The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel Page 2

  ‘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 mid-morning,’ and when I said, ‘He roa te wā 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 never heard of. 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 on 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 mental,’ 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 watch 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 was, 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 manky 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 just asked Ruen. ‘Why are they talking about my mum?’

  He looked at me and raised 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 Broccoli, she said. Alex’s mother attempted suicide yesterday and has since been sectioned, while the boy has been taken to the paediatric unit at the City Hospital. Alex was at his home in west Belfast and had spent an hour alone with her, trying to call for help. Eventually a lady coming to collect Alex for a drama group intervened and took the pair to hospital. Quite understandably, the boy was in quite a state. Ursula informed me that a social worker named Michael Jones had already had contact with the boy and that he was concerned about his 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 child and 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 swathe 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 flat 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 in 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 who 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 colour 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 said, and I began to explain about my contract, about the fact that I’ve booked 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 intimidated by Ursula. At forty-three, I like to think I am past such things as an inferiority complex, 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 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 which 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 verbalise 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 tim
e I feel it in my knees, my ankles, even my sacrum, 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 that 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.

  ‘OK,’ I told her. ‘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 at the reception 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 make-up seems to compensate. I looked over the jagged white scar on 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. I made do with sweeping my hair into a chignon spiked by a biro and threw on the only item 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 a bid 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, rendered instead by 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 refurbished, 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, behavioural disorders, depressive disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, psychotic disorders, and then some. 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 onsite school is available and provided by specialist teaching staff. 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 tentative about.

  I spotted a new vehicle parked beside Ursula’s gleaming black Lexus in the car park – a battered bottle-green Volvo with a 1990 registration plate – and I wondered if Alex’s social worker, Michael Jones, had already arrived. I raced across the gravel car park using my briefcase as protection against the pouring rain, when a tall man in a navy 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 well inside, where Ursula was waiting at reception. She is tall with an imperial air, her red suit, thick black Diana-Ross mane streaked with grey and handsome Greek bone structure more suggestive of a high-profile 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 got 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 developments 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 had a desire 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 jag. 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 question out of Ursula’s thinly veiled joke.

  Do you believe you’ve found all the answers, Anya? Or is that your intent by taking up this post?

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

  My intent is to make a difference.

  At reception, Ursula gave me an overly wide smile, then extended a hand and shook mine 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 phonecall that whatever issue she had with me at the interview had been resolved. She turned from me to Michael, who was shaking out the umbrella and slotting it into the coatstand.

  ‘Anya, this is Michael, Alex’s social worker. He works for the local authority.’

  Michael turned and flashed a crooked smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Someone has to.’

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

  Michael held his hand out for a shake. ‘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 of its own accord 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.

  ‘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 slightness 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.

  ‘What was a social worker doing at a child psychiatry conference?’ I turned towards the corridor behind us that led to my office.

  ‘Psychiatry was my original discipline, after a spell studying for the priesthood.’

  ‘The priesthood?’

  ‘Family tradition. I liked your paper, by the way. “Addressing the need for psychosis intervention in Northern Ireland,” wasn’t that it? It struck me that you’re passionate about changing things around here.’

  ‘Change is probably a bit ambitious,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to look at the way we handle younge
r cases of psychosis.’

  ‘How so?’

  I cleared my throat, feeling an old defensiveness rise up. ‘I think we’re missing too many signs of psychosis and even early onset schizophrenia, allowing these kids to flail and even harm themselves when treatment could very easily help them live normal lives.’ My voice had started to wobble. I heard Poppy’s efforts on our piano in my head, her voice softly humming the melody she was trying to match on the keys. When I looked back at him I noticed he was staring at the scar on my face. I should have worn my hair long, I thought.

  We reached the door to my office. I tried to remember my entry code, given to me the week before by Ursula’s secretary, Josh. After a few seconds I punched the gold number on the lock. I turned to see Michael looking up and down the corridor, his expression wary.

  ‘You never been to MacNeice House before?’ I asked lightly.

  ‘Yes. Too many times, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘I don’t agree with psychiatric institutions. Not for kids.’

  I opened the door. ‘This isn’t a psychiatric institution, it’s an inpatient unit …’

  He grinned. ‘Tomayto, tomato, eh?’

  Inside, Michael remained standing until I pointed out two softbacked armchairs at a white coffee table and offered him a drink, which he declined. I poured myself a herbal tea and sat down in the smaller armchair. Michael leaned back in his chair, his gaze turned to a poster on the wall by my bookcase.