The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel Read online

  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 programmes I’d missed and counting them off on my fingers.

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

  ‘Woof’s OK,’ 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 very soothing and kind. ‘I’m a consultant 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 him 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 MacNiece 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.’

  Mum scowled. ‘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, too. 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.

  ‘You sister Bev is here,’ Anya said softly. ‘She came up from Cork to take care of Alex. Part of the arrangement, if Alex was to stay at MacNeice House, was that Bev would look after him at weekends …’

  Mum widened her eyes. ‘Bev is here?’

  Anya nodded.

  Mum lifted a hand to her face and started to cry. ‘I really 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 have a chat.’

  There was something about the way Anya said ‘have a chat’ 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. 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 went 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 that 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 the class in English. He hasn’t got any of that from me, I can tell you. He’s so clever.’ 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 colour 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 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 didn’t look up at him.

  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 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 torch down people’s ears and mouths. She wears a small gold cross on a chain around her neck though she’s not Catholic any more, 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 worked 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 ground.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, though I still had no idea why she’d done that. Then she laughed and jumped down and the 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 that long since I lived here that 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 gobstoppers. ‘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. ‘Dearie me, 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 shrugged. ‘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 hand. ‘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 from primary school, who has called nineteen times since Poppy’s anniversary and left four messages ordering me to ring 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 apologise and explain later. First, there is the issue 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 this mild but otherwise down-at-heel and volatile land of my birth appeared to others – like a treasured friend whose social graces often do them 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 first-hand. 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 empathise with Michael for wishing to keep Alex and Cindy 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 car park of MacNeice House at 8.59 a.m. 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-OK, as if he’s passed an exam to qualify for a decent family life. If only it were that simple. I should have realised it sooner – Michael perceives me as the enemy. He wants 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 leaf through a handful of old, yellow-paged 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 are 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 maybe 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 colours, 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 the pills and razor blades every time a black cloud passes 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. It was a gift from a fellow student during the first year of my psychiatric training, when the questions surrounding Poppy’s behaviour were pounding my brain, when I felt launched beyond the natural maternal impetus to make everything all right into a quest worthy of Superwoman: 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 – and when the mind is left to plummet into itself without proper intervention. My thoughts turn back to Alex. Michael wishes 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 – counselling, better housing, care assistance. But something nags at me. Poppy’s voice in my head morphs to Alex’s when 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 as, in many cases, it has virtually been ruled out from the get-go on account of early onset schizophrenia affecting one in ten-hundred-thousand children under the age of twelve years old. Some psychotic disorders may be a result of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood. I will ask after the boy’s father and other relatives who have played a part in his life so far. 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? Abuse will be my primary area of enquiry, although I need to explore the history of Cindy’s depression and its impact on Alex: a much harder thing to investigate.

  First, I contact Alex’s school and leave a message with the secretary to speak with Alex’s teacher, Karen Holland. Then I Google the name of the theatre company that Alex belongs to – Really Talented Kids Theatre Company NI – and discover a sophisticated website with a photograph of several dozen children grouped on a stage, Alex’s smiling face among them. A cluster of logos for high-profile businesses in the region feature under the banner ‘Our Sponsors’, beside which is an attractive woman with sharp cheekbones, a melon-slice white smile and a wild nest of backcombed red hair. I recognise her as Jojo Kennings, an actress in a TV series I much admire. Like me, Jojo is originally from Belfast, and has returned after twenty years in London to boost regional participation in the arts, enlisting the help of her celebrity friends such as Kenneth Branagh to mentor the kids in the theatre company. I am impressed by her passion, and feel a sense of hope that Alex is involved in the project. I type a message into the ‘contact’ box on the website, delete it, and rewrite one that sounds less formal.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Date: 08/5/07 09.21 a.m.

  Dear Jojo (if I may),

  I’m writing to ask if I might have a brief chat with you about one of the children involved in your production of Hamlet in Belfast next month, Alex Broccoli. I’m a consultant with the CAMHS team at MacNeice House and am assessing Alex in the light of some recent changes at home. I’d be keen to find out more about his involvement in the play, and the performance in general. Might there be a suitable time to meet?