The Boy Who Could See Demons (14 page)

‘I thought angels were good and they protected people.’

Ruen keeled off the bed and staggered across the floor, dragging his feet and holding his stomach and making hacking noises as if my braindeadedness had stunned him to the point of death. Finally he slumped to the floor and gave a big sigh as if he’d actually died.

‘Ruen?’ I said, and I felt a sharp pain in my chest in case he’d actually died.

He jumped up to his feet and gave a big stupid grin. ‘It’s
me
that’s been protecting you!’ He walked up to me and leaned very close. ‘They know you have a gift to see into our world. And they don’t like it.’

‘Why?’

Ruen looked around again in case someone saw us talking. The nurse that sounded like a pig was still snorting and I started wondering what it would be like if a cow wandered down the corridor. Ruen sat on the bed beside me.

‘Because everyone thinks angels are beautiful when in fact they’re hideous creatures. And they’d rather everyone believed the opposite.’

‘So angels are trying to attack me?’

‘Haven’t you seen the white lights appear every now and then?’

I shrugged with one shoulder which means maybe I had but who cares? But really, I had seen white lights. They happened sometimes when I was getting scared or when Ruen was trying to make me do something and they looked like a bit of sunlight had drifted out of the sky and into the room. Ruen picked up his bat and ball and looked like he was going.

‘You off, then?’ I said, trying not to sound like I could give a rat’s backside whether he was or not.

He turned and grinned. ‘You want me to stay, don’t you? You’re
scared
.’

‘Am not,’ I said, but when he turned and sat back down and put his arm around me, I gave a big sigh of relief.

When I started to fall asleep Ruen said I was boring as a granny’s picnic and left. Then I had a dream which was really lovely and really horrible at the same time. It was horrible mostly because I didn’t want it to be a dream, and when I woke up I sat with the balls of my palms pressed against my eyes and sang the only song I knew over and over again which was ‘Away in a Manger’.

My dream was about Granny. Granny reminded me of a Doberman, which sounds funny but I mean that she was really snarly and people were scared to say the wrong thing to her but when she liked you she’d protect you and scare bad people off. One time two men called bailiffs knocked on the door of her neighbour Doris because they wanted Doris’s sofa. Granny ran out with a broom and whacked the men until they left because she said Doris hadn’t done any harm to anybody, though I wonder why they wanted Doris’s sofa cos it had cat hairs all over it. Granny lived a bus ride and four-and-three-quarter minutes of walking away from us and everyone called her ‘Granny’, like she’d been born with that name. She was short and the skin on her face shook when she laughed and most of her teeth were metal stubs screwed into her gums like a pirate and she smoked so many cigarettes that her voice was deep like a man’s. Sometimes she lit another one while one was still making spirals of smoke in her ashtray. She was ill for years and years. I remember she said she’d
rather burn out than fade away
and at the time she was holding a cigarette in each hand.

Granny was very proud of her back garden because not many people we knew actually had back gardens and she’d always grown up with a yard made of concrete. So she decided to grow strawberries, which were red as postboxes and big as fat men’s noses. The only time Granny ever told me off was when I ate them because she said she needed them to make jam.

‘Jam keeps for ever,’ she used to say, ‘but strawberries only last a season – or a few minutes once
you
get your mucky paws on them.’

So in the dream I was in her kitchen and she told me to go outside to collect strawberries to make jam. Outside it was really sunny, and the clouds looked like balls of wool in the sky. I walked down into the grass which was really deep. There was a snake in the grass and at first I was really scared and backed away, but when I looked again I saw it wasn’t a snake, it was a shadow. Then I noticed that the shadow was really long and I couldn’t see what was making the shadow. I followed it all the way through the grass towards the end of the garden and when I looked up I saw Ruen standing in front of me. He was the Old Man. The shadow led right up to a thread hanging down from his suit which I thought was mental.

‘What do you want?’ I said. He looked down at the shadow. That’s when I saw that it split in two, like a fork. One of the forks led to Ruen, and the other led to me and it was wrapped around my chest.

‘What’s this?’ I asked him.

