Jenny’s finger hovered over the drawing. “This. She went, ‘That! Mummy, that! It’s in my wardrobe!’”
The gasping was gone; her voice had stilled, slowed, just a small pinpoint of life scratching at the thick silence of the room. “The bedside lamp’s only little, and the paper was in a shadow. All I could see was the eyes and the teeth, in the middle of black. I said, ‘What is it, sweetie?’ But I already knew.
“Emma said—she was starting to get her breath back, but she was still doing that hiccuppy thing—she said, ‘The animal. The animal Daddy wants to catch. I’m sorry, Mummy, I’m so so sorry—’
“I put on my sensible voice and I went, ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry for. But we’ve talked about that animal before. It isn’t real, remember? It’s just a game Daddy plays. He’s just a bit confused. You know that.’
“She looked so wretched. Emma’s sensitive; things she doesn’t understand, they just rip her up inside. She knelt up in bed and hugged me around the neck, and she whispered—right into my ear, like she was scared something would hear her—‘I see it. For days and days now. I’m sorry, Mummy, I tried not to…’
“I wanted to die. I wanted to just melt into a little puddle and soak away into the carpet. I thought I’d kept them safe. That was all I ever wanted. But that animal, that thing, it had got everywhere. It was inside Emma, inside her head. I would have killed it if I could have, I’d have done it with my bare hands, but I couldn’t do that because it didn’t exist. Emma was going, ‘I know I wasn’t meant to tell about it, but Miss Carey said draw your home and it just came out, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ I knew I had to get the kids away, but there was nowhere I could take them. It had escaped; it had got outside the house, too. There wasn’t anywhere left that was safe. And nothing I could do was worth anything, because I couldn’t trust myself to do things right any more.”
Jenny laid her fingertips on the drawing, lightly and with a kind of bleak wonder: this tiny thing, this slip of paper and crayon that had changed the world.
“I kept so calm. I said to Emma, ‘It’s all right, sweetie. I know you tried. Mummy’s going to make it all OK. You go to sleep now. I’ll stay right here so the animal can’t get you. OK?’ I opened her wardrobe and looked in all the corners, so she could see there was nothing there. I put all her things back in her schoolbag. Then I switched off the lamp again and I sat there on the bed, holding her hand, till she fell asleep—it took a while, she kept opening her eyes to double-check that I was still there, but she was exhausted from getting so freaked out; in the end she went off. And then I took the drawing and I went downstairs to find Pat.
“He was on the kitchen floor. He had the cupboard door open, this cupboard where he’d made a hole at the back, and he was crouching in front of it like an animal, like this great big animal waiting to pounce. He had one of his hands in the cupboard, spread out on the shelf. In the other hand he had this vase, this silver vase, it was our wedding present from my grandmother—I used to put it on the windowsill in our bedroom with pink roses in it, like I had in my bouquet, to remind us of our wedding day… Pat was holding it by the neck, holding it up like he was about to smash something with it. And there was this knife, one of these really sharp cooking knives that we bought back when we used to do Gordon Ramsay recipes, it was on the floor right next to him. I said, ‘What are you doing?’
“Pat said, ‘Shut up. Listen.’ I listened but I couldn’t hear anything, there was nothing there! So I said that: ‘There’s nothing there.’
“Pat laughed—he didn’t even look at me, he was just staring into this cupboard—and he said, he said, ‘That’s what it wants you to think. It’s right there, inside the wall, I can hear it, if you’d shut up for a second you’d hear it too. It’s smart, it keeps very quiet till I’m just about ready to give up and right then it does a quick little scrabble, just to keep me on my toes, it’s like it’s laughing at me. Well fuck that, I’m smarter than it is. I’m staying one step ahead. Yeah, so it’s got plans, but I’ve got plans too. I’m keeping my eye on the prize. I’m ready to rumble.’
