The Outcast Son

by Jacobo Priegue

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” he said, pretending he meant it. “I would’ve liked to come every day, but there’s a good reason I couldn’t.” He sounded honest. Perhaps he wanted to help me after all. Perhaps Susan was right and he didn’t mean to betray me, he just wanted to do the right thing, but what he had said at court would be difficult to forget.

  However, thinking about it, his persistence in making me look like a maniac had saved me several years in prison. Be positive, I heard Susan’s words echoing in my head. Don’t think about what makes you angry, rather think about constructive outcomes, about what you can get from your conversation.

  “Oh, I’m sure there is,” I said, “and I’m very much looking forward to hearing it.”

  “We have been looking at the case after the trial, and Andrew…”

  “Mark, I swear I will jump over the table and uproot your eyes if you say his name again.”

  The sound of one of the guards clearing his throat made me turn around. They were staring at me and giving short glances at each other. Their arms weren’t crossed anymore, as if they wanted to be ready for anything.

  “I’m obviously not going to do that!” I said. “It’s just a way of speaking!” But they just stared at me, vigilant and prepared. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Laura, listen to me,” Mark said. “Let me tell you what we came up with, please.”

  I stared at him, narrowing my eyes. I was curious. After a few seconds of silence, I nodded.

  “Is there any place we can speak in private?” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered. “We can go to the TV room. I wanted to meet with you here because I didn’t want the whole ward to see me crying when I saw Marcus, but I guess it’s kind of pointless now.”

  “Won’t there be guards?” he asked.

  “Yes, there will, but they won’t be so close as to hear what we say, and we can choose a spot where the rest of the users can’t hear us either.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That will do.”

  “Could we move to the common area?” I asked one of the guards.

  They looked at each other, and one of them nodded. For some reason, they didn’t talk a lot to the users. I assumed they weren’t allowed more contact than strictly necessary, but I was convinced this made them see us as less than human. We were users. Not worth a conversation, warm words or much thinking.

  Mark walked in front of me. The light in the corridor was dim. It had no windows, and two rows of closed doors kept the light in the rooms from reaching us. We got to the hallway next to the entrance. It was empty. The users were having breakfast at the canteen, and the members of staff who weren’t watching over them were just relaxing in their offices and rooms or smoking by the gates. We followed the narrow corridor to the TV and sat on a sofa in a corner. There were only three more people there, and they were far from us.

  “Could we please have some privacy?” I asked the guards.

  “Sorry, but we have to stay here,” one of them said.

  “I understand,” Mark said, “but would it be possible for you to move a few metres away so we can have a private conversation?” The guards exchanged glances. They wouldn’t give in. But Mark was a tenacious negotiator and always knew the face he had to show and the words he had to say to get what he wanted. It used to work with me too. “Please,” he said, opening his eyes and barely disguising his threat.

  “Okay, that’s fine,” one of them said. “But only a couple of metres.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

  “So,” I said, “what’s the secret?”

  “First of all, you need to promise you won’t shout or scream or hit me.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You won’t like what I’m about to tell you,” he said, “and it won’t benefit you to look agressive in front of the guards.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you going to tell me?”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise I’ll grab that chair and smash your head with it if you don’t speak now!”

  “Lower your voice, Laura,” he said. “You need to calm down. I can’t tell you if you don’t promise you won’t make a scene.”

  “How dare you come here without Marcus and lie, saying you want to help? And now you tell me I won’t like what I’ll hear?”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said, shrinking his lips.

  “Speak!”

  “Laura,” he said, “I will speak, one way or the other, and it’s your choice to listen to me very carefully and at ease or be restrained by these two gentlemen first and continue our conversation in your room.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. To think I’d given him the benefit of doubt made me sick. He hadn’t intended to bring my baby to me from the very beginning. It was just his ticket in, and he didn’t look interested in my well-being at all. He had destroyed my life, or at least he had helped. He couldn’t get anything else from me. So, what did he want now?

  “You bastard,” I whispered. “Speak out, I’ll keep my composure,” I said, although I wasn’t very sure I’d be able to honour my promise.

  “You need to confess.”

  “What? What do you mean?” I said, narrowing my eyes and wrinkling my forehead.

  “Calm down, Laura, and listen to what I have to say.” I couldn’t see how admitting to having killed my son would help – the sentence had already been stayed – but he had made me curious. “You know why you’re not in prison. If you tell the doctors you did it, if you finally admit what happened, they’ll write a positive evaluation and the report will reach the judge’s ears. You’re ill, Laura, and they know it. The only way to get out of here and carry on with our lives is to admit everything and recover. I know you committed homicide because you were temporarily insane, but they think you suffer from psychosis, and they won’t let you out until they think you can cope with it.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. Firm and obstinate.

  “Laura,” he said. “We’ve talked about this.”

  “I know it wasn’t me.”

  “Honey, you…”

  “No, listen to me,” I interrupted. “I know it was you.”

  “What have you said?”

  “I know it was you, Mark. You killed Jaime.” I made a short pause for my words to sink in. “You lied. You told the jury there wasn’t anybody following us in Peru.”

