Blood Tears (37 page)

‘They had parties. My mum and Devlin.’ His voice is almost a whisper. ‘Drugs were the starter and the main course… I was dessert.’ His voice louder now.

‘I paid for their drugs with my mouth…’ he pauses, and collects himself, ‘… and my arse. Half a dozen men would have their turn, while my mother and her friend Devlin laughed with relief at managing to get a fix.’ His words are squeezed through the bars of his clenched teeth. His eyes light on me and I feel a cold hand grip my heart.

I am going to die.

‘An eye for an eye. How many lives will it take?’ he asks me, his torment a faint flicker at the corner of his eye. Enough. No more. I want to scream. I manage to open my mouth.

‘Quick, give him some more of that stuff,’ says Leonard. ‘He shouldn’t be able to move like that.’

McCall jabs at my arm and steps away from me, his hands behind his back. I feel cold and I don’t know whether it is from the drug McCall has just given me, or the deadness that squats in his eyes. A chill spreads from arm to my heart and follows the flow of my blood. Through arteries and veins it flows, spreading the word. And the word is death.

I am going to die.

With a giggle Leonard pulls a large knife from the bag and leans over to hold it in front of the Mother’s face. Her mouth punches open in a long, silent scream. He sits on her chest and pushes his face into hers, his lips on hers, breathing in her panicked cries.

‘Not long now, Mother.’ He looks into her eyes. ‘Reliving the past are we? How many children did you torture? Can you see their ghosts line up behind me? I hope you can, because they are going to chase you all the way down to Hell.’

Her mouth is working. It’s as if she’s trying to say something, but then a gob of spit flies into Leonard’s eye.

‘Call yourself a Bride of Christ. More like Whore of Satan.’ His hand lashes out, the one bearing the knife, its aim unerring, across her throat. Blood sprays over him, he jumps up to avoid it and his feet slip. He laughs delightedly as if this was a slapstick moment.

‘Oh well. Never mind,’ he says to me. ‘I’m alive. I’m ALIVE. And it’s AMAZING.’  He pulls the headdress off and wipes his face with it. Then he pulls the black gown over his head. Below it he is naked. He has an erection. It bobs obscenely as he walks towards me. He bares his teeth, closes his eyes and grips his cock.

‘Jim,’ McCall’s voice is a low growl of warning. ‘I told you if you did any of that you would be on your own.’ Presumably murder and mutilation have a low score on McCall’s toleration index, while sexual misconduct is a real no-no. The crazy light in Leonard’s eyes flames one more time and then dies down to a flicker, like a pilot light waiting to spark the furnace back to life. He turns back to the bag and pulls out a pair of garden overalls.

‘Temptation is a terrible thing,’ he tells me, his breath foul in my face. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not my type. You still have a pulse.’ Now he’s calm and considers me for a moment.

‘You really don’t remember do you? And I thought this “police” thing was just the act of a guilty conscience.’ His laughter is like a bark and it reverberates around the room.

‘C’mon, Jim. I think I heard something.’ McCall says urgently and takes a step out of my vision. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘Poor Ray…’ So wide is McCall’s smile he could hang the ends of it over his ears. ‘He doesn’t remember.’

No. No. No. I don’t want to know.

‘Our little gang; you, John and me. Carole and her friend… what was her name? Ah yes, Frances. Who turned out to be Joseph’s mother. And do you remember what brought us together?’

No.

Yes.

‘Jim, c’mon. Is that a car I hear coming up the drive?’ McCall is getting nervous.

Leonard turns my hands over, places them palm upwards.  ‘Your chosen method of suicide is the old favourite,’ he sings, and slides the blade across my wrists like he’s playing a violin. This isn’t happening to me. I am up in the roof of the church looking down at my slack expression. I feel nothing though the view is painful.

Pain is only a concern of the living, a voice sighs in my mind.

The blade has gone deep. The line of flesh separates as easily as beef under the butcher’s blade. I’m sure I can see a pale glint of bone before blood surges out of the wounds. I slam back into my body. Fire blazes on my arms. Screams melt against the heat of the pain that surges through my nervous system to pool against the base of my spine. My sphincter relaxes in preparation of a flight that is impossible.

Floating.

Am I dead yet
? 

Carole Devlin finds me up behind the tennis court. I’m down on my hunkers, wondering if I’m about to die, if the pain would ever stop and reliving the fury of Sister Mary when she saw me.

