by Kate Sten
No further exchanges passed between them, and serene silence filled the small space where the frail but stable boy laid still, fighting for his life.
NINETEEN
JOHN
The sheets beneath my skin were cold to the touch. I bunched my hands up and buried them under my chin to keep myself from getting colder. I felt the chills crawl up the tips of my toes, straight through the black cookie monster socks that hugged my feet.
The windows? A thought flashed through my head.
Perhaps they had been left open again. Perhaps there was something wrong with the latch. Perhaps the bits and bobs in the lock mechanism didn’t quite snap into place properly. I had not heard her speak for some time - The subtle, bitter voice in my head. She had gone silent since Molly started getting close to Mister Winters, allowing him to stay the night sometimes.
‘John! Get yourself cleaned and dressed, ASAP!’ Molly pushed her head through the door, deliberately shouting on top of her voice, as loud as she possibly could.
‘What? Why?’
‘It is freezing. I don’t want to get out of bed,’ I moaned, throwing a pillow over my head.
‘The circus trip. Henry got us tickets. You have been going on about seeing your favorite act - The flying mongoose. They are in town today and it will be good for you to get out of your room. You’ve been cooped up in here, on your PSP for way too long. You'd have grown a beard before you know it.’ Molly giggled, banging her knuckles against the door just to antagonize my ears even further.
I reluctantly shoved the duvet to one side, sat up on the edge of the bed, and crammed my freezing feet into a pair of slippers. The grump on my face soon transitioned to a warm rosy glow on either side of my cheek, as I relished the warmth of the snug plush insides of the slippers on my feet.
‘I didn’t think you'd want to miss the grand display and all the fireworks at the circus.’ Molly dived out of the way to allow me passage, her eyes focused on the creases on the slovenly overturned bedspreads.
She did not give me the judgmental look for my shoddiness. Her eyes seemed way too distracted for that. The contempt for my repugnant gnawing on the tip of the sheets not to mention my litany of quirks that seemed to involuntarily work their way into my retinue of rituals that I observed when I got up in the morning or after I had retired to bed for the night.
I didn’t look back at Molly. I just breezed towards the bathroom. It was neat and the tiles on the wall were gleaming. They had no doubt been dutifully polished by Molly as was custom for her to do. There was nothing ridiculously outrageous about shiny tiles except for the fact that I could almost see my own reflection behind the snow-white tiles in front of my face.
Door kicked shut behind me, I disrobed myself, slowly disentangling the night time clothes from my body. Liberated from my clothes, I climbed into the bathtub and steeped myself in the warm water that had been sitting there. It did not feel tepid against my skin. Molly drew my baths. She was good at feeling the water for the perfect temperature.
The soapy water sloshed over my skin, the warmth burning away the filth and the lavender fragrance banishing the rancidness in the hollow pouches beneath my arms. I wasn’t very keen on that smell. I wasn’t keen on having the ladies touch influence the way I smelt.
I always crossed my fingers when I left the house after soaking in one of Molly's drawn baths, hoping that I would not be referred to as girly and smelling of roses, or lavender as the case may be.
‘Yuck!’ I wafted my hands in front of my nose as the rising fumes from the warm water that sloshed over me shot up my nostrils.
‘How in God's name does anyone put up with this naff girly fragrance choking the hell out of my flipping nose? This is just ridiculous! I must totally learn to run my own bath!’ I nodded in agreement with my own mutterings, even though I knew I did not really have any intentions of doing what I had resolved to do.
I reached my hand out to grab a towel. And there he was, his hairy calves and feet pressed firmly against the waterproof carpet. His trousers had been folded up to knee length to avoid getting splashed.
‘Here you go,’ The words dropped flippantly out of Henry's mouth, his eyes facing the wet floor and hand stretched forward.
What the hell was he doing there? How did he even get there, behind the plastic blinds? The guy moved like a freaking ghost.
