Open Your Eyes

by Paula Daly

  ‘Mrs Campbell!’ she exclaimed when she saw me. ‘How absolutely wonderful to meet you. You have a beautiful home here. And your children – Leon has been showing me their photographs. Well, they’re just little poppets. What a lucky lady you are.’

  I stepped forward. ‘Call me Jane.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘I’m Miriam Price. We’ve had a very fruitful morning.’

  Leon was nodding along with her enthusiastically.

  ‘When I saw the note on the front door,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t sure if this meeting had actually gone ahead.’

  Miriam Price batted my words away with her hand. ‘Oh, we soon got past that. Didn’t we, Leon?’

  I glanced at Leon. He was looking at his feet.

  ‘I think he was worried I was here to interfere,’ she said. ‘But once we’d had a nice little chat through the letterbox it was all sorted out … Leon says you’re a creative writing teacher? That sounds like such a lovely job.’

  Ryan Toonen’s lascivious smile flashed into my head. I felt his hand around my throat, the smell of his breath inside my nose. ‘It has its moments.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to write a book,’ she went on. ‘The stories I could tell! Honestly, you wouldn’t believe. It’d be a bestseller.’

  I looked at Leon. In the past he would have groaned audibly at this statement. ‘Everyone thinks they have a book in them,’ he used to say, ‘and that’s exactly where it should stay.’ But he was smiling at Miriam encouragingly, as if he could think of nothing better than to read her life story retold as fiction.

  ‘Not that there’d be a lot of sex in my book,’ Miriam confided. ‘And that’s the one thing you need for a bestseller, isn’t it? Sex sells, as they say.’

  ‘Sex doesn’t sell,’ Leon cut in unexpectedly. ‘World War Two sells.’

  ‘Really, Leon?’ she said, quite astonished. ‘Never would have thought that.’

  ‘Readers can never get enough of Hitler,’ he added, and I wondered where on earth he’d plucked that information from (though it was true).

  ‘Hmm,’ Miriam Price replied. ‘I suppose he was a rather excellent villain. Anyway, enough about him. We’re here to talk about you, Leon.’

  She was exactly as I’d pictured her: a soft-fleshed woman, no sharp edges. There was a hint of Zoflora about her person and I could imagine her happily using it to disinfect her surfaces as that’s what her mother, and her mother before her, had done. She had high colour in her cheeks and, taking in the whole package, I thought she was rather a good foil. No wonder Leon had let her in. She wasn’t the type to get your back up. She was the grandmother you missed being hugged by, the dinner lady who gave you extra custard. ‘What’s your professional opinion?’ I enquired, with regards to Leon.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know what her profession actually was. Was she a clinical psychologist? A community psychiatric nurse? To be honest, I was past caring what people’s official roles were. After months of dealing with health professionals their titles and job descriptions had become meaningless to me. Can you help? was all I wanted to know. And something about this woman told me that she could.

  ‘I’m going to recommend that Leon—’

  Her phone began to ring.

  ‘Excuse me a moment.’ She raised her eyes skyward in a gesture of never a minute’s peace as she put the phone to her ear. ‘No, I’m still at work. You know you’re not supposed to ring me until after three … No, it’s not after three … I don’t know, you’ll just have to ask them yourself … Well, I can’t do everything … I thought you valued your independence.’ Then she sighed out wearily. ‘No,’ she said, seemingly beaten, ‘I’ve told you I won’t put you in a home … We’ve been through this how many times? I won’t put you in a home.’ I sneaked a look at Leon to see if her care home reference pushed his buttons about Magellan House all over again, but he remained passive. ‘Call you later,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t forget.’

