The Killer Inside

by cass green

  Michael was always nagging her to look after herself properly, but it was difficult, when she was on her own.

  She hoped he was alright, whatever he was doing.

  What was he doing?

  He pretended that he was happy, but she knew he wasn’t, not really. How could they be happy, after what had happened, any of them?

  Abandoning all thoughts of tea now, Irene went into the sitting room and picked up the photograph that sat on the mantelpiece. Liam, aged eight, all gappy teeth and sparkling eyes. He was always such a beautiful child. When he was a toddler, people used to stop her to comment on his auburn hair and those big, light brown eyes. Once, when she was up in London for the day visiting her mother, a man in the street gave her a card and said he was from a modelling agency that represented children. Modelling!

  Irene had been dying to tell Colin about it when she got home, but he hadn’t been excited at all. He said that Liam already ruled the roost and it wouldn’t do him any favours to make him a bighead. She never called the modelling man.

  It was a shameful thing she kept locked away inside; the fact that Liam had always been that tiny bit easier to love than his older brother.

  Michael was always sick; always complaining about something or another.

  And as an adult, he had all his weird theories about things; that there was a secret group of powerful people who controlled everything we did, that the state was constantly monitoring us. Irene couldn’t really keep up and just humoured him when he went into one of his rants.

  Liam, though, seemed to have sprung from her womb raring to go at life. He sparkled with some sort of vitality that pulled you in.

  He could have been anything, really. She gazed at the picture in her hands. He was still so open then, at primary school. Later, his smile became uncertain and wary. That was when things started to go wrong for him, at secondary school. He was always drawn to the bad lads, the cheeky ones at first, then worse. Something about extreme behaviour in others seemed to draw him like an insect to a lit window, and just like that insect, he would destroy himself, bashing against the glass.

  For a minute she allowed herself a fantasy.

  Liam was working in some sort of well-paid job in an office. He had a nice car and liked to go on holidays to hot places, where he bought her daft souvenirs. He hadn’t settled down yet, but was getting serious about the latest girlfriend, a nice girl he’d met at work. Michael’s marriage was still going strong and he hadn’t lost his job. Maybe he’d had a promotion and they would celebrate with Prosecco. Everyone was always going on about Prosecco and Irene hadn’t ever tried it. For a moment the fantasy was so real and delicious she could almost hear the sounds of them all around her.

  Irene leaned forwards and covered her face with her hands.

  It killed Colin. That was for sure. Even though they had their differences – God knows they did – Colin still loved his son. For a time after they got that postcard, their last contact with him, Colin had raged about the ‘lack of consideration’ and the ‘utter thoughtlessness for anyone else’. But when it was evident that Liam really wasn’t coming back, even when Colin was sick … well, it did for him.

  All the postcard said was, ‘I have to go away. I’m sorry. Don’t look for me. Lx’.

  His passport was missing. He’d been talking for ages about how he wanted to ‘get away’. Ever since he was a little boy, really.

  And now it was just her and Michael left.

  She went back into the kitchen to check her mobile again.

  Where are you, Michael?

  ELLIOTT

  Gloomy at the prospect of going back to work after the weekend, I’d stayed up too late the night before watching a trashy horror film and drinking a few beers.

  In the morning, I was feeling scratchy and tired and not at all like a man who’d just had six weeks off.

  I found myself thinking about Mum again, which immediately led me down an unwelcome rabbit hole.

  Nowadays I would probably be called a child carer or something, but it didn’t really seem like that at the time. I just had to do a bit more on occasion than most kids my age.

  Mum had rheumatoid arthritis that used to flare up quite often, leaving her skin grey and her eyes deadened as she crab-walked gingerly around our small flat. She had strong drugs that were supposed to help but she said they made her sick, so she had periods of not taking them. Her weight had always been a problem and I can’t exactly say we had the best diet, so she was what you’d call clinically obese.

  We lived in a ground-floor flat that was a stone’s throw from Holloway Road.

