Boy Who Could See Demons Read online

  “How are you today, Alex?” she said as we walked through the hospital.

  “I thought of a new joke,” I said, and I told her it. “How do you make a hot dog stand?”

  She shrugged.

  “You steal its chair.”

  She laughed, though she sounded like she didn’t find it funny.

  “I bet you’re excited to see your Mum,” she said, and I nodded. “She might not look like her usual self, though. Is that okay?”

  This to me could only be a good thing, so I gave a big grin and Anya told me to follow her. We walked down loads of hospital corridors until I thought my legs would fall off and then finally we came to a small room where Mum was in a white bed.

  When I went in she didn’t look up at first. She was just lying there with white bandages around her wrists and a tube in her arm. Her face looked like someone had taken a rubber to it and erased Mum out of it. Then she turned her head and smiled at me, and it was as if someone had put all the color back into her face. Her hair turned yellow again with black roots and her eyes changed from gray to sky blue, and even the tattoos on her arms and neck seemed brighter. Someone had taken out the hoop in her nose but that was a good thing because I thought it made her look like a bull. I wanted to ask if they’d taken the one out of her tongue, too, but I didn’t.

  “Hello, love,” she said. Her voice was creaky. I felt nervous to go in, in case Ruen appeared.

  “Come here, Alex,” she said. I stepped forward and she put her arms around me and squeezed me. Her arms felt cold and skinny.

  “Are you feeling better yet?” I said.

  “I’ve had better days,” she said after a long, long pause, and she smiled but her eyes were wet and small. “How have you been?”

  I shrugged. “They don’t have TVs here.”

  “What a shame, eh? You can watch TV when you get home.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve missed loads.” And I started naming all the programs I’d missed and counting them off on my fingers.

  Mum just stared at me. “How’s the barking footstool?”

  “Woof’s okay,” I said. “Though who’s feeding him, Mum? Won’t he be hungry?”

  Mum’s face looked worried. Then Anya stepped forward and touched mum’s hand with her fingers.

  “I’m Anya Molokova,” she said, and her voice was suddenly really soothing and kind. “I’m a doctor at MacNeice House. I’m here to take care of Alex.”

  I wanted to say this was a lie because Anya wasn’t cooking me pizza or onions on toast or anything like that. Mum nodded. I pulled a chair close to her bed and she reached out and ruffled my hair.

  “Cindy, I’m aware that you’ll be kept in here for another few weeks?”

  “Yeah?” Mum said in a way that made me wonder if Anya was doing something wrong.

  “I’d like Alex to stay at my unit for a little while. Just so I can assess him.”

  Mum’s face tightened. “Assess for what?”

  Anya glanced at me. “I wonder if we should discuss this in private …”

  “No,” Mum said loudly. “It’s about him, so he should be here.”

  Anya sat down on the other side of the bed, then took off her black square glasses and used her shirt to clean them.

  “In light of recent circumstances, I think Alex may have a kind of illness that requires ongoing assessment and monitoring. It might be in his interests to have a stay at MacNeice House.” I wondered what sort of illness she meant and if MacNeice House had TVs.

  “Isn’t that a place for nutjobs?” Mum said.

  Anya’s smile turned real. “Not at all. It’s where we do some of our most important work for families in the region.”

  “Last time some woman in a suit tried to take Alex away from me.”

  Mum and I stared at Anya. I noticed she was wearing a suit. She swallowed. “If we were to do this, I’d need your permission …”

  “Well, you don’t have it,” Mum snapped, and her voice wobbled until I squeezed her hand and she looked at me and smiled. “I’ll get myself out of here soon, I promise,” she said.

  “Your sister Bev is here,” Anya said softly. “She came up from Cork to take care of Alex. Part of the arrangement, if Alex stays at MacNeice House, was that Bev would take care of him weekends …”

  Mum widened her eyes. “Bev is here?”

  Anya nodded.

  Mum lifted a hand to her face and started to cry. “I don’t want her seeing me like this,” she said, and she started pressing her hair down with her fingers because it was sticking out all over the place like she’d been electrocuted.

  “She’ll only visit when you’re ready. Everyone’s very aware that you need time. I’ll drop Alex home this afternoon, but if you’re not happy with him coming to MacNeice House I need to get permission to visit with him every day for the next week for us to talk.”

  There was something about the way Anya said talk that sounded like she meant something much more serious. Mum seemed to think so, too. She stared at Anya very hard.

  “You mean, about me?” Mum said.

  Anya glanced at me. “And other things, too.”

  Then she stood up and said she’d see if she could get one of the nurses to let me watch TV. She went out of the room and I didn’t look at Mum because just then Ruen appeared and I jumped about three feet in the air.

  “What’s wrong now, Alex?” Mum said.

  But I ignored her. I was nervous because I could see that Ruen was Monster. Only, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at something in the doorway. I tried to see what he was looking at but there was no one there. But Ruen was so angry that he was growling. Three seconds later he disappeared.

  When Anya came back she told me they would let me watch TV, then she saw Mum was upset and I was curled up on the floor.

  “What’s happened?” she asked Mum, who just shook her head and whispered something.

