Roseview

By Des Kirby

In the Ireland of the 1990s, a strange phenomenon known as the Celtic Tiger economy emerged. It was the start of an extreme transition for the country both economically and culturally and lasted over a decade. Like all of these sudden economic upturns, the Tiger economy brought some good and some terrible changes. The most obvious change was the level of spending power that seemingly ordinary citizens were capable of. Suddenly the country was awash with cheap credit and with it came a gluttonous spending spree the likes of which Ireland had never seen before in its entire history; new houses, new cars, new clothes, holidays, home extensions and refurbishments. Every bar and restaurant in the country were busy and there was a sense that Ireland was, at last becoming a prosperous nation.

With all these changes came a darker side. Some truly disturbing acts of violence occurred which left people both shocked and angry. Much of this violence was perpetrated against women and at one stage there were reports of a serial killer operating in the east of the country, with the disappearances of several women who have never been found. It wasn't just the increase in violence that marked the Celtic Tiger years but the type of violence. Amidst all the jubilance, violence and fictitious prosperity of the Tiger economy, not everyone was thriving. Many people were left behind and found the boom years a chilling and grotesque period of our recent history.

Roseview is a novel inspired by this tumultuous period. Deacon Burns, the central character in Roseview, is one of those people. He lives in a quiet, beautiful and peaceful middle-class neighbourhood. His family and neighbours have no clue as to Deacon's state of mind. He is a psychopath in the making. Deacon becomes obsessed with Bella Myles, his childhood crush and the object of his deranged desires. Bella has returned to Roseview with her new fiance. Deacon becomes possessed by her and disgusted by her, and her friends.

In his lonely, desperate mind Deacon convinces himself that by killing Bella he will vanquish his own inner demons forever. He is crumbling but he hides it well. He is tormented but manages to cover up the torment just enough to get by. Just as the society around him has become adept at hiding the truth about itself, Deacon has become adept at containing his murderous, vicious, psychotic fantasies. But for how long?
Genre: novel, suburban fiction, crime, drama, chiller

• Language: English
• Publisher: Des Kirby
• Release date: Sep 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458058799

Des Kirby

To date I have completed one novel called Roseview which is available to buy on Smashwords. Quickie is my first short story collection. I have also published several short stories which are available to read for free on Medium. I write fictional stories but my characters are usually inspired by real life people and scenarios. I’m happy to self-publish but I'd rather have a literary agent on my side as opposed to operating entirely on my own. The search continues....

Book preview

ROSEVIEW

by

Des Kirby

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright© 2010 Des Kirby

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise)without the prior written permission  of the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine or journal.

This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to locales, events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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ROSEVIEW

Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.

Marcus Antonius

Prologue

Deacon Burns waited patiently outside the counsellor’s office. Since coming to the National University of Ireland in Galway he hasn’t been coping too well. He didn’t expect things to unravel so fast. He was only nearing the end of his first year and already he was silently crying out for help. The counsellor’s door opened and a lean, middle aged balding man with a finely trimmed beard greeted him with a handshake then invited him in. He waited for the counsellor to sit first then sat in the other empty chair.

‘My p-parents don’t know I’m here.’

The young man’s voice sounded frail and his round face looked weary as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was thin framed and appeared undernourished. His eyes were dark and sunken and were his most salient feature, with thick eyebrows hanging over them in an almost continuous line. His hair was black, thick and swept back with a fine tooth comb and it seemed to shine in the sunlight that filled the room. The uneven shadow of an adolescent beard could be faintly seen and the rosy red blush of his cheeks gave him a babyish quality. He was an awkward mix of man and boy. He looked tired and troubled but the counsellor had met many troubled young men during his time at the university.

‘No one k-knows I’m here,’ he added.

‘Well that’s as good a place as any to start,’ replied the counsellor. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you are here? In your own time.’

Deacon sat uncomfortably and tried to breathe easily but his fears had him in their grip and he took a long time to speak.

‘I don’t k-k-know what to say,’ he stuttered and looked at the counsellor for some kind of assistance.

‘How do you feel right now?’ the counsellor asked. Deacon took another long pause before responding.

‘I feel...I feel... l-like I’m cracking up.’ He held his mouth open as if he were about to elaborate then fell silent again.

‘Like you are cracking up?’ the counsellor repeated. ‘When you say cracking up what do you mean exactly. Can you explain more about that?’

Deacon began telling him how he seems to get scared for no particular reason, how he can’t seem to concentrate on his degree studies and how college life wasn’t what he thought it was going to be.

‘What did you think college life was going to be,’ the counsellor asked. ‘How did you picture it before you came here?’