  “I did it for you!” he said. “I didn’t want you to end up in prison. This was the only way!”

  “Fuck you, Mark! You’ve betrayed me! From minute one! From the moment the police entered our house! You didn’t need to say anything! Even if it was true that you think you saw me do it! I’m your wife!”

  “I panicked, okay?” he said. “I didn’t know what to do! I wanted to protect my family!”

  “You wanted to protect your family against me?”

  “No! That’s not what I mean! I wanted to protect you too! I thought you were going to die! There was a lot of blood, Laura, you were bleeding out, and the ambulance wouldn’t come!”

  “So, you thought the right thing to do was to sell me to Detective Hassan the first chance you had?”

  “I didn’t sell you! I knew you wouldn’t go to prison. I knew it’d be easy to prove you weren’t of sound mind if we told the jury about your past.”

  “And how do you think I felt when I heard you say all those things in the trial? That I was mad? That I had murdered before? That I was a danger to my family?”

  “Laura, you accused me of murdering Jaime. How do you think I feel about it?”

  “But you did it! You killed him! I know you did!”

  “Laura, stop. You’re making a scene.”

  “You hated Jaime!” I said. “You were scared to death of him. When Marcus was born, you couldn’t even look him in the eyes. You wanted to get rid of him! You told me! Don’t deny it!”

  “Yes!” he said. “I didn’t want him in our house any longer
! But I didn’t want him to die! I told you!”

  “But when you saw both of us unconscious, you found the chance you were looking for. You grabbed his neck and you killed him!”

  “No!” he said. “When I saw you unconscious, the first thing I did was sit you up to stop the bleeding, and then I called the ambulance!”

  I got you, I thought to myself, drawing a smile on my face. “You did what?”

  “I,” he said, with a trace of confusion in his voice, “I called the ambulance.”

  “No,” I said, “before that. What did you say before that?”

  “I said that I called the ambulance when you fainted.”

  “You sat me up,” I said. “You dragged me and sat me up.”

  He stood silent for a few seconds. He didn’t know what to say. I’d found a hole in his story, and he couldn’t think about anything wise to say. His forehead was wet. His eyes shifting, looking for an answer, looking for something to hold on to, but he was lost.

  “You killed him,” I said. The confidence in my voice made him understand that there wasn’t anything he could say to convince me now. “You killed my son, you bastard.”

  His expression became serene now that he didn’t have to pretend, now that this farce of his had come to an end. “It was the only way,” he said. “It was either he or our family.”

  “He was our family, Mark!”

  My eyes were blurry, and I felt dizzy. I fought to stay awake and listen. “I love you,” he carried on. “Very much and at first sight, and I wanted to make you happy from the day I met you. That’s why I nodded when you asked me to bring that jinx back to England with us. I nodded like a wimp. But I knew what he was. He was a disgrace. He’d bring disgrace upon us. No escape. And you see? I was so right.

  “I had the hope you’d see it as well. With time. You’d see he was bad luck. Even his own parents rejected him, Laura! But you’re stubborn. Even after the miscarriage, you kept defending him. You know it was him. His evil eye. It was the very night you told him! That very night. But you pretended it didn’t happen. You wouldn’t even talk to me, or to anybody. You swallowed it, you kept it to yourself, and you didn’t even think about how I felt. I wanted to get rid of him before he hurt us or our babies-to-come, but I knew it’d be impossible to convince you, so I faked a seizure.”

  “Sorry, you did what?” I asked, awaking from my trance, barely able to speak and with a trembling voice.

  “Yes,” he said, “I faked it. I awaited a day when Jaime and I were alone, and as soon as I heard your keys in the lock, I lay down next to him, pretending I was unwell and staying completely still when you came upstairs, but not even that was enough. You believed in Jaime more than you believed in me, so I let it go for a while. Perhaps it could work. I tried to get on well with him. He made you happy, and I wanted you to be happy, so I put my dreads aside and did my best to help you recover from your miscarriage.

  “However, nothing I did was good enough. Not even Jaime was able to cheer you up, and one day I somehow came across this article about using pets to help people recover from depression. It was something pretty obvious, and I had heard of it before, but when I had the article in front of me, I thought, Why not? And so I bought Happy for you.

  “It worked. You seemed to recover. But the hunch you thought you had when we went out for a dinner date awoke my worries again. I didn’t say anything to you, but I had a gut feeling as well. Jaime was cursed, something was going to happen, and when you verbalised exactly what I was thinking, the fear took over. What if he burned the house down? What if he did something to Karen? I worried about Happy too, but he was only a dog, after all. We won’t be in too much trouble if something happened to him.

  “The boy creeped me out. I tried to show him my best face. I think the poor bastard even thought me a friend. So I planned something. Something I thought it’d be impossible for you to ignore. Something so horrible that you wouldn’t have any choice but to be on my side. And when you told me about going on a holiday to the countryside, I saw the opportunity.

  “For it to work, I had to be alone with Jaime and Happy. I had planned to prepare you a nice bath with bubbles, a fancy soap and rose petals, but it wasn’t necessary, as on the first day, Jaime twisted his ankle and I had to carry him to the hospital. It was perfect. It even looked like he was mad at Happy for making him fall.

