Cuts Like An Angel (5 page)

Chapter Six

Rosie

Rosie shoved her stick shift into first and shut the car off. God, no. She took in a slow breath and cocked her jaw at the pink paper attached to her front door. She noticed the washroom door at the rear of the house was open—again.
God, Ms. Mandy, would you please stop trying to wash clothes.
She always left the door open, and people would help themselves to their detergent. Rosie started hiding it in behind the washer when Ms. Mandy claimed it was the All-timers disease as she called it, making her forget. More like old-timer of the ornery sort.

She checked her mirrors, a survival instinct she’d picked up during the months she lived there. More than once, she’d been approached by random people right off her street, before she ever got out of the car—
you got al light, a few quid, a few bucks
?

Seriously? You just come right up to my car, in my yard, and ask for that?

When she mentioned it to Stacey at work, Rosie got a grimace and learned that her little two story cement home wasn’t an adorable English cottage, but a longtime neighborhood crack pot stolen by a stupid American woman that wasn’t good for the business.
Thanks for finally telling me
, Rosie had thought. After finding that out, she felt a giant X on her back.

They may not need to kill her to get their crotch box back if she didn’t figure out how to pay the damn gas bill. Ms. Mandy’s disability check paid the rent, and Rosie’s monthly contributions from her parents paid for food and utilities.

Until they cut the money off.

Two months ago she got the call from her mom.
“It’s wrong to foot your bills while you lollygag in England, of all godforsaken places,
” her mom had said. Of course her dad agreed. She wore the pants when it came to Rosie. Rosie was a girl; all the girls were Mom’s problem. Dad had Jerry to worry about, the only spoiled rotten son, two years her junior.

But this wasn’t lunch money they were giving her; this was Rosie’s inheritance. She was using it just like her brother and two sisters had. 

“To buy a home, to start a business,” her mom had argued when she brought that up. It didn’t count that Rosie was doing the same thing. Rosie was being difficult and stupid running off to another country where things were ridiculously expensive. “Is the American medical field not good enough for you here? Seriously, Rosie, you’re acting like a childish teenager.”

And when Mom found out Dad was giving her inheritance money, she found her leverage—her foothold back into her life to control her, or so she thought.

Rosie opened the car door, the loud creak announcing her arrival to the entire neighborhood. She’d not be
played
by her mom or dad. She would not be manipulated and controlled another day of her life. Ever.  Those days had ended when she was seventeen and had begun planning her escape from her families domineering clutches. “Oh, you know I love you Rosie.” That was always Mom’s signature when she blocked Rosie from being her own person.

Rosie wasn’t stupid. She’d saved as much money as she could, never counting on any of it. She’d saved enough to survive to the paid position at the hospital, but Ms. Mandy got sick and needed all that expensive organic crap. That took care of the gas bill money.

Something would come. She’d find the money. If there was one thing her mother gave her, it was determination—determined to make it on her own … without any of her righteous family. The irresponsible Rosie, the first fruit was supposed to lead by example. She’d blown that at sixteen and would never stop paying, would never recover that position. Good. She didn’t want their idea of success and the American dream, the American nightmare. They were nothing but high society social sluts, and they disgusted her. They cared about her because Rosie’s success and failures reflected on them.

Rosie would be her own mother, father, best friend, family. She didn’t need a single one of them. She yanked the pink paper off the door. “Bastards,” she muttered. She didn’t mean the gas company, either. How dare they do this to her.

She didn’t dare to tell them she was working at a job with no pay. How could she afford to give when she had nothing? They didn’t think she was smart enough to have a plan. She would get the promotion because she was perfect for it … because she was the only one there qualified to
get
it. Take that Mum, as they said here in England.

“Ms. Mandy?” The second she opened the door, the cat shot out of the house. “You forgot to let poor Mr. Buckles out,” she called, stepping in and locking the door. God, what was that smell? Rosie hung her purse on the wall hook and looked around. She screamed at seeing Ms. Mandy on the bathroom floor, just beyond the tiny kitchen.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” she gasped, hurrying over to her. Rosie’s stomach heaved as she looked around. Crap on Ms. Mandy, on the toilet, the floor. Again she fought a heave as she touched a finger to the old woman’s face. She stifled a scream at finding her cold and stiff.

