In a thousand different.., p.9
In a Thousand Different Ways, page 9
Ollie attracts the despair around him. He sucks it up. In the visiting room it drifts over to him like a storm cloud. He’s not the only one, of course, but I focus on him. I think he’s taking antidepressants. There’s something numb about him, about his eyes and face. His colours are muddy blues and greys surrounded by an unnatural fog of green. Not a calming green, but a neon green. Like toilet cleaner. I don’t know what kind of pills they’re giving him; low-grade stuff, probably. It’s a synthetic, chemical calm; the real feelings are all still there, they’ve just been blanketed by an itchy scratchy chemically dyed nylon. I wish I could bring him in a patch of grass to stand on, to put in his cell so he can curl his toes into the soil like he used to and calm himself, root himself, get some perspective, remember that all surfaces aren’t hard and rough and non-porous.
Other people’s woes in the visiting room move towards him like an army and hang around him, then it mobilises, parts of it break up and attack his energy, but the neon green pills do their work, blocking the soldiers from entering. If it’s been a while since he’s taken a pill you can see the negative energy start to break the forcefield down and find a way in. Maybe they give them the pills before visiting hours to make it easier for everyone. Sometimes it takes him longer to get from his cell to us, some fight or drama has delayed everything, and the pills are wearing off by the time he arrives.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asks me, looking back over his shoulder, thinking there’s someone standing behind him.
‘She always does that, never mind her,’ Lily says.
‘It’s fucking weird, freak, don’t do it,’ Ollie says.
I take long showers after our visits. I wash it off me. All that misery, all that wasted life. I spend time in the garden. I eat raw carrots and celery, chew on chia seeds, imagine the pumpkin seeds scraping my gut and colon, I drink green smoothies; I want to clean myself out from the gut. She’s happy to sit on the couch with the chips we pick up on the way home, watching Coronation Street, the melancholy dripping from her like greasy fried chip fat.
‘You’ll be coming home soon,’ Lily says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Got your room ready for you and all. Your Star Wars duvet on the bed.’
‘You can burn that for a start,’ he says, smiling briefly. I see a tooth missing, at the side, near the back. ‘A friend of mine was released yesterday. He was in here ten years. From Cork. He asked us, when they let him out, when he’s on the street, does he turn left or right.’
For a moment I think he’s being philosophical but then they both start laughing. She snorts.
‘Eejit,’ he says.
Though I boast of knowing somebody on first sight, it can actually take years to figure someone out. I might know that I don’t like them, that I don’t trust them, but I won’t know why. Sometimes I see a new colour and I can’t read it; I don’t know what it represents. I need to have known someone with it before, witnessed their character in order to understand. Some colours I’ve only ever seen on one person and never again on another, and it’s the moment when I see the colour again that the first person becomes completely understandable, clear and in focus in my head.
It happens when the doorbell rings and I answer to find a man at the door, surrounded by a harsh magenta, pretty and becoming on a hard man like him, but I know exactly who he is.
I’ve seen his colour before.
I’ve tried to stay away from Esme, the Clearview Academy reiki practitioner, but this person I’m deeply repelled by also has the power of pulling me close. It’s like I sense her before I see her, as though, when I near a corner, I know she’s around it. And when she passes by with her pretty smile, she sucks the oxygen out of the room and leaves me feeling depleted. I have never spent so much time and energy on disliking somebody so much. Disliking her, obsessing over her has become a hobby.
I work on a plan for Gospel to attend a session with her.
‘Your nemesis,’ he whispers, dramatically, knowing about my obsession with her.
But we both laugh, not actually thinking it’s true.
Seeing that there’s only one of her and hundreds of us, there’s a long waiting list, and she won’t do more than a few hours a day as the sessions drain her. Despite the waiting list, the school prioritises the worst, so it doesn’t take long until Gospel is first on the list. I’ve noticed that when he’s stressed, or mentally exhausted, like during exam time, his tics increase. Gospel has explained that his tics are like having a song stuck in your head, he has to make the movement until he no longer feels the need to. The more someone mentions it or attention it is given, the more he feels the need to keep doing it.
