What Goes Around: A chilling psychological thriller (30 page)

‘Thank you.’ I make towards the exit and then veer off along a corridor, following the signs for the surgical wing. Perhaps he’s had his appendix removed or a small cyst or a lump cut out – something unimportant. Fingers crossed. Rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clovers. Black cats crossing my path and straight into Gareth’s hands. I shake that image out of my head.

This must be the one of the moments when people pray. I try for ‘Please God, don’t let it be serious. Please, please let him live. Please God, let him live’, but it sounds trite, phoney, a cliché of wanting and hoping that is entirely without substance when it’s coming from someone like me. And if God is the all-seeing eye then he’ll be laughing into his celestial coffee.

I walk confidently onto the ward as if I’m meant to be there and so no one challenges me. A group of doctors are off to one side discussing X-rays and I pass a physio helping a patient to walk. There is a mix of rooms, ranging from just one bed to six beds, and I glance into every one until I see my brother in a two-bedded room, propped up in bed with several pillows supporting his head, a drip going into his arm and a plastic tube clogged with what looks like pus and blood draining into a glass bottle on the floor.

His eyes are closed. I pull the curtains around us but he doesn’t wake up so I take the opportunity to notice the changes in him. I haven’t seen him for almost a year, three hundred and forty-three days to be exact, and in that time his jaw has grown squarer and his nose slightly thicker. I pull aside the covers to see where the drain is coming from and whether it will give me a clue as to why he’s on a surgical ward. There’s a large dressing covering the area above his hip and the plastic drainage tube appears from under the gauzy mass. It’s too high to be the appendix. Could he have fallen on something?

‘Excuse me. Can I help you?’ A young nurse has arrived and she stands on the opposite side of the bed to me, beside David’s head, as if protecting him.

The sound of her voice has roused him from sleep and he stares up at her. ‘Is everything okay?’ His voice is weak.

‘David?’ I say. He turns his head very slowly towards me. Our eyes meet and hold. A single tear slides down his cheek and then he smiles.

‘I knew you would come,’ he says.

‘The wound was self-inflicted,’ the doctor tells me. ‘Your brother used a kitchen knife.’

He pauses while I take a startled breath.
David took a knife to himself?
How desperate must he have been?
How much of this is my fault?
I swanned off down south and left David out of sight and out of mind.

Shame on me.

‘He was extremely lucky not to puncture an artery,’ the doctor says, and I nod, holding the back of my hand against my mouth in case I scream.

‘He should make a full recovery but I am very concerned about his emotional and mental state. He has assured me, however, that this was not a suicide attempt.’

I remove my hand from my face and grip the edge of the seat. ‘A cry for help,’ I say.

The doctor nods. ‘Does he have a history of self-harm?’

‘No,’ I lie. I can’t get my head around this. David, my sweet, kind baby brother, stabbed himself. He plunged a knife into his own flesh. He could have died. I stand up and walk around the room while the doctor watches me, his expression sympathetic but weary. ‘It was my fault. I shouldn’t have left him alone in the house.’

‘Alone?’

‘Just with my stepfather.’ I touch the base of my skull where the darkness waits. ‘Apart from my mother but she doesn’t really count.’

‘And why is that?’

‘She’s bedridden.’ I massage the back of my neck. ‘David and my stepfather don’t get on.’

The doctor sits forward. ‘Is your stepfather ever violent towards him?’

‘No. He’s never hit either of us.’

The doctor nods, satisfied with this. ‘Personality clashes can feel very intense for teenagers.’

I don’t tell him that it’s far worse than a clash of personalities; it’s the atmosphere in the house that is the killer – the very air is infected with Gareth’s obsession. Death is inhaled with every breath, stealing oxygen from your bloodstream until you’re rendered breathless and afraid. It’s like living in a grave. No wonder my mother is a walking corpse.

‘I’ll come back to Dundee,’ I say. ‘I’ll look after my brother. He can go to school, do his Highers. I’ll make sure he’s safe and well-fed.’

The doctor looks doubtful. ‘That would be quite a commitment for you, don’t you think? How old are you?’

‘Twenty-two. And I know it would be a commitment but he’s always better off when he’s with me.’

‘Why don’t we talk to your mother and stepfather?’