“I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ and Pat goes—he’s hunched over towards me, practically whispering, like he thinks this thing can understand him—‘I finally figured out what it wants. It wants me. The kids too, and you, it wants all of us, but most of all it wants me. That’s what it’s after. No wonder I couldn’t catch it before, fucking about with peanut butter and hamburger— So here I am. Come on, motherfucker, I’m right here, come and get me!’ He’s like beckoning at the hole with the hand in the cupboard, like a guy trying to get another guy to go for him. He goes, ‘It can smell me, I’m so close it can practically taste me, and that’s driving it wild. It’s smart, all right, it’s careful, but sooner or later—no, sooner, I can feel it, any minute—it’s going to want me so bad that it can’t be careful any more. It’s going to lose control and it’s going to stick its head out of that hole and take a big bite of my hand and then I’ll grab it and bam bam bam not so smart now motherfucker not so smart now are you—’”
Jenny was shaking with the memory. “His face was all red, all covered in sweat, his eyes were practically popping out—he was smashing the vase down over and over, like he was hitting something. He looked insane. I yelled at him to shut up, I was like, ‘This has to stop, I’ve had enough, look at this, look—’ and I shoved this thing in his face.” She had both palms on the drawing, pressing it into the blanket. “I was trying to keep it down because I didn’t want to wake up the babies, I couldn’t let them see their dad like that, but I guess I was loud enough that at least I got Pat’s attention. He stopped waving the vase around and grabbed this and stared at it for a while, and then he was like, ‘So?’
“I said, ‘Emma drew that. She drew it in school.’ He was still looking at me like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I wanted to scream at him. Pat and I don’t have screaming rows, we’re not like that—weren’t. But he was just squatting there looking at me like all this was totally normal, and it made me—I could barely even stand to look at him. I knelt down next to him on the floor, and I said, ‘Pat. Listen to me. You have to listen to me. This stops now. There’s nothing there. There never was anything there. Before the kids wake up tomorrow morning, you fill in every single one of these bloody holes, and I’ll take these bloody monitors down to the beach and I’ll throw them in the sea. And then we’ll forget this whole thing and we’ll never mention it again, ever ever ever.’
“I actually thought I’d got through. Pat put down the vase and he brought his bait hand out of the cupboard, and he leaned over and took hold of my hands, and I thought…” A quick breath that caught Jenny off guard, juddered her whole body. “They just felt so warm, his hands. So strong, just like always, just like they’ve always felt since we were teenagers. He was looking straight at me, properly—he looked like Pat again. For that one second, I thought it was OK. I thought Pat was going to give me a hug, a big long hug, and then we’d find a way to fix the holes together, and then we’d go to bed and sleep wrapped round each other. And someday, when we were old, we’d have a laugh about the whole insane thing. I actually thought that.”
The pain in her voice went so deep that I had to look away in case I saw it open up in front of me, a blackness gaping right down to the core of the earth. Bubbles in the magnolia paint on the wall. Red leaves rattling and scraping at the window.
“Except then Pat goes, ‘Jenny. My sweetheart. My lovely little missus. I know I’ve been a crap husband the last while. God, I totally know that. I haven’t been able to look after you, I haven’t been able to look after the kids, and you guys have stood by me while I sat here and let us fall deeper into the shite every day.’
“I tried to tell him it wasn’t about money, money didn’t even matter any more, but he wouldn’t let me. He shook his head and went, ‘Shhh. Hang on. I need to say this, OK? I know you don’t deserve to live like this. You deserve all the fancy clothes
and expensive curtains in the world. Emma deserves dance lessons. Jack deserves tickets to Man U. And it’s been killing me that I can’t give you that stuff. But this, at least, this one thing, this I can do. I can get this little fucker. We’ll have it stuffed and mount it on the sitting-room wall. How’s that?’
“He was stroking my hair, my cheek, and he was smiling at me, actually smiling—he looked honest-to-God happy. Joyful, like the answer to all our problems was shining right there in front of him and he knew exactly how to catch it. He went, ‘Trust me. Please. I finally know what I’m doing. Our lovely house, Jen, it’s going to be all safe again. The kids, they’re going to be safe. Don’t worry, baby. It’s OK. I won’t let this thing get you.’”
Jenny’s voice was rocking wildly; her hands were fisted in the bedclothes. “I didn’t know how to say it to him: that was exactly what he was doing. He was letting this thing, this animal, this stupid insane imaginary it was never even there animal, he was letting it eat Jack and Emma alive. Every second he sat there staring at that hole, he was giving it another bite out of their minds. If he didn’t want it to have them, all he had to do was get up! Fix the holes! Put the bloody vase away!”
Her voice was so thick with damage and tears and rising hysteria, I could barely make out the words. Maybe someone else would have patted her shoulder and come out with the perfect thing to say. I couldn’t touch her. I took the glass of water from her bedside table and held it out. Jenny buried her face in it, choking and coughing, until she got some water down and the terrible noises subsided.
