Bad Faith

by Gillian Philip

  Well, that’s how I felt, only my demon couldn’t get out. Okay, I knew it was there now, and it was digging and biting and scrabbling inside me but damn, my bones and my flesh were too strong. It couldn’t make a dent. And I wished it would, I wished it would just explode out of my chest so I could die and stop it biting.

  But meanwhile I smiled at a spot in the middle distance. I don’t know what else they expected me to do, and if I stopped smiling long enough to think, I was just going to die anyway.

  Me and my demon.

  • • •

  We sat there in the rain, all three of us on the kerb, Ming and Griff on either side of me. Griff’s arms rested on his knees and he was staring across the road. Ming had his head in his hands and he wasn’t saying a word. I watched the brown filthy rain as it gurgled and swirled down the iron drain cover at my bare feet. We were all soaked and the rain was still falling, relentless. We were alone, nobody was around. Nobody sane would be.

  ‘It didn’t go quite that far.’ Griff didn’t look at me. He didn’t want to say the word, the word for how far it apparently didn’t go. ‘He really hurt you. I mean, he was about to – but I walked in as he was...’ He took a breath. ‘If he’d actually – Dad would have killed him.’

  ‘Would he?’ I paddled my toes in the rainwater.

  ‘I nearly did.’

  ‘You’re not Dad,’ I said.

  To avoid Griff’s troubled glance I studied Ming’s hands against his face. The fingers raked into his hair were long and thin, with prominent knuckles. Not like the Bishop’s. Not like those fat white grubs. All the same I wondered if I’d ever in my life be able to contemplate them touching me, ever again.

  ‘It went far enough,’ I said.

  Griff was silent for so long that I turned and looked at him. In the driving rain I couldn’t decide if he was crying. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Thing is, I left. I’d served at the altar that day. Dad was preaching somewhere else and Todd was the guest preacher at our church, and afterwards I was kind of torn between staying and talking to him, or rushing home to see The Exorcism Files. You know how much I liked Todd but he seemed kind of brusque that day. It was almost like he wanted rid of me. If I’d stopped to think about it I might have wondered.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Why should you?’

  Griff didn’t answer that. ‘He told me to go ahead, said he was waiting for Dad, so you could stay and wait with him. He’d been kind of joking around with you all morning, and I was jealous he was paying you so much attention. I didn’t even get suspicious, you know. I wouldn’t have come back at all if I hadn’t forgotten my jacket and my keys hadn’t been in the pocket. But I should have guessed. I should have known.’ Griff was definitely crying now, but his voice stayed steady. ‘I should never have left you.’

  I didn’t feel like crying. I felt perfectly calm, despite that demon in my ribcage. ‘How, precisely? You were thirteen. How would you have known?’

  He sniffed and rubbed the back of his arm across his face. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. When I went in the vestry, I mean. You’re not big now but you were so small. You’d just turned eleven. Eleven, for God’s sake. I grabbed that wonky candlestick, the one that was coming off its base, the one that needed soldering. I couldn’t think what else to do.’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t.’

  ‘No. Yes. Actually, I wasn’t thinking anything at all. He had a hold of you by the hair, he had a great big fistful of your hair, Cass, and I just wanted to make him let go. I swung the thing at him, as hard as I could. I missed, but he had to let you go. You ran. You just ran, you didn’t scream or anything, and I should have followed you, but I was too angry and I was frightened.’ He swallowed hard. ‘Do you remember it all?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Bits. Vague bits. I keep remembering more.’ I didn’t want to.

  He was silent again for ages, while the rain ran off us, soaking us to the skin. I could feel it trickling between my toes, dripping down my neck and my back, running off my eyelashes and getting in my eyes. My brain knew it was fresh colourless rainwater but I imagined it was just like the grimy water in the gutter, thick and brown and scummy. It was soaking through my skin, staining my innards, and I’d never get it off. Not in a million years.

  ‘You never screamed,’ said Griffin.

  I don’t know if that was an accusation or what. I didn’t really care. ‘I was scared of him,’ I said, remembering. ‘I was so scared. He was scary.’ Mystified, I shook my head. ‘He always seemed so...’