  She closed her eyes for an extended moment as if trying to regain her equilibrium. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘Leon,’ I said. ‘You were going to recommend …’

  ‘Ah, yes. Sorry about that. My mother over in Old Swan can’t seem to get her head around the fact that I’m not at her beck and call twenty-four hours a day. I’m off to Goa next week, but I daren’t tell her till I’m actually on the plane, or she’ll be struck down with something life-threatening. Or else throw herself down the stairs – she’s done that twice … Anyway, Leon …’ and she glanced sideways to where Leon was standing before smiling at me conspiratorially, as if she had something up her sleeve. ‘I’ve gone through the assessment process fully and I’ll be honest with you, Mrs Campbell, Leon is not someone we can provide carers for at this time.’

  My face must have dropped to the floor because she reached out and placed her hand on my upper arm reassuringly. She gave it a small squeeze.

  ‘But you saw the state of the attic?’ I said. ‘You saw our bedroom ceiling? Leon put his foot right through that. And when he gets mad I just don’t know if he’s—’

  ‘If it was only up to me then of course I would authorize some supervision for Leon. It would make all your lives easier, anyone can see that. But sadly, right now, we have far more needy cases than Leon, and we always have the problem of a limited pot of money.’

  ‘You know he physically attacked a friend of ours too?’ I said, arguing the point. ‘Frankie was looking after him and he had to lock himself in the bathroom because Leon was so violent. And you know Leon wandered off and I didn’t know where he’d got to?’ My voice was shrill-sounding and desperate. ‘I know none of this sounds particularly life-threatening, but I’m alone here. With a job. And two small children. I’m not sure I can cope with the unpredictability of it all.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could either, but when I discussed the problem with Leon, told him that you were finding the situation untenable, he came up with rather a good suggestion.’

  I turned to Leon. He was looking at his feet again.

  ‘He mentioned a nephew,’ she said. ‘Edwin?’

  I paused.

  ‘Eden?’ I said. ‘You mean Eden? What can Eden do?’

  ‘Leon says that when he chatted to him recently, Eden mentioned he wasn’t doing very much right now.’

  This was true. Eden had failed his GCSEs. Everything apart from art and product design, so he was scheduled to retake maths and English in January. Leon and Eden had been Skyping every few days and their conversations seemed to perk Leon up considerably.

  Miriam Price said, ‘He could hang around here not doing very much – I believe teenagers are rather good at that – but he would be keeping an eye on Leon for you at the same time. Stop him wandering off and so forth.’

  ‘Leon suggested this?’

  ‘He did.’

  I glanced at Leon. He still had his eyes glued to the floor. He looked like a child in the headmaster’s office waiting to hear the outcome of his misdemeanour.

  ‘And he promised,’ Miriam Price said, raising her voice now so that Leon was included in the conversation, ‘he promised that if we could arrange this, then he would behave himself properly this time. Didn’t you, Leon?’

  Leon lifted his head and nodded vigorously.

  ‘You won’t let me down now, will you, Leon?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because I’m counting on you. It’s going to require some sorting out and we don’t all want to waste our time, do we?’

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ Leon said.

  Miriam Price turned back to me and winked. Her behaviour was completely improper, treating Leon as a child in this way. She was probably breaching all sorts of rules of professional conduct.

  But Leon was behaving like a lamb and I could have kissed her for it.

  ‘Eden,’ I said to myself.

  ‘Leon says he likes the lad’s company,’ she said. ‘Says he finds him soothing and he feels less frustrated when
he’s around.’

  She smiled at me encouragingly.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ she said, waiting for my response. ‘Do you think it’s a goer or not?’

  26

  It was decided Eden would arrive the following week. Juliana was happy with the proposal as she didn’t like the idea of Eden lying around the house all day doing nothing, and Eden told me he was eager to escape, as relations between Juliana and Meredith were, as he put it: ‘Proper frosty at the minute, Auntie Jane.’ He would sleep on the sofa bed in the attic as Leon was still in the spare room.

  In the meantime, I had a further four days alone with Leon during which I tried to keep him calm and away from the subject of his attack. It wasn’t easy, and I was still holding out hope that Inspector Ledecky would magically appear armed with news that she’d made an arrest after searching through Leon’s computer and our financial records. Mercifully, Leon was at his best when the children were around, but when they weren’t, he remained volatile, and I was counting down the hours until I had Eden here, who I hoped would occupy Leon, and stop him ruminating on the brochure for Magellan House – which he kept brandishing at me as proof that I’d wanted rid of him.

