The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

I think I’m most disturbed that he didn’t notice it. Or at least, he gave no visible signs of having noticed. There was blood that descended from a patch of raw skin above his left elbow, emerging just beneath the tattered hem of a short sleeve, which isn’t something a person simply stands oblivious too. Especially a child. I’m left wondering what caused it. A bad scrape from a fall? Rough play? In any case, what I’d seen was too much blood for a little child – the amount of blood you expect to draw tears. But there were no tears.

There was no expression on his shadow-hidden face. None that I could make out. The blood dripped a little, but his attention remained at the tip of his stick, tracing figure eights in the algae at the surface of the water. He appeared unfazed and unemotional.

I’m plucked back into the present by a woman who wants to know about dietary supplements. ‘The kind for losing weight.’ I walk her over to a whole shelf we have cunningly dedicated to this particular myth. HEALTHY RAPID WEIGHT LOSS is the sign we’ve affixed to the top of the section: words so oxymoronic that I’m surprised we’ve never been sued for deception.

The woman gasps, mystified at the array of bottles. It’s the gasp that comes with a look of excited enthusiasm I’ve seen many times before.

‘Which would you recommend?’ she asks. There are so many! Clearly, these are going to change my life!

She’s in her mid thirties, pudgy but not fat. Not as fat as the men who usually come to browse this section, who absolutely never want to talk to anybody about their options (if caught gazing at the weight-loss shelf, they usually swerve just to the right, where we’ve cleverly placed the Protein Muscle Bulk powders so as to save them the embarrassment of admitting what they were really looking for). The whipped cream of the woman’s mocha Frappuccino is piled high beneath a domed plastic lid, a crowning chocolate-covered coffee bean beginning to sink into its sugary pillow. She seems entirely oblivious to the irony.

‘A lot of people are going for the cinnamon extract,’ I say non-judgementally, pointing to a green bottle. ‘But others swear by the basic fibre capsules. They fill up the stomach with harmless bulk.’ A brown bottle. ‘Keeps you from wanting so much when you eat. So the theory goes.’

And they’ll each do you about as much good as closing your eyes, clicking your heels three times and hoping the fat will make a pilgrimage to Oz.

I artfully keep that last bit to myself. My job is to get her to pick a bottle, any bottle, and politely charge her the 450 per cent mark-up we make on what is mostly encapsulated sawdust with a token sprinkling of your favourite herb. I smile warmly, something I’ve practised. She goes for the brown bottle and I nod in knowing approval. A wise choice, ma’am. That’s the one I would have suggested all along. A few minutes later I have gratefully relieved her of $39.50. If she loses a pound from a fistful of fibre capsules three times a day, I’ll personally double back her money. But at least she won’t be suffering from irregularity.

My mind is back in the park. He remained a few minutes, there, the boy. Standing motionless on the far side of the pond like he always did, though not for quite as long, I think, as usual. When I saw his wound I felt the urge to say something. Are you all right? Did you fall? Do you need that looking at? But I sat quietly, instead, and I wished I’d had a coffee. Maybe that was selfish. I’m not used to looking after other people’s children. And after all, it’s just a scrape.

A few moments later, the boy plucked up his stick, turned and walked back into the greenery, into the depth of the park.

Tough breaks, kid. Everybody falls. Given the calmness of his demeanour, it was a lesson he seemed to have learned with grace and dignity.

Once he’d gone I closed my notebook. The muses had still not come and there was no more time to wait for them. My two lines remained an unaccompanied duo. I rose from my bench, said farewell to Margaret’s ghost, and walked away.

That was hours ago. I must really be bored to have spent the afternoon dwelling on it as I have. The clock on the wall says 5.49 p.m. and I can’t imagine anyone is coming supplement shopping between now and six, so I flip the sign to ‘Closed’ and lock up. It’s enough for today. There’s a bus ride ahead. Home, and diamonds, and memories.

5

Taped Recording Cassette #014A Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

The recording hisses slightly as it begins, but she is content. The sound quality overall is good.

A rustle of papers before the dialogue ensues. When the voices emerge, their interactions pick up mid-stream; a continued recording from a continuing conversation. Not the first Pauline Lavrentis had had with him, and far from what would be the last.