  ‘Nice,’ said Griff.

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘Cuddly.’

  ‘I broke the candlestick against the wall. I swung it so hard I could have killed him, and maybe I meant to. I was aiming for his head and he knew it. So he grabbed the bits of candlestick and he threw them through that window. That stained glass window. Dad really liked it.’

  ‘Yes.’ I stared at the swirl of filthy rain in the gutter.

  ‘He grabbed me. He got me by the throat, I thought he’d kill me. Cass. I don’t think he’d have let go if Dad hadn’t come in. He came in the back door of his own church and found an Arch-Rector with his hands round his son’s throat.’ He shut his eyes. ‘I never felt so helpless or useless or angry. Then we heard the screams outside, and the car hitting the wall after it hit...’ His voice died.

  ‘You weren’t useless,’ I told him calmly.

  ‘Yeah. I was so busy being a superhero I let you run under that car.’

  ‘So did Dad.’

  ‘Don’t blame Dad,’ said Griff miserably. ‘You should have heard the things they said to each other later. God.’

  ‘Yes, I bet they had a bit of a squabble.’

  ‘Please, Cass. Please.’

  I sighed. ‘Didn’t somebody notice at the hospital? I mean, did somebody ask why I ran under a car?’

  ‘Far as the staff knew you’d just been fooling around, you’d run into the road without looking. I think there was a nurse who saw more, and a doctor. The doctor, he got posted to the islands where the army were fighting rebels, and he hasn’t been heard of since. The nurse just disappeared. Y’know?’ He couldn’t help adding bitterly, ‘The way they do.’

  Lovely. Blood on my hands, on top of everything else.

  ‘Mum and Dad didn’t know anything either, not then, they didn’t ask questions. All they cared about was you not dying. But when you were sort of stable, Dad took me home. His head was in pieces, he was so confused, and that’s when he asked me what had happened. Why was I fighting with Todd, for God’s sake? When I told him, he had to park the car for about twenty minutes. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking, he was so angry I was scared for him.

  ‘And when we got home? Todd was right there in our house. Cocky as hell. He must have taken the keys from my jacket pocket, cool as that. Dad went for him, threatened to kill him, but he couldn’t follow through. Not Dad. And I think he really wanted to hear Todd explain himself, he was desperate to hear an apology, some kind of remorse.’

  ‘An apology,’ I said coldly.

  ‘What if Dad had killed him?’ For the first time Griff sounded as if he could get angry with me. ‘What do you think would have happened to him? You only had to hear Todd when he got his breath back. The things he said. Oh, Cass. The things he threatened Dad with. He was going to have you and me taken away. He said he’d blame Dad for everything and I mean everything. Do you understand what I’m saying? He’d say Dad abused you. Imagine it, Cass.’

  ‘No,’ I said. My hands had started to shake too.

  ‘He said no-one would believe Dad. That’s true. Todd could have accused him of anything. Nobody would take your word or mine, Cass. We were kids, he was our father. Todd was going to say he’d intervened, that he’d walked in on Dad...The police would have sided with Todd, even if they had to fabricate evidence. Do you see? Dad had no choice. None.’

  ‘None,’ I echoed.

  But he had. He’d had another choice, one day
in the woods, and he’d taken it because it was better than the last choice, anything would be. Because it was the first choice he’d been given in the matter, and he’d taken it.

  I still couldn’t forgive him. Or her. ‘Mum knew,’ I said.

  ‘Uh-huh. Of course.’

  ‘And you knew. And...’ I glanced aside at Ming, my best friend, my oldest friend, the love of my life.

  ‘Sometimes we thought you knew. That you’d remembered.’ Griff smiled weakly. ‘Like when you cut all your hair off. We thought you’d remembered then, but you hadn’t.’

  ‘No. I remember doing that but I didn’t know why. Because that’s how he kept hold of me, that’s why I did it.’

