‘What do you think you’re doing, you weirdo?’ she yells. ‘You don’tforceyourself on a girl!’
‘I didn’t!’ I reply. ‘I’m showing you how much I love you.’
‘Damon, get this through your head. I don’t love you and I’ll never love you. You’re just a boy.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m more of an adult than you.’ She laughs and I desperately try to find something,anything, to make her stay. Make her realise I’m more mature than she knows. ‘I killed someone once!’ I blurt out in desperation.
Her face pales. ‘What?’
Shit! What have I said? I know I should stop, tell her I’m joking and walk away, but I can’t help myself. ‘His name was Callum. He was bullying me and tried to poison my mum against me, so I killed him. I couldn’t have done that if I was just a kid.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she says. But when my expression doesn’t falter under her scrutiny, I see she knows I am telling the truth. And instead of it demonstrating I’m more mature than she believes, she’s scared. She turns her back on me and hurries further down the path and deeper into the encroaching night until she is little more than a wavering shadow amongst the trees and a flickering streetlight above. Nobody but she and I know we are here.
The girl I adored wants nothing to do with me. The rage that first made its presence felt the day I killed Callum returns within the blink of an eye. My head pounds like thunder rolling through the sky above us and I know the only way to relieve it is to hurt her like she is hurting me. So I clamber to my feet, pick up the first object I can find – a rock – and now I’m running after her. Shemust hear the crunching of gravel under my feet because she also begins to run, but she is no match for my grit and urgency.
I hit the back of her head so hard with the rock, she staggers forward, which makes it easy for me to shove her to the path. I turn her over and mount her, forcing her to see what she is making me do. But she is impossible to pin down properly and keeps squirming and turning her head to one side, in a vain attempt to protect herself as she yells for help.
Instead of trying to silence her cries by stuffing a handkerchief down her throat like I did with Callum, I hit her once more with the weapon, and then over and over again, until no one can ever call her pretty again.
Chapter 77
Damon
Back in the present, I stare at Fernandez-Jones as I lie on the bed in his office. There’s a bitter aftertaste in my mouth from the two anti-sickness tablets I’ve swallowed. I don’t, I can’t, speak. Nothing has ever overpowered me like the ECT I’ve just undergone. Not even my childhood urges to kill. He warned me that both nausea and migraines might follow treatment, and how they’d be more severe if I insisted on refusing his offer of a general anaesthetic or even a muscle relaxant. He doesn’t understand that I’ve spent too much of my life as a spectator. That I now need tofeelthe things I fear the most, including the electrical current going into my brain.
The details of what happened when he got to work on me are scant, but I do remember my whole body jerking then stiffening. Fernandez-Jones tells me now the seizure was brief, half a minute at most, but it felt much, much longer to me. Now, he has his notebook out and his fountain pen in his hand and he’s asking me questions, but I don’t have the cognitive capacity to listen or respond. Instead, I’m thinking about what I’ve learned. In a few short moments he has given me the clarity I’ve spent months searching for. And as a result, I know almost everything. Memoriesthat were taken away from me have returned. Not all, but enough to paint a more detailed picture of my past.
I think I must fall asleep, because I don’t remember catching him moving to the chair behind his desk. He’s writing again in his notebook, too busy to spot me regaining consciousness. He hasn’t seen me watching the man who’s returned so much of what he once took away. I’m aware that guilt at what I’ve done in the past should be clawing at me like an animal trying to scratch its way out of a locked room. I should be spiralling and racked with self-loathing. But I don’t feel those things. Instead, a calmness has descended.
I’m no longer the person I was a few days ago, or even earlier today, when I first approached his front door. I have returned to the one they tried to erase. The one Fernandez-Jones met with when I was twelve.
The one he is about to become the first person to witness the return of.
I’m aware of Callum in the room with us, and before I turn to face him, he opens his mouth, once again pulling at the handkerchief I wedged into it. He is muttering that familiar phrase that always sounds something like ‘oodis’ as he tugs at it.
‘Oodis,’ he continues as he slowly pulls more of it out.
‘Youdis,’ he is saying.
No: ‘You dis.’
Now he holds the handkerchief in his hand. And finally, I understand what he has been trying to tell me, ever since he first appeared.
‘You did this.’
A sudden rush of energy passes through me and I hear what sounds like the crackling of static electricity. I know I’m imagining it, but I still look to Callum to see if he heard it too. He knows what I’m thinking because the corners of his mouth lift as his eyesnarrow. My head feels thick and heavy, like a crushing weight on my shoulders. There is only one way to alleviate it. My expression mirrors Callum’s and we nod to one another.
Together, we look at Fernandez-Jones, who is completely oblivious to our candid exchange.
Chapter 78
Laura
Laura reacts to the video of Garry twice being run over by Damon as casually as she might respond to a TikTok short of pets doing silly things. This clip is something she returns to regularly. Sometimes she’ll replay it to see if it prompts an emotional response, as she has yet to muster up a shred of guilt for sending Garry to his death. Today is no different. She feels nothing. She can justify her lack of concern by reminding herself they weren’t really friends, so the murder of a drug-dealing rapist is no great personal loss to her. A minor inconvenience. The only emotion she concedes to is a small pang of jealousy for the moment she views Damon leaning over Garry’s body, and how he might have caught his last breath without even realising it. Withoutappreciatingit. It’s like eating caviar on a digestive biscuit.
‘How far do you want me to go with him this time?’ Garry asked, when they last met face to face at a café close to the hospital where they once both worked. She’d been a volunteer visitor and he was a porter, wheeling patients in chairs and beds from ward to theatre. One day she had watched from a doorway as he’d pocketed medication from the sleeping and unconscious. He lateradmitted, when pressed, that he’d sell those meds on the nights he moonlighted as a nightclub doorman. She’d promised not to report him, but told him in return she might one day need a favour. A year later and she had called on him for help with Damon.
‘What we did last time wasn’t enough for him to take me seriously,’ she said. ‘That’s my fault. I need you to up the ante.’
