The Boy Who Could See Demons
Read The Boy Who Could See Demons Online
Authors: Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-11847-2
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Carolyn Jess-Cooke
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
For Phoenix
my precious son
Contents
Chapter 4 ‘Who Gave You That Scar?’
Chapter 10 The Thin Edge of Belief
Chapter 13 The Unbested Friend
Chapter 15 The Greatest Dream of All Time
Chapter 16 The Bitter Side of Freedom
Chapter 20 A Love Song For Anya
Chapter 23 The Things That Are Real
Reading Group Discussion Points
Ciaran Carson’s poem ‘Belfast Confetti’ from
Collected Poems
(2008) is reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press.
www.gallerypress.com
.
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being
only the products of the psychic activity of man
.
–
Sigmund Freud
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to
convince us all that he does not exist
.
–
Charles Baudelaire
Alex
People look at me funny when I tell them I have a demon.
‘Don’t you mean, you have
demons?’
they ask. ‘Like a drug problem or an urge to stab your dad?’ I tell them no. My demon is called Ruen, he’s about five foot three, and his favourite things are Mozart, table tennis, and bread and butter pudding.
I met Ruen and his friends five years, five months and six days ago. It was the morning that Mum said Dad had gone, and I was at school. A bunch of very strange creatures appeared in the corner of the room beside the canvas we’d made of the Titanic. Some of them looked like people, though I knew they weren’t teachers or anyone’s parents because some of them looked like wolves, but with human arms and legs. One of the females had arms, legs and ears that were all different, as if they had belonged to different people and were pieced together like Frankenstein’s monster. One of her arms was hairy and muscly, the other was thin like a girl’s. They frightened me, and I started to cry because I was only five.
Miss Holland came over to my desk and asked what was wrong. I told her about the monsters in the corner. She took off her glasses very slowly and pushed them into her hair, then asked if I was feeling all right.
I looked back at the monsters. I couldn’t stop looking at the one who had no face but just a huge red horn, like a rhino’s horn, only red, in his forehead. He had a man’s body but it was covered in fur and his black trousers were held up with braces that were made out of barbed wire and dripping with blood. He was holding a long pole with a round metal ball on top with spikes sticking out of it like a hedgehog. He drew a finger to where his lips would be, if he had any, and then a voice appeared in my head. It sounded very soft and yet gruff, just like my dad’s:
‘I’m your friend, Alex.’
And then all the fear left me because what I wanted more than anything in the whole world was a friend.
I found out later that Ruen has different ways of appearing and this was the one I call the Horn Head, which is very scary, especially when you see it for the first time. Luckily he doesn’t appear like that very often.
Miss Holland asked what I was staring at, because I was still looking at the monsters and wondering if they were ghosts, because some of them were like shadows. The thought of it made me start to open my mouth and I felt a noise start to come out, but before it grew too big I heard my dad’s voice, again, in my head:
‘Be calm, Alex. We’re not monsters. We’re your friends. Don’t you want us to be your friends?’
I looked at Miss Holland and said I was fine, and she smiled and said OK and walked back to her desk, but she kept glancing back at me with her face all worried.
A second later, without crossing the room, the monster who had spoken to me appeared beside me and told me his name was Ruen. He said I’d better sit down otherwise Miss Holland would send me to talk to someone called A Psychiatrist. And that, Ruen told me, would not involve anything fun, like acting or telling jokes or drawing pictures of skeletons.
Ruen knew my favourite hobbies so I knew there was something strange going on here. Miss Holland kept looking at me like she was very worried as she continued her lesson on how to stick a needle through a frozen balloon and why this was an important scientific experiment. I sat down and said nothing about the monsters.
Ruen has explained many things to me about who he is and what he does, but never about why I can see him when no one else can. I think we’re friends. Only, what Ruen has asked me to do makes me think he’s not my friend at all. He wants me to do something very bad.
He wants me to kill someone.
Alex
Dear Diary,
A ten-year-old boy walks into a fishmonger’s and asks for a leg of salmon. The wise fishmonger raises his eyebrows and says, ‘Salmon don’t have any legs!’ The boy goes home and tells his dad what the fishmonger said, and his dad starts to laugh.
‘OK,’ the boy’s dad says. ‘Away off to the DIY store, pick me up some tartan paint.’
So the boy goes off to the DIY store. When he returns, he is feeling very humiliated.
‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,’ the dad says, though he’s laughing so hard he almost pees himself. ‘Here’s a fiver. Go get us all fish fingers and use the change for some chips for you.’
The boy threw the fiver back in his dad’s face.
‘Here, what’s all that about?’ the dad yelled.
‘You can’t fool me,’ the boy shouted back. ‘Fish don’t have any fingers!’
This is a new diary that Mum bought me for my last birthday when I was ten. I want to start every entry with a new joke so I can keep in character. That means I can remember what it feels like to be the person I’m playing, which is a boy called Horatio. My acting teacher Jojo said she’s rewritten a famous play called
Hamlet
as a ‘contemporary retelling of twenty-first century Belfast, with rap, street gangs, and kamikaze nuns’, and apparently William Shakespeare is OK with that. Mum says my getting into the theatre company is a really big deal but not to tell anyone in our street as I might get beaten up.
We’re performing the play at the Grand Opera House in Belfast City which is cool cos it’s like a ten-minute walk from my house so I can make rehearsals every Thursday and Friday after school. Jojo said I can even make up my own jokes. I think this joke is funnier than my last one about the old woman and the orangutan. I told it to Mum but she didn’t laugh. She is sad again. I have started to ask her why she gets sad, and each time the reason is different. Yesterday it was because the postman was late, and she was waiting for a Really Important Letter from social services. Today, it’s because we’ve run out of eggs.
I can’t think of a more stupid reason to be sad. I wonder whether she’s lying to me, or if she actually thinks that it’s fine to burst into tears every five seconds. I think I’ll ask her more questions about what the sadness is like.
Is it because of my dad
? I wanted to ask this morning, but then I had what the bald counsellor called a Wakeful Dream and remembered my dad the time he made Mum cry. Usually she was really really happy when he came to visit, which wasn’t very often, and she’d make her lips red and her hair would look like ice cream piled up on her head and she’d sometimes wear her dark green dress. But there was this time that he came and all she did was cry. I remember I was sitting so close to him that I could see the tattoo on his left forearm of a man who Dad said starved himself to death on purpose. He was saying to Mum,
Don’t give me the guilt trip
, leaning across the kitchen sink to tap his cigarette into the sink. Always three taps.
Tap tap tap
.
Aren’t you always going on about how you want a better house than this? This is your chance, love
.
And just as I reached out to touch his jeans, the left knee almost worn through from where he’d always bend down to tie my shoelaces, the Wakeful Dream faded and it was just me, Mum, and the sound of her crying.
Mum hasn’t talked about Dad in about a million years, so I think she might be sad because of Granny, because Granny always looked after us and was tough with nosy social workers and when Mum got sad Granny would slam her hand on the kitchen bench and say things like, ‘If you don’t stand up to life it’ll knock you down,’ and then Mum seemed to snap out of it. But Granny doesn’t say that any more, and Mum just gets worse all the time.
So, I do what I always do, which is ignore Mum as she walks around our house with her face all dripping wet, and I hunt through the fridge and kitchen cupboards and under the stairs for something to eat, until finally I find what I’m looking for: an onion and some frozen bread. Unfortunately I don’t find any eggs, which is a pity because it may have made Mum stop crying.
I stand on a stool and chop up the onion underwater in the sink – like Granny taught me, so the juices don’t make my eyes flood – and then fry it up with some oil. Then I put it all between two slices of toasted bread. Trust me, it is the best thing in the world.
The second best thing in the world is my bedroom. I was going to say drawing skeletons, or balancing on the back legs of my chair, but I think they’re third best, because my bedroom is so high at the top of our house that I don’t hear Mum crying when I come up here, and because it’s where I go to think and to draw, and also to write jokes for my part as Horatio. It’s freezing up here. You could probably store dead bodies. The windowpane is cracked and there’s no carpet and all the radiator does is make a big yellow puddle on the bare floor. Most of the time I put on an extra jumper and sometimes a coat, a hat, woolly socks and gloves when I get up there, though I’ve cut the fingertips off my gloves so I can hold my pencils. It’s so cold that Dad never even bothered to rip all the old wallpaper off the walls, which he said has been up since St Patrick kicked all the snakes out of Ireland. It’s silver with lots of white leaves all over it, though I think they look like an angel’s feathers. The last person who lived here left all their stuff, like a bed with only three legs, a wardrobe, and a tall white chest of drawers which was filled with lots of clothes. The person who left them was probably just lazy but it’s worked out OK as Mum never has any money to get me any new clothes.
