The Game Changer

by Louise Phillips

  (Page 1 of 1)

  Kate

  BACK AT THE APARTMENT, KATE MADE UP HER MIND that the situation couldn’t go on. She had told Adam as much driving back from the station. He wasn’t happy about it, but if she didn’t start making changes, getting away from those four walls, taking risks, when would she be able to bring Charlie home?

  Standing at the large living-room window, she people-watched, seeing a number of teenage girls on their lunch break from the local school, huddled in groups. A couple were on mobile phones, others eating bread rolls out of paper bags. Most were talking, laughing at each other’s jokes. A man passed on a bicycle, wearing a sky-blue helmet and canary-coloured wet gear.

  Kate’s breath fogged the windowpane, and she used her index finger to draw circles linked together, like tiny atoms under a microscope. Something was changing inside her. Although she wasn’t sure what it was, she knew there had been a shifting of perspective, and it was more than introspection or a virus. ‘You think too much,’ her mother used to say. ‘Have more fun. Stop dwelling on things.’

  Hearing her mother’s voice, she thought again about Charlie coming home. Since he had left, other than a missing notebook and pen – which could be anywhere, considering how her mind had been – nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and the notes had stopped. ‘Give it a few more days,’ she heard her mother saying. ‘After that, he can come home.’

  Adam had finally got the report back from the script expert. He had examined the note sent to Kate, and the letter from Amanda Doyle. Although the similarities were remarked upon, there wasn’t enough to determine they had been created by the same person. It was a possibility, but not an absolute. Perhaps she had overreacted, allowing her fears and imagination to get the better of her. Either way, it didn’t matter now. She was going to put an end to this self-determined prison, and if nothing else happened, Charlie would come home, and that would be that.

  Having read the statement at Harcourt Street, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything, and glancing at the study door, she knew she wasn’t ready to start looking at the mind maps again or make any notes. Instead, she went into the bedroom, pulling out the memorabilia drawer, already knowing what she was looking for: an old photograph album she had put together as a child. The album had been a seventh-birthday present, and it had a blue plastic cover with the picture of a chestnut horse on the front.

  The first photograph had been taken at Christmas time. She was standing outdoors with a baby doll in her arms, pretending to feed it milk from a plastic bottle. The next one was of her and her mother. They were at a funfair, standing in front of the bumper cars. She had pink candyfloss in her hand. Kate pulled the photograph closer, peering into her mother’s face, wondering what thoughts were going through her mind. Was she happy, despite all the anger? Only one of the images included Kate and her father. He always preferred to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

  The two of them were walking through town, and the man on the bridge, the one who took photographs of people coming from O’Connell Street, had taken it. They’d been to see Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox. Kate had been ten at the time. She took the photograph from the sleeve, the plastic making a sound like Sellotape when she pulled it back. Examining the reverse side of the image, she saw ‘26198/3’ written in pencil, probably put there by the photographer as a reference. Underneath, she saw her ten-year-old handwriting. In blue biro she had written, ‘Dad and Kate, 1986, O’Connell Street Bridge’. She wore a loose tartan jacket, with a grey T-shirt underneath, and black jeans. If her hair hadn’t been in a ponytail, she might have been mistaken for a boy. Beside her, her father wore a long grey overcoat with a cream scarf, and a light grey trilby. Half his face was hidden in shadow, and the half that wasn’t looked happy.

  She thought about a quote by Chesterton, talking about families: When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairy-tale.

  To Kate, the term ‘fairy-tale’ meant the inexplicable. She wondered how anyone could look back and work out what had really happened in their childhood, or fully understand the why of things. In the photograph, her father looked like a proud man, someone others could depend on. But she knew, more than anyone, how his mood could change from angry to friendly at the sound of a doorbell ringing. What kind of person could switch like that? Fooling others so well that only those in the inner family circle held their breath in fear of the anger that would still be there after the visitor had gone.

  Kate went back into the living room. The clatter of schoolgirls outside had subsided. She needed to do something useful if the day wasn’t going to be a total write-off. She thought about the missing-person cases again, telling herself she had to keep her mind occupied. Rather than going into the study, she picked up her mobile phone to record. ‘Heading – Cult Groupings with Narcissism.’ She cleared her throat. ‘One of the standard common denominators is group isolation, taking members to a place where they have limited contact with the outside world. Isolation feeds into the notion that the beliefs and structures of the artificial world of the group are primary. The types of individuals drawn to these groupings can vary. They attract people from different cultures, educational levels, emotional and intellectual ability, and socioeconomic ranges. Most usually have a desire for change, and to find something their current lives are unable to give them.’

  She remembered a study she had done on the rise of Flower Power in sixties California. The movement had attracted young people like moths to a flame. Initially, it was all about peace, love and freedom, but over time, especially in San Francisco, a darker element had come into play, and a couple of years into the movement, as busloads of young Americans were arriving, instead of flowers in their hair they needed protection.

