Sixty Seconds (4 page)

The look
on his face made Selena’s blood run cold but she nodded and grabbed
Janice by the arm.

“
Come on,” she whispered. “We’re out of here.”

The ride
to the party was silent and uncomfortable. Graeme brought them to a
tiny, scruffy flat that smelled like cat piss. Janice wanted to
leave but Selena made her promise not to ditch her. They sat on a
dirty sofa that was ripped and covered in dark brown stains.
Graeme’s mates were all old and ugly but they had cans and joints.
Enough hash to share. They passed spliffs to Selena and her friend
but none offered the powder they shoved up their noses.

Selena
did her best to flirt with Graeme but he kept ignoring her to talk
to Janice. How could she? Janice kept looking away from Graeme,
pretending to be coy, probably. She crossed her arms to cover the
breasts Selena envied. She played hard to get and it worked, as far
as Selena could see.

Selena
watched his eyes follow Janice, his hand travel up her thigh – even
though she pushed him away. Selena saw him look at her friend the
way she wanted someone to look at her. Anyone. A little attention,
that’s all. But not even a couple of winos wanted her, yet her
geeky friend got all the attention. It wasn’t fair.

Selena’s
heart grew darker and darker as all of her insecurities and
jealousies combined together and melded with her sadness and loss.
A great big pit of nothingness lay within and she had no idea how
to fill it.

Any pair
of hands were better than none so she sat in the lap of the least
repulsive of Graeme’s friends. She whispered in his ear all the
things she would do to him and meant every word. He pinched her
wrists, his eyes a warning she didn’t heed. As he led her out of
the flat, Janice ran after her.

“
Wait for me,” Janice said, her eyes pleading with her
friend.

Selena’s
voice was cold, like a stranger. “Nah. Have fun.”

Graeme
grabbed Janice from behind with a creepy smile on his face; he
carried her into another room. Selena heard her best friend scream
then closed the front door behind her.

He sits
alone in a dirty chair. No other furniture in the room. Murky
windows, dirty floor, grime on the walls. Dust covers all. He sits
in his dirty chair and hears no sounds, only the smallest
sensations as unseen things touch him with light hands

Fine
threads of a spider’s web connect him to the ceiling. He’s been
there forever and a day more. He sees it all because he can’t
escape it. At least not completely. Like a television in his brain,
his eyes see not only the empty room but his other life too, the
one where he can touch and speak – if he wants.

All of
the suffering, all of the hate, all of the people he’s murdered,
all of the lives he’s changed. Living in his head doesn’t help.
Nothing helps. Nothing can change the past and he wouldn’t want to
try. Here, he is King. Here, he is the All Seeing Eye.

Memories
or ghosts? He can’t tell what the flimsy apparitions might be. They
don’t scare him, they’re just reminders. They serve him. Maybe they
feed on the pain he’s caused. Maybe they feed on the emotions he
once had. Now he’s an empty shell and there’s nothing for them to
feed on so he has to make sacrifices. Treat them
sometimes.

Even
when the lights come on, he’s never quite there. His soul stays put
while his body drifts from place to place, doing whatever it can to
fill the emptiness that keeps exploding into something bigger. He
sees every movement but he never manages to feel it. Not the old
women crying before him, not the hysterical girls, not the weeping
men, not the children who can’t understand why. He has no problem
doing the deeds of a devil because it doesn’t exist. Not
really.

Reality
is reversed. But he sees it all and sometimes it’s hard to tell
which life is real.

In his
head, the room is real. The dirt, dust and spiders are real.
Everything else is the hallucination. The drugs take him there but
he could explain that if he tried. Here is he a God. He can change
the room with a thought. But he doesn’t. Because he’s comfortable
in the dark. He is the spider. The rest of the world are the flies.
One day he will catch enough and be sated – the apparitions will
drink their fill. One day.

The
light flickers off and on and he feels himself slipping. His soul
being sucked back into his body. Time enough to see the blood and
smell the fear. Then it’s over and he slips his payment onto his
tongue. The sacrifice feeds the apparitions who carry him back into
his room and kneel at his feet in the darkness. A dark God. One who
inflicts pain and takes tiny blue and white pills to stay in his
Kingdom.

When the
world is dead and gone, he will be safe in his dark room,
surrounded by his soulless guardians.

Jean
sang along with Sinead O’Connor as the iron hissed and steamed
under her hand. Ironing had to be done, even if her back ached
after working two shifts in one day. It was the stairs in the
office building that hurt - hauling a heavy vacuum cleaner up and
down so many times in a week wasn’t good for her spine. But they
needed the money. If they had money then Jamie wouldn’t need to
mess about with the likes of Graeme Moore. Besides, Gemma needed
all the help she could get, with a baby on the way.

Jean
tutted and ironed out wrinkles in one of Jamie’s shirts. It felt
like she was fixing the world with each stroke of the iron. She
couldn’t fix Jamie though. No matter how hard she tried. It wasn’t
the flats or the fact he didn’t have a father. It wasn’t that he’d
left school early or that she hadn’t been around when he came home
from school because she worked so much and couldn’t afford a
babysitter. It wasn’t any of those things. He could have risen
above all of it if he tried.

The
problem was, he didn’t try. He was a good kid at first. Never a bad
word. Smart, polite, respectful. Then he got drawn in by what other
people had, things he wanted too. Nothing was enough after that.
Not even Gemma. Sweet, sweet girl. Naive but sweet. Good for Jamie.
Clean, hard-working – she would keep him on the right track. If he
let her.

She
glanced at the clock. The real reason she decided to take on the
mounds of laundry that seemed to multiply overnight. She hadn’t
seen Jamie for days. The last time he came home, she knew something
had gone wrong. His face was slick with sweat and his eyes were
wild. He had brushed past her without a word, showered, left –
hadn’t come back.

