Blueeyedboy

Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest, moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother’s favourite. And he was a murderer.

1

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 02.56 on Monday, January 28

Status: public

Mood: nostalgic

Listening to:Captain Beefheart: ‘Ice Cream For Crow’

The colour of murder is blue, he thinks. Ice-blue, smokescreen blue, frostbite, post-mortem, body-bag blue. It is also his colour in so many ways, running through his circuitry like an electrical charge, screaming blue murder all the way.

Blue colours everything. He sees it, senses it everywhere, from the blue of his computer screen to the blue of the veins on the backs of her hands, raised now and twisted like the tracks of sandworms on Blackpool beach — where they used to go, the four of them, every year on his birthday, and he would have an ice-cream cone, and paddle in the sea, and search out the little scuttling crabs from under the piles of seaweed, and drop them into his bucket to die in the heat of the simmering birthday sun.

Today he is only four years old, and there is a peculiar innocence in the way he carries out these small and guiltless slayings. There is no malice in the act, merely a keen curiosity for the scuttling thing that tries to escape, sidling round and round the base of the blue plastic bucket; then, hours later, giving up the fight, claws splayed, and turning its vivid underbelly upwards in a futile show of surrender, by which time he has long since lost interest and is eating a coffee ice cream (a sophisticated choice for such a little boy, but vanilla has never been his taste), so that when he rediscovers it at the end of the day, when the time comes to empty his bucket and to go home, he is vaguely surprised to find the creature dead, and wonders, indeed, how such a thing could ever have been alive at all.

His mother finds him wide-eyed on the sand, poking the dead thing with a fingertip. Her main concern is not for the fact that her son is a killer, but for the fact that he is suggestible, and that many things upset him in a way that she does not understand.

‘Don’t play with that,’ she tells him. ‘It’s nasty. Come away from there.’

‘Why?’ he says.

Good question. The creatures in the bucket have been standing undisturbed all day. He gives it some thought. ‘They’re dead,’ he concludes. ‘I collected them all, and now they’re dead.’

His mother scoops him into her arms. This is precisely what she dreads. Some kind of outburst: tears, perhaps; something that will make the other mothers look down their noses at her and sneer.

She comforts him. ‘It’s not your fault. It was just an accident. Not your fault.’

An accident, he thinks to himself. Already, he knows that this is a lie. There was no accident, it was his fault, and the fact that his mother denies this confuses him more than her shrill voice and the feverish way she clasps him in her arms, smearing his T-shirt with suntan oil. He pulls away — he hates mess — and she fixes him with a fretful gaze, wondering if he is going to cry.

He wonders whether perhaps he should. Maybe she expects it of him. But he can sense how very anxious she is, how hard she tries to protect him from pain. And the scent of his ma’s distress is like the coconut of her suntan oil mixed with the taste of tropical fruit, and suddenly it hits him —Dead! Dead! — and he really does begin to cry.

And so she kicks sand over the rest of his catch — a snail, a shrimp, a baby flatfish all landed and gasping, with its little mouth pulled down in a tragic crescent — smiling and singing; Whoops! All gone! — trying to make a game of it, holding him tightly as she does, so that no possible taint of guilt may darken the gaze of her blue-eyed boy.

He is so sensitive, she thinks. So startlingly imaginative. His brothers are another race, with their scabbed knees and their uncombed hair and their wrestling matches on the beds. His brothers do not need her protection. They have each other. They have their friends. They like vanilla ice cream, and when they play at cowboys (two fingers cocked to make a gun) they always wear the white hats, and make the bad guys pay.

But he has always been different. Curious. Impressionable. You think too much, she tells him sometimes, with the look of a woman too much in love to admit to any real fault in the object of her devotion. He can already see how she worships him, wants to protect him from everything, from every shadow that may pass across the blue skies of his life, from every possible injury, even the ones he inflicts on himself.

For a mother’s love is uncritical, selfless and self-sacrificing; a mother’s love can forgive anything: tantrums, tears, indifference, ingratitude or cruelty. A mother’s love is a black hole that swallows every criticism, absolves all blame, excuses blasphemy, theft and lies, transmuting even the vilest deed into something that is not his fault —

Whoops! All gone!

Even murder.

Post comment:

Captainbunnykiller: LOL, dude. You rock!

ClairDeLune: This is wonderful, blueeyedboy. I think you ought to write more fully about your relationship with your mother and the way it has affected you. I don’t believe that anyone is born bad. We simply make bad choices, that’s all. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Why, thank you...

2

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 17.39 on Monday, January 28

Status: restricted

Mood: virtuous

Listening to: Dire Straits: ‘Brothers In Arms’

My brother had been dead for less than a minute by the time the news reached my WeJay. That’s about how long it takes: six or seven seconds to film the scene on a mobile phone camera; forty-five to upload the footage on to YouTube; ten to Twitter to all your friends — 13:06 OMG! Just saw a terrible car crash — and after that the caravan of messages to my WebJournal; the texts; the e-mails, the oh-my-Gods.

Well, you can skip the condolences. Nigel and I hated each other from the day we were born, he and I, and nothing he has ever done — including giving up the ghost — has caused any change to my feelings. But he was my brother, after all. Give me credit for some delicacy. And Ma must be feeling upset, of course, even though he wasn’t her favourite. Once a mother of three, today only one of her children remains. Yours truly, blueeyedboy, now so nearly alone in the world —

The police took their time, as usual. Forty minutes, door-to-door. Ma was downstairs, making lunch: lamb chops and mash, with pie for dessert. For months I’d hardly eaten; suddenly now I was ravenous. Perhaps it takes the death of a sibling to really give me an appetite.

From my room, I followed the scene: the police car; the doorbell; the voices; the scream. The sound of something in the hallway recess — the telephone table, at a guess — slamming against the wall as she fell, cradled between two officers, clutching the air with her outstretched hands, and then the smell of burning fat, probably the chops she left under the grill when she went to answer the door —

That was my cue. Time to log off. Time to face the music. I wondered whether I could get away with leaving in one of my iPod plugs. Ma’s so used to seeing me wearing them that she might not even have noticed; but the two officers were a different matter, of course, and the last thing I wanted at such a time was for someone to find me insensitive —

‘Oh, B.B., the most terrible thing—’

My mother’s a bit of a drama queen. Contorted face, eyes wide, mouth wider, she looked like a mask of Medusa. Holding out her arms to me as if to pull me under, fingers clawing at my back, wailing into my right ear — defenceless now without my iPod — and shedding tears of blue mascara down the collar of my shirt.

‘Ma, please.’ I hate mess.

The female officer (there’s always one) took over the business of comforting her. Her partner, an older man, looked at me with weary patience, and said:

‘Mr Winter, there’s been an accident.’

‘Nigel?’ I said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

I counted the seconds in my head, whilst mentally replaying Mark Knopfler’s guitar intro to ‘Brothers In Arms’. I knew I was under scrutiny; I couldn’t afford to get this wrong. But music makes things easier, reducing inappropriate emotional responses and allowing me to function, if not entirely normally, then at least as others expect of me.

‘I knew it, somehow,’ I said at last. ‘I had the weirdest feeling.’

He nodded, as if he knew what I meant. Ma continued to rant and rail. Overdoing it, Ma, I thought; it wasn’t as if they were especially close. Nigel was a ticking bomb; it had to happen sooner or later. And car accidents are so common these days, so tragically unavoidable. A patch of ice, a busy road; almost the perfect crime, you might say, almost above suspicion. I wondered if I ought to cry, but decided to keep it simple. So I sat down — rather shakily — and put my head in my hands. It hurt. I’ve always been prone to headaches, especially in moments of stress. Pretend it’s just fiction, blueeyedboy. An entry in your WeJay.

Once more I sought the comfort of my imaginary playlist, where the drums had just come in, ticking gentle counterpoint to a guitar riff that sounds almost lazily effortless. It isn’t effortless, of course. Nothing so precise ever is. But Knopfler has curiously spatulate, elongated fingers. Born for the instrument, you might almost say, destined from birth for that fretboard, those strings. If he had been born with different hands, would he have ever picked up a guitar? Or would he have tried it anyway, knowing he’d always be second-rate?

‘Was my son alone in the car?’

‘Ma’am?’ said the older officer.

‘Wasn’t there — a girl — with him?’ said Ma, with the special contempt she always reserves for any discussion of Nigel’s girl.

The officer shook his head. ‘No, ma’am.’

Ma dug her fingers into my arm. ‘He never used to be careless,’ she said. ‘My son was an excellent driver.’

Well, that just shows how little she knows. Nigel brought to his driving the same temperance and subtlety that he did to his relationships. I should know; I still have the marks. But now he’s dead, he’s a paragon. That hardly seems fair, does it now, after all I’ve done for her?

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Ma.’ Anything to get out of here. I made for the kitchen, only to find the officer obstructing my way.

‘I’m afraid we’re going to need you to come with us to the station, sir.’

My mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘The station?’ I said.

‘Formalities, sir.’

For a moment I saw myself under arrest, leaving the house in handcuffs. Ma in tears; the neighbours in shock; myself in an orange jumpsuit (really, not my colour); locked up in a room without windows. In fic I’d make a run for it: knock out the officer, steal his car and be over the border before the police could circulate my description. In life —

‘What kind of formalities?’

‘We’ll need you to ID the body, sir.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Ma made me do it, of course. Waited outside while I put a name to what was left of Nigel. I tried to make it fictional, to see it all as a film set; but even so, I passed out. They took me home in an ambulance. Still, it was worth it. To have him dead; to be free of the bastard for ever —

All this is fic, you understand. I never murdered anyone. I know they tell you to write what you know, as if you could ever write what you know, as if knowing were the essential thing, when the most essential thing is desire. But wishing that my brother were dead is not the same as committing a crime. It’s not my fault if the universe follows my WebJournal. And so life goes on — for most of us — much the same as it ever did, and blueeyedboy sleeps the sleep of the just — if not quite that of the innocent.

3

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 18.04 on Monday, January 28

Status: restricted

Mood: blah

Listening to: Del Amitri: ‘Nothing Ever Happens’

That was just two days ago. Already we’re back to normal, apart from planning the funeral. Back to our comfort rituals, our little everyday routines. With Ma, it’s dusting the china dogs. With me, of course, it’s the Internet: my WeJay, my playlists, my murders.

Internet. An interesting word. Like something brought up from the deep. A net for something that has been interred, or something as yet to be interred; a holding-place for all the things we’d rather keep secret in our real lives. And yet, we like to watch, don’t we? Through a glass, darkly, we watch the world turn: a world peopled with shades and reflections, never more than a mouse-click away. A man kills himself — live, on cam. It’s disgusting, but strangely compulsive. We wonder if it was a fake. It could be a fake; anything could. But everything looks so much more real when you’re watching it on a computer screen. Thus even the things we see every day — perhaps especially those things — gain an extra significance when glimpsed through the eye of a camera.

That girl, for instance. The girl in the bright-red duffel coat who walks past my house nearly every day, windswept and oblivious to the camera’s eye that watches her. She has her habits, as do I. She knows the power of desire. She knows that the world turns not on love, or even money, but on obsession.

