Guilt
by Harley Carnell
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Paul said.
I didn’t think it would be fun. The thought of scaring my mother half to death, even if only for a minute, seemed like the very last thing that would be enjoyable. But Paul was determined, and he had that look in his eye. He may have been my friend, but I was slightly afraid of him. I knew not to disagree with him whenever he was set on something. What decided it all was Stevie, who said:
“Come on Alan, don’t be such a baby.” He then began mimicking a baby crying, acting brazenly as he did whenever Paul was around to protect him. Paul burst out laughing.
“See,” he said, “Stevie’s on board. What’s your problem?”
“Alright, fine,” I said, old enough to know that you shouldn’t give in to peer pressure but young enough to be unable to help it.
Stevie stuck his tongue out at me and started doing one of his stupid Fortnite dances. I had to turn away, not wanting him to see he’d reluctantly conjured a smile from me.
“That’s your mum at the door,” Paul said, looking at Stevie. “Hurry up, and don’t mess it up by laughing.”
This seemed a real possibility, as Stevie’s hyperventilating giggles trailed him under the bed. But once he was under, he stopped immediately. He was a little scared of the dark, but I suspected Paul was a bigger motivation. He’d always liked and respected him more than me, and the thought of disappointing him by messing up the prank was probably enough to shut him up.
“Hi, Alan,” my mum said happily as she entered the flat. Then, when she saw Paul, she added: “Oh, hi there, Paul.” My mum had never really liked Paul. She was never rude or openly hostile to him, but I could detect the dislike in her tone and the disingenuousness of her smile even if Paul couldn’t. Her fake smile dropped when she saw our fake frowns.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Smith,” Paul said. “It’s Stevie—he’s missing.”
“What?” she said, her face dropping further and her eyes widening. “What do you mean he’s missing?” Her tone was so frantic that even Paul flinched a little. I would have caved immediately at this point, but Paul persisted.
“We were in the living room, watching TV, and we went into check on him, and he was gone from his room. We looked all over the flat but couldn’t find him anywhere.”
I had never seen anyone progress from worry or concern to outright terror so quickly. I don’t think I had ever seen anyone look actively terrified before. By this point, I was frozen. I couldn’t say anything and could only hope that Paul would cave. But he remained quiet as my mother pushed past us both and began frantically tearing up Stevie’s room. Indeed, as I turned to look at him, I could see that he was smirking. There was the odd bit of petty vandalism and graffiti; there was mouthing off to the teachers at school; but as I watched Paul smile at my mum losing her mind, I knew that this was something else. We all do stupid or bad things when young, but this was different. There was something disturbing, something distinctly adult, about the pleasure Paul was getting from my mother’s fear.
“Stevie!” my mother screamed. “Stevie!”
Hearing her scream like that decided it for me. I stepped forward, shaking off Paul as he grabbed my arm.
“Mum? Mum!” She turned around, presenting a face that would have made a ghost shudder. “It’s fine, Mum, he’s under the bed. We were only playing around.”
We lived in a rough area. At least a few boys in my class had been in trouble with the law, and a couple were in gangs. And there was also Paul, of whom I always retained a persistent low-level fear. But I had never been as scared of anyone in my life as much as my mother in that moment when she turned to look at me. She stared at me for a few seconds and then looked at Paul. I had seen him stare down many adults, but with my mum he looked away and bowed his head penitently.
My mum walked over to the bed and knelt down. After a few seconds, she turned around and looked up.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“What?” Paul and I said in unison.
“Where is he?” she said, leaping up.
“Mum, he’s under the bed, I swear. That was the joke. We got him to hide under the bed.”
Although it was for a child, Stevie’s bed was an antique that had caused two burly Polish builders a great deal of strain as they hauled it the spitting distance from our front door to Stevie’s bedroom. But in a real-life mother-lifting-up-a-car-to-save-her-child scenario, my mum ripped the bed off the floor and tipped it against the wall. I don’t know if it was my choking gasp, or the look of sincere terror on Paul’s face that did it, but I knew that my mother believed we were telling the truth when she began to scream.
Our flat was tiny, but we spent the next ten minutes trawling through it. It was on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, without a balcony, and so it was impossible for Stevie to have climbed out of the window. Even if it wasn’t, the window was closed and locked from the inside. In the time between him getting under the bed and my mother coming in, he could not have gotten through the front door, either. My mother went to speak with a number of neighbours anyway, and they all said they hadn’t seen him.
We told the police everything. They looked through CCTV footage, confirming he had not exited our flat at the time of his disappearance. The building manager accessed the floorplan, which confirmed there were no hidden areas or crawlspaces he might have gotten into underneath the flooring. For days, the neighbourhood was searched. My mother made missing posters. The disappearance even made the local news. Given some of the things I’d seen or heard them do, I found the kids at my school surprisingly supportive. Some of the nastier ones left me alone, even when Paul wasn’t there to protect me, and others used social media to spread the word about Stevie.
The police questioned Paul and me separately for hours. They knew Paul already, and I imagined they displayed even more sternness with him than they did with me. I hoped the police recognised that petty theft and vandalism were on a different level than, what, staging a kidnapping? Colluding in a child going missing? Whatever you would call what they must have assumed happened to Stevie.