I had been trembling and crying, trying to hide my blood-stained trousers and underpants under my bed when Sister caught me.

‘What work of Satan are you engaged in now, boy?’

‘Nothing, Sister.’ It was all I could do to stand up from my kneeling position. ‘I think I need a doctor.’

‘It’s the Confessional you need. What have you got there?’ She whipped the garments from my hands. ‘Holy Mary, mother of… is that blood? On your pants? What in God’s name have you been doing?’ Her fist connected with my cheek. The pain of that was nothing to what was going on below my waist. ‘Just the other day you had the marks of the stigmata… drawn on with a pen. What have I done to deserve these heathen children, Holy Father?’ she screeched. ‘Get out of my sight, boy, before I strangle you with these bare hands. Go on. Go.’ Her face was purple. I didn’t wait to be told again, as fast as the pain allowed me, I fled.

Her voice chased me down the stairs. ‘As sure as the good Lord died on that cross, you are going to Hell, Ray McBain.’

Like any wounded animal I wanted to be on my own. Perhaps I could find peace and quiet up behind the tennis courts. There I could crawl under a bush, wait for darkness, the cold and death. Then Hell. I wasn’t good enough even for Purgatory now. Not after what that man did to me.

An eye for an eye, isn’t that what the Bible said? Except he was a man and I was only a boy. What could I do to him? Nothing. The best thing for me would be to hide and wait for the end. Because surely with this amount of pain, I’m dying.

That is when Carole Devlin finds me.

‘Are you crying, nancy-boy?’

‘Scram.’ I carefully stand up. My insides feel torn. ‘Can’t you see that I’m dying?’

She snorts, ‘You don’t look too good, Ray, but dying? Don’t think so.’ She reaches out a hand and holds my face. Pushes my chin up so she can see my cheek more clearly.

‘That looks like the handiwork of a certain Sister Mary.’

‘Leave me alone,’ the tears are flowing, my chest is heaving. Everything hurts.

‘What happened, Ray?’ Carole’s voice changes. Is that concern?

‘Nothing. A man. It hurts so much.’ I fall into the grass. She touches my shoulder.

I crave her comfort but I won’t allow it. ‘Beat it,’ I push her hand away.

She stays. I hear the grass beside me getting flattened as she sits down.

‘Bastard.’

I gasp. After everything I have been through, hearing that word out loud still shocks me.

‘He got you as well, didn’t he?’

Who? I didn’t get a good look at his face. But I thought I would remember the hands and the smell of him for the rest of my life. Tobacco and aftershave.

‘Bastard.’ The shock of the word was no less the second time.

‘I’m telling Sister Mary you swore, Carole Devlin,’ a boy’s soprano sounds from a few feet away. I look up and see the twins.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ asks John Leonard.

‘He’s crying like a baby,’ says Jim.

‘
He
got him,’ answers Carole.

‘Bastard,’ the twins say in unison.

I sit up and look at the row of firm-set faces in front of me. We are only children and we have experienced far too much. I feel the weight and the helplessness of my youth. Anger sets in a knot in my jaw line.

‘An eye for an eye,’ I say. Fury sets in my jaw and sparks in my eyes. The children round about me shrink from me as if frightened for the briefest of moments.

A few nights later, after lights out, I am woken by the sensation of someone leaning on my bed. I sit bolt upright, knees under my chin, eyes huge against the darkness.

‘Who is it?’ I squeak. I am so terrified I am not even sure the words came out. I can make out two small shapes at the end of my bed.

‘It’s me.’

‘And me,’ say the twins. ‘Don’t start greetin’ again.’

I’m stung. I’m not a cry-baby.

I can feel more movement as they move on to the bed. ‘We know who it was.’

‘We know where he sleeps,’ they say.

I pull my knees tighter. ‘He won’t hurt me again, will he?’

‘Like he hurt one of us?’ a twin says and I’m not sure which.

‘An eye for an eye,’ the other one says.

‘What do you mean?’ I try to make out the faces before me in the blackness.

I remember what I read about Red Indians and how they would look slightly to the side of something in the darkness and almost be able to see it. I try this trick and I am impressed by how much it helps. But I still can’t make out any individual features.

‘Time to get our own back, eh?’ One jumps off the bed and coughs. ‘I’ll be back.’ His bare feet slap at the linoleum as he rushes from the room.

‘We need to do this together.’