Obsession? Of course. We are all obsessed. Obsessed with TV; with the size of our dicks; with money and fame and the love-lives of others. This virtual — though far from virtuous — world is a reeking midden of mind-trash, mish-mash, slash; car dealerships and Viagra sales, and music and games and gossip and lies and tiny personal tragedies lost in transit down the line, waiting for someone to care, just once, waiting for someone to connect —

That’s where WeJay comes in. WebJournal, the site for all seasonings. Restricted entries for private enjoyment; public — well, for everyone else. On WeJay I can vent as I please, confess without fear of censure; be myself — or indeed, someone else — in a world where no one is quite what they seem, and where every member of every tribe is free to do what they most desire.

Tribe? Yes, everyone here has a tribe; each with its divisions and subdivisions, binary veins and capillaries branching out into a near-infinity of permutations as they distance themselves from the mainstream. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, the pervert with his webcam. No one has to hunt alone, however far from the pack they have strayed. Everyone has a home here, a place where someone will take them in, where all their tastes are catered for —

Most people go with the popular choice. They choose vanilla every time. Vanillas are the good guys, common as Coca-Cola. Their conscience is as white as their perfect teeth; they are tall and bronzed and presentable; they eat at McDonald’s; they take out the trash; they come with a PG certificate and they’d never shoot a man in the back.

But bad guys come in a million flavours. Bad guys lie; bad guys cheat; bad guys make the heart beat faster — or sometimes come to a sudden stop. Which is why I created badguysrock: originally a WeJay community devoted to villains throughout the fictional universe; now a forum for bad guys to celebrate beyond the reach of the ethics police; to glory in their crimes; to strut; to wear their villainy with pride.

Membership is open right now; the price of admission a single post — be it a fic, an essay or just a drabble. Though if there’s something you’d like to confess, this is just the place for it: no names, no rules, no colours — but one.

No, not black, as you might expect. Black is far too limiting. Black presupposes a lack of depth. But blue is creative, melancholy. Blue is the music of the soul. And blue is the colour of our clan, embracing all shades of villainy, all flavours of unholy desire.

So far, it’s a small clan, with less than a dozen regulars.

First comes Captainbunnykiller: Andy Scott of New York. Cap’s blog is a mixture of jackass humour, pornographic fantasy and furious invective — against niggers, queers, fucktards, the fat, Christians and, most recently, the French — but I doubt he’s ever killed anything.

Next comes chrysalisbaby. Aka Chryssie Bateman, of California. This one’s a typical Body Freak — has been on a diet since she was twelve, and now weighs over three hundred pounds. Has a history of falling for vicious men. Never learns. Never will.

After that there’s ClairDeLune; Clair Mitchell, to her friends. This one’s a local; she teaches a course on creative self-expression at Malbry College (which explains her slightly superior tone and her addiction to literary psychobabble) and runs an online writers’ group as well as a sizeable fansite devoted to a certain middle-aged character actor — let us call him Angel Blue — with whom she is infatuated. Angel is an irregular choice, an actor specializing in louche individuals, damaged types, serial killers, and other assorted bad-guy roles. Not A-list, but you’d know his face. She often posts pictures of him on here. Curiously enough, he looks something like me.

Then there’s Toxic69, aka Stuart Dawson, of Leeds. Left crippled in a motorbike crash, he spends his angry life online, where no one needs to pity him; and Purepwnage9, of Fife, who lives for Warcraft and Second Life, oblivious of the fact that his own life is surely but swiftly slipping away; plus any number of lurkers and irregulars — JennyTricks; BombNumber20, Jesusismycopilot, and so on, who exhibit a diverting range of responses to our various entries, from admiration to outrage; from cheeriness to profanity.

And then, of course, there’s Albertine. Definitely not like the rest, there’s a confessional tone to her entries that I find more than a little promising, a hint of danger, a dark undertone, a style perhaps more akin to my own. And she lives right here in the Village, no more than a dozen streets away —

Coincidence?

Not quite. Of course, I have been watching her. Especially so since my brother’s death. Not with malice, but with curiosity, even a measure of envy. She seems so self-possessed. So calm. So safely cocooned in her little world, so unaware of what’s happening. Her online posts are so intimate, so naked and so oddly naïve that you’d never believe she was one of us, a bad guy among bad guys. Her fingers on the piano keys danced like little dervishes. I remember that, and her gentle voice, and her name, which smelt of roses.

The poet Rilke was killed by a rose. How very Sturm und Drang of him. A scratch with a thorn that got infected; a poison gift that keeps on giving. Personally, I don’t see the appeal. I feel more kinship with the orchid tribe: subversives of the plant world, clinging to life wherever they can, subtle and insidious. Roses are so commonplace, with their whorls of sickening bubblegum pink; their scheming scent; their unwholesome leaves, their sly little thorns that poke at the heart —

O rose, thou art sick —

Still, aren’t we all?

4

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.30 on Monday, January 28

Status: restricted

Mood: contemplative

Listening to: Radiohead: ‘Creep’

Call me B.B. Everyone does. No one but the police and the bank ever use my real name. I’m forty-two and five foot eight; I have mousy hair, blue eyes and I’ve lived here in Malbry all my life.

Malbry — pronounced Maw-bry. Even the word smells of shit. But I am unusually sensitive to words, to their sounds and resonances. That’s why I don’t have an accent now, and have lost my childhood stammer. The predominant trend here in Malbry is for exaggerated vowels and clumsy glottals, coating every word in a grimy sheen. You can hear them on the estate all the time: teenage girls with scraped-back hair, shouting hiyaaa in shades of synthetic strawberry. The boys are less articulate, mouthing freak and loser at me as I pass, in half-broken voices that yodel and boom in notes of lager and locker-room sweat. Most of the time I don’t hear them. My life has a permanent soundtrack, provided by my iPod, into which I have downloaded more than twenty thousand tracks and forty-two playlists, one for every year of my life, each with a specific theme —

Freak. They say it because they think it hurts. In their world, to be labelled a freak is obviously the worst kind of fate. To me, it’s just the opposite. The worst thing is surely to be like them: to have married too young; to have gone on the dole; to have learnt to drink beer and smoke cheap cigarettes; to have had kids doomed to be just like themselves, because if these people are good at anything, it’s reproduction — they don’t live long, but, by God, they populate — and if not wanting any of that has made me into a freak in their eyes —

In truth, I’m very ordinary. My eyes are my best feature, I’m told, though not everyone appreciates their chilly shade. For the rest, you’d hardly notice me. I’m nicely inconspicuous. I don’t talk much, and when I do, it’s only when strictly necessary. That’s the way to survive in this place; to keep my privacy intact. Because Malbry is one of those places where secrets and gossips and rumours abound, and I have to take exceptional care to avoid the wrong kind of exposure.

It’s not that the place is so terrible. The old Village is actually very nice, with its crooked York stone cottages and its church and its single row of little shops. There’s rarely any trouble here; except perhaps on Saturday nights, when the kids hang around outside the church while their parents go to the pub down the road, and buy chips from the Chinese takeaway and push the wrappers into the hedge.

To the west, there’s what Ma calls Millionaires’ Row: an avenue of big stone houses shielded from the road by trees. Tall chimneys; four-by-fours; gates that work by remote control. Beyond that there’s St Oswald’s, the grammar school, with its twelve-foot wall and heraldic gate. To the east, the brick terraces of Red City, where my mother was born, then to the west, White City, all privet and pebble-dash. It’s not as genteel as the Village, though I’ve learnt to avoid the danger zones. This is where you’ll find our house, at the edge of the big estate. A square of grass; a flowerbed; a hedge to keep out the neighbours. This is the house where I was born; hardly anything has changed.

I do have a few extra privileges. I drive a blue Peugeot 307, registered in my mother’s name. I have a study lined with books, an iPod dock, a computer and a wall of CDs. I have a collection of orchids, most of them just hybrids, but with one or two rare Zygopetala, whose names bear the scent of the South American rainforests from which they were sourced, and whose colours are astonishing: violent shades of priapic green, and mottled, acidic butterfly-blue that no chart could possibly duplicate. I have a darkroom in the basement, where I develop my photographs. I don’t display them here, of course. But I like to think I have a gift.

At 5 a.m. on weekdays I clock in at Malbry Infirmary — or I did, until very recently — wearing a suit and a blue striped shirt and carrying a briefcase. My mother is very proud of this, of the fact that her son wears a suit to work. What I actually do at work is a matter of far less importance to her. I am single, straight, well-spoken, and, if this were a TV drama of the type favoured by ClairDeLune, my blameless lifestyle and unsullied reputation would probably make me a prime suspect.

In the real world, however, only the kids notice me. To them, any man who still lives with his mother is either a paedo or a queer. But even this assumption comes more from habit than real belief. If they thought I was dangerous, they would behave very differently. Even when that schoolboy was killed, a St Oswald’s boy, so close to home, no one thought me remotely worthy of investigation.

Predictably, I was curious. A murder is always intriguing. Besides, I was already learning my craft, and I knew I could use any information, any hints that came my way. I’ve always appreciated a nice, neat murder. Not that many qualify. Most murderers are predictable, most murders messy and banal. It’s almost a crime in itself, don’t you think, that the splendid act of taking a life should have become so commonplace, so wholly devoid of artistry?

In fiction, there is no such thing as the perfect crime. In movies, the bad guy — who is invariably brilliant and charismatic — always makes a fatal mistake. He overlooks the minutiae. He succumbs to vainglory; loses his nerve; falls victim to some ironic flaw. However dark the frosting, in film, the vanilla centre always shows through; with a happy ending for all who deserve it, and imprisonment, a shot through the heart, or better still, a dramatically pleasing — though statistically improbable — drop from a high building for the bad guy, thereby removing the burden to the State, and leaving the hero free of the guilt of having to shoot the bastard himself.

Well, I happen to know that isn’t true, just as I know that most murderers are neither brilliant nor charismatic, but often subnormal and rather dull, and that the police force is so buried under its paperwork that the simplest murders can slip through the net — the stabbings, the shootings, the fist-fights gone wrong, crimes in which the perpetrator, if he has left the scene at all, can often be found in the nearest pub.

Call me romantic, if you like. But I do believe in the perfect crime. Like true love, it’s just a matter of timing and patience; of keeping the faith; of not losing hope; of carping the diem, of seizing the day —

That’s how my interests led me here, to my lonesome refuge on badguysrock. Harmless interests, to begin with at least, though soon I grew to appreciate the other possibilities. And at the beginning it was just curiosity: a means of observing others unseen; of exploring a world beyond my own, that narrow triangle between Malbry town, the Village and Nether Edge moors, beyond which I have never dared to aspire. The Internet, with its million maps, was as alien to me as Jupiter — and yet, one day, I was simply there, almost by chance, a cast-away, watching the changing scenery with the slowly dawning awareness that this was where I truly belonged; that this would be my great escape, from Malbry, my life, and my mother.

My mother. How it resonates. Mother is a difficult word; so dense with complex associations that I can barely see it at all. Sometimes its colour is Virgin-blue, like the statues of Mary; or grey like the dust-bunnies under the bed where I used to hide away as a child; or green like the baize of the market stalls; and it smells of uncertainty and loss, and of black bananas gone to mush, and of salt, and of blood, and of memory —

My mother. Gloria Winter. She’s the reason I’m still here: stuck in Malbry all these years, like a plant too pot-bound ever to thrive. I have stayed with her. Like everything else. Apart from the neighbours, nothing has changed. The three-bedroomed house; the Axminster; the queasy flowered wallpaper; the gilt-edged mirror in the kitchen that hides a hole in the plaster; the faded print of the Chinese Girl; the lacquer vase on the mantel; the dogs.

Those dogs. Those hideous china dogs.