  ‘Like the prison?’ Anya said once, eyes wide.

  Like the prison. Our estate was one of those blocks of flats built in the 1930s.

  Morningside House was a big rectangle of brown and white buildings with a scummy grass area in the middle. The ‘No ball games’ signs were ignored but so much of the grass was covered in dog shit that it wasn’t exactly a draw anyway. I mostly played football in the playground after school.

  There were benefits to living on the ground floor here, in that you never had to use the pissy-smelling stairs. The lifts never worked. But there was much more chance of being broken into, not that we had anything worth stealing. Mum had her bag taken right off our kitchen table when we were in the other room, eating our favourite meal (Findus Crispy Pancakes and oven chips) and watching EastEnders. We never even heard the door being jemmied open.

  But that was lucky, for where we lived. There weren’t quite as many stabbings as you hear about now, but there were still a number, plus the odd shooting. More than anything, though, people opted for the good old-fashioned methods; knuckle, boot, and skull. Maybe the odd car jack or iron bar.

  On one side of us was a family with three sons who seemed to spend the better part of the day beating seven shades of shit out of each other. Every now and then you’d hear the mum, Marie, shouting that she would ‘burn down the fucking house one day, with youse-all in it’. It sometimes seemed quite a reasonable idea.

  Brendan was the father, a hairy-faced bull of a man whose glower alone could send me scuttling into the house if I happened to come across him outside the flats. The three sons – Frank, Kieran, and Bobby – were all a little older than me but the youngest, Bobby, had enough of a sphere of influence at school for me to avoid ever passing on stuff I saw or heard from their household. Like the time I saw Marie kick him up the backside at the front door because he couldn’t open it fast enough. All it took was one look from him, anger and humiliation glittering hard in his eyes, for me to know to keep my mouth shut.

  When Mum’s pain got too bad, she would sometimes go to bed and not get up for a day or two. She took Valium – had been on it for years – from the days when GPs thought nothing of prescribing it for every period of stress or mild sleeplessness. She wasn’t a huge drinker but she knew that if she combined it with alcohol then it would knock her out. That was all she wanted. I don’t think she even liked the taste of alcohol very much.

  My neighbour on the other side was an elderly Scottish woman called Mrs McAllister, known as Mrs Mack. She had neat, grey curls and bright eyes behind thick glasses. Her mouth seemed to transmit disapproval without the need for words.

  There had always been a polite distance between her and Mum. Mum said she thought Mrs Mack disapproved of us, once speculating it was because of Mum’s brown skin. Or maybe it was because she knew about my father. When she said that it gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Like there was a thread that tied me to him, still. That I was somehow the same as him.

  The whole thing with Mrs Mack started on one of those days when Mum had taken to bed. I came in from school and could tell straight away that she was home, but that something was wrong. There was a stillness, a kind of hesitation in the atmosphere, like the house was waiting for me.

  Her bedroom door was closed. I popped my head in and could see the mound of her in the bed, smell the sweetish smell of her b
edroom, a mix of smoke, the air freshener on the side, and a uric tang from the damp patch on the ceiling.

  Afternoon light was bleeding through the thin orange curtains, highlighting crumpled tissues on the floor next to the bed and an empty can of beer.

  This was the sort of detail Anya would never have been able to understand. A gulf of distance so large would open up between her and what she thought my mum was, that I wouldn’t be able to face trying to explain. So, there was only so much I told her about it.

  As for the other stuff …

  If I could just keep her away from the darkness, you see, and in the light where she belonged, maybe we really had a chance long term. Maybe I would stop feeling that she was an incredible gift I only had on loan.

  That day I had been desperate to speak to Mum after school. We’d been given a letter in History about a trip to the Imperial War Museum and it was going to cost parents ten pounds. Museums weren’t free then, so I’d never been, and being a bit obsessed with old war movies, had always wanted to go and see all the tanks and guns. Mum was on benefits and I knew that ten pounds was a lot, but it seemed reasonable to me that we could spare this when it was for school. Especially if Mum could afford a can of Stella when it suited her.