‘I want us to return to yesterday.’ Her voice creeps out of the small speakers. In recordings she hears what always sounds an odd echo of herself. Her voice emerges as that of a woman of indeterminate age, though certainly without the lilt of youth she’d once had. It’s free of the humour she likes to feel she possesses, and the emotion by which her husband has always characterized her. That dispassion is intentional now, of course – speaking in just this way, in just this tone, has become a crafted skill – but it still sounds odd to her in the recordings, and she assumes it probably always will.

A pause.

‘What about yesterday?’ The voice that responds is a male’s, its own ambiguous qualities creeping through. Definitely not a child’s tones, but not an old man’s either. Somewhere in the vast expanse in between.

‘You said you killed your wife.’

A far longer pause. Plastic squeaks: the back of a chair bending under readjusting weight. Pauline leans towards the small recorder in its playback, straining to catch every sound.

‘I had to admit it eventually,’ the male voice finally responds. ‘Can’t keep everything bottled up. That’s what you’re always telling me, isn’t it?’ More fidgeting.

‘It’s good to talk,’ she answers with words she’d spoken a hundred times before, ‘to open up about ourselves.’ But not everything about this interview is usual. Some of her words are rarer, less customary on her lips. ‘I’ve been troubled by what you said.’

‘No shit.’ The male voice is flippant, now. The change happens quickly, seamlessly. ‘Can’t say I’m not troubled by it myself, lady. Terrible. Just a terrible, terrible thing. A man shouldn’t kill his wife.’

‘It’s not the killing that’s troubling me, Joseph.’

A hesitation.

‘You’re … not bothered I killed my wife?’ Genuine confusion sounds in the man’s voice. The cassette captures a different, halting rhythm to his speech. ‘That’s just sick.’

‘Killing is very—’

‘No, seriously,’ his words slice across hers. ‘You ought to be fucking revolted. I told you I killed my goddamned wife! Held a pillow over her head till she stopped breathing.’

‘I remember what you told m—’

‘What sort of callous bitch are you?’ His voice is angry now. Pauline recalls how swiftly it had changed, the features of his face altering along with it. ‘You’re always doing this! Playing with me. Finally getting me to open up, then you toy around.’ A pause. His breathing is heavy and angry. ‘Bitch.’

On the cassette, Pauline allows a silence to linger. The man’s breath continues to resonate. Several seconds pass. When Pauline begins to speak again, her voice has a different tone to it. A deliberate strategy, and on hearing it now on tape, Pauline is certain it was the right one.

‘Perhaps that isn’t where we should begin, today. Perhaps it’s too much.’ She’d let her focus remain vague, unclear whether she was speaking to the man or to herself. But then, more definitively, ‘Did you love her? Your wife?’

The question provokes a hesitation, captured on the miniaturized magnetic tape. ‘That’s … that’s a ridiculous thing to ask. Of course I loved my wife.’

‘And you remember that – that love?’

The pauses grow longer and more frequent. ‘You ask foolish questions. How could I not remember being in love? Obviously I remember it. We were head over heels. Full of romance. All that.’

‘It sounds very lovely,’ Pauline answers. Now, as then, his initial response provoked images of perfection. The kind of perfection she’d felt when she’d first met her husband, on those first dates when romance was everything and the world slipped away from her attention. For a time. And that was the key: for a time. Reality always steps back in. Pure romance is meant to give way to the sturdier, though sometimes less flattering, realities of genuine love.

‘Always been a traditional man,’ the male’s voice continues, ‘loving the lovely. She was the traditional woman, too, the kind any guy would want.’

A silence lingers between them. Finally, the sound of Pauline leaning in towards the recorder.

‘I told you before that something was troubling me about your recollection of the murder.’

‘I haven’t forgotten. Your reaction was just … sick. Most people, normal people, would be horrified. But you, you’re “troubled”.’

‘It’s not that I don’t find killing repulsive, Joseph,’ she continues. ‘I do.’

‘Then are you going to get to just what it is that’s “troubling” you?’ Sarcasm clings to his syllables.

There are more sounds of bodily readjustment. When Pauline’s voice returns, it comes from a place closer to the microphone. She’d positioned her body carefully, the memory still fresh in her mind. She’d brought her face closer to his, lined it up directly with his eyes.