An affectation to start with, that since has got totally out of hand. There are dogs on every surface now: spaniels, Alsatians, chihuahuas, basset hounds, Yorkshire terriers (her favourites). There are musical dogs, portraits of dogs, dogs dressed up as people; dogs eager-tongued and lolloping, sitting to attention, paws lifted in silent appeal, heads topped with little pink bows.

I broke one once, when I was a boy, and she beat me — though I denied the crime — with a piece of electrical cord. Even now, I still hate those dogs. She knows it, too — but they are her babies, she explains (with a terrible, girlish coyness), and besides, she tells me, she never complains about all my nasty stuff upstairs.

Not that she even knows what I do. I have my privacy: rooms of my own, all of them with locks on the doors, from which she is excluded. The converted loft and study room, the bathroom, the bedroom; and the darkroom in the cellar. I’ve made a home for myself here, with my books, my playlists, my online friends, while she spends her days in the parlour, smoking, doing crosswords, dusting and watching daytime TV —

Parlour. I always hated that word, with all its fake middle-class resonances, and its stink of citrus potpourri. Now I hate it even more, with her faded chintz and her china dogs and her reek of desperation. Of course, I couldn’t leave her. She knew that from the very first; knew that her decision to stay kept me here, chained to her, a prisoner, a slave. And I am a dutiful son to her. I make sure her garden is always neat. I see to her medication. I drive her to her salsa class (Ma drives, but prefers to be driven). And sometimes, when she’s not there, I dream . . .

My mother is a peculiar blend of conflicts and contradictions. Marlboros have ruined her sense of smell, but she always wears Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. She despises novels, but loves to read dictionaries and encyclopaedias. She buys ready meals from Marks & Spencer, but fruit and veg from the market in town — and always the cheapest fruit and veg, bruised and damaged and past their prime.

Twice a week, without fail (even the week of Nigel’s death), she puts on a dress and her high-heeled shoes and I drive her to her salsa class at Malbry College, after which she meets up with her friends in town, and has a cup of fancy tea, or maybe a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and speaks to them in her half-bred voice about me and my job at the hospital, where I am indispensable (according to her) and save lives on a daily basis. Then at eight I pick her up, although it’s only a five-minute walk from the bus stop. Those hoodies from the estates, she says. They’d stab you soon as look at you.

Maybe she’s right to be cautious. The members of our family seem unusually prone to accidents. Still, I pity the hoodie who tries to mess with my mother. She knows how to look after herself. Even now, at sixty-nine, she’s sharp enough to draw blood. What’s more, she knows how to strike back at anyone who threatens us. She is a little more subtle, perhaps, than in the days of the electrical cord, but even so, it isn’t wise to antagonize Gloria Winter. I learnt that lesson very young. In that, if nothing else, I was a precocious pupil. Not as smart as Emily White, the little blind girl whose story has coloured so much of my life, but smart enough to have survived when neither of my brothers did.

Still, isn’t that all over now? Emily White is long dead; her plaintive voice silenced, her letters burnt, the blurry flashgun photographs curled away in secret drawers and on bookshelves in the Mansion. And even if she were not, somehow, the Press have almost forgotten her. There are other things to squawk about; newer scandals over which to obsess. The disappearance of one little girl, over twenty years ago, is no longer cause for public concern. Folk have moved on. Forgotten her. Time for me to do the same.

The problem is this. Nothing ends. If ever Ma taught me anything, it is that nothing is ever truly over. It just works its way slyly into the centre, like yarn in a ball. Round and round and round it goes, crossing and re-crossing, until eventually it is almost hidden beneath the tangle of years. But just to be hidden is not enough. Someone will always find you out. Someone is always lying in wait. Drop your guard for even a second and — wham! That’s when it all blows up in your face.

Take that girl in the duffel coat. The one who looks like Red Riding Hood, with her rosy cheeks and her blameless air. Would you believe that she is not what she seems? That beneath that cloak of innocence beats the heart of a predator? Looking at her, would you ever think that she could take a person’s life?

You wouldn’t, would you? Well, think again.

But nothing’s going to happen to me. I’ve thought this out too carefully. And when it does go up — as we know it must — blueeyedboy will be half a world away, sitting in the shade by a beach, listening to the sound of the surf and watching the seagulls overhead —

Still, that’s for tomorrow, isn’t it? Right now I have other things on my mind. Time for another fic, I think. I like myself better as a fictional character. The third-person voice adds distance, says Clair; gives me the power to say what I like. And it’s nice to have an audience. Even a murderer loves praise. Maybe that’s why I write these things. It certainly isn’t a need to confess. But I do admit to a leap of the heart every time someone posts a comment, even someone like Chryssie or Cap, who wouldn’t know genius if it poked them in the eye.

I sometimes feel like a king of cats, presiding over an army of mice — half-predatory, half in need of those worshipful voices. It’s all about approval, you see, and when I log on in the morning and see the list of messages waiting for me I feel absurdly comforted —

Losers, victims, parasites — and yet I can’t stop myself from collecting them, as I do my orchids; as I once collected scuttling things in my blue bucket on the beach; as I was once collected.

Yes, it’s time for another murder. A public post on my WeJay, to balance these private reflections of mine. Better still, a murderer. Because, although I say he —

You and I know this is all about me.

5

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 03:56 on Tuesday, January 29

Status: public

Mood: sick

Listening to: Nick Lowe: ‘The Beast In Me’

Most accidents occur in the home. He knows this only too well; has spent much of his childhood avoiding those things that might potentially do him harm. The playground with its swings and roundabouts, and the litter of needles along the edge. The fishpond with its muddy banks on which a small boy might so easily slip, to be dragged to his death in the weedy depths. Bikes that might spill him on to the tarmac to skin his knees and hands — or worse, under the wheels of a bus, to be skinned all over like an orange and left in segments on the road. Other children, who might not understand how special he is, how susceptible — nasty boys who might bloody his nose, nasty girls who might break his heart —

Accidents happen so easily.

That’s why, if there’s anything he should know by now, it’s how to create an accident. Maybe a car accident, he thinks, or a fall down a flight of stairs, or a simple, homely electrical fire. But how do you cause an accident — a fatal accident, of course — to happen to someone who doesn’t drive, who doesn’t indulge in dangerous sports, and whose idea of a wild night out is popping into town with her friends (they always pop, they never just go), for gossip and a glass of wine?

It isn’t that he fears the act. What he fears are the consequences. He knows the police will call him in. He knows he will be a suspect, however accidental the deed, and he will have to answer to them, to plead his innocence, to convince them that it isn’t his fault —

That’s why he has to choose his time. There can be no margin of error. He knows that murder is a lot like sex: some people know how to take their time; to enjoy the rituals of seduction, rejection, reconciliation; the joy of suspense; the thrill of the chase. But most of them just need to see it done; to get the need of it out of themselves as quickly as they possibly can; to distance themselves from the horrors of that intimacy; to know release above all things.

Great lovers know it’s not about that.

Great murderers know it, too.

Not that he is a great murderer. Just an aspiring amateur. With no established modus operandi, he feels like an unknown artist who yet has to find a style of his own. That’s one of the hardest things to do — for an artist or for a murderer. Murder, like all acts of self-affirmation, requires a tremendous self-confidence. And he still feels like a novice: shy; uncertain; protective of his talents and hesitant to make himself known. In spite of it all, he is vulnerable; fearing not just the act itself, but also the reception it may have to endure; those people who will, inevitably, judge, condemn and misunderstand —

And of course, he hates her. He would never have planned it otherwise; he is no Dostoyevskian killer, acting at random and thoughtlessly. He hates her with a passion that he has never felt for anything else; a passion that blooms within him like blood; that sweeps him away on a bitter blue wave —

He wonders what it would be like. To be free of her for once and for all; free of the presence that envelops him. To be free of her voice, of her face, of her ways. But he is afraid, and untested; and so he plans the act with care, selecting his subject (he refuses to use the word victim) according to the rules, preparing it all with the neatness and precision that he extends to all things —

An accident. That’s all it was.

A most unfortunate accident.

To challenge the boundaries, he understands, you first have to learn to follow the rules. To approach such an act, one has to train, to hone one’s art on some baser element, just as a sculptor works in clay — discarding anything that is not perfect, repeating the experiment until the desired result is achieved — before creating the masterpiece. It would be naïve, he tells himself, to expect great things of his first attempt. Like sex, like art, the first time is often inelegant, clumsy and embarrassing. He has prepared himself for this. His aim is merely not to be caught. It has to be an accident — and his relationship with the subject must, though real, be distant enough to defy those who will come looking for him.

You see, he thinks like a murderer. He feels its glamour in his heart. He would never harm someone who does not already deserve to die. He may be bad, but he is not unfair. Nor is he degenerate. He will not be a commonplace, bludgeoning, thoughtless, messy, remorse-sodden killer. So many people die futile deaths — but in her case, at least, there will be reason, order and — yes, a kind of justice. One less parasite on the world, making it a better place.

A strident call from downstairs intrudes upon the fantasy. He feels an annoying tremor of guilt. She hardly ever comes into his room. Besides, why should she climb the stairs when she knows that a call will bring him down?

‘Who’s there?’ she says.

‘No one, Ma.’

‘I heard a noise.’

‘I’m working online.’

‘Talking to your imaginary friends?’

Imaginary friends. That’s good, Ma.

Ma. The sound a baby makes, the sound of sickness, of lying in bed; a feeble, milky, helpless sound that makes him feel like screaming.

‘Well, come on down. It’s time for your drink.’

‘Hang on. I’ll be right there.’

Murder. Mother. Such similar words. Matriarch. Matricide. Parasite. Parricide, something used to get rid of parasites. All of them coloured in shades of blue, like the blue of the blanket she tucked around his bed every night when he was a boy, and smelling of ether and hot milk —

Night night. Sleep tight.

Every boy loves his mother, he thinks. And his mother loves him so much. So much I could swallow you up, B.B. And maybe she has, because that’s how it feels, as if something has swallowed him, something slow but relentless, something inescapable, sucking him down into the belly of the beast —

Swallow. There’s a blue word. Flying south, into the blue. And it smells of the sea and tastes like tears, and it makes him think of that bucket again, and the poor, trapped, scuttling things dying slowly in the sun —

She’s so proud of him, she says; of his job; of his intellect; of his gift. Gift means poison in German, you know. Beware of Germans bearing gifts. Beware of swallows flying south. South to the islands of his dreams: to the blue Azores, the Galapagos, Tahiti and Hawaii —

Hawaii. Awayyy. The southernmost edge of his mental map, scented with distant spices. Not that he’s ever been there, of course. But he likes the lullaby lilt of the word, a name that sounds like laughter. White sands and palm beaches and blue skies fat with fair-weather clouds. The scent of plumeria. Pretty girls in coloured sarongs with flowers in their long hair —

But really, he knows he’ll never fly south. His mother, for all her ambitions, has never been a traveller. She likes her small world, her fantasy, the life she has carved for them piece by piece into the rock of suburbia. She will never leave, he knows; clinging to him, the last of her sons, like a barnacle, a parasite —

‘Hey!’ She calls to him from downstairs: ‘Are you coming down, or what? I thought you said you were coming down.’

‘Yes, I’m coming down, Ma.’

Of course I am. I always do. Would I ever lie to you?

And the plunge of despair as he goes downstairs into the parlour that smells of some kind of cheap fruit-flavoured air-freshener — grapefruit, maybe, or tangerine — is like going down into the belly of some huge, fetid, dying animal: a dinosaur or a beached blue whale. And the smell of synthetic citrus makes him almost want to gag —

‘Come in here. I’ve got your drink.’