  I wandered into the living room and booted a cushion covered in a greasy sort of green taffeta across the room with as much savagery as I could muster. It knocked down a dusty cactus that sat in a knitted pot-cover on the table by Mum’s chair. I glared at it for a moment, then prowled into the kitchen.

  Rooting in the fridge, I saw Mum hadn’t got to the shops like she’d said she would. I knew that I’d be trying to find enough change in her purse for some chips again. I was always starving then, right in the middle of a pre-pubescent growth spurt. My knees were like knots in pieces of string, my elongated thigh muscles giving me almost constant pain. I found the crust of a loaf, and slathered on the last of the peanut butter, before folding the whole thing into my mouth at once. It was never enough. Hunger felt like something living inside me, a growling beast that nagged and heckled.

  I wandered out to the front of the flats, not knowing what I wanted to do, but feeling like the whole place was wrapping itself round me and squeezing air from my lungs.

  Mrs Mack had a series of little pots outside her house, along with a ceramic toadstool and a Smurf holding a fishing rod. I looked down at it, with its annoying blue face, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d slammed my toe into it so hard it went clattering down the length of the path running in front of the houses. My toe hurt through my trainer and, before I could run off, her front door was open, and she was peering out at me.

  ‘What was that?’ she said. I stared back at her, too numb to speak.

  She regarded me through her horn-rimmed glasses like I was a specimen in a jar and said, ‘What are you doing, lurking out there anyway?’

  ‘Not lurking,’ I managed to grunt. Then, ‘Going to get chips.’ I didn’t know why I added that. It was the first thing that came into my head. I didn’t even have the money for any chips.

  She looked at me for a few moments more. ‘I’ve made a cottage pie,’ she said. ‘Do you like cottage pie?’

  I shrugged. It wasn’t so much confusion about my feelings on cottage pie (I was hazy on exactly what it was). Guilt at what I’d done, coupled with the horror that she would notice it any second, was stoppering my throat like a wad of cotton wool. My cheeks throbbed with heat and I stared down at my shuffling feet, willing time to move on so I was anywhere but here.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, opening the door up wider. ‘You’re like a string bean. You need something better than chips inside you.’

  I hesitated for a moment, calculating how I might be able to hide the evidence of my Smurf-destruction, and reasoned it would be easier to keep her distracted for a while.

  I went into her hallway and the smell of cooking meat immediately flooded my mouth with longing. I had to swallow to stop myself drooling like a dog.

  It turned out that I liked cottage pie very much indeed, along with pudding thrillingly steamed in a tin and served with thick custard for afters. I liked the biscuit tin with the picture of the Scottish Highlands on the cover (I only knew that because she told me) and I liked the proper Ribena, gloopy and sweet, that she had instead of Value blackcurrant squash we sometimes had.

  I don’t know why that day was different to the others.

  But she should never have invited me in.

  IRENE

  Irene’s hands trembled as she checked inside her handbag for her purse. It would involve a bus ride to get to Michael’s flat and she got anxious about travelling anywhere on her own lately. But she needed to know what was going on.

  She thought about ringing Linda. She still had her number.

  The shameful truth was that she was a little frightened of Linda, with her screechy laugh and her sharp tongue. No wonder she and Michael hadn’t lasted, although Irene wasn’t naïve enough to think that her eldest son had been blameless in the marriage.

  It was drizzly outside, and Irene felt a strong desire to turn straight back as she began to walk down the street. Everything felt so loud after being on her own for the last couple of weeks – roaring traffic and the jarring sound of human voices.

