

I hesitated. ‘I’m so sorry about your mum, Alex.’

He nodded and struggled not to break down again. When he turned back to me, he seemed older, somehow. No longer the nervous, troubled boy I met in the psychiatric unit only two months ago.

‘The funeral is on Thursday,’ he said, wiping tears from his cheeks. ‘Will you come?’

‘Of course I will.’

He seemed relieved at this, enlivened by my support. He took a few deep breaths, wincing with each breath. I glanced at the bandages across his chest and stomach.

‘What happened there, Alex?’

He looked down. ‘Ruen did it.’

‘Ruen?’

He raised his head slowly and nodded.

‘Can you tell me
how
he did it?’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Not really. I think it was because he had such a hold on me. He didn’t want you to make him disappear.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

He looked down again, wrapping an arm around his chest. ‘It’s just something I knew about him. When you’re friends with someone you know things about them without them having to tell you, you know?’

I nodded. After a moment he looked at me and said, ‘I never meant to hurt you. I’m so sorry.’

I thought quickly of the moment when I realised what was happening. The twist in my gut. The tightness of my throat. I closed my eyes, thinking how close I came to dying.

Would I have seen Poppy on the other side?

‘Did you understand what you were doing when you put the nuts in my coffee?’ I said carefully.

He looked deeply ashamed. ‘Ruen said to …’ He began to tell me about Ruen’s revelation that Cindy was dying and his promise to save her if Alex took his own life. The images of Cindy in his mind. I waited until his wounds forced him to stop and take a long, slow breath. ‘I just thought you’d go to sleep,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’