***
‘Shelly.’
‘Shelly, darling.’
The darkness inside is black and heavy. I’m moving off the ground. I feel damp and I’m shivering. I hear moaning.
‘Darling, it’s your mum. Shelly, open your eyes. It’s okay…it’s okay.’
I’m rolling back and forth. There’s a hand on my back and I smell wine in my nostrils.
‘That’s it Shelly; you’re okay, honey-sweetheart. Mummy’s here.’
I make a low droning sound. I can’t seem to stop it. I feel the contours of the carpet on the side of my face. I can smell a sickening mixture of stale cigarettes and damp dog.
‘Honey, you’re okay. Shelly, open your eyes; you’re okay.’
‘Mum.’ I whimper.
‘That’s it Shel; Just a bad dream, just a bad dream – you’ve been sleep-walking.’
I twist my head sideways so I am looking straight ahead across the floor. My eyes are wet, my brow is saturated and my breathing is fast; very, very fast.
I see Buddy sitting up in bed with the covers drawn up over his mouth. He’s staring down at me on the floor.
‘Shelly, look at me; it was just a bad dream.’
I peer at my mum; at her claret stained teeth – booze for her pain. She pulls me up, into her lap and I protest, trying to break free, but she shushes me and rocks me in her arms. I shiver in silence.
My room seems darker. I don’t see the Cherub, but I see the book lying on the floor. It’s closed. I shiver. I look again at Buddy; he looks confused. I look back to my bed, as I relent from struggling.
‘I’m so sorry darling, I never heard you get back in. I knew Arthur would look after you. What’s happened to your neck?’
I feel drops of saltwater fall on to my neck; my mother’s tears.
Busted-up fingers; tattoos; a huge lump on the back of my head and for all intents and purposes – in my mum’s eyes anyway – noose marks.
I try to respond but I lack the capacity.
I have had quite enough. I wish they were noose marks.
My mother raises me to my feet and places her arm under my shoulder, carrying me to my bed and laying me down.
‘I’m staying here until you fall asleep.’
I lay there, one eye on the book, one eye on my brother. I try to process all the thoughts in my head – many painful thoughts that I have unconsciously suppressed for many, many years.
Buddy turns his head slightly towards me, his covers still drawn up to his eyes. His eyes speak so much to me.
At the back of my mind, I hear my mum say something about leaving the light on and reading a book until I drop off as I continue to stare at Buddy.
Here’s the thing:
Buddy isn’t real.
At least not anymore.
He’s not even a ghost. He’s a figment of my imagination. He is my mind dealing with an event that happened to me when I was very young. An event so far-reaching and tragic, that at the time it took place, my three year old mind couldn’t comprehend it, let alone begin to handle it. So, I denied it even happened; I blocked it out.
Buddy died just before my third birthday.
He was murdered on a blue sky day, as I played on a beautiful lawn by a small peaceful stream. An event - I have suppressed for over ten years. I did not possess the capacity to understand the trauma. My past has finally caught up with me.
On that hot summer’s day in early July, I have a vivid memory, a startling, but real recollection that has just been re-revealed to me by the final picture in the book.
I remember a woman, a woman with unnaturally long dark hair, striding towards my brother as he sits on a rug playing with some toys. He’s engrossed in his little game; just like the Buddy I know now. I remember a flash, an arc of sunlight catching fresh, shining steel, and then a violent physical action- one that I have never seen a human perform, before or since.
I can see blood spurting from Buddy as he slumps to the ground immediately, the light from the steel diminishing, dulled by red, as it is withdrawn from a gaping wound in the back of his head.
Moments before, there had been a man. He also had long hair… and a smiley face. He was playing with me and two other little girls, although Buddy had been quite content to play on a separate rug by himself. The man was looking after us. He was...my daddy. He left us alone, only for a minute or so to go inside. I see him disappearing through some French windows at the back of the house. He never came back...
And then, there was the woman.
I remember screaming as she turned towards the nearest girl. I can see spittle on her lips and a maroon stain on her beige, dirty dress. She looks like a rabid wolf. Her movements were jerky, almost as if she wasn’t human; like she was controlled by something that prevented her body moving fluidly. She charged at the other little girl who was throwing pebbles into the stream.
I didn’t like this little girl. She was mean to me. She had long, black hair. At least, that’s how I remember her.
This little girl turned to face the mad woman, and in the last moments of her short, young life, she displays such courage; defiance even. The little girl stood her ground even as the woman ran the same knife that pierced my brother, straight through her, and the force of the blow sent her staggering backwards into the stream.
I sensed that she had no fear.
Maybe she was too young to understand what was really happening. It’s only now that my mind allows me to vividly see her lying face up in the stream, in a pool of her own blood; the water too shallow to cover more than an inch of her skin. She is now completely still. Blood cascades over tiny pebbles mingling in with stream water.
I turned and grabbed the hand of the other little girl, the blonde girl next to me, who was sobbing uncontrollably. I tugged at her several times before she ran with me. The woman was running again: We needed to run. The woman’s beige dress flapped above her knees as she bounded towards us with inhuman speed. I looked back deep into that ashen face, splattered with blood – the very image I saw earlier in the book.
We ran down the side of the house. We did not know where we were going. We passed the smiley, long-haired man as we came to a tall fence-gate at the front. He was lying on a footpath by the side of the house.
