Spider in the Corner of the Room (The Project Trilogy) (13 page)

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘What did you say, darling?’

I look at Mama. ‘I didn’t kill him. The priest.’

Mother’s head drops. Ramon places his arm round her and twists his head to me. ‘Maria, this has to end. Your lies, the harm you cause.’ Mother sobs; he pulls her closer. I feel a stab of loneliness. ‘You were arrested, convicted, for God’s sake. Accept it. Now. Before any more of us suffer.’

I blink at the table. They don’t believe me. My own family. They still don’t believe me. I feel as if I am falling, through the sky into a deep pit, ready for dirt to be kicked on my face, into my mouth. Buried alive. I sniff. ‘Father Reznik left just after I graduated,’ I say, distress creeping into my movements, my thoughts. I need my family to understand me. ‘I came to England, went to the convent to find him. He was my friend. Mama, you said he had family in England. That is why I came here.’

‘What?’ Ramon says. ‘So it’s all Mama’s fault now that you came here? Mama’s fault that Father Reznik left? That you killed someone? Christ.’ Chairs scrape on the floor ahead, visitors beginning to leave. He pauses, glances at
them, then back to me. ‘Maria, please. No one is conspiring against you. It’s all in your head.’ He pauses, swallows, his voice drops an octave. ‘It always has been.’

I grip the table as if I were clawing on to the edge of reality. It’s a puzzle. It has to be. Pieces, sections of time and events that slot together to create one complete picture. I just have to first find where all the pieces are.

‘I am going to get out,’ I say. ‘Mama? I am going to request an appeal. You have to believe me. I shouldn’t be here.’

Mother raises her head now, eyes rimmed pink, cheeks flushed. ‘Oh, my baby. Please, listen to your brother. We both care about you so much. You are doing so much harm to yourself pursuing these…stories. Because that is all it is. Fiction. Pretend. Made up in your mind.’

‘No,’ I say, shaking my head, trying to stave off the doubt, the rolling wave of reservation. ‘I have a new barrister.’

‘Who?’ Ramon asks.

‘Harry Warren. He’s going to help me. I am seeing him this week.’

Mama and Ramon share a glance. Ramon jots down the name.

‘Maria,’ Mama says, ‘you know an appeal won’t work, don’t you?’

My stomachs twists at my mother’s words. ‘Mama, I have to try,’ I say after a few seconds, squeezing my fingers together.

‘But what about your health?’ she says. ‘What about your…condition?’

‘It is accelerating in here.’

She goes still. ‘It is? How?’

I tell her about Dr Andersson. She listens, but does not speak, does not murmur, only a slice of grimace on her face. ‘It must be the prison environment,’ I say. ‘I can do and think faster. It happens, doesn’t it? To people like me. It happens. I am even recalling more things—numbers, calculations—things I have never learnt. I have written it all down.’ I stop. ‘My journal, please, Mama, can you get it to me? I can cross-reference my notes.’

‘Maria,’ Ramon says now, ‘are you lying again?’

‘What? No.’

‘Maria,’ he urges. ‘Come on. All this “doing things faster”. It sounds impossible, unbelievable.’

‘I am not lying!’ I shout. My chest explodes and, when I look down, when I glance at my torso, I realise, to my surprise, that I am standing. Guards take a step forward; inmates gawp.

‘Ramon,’ my mother whispers, but we do not look at her, our attention fixed on each other. One second, two seconds, three.

‘Ramon?’ Mother repeats, a little louder this time. ‘Ramon, I need to—’ She slumps to the table.

‘Mama?’ Ramon looks down to her now, as do I.

My mother’s body seizes like stone, then, softening, floats to the floor.

A
n alarm pierces the air and guards rush to our table.

I stare at the floor where my mother now lies, fitting. A smell of vomit fills the room.

‘Mama?’ Dread washes over me, fills every molecule of my body, momentarily paralysing me. She fits again and I snap to. Moving quickly, I drop to my knees and loosen her blouse, check her vitals.

I glance to Ramon. ‘Do you know what could have triggered this?’ My fingers are on my mother’s neck checking her pulse, her blood pumping, weak, laboured. I tilt my head, hover my ear over her mouth listening for signs of breathing. It is shallow, but there, the stench of vomit drifting in and out of my consciousness. I am about to check her chest when I feel myself dragged upwards, hands under my shoulders.

‘Hey!’ I shout. Two guards haul me up.

