When You Wake up and Scream

Conán nearly had his hands around her throat when his plan was thwarted, much to Conán's annoyance and anger, though he didn't have time to process the feelings straight away. His mother's eyes suddenly snapped open and she swung her arm at him, catching him just below the chin and sending him sprawling to the floor, momentarily not being able to breathe.

"What are you doing, you filthy bastard?" she screeched at him. Conán was counting himself lucky – he had nearly impaled his hand on a syringe. He stood up carefully, still coughing slightly. His mother jumped up as well. "What do you think you're doing in here, brat? What are you thinking? Get out, you piece of filth, go on!"

She hit out at him again, catching him around the side of the head, and Conán staggered away from her.

"Ma –"

"GET OUT!"

"Ma, he's dead!" Conán yelled, hoping to distract her from hitting him again. It worked – her arm stopped in mid air.

"What?" she asked bluntly.

"The guy you were with last night, he's dead! In the living room!"

"You're a filthy liar!"

"I'm not, Ma, I swear! He's dead! He's all cold and stiff and everything!"

Something in the child's face told her he was telling the truth. She always knew when her son was lying, and he wasn't now. She pushed past him and went out into the hall. Conán hurried after her, catching up as she went into the living room. She grabbed the man's wrist and for a moment with her fingers pressed against where his pulse would be. After she had established nothing was there, she held her hand over his nose and mouth, opened his eyes and looked into them, but there was nothing at all, no sign of life, nothing. He was dead, and had been for some time.

She let the man's arm fall limply down again, and turned slowly to Conán, who was cowering in the doorway, not knowing how his mother would take it.

"What did you do to him?" she hissed dangerously.

"What? Me? Nothing, I didn't do anything –" Conán was cut off by his mother leaping at him and cracking him over the head with one of the many alcohol bottles. Stunned, Conán collapsed to the floor.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM, YOU EVIL PIECE OF SCUM?" she screeched, kicking him where he lay on the floor.

"NOTHING!" Conán yelled back. "I didn't do anything, I found him! I found him like that, I never did nothing!"

"You evil brat! You did something to him, didn't you? Did you curse him? I bet that was it! You cursed him, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?"

"No! How could I? I can't do anything like that –"

"Yes you can, because you're evil! I knew from the moment you were born you were the devil's work! You killed him, didn't you? You killed him to get at me! Well, it's not going to work, Satan!"

His mother's foot collided with his head for the third time in her little speech and Conán sprawled onto the floor completely, flat out, looking at the carpet with what he knew to be blood beginning to make its way down his face. Taking advantage of her child's current state, Conán's mother grabbed him and hauled him up, and Conán was unable to protest as she dragged him into the bathroom and threw him down onto the floor.

"I'm fed up of this!" she yelled, as she slammed the plug into the plughole and turned the
cold water on full blast. "We're going to get this out of you whether you like it or not!"

Conán didn't help his case by scrambling to his hands and knees and trying to get away from her. She took this as a sign that whatever it was in Conán, the Devil, a demon, whatever, had heard what she had said and was trying to make a break for it. She grabbed him and dragged him to the side of the bath, pushing him into it headfirst. He hit his hard off the solid side of the bath on the way in, and the freezing water knocked all of the breath out of him. Within a few seconds he felt his hands and feet beginning to numb, and he tried in vain to scramble out again. His punishment was his mother dunking his head under the water until he thought his lungs would burst, and then when his struggling became weaker she would drag his head back out of the water by his hair, allow him a few gasps of breath, and then push his head back under again.

After forty-five minutes of this, she had stood up and finally let go of Conán's head.

"You're to stay in there," she told him sternly. "If I find you've even moved an inch – keep your mouth under there! If I find you've moved even an inch from where you are now, you'll be sorry, you hear me?"

Conán nodded, completely submerged all apart from his head above his nostrils. Even his nostrils were nearly touching the water, and he had to hold his breath every so often as the water sloshed and settled.

He lay there for nearly two and a half hours, shivering furiously and in pain because of the cold. It hurt him to shiver, it hurt him to breath, and he thought he was starting to go mad with the cold. He sang songs in his head for a while, but icy spears soon penetrated every thought in his head until his brain was just a cloud of cold. His clothes were heavy and weighing him down, and he was terrified that he was going to end up loosing his feet and hands.

After what seemed like a lifetime, his mother came back into the room. Without a word to him, she grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out of the bath. Conán was so numb that he instantly crumpled to the floor again, and she stood over him, watching him shiver, with a slight smile on her face. She did this until Conán began to involuntarily twitch, as his body was covered in pins and needles and the feeling gradually started to return. The boy was still shivering and trembling furiously, but his mother didn't take any notice.

"Get up," she finally commanded. Conán tried to obey, and failed. "GET UP! Get the Hell up or it's back in there for you!"

Conán couldn't bear the thought of returning to the icy grip of the water in the bath, and so he forced himself to stand on his shaky legs. He was shivering so violently that he was leaving the ground at some points.

"I have to call the police over the body." she told him, her voice strangely calm. "The place is all nice and tidy with no hint of drug use on the premises. The only problem is you. The catch a glimpse of you and it'll be the police station for me, and I don't fancy that. You're to go outside, out the back, and over the wall and into the alleyway. You're to sit there until I call you to come back in."

It was the last thing Conán wanted to do, but he had no choice but to obey her. He knew he would end up out there anyway, no matter how hard he tried to resist, and then he would pay twice as much when he got back inside. He obeyed, and soon found himself shivering even more violently, if that was possible, out in the alleyway on the cold, hard ground.

He knew hours had passed, but by this time he had no energy due to the bitter winter air biting at his sodden clothes and already numb skin. He felt his head drop to his chest after he had been out there for several hours, and all he wanted to do was sleep. Gradually, he couldn't be bothered trying to stay awake anymore, but no sooner had he let his eyes close, his mother had shouted him from the small concrete yard.

"Get in here!" she yelled at him. "I'm locking the door in one minute! If you're not in, you're staying out there!"

Conán tried to get up, but he was too tired. He was falling asleep, and sleep was so warm … he didn't care anymore.

For reasons that Conán never understood, his mother never followed up her threat. The wooden gate opened after a minute and she was standing there, and there was something in her face that told Conán she was, for some strange reason, worried about him. He never knew why, but she grabbed him and dragged him into the house. She never said a word to him, nor did she show him any sign of affection or remorse or apology, but she still, nevertheless, helped him to change into dry clothes and, to Conán's utter shock and disbelief, put him into her bed and threw the quilt and several blankets over him. She was still sitting, watching him, when he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Conán was silent as he recalled the memory, as clear as all of the others that were burnt into his brain. He hadn't understood what had made her think ahead that day, though she had offered some explanation when she had next yelled at him. She had told him that she had only brought him in because she thought he was about to die, and she couldn't call the police or she would have been caught and she didn’t want his body stinking up the place. Conán had never been hopeful enough, or stupid enough, to think that perhaps she had had enough of being cruel to him, that perhaps that was her way of a fresh start … he knew she would have some other reason, but those few nights spent in warmth were welcome nevertheless. It had turned out he had been suffering from quite a bad case of hypothermia, but Conán had always been a fighter, and, to his mother's annoyance as she had insisted, he had battled through it and lived to die another day.

Conán still remembered being with that man's body with the same tingle of excitement that he had felt the very moment it had dawned on him what had happened. He smiled to himself. The urge to kill was still in him, stronger than ever now he had been trying to subdue it, but now it reared up as a part of him, as something he knew he could never get rid of. He stood up. This time, Conán would welcome it.