by Kate Sten
I didn’t know what was going to be in store for me. The meds that I was on dulled the voices. Helped me concentrate better, but the visions never really faded away completely. I didn’t tell anybody, but some days I could swear that I could see glimpses of her crawling over my bed, or gliding casually across empty space.
‘What are you doing all wrapped up like a ball? Excuse me - Are you pissing your pants in here, or something?’ The familiar mocking voice of Boris Barker chimed in my ears.
How the hell did he get into the timeout room? He must have broken in!
I got the sinking feeling that he hadn’t come to offer me any solace from my stifling predicament. His larger than life frame was plunked right in my line of sight. The fat bastard wanted me to know he was there. He wanted me to see it was him adding more discomfort to my already dishevelled state.
If I were any stronger in the mind, I would have bunched up my fists and swung for that flapping mouth of his. He was bigger and therefore he must have been stronger, right?
That was how these things usually worked. That was the natural order to most things. He always usually had his way. He made jest, and the rest of us scrawny, little kids swallowed it. My face was going red with indignation towards my rather robust oppressor.
“You don’t look so good. You aren’t saying much either. You know what is going to happen, you little runt! You might as well say something, and make this more enjoyable - at least for me!” Boris Barker let out a condescending grin, pounding his palm with his other beefy fist.
I wanted to scream for help but I just couldn’t form the words. There was some genuine fear shooting through every fibre of my being. It almost felt as if my tongue had been nailed to my palate. I didn’t even realize when the first blow struck me in the chin.
All I know, is that I lost balance and fell off the chair. I could barely see a thing. My vision was a mosaic of blue and red stars, circling around my dazed eyes. The skin under my eyes soon turned into protruding bumps filled with pus as a result if inflammation.
I had been beaten to a pulp, and I didn’t feel a damn thing. No sorrow, no joy and no resentment. The fat kid just got off me and walked away like a dissatisfied lover. He hadn’t quite got the aphrodisiac he wanted out of pummeling the living day light out of me. His fists were stained with my blood and yet that did not do it for him.
There was no gnashing of teeth in abject fear, or screams of agony to inflame his mountainous ego. He had done the deed but did not get any relish from it.
‘Fucking weirdo! That was no fun!’ Boris Barker kicked me in the rib as he walked off with a less than impressed look on his face.
I should not have been able to move from where I was. The pain in my sides was crippling. But yet it felt as though I was not in control of my own limbs. My vision was still a fog, and my brain felt as if it was a defective jigsaw puzzle, that mismatched at every point.
‘What the bloody hell have you done, John? What have you done?’ Mr. Bradshaw’s hands shook me like a damn ragdoll. ‘You shoved Boris Barker down the stairs, and now his leg is fractured in two places. The school nurse says he will be in a wheel chair for months.’
‘What? I didn’t even touch the fat sod!’ I screamed in protest at Mr. Bradshaw’s accusing stance.
‘Is that why your face is swollen, and your shirt torn? You have some serious questions to answer, young man!’ Mr. Bradshaw sighed deeply, glaring contemptuously at me.
I saw them cart the fat bully off on a stretcher. He could barely look me in the face. Those small eyes of his shrank even smaller with trepidation. His fingers recoiled into the cleft of his palms as I brushed past him.
‘D…D...D... Don’t let him hurt me! Please!’ The fat boy yelled, as tears rolled down either side of his plump cheeks.
I almost felt a sense of pride shoot up my chest. I would have been pleased too if I didn’t get the sense that I had been invaded by something with a singular malignant will - The will to perpetrate evil against anyone that got too close to me.
The fat sod had placed his insufferably obnoxious self ever so close to my person that he must have provoked the reaction that he got.
I did not know whether she was evil or good. I still don’t.
But I knew she punished without mercy, or hesitation. I had been told more times than I could count, that she was nothing but a warped figment of my imagination; that I was channeling my rage through her. But that school of thought was feeling less comforting with each day that passed.