‘Stay,’ one of them orders like an owner would to their dog. I snarl but do as I’m told, only the sight of my mother
preventing me from screaming at the guards. Ramon shoots me a glare.

A doctor and two nurses arrive now. I try to give them my medical observations but they ignore me. ‘Why are you not listening to me?’ I shout.

A guard intervenes to constrain me when Mama coughs, oxygen spluttering into her lungs.

‘Mama?’ I rush to her. Have I caused this? Have I driven my mother to illness all because of who I am?

‘What is happening here?’

I turn. The Governor stands one foot from the scene, shoulders wide, face set in a frown. He spots my mother on the floor. ‘Ines?’

‘Balthus?’ she croaks.

I spin round to her. ‘You know him? How?’

The Governor turns to the attending medic. ‘Will she be okay?’

But the doctor only nods before commencing chest compressions. I look back to the Governor, my eyes wide, agitated. ‘How do you know my mother?’ When he does not respond, I say, ‘Tell me!’ But a guard has arrived and is now speaking into the Governor’s ear.

‘Take care of her,’ the Governor says to the medic team, and, throwing one more look at my mother, he strides away.

I watch as he exits the door. How does the Governor know my mother? Why did he not tell me when we met? I rub my head, spinning round to see what is happening, where my mother is. The room whirls around my head like clothes in a washing machine, noises muffled, woolly.

‘Maria!’ Ramon shouts.

I cock my head, blink at him. Ramon’s words sound as
if they are underwater. I feel strangely stoned, intoxicated almost by events, by the confusion, the drama, the guilt.

Ramon steps over to me now, his face looming large in my vision. He finally swims into focus. ‘Maria. She is trying to speak. Can you translate for the medical team,’ he says. ‘Maria, help, please, this once.’

Mother is lying now on a stretcher. My mama, frail, almost invisible under the blanket that shrouds her.

‘Balthus?’ My mother’s voice croaks to life. ‘Ramon, Balthus was here. My stomach hurts this time…’

I peer at her, my brain whirling back to life, connecting, solving. I relay to the medical team what she is saying, before looking back to Mama. ‘How do you know the Governor, Ochoa?’ I pause. ‘His name is Balthus.’

‘Maria,’ Ramon says, ‘leave her—’

‘He is not who he claims to be,’ mother says, then coughs into her hand.

‘What does that mean?’ When she does not respond, I tap her cheek. ‘Tell me what that means.’ But the cough returns, more violent this time, hacking.

Ramon pulls me away. ‘It’s back,’ he whispers. ‘Maria, the cancer is back. It’s stage three this time.’ He glances at her. ‘She went into treatment last month.’

I feel decapitated by Ramon’s words, sliced apart, severed by the fact that she may leave me, that someone else may leave me. I steady my voice and force myself to ask the question. ‘What is her prognosis?’

He shakes his head.

‘Maria?’ My brother and I turn to our mother.

‘No more trials, darling, please.’ Her voice is flimsy like a thin sheet of tracing paper. ‘You have to end this. Balthus
cannot help you. He is not a good man. You are in prison. Accept it, my beautiful daughter. Get better.’

I wipe my eyes. ‘Why must I stay in here?’ I pause, try to breathe, be calm, quell the panic, the fear. ‘Mama, please, how do you know the Governor?’

But her hands go limp, her eyelids flutter. The medics begin to wheel her away and I can barely look, my fingers squeezing each other, my mind knowing that, as she goes, my mother takes away the answers, takes away any belief or comfort she may ever have had for me. I am on the edge of jumping into an abyss of solitude.

Ramon follows the trolley, his eyes damp, his lips mouthing a goodbye to me. How do I tell him that I don’t want to be left alone here? That it is dark and cold? Instead, I stand and stare; he sighs, turns his back and walks away.

‘Visiting time is over,’ says a guard.

I turn, knowing now what I need to do. ‘I have to speak to Governor Ochoa.’

The guard laughs. ‘Not going to happen.’ She points to the door. ‘Exit’s that way.’

As the door swings open, a movement in my peripheral vision makes me halt. Someone has entered to the far right of the seated area. My mother is on the stretcher, just as I left her, three medics hovering around her, but now—now there is one more body, one more person.

Dr Andersson.

‘Martinez,’ says the guard, ‘time to go. I haven’t got all fucking day.’

I take one last look. Dr Andersson leans over and whispers in my mother’s ear, rising and turning to speak to Ramon.

