The Boy Who Could See Demons (11 page)

I nodded and finished my drawing on the window. After a few minutes Mum leaned back and stared at it and her face looked confused.

‘What’s that, Alex?’

‘What’s what?’

She stood up and the metal brush splatted foam on the floor. ‘Your picture. What is it?’

I looked at it and thought,
Crap, Mum doesn’t know who Ruen is
, and then I tried to think of a lie but Mum was staring at me.

‘It’s a man.’

‘I can see that. Why did you draw it?’

I opened my mouth for a long time and said, ‘Because I was bored,’ but she was wiping her face now and knelt down in front of me.

‘Alex, is there something you want to talk to me about?’

I shook my head, then thought better of it. ‘I’m hungry.’

She tightened her hands on the tops of my arms. ‘You know, what Dad did – it wasn’t anything to do with you.’

I was thinking of asking Ruen for a burger now. Forget the bike. I’d seen someone eat a burger through the window of a shop in town: at first I thought it was like a totem pole or something, but no. It was a burger, with two fat round brown juicy slabs of burger meat and salad and a thick pink strip of bacon and cheese sliding on to the plate and it was so tall someone had stuck a flag in it like Mount Everest.

‘… with chips, too,’ I said, and Mum stopped whatever she was saying and looked at me with her eyes wide. She looked like me when she did that, because normally her eyes are small and puffy and sad.

‘Alex, did you hear what I said?’

My arms were really hurting now. I nodded.

‘Repeat it. Repeat what I said.’

I tried to think back, though my stomach was growling and I could actually
smell
it now, I could smell that burger. She kept asking me to say what she’d said and so words came rising up in my mind like chips in a deep fat fryer,
police
and
Dad
and
blood
and
got what he deserved
.

‘There are some things you’re too young to understand,’ she said, her voice growing softer, and I took a big breath because finally she’d let go of my arms. And then she raised a hand to her mouth and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Oh, Alex,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I looked down and where she’d held me on each arm was a big red mark in the shape of her hand. She tried to rub the mark with her palms but it didn’t go away. So she pulled me close to her and my head was between her jaw and her shoulder and she was rubbing my back. I could smell cigarettes in her hair and also sweat and then Mum’s smell which is quite nice. After a long time she leaned back and looked at me and there was a big smile on her face, which didn’t happen very often.

‘If you could have anything in the whole world, what would it be?’

‘A burger with a slice of bacon and cheese.’

‘No, really, Alex. What would it be?’

I looked at the picture I’d drawn in the window, which was starting to look like it was melting.
For Dad to come back
, I thought, but I didn’t say that because I knew it would only upset her.

‘What would
you
have?’ I asked. She looked shocked and blinked three times.

‘No one’s ever asked me, I don’t think,’ she said. She stood up and stared at the windowsill.

‘A new house,’ she said then. ‘Yeah. A brand new house. With a garden. And three … no,
four
bedrooms, with a guest bedroom and everything. Maybe a gym.’

She started pacing up and down, describing every single room in microscopic detail, right down to the fact that we’d have no crappy attic with mould and no dead person’s things all over the place and no mice and no drug-dealing neighbours either.

Later that day I told Ruen that the sort of house we’d like would have a garden at the back that gets some sun during the daytime, a kitchen big enough for two people to move in with an oven that works and hopefully a tap that doesn’t drip, a toilet that flushes and walls that don’t look like the last person living there took a pickaxe to them.

‘Consider it arranged.’

‘What?’

He narrowed his eyes at me in his Alex Is Stupid look. ‘I’ll sort it out, Alex.’

‘How will you sort it out?’ I asked. ‘Do you have lots of money?’

He smiled and winked. ‘I have powers of which you are unaware. A mere house is a trifle, my boy. If you’d asked me for a planet, it might have taken some time. But I could accommodate.’

I just laughed.
A planet
, I thought. What would I need a planet for? He’s like that, Ruen. A bit of a snob, at least when he’s the Old Man. He rolls his eyes when I play football and tells me my drawings of skeletons are
inept
, which means they’re crap. According to Ruen, I should be reading something called
Chekhov
and am very
uncultured
for not learning the piano.