  The phenomenon of the Manson killings, even now, was testament to that. In Kate’s eyes, it was a perfect example of how a social outcast, someone who had spent much of his early life in prison, could change the lives of others dramatically. Charles Manson had never come straight out and said he manipulated those around him. Instead, he was still adamant that what they had done, they had done of their own free will.

  The two massacres of Hollywood’s elite, the first when the actress Sharon Tate and her friends were brutally butchered, the second the subsequent night at the LaBianca residence, were not drug-induced. The killers had been perfectly lucid and, in most people’s eyes, capable of knowing right from wrong. However, even a non-professional study of the lead-up to the killings could identify reasons why an unremarkable social outcast managed to turn young people seeking peace and freedom into vicious killers.

  Over time, if you wipe away someone’s identity, persuade them to forget everything they have ever learned, you are left with a blank canvas, which someone can manipulate, bit by bit, substituting a particular philosophy or belief for their own. The group gradually becomes more aligned with the leader, and in Manson’s case, to such an extent that his followers would have done whatever he told them to do. All of the techniques used by Manson – isolation on that old movie set in the desert, convincing his followers that he was godlike, their guru, getting them to dress as Indians, or cowboys, or other fictional characters on a daily basis, along with drugs for periods when time disappeared – fed into their indoctrination, and loss of individuality.

  On the first night of the killing spree, when Manson woke the girls, telling them to do whatever Charles Watkins, the only male killer who accompanied the girls to the Tate residence, told them to, they followed his instructions, carrying out the killings as if they were Manson himself. Psychologically, and in every other way possible, they became Manson, the elevated sense of him. He told his followers that he didn’t lie and that he would die for them, asking them if they would die for him. When asked
about the killings afterwards, he said, ‘I walked with them, but they made their own choices. I told them to leave something, the same way as I would, to make a statement.’

  Through manipulation, Manson had led middle-class, disillusioned young people to madness, down a path he had created and from which he had nothing to lose. The social outcast and victim became the powerful game changer, and while others moved on – hippies no longer wearing flowers in their hair – forty-six years later those, including Manson, who had carried out the crimes were still in prison. His followers had done things that, years later, they found impossible to understand. They had followed an anti-social, manipulative man who could become anyone those girls had wanted him to be. The gradual reduction of self, vulnerability, hourly indoctrination, led to an utter belief and obedience, as if to God, so that one day he could say, ‘Get up and do what I tell you to do,’ and those mind-altering methods had created short moments of evil.

  Kate recalled a television interview with Leslie Van Houten, one of the killers. Leslie had been in her forties, and when asked what she had thought would happen that night, she had said, in a gentle tone, barely above a whisper, ‘I knew people would die. I knew there would be killing.’

  Addy

  ADDY’S MIND JUMPED IN ANY NUMBER OF directions. He thought about Donal and all the crazy stuff he had said. He thought about Aoife, too, and how much she had changed. Neither, as he thumped the wall in frustration, could he get out of his mind the idea of Chloë being in danger. He didn’t trust Stephen, and although he hadn’t met Saka or his sidekick Jessica, he didn’t trust them either.

  Increasingly desperate, he contemplated the use of physical force to escape. If he attacked one of the members delivering the meals, he might manage to get to the stairs but, more than likely, not a lot further. Being trapped made him feel as though he was wearing a neck brace, especially in the middle of the night when he faced hours of isolation.

  The only way he was going to get out of there was if he convinced some of the members that he had changed his ways and wanted to be part of the programme, to become self-enlightened. That day, those delivering the food had started talking to him, and it became increasingly obvious that they believed they were helping him; they saw his isolation as a form of therapy.

  He asked thought-provoking questions about the programme, telling a couple of them how much his time alone had helped him. How it had taught him to value each moment, saying things like, ‘The most important answers are often within us.’ At first, he had worried they wouldn’t believe him, but then he became more confident, and the more conversations he had, the more he hoped he was bringing them onside. He used information given to him by one member to feed to another. One had gone as far as saying he was now on the right path. All of which, if Addy was patient, would bring him nearer to getting out of there.

  One wrong move, though, one stupid statement, and he could jeopardise everything. He put his hands to his unshaven face, then became conscious of his body odour, impossible to get away from. He had changed not only physically but emotionally, as if he had a new outer skin, as if the doubts and questions were making him stronger, more focused. The last thought he had was of Aoife, and how, if he could, he would make one final effort to convince her to drop this madness.

  Kate

  KATE PHONED ADAM, AND TOLD HIM SHE WAS GOING for a run. She was apprehensive, but she had to start somewhere. She hadn’t planned to go back to her old home, but thirty minutes after making the call to him, she stood across the road from the house she had grown up in.

  The earlier rain had eased, and with the sun coming out from the clouds, the passing traffic made swishing sounds on the wet tarmac and through the puddles. She stared at the house, as she had a few weeks earlier, and thought about ringing the bell. Perhaps this time there would be an answer, and she could walk on the floors she had once run on as a child.