  Griff looked at the sky, letting rain sting his eyes. ‘Dad said to him, You call yourself a man of God! And Todd gave him that dimply smirk, that one he had when he was really pleased with himself. Y’know? And he said, But, Gabriel, it’s what I call myself that matters!’

  ‘He’s right.’ Suddenly I felt exhausted. ‘I want to go home now.’

  Not that I knew what I’d do when I got there, or whether I’d even stay. A part of me just wanted somebody to come along and take pity on me and hit me with a stick like they should have done before. That was only a small part, though. The rest of me wanted to take a stick myself, and kill my parents.

  14: Running

  Nothing was going my way. It’s not possible to keep rage boiling away forever without running out of energy, and I had to sit curled in an armchair and hugging my knees for hours. Mum had been taken down to the police station to give a statement about some other bloody mystery I’d never been told about, and Dad was still there, never having come home in the first place.

  I watched the relentless rain make patterns on the windows. I bit my nails methodically down to the quick, one at a time. I tried to watch television, but there was nothing but bad soaps and gameshows and endless news bulletins, and if I saw Ma Baxter’s mournful brave face once more I’d throw something through the screen. And I didn’t want to waste any more rage. It was burning down to a single bright ember inside me and I had to nurse it, like I nursed my demon, keeping it happy in there so it wouldn’t kill me.

  Griff didn’t want to leave me on my own but I made him go. I thought he’d go upstairs and lose himself in Hell Breaker II but he didn’t. He put on Dad’s long black raincoat and went outside and stood in the rain. God knew how he kept his cigarettes alight but now and again I’d see weak little trails of wet smoke drift across the window. I hadn’t made him stand outside, so I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel angry with him. I didn’t blame him like I blamed them. I kept hearing Mum say He’s never got over it you know, and the soft spot I had for my brother was getting softer by the minute.

  Those nights were long and light, but it was nearly dark by the time the parents slouched home. I heard the gravel crunch wetly, the rain settle to a dull drumming on the car roof, the engine killed into silence, the creak and slam of the doors. Griff must have intercepted them, because they took a few seconds too long to come into the house, and when they did they just stared at me, red-eyed, Dad as pale as death and Mum twisting her hands together as if she was trying to unscrew them.

  I wasn’t crying. If either of them did, I thought I might slap them, but they didn’t.

  Well, I wanted to say, what did the pair of you think? That I’d never remember? Did you think I’d go through life with this locked inside me? Did you think the demon was going to like it so much in there it would curl up in my chest and go to sleep and never want to see the outside world?

  I never said any of that, of course. I kept my mouth shut, because if I opened it the demon might get out that way.

  ‘We didn’t know how much you remembered,’ Mum said at last. ‘We never knew.’

  ‘You never tried to find out.’ My voice sounded like somebody else’s. Maybe it was.

  ‘I was scared to.’ She put the side of her hand into her mouth and bit it.

  ‘We didn’t want to remind you,’ said Dad. ‘Different if he’d been punished.’

  ‘He was,’ I said. Was that my demon’s voice? Certainly wasn’t mine.

  Dad took a silent breath. ‘Not then.’

  ‘But now,’ I said. ‘Now he’s been punished.’

  Mum sat down very abruptly on the sofa. Her teeth dug so hard into the skin of her hand I thought she’d draw blood. I was interested to see if she would, so I watched it closely.

  ‘Do you understand we couldn’t do anything?’ said Dad. His voice sounded alien too.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him.

  ‘But you don’t forgive us.’

  ‘No.’ I sighed deeply, while the demon punched my ribcage. Down, boy, I told it. See, I was getting used to it already. ‘Know what? I could forgive you when I thought it was Griff. I understood. I was okay about it when my brother got assaulted. There was nothing you could do. It was awful but it couldn’t be helped, it wasn’t your fault.’ I took a breath. ‘And now I know it was me? I’m not okay about it. At all. It’s not a terrible necessity and I don’t understand it, because it was me.’ I gave Dad a cold little smile. ‘Can you see why I feel lower than a slug?’

  Strands of black hair had fallen across Dad’s eyes. They’d been wet with rain but by this time they’d dried and stiffened to spikes. He didn’t push them away; he was trying to hide behind them, but it was no good. His eyes were hardly blue at all, they were dilated and indigo.