‘Thanks. I was looking for that.’ I shivered, as my hands took the dry towel away from his.
He did not look me in the face. In fact, his back was turned and his attention focused on the door handle ahead of me. He seemed as uncomfortable as I was with sharing the same bath space.
‘Molly sent me to get you. She is looking forward to this. Maybe even more than you are young man,’ Henry croaked, his eyes moving from the door handle to the ceiling.
‘I do like the fire eaters and the trapeze acts,’ I spat the words out very abruptly.
I walked past him, racing straight through the door, not in terror of him but in fear of the hands of the clock skipping past by the second. I did not want to miss out on a second of the trapeze act. The flying mongoose were nothing short of a flying marvel - a bedazzling spectacle that always seemed to keep kids on the edge of their seats. I had fallen off my seat on one occasion when I had become discombobulated with sheer excitement at the glitz of the whole swinging-through-the-air affair.
I shut myself behind the door of my bedroom, away from prying eyes. The towel was shoved quickly over my wet skin, soaking up the droplets off my body. A pair of jeans and a striped T-shirt had been neatly laid out on the tidied bed. I didn’t care to regard the hard work that went into reassembling the sheets into a better state than I had left them.
The blue jean pants went up my waist very quickly and I wrapped my feet up in thick woolly socks. I loved my black trainers. So those were going to be the ones that I would be sporting that day.
Olive-green jacket hung over my torso, and hands pushed through its narrow tubed sleeves, I danced around in a circle very briefly. The zip was stiff, so I tugged hard on it, pulling the damn thing along the toothed track with much effort. ‘Finally, I can get out of here and see the show. I hope they haven't left without me.’
Soon I was done and finally ready to tag along with Molly and Henry on the trip to the circus.
TWENTY
BARRY GARDNER
May 2017, WOODHILL PRISON, MILTON KEYNES
Eyes pencil-sharp, shirt slightly wrinkled and woolly sweater clad over him, the prison shrink, Barry Gardner, set out to do his routine psych evaluation on one of his most exciting patients - at least this one was certainly of interest to him. To be more exact his research paper needed cases like this one and there weren't many of such cases available to be tapped for his personal gain.
Behind the door of the interrogation room was a young man barely out of his teens, sat on a plastic chair, his hands strapped to a table with a pair of steel handcuffs. There was a single light bulb illuminating the room, dangling from a single wire attached to the white square ceiling above his head.
‘John Bishop! How are we feeling today? Any voices? Any negative or suicidal thoughts bouncing around in your head?’ Barry slouched to one side in the large comfortable mobile leather chair that had been wheeled out for him by an attending prison guard.
The rough-faced bulky male orderly stood erect behind John, taser held firmly in the right hand just in case there was need for a show of force. Some prisoners, especially the ones with a mental imbalance of sorts usually lashed out when they were told hard facts that they just couldn’t or wouldn't deal with. Some just hated Barry Gardner's smug face, the one he wore right after he had savaged every single sinew of their entire life and reduced it to five simple words with a big red stamp over their file - not fit to be released.
The eyes in Barry's gruff face were mechanical and unfeeling - They put everything on a scale and weighed the worth of them based on years of experience in his line of work and of course, the n
umber of degrees he had racked up on his ever growing curriculum vitae.
He was mercilessly thorough in his scrutiny of people, analyzing them as if they were either malfunctioning bits of product or in good form for processing. Of course, the bad ones always disappeared back into the abyss where their faces were long forgotten and their voices unheard. Barry had an ex wife he hated and a kid he got to see once a fortnight when he was lucky and the ex-wife hadn't taken the kid on a safari somewhere, in some exotic part of the world with her latest catch, Daniel Rose.
Danny, as Phillipa intimately referred to him, was the perfect bachelor, a few years younger than her and successful in the stock brokerage industry, often on the phone to his stupidly wealthy clientele. Even worse, was those perfect emerald-green eyes in that annoyingly handsome, unblemished face of his.