During a History exam, Gospel has such an enormous tic attack that his neck continuously throws his head back and his grunting is rapid fire. He has to be removed from the classroom. Gospel is so mortified and apologetic and requests a new form of therapy with Esme.
For Gospel’s session with Esme, I sneak across the playing fields to stand outside the reiki prefab. Gospel knows I’m outside and when Esme’s back is turned he winks at me, enjoying the clandestine mission. They have a talk first, about his tic disorder and his moods as a result of it, and I feel bad listening in, so I move away from the window so that he can speak freely. She explains what reiki is and her intention to clear his chakras. He lies down on the bed.
If I was asked to describe Gospel in one colour, I would say honey. It’s not quite orange and it’s not quite yellow, maybe it’s both of them mixed together, but it’s warm, syrupy. When he goes into a rage it’s all the usual angry colours everybody has, but his personal colour is honey. It comes alive when we’re at work in school. He’s smart; he loves technology. He excels at football. He is the best player on the field. Because the football field is the one place he doesn’t tic, he spends as much time there as possible, finessing his skills and abilities, and because he doesn’t tic on the field, he doesn’t get agitated, and therefore doesn’t lose his head. It’s his escape and he’s the king on the field.
The orange is rich and warm, the yellow is clear and sharp, and when they mix it’s honey-coloured, like sugar melting in a pot and transitioning to caramel. Watching his colours is like watching his brain at work. Sharp, focused, processing, turning grains into something smooth. Solution-based. Syrupy flowing oozing thoughts.
He’s not anxious now. Not really. Now and then I see him jerking his shoulders as his muscles tic, but he’s mostly relaxed.
Esme takes a few rounds of deep breaths. Her magenta isn’t as powerful as it was when I was in the room with her, she mustn’t feel the need to mark her territory as grandly with Gospel as she did with me. I watch her magenta as she takes deep breaths, expecting it to become sharper and more focused, but the opposite happens. Oddly, a grey, maybe more like a misty white appears. Harsh magenta and misty white. I watch the mist, wondering what it is and what it means.
She stands at his head with her back to me, so I’ve to move to get a better view. She asks him to take deep breaths, she counts to three as he inhales and counts to five as he exhales. Absolutely nothing happens to Gospel’s colours. She stands at his head and shoulders for ten minutes, eyes closed, hands out. I look for the colour of the heat she spoke about but there’s nothing, nothing between her hands and his shoulders. She moves on to his chest and the rest of his body.
After a maddening twenty minutes of nothing happening, she says gently, ‘Now I’m going to seal off the energy.’
All of a sudden she starts waving her hands around as if she’s wafting a fly. His colour spatters. Some of it gets stuck on her hands. She wipes her hands, the colours fling off and land back on Gospel. She’s breaking them up, honey becoming orange and yellow. The yellow breaks up into different shades of yellow, light, sharp, clear, bright, a brilliant canary yellow, all emerge as she stands over him like a Teppanyaki chef doing an intricate knife skills show. Chop chop chop, the colours are broken up, fly around the room. The same with the orange; now a pale orange blob hovers by his knee. This is confusing. It’s like she’s a child, carelessly splashing paint. Blobs of it are landing around the room. I have to fight the urge to burst in there and put an end to her freak show.
After her manic fly-wafting, knife-chopping, paint-blobbing outburst, she’s finished. She says his name gently, but he doesn’t move.
He doesn’t move.
His eyes don’t open. My heart pounds. I race around the front of the cabin and practically kick the door open.
‘What have you done to him?’ I yell, at the same time as the door flings open and bangs the wall.
She shrieks in fright.
Gospel sits up. He grins at the sight of me. ‘I fell asleep.’ He looks at Esme. ‘Did I?’
