Sin Read online

  I just didn't know. But something had changed. And I could only think that it was for the better. I could only hope it was for the better.

  In a folder in a box on a shelf in a cupboard under the stairs was an envelope. In the envelope in the box blah-de-blah was my life. Credit card, bank card, passport, the lot. My life, such as it had been, could be stored in an A5 sized brown envelope. The sum of me, carry the one. Beneath my envelope was another belonging to Joy. It contained only her passport and her driving license, the credit and bank cards long since being defunct and cut up. These two items, though, I couldn't dispose of as easily as I could her credit card. Was it because they had her photograph on? Was it because, by virtue of being her ID, they'd somehow become part of her? That, I think, was closer to the truth. I'd lost her, but keeping these items, especially in such close proximity to my own, somehow meant we were still together on some plane.

  I opened her passport and smiled. She'd always hated the photo. False smile to match the fake eyelashes. She was looking forward to renewing the passport and, along with it, her photo. It still had almost a year to go when she killed herself. I supposed, going by my dream the other night, she could pretty much go anywhere she wanted now, so a passport was somewhat redundant. And she didn't need to drive so ditto on the license. Useful thing, death, then.

  I slipped what remained of my sister back into her envelope and put it away. Taking my own little packet of Me, I went back upstairs to my room. The living room would maybe have been a better place to kick back and think, but I knew what I was like. I'd turn the TV on and watch inane programmes try to sort out the lives of inane people, from those that couldn't find a new home on their own to those that couldn't find themselves. Reality television in its many forms would latch on to me like a leech and suck the will to do anything from me until it was full and bloated and dropped off. By then the stars would have turned and the Doctor's friends would have come knocking, no doubt.

  So back to my room. Maybe a short nap. Then lights, camera, action, with no need for a stunt double.

  It was dark when I awoke. Well, night time anyway. A street lamp stood guard outside, lighting the room with an anaemic glow that I would normally have blocked out with a blackout blind. So much for a short nap. Sleep had fooled me, hiding behind the curtain of my hyped up energy, sneaking out when my back was turned and my eyes were closed to steal the day from me.

  Joy was sitting at the end of my bed.

  * * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  "Hey there, sleepy head," she said.

  I smiled, yawned and stretched. "Hey sis."

  Clearly I was still asleep. Maybe it wasn't actually night time and the street light wasn't swathing the room in a sickly yellow. At least Joy's face was in one piece - for now anyway. I could do without having to hand her sections of skin while she spoke or flicking maggots that crawled my way, even if it was only a dream. She looked good. Better than the other night. Her smile was back to full power and her eyes radiated a warmth that even the chill of a house left unheated for years couldn't defeat. I pushed myself up and looked around.

  It was a little disappointing. My dream world bedroom was exactly the same as my waking world one. I didn't have a four poster bed. There were no sumptuous carpets or fitted wardrobes and a huge plasma screen TV wasn't hanging on the wall opposite. It was the same impersonal (deliberately so, I know) room I'd gone to bed in. You'd think my subconscious would embellish things just a little wouldn't you? Just for fun?

  Well, I suppose you could count my dead sister as an embellishment.

  "Cheers," she said. "I'm just the best you could do next to a four poster bed, am I? A decoration? An adornment? Thanks a bunch, boy."

  I hated it when she called me boy. Always had. She knew it, which was why she did it.

  "Think of it as an enhancement," I told her. "An improvement. You're giving the room some spirit!"

  "You know," said Joy, "you should be on stage. Sweeping it."

  "I know, you said that," said I. "I do have my moments."

  "Unfortunately, that's all they are - moments."

  Touché, said the turtle.

  "Anyway," she said. "Enough of this frivolity. You'd sleep the world away, you know."

  Would if I could. But oh-oh. I knew that tone.

  "You've got your business head on."

  Joy shook her head, her long locks putting Pantene to shame. The Grim Reaper should open a beauty salon. Death seemed to do Joy justice. She put her hands to her ears.

