Boy Who Could See Demons Read online

  Mum never sees Ruen, and I haven’t told her about him or about any of the demons who come into our house. Some of them are a bit strange, but I just ignore them. It’s like having loads of grumpy relatives tramping through the place, thinking they can order me about. Ruen’s okay, though. He ignores Mum and likes poking around our house. He loves Granddad’s old piano that sits in the hallway. He’ll stand beside it for ages, leaning down to have a closer look at the wood as if there’s a miniature village living in the grain. Then he lowers down to press his ear against the bottom half, as if there’s someone inside trying to talk to him. He tells me this was a stupendous make of piano, once upon a time, but he’s very irritated by the way Mum keeps it pressed up against a radiator and doesn’t get it tuned. Sounds like an old dog, he says, rapping it with his knuckles like a door. I just shrug and say, big deal. Then he gets so cross that he vanishes.

  Ruen sometimes turns into the Old Man when he gets cross. If I look like him when I get older, I’ll honestly kill myself. When he’s the Old Man he’s so skinny and withered he looks like a cactus with eyes and ears. His face is long as a spade with lots of wrinkles grooved so deep he looks sort of scrunched up, like tinfoil that’s been reused. He’s got a long hooked nose and his mouth reminds me of a piranha’s. His head is shiny as a silver doorknob and is covered in wispy tufts of fine white hair. His face is gray like a pencil but the bags under his eyes are bright pink, as if someone’s ripped the skin off. He’s really ugly.

  But this isn’t as bad as what he looks like when he’s Monster. Monster is like a dead body that’s been underwater for weeks and is dragged up by the police onto a small boat and everyone pukes because the skin is the color of an eggplant and the head is three times the size of a normal person’s head. And that’s not all; when he’s Monster, Ruen’s face isn’t a face. His mouth looks like someone blew a hole there with a shotgun and his eyes are tiny like a lizard’s.

  Here’s another thing: he says he’s nine thousand human years old. Yeah, right, I said when he first told me, but he just tilted his chin and spent the next hour telling me how he could speak more than six thousand languages, even the ones that no one spoke anymore. He went on and on about how humans don’t even know their own language, not really, and don’t even have proper words for big things like guilt and evil, that it was idiotic that a country with so many different kinds of rain should only have one word for it, blah blah blah, until I yawned for about five minutes solid and he took the hint and left. But the next day, it rained, and I thought maybe Ruen isn’t such an eejit after all. Maybe he actually has a point. Some rain is like little fish, some is like big globby chunks of spit, and some is like ball bearings. So I started to borrow books from the library to learn some words in lots of cool languages, like Turkish and Icelandic and Maori.

  “Merhaba, Ruen,” I said to him one day, and he just sighed and said, “it’s a silent h, you imbecile.” So I said, “Góða kvöldið” and he snapped, “it’s still only midmorning,” and when I said, “He roa te wä kua kitea,” he said I was as obtuse as a gnu.

  “What language is that?” I asked.

  “English,” he sighed, and disappeared.

  So I started reading the dictionary to understand the weird words he uses all the time, like brouhaha. I tried using that word with Mum about the riots last July. She thought I was laughing at her.

  Ruen also told me all this stuff about people I had to look up on the Internet. He said one of his best mates for ages was called Nero, but that Nero preferred to be called Seezer by everyone and still peed the bed when he was like twenty years old. Then Ruen told me he’d stayed in a prison cell with a guy called Sock-rat-ease when Sock-rat-ease was under a death sentence. Ruen told Sock-rat-ease that he should escape. Ruen said that he even had some of Sock-rat-ease’s friends offer to help him escape, but Sock-rat-ease wouldn’t, so he just died.

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Ruen.

  It sounded like Ruen had loads of friends, which made me sad because I didn’t have any except him.

  “Who was your best friend?” I asked him, hoping he’d say me.

  He said Wolfgang.

  I asked, why Wolfgang?, and what I meant was why was Wolfgang his best friend and not me, but all Ruen said was he liked Wolfgang’s music and then he went quiet.