Esme nods, hands clutched to her chest. She’s afraid of me.
‘What did I miss?’ he asks, sliding off the table, looking from her to me mostly amused, not at all bothered, no idea of the danger she has put him in.
I glare at her, feeling a physical repulsion. Nothing but air between us, yet there’s a barrier so strong that it won’t let me go near her, like two clashing magnetic fields. Not that I want to go near her. I want to be out of this room, away from her.
‘Let’s go,’ I say.
‘Well, whatever happened I didn’t feel anything.’ Gospel hops down and slides his feet into his trainers. He’s a bit stiff as he lands on his feet and hobbles a little to straighten up.
I take him by the hand and pull him out of there and across the playing fields back to the school, while he forces his feet into his shoes, laces still undone.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gospel says, amused and not at all worried. ‘What happened? I thought you were going to hit her. Did she do something weird?’ Blink. Blink. He throws his head back and grunts. ‘She didn’t touch my cock, did she?’
‘No! No way! Nothing like that. How do you feel?’ I ask.
‘Fine. The same. I just fell asleep. It was relaxing. Look, as much as I love the fact you’re my knight in shining armour and that you’re holding my hand, I’ve got football now. I’m over this way.’
‘Oh.’ I try to let go of his hand but he clings on, a grin on his face. He kisses me, briefly, a light brush of our lips, because we’re not allowed to. He finally lets go and I walk back to the school alone.
‘Talk later, yeah?’ he calls.
‘Yeah,’ I say, my back still turned.
But my blood is boiling, my heart is pounding at the hot harsh magenta and misty white of a fake guru. I can’t control my rage. I don’t even try the breathing techniques I’ve been taught. This time I can’t be bothered. I don’t want to calm down; there is only one way to get this anger out. I go to the toilet and grab a toilet roll, then I take it to the car park and wrap it around Esme’s car. Round and round and round, I use the entire roll while a group of kids gather to watch and laugh.
‘Anyone got a Sharpie?’
They are only too delighted to give me one.
I write FRAUD on her windscreen. Nice and big and clear.
I learn later that Gospel didn’t play football for long. His knee was sore; the one where she left the pale orange blobby energy hovering.
‘Hello,’ the man at my door says cheerily. ‘My name is Howard Higgins.’
He hands me a leaflet, and I smile. I lean against the doorframe. This should be fun. ‘That’s my business information there. I’m in the neighbourhood, I’ve just done a job for your neighbour and I noticed you’ve got some roof damage. We’ve got the materials here left over from the other job and can do it today at a discount, if you’re interested. I’d recommend you do it now, love, before it gets worse,’ he says, looking up, concerned.
‘Which house were you working on?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘The Johnstons’.’
‘To be honest, I didn’t catch their names, love. My colleague was in charge of that one. What’s your name, so I don’t get caught out again?’ he grins.
‘Minnie,’ I say. ‘What were you doing at their house?’
‘The gutters. You see when leaves and other debris clog up your gutters to the point that water is flooding over, you can end up having issues with rot on your roofing, which is what you’ve got happening up there. Come out and I’ll show you.’
I’m quite sure he’s making it up: both the claim that he was working for a neighbour and that my roof has problems.
I walk out with him and look up at the roof.
‘It’s best to clean them twice a year. Once in spring and once in autumn. I know you probably don’t give much thought to your gutters, but that’s what we’re here for. We can do you a deal, a reduced price if we do them today, and then we’ll come back in the autumn. The work is urgent, I’m telling you. But up to you, of course, love.’
‘How much is it?’
He blows out air. ‘I’d do it for one hundred. Cash. Would cost you double that usually, though.’
‘I don’t have any cash on me.’
‘I could go to the machine with you, if you want. I’m going for a coffee anyway.’
I smile. ‘No thanks.’
‘I’ll put you down in my book for next time. Minnie, is it?’
