Boy Who Could See Demons Read online

  He nods.

  “Anya, perhaps it’s best if you and Michael work closely from this point toward a program that takes the individual contexts and requirements into consideration.” She glances at Howard. “We can review again in a couple of weeks.”

  I open my mouth to protest her decision, but she is already standing to leave. Howard smiles awkwardly and follows, pausing to pour himself a cold cup of coffee from the stainless-steel canister in the corner of the room. Michael stays seated, his eyes lowered, and so do I.

  He waits for Howard to slurp from his coffee cup and bustle noisily down the hall before raising his eyes.

  “Anya,” he says quietly. “Look … I just want to go easy on this family, okay? I appreciate that you’re a mover and a shaker, and we’re all just playing catch-up after years of too much shaking and not enough moving, you know?”

  I feel my cheeks burn. I remind myself that Alex’s case is not a battle of wills between me and my colleagues. I try to reason with myself that, maybe, waiting until Cindy is released is absolutely fine. But I am furious at being overruled. I am seized with an urgency to resolve this case and I don’t really know why.

  Michael stands up, walks around the table and sits down in the chair beside me.

  “Are you okay?” he says, and I realize that he looks worried. I raise a hand to my cheek and find, to my horror, I have started to cry.

  I nod and laugh and try and rein in whatever emotions have slipped out of my grasp without my noticing.

  “Yes,” I tell him, looking at my wet fingertips as if they belong to someone else. “I guess I’m just trying to find my feet in this place. We just arm-wrestled each other in review meetings in Edinburgh, played some poker. None of this debate stuff.”

  He smiles and I seize the opportunity to run a finger under both eyes, mopping up the inevitable black smudge. Then I pull out the pen that’s holding my hair up. Suddenly I want it down, covering my scar. Michael stops smiling.

  “I don’t mean to be a hypocrite,” he says carefully, “but I think you should be careful not to become too involved in this case.”

  “You think I’ve become involved?”

  “You said before that riddles frustrate you. I’m worried that the real riddle that bothers you is Poppy. And that you see much of Poppy in Alex’s case.”

  I frown at him. “I deal with dozens of kids with mental health issues all the time, what makes you think—?”

  “Not with Poppy’s illness, Anya,” he interrupts. “Not like this. You’re scared, aren’t you? That he’s going to hurt himself, like your daughter did?”

  I can feel the blood roaring in my veins, and it is difficult to breathe, suddenly. He is angry because I disagreed with him, making wild assertions to get even. I refuse to rise to it.

  “I intend to keep interviewing Alex’s schoolteachers and his aunt. If I do find proof that he’s self-harming, I’m sure you’ll agree that I have no option but to bring him in.”

  Michael gives me a curt nod and a smile before striding out of the room.

  When I return to my office I find a new message in my inbox. I am relieved when I see it is from Alex’s schoolteacher, Karen Holland.

  To: A_​Molokova@​macneicehouse.​nhs.​uk

  From: k.​holland@​stpaul​sprimary.​co.​uk

  Date: 05/12/07 1:44 PM

  Dear Anya,

  I would be more than happy to speak to you—indeed I remember Alex very well. I had concerns about him when I taught him three years ago and am pleased he seems to be receiving proper treatment at last. I have a couple of slots available for a meeting here at the school—next Thursday at 5 PM, the following Tuesday at 4:30, or perhaps today at 4 PM? Do you need directions?

  Sincerely, KH.

  I email her immediately to take her up on the offer of an appointment that afternoon. I change my heeled shoes for running shoes and transfer Alex’s files from my briefcase to my backpack, then head off on foot, threading through the familiar streets around Queen’s University. Among layers of students’ advertisements pasted on lampposts and boarded-up buildings I spy a large, dazzling poster for Jojo’s company, Really Talented Kids. HAMLET is spelled out in bullet holes, and there are several pictures of nuns holding machine guns and kids making gang signs with several movie-star endorsements beneath. I spy a small image of Alex during one of the rehearsals in his role as Horatio, and I smile at the thought of him attempting to concoct bad jokes for the part. Jojo had whispered to me that bad jokes was exactly what she was aiming for, though it was Alex’s confidence that was the real reward—he had transformed from a stage-shy, nervous kid who was barely audible to the front row to a boy who was beginning to command his presence and find his feet on stage. I make a mental note to invite Jojo to MacNeice House.