‘I’m troubled, Joseph, because there’s a fact of this case that simply doesn’t mesh with what you’ve confessed.’

‘There’s lots of details. Not everything “meshes” in real life, and murder isn’t an everyday occurrence that follows ordinary rules.’

‘No, but usually the pieces fit together, once we look at them. The details of the crime, and of the criminal.’

‘You can’t expect me to remember every little detail perfectly.’

‘It’s not a little detail, Joseph.’ Her instinct, Pauline recalled, had been to offer a compassionate smile, something almost maternal. She’d forced herself to hold it back.

The man’s voice grunts in impatient displeasure.

‘Just get to the point, would you?’

‘Joseph,’ she answers, slowly, ‘the simple fact of the matter is, you didn’t kill your wife.’

Thirty-seven seconds of sustained silence. Not even the sound of breathing. As if the microphone has dropped out.

Then, the last word recorded on cassette #014A.

‘Bitch.’

6

Thursday Lunchtime

I’ve chosen a frou-frou coffee for my lunch break today: double latte with caramel syrup and whipped cream. There’s no particular reason I’ve switched from my usual black filter selection; perhaps it’s the slightly overcast sky, the nip of a chill in the air. Some days are bright on their own. Some need to be brightened up and sweetened, however artificial the sweetener.

I walk towards the park along my usual route. I have a full hour for lunch today – an extra fifteen minutes occasioned by the manager training in a new employee. ‘I’ll stay in and watch the counter with her for a bit,’ he said. ‘She can use the practice on the till. Have a good walk.’ That’s Michael. Not a bad man. Looks like death warmed over: pale, gaunt, waxy eyes and a head of hair so sparse that at a polite distance you can make out individual strands emerging like sprouts from a desert dry scalp. And he still manages to run a successful shop that sells health supplements and vegetable-based ‘miracle’ hair products.

Today is a ‘Free Day’ in the SF Botanical Gardens, meaning that as I approach I see larger than usual crowds strolling over the Great Meadow. They have these, every so often: days in which there is no entrance fee, even for non-residents – so the throngs of tourists ambling through Golden Gate Park have a chance to see one of the finer places in the city. A noble, civil attitude. I support it wholeheartedly. As long as it doesn’t become everyday and we locals get entirely run out.

Cindy is in the entrance booth, the one marked Tickets. ‘Good morning, Dylan,’ she says with a broad smile as I walk by. Cindy volunteers Tuesdays and Thursdays, and normally checks my driver’s licence each and every time I arrive, even though she’s known me for two years now. She’s a law student up the hill – a career that makes for that kind of attitude, I suppose. But she’s delightful in every other way. I smile back as I pass by, noting her kind eyes behind the massive orange plastic rims of her eyeglasses and the nod as she beckons me onwards. No IDs required today. Not on a Free Day.

It takes two left turns, a brief jaunt down a main pathway (today covered in people), and then a right onto a short, planked path into the trees before I arrive at the dirt walkway that leads to my pond. All in all, no more than five minutes from the entrance. Five minutes, and I’m in another world.

I set the caramel latte on the bench beside me, bid hello and a pleasant afternoon to the memory of Margaret, and pull out my notebook. Its home in my back pocket has left an indelible imprint on my khakis, every pair of them; and the shape of my ass has left the notebooks slightly bent. Every one of them. There are stacks, piled up at home. A lifetime of poetry, thus far read only by me.

I am not alone this afternoon. Free access and not-too-miserable weather have brought others into what is normally a rather secluded area. A group of children plays with stones off to my left, down at the water’s edge, their parents chatting idly behind them, visibly relieved that for the moment their offspring don’t require active observation. Further in the distance, a clutch of tourists with enormous cameras stops and starts along the beds by the water. I’ve never understood the fascination with taking pictures of plants, but these kinds of visitors are the standard, not the exception. The kind that take photos of flowers rather than actually see them – smell them, feel the way they reflect the light into your eyes, standing before their simple, unadorned magnificence. Surely this is a far greater thing than converting them to pixels. But I suppose there’s a whole generation, now, who simply do not know how to encounter anything directly. Human experience is mediated by a small screen held up between face and reality. Only what it captures is truly real. The memories of life have become confined to a span of 2.5 x 5 in (3.5 x 6 if you’ve got the latest model). On the periphery, nothing truly exists.

