The Boy Who Could See Demons (6 page)

He said: ‘What does love feel like?’

I said: ‘You’d have to ask a girl.’ And then I thought of Mum and how much I love her and so I said: ‘Like you’d do anything for the person you love.’ And then I stared at him for a long time and worked it out by myself.

‘You love Anya,’ I said.

‘I most certainly
do not,’
he said.

‘You do,’ I said, laughing. ‘You
fancy
her.’

I was having great fun getting my own back after he teased me mercilessly about fancying Katie McInerny just because I let her share my locker.

He got all angry, then disappeared so fast he made a slight pop, and I laughed myself to sleep.

When I woke up, it was really dark outside. All the rooftops of the houses across the street looked like a zigzaggedy dinosaur spine against the sky. I could tell Ruen was in the room because I was colder than frozen sausages even though it was May, and sometimes he does that. All the hairs on my arms were standing straight upright. I said, ‘What is it now, you creep?’

He took a step out of the shadow beside the window and said, ‘I want you to tell Anya all about me.’

I sat up in bed, trying to keep the blankets tight around me. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? You really
do
fancy that lady, Ruen.’

And for some reason I thought of my dad just then. I saw his face in my head, all blurry, his eyes blue just like mine, Mum said. Then I saw the policeman, his face turning towards me in slow motion, angry and scared at the same time.

Ruen scowled at me. I snapped out of my daydream and rolled my eyes at him.

‘Fine, Ruen. I’ll tell her about you, OK? Does that make you happy?’

He gave a tiny nod and then he vanished and I thought,
What a nut
.

I slept all night at the hospital and in the morning Anya came and said I could see Mum. She was more smiley today, though her eyes looked sad and she was wearing black square glasses. I didn’t tell her what Ruen had said because I was so excited to see Mum.

‘How are you today, Alex?’ she said as we walked through the hospital.

‘I thought of a new joke,’ I said, and I told her it: ‘How do you make a hot dog stand?’

She shrugged.

‘You steal its chair.’

She laughed, though she sounded like she didn’t find it funny.

‘I bet you’re excited to see your mum,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘She might not look like her usual self, though. Is that OK?’

This to me could only be a good thing, so I gave a big grin and Anya told me to follow her. We walked down loads of hospital corridors until I thought my legs would fall off, and then finally we came to a small room where Mum was in a white bed.

At first, when I went in, she didn’t look up. She was just lying there with white bandages around her wrists and a tube in her arm. Her face looked like someone had taken a rubber to it and erased Mum out of it. Then she turned her head and smiled at me, and it was as if someone had put all the colour back into her face. Her hair turned yellow again with black roots and her eyes changed from grey to sky-blue and even the tattoos on her arms and neck seemed brighter. Someone had taken out the hoop in her nose but that was a good thing because I thought it made her look like a bull. I wanted to ask if they’d taken the one out of her tongue as well, but I didn’t.

‘Hello, love,’ she said as I walked in. Her voice was hoarse. I felt nervous to go in, in case Ruen appeared.

‘Come here, Alex,’ she said. I stepped forward and she put her arms around me and squeezed me. Her arms felt cold and skinny.

‘Are you feeling better yet?’ I said.

‘I’ve had better days,’ she said after a long, long pause, and she smiled but her eyes were wet and small. ‘How have you been?’

I shrugged. ‘They don’t have TVs here.’

‘What a shame, eh? You can watch TV when you get home.’

‘Yeah, but I’ve missed loads.’ And I started naming all the programmes I’d missed and counting them off on my fingers.

Mum just stared at me. ‘How’s the barking footstool?’

‘Woof’s OK,’ I said. ‘Though who’s feeding him, Mum? Won’t he be hungry?’

Mum’s face looked worried. Then Anya stepped forward and touched Mum’s hand with her fingers.

‘I’m Anya Molokova,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly very soothing and kind. ‘I’m a consultant at MacNeice House. I’m here to take care of Alex.’

I wanted to say this was a lie because Anya wasn’t cooking me pizza or onions on toast or anything like that. Mum nodded. I pulled a chair close to her bed and she reached out and ruffled my hair.

‘Cindy, I’m aware that you’ll be kept in here for another few weeks?’

‘Yeah?’ Mum said, in a way that made me wonder if Anya was doing something wrong.