She’s sitting in the kitchenette, arms folded across her chest, feet camel-backed in her high heels. For a moment he is surprised, as always, at how very small she is. He always imagines her larger, somehow; but she is smaller than he is by far, except for her hands, which are surprisingly large compared to the bird-bony rest of her, the knuckles misshapen, not just with arthritis, but with the rings she has collected over the years — a sovereign, a diamond cluster, a Campari-coloured tourmaline, a piece of polished malachite and a flat blue sapphire gated with gold.

Her voice is at the same time both brittle and oddly penetrating. ‘You look terrible, B.B.,’ she says. ‘You’re not coming down with something, are you?’ She says coming down with a certain suspicion, as if he has brought it on himself.

‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ he says.

‘You need to take your vitamin drink.’

‘Ma, I’m fine.’

‘It’ll do you good. Go on — take it,’ she says. ‘You know what happens when you don’t.’

And take it he does, as he always does, and its taste is a murky, rotten mess, like fruit and shit in equal parts. And she looks at him with that terrible look of tenderness in her dark eyes, and kisses him gently on the cheek. The scent of her perfume — L’Heure Bleue — envelops him like a blanket.

‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while? Get some sleep before tonight? They work you so hard at that hospital, it’s a crime they get away with it—’

And now he’s really feeling sick, and he thinks that maybe he will lie down, go back to bed and lie down with the blanket pulled around his head, because nothing could be worse than this; this feeling of drowning in tenderness —

‘See?’ she says. ‘Ma knows best.’

Ma-ternal. Ma-stiff. Ma-stodon. The words swim around inside his head like piranhas scenting blood. It hurts, but he already knows that it will hurt much more later; already the edges of things are garlanded with rainbows that in the next minutes will blossom and swell, driving a spike into his skull just behind his left eye —

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ his mother says. ‘Shall I sit beside you?’

‘No.’ The pain is bad enough, he thinks, but her presence would be so much worse. He forces a smile. ‘I just need to sleep. I’ll be fine in an hour or two.’

And then he turns and goes upstairs, holding on to the banisters, the filthy taste of the vitamin drink lost in a sudden surge of pain, and he almost falls, but does not, knowing that if he falls, she will come, and she will stay at his bedside for hours or days, for as long as the terrible headache lasts —

He collapses on to his unmade bed. There is no escape, he tells himself. This is the verdict. Guilty as charged. And now he must take his medicine, as he has done every day of his life; medicine to purge him of bad thoughts, a cure for what’s hidden inside him —

Night night. Sleep tight.

Sweet dreams, blueeyedboy. 34

Post comment:

chrysalisbaby: wow this is awesome

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

ClairDeLune: This is quite intriguing, blueeyedboy. Would you say it represents your true inner dialogue, or is it a character portrait you’re planning to develop at some later stage? In any case, I’d love to read more!

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

6

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 22.40 on Tuesday, January 29

Status: restricted

Mood: vitriolic

Listening to: Voltaire: ‘When You’re Evil’

The perfect crime comes in four separate stages. Stage One: identification of the subject. Stage Two: observation of the subject’s daily routine. Stage Three: infiltration. Stage Four: action.

So far there’s no hurry, of course. She is barely a Stage Two. Walking past the house each day, the collar of her bright red coat turned up against the cold.

Red isn’t her colour, of course — but I don’t expect her to know that. She doesn’t know how I like to watch: noting the details of her dress; the way the wind catches her hair; the way she walks with such precision, marking her passage with almost imperceptible touches. A hand against this wall, here; brushing against this yew hedge; pausing to lift her face to the sound of schoolchildren playing in the yard. Winter has stripped the leaves from the trees, and on dry days their percussion underfoot still smells dimly of fireworks. I know she thinks that too; I know how she likes to walk in the park with its alleys and walled gardens and listen to the sound of the naked trees shushing to themselves in the wind. I know how she turns her face to the sky, mouth open to catch the droplets of rain. I know the unguarded look of her; the way her mouth twists when she is upset; the turn of her head when she listens; the way her face tilts towards a scent.

She notices scents especially: lingers in front of the bakery. Eyes closed, she likes to stand by the door and catch the aroma of warm bread. I wish I could talk to her openly, but Ma’s spies are everywhere; watching; reporting; examining . . .

One of these is Eleanor Vine, who called round early this evening. Ostensibly to check on Ma, but really to enquire after me, to search for signs of grief or guilt in the wake of my brother’s death; to sniff out what was happening at home, and to collect any news that was going.

Every village has one. The local do-gooder. The busybody. The one to whom everyone applies when in need of information. Eleanor Vine is Malbry’s: a poisonous toady who currently forms part of the toxic triumvirate that makes up my mother’s retinue. I suppose I ought to feel privileged. Mrs Vine rarely leaves her house, viewing the world through net curtains, occasionally condescending to welcome others into her immaculate sanctum for biscuits, tea and vitriol. She has a niece called Terri, who goes to my writing-as-therapy class. Mrs Vine thinks that Terri and I would make a charming couple. I think that Mrs Vine would make an even more charming corpse.

Today she was all sweetness. ‘You look exhausted, B.B.,’ she said, greeting me in the hushed voice of one addressing an invalid. ‘I hope you’re taking care of yourself.’

It is common knowledge in the Village that Eleanor Vine is something of a hypochondriac, taking twenty kinds of pills and disinfecting incessantly. Over twenty years ago, Ma used to clean her house, though now Eleanor reserves that privilege for herself, and can often be seen through her kitchen window, Marigolds on standby, polishing the fruit in the cut-glass dish that stands on the kitchen table, a mixture of joy and anxiety on her thin, discoloured face.

My iPod was playing a song from one of my current playlists. Through the earpiece, Voltaire’s darkly satirical voice expounded the various virtues of vice to the melancholy counterpoint of a gypsy violin.

‘I’m quite all right, Mrs Vine,’ I said.

‘Not sickening for anything?’

I shook my head. ‘Not even a cold.’

‘Because bereavement can do that, you know,’ she said. ‘Old Mr Marshall got pneumonia four weeks after his poor wife passed on. Dead before the headstone went up. The Examiner called it a double tragedy.’

I had to smile at the thought of myself pining away for Nigel.

‘I hear they’re missing you at your class.’

That killed the smile. ‘Oh yes? Who says?’

‘People talk,’ said Eleanor.

I’ll bet they do. Toxic old cow. Spying on me for Ma, I don’t doubt. And now, thanks to Terri, a spy for my writing-as-therapy class, that little circle of parasites and headcases with whom I share — in supposed confidence — the details of my troubled life.

‘I’ve been preoccupied,’ I said.

She gave me a look of sympathy. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It must be hard. And what about Gloria? Is she all right?’ She glanced around the parlour, alert for any telltale sign — a smear of dust on the mantelpiece, a speck on any one of Ma’s collection of china dogs — to suggest that Ma might be cracking up.

‘Oh, you know. She manages.’

‘I brought her a little something,’ she said, handing me a paper bag. ‘It’s a supplement I sometimes use when I’m feeling under the weather.’ She gave her vinegary smile. ‘Looks like you could do with some yourself. Have you been in a fight, or something?’

‘Who, me?’ I shook my head.

‘No. Of course,’ said Eleanor.

No, of course. As if I would. As if Gloria Winter’s boy could ever be involved in a fight. Everyone thinks they know me. Everyone’s an authority. And it always irks me a little to think that she, like Ma, would never believe the tenth of what I am capable —

‘Oh, Eleanor, love, you should have come through!’ That was Ma, emerging from the kitchen with a tea-towel in one hand and a vegetable peeler in the other. ‘I was just making him his vitamin drink. D’you want some tea while you’re here?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘I just popped in to see how you were.’

‘Holding up all right,’ said Ma. ‘B.B.’s looking after me.’

Ouch. That was below the belt. But Ma is very proud of me. A taste like that of rotten fruit slowly crept into my mouth. Rotten fruit mixed with salt, like a cocktail of juice and sea water. From my iPod, Voltaire declaimed with murderous exuberance:

Eleanor gave me a sidelong glance. ‘He must be such a comfort, love.’ She turned once more to look at me. ‘I don’t know how you can hear a word we’re saying with that thing in your ear. Don’t you ever take it out?’

If I could have killed her then, right then, without risk, I would have snapped her neck like a stick of Blackpool rock without so much as a tremor of guilt — but as it was I had to smile so hard it made my fillings ache, and to take out one of my iPod plugs, and to promise to go back to my class next week, where everyone is missing me —

‘What did she mean, go back to your class? Have you been skipping sessions again?’

‘No, Ma. Just the one.’ I did not quite dare meet her eyes.

‘Those classes are for your own good. I don’t want to hear you’re skipping them.’

Of course, I should have known that sooner or later she would find out. With friends like Eleanor Vine, her net covers all of Malbry. Besides, I quite enjoy my class, which gives me the chance to disseminate all kinds of misinformation —

‘Besides, it helps you cope with stress.’

If only you knew, Ma.

‘OK, I’ll go.’

7

You are viewing the WebJournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 01.44 on Wednesday, January 30

Status: restricted

Mood: creative

Listening to: Breaking Benjamin: ‘Breath’

Most accidents occur in the home. I’m guessing that’s how I came about; one of three boys, all born within five years. Nigel, then Brendan, then Benjamin, though by then she’d stopped using our real names, and I was always B.B.

Benjamin. It’s a Hebrew name. It means Son Of My Right Hand. Not so very flattering, really, when you consider what guys actually do with their right hand. But then, the man we knew as Dad was hardly a dutiful father. Only Nigel remembered him, and then only as a series of vague impressions: a big voice; a rough face; a scent of beer and cigarettes. Or maybe that’s memory doing what it does sometimes, filling in the gaps with plausible detail while the rest turns over in darkness, like a spindle laden with black sheep’s wool.

Not that Nigel was the black sheep — all of that came later. But he was destined to always wear black, and with time, it affected his character. Ma worked as a cleaner in those days: dusting and vacuuming rich people’s homes, doing their laundry, ironing their clothes, washing their dishes and polishing their floors. Time spent on our own house was unpaid work, and so of course it took second place. Not that she was slovenly. But time was always an issue with her, and had to be saved at every turn.

And so, with three sons so close to each other in age and so much laundry to do every week, she hit upon an ingenious system. To ensure that items could be easily identified, she allocated to each of her sons a colour, and bought our clothes accordingly from the local Oxfam shop. Thus Nigel wore shades of charcoal, even down to his underwear; Brendan always wore brown and Benjamin —

Well, I’m sure you can guess.

Of course, it never crossed her mind what such a decision might do to us. Colours make a difference; any hospital worker can tell you that. That’s why the cancer unit in the hospital where I work is painted in cheery shades of pink; the waiting rooms in soothing green; the maternity wards in Easter-chick yellow —

But Ma never really understood the secret power of colours. To Ma, it was just a practical means of sorting laundry. Ma never asked herself what it might be like to have to wear the same colour day in, day out: boring brown or gloomy black or beautiful, wide-eyed, fairy-tale blue —

But then, Ma always was different. Some boy’s mothers are sugar and spice. Mine was — well — she was something else.

Born Gloria Beverley Green, the third child of a factory girl and a steelworker, Ma spent her childhood in Malbry town, in the maze of little brick terraces known locally as Red City. Washing strung across the streets; soot on every surface; cobbled alleyways leading to nothing but blind and litter-lined spray-painted walls.