And Ramon? Ramon is nodding.

Ramon is staring at me.

Kurt tilts his head. ‘How did you feel when your mother collapsed that day in the visiting room?’

Kurt is asking questions about my feelings. These are the worst kind. I am never sure what the correct response is. I shift in my seat, the room stuffy, suffocating. ‘It was loud,’ I say. ‘The visiting room was loud.’

‘Were you scared? Happy? Shocked when you saw her?’

I tap my finger on the chair. I do not speak, anaesthetised by the image of my mother frail on a stretcher, by the sheer desperation I felt when she said I was lying, her and my brother. Outside, the sun flickers and fades, the clouds take over.

‘Tell me,’ Kurt says after a while, ‘have you ever wondered about your Asperger’s, why certain aspects of it are more…heightened at times, particularly in comparison to others on the spectrum?’

I inhale, try to imagine I am elsewhere, that I am someone else, someone normal. ‘Officially, being on the autistic spectrum and having Asperger’s are now the same thing,’ I say eventually. ‘The American Psychiatric Association officially eliminated Asperger’s as a separate syndrome.’

‘And what do you think of that?’

I think about myself, how I am different from others, and them from me. ‘People with Asperger’s and those with autism do not have the same needs.’

He smiles. ‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ I pause. He is still smiling. What does it mean? ‘High-functioning autism cannot occur in a person with an
IQ below sixty-five-seventy. Those with Asperger’s have high IQs. That is why you cannot merge Asperger’s with autism.’

A beat passes. Then, ‘You think you are different?’

I lower my voice. ‘I know I am.’

‘Special?’

‘I cannot answer that.’

‘Above everyone else?’

‘I do not know what that means.’

He rests his cheek on his fist. ‘So you believe you are high-functioning?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I have a photographic memory. I can fix things, reassemble electronic components at speed. I know numbers, can calculate vast equations, remember dates, decipher codes, detect patterns. I can—’

He holds up his hand. ‘And you think that is normal?’

A phone shrills somewhere from outside, one second, two seconds, then stops. ‘My father always said I could be myself.’

‘And was he right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how is that working out for you, being yourself?’

I say nothing, disarmed by his question, by his frozen smile. I don’t feel safe.

‘Was being convicted of murder “being yourself”?’ he asks now. Then he suddenly sits forward, sets the Dictaphone on the table. ‘How about this: have you ever considered that your Asperger’s is not simply about nurture, or
about how your father helped you, or about how you react to the environment around you?’

‘I don’t—’ I halt.
Be careful
, a voice in my head whispers.
Be careful.

‘What about nature?’ Kurt is now saying. ‘What about the theory that what we are, what we do, is preprogrammed? That our DNA, ultimately, defines us? Maybe you have ended up where you are because of your genes. Maybe this—’ he gestures to the room ‘—was always going to happen to you.’

My chest tightens.
Be careful.
‘What are you trying to say? What do you know?’

He remains quiet, still, like ice. I shiver. The clouds outside turn black, a droplet of rain taps the windowpane. ‘Okay,’ Kurt says finally, ‘we are going to move on now.’

He consults his file. I blink, press my palms together, barely breathe. What just happened? Does he know? Does he know what we found out?

‘You had a therapy session,’ Kurt says, voice clipped, businesslike, ‘with Dr Andersson on the twenty-third of May—the day you also met with your barrister for the first time. I want you to tell me about that.’

My shoulders tense. My friend, that day—I will never forget it, no matter what anyone tries to do to me. ‘That was the day that Pat—’

‘Yes, I know. I want you to tell me what happened.’

I try to remain steady, but even as I begin to speak, my hands shake a little.

Because all I can think is: why is this man here? And is he really a therapist?

‘It seems your face is all over the papers. Again,’ Dr Andersson says.

She talks sitting with her legs crossed, poised and ready for our therapy appointment. She slips one hand down to her shoe, flicks off the heel and rubs the arch of the foot. It is small, supple; I imagine what it would look like tied up in rope. Sighing, she pops her heel back and reaches forward to touch the pile of newspapers that fan out on the low table in front of her.

The air is hot and heavy. I don’t want to be here, not wanting to talk, not wanting to ransack my brain, to verbalise my emotions, to be exhausted by the sheer effort it all takes. I dab my forehead and scan the walls, focus on anything concrete to stave off my pulsing agitation.