Father of Lies

by Sarah England

  Suddenly the ceiling light dipped, rendering the room gloomy for just a second. Before plunging it into total darkness.

  Slow to react, Kristy stared helplessly as the door to the landing slammed shut at the same time, the breeze ruffling her hair. Downstairs, the sound of cutlery being clattered in the kitchen carried on, along with the soft hum of her friend’s television set. She tried to call out but no sound came. Attempted to move, to throw off the quilt and walk to the door, yet her limbs remained leaden weights. Dully, her heart thumped in her chest and nausea rose like a nut kernel to lodge in her throat. As, gradually, so insidiously as to become almost acceptable to the mind, a figure materialised in front of her: a small girl with a bloodless complexion and blue, doll-like eyes, in a white dress.

  “Be careful, Kristy,” said the tinkerbell voice. “You’re next.”

  ***

  Chapter 25

  Leeds. November 2013

  9 pm and it’s fucking freezing. Still, it’s work isn’t it? The first car to slow down is a people carrier, so the hypocrite’s got a family. Rolls of lard bulging over his waistband, stinking coffee breath and big open pores on his nose. Imagine the saggy, hairy arse on him! Puke! A disgusting old pig in an anorak. No wonder he’s got to pay for it. We’re the only women dirty old gits like him can get anywhere near. Anyway, he’s offering me twenty quid and I’ve done worse. Helps when your brain’s fucked with smack. Like, who gives a shit?

  “Get in,” he says, indicating the passenger side door.

  His eyes dart to my crotch the minute I sit down. Garlic, stale sweat and unwashed flab make me want to vomit. I’m trying not to gag - but it’s like I’m already on the way to getting my next hit. If I don’t I’ll die, it’s that simple. Two minutes and we’ll be parked down an alleyway and seconds later, trust me, it’ll all be over and I’ll get the smack.

  Only it isn’t seconds, is it? This is one of those nasty ones where he grabs the back of my hair and slams my face into his groin, calls me all the filthy whore names his pea brain can come up with and then does what he promised not to - comes into my mouth. All that disgusting, slimy scum. Only positive thing being on smack - you don’t feel much. It’s like it happens to someone else and that’s fine - in my case, it actually does.

  “There’s a good girl,” says he, zipping up and laughing as he pushes me out of the door.

  ***

  When I wake up the light’s changed to a kind of blue. The room is arctic cold, my breath steaming on the air. Through a gap in the curtains snowflakes billow round a streetlamp like fairy dust. It’s night time again then - God, where did the days go? And how many? Because my guts are cramping and my mouth’s dry.

  He’s silhouetted against the doorway.

  “Getting up this week or what, you lazy bitch? You look a right mess.”

  Charming as ever.

  “I need a hit.”

  “You need a fucking shower.”

  He’s right. There’s this woman in the mirror opposite, with hair that hangs like dirty curtains, bruises under her eyes, blood on her t-shirt. Blood? Did something happen I don’t know about?

  “We have to have a little chat, Ruby. Take the shower then we’ll talk. You can have real coffee if you tell me what I need to know.”

  Now Jes isn’t someone you can lie to. It’s a struggle to remember stuff sometimes, though, and if he doesn’t hear what he wants to hear you get a slap that’ll knock you across a room and into next week. You’ve got to think on your feet, like, all the time because he’ll smell a rat if you try to hide so much as a cigarette butt. He’s got Romanian and Ukrainian girls here now - bit of language problem - lots of screaming going on…

  So is it them or is it me? Screaming, I mean. Sometimes I don’t know. All I know is, looking at him sitting on the stained sofa peppered with burn marks a few minutes later, is this - I’m in deep shit.

  Think, Ruby, start thinking. Where was I?

  “And?” He pats the seat next to him. Bares his teeth with the gold fillings. “I’ll ask you one more time, Baby: what - the - fuck- do - you - know - about - the - guy - who - got - his - head - smashed - to - a - fucking - pulp?”

  I don’t know…

  His shark grin dies in an instant. Then he examines his fingernails, stroking the knuckle-duster rings he wears. Another second and the back of that hand will slash across the side of my face. “Don’t lie to me, Ruby. If we’ve got tracks to cover I need to know.”

