Born Scared

like this

unscrew the cap, look inside . . .

Nothing.

I go through the same process with the other two bottles, but they’re both empty too, as I knew they would be.

Satisfied?

‘Not yet.’

I start removing everything else from the cabinet – packets of pills (for headaches and indigestion), eczema cream, toothpaste, toothbrush – and when the shelves are completely empty, I stand there scanning the dusty emptiness for any specks of yellow, hoping against hope that if I look hard enough I’ll find a stray pill. But I don’t. So then I reach up and start running my fingers through the dust, feeling around in every little corner of the shelves, every little gap between the shelves and the back of the cupboard, every possible place where a small yellow pill could be lodged . . .

There’s nothing there.

No doubt about it.

I close the cabinet, reach into my pocket, and pull out my current pill bottle. I give it a shake

like this

and the last remaining pill rattles thinly against the glass. I close my eyes for a second and think again about taking it now. The last one I took is beginning to wear off, and I can already feel the first faint stirrings of the thing I dread the most – the beast that is the fear of fear itself – and I know that if I don’t take the pill now . . .

Save it for later, Ellamay says.

‘I don’t think I can.’

You’re probably going to need it later a lot more than you need it now.

I know she’s right.

I know I have to wait.

I shake the bottle one more time

like this

and put it back in my pocket.

Is that it? Ellamay says. Can we go now? It’s going to be completely dark outside if we don’t go soon.

‘I know,’ I tell her, crossing over to the bedside cabinet and picking up my torch, ‘that’s why I need this.’

I switch it on to make sure it’s working. I already know that it is – I check it every night, and I only put new batteries in it a couple of days ago – but I go ahead and check it anyway.

It works, the beam’s strong and bright.

I drop the torch into my coat pocket, turn to leave . . .

Then stop.

And slowly turn round.

What now? says Ella.

The snow globe was a gift from Auntie Shirley. She’d been on a day trip to Whitby with her son Gordon, and when she was looking around one of the souvenir shops she’d spotted a snow globe that she really liked. In fact, she’d liked it so much that she’d bought two of them – one for herself, and one for Mum.

I’d never seen a snow globe before, so when Mum finally showed it to me – after thinking long and hard about whether it would frighten me or not – I had no idea what it was. I remember holding it my hands and gazing curiously at it, wondering what on earth it could be. A small glass dome, filled with clear liquid, with a miniature woodland scene inside. It was a fairytale scene – Little Red Riding Hood walking through the woods with the Big Bad Wolf – and although the small plastic figures and plastic trees weren’t particularly well made or anything, there was something about them, something about the whole thing, that felt very special to me.

‘Shake it,’ Mum said, smiling.

I didn’t know what she meant.

‘Like this,’ she told me, gesturing with her hand.

I copied her, awkwardly shaking the globe, and I was so surprised when it filled up with a blizzard of tiny snowflakes that I actually cried out in delight.

Mum was so relieved that I wasn’t scared of the snow globe, and even more pleased that I actually seemed to like something for a change, that she let me keep it. And it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since.

Shirley keeps her snow globe on the windowsill of her front room, and on the few occasions when I’ve been in Shirley’s house – visiting with Mum – I’ve always wondered if there’s some kind of connection between our two identical snow globes, some kind of at-a-distance awareness of each other . . .

Or something.

I don’t know.

What is it, Elliot ? says Ella.

‘Nothing,’ I tell her, looking away from the snow globe.

What did you see?

‘What do you mean?’

You know what I mean. What did you see just now in the snow globe?

‘Nothing . . .’

She knows I’m lying. She always knows.

Just tell me, she says quietly. What did you see?

‘It was snowing . . . like someone had shaken it up. That’s what made me look at it. And I saw something . . . or I thought I did.’

In the snow?

‘In the whole thing.’

What was it, Elliot? What did you see?

I was in there, in the snow globe. Or something of me was in there . . . a bedraggled figure, limping along the pathway through the woods . . . snow falling in the darkness . . . great black trees all around me, their white-topped branches glinting in an unknown light . . . and up ahead of me an endless climb of rough wooden steps leading up a steep-sided slope . . .