  ‘We’re sorry, Cass,’ he said. ‘We’re so sorry.’

  Sure they were. ‘How’s Abby?’ I asked.

  ‘Um.’ Dad rubbed his hand across his face, several times. ‘She’s... fine. Fine.’

  Well, that was another lie. Oh, so what.

  ‘I don’t want to know about it,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want to know why she’s there. I don’t want to know another secret just now.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’m going to go now.’

  They were silent for ages. ‘Go,’ echoed Dad at last. ‘Where to?’

  I stood up. ‘Well, I’ll have to go to Ming’s,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else. I’ll be all right there. You’ll know where I am.’

  ‘Will Mrs Urquhart...’ began Mum. She faltered. ‘Will she be okay with that?’

  ‘Of course she will,’ I said frostily. ‘She’s like me. She doesn’t ask awkward questions.’

  ‘No.’ Mum bit her lip.

  ‘I mean, they live in a slum and everything,’ I said sarcastically, ‘but there’s always room on their sitting room floor. They’re very welcoming. They’re nice people.’

  ‘Perhaps I should...’ Mum’s voice petered out. ‘Yes. All right.’

  I could have thrown it in their faces that Mrs Urquhart wouldn’t be there and neither would her husband, but I held my tongue. If I told them, they might still try to stop me going. I resented not being angry enough to tell them and defy them anyway.

  ‘I’ll call her,’ said Mum dully. ‘Let her know you’re coming. That’s only... polite.’ She half-swallowed the last word, knowing fine how it would clang in my brain in the circumstances.

  I went upstairs to pack.

  Neither of them tried to follow me and talk me out of it, and I didn’t know whether to be sad or relieved about that. When I came downstairs, dragging my backpack and my sleeping bag, they were in exactly the same position, as if they hadn’t moved or breathed or spoken a word since I’d left the room. You know that moment when you realise that not only are your parents not omnipotent, they’re utterly helpless in the face of the world? Well, that was it for me.

  I tucked my sleeping bag awkwardly under my arm. It was a big padded lie, that sleeping bag, since I had no intention of using it. I didn’t care. Deviousness was in my genes.

  ‘It was on answerphone,’ said Mum. Her mobile phone hung in her limp hand. ‘I left a message. I hope that’s okay.’

  She knew it was okay, it was always okay. Mum never spoke to Ming’s mum
or dad if she could help it; she didn’t want cosy chats with troublemakers. If my parents and Ming’s parents had an answerphone relationship, it was of Mum’s making. Right now, I was having no trouble keeping my balance here on the moral high ground.

  ‘Give me a call if there’s a problem, any problem,’ said Mum. Then she took a breath and made a massive adjustment. ‘Ask Mrs Urquhart to call me if you don’t want to talk to me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ said Dad.

  I took a breath to say no, but what came out was ‘All right.’

  • • •

  I had to say goodbye to Griff. He was in the garden, under a dripping rowan, gazing down at the twilit valley. You could hear the low roar of the river even above the lashing rain. The dusk obscured its violent torrent but you could make out that the trees on its banks were still clear of the water.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ said Griff. ‘Have you seen the river?’

  I went to stand beside him.

  ‘You’re going, then. Thought you would.’ He looked down at the gorge.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ I said.

  ‘Course I’m not angry with you.’

  ‘Only I’m going to Ming’s. Just for a bit,’ I added.

  ‘Fine. I like him, don’t I? Go ahead, be happy for a bit.’ He smiled at me without showing his teeth, one of his tight little real smiles. ‘What difference does it make now?’

  ‘Bye,’ I told him. ‘See you later.’

  • • •

  Dad didn’t say a word, all the way to Ming’s, just rubbed his hand across his face now and again. It was almost dark now so I couldn’t see the colour of his eyes, but he kept pushing his hair out of them and his fingers were trembling. My handsome fallen-angel Dad. My lovely murderer. My avenger. I still loved him but I needed to try and hate him for a while.