Ambitious even then, she dreamed of far pavilions, distant shores and working girls rescued by millionaires. Even now, Ma believes in true love, in the lottery, in self-help books, in boosting your word power, in magazine columns and agony aunts and TV advertisements in which the floors are always clean and women always worth it —

Of course, she was neither imaginative nor particularly bright — she left school with only five CSEs — but Gloria Green was determined enough to compensate for her failings, and instead turned all of her considerable willpower and energy towards finding a means of escape from the grime and small-mindedness of Red City into that TV world of clean babies and shiny floors and numbers that can change your life.

It wasn’t easy, keeping the faith. Red City was all she had ever known. A rat trap, that lures you in, but seldom lets you out again. Her friends all married in their teens; found jobs, had kids. Gloria stayed with her parents, helping her mother keep house and waiting day after tedious day for a prince who never came.

Finally she gave in. Chris Moxon was a friend of her dad’s; he ran a fish-and-chip shop and lived on the edge of White City. He wasn’t exactly Catch of the Day — being older and balder than she’d planned — but he was kind and attentive, and by then she was getting desperate. She married him at All Saints’ Church in white tulle and carnations, and for a while she almost believed that she had somehow escaped the rat trap —

But she found that the smell of frying fat crept into everything she owned — her dresses, her stockings, even her shoes. And however many Marlboros she smoked, however much scent she dabbed on to her skin, there was always that stink — his stink — underlying everything; and she realized that she hadn’t escaped the rat trap, she had simply fallen deeper inside.

Then she met Peter Winter at a Christmas party later that year. He worked at a local car dealership and drove a BMW. Heady stuff for Gloria Green, embarking on her first affair with the coolness of a professional poker player. Certainly, the stakes were high. Gloria’s Pa thought the world of Chris. But Peter Winter looked promising: he was solvent, ambitious, untroubled, unwed. He spoke of moving out of White City; of finding a house in the Village, perhaps —

It was good enough for Gloria. She made him her personal project. Within twelve months she was divorced, and pregnant with her first child. She swore that the boy was Peter’s, of course, and when she was able, she married him, in spite of her family’s protests.

This time, there was no fanfare. Gloria had shamed them all. No one attended the ceremony, which was held on a dismal November day at the local Register Office. And when things started to fall apart — when Peter started drinking, when the dealership went broke — Gloria’s parents refused to back down, or even to see the little boy that she’d named after her father —

But Gloria was undaunted. She took an evening job in town, as well as her daily cleaning shift; and when she became pregnant again she hid it, wearing a girdle right up until the eighth month, so that she could keep earning money. When her second son was born she took in mending work and ironing too, so that the house was always filled with the steam and the smell of other people’s washing. The dream of a house in the Village had become increasingly remote; but at least in White City there were schools, and a park for the kids, and a job at the local laundrette. Things looked good for Gloria, and she faced her new life with optimism.

But two years of unemployment had wrought a change in Peter Winter. Once a charmer, now he’d grown fat, spending his days in front of the TV, smoking Camels and drinking beer. Gloria was carrying him, much to her resentment; and unbeknownst to her, by then she was pregnant once again.

I never knew my real father. Ma seldom spoke of him. He was handsome, though. I have his eyes. I think Gloria secretly thought that he might turn out to be her ticket out of White City. But Mr Blue Eyes had other ideas, and by the time Ma learnt the truth, her ship had sailed for sunnier shores, leaving her to weather the storm.

No one knows how Peter found out. Perhaps he saw them together somewhere. Perhaps someone talked. Perhaps he just guessed. But Nigel remembered the night he left — or at least, he said he did, though he can’t have been five years old at the time. A night of broken crockery, of shouted oaths, of insults — and then the sound of the car starting, the slammed door, the squeal of rubber on the road — a sound that to me always conjures up the smell of fresh popcorn and cinema seats. Then, later, the crash, the broken glass, the howl of sirens in the air —

Of course Nigel never heard all that. That was the way she told it, though; that was Ma’s version of the tale. Peter Winter took three weeks to die, leaving his widow pregnant and alone. But Gloria Green was tough. She found a childminder in White City and simply worked harder, pushed herself more, and when she left her job at last, two weeks before the baby was due, her employers took a collection that raised a total of forty-two pounds. Gloria spent some of it on a washing machine and banked the rest, to make it last. She was still only twenty-seven.

At this point I think I might have gone home to my parents. She had no job, hardly any savings, no friends. Her looks, too, had begun to fade, and little remained of the Gloria Green who had left Red City with such high hopes. But to crawl back to her family — defeated, with two children, a baby and no husband — was unthinkable. And so she stayed in White City. She worked from home; looked after her sons; washed and ironed and mended and cleaned, while all the time she was searching for another escape, even as her youth left her and White City closed around her like a drowning man’s arms.

And then Ma had a stroke of luck. Peter’s insurance paid out. Turns out he was worth more dead than he’d ever been worth alive; and finally, Ma had some money. Not enough — there was never enough — but now she could see a light ahead. And that piece of good fortune had come along just as her youngest entered the world, making him her lucky charm; her chance at the winning ticket.

In certain parts of the world, you know, blue eyes are thought to be bad luck, the sign of a demon in disguise. But to carry a blue-eye talisman — a glass bead on a piece of string — is to divert the path of malchance, to send back evil to its source; to banish demons to their lair and to bring good fortune in their place —

Ma, with her love of TV drama, believed in easy solutions. Fiction works to formula. The victim is always a pretty girl. And the answers are always right under your nose, to be revealed in the penultimate scene: by accident, or perhaps by a child — tying up all the loose ends in a pretty birthday-party bow.

Life, of course, is different. Life is nothing but loose ends. And sometimes the thread that seemed to lead so clearly into the heart of the labyrinth turns out to be nothing but tangled string, leaving us alone in the dark, afraid and consumed with the growing belief that the real action is still going on somewhere without us, just around the corner —

So much for luck. I came very close. Almost close enough to touch before it was taken away from me. It wasn’t my fault. But still she blames me. And ever since, I have tried to be everything she expects of me; and still it’s never quite enough, never enough for Gloria Green —

Is that what you feel? says Clair, from Group. Don’t you think you’re good enough?

Bitch. Don’t even go there.

You’re not the first to try it, you know. You women, with your questions. You think it’s so easy to judge cause and effect, to analyse and to excuse. Do you think you can fit me into one of your little boxes, a neatly labelled specimen? That, armed with a few choice details, you can pencil in the rest of my soul?

Not much chance of that here, ClairDeLune. You people really have nothing on me. You think I’m new to this game? I’ve been in and out of groups like yours for the greater part of twenty years. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of fun: recalling childhood incidents; inventing dreams, spinning straw into fantasy —

In this way, Clair has come to believe that she knows the man behind the avatar. Fat Chryssie — aka chrysalisbaby — also thinks she understands. In actual fact, I know more about them than they could ever know about me; knowledge that may come in useful some day if ever I choose to exploit it.

Clair thinks she is trying to help me. I think she is in denial. Clair’s therapeutic writing class is really nothing but a disguised attempt at amateur psychoanalysis. And Clair’s online fascination for all things damned and dangerous suggests that she, too, feels damaged. I’m guessing an early experience of abuse, perhaps by a family member. Her fixation with the actor Angel Blue — a man so much older than herself — suggests that she may have daddy issues. Well, of course, I can sympathize. But it’s hardly reassuring in a lecturer. Plus it makes her so vulnerable. I hope it doesn’t end in tears.

As for Fat Chryssie’s interest in me — it seems to be purely romantic. Well, it makes a change from her usual posts, which normally consist of a series of lists detailing her calorie consumption — Diet Coke: 1.5 cals; Skinny Cow: 90 cals; nacho chips, lo-fat cheese: prolly about 300 cals — punctuated by agonizing monologues on how ugly she feels, or interminable pictures of skinny, fragile Goth girls that she refers to as thinspiration.

Sometimes she posts pictures of herself — always body shots, never the face — taken on a mobile phone in front of the bathroom mirror, and encourages people to rant at her. Very few indulge her in this (with the exception of Cap, who hates fatties), but some of the other girls leave ana — love, or saccharine messages of support — Babe, you’re doing great. Stay strong! — or half-baked advice about dieting.

Thus Chryssie has acquired an almost evangelical faith in the properties of green tea as a metabolism booster, and in ‘negative calorie foods’ (which to her mind include carrots, broccoli, blueberries, asparagus and many other things that she rarely eats). Her avatar is a manga drawing of a little girl dressed in black with butterfly wings growing out of her shoulders, and her signature line — at the same time hopeful and unutterably sad — reads: One day I’ll be lighter than air . . .

Well, maybe she will. There’s always hope. But not all Body Freaks die thin. Maybe she’ll end up as some of them do, dead of a stroke or a heart attack on the porcelain phone to God.

One of her online friends — Azurechild — has been urging her to try something called syrup of ipecac. It’s a well-known purgative, with potentially fatal side effects, but which causes rapid weight loss. Of course it’s irresponsible, one might say downright criminal, to encourage someone with Chryssie’s weight problem, and with her already weakened heart, to take such a dangerous substance.

Still, it’s her choice, isn’t it? No one is forcing her to take the advice. We do not create these situations. All we do is hit the keys. Control. Alt. Delete. Gone. A fatal error. An accident —

So — How Well Do You Think You Know Me Now?

That’s this week’s meme, posted by Clair, snagged by Chryssie, who always tags me, like a child in a crowded playground trying to summon a circle of friends.

Clair and Chryssie, like so many of our online clan, are addicted to memes: Internet chain-letters, whose purpose is to simulate interest and conversation, often in the form of a questionnaire. Sweeping the Net like a schoolyard craze — Post three facts about yourself! What did you dream about last night? — passing from one person to another, disseminating information both useful and otherwise; these things behave like viruses, some going global, some dying out, some ending up on badguysrock, where talking about oneself — Me! Me! — is always a popular pastime.

When tagged, I tend to reciprocate. Not because I enjoy self-promotion, but I find these exercises intriguing for what they reveal — or not — about the recipient. The questions — to be answered at speed — are designed to create the illusion of intimacy, and to answer them correctly sometimes requires a level of detail that might challenge even the closest friend.

Thanks to this medium I know that Chryssie has a cat called Chloë and likes to wear pink socks in bed; that Cap’s favourite film is Kill Bill, but that he despises Kill Bill 2; that Toxic likes black girls with big breasts; and that ClairDeLune likes modern jazz and has a collection of ceramic frogs.

Of course, you don’t have to tell the truth. And yet, so many people do. The details are designed to be trivial enough to make the lie seem unnecessary — and yet, from those details a picture emerges, the little things that make up a life —

For instance, I know that Clair’s computer password is clairlovesangel. It’s her hotmail password too, which means that now I can open her mailbox. It’s so easy to do these things online; and fragments of gleaned information — names of pets, children’s birth dates, mothers’ maiden names — all make it so much easier. Armed with such seemingly innocuous data, I can access more intimate things. Bank details. Credit cards. It’s like nitrogen and glycerine. Each fairly harmless on its own, but pair the two together, and — Wham!

Tagged by chrysalisbaby posting on badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at : 12:54 on Tuesday, January 29

If you were an animal, what would you be? A rat.

Favourite smell? Petrol.

Tea or coffee? Coffee. Black.

Favourite flavour of ice cream? Bitter chocolate.

