Chapter eleven
Ron and Kevin were watching a documentary on the historical breakthroughs as a result of carbon-dating. Kevin was taking less of an interest than Ron, who was engrossed by the elderly historian’s words.
“One might say,” the historian was saying, “that the current trends shown by the fossils found suggest that humanity is headed for something spectacular. We, of course, do not know what. The fossilised remains of Homo Neanderthalensis suggest that they might be a common ancestor to our Homo sapiens. The Neanderthalensis skull shares the common trait of a wide brain cavity, with the position of the foramen magnum being positioned such that Neanderthalensis may stand upright and walk on two legs. Other fossil evidence suggests that we Homo sapiens may have in fact coexisted and even interacted with our distant Neanderthal cousins! If such a fossil could be found, we may be able to prove that Neanderthalensis and an early sapiens mated successfully, proving that factors other than speciation prevented hybridised hominids.”
The documentary cut away from the historian, and a voiceover went on to talk about various archaeological sites where artefacts such as bronze and iron weapons had been found. The presenter was talking to a woman with roughly-cut, purple-tipped brown hair and piercing eyes. She was holding a metallic circular disc and talking about the ancient Romans. The caption that appeared beneath her read: Dr. Marcella Mafuro, archaeologist.
A few minutes after she finished her piece, the documentary cut to allow a break. Ron’s attention piqued when the screen turned black with white writing, spelling out: EMERGENCY NEWS BROADCAST.
The screen cut to a familiar male newsreader known as Jeremy. He looked disturbed and shabby, like he hadn’t slept for a few nights.
“Good afternoon,” he said, “I am here to bring you an important announcement: a state of emergency has been declared. The terror level has been raised to red alert. Parliament Square has been attack. I repeat: Parliament Square has been attacked.”
Ron’s heart sank, his stomach caved in and paranoid thoughts rushed through his head.
“The walls of the Houses of Parliament appear to have caved in on themselves, creating a tent-like holding,” Jeremy continued, “over one hundred politicians are estimated to be held within...”
Ron stopped paying attention and called for Richard.
“RONNY!” Kevin cried, leaping to Ron’s side and hugging him tight. Ron wrapped his arms around his little brother and squeezed him tightly.
“What? What is it?” Richard’s voice came booming from the corridor as he ran into the living room. He was covered in flour and slightly red from cooking. He stood in the threshold looking into the living room.
“There’s been an attack,” Ron said carefully, with worry in his voice.
Richard’s eyes widened slightly.
“Parliament Square was hit,” Ron explained, “pretty badly. Politicians are trapped inside!”
Despite the look of anxiety on Ron’s face and the fact that Kevin was holding onto his older brother for dear life, Richard merely utter something that sounded like “Oh” and left to return to the kitchen.
Ron sat on the floor, comforting his younger brother and feeling shocked at the way Richard had responded to the news. The emergency broadcast was still playing, and Ron could feel the atmosphere in the entire block: the family above him were most likely holding their small children and praying to whatever deity they believed in that this would be over soon; the elderly man to the right of the Amsterdam’s flat was crossing his heart and hoping for a miracle; the family to the left was arguing with panic-stricken raised voices, a screaming match titled “Where to go now that London isn’t safe”; and lastly, the couple below the Amsterdams would be hugging each other for dear life and crying their eyes out, for a good friend happened to be a politician.
Ron could feel everything that was going on in the block- the tears, the hugs, the screaming- but what he felt most of all was that Richard had let him down. Letting go of Kevin, Ron stood up from his place on the floor and marched into the kitchen with Kevin following behind him just for fear of being alone in the living room with the news broadcast going.
“Dad.” Ron said when he reached the kitchen. “We have to talk.”
Richard was chopping up an onion on the wooden chopping board, and he looked a little less red. It may have been the onion, but it looked like he was crying.
“About what, son?” he asked, not looking up from the onion.
“Kevin’s scared.” Ron told him, and as though on cue, Kevin clung again to his older brother for dear life.
