The Boy Who Could See Demons (13 page)

‘Could have been from wrapping his own arms around himself too tightly,’ the doctor offers. ‘Maybe leaning against something. In any case, there’s no bruising. In fact, no external marks at all.’

Bev turns and walks away in frustration. I thank the doctor for his time and jot down some notes while they’re fresh in my mind. I note that Alex’s separation from Cindy has intensified his anxiety, so I arrange for him to visit his mum as soon as possible. She is based in the psychiatric ward of this same hospital, and it strikes me as sad that both mother and son are hospitalised. Michael will be beside himself.

Once Alex is settled, I pull up a chair close to his bed and pull the curtains around us.

‘Where’s Bev?’ he asks.

‘She’s getting some fresh air.’
She’s outside, smoking
.

‘Is she OK?’

‘She’s absolutely fine, Alex.’
No, she’s hyperventilating
. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m OK. I really like Auntie Bev. I haven’t seen much of her for a long time but she’s really nice.’ A pause. ‘Did I scare her?’

‘She just wants to know you’re safe and well, that’s all.’

He feels for his chest.

‘Does it hurt?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘Not any more. It was weird …’

‘What did it feel like?’

He opens his mouth to describe it but can’t seem to find the words. ‘Like fear,’ he says eventually.

‘Fear?’

He gives a heavy sigh. ‘Can I see Mum now?’

I pull my chair closer and look him over. He has a sweetness about him that makes me feel protective towards him. For a moment I hear a B natural note ring across the room from a dropped petri dish. Already my mind is turning to Poppy. Her dark head bending at the piano.
I love you, Mummy
.

I close my eyes and focus on what I want to ask next. It is important that I do not let Poppy enter this case. Alex is a patient, not a projection of my daughter. She is not an entity I can revive with another’s breath.

‘Alex, I wanted to ask you something.’

He stares at me.
‘Please
not more stuff about Ruen …’

I shake my head. ‘I’m going to take you to see your mum very soon. But do you mind if I stay, too?’

His face lights up. ‘I’m going to see Mum?’

‘Not this afternoon. But maybe tomorrow, when you’re feeling better.’ His eyes fill with tears. And, right then, he flings his arms around me and sobs into my neck. I feel tears rising in my own throat. His vulnerability is screaming at me, and, with only one exception, I have never felt as helpless in my whole life.

In the light of Alex’s hospitalisation, it is crucial that we review the management of his case. I call a meeting at MacNeice House tomorrow morning and arrange to meet with Michael later that day to prepare him about what I intend to put before the team: that I wish to move Alex into my inpatient unit.

I don’t tell Michael why I want to meet, however, and he sounds flattered.

‘OK,’ he says on the other end of the line, after a long silence. ‘I’m on my way back to the office from the Falls Road. What say we meet somewhere less formal than your office?’

‘
Your
office, then?’

‘How about the Crown Bar?’

‘So be it.’

Michael arrives late. I see him bobbing through a heavy throng of punters in the same dark-green jumper, his head gleaming golden in the bright lights.

‘Evening,’ he says, reaching down and kissing me on the cheek. He takes off his jacket and folds it neatly before setting it down beside me.

‘G&T?’ he asks, still out of breath.

‘Orange juice.’

He gives me a look. ‘You driving?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t drink alcohol.’

He cocks his head. ‘A teetotal child psychiatrist from Tiger’s Bay. That’s a mixture.’

I shrug. ‘I like to take care of myself.’

Michael blinks at me for a few moments. Then he straightens up, heads to the bar, and returns with two glasses of fresh orange juice.

I feel very guilty and dull – the Crown Bar is a jewel in a country which has transformed the act of drinking alcohol into a cultural art. ‘Just because I’m not doesn’t mean you can’t,’ I say, then wonder what has caused me to reduce myself to state the perfectly obvious.

He slides up next to me. ‘And how gentlemanly would that be of me?’

His crooked smile is wider tonight, accompanied by a gleam in his eye and a ripe colour to his cheeks. In this light it strikes me that, under different circumstances, I would enjoy his company. And I sense it then, that old buttery flutter in my belly. Flirtation. Which I am reciprocating beyond my better judgement. I really, really don’t want this. I think of Fi, her round blue eyes heavy with sincerity and kindness. She would tell me this is a
sign
. Fi is all about signs.