She ran back to the front door and grabbed her phone out of her purse. Her fingers trembled as she pressed 911. “Shit, shit, shit,” she whispered, redialing 999.

Rosie hurried out of the house when the bile burned in her throat. She gave the dispatcher all the answers they needed and then hung up to pace up and down near the front door. Unable to stand being in the house, she raced to her car and locked herself in to wait. She couldn’t go back in there. Oh God … Ms. Mandy. Dead.
In her house.

Rosie clenched her eyes tight, putting the heel of her hand to her throbbing right eye. “Not your fault. Not your fault,” she whispered, rocking a little.

She looked around and the dilapidated houses stared back accusingly at her. She eyed the half-standing metal fence that collapsed midway down the driveway. She scanned the dead overgrowth in the joining yards. Everything in her life took on the face of failure and loss. Disappointment.

She fanned her face, resisting the shit storm brewing in her chest. “Keep calm, Rosie. You did everything you could. Old people die. She was sick.” Oh God. Ms. Mandy was the only living person she was close to, outside of Stacey at work. Now she was gone.

Rosie stared at her phone, not wanting to call Stacey and hear the speech. She would give her the grief-speech in that tone that reminded Rosie that nobody really cared. Not really.

She remembered Josh and gasped in hope only to have the brief salvation yanked from her. She’d given him
her
number. He didn’t give his.

She slowly lowered her forehead to the steering wheel, fighting an onslaught of fears. With everything happening, she chose to focus on the one being he hadn’t given his number because he hadn’t wanted to. That she’d read into his interest a thousand miles too deep, dreamed it right out of thin air as usual. That the English hunk wasn’t the hero she secretly hoped he might be. That she’d opened herself up to wanting something, needing something. Needing someone. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t survive that kind of let down in a country a million miles from home. She couldn’t survive another death like that.

Chapter Seven

William

The strong tang of cheap perfume made William’s eyes water. The harshness of it caught in his throat—the poisonous aroma of his mother. But it wasn’t just the stench of it, it was the reminder from it. The scent of coming home. The scent of facing her and her diabolical thoughts and words. It was the acrid scent of poison and fear and all the shit that she had done in his life, smacking him in the chest and making him gasp for breath.

The house was silent. More silent than he had ever known it. Even in all the years of coming home to an empty house as a child, he had never felt silence like this. It pressed against him, heavy on his chest.  Silence with the missing promise that she would come home tonight. She wouldn’t, though. She wouldn’t ever come home again.

Sunlight filtered in through the large window at the top of the stairs. Her Mother Mary statue sitting there—a bottle, filled with unholy tap water, nothing pure about it. He could still see her, filling it up, swaggering to the side with a cigarette nestled between her fingers tipped with chipped red nail varnish. “I don’t know why he cursed me with you,” she’d spat as she refilled it. “You …”

She’d knocked the bottle over, not him. But it had been his fault—his fault because he was the one she had chased down the stairs.

He pushed his way into the first room, shoving the door with his shoulder. All her collected keepsakes, clothes of the woman his mother used to be, boxed up and labelled. She wasn’t turning tricks anymore. The only trick she’d be lucky to turn now was keeping her teeth in while she shot her abusive words at him. He climbed over them, careful at first. Lifting one box and then another out of the way. He knocked one over, it hadn’t been sealed. It spilled its guts out onto the other piles of crap she had in there. Shoes … fucking shoes. He picked them up, red, glossy. Shoes that made a click clack sound as she walked. Heals so high and pointed like needles. He ran a hand delicately down the side. A lover stroking the legs of his prize. His fingers wrapped around the perfect heel and he pulled it back, snapping it. “Kick me with these again …”

He took the other one, grabbed the heel and destroyed it the same way. There were more shoes in boxes—more dinners he didn’t eat. More toys he couldn’t have, clothes she couldn’t afford to buy. That’s what all these were. The money she didn’t spend on him, and here they sat in dusty unopened boxes. He dumped them out. Last came a neat box with a ribbon holding it closed—a beautiful box with lace around the edges and a window to peer and marvel at the shoes inside. These weren’t shoes. They were something more. Something more extraordinary than that. Black and sleek. They oozed elegance even from the cardboard cave. He tore the black silk ribbon from the top, pulling it apart to get to the shoes. These ... so beautiful, so perfect. The kind of thing that belonged in a glass cabinet for the richer people to stand around with champagne, to marvel at how wonderful they all were. These shoes were the Christmas morning he woke to nothing. The day Santa said he didn’t deserve anything. These were the Christmas dinners when he got tossed under the stairs with a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk while the family next door laughed and cheered and sang Christmas carols through the wall. Singing their cheer and their happiness and all they were grateful for. These were the shoes.

