Gregory’s hand really, really hurts. It looks all puffy and red around the cut. Washing it hasn’t helped at all and infections can be really serious. Is he going to die from a stupid cut?
Heather keeps sleeping. She’s like some sort of hibernating creature. Gregory looks over at the hump of her back turned away on the narrow, greasy sofa that barely holds her. She told him she hadn’t slept properly since she went to prison. That can’t possibly be the truth, but she does sleep a lot. And she constantly sips from a bottle of gin or vodka; he hasn’t seen the label so can’t be sure. Daddy says women drinking anything other than a white wine spritzer, like Mummy, is ‘chavvy’. He gazes over at her. It’s so cold, she’s wearing all her clothes at once – so is he – and she looks enormous.
It’s partly that everything is smaller in the ‘van’ as she calls it. It’s cold and damp and everything has a sort of fishy smell. He keeps thinking about the beach that’s nearby but he’s not allowed to go outside to see it.
She’d made it sound like an adventure, hiding out here.
He hadn’t even really believed her at first, when she said they could run away together. It seemed like a joke. But then the stuff happening got worse and worse and he started to want to leave the house more than anything. The pinching was the new thing. The final straw.
He kept thinking about Heather killing those people – her own family – after the boy in the wall told her to. It all started just the same way as it had for him. Her dad, who she says she fought with constantly even though she knows from prison he could have been so much worse, started having accidents around the house. Just like his daddy.
Then the voice started whispering to her and telling her she should do bad things. Finally, it told her that the only way to get rid of the evil was to burn the house down and that everyone in it needed to be ‘purged’ of it. She gets all upset and says she ‘just wanted it to stop’.
She couldn’t tell anyone about that after because they would think she was mad and put her in a mental hospital, which terrified her. There’d been some film she saw as a child that was set in one; something about a cuckoo nest? He’s confused about that bit of her story. Anyway, it all frightened her so much she couldn’t say anything about hearing voices, even when the psychiatrist tried to get her to say why she’d done it.
Gregory heard those whispers too. The boy had started saying that Daddy was a really bad man and that Gregory and Mummy wouldn’t be safe with him. But he didn’t want to hurt him, even if he was a bit too strict about things like television and having a phone.
So he’d tried the nocebo thing but it hadn’t worked at all. Daddy wasn’t even kept in overnight once they realized he wasn’t actually poisoned and it was all in his head.
Daddy hadn’t been very happy about what Gregory had done. He didn’t shout, which was much, much worse than the Arctic disapproval that chilled him to the bone.
So maybe it’s better to be here, even though he doesn’t like the thought of his parents being worried. He wanted to leave a note but Heather talked him out of that.
Still, he wishes he could speak to Mummy just for a little while.
Instead, he makes himself think through some of the worst of the things that have happened. Reassuring himself that he hasn’t done a terrible thing in running away.
There was the time when the rug was all rolled up at the top of the stairs and Daddy fell all the way down. And the time when the water coming out of the tap was suddenly as hot as kettle water. The plumber hadn’t been able to find any reason for it, which made Daddy shout at the plumber and then at Mummy.
But the thing with the razor blades was the worst.
They’d had their dinner of steamed fish, potatoes, and broccoli. Gregory hates that meal, but he knows it’s ‘brain food’ so he forced himself to eat almost all of it, only leaving a horrible broccoli stalk on his plate.
He was in his room doing some test papers after dinner, one earbud secretly in his ear as he listened to the cricket match on the radio. It was a very exciting match in Antigua. England had enforced the follow-on and the West Indies were about to bat again. If Daddy knew he wasn’t concentrating properly he would be annoyed. Daddy doesn’t like cricket and says rugby is the only decent sport, but Gregory likes cricket and football more than anything. Rugby is stupid and violent, while football is full of grace and beauty. Gregory misses the poster that he bought with his birthday money, of Aubameyang and Lacazette doing their funny celebration handshake after one of them scores a goal. He’s planning to buy an Arsenal scarf that he can hang across the big mirror in his room when he has birthday money.
Drifting into a pleasant football-related daydream for a moment, he’s disturbed by a shiver of cold running through him as he remembers what he was thinking about before.
Needing a wee that evening, he’d gone down the hallway to the bathroom and heard Mummy on the phone to someone. Pine bubble bath smells tickled his nose. Daddy liked to spend ages in there when he’d finished all his work for the evening.