She said, down to the glass, “So then I just sat there next to him, on the floor. It was freezing cold, but I couldn’t get up. I was too dizzy, it was the worst it’s ever been, everything kept sliding and tilting. I thought if I tried to stand up I’d fall over face-first and smash my head on one of the cupboards, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I think we sat there for a couple of hours, I don’t know. I just held onto this thing”—the drawing, spattered with drops of water now—“and I stared at it. I was terrified that if I stopped looking at it even for a second, I’d forget it had ever existed, and then I’d forget that I needed to do something about it.”
She wiped at her face, for water or for tears, I couldn’t tell. “I kept thinking about that JoJo’s pin, up in my drawer. How happy we were back then. How that had to be why I’d dug it out of some box: because I was trying to find something happy. All I could think was How did we get here? I felt like there had to be something we had done, me and Pat, to make this happen, and if I could just find that, then maybe I could change it and everything would be different. But I couldn’t find it. I thought right back to the first time we kissed, when we were sixteen—it was on the beach in Monkstown, it was evening but it was summer so it was still bright and so warm, the warm air on my arms. We were sitting on a rock talking, and Pat just leaned over to me and… I went through every moment I could remember, every single one, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work out how we had ever got here, this kitchen floor, from where we started out.”
She had quieted. Behind the fine gold haze of hair, her face was still, turned inwards. Her voice was steady. I was the one who was afraid.
Jenny said, “Everything looked so weird. It felt like the light kept getting brighter, till it turned into searchlights everywhere; or like there had been something wrong with my eyes for months, some kind of haze blurring them up, and all of a sudden it was gone and I could see again. Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful—just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window, and the kids and Pat were left there to get eaten up alive. I said, ‘Pat, we have to get out now’—at least I think I did, I’m not sure. He didn’t hear me, either way. He didn’t notice when I got up, didn’t even notice I was leaving—he was whispering something to that hole, I couldn’t hear what… Going up the stairs took forever because my feet weren’t touching the ground, I couldn’t move forward, I kept hanging there trying to go up in slow motion. I knew I should be scared that I wasn’t going to get there in time, but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and sad. So sad.”
The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”
Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.
“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What… ?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen—he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away—I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry…’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’—he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”
O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.
“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I—I was so tired . . . I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said—his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice—he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’
“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”
Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.
Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work—my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there. I… Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and… I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”
She was rigid, staring into the folds and valleys of that worn blanket, seeing things. She said, “I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary—I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember. I said Please, over and over. Please.”
I said, “And that’s when Conor arrived.”
Jenny’s head came up and she stared at me, confused, as if she had forgotten I was there. After a moment she shook her h
ead. “No. Conor didn’t do anything. I haven’t seen Conor for, since, for years—”
“Mrs. Spain, we can prove he was in the house that night. We can prove that some of your wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That puts at least part of the attack on Conor. Right now, he’s going down for three murders and one attempted. If you want to get him out of trouble, the best thing you can do for him is tell me exactly what happened.”
I couldn’t get any force into my voice. It felt like a struggle underwater, slowed, weary; both of us were too drained to remember why we were fighting each other, but we kept going because there was nothing else. I asked, “How long did it take him to get there?”
Jenny was more exhausted than I was. Her fight ran out first. After a moment her eyes drifted away again, and she said, “I don’t know. It felt like ages.”
Out of the sleeping bag, down the scaffolding, over the wall, up the garden and turn the key in the back door: a minute, maybe two, tops. Conor must have been drowsing, wrapped snug and warm in his sleeping bag and in the certainty of the Spains’ lives sailing onwards below him, in their shining little boat. Maybe the fighting had woken him: Jenny’s muffled screams, Pat’s shouts, the faint bangs of overturning furniture. I wondered what he had seen when he leaned to the windowsill, yawning and rubbing his eyes; how long it had taken him to understand what was happening, and to realize that he was real enough to smash through the wall of glass that had held him away from his best friends for so long.
Jenny said, “He must have come in through the back door; I felt the wind on me when it opened. It smelled like the sea. He picked me up off the floor, my head, he pulled me into his lap. He was making this sound, like whining or moaning, like a dog that’s got hit by a car. At first I didn’t even recognize him—he’d got so thin and so white, and he looked so terrible; his face was all the wrong shapes, he didn’t even look like a human being. I thought he was something else—like an angel maybe, because I’d prayed so hard, or something awful that had come up out of the sea. Then he said, ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jenny, oh Jesus, what happened?’ And his voice was the same as always. The same as when we were kids.”