Angelica

‘Does it help?’

The Stink continued to stare at her, those infuriating beady grey eyes boring into her skull like a couple of blunt cranial drills, but Angelica took her gaze elsewhere, outside the window into the sombre mists that encircled the neighbouring skyrises. She used to check the clock constantly in these sessions, but now time seemed to pass a little faster if she simply stepped into that comatose fog where no one else could reach her, and it was all the thicker and soupier now that her mother had finally died.

About time. About time the polished turd left something worthwhile to her only daughter. Now all the world needed was the coffin dodger in the maddeningly squeaky leather armchair before her to pop her clogs and peace might be a step closer after all.

‘Angelica?’

‘Mm?’

‘The book, I noticed you bring it to every session now. Was it a good suggestion of mine? What do you find yourself writing most days?’

God, that voice. If anyone ever wondered what the sound of Hell’s Bells was like, surely Angelica knew first-hand. She caught another passing whiff of the woman’s suffocating concoction she called perfume and wondered why she still attended these sessions at all, and in truth she was not entirely sure. Perhaps it was to remind herself that at least she didn’t look like that, a twisted old bat that had been wrung out like a dishcloth one too many times, the once-taut fibres dragging each sag a little further southward. Not to mention her deluded dress sense that left much to be desired; she donned those tight-fitting corporate dress suits that only prenatal twenty-somethings could really pull off. All Angelica could see was a cracked and chipped old teapot with a fancy tea cosy and a knitted pompom on top for good measure, only this tea cosy betrayed its wool and could barely hide the warning labels underneath. Or perhaps it was to remind herself that at least she didn’t smell like that, that sickly deep lavender that was usually confined to the faded floral curtains of old biddies and stuck fast like a plague in itself. Unbeknownst to dear old Margaret, such a mistake had earnt her the name of The Stink for good in Angelica’s eyes. And the voice, who could forget the voice, yet another reminder that at least she didn’t sound like that.

‘What? What did you say?’ Angelica snapped impatiently.

‘I was just asking about the book –’

‘Yeah, right. Yeah, it’s…it’s useful, I guess.’

Angelica remembered the little black book in her hand, clawed between her fingernails and the arm of the sofa. It had become a battered old thing since the Stink had given it to her only a couple of months ago, and she had quickly come to hate it, even that new stationary smell that everyone else seems to love so much. Still, she found herself writing or drawing in it almost every day, and it travelled with her wherever she went, and perhaps that was for the best, because the things that bled out of her mind and took form on each page should not have found any other hand but hers.

‘And what do you find yourself writing in it?’ said the Stink sweetly, cracking a smile in her dry, papery jowls as if to encourage her.

Your name. Angelica slumped lower in her seat and her head hung against her chest as she recalled all the people’s names she had either jotted down in a hurry or wrote reams of details about. No one name appeared in the book out of good fortune, no, and so why should the Stink be left out? She appeared multiple times and a medley of her possible futures were written at great length. And the Stink wasn’t alone; the man that pushed in front of her in the bus queue, he was in there. The scantily-clad teenager who rejected her food voucher, she was in there. Even the beagle that pissed on her shoes as she waited to see said teenager was in there. She wrote down all the terrible ends she thought they deserved, or sometimes just a degree of harm. The book was given with the purpose of writing down her thoughts and feelings, but thoughts and feelings weren’t solutions to her problems. This was. This was validating, and for that she felt some terrible addiction to the thing.

‘Thoughts and feelings,’ she lied. ‘Sometimes I draw.’

The Stink gave her another slack smile as she made a note with her pretentious, fat black fountain pen with its gold band round the middle.

Angelica hadn’t lied about the drawings. She had even tried to draw the Stink once, but with art not being her forte, had scribbled over the amateur image so hard the pencil tip broke off and it had looked like some dark foretelling drawn by a kid in a horror movie who was riddled with demons. That had disturbed her, and so she had attempted to erase it, only to smudge the soft 4B carbon everywhere instead. She had thought about drawing her mother at one point, when she was still alive and as loathsome as ever, wanting to design a creative end for her as well. She never bothered wasting her pencils on that however, the woman had been dying anyway and Angelica’s book was reserved for those who showed no sign of leaving her life. She might have been referred for psychiatric help but she hadn’t lost all sense of logic.

The Stink paused a moment, and then put on her best sympathetic stretch across that smear she called a face. ‘I know these sessions will seem harder than our usual ones, Angelica. Losing your mother has not been easy, but I know you are keeping strong, for Jack as well.’

Angelica’s eyes darted up to her and back again. For a psychiatrist who had listened to most of her past she was not exactly insightful. Her mother was gone, and after enduring such a turbulent relationship for forty years Angelica had awaited the fated day for so very long. It was her mother who had paid for all the Stink sessions, even before she died she had paid for another thirty in advance so that she still tormented her even now in death.