  “Is there TV now?” I said, and I saw that Ruen was gone so I stood up.

  Anya smiled and started to say something, but then she just said, “follow me.” So I went out and sat in a smelly room with the tiniest TV I’ve ever seen that had yellow lines running through all the channels. About five minutes later Anya came in smiling and told me I could come and see Mum again, but only for a little while because Mum was very tired.

  I sat beside Mum and a lady came with a tray of food, which Mum didn’t want.

  “Do you want it, Alex?” Mum said, and I nodded and tucked into the beans and potatoes.

  “Did you know Alex is in a play?” I heard Mum say to Anya.

  “Yes. Hamlet. You must be very proud.”

  I felt Mum stare at me. “I could hardly read when I was his age. He’s top of his class in English. He didn’t get any of that from me, I can tell you. He’s brilliant.” Then there was a long pause as I used the last piece of toast to mop up the juice from the beans.

  “Sometimes I think I’m holding him back,” I heard Mum say, and her voice was very small.

  “How do you think you’re holding him back?” Anya said.

  Mum’s color looked like it was fading again. “Do you think there’s ever a chance for a kid that starts out in life like me and Alex did? Or do you think it would have been better if I’d just never been born?”

  Anya looked from me to Mum. Then she leaned forward and took Mum’s hand. “I think some of us have really big challenges in life. But I think everything can be overcome.”

  Mum stared at Anya a long time. Then she leaned over and gave my cheek a gentle tap, and even though she smiled at me there was this look in her eyes that made a knot in my belly until I couldn’t eat my toast. I saw Ruen in the doorway but pretended not to.

  Auntie Bev is Mum’s sister though she looks nothing like Mum, not even slightly. In fact you couldn’t really tell they’re sisters. She’s older than Mum by eleven years and ten months and about two days but she looks actually younger and finds everything funny and she doesn’t have any tattoos,
except for a black squiggle on her left ankle, which she says happened when she was out of her tree in Corfu. She says weird things like “I nearly took a buckle in my eye.” Her hair is short and white like Woof’s fur and her job means she spends all day shining a flashlight down people’s ears and mouths. She wears a small gold cross on a chain around her neck though she’s not Catholic anymore and I’m never to say the name Lawrence in front of her because that’s the name of the husband who took all her money. When she moved into my house the first thing she did was put a shower pole in the doorway of our living room. I stood for a few minutes, wondering if her brain had slipped out of her ears in the night.

  “For this,” she said, when she figured out why I looked so puzzled. She held on to the pole and started pulling her head up over the bar with her arms. She did it three times before I noticed her feet weren’t touching the floor.

  “Oh,” I said, though I still had no idea why she’d done that. Then she laughed and jumped down and next thing I knew she’d hooked both her feet over the bar and was hanging like a bat.

  This morning she came up to my room and knocked on the door, and when I noticed she wasn’t out of breath I said to her:

  “Why don’t you sound like an old dog?”

  She looked at me funny and asked what I meant, and I told her Mum always made a noise like this (I went hah hah hah with my tongue hanging out) when she climbed all three floors of our house. The lines in Auntie Bev’s forehead disappeared then and she giggled, then flexed her arm muscles, which I thought was a funny thing for a girl to do, though they were big and made me think of onions in a sock.

  “That’s what wall climbing three times a week will do for you,” she said, slapping her arm.

  “Wall climbing?” I said. “Can you take me wall climbing with you?”

  “Of course,” she said, her face all shocked. “We should find one close by. It’s been so long since I lived here, I can’t even remember where a wall would be.”

  “There’s a wall outside our front door,” I told her.

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the kind of wall I meant, Alex.” Then she looked me up and down for a long time, her eyes like gum-drops. “What in the name of Mary and Joseph are you wearing, Alex?”

  I looked down at my clothes. I’d forgotten to roll up my trousers.

  “A suit?”

  Auntie Bev laughed really loudly and she sounded like an owl. “We need to go shopping, don’t we?”

  Before I could answer she dragged me downstairs for some food but she wouldn’t let me chop the onions in case I cut myself.

  “But Granny taught me how,” I told her, and suddenly her smile slipped off her face and she looked out the window. It was starting to rain.

  “Was your Mum happier when Granny was around?” she asked very quietly.

  “I think so. Though Granny didn’t like my Dad so that made Mum sad.” At the thought of Granny, I felt my whole body stiffen though I wasn’t sure if it was just the cold. “I really miss Granny.”

  Auntie Bev reached down and squeezed my arm. “I miss her, too, Alex.”

  And when I looked back Auntie Bev’s face was all misty and our breaths hung in the cold air like smoke.

  6

  THE SILENT TOLL

  ANYA

  I sleep late and avoid my morning run. My leg, back, and neck muscles feel like I’ve been on a rack all night and when I look outside it’s raining. I make a conscious effort to compile my notes from yesterday and catch up on emails instead. I don’t return any of the phone calls from my worried friends, not even Fi, my best friend, who has called nineteen times since Poppy’s anniversary and left four messages ordering me to call her back. Instead, I hide behind the faceless deletability of email, cutting and pasting the same Hey, I’m fine, sorry I missed you message to each of the friends who knew Poppy. I will apologize and explain later. First, there is the problem of Alex. I shower quickly, then head to my office. Unpacking will have to wait.