He put them back in the box, pulled the ribbon back around it and tied it in a neat little bow. She’d never know. He placed the box to one side and carried on climbing the mountain of useless possessions to the window at the front.

He grabbed the handle on the sash and pulled, but the window didn’t move. Stuck down from years of neglect. William put a hand against the half-rotted wood and pushed, forcing the aged crone from its case. The blast of cool fresh air swept in, diluting the stench of the room … the scent of his mother. Soon there would be no trace.

He didn’t climb carefully on his way back to the door. He kicked like a boy wading through water. Kicking with purpose, forcing his way through the sea of things that should have been food in his belly. He grabbed the black box on his way out, and then closed the door. Tomorrow … he’d clear it out. All of it. She didn’t need it any longer. She was gone.

He paused at the door of the next room—her room. The place he was forbidden from entering. Her sanctuary. His rebellious hands gripped the handle, urging him to push it open. She couldn’t do anything now. She wouldn’t know. She’d never know again.

He opened the door to the heart of the sour stench in the house—piss and vomit, alcohol and cigarettes—all of the scents rolled into one ghastly creature. He put a hand over his mouth, blocking out as much as he could. No, he wasn’t ready for this yet. Yanking the door shut, he tucked the box under his arm and raced up the stairs to his room, the sanctuary he had claimed when he was old enough. He reached up to the ledge above his door and took down his key. He unlocked his hide out and went in, shutting out the world of his mother. This was his place. The place she couldn’t touch. She had tried. God, she tried so many times. 

He’d moved out when he was sixteen. Moved into one of those places that advertised new starts for kids. He’d got himself a job, too, but she’d ruined that. Taken it from him. Overdosing herself and passing out in her own vomit. She wasn’t safe to be left alone.

So he’d packed his things back up, things being two plastic bags of clothes and a pair of trainers. He’d taken them home, but he had not been the same boy who had left. He would not settle for having nothing. He made his own life and his own things. His room was his place. Decorated how he wanted it. Shelves lined with books. A desk filled with papers … his scribblings, his writings, the things that came from his mind in those darkest of moments. A testament to the man inside who would not be beaten and hidden any longer.

He stacked his things, his journals and his papers into a pile, swiping away the pens to one side to leave himself a space on his desk. He put the shoes there, holding the box with his hands at either side.
Never put shoes on a table. It’s bad luck.

He let go of the box, leaving it there and ignoring the niggle inside his chest, the words yelling at him inside his mind.
You’ll be sorry.
But could his luck be worse?

For the rest of the day, William set about cleaning the room at the front of the house. It was as good a place as any to start. When he was done, a long row of black bags lined the hallway, threatening to topple over. Thirty-six of them in total. She had so much shit ... so many things. William swiped the back of his hand across his forehead and took a long hard gulp from his water bottle. The muscles in his arms and shoulders ached from the day’s work. His eyes stung from the dust and his nose had long since blocked up, but he didn’t care.

He stood and smiled at his accomplishment. It was just one room. One room of nothing but these bags, these were the symbol of getting rid of her. Soon she’d be gone for good.

The front lounge was done, vacuumed and dusted. He unearthed the deep red three-piece suite his mother had bought but never allowed them to use. He found an old coffee table, its middle bowed with the burden of boxes, but he’d cleaned and shined it and now it sat in the middle of the room. He took down the picture of his grandfather, dusty and old, memories he didn’t remember. A small boy in the picture, the boy, the one who thought the world was good. Now, this was William’s room, too.

No, this was Josh’s room.

He went into the kitchen and pulled out an instant meal from the cupboard. He readied a pot of the dehydrated noodles that were supposed to taste like curry. His mother’s specialty. The sour gravy she’d slurp down herself, wearing it like decorations on her clothes. But he wasn’t going into the fridge Not yet. What monstrosities would be germinating in there from all this time?

He would face that tomorrow.