There has to be something tragic in this, there just has to be. I know we’re more connected than we’ve ever been, that it’s become the norm for the anonymous ‘us’ of the world to tweet and post and link to a degree that wouldn’t have been imaginable a generation ago. And I’m not against occasionally stepping into the public library and accessing the Internet with a swipe of my ID, to visit an online story or revel in the latest news of the day. But I cannot be the only one who feels more detached there than anywhere else. When I’m sitting beneath my trees and the water ripples beneath me, I feel more connected to the world than in any other spot. Even when there’s not another dot of humanity around me. But when I ‘connect’, when wires and satellites link my data stream to that of everyone else in creation, it’s then that I feel the most lost. The most alone.

And they make you pay for the experience.

Still, today is not about being alone. The tourists with their eyes pressed to their cameras may not notice the wide beauty of the periphery they’re avoiding, but for me the periphery is what’s interesting. Because there, at the edge of my vision, the branches wiggle again at the water’s edge.

In the usual spot.

I sit forward, unsurprised but eager. I’ve been looking forward to seeing him, to seeing the scrape that had upset me yesterday bandaged and a boy back to being a boy. Sure, the injury may have been unpleasant, but there are times when unpleasantness brings rewards. Now the boy will have war wounds to prove his courage and offer bragging rights before his peers. Every boy needs to have those: stories connected to little scabs, scars, offering fleshy proof that ‘I was brave, guys, and all grown up.’ Men seem to need them, too, though their scars tend to be deeper, their falls more brutal, and the evidence of maturity even more fleeting.

He dutifully emerges, as if on cue, and promptly takes his customary three steps down to the edge of the pond. Then, as always, he stands like a statue, his stick in hand, its tip just piercing the water. The familiar scene. My own comforting reassurance of normalcy. My heart loosens with gentle satisfaction.

But my breath chokes in my throat. The blood, I immediately realize, is still on his arm, just as fresh as yesterday. It glistens in the grey light seeping down from the overcast sky: moist, liquid, fresh. Even at the distance, I can see a stream of it flow along the path of his dirty skin towards his hand, trailing brown edges where the red blood meets dust and grime.

There is no bandage. His wound hasn’t been cleaned. Hasn’t been tended to at all.

But it’s not just the blood that stops my breath and keeps it halted. The blood’s not even the worst of it. There’s more, today. I’m glued at first on the injury I remember – poor child, still all scraped up – but finally my glance wanders a few inches to my left. Initially, I think it’s the shadows, a trick of the light; but then a sunbeam pierces the clouds and I see directly. The boy’s other arm is overwhelmed by something oval, black. I think at first it’s a patch of some kind, maybe a dark bandage over a different scrape. But it’s not fabric. Almost mirroring the wound on his left arm, I can see now that the large mark on his right is a bruise, deep and discoloured. The kind so dense it looks like it digs down to the bone. It extends over the whole of his forearm, from his elbow to the hand that clutches his favourite stick. Blues and purples and almost-greens that should never be the colours defining the skin of a boy.

I can’t fully focus. This isn’t right. A child so small should not be walking around with such wounds. I try to look into his face, into his eyes, to see if they’re watering, filled with pain. They ought to be filled with pain. But I can’t make out his features through the shadows and distance. Only the basic outline of his face, a few details – the bumps of his ears beneath his hair, the shadow that barely defines his nose. If only I could see him a little better; but the sunbeam is interrupted by tree branches high above, restricting its light to his shoulders and below.

I really have to approach him. Someone must take him to get cleaned up somewhere, at the very least. Get that scraped arm washed off.

But the boy senses my thoughts – his motions are almost that synchronized – and turns. Three steps and he is gone, the bristly green leaves of the Cryptomeria japonica brushing closed behind him.