  When the boys were little, and scared about something, she used to say to them, ‘Just put one foot in front of the other,’ and that’s what she did now, making her way to the bus stop and joining a small queue of people there. A young woman with a pram was jiggling it backwards and forwards in an attempt to distract a baby that was emitting hiccupy sounds of misery. The woman’s eyes had lilac smudges beneath them and her long red hair was greasy at the roots. Irene gave her a sympathetic smile and the woman looked surprised for a moment, almost as though she felt caught out in her thoughts, then she rewarded Irene with a returned smile.

  ‘How old?’ Irene said, peering into the pram and seeing a baby so tiny it still bore the wrinkled, shocked look of the newly hatched.

  ‘Three weeks,’ said the woman quietly. Irene looked up to see her eyes were now brimming with tears.

  She patted the hand that was holding the handle of the pram and said, ‘It will get so much easier. I promise you that, sweetheart,’ and the woman nodded her thanks and lowered her eyes.

  Climbing onto the bus, Irene felt a stab of guilt at what she had said. If only sleepless nights were the hardest bit of parenting. She hadn’t expected to be worrying herself sick in the wee small hours about her children when it had been thirty-four years since she had given birth.

  When, twenty minutes later, she arrived at the street where Michael was renting the attic room, she looked up and down for his car. But there was no sign of it.

  That didn’t mean anything in itself, she told herself, as she got to the terraced house where he lived. He might just be out.

  Her stomach turned over as she pictured him lying on an unmade bed with an empty bottle of pills next to him. It would be so unlike him to do something like that though, wouldn’t it? He had never been the one to take drugs. Not after his brother.

  But life hadn’t been especially kind to him lately. Breaking up with Linda had really cut him up, however much he’d claimed he was ‘better off without her’.

  Irene was glad they didn’t have any children of their own, even though she would have loved grandchildren. It would have made the break-up even harder on everyone.

  Gathering herself, Irene went to the front door and located the buzzer for the top flat. There was no name, just ‘Top flat’. It wasn’t the sort of place anyone would put down roots. When Michael got made redundant from the print company he’d worked with for many years, he’d been given a small pay-out, which was keeping him afloat. When she’d asked him about getting a new job, he told his mother he was ‘assessing his options’. He was forty, but that wasn’t very old these days, was it? Forty felt like nothing much now, not to Irene, anyway.

  There was no reply from the top fla
t. Irene pressed the buzzer again and then got a shock as the front door was suddenly flung open. A young black man with a woolly hat and a beard, a cigarette halfway to his mouth, seemed as surprised to see her and for a moment they both stared at each other.

  ‘You going in?’ he said after a moment and Irene blurted out, ‘Do you know Michael? He lives in the top flat?’

  The man scrunched his brow for a minute then recognition dawned. ‘That fat ginger bloke?’

  Irene bristled, but forced herself to remain polite.

  ‘He’s my son,’ she said. It was answer enough for the other man who avoided her direct gaze then and said, ‘Not for a while. Ask Rowan on the second floor. She usually knows what’s going on.’

  Irene thanked him stiffly and, as he bounded down the steps behind her with an air of gratitude to be getting away, she came into the cramped hallway. There were two bicycles to one side, and on the other an ornate and old-fashioned wooden sideboard with a speckled mirror. It was covered in a sea of post and fast-food flyers and, looking around awkwardly, Irene began to rifle through, separating the letters from the flyers.

  She quickly found one, then two letters addressed to Michael, but on closer inspection, they looked like junk mail. She put them back.

  The steps were steep, and covered with a treacherously rucked carpet, so she climbed slowly but was still a little out of breath when she got to the top floor. She took a moment to collect herself, then rapped on the door to Michael’s flat. She waited, then did it again, but there was no response.

  ‘Michael? Love?’ she called out, hating how quivery she sounded. Nothing happened.

  Reluctantly, she walked back down the stairs and found herself hesitating on the second floor.

  She felt silly knocking on doors and speaking to strangers about her business, but, in for a penny, in for a pound, she guessed.

  Some very strange sounds were emanating from inside the flat there. It sounded like someone was giving birth, having an argument and playing the drums at the same time.