Barry by contrast had grown a beer belly over the years and sported an untrimmed beard which had been deliberately left to grow wild and untamed to cover a scar beneath his chin which he hated to look at, or acknowledge.
He had his flaws, very much like the rest of us mere mortals but he loved the power of sitting in the judge's seat, dispensing whatever opinion suited him about the lives of others. In those few minutes he spent with his patients, there was an almost god-like rush of unbridled power coursing through his veins and he felt every bit of it in his fingertips.
The prisoner shook his head from left to right to indicate an affirmative no. Johns head was bowed and his eyes focused on his feet. There was little signs of animation from him - barely even a grunt in response to the barrage of questions that came rolling off Barry's coercive tongue.
Barry's eye twitched, a tick above the left eye - subtle signs of his alcohol cravings bubbling to the surface, scratching like a chick trying to escape its shelled enclosure. For Barry, that was not a practical option.
His eyes were already heavy and there was heat under his skin. Hot sweat trickled down the side of his face and a bitter taste lingered at the back of his throat. He swallowed hard and held his pen in a strangling grip. If he had squeezed any tighter, any harder, he would almost certainly have snapped it in half.
‘Okay. We are doing the silent thing today. You don’t want to talk. So I guess a simple shake of the head would suffice. I shall take the answer to that question as a no.’ The prison psychologist scratched the paper on his lap with a pen, ticking off a box in a pair of binary options.
‘You talked about your day at the circus the last time I had the pleasure of your company at her majesty's pleasure. I recall that was a happy day. We made some progress with that recollection of yours. What more do you remember of that day?’ Barry tapped his pen softly on the table, his eyelid squeezed halfway, and his posture more relaxed, exuding a false sense of deep focus. ‘If you feel like talking, that is?’
There was still no utterance from behind the veil of overgrown hair that draped over the young man's stony face. He remained recalcitrant and distant, hands flat and spread out before him. You could have poked a knife in his eye and he still wouldn't have flinched.
His frame was bulked out beneath the green and yellow jumpsuit that covered his bare flesh. Fingernails scraping at the metal coating of the table in front of him, John remained resolute to complete whatever task he had set his mind on, those bedeviled eyes unmoving.
‘Oh we are back to that again, are we?’ Barry leaned forward to take a look at what John had scratched into the table.
‘She wants to get out. I still feel her scratching, clawing inside my skull, looking for that small crack. If she gets out again, there is no telling what she will do. Those pills - they don’t help. They don’t help at all,’ John looked straight at Barry, raising his head up at an unreal speed.
‘Sure, your imaginary buddy Alice is going to gash our throats and pull out our eyeballs and feed us our testicles before she breaks our necks. Bla… Bla… Bla… And so on. You see, I have heard this raving lunacy from you before. This stuff doesn't help your recovery, spouting all that crazy. You’ve been given the pills to help with the visions and the voices but I bet you flush those down the toilet,’ The frustrated psychologist ranted, flapping his hands about in the air above his head.
‘What is it with guys like you, huh? You think you are special? That life owes you a free pass! It was tragic - the shit that happened to you. But you have got to let go with the ghosts. You have to take all that bad stuff and process that. You have got to look the gorgon in the eye and tell that son of a bitch that you are not taking the crap anymore. Own whatever mistakes you know you have made and stop parking the blame at the doorstep of a delusion. If you want to be helped you have got to do the work.’ Barry adjusted the knot in his tie, the sweat building up on his forehead and palms.
He scribbled on the notepad on his lap and tore out a page - he had written a further prescription for the inmate. Barry had decided not to draft his report yet. It was not a weighty document, just a few measly pages that did not need to be extensively thorough. He was not paid that much, or to produce the best standard of work. The cuts to the prison services meant that they were desperate enough to procure the services of a less than sober mental health professional with a sketchy track record in the ethics of compassionate treatment of his clientele.
