Before There Were Angels (22 page)

We were all going to have to change and life would never be quite the same again.

Chapter 27

“Luke, have you seen Zack?”

“Not recently, Stevie, no.
Not since he went out and found your mom in the park. He and your mom had a long chat afterwards here in the living room.”

“I can’t find him anywhere. Do you think he
’s gone?”

“I don’t know. I am sure he is not avoiding you. I don’t know where ghosts go or how we get to see them. Do they deliberately make themselves visible? Is it something we do that allows us to see them? Are they there all the time or only when we can see them? I don’t know.”

“I need Zack. It’s lonely without him.”

“Your mom and I are always here for you, Stevie.”

Stevie didn’t look too convinced. I knew that I wasn’t enough for him. After all, I was just this random stranger his mother had picked up, someone who was perfectly nice to him (I hoped) but not someone he had spent much time with, whom he had come to rely on or who had come to rely on him. I was hoping that Belle was different, and that although she could not fill in entirely for Zack, she would at least be a considerable consolation.

“Mom has gone crazy
,” Stevie said bluntly. “I don’t know what happened to her. She used to be a really great mom, now she is losing it over everything, interfering with everything, picking fights. That’s not Mom.”

I tried to be conciliatory. “I am sure she will get back to the way she was in time. She has had a terrible shock and that has thrown her off-balance for a while, that is all.”

“She is acting like a crazy person,” Stevie declared definitively. “I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“Stevie, you are meant to help out the people you love when they are going through hard times, not to turn you back on them.”

“I love Mom, I do, but not right now, not like this. She really pisses me off. She embarrasses me. The school is really pissed at me because she is pissed at them. Can’t she leave me alone?”

“She is probably worried about you, Stevie. And it is true that your school work is becoming more and more important.”

“She was never worried about that before.”

“You are getting older.”

Stevie grimaced. “Zack is lucky, then. He doesn’t have to deal with all this shit and now he never will. It must be good to be dead.”

This turn in the conversation was certainly morbid but it didn’t really worry me, although perhaps it should have done. Stevie had gone through so much and he was showing signs of not being able to handle any more upsets.

I looked at George, peacefully lying on the couch, as Old English Sheepdogs are wont to do, sleeping off a hearty gulp of alcohol, I suspected.

“George doesn’t have to go through any of that either,” I joked.

“He’s a dog.”

“Perhaps when you are considering your options, you should consider becoming a dog rather than following in your brother’s footsteps. Look at George, here. He eats everything he likes, he drinks as much as he likes and nothing is expected of him whatsoever.”

“And he has to lie around here all day because he has nothing better to do.”

“I’ve never wanted to be a dog personally,” I confessed. “I like being an adult. Yes, you have to work but that makes you feel good about yourself. You are using your skills. Sometimes you are helping people. Then, so long as you earn enough money to pay for it, you can more or less do what you like. Certainly when you start out, you have to do some pretty shitty jobs but hopefully that won’t last forever.”

“What kind of job do you think I should do?”

“I don’t know, really. I don’t know what you are allowed to do.
In England people your age don’t normally work except to do paper rounds, and there isn’t much call for that around here, I wouldn’t think. Maybe work in a shop? A restaurant? You had better ask your mom. She will have a better idea.”

“Could I work for you in your company?”

“If you get your computer skills up, sure you can. My company gives people advice on how to fix their computers and how to use specific programs. I would certainly be willing to train you in some of that but the main thing is to build up your general computer skills in school.”

George yawned and Stevie followed his lead. Discussing work is rarely as exciting as doing it
, unless all parties to the conversation do the same work, and at that moment I suspected that George would be as likely to want to work for my company as Stevie. Stevie was wrestling with the huge transition from childhood to manhood, a very unsettling and sometimes seemingly insuperable task, although so long as you keep stepping forward, you usually get there.

The same is not true of relationships. Once they get undermined, it is often
impossible to repair them. It is like hanging on the end of a rope, knowing that sooner or later, as your hands burn, you are going to have to let go.

I was hoping that I had not reached that point with Belle, or her wi
th me, but it wasn’t looking promising. Something had happened to her during that trauma and there was no evidence that she was making any progress back to her old self, quite the opposite in fact. She was becoming more and more confrontational. I was seeing it, Stevie was seeing it, even George was seeing it. At least I wasn’t on my own in this observation. It wasn’t my fault that Belle was this way but it was my problem to fix it for all our sakes.

Should Belle be going to see a psychiatrist? Would some magic pill get her back on track? And how would I ever get her to see one? She would be insulted if I suggested it, resisting and resentful. There again, maybe that was a responsibility I had to take on behalf of us all.

I wished I could consult with Zack too. Where is a good ghost when you need one?

Maybe next time Belle got into one her snarky moods, I would raise the topic …

*  *  *

I didn’t have long to wait.

That night Belle wanted to talk furniture - new furniture. Since when was Belle interested in buying new furniture? She liked the type with bullet holes or ingrained blood, maybe a hangman’s gallows,
but Jennifer Convertibles
?

We really were entering unchartered territory.

“This house isn’t comfortable,” she said. “It isn’t a home. I want to make it a home for us, somewhere Stevie will want to stay when he grows up.”

“I thought you said you wanted to throw him out of the house at eighteen.”

Belle looked puzzled. “I did?”

I laughed. “Yes, you definitely did.”

Belle shrugged. “Then I have changed my mind.” She switched back to a discussion about our future furniture. “What do you want for this house? You should be involved in making this a home too.”