‘I’d like Alex to stay at my unit for a little while. Just so I can assess him.’

Mum’s face tightened. ‘Assess him for what?’

Anya glanced at me. ‘I wonder if we should discuss this in private …’

‘No,’ Mum said loudly. ‘It’s about him, so he should be here.’

Anya sat down on the other side of the bed, then took off her black square glasses and used her shirt to clean them.

‘In light of recent circumstances, I think Alex may have a kind of illness that requires ongoing assessment and monitoring. It might be in his interests to have a stay at MacNeice House.’ I wondered what sort of illness she meant and if MacNiece House had TVs.

‘Isn’t that a place for nutjobs?’ Mum said.

Anya’s smile turned real. ‘Not at all. It’s where we do some of our most important work for families in the region.’

Mum scowled. ‘Last time some woman in a suit tried to take Alex away from me.’

Mum and I stared at Anya. I noticed she was wearing a suit, too. She swallowed. ‘If we were to do this, I’d need your permission—’

‘Well, you don’t have it,’ Mum snapped, and her voice wobbled until I squeezed her hand and she looked at me and smiled. ‘I’ll get myself out of here soon, I promise,’ she said.

‘You sister Bev is here,’ Anya said softly. ‘She came up from Cork to take care of Alex. Part of the arrangement, if Alex was to stay at MacNeice House, was that Bev would look after him at weekends …’

Mum widened her eyes. ‘Bev is here?’

Anya nodded.

Mum lifted a hand to her face and started to cry. ‘I really don’t want her seeing me like this,’ she said, and she started pressing her hair down with her fingers because it was sticking out all over the place like she’d been electrocuted.

‘She’ll only visit when you’re ready. Everyone’s very aware that you need time. I’ll drop Alex home this afternoon, but if you’re not happy with him coming to MacNeice House I need to get permission to visit with him every day for the next week for us to have a chat.’

There was something about the way Anya said ‘have a chat’ that sounded like she meant something much more serious. Mum seemed to think so too. She stared at Anya very hard.

‘You mean, about me?’ Mum said.

Anya glanced at me. ‘And other things, too.’

Then she stood up and said she’d see if she could get one of the nurses to let me watch TV. She went out of the room and I didn’t look at Mum because just then Ruen appeared and I jumped about three feet in the air.

‘What’s wrong now, Alex?’ Mum said.

But I ignored her. I was nervous, because I could see that Ruen was Monster. Only, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at something in the doorway. I tried to see what he was looking at but there was no one there. Ruen was so angry that he was growling. Three seconds later he disappeared.

When Anya came back she told me they would let me watch TV, then she saw Mum was upset and I was curled up on the floor.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked Mum, who just shook her head and whispered something.

‘Is there TV now?’ I said, and I saw that Ruen was gone so I stood up.

Anya smiled and went to say something, but then she just said, ‘Follow me.’ So I went out and sat in a smelly room with the tiniest TV I’ve ever seen that had yellow lines running through all the channels. About five minutes later Anya came in smiling and told me I could come and see Mum again, but only for a little while because Mum was very tired.

I sat beside Mum and a lady came with a tray of food that Mum didn’t want.

‘Do you want it, Alex?’ Mum said, and I nodded and tucked into the beans and potatoes.

‘Did you know Alex is in a play?’ I heard Mum say to Anya.

‘Yes.
Hamlet
. You must be very proud.’

I felt Mum stare at me. ‘I could hardly read when I was his age. He’s top of the class in English. He hasn’t got any of that from me, I can tell you. He’s so clever.’ Then there was a long pause as I used the last piece of toast to mop up the juice from the beans.

‘Sometimes I think I’m holding him back,’ I heard Mum say, and her voice was very small.

‘How do you think you’re holding him back?’ Anya said.

Mum’s colour looked like it was fading again. ‘Do you think there’s ever a chance for a kid that starts out in life like me and Alex did? Or do you think it would have been better if I’d just never been born?’

Anya looked from me to Mum. Then she leaned forward and took Mum’s hand. ‘I think some of us have really big challenges in life. But I think everything can be overcome.’

Mum leaned over and gave my cheek a gentle tap, and even though she smiled at me there was this look in her eyes that made a knot in my belly until I couldn’t eat my toast. I saw Ruen in the doorway but didn’t look up at him.