‘I told you, my mother is an invalid, she won’t come here.’ I bring my hand away from my neck and back down to my side. ‘And anyway, David turned sixteen last week so legally he can leave home, can’t he?’

‘Yes, he can,’ the doctor agrees.

‘Good.’ I open the door. ‘I’ll be back later.’

I hitchhike back to where Gareth and my mother live. It’s a semi-detached 1930s house, part of a rambling estate where Gareth is employed as the gamekeeper. He must have been waiting behind the net curtains, because as my finger stretches for the bell, the front door opens.

‘Look who it is,’ he says. ‘The lovely Leila Mae.’

The house is divided into two sections. The front of the house is for visitors. There is a living room and a large kitchen, both sparsely but cleanly furnished. Gareth and my mother never entertain but there is the odd visit from the next-door neighbour to consider (she cleans up at the big house and mostly keeps herself to herself) and every now and then the owner from the big house might stop by to ‘see how things are going’.

Keeping up appearances takes on a whole new meaning because, while the front of the house is bog-standard normal, the back of the house is where the living and the dying happens. There is a connecting door that I push open and then I walk along the hallway, squeezing past the tatty piles of newspapers lined up on both sides. The back two rooms are where the tokens and memorabilia of Gareth’s obsessions are kept and they have multiplied in my absence: rows of tiny, and not so tiny, bleached animal bones; ugly wooden dolls with painted faces fixed in expressions of pain or violence; glass jars full of floating pieces of animal specimens; pile after pile of ghoulish photographs and drawings.

I stop in the centre of the room and wait for Gareth to follow me in. I avoid eye contact with him because the look in his eyes makes me feel as if insects are crawling under my skin and I automatically reach inside my sleeve to scratch myself. He’s the least trustworthy-looking person I’ve ever met and I don’t know why everyone can’t see it. The irony is that he’s never touched either of us physically, not once, but emotional abuse was a daily occurrence as he denied us everything that a child needs: love, security, nourishment, normality. And now he’s driven David to attempted suicide.

I’d use a knife on Gareth if I could but a) I doubt I’d be quick enough, b) if I was quick enough, I don’t believe he would die and c) if by some chance I was quick enough and he did die, I’m absolutely sure his cretin of a ghost would haunt me for the remainder of my days.

No, the way to beat him is to leave him, to take ourselves beyond his reach, to deny him our presence and show him that his habits don’t live on in us – the ultimate fuck you.

I’ve done it for myself and I’ll do it for David too.

‘I’ve come for David’s things,’ I say. ‘I’m taking him to live with me.’

‘And where would that be?’

‘None of your business.’

‘It’s not happening.’

‘Still practising your secret experiments?’ The grey of his eyes seems to swirl. ‘If I ventured into the cellar, what would I find there?’

‘Leila?’ It’s a voice from the hallway as wispy as smoke. Seconds later my mother comes into the room. Her skin is tight across her skeleton; her muscles are wasted. Her hair has fallen out and there is a weeping ulcer on one of her legs. If the spectrum of my hearing was wider I feel sure I’d be able to hear the sound of disease eating through her body like locusts swarming a cornfield.

‘Mum.’ My acknowledgement of her existence is enough to make her hobble towards me, to try to touch me with her witch’s fingers. I can’t let that happen and so I sidestep her. She stumbles and then falls over, grasping for the back of a chair but missing. ‘I’m going to pack David’s belongings,’ I tell Gareth. ‘Don’t try to stop me.’

My mum whimpers and stretches out her hand from the floor like a beggar. ‘Help me, Leila.’

Repulsed, I run upstairs to throw David’s belongings into a couple of bin bags. Gareth stands at the door watching me, his dead eyes trying to pull me towards him. ‘It doesn’t work on me any more,’ I say, ramming clothes into the bin bags. ‘I’m not a child now.’ I grab David’s coat and shoes, pick up the bags – he has precious little to his name, so they aren’t heavy – and go straight downstairs again, shouting behind me, ‘Don’t try to find us.’

My mother is waiting to ambush me. Her touch is like poison and I push her hard. ‘Stay the fuck away from me!’ I hear a crack as her head hits the door, but she rebounds back towards me and this time her emaciated body lines up with mine: hugging me, her mouth on my cheek, her limbs rubbing up against mine. A wave of revulsion empties right through me.