EVENING

I cannot sleep. Not tonight. It’s not my usual insomnia, either. My normal night-time torture is more gentle: a sustained, unwavering, yet calm refusal to let sleep come, with no specific cause and no specific cure. I’ve grown accustomed to the ruthless consistency of its long-game attack. I know what it’s like to have no thoughts fill my head but still find sleep a foreigner, and to start counting sheep at number one, knowing I’ll easily make it to a thousand without my eyelids growing the slightest bit heavier. One sheep after another, waiting their turn without drama or protest, each mocking the sleep I crave.

But tonight’s insomnia is different, a punctuated sort of thing. Pokes and prods that bolt me to alertness every time I start to fade. And my body is actually fading, that’s the strangest part. I’m genuinely tired tonight. Exhausted. But each time my body starts to give way, to give in, my mind pounces and shoves sleep off.

I am thinking of the boy. He’s all I’m thinking about. Those arms, bloodied and bruised. The fact that I did nothing. I don’t understand his silence and I can’t fathom his threshold for what must be tremendous pain, but mostly I feel guilty that I saw a child with wounds he shouldn’t have had, whom no one had tended to since the day before, and now I’m here comfortably in bed – awake or otherwise – and I didn’t so much as say a word to console him. I feel ashamed, and embarrassed with myself.

This all must change, I resolve, and the change must begin with my behaviour. It’s not socially responsible just to sit on one’s own in such circumstances. I must take my courage in my hands and get my posterior off my bench.

Tomorrow, I’m going to say something.

7

Friday

The new day hasn’t begun well, and that’s not entirely a surprise. The organic Vitamin-C-and-Zinc tablets in the yellow jars are selling themselves, but my mind is otherwise occupied. The sun is brighter today – none of the half fog / half overcast sky that sullied yesterday – so I ought to be in brighter spirits. My mood so often follows the weather outside the window: bright when it’s bright, grey when it’s grey. But I’ve spent the morning grey when it’s orange, troubled, as I knew I would be, from the moment I awoke, by the memory of the boy.

Memory allows the space for analysis, and in the scope of such analysis I recognize that there are a few features about this child that should, just possibly, not have me in quite such a state over his present circumstances. He’s never looked entirely in top form, not on all the many occasions I’ve seen him. That’s the first reality that sinks in. He’s never been one of those made-up children that urban parents produce as if from a factory or mail-order supply. The kind sculpted out of name-brand ‘playwear’ that’s stain-, wrinkle- and pleasure-resistant, trained to hold their autographed football rather than throw it, ‘because the grass is so dirty, Junior, and leaves marks.’ The boy is rougher than that. A little out of place for the middle of San Francisco, as if the Midwestern prairies had lost one of their member in this peninsular metropolis; and this child, who would have looked at home on an Oklahoma farmstead, had found himself wandering through the cultured greenery a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley. Out of his environment, caught askance out of time, with a body and a posture not quite sure what to make of this different jungle. The kind of boy who inserts himself into a tyre swing and kicks until his feet are above his head and the arcs so high the rope goes slack when it crests. Who sits in the muddiest patch of the field, just to sense what it’s like to feel the liquid sludge seep over his ankles. Who’s never owned a ball, because balls cost money; but has also never wanted one, because he’s always had access to sticks, and sticks are so easily horses, and rocket ships, and swords and sceptres.

But children don’t wander alone from Little House on the Prairie to the Inner Sunset, I know this full well. The fact that he’s not an Abercrombie Child doesn’t mean he’s not from around here. Not everyone in the City on the Bay is rolling in start-up fortunes and Union Square attire, and it’s possible to be poor and haggard in the city. Perhaps more normal than I generally appreciate. It’s the glitter that catches the eye, they say. Beneath it there’s usually a lot more glue and bare cardboard than we care to notice.

I’m stuck in these memories, such as they are. Second day running he’s done that to me. And in the mix of them, I find myself calling back to the most unlikely of things; the one feature that really nags at my attention. To my puzzlement it’s not the blood, not even the bruise. Instead, what troubles me is the fact that he’s never looked me squarely in the face. I’ve often thought this peculiar, even penned it into one of the poems in my notebook. Kids normally look at everything. From the moment their eyes first open children are absorbing the universe, striving to interpret it. Relishing every sight – which to young eyes are usually new sights, never before seen – and adding them to the canvas of their experience of life. What sort of child doesn’t fit this bill?