What are you wearing right now? A dark-blue hooded top, jeans, blue Converses.

What are you afraid of? Heights.

What’s the last thing you bought? Music for my iPod.

What’s the last thing you ate? A toasted sandwich.

Favourite sound? Surf on the beach.Siblings? None.

What do you wear in bed? Pyjamas.

What’s your pet hate? The slogan ‘Because I’m worth it.’ Because you’re not, and you know it —

Your worst trait? I’m devious, manipulative, and a liar.

Any scars or tattoos? A scar across my upper lip. Another on my eyebrow.

Any recurring dreams? No.

Where would you most like to be right now? Hawaii.

There’s a fire in your house. What would you save? Nothing. I’d let it all burn.

When did you last cry? Last night — and no, I won’t tell you why . . .

See how you think you know me?

As if you could possibly form a judgement on the basis of how I drink my coffee, or whether I wear pyjamas in bed. In fact, I drink tea, and I sleep naked. Has that changed your impression of me? Would it have made a difference if I’d told you that I never cry? That my childhood was bad? That I’ve never been outside of a hundred-mile radius of the place where I was born? That I’m afraid of physical violence, that I suffer from migraines, that I hate myself?

Some — or all — of those things might be true. All or none of the above. Albertine knows some of the truth, although she rarely comments here, and her WeJay is password-protected so that no one can read her private posts —

But Chryssie will study my answers with care. She will establish a profile from my replies. There’s more than enough to intrigue her there, plus there’s a hint of vulnerability, which will counterbalance the veiled aggression to which she responds so readily.

And I do come across as a bad guy — but I may be redeemable, through love. Who knows? It happens in movies all the time. And Chryssie lives in a rose-tinted world in which a fat girl may find true love with a killer in need of tenderness —

Of course it isn’t the real world. I save all that for my writing group. But I like myself so much better as a fictional character. Besides, who is to say that what she sees isn’t some fragmentary part of the truth — truth, like an onion, layer upon layer of tissue and skin, wrapped tightly round something that brings tears to your eyes?

Tell me about yourself, she says.

That’s how it always starts, you know, with some woman — some girl — assuming she knows the best way to mine the motherlode at the centre of me.

Motherlode. Mother. Load. Sounds like something you’d carry about — a heavy burden, a punishment —

So let’s begin with your mother, she says.

My mother? Are you really sure?

See how quickly she takes the bait. Because every boy loves his mother, right? And every woman secretly knows that the only way to win a man’s heart is, first of all, to dispose of Ma —

8

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 18:20 on Wednesday, January 30

Status: public

Mood: vibrant

Listening to: Electric Light Orchestra: ‘Mr Blue Sky’

He calls her Mrs Electric Blue. Appliances are her thing: novelty door-chimes, CD players, juicers, steamers and microwaves. You have to wonder what she does with so many; her guest bedroom alone contains nine boxes of obsolete hairdryers, curling tongs, foot spas, kitchen blenders, electric blankets, video recorders, shower radios and telephones.

She never throws anything away, keeping them ‘for parts’, she says, although she belongs to that generation of women for whom technical ineptitude counts as a charming sign of feminine fragility rather than just laziness, and he knows for a fact that she hasn’t a clue. She is a parasite, he thinks, useless and manipulative, and no one will grieve very much for her, least of all her family.

He recognizes her voice at once. He has been working part-time in an electrical repair shop a couple of miles from where she lives. An old-fashioned place, rather obsolete now, its small front window packed with ailing TVs and vacuum cleaners, and dusty with the grey confetti of moths who have flown in there to die. She calls him out on his mobile number — at four on a Friday afternoon, no less — to look over her menagerie of dead appliances.

She is pushing fifty-five by now, but can look older or younger according to necessity. Ash-blonde hair, green eyes, good legs, a fluttering, almost girlish manner that can change to contempt at a moment’s notice — and she likes the company of nice young men.

A nice young man. Well, that’s what he is. Slim in his denim overalls, angular face, slightly over-long brown hair and eyes of that luminous, striking grey-blue. Not the stuff of magazines, but nice enough for Mrs Electric Blue — and besides, at her age, he thinks, she can’t afford to be particular.

She tells him at once that she is divorced. She makes him a cup of Earl Grey tea, complains about the cost of living, sighs deeply at her solitude — and at the gross neglect of her son, who works down in the City somewhere, and eventually, with the air of one about to confer an enormous privilege, offers him her collection for cash.

The stuff is totally worthless, of course. He says so as gently as he can, explaining that old electrical goods are fit for nothing but landfill now, that most of her collection doesn’t conform to present safety standards, and how his boss will kill him if he pays as much as a tenner for it.

‘Really, Mrs B.,’ he says. ‘The best I can do is dump it for you. I’ll take it down to the rubbish tip. The council would charge you, but I’ve got the van—’

She stares at him with suspicion. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Only trying to help,’ he says.

‘Well, if that’s the case, young man,’ she says in a voice that is crystalline with frost, ‘you can help by taking a look at my washing machine. I think it’s blocked — it hasn’t drained for nearly a week—’

He protests. ‘I’m due at another job—’

‘I think it’s the least you can do,’ she says.

Of course, he gives in. She knows he will. Her voice still has that blend of disdain and vulnerability, of helplessness and authority, that he finds irresistible . . .

The drive-belt has slipped, that’s all. He unbolts the drum, replaces the belt, wipes his hands on his overalls, and in the reflection from the glass door he sees her watching him.

She may have been attractive once. Now you’d call it well-preserved; a phrase his mother sometimes uses, and which to him conjures up images of formaldehyde jars and Egyptian mummies. And now he knows she is watching him with a strangely proprietary look; he can feel her eyes like soldering irons pressing into the small of his back — an appraising glance as careless as it is predatory.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he says, turning his head to meet her gaze.

She gives him that imperious look.

‘My mother used to clean your house.’

‘Did she really?’ The tone of her voice is meant to suggest that she couldn’t possibly remember all the people who have worked for her. But for a moment she seems to recall something, at least — her eyes narrow and her eyebrows — plucked into insignificance, then redrawn in brown pencil half an inch above where they should be — twitch in something like distress.

‘She used to bring me with her, sometimes.’

‘My God.’ She stares at him. ‘Blueeyedboy?’

He’s killed it now with that, of course. She’ll never look at him again. Not in that way, anyhow — her languid gaze moving down his back, gauging the distance between the nape of his neck and the base of his spine, checking out the taut curve of his ass in those faded blue overalls. Now she can see him — four years old, hair undarkened by the passage of time — and suddenly the weight of years drops back on her like a wet winter coat and she’s old, so terribly old —

He grins. ‘I think that’s fixed it,’ he says.

‘I’ll pay you something, of course,’ she says — too quickly, to hide her embarrassment — as if she believes he works for free, as if this might be some kind gesture of hers that will put him for ever in her debt.

But they both know what she’s paying him for. Guilt — maybe simple, but never pure, ageless and tireless and bittersweet.

Poor old Mrs B., he thinks.

And so he thanks her nicely, accepts another cup of lukewarm and vaguely fishy tea, and finally leaves with the certainty that he will be seeing a lot more of Mrs Electric Blue in the days and weeks to come.

Everyone’s guilty of something, of course. Not all of them deserve to die. But sometimes karma comes home to roost, and an act of God may sometimes require the touch of a helping human hand. And anyway, it’s not his fault. She calls him back a dozen times — to wire a plug, to change a fuse, to replace the batteries in her camera, and most recently, to set up her new PC (God only knows why she needs one, she’s going to die in a week or two), which prompts a flurry of urgent calls, which in their turn precipitate his current decision to remove her from the face of the earth.

It isn’t really personal. Some people just deserve to die — whether through evil, malice, guilt or, as in the present case, because she called him blueeyedboy —

Most accidents occur in the home. Easy enough to set one up — and yet, somehow he hesitates. Not because he is afraid — although he is, most terribly — but simply because he wants to watch. He toys with the idea of hiding a camera close to the scene of the crime, but it’s a vanity he can ill afford, and he discards the scheme (not without regret), and instead contemplates the method to use. Understand: he is very young. He believes in poetic justice. He would like her death to be somehow symbolic — electrocution, perhaps, from a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, or from one of the vibrators that she keeps in her bathroom cabinet (two of them modestly flesh-toned, the third a disquieting purple), amongst the bottles of lotions and pills.

For a moment he is almost seduced. But he knows that elaborate plans rarely work, and firmly dismissing the beguiling image of Mrs Electric Blue pleasuring herself into the grave with the aid of one of her own appliances, on his next visit he sets up the makings of a dull but efficient little electrical fire, and gets back home in time for a snack in front of the TV. While meanwhile, in another street, Mrs Electric gets ready for bed (with or without her purple pal), and dies there sometime during the night, probably of smoke inhalation, he thinks, although, of course, one can only hope —

The police call by the following day. He tells them how he tried to help, how every appliance in the house was some kind of accident waiting to happen, how she was always overloading the sockets with her junk, how all it might take was a little surge —

In fact, he finds them ludicrous. His guilt, he thinks, should be plain for them to see, and yet they do not; but sit on the couch and drink his mother’s tea and talk to him quite nicely, as if trying not to cause him distress, while his mother watches suspiciously, alert for any hint of blame.

‘I hope you’re not saying that was his fault. He works hard. He’s a good boy.’

He hides a smile behind his hand. He is trembling with fear, but now laughter overwhelms him, and he has to fake a panic attack before someone realizes that the pale young man with the blue eyes is actually laughing fit to split —

Later, he can pinpoint the moment. It is a thunderous sensation, something like orgasm, something like grace. The colours around him brighten, expand; words take on dazzling new shades; scents are enhanced; he shivers and sobs and the world blisters and cracks like paint, revealing the light of eternity —

The female PC (there’s always one) offers him a handkerchief. He takes it and scrubs his face, looking scared and guilty but laughing still, though she, the woman, who is twenty-four and might be pretty out of that uniform, takes his tears as a sign of distress, and puts a hand on his shoulder, feeling strangely maternal —

It’s OK, son. It’s not your fault.

And that ominous taste at the back of his throat, the taste he associates with childhood, with rotten fruit and petrol and the sickly rose-scent of bubblegum, recedes once more like a bank of cloud, leaving only blue skies in its wake, and he thinks —

At last, I’m a murderer.

Post comment:

chrysalisbaby: woot woot! blueeyedboy kicks ass

Captainbunnykiller: ‘Mrs Electric Blue pleasuring herself into the grave . . .’ Dude. There’s a scene I’d give money to read. How about it, huh?

Jesusismycopilot: YOU’RE SICK. I HOPE YOU KNOW THAT.

blueeyedboy: I’m aware of my condition, thanks.

chrysalisbaby: well i don’t care i think ur awesome

Captainbunnykiller: Yeah, man. Ignore the troll. Those fucktards wouldn’t know good fic if it jumped up and bit them in the ass.

Jesusismycopilot: YOU ARE SICK AND YOU WILL BE JUDGED.

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

ClairDeLune: If these stories upset you, then please don’t come here to read them. Thank you, blueeyedboy, for sharing this. I know how hard it must be to express these darker feelings. Well done! I hope to read more of this story as it develops!

9

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.25 on Wednesday, January 30

Status: restricted

Mood: unrepentant

Listening to: Kansas: ‘Carry On Wayward Son’

No, I don’t take it personally. Not everyone appreciates the value of a well-written fic. According to many, I am sick and depraved and deserve to be locked up, or beaten to a pulp, or killed.

