The Boy Who Could See Demons Read Free Page A

and hates that only I can see him.
    Wait. I think I can hear Mum downstairs. Yep, she’s crying again. Maybe I should pretend that I don’t notice. I’ve got rehearsals for Hamlet in seventy-two and a half minutes. Maybe she’s just doing it for attention. But my room has started filling with demons, about twenty of them sitting on my bed and huddled in corners, whispering and giggling. They’re all talking excitedly like it’s Christmas or something, and one of them just said my mum’s name. I have a funny feeling in my tummy.
    Something is happening downstairs.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I just asked Ruen. ‘Why are they talking about my mum?’
    He looked at me and raised one of his caterpillar eyebrows. ‘My dear boy, Death has arrived at your front door.’

3
    THE FEELING
    Anya
    The call came this morning at seven-thirty.
    Ursula Hepworth, the senior consultant at MacNeice House Child and Adolescent Mental Health Inpatient Unit in Belfast, rang me on my mobile and mentioned a ten-year-old boy at risk of possibly harming himself and others. Name of Alex Broccoli, she said. Alex’s mother attempted suicide yesterday and has since been sectioned, while the boy has been taken to the paediatric unit at the City Hospital. Alex was at his home in west Belfast and had spent an hour alone with her, trying to call for help. Eventually a lady coming to collect Alex for a drama group intervened and took the pair to hospital. Quite understandably, the boy was in quite a state. Ursula informed me that a social worker named Michael Jones had already had contact with the boy and that he was concerned about his mental health. Alex’s mother has attempted suicide at least four times in the last five years. Eight out of ten children who witness a parent self-harm will go on to repeat the action on themselves.
    ‘Typically, I would be the lead clinician on this boy’s case,’ Ursula explained, her Greek accent sliced up by Northern Irish tones. ‘But as our new child and adolescent psychiatry consultant I thought I’d pass the baton over to you. What do you say?’
    I sat up in bed, greeted by a swathe of boxes all over the floor of my new flat. It’s a four-room place on the outskirts of the city, so close to the ocean that I wake to the sound of seagulls and the faint smell of salt. It is tiled floor to ceiling in a tomato-red tile that burns like the inside of a furnace every sunrise, on account of the fact that the flat faces east and I haven’t had the chance to buy curtains. I haven’t had time to furnish it either, such have been the demands of this new job since moving back from Edinburgh two weeks ago.
    I glanced at my watch. ‘When would you need me to come in?’
    ‘In an hour?’
    The sixth of May has been circled in my work schedule as a day off for the past three years, and was agreed at the point I signed my employment contract. It always will be for the rest of my working life. On this day, those who I count as my closest friends will arrive bearing consolation offerings of cheesecake, tender embraces, photo albums of me and my daughter in happier times, when she was alive and relatively well. Some of these friends will not have seen me for months, but even when their hair colour has changed and other relationships have ended, these friends will show up on my doorstep to help me purge this day out of my calendar for another year. And it will always be so.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and I began to explain about my contract, about the fact that I’ve booked this day off and perhaps she could interview the boy for today and I could catch up on his notes tomorrow?
    There was a long pause.
    ‘This is really quite important,’ she said sternly.
    There are many who feel intimidated by Ursula. At forty-three, I like to think I am past such things as an inferiority complex, and in any case the staggering reality of Poppy’s fourth anniversary already had me on the verge of tears. I took a deep breath and