Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

I watched and I understood nothing. By this point, I did not even understand myself. I wrote this, in my mental diary: I do not know who I am, or why I did what I did. I am merely a forward arrow through time. I wonder if I am truly human any more.

Kids! They break your heart.

When he was nine years old I realised I was afraid of Peter. He had tantrums, terrible screaming fits that left me shaking and shuddering for hours afterwards. But there was always that sense that he never really lost control. There was always that still, eerie eye at the centre of the storm.

He didn’t like green vegetables but we had a nanny who insisted that he ate them. He thought this was awful, so he begged and begged me to sack her, but of course I refused. Then he started to wet the bed. I was so ashamed. I had a cleaner of course, but I couldn’t bear for her to see the sheets, so I’d be up in the early hours washing and ironing sheets and replacing them on the bed before dawn. Then he started to wet himself in school. Every night, before going to bed, he would drink a gallon and a half of water with the sole intention of urinating it back up again over his plastic sheets or his schoolbooks. Eventually, I sacked the nanny, and the bed-wetting stopped. Peter had got his way.

To my astonishment, other children always did what he told them to do. It was a knack he had. If he asked a child to jump out of a first-floor window, the child would do so. Numerous broken limbs resulted. If he wanted extra sweets, he would demand that other children give their allowances to him. And no one dared argue with him.

And so the parents of the other children refused to have him in the house. He became a pariah, the child no one wants their child to be with. He once put a dead bird in the drainpipe of the house of one of his little friends. It stank the house out, and the parents had to call the Council round to fumigate. And another time, he superglued two little girls together by their hands. They were too embarrassed to tell anyone for two days. So they just walked side by side together even when they went to the toilet. When the parents found out, they were devastated – at the injury committed, and at their own neglect of their daughters.

Peter was an ugly teenager. His face was pockmarked and scarred with acne. I had to pay for skin rejuvenation therapy to start him off at the age of fifteen with a clean slate, and a face girls could bear to kiss. But at some level, he never lost that ugly face. He always had that cautious look of someone who expects the first reaction of others to be recoil.

He masturbated incessantly. Don’t all boys do that? I suppose they do. But I found it shocking, I was tired of finding damp tissues chucked down the toilet bowl, and sheets that were stiff with the previous night’s emission.

He used to steal hard-core magazines. I was searching his things regularly by then, and I was horrified at the material he read. Coprophilia, necrophilia, other perversions that even now I can’t bear to think about. I took him to a therapist and Peter made false allegations of incest against me just as a joke.

How could a child grow up so bad?

But then, perhaps there are in fact reasons and excuses for his behaviour. And perhaps, after all, I was to blame. Because, even in the period after my encounter with Future Dreams, and the flaying, even when I was well and skinned again, I was never there for him. I had my other concerns. I was preoccupied with work, I rarely came home before midnight. And, of course, I was constantly afraid that Future Dreams would wreak a terrible revenge for what I had done to them. They might send mercenaries to kill me or my child or fit us up for crimes or even, conceivably, murder or rape me in my bed. I was very paranoid during that period. I was also drinking heavily. I was also abusing pharmaceutical drugs and overdosing on rejuves. I was a total screw-up, with a small child. What was I thinking of?

It was all my fault!

But Peter did change. By the age of seventeen, his face was smooth, and he had a ready smile. He was smart and charismatic, and he had learned how to flatter me. He was mummy’s little boy. I basked in his approval.

He took a ferocious interest in the work I was doing He travelled with me round Europe, and Egypt, and Africa. We walked around the Parthenon together, arms linked like husband and wife. But in fact, he was my son. My handsome, funny, clever son.

For a time I forgot, to be honest, about his dark-child years. I smothered him, I pampered him. I never challenged his opinions, though he was inclined to wild supernatural speculations. He never wanted for anything. I catered to his every whim and desire. And I was so proud of him when he said he wanted to be a doctor, and got a place at an Oxford college to study medicine. Then, after he was thrown out of Oxford for assaulting a fellow student, I was so proud he quickly managed to get a place on a BA course in ecology at London Met. Then, when he was sent down from London Met for abusing the Vice Chancellor at a freshers’ networking event, I was so proud of the way he managed to get himself a job in the City of London.

Then, when he was sacked from his job in the City for misappropriating clients’ funds, I was so proud of him when he shrugged off the disgrace and came to live with me, and stayed in bed all day, and drank a lot, and screwed a different woman every night. As long as he was happy, that’s all that mattered.

Then, after about a year of unemployment, he was arrested for raping a girl who worked in Tesco’s. He’d met her, apparently, at an all-night rave. They’d both been taking drugs. She claimed rape, he argued consensual sex. There was some bruising on the girl and the police were keen to prosecute. But I pulled some strings, and paid some money to the girl’s family to encourage her to revise her testimony. Because I believed, of course, that Peter was innocent. I knew he’d been rough with her – but with that much crack in his system, what could you expect?

But a year after the cover-up, Peter calmly explained that he hadn’t, in fact, been on drugs that night. The girl was coked to the eyeballs; but he’d been sober and in control. He’d targeted her, basically, because he knew she wouldn’t fight back. He took her to his room, tied her to the bed, and raped her. And he’d filmed the rape too, as an aid to future masturbation. He even, the bastard, offered to show me the tape.

Peter’s theory of women, which he explained at some length, was that they needed to be melded to the spirit of a superior male. Rape, he argued, was nature’s way of doing just that.

Of course, after hearing all this, I recognised all the telltale signs of egomaniacal psychopathy. But he refused to go to therapy, and he wouldn’t let me contact the police. He made me feel complicit in his guilt. Even now, part of me feels that I am a rapist. By loving my son, I feel a part of every evil thing he has ever done.

But I did love my son. And so I had to embrace and forgive his evil. So I continued to cover up the rape, and continued to persuade myself that there was some good to be found in Peter. He was, after all, delightfully entertaining company.

Peter joined a neo-Nazi party for a while, and campaigned in favour of a Mass Exodus proposal which mean compelling Muslims to leave Earth en masse. His friends were all con artists and burglars and diagnosed psychopaths and fellow neo-Nazis. He had a harem of beautiful girlfriends, who were always going off with other men, and I strongly suspected Peter was pimping them.

We stayed good friends, even when he left my house and took a flat of his own (paid for by me) and amassed debts of tens of thousands of pounds. Once, I had to pay for him to have plastic surgery after his face was burned with acid by a fifteen-year-old girl who, he claimed, had an irrational grudge against him. The girl was later murdered. I have no reason to suppose Peter was responsible for her death. But I never enquired, just in case.