  • • •

  I know what you’re thinking: I’m crazy and Ruen is all in my head, not just his voice. That I watched too many horror movies. That Ruen’s an imaginary friend I’ve dreamed up because I’m lonely. Well, you’d be incredibly wrong if you thought any of that. Though sometimes I am lonely.

  Mum bought me a dog for my eighth birthday that I named Woof. Woof reminds me of a grumpy old man ’cos he’s always barking and baring his teeth and his fur is white and tough like an old man’s hair. Mum calls him the barking footstool. Woof used to sleep beside my bed and run down the stairs to bark at people when they came into the house in case they were going to kill me, but when Ruen started appearing more often Woof got scared. He just growls at thin air now, even when Ruen isn’t there.

  Which reminds me. Ruen told me something today that I thought was interesting enough to bother writing down. He said he’s not just a demon. His real title is a Harrower.

  When he said it he was the Old Man. He smiled like a cat and all his wrinkles stretched. He said it the way Auntie Bev tells people that she’s a doctor. I think it means a lot to Auntie Bev that she’s a doctor, because nobody in our family ever went to University before, or drove a Mercedes and bought their own house like Auntie Bev.

  I reckon Ruen is proud of being a Harrower because it means he is someone very important in Hell. When I asked Ruen what a Harrower is, he told me to think of what the word meant. I tried to look it up in my dictionary but it described a gardening tool, which makes no sense. When I asked again, Ruen said did I know what a soldier was. I said, duh, of course I do, and he said, well, if a regular demon’s a soldier, I would be comparable to a Commander General or Field Marshal. So I said, do demons fight in wars, then. And he said, no, though they are always fighting against the Enemy. And I said that sounded paranoid, and he scowled and said demons are perpetually vigilant, not paranoid. He still won’t tell me exactly what a Harrower is, so I’ve decided to make up my own definition: a Harrower is a stinky old sod who wants to show off his war medals and hates that only I can see him.

  Wait. I think I can hear mum downstairs. Yep, she’s crying again. Maybe I should pretend that I don’t notice. I’ve got rehearsals for Hamlet in seventy-two and a half minutes. Maybe she’s just doing it for attention. But my room has started filling with demons, about twenty of them sitting on my bed and huddled in corners, whispering and giggling. They’re all talking excitedly like it’s Christmas or something, and one of them just said my mum’s name. I have a funny feeling in my tummy.

  Something is happening downstairs.

  “What’s going on?” I ask Ruen. “Why are they talking about my Mum?”

  He looks at me and raises one of his caterpillar eyebrows. “My dear boy, Death has arrived at your front door.”

  3

  THE FEELING

  ANYA

  The call came this morning at seven thirty.

  Ursula Hepworth, the senior consultant at MacNeice House Child and Adolescent Mental Health Inpatient Unit in Belfast, rang me on my mobile and mentioned a ten-year-old boy at risk of possibly harming himself and others. Name of Alex Connolly, she said. Alex’s mother had attempted suicide yesterday and has since been hospitalized, while the boy had been taken to the pediatric unit at the city hospital. Alex had spent an hour alone with her in their home in West Belfast, trying to call for help. Eventually a woman coming to collect Alex for a drama group arrived and took the pair to hospital. Quite understandably, the boy was in quite a state. Urusla informed me that a social worker named Michael Jones had already had contact with the boy and that Jones was concerned about the boy�
�s mental health. Alex’s mother has attempted suicide at least four times in the last five years. Eight out of ten children who witness a parent self-harm will go on to repeat the action on themselves.

  “Typically, I would be the lead clinician on this boy’s case,” Ursula explained, her Greek accent sliced up by Northern Irish tones. “But as our new adolescent psychiatry consultant I thought I’d pass the baton over to you. What do you say?”

  I sat up in bed, greeted by a swath of boxes all over the floor of my new flat. It’s a four-room place on the outskirts of the city, so close to the ocean that I wake to the sound of seagulls and the faint smell of salt. It is tiled floor-to-ceiling in a tomato-red tile that burns like the inside of a furnace every sunrise, on account of the fact that the apartment faces east and I haven’t had the chance to buy curtains. I haven’t had time to furnish it, either, such have been the demands of this new job since moving back from Edinburgh two weeks ago.