‘A sign of
what?’
I once asked her when a wasp stung me on my face, of all places.

‘A sign that you don’t believe you’re beautiful,’ she said. She’d had a point: a garish scar on one’s face is a powerful antidote to vanity. And then I think of her sitting at my kitchen table and taking both my hands in hers, saying:

‘Repeat after me: “Poppy’s death does
not
mean that I have to abstain forevermore from life’s pleasures.”’

At the time I squeezed her hands and let go. ‘I can’t say it, Fi. I can’t.’

She had reached out and stroked my face. My oldest friend, younger than me. A divorced mother of four, maternal and homely; at ten years old she was kissing my knee scrapes better.

But even Fi didn’t understand why I wanted to stay single. Something changes inside when you lose a child. No,
everything
changes. This kind of loss is far different – I won’t say worse – than becoming bankrupt or losing your entire belongings in a house fire. Poppy’s death was a different kind of agony, a different loss, even, than watching my mother sink beneath the yellow waters of cancer. Add together all the men I ever loved, then multiply that sum by how bad it felt when they all left, one by one … you still don’t come close to what Poppy’s death was like. The only way I can describe it – and I rarely describe it, not even to Fi – is that in order to continue living and breathing in a world where my child is eternally robbed of her opportunities to grow up, fall in love, build a career and have babies means that I must remain my own personal fortress. I run, I don’t drink, and I watch what I eat so that no one ever has to take care of me. I save sixty per cent of everything I earn in a high interest account so that I never have to depend on anyone. And I will not love again, because I can never, ever experience that degree of loss again.

There is a heavy pause as I realise Michael is staring at me. He has said something that I’m certain requires a response other than a blank stare.

‘Sorry, could you repeat that?’

He half smiles and finishes his glass of orange juice. ‘Actually, I was saying that I had Googled you. Quite an impressive list of awards, Dr Molokova. The Freud Medal for Excellence in Child Psychiatric Research, no less. And a Rising Star from the British Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.’ He gives me a small round of applause. ‘I should get you to sign this beer mat.’

I grin, until he presents me with a pen and holds up the beer mat. I am laughing now, and the sound feels alien and delicious to me. Eventually, I sign it, and he tucks the mat into his jacket pocket.

‘What else did Google tell you?’

He lowers his eyes, and I know he has read about Poppy. ‘Only about your outrageous toothpick fetish, your blazing passion for bathmats …’

I take my chance. ‘Can I ask
you
a personal question?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why did your parents send you to a psychiatrist?’

He widens his eyes. ‘Wow, that’s a curve ball down memory lane. I had an imaginary friend. Why d’you ask?’

I make a mental note of the ‘imaginary friend’. Seems he and Alex have a lot in common.

‘It’s just that you portray mental illness units as bad places, Michael. A lot of kids with even the most extreme psychosis can live a relatively normal life when they’re properly treated. That’s why I’m here.’

His smile is fading. He stares at a spot on the table for a long time. When he looks up, his eyes are hard. ‘You want to move Alex. Don’t you?’

I tell him what happened earlier that day, about the marks on Alex’s skin. ‘If he has psychosis, he will need treatment at the proper facility with the requisite medication and medical staff. Just as if he had to have surgery.’

‘Surgery,’ he repeats, unconvinced.

‘The success rate of MacNeice House is impressive, Michael. Really.’

He shakes his head. ‘To you, maybe. To those of us who’ve been in Belfast for the last seven years … not really.’

I try another tactic. ‘I’m concerned about his long-term living arrangements, in any case. I mean, have you seen the state of his house? Do you know how many health and safety hazards I spotted?’

‘How many?’ he says, his voice hollow, far away.

‘More than fifteen.’

I tell him energetically about the electrical socket I saw hanging off the wall and occasionally flicking blue sparks; the ancient, leaking radiators; the cracked ceiling; the smashed window at the back of the house covered up with tape and cardboard. Conditions that no human being should be forced to live in, and certainly not a mother and a child with mental health issues.

