When Jason protests fervently like this, I can still recognise within his pale blue eyes remnants of normality despite his tattered years of self-neglect, first experimenting with drugs at the age of fourteen.
And somewhere in the quietness of my mind, I have to confess that there is something compulsive about his claims that he’s been plagued by supernatural visitations since childhood. He’s adamant there’s legitimate evidence to back him up too.
“I’m telling you, Marc,” he’ll say pleadingly as if repeating this somehow makes it all true. “These things follow me about. I’m telling the truth.”
To a stranger, his claim probably sound ludicrous. It’s difficult to fathom and to treat seriously and I can only listen with the care of a man who loves his unsound brother. There’s one nagging question for me, though: was the moment he entered our strange new home, Fir Tree Cottage, at age four the catalyst for all his trauma?
Our mother had another theory when I discussed Jason with her.
“He was a footling.” She drained the last of the wine from her glass and moved towards the fridge for a top-up with a furrowed expression. “Breech babies arriving feet first can receive brain damage during birth,” she continued. “He couldn’t walk until he was eighteen months.” Perched on the corner of the kitchen table she pondered this fact ruefully, gazing through the window as her cigarette smoke curled through the air. “On the other hand, he could say multi-syllable words like elephant and hippopotamus long before you could utter basic ones.”
Yet I always knew Jason wasn’t ‘backward’. He was intelligent at school, a thoughtful boy who pondered rather than squandered his words. My brother was profoundly creative, always excelling at art. I think our mother was clutching at straws.
The unavoidable truth is that no single fact has ever been able to explain my younger brother.
My attempts to tell Jason’s story may sound at times like fantasy or warped memory. But the events I’m writing about actually did happen. I’ve long been Jason’s carer and loving brother and I have researched others’ personal accounts. These include those chronicled in the eminent Catholic priest Dom Robert Petitpierre’s memoir, Exorcising Devils, the relevance of which will become clear.
My hope is that if you ever come across a person like my brother, someone with mental health and addiction issues, you will try to consider their back story. The past unavoidably moulds our future, sometimes in small ways, sometimes shaping our entire existence. And in Jason’s history, there is that extra paranormal factor that we have never been able to explain.