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Semi-dressed, I stumble downstairs, and go straight for Dad’s drinks cabinet. Whisky. Whisky is what I want. I grab the bottle, tear off the lid and gulp. It is like fire in my throat, it tastes like petrol. I drink some more. I want the oblivion, want the denial that alcohol affords. I retch, but carry on.
I walk out of the house, carrying the whisky bottle at my side, bringing it to my mouth every few seconds.
‘You didn’t tell me the truth,’ I shout. ‘You told me I would suffer. You told me I was one of you.’
I continue to walk, continue to drink. My head is softening, my words blurring, dissolving into the night. I want to disappear. I want to go back to where I came from, back to nothingness. Fifty years wasn’t long enough. I can see her eyes, staring up at me, the ash circling us. It was not the despair; it was not the desperation; not the pain or the final understanding of what was happening to her, to them all. It was the hope. In spite of everything, in spite of all my brutality, she was offering me her child. Hoping that I would take it, look after it, save it.
Me.
I remember it all now; remember how in that moment the ice cracked; the horror began to seep in, slowly, then more quickly, insistently. I couldn’t keep it out, couldn’t fill the holes it was flooding through. It was consuming me. I could remember too much, had seen too much. Too much for one soul.
An argument. I am shouting. Too much. I can’t go back. I won’t. I can’t take it.
You must take it. That is what you are. You will find a way.
Why did I come back? So I could send some more people to the gas chambers? I don’t know where I’m going; I’m walking unsteadily down the street, bumping into lamp posts. No, walking into them. I need the crash, need to feel the pain. Inhumane. I know what the word means now.
It means me. It defines me. I am evil. I am the bogeyman Mum was so afraid of.
I stop dead. Mum. I am clutching the bottle, gripping it tightly. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me who . . .
Was it?
I fall to my knees. I cannot cry; I can only groan silently, my stomach full of bile. Did I kill her? Or did she kill herself because she knew, because she could see what I was?
I am in the middle of the road, but it’s late – there are no cars. I pull my knees into my chest and rock slowly. I am crumbling. There is nothing to hold me together, not any more. Did Mum look at me and see the devil? I was her boy. That’s who I was. But now . . . now I am something else. Now there is nothing good in me, nothing at all.
I rock, back and forth. If I rock hard enough, I will cease to exist. If I rock hard enough, everything will stop.
That is how the man finds me – the man from the coffee shop, the man from outside the school. He crouches next to me. His name is Douglas, he tells me, although only in this life. Returners have no given names; they track each other across time by feeling their presence. They don’t need to be labelled. There is no gender. Returners can come back male, female, rich, poor. It is their soul that is the same. It is their soul that the others look for.
He tells me this softly, gently, as I rock forward and back. I listen as though I am eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. He puts his arms around me; I shake them off.
‘Get away from me. I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t deserve it. You know what I am.’
I hate him for knowing, for not kicking me when I’m down.
‘It’s natural to hate yourself,’ he says.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ I say, my eyes shut now. If I cannot see, I am nearer to oblivion, closer to not existing at all. ‘You didn’t tell me the truth.’
‘The truth?’
‘About who I am.’
Douglas digests this. ‘You had to remember,’ he says eventually.
‘You said I was away for fifty years because I’d suffered. Not because . . .’ I grapple for the right words. For any words. Words aren’t up to the job, though. ‘Not because I did that . . . I was the person who . . . who . . .’
‘People suffer in different ways, Will,’ Douglas says. ‘You suffered terribly.’
‘I killed her. I killed her baby.’
He nods. ‘You did what you did. What you had to do. What you were there to do.’
‘I exist to be evil?’ I ask angrily. ‘You think that’s OK?’
‘You are who you are.’
I turn this over for a few seconds. ‘Am I? I didn’t want to come back. I should have been there, shouldn’t I? In Rwanda? The man in the van, that was supposed to be me. Killing those people. Locking the doors and waiting for them to die. But it wasn’t me. It was some other Returner. I wouldn’t go back.’
‘You are who you are,’ Douglas says again. ‘Your soul needed to rest. But that does not change your destiny.’
‘You should have told me the truth.’ I want to be sick, want to empty out my insides, leaving a hollow shell for someone else to inhabit. Someone who isn’t me.
‘You weren’t ready for it,’ he says. ‘You had to get there in your own time.’
‘Get there?’ My voice is sarcastic, icy. ‘Oh, I got there all right.’
Douglas sits down next to me. ‘You are not evil. You simply occupy human evilness. You absorb the evil just as we absorb the pain and suffering. You remember, like us.’
‘I remember killing people. I remember watching people queue up as those first in line were gassed to death and burnt. I remember . . .’ I can feel my nails digging into my palms. ‘I’ve been bullying a boy at school. Every day. Punching him senseless for money. I didn’t know . . .’ I cannot finish the sentence. He’s right. I am who I am. I didn’t come back for over fifty years, but I am back now, and I am evil. I have not changed.