Ruen just did that thing when he flares his nostrils and tweaks his ears and I could see the tufts of white hair in them. It means he’s annoyed, but I just stared at him. Then Granny called out the kitchen window.

‘He wants to hurt you, Alex.’

This was weird to me because Granny had never seen Ruen and in the dream I wondered if maybe they’d met.

I turned around and shouted back to her. ‘What you mean?’

She started waving. ‘Come on inside, Alex. He’s no good for you. Leave him well alone.’

I shook my head. ‘No, he’s OK, Granny. Ruen’s my friend.’

She gripped the edge of the window ledge and looked very cross. ‘No, he is
not
, Alex. He wants you to think you’re nothing. He wants to hurt your soul.’

‘My
soul?’

When I turned around Ruen was gone, and then when I looked back at Granny the kitchen window was closed, though I could see Granny there doing the dishes at the sink, just as I remembered. I turned to the strawberry patch but beneath their green leaves they weren’t red and juicy as usual. They were like big fat blobs of shadow and they smelled like poo.

I picked them anyway and brought them inside. I went to set the basket down on the table and tell Granny about the strawberries. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault they’d gone bad. But she picked them out of the basket and they were red and beautiful and I thought I’d gone daft, so I said nothing else. Granny was humming and happy and there wasn’t even a cigarette in sight.

‘Will you stir these, Alex?’ she said, plopping the strawberries into a big boiling pan on the stove while she got some sugar from the cupboard. I took a ladle from the jar on the bench and started to stir, and the strawberries bubbled and smelled delicious.

Granny poured in the sugar and said, ‘Memory’s a funny thing, Alex. Sometimes it can hurt us without us realising.’

I nodded but had no clue what she meant. I figured this was what old people said when they were about to lose their marbles.

But then I looked inside the pot I was stirring. The jam had already gone from being a big boiling mass of lumpy goo like something Woof had barfed to a cold stew that Granny could pour into the jars that she’d lined up on the kitchen table.

‘Now, Alex,’ she said. ‘You have to hold each jar in place so I don’t knock it over as I pour.’

I stopped stirring the stuff in the pot and walked over to the table. Granny nodded at the six jars on the clean spotty tablecloth and I gripped one with both hands.

‘Hold it tight,’ she said, so I did. Granny went and got the pot and slowly tipped it over the jar I was holding. The jam plopped out into the jar.

Granny said: ‘You can make jam out of strawberries, but you can’t make strawberries out of jam.’

I looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

She set the pot down and stroked my face. ‘Ruen wants to try to change you into someone you aren’t. I want you to remember who you are, Alex. Do you know who you are?’

I nodded. ‘How do you know Ruen?’ I said. She smiled and the room started to fill with a bright light. The light grew and grew until it squeezed everything out of view.

And then everything changed. When I looked around I wasn’t in Granny’s kitchen any more. I was in a street with houses and lots of people. I recognised the street but didn’t know how I did. The street was small with a black wet road in the middle with small stone shops at either side and there was a post office on the other side of the road. People were running on the pavement and I was outside a church. I think I might have been singing in a choir because I could hear singing and I knew the words.

In front of me I saw a man in a black mask and a black jacket and jeans. He raised his gun and pointed it right at me. And then it was like time went on hold. There were pigeons flapping in the air and they still had their wings outstretched so I could see the white feathers. Someone’s Coke can was floating, liquid pouring out of it like a brown ribbon. A policeman next to me turned his face and his lip curled like he was afraid or angry. His face was blurry.

I turned back to the man in the black mask. I could see his blue eyes through the holes in the mask and they looked right at me. I could see his gun, black and shining and wet. He squeezed the trigger and I heard a deep crack. Beside me, the policeman’s knees buckled and his arms flung up in the air like a puppet’s. As he fell to the ground the man lowered his gun and started to take his mask off. I watched, and my heart was pounding and my mouth was open.

Just before I woke up, I saw his face.

It was me.

12

THE PAINTINGS

Anya

My mornings are filled with meetings with other inpatients at MacNeice House. Our youngest resident is a girl, Cara, aged eight years old. Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She is also a gifted artist, and our visiting art therapist, Iris, seems to have made a lot of headway in developing Cara’s social skills and channelling a lot of her aggression through creative sessions. Cara brings one of her paintings to show me.