  I glanced at my watch. “When would you need me to come in?”

  “In an hour?”

  The sixth of May has been circled on my work schedule as a day off for the past three years, and was agreed at the point I signed my employment contract. It always will be for the rest of my working life. On this day, those whom I count as my closest friends will arrive bearing consolation offerings of cheesecake, tender embraces, photo albums of me and my daughter in happier times, when she was alive and relatively well. Some of these friends will not have seen me for months, but even when their hair color has changed and other relationships have ended, these friends will show up on my doorstep to help me purge this day out of my calendar for another year. And it will always be so.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Ursula, and I began to explain about my contract, about the fact that I’ve arranged to take this day off and perhaps she could interview the boy for today and I could catch up on his notes tomorrow?

  There was a long pause.

  “This is really quite important,” she said sternly.

  There are many who feel initimidated by Ursula. At forty-three, I like to think I am past such things as inferiority, and in any case the staggering reality of Poppy’s fourth anniversary already had me on the verge of tears. I took a deep breath and informed Ursula in my most professional voice that I would gladly meet with the rest of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services team first thing tomorrow morning.

  And then something happened that I still can’t explain, something that has happened only a few times before and is so unlike any other feeling that I’ve named it, quite simply, The Feeling. It defies words, but if I’m to attempt to verbalize it, it goes like this: Deep in my solar plexus, there’s at first a warmth, and then a fire, though not a sensation of heat or pain, that creeps up my neck and jaw, right into my scalp until my hair stands on end, and at the same time I feel it in my knees, my ankles, even my pelvis, until I am so conscious of every part of my body that I feel like I’m about to lift off. It’s like my soul is trying to tell me something, an urgent, tingling message that so fills my capillaries and cells, it threatens to burst if I don’t listen.

  “Are you all right?” Ursula asked, and I told her to give me a moment. I set the receiver on my dresser and wiped my face. In ten years of training I have never come across a single piece of literature to inform me why this thing happens to me sometimes, nor why it tends to happen on the most significant of occasions. I only know that I have to listen. Last time I didn’t, my daughter decided to end her life and I was not able to stop her.

  “Okay,” I told Ursula. “I’ll be there this morning.”

  “Appreciate it, Anya. I know you’ll be wonderful on this case.”

  She told me she would contact the boy’s social worker, Michael Jones, and have him meet me in the lobby of MacNeice House in two hours. I ended the call and glanced in the mirror. One of the effects of Poppy’s death is that I now wake frequently during the night, resulting in sallow patches beneath my eyes for which no makeup seems to compensate. I studied the jagged white scar in my face, the flat of my cheek there sucked inward by the ribbed pattern of dead tissue. Usually I spend a considerable amount of time each morning arranging my long black hair in a way that shields this ugliness. Today, however, I made do with sweeping my hair into a chignon spiked by a pen and threw on the only items of clothing that I’d unpacked—a black trouser suit with a crumpled white shirt. Finally, of course, I draped my silver talisman around my neck. Then I left a note for the friends who would come and find, to their astonishment and fear, that I had actually crossed the threshold of my home on the anniversary of Poppy’s death.

  • • •

  I took the coastal road instead of the motorway in an attempt to distract myself from thoughts of Poppy. Maybe it’s a consequence of approaching middle age, but my memories of her these days are not visual. They come to me, instead, as sounds. Her laughter, light and infectious. The melodies she used to make up on my old Steinway in our Morningside flat in Edinburgh, using one finger. The phrases she’d use to describe her condition. It’s like … it’s like a hole, Mum. No, like I am one. A hole. Like I’m swallowing darkness.