  "This isn't my business head," she said, suddenly performing a perfect Worzel Gummidge impression by pulling up and separating her head from her body. While I stared wide eyed, she laid it down on the bed next to another that had somehow materialised. She picked up the new one, which was identical to the first, and put it on the newly vacant space atop her torso. "THIS is my business head."

  I looked back on the bed but there was nothing there. A pair of small dips, though, were proof that something had been.

  "Embellish that, boy," she said.

  Well, that wasn't going to be easy. It would be hard for me to top a trick such as self-decapitation. Even I, the Mighty Me, couldn't out perform the dream of a ghost of a sister.

  "You win."

  "Yes," she said. "I do. And stop thinking of me as a dream, please! It's not good for one's ego, you know?"

  "Well you please stop reading my thoughts, then."

  "Hey," she prodded my arm. "You're the one who's convinced I'm actually in your head, so I’m bound to know what you're thinking if you're the one thinking of me!"

  Erm... Hold one. Let me figure that out.

  Right. Got it.

  Hey, that proved me right, didn't it?

  "Not necessarily," she said with a grin. "Being dead might just make me telepathic. I may be able to really read your thoughts. I could be a psychic spirit."

  Septic, more like, I thought, my mind flashing back to her dripping facial features back in the forest.

  "Yes, very funny. Let me get you that broom."

  "So come on then," I said. "Convince me. Show me I'm really awake and you're not just a figment of my warped imagination. Prove to me you're the ghost of my sister and not just a recurring dream I'm having because I'm feeling alone now and need someone and you're all my mangled mind can manage."

  "God," Joy said, rolling her eyes (but not literally out of her head this time). "The boy wants a soapbox now! Maybe he should see a psychiatrist to sort out his abandonment issues!"

  "Stop..."

  "...Calling you boy. I know, I know. OK. It's just habit to tease you."

  Well, that was true.

  "Listen," she said, resting her hand on mine. It was warm like before. Not chilled or clammy. Not ghostly or zombie-fied. "Believe what you want to believe. It's up to you. I don't have time, you don't have time for me to prat about proving myself to you. If I'm real then listen to me, if I'm not then still listen to me, because then you'd be listening to yourself!"

  OK, I get the point.

  "OK," I said. "I'll listen."

  Joy smiled and I thought back to when we were kids. She could always make me feel better. Whenever I'd been the brunt of a particularly savage stream of abuse from our father, Joy just had to look at me, hold my hand and smile. Dad could shove it then as far as I was concerned. I realised, later of course, just how and why she could make me feel that way. Joy was joy and I was sin. Her curse had led her to her eventual death, but it had been my salvation at the time.

  She suddenly hugged me, hard. When she pulled away she had tears in her eyes.

  "Joy?"

  "I'm OK," she said. "Just... thanks for that, that's all."

  "For what?"

  "For making me feel that I did something good. For making me feel like I wasn't a waste."

  "A waste? Of course you weren't! You helped so many people!"

  "Yes, but you're my baby bro. They don't matter. You do. And you had it harder when we were kid
s than I did. So thanks."

  I felt that I should have been thanking her, not the other way around, but I didn't say so. She would, it seemed, know what I was thinking anyway, so I didn't have to.

  "Let's walk," she said.

  "Walk? Where?" I didn't like the idea of leaving the house. I was like Quasimodo but without the bell... or his hump. This was my Sanctuary. Joy was a sibling version of Esmeralda. Going outside held me open to attack and capture and all manner of unpleasantness.

  "It'll be fine. Come on."

  "Where are we going?"

  "Seven Hills," she said.

  The Seven Hills. Were there seven? I didn't know. It was the name, locally at least - it wouldn't appear on any map as that - for an area of waste ground near our parents' house. Perhaps waste was a little too harsh. Undeveloped was closer to the truth. They just hadn't managed to get round to building on it, a fact that constantly surprised me. They, the council, the developers or whoever, hadn't yet crammed three hundred or so town houses into the little plot of land. It wasn't so little but nor was it a vast expanse of unkempt and untamed wilderness. It was an opportunity untapped for some enterprising company, and that tap would be turned on full before too long, I shouldn't wonder. Near to my house in Scunthorpe there'd been a small area on the tight corner of a junction. You'd have thought a couple of houses with smallish gardens would have happily fitted on there. Nope. Forget the gardens. A communal parking area surrounded by a claustrophobic collection of almost a dozen dwellings that you'd be lucky enough to be able to swing a cat in, if you were lucky enough to be able to fit yourself and a cat in. On the Seven Hills you could probably slot a small town. Maybe a Tetney sized village.