That’s what I saw.

It was all there, all in a timeless moment, and then it was gone again, and all that remained of it was an unfamiliar – and unsettling – feeling of deadness in my heart.

8

A BLOOD-RED NIGHTMARE

I was six when Mum took me to see a child psychologist. I don’t think she really wanted me to see one – partly because she knew it would terrify me, and partly because it meant admitting to herself that my problem was mental rather than physical, which she still didn’t want to accept. But deep down she knew it was true, and she knew she had to do something about it. So she’d asked the Doc to recommend someone, and he’d asked around and come back with a name, and Mum had got in touch with her and made an appointment.

We got as far as the waiting room.

When the psychologist (or therapist, or whatever she called herself) came out of her consulting room and called me and Mum in, I simply couldn’t move. The sheer sight of her terrified me so much that I went into some kind of shock – paralysed in my chair, my muscles locked up, my eyes bulging, my throat too tight to breathe. The psychologist lady also froze for a moment, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was a bit startled by my petrified reaction to her. But, to her credit, she composed herself pretty quickly. Forcing a friendly smile to her face, she came over to where I was sitting with Mum and stopped in front of us. I didn’t want to look at her, but I just couldn’t help it. She was fairly old, but not ancient or anything. She had longish white hair tied back in a plait, and she was wearing a big necklace made out of shiny gold discs. She had a pea-sized mole or something on her upper lip, a hard-looking dark-brown lump, and as I sat there staring helplessly at it, I suddenly began to imagine it pulsing and throbbing, turning red, and then I saw it splitting open, and a big fat yellow fly crawling out . . .

‘Hello, Elliot,’ the psychologist lady started to say. ‘My name’s . . .’

I didn’t hear the rest of it. I was already up and running for the door, screaming my heart out as I went.

About six months after that, Mum and the Doc arranged for another psychologist to visit me at home, but that didn’t work out either. The night before the day of the visit, I got myself into such a state just thinking about it that I ended up being physically ill. Vomiting, diarrhoea, cold sweats, a burning fever . . .

The home visit was cancelled.

‘How about if I talk to him?’ the Doc said to Mum. ‘I could ask him how he feels about everything, why he’s so frightened of things, and I could record our conversation, then pass it on to a child psychologist to see what they think.’

‘Would they be willing to do that?’ Mum asked.

‘There’s no harm in asking, is there?’

DOC: How do you actually feel when you’re frightened of something, Elliot?

ME: I feel scared.

DOC: Do you know why?

ME: What do you mean?

DOC: What I’m trying to get at is why you get so frightened. What is it that makes you afraid?

ME: It depends.

DOC: On what?

ME: Different things scare me in different ways.

DOC: Can you give me an example?

ME: Like what?

DOC: Cars, for instance. You’re frightened of cars, aren’t you?

ME: Yeah.

DOC: Why?

ME: Because they can kill me.

DOC: Could you expand on that a bit?

ME: When I’m in a car all I can think about is what happens if something goes wrong with it and it swerves off the road, or if something goes wrong with the driver and they lose control and drive into a wall, or if something goes wrong with another car or its driver and that car loses control and smashes into us . . . that’s why I’m frightened of cars.

DOC: Because you think they can kill you?

ME: Because they can kill me.

DOC: So it’s a fear based on a possible future reality.

ME: I don’t know what that means.

DOC: It means you’re frightened of something that could happen. It’s highly unlikely that it will happen, but there’s always a possibility.

ME: Right.

DOC: What about when you’re scared of things that don’t pose an obvious threat? Like colours. What is it about the colour red that scares you, for example? Is it the actual colour itself ?

ME: Not really, no.

DOC: What is it then? Does the colour red remind you of something scary?

ME: Blood.

DOC: Blood?

ME: Yeah.

DOC: Red reminds you of blood.

ME: Yeah.

DOC: And that scares you?

ME: Yeah.

DOC: Why?