  Unlike the other houses, there wasn’t any smoke coming from the chimney and the windows looked darker. Immediately she understood why: the heavy curtains were drawn. She told herself that nobody was at home, yet she crossed the road regardless, repeating what she had done before, ringing the doorbell and not expecting an answer. She listened as the bell rang in the hallway, visualising her mother rushing to the door. Kate put her fingers to the lock at the top, imagining her father turning his key. Other memories came back: the three of them together, returning from the park, their cheeks rosy red with the cold, all wearing coats, scarves and gloves, huddled on the front step, waiting to get inside to the warmth. She thought of birthday parties and Christmases, when her father had taken down the video camera and recorded all the happy bits, as if they, instead of the dark times, were the long-standing proof of their lives.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a female voice hollered from behind.

  Kate turned to see the old woman with the dachshund.

  ‘There’s nobody home,’ the woman said. ‘They’ve gone away.’ This time she was wearing a clear plastic raincoat with the hood up.

  ‘Do you know when they’ll be back?’ Kate asked.

  ‘It’ll be a while. I’m keeping an eye on things for them.’ The woman maintained her position at the gate, as if she was some sort of sentry. ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘My name’s Kate Pearson. I used to live here.’

  The woman blinked a few times. ‘Oh, yes, I remember you. You’re the girl that went missing.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kate replied, although she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with being referred to in that way. ‘Do you know where they’ve gone, or if there’s any way I can contact them? I’d like to visit the house for old times’ sake.’

  ‘I used to know your mother,’ the woman replied, instead of answering Kate’s question. ‘We played bridge together.’

  ‘Mrs Grant, is that you? I didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘Well, none of us is getting any younger.’ Her tone said she was insulted by Kate’s remark.

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just that it’s been so long.’ Her sentences came out on top of one another. ‘Sorry, Mrs Grant.’ She smiled, attempting to retrieve the situation. ‘I think you look great.’

  ‘I like to exercise. There’s no point in letting the body age too fast.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘You can call me Pat, seeing as how you’re not a child any more.’ Clearly she was mellowing.

  ‘Good to meet you again, Pat.’ Kate walked towards her.

  ‘I have a key if you want it,’ the old woman said, as if it was some kind of tease, then added, ‘there’s an alarm connected to a security depot, and they need a local key holder. I wouldn’t be giving it to anyone, mind, but I guess it wouldn’t do any harm for you to have a quick look around, seeing as how I know you.’

  ‘Great.’ Kate could hardly believe her luck. ‘That’s really kind of you.’

  Pat Grant rooted in her bag, while the dachshund glared at Kate, but obediently remained in the sitting position. ‘They’ve gone somewhere on the south coast, on holidays.’ She held up the gold Yale key, then handed it to Kate. ‘They must be mad in this bloody awful weather.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Don’t be long now. I’ll be back with Hubert in a quarter of an hour. The wet weather isn’t good for his bones, especially if he’s out too long. The alarm is inside the door,’ then lowering her voice, ‘the code is “pass”.’

  Kate held the key in the palm of her hand. ‘I’ll be quick. I promise.’

  ∞

  Turning the key in the door, she wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but in the hallway her heart quickened, as she punched in the alarm code. It wasn’t the idea of being inside someone else’s home. It was the acknowledgement that somehow, again, she was stepping back in time. She had last been inside the house eight weeks after her mother’s death, to clear away her things. The memorial cards had been sent out, the visits to the solicitor and the bank sorted, and all the o
ther details that followed a person’s death completed.

  Back then, the house hadn’t pulled at her memory strings. Her mother had been in the nursing home for so long that the place didn’t feel the same, seeming more like an empty shell of what it used to be. Leaning against the front door, another image jumped into her mind: her mother in her final days, her lower lip dropped in an effort to breathe, her frame shrunken to little more than bone, the veins on her hands protruding, and that vacant stare, the one that looked beyond you.

  That afternoon, though, the house felt different, and she could see the place anew, with open doors leading to each of the rooms, every element containing part of who she used to be. The light forced its way from behind the drawn curtains, and she could feel a draught sneak up the hallway from the back of the house as she breathed in her old home again.

  The first new owners had been a young couple. Later, she learned they had fallen on hard times, the husband’s business collapsing with the end of the Celtic Tiger, and the house was resold. To whom, Kate had no idea.

  She switched on the light in the hall, opening the front zip of her rain jacket. There were new furnishings – lamps, carpet, an umbrella stand – and pictures on the wall. It was as if someone had taken a drawing done by another and changed it, putting items where spaces had been blank.

  Conscious of time, Kate walked through the house, until she stood outside her parents’ bedroom. The doors had remained unchanged, other than a fresh coat of cream paint. Holding the handle, she paused, wondering again what she expected. How many times had she turned that handle in the past? How many times had she stood in that exact spot? She tried to envisage herself as the twelve-year-old who’d thought she knew so much.