Auntie Bev is Mum’s sister, though she looks nothing like Mum, not even slightly. In fact, you couldn’t really tell they’re sisters. She’s older than Mum by eleven years and ten months and two days, but she looks actually younger and finds everything funny and she doesn’t have any tattoos, except for a black squiggle on her left ankle which she says happened when she was
out of her tree in Corfu
. She says weird things like, ‘I nearly took a buckle in my eye.’ Her hair is short and white like Woof’s fur and her job means she spends all day shining a torch down people’s ears and mouths. She wears a small gold cross on a chain around her neck though she’s not Catholic any more, and I’m never to say the name
Lawrence
in front of her because that’s the name of the husband who took all her money. When she moved into my house the first thing she did was put a shower pole in the doorway of our living room. I stood for a few minutes, wondering if her brain had slipped out of her ears in the night.

‘For this,’ she said, when she worked out why I looked so puzzled. She held on to the pole and started pulling her head up over the bar with her arms. She did it three times before I noticed her feet weren’t touching the ground.

‘Oh,’ I said, though I still had no idea why she’d done that. Then she laughed and jumped down and the next thing I knew she’d hooked both her feet over the bar and was hanging like a bat.

This morning she came up to my room and knocked on the door, and when I noticed she wasn’t out of breath I said to her:

‘Why don’t you sound like an old dog?’

She looked at me funny and asked what I meant, and I told her Mum always made a noise like this (I went
hah-hah-hah
with my tongue hanging out) when she climbed all three floors of our house. The lines in Auntie Bev’s forehead disappeared then and she giggled, then flexed her arm muscles, which I thought was a funny thing for a girl to do, though they were big and made me think of onions in a sock.

‘That’s what wall climbing three times a week will do for you,’ she said, slapping her arm.

‘Wall climbing?’ I said. ‘Can you take me wall climbing with you?’

‘Of course,’ she said, her face all shocked. ‘We should find one close by. It’s been that long since I lived here that I can’t even remember where a wall would be.’

‘There’s a wall outside our front door,’ I told her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s not the kind of wall I meant, Alex.’ Then she looked me up and down for a long time, her eyes like gobstoppers. ‘What in the name of Mary and Joseph are you
wearing
, Alex?’

I looked down at my clothes. I’d forgotten to roll up my trousers.

‘A suit?’

Auntie Bev laughed really loudly and she sounded like an owl. ‘Dearie me, we need to go shopping, don’t we?’

Before I could answer she dragged me downstairs for some food, but she wouldn’t let me chop the onions in case I cut myself.

‘But Granny taught me how,’ I told her, and suddenly her smile slipped off her face and she looked out the window. It was starting to rain.

‘Was your mum happier when Granny was around?’ she asked very quietly.

I shrugged. ‘I think so. Though Granny didn’t like my dad so that made Mum sad.’ At the thought of Granny, I felt my whole body stiffen, though I wasn’t sure if it was just the cold.

‘I really miss Granny.’

Auntie Bev reached down and squeezed my hand. ‘I miss her too, Alex.’

And when I looked back, Auntie Bev’s face was all misty and our breaths hung in the cold air like smoke.

6

THE SILENT TOLL

Anya

I sleep late and avoid my morning run. My leg, back and neck muscles feel like I’ve been on a rack all night and when I look outside it’s raining. I make a conscious effort to compile my notes from yesterday and catch up on emails instead. I don’t return any of the phone calls from my worried friends, not even Fi, my best friend from primary school, who has called nineteen times since Poppy’s anniversary and left four messages ordering me to ring her back. Instead, I hide behind the faceless deletability of email, cutting and pasting the same ‘Hey, I’m fine, sorry I missed you’ message to each of the friends who knew Poppy. I will apologise and explain later. First, there is the issue of Alex. I shower quickly, then head to my office. Unpacking will have to wait.

When I moved to Edinburgh to go to medical school, people always asked,
What was it like growing up in Northern Ireland
? with an occasional sense of awe, as if I was the first person to have done it. It was only when I’d left that it struck me how dangerous this mild but otherwise down-at-heel and volatile land of my birth appeared to others – like a treasured friend whose social graces often do them a disservice in the eyes of strangers.