I welcome the darkness. I welcome the rush of oblivion as it fills my head. I don’t know what I’m doing … I know what I’m doing. My hands are strong, sure and purposeful as they link around her skinny throat. It feels like it’s been a long time coming and when she takes her last breath, my mouth smiles and my heart beats faster, like I’ve just seen a lover on the other side of the street and I’m crossing the road to kiss him.

I stop. She falls to the ground. My mother has looked like a corpse for so long that it never occurred to me she would actually
die
like normal people do. Dead. My mother, the endlessly moaning presence in the bedroom, is dead.

And I killed her.

This is too much even for Gareth. ‘She fell down the stairs,’ he tells me, a shake in his voice. ‘That’s what happened. She fell down the stairs.’

I lean into him and I say, ‘You better watch out or you’ll be next.’

I’m a hundred yards away before I retch at the roadside, my limbs shaking, my heart a jumble of pain and pleasure. I sit on the kerb and breathe the cool, fresh air of freedom. She’s dead. My mother is dead. The noose round my neck is severed, the chains round my ankles cut away.

And I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I put the incident out of my mind. Literally. I am able to do that.

I rent a furnished, two-bed flat in Dundee town centre and four days later I bring David back to it. I’m proud of what I’ve managed to achieve in a week. I’ve scrubbed the rooms from floor to ceiling and scoured charity shops for cheap nick-nacks to add colour to the drab place.

‘It’s the only flat I could get at such short notice,’ I tell David. ‘But I think we can make it homely.’

‘I love it.’ His face is as pale as the wind, and tight with pain, but he manages a smile. ‘You’ve made it really cosy.’

He refuses to attend the therapy session recommended by the hospital, and I don’t force him. ‘Exploring what I feel, Leila. Can you imagine?’ He laughs. ‘It would take them years to sort me out.’

‘Tell me, then,’ I say, settling down on the sofa beside him. ‘Tell me why you stabbed yourself.’

He sighs and pulls at his hair before saying, ‘He made me kill a dog, an Alsatian that he had trapped in the cellar, muzzled and starving for three weeks. He hammered nails through the dog’s paws. I—’ He stops talking and punches the side of his face. ‘Too much, Leila. Too fucking much.’

We leave it there because I know those sorts of details and they don’t get any easier with the telling. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ I say, suddenly fed-up with our continued childish silence. ‘An anonymous tip-off.’

‘We can’t, Leila.’ He grabs for my hand. ‘What about Mum? He looks after her. Where would she live? How would she manage?’

‘Okay,’ I say, keeping his hand in mine. ‘We’ll say nothing.’

Should I feel guilty omitting to tell him that I killed our mother? No, because his attachment to her is imagined. She has never been a mother to him. And now she never will be. But more to the point, when I think it through, I know it would be foolish for me to involve the police because killing my mother has meant that Gareth now has more on me than I have on him. He’ll keep the secret; I know he will. But there’s no point pushing my luck.

We have several weeks of domestic harmony. I secure myself a psychology research post at the university and David is back at school studying for his Highers. Every evening I cook us a wholesome meal with protein and vegetables and complex carbohydrates. He eats two thirds of the food and grows stronger. By Christmas he’s completely recovered and I encourage him to go out more.

‘I’m worried about you not having a social life,’ I say.

‘I like it being just the two of us,’ he tells me.

I don’t like it being just the two of us. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m staying in every night watching television with my teenage brother, whom I’m beginning to realise is like a vine that’s creeping around me, tentacle by sticky tentacle, tying me down. And once I’ve started to think like that I can’t stop.

I feel restricted. I miss having a man in my bed. I know it’s not David’s fault – he didn’t ask me to give up my life – and now I simply have to wean him off me; but I’m unsure how to go about it.

And then one evening I bring a bloke home with me. He’s called Edward Trent and he’s one of my fellow researchers. We’ve spent days flirting with each other and are at the point where we can’t keep our hands to ourselves. We’ve been in my bedroom for half an hour when David walks in on us. I shout at him to get out, and he does, but not before he’s taken in an eyeful: both of us naked and enjoying oral sex.

An hour later when Ed has gone home, I find David, all innocent, in the living room. ‘What the hell was that? How dare you walk in on me! You knew Ed was in there.’