‘Look,’ she says, her hazel eyes wide as she points to a large painting on the wall of her room here at the unit. It is of four stick figures engaged in various activities of gardening, football and ballet. One of them seems to be fixing a car. ‘There’s me, there’s my mum and dad and that’s Callum.’

‘It’s beautiful, Cara,’ I tell her, noticing the colours she’s chosen. They are telling: instead of her usual preference for black, the painting features a mixture of sky-blues, pinks and yellows. Iris also highlights that Cara has started drawing circles as complete wholes instead of never-ending spirals – another sign of improvement.

Some of the other kids have more severe problems that remain to be as easily resolved – our fifteen-year-old inpatient, Damon, had been on a self-imposed hunger strike for four days before his parents brought him in. When I visit him in his room he refuses to make eye contact, let alone open his mouth to speak, and I am forced to have him restrained and put on a drip. Psychiatric assessments have indicated psychosis, and his medication seemed to be working: this sudden relapse is quite out of the blue. There are days when I feel the human mind is a jigsaw puzzle that I will never be able to solve.

The morning after Alex’s transfer to hospital following his injuries at home, I call a review meeting of his case in the conference room, which involves Michael, Ursula, and Howard Dungar, an occupational therapist. Such meetings are necessary for me to present my findings and to get a variety of expert perspectives on the best programme of care for Alex.

Michael is already in the conference room when I arrive, warming his hands on an old radiator by the window.

‘How’s the allotment?’ I ask, noticing his posture. He is stiff, frowning, ready for battle.

He turns and leans on the windowsill, digging his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed trousers. The corners of his mouth twitch. ‘My runner beans are four inches long,’ he says blankly.

I shake my coat off and grin. ‘I love it when a man says that to me.’

His mouth makes it all the way to a half-smile and I blush, wondering for a moment where my retort emerged from.

Ursula arrives, surrounded in her usual cloak of self-importance and wearing jeans for the second day in a row. The day before yesterday an advertisement went out for a replacement clinical psychologist, so her noticeable distancing from Alex’s case is understandable. Howard shows up a minute after the hour, a white ring of sugar around his mouth and his fly undone.

When everyone has taken their seats, I begin the meeting with a brief commentary on my assessment of Alex to date.

‘Alex Broccoli has witnessed his mother attempt suicide four times that we know of. He’s also been privy to countless episodes of her self-harming. He has indicators of schizophrenia, including high vigilance, mild paranoia, bizarre behaviour and frequent and intense hallucinations. After an initial consultation at the hospital I arranged for him to undergo a series of physical tests to rule out any physical cause for his presentation. His brain MRI and EEG are normal and his blood tests proved fine.’

I look up from my notes to check everyone is still with me. Michael has his head raised slightly, his wide palms pressed into the wood of the table. Ursula is studying me through her small red reading glasses. Howard is picking at a shaving wound. I continue.

‘As we’ll all agree, there is a consensus that it is often better to keep the family together, but because of Alex’s current state I feel it might be dangerous to keep him at home. It’s my view that Alex needs constant assessment. Rest assured that I will do my best to maintain contact between Alex and his mother as regularly as possible.’

Howard looks up. ‘Can you explain what you mean by “dangerous”?’

I nod. ‘My interviews with him have revealed that he has frequent perceptual disturbances and delusions, including a strong attachment to an imaginary friend named Ruin. It’s this character that I’m most interested in, because it tells me a lot about how Alex perceives himself.’

Ursula laces her fingers. ‘How so?’

‘He tells me Ruin is the “bad” version of Alex.’

She tilts her head. ‘So Alex isn’t saying
he
is bad?’

‘No, but I believe Ruin is Alex’s projection of himself. He also claims he can see demons, all the time, everywhere. I want to move him to MacNeice House for a period of at least one month for proper observation and assessment. Transferring Alex to MacNeice House requires his mother’s consent. Cindy refuses to give it. She is currently being assessed to determine whether she is fit to make decisions for Alex as his mother, which makes me very sad. If she is found not to be, Alex will be moved to MacNeice House at the first opportunity.’