But then he tries to do what I see all the other demons doing: he suggests I do something mean, like drop the light in the Opera House on Katie’s mum’s head. I was too scared to do that. He told me later I was dumb for not doing it because really it would have been Terry dropping the thing and because Katie’s mum hits her because she’s a drunk and is jealous of Katie.
How can a mum be jealous of her own kid
? I asked him and he gave me The Look again, like I’m stupid.

And then last night Katie only came to rehearsals to tell Jojo she couldn’t stay and when I saw her at the door she had a big black bruise on her cheek and her face was swollen and Jojo put her arms around her. She gave me a wave and ran off and I looked up at that light and thought,
Ruen was right
. Sometimes bad people need bad things to happen to them otherwise the bad things just go on and on and on.

I don’t think I’ve ever done any of the things Ruen tells me to do, so I don’t really know why I told Anya who he was when he asked me to. Sometimes his friends will come up to me and ask me to do things too, like steal from Mum’s purse so I can buy her a Mother’s Day card, or, once, one of them spent a long time plotting out how I can get back at our neighbours for breaking our window. I told them all to go away and leave me alone. I allowed Ruen to study me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a brain and will just follow what he says like I’m a stupid donkey or something.

Plus, I know what happened to Mum. I don’t think Ruen realises this, and I don’t tell him. But sometimes, when she gets sad, I see some demons surrounding her and talking to her, and the more they talk to her the sadder she gets. I tell them under my breath to get out. Usually, they just laugh at me.

I am very scared that they’ll keep talking to Mum and she’ll just keep taking tablets and never wake up. I want to tell this to Anya, but I’m not sure what she’ll make of it.

Still, when Anya arrives at our front door, I am really pleased. I’ve made her onions on toast with a glass of milk and set it all on the table like she’s a guest. Auntie Bev is really smiley. She wags her finger at me and says:

‘He looks like a right wee Chaplin today, doesn’t he?’

Anya looks at my clothes and says, ‘What a lovely suit, Alex, and the bow tie’s a nice touch, too.’

‘Alex dresses himself,’ I hear Bev whisper to Anya. ‘I found a whole wardrobe of stuff left over from the old man who lived here before. I think he’s supplementing his clothes with these old suits. I’m taking him to the shops tomorrow.’

Him
, I think. It’s rude for them to talk about me as if I’m not even here. I look at Auntie Bev’s silver shower rail in the doorway and try to pull my head up, but I can hardly reach it. I climb up on the sofa then on to the lamp table beside it. I hold on to the door frame and lift my foot up over the bar to hang like a bat, the way Auntie Bev did.

‘Alex?’

I can see Auntie Bev and Anya but they’re upside down. Our dinner table looks like it’s floating and the blue chair looks like it’s stuck to the ceiling and everything looks so different I start to laugh.

Anya steps forward and holds my shoulders. ‘Careful,’ she says, slipping my feet off the bar and catching me as I drop slightly. Then she turns me the right way up and I feel dizzy.

‘Well done!’ she says. ‘That’s not easy to do, you know. Though maybe it’s best if you warn me next time. Don’t want you falling on your noggin.’ She ruffles my hair and I feel surprised that no one’s yelled at me. Anya sits down at the table, waiting for me.

‘I’ll just be in here while you have your chat, is that OK?’ Auntie Bev tells Anya in a loud voice, pointing at the kitchen.

Anya nods. ‘By all means. Are you making something nice?’

Auntie Bev ducks back out of the kitchen and wrinkles her nose. ‘I’d love to, but all my sister has in the cupboards is ketchup and’ – she glances at me – ‘what the mice left behind.’

‘You could make a nice risotto out of that, surely?’ says Anya, though her face looks disgusted.

Auntie Bev presses her hand against her forehead and then crosses herself quickly. ‘We’ll go to M&S,’ she tells me, then gives Anya the thumbs-up.

‘What’s risotto?’ I ask Anya.

‘Haven’t you had risotto before?’

I sit down at the table and shake my head.

‘It’s like rice,’ she says.

‘Rice?’

She looks at me with her face all blank then says, ‘You’ve not had rice either?’

I shake my head. Mum says she only has sixty quid a week for all the bills, and the way I go through sketchpads and cans of dog food for Woof we’re lucky we don’t have to live on air.

‘Do you know you can buy enough onions for a whole week for less than a quid?’ I tell Anya, and her face changes. She says, ‘that makes sense.’

