The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel Read online

  I wonder why the decision has been made to hold it secret. I make a note to ask Cindy about it: even if Alex’s father needs to remain unnamed, I still need more information about their relationship.

  My session with Alex ends badly, though it reveals much about his relationship with his mother. When I ask him to draw a picture of her he sketches an image of himself carrying his mother, and I notice that his self-portrait is much larger than his sketch of Cindy. She looks baby-like, vulnerable in his arms, her own arms wrapped tightly around Alex’s neck. From this I deduce that Alex has sensed her fragility and instability for a long time, which must have borne a huge impact on his sense of security and his role in the family as protector. His representation of his father is in the form of a blue car, which I believe is a memory from his childhood – most likely his father collected him in such a car during his visits.

  He also tells me numerous things about the spiritual world, about what he can see and hear, and what he makes of it all. Most of it I can peg on the things I have witnessed in his surroundings, and there are connections to be made between his role in Hamlet and his interpretation of his home life. I notice his descriptions flit in and out of religious rhetoric – ‘a dragon with seven horns’, which I believe is in Revelations in the Bible – and the language he uses for such descriptions is far beyond his usual ten-year-old lingo.

  ‘Ruen is not bestial, he says, he’s a committed intellectual,’ Alex informs me, when I query the portraits of some of the beings in the world he describes. His fondness for Ruin is palpable – protective, even – and I believe there is something of Alex’s feeling towards his mother projected on to his imaginary sketch of Ruin, and with good reason: whereas Alex cannot control his mother, he can control these other beings.

  It is common for psychotics to construct a highly fantastical world with clearly defined boundaries and with a system of rules that derives from a system that exists in reality – in this case, the supernatural. Alex never mentions angels, which I find very interesting. No mention of God or any other deity either. However, he says there are demons everywhere, all the time, and that when he enters an empty room it is not empty, it is like a pub, with demons grouped in corners, plotting, huddled around any humans who happen to be about, tempting, cajoling, scheming.

  When I press him to discuss Ruin in more detail, Alex erupts. His descriptions of Ruin ascend into a screaming fit, and to my horror he passes out in the chair opposite me.

  Bev charges across the room and grabs him. He is limp and deathly pale, and for the first time during my assessment I feel afraid. I feel myself turn over the things he told me about demons, about spirits – immediately I dismiss the notion, but the fear lingers. On reflection, it astonishes me how frail a thing belief is.

  After a few moments, Bev shouts, ‘He’s awake! He’s awake!’ I am in the kitchen getting Alex a glass of water. Then: ‘He’s going to be sick!’ I grab the basin out of the sink and race into the living room, just in time to catch a spew of vomit from Alex’s mouth.

  ‘That’s better, that’s better,’ Bev is saying, thumping him on the back and fumbling in her pocket for her mobile phone.

  I kneel down in front of Alex and take his pulse. His heart rate seems fast, his pupils dilated. ‘How do you feel, Alex?’ I ask calmly. He blinks and tries to focus on me. Then he presses a hand against his chest.

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘What hurts?’

  ‘Here.’

  Bev quickly unbuttons Alex’s shirt. She gasps, and I look down to see three red stripes on his chest, as if something has just scorched his skin.

  ‘Did someone at school do this to you?’ Bev is shouting, and I try to tell her that these marks must have been made recently – as recent as my visit, in fact. My mind reels with questions, but just then Alex leans forward, his face pale and strained. I yank the bucket up, just in time to catch another fountain of puke. Bev dashes into the kitchen to find a cloth. When Alex collapses back in his chair he looks weak, but gives a little smile nonetheless.

  ‘You feel better?’ I say. He nods.

  ‘Is Ruin still here?’ I ask tentatively. He looks around, then shakes his head.

  Bev returns, a tea towel in one hand, Alex’s coat in the other. Alex is mumbling something about a diary.

  ‘What should we do?’ Bev splutters.

  I look him over. ‘We need to take him to hospital.’

  *

  We travel to the hospital in Bev’s car, where an examination determines that he is absolutely fine. The doctor can’t find any sign of the marks, despite Bev and I confirming that we saw them.

  ‘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.’