‘Yeah. M-i-n-n-i-e. I think you called round here before,’ I say. ‘You were talking to my mum.’ I do admit to her official role now and then.
‘Ah right.’
‘The woman in the wheelchair.’
‘Ah yeah, I remember her. And your surname?’
‘Mouse.’
He looks up at me and for a moment I think he’s going to hit me, but instead he backs away, angry head on him. He knows I know he’s a fraud. I can catch a phoney from a mile away. Charming and calculated, if you’ve met one you’ve met them all. They ooze it. He makes his way to the waiting white van and drives off.
After five years inside Ollie is released and allowed to come home. He went in at sixteen and returns as a twenty-one-year-old. The remainder of his sentence is remitted.
I feel a sense of trepidation about his return, about who he will be when he steps in the door. What stranger will we be living with? But I also feel relief that he will at least now be given a chance to live, to have freedom, to go for a walk outside when he wants, eat when he wants, sleep when he wants. I worry for him that employers won’t hire a young man with a criminal record, that the world will make it so hard for him to be the best version of himself that there will be a return to business as usual. I want to advise him to be wise, to be careful, to change, to take this second chance of life. To warn him that his prison sentence didn’t necessarily end when the prison gates opened.
I want to show compassion for a man who has new-found freedom. I am ready to help him, to be the big sister he would never let me be. While he was counting down his weeks and days, I too was counting down mine, because I wonder if when he comes home it will mark the beginning of my freedom. Two of us here to help Lily means that perhaps I can pursue something else. After all this time, even I don’t know what exactly, but I spend my days thinking and hoping.
Scrap that.
He comes home set for a fight. He takes one look at the house, at his room with the Star Wars duvet that she didn’t throw out, and suddenly realises the time he’s lost. He goes off like a grenade. And he blames me for this lost time because I wouldn’t provide him with an alibi. He accuses me of being a scrounger, not working, living off Lily when everyone knows I never cared about her, and he bangs his bedroom door closed, the first time he has closed the door on himself in one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days.
Lily and Ollie sit at the kitchen table looking at me. Two against one.
‘It’s unfair on Ollie,’ Lily begins, ‘that both of you are caring for me now and you get all the carer’s allowance.’
‘Excuse me? He brings you out with him for a few walks now and then, probably as a disguise because he looks less like a drug dealer with a woman in a wheelchair.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Ollie yells, one hand banging against the table, the finger of the other hand pointed close to my face.
It does startle me, and scares me, this sudden level of anger. I got no warning in his colours. He just explodes, a charcoal-coloured eruption, like gunpowder. Not black, I’m afraid of black in people, but it’s scarily close.
‘All right,’ Lily snaps, pulling his hand away from my face, swatting it away like he’s merely a silly little boy and not a recently released jailbird.
I swallow, feeling my insides tremble.
‘Well,’ I say, looking at Lily, unable to give him any attention. ‘We can’t pretend it’s not happening.’
I can’t tell by her face whether she knew it or not, what she was being used for. She’s not an idiot but he can be quite deceptive. Especially with her; her baby Ollie can be so charming to her.
‘I’ve given him plenty of my carer’s allowance already to help him get on his feet,’ I tell her. ‘Loans which he owes me.’
‘I don’t owe you fucking anything. Jesus!’ he pants, looking disgusted. ‘Does family mean anything to you or are you running a bank here?’
‘Does family mean anything to me?’ I ask him through gritted teeth, feeling the anger rise. I look at Lily, waiting for her to defend me. I will her to step in. She never has before, but I want her to now. I stayed here. I stayed. I did everything for her for the past five years. In fact you could argue I’d been doing it all before then too. What eight-year-old makes a packed lunch for her five-year-old brother? Not that he’s grateful for it now.
‘All we’re saying is that you should let Ollie have the allowance and you can get a job.’
‘This is my job. I’m not sitting around on my arse doing nothing.’
