The Boy Who Could See Demons (18 page)

‘Well, you’re making a statement, aren’t you?’ I said, winking at Alex. ‘Even when you’re in the gutter you can become something beautiful.’

Cindy gave a big cheer. ‘See, Alex? Told you she was clever. Daffodils mean hope. I thought that sticking them in a toilet bowl would be poetic, sort of. Plus they were throwing this out and I thought it would be a waste.’

Alex looked disgusted. ‘But it’s a
toilet
, Mum. That’s
gross
.’

As we headed back to the ward, Cindy had her arm round Alex’s shoulders and her chin leaning on his head, whilst Alex had his arms tightly around her waist. Both of them had slowed down their pace considerably, until I was forced to stop behind them and pretend to remove a stone from my shoe.

Just as the side entrance came into view, it felt like it was about to rain. The sky had turned from cloudy blue to wet slate in a matter of seconds, and the wind had started to move so fast that all the small white flowers I’d collected from the long grass flew out of my grasp as if someone had slapped my hands. I was about to shout to Cindy and Alex that it was time to go inside, when I noticed something very strange. Both of them were gone, and in fact the entrance to the adult psych unit was no longer in view, nor were the trees, the greenhouses, even the grass at my feet. I stood dumbly in a dark vacuum for a few seconds, rolling through a rapid list of possibilities. Fog? A blackout?

Right as I turned to find Alex and Cindy, a white light flashed in front of me, so bright that I staggered backwards, blinded for a few moments. When I recovered, the fog had disappeared. Alex and Cindy were ahead, still ambling towards the entrance. The sky was feathered with white clouds, and all around me was green lawn and bowing trees. Still, I felt shaken by the experience, unable to explain it. I asked Alex and Cindy if they had happened to have seen lightning, but they looked puzzled. All the way back to MacNeice House I felt on edge, raw with shock.

I cancelled a meeting with Howard, Ursula and Michael, went straight back to my flat and slept for nine hours straight. My head, I decided, had obviously been missing from my pillow much too often.

15

THE GREATEST DREAM
OF ALL TIME

Alex

Dear Diary,

A sandwich walks into a bar and says, ‘A pint of Guinness, mate.’ The barman replies, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve food here.’

I have to write really fast cos I have a dress rehearsal for
Hamlet
and Jojo is going mental with people who turn up late. Good stuff and bad stuff has happened lately. The good stuff is so good though that I’m not even sure I can call the bad stuff bad, it’s just not even important any more. The first cool thing that happened was that Anya came and told me I could see Mum. I thought it would be a while before I could see her because she’s chilling out and getting her strength back, according to Auntie Bev. But when I saw Mum I couldn’t believe how much better she looked. Her hair had been washed and was shiny and soft and not like pasta that’s been in the fridge for a week. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes didn’t have dark bits under them and she was wearing a long white T-shirt which almost covered all the marks on her arms. It made me feel happy.

‘Alex!’ Mum said when I walked in, and her voice was normal and she hugged me so hard I coughed. ‘How have you been?’

Then, before I could tell her about Auntie Bev throwing out all the onions and about the play and how I would love her to come, she said: ‘You know what’s weird? I had this dream about Granny last night and she told me I needed to give you a big hug.’

‘Did she tell you to crack my ribs, too?’ I said, rubbing my sides from her big bear hug and she laughed but I was serious.

Anya said she’d wait outside and Mum nodded and when Anya had gone she asked me if Anya was asking me anything that bothered me. I thought about Ruen but I didn’t want to say anything to upset her.

‘Has Anya asked
you
anything that bothered you?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But my therapist keeps asking about my childhood. All she wants to know about is my favourite doll.’ She made a clicking noise with her tongue then put on a voice, as if she was imitating someone. ‘“Why did you call her
Ugly
? Why did you dress her in black? Why did you put her facedown when your foster dad came in?”’

‘Why
did
you put the doll facedown when your foster dad came in?’

She looked at me funny. ‘Sorry, Alex,’ she said, glancing down. ‘I shouldn’t have let my mouth go. Sometimes I forget you’re not an old man, you know? How are
you
, anyway?’

I shrugged. ‘When are you coming home?’

She bit her lip and ran her fingers through her hair. It was starting to go black again at the roots and I was about to tell her that if she came home I could help her put the sky-blue stuff in it to turn the roots yellow but she said:

‘I just don’t know.’

‘Woof misses you.’

‘Woof
misses me?’

I nodded. She leaned forward and looked at me closely and I touched my face in case I had a black mark on it or something.

‘You’ve never … hurt yourself, have you, son?’ Mum said.

I felt my cheeks turn hot. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘I just wondered if what I’d … I mean, you’re different from me, aren’t you? You’re Alexander the Great, aren’t you?’

Just then I had a flash in my head of someone else saying the words Alexander the Great, and I could see our living room but from a height. For a second I remembered my dad crying
‘Alexander the Great!’
and I was on his shoulders and he was bouncing up and down, and then the memory was over.

Mum went to say something but then a nurse knocked loudly on the door and came into the room.

‘Sorry for interrupting,’ she said, though she didn’t look sorry. ‘Trudy thinks you should get out today, Cindy. Maybe take Alex to the greenhouse, show him what you did with the horticulturalist?’

Mum nodded. ‘Okey-dokey. Come on, Alex, let me show you what you can do with a toilet.’

