The Boy Who Could See Demons (16 page)

She nodded, though I sensed some reluctance on her part to admit this. ‘He had … and they were occasional, mind you … explosive rages that would end with him in floods of tears.’

I remembered what I’d read in the notes. ‘Alex hit you, didn’t he?’

She sighed. ‘He lashed out, caught me full force in the chest with his fist. I think he was more shocked than I was. Still, I reported it to Alex’s consultant at the time. He was growing more and more wound up by the day, I thought it was in his interests …’

‘Did he ever hit another student?’

She shook her head. ‘He never explained
why
he blew up, either. It was like a tantrum, but much worse. Cursing, shouting, threats.’

‘Threats?’

‘Yes. To me, to the other children. But they were … what I would call
blind
threats. As if he could hardly see who was there. As if he didn’t recognise me or the people around him. As if he’d forgotten who we were.’ She paused, upset by the memory of it. ‘He would be completely devastated, an utterly different version of himself. When I spoke to his mother about it she seemed distressed, but refused to offer any suggestions.’ She sighed. ‘There’s only so much we can do at school. The buck stops at home, which is unfortunate in some cases.’

When my page was filled with notes I thanked her for her time and began to close up my briefcase.

She took off her glasses again, her eyes immediately disturbed by the light. ‘He isn’t a bad kid,’ she said. ‘And something I never told the other consultant was that Alex wrote me a little note after he hit me that time.’

‘Do you have it?’

She nodded. ‘Of course I do. It’s at home. I kept it, as I do all the gifts I get from my kids. He’d drawn a little picture of me with the word “SORRY” in capital letters, then signed it with kisses and hugs. Not every kid would do that, you know?’

I smiled at the thought of it, then wondered why no mention of that picture appeared in my notes about Alex.

‘Karen, you taught Alex on and off for several years, didn’t you? When would you say his behaviour changed?’

‘December sixteenth, 2001,’ she said briskly, and I looked up. She smiled sadly. ‘The day Alex told me his father died.’

13

THE UNBESTED FRIEND

Alex

Dear Diary,

It’s three sleeps ’til we perform
Hamlet
at the Grand Opera House. I like it loads in there. It’s all red and I feel bigger when I’m on stage, like I’m a giant. I bet you could fit three of our house inside there. We had a rehearsal last night for
Hamlet
and for once everyone remembered their lines and Jojo’s make-up ran and she hugged Cian, who she doesn’t like normally, and then she made us all sit in a circle on the stage and talk about our Fears and Hopes for Opening Night.

Katie’s hand went up first. ‘I’m afraid my mum will go crazy,’ she said, and her voice was flat. Jojo’s smile came off her face and she asked Katie what she meant. Katie just shrugged and wouldn’t say anything after that but kept snapping the elastic on her wristband until I told her to stop it.

I put my hand up. ‘I hope the audience shouts, “Encore!”,’ I said, and Terry and Sean sniggered.

‘I hope that, too,’ Jojo said, giving me a wink. ‘Though I think it’s more likely that they’ll applaud for a very long time if they like our performance.’

Then she held up her two index fingers which is a sign for everyone to be quiet. ‘Now. Who thinks they understand why we’re doing this play?’

We all looked at each other. Finally Bonnie Nicholls put her hand up. ‘Because we’re really talented kids?’

Jojo gave her a big smile. ‘That’s definitely one reason, thanks, Bonnie. Anyone else?’

‘Because the play is famous?’ Liam said. Jojo said yes but she said maybe we needed a hint. ‘Where is this play set?’

‘Belfast,’ I said.

‘Correctamundo!’ Jojo said, and I felt proud. Then she looked serious and pressed a finger against her lips. ‘But where did
Shakespeare
set his play?’

There was a lot of whispering. I saw Terry Google it on his mobile phone. ‘Denmark,’ he said.

‘Yes!’ shouted Jojo, pointing at Terry. ‘And what does Shakespeare say about Denmark?’

‘It’s rotten,’ I said quietly. And she opened her mouth to say
correctamundo
but I put my hand up again and she tilted her head.

‘Are you saying that Belfast is rotten?’ I asked.

‘It
is
rotten,’ said Terry, and everyone agreed.

