Trevor
I’M NOT SURE what time Mother gets up. I’m always gone before she stirs. I drive as far as Galway some days. I still get scared crossing the bridge in Portumna, like I used to as a child. The planks on the wooden stretch still clank loosely, as though they could break under the car. On a sunny day in Eyre Square you can sit and look at girls’ legs all day long. Some of those girls wear skirts so short you can almost see their underwear. I bought a pair of sunglasses that block the sides of my eyes so that they can’t see me looking at them. The trick is not to let your head move as you follow them with your eyes. I tried to hide my wraparound shades from Mother. She found them, though; she must have been rooting around in my car. She asked me what I was doing with them. She said they were plastic rubbish. She said she hoped I didn’t wear them going through the village. She said people would think I was gone mad. She said I’d look a show wearing those things. She looked at me and shook her head. I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at the ground. I saw her putting my shades into the pocket of her apron.
I’m dying. I’m sure of it. One day soon my heart will just stop dead. I sometimes have a striking pain in my left hand. It could be a blockage in an artery. Sometimes I feel light-headed, sometimes I feel a pounding in my temples; my blood speeds and slows, speeds and slows. Last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I started violently. My heart must have stopped and then kick-started itself again. I’ll die soon. I hope I don’t know it’s coming; I hope I’m asleep. I hope my lungs don’t constrict and burn for want of air. I hope my brain doesn’t show me scary pictures as it shuts down. I hope my life isn’t concentrated into seconds and flashed across my consciousness like a scream. I hope I just stop.
I saw that girl again yesterday afternoon. She was standing outside her house, watching a child playing on a plastic tractor. The child was shouting, loudly and almost absentmindedly; long shouts with a rising note at the end. He looked like he was two and a half or maybe three at the oldest. He looked happy. Her house is painted white and there are flowers planted in the borders of her small front garden. It’s like one good tooth in a row of decaying ones. Mother’s friend Dorothy lives in the only other house that’s occupied in that estate. She seems to think I’m her houseboy. Mother says she paid through the nose for that house, way more even than the market value at the time. She was desperate to downsize from her draughty old lodge. She got rightly stuck above in that place, Mother says. She thought she’d be right swanky!
Dorothy asked me to paint her window sills last week. I came on Saturday with white paint and a brush. I brought a flat-head screwdriver to open the tin. That’s not emulsion, she screeched at me. You need emulsion. I imagined myself plunging the screwdriver into one of her milky eyes. Would she die straight away, I wonder? Maybe she’d spin and scream and claw at the protruding screwdriver. A fine mist of blood would spray in a widening arc as she spun. The blood would be pink, full of oxygen. That girl might run down to see what was going on. Dorothy would have finished gurning by then. You killed her, she’d say. I had to, I’d tell her. She wasn’t really a human. She was a vampire. Dorothy would explode into dust, then. And that girl would rush into my arms.
I FEEL a pain in my lower back lately, if I stand still for too long. The pain travels around to the front sometimes. It could be my kidneys failing, shutting down, stopping. It could be testicular cancer, too. The pain from that often manifests in disparate body parts; it can travel down your leg, up your spine, into your stomach. I could be riddled with tumours. I probably am. I definitely have skin cancer. Mother never used sun block on me when I was a child. She murdered me when I was a child by giving me skin cancer. A slow, undetectable murder, a pre-emptive strike, a perfect crime. She’s a genius, the way she makes evil seem so normal. She can be evil while making a cake, without even blinking. She flaps around in a cloud of flour so that her sharp old head seems to float, disembodied, above it, and says things like: What were you doing for so long in the bathroom? Or: Dorothy’s son is a captain in the army now, you know. Or: Who ever heard of a young man with a certificate in Montessori teaching? Or: You’re gone as fat as a fool.
Sometimes I just catch a glimpse of her black, forked tongue as it flicks back in. I wonder if she knows I’ve seen it. I think she thinks I see it but don’t believe it to be real. I think she thinks I think I’m going mad. She’s trying to drive me mad. These creatures feed on madness, obviously. Dorothy is one as well. I could easily just kill them both, but I need a way of making sure everyone knows what they are before I move against them. If I just kill them, I’ll be sent away to prison, or to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum if I plead insanity. If I kill them and expose them for what they are, I’ll be a hero. They smell the same; they look more or less the same; they are concomitant in evil. I’m going to have to take that child from the girl who lives near Dorothy. Lloyd will help me. I won’t let Lloyd hurt him or anything. We probably will have to put some marks on him, though. Then I’ll kill Mother and Dorothy and tell everyone that I apprehended them just as they were about to sacrifice the child. They’re witches, I’ll say. They’ve held me prisoner with a spell since I was a baby. Don’t touch their bodies, I’ll say, they may not be really dead. The authorities might require my services as a consultant. I am probably the only living soul who knows how to spot these creatures and deal with them.
SOMETIMES I sit and think for hours about things. And then I fall into a sort of a reverie. After the reverie abates, I don’t remember what I was thinking about before it, I just know that I was thinking too hard. My head pounds dully. It happened last evening, while I was sitting on the couch, watching through the kitchen door as Mother baked a cake. After it, I was slumped forward. My head was almost resting on my knees. Judge Judy was nearly over. Mother was shaking me. I had a strange picture in my head of Mother with a forked snake’s tongue. Trevor, Trevor, oh Trevor, she was saying as she shook me awake. Her eyes were wet with tears. I’m okay, Mother, I told her. You’re not, she said, you’re not okay at all. We’ll have to send you over to Doctor Lonergan. You’ll have to get something to keep you together. I couldn’t bear it if you fell to pieces the way your father did.
My father split in two, and then fell to pieces. That’s what I think schizophrenia is: splitting in two and then falling to pieces. Am I a schizophrenic? Is it hereditary? I could find out, but I don’t want to. Like I needed only to open the wardrobe door to find out if there was a monster waiting in there to kill me, but I never did. I might have woken him if I did. I’m not waking a monster. No way.