Alice wasn’t being subdued. She was getting more creative at doing what she did. She enjoyed hurting people. I was more squeamish about that sort of thing. I always tried to hold her back the best I could. But somehow, she always found a way to claw her way to the surface.
I hadn’t mentioned her name in weeks. Maybe months even. I had enjoyed an almost blissful life without incident. But now, that stupid fat sod got under my skin. He provoked me enough to want to say her name. And I did.
I was convinced that I lacked the courage or resolve to be malicious in that way, causing injury, even to the worst that humanity had to offer. I had gone through the immediate events that had transpired inside my head. My memory was blurry but I was not a moron.
I wasn’t out of breath. I wasn’t panting. I would have been all of those things if I had chased down Boris Barker to seek some cold and calculated payback. There was no forethought of malice towards him. Not to the extent of doing any lasting damage.
Besides, I couldn’t move 75 kilos of lard a single inch in whatever direction I so desired, even if I wanted to. That was a physical impossibility for my weedy frame. My tiny hands were simply not up to the job.
Alice was to blame. She did that to him. She flung his fat frame down the stairs and grinned as his bones broke.
‘Your boy is suspended from the premises of this school until further notice. We do not condone such level of violence against other pupils. John should be thoroughly ashamed of his actions.’ Mrs. Vicars, the head teacher, flew into a righteous rage at Molly, shoving me into her arms like some sort of unwanted leper that would infect the rest of the school with my ugliness.
‘I can’t apologize enough for John. He has had a very rough life, and an even rougher couple of weeks lately. That’s no excuse but I urge you not to write him off, or judge him so harshly. He is an okay kid, really.’ Molly’s eyes widened in bewilderment, as words of placation oozed ceaselessly out of her mouth.
‘It wasn’t me. I kept telling them - It was her. It was Alice. He must have made her angry and she lashed out.” I tugged at the sleeve of Molly’s blouse.
The muscles in her face tensed, and her eyes scanned my face distrustfully for any tell-tale signs of untruthfulness. Molly was not pleased with my line of defence. She had heard it before. She had watched me blame some phantom for the poor decisions that seemed to be associated with my person.
How could it possibly be anyone else? After all, I was the only one at the scene of the horrors that Alice often left in her wake, wasn’t I? Who else could possibly be culpable when it was my face, bold as brass and guilty as sin, that people could see next to Alice's handiwork?
This was how things always went down. I had come to expect things not to pan out any differently. I had come to expect to bare the brunt of her dangerous games.
She was in my head. She knew everything about me, yet I knew next to nothing about her. I hadn’t even seen her face-not properly, anyway. I never dared to look beyond the blackness that enveloped her tall, slender frame.
Yep, she was there in my thoughts. She was close. She was close like a memory that I quite couldn’t touch.
‘We are back to blaming your imaginary friend, are we? You can’t keep doing this when things get hard! You can’t keep using this made up person as your safety blanket, and distance yourself from any sort of responsibility for your actions!’ Molly thundered with outrage in her countenance. ‘You just can’t.’
‘Well said. I c
ouldn’t have put it better myself.’ The head teacher applauded Molly’s method of chastisement.
‘What happens with his schooling? I don’t want him falling behind when he returns to school!’ Molly slapped both hands on the head teacher’s desk, eyes peering straight at the wrinkly-faced woman bedecked in a dated jacket.
‘You mean, if he returns?’ The head teacher shot out a sharp, abrupt reply.
‘What? John hasn’t killed anyone! He just made a grave mistake which he deeply regrets!’ Molly swiveled uncomfortably from left to right in her seat.
‘The boy didn’t just give someone a bruise. He broke a boy’s leg in two places. That is grievous damage to his fellow pupil. We cannot treat this with kid gloves. This is serious stuff. The security of other students around your boy has to take precedence in any final decision that will be made in this particular case.’ The head teacher shrugged without flinching or batting an eyelid.