ME: I don’t know . . . it just does. When I see something red, the redness of it just kind of fills my head with blood.

DOC: Is that why you ran away from that Santa Claus when you were little?

It happened eight years ago, when I was five years old. I was in town with Mum, clinging on to her hand as we made our way through the crowds of festive shoppers. It was so noisy and chaotic that I was already scared out of my wits, but that was nothing compared to the utter horror I felt when a hunchbacked Santa Claus suddenly appeared right in front of me.

I don’t know where he came from – he was probably part of some Christmas carnival or something – and I don’t know what on earth he thought he was doing either. All I know is that as he loomed towards me out of the crowd – stooped over (so his head was level with mine), and with his arms stretched out towards me – I was so shocked and horrified that I actually wet myself. He was hideous. His face all scabby and broken-veined, his eyes unfocused, his teeth just a row of rotten black stubs. His manky old Santa’s beard was yellowed with nicotine stains and dotted with cigarette burns and ketchup drips and God-knows-what-else, and underneath the beard, clearly visible, was a thick growth of bristly black stubble.

Although he had all the Santa gear on – red hat, red jacket, red trousers – he didn’t look anything like he was supposed to. He wasn’t very old for a start – mid-twenties at most – and he wasn’t fat or jolly either. He was just horrible. A blood-red nightmare. And he smelled bad too, like rotten fruit . . . rotten fruit mixed with cigarette smoke.

It must have been obvious how terrified I was, but as I cowered away from him, desperately hiding behind Mum’s legs, he just grinned and kept coming after me, as if it was some kind of game.

‘Don’t be scared, kid,’ he said, his voice all wheezy and croaky. ‘It’s only Santa . . . hey, come on, I ain’t gonna hurt ya . . .’

This all happened so quickly that I don’t think Mum knew what was going on at first, but when this monstrous Santa reached round her legs, pawing at me in what he must have thought was a playful fashion, and I tore my hand from hers and ran off into the crowds, she suddenly sprang into action. When the devil-Santa stood up straight, swore under his breath, and started to come after me, she lashed out at him, kicking him hard in the groin, and as he doubled over in agony and sank to the ground, she ran off after me, calling out my name as she went.

ME: I would have been scared of him whatever colour clothes he was wearing.

DOC: Do you think you would have been less scared if he wasn’t dressed all in red?

ME: Yeah, but I still would have run away from him.

DOC: What about all the red things you see every day? I mean, that Homer Simpson mug on your desk over there, the one with all your pens in . . . that’s got bits of red on it.

ME: I’m okay with bits of red. It’s only when there’s a big solid lump of it that it really gets to me. Like if someone’s wearing a red coat or something. And it doesn’t happen all the time either.

DOC: What do you mean?

ME: Sometimes I can see the scary colours and they don’t do anything to me at all, and other times they only bother me a bit. But on scary-colour days . . . that’s when it’s really bad.

DOC: What other colours are scary?

ME: Black, blue . . . purple sometimes.

DOC: Do they fill your head with frightening things in the same way that red does?

ME: Yeah.

DOC: What does blackness fill your head with?

ME: Death, darkness, night, nothingness . . .

DOC: Blue?

ME: The sea, lakes and rivers . . .

DOC: What is it about the sea that scares you?

ME: Drowning.

DOC: Do you have scary days and non-scary days with these colours too?

ME: Yeah.

DOC: Different days for different colours?

ME: No. A scary-colour day is the same for all colours, and so is a non-scary day.

DOC: What kind of day is it today?

ME: Not too bad. Not completely non-scary, but not totally scary either. Somewhere in between.

DOC: And what about all this, Elliot? All your books, the television, your laptop . . .

ME: What about it?

DOC: Well, a few minutes ago you were telling me about your fear of cars, but if the television was on now, you’d almost certainly come across a car on one of the channels. It might be in a film, an advert, a documentary . . . cars are everywhere on the television. So how can you watch it?

ME: It’s not real. A car on the television isn’t a ton of speeding metal, it’s just a digital image made up of millions of pixels. Pixels can’t kill you.