  He carried the brochure around in the pocket of his jogging bottoms all the time and I was certain that if I could just get the bloody thing off him, then he’d quit with his accusations, and he would be a lot more settled. But he wouldn’t part with it. I’d even sneaked into his room when he was asleep and emptied his pockets, only to find he’d removed the brochure and stashed it where I couldn’t find it.

  I was now beginning to feel pretty wrung-out and frayed, a skittish version of myself, and I wasn’t sure how long I could keep going. I’d tried once more to contact Alistair Armitage, but that now looked like a dead end too, as he’d declined to reply, so I was back in Leon’s documents folder, trawling through the files, hoping to find something, anything, to show Leon to convince him that I wasn’t responsible for all of this.

  The attic was still in mild disarray. I had done a perfunctory clean-up immediately after Leon wrecked the space: tidying papers into piles, vacuuming the plaster from where he’d punched the wall, but a joiner was needed to repair the hole in the attic floor and the corresponding hole in my bedroom ceiling, as well as the hole in the wall, before Eden arrived. I’d booked a guy in, but I’d had to make the call in secret as Leon kept assuring me he was capable of sorting out the damage himself, because he may not be able to remember how to punctuate dialogue correctly, but he sure as shit knew how to fix a sodding wall.

  I didn’t have the nerve to tell him he was shit at fixing walls before the brain injury. So I told him I was having difficulty sourcing materials. Then I was hoping his short-term memory would get on with its usual business of scrambling all recent incoming information, and he wouldn’t bring it up again.

  I sat at Leon’s computer and scanned his documents, wondering which to open next. I’d already waded through a folder entitled ‘BAD BOOK REVIEWS’, hoping I might find something, but it had only served to depress me. Leon would not receive a book review – good or bad – for another new book, ever. He would never write another book. I knew that now, and I wondered what was worse for a person: never having had your dream realized, or having your dream realized and then having it all taken away again.

  I scrolled down the list of files.

  Nothing was jumping out.

  I was about to start at the top of the list, wade through them all alphabetically, when something caught my eye.

  At the bottom of the folder was a document entitled 013. Leon wasn’t superstitious but there weren’t any documents entitled 01 through to 012, so it looked out of place.

  I clicked on it.

  Microsoft Word began to load.

  From the double-spaced lines, indented margins and the flowery prose, it was immediately evident that this was a piece of fiction. I glanced to the bottom of the screen. The document was 356 pages long. I read the first paragraph and it was a little over-written, too many adjectives for an opener, but it did have something.

  Could this be one of Leon’s early manuscripts?

  Every writer has them. Unpublished books that are kept firmly in the bottom drawer, for no one to see.

  When I moved in with Leon I’d begged him to let me read his early work. I wanted to see how much he’d progressed. I wanted to know that he didn’t just arrive as this writer, fully formed and ready to go. I wanted to know that, like me, he was once quite crap.

  But he wouldn’t show me. He said he’d not held on to his early novels as they embarrassed him. Much as an actor does not enjoy seeing himself on screen, Leon said he found the work unsatisfactory. He told me he never went back; looking ahead was the key in fiction writing. Then he assured me that my work was of a far superior quality to what he had produced in the early days, that my talent did not require the heavy lifting that his had, and the reason I was not receiving the breaks right now was nothing to do with my skill as a writer, it was all down to luck.

  So I’d let it drop.

  Now, reading this manuscript, it felt rather thrilling. As if I’d been allowed in a room that was kept locked. Or I’d found the key to a box placed on a high shelf.