‘I t-thought it would be d-different...to s-school I mean. I t-thought it would be f-f-fun...and...but it’s not...it’s just like before...it’s no d-d-different. They’re s-still the same.’

‘They? Who are they?’ the counsellor enquired. Deacon didn’t like the way the counsellor kept staring at him. He didn’t know what to expect when he came here but now that he’s here he wishes he hadn’t come. He took a deep breath.

‘Other people...you know...the students. They are no better than where I was before. I t-t-thought they would be different.’

Deacon and the counsellor took their first tentative steps together in the session and afterwards the counsellor recorded issues of anxiety around fellow students, occasional panic attacks and self-esteem issues in his session notes. He also noted that the client had mentioned loss of appetite and insomnia but did not have suicidal thoughts. He agreed a series of nine more sessions with the client and arranged them for the same time, once a week, each Thursday afternoon at 3.30.

Over the following weeks Deacon attended the sessions as planned and after each one the counsellor noted various aspects of Deacon’s physical state, verbal statements and emotional disposition. In the second and third weeks he built up a picture of Deacon’s family, his college social circle and his self-image. He noted how Deacon’s perceptions of himself appeared deeply flawed and his perception of others seemed to be blighted by fear, suspicion and hostility.

In the fourth session he noted that the client had begun focusing on a particular group of fellow students. Some of these students were people he knew from childhood and one name was mentioned repeatedly. Her name was Bella Myles and the client appeared to have a fixated and somewhat skewed opinion of her. In session five the client continued discussing Bella and indeed most of the session was devoted to her and how Deacon often feels anger towards her. In preparation for session six the counsellor decided to begin challenging the client’s thought processes and see how Deacon may react. Session six was not what the counsellor was hoping for.

‘Deacon, you mentioned your anger towards Bella Myles last week. You spoke quite a lot about her in fact. I’d like to pick up on that if that’s ok with you.’

‘Sure,’ Deacon replied, his body immediately becoming rigid and his frown more accentuated.

‘I just want to explore your thoughts about her and perhaps later we could look some more at your thoughts about your family and about the college too.’ Deacon said nothing and let the counsellor end the pause. ‘Ok...so at the end of the last session you spoke about Bella’s effect on you and how she makes you feel dark inside and you get dark thoughts about her. We didn’t really get a chance to explore that. Can you tell me about these dark thoughts you have of Bella?’

‘I just d-don’t like her...I mean she is b-b-beautiful and all but she’s....she....and her friends....Sandy and Nora....they’re t-the same...they...’ He tapers off unable to complete the sentence.

‘Yes you’ve said that several times before, that you don’t like her. She makes you angry. But you also say she is beautiful. For what reason do you think you don’t like her? Has she done something to you personally that’s makes you feel mad at her?

‘Yes...she has.’ Deacon mutters. ‘I mean she has a way of making people f-feel bad....so do her f-f-friends.’

‘Let’s stick with Bella for a moment,’ the counsellor says. ‘She did something to you. Something you resent, something that makes you feel mad. What did she do?’

‘She just has a w-way about her....it's hard t-t-to explain. You don’t know her.’

‘I’d like to understand. Explain it in your own words. Take your time.’

Deacon stared at the ground in front of him and he felt a wave of desperation flow through his mind. His stomach went into knots and his face became hotter with each passing second. He wanted to tell the counsellor the truth, he wanted him to hear the words that echoed in his mind. He wanted to tell him exactly what the dark thoughts were. That he wanted to kill Bella more than anything. He wanted to tell him how he has fantasized for years about killing her and he wanted him to know how scared it made him feel. He wanted to reveal all but as he looked up to face the counsellor’s unflinching expression, his courage abandoned him once again. He could not say the words and so proceeded to lie.

He spent the rest of the session being evasive and all attempts by the counsellor to challenge his thoughts about Bella became futile as Deacon retreated back behind the safety of his lies. The more he lied the more uncomfortable he felt and the atmosphere seemed to sour between himself and the counsellor. The session frightened Deacon and he never showed up for session seven. The counsellor never saw Deacon Burns again.

Ch.1

The modern part of Roseview sprang up in the 1960s, at least it must have seemed modern then with its parks and sports grounds and views of Galway Bay. The freshly built houses were three-bed semi’s with front and back gardens and they fit perfectly around the Calvary Hospital and St. Oliver Plunkett Catholic Church named after the last Catholic martyr to be hung, drawn and quartered in England.

Roseview stretched from the Dublin Rd on the East side of Galway down to the shoreline and it proudly spoke to the emerging middle class of the day. People with secure jobs and an aspiration to breed kids who would never experience the poverty they had growing up. It even had an army barracks with its own garrison church. On one side of Roseview a small inlet of water called Lough Atalia separated it from the City.