‘Do what?’

Just then the twin returns with another two larger shapes. Girls.

‘You guys ready?’ It’s Carole Devlin, and the smaller outline must be a friend of hers. It’s Frances Collins. I hadn’t seen her for a few weeks. We were told she had the flu.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask.

‘Just what you said. An eye for an eye,’ the twins sing. ‘Let’s go.’

A hand pulls me from the bed and in single file we make our way from the room and out into the corridor. From there we make our way to the stairwell. It is cold and my teeth are clacking together. Moonlight enters the large window above us as we make our way down to the next landing and the old people’s floor.

My teeth are still rattling together, but now it is less from the cold than the realisation that something is very wrong here.

We are still walking in single file, Carole, then Frances, then the twins and then me.

‘What are we doing?’ My whisper sounds like a roar in the hush of the stairway. One of the twins has one of his pyjama sleeves stuffed in his mouth to stifle his cough. Carole keeps looking at him as if she is going to take him by the throat.

‘Just hurry up, McBain,’ says Carole. ‘Keep up, Cry-Baby.’

Spurred on by the insult I walk too fast and collide with one of the twins. I see the flash of teeth as he growls at me. I punch his arm. But if you take on one Leonard you take on them both and they both stop and square up to me.

‘Enough, boys,’ says Carole. ‘We have work to do.’

What exactly that work is not entirely clear to me yet. An eye for an eye is what I said. But how does that translate into what that man did to me? He did it to one of the twins as well. The girls are here too… can things like that happen to girls as well? If so, which one?

Or was it both?

‘But I want to go to bed,’ I whisper.

Frances is on me in a flash. ‘You’re here and you’re staying.’ She has a tight hold of my pyjama top. ‘We all have to do it.’

I push her away. The look in her eyes really scares me. We all have to do what?

Carole pushes a door open slowly, sticks her head through, waits a moment and then motions for us all to move through. We do so and the first things that strike me are the soft carpet underfoot and the smell. Did the nuns never open the windows on this floor? The old people smell is very strong.

‘Hang on a minute,’ Frances vanishes through another door and returns in moments. She has a hand behind her back.

‘Right. It’s through here I think.’ She points ahead and we all follow her.

‘This is where
he
sleeps.’

We are in a tiny cell-like room. Through a chink in the curtains enough light is coming in so that we can see how close the walls are and we can make out the bed, with the long shape of a man stretched in slumber. We stand frozen at the end of the bed, and watch the rise and fall of his chest. He is on his back and his mouth is open.

So this is him? The man who damned me to Hell?

‘Who’s doing it then?’ Carole whispers.

‘An eye for an eye was Ray’s idea. He should do it.’ The coughing twin forces words out between coughs.

‘Do what?’

‘Would you stop that? You’re going to wake him up,’ Carole whispers again.

‘Do what?’ I ask again.

The man snuffles in his sleep. We freeze. My heart is beating so fast it is about to burst. Is this what a heart-attack feels like?

Silence settles over us again like the moment before thunder sounds. All eyes are trained on the long line of skin, flesh and bone under the blankets. He is just a man, yet he holds us under his power even as he sleeps. I feel like I’m in a dream; one where my movements are dictated to me, once the decision to act is made there is no turning back.

‘Ray, use the pillow,’ a girl’s voice reaches my ears and something soft is pushed into my hands.

What do I do with it?

‘Use the pillow. Hold it over his head.’ A flash of teeth. ‘We just want to give him a fright. Let him know what will happen if he hurts any more children.’ Frances’ eyes are shining.

‘Just a wee fright?’ I want my bed. I want to huddle under the blankets and not come out until I’m at least sixteen. Someone pushes me towards the bed.

My legs won’t move.

‘McBain. Do it,’ urges Carole. ‘This man hurt you. He deserves it.’

Again I feel my helplessness in the face of the series of adults who had let me down. My mum. My dad. Sister Mary. And here, perhaps was the worst of them all. He had hurt me so much. He did things to me that were wrong.

‘Just a wee fright,’ someone whispered. ‘We’ll all help you.’

I moved my left foot about an inch. Just a wee bit of a fright would teach him a lesson. Wouldn’t it? I was going to Hell anyway. A saint’s life wasn’t for me anymore because of this man. He deserved a fright. Something flared in my gut, travelled past my heart and set itself in stone in my jaw. I found my rage.