So, everyone’s a critic, right? I get a lot of death threats. Most are rants from the God squad: Jesusismycopilot and friends, who always write in capitals, with little punctuation except for a forest of exclamation points that rises above the main text like the upraised spears of a hostile tribe, and who tell me YOUR SICK! (sic) and THE DAY IS AT HAND! and that Yours Truly will BURN IN H*LL (!!!) WITH ALL THE QUEERS AND PEDOPHILES!

Well, thanks. There are headcases everywhere. A newbie, who calls herself JennyTricks, has become a regular visitor, posting comments on all of my fics on a rising scale of outrage. Her style is poor, but she makes up for it in vitriol; leaves no term of abuse unused; promises me a world of hurt if ever she gets her hands on me. I doubt she will, however. The Internet is a safe house, close as the confessional. I never post my details. Besides, their anger gives me a buzz. Sticks and stones, dude; stones and sticks.

But seriously, I love the applause. I even enjoy the occasional hiss. To provoke a reaction with words alone is surely the greatest victory. That’s what my fiction is for. To incite. To see what reactions I can collect. Love and hate; approval and scorn; judgement and anger and despair. If I can make you punch the air, or feel a little sick, or cry, or want to do violence to me — or to others — then isn’t that a privilege? To creep inside another mind, to make you do what I want you to do —

Doesn’t that pay for everything?

Well, the good news is — apart from the fact that my headache is gone — that I now have more time to indulge. One of the advantages of sudden unemployment is the amount of leisure it provides. Time to pursue my interests, both on and offline. Time, as my mother says, to stop and smell the roses.

Unemployment? Well, yes. I’ve had some trouble recently. Not that Ma knows that, of course. As far as my mother is concerned, I still work at Malbry Infirmary, the details unclear, but plausible — at least to Ma, who barely finished school and whose medical knowledge, such as it is, is taken from the Reader’s Digest and from the hospital soaps she likes to watch in the afternoons.

Besides, in a way, it’s almost true. I did work at the infirmary — I worked there for nearly twenty years — though Ma never really knew what I did. Technical operations of some kind — also a partial truth of sorts — in a place in which everyone’s job description contains either the word operator or technician; I was until recently one of a team of hygiene technicians operating two shifts a day and attending to such vital responsibilities as: mopping, sweeping, disinfecting, wheeling out the rubbish bins and general maintenance of toilets, kitchens and public areas.

In layman’s terms, a cleaner.

My secondary, even more dangerous job — again, at least, until recently — was that of day carer for an elderly man, wheelchair-bound, for whom I used to cook and clean; on good days I’d read, or play music on scratchy old vinyl, or listen to stories I already knew, and later I’d go looking for her, for the girl in the bright-red duffel coat —

As of now, I have more time, and much less chance of being caught in the act. My daily routine hasn’t changed. I get up in the mornings as usual, dress for work, care for my orchids, park the car in the infirmary car park, pick up my laptop and briefcase, and spend the day at leisure in a series of Internet cafés, catching up on my f-list, or posting my fiction on badguysrock away from my mother’s suspicious eye. After four I often drop by at the Pink Zebra café, where there is a minimal chance of my running into Ma or her friends, and which offers Internet access for the price of a bottomless pot of tea.

Given my own choice of venue, I think I’d prefer something a little less bohemian. The Pink Zebra is rather too informal for me, with its wide-mouthed American cups, and its Formica-topped tables, and chalked Specials boards and the noise of its many patrons. And the name itself, that word, pink, has a most unfortunate pungency that takes me back to my childhood, and to our family dentist, Mr Pink, and of the smell of his old-fashioned surgery with its sugary, sickly odour of gas. But she likes it. She would. The girl in the bright red duffel coat. She likes her anonymity among the café’s clientele. Of course, that’s an illusion. But it’s one I’m willing to grant her — for now. One last unacknowledged courtesy.

I try to find a table close by. I drink Earl Grey — no lemon, no milk. That’s what my old mentor, Dr Peacock, drank, and I have acquired the taste myself; not entirely usual for a place like the Pink Zebra, that serves organic carrot cake and Mexican spiced hot chocolate, and acts as a refuge for bikers and Goths and people with multiple piercings.

Bethan — the manager — glares at me. Perhaps it’s my choice of beverage, or the fact that I’m wearing a suit and tie and therefore qualify as The Man — or maybe today it’s just my face — the ladder of suture-strips across one cheekbone, the cuts bisecting eyebrow and lip.

I can tell what she’s thinking. I shouldn’t be here. She’s thinking I look like trouble, though it’s nothing she can quantify. I’m clean, I’m quiet, I always tip. And yet there’s something about me that unsettles her; that makes her think I don’t belong.

‘Earl Grey, please — no lemon, no milk.’

‘Be with you in five minutes, OK?’

Bethan knows all her customers. The regulars all have nicknames, much the same as my friends online, like Chocolate Girl, Vegan Guy, Saxophone Man and so on. I, however, am just OK. I can tell that she would be happier if she could fit me into a category — perhaps Yuppie Guy, or Earl Grey Dude — and knew what to expect of me.

But I prefer to wrong-foot her sometimes: to turn up in jeans occasionally; to order coffee (which I hate), or, as I did a couple of weeks ago, half a dozen pieces of pie, eating them one by one as she watched, clearly itching to say something, but not quite daring to comment. In any case, she is suspicious of me. A man who will eat six pieces of pie is capable of anything.

But you shouldn’t judge by appearances. Bethan herself is an irregular choice, with the emerald stud in her eyebrow and the stars tattooed down her skinny arms. A shy, resentful little girl, who compensates now by being vaguely aggressive with anyone who looks at her askance.

Still, it is to Bethan that I owe much of my information. From the café she notices everything. She seldom speaks to me, of course, but I overhear her conversations. With people like me she is cautious, but with her regulars she is cheery, approachable. Thanks to Bethan I can collect all kinds of information. For instance, I know that the girl in the red duffel coat would rather drink hot chocolate than tea; prefers treacle tart to carrot cake; favours the Beatles over the Stones, and plans to attend the funeral at Malbry Crematorium at 11.30 on Saturday.

Saturday. Yes, I’ll be there. At least I’ll get to see her away from that wretched café. Maybe — just maybe — she owes me that. Closure, as the Americans say. An end to this parade of lies.

Lies? Yes, everyone lies. I’ve lied ever since I could remember. It’s the only thing I do well, and I think we should play to our strengths, don’t you? After all, what is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence? You’d never guess from my writing that I’m as plain-vanilla as they come. Vanilla, at least, on the outside; the heart is something different. But aren’t we, all of us, killers at heart, tapping out in Morse code the secrets of the confessional?

Clair thinks I should talk to her.

Have you tried telling her how you feel? she suggests in her latest e-mail. Of course, Clair only knows what I want her to know: that for an indeterminate time I have been obsessed with a girl to whom I have hardly spoken a word. But maybe Clair identifies with me rather more than she is aware — or rather, with blueeyedboy, whose platonic love for an unnamed girl echoes her own unrequited passion for Angel Blue.

Cap’s advice is rather more crude. Just fuck her and get it over with, he advises, in the world-weary tone of one trying vainly to hide his own inexperience. When the novelty wears off, you’ll see she’s just like all those other bitches, and you’ll be able to get back to what matters . . .

Toxic agrees, and pleads for me to write up the intimate details in my WeJay. The dirtier the better, he says. And by the way, what’s her cup size?

Albertine rarely comments. I sense her disapproval. But chrysalisbaby responds to what she sees as my hopeless romance. Even a bad guy needs someone to love, she says with awkward sincerity. You deserve it, blueeyedboy, really you do. She does not offer herself, not yet, but I sense the longing in her words. Any girl would be lucky, she hints, to earn the love of one such as I.

Poor Chryssie. Yes, she’s fat. But she has good hair and a pretty face, and I have led her to believe that I prefer the chubby ones.

The problem is that I play it too well. She now wants to see me on webcam. For the past couple of weeks she has been talking to me through WebJournal, sending me personal messages, including photos of herself.

Y can’t i C U? she messages.

Out of the question, I reply.

Y? U ugly?

Yeah. I’m a mess. Broken nose, black eye, cuts and bruises all over me. I look like I went twelve rounds with Mike Tyson. Trust me, Chryssie. You’d run a mile.

4 real?? What happened?

Someone took exception to me.?

O!!! U mugged?

I guess you could call it that.

!!! Oh, fuck, oh, babe,i just wanna give U a great big hug.

Thanks, Chryssie. You’re very sweet.

Does it hurt??

Dear Chryssie. I can feel the sympathy coming from her. Chryssie loves to nurture, and I like to feed her fantasy. She’s not quite in love with me — no, not yet. But it wouldn’t take much to draw her in. It’s a little cruel, I know. But isn’t that what bad guys do? Besides, she brings these things on herself. All I do is enable them. She’s an accident waiting to happen, for which no one could possibly hold me to blame.

Babe, tell me what happened, she says, and today I think maybe I’ll humour her. Give a little, take a lot. Isn’t that the better deal?

All right then — babe. Whatever you say. See what you make of this little tale.

10

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 14:35 on Thursday, January 31

Status: public

Mood: amorous

Listening to: Green Day: ‘Letterbomb’

Blueeyedboy in love. What? You don’t think a killer can fall in love? He has known her for ever, and yet she has never really seen him, not once. He might have been invisible as far as the woman he loves is concerned. But he sees her: her hair; her mouth; her small pale face with its straight dark brows; her bright-red coat in the morning mist like something out of a fairy tale.

Red is not her colour, of course — but he doesn’t expect her to know that. She doesn’t know how he likes to watch through his telephoto lens; noting the details of her dress; the way the wind catches her hair; the way she walks with such precision, marking her passage with near-imperceptible touches. A hand against this wall, here; brushing against this yew hedge, turning her face to catch the scent as she passes the village bakery.

He is not a voyeur, he thinks. He acts for his own protection. His instinct for self-preservation has been honed to a point of such accuracy that he can sense the danger in her, the danger behind the sweet face. It may be the danger he loves, he thinks. The fact that he is walking a dangerous line. The fact that every stolen caress through the lens of his camera is potentially lethal to him.

Or it may just be the fact that she belongs to somebody else.

Until now he has never been in love. It frightens him a little: the intensity of that feeling, the way her face intrudes on his thoughts, the way his fingers trace her name, the way everything somehow conspires to keep her always in his mind —

It changes his behaviour. It makes him contradictory; at the same time more accepting, and less so. He wants to do the right thing, but, so doing, thinks only of himself. He wants to see her, but when he does, flees. He wants it to last for ever, but at the same time longs for it to end.

Zooming closer, he brings her face into mystic, near-monstrous proportions. Now she is a single eye, its colour a hybrid of blue and gold, staring sightlessly through the glass like an orchid in a growing-tank —

But through the eye of love, of course, she always appears in shades of blue. Bruise-blue; butterfly-blue; cobalt, sapphire, mountain-blue. Blue, the colour of his secret soul; the colour of mortality.

His brother in black would have known what to say. Blueeyedboy lacks the words. But he dreams of them dancing under the stars, she in a ball dress of sky-blue silk, he in his chosen colours. In these dreams he is beyond words, and he can smell the scent of her hair, can almost feel her texture —

And then comes a sharp knock at the door. Blueeyedboy starts guiltily. It annoys him that he does this; he is in his own home, hurting no one, why should he feel this stab of guilt?