“What’s spooking him?” Richard asked casually, finishing the onion and setting the knife down. He grabbed another onion and started to peel it.
“I just told you what’s scaring him!” Ron said. “In the living room! There’s an emergency broadcast about it!”
“About what?” Richard asked, picking up the knife and chopping the freshly-peeled onion.
Ron let out a frustrated sigh and cried; “THE PARLIAMENT SQUARE ATTACK!”
“Oh,” Richard said. He was trying to remain calm, but Ron could see that his hands were shaking, trying to control the knife and onion as best they could.
“Aren’t you going to say something other than ‘oh’?” Ron asked.
“To be honest, son,” Richard said, putting down the knife and turning to his two sons, “the both of you are old enough now to know that it’s not really my job to deal with disasters like the Old Bailey, Tower Bridge and Parliament Square.” He rested his hands on the counter. “In fact, the company I work for has an entire department devoted to preventing events like this, and even if they happen anyway, that same department is supposed to damn well rectify the situation.”
“Now is not the time for stories,” Ron said.
“If you say so, son” Richard said, returning to the onion.
Ron felt frustration and anger explode in his chest.
“DON’T YOU CARE AT ALL?” he screamed.
“Indoor voice, please.” Richard said.
Ron could feel Kevin let go and retreat a few paces, but that wasn’t his main concern. How could Richard be so uncaring? Even before the boys’ mother had died, Richard had been a caring man. He helped the neighbouring community and attempted to rehabilitate wayward teenagers by setting up an apprenticeship programme in the area. It had been successful, but that was before they left California so Ron didn’t know if it was even still running.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Ron grumbled, leaving the kitchen and heading towards his bedroom. He passed the living room and peeked in to see if the news broadcast was still on. It wasn’t- the documentary had returned, but Ron was no longer in the mood to watch it. He went straight to his and Matt’s bedroom, which he found closed. He opened the door and started to enter, but he was greeted by a hysterical Matt screaming: “DON’T OPEN THE DOOR! WAIT A MINUTE! I’M NOT DECENT!”
Ron jumped back with surprise, but he entered the bedroom to find Matt kneeling on the floor and hastily pulling on a green long-sleeved t-shirt. Normally, this wouldn’t have surprised him, but the lines of blood around Matt’s hips and the dark blotches appearing in different places on the material worried Ron.
“You’re a self-harmer?” he asked.
Matt looked at him with large, teary eyes.
“Come in and close the door.” Matt said quietly, hoisting himself up onto his bed.
Looking back to see if Kevin was behind him- he wasn’t- Ron entered the bedroom and closed the door. He followed Matt’s example and took a seat, but on his bed so that the brothers were facing each other.
Ron felt silly in his blue pyjamas, facing Matt who was wearing his jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt which was gradually becoming patterned with blood. On the right sleeve, just above Matt’s wrist, Ron thought he could see a misshapen butterfly.
Matt stared down at his feet and twiddled his thumbs. Ron shifted to sit cross-legged on the bed and looked at the floor.
“Why do you do it?” Ron asked.
“Because I can.” Matt said earnestly, with a shrug. “Richard’s blades amount in the thirties. I figure he won’t miss one or two.”
“You counted his razors?” Ron asked, slightly surprised.
“It was after I started,” Matt admitted, “when we were still in California, after Marissa died and Richard took us to Spain for summer vacation. The metal detector at the airport went off when I went through.”
“I remember that,” Ron said. “It was your belt-buckle, right?”
Matt looked up at his younger brother with guilt in his eyes.
“It was your belt-buckle, right?” Ron asked uncertainly.
Matt shook his head and said: “Not fully. That’s where I kept the razor.”
This took Ron by surprise, and instantly he felt guilty because his first thought was ‘How do you fit a razor blade into a belt-buckle?’ As much as he wanted to ask this, the guilty feeling in his stomach stopped him.