  My brain sits like a lump of wet, grey concrete. Nothing. No memory. It can’t be me. I’d never do that - I work, get the smack, sleep it off. That’s it. God, I’m so cold, there’s a sweat rising on me. I’m going to be sick.

  “It was with a brick a few days ago. You were seen, Ruby. Katya saw you get in his car.”

  Lying bitch - just getting herself off the hook. There’s a nerve in his jaw starting to twitch. Seconds. Think!

  How the hell did this nasty bastard get into my life, anyway? The muscles in my face contract in painful concentration, trying to think through the fog - some distant memory of Jes from a long time ago…a swarthy gypsy face looking down at me through water, being dragged out of a river, slumped into wet dirt, his mouth clamped onto mine, a huge swell of pain in my chest…Where? Where, though? There’s rushing water and whispering voices in stone walls, and it’s so very cold…I just can’t…it’s like there’s a dream I can’t quite catch…

  “Ruby, wake up. Come on, wake up. Okay, I believe you - take this - hold out your arm.”

  As the syringe goes in, I’m shivering so badly my arm judders and his grip tightens round the tourniquet.

  “I don’t know ’owt about a bloke getting bashed, honest…” I’m saying, thinking, ‘fuck he’s good at getting the needle straight in - no skin pops from Jes - just an immediate highway to the stars’. Oh, oh, five, six seconds top and oh, oh God…like the best rush of warm, golden euphoria you could ever imagine. Exquisite bliss - heat filling my lungs, muscles melting into honey, arms wrapping me up safely like angels from heaven.

  Thing is, you sometimes get this magical high but then you spend the rest of your life trying to get it again, because trust me it’s like nothing on earth and once you’ve had it nothing else comes close. You crave and crave it, and if you do it right you almost get there again…And boy does he do it right.

  God, that’s good. So, so good…So safe, so sweet, so warm…

  It’s over though now - God, already - as fleeting as an orgasm - with a cold draft on my back to hasten the descent. Down and down and down… falling into the deepest water well, down and down to where it’s dark and wet and hard. Oh please, not so soon.…he should have given me more…I need more to stop the crazy dreams. But there’s a dead weight climbing onto my shoulders now, pressing me down to the floor, legs crumbling under the weight, eyelids closing.

  Numb. Anaesthetised. No more thoughts. No more memories.

  “Better?”

  I look up.

  He smiles. Dark eyes. Black as glittering coal.

  “Mmm.”

  “Back out tonight then, yeah?”

  I shrug. Stumble to the door. Maybe got an hour before I need to get another fix. Hope there are a few punters out there, even with snow on the ground.

  ***

  It’s slippy underfoot. And sleeting sideways. Passing traffic sprays the pavements with dirty slush and people are rushing to cars with coats over their heads, groups of girls laughing and shrieking. Music pulses out from bars and oblongs of buttery light spread out across the pavement. That’s a world that isn’t mine.

  People don’t really see me - I am what I am - because once you’ve crossed the invisible line into a darker world then everything in that other world ceases to matter. So my coat’s open to show what I’m wearing - stockings and a black pvc mini dress. Drifting down Chapeltown in a daze. Just need to be picked out in headlights, called over, climb in and do what I have to do.

  A gang of lads stagger past on a
pub crawl.

  “Whoa - a prossie. What you charging, luv?”

  “She’d have to pay me - look at t’ state on ‘er…”

  A lucid moment. Looking sideways at my reflection in the window of a kebab shop, a cadaverous, sickly old woman stares back at me - a horror movie of mottled skin whiter than death, pockets of darkness under hollowed-out eye sockets, blood-red lipstick like an open gash. A woman of the night. Laughter snorts into the freezing air. A woman of the night…a vampire lady working the twilight zone…

  Who’s that? ’cos it ain’t me!

  “Fuck me!” someone says. “Fucking, fucking hell.”