  “I was in a hurry. I wanted to make sure we got to the B&B before you did, that’s why when I called you, we were already getting there. I had to act quickly. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a large knife. I told Jaime we were going to play a game. We would make Happy go to an amazing place. He’d be sad at first, but Happy would be living a life of dreams, with more sausages than he could possibly eat and hundreds of acres for him to run and jump and be free. Of course, we couldn’t tell Mum. It’d be our little secret. For it to work, Happy had to bleed. He nodded, bless him, so I approached the dog and cut his throat in front of Jaime, and the blood splashed on his clothes. I liked the dog, he was great, and it was distressing to see him twisting on the floor and fighting for his life. But it was the only way. It was either the dog or our family. Jaime would be our ruin.

  “I needed to hurry. I grabbed the golden sphere I had brought with me from my bag. I knew you were fascinated with it and it’d creep you out. I put it next to the dog, in the same position you had found it in Cusco, or at least how I remembered you told me it was. The dog needed to be in the same position, too, so I couldn’t help staining myself in the process. It didn’t really matter.”

  Chapter 31

  Confessions

  His words were punches to my face, a hive of putrid insects staining the air with their corruption and their sickness and their foulness. But I listened. Horrified. Seeing how one word led to the next one. I didn’t dare think. I just listened.

  “You,” I was able to pronounce, “you shouldn’t have done it. It’s horrible, Mark. Horrible.”

  “It was the only way. What could I do? I had to look after my family. It was my duty. I had to protect us.”

  “He didn’t have to die, Mark. I understand what you did, I understand you wanted to convince me he had to go, but he didn’t have to die.”

  “I couldn’t get to you! You wouldn’t listen to me!” he said. “I tried to help you, to warn you, but you were blinded by the boy. When Jaime was six, I didn’t have to do much. His behaviour was self-explanatory. But you were always there to make up an excuse for him. ‘The boy doesn’t fit,’ ‘the other kids don’t like him,’ ‘he’s too clever and gets bored in class.’ I felt like an outside observer. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for you to realise. Carrying the boy from one school to the other among expulsions, incidents and parental meetings. I was sick of it, but I never said a word. Not really. Not about how I actually felt. Because I love you.

  “Then he learned about his past. He found the old piece of news and the picture and became curious about Cusco and Peru and crossing the ocean to see the land where he had been born. You suggested we take him there, and I agreed. I saw a new chance to make you see the boy was dangerous.

  “I called my contact in Lima. I told Patrick that I was desperate, that I needed to make you see what the boy was, so he made up a story, something scary that would convince you it was dangerous to be anywhere near Jaime. He did a great job, he overdid it, actually. He hired a family. Just for a few quid, they spent the whole day at the airport waiting for us. They knew what we looked like because Patrick had shown them a picture.

  “Then he told us about him being kidnapped and tortured. It was a terrifying, incredible story, but you bought it. I must confess, I’d believe it myself if I didn’t know beforehand he’d make it up.

  “When you woke up amidst a panic attack the following day, I thought you were going to go mad. I was genuinely worried about you. You were paranoid. You even saw the family in Cusco! I felt terrible. I thought we had crossed the line. We’d been messing with your mind so badly that you were making
up things on your own.

  “When Jaime ran away from the car, I thought I’d lose you forever. You weren’t of sound mind and it was too hot and your pace was too fast to physically endure it. You did believe something nasty was happening and the boy was the centre of it, so you pushed your body to its limits.

  “However, this wasn’t enough. You weren’t scared enough. You always defended him. When you told me you were pregnant again, the fear wouldn’t let me breathe. He had killed our first son, our first true son, and I wouldn’t allow him to kill our second. I tried to convince you. More than ever, I tried to open your mind to reasons, reminding you what had happened to me and the dog and the rest of it, but not only didn’t you listen to me, you got mad at me for blaming Jaime for the miscarriage. You were so blind, and I couldn’t pretend anymore. I hated him, and I was resentful towards you for having told him you were pregnant. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, and he knew it.

  “Somehow, this time was different. Your pregnancy went smoothly, and Jaime seemed happy to have a little sibling, so I stepped aside once again, observing quietly from the distance. Then little Marcus was born. I was amazed by how well they got on. Jaime would look after him as if he were his true older brother, but I knew it wasn’t safe. It was a matter of time before Jaime had one of his violent outbursts.

  “Time proved me right. His behaviour declined soon enough. The phone started to ring again, and at the end of the line there was always an angry teacher saying he had kicked somebody or punched somebody or spat on somebody’s face. My arguments with him became nasty, and he argued with you as well, although you always gave in to his capricious character. But you were fed up, too. You started fearing for Marcus.”

  I stood up. My hair was soaked and my eyes blurry.

  “What’s wrong?” Mark said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, “I just need something to drink, that’s all.”

  He stood up and tried to help me. “It’s okay, Mark. I got it. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in two minutes. Please wait here. I need to hear the rest of the story.”