Gregory walked into the bathroom and did a long wee, quickly, before anyone came in. He hadn’t really been paying attention when he came into the room but as he turned to the sink to wash his hands, his blood seemed to turn to electricity in his body; shock zapping cold all the way through him.
Razor blades – the type Daddy buys off Amazon and uses to trim his beard – had been taken out of their packets and laid all around the edge of the bathtub. He stepped a little closer, his heart throbbing in his chest with dread.
They looked so neat; like someone had taken a ruler and placed them so they were an exact distance apart all the way round the bath. It felt like a machine or a robot had done it, it was so precise.
Gregory’s fingers had migrated to his mouth, a bad habit he was trying to give up, so he took them out before grabbing a big wodge of toilet roll. Then he carefully picked up the razor blades and laid them gently inside the paper. Even though he was being really careful, he cut his hand and a single drop of blood fell into the bathwater and spread in tiny swirly circles. It was sort of fascinating and for a minute he’d stood and watched as the blood dissipated, which meant he didn’t hear the sound of anyone coming into the bathroom until it was too late.
‘What the hell is going on in here?’ Daddy’s voice had been so loud, Gregory had almost jumped out of his skin. ‘Are those my razor blades? What are you thinking, Gregory? You could seriously injure yourself!’
His father began to pick up the blades very carefully between his big fingers and somehow, they had all been collected and put away before Mummy came into the bathroom, looking confused by the scene. Daddy told her Gregory had cut his finger in his bedroom and left Mummy to clean it and put on a plaster. Neither of them told her what had happened. Daddy had given him The Look; the one that meant he should keep quiet and not make things worse. He wanted to tell Daddy that it wasn’t him who had put out those razors on the bathtub. But Daddy never believed him. He probably thought Gregory cut all the flowers too. The trouble was, Gregory couldn’t say for a hundred per cent certain that he hadn’t done it. When the strange things happened in the house, he sometimes wondered whether he had done them without even knowing it.
When he told Heather that, she’d said that was ‘how it started’ and how he would end up doing something really terrible if he didn’t get away.
And at first, it really had been exciting. He hadn’t liked being in the garage thing that much though, hunkered down in a sleeping bag, even though he had a book to read that he had brought with him. But Heather said she would be one of the very first people they would interview, and she was right. She didn’t go to a good school like Beamishes but she’s still really smart about a lot of stuff. He hadn’t wanted to tell her he’d been fiddling with the lid of the can of Coke and opened up the cut on his hand until after they were on the road and then she told him he should wrap it in the kitchen roll in the car. It bled so much it stuck to the paper but it finally stopped.
Heather isn’t that great at looking after him. When he complained about the clothes she had brought for him – a horrible red hoodie that was like a girl’s, jeans that were a bit small and a couple of T-shirts, along with pants and socks – she snapped at him really nastily. For a moment he remembered that, actually, she may be his friend but she’d still killed three people. This is a thought that has to be kept right at the back of his mind because it’s too scary to face directly.
His hand really, really hurts.
He looked all through the van for antiseptic but there’s nothing like that. At home they have a first aid box that is stuffed with all sorts of plasters and medications. How can you clean a wound properly without antiseptic?
Then Gregory remembers something and sits up a little straighter. He was only little and they were on holiday in France. He remembers he wasn’t allowed an ice cream because Daddy said he had been too whingey on the way to the beach, so he’d stomped off down to the water, where he’d trodden on a sharp shell, cutting his toe. When he ran back to Mummy, trying not to cry, she said that the salt in the sea was the very best thing for it and made him come with her to walk in the freezing-cold water. He remembers the sharp bite of it and Mummy saying it would be okay in a soothing voice, holding his other hand tightly.
Maybe if he would get some sea water on his hand now, it would be better than nothing? He looks over at Heather, who is absolutely silent and still, like she’s dead. He wonders what will happen if she did die because he would be here all alone then. A tiny secret thought worms its way up that instantly makes him feel ashamed.
If she was dead, I could go home.
Heather murmurs in her sleep. If he’s going to do something, anything, he has a tiny amount of time left in which to do it.
He eyes the window. It’s not raining for a change and the sky is a watery blue.
Gregory bites the nails on his good hand, thinking hard.
He’ll run down to the water and dip his hand in, then come straight back. No one will see him. He won’t speak to anyone. What harm can it do? And it might stop his hand from hurting for a little while at least.