‘All of it?’ Jojo said in a small voice. ‘Or just some of it?’

Bonnie stretched her hand up high. ‘I like Mauds ice cream.’ You can’t buy Mauds ice cream anywhere but in Northern Ireland which makes me feel sorry for anyone not living in Northern Ireland.

Queen Gertrude – actually her real name is Samantha but she makes us all call her Queen Gertrude – raised her hand. ‘I like Helen’s Bay.’ Helen’s Bay is a beach three miles from our house which I’ve never been to but Granny used to show me pictures and it looked nice.

‘Good jogging,’ said Jojo in agreement, pointing at Samantha. ‘Anyone else?’

‘I like it when nobody gets shot,’ I said, and Jojo turned her head to look at me. For a moment everyone was silent.

‘Hear hear!’ said Liam. Then Bonnie said it, then Katie, then Samantha and Terry and everyone else. Even Jojo.

After a few minutes Jojo put her chin to her chest and folded her hands behind her back the way she does when she’s thinking. We all knew to stop talking and the stage went very quiet.

‘There’s a line at the end of this play that gives a message. A message of hope. Who can tell me what it is?’

Hamlet
wasn’t really about hope as far as I was concerned. It was about a boy whose dad haunted him and made him kill someone to get back at him but it only made things worse.

‘
We defy augury,’
I said quietly, because I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but it was the final line of the play and Jojo had told us she chose that line for us all to end on because it meant that just because the future was predicted in one way didn’t mean we couldn’t choose a different path.

‘What was that?’ Jojo said, looking over us all.

‘He said,
“We defy augury”
,’ Katie piped up. ‘This play is about us saying that we don’t care what’s happened in the past cos we have a say in what happens to the future.’

Jojo’s face lit up and she started to applaud and we all joined in, too. We clapped and cheered and then started chanting,
‘Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet!’
which gradually turned into,
‘Belfast, Belfast, Belfast, Belfast!’
Jojo waved her hand like she was conducting us and then, finally, when Liam and Gareth changed the chant to,
‘Celtic, Celtic, Celtic!’
she held up her index fingers again. We all fell silent.

‘Remember, folks. This is an important statement about who you are and where you want to be,’ Jojo said.

‘McDonald’s,’ Liam said under his breath. Some people giggled but Jojo just stared.

‘This is more than Shakespeare’s play. This is about what it means to rise up from the ashes of Belfast’s past. Do yourselves proud.’

The other day after lunch I was thinking about the dream I had about Ruen and Granny and I remembered something: that when Ruen came to the hospital I saw he had a thread hanging down from his black jumper, just like in the dream. I have threads hanging down from my clothes all the time and in the hospital I had a gown on that had a long bit at the back, and I could have sworn there was a second when it looked like the thread from Ruen’s jumper was linked to it. I don’t know what this means but it makes me feel weird.

So I decided to tell him that I didn’t want him to study me any more. I thought that it might make him cross. I didn’t care about getting a new house. I thought that even though it would be nice and all, I just wanted Mum to get happy again and not cry any more. And I didn’t know if being someone’s friend means that you had to do stuff for each other either. Anya told me that she had arranged for me to go see Mum again very soon and I was so excited about this and also I was worried in case Mum died before I got to see her. Sometimes I think of the times she took all those pills and I think she actually knew that she would have died if the doctors didn’t fix her. Why would she do that? Why would she
want
to die? And if she did, who would look after me then?

I hardly slept last night because I was scared that if I told Ruen that I didn’t want him to study me any more, I wouldn’t have a best friend. I still didn’t know why he wants to study me. It’s stupid actually because I’m just a ten-year-old boy from Belfast not a Prime Minister or a footballer or anything, and also he was starting to scare me. He used to be a right laugh and tell me comebacks. Like the time when Eoin Murphy got everyone at school to call me ‘Azz’ instead of ‘Alex’ and kept saying I was a
gay gypo psycho
. He had the whole class laughing at me and I felt so scundered that I couldn’t think of anything to say back, not a single word. Then Ruen came up to me and whispered something in my ear. Right as Eoin was getting everyone to start chanting, ‘Azz is a spaz,’ I turned to him and repeated what Ruen had said.