I could tell that they distrusted me, partly for my association with Paul, but also for something more general. Bluntly, what had happened was impossible. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, anything that remained, no matter how improbable, had to be true. I remembered getting a particularly gruesome thought once. The only way that we could possibly have made Stevie disappear was by killing him, chopping him up, and then dissolving him in acid. The thought was so repulsive that it was enough, along with the stress I was feeling generally, to make me throw up. It was something out of a TV show, and so improbable and stupid I would have laughed at it in another situation. But this was the problem the police were faced with: as ridiculous as it and theories like it were, it was the height of logic and sense compared to what had actually happened. To Stevie just vanishing.
Between us, we spent many accumulated hours discussing the sixty seconds between Stevie going under the bed and my mother failing to find him under it. I spent further time talking with my mother. I could tell that she never fully believed me—how could she? Although I also got a strange sensation that, even if she had, and knew that it wasn’t my fault, our relationship would never be the same again. Years later, I would give my therapist an analogy:
“It would be like if I was holding Stevie’s hand crossing the road and he just unexpectedly decided to run away from me and got hit by a car. Even if she believed that was what happened and knew there was nothing I could have done, there would still always be a bit of her that resented me for it.”
The reason for that was simple—I knew it even then. You have to have someone to blame when a terrible thing happens. That’s one of the many reasons terminal illnesses are so hard to cope with, because there is no one to blame. After all, if there is no one to blame, then there is no way that you could have ever stopped it. Obviously, I hadn’t known what would happen to Stevie and had certainly not wanted it to. Even Paul, as bad as he was, wouldn’t have wanted to hurt Stevie in a million years. When we’d sent Stevie under the bed, the very worst outcome we’d envisioned was my mother being scared half to death. Yet we had sent him under the bed, and whether we’d intended it or not, Stevie had disappeared.
My mother could not cope. If Stevie vanished physically, she did mentally. She still went to work every day and provided for us; after the initial few days, she was never outright horrible to me or even so much as raised her voice; from the outside, or to someone who didn’t know her, she would seem like any other woman getting on with her life. But I could tell that her head had gone. She was never the same after that, and our relationship was irretrievably destroyed.
One night, I heard a noise coming from Stevie’s room. I leapt up, thinking that he had returned, or that he had never gone in the first place. But when I came into the room, I saw that it was only my mother. Even through the dark, the look she gave me was unmistakable: resentment, anger, and, most of all, disappointment that it was me who had walked through the door.
Then again, I could not blame her. After all, my relationship with myself was never the same again. One thing that people will often say is that if you can’t love yourself, you can’t expect others to love you, and I certainly did not love myself or forgive myself.
I understood, too, because of how I felt about Paul. I knew that Paul had not meant for this to happen, and that he was torn up about it, but I could not forgive him. We rarely saw each other in the neighbourhood. Whenever we did, we walked past each other as if we were strangers. It was clear from these distant glimpses, though, that Paul’s mind had also gone. And there was a part of me that wondered if he was so far gone that maybe he was not blanking me as I was him, but he simply didn’t recognise me. That maybe the only way he could truly cope with what happened was to block it out until I became just another face passing him by.
Years later, I heard that he was killed after a mugging gone wrong. I later heard the whole story. Paul had gone walking into a place called the Byron Estate at one in the morning, visibly wearing an expensive watch and openly carrying a new smartphone. When confronted, he refused to give up either. Paul was savvy and had always told me which areas of Gritton to avoid, but even outsiders knew of the notorious Byron. When I heard about it, I knew that Paul’s murder was a suicide. In a sick way, I felt sorry for his murderers, as if they had been duped or had unknowingly walked into a trap.
People talk of how pointless school is, how little of value or application you learn in it, and I learned about that pointlessness when I learned about guilt. When I did, I saw how innocuous and powerless words were. How the word “guilt” could describe feelings after cheating on a test or lying to a friend, but it could also encompass something as expansive and indescribable as this. I knew what real guilt was then, as did Paul.
And I know it now, all these years later.
I can’t sleep at night, no matter how many pills I take. I work in a warehouse, where I spend all day lifting and carrying heavy boxes around a large floor. I leave work so exhausted I am suffused with numbness and can barely feel anything. I drift through the days like a ghost. As I binge TV and scoff takeaways, I barely register consuming either. At times, I feel as if I am living a persistent near-death experience, watching myself outside of myself. At these moments, I think and hope I will be tired enough to sleep when I try to, but I never can.
I rarely talk about Stevie, but whenever I do, I will always say that he went missing. Whatever it was that happened that day, whatever incursion of the supernatural or improbable or impossible into our world, that is the bare bones of it: he went missing.
But the reason I can’t sleep at night is because I know it is not strictly true. At least not anymore. Because every time I enter my room, I can see his eyes, looking out at me from under the bed. Then, when I get into bed, I will hear him begin to laugh and giggle underneath it as he waits to be found.
Finally, when he realises that he won’t be, he begins to scream, and so do I.
| EXHIBIT THREE: Return to Gallery One: Domestic Subversion and “QVC“ | Proceed to the next Gallery Two: Domestic Betrayal attraction, “A Witch’s Envy“ |