Lying Beside You (Cyrus Haven #3)
Michael Robotham
‘Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.’
— Julie Buntin, Marlena
1
Cyrus
If I could tell you one thing about my brother it would be this: two days after his nineteenth birthday, he killed our parents and our twin sisters because he heard voices in his head. As defining events go, nothing else comes close for Elias, or for me.
I have often tried to imagine what went through his mind on that cool autumn evening, when our neighbours began closing their curtains to the coming night and the streetlights shone with misty yellow halos. What did the voices say? What possible words could have made him do the things he did?
I have tortured myself with what-ifs and maybes. What if I hadn’t stopped to buy hot chips on my way home from football practice? What if I hadn’t propped my bike outside Ailsa Piper’s house, hoping to glimpse her in her garden, or coming home from her netball practice? What if I had pedalled faster and arrived home sooner? Could I have stopped him, or would I be dead too?
I am the boy who survived, the one who hid in the garden shed, crouching among the tools, smelling the kerosene and paint fumes and grass clippings, while sirens echoed through the streets of Nottingham.
In my nightmares, I always wake as I step into the kitchen, wearing muddy football socks. My mother is lying on the floor amid the frozen peas, which had spilled across the white tiles. Chicken stock is bubbling on the stove and her famous paella had begun to stick in the heavy-based pan.
I miss my mum the most. I feel guilty about playing favourites, but nobody is around to criticise my choices, except for Elias, and he doesn’t get to choose. Ever.
Dad died in the sitting room, crouching in front of the DVD player because one of the twins had managed to get a disc stuck in the machine. He raised one hand to protect himself and lost two fingers and a thumb, before the knife severed his spine.
Upstairs, in the bedroom, Esme and April were doing their homework or playing games. April, older by twenty minutes, and therefore bossier, was usually the first to do everything, but it was April, dressed in a unicorn onesie, who ran towards the knife, trying to protect her sister. Esme had to be dragged from under her bed and died with a rug bunched beneath her body and a ukulele in her hand.
Many of these details have the power to close my throat or wake me screaming, but as snapshots they are fading. My memories aren’t as vivid as they once were. The colours. The smells. The sounds. The fear.
For example, I can no longer remember what colour dress my mother was wearing, or which of the twins had her hair in braids that week. (Esme and April took it in turns to help their teachers differentiate between them, or maybe to confuse them further.) And I can’t remember if Dad had opened a bottle of home brew – a six o’clock ritual in our household – when he uncapped his latest batch with a brass Winston Churchill bottle opener. With great ceremony, he would pour the ‘amber nectar’ into a pint glass, holding it up to the light to study the colour and opacity. And when he drank, he would swish that first sip around in his mouth, sucking in air like a wine connoisseur, saying things like, ‘Bit malty … a little cloudy … a tad early … half decent … buttery … quenching … perfect in another week.’
It is these small details that elude me. I can’t remember if I knocked the mud off my football boots, or if I chained up my bike, or if I closed the side gate. I can remember stopping to wash the salt from my hands and to gulp down water, because Mum hated me spoiling my appetite by eating junk food so close to dinnertime. In the same breath, she’d complain about me having ‘hollow legs’ and ‘eating her out of house and home’.
I miss her cooking. I miss her embarrassing hugs in public. I miss her spitting on tissues and wiping food off my face. I miss her trying to slick down my cowlick. I miss her nagging me about telling ghost stories to the twins, or leaving the toilet seat up, or the cap off the toothpaste.
I had nobody to nag me after the murders. My grandparents didn’t have the heart. They were grieving too. I became the boy who was pitied and pointed at and whispered about. Befriended. Bullied. Cosseted. Counselled. The boy who did drugs and cut himself and turned up drunk at school. A hard child to love. Not a child at all, not after what I’d seen.
Monday morning, at a quarter to ten, and I’m sitting in the reception area of Rampton Secure Hospital, an hour’s drive north of Nottingham. In fifteen minutes, a panel of three people – a judge, a consultant psychiatrist and a layperson, will hear an application from my brother to be released. It has been twenty years since my parents and sisters died. I am now thirty-three. Elias is thirty-eight. The boy is a man. The brother wants to come home.
For years, I have told people that I want what’s best for Elias, without knowing exactly what that means and whether it extends to setting him free. As a forensic psychologist, I understand mental illness. I should be able to separate the person from the act – to hate the sin but forgive the sinner.
I have read stories about forgiveness. People who have visited killers in prison, offering sympathy and absolution. They say things like, ‘You took a piece out of my heart that can never be replaced, but I forgive you.’
One woman, a mother in her sixties, lost her only son, who was stabbed to death outside a party. After the jury convicted the killer, a boy of sixteen, she forgave the teenager. Doubled over in shock, she kept repeating, ‘I just hugged the man that murdered my son.’ In the next breath, she said, ‘I felt something leave me. Instantly, I knew all the hatred and bitterness and animosity was gone.’