  I cut through the quad of Queen’s University, its new buildings gleaming alongside the old red-brick ones. I find myself thinking back to the days I spent as a student on a blanket with friends—it takes me a moment or two to remember their names—a picnic of jam sandwiches and cold tea, Blondie on the radio.

  Was that really a quarter century ago?

  I pass a gleaming new building bearing the sign THE SCHOOL OF MUSIC, its clean, spacious rooms visible through large windows. A couple of students walk past, one of them on a mobile phone, another holding a Starbucks cup. I continue on toward the Botanic Gardens, then stop in front of the dome of the hothouse, where two patches of white tulips have been grown to form the shape of a pair of wings. They are so real, so richly bright, that they almost seem to move, and the petals ruffle distinctly like feathers. I stop walking and spend a long time staring at them, moved by the way they had appeared so different from a distance—shaped in the form of a dove’s wings, I realize, fanning outward, the bird’s head rendered by a smaller patch, its beak rendered by primroses. The symbol of peace.

  • • •

  When Poppy was buried, I could not bear the thought of a tombstone. It seemed too final, too grim for my little girl. On her grave plot in Edinburgh, I had a craftsman cut dove’s wings into Portland stone—a kind of stone that whitens with time. Each wing was carved with precision, the feathers so lifelike that they appeared to move in the sunlight. I had hoped to bring her peace. It is my own peace that I have never found.

  And I don’t know how.

  I arrived at Saint Paul’s Primary School fifteen minutes early. Housed in a converted chapel, the school has a distinctly religious air about it outside that continues inside in the form of child-crafted murals of saints and religious festivals. I studied the scenes of angels and Jesus in the stained-glass windows, their colors and pathos ripe in late-afternoon sun. A sign directed me to reception, where I found a young man typing at a computer.

  “I’m here to see Karen Holland,” I told him. He nodded and asked me to sign a register before taking me to the staff room.

  “Karen’s in a meeting.” He nodded at the sink and coffeemaker opposite a square of sofas. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  In the corner of the room stood an old black upright piano, candelabras curved like cactuses in its front panel, lid open. Its keys were yellow and chipped, like the teeth of an old man. I looked up at the doorway to be sure no one was coming, then I slid my fingers over the notes that formed the opening chord of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique. For a moment I was tempted to lean down, sound out the thick, hungry texture of that gorgeous chord, but I stopped short of pressing down on the keys. Slowly I lifted my hands and left the piano to its silence.

  When Poppy died, I sold her beloved baby grand for a sliver of its value just to be rid of the sound of it. It seemed that even when the lid was closed the wind would find its way inside, brush across the strings, and Poppy’s songs would rise up like ghosts. I had been playing since I was a child, tinkering on the old Yamaha at my school, then offered free piano lessons by a generous teacher. It was important for me to teach Poppy, to give her the same joy I’d felt—but I had not anticipated h
ow deep the sound would dig into my veins after she’d gone. How much loneliness would suddenly infuse the music I had once loved.

  “Dr. Molokova?” a voice said. I turned to see a short round woman in a rust-colored dress standing in the doorway, her eyes hidden by tinted glasses. She had a helmet of thick amber-colored hair, a run in her brown tights and hands that felt warm as toast when I returned her handshake. She grinned broadly. “I’m Karen Holland. Would you like to come to my classroom?”

  I nodded and followed her out of the room along a corridor lined with papier-mâché mosaics of Africa, self-portraits sketched by thirty eight-year-olds. I searched for Alex’s face among them but it wasn’t there.

  “I dug something out of my archives to show you,” Karen told me when we were inside her classroom.

  “Archives?”

  I looked around. The walls of the classroom were covered in paintings, progress charts, lists of rules. A film about elephants played silently on the whiteboard on the far wall. Karen walked past me to her desk, where a handful of childish paintings had been spread out for me to view.