“It’s been going on-and-off for a couple of years,” Matt said. “I have to choose when to cut and when not to. I make sure I cut my arms in the winter, because then I can wear long-sleeves. In the summer, I try my best to make sure I have dark gloves and summer cardigans to cover up the scars, to give my arms a break. But in the summer months, I make a start on my legs.”
“What about your hips?” Ron asked, his stomach feeling light.
Matt shrugged, “I guess they’re a constant. I can cover them up with swimming trunks if I have to, but that’s rarely necessary.”
Something touched Ron’s heart, and he had to know more.
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
Matt looked at him with tears rolling down his cheeks. Had he been crying all this time? Even if he hadn’t, the guilty feeling deepened as he tried to imagine how hard talking about this must be for Matt. From Ron’s understanding, self-harm was a taboo subject. Numerous psychologists had dedicated themselves to the study of why people self-harmed and why they did so in certain ways. Ron had heard a theory in one of his first English lessons when he moved to England: people self-harm based on their past experiences. What the theory suggested meant that Matt had either learned to seek comfort from self-induced pain, or that others had inflicted pain on him to the extent that he had learned to accept pain as a normal part of life. Ron remembered rejecting this theory in class discussion, because either way it blamed the self-harming individual. While most of the other students in his class had supported the theory, calling self-harmers ‘idiots’ and ‘wastes of space’, Ron had pointed out that it was exactly that kind of treatment that might encourage a person to self-harm, so really most of the responsibility should lay with the social environment the self-harmer presently experiences, because although the past plays a significant part, if the present environment does little to encourage a positive personal growth, then the past would come shooting right back and the self-harmer would have to deal with internal conflict every day and try to ‘beat it out’ of themselves and forget it in the only way they knew how- through pain.
Had Ron known that Matt self-harmed at the time of that particular English lesson, he might have fought a little harder to argue his case and join in the various discussions kept alight by students who seemed to follow him everywhere. Instead, Ron had kept his mouth shut and bore a grudge until everything had died down.
“I do it because I’m bad.” Matt whispered in a choked voice.
Ron’s stomach dropped. His mouth dropped open and he leant forward. The disbelief should have been obvious on his face. He watched a tear roll down Matt’s cheek and drop off his chin.
“How in the world are you ‘bad’?” he asked, still disbelieving.
“Because I’m a very, very horrible boy,” Matt said, still in a choked voice, “I was there the night Marissa died. I could have done something to prevent it, but I didn’t.”
Ron’s interest piqued. Matt had known for the past nine years how their mother had died? Ron felt betrayed, for their father had refused him on a regular basis to tell him how their mother met her end. Whenever Ron asked, Richard would become irate and say “You’re too young to understand!” Eventually, Ron gave up on asking and concentrated on his schoolwork and social life, but now he was hearing that Matt had been there when their mother had died. Ron couldn’t resist asking how she had died, and he regretted it the moment the question left his lips, for Matt’s face contorted in a look of pain so pitiful that Ron felt like taking a knife to his chest.
“She was pregnant,” Matt whispered hoarsely. “You know how much Richard and Marissa wanted a daughter. Marissa used to tell me that, when she was younger, she wanted a girl first and then a boy. She said that having me first was better, because then I could protect my little sister if anybody tried to mess with her. She was so happy when she had you, and so was I because I wanted to protect you, but they both gave you more attention. When Kevin came along, I hoped that you and me could protect him together, but that fell through the floor. I don’t suppose you know this, but she got pregnant again a number of times after Kevin. She had miscarriages every time she got to the end of the third trimester. Finally, she got to the end of the second trimester, and the sonogram showed that she was expecting a girl. Richard and Marissa were so happy, but a month later she started having complications. She had to stay in bed for the remainder of her pregnancy, otherwise she could have lost the baby.