I looked up and took hold of the large bolt on the gate. I tried sliding it, but it was too heavy for my soft, innocent, fingers to move. I hear the woman ease her pace and then, pad slowly towards us.
I keep tugging and tugging; my fingers bleeding.
I sense her behind me.
I feel her breath on my neck; it’s warm, it’s stale. Drops of saliva fall slither down onto me. She leans closer.
I have a fleeting image of nails that have been bitten away, narrow and calloused fingers, and then, I am yanked around by my throat to face her. Her face is the face of everything a woman cannot and should not be.
She spits into my face, but doesn’t say anything; I listen to her panting.
Even now, I don’t understand the concept of death; I know very bad and terrifying things are happening. I’m so desperately scared.
From the angle of her arm and the knife raised above me, I know she is going to ram the blade straight into my forehead. I know the blood from the blade that drips on me, contains the last essence of two little lives and now mine will flow against the same shaft of steel.
She brings it down full-force with a screech and everything goes into slow motion.
In that reduced speed, I watch silently as she falls backwards and yet face-forwards at the same time.
It’s puzzling and unexpected.
Her blade smacks out of her hand, into the cement, as she smashes face-first into the ground.
I see the smiley; long-haired man isn’t smiling anymore. His forehead is gashed and covered in crimson and he is holding the woman by the back of her ankles. He looks dazed and weak, but he has managed to tug her backwards with such force that she falls full-length. The o
ther little girl – the blonde girl, grabs me now.
I swing one-eighty and see that she has managed to slide the bolt on the gate. She grabs my hand; we run through the gate; we run and run and run.
I close my eyes trying desperately to suppress and forget, just as I have for years.
But, there is no more hiding.
My little brother still stares at me from under his bed-sheets. I stare back at him.
It’s in this moment that I recall other events from this fateful and defining day in my life. I remember the drive away from the house in a police car, a short while after the bloodbath, and seeing many people watching, including a man on a motorbike. His engine growls steadily, but then his exhaust backfires loudly…
…The seeds of this memory were beginning to flourish when mother gave me a lift home from school and her own car exhaust fired…
…And when I stood behind Elvis’ dirt bike as he tore around school; the growl of his motorbike and its exhaust blowing.
Triggers.
Pieces of the warped puzzle slot into place.
Just a couple of days earlier - my mum told me to come home because Buddy was upset after Mark and Elvis had argued viciously. She was playing on my heart-strings as she has done all my life; she knows Buddy is my coping-mechanism for dealing with this world. She would still gladly blackmail me – because she knew, in her selfishness, that she needed me. She needed me here at the house. I would do anything for my brother, even come home to violence. Mother knew this. I’d be there for my brother; the brother I loved and lost; the brother who died in front of me and I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it happening.
There is no birthday card from Buddy on my bedside table - no picture of me and him holding hands.
Buddy didn’t cycle ahead of me, leading me straight to St. Harold’s. I led myself there on purpose.
Then, the memories of Evelyn Parker…
Spitting vitriolic abuse about my ‘special needs’ brother at the school gate the other day and those taunts were only ever made from her in front of all the other bullies.
She has always been vying with Buddy, in my own mind, to be the centre of my thoughts; my imagination. I recall searching for Evelyn’s invisible bag, after I had smashed the fire alarm, to no avail. And of course, Dezza looking confused about my descriptions of Evelyn after I took that whack in class. ‘She’s the blonde one right?’
You see, it was never her in the classroom – the thirteen year old, callous bully.
The three year old, Evelyn Parker was the woman’s second victim, left lying in the stream. It was her gravestone I discovered while I was arguing with Camille in the graveyard earlier on this afternoon. She is another figment of my imagination; another loose screw in the mind of Shelly Clover. Buddy, the kind, simple soul to whom I’ve tried to make amends for the last ten years. And Evelyn - my self-hate and self-loathing - for not intervening on that day in the first place.
Both, parts of my personality: My split-personality, my seriously misaligned and messed-up personality.
And now, as mother helps me into bed, I attempt to keep my head slightly aloft from the pillow, knowing that Arthur’s device will induce sleep straight away, I smile kindly back at my lovely Buddy with tears stinging my eyes.
I watch as my brother- my last vestige of hope in this world - slowly starts to fade away into nothingness right before my eyes.
It’s over. I can finally let go.
I have faced my own lies, my own hope-filled lies.
With anguish in my heart, I know there is no closure whatsoever; I have no closure or relief; just the most catastrophic heartbreak.
The last thing I love in the world, burns away before me like a candle that flickers....and diminishes silently.
I see those big brown, sad eyes staring into mine, lost and alone, but full of love, so full of love, and so full of hope. He opens his mouth and I know if he could, he’d be whispering words of love, words of beauty.
’Thank you, Shelly, you were always there for me when no one else was.’
I whisper back, ‘I love you Buddy.’
I see him smile. I think I can see him smile.
And then there is nothing…
…but his untouched bed.
A bed that has remained untouched in over ten years.
I know that Buddy’s gone, Evelyn’s gone; my hope has gone.
It stands to reason that the only other real person in all of this apart from me is the girl who took my hand as we ran out of the gate and away from certain death and of course…
It all makes sense now…
Camille Karrington.
Chapter Eleven
She Can’t Let Go.