Michael mulls it over, drains his glass, then says, ‘Excuse me,’ before stalking towards the front door of the pub. For a moment I wonder whether he’s clued in to what I’m
really
doing, and has responded by simply leaving me here, high and dry. I sip on my juice and check my phone for messages.

A few minutes later, I see him threading his way through punters towards me.

‘Done,’ he says with a wide smile, thumping down on the seat beside me. Though, I notice, not as close as before.

‘
What’s
done?’

He slaps his mobile phone on the table. ‘I just phoned a friend of mine who works at the housing association, told him everything you told me. He says he’ll have Alex and Cindy at the top of the re-housing list first thing tomorrow morning.’ He raises his eyes to meet mine. ‘It’s your call if you want to put Alex in MacNeice House. I know what I know. That’s all.’

Then he heads to the bar and brings back another OJ for me and a pint of Guinness for him.

11

STRAWBERRY PICKING

Alex

Dear Diary,

So there’s this man who walks into a doctor’s office with a carrot up his nose, a cucumber in one ear and a banana in the other. ‘Help!’ he says to the doctor. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me!’ The doctor looks at him and says: ‘Clearly, you’re not eating properly.’

Well, I’m in hospital now, not to see Mum though. I’m in hospital because Ruen went mental and turned into a monster and attacked something that he said was an angel, though I didn’t see any angels. He came last night when everyone had gone home and I could hear the nurses’ feet clapping up and down the corridor. I hope I don’t have to miss rehearsals tomorrow. Everyone kept asking about the pain in my chest but it’s gone now and so has Ruen.

He came just after Anya left. At first I was a bit nervous to see him because he really frightened me before. He was Ghost Boy then and he had a blue table tennis bat and a small white ball which he was trying to balance on the bat.

‘Pity you’re stuck in here,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you could come and play a game with me.’

He stood by the bed and started bouncing the ball up and down and counting.

‘Stop that,’ I said. ‘Someone will hear you.’

He looked at me with his horrible black eyes. ‘Are you soft in the head? No one ever hears me.’

‘But they
feel
you, don’t they?’

He stopped bouncing the ball. ‘What you mean?’

‘Don’t be stupid, you know what I mean.’

He sat down on the bed next to me. I saw the blanket crease under his legs and I tugged it back because I was cold.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, smiling and folding his arms. ‘Since you’re the one who can see both worlds, why don’t you fill me in? How do people
feel me
, Alex?’

‘They just know, OK? They smell you, that’s how.’

He pouted and I hope I don’t look that girly when I pout. ‘Why do you always have to be so mean? All I ever do is try and help you.’

I went to tell him he was a right whinger but then I wondered whether he really was trying to help me.

‘That’s what I was doing before, you know,’ he said.

‘What you mean?’

‘Oh, so you actually want to hear, now?’

I sat up and looked around. The other people on the ward were asleep and the light above kept flickering and I could hear the nurses laughing in the tea room. One of them kept snorting and it sounded like a pig. Then another laughed and sounded just like a horse and I realised I’d never been to a farm.

Ruen picked up the ball and balanced it on his head.

‘You can’t see everything, you know,’ he said. ‘You never see angels. They’re so annoying.’

I was thinking about what a farm might look like when it occurred to me he was right: I’d never seen angels. I’d never even thought about it until Anya mentioned it before.
How come you don’t see angels
? she’d asked.
And what about God? And the Devil
? I said God was a man with a white beard and a red suit and a jolly face and the Devil was red too and he also smiled but was
inherently evil
.

‘Is that what you think you are, Alex?’ Anya had said, and I asked her what she meant and she said
never mind
. I told her angels had long golden hair and huge white feathery wings and usually lived on top of Christmas trees.

I told Ruen about this and he wrapped an arm round his waist and chuckled. ‘Oh, you
are
thick, Alex,’ he said. ‘Angels don’t look like that at all. In fact, angels keep trying to hurt you.’

This is the thing with Ruen when he’s Ghost Boy. He’s constantly trying to prove he’s smarter than me but sometimes he says stuff that makes me think and think.