She leans forward and pulls a notepad from her bag, then a pen, then a fat pencil case and a big sketchpad. She hands the pencil case and sketchpad to me.

‘What’s this for?’ I ask.

‘I know you love drawing,’ she says. ‘I’d love it if you could draw some pictures for me.’

I unzip the pencil case and say, ‘Cool!’ because there’s pastels in there as well as pencils, and I like the pastels because I can lick them and make the colours blurry which looks cool.

‘What do you want a picture of?’ I say, though I’ve already started licking the back of my hand and dabbing a yellow pastel in the spit. Anya doesn’t say anything and just watches as I start drawing. I don’t even know what I’m drawing but it makes sense to use yellow. I start off by drawing a sun with spirals instead of rays because the rays sometimes look like a spider and spiders are gross.

‘Why don’t you draw your mum for me?’ Anya says.

I take out a peach colour and a brown and start to draw. I begin with Mum’s face which is an egg-shape with quite hollow cheeks, and then her legs which are like sticks. When I finish, Anya tilts her head and points at my drawing.

‘Someone’s carrying your mum. Who is it?’

I look at the picture and realise I haven’t given myself a bow tie. I quickly find a red and draw it in.
‘I’m
carrying Mum,’ I tell Anya. Then I use a dark-blue for my eyes and find a light-blue for Mum’s eyes.

‘Why are you carrying your mum in this picture?’

I’m not sure. ‘I think she might have a sore foot. Or maybe she’s too tired to walk.’

Anya nods and frowns so I pick up a red pastel and dab some bits of blood from Mum’s foot to show why I’m carrying her.

‘What about Woof? Can you draw him?’

I find some white and black and draw Woof with his head under Mum’s feet, because if I
was
carrying Mum like that he would definitely help me.

Anya takes a big breath. ‘And what about your dad? Could you draw him?’

I look at my colours. I don’t know what colour to use for Dad. I can’t even remember what colour his eyes were and for a minute this scares me. Then Anya says: ‘Even if you can’t draw a picture of your dad, can you draw something that comes to mind when you think of him? Even if it’s just a mark on the page?’

I blink my eyes four times. I pick up the blue pastel again and draw.

‘Is that a car?’ Anya asks. I nod.

‘Did he drive a blue car?’

I shake my head, and she just nods and I stare at the picture. My hands feel tingly and my heart is pounding.

‘I saw him in a blue car once,’ I tell her.

Anya nods and smiles. ‘What about Ruin? Or any of the people you see. Could you draw them?’

I had hoped she had forgotten all about Ruen. I wasn’t happy when Ruen asked me to tell her about him but I felt I needed to be honest with her, and she seems like the sort of person I can be honest with. I look around me. There’s a demon in the kitchen with Auntie Bev. You wouldn’t think she was a demon as she is wearing a white dress tied at the waist and she’s small with curly brown hair and looks like she eats a lot of cakes, but when she looks at me her eyes are black and I feel sick.

‘Who’s that?’ Anya says, pointing at the picture.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is that Ruin?’ she asks, tapping at the picture I’ve drawn of Horn Head, though I haven’t drawn his red horn properly and it looks squiggly. I shake my head and rub it out with my thumb.

I fiddle with the scratchy corners of my bow tie and say:

‘I
would
tell you more about Ruen, but I think you just think I’m crazy and that Ruen is someone in my head.’

She looks surprised. ‘Does Ruin live in your head?’

I shake my head, very slowly. ‘I’m not sure where he lives. Hell, probably. But for a long time he’s lived mostly with me.’

‘How long, would you say?’

I shrug. ‘Since my dad died.’

She nods and writes something down in her notebook.

‘Where does Ruin sleep?’ she says, and she says it while she’s writing.

‘I don’t think he sleeps. He comes and goes. Sometimes he disappears and I don’t see him.’

‘How long does he disappear for?’

I shrug. ‘Sometimes a few hours. I usually see him every day, at least three times. Sometimes he just walks up and down our hall.’

‘Why does he walk up and down the hall?’

‘I think he gets bored.’

‘What does he get bored of?’

Just as I’m getting sick of answering for Ruen he appears in the corner of the room. So I lean forward and look at him and ask, ‘What do you get bored of?’