  The Seven Hills. Reputed to be inhabited by rats the size of small dogs that wouldn't so much as nip at your ankles as take your leg off at the knee. Maybe that's why it was left alone. Perhaps the Beast of Bodmin or the Hound of the Baskervilles wandered loose and people were too afraid to set foot in there. Or the dog-sized rats were a new, protected species, and scientists wanted their natural habitat to remain untouched so they could be studied. Nessie herself might be holidaying there, taking a break from her Loch and from the unending stream of tourists and investigators. Or maybe it was just that it would be such a colossal project to level off the wildly uneven and wildly wild ground that no-one had been bothered. I mean, who'd want a house so off kilter the water wouldn't stay in the bath or you'd open the front door to go to work in the morning and fall out? It wasn't really a selling point, was it?

  So the Hills, all Seven of them remained. Not quite Rome, but good for roaming. I just hoped I didn't become the Nero of this particular town. I couldn't play the fiddle so maybe that was a plus for me.

  Joy and I walked in almost silence. I couldn't think what to say, because I knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself asking questions she wouldn't be able to answer. She might not believe it, but I did listen sometimes. She couldn't say, that's what she'd told me the last time we met. The words just didn't want to come out, like petulant children when they were refused an ice cream. So questions such as "What's it like to be dead?" or "Do you get cable TV?" were redundant. It would be like talking to a brick wall, except the brick wall wouldn't whinge at me for asking. Or if it did I wouldn't be able to understand it, not being fluent in Brick. A smattering of conversation stopped it becoming complete silence, but it was mainly silly comments about nothing. Talking crap to avoid talking sense. Still, it could have been uncomfortable, but it wasn't. We'd spoken enough crap to each other over the years for this episode to be less awkward than it might otherwise have been. I was sure all would be revealed when we were finally in the domain of the giant rat.

  The air echoed in the darkness - if this was a dream, it added a touch of the macabre to my mental invention. I had to accept, though, that this wasn't sleepytime. I was wide awake. Night had fallen and the streets were drifting amongst the twilight, waiting for their chance to get a little kip themselves. I saw the odd moth battling with a street lamp – dusty winged Don Quixotes and their windmills. I saw my breath clouding in the light chill, hopefully not my soul escaping before the trouble to come that Joy had promised. I hadn't checked the time, my watch was still in the safe back at the institution, but it felt as if it was around 8 o'clock or so. I'd slept the day away. I was refreshed, but I wasn't sure I could afford to lose those hours. Dr. Connors might have simply thought "Oh well, that's one less loony to worry about," but I doubted it. Once you had handed yourself over to him, you were his property. Until he said otherwise.

  As we walked we, naturally, passed other pedestrians. At first I didn't notice that anything was out of the ordinary. Or rather, I didn't notice that anything was not out of the ordinary. We could have been simply a brother and sister out walking - going to the shop or the pub or the cinema. Ordinary. No-one would know one of us was serial killer and the other was dead. And that was the point. How could we be seen as a couple? Whether Joy was a spirit or just the product of my own tortured mind, she would be invisible, wouldn't she? I'd look like a loon, chatting to myself - or at best someone talking through a bluetooth headset which, on closer inspection didn't exist. But Joy wasn't there, not in corporeal, physical, real terms.

  You'd think.

  So why did the guy in the torn jeans, tinny music spilling out from his tiny earphones, make eye contact with her? And the girl who was only just managing to keep atop the heels she was wearing walk - after a fashion - around her? Why were people acting as if she was there when she couldn't, shouldn't, wasn’t?