I said: ‘Eoin, the zoo just called. The baboons want their bums back, so you’ll have to find a new face.’

Everyone stopped chanting and Jamie Belsey sniggered into his hand. Eoin’s face went red. He looked at me and said, ‘You think you’re funny, psycho boy?’

Ruen whispered to me again and I repeated what he’d said:

‘I heard your parents took you to a dog show and you won.’ Then everyone laughed and Eoin got really angry.

‘You wanna fight?’ he said, shoving me backwards, but I stood straight and said what Ruen had told me to say:

‘I would love to beat you up, but I don’t like being cruel to dumb animals.’

Eoin punched me in the neck then which hurt but I still felt like I’d won somehow.

Ruen and me have had lots of fun and he’s been a really good friend and we laughed about stuff like that for days. When he was the Old Man he was like a grumpy uncle who dared me to do naughty things, like jump off a bus while it was still moving or copy someone’s homework or steal Miss Holland’s cigarettes when she’d left her bag on the table. But he had gotten scary and angry and I felt weird when he was around. I reckoned he’d be cross at me but thought that maybe he could study someone else.

It made me so nervous to tell him this that I got up eleven times during the night to pee. My hands and feet were numb and when Woof refused to get into bed with me I got out from under the covers and curled myself around him on the floor.

When I woke up this morning Ruen was already downstairs. He was the Old Man and was sitting in Dad’s old blue armchair with his feet up on Granny’s old coffee table with his hands folded on his pot belly as if he was waiting for me. This surprised me. The second thing that surprised me was that he was very smiley. He looked like he’d just won a prize or something, twiddling with his bow tie and licking his palm to smooth down the strands of white hair that stuck up from his skull like dandelion clocks. When I came into the room he stood up with his hands behind his back and creaked his mouth into a smile that made him look constipated.

‘Alex, my boy,’ he said. ‘I have some wonderful news.’

I didn’t really want to hear his news. I was really tired and just wanted to spit out the speech I’d practised, which I’d cut short to just this: ‘Ruen, I know we’re friends and all but I don’t want to be friends any more.’

I knew he wanted me to ask what the news was so I didn’t. I stood there staring at him until Auntie Bev came out of the kitchen. She was wearing tight shiny shorts and a small shiny vest that showed the skin on her belly which meant she was going wall climbing. She put her hands on her hips and sighed at me.

‘Do you
really
have to have onions on toast for the fifth morning in a row? That kitchen
stinks.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and turned back to Ruen. Auntie Bev was going on about
a nice Ulster Fry or even some porridge
but I ignored her and finally she went back into the kitchen.

Ruen headed for the hallway and waved his hand for me to follow. I yawned and trailed after him. I walked past the coats hanging on the coatstand – all of them Auntie Bev’s, she’s like a collector of coats – and kicked at the old red rug that’s fraying on the floor. Ruen was standing beside Granny’s old piano, both hands behind his back, a big stupid grin on his ugly face.

‘Alex,’ he said. ‘I’ve found you a new home.’

At this my heart started to beat faster and I felt sorry for thinking how stupid he was. ‘You have?’

Ruen took a deep breath and his smile grew wider. ‘Later today Anya is going to tell you that you and your mother will be moving to a brand new house with a garden and all the things you requested of me.’

I just didn’t know what to say. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

‘You can start by thanking me,’ Ruen said, tilting his head to remind me.

I started to say it, because I was grateful, but I was still angry with him. He had scared me the other day and I was cross about it.

His smile turned back to his usual scowl. ‘What is it, Alex?’ he said. ‘I thought you would be really pleased, now that I’ve given you the thing you wanted most. Don’t you think that’s a tad ungrateful?’

I looked at the red rug on the ground. It was so old it was just a big bunch of threads clumped together, but I kept my eyes stuck to it so I wouldn’t have to look up at Ruen. I felt scared in case we wouldn’t really get the house but then I realised that this was Ruen and that he had helped me so much in the past and hadn’t gone back on his word.

‘And what is it your mother hates most?’ he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling and clicking his tongue.

‘People who don’t say thank you,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

Auntie Bev called my name from the living room. I looked through the doorway to see her set a plateful of onions and toast on the table.