Her
stomach had turned when she picked up the dirty clothes he left
behind. Even now, her stomach ached at the memory. The clothes had
been covered in rusty red stains. No matter how many times she
washed them, the stains only faded – never quite disappeared.
Mistakes always faded but still managed to stick around. Even her
own. She burned the clothes, threw them in the incinerator – but
she couldn’t burn the image from her mind, her baby was in
trouble.

The
clock kept ticking but nothing happened. The song ended and Jean
pulled another shirt from the pile. The love she had for her son
soaked into her chores. “Please, God. Please, protect him.” She
didn’t hear herself mutter the words but they kept slipping from
her mouth in time with the movements of the iron. Side to side,
smoothing out creases, wiping away the problems.

Somewhere, deep inside, was the knowledge she wouldn’t see
him again, that it was too late to save him from himself. His eyes;
sweet Jesus, she had never seen him look as scared. Not even the
time he had accidentally smashed the tiny china doll her mother had
left her. He was only a little thing himself at the time but even
he knew how important it was to her.

She had
wanted to scream at him, slap his face, break his toys, but she
calmly picked up the pieces, one broken chip of a memory at a time.
She threw the only thing she had to remind her of her mother in the
bin and moved on. She couldn’t do that for Jamie. She couldn’t move
on, no matter how chipped and broken he was.

She gave
up on the ironing and made a cup of tea, pulling out the chocolate
biscuits she kept hidden in the back of the press. She took a sip
of the scalding hot tea and decided she had been off the cigarettes
for long enough. Standing on a shaking chair, she delved into the
emergency supply on top of the wardrobe. Two cigarettes and a cheap
green lighter. Shaking fingers held a cigarette to her lips and the
lighter took a couple of tries to produce flame but finally, she
inhaled.

The
smoke tasted ashy at first, made her cough. Then it was a beautiful
nicotine rush. Two years off them yet they still managed to produce
the same euphoric feeling. Perfect with a cuppa. She stopped
thinking about Jamie and relaxed.

Proud of
herself for staying off the fags for so long, but sometimes you
needed one. Just one. To make it through a bad day. Better than the
drink, or so she always thought. Easier to think through. Helped
her search for an answer. Even if the questions were impossible.
Even if the answers didn’t exist. There was no helping Jamie. She
could drag him to school but she couldn’t make him learn, she
herself learned that lesson the hard way. Jamie had to figure it
out for himself. That was the answer the nicotine brought to
her.

She gave
an appreciative glance to the cigarette and was distracted by the
lines of her hands. She wasn’t as old as her hands looked. Years of
cleaning and hard graft had been hard on them. Time itself had been
bad enough to her. Pregnant straight out of school, desperate for a
husband when her mother died. Nothing good had come of it even if
the baby had been that something to love, that little person who
loved her back. Now it wasn’t enough. She idolised Jamie but she
knew he would have been better off elsewhere. Better off with a
father, better off with a mother who didn’t have to work seventy
hours a week just to keep their heads above water.

Jean
smoothed out the skin on the back of her hand with her finger and
thumb and remembered what it was like to feel young. Like Gemma,
she had been naive – too willing to believe anything, too desperate
for love. Maybe Jamie was like his father after all. Maybe it was
in the blood, that careless, irresponsible, mean streak that left
broken women and fatherless children in its wake.

A heavy
knock on the door made her jump to her feet. Her heart pounding in
her chest, she hesitated, not wanting to see uniforms. Cold sweat
down her back, her fingers trembled as she turned the lock, opening
the door a few inches only. Two men stood on her doorstep. No
uniforms. No bad news. Not yet.

“
Jamie here?” The one who spoke sounded gruff and puffed out
his chest, accentuating his height. He wanted her to be afraid, she
could tell. The other one though, he really did intimidate her with
his blank eyes and dark soul. She could feel it, evil, like her
mother used to warn her about. She thought she felt her mother’s
spirit beside her, chided herself inwardly for her morbid thoughts
and shook her head in answer to the men.

The
silent man held her gaze but didn’t speak. The other stepped toward
her and leaned his arm on the doorway, forcing her to look up at
him.

“
You sure about that?”

“
He hasn’t been home in days. You see him, you tell him he’s
wanted, you hear?” Anxiety made her snap at him, something told her
not to be timid in front of that man.

He
paused, looked at his companion and nodded. “Alright. He comes
back, let him know Graeme is looking for him, alright
love?”

Jean
nodded and retreated back into her home, shutting her door
carefully. She thought for a second, holding her fingers to her
lips, smelling the nicotine that never washed away. She secured the
chain – jumped when one of the men kicked the door. One of them
laughed but they moved on, leaving her grateful she kept that
second cigarette.

She
curled up on her sofa and prayed for her son. This time, she hoped
he never came back.

Shane
fell through the doorway when she opened it for him.

“
Silly cow, you did that on purpose,” he said, spittle flying
in her face.

“
I didn’t. I heard you trying to . . . . “

“
Oh, just shut up, Mags. Jesus. I’m only in the door and you’re
starting.” He pushed her aside and kicked off his boots, leaving
them in the hallway. Mags picked them up and followed him into the
kitchen.

“
Where’s dinner?”

“
In the oven,” she said, glad she had the presence of mind to
turn on the heating or he’d be kicking up a fuss about that as
well. She put his boots away and waited while he took out some milk
and drank straight from the carton. She ground her teeth, he was
doing it just to annoy her.

Shane
left the carton on the counter and opened the cooker. He observed
the dried out meal in disgust. “Are you for fucking real? Am I
supposed to eat this crap?”

“
It’s after three in the morning, Shane, it was fine at
dinnertime.” Mags had spent ages making it just the way he liked
it. She wasn’t sure why she bothered.