  Doing a double take, there’s another woman in the street staring at my reflection with her mouth open. A snapshot - that’s me only years ago! Look at what you could’ve had… Next to me she’s got colour to her hair and light in her neatly made up eyes, which are painted with liner and mascara. I look her up and down - taking in the sensible court shoes and dark wool coat, pink scarf, shoulder bag tucked tightly under her arm. Same height. Same features. Different world. What is she, then? Some kind of fucking social services bitch? Only, hang about - a foul mouthed one. How funny! She’s just seen her doppelganger! Poor cow - imagine seeing what you’d look like if you were a drug-addled hooker! You’d curse like a navvy, an’ all.

  I stare back at her reflection. “Got a problem, love?”

  “Ruby, I’m Marie!”

  “And?”

  Her hands fly up to her cheeks. Tears in her eyes. “I’ve been looking for you for ten years.”

  I laugh. “How do you know it’s me? Even I don’t know that.”

  Her reflection turns to stare at me. “Look at me, Ruby.”

  Ruby…

  Something stirs.

  A fragment. Whispers under the bedclothes.

  “Marie?”

  “Yes. Your sister, remember? Oh please say you know me! Ruby, listen to me - there are things you have to know. Do you remember Alice? Tell me you remember her! Please, please!”

  I shake my head. “Gotta go to work.” In the background there’s a car slowing down and I whirl around. A punter. Twenty quid is life or death. It’s like I got the worst kind of flu and it’ll get worse and worse if I don’t score soon. Stomach twisting already. Badly want to crash. I walk towards the kerb.

  “No, wait!”

  “Get off me, you mad bitch.”

  She holds on, though, fingers digging into my arm, her tone urgent and hard. “No, I’m not letting you slip away - Ruby you had a daughter when you were fifteen. Baby Alice. Shortly after the birth you left home, and I was told you’d taken her with you. I’ve been trying to find you both all this time. I’ve moved heaven and earth but…”

  My heart lurches into my chest. “A kid? What the fuck’s going on?”

  “ You got pregnant at fourteen. I remember you going into labour. But when I came home from school you’d both gone….”

  “Fuck off lady - you’re messing with my head.”

  “It’s all true. I searched everywhere but Mum and Dad said you’d upped and left, and if I spoke about it to anyone official I’d be whipped to hide. I asked Nana Cora and she said it was your choice - you’d gone for a better life. I believed it for a while. I was thirteen. But later I knew they’d lied.”

  Nana Cora!

  The pavement is rising up to meet me then panning away again.

  The punter leans out of his window. “You working or not?”

  I turn back to him, just as this woman, Marie’s, words cut into a rare moment of lucidity, “Ruby, there are no records for your existence! Police can’t search for you because you don’t exist and neither does your baby. Ruby, I think he’s doing to Alice what he did to you.”

  I spin round. Look into her eyes. My eyes. The palest blue.

  He.

  I’ve never been so sick in all my life, and that’s coming from someone who‘s been cold turkey more times than a Christmas leftover. Sick until my stomach burns in acid. Until someone, something else, takes over, and I can float away…

  ***

  Chapter 26

  Present Day December 2015. Laurel Lawns Private Medical Home.

  The others in here were bonkers. From those who paced across their rooms a thousand times, occasionally raging at the television with shaking fists, to the ones who tracked and ate spiders found in the skirting boards…

  Jack rocked back and forth in his chair by the window, idly observing the reflection of fairy lights in the snow. Barking lunatics, all of them. What a strange mystery madness was when you really thought about it - not so much those with delusions and hallucinations such as in schizophrenia - which had a chance of being understood and treated - it was more the lost souls who hadn’t a clue who they were - living out a human life in the shell of a body, which withered, festered and dried up before its time. Take Bertha down the hall, whose stomach protruded like there was an alien three stone baby in there waiting to pop out these last twenty years. She’d once eaten a snake, was the explanation. And that snake needed feeding.

  Maybe their souls were living a perfectly normal life in another galaxy - after all, quantum physics suggested there were at least eleven parallel universes - but the body had been accidentally assigned to this one. Imagine the confusion! Did they have a body in the other universe? Or was this a duplicate? Maybe mad - truly mad - people were here to help everyone else appreciate their own sanity, or to induce compassion? God didn’t cock up, did he? So there had to be a reason. Or…and here was a thought - because these souls were such easy meat for vengeful spirits when they’d no driver in the seat of consciousness - maybe they were possessed by evil spirits? And that was a good one - nicely played Satan - because there was not a chance in hell of a medic, even in their wildest nightmares, blaming a demon.