‘Yes, you are back,’ he says. I can hear the relief in his voice.
‘I want to be dead.’
The thought has been in my head since I woke up; only now does it find words.
‘No, Will. You don’t want that.’
I don’t answer.
‘You suffered trauma. That’s why you were away for so long.’
‘I suffered trauma?’ I can’t accept it. I pull away. ‘I wasn’t the one who suffered. Don’t you understand that?’
‘I understand, Will. You will too, eventually. We all have a role to play. Each relies on the other. Each is an important part of the jigsaw.’
I stand up. ‘A jigsaw? That’s what you think this is?’ My face is filled with disgust. ‘This isn’t role play. Role play is make-believe and this . . . This is very far from make-believe. Don’t you understand? If I don’t kill people, if I don’t torture them, they don’t suffer. You don’t suffer. Nor do the others. It ends. It’s over.’ I’m staring at him, looking for a reaction, but he doesn’t give me one. What did I expect? ‘It’s almost as if you want people to feel pain. It’s almost as if you enjoy this,’ I say accusingly.
Douglas smiles. It just makes me more angry. ‘This isn’t a game,’ I say.
‘No, not a joke. I’m not smiling because this isn’t serious, Will. I’m smiling because you and I . . . we have discussed these things many times before. Usually we are arguing the other way round.’
I regard him stonily. ‘We have not,’ I say. ‘You have, with someone, some other person, but not me. Not with Will Hodges.’
‘No,’ Douglas concedes. ‘Not with Will Hodges.’
He stands up and walks towards me. ‘What you are facing is the reality of human existence,’ he says softly. ‘The human condition. Great joy is tempered by great pain, good deeds by terrible ones. All predetermined, all set out like milestones on a journey we haven’t yet made.’
‘A journey I’m not going to make,’ I say through gritted teeth.
‘A journey that is inevitable, Will. A path that you must go down.’
I turn and stare at him. ‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say? You’ve lived a million lives and still you think this is just the way things are?’
‘I have lived many lives,’ Douglas agrees. ‘As have you. That does not make me an expert. But it does make me understand that this is the way things are, Will.’
‘Then you’re as bad as me,’ I say angrily. ‘You’re part of it. You just sit there passively and let stuff happen to you. You’re complicit. I mean, what’s the point? What’s the point of remembering if it just happens again and again? What is the point of you? Of all the Returners? I mean, you don’t fight, you don’t even try to stop the evil, do you? You just let it happen. You’re pathetic. You’re pointless.’
Douglas takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly. ‘You’re right,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re right in some ways. We are passive, Will. Returners cannot change humankind. We can only inhabit the souls of humans, to absorb their pain, to remember it. Only humans themselves can fight their enemy, fight their instincts. We can only be there for them, a hand on their shoulder, by their side on their journey. We can stand in front of them and take the blow; we can protect them from themselves and inflict the agony. But we cannot change them. Only humans can change themselves.’
‘And me? I don’t take the blow. I inflict it.’
Douglas nods slowly. ‘Yes, you do. But you also protect. You are not evil, Will. You inhabit the souls of men and women who turn to the dark side, who lose their morality, who are consumed with greed, with anger, with bitterness. Those who lose their humanity.’
‘But why? They don’t need protection.’
‘They need a different sort of protection,’ Douglas says gently.
‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ I say bitterly.
‘It isn’t for us to tell people how to live their lives, to force them to do as we think they should do.’ I look up sharply; someone else is talking – someone else has joined us and I hadn’t even noticed. It’s the girl. The girl from the shopping centre. She walks towards me, hand outstretched. ‘Will, no one can do that. We can only protect, as best we can –’
‘Yeah,’ I interrupt, ‘I get it. We protect. We absorb.’ I turn away; I can’t bear to look at her, at Douglas, to see their eyes filled with pain, with passive acquiescence. ‘Have any of you tried to stop me? To stop us? How many of us are there anyway – the bad guys, I mean?’
‘It is not about good and bad, Will; they are two sides of the same coin.’
‘Well, it’s a stupid coin,’ I say, walking away. ‘It’s a pointless coin. It’s a pointless, pointless world and I don’t want anything else to do with it. Or you. Don’t talk to me again, Douglas. Don’t talk to me or look at me or follow me around. I’m done, OK? I’m done.’
But I’m not done. Of course I’m not – how could I be? My head, for so long like a jigsaw with hundreds of missing pieces whose absence I chose to ignore, is now flooding with memories; they crash like waves, swirling around, making me seasick, filling me with terror. With horror.
How long have I been doing this? How many people have suffered at my hands? Who brought me back – whose sick idea was it to create me in the first place?