“Richard woke me up one night because he had to run out to get somebody. He needed me to watch Marissa. He took me to their bedroom and told me to do whatever she told me to do, then he left. I was in that bedroom with her. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way she looked- she was so deathly pale, her eyes were wide and they lost their colour. They were a sickly yellow, and her lips were raw red from being bitten so much, and her hair was drenched with sweat. I don’t know how you didn’t hear it, but she was screaming so loud. Why didn’t you wake up? You should have heard it!”
At this point, Matt had to stop and take a breather, only to let out loud, pent-up sobs. Ron ached to comfort his brother, but he was didn’t want to seem like he was doing so because he had to.
Matt got a hold of himself long enough to continue; “It was horrible. I went up to the bed and asked her if she needed anything, or if I could do anything to help her. She cried ‘Go back in time and be born a girl!’, but I didn’t know how do to that so I kept my mouth shut. Then I heard something dripping. Remember how Mom and Dad had a wooden bedroom floor? Well, blood was dripping from the bed and it was making a disgusting dripping sound-”
“And that’s why you have to turn a tap off all the way...” Ron said, suddenly realising why his brother had always been so compulsive about turning off taps. When he was nine, Ron hadn’t quite turned off the kitchen tap, and Matt had gone ballistic over it.
“It sounds like blood!” his brother had cried. Their father had come in to find Matt looking grief-stricken and Ron cowering under the kitchen table. He had then proceeded to take Matt away to his office, and from then on Matt always begrudgingly turned off a tap and wiped away any water that may be clinging on to the rim of the faucet.
Now, it made sense.
Matt nodded sheepishly and continued; “And I just stood there and watched the life drain out of her. I didn’t know what was happening to her, but I was old enough to know that it was something very, very bad. She was crying out for Dad, but he didn’t come. I tried giving her some water, but she wouldn’t drink it. She kept telling me that I was a very bad boy, that I had killed my sister, that I should have been a girl. Then, finally, Dad came back with a woman holding a medical bag and told me to leave. I left the room, but I stayed outside the room, listening even when they closed the door. I couldn’t hear anything going on, but after about twenty minutes the door opened and the woman came out looking very sad. She looked at me and said ‘You did the best you could, young man’ and left. The door was still open, so I looked in. I saw Mommy lying down, her eyes closed and her chest rising and falling at irregular intervals. It was close to five in the morning. On the bedside table, there was a large jar filled with something red that hadn’t been there while I was trying to help her. Daddy was holding her hand, his head on her shoulder. He was saying how much he loved her, how sorry he was for giving her two dead children who would be daughters. I’ve never seen him cry like that. It had just turned six-thirty when she stopped breathing altogether.”
The story was unbelievable, but the emotion swimming in Matt’s eyes told Ron that it was all true. It explained why Richard had been so irate whenever Ron asked him what had happened, why his Mommy was alive and breathing one day and then sleeping forever the next. Ron clutched his stomach and leapt off the bed. He yanked open the bedroom door and ran for the toile. He made it just in time before the contents of his stomach reappeared as vomit. He flushed the toilet, wiped his mouth and cleaned his teeth. He swished and gargled with some mouthwash to get rid of the taste of vomit before returning to the bedroom where he found Matt, still sitting on his bed, but with his head in his hands and sobbing uncontrollably. He went over to his brother and sat beside him. He hugged Matt, and to his surprise Matt hugged back.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ron told him.
Matt sobbed, “How do you know?” he challenged.
“Because you were eight.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You were too young to know what to do,” Ron consoled him, “and it was Dad’s fault in the first place for entrusting such a young child to do watch his mother die. She would have died anyway- you were just unfortunate enough to witness it.”
“But she said I killed our sister,” Matt said between sobs.
“She was in pain, and she needed somebody to take it out on.”
Matt didn’t say anything, which was fine by Ron. The brothers just stayed in the room and hugged. The silence was accentuated by Matt’s soft sobbing and whimpering, and soon footsteps were tapping down the corridor in tune. Ron looked over just as Richard appeared at the door. He looked like he had been doing some crying of his own, but Ron reasoned that the onions had done that to him. Some of the flour had been wiped off of his clothes.