In time Galway would establish itself as the capitol of the West of Ireland. The new residents of Roseview must have felt like they had found an oasis in the West. They could walk into the city in fifteen minutes. They had a bus route to take their kids into the city’s secondary schools. Later Roseview got its own national school to add to the parents’ convenience. They had the churches for their spiritual sustenance, several local family run corner shops to feed their growing broods, a pharmacy to sooth their ailments and at the weekend the parents could relax in the bars of one of the local hotels.

Roseview had it all for the parents pursuing a better life for themselves and their kids and what parent wouldn’t feel happy at the sight of their offspring playing in the parks outside their front doors? To hear the joyful pitch of childish screams as the children played tag, climbed trees and played football till the sun went down. Roseview is what family is all about.

Dawn breaks over Roseview and so begins another day in the life of one those families. Although they were not part of the original pioneers who took up residence in the 60’s, Joseph and Catherine Burns felt like their quest for happiness was over when they moved into Calvary Road. Joseph and Catherine begin their morning routine. They rise from their bed faithfully at 7.30 every Monday to Friday. Joseph draws the curtains and looks out at another winter morning on Calvary Road, where they have lived for more than twenty years now.

Outside is dull and damp and the sun struggles to rise and shine. He dresses without showering. He showers every second day and so does his wife. They developed the routine a long time ago. He has the bathroom Monday morning, she on Tuesday, him again the next day and so on, it’s their way. This morning’s Catherine’s turn.

He goes downstairs and washes his face in the kitchen sink, combs his hair in the kitchen mirror and sets the table for breakfast. He is rarely late for work at Butlers Accountants and this morning will be no exception. He will have his breakfast eaten and be on the road to work by quarter past eight. He never leaves however, until he says goodbye to his daughter Ann, whom he dotes on. Catherine wakes Ann upstairs then finishes dressing.

They come downstairs together and sit at the table and begin pouring tea and filling their bowls with cereal and buttering fresh toast. Joseph sips his tea and watches his daughter eat her breakfast. She’s eleven years old and sometimes he worries he won't be around long enough to see what becomes of her. He’s sixty-four and will be retiring soon but still hasn’t set a date. He’s afraid to pick a date, as he doesn’t like the idea of not having some place to go every morning.

He has never particularly enjoyed accountancy and if he were honest with himself he would admit he made a wrong decision to train for it all those years ago. He paid for his training when he sold his family home for a small sum after his adoptive parents passed away. He sold up long before the beginning of the Celtic Tiger property boom of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. He had little left over after he moved into Galway City in the 80’s after he married Catherine.

His new mortgage ate up most of the sale of his home, he spent some on educating himself at night school and the rest he put in the bank for a rainy day that never came. The savings are still there and he’s still too afraid to do anything with them. He took the first job he was offered when he moved to the city, finding work in a local factory. Jobs were scarce in the early 80's in Ireland and he was in his forties by then and knew he was lucky to get a job at all. He put his heart and soul into the night classes in accountancy because he wanted a better future for Catherine and himself and the family he presumed he’d have. There never seemed to be enough money, they scraped by and despite his occupation, he’s always been afraid of money and now he feels afraid to retire, afraid to leave the job he’s never even liked. But he doesn’t admit it to anyone, not even his wife.

That said, he can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that his working life is approaching the end. He still doesn’t know how he’d fill his retirement time.  When he looks at his daughter he feels proud. He feels a joy he doesn’t feel with anyone else, but he feels afraid sometimes that he won’t live long enough to see her marry or have kids. He loves Ann and it’s probably because she’s the special one in the family, the non-biological one. They adopted Ann eleven years ago, and for Joseph Burns it was a good decision.

Being an adopted child himself, he spent the first four years of his life living in an orphanage outside Galway City. His memories of the place are vague and he doesn’t like to dwell on it. A childless couple in rural Galway adopted him and accepted him into their home; his new parents were middle aged and not well off and lived on a few acres of hard, unprofitable land.

They were loving in a practical way but never in an emotional way. They fed and clothed him and made sure he went to school every day, but they never were affectionate towards him, they didn’t know how to be. The result was a life spent on a small farm in rural Galway where the income was meagre and the affection even less so. It was a quiet and unemotional home with a strange repressive atmosphere. He never had a feeling of truly belonging there.

His parents did provide him with a home though and he always felt a sense of gratitude for that. They were good people who just did not know how to relate to a child. They didn’t understand family love any more than he did. Together the three of them did the best they could. Joseph went to a small local primary school and integrated with his classmates reasonably well but emotionally always felt afflicted with a terrible feeling that something was missing. What that something was he could never tell, it was always an elusive feeling, the loneliness of a misfit perhaps.