I looked around our bedroom. There was a bed
with blood stains and places to put our clothes - what more could we want?

Belle was lying there, watching me intently
, almost piercingly. She was waiting for me to come up with suggestions. I leaned over and hugged her. “Belle,” I said, “I thought we had agreed that we liked our rooms to be spare, not to be cluttered with stuff.”

“That is what you wanted.”

“Oh. So what do you want?”

“I want paintings on the wall, some rugs on the floor, more ornaments,
curtains, more places to sit. I want it to be more homey for us as a family.”

I wasn’t exactly in shock but I was definitely confused. Since when had Belle wanted any of that? She hated rugs on floors and she loathed curtains, as I did. That was one of the first things we had spontaneously agreed on when we set up the apartment together in the city.
Nothing to cover the windows and cut down the light. I had proposed it and Belle had vehemently agreed. We had agreed on everything in those days. Where was this conversation, our life together, leading to? Were we to overthrow all of our most distinctive values, the ones that defined us as being different from people living in the dreaded suburbs, the little pink houses?

The curtains and the rugs were a small thing but in their implications for us they were huge too. It was like Belle was becoming a Republican. That, of course, would be a catastrophic change of direction, a real jaw-gaping move
, but Belle wanting rugs and curtains suddenly seemed right next door to it. What was next, a contempt for homeless people, homophobia, a fear of walking the streets in case we were attacked? Where was Belle headed, and more importantly, why? Had she being wanting ‘things’ all along and been humoring my Spartan taste, waiting for the opportunity to strike out on her own, to fill the house with clutter, darkness and stupid rugs for us to trip over? Had her trauma brought her real desires to the fore, freed from their dissembling?

This was becoming a chilling conversation. I loved it that we had always agreed on everything in every aspect of our lives. Were we hitting a new phase in our relationship where we agreed on nothing at all, where every decision became a battleground to be negotiated between us or as a meeting point for outright warfare? ‘I want this!
’. ‘No, I don’t.’. ‘Why not? I have a say in this too.’. Etc..

“I’m sure George would like a rug in the sitting room he can lie comfortably on and we ne
ed curtains so that our neighbors can’t see in all the time. I want us to be more private.”

“George has his own coat, his own woolly rug
. Besides, he only likes lying on beds and sofas, as you very well know. I don’t think he needs some stupid thing that walks around the room with a mind of its own and trips us all up.”

Belle was visibly getting annoyed, frustrated. Frustration seemed to be the dominant motif of the entire household at the moment. Everyone was frustrated. We had all been totally har
monious before Belle’s whatever it was that had befallen her - her trauma, her accident, her illness.

“I think I want to invest in curtains first.” She looked up at me meaningfully, determinedly. I was not going to get away with not investing in curtains.

Then it struck me and it was as if Belle had suddenly jumped up and stabbed me.
Invest
. Belle never talked about investments, she talked about how our money could be used to help other people. She gave away things. There was that time in Yerba Buena Park when she gave her diamond earrings to a homeless woman, saying that Robert had given them to her and she had always hated them, that she was so happy being with me, she wanted to spread that happiness.

‘Investment’ was simply not a Belle word. It was an anti-Belle word, and anti-Belle sentiment, contrary to every aspect of her philosophy, and while she didn’t particularly like Philosophy as a subject, she had a precise and complete philosophy of her own, none of which was to do with investing.

How many times had she said that buying new furniture and furnishings was stupid, that whatever you bought was worth about one per cent of what you had paid for it as soon as you got out of the shop?

This wasn’t the Belle I had lived with for a year.

My ears rang, my body froze, my vision blurred in its horror.

This wasn’t Belle
.

Everything was telling me suddenly
that not only this wasn’t the real Belle, but that this wasn’t Belle at all. Rafaella thought like this, Belle never did. Either Belle was becoming Rafaella, as Rafaella had predicted, or …

…
or Rafaella had already become Belle.

That was it. The woman lying beside me wasn’t Belle at all, it was
Rafaella. The body was Belle’s, its usual model’s tall, slim frame, but the mind was now almost completely Rafaella’s. That is what had happened in this bedroom that night. Rafaella hadn’t chased Belle out of the house; she had invaded her, taken her over. It wasn’t that Rafaella wanted to live with me as such - I was sure she was far more contended living on her own within her own dominion - but she was determined to be right, even if she had to fabricate all the evidence, all the data, to make it so. For Rafaella, being right about everything was essential to her survival. If she was right, she could control things. If she could control things, she could survive in a relentlessly hostile word. Rafaella saw the world as her enemy, intent on undermining and destroying her. She wanted a bullet-proof jacket to protect herself from it and that jacket was a sense of infallibility. Rafaella had taken over Belle’s mind to prove to me that she had been right about everything all along. Maybe she had done the same with Martha DeGamo’s mind in order to get her kill the rest of the family and to lure Belle here to this house.

I had always known that
Rafaella would go to almost any length to get her own way but I had never included murder in the equation while I was still living with her. I was always apprehensive as to when the next attack would be launched against me, knowing that it was always only hours, if not minutes, away but I had never expected that attack to be life-threatening. Sometimes physical, yes, but not potentially lethal. I had not recognized Rafaella as having the potential or even the ruthlessness to kill.

However, when the possibility of Zack having been murdered by
Rafaella had arisen, it hadn’t seemed so far-fetched to me. When Martha DeGamo had said that a quadruple murder had taken place in this house to get us here, that hadn’t seemed too far-fetched either.