“Matt told me,” Ron said just as Richard opened his mouth.
“About what?” Richard asked.
“Mom.”
Richard stiffened. His jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed, not from suspicion but from caution. He stood in the threshold, staring at his sons for a few minutes before forcing himself to relax.
“Better you find out from Matthew now,” he said, “than me on my deathbed.”
“Whatever you say, Dad.”
Ron turned back to consoling his older brother. Richard entered the bedroom and sat on Ron’s bed. Ron ignored him as his brother gradually stopped sobbing and broke the hug. Matt turned and looked at Richard with hatred in his eyes. His eyes had gone from milky white and emerald green to bloodshot and forest green. There were red patches around his eyes and his face was red from crying.
“I came in here to tell you boys something,” Richard said, keeping his voice even. “But first, Matthew, I want to apologise for what you saw as a child. I was wrong to make you wait with your mother, bur please understand that I didn’t want her to be alone in case she... in case she died while I was away. It wasn’t your fault that she died, and I hope you can forgive me for giving you such a responsibility at such a young age.”
Matt stayed silent, glaring at Richard.
“What do you have to tell us?” Ron asked, trying to keep himself from telling Richard to leave, because the look in Matt’s eyes and the grinding of his jaw did little to reassure Ron that Matt would ever forgive their father.
“It’s about Parliament Square,” Richard said, clasping his hand between his knees and making eye contact with Ron. “I called my friend, Thom, and told him about it. He is going to do the best he can to rectify the situation.”
“Dad,” Ron said, “I don’t believe what you told me earlier. Don’t try to make me believe.”
Richard shrugged. “I don’t expect you to believe me,” he said, “but it would help. I’ve actually been doing some thinking, and maybe you two boys would like to come somewhere with me tonight. I’m supposed to bring food along with me, and I need a couple of extra pairs of hands to transport it.”
“Where are you going?” Ron asked.
“Help me take the food and you’ll find out.” Richard replied.
Ron and Richard stared at each other in a stalemate until Ron broke the stare by turning to Matt and asking; “What do you think?”
Matt, who hadn’t taken his hateful glare from Richard since he had sat down on the bed, wiped at his eyes and murmured something inaudible.
“What was that?” Ron asked.
“I said,” Matt said clearly, “there’s no point- he’ll ditch us once we’ve helped.”
“How do you know unless you help me?” Richard challenged. “I thought, of the two of you, Matthew might be the one more willing to go, since you’ve been to my place of work before.”
The look of hate was swept off of Matt’s face to be replaced by surprise.
“I have?” he asked.
“Sure you have,” Richard said, “when you met Loki and I was trying to help you understand your nightmares. Don’t you remember? You fainted. You woke up in Loki’s house- he called Ryan to come and collect you, thinking you’d probably be happier if you were in Ryan’s company. I know how well you two get along.”
“I thought that was a dream.” Matt said, stunned.
“That’s what Thom made you believe it was,” Richard said, “he’s very powerful like that. You weren’t far wrong when you said I’m magical. Observe.” Richard pointed to the bedroom door and it swung closed.
“It could have been the wind, Dad,” Ron deadpanned.
Richard looked at the window and it locked itself. A pair of black curtains magically appeared and closed over the window. Somehow, Ron was a little bit more convinced, but he still needed evidence. Richard reached under Ron’s pillow and pulled out a folded-up piece of purple paper. Ron instantly recognised it as the message Hermod had given him, and he leaned forward with interest.
“Sources tell me,” Richard said, “that a friend of a friend received something similar to this.” He unfolded the paper and looked over it, turned the paper with the message face-down and wiped a hand over the back of it. A symbol appeared: a winged scroll.
“Ah,” Richard said, sounding pleasantly shocked, “this is very interesting.”
“What is it?” Matt asked.
Richard looked at Ron, “This,” he said, indicating the winged scroll, “is the symbol of Hermod, the messenger god. Matthew and Ronald, I think we’d better forget the food- just come with me.”