‘What am I supposed to do with him while you are considering his case? The law does still require a boy his age to be educated!’ Molly sighed, rolling her eyes atrociously at the head teacher.
‘Try home-schooling. I am sure you will find lots of good home tutors willing to take your boy on in the safety of your home. I am not sure that his needs are best served here. Till we can decide whether to readmit John or not, you should look seriously at other alternatives to mainstream schools,’ The head teacher slammed some thick paperwork on the desk in front of her, and waved a hand at the door, urging us to use it.
SIX
JOHN
‘Sometimes I am there and sometimes I am not. My head goes blank. Empty like a slate. It sort of feels like I have gone to sleep.’ I scraped the edge of the tables nervously with the tip of my fingernails.
The child psychologist looked across the table, and slouched to her side, scribbling furiously on the surface of the paper that was balanced on the inside of the lower part of her arm. Her eyes seemed distracted, but her wits were sharper than a butcher's knife.
‘While you are in this sleep, do you hear any voices? Any words floating about in your ears while you dream?’ Doctor Salter raised her eyes for a brief second, paused for a while to snatch a glass of water off the table which she sipped rather slowly, doing her utmost not to spill any of the contents of the cup on her notes.
‘Voices?’ I bit my lips, and fixated on the design on the flimsy purple curtains which hung from railings above the window, doing as little as I possibly could to engage with Doctor Salter's probing questions.
‘Yeah, voices. The ones that don’t sound like they should be there. The whispers, or loud shouts that sort of linger even when you want them to go away.’ Doctor Salter took the time to elaborate. ‘Do you hear anything like that in your head, John?’
I almost went red in the face with embarrassment. I didn’t want her to peg me as a nutcase-a crazy person. Even though I thought of myself as exactly that most of the time. I didn’t have the best of memories. It often felt like reels of tapes had been deleted or deliberately omitted from the parts of my brain that should hold such precious details about my own life.
I didn’t feel like sharing what I was going through. I didn’t like having to be taken apart, and put under a giant lens.
‘You know you don’t have to do everything they tell you to! That is the beauty of free will!’ Doctor Salter spanked the writing pad playfully with the tip of her pen.
‘Who is they? I am starting to think that maybe you are the crazy one!’ I acted aloof, hoping that the session would end quickly.
It was beginning to feel like I had been trapped in that armchair for what seemed to be an eternity rolled into one painful moment of having to listen to the therapist repeating the same line of questioning over and over again.
‘You need to understand that this isn’t a game, John. These things can only get worse if you do not cooperate with your sessions. The loss of time, that is only the beginning. Bad things could happen. People could get seriously hurt. Trust me, kid, you don’t want that kind of stain on your conscience,’ Doctor Salter leaned forward, waving her index finger in my face.
She had never been so bold in her confrontation before, and I had not been so stubborn and unreceptive to her probing techniques before. She was frustrated by my decision to stall. I was holding out on her and she wasn’t keen on having that.
She wasn’t the type of woman to quit so easily. There was this unbreakable backbone in the charisma that Doctor Salter exuded. She was not a minnow in her profession. She had had some successes credited to her.
She wasn’t about to let me be the one that broke her winning streak. I was like a vulnerable, broken, little bird that she was keen to fix.
‘You did something at school today. Something really bad. Something...’ Doctor Salter paused and clasped both hands, pressed them against her chest, sucked her lips in, and gazed at the ceiling as if she expected inspiration to fall from above.
The hamster wheels in her head must have hit a ditch and wasn’t giving her the kind of feedback she needed to get me singing like a damn canary. I hated talking about my state of mind - That made me feel more depressed than I usually was.
Reliving the past was like trying to pull deformed rabbits out of a hat. You’d never get a whole rabbit that way. You’ll never quite fit that shattered puzzle together. I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to know - whatever it was - that was the source of my reclusive and irrationally blind avoidance of the acknowledgment of my own existence.