I didn’t see Ruen all day after that. I remembered he said that Anya would tell me that we’d be moving house by the end of the day, but she didn’t and I thought,
I’m definitely, definitely going to tell him I don’t want to be friends next time I see him
. But he didn’t turn up, which was nice because I got to go back home in the evening and Woof licked my face and whined as if he’d really missed me and slept on my bed all night.

And then Anya came to see me this morning instead of this afternoon because it’s Saturday. She couldn’t stop smiling. I asked her what was wrong and she told me to sit down, which I did, and she started taking lots of things out of her briefcase and spreading them across the table.

‘This,’ she said, ‘is your new home.’

I could not believe it
. I watched her arrange a set of photographs and drawings of our new house in front of me and Auntie Bev came in and asked all the questions I wanted to ask but couldn’t, like,
Does Cindy know? How did this come about? Where is it? When can they move in? Is this for real
?

Anya kept wringing her hands and bouncing on the balls of her feet like she was moving, too. I think she was just really happy for this to happen even though she didn’t even know that it was my Greatest Dream Of All Time. Auntie Bev said things like, ‘Well, thank the elephant in the sky for that, then, this place is falling apart,’ and, ‘Is it seriously a council property? Looks stunning.’

‘And there’s more,’ Anya said. ‘The reason that some of the photographs look as though the rooms aren’t finished is because this is a brand new property.’

‘Brand new?’ I said, and I tried to think of the last time I had something that was brand new.

‘You can even choose your own wallpaper,’ Anya said, her smile growing wider. ‘Even your own kitchen units. The front door can be whatever colour you want it to be. The council are keen to ensure their residents have proprietorship over their accommodation.’

‘What?’ I said, because this made no sense.

Anya laughed. The sound was light and like bells and made me laugh even though nothing was funny. She turned to Auntie Bev, who was smiling and kept folding and unfolding her arms as if she didn’t know what to do with them.

‘They’re calling the street “Peace Street”,’ Anya said to Auntie Bev, and they both found this really funny and laughed for about a decade. Apparently the politicians had knocked down one of the old streets where they used to barricade people in their houses and have riots, so they bulldozed the whole area and hired a poet to rename all the new streets and write a poem that would be carved on to a wall instead of a mural with gunmen.

‘Which poem?’ Auntie Bev asked.

‘It’s called “Belfast Confetti”, by Ciaran Carson,’ Anya said, and she pulled out a page and read it out loud.

‘Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining

exclamation marks
,

Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the

explosion
.

Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a

burst of rapid fire …

I was trying to complete a sentence in my head but it kept

stuttering
,

All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and

colons
.

I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan
,

Inkerman, Odessa Street –

Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea

Street. Dead end again
.

A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields
.

Walkie-

talkies. What is

My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A

fusillade of question marks.’

Anya put the page on the table. ‘They’re carving it in letters that will be three feet tall.’

I looked at the pictures for ages and ages as Auntie Bev and Anya chatted. The house was big at the front and didn’t have other houses at either side and it had a garden. It had a big kitchen, which I knew would make Mum happy. There was a driveway at the front in case we ever got a car and didn’t want to leave it on the street in case someone slashed the tyres. I thought of what it would be like if we got a car and all the places we could go to, like Helen’s Bay and Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway. My mind filled with so many thoughts and wishes that I got a headache.

‘Well, Alex,’ Anya said to me at last. ‘What do you think?’

I didn’t say anything, not because I wasn’t thinking anything but because I was thinking too much, and I thought that if I opened my mouth all the words would just explode out like streamers from a party popper.

‘You don’t seem very excited, Alex,’ said Auntie Bev, and I saw Anya reach out and touch her arm as though she shouldn’t say that.

‘Thank you,’ I said to Anya.

After that she asked me loads more questions about Ruen and about demons and whether I could see angels.

‘There are demons everywhere,’ I said.

‘Are there any here now?’ she asked, and she seemed nervous. I looked at the fat man who’d appeared above her again. Sometimes I could only see a bit of him, like his toe or his belly with the bellybutton I could probably fit my head in. His eyes were black and when he grinned at me I saw his teeth were, too.

‘Alex?’

I pointed up at him cos I could see all of him now. ‘He’s fat,’ I said.

‘Who is?’

‘Your demon.’

She looked puzzled. ‘I have a demon?’

He was stretching his arms out now like he’d had a really long nap, and the blanket that was covering up his willy almost slipped off. I looked away.

‘Can you tell me what he’s called?’ Anya was saying. I looked back at him but he was disappearing.

I shrugged. So she asked me what demons looked like and why I thought I could see them and I was still so excited about the house that I can’t even remember what I said. It was like there was a film of the house in my head and I could see every room really clearly and it was beautiful, just beautiful. Then she asked me something barmy which made the film stop suddenly and I was back in my own living room.

‘Alex, have you ever been involved in a terrorist attack?’

I asked her what she meant.

‘Like a bomb scare? Or a shooting? Did you ever get hurt in a riot, maybe?’

I thought about it. Granny’s first husband died in a bomb and last year someone set a car on fire and rolled it down our street.

Anya nodded and wrote all this down. ‘What about a policeman, Alex?’ she said. ‘Did you ever see a policeman get hurt?’

I felt sick and shook my head.

She looked at me very closely. ‘Are you sure?’

I saw the policeman’s face in my head, his mouth curling in a funny way as his head snapped towards me. I opened my mouth to say something but then I felt my hands make fists and I knew it was wrong to say anything, it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

‘Deep breath,’ Anya was saying, and when I opened my eyes I had both arms wrapped around me very tightly. When I felt normal again I said, ‘I saw people on TV at a policeman’s funeral. They were crying.’