  Frankly, once you’d been incarcerated, your only protectors were doctors, who in turn, had little in their armoury save a handful of drugs to sedate, lift depression or alleviate the symptoms of psychosis. That was it. And even that came at a price. Those anti-psychotics, the older ones for sure, made the poor sods look mad if they didn’t before - gripped as they were by violent, uncontrollable twitches and tongue flicking. At least they had a chance though. The truly mad had nothing. And the possessed were fucked.

  A chuckle (his own?) resonated around the room. Once a nice room with pale blue curtains, a television set, and a shelf stacked with books and films to watch. Now as barren as a padded cell. He’d been in that a few times too. Foaming at the mouth, kicking and biting, wondering why his body was convulsing and vile filth was spewing out of his mouth. They’d left him there for days. First strapped into a straight jacket and later restrained with padded cuffs to an iron bed. Dry food sat in his stomach like lumps of acid to be vomited straight back. Water ran through his body and seeped down his legs. Every muscle ached, his eyes blood sore.

  He wouldn’t be going back there. Had a word with the demons inside. It paid to be polite to the medics - to smile and agree with perfect, intelligent logic. That’s what got you out and kept you out. The padded cell, with the accompanying rage to his heart, would kill him before he’d exercised maximum destruction, he’d explained to the demons inside. The Kingdom.. Hissing, sighing, they’d retreated for a while…but not for long.

  You’re not getting out, Jacky boy. That’s not the point. We’re in the last stages, you know that!

  Damn voices. Why had he told the medics he heard them? Olanzapine would have done a fine job if he’d actually got fucking schizophrenia. Instead all it did was make him pile on weight and go to sleep a lot. What a joke. How come every single psychiatrist in here was a fucking atheist, anyway? Not one thought of a priest. There are loads of us in here sucking up demons - we need an exorcism not a fucking anti-psychotic! Mind you - he would have done the same. No way would he have thought about demons and priests. Fair cop.

  A wave of depression washed over him.

  No way out.

&n
bsp; That’s right, Jack. Biggest trick the Prince of Darkness ever pulled …to convince the world he doesn’t exist!

  They’d assigned him to his old mucker, Isaac Hardy, on account of how he’d attacked his pregnant wife in the ambulance. So now he was a forensic patient dosed up on the full drawer of sedatives and anti-psychotics. All of which made it so much easier for the demon to hop into the driver’s seat and have a high old time before writing him off as a car wreck.

  Reasons to be fearful, part 1: take an agitated, well-to-do schizophrenic in relapse. A young man who had high hopes but now doesn’t. Have a little chat about his particular brand of paranoia - someone on the television with a special message from The Kremlin, perhaps? And watch, from the recesses of your mind, as he breathes in your toxin. Swallowed and absorbed. Observe helplessly the change in the young face, as his pupils flicker lilac, the neck swells, and pulse points bulge…oh what strange hell to come…night descending then as lunatics, ever alert to the supernatural, wail from within their four walls, curling into balls, whimpering and calling out. Trapped souls. Watching black shapes lift out of a pile of clothes before crawling across the floor towards them. No one believing their stories next day - how a reading desk scooted across the floorboards in the blink of an eye, how their locked door flew open and they found themselves lying rigid and freezing in the corridor outside; or, worst of all, the choir of voices chanting the bible backwards incessantly through the night.

  Yes, we understand - here’s a bit more risperidone and something to help you sleep a bit better.

  There had been four suicides since he’d arrived. All young. All temporarily out of touch with reality, left here in a salubrious private mental health facility to be rebalanced and returned to normality. Alas they never did. Three others had gone home to their middle-class, professional backgrounds where maximum damage could occur. With no one suspecting the quietly spoken doctor. His rages, sometimes heard from behind closed doors, were nothing to do with their son’s increasing paranoia or their daughter’s upturn in violent self harm. There was no connection. .All he ever did was listen, offer sensible counsel, and teach them chess.