  I got past the first few pages and had to admit that if this was Leon’s early work it wasn’t half bad. You could tell it was the work of an amateur: there was too much exposition, too much back story about the main character, crammed into the opening. We were being told why he was the way he was, why he was a lone wolf. We were being knocked over the head with why he found human connection hard – naturally, it all came down to the hurts of his past: the woman he couldn’t get over, the child he never saw, the sister that was murdered. A more skilled writer would let the reader try to work this out for themselves. Or else cause the reader to think: Who is this character? He’s holding something back. I have to keep reading! I need to know more!

  After giving us his main character’s raison d’être pretty bluntly on the page, Leon then started to build up his story. And I could see the beginnings of how Leon liked to shape his novels emerging. But the prose was clunky and repetitive. The dialogue like bad movie dialogue.

  I smiled as I read because I realized how far he’d come and, yes, I could understand why he’d want to hide this from me; it was immature and lacking in depth, but it was also quite endearing. This was who Leon was before I met him. This was Leon’s best attempt. And it was not great.

  At the bottom of page nine there was a sentence highlighted in yellow.

  This was a habit of mine, and perhaps of many writers. You highlighted the stuff you needed to check, or edit, because you couldn’t find the right words the first time around. Or you added notes in as you wrote, notes to come back to later.

  The highlighted sentence read: ‘Change AA’s plot point here? Go for something more risky, less cliché.’

  I read it again.

  Change AA’s plot point.

  Who or what was AA?

  I scrolled down the document fast.

  Every ten pages or so there would be another of Leon’s notes to himself highlighted in yellow:

  ‘Increase tension here.’

  ‘Another twist here?’

  ‘Make main character do something FFS!’

  Around halfway through the manuscript, across the bottom of the page, there was simply: ‘Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.’

  This row of Zs was something Leon used to text me if he was in the pub for the evening with a particularly boring person. Or sometimes he’d send a line of them if he was with Frankie Ridonikis and Frankie was droning on about the complicated interior lives of his characters.

  I scrolled ahead again. For a while there was nothing. And then, there here, were the words: ‘Lose AA’s shitty romance stuff.’

  AA.

  My blood ran cold.

  I stared at the file, realizing what I had in front of me.

  This was not Leon’s early work.


  It was not his novel.

  This novel belonged to Alistair Armitage.

  27

  I asked Frankie Ridonikis to meet at Otterspool Prom after I’d picked up Jack and Martha from school and nursery.

  I didn’t tell Leon who I was meeting and I took the kids along so they could blow off some steam. They rode their scooters back and forth, putting a foot down each time they came to make a turn, getting in the way of some serious-minded cyclists.

  Frankie arrived looking like a real author: five-day stubble, mildly dishevelled, a once-expensive but now shabby overcoat worn over his black suit. He wore brown brogues that needed polishing, and he smelled faintly of yesterday’s Jim Beam.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.

  We rested our elbows on the railings, side by side, and looked out across the Mersey. The broken cloud gave the water a dappled look. It could be such an ugly body of water, and then, at other times, astonishingly beautiful. The salt tang in the air always made it feel like home.

  Frankie coughed up some phlegm from his throat and then spent a moment deciding whether to shoot it into the water. I looked away.

  ‘How’s Leon doing?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s why I asked you here.’

  Frankie turned to me. ‘Look, Jane, I’m so sorry about what happened when I came over. I should have handled it better, I should have calmed him down, stopped him from taking off like that.’

  I held up my hand. ‘Don’t apologize. No one can control Leon when he gets like that. And you never know when it’s going to happen. He trashed the attic when he got back. That’s the scariest part; it always comes from nowhere.’

  ‘Yes, but I let him go and I shouldn’t have.’ He turned back to face the river. ‘It’s been playing on my mind. I could’ve tried harder to stop him, spared you all the worry and …’ Frankie paused. Sighed. Then he rubbed at the stubble of his neck as he tried to get his words together. ‘Oona’s had a massive go at me over this. We’re still not really speaking, to be honest. She said I was catastrophically weak-willed and unforgivably selfish to leave you with the task of trying to track Leon down alone.’ He seemed genuinely disgusted with himself.