And of all the memories, amongst all the horror, there is one image that brings sweat to my forehead, dries my throat to a desert. Yan’s brother.
Because he is now. Because he is real. Because what has happened to him did not happen a long time ago. Because what attacked him was not another soul. It was mine. All this time I didn’t get the look he was giving me. Reproach. Fear.
It was me attacking him. My hand. My fist.
Have I chosen not to remember? Do I have such a choice? Is it easier that way?
I’m feeling sick, nauseous – I don’t know if it’s the whisky or the knowledge of who I am that’s doing it. A car drives past and narrowly misses me; for a moment I’m sorry it didn’t hit me full on.
I didn’t ask for this.
Nor did the people I gassed to death. Nor did the people I tortured.
This isn’t who I am.
But I know that’s not true. I’m a freak. An evil, sadistic freak.
I put my hand in my pocket. Five pounds. Does he bring it every day? I wonder where he gets the money. Does his father know about it? Does Yan?
Does Claire?
The thought hits my stomach with a thud.
I have to see her. I have to explain.
The world works in strange ways. It was a deceit that led to one of my happiest memories of me and Mum. Funny, Mum hadn’t ever seemed like someone who would lie; she was too pure for that, too pretty and fragrant and nice. I probably didn’t even know the word deceit back then but I knew immediately that’s what it was when I came home early from a friend’s house one day. When I opened the door, Yan’s dad was in our kitchen. With my mum. They didn’t hear me come in. They were talking and drinking tea. At least, there was tea on the table. They weren’t holding their mugs. They were talking intently, their heads close together.
‘He doesn’t know,’ I heard her say. ‘He can’t know.’
‘You have to tell him,’ Yan’s dad said. ‘How can you love a man like that? How can you?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t ask me that. If he thinks . . . If he finds out . . . I can’t. Let me do this my way.’
Yan’s dad shrugged. I stared at him, my heart thudding in my chest. We weren’t meant to talk to Yan’s dad, or to Yan, or his brother or any of his family by that point. Dad had told us not to. We weren’t supposed to even look at them in the street. They were the lowest of the low. They’d get their comeuppance one day and in the meantime we weren’t to have anything to do with any of them.
Yan’s dad saw me first; he motioned to Mum, who looked up startled.
‘Will! Hello, darling!’ She sounded flustered. ‘Gosh, you’re home early. I was just . . . We were . . .’
I don’t remember what else she actually said. But I do remember that she was more attentive than usual. She helped me off with my blazer, took my school bag and took out my packed lunch things. Then she started to clean them, running the hot water tap and squirting washing liquid on to the brush before scrubbing the box inside and out. Usually she wiped it with a piece of kitchen roll just before she filled it in the morning. I watched her silently. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Yan’s dad watching her too.
‘You all right, Will?’ he said in his thick accent. He was trying to look relaxed, but I knew he wasn’t.
I nodded awkwardly. I looked at my feet.
Yan’s dad stood up.
‘Well, thank you for the tea, Chloe. Your mother makes very good tea,’ he said, smiling at me as though everything was OK.
I nodded.
Yan’s dad made his excuses and left. ‘We were just having a chat,’ Mum said cheerfully. Too cheerfully. She looked at me for a moment, her cheeks slightly flushed. ‘No need to tell Dad, is there?’
I shook my head. I made my decision easily, but it still sat heavily on me. Best friends didn’t lie to each other. Best friends who lied to each other didn’t stay best friends. Everyone knew that. If Dad found out . . . I pushed the thought away. I’d heard Mum and Dad arguing late at night. I’d heard noises, crashing noises, the noises people make on television when they’re fighting. Whenever I heard fighting noises, Mum would be extra cheerful the following morning. She’d wear more make-up, wear brighter clothes, as though hot pink would make everything OK again.
Mum followed me around for the next hour, helping me with my homework, feeding me biscuits, asking me about the television programme I was watching. Eventually she sighed and slumped down next to me on the sofa. She put her arms around me. ‘Some people burn bridges; some people build them,’ she said. ‘Do you understand, Will?’
I shrugged.
‘The bridges I’m talking about – they’re not real bridges. They’re talking bridges. Friendly bridges. So if someone upsets you, or you upset them, you build a bridge by saying sorry. Or by listening to them. Do you see?’
I thought about it. ‘I told Claire she was rubbish at football on Sunday,’ I said eventually. ‘But afterwards I said she was better at other things. I wanted her to still be my friend.’
Mum looked at me for a moment – she looked like she was going to cry, but instead she leant over and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You’re a good boy, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh yes, my darling. You’re my good boy. You’re the very best boy I could have.’
I still remember the glow, remember the warmth in my stomach after she said that. Her very best boy. That’s who I was – not Will, not the boy who came second from bottom in spelling tests, but my mum’s very best boy.
I’m not anyone’s best boy any more. I’m not good at all. I’m the opposite of good.