Still his parents were good people and he could never dishonour them by speaking of them in any derogatory way. He feels he owes them that, a sense of duty to speak well of them and try to appreciate what they did for him. He never discusses his childhood; it’s just not a subject that he’s comfortable with. It’s easier not to speak of it. The way he sees it, why speak of something that causes feelings of sadness, better not to. Besides he feels too old to care about his past anymore. Instead he looks at his daughter and smiles. She smiles back as she munches on some toast.

‘Well I better get going’, he says. He puts on his blazer. ‘Make sure you wake that fella upstairs before you go,’ he says to his wife, referring to his eldest child and only son, Deacon Burns. He kisses Ann on the top of her head.

‘Bye dad,’ she says with a smile.

Just hearing her say the word dad puts him in good form. He leaves for work happy knowing her adoptive childhood is better than the one he had. Catherine Burns continues with her breakfast. She and her daughter eat in silence. She has watched her husband leave for work every morning for many years and every morning she feels the same empty feeling. She, like him, is full of insecurity but despite this common trait they’ve never communicated very well. She feels as distant from him now as she ever did. She’s only ten years younger than him but it feels like more.

She was thirty-one when she married him he was forty-one, two lonely, rural, insecure souls who first formed an uneasy alliance, which grew into a friendship of sorts. It took them ages to approach each other in any sexual way and even then it didn’t go all the way. They didn’t have sex until after they were married. When it happened the sex was awkward. No passion, no lust, no real knowledge of the flesh. They were both late developers, and could not relax with each other.

They both secretly hoped it would improve on its own. It never did and the marital arrangement became one of mutual respect for each other’s boundaries both in and out of the bedroom. She knows Joseph got married out of a sense of pressure, not love, at least not true love, but a kind of love in its own strained way. But Joseph was an emotional cripple from the start and she wasn’t altogether different.

Their friendship never blossomed into passionate romance, they never learned romance. Before Catherine, Joseph never had a relationship and seemed destined for bachelorhood until he died an old single man, one of Ireland’s lonely rural souls. He became increasingly worried in his thirties about this and even more so in his forties.

So when the friendship started with Catherine it was a lifeline, something for him to hold onto. The first and probably only opportunity he was ever likely to be granted. This was a deep conviction he had at the time and considering how bad his fear of aloneness and bachelorhood was affecting him, it seemed like a good idea to ask Catherine to marry him, before she got away, before his one and only chance slipped through his fingers forever.

At thirty-one she was already being treated like an oddball by her few remaining peers in the country village she grew up in, just a few miles from Joseph’s farmhouse. She saw him as her escape and did not suspect at the time that he saw her the same way. They rescued each other from their respective realities. It was escapism pure and simple. They never stopped to consider what it might lead to.

They got along fine because neither of them are the confrontational type. Catherine herself comes from an emotionally stunted family with no males for company other than her father who she was never close to and was absent a lot of the time. When he was there he barely looked at her and he had a short temper she learned to avoid. She’s always been uneasy in male company. Both herself and Joseph are unwilling to change or challenge each other in any way, neither has any real self-esteem; they never even consider the term. They are from the ‘just get on with it generation’. Don’t complain, don’t discuss, don’t express, just get on with your job and do your duty. Catherine is a homemaker, mother and wife. She also works part-time in administration in Calvary Hospital. It gets her out of the house in the mornings and the money helps a little.

Catherine looks at her daughter with a sense of pride too. It seems as though she’s the only good thing about the Burns family. She has a beautiful face with long brown hair like strands of silk and sparkling hazel eyes with clear skin, thin lips and a straight nose. No blemishes, no odd features, just a striking beauty that’s almost exotic. Ann is so different from the other three members of the house.

Joseph has thick eyebrows that used to be black but now are gray and hang over his eyes like canopies, like a hawks eyes that make him look perpetually angry. His once thick black hair is still quite thick but now almost white. He is small in height, barely five foot six and his weight has escalated beyond his control leaving him with a stomach much too big for his small frame. His monotone voice does nothing to enhance him; it’s a voice with no melody that rarely rises above a pitch just short of a whisper.

Catherine has never seen him lose his temper and never actually heard her husband shout. She wonders what he would sound like if he shouted, really shouted but he doesn’t like to shout. He grew up in a quiet home where nothing much was ever said, good or bad and voices were never raised. Catherine knows her adoptive daughter is better off without her father’s looks and her mother's too.

Catherine’s hair is a watery reddish blonde, not fully red and not a golden blonde but an awkward mix