There was barely any feeling of that zest to enjoy the life that I had. I just couldn’t get close to people. Not close enough to let them see me. I guess that was because I had somehow lost who I was in the midst of all the fragmented thoughts that spun around in the windmill that was my mind. It was not a fun place to be.
‘Do you feel sorry for him? Do you feel any regret for what you did to that boy?’ Doctor Salter stared intently at my disinterested face from the other side of the table.
‘Do you see my face? What the hell do you think happened to it? No.. No answer?’ I thumped the table with clenched fists.
‘I am not a diviner, John. You can tell me what happened to your face.’ Doctor Salter blurted out a casual response to my outburst.
There was a storm brewing between my eyes. I was angry. I was feeling something - I hadn’t felt anything for some time now. The blood rushing to my face; the drumbeat raging away in the tightness of my chest. Those were feelings of someone that felt sentient.
Sentient - This was a strange thing to me.
I existed. That was the most that I felt about myself. Emotions were more tricky to express. I did not know how to channel those, so I sort of faked a smile or two when I thought that people wanted me to be happy about something.
Numbness was the more familiar feeling that blanketed my every perceived human sensation. I could see the old woman’s game now - she was trying to provoke something in my subconscious to scream out answers to her.
She was digging into my skull with her words. She wanted to drag the murky reality out of all the tangled fantasies that had built up over the years in my noggin.
Her eyes were penetrating and her words seemed unfriendly, and accusing. She had little concern about what I was going through in that moment. She did not really care to know if I was the innocent or guilty party.
She most likely had assumed that I was a certifiable nut job for doing what I did, even though I wholeheartedly believed Alice had done it out of pure malice, as she usually did. I was aware of Alice. Even when she wasn’t close enough to touch, her presence invaded my personal space like some sort of putrid malignancy.
‘Don’t listen. She doesn’t care about you.’
‘She is impotent. She could not save Alex. She was useless - as useless to him as she will be useless to you.’ Alice's vague whispers circled around in my skull, warping my headspace in an uncomfortable sort of way.
I felt faint, and queasy, as if I was going t
o throw up. Luckily for the head doctor, I had a stomach that was built like a tank. I did not plaster her fancy table and leather chair with regurgitated stuff that would have been ejected from my insides.
The doctor had not said a word in what seemed like hours. Her lips had not moved and the hands on her vintage table clock had barely moved an inch. Most of the room seemed to be gleaming rather brightly. The room seemed so bright that my eyes were almost irritated by all that brilliant light.
‘Not again! Too bright! You’ve got to switch the lights off!’ I yelled on top of my voice, rolling down my eyelids to block out the blinding lights.
‘Are you okay, John? What do you see? Whatever it is, it isn’t real?’ Doctor Salter's voice bleeped in my ears.
A dark hooded figure with a hollowed out face stood erect behind Doctor Salter's seat. Muddy soil plopped out of the eyes and mouth of the obscure figure with all sorts of creepy crawlies crawling all over the entire span of space where an actual face should have been. There was something that resembled a rock, clenched tightly in the blank-faced figure's hand.
I thought it was Alice. She felt like Alice.
She always hid her face from me. She was angry enough to lash out. She was angry enough to hurt Doctor Salter. I was mostly afraid of her. But I was more afraid of what would happen to my head doctor if I did not find some way to stop Alice from splitting the kindly old lady's skull with a rough-looking rock.
‘No don’t! Don’t do it!’ I yelped with great discomfort.
Blood dripped from Doctor Salter’s temple, trickling over her eye brows and running down her neck, then straight through her clothes. Oddly, the floor was as clean as a pharmacology lab. The floor glittered brightly with astonishing rays of light emerging from between the tiles.
The Doctor’s face had become a distorted blackened figure, slanted sideways, walking freakishly slow towards me. I could have easily bitten off my tongue in fright. I pinched my own skin so hard that it turned purple and became bruised from the vicious self-inflicted assault by my restless fingers.