  “What are these?” I asked, unable to make sense of what seemed to be a series of large, misspelled phrases with boxes and small profile pictures in old, cracked black paint.

  “I’m glad I kept these, now,” Karen said, removing her dark glasses and rubbing her eyes. I could see they were small and intensely blue, narrowed against the soft light from the window.

  I turned my head to view the paintings from a different angle. “Are these newspaper headlines?”

  She put her glasses back on, sighing at the relief, perhaps of dimming the light in her eyes. “Alex did these for a class project when he was six years old. We were studying how the sinking of the Titanic might have been conveyed in headlines … As you can see, Alex deviated substantially from the task in a way that always struck me as significant.”

  I looked over the headlines. MONSTROS CRIME read one. Another bore a picture that looked like a swaddled baby Jesus and the title, ROT IN HELL. Then another: RUEND PEEPELS LIVES. I paused at the word ruend.

  “I’ve showed these to Alex’s doctors. But they didn’t see a link,” Karen said.

  I glanced up at her. “Did you ask Alex why he’d done these paintings?”

  She nodded. “He didn’t seem to know why he’d done them.”

  “But the lesson was about the tragedy of the Titanic …”

  I scanned the paintings again, tracing my conversations with Alex in my mind. He must have read the headlines in a newspaper. I glanced again at the word ruend. Could Ruin be Ruen?

  “What was Alex like as a pupil?” I made a note.

  Karen raised a hand to touch her thick hair. “He was always polite. Quiet. An above-average student. No friends, not really. I used to feel sad when he’d be the only boy in the class without an invitation to so-and-so’s birthday—but it happens, you know? I think it was this sense of exclusion that contributed to his anger.”

  I stopped writing. “Anger?”

  She nodded, though I sensed some reluctance on her part to admit this. “Alex had … not often of course … explosive rages that would end with him in floods of tears.”

  I remembered what I’d read in the files. “Alex hit you, didn’t he?”

  She sighed. “He lashed out, struck me in the chest with his fist. It was painful, but I really think he was more shocked than I was. Still, I reported it to Alex’s doctor at the time. Alex was growing more and more tense by the day, I thought it was in his best interest …” She faltered.

  “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 … I know this sounds odd, but they were what I would call blind threats. As if he could hardly see who was there. As if he didn’t recognize me or the people around him. As if he’d forgotten who we were.” She paused, upset by the memory of it. “He was completely devastated, an utterly different version of the sweet, quiet boy we all knew. When I spoke to his mother about it she seemed distressed, but refused to offer any suggestions.” She sighed again. “There’s only so much we can do here 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.

  “He isn’t a bad kid,” she said, taking off her glasses again. “And there’s something I never told the other doctor … Alex wrote me a little note after he hit me that time.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  Karen smiled. “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 big block letters, then signed it with kisses and hugs. Not every kid would do that, you know?”

  I smiled at the thought of it.

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

  “December sixteenth, 2001,” she said without hesitation, surprising me. She smiled crookedly. “The day Alex’s father died. Or so he told me.”

  13

  THE UNBESTED FRIEND

  ALEX

  Dear Diary,

  It’s three sleeps till 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 makeup ran and she hugged Cian, who she doesn’t usually like, and then she made us all sit in a circle on the stage and talk about our Fears and Hopes for Opening Night.

  Katie raised her hand first. “I’m afraid my Mum will go crazy,” she said. Jojo’s smile came right off her face. 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 snickered.

  “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 really 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, nodding at Terry. “And what does Shakespeare say about Denmark?”

  “It’s rotten,” I said quietly. And she opened her mouth to say correctamundo again, but I put my hand up 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 Maud’s Ice Cream. You can’t buy Maud’s 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 next. “I like Helen’s Bay.” Helen’s Bay is a beach three miles from our ho
use that I’ve never been to but Granny has pictures and it looks 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 quet.

  “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 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 said. “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 back and forth 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 got quiet.

  “Remember, people. 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.”