  Ask me another. Unlike my sister who most probably knew the answer but wasn't allowed to say, I really didn't have a clue.

  I wanted to ask. Did she know that? Had she read my thoughts - or even been my thoughts if she was part of my mind - but was waiting for me to voice my question? To admit what it must mean?

  OK. So be it.

  I saw dead people and, it seemed, so the hell did everyone else. Unless I was somehow projecting my own brand of Krayzeee onto each and every person who happened by, Joy was a walking corpse, or ghost, or hallucination. Take your pick. What's your fancy? Reanimated cadaver anyone? Ghost of sister passed?

  I said it.

  "You're real."

  "Well whup-de-do."

  "I suppose I can't escape it."

  "Nope."

  "So what are you then? Are you a ghost? Or a zombie? Or one of my delusions made real?"

  "Yep."

  "Yes what?"

  "I am a ghost, or I'm a zombie, or I'm a little pinch of Sin's Delirium."

  She could be as aggravating as me sometimes.

  "Sin's Delirium," I said. "Sounds like something you'd put in a curry."

  Joy laughed and the world clicked back into its groove for a little while longer. At least until I derailed it again.

  The Seven Hills were surrounded by four long roads. Littlecoates Road was home to Western School, which was my own seat of learning as a kid, a golf course, a hotel and a residential home for the elderly. Yarborough Road was a sweeping curve where, at its apex, had once been a video rental store owned by a friend of mine's family. They'd had an Alsatian dog that had suffered from a growth hormone imbalance. By the time it was fully grown you could have slung a saddle over its back and ridden off into the sunset crying "Yeehaaaah." On Chelmsford Avenue resided the water company's water tower (between the road and the Hills) and another school. Once it, the school, had been 'affectionately' referred to as Pram Land, a reference to the abnormally high pregnancy rate amongst its pupils. About ten years ago it had been turned into a sixth form college, quite a successful one by all accounts, and the prams had been traded in for a crèche. Along the fourth side was Cambridge Road and this held the main entrance into the Hills. For a hundred metres or so a low metal fence, less than knee high, served as the barrier between residential and run-amok. How anyone thought such a barrier would hold back a pack of raving rabid rats, I didn't know, but it did. There were never, to my kn
owledge, any reported cases of individuals being mauled or eviscerated as they walked by, nor were there tales of folk going missing in the Hills' vicinity, possibly being dragged under the barrier and off to the rats' lair for the main course of a Sunday roast, without it being roasted.

  We were turning onto Cambridge Road when a high pitched voice clawed my ears from somewhere off to the side.

  "Sin!"

  Poo. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, but why couldn't it have been so much later? And why did it have to be while I was with whatever remained of my dead sister, who refused to not be seen?

  I recognised the voice immediately. Wendy Carpenter. Long time friend and co-conspirator of my mother. Putting the world to rights by tearing apart the reputations of their friends and neighbours. She had the dress sense of a hippo, bathed probably once every full moon, and was the proud owner of a voice that could strip wallpaper at twenty paces. I remember wondering, when I was much younger and she'd visited mum for one of their regular Saturday afternoon shredding sessions, if I held an orange near her while she was ranting, would its skin peel off by itself, helped along by her fingernails-on-blackboard voice.

  I never tried it though, fruit being something only yearned for on a semi-permanent diet of chips and fried anything. I use the term 'diet' very loosely.

  I stopped and turned, a smile trying desperately to not become a grimace.

  "Wendy," I said. A hint of enthusiasm struggled to make itself heard and was very nearly successful.

  "Sin! How are you! It's been so long, I almost didn't recognise you there."

  Not long enough.

  "Hello Wendy. I'm doing OK. Same old, you know."

  Her breath smelled of old onions. Her coat was the same one she'd worn so many years ago - grassy green with a faux-fur collar and cuffs. It seemed cleaner than I remembered. She was wearing her slippers, dark brown moccasin style ones with worn toes. I don't think she had ever had a normal pair of shoes on her feet. I could only ever recall slippers or those flip flops that slap-scrape-slapped as she walked.