DOC: Doesn’t it remind you of cars though, like red reminds you of blood?

ME: No.

DOC: Why not?

ME: I don’t know. That’s just how it is. I don’t have any control over what scares me and what doesn’t.

DOC: Does anything on the television frighten you?

ME: No.

DOC: Not even horrific things on the news?

ME: It’s not real.

DOC: It’s a representation of reality though, isn’t it?

ME: It’s still not real.

DOC: And that’s the same with all your books and the things you see on the internet, is it? It’s not real, so it’s not frightening?

ME: I can’t explain it. I don’t even bother trying to understand it myself any more. I just . . . I don’t know. I just do my best to live with it.

DOC: Do you ever get used to being scared all the time?

ME: No, but I’ve kind of got used to not getting used to it.

9

AT LEAST A MILLION

‘Are you sure you can trust her?’ Dake asked Jenner.

They’d left the moors behind now and were driving along a single-track lane that would eventually bring them out at the top of the village. The snow had eased off a little, and although the icy wind was still blowing hard, the Land Rover was shielded from the worst of it by the high banks and dry-stone walls either side of the lane.

‘I don’t trust anyone,’ Jenner said matter-of-factly.

‘So how do you know she’s not lying?’

‘Because she knows what I’ll do to her if she is.’

Dake didn’t doubt there was a veiled threat to him in Jenner’s answer – and you’d better not mess me around either – and he also knew that Jenner didn’t make idle threats. He made promises, and he kept them.

‘It just seems a bit odd, that’s all,’ Dake said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The timing, you know . . . Christmas and everything. I still don’t get it. I mean, you would have thought they’d empty the place over Christmas, not keep it all there.’

Jenner sighed. ‘How many more times do I have to tell you? The whole point of this, the reason it won’t be expected – and why we’re going to get away with it – is precisely because of the timing. They usually would keep all the branches empty over Christmas, but when their internal computer system crashed last week it messed up the program they use to schedule and track the collections . . .’ Jenner paused, glancing sideways at Dake. ‘Do I really have to go over all this again? Don’t you remember anything, for God’s sake?’

‘Yeah, of course I remember,’ Dake said defensively. ‘It’s just . . . well, you know . . . I can’t be expected to remember everything, can I?’

Jenner shook his head in disbelief. He’d always known that Dake wasn’t particularly intelligent – he could barely read or write, for a start – but Jenner was beginning to wonder now if there was something seriously wrong with him. How could he not remember what he’d already been told at least three or four times?

Jenner slowed the Land Rover and pulled into a passing space to let a tractor go by. Once it had passed, he lit a cigarette and turned to Dake.

‘The money’s there, okay?’ he said, as patiently as possible. ‘It’s in the vault. That’s all you need to know.’

‘How much?’

‘I’ve already told you that.’

‘I know.’ Dake grinned. ‘I just want to hear it again.’

‘At least a million, according to the girl. Probably more.’

‘At least a million . . .’ Dake echoed dreamily.

‘Yeah, and the best thing about it is they won’t even know it’s gone until the day after Boxing Day.’

‘He’ll know though, won’t he?’

‘Who?’

‘The manager guy, you know . . . the one who’s going to open the safe for us. He’ll know the money’s gone.’

‘He won’t tell anyone.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’ll know what I’ll do to his mother if he does.’

10

A DEAD BLACK LINE

ME: Do you think I’m mad?

DOC: Do you?

ME: I don’t know . . . sometimes, maybe. I’m definitely not normal, am I?

DOC: None of us are normal. We all have things wrong with us. It’s just that some of those things have a much bigger effect on our lives than others.

ME: Do you think something could have gone wrong in my head when I was a baby?

DOC: Do you mean when your heart stopped?

ME: Yeah. Maybe my brain stopped too, or it got damaged or something.

DOC: Well, that can happen, yes. If you’re starved of oxygen at birth it can lead to irreversible brain damage. But in all the instances I’ve ever come across, the oxygen supply has been stopped for at least two or three minutes, usually quite a bit longer. But that wasn’t the case with you, Elliot. Your heart stopped beating for less than a minute.