  MacNeice House is an old Victorian mansion located in an acre of wilderness high in the hills that look down on Belfast’s bridges named after British monarchs. Recently renovated, the unit offers inpatient and day patient treatment for children and young people between the ages of four and fifteen suffering from any mental illness noted in textbooks—anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorders, behavioral disorders, depressive disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, psychotic disorders, and more. There are ten bedrooms, a common room with computers, an art room, an interview or therapy room, a toy room, a dining room, a swimming pool, a small apartment for parents who need to stay over occasionally, and a restraining room—strictly referred to in-house as the quiet room. Inpatients require education, and so an on-site school is available and staffed by specialist teachers. After completing my training at Edinburgh University I worked at a similar unit there for two years, but the reputation of MacNeice House attracted me back home to Northern Ireland—a move I am still unsure about.

  I spotted a new vehicle parked beside Ursula’s gleaming black Lexus in the parking lot—a battered bottle-green Volvo with a 1990 registration plate—and I wondered if Alex’s social worker, Michael Jones, had already arrived. I was racing across the gravel lot using my briefcase as a shield against the pouring rain, when a tall man in a navy-blue suit stepped out from behind the stone pillars, opening a golf umbrella in my direction.

  “Welcome,” he called. I stepped underneath the umbrella and he shielded me until we were inside, where Ursula stood waiting. She is tall with an imperial air, her red suit, thick black Diana Ross mane streaked with gray and handsome Greek bone structure more suggestive of a high-powered businesswoman than a clinical psychologist. She was also one of the panel members at my interview for this post, and it was because of her that I was sure I hadn’t gotten the job.

  You originally trained to become a GP. Why the shift into child psychiatry?

  At the interview I had slipped my right hand beneath my thigh, looking over the faces of the panel—three male psychiatrists and Ursula, internationally renowned as much for her work in child psychology as for her boorishness.

  My original interest lay in psychiatry, I had replied. My mother had a long battle with mental illness, and I wanted to find answers to the riddles posed by such illnesses. If anyone knew the devastation caused by mental illness—its social taboos, disgraces, its ancient, fearful association with shame at just how far the human mind can plummet into itself—it was me.

  Ursula had watched me carefully from behind the panel desk. I thought the cardinal sin of any psychiatrist was to suppose that all the answers can be found, she had offered lightly—a joke with a knife thrust. The panel chair—John Kind, head of the Psychiatry Department at Queen’s University—had glanced uncomfortably from Ursula to me and attempted to forge a qu
estion out of Ursula’s thinly veiled joke.

  Do you believe you’ve found all the answers, Anya? Or is that your intention in taking up this position?

  My heart said yes. But at the time, I smiled and gave the answer they were looking for.

  My intention is to make a difference.

  Ursula gave me an overly wide smile, then extended a hand and shook it firmly for the first time since my interview. It is not entirely uncommon for psychiatrists to clash with psychologists, given the disparity in our approaches, though I assumed from her phone call that whatever issue she had with me at the interview had been resolved. She turned from me to the man in the navy-blue suit, who was shaking out the umbrella and slotting it into the coat stand. “Anya, this is Michael, Alex’s social worker. He works for the local authority.”

  Michael Jones turned and flashed a crooked smile. “Yes,” he said. “Someone has to.”

  Ursula regarded him through heavy eyelids before turning to me. “Michael will talk you through the details of the case. I’ll meet with you later to discuss its management.” She nodded curtly at Michael before walking away down the corridor.

  Michael held out his hand. “Thanks for coming in on your day off,” he said. I wanted to tell him it was more than a day off—it was the anniversary of my daughter’s death—but found a lump forming in my throat. I busied myself with signing my name into the register.

  “You know, we’ve already met,” he told me as he took the pen from my hand to sign in.

  “We have?”

  He signed his name with an illegible flourish. “At the child psychiatry conference in Dublin in 2001.”

  The conference was six years ago. I had no memory of him at all. I saw he was rangy and wide-shouldered, with steely green eyes that held a stare several seconds longer than was comfortable. I guessed him to be in his late thirties, and there was a weariness about him that I’d encountered many times with social workers, a cynicism detectable in his body language, the thinness of his smile. His voice bore the rough edge of too many cigarettes, and from the cut of his suit and the shine of his shoes I suspected that he had no children. His blond hair was worn messy and long over his collar, but a scent of hair gel told me this was deliberate.