He puts away his camera. The knock is repeated; peremptory. Someone sounds impatient.

‘Who is it?’ says blueeyedboy.

A voice, not well-loved, but familiar, comes to him from the other side. ‘Let me in.’

‘What do you want?’ says blueeyedboy.

‘To talk to you, you little shit.’

Let’s call him Mr Midnight Blue. Bigger by far than blueeyedboy, and vicious as a mad dog. Today he is in a violent rage that blueeyedboy has never seen before, hammering at the front door, demanding to be let in. No sooner are the safety locks released, than he barges his way into the hall and, with no kind of preliminaries, head-butts our hero right in the face.

Blueeyedboy’s trajectory sends him smashing into the hallway table; ornaments and a flower vase fly into shrapnel against the wall. He trips and falls at the bottom of the stairs, and then Midnight Blue is on top of him, punching him, shouting at him —

‘Fucking keep away from her, you twisted little bastard!’

Our hero makes no attempt to resist. He knows it would be impossible. Instead he just curls into himself like a hermit crab into its shell, trying to shield his face with his arms, crying in fear and hatred, while his enemy lands blow after blow to his ribs and back and shoulders.

‘Do you understand?’ says Midnight, pausing to recover his breath.

‘I wasn’t doing anything. I’ve never even spoken to her—’

‘Don’t give me that,’ says Midnight Blue. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. And what about those photographs?’

‘Ph-photographs?’ says blueeyedboy.

‘Don’t even think of lying to me.’ He pulls them from one of his inside pockets. ‘These photographs, taken by you, developed right here, in your darkroom—’

‘How did you get those?’ says blueeyedboy.

Midnight gives him a final punch. ‘Never mind how I got them. If you ever go anywhere near her again, if you talk to her, write to her — hell, if you even look at her — I’ll make you sorry you were born. This is your final warning—’

‘Please!’ Our hero is whimpering, his arms thrown up to protect his face.

‘I mean it. I’ll kill you—’

Not if I kill you first, blueeyedboy thinks, and before he can protect himself, the hateful aroma of rotting fruit fills his throat with its hot-house stench, and a lance of pain drives into his head, and he feels as though he is dying.

‘Please—’

‘You’d better not lie to me. You’d better not hold out on me.’

‘I won’t,’ he gasps, through blood and tears.

‘You’d better not,’ says Midnight Blue.

Lying dazed on the carpet, blueeyedboy hears the door slam. Warily, he opens his eyes and sees that Midnight Blue has gone. Even so he waits until he hears the sound of Midnight’s car setting off down the driveway before slowly, carefully, standing up and going into the bathroom to investigate the damage.

What a mess. What a fucking mess.

Poor blueeyedboy; nose broken, lip split, blue eyes blacked and swollen shut. There’s blood down the front of his shirt; blood still trickles from his nose. The pain is bad, but the shame is worse, and the worst of it is, this isn’t his fault. In this case, he is innocent.

How strange, he thinks, that for all his sins, he should have escaped retribution so far, whereas this time, when he has done nothing wrong, punishment should descend on him.

It’s karma, he thinks. Kar-ma.

He looks at his reflection, looks at it for a long time. He feels very calm, watching himself, an actor on a small screen. He touches his reflection and feels the answering sting from the abrasions on his face. Nevertheless he feels strangely remote from the person in the looking glass; as if this were simply a reconstruction of some more distant reality; something that happened to someone else many, many years ago.

I mean it. I’ll kill you —

Not if I kill you first, he thinks.

And would it be so impossible? Demons are made to be overcome. Maybe not with brute strength, but with intelligence and guile. Already he senses the germ of a plan beginning to form at the back of his mind. He looks at his reflection once more, squares his shoulders, wipes blood from his mouth and, finally, begins to smile.

Not if I kill you first —

Why not?

After all, he has done it before.

Post comment:

chrysalisbaby: awesome wow was that 4 real?

blueeyedboy: As real as anything else I write...

chrysalisbaby: aw poor

blueeyedboy i just wanna give him a great big hug

Jesusismycopilot: BASTARD YOU DESERVE TO DIE.

Toxic69: Oh, man. Don’t we all?

ClairDeLune: This is fantastic, blueeyedboy. You are finally beginning to come to terms with your rage. I think we should discuss this further, don’t you?

Captainbunnykiller: Bitchin’, dude! This fic pwns. Can’t wait to see the payback.

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: You’re very persistent, JennyTricks. Tell me — do I know you?

11

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 01.37 on Friday, February 1

Status: restricted

Mood: melancholy

Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Born Bad’

Well, no. It wasn’t quite like that. But not too far from the truth, all the same. The truth is a small, vicious animal biting and clawing its way towards the light. It knows that if it wants to be born, something — or someone — else has to die.

I started life as a twin-set, you know. The other half — who, if he had lived, Ma would have christened Malcolm — was stillborn at nineteen weeks.

Well, that’s the official tale, anyway. Ma told me when I was six that I’d swallowed my sibling in utero — most probably at some point between the twelfth and the thirteenth weeks — in the course of some dispute over Lebensraum. It happens more often than people think. Two bodies, one soul; floating in Nature’s developing fluid, fighting for the right to live —

She kept the memory of him alive as an ornament on the mantel-piece — a statuette of a sleeping dog, engraved with his initials. The same piece, in fact, that I broke as a boy, and tried to lie about to protect myself. For which I was thrashed with the piece of electrical cord and told that I was born bad — a killer, even in embryo — that I owed it to both of them to be good, to make something of my stolen life —

In fact, she was secretly proud of me. The fact that I’d swallowed my twin to survive made her believe that I was strong. Ma despised weakness. Hard as tempered steel herself, she couldn’t stand a loser. Life’s what you make it, she used to say. If you don’t fight, you deserve to die.

After that I often used to dream that Malcolm — whose name appears to me in sickly shades of green — had won the fight and taken my place. Even now I still have that dream: two little ravenous tadpoles, two piranhas side by side, two hearts in a bloodbath of chemicals just clamouring to beat as one. If he had lived instead of me, I wonder, would Mal have taken my place? Would he have become blueeyedboy?

Or would he have had his own colour? Green perhaps, to go with his name? I try to imagine a wardrobe in green: green shirts, green socks, dark-green V-necked sweater for school. All of it identical to mine (except for the colour, of course), all of it in my size, as if a lens had been placed on the world, painting my life a different shade.

Colours make a difference. Even after so many years, I still follow my mother’s colour schemes. Blue jeans, hoodie, T-shirt, socks — even my trainers have a blue star on the side. A black roll-necked sweater, a birthday present from last year, lies unworn in a bottom drawer, and whenever I think to try it on, there’s a sudden stab of unreasonable guilt.

That’s Nigel’s sweater, a sharp voice says, and although I know it’s irrational, I still can’t bring myself to wear his colour, not even for his funeral.

Perhaps that’s because he hated me. He blamed me for everything that went wrong. He blamed me for causing Dad to leave; blamed me for his stretch in jail; for his breakdown; for his ruined life; resented the fact that Ma liked me best. Well, that, at least, was justified. Without a doubt, she favoured me. Or at least, she did at first. Perhaps because of my dead twin; the anguish of her delivery; perhaps because of Mr Blue Eyes, who was, as she said, the love of her life.

But Nigel made sibling rivalry into a major art form. His brothers lived in terror of his uncontrollable rages. His brother in brown escaped the worst, being vulnerable in so many ways. Nigel held him in contempt, a willing slave when it suited him, a human shield against Ma’s wrath, the rest of the time a whipping-boy, taking the blame for everyone.

But bullying Bren was too easy. There was no satisfaction to be gained from hitting such a target. You could punch Brendan and make him cry, but no one ever saw him fight back. Perhaps he’d learnt from experience that the best way to deal with Nigel, as with a charging elephant, is to lie still and play dead, hoping to avoid the stampede. And he never seemed to bear a grudge, not even when Nigel tormented him, confirming Ma’s belief that Bren was not the sharpest tool in the box, and that if anyone were to give them their fairy-tale ending, then it would be Benjamin.

Well, yes. Ma liked her clichés. Brought up on tales of the Lottery, of younger sons who end up marrying princesses, of eccentric millionaires who leave all their wealth to the sweet little urchin who captures their heart — Ma believed in destiny. She saw these things in black and white. And though Bren submitted without complaint, preferring safe mediocrity to the treacherous burden of brilliance, Nigel, who was no fool, must have felt a certain resentment to find that he had been cast from birth in the role of the ugly stepsister, perpetually the man in black.

And so, Nigel was angry. Angry at Ma; angry at Ben; even angry at poor, fat Brendan, who tried so hard to be quiet and good, and who found increasing solace in food, as if through the comfort of sweet things he might provide himself with some measure of protection in a world too full of sharp edges.

And so when Nigel was playing outside, or riding his bike around the estate, and Bren was sitting watching TV with a Wagon Wheel in each hand and a six-pack of Pepsi at his side, Benjamin was going to work with his Ma, a duster clutched in one chubby hand, eyes wide at the opulence of other people’s houses; at their broad stairs and neat driveways, sprawling sound systems and walls of books; at their well-stocked fridges and hallway pianos and shagpile carpets and bowls of fruit on dining-room tables as shiny and broad as a ballroom floor.

‘Look at this, Ben,’ she would say, pointing at some photograph of a boy or girl in school uniform, grinning gap-toothed from a leather frame. ‘That’ll be you in a few years’ time. That’ll be you, at the big school, making me so proud of you—’

Like so many of Ma’s endearments, it sounded eerily like a threat. She was in her thirties by then — already worn down to the canvas by the years.

Or so I thought when I was young. Now, looking at her photographs, I see that she was beautiful, perhaps not in the conventional way, but striking with her black hair and dark eyes, and the full lips and high cheekbones that made her look French, though she was British to the bone.

Nigel looked just like her, with his dark espresso eyes. But I was always different: blond hair that faded to brown with time; a thin and rather suspicious mouth; eyes of a curious blue-grey, so large that they almost ate up my face —

Would Mal and I have been identical? Would he have had my blue eyes? Or do I have his, as well as my own, looking for ever inwards?

In oriental languages, or so Dr Peacock used to say, there is no distinction between blue and green. Instead, there is a compound word, something that expresses both shades, and that translates as ‘sky-coloured’, or ‘leaf-coloured’. It made a kind of sense to me. From my earliest infancy, I’d always thought of blue as being primarily ‘Ben-coloured’, or brown as ‘Brendan-coloured’, or black as ‘Nigel-coloured’, without ever stopping to ask myself if others perceived things differently.

Dr Peacock changed all that. He taught me a new way of looking at things. With his maps and his recordings and his books and his cases of butterflies, he taught me to expand my world, to trust in my perception. For that I’ll always be grateful to him, even though he let me down. Let us all down, in the end: me, my brothers, Emily. You see, for all his kindness, Dr Peacock didn’t care. When he’d had enough of us he simply threw us back on the pile. Albertine understands, even though she never makes any reference to that time; pretends, in fact, to be someone else —

Still, recent events may have changed all that. It’s time to check on Albertine. Although she may not know it yet, I can read all her entries. No restrictions apply to me; public or private, it’s all the same. Of course, she doesn’t know this. Hidden away in her cocoon, she has no idea how closely I’ve been watching her. Looks so innocent, doesn’t she, with her red coat and her basket? But as my brother Nigel found out, sometimes the bad guys don’t wear black, and sometimes a little girl lost in the woods is more than a match for the big, bad wolf ...