He had barely handed the note to the orderly behind John, when a strong hand reached out and grabbed him by the collar, fingers reaching for his tie. He felt the air dry up in his lungs and the pressure tighten around his stump of a neck, legs kicking at the chair behind his heels and hands groping at the fuzzy face in front of him.
His brain had been fast starved of oxygen and the alcohol withdrawal wasn’t helping. His fingers did the shakes and his eyes looked as if they were going to explode as the makeshift noose around his neck got even tighter.
‘Please,’ Barry squealed, his eyes reddened and the blood drained from his face.
‘You are not a nice man. You should have that sewer on your face washed out with bleach. I should snap your neck like a twig. But I can smell death on you. You reek of it. Nobody likes leftovers. Lets just let the bowel cancer finish what it started, shall we?’ A shrieking female voice ripped through John's mouth, as he started to withdraw his hands from the gasping psychologist's throat.
How could he have known that? Barry's face froze in horror.
He had not even told his his own mother about his terminal diagnosis. There was almost a glint in his eyes. He had stumbled on something truly exceptional but he was not sure he would live long enough to explore the possibilities.
Alice was just a delusion and nothing more - A mere figment of a madman's broken mind. What was so special about her?
A shock prodded John's back, causing the young man to crash to the ground, and wriggle around like a fish out of water. The prison guard had zapped him with the taser after a protracted period of hesitation.
‘What the fuck took you so long? He could have fucking killed me!’ Barry raged at the smirking prison guard.
‘He barely touched you. Besides if I had zapped him while his hands were on you, your ass would have been shocked too and you would have been rolling around with your tongue hanging out of your head like that guy,’ The prison guard shrugged, pointing his taser at the quaking man on the floor.
Barry gnashed his teeth and proceeded to straighten his tie, before shooting a scornful parting stare at the prison guard. He hated it there at the prison. The guards were just plain rude, even to visitors. They reminded him of the bullies he had fended off repeatedly when he was much younger and had less hair poking out of his nostrils.
At least he didn’t end up a brainless sentry - like the bullies at school - watching over societies rejects. They were nothing more than guard dogs placed at the gate to prevent the undesirables from getting out. The paltry stipends they earned was scraps of red meat thrown gracelessly at them by their uncaring masters.
He perked up with a smile as he drove to the gate that led out of the prison. He had seen en
ough and he had had enough of Woodhill that afternoon. The rounds were done and forms faxed. He would receive his due when the month had run out. It was back to his beloved bedsit - a single room with a bathroom and a small kitchen that could barely fit two adults.
This was the best he could manage after his marriage crumbled beneath him and drowned so deep at the base of his bottle. He had never really shared anything with his so-called ex and they never really connected on any level.
There was a nested set of tables at the centre of the dimly lit room and a washed up leather sofa with all sorts of scratch marks on it. Phillipa had allowed him custody of Louie, the bob cat. She had always thought of Louie as fat, lazy and a fabric wrecking furball that was only interested in tearing holes in her most precious collection of handbags and dresses. She was glad to see the feline gone.
In fact, she loathed the cat more than she did her ex. And She had even dubbed Barry a Lucifer incarnate once. He laughed in her face when he heard her say that. She was an intense woman and he was a ball of frost - Nothing like the fire and brimstone spitting kind of dude she had convinced herself that he was.
Clutching his juddering hand by the wrist, he eyeballed a drawer on the desk that faced the single window to his left. Barry bit his lip hard, drawing blood. He did not want the booze in his stomach and in his veins. It was killing him. The diagnosis was bad. The gastrointestinal endoscopy had revealed some malignancies. The rogue cells were already multiplying inside him and sucking the life out of him day after day.
He felt more tired, less enthused about anything. What harm could one more drink do? He was already halfway down the road to purgatory if you believed in such things. He would rather go down those flaming depths with his tank full and a wide grin on his face.
