her, which led to physical struggles, which Ben once saw.
There is nothing quite as sickening to a child, regardless of age, as witnessing the two people you love and care for more than anyone else, fighting and shouting and screaming at each other, and then seeing your mother forcing herself to throw up, if your father was lucky enough to get her to take her medication in the first place.
She should have been in a home for the mentally ill a long time ago, but Mr Green was old school, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. Looking back, Ben could now see that this was a mistake on his father’s part.
Was it his only mistake?
Ben had moments when he believed in the awful words his mother had mumbled to him in the last day or so, the fact that his father had been a serial killer, that he carried the same murderous gene that his father had, and that he could only fight his natural instincts for so long before they took over.
Why did his mother have to tell him that? Why couldn’t she leave Ben to believe that his father was a saint? Just let him think his father was a great man who loved and cared and gave and shared.
Why did she have to break Ben’s heart again? Why?
Ben felt a rage build in his body and before he knew it, he’d smashed his fist down hard onto the kitchen table, his mother’s head bounced up from the surface from the impact. She awoke from her alcohol-induced slumber and smiled as she stared bleary-eyed at her son, as she sat back in her seat and looked for her glass of wine before realising it was in Ben’s hand.
‘So, Charlie’s dead,’ said Ben, staring into his mother’s eyes, searching for a reaction, a sign of how much she knew, how much she understood or cared about the torment he was going through.
‘You did well, my son.’ she replied. ‘Yes, I heard it on the radio. How do you feel?’
‘How do I feel?’ said Ben, ‘I didn’t do it. The police had me in the station for a murder I didn’t commit. Thank god they’re so stupid they didn’t realise I’m the bastard who killed those fucking kids!’
Ben leaned in towards the table, finished the glass of wine and poured some more.
‘Of course you killed him, Ben,’ said his mother, ‘who else?’
‘I bottled it, mum,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t go through with it. I ran away. Then the next thing, four policemen are at my front door, asking me to the station to answer some questions.’
Mrs Green held out her hand and Ben gave her the wine glass.
‘Your father used to forget as well, Ben,’ she said, before taking a large gulp of the red wine. ‘He would sometimes wake up, specks of blood on his face and in his hair, and deny he’d done anything wrong. He denied it so much. I could only believe that he didn’t know what he had done, like he’d chosen to forget.’
She emptied the wine glass with another large gulp, slid it along the table to Ben, who filled it again.
‘He chose to forget?’ said Ben. ‘You can’t just forget these things, mum, not even you with your unstable mind and fucking drinking problem.’
Ben swiped his arm across the table and the glass flew into the wall to his left, broken glass crashed to the floor and wine ran down the wall.
His mother didn’t flinch.
‘Now, now, Ben,’ she said, ‘calm down. This is not the moment to panic. Your mind lets you forget what you have done because you are not ready to accept what you are, not yet. It will come. For now, your mind is protecting you, hiding your ills deep down, and we’ll wait, we’ll wait until you’re ready.’
It was at this point, Ben realised how much he hated his mother. He hated looking at her, he hated the sound of her voice, but more than that, he hated the awful words that she spoke. She spoke them like the truth, and Ben didn’t know if she was lying, and exploiting his instability to fulfil some bizarre fantasy she had turning around in her sick head, or if she was telling the truth, that not only was he a cold-blooded killer, but his mind was also playing incredible tricks on him.
Sometimes when you hate someone, you don’t want to believe what they are saying is the truth, even if you haven’t an argument against it.
Mrs Green was now telling Ben how she first discovered that his father was The Phantom. There was the stress and the anger, things that Ben never saw in his father, then his late night walks and coming home late at night and crying himself to sleep on the sofa, thinking that his troubled wife upstairs couldn’t hear.
She explained that she took some of the blame, for being such an exhausting wife, that her illness affected the people around her, she knew that, but ultimately, it was Ben’s father who had this desire inside him, the need to shed the blood of another to ease the pain and torture inside of him.
Eventually, at a time of weakness for Mr Green, she approached him and told him that she knew what he had been doing, he broke down in tears, she swore to secrecy, and together they’d get through it.
He’d explained he did it to quieten the voice in his head, how he’d put on some of his painting overalls, take a knife and stalk the streets, keeping to the shadows until he found a victim, someone on their own, someone who wasn’t ready to defend themselves, then he’d claim them as his own, sacrificing them, in the hope that their death would buy him peace of mind.
‘I pledged my allegiance to my husband, like I’m doing to you now.
Ben despised every single word she said. How could he not know the evil that lived inside his father? It seemed impossible. He was the kindest, gentlest man. But then, until recently, so was Ben.
He’d had enough for one day.
He picked himself up and walked around the table, kissed his mother on her cheek then retired to his old bedroom. He took the mirror from his bedroom wall, placed it face down on the floor, and slid it under the bed, then lay himself down with his eyes wide open and let the thoughts run wild through his head.
For the time being, Ben still had control of his mind for fairly long periods, and he needed to make the most of his sanity.
39
It was morning, Ben had collected Natalie from home and they had driven into town. He was going to see the solicitor to fill out any necessary forms and collect the inheritance from his father.
Natalie said she wanted to look at baby clothes and maybe pick out an outfit for their wedding, which she had decided should take place at a registry office. Waiting for a decent church could take too long, and neither of them came from large families and they weren’t religious, so she reasoned it was the better option.
Ben accepted her plans with a nod and dropped her off by the high street before driving five minutes up the road, closer to the solicitor’s office.
Natalie grabbed a few items of baby clothes from the first shop she went to, not much heart-felt consideration went into her purchases, just enough care to make it seem she cared. She bought whites and yellows, colours that would suit either a boy or a girl, because clearly, she didn’t yet know what sex her fictitious baby would turn out to be.
As she came out of the shop she looked both ways along the street, searching for the real reason she had come into town today, a pharmacy.
Before entering, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and took a moment to get into character.
Inside the store, she saw two of the three employees were available and decided which would be better suited to answer the questions she had. She ignored the older man, and opted for the younger woman, maybe in her late twenties and wearing some nice make-up, Natalie knew that she could relate to her.
She told the pharmacist that she had a friend, who thinks that she may have had a miscarriage, as she had a little bleeding in her underwear.
‘Is that likely to be a miscarriage?’ she asked. ‘What other signs would there be?’
The smile disappeared from the young pharmacists face, and turned into a face of concern.
She explained that bleeding could be a sign of miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion (SAB), but that a little bleeding happened in around one in four pregnancies. If the bleeding were to arrive and then be followed by abdominal pain, lower back pain or pelvic pressure, these were signs that her friend should be wary of. The best thing would be for her friend to see her practitioner, who would organise an ultrasound to see what’s going on