Angelica’s mobile buzzed on the sofa next to her, her eyes widened in anticipation as she snatched it up to answer the call she had been waiting for all week, much to the Stink’s consternation.

‘Yes?’

‘Hi – Angelica?,’ came the tinny male voice on the other end. ‘It’s Simon Parsons here, your mother’s lawyer. Just trying to arrange with you when a good time to meet would be regarding the will. Can you come by the office tomorrow –?’

‘Just tell me now,’ Angelica interjected feverishly. ‘Tell me what she left.’ She rose from her seat without hesitation and made for the door.

‘Angelica!’ called the Stink. ‘We still have an hour remaining!’

Angelica waved her off and left the building. The streets of the city were heaving when she merged into the throngs of people.

‘It’s not how I would have liked to handle things but…well, your mother has left twenty thousand dollars to your son, Jack, therefore…’

Angelica stopped listening at that moment. She slipped into a red haze as the phone remained glued to her left ear. The crowds about her disappeared and all she could feel was a dead heat rising in her gut. Of course. Of course she would double-cross me like this.

‘Hello…?’ the faint voice rang out. She hung up and walked the five miles home.

Home was pressed between areas run by gangs; the public housing was dilapidated, holes in every ceiling and grime in every corner, sometimes Angelica even played needle bingo with herself every time a heroin addict let their instruments go astray. Yet there was light in some corners, her six-year old son Jack was one of them, and he was rarely dampened.

As Angelica climbed the stairs she found him there on the steps outside their apartment, smiling. Next to him sat Liam, their fifteen-year old neighbour who happily babysat anytime the need arose. He was another light in this dark place, for nothing seemed to chill his spirits, although Angelica had written the names of his parents in her book on more than one occasion for all the screaming and abuse he received. He was a good kid, and good kids deserved better.

‘Oh hey, Angie,’ said Liam jovially, the broken voice that puberty newly afforded him still shaping its pitch delicately. ‘You’re home early –’

‘In, now,’ Angelica ordered to Jack as she unlocked the door, her son’s floppy chestnut locks flying about his face as he raced in. Then she turned to Liam. ‘Don’t call me Angie, it’s Angelica.’

Liam was a twig, a skinny wretch who seemed to shrink even smaller when a tone of authority and discontent was thrown upon him. ‘Sorry. Didn’t you say just last week to call you Angie –?’ Suddenly the door was closing rapidly in his face. ‘Ok, same time tomorrow then!’

Angelica could not abide by all the neighbourly goodwill today, not when she was raging like this, and things only worsened when she turned and stubbed her toe on a paint can by the floor. She cursed at the top of her lungs, and Jack fell silent as he dutifully went and watched TV before she commanded him to. Anything to get him out the way when she was like this, he knew the drill.

She glared down at the can of paint, one of five stood clustered together, unopened. She found the first one at the bottom of the stairs and took it on a whim, struck by the idea that she would paint the bland walls of the apartment and decided to buy four more cans out of her benefits to bring it to fruition. The walls were sterile, pockmarked with imperfections. No, worse, they were cream, and cream can’t decide what it wants to be. To that end it was almost muddy to Angelica, but black was finite. Black was dark, it was serene.

She thought of the will once more, and no amount of black paint could console her then. Nothing could sponge that red haze away. She sat down at the kitchen table with her forearms laid down, her hands like two boulders as they curled into fists. The apartment fell away before her, and the world seemed to be spinning whilst she merely held on; faces appeared, all the damned faces of the people who had sprung from the pages of her black book, all who deserved to bleed and suffer. Jack’s face, too. He was hateful, a hateful little worm and thief.

She screamed at him to go to bed, and she wrote his name all over the last pages of the book. Not enough. She grabbed a brush and a can of black paint, and when she was done painting his name all over the walls…not enough. Her eyes turned on Jack’s bedroom door.

Red. Haze.

The following morning, Angelica found herself sitting in Simon Parson’s office. Ferns drooped with hot death in the corner, Newton’s Cradle tsked at her from the table. She was calm. Validated.

‘Right, to go over what I said yesterday,’ said Simon, ‘your mother is leaving you twenty thousand dollars exactly, so –’

‘What?’ Angelica felt as if she had been hit with a sledgehammer. ‘You said Jack yesterday?’

‘No, you. I know it’s not my place to say but, I knew your mother, and she loved you very much.’

The phone buzzed. Liam was calling, wondering why there was no answer at her door and why black paint was pooling into the hall from beneath it. My boy…

She cancelled the call. Jack doesn’t need you today, Liam.