  When I moved to Edinburgh to go to medical school, people always asked, What was it like growing up in Northern Ireland? with an occasional sense of awe, as if I was the first person to have done it. It was only when I’d left that it struck me how dangerous the mild but otherwise down-at-heel and volatile land of my birth appeared to others—like a treasured friend whose social graces often do her a disservice in the eyes of strangers.

  From a professional viewpoint, Northern Ireland’s social scars run deep, and not just through the psyches of those who experienced the violence firsthand. Although the politicians are celebrating what they call “peace,” those of us working behind the scenes are finding anything but. The history of violence here is usually measured in terms of its death count, but there is another silent, and more alarming, toll: One in five Northern Irish children will experience major mental health problems before their eighteenth birthday, with case studies flagging self-harm as a response to confrontation and shame for family involvement in violence. I empathize with Michael Jones for wishing to keep Cindy and Alex as a family unit, but I have not returned to my homeland to perpetuate a failing system. I am here to begin rebuilding lives.

  I pull up into the parking lot of MacNeice House at 8:59 AM. For some reason I half expect to see Michael’s battered Volvo parked in my space, his tense, brooding stare forcing me to sign off Alex’s report as A-okay, as if he’s passed an exam to qualify for a decent family life. If only it were that simple. I should have realized it sooner—Michael sees me as the enemy. He wants to keep me close so he can have a better chance at keeping Alex out of—Michael’s terms—the “nuthouse.” And I suppose it is in this respect that Michael and I share a common goal—despite myself, I have bonded with this child, sensed something very familiar about his predicament, something that lies close to the bone. And I feel I can help him—though it may not be in the way that Michael desires.

  Inside my office I flick the switch on the kettle and browse the few shelves of books I’ve finally managed to stack in my bookcases. My collection comprises psychiatric journals and textbooks, naturally, but also literature, drama, and religious texts—the truth about the human psyche doesn’t always reside in the factual and academic tomes. As I flick through a handful of yellowing books by C. S. Lewis and John Milton, I reflect on Alex’s claim that he can see demons. As far back as the first century the symptoms of mania and schizophrenia have been linked closely to superhuman manifestations and hallucinations. God, angels, superheroes, martyrs … they’ve all played across the stage of schizophrenia throughout the recorded delusions of the last two thousand years. Patients’ claiming to see demons is not entirely out of the ordinary, but Alex’s case strikes me as unusual. He claimed that a demon was his best friend. And he seemed to know about Poppy. At the very least, a ten-year-old with such powers of perception is extremely rare.

  The kettle trembles with heat. Poppy’s voice rattles in my head. It feels like a hole, Mum. A hole instead of a soul.

  The red switch clicks.

  I think of Cindy at the hospital, her tired, thin face filled with the weariness of a woman three times her age, how she had admitted that she did not feel good enough. I jot down some notes to the effect that Alex is struggling to understand his dark colors, and most likely those of his mother. I make another note to pursue aspects of shame and guilt in his character; why he feels both of these and how I might help him come to understand that they are natural elements of his being. How to deal with them when they cause him rage and potential self-harm, as well as the risk he may pose to others. Helping him understand why his mother turns to pills and razor blades every time a black cloud passes by will be much more difficult.

  I stare at my page of scribbles. On the open textbook beside me I circle a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, not because of any insight it offers me into Alex’s situation, but because it clouds me in an overwhelming sense of déjà vu:

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a
heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

  I tap my pen on the desk for a few moments, trying to remember where I came across this quote before, and why it should feel so familiar, and then it all comes back: I picked it up from a fellow student during the first year of my training at Queen’s University, when the questions surrounding Poppy’s behavior were pounding my brain, when I felt launched beyond the natural maternal impetus to make everything all right into a quest worthy of Super-Woman: to make Poppy’s hell a heaven. It never happened.

  That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, I remind myself. The hell that psychotics live with can be relocated, if not redecorated, so to speak. “Hell” is when no treatment is given—or the wrong sort of treatment—and when the mind is left to free fall into itself without proper intervention. My thoughts turn back to Alex. Michael wants me to write a report that will enable him to give Cindy and her son the kind of family support they should have been receiving for years—counseling, better housing, care assistance. But something nags at me. Poppy’s voice in my head morphs to Alex’s when he’s talking about Ruin: He’s the bad Alex.

  There has already been some speculation in Michael’s notes that Alex is bipolar, but I am not convinced. With a deep breath I write SCHIZOPHRENIA??? at the top of my notes. In many cases before, it has virtually been ruled out from the get-go because early-onset schizophrenia affects only one in ten thousand children under the age of twelve. Some psychotic disorders may be a result of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood. I need to find out more about the boy’s father and those other relatives who have played a part in his life. Has the mother had lovers, and how much have they been around Alex? Very often, mothers in Cindy’s position end up using their lovers as babysitters: Has this been the case here? Abuse will be my primary area of inquiry, although I need to explore the history of Cindy’s depression and its impact on Alex; a much harder thing to investigate.