ME: Yeah, but what if –?

DOC: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your mind, Elliot. Trust me. If you’d suffered any brain damage I’d know.

ME: So are you saying it’s perfectly all right for me to be terrified of everything?

DOC: No, of course not.

ME: So there is something wrong with my brain then.

Sometimes I have no sense of the present. All I can feel is a sense of the past and a sense of the future – the ‘then’ and the ‘when’. I can look back and remember things – things that happened, things that I did – and I can look forward to things that haven’t happened yet. I can imagine things happening in the future – the next half hour, the next day, next Monday afternoon, next year. I can do all that. But the present . . . the present seems to pass me by. I can’t get hold of it. It’s like a shapeless and senseless void that moves, like a cursor, between the past and the future. A dead black line, forever moving, forever being . . . but never actually there.

ME: I know you think I’m weird.

DOC: What makes you say that?

ME: I heard you talking to Mum once. You told her it was really weird how sometimes I sound really grown up, almost like an adult, but other times I seem almost babyish.

DOC: I didn’t say it was ‘really weird’, I just said I’d noticed it, that’s all. And I didn’t say ‘babyish’ either. All I said was that sometimes the way you talk makes you sound older than you are, and sometimes you come across as being younger than you are. I didn’t say it was ‘weird’. And I wouldn’t use that word anyway.

ME: What word would you use?

DOC: I don’t know . . . ‘different’, perhaps.

‘Unusual’. There’s nothing wrong with being unusual.

I’ve never met my father. According to Mum, she met him at a party, they spent the night together, and that was that. They never saw each other again.

‘It was all perfectly amiable,’ she told me once. ‘He was a lovely man, and we had a very nice time together. But neither of us wanted to take it any further, and we were both quite happy to go our separate ways.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked her.

‘Martyn.’

‘Martyn what?’

‘I honestly don’t know. He introduced himself as Martyn, and I told him I was Grace, and that’s all we needed to know.’

Even if she had known his surname, she still wouldn’t have made any effort to contact him when she found out she was pregnant.

‘It would only have complicated things,’ she explained. ‘And besides, apart from his name, the only other thing I knew about Martyn was that he lived in Los Angeles and he was a writer, but he didn’t write under his real name. So I couldn’t have tracked him down even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t.’

I don’t miss having a father – you can’t miss what you’ve never had, can you? – and on the rare occasions when I do wonder what it would be like to have a dad, the mere thought of it makes me shudder. A man living in my house? A monkem? A man I’d have to share Mum with . . .?

No.

I wouldn’t like that one bit.

DOC: We might not know the precise cause of your problem, Elliot, but we know how it affects you, and it might be possible to lessen those effects to some degree.

ME: How?

DOC: There are anti-anxiety medications that might help. They’re obviously not intended for treating the level of fear that afflicts you, and normally I’d never even consider this type of medication for a child, but you’re a far from normal case, Elliot.

ME: Thanks a lot.

The Doc looks totally different when he smiles, which isn’t very often. But when he does smile, it lightens his face, makes him look younger. It lifts his mask of sombre gravity and reveals a twinkle of the child in him.

DOC: Anyway, I’ve talked to your mum about it, and although she hates the idea of putting you on medication as much as I do, she agrees that it’s worth giving it a go. But only if you want to try it.

ME: Will the drugs stop me being afraid?

DOC: No, but they might lessen the severity of your fears.

ME: So I’ll still be scared of things, but not so much.

DOC: Possibly, yes. It’s also possible that medication won’t help you at all. In fact, it could actually make you feel worse. But the only way to find out is by trying it. You also need to bear in mind that there are dozens of different types of anti-anxiety medication, and it could easily take months, or even years, to find out which of them – if any – is best for you. Now I know this is a lot to think about, but at the moment that’s all I want you to do – just think about it, okay? There’s no rush, you can take as much time as you want. And if there’s anything you’re not sure about, anything you want to ask, just let me know, okay?