He ate his snack in the kitchen, standing at the counter as he read last month’s newspaper. When he was done, he rinsed his fork under the tap and put it in the drainer, throwing his pot into the trash. Dirty dishes stacked up on the side, food still encrusted on them. Mould grew on the bread that was still sitting on the counter

William eyed the month-old grease in the sink. Closing his eyes a moment, he plunged his hand into the rotting waste of his mother’s last meals and yanked the plug. The water let out with a loud slurping as he fought his throat trying to retch the junk he’d just eaten.

In the bathroom, he turned the shower taps on, letting the spray heat and fill the room with steam. He leaned on the sink and faced the mirror, shaking his head. “You’re dead to me. You need to be dead.” He opened the cabinet, pulling out his mother’s small, black scissors and reached for his hair. It had got long these last months—dark blond and dirty looking. He pulled one of the longer parts and set about it with the scissors. He didn’t stop until the sink was filled with dirty blond curls. “I hate you,” he said.

Without thinking, he opened the scissors and lay the blade against his arm. He pressed it down, his eyes on his reflection as he pulled the blade slowly along his skin. He watched the relief in his expression, utter peace as the blade cut, peeling open flesh and letting out the pain that his skin contained.

Peace, calm, solace. All of it rolled through him like a comforting hand touching his soul. Each cut was more freeing than the last. A sheer moment of bliss brought on by the burn in his flesh. “Oh God,” he murmured, his mind delirious from the onslaught of pleasure. He stopped when the last cut was at the crook of his elbow, his hand slick with his blood. It ran into the sink; into the discarded hair. He raised his eyes slowly to his reflection and smiled. The world around them both so still, like the calm of the water before the stone is thrown.

He showered and brushed his teeth., then turned out the light and went to his room. Closing the door, he locked it behind him and sat down on his bed. There, on his nightstand, was the piece of paper she’d given him. Rosie … He picked it up and stared at her name, at the way she curled her letters, the delicate way she wrote them. He didn’t know her, but … he needed to. She needed him. He’d call her soon. Call and make that appointment to work at the office. Josh could do it. He was the kind of man who could do these things. Josh was confident … Josh would call.

William climbed into bed. He didn’t close his curtains; he never did. It felt like he was closed in when they were shut, and he’d had enough of being closed in anywhere. In his bed, he could watch the night sky, he could escape whenever he needed it. He closed his eyes and let himself drift off.

The rain was heavy against the window, but the rat-a-tat-tat was more rhythmic than annoying. It had a calming facet to it. William watched the droplets on the glass as they slid down idly, like tiny water warriors on the glass. One droplet landed, clinging until the one above lost its grip and slid down the window pane, taking others with it. Sometimes a new droplet would land directly onto the one clinging for presence, for its space, the territory that belonged to it—only for a moment. Like people in his life … coming, going, never really clinging on.

The rain—mother nature’s song if anyone cared to listen, the music of her heart. Rain water falling, echoes in the otherwise silent night. The rain fell from the drains at the edge of the roof, the guttering overwhelmed from all the storms they’d had recently. The night almost cried for him—tears that he could no longer weep himself. Tears for the boy under the stairs.

The water flowed, echoing into the empty alleyway below at the side of the house—tiny tin drums of nature’s orchestra.

In the garden, his mother’s tulips held cups of water, bowing only when overburdened by the weight of it and then spilling over.

The notes of the night song played through the darkness, and soothed William’s skin. He raised his arm, staring at it with the moonlight that came in through the window. He traced his fingertips along each cut, some new, some old—all of them holding the invitation to play in mother nature’s band. He could bring the painful edge to the music, the part of the song that made you cry.

He slid his phone off the nightstand. 3:30 a.m. … again. Always this time.

Before he knew what he was doing, he swiped his finger across the screen, opening the world to him with a smear of blood from his fresh wounds. He flicked to the keypad and pressed dial.

Rosie answered before the first ring ended. She’d been waiting? Waiting to join in with the beautiful song. To take her place.

“Mental Health Helpline. How can I help?”

William rolled onto his side and let out a breath, clenching his eyes shut. Her voice was the new music he wanted to hear. She ignited a spark inside his heart just by speaking.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk,” she soothed just as always. “We can just sit together a while, but I’m here if you want to.”

William closed his eyes. He wanted to. God, he did.