Blueeyedboy

1

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 20.54 on Saturday, February 2

Status: restricted

Mood: black

I’ve always hated funerals. The noise of the crematorium. The people talking all at once. The clatter of feet on the polished floor. The sickly scent of flowers. Funeral flowers are different from any other kind. They hardly smell like flowers at all, but like some kind of disinfectant for death, somewhere halfway between chlorine and pine. Of course, the colours are pretty, they say. But all I can think of as the coffin goes into the oven at last is the sprig of parsley you get on fish in restaurants: that tasteless, springy garnish that no one ever wants to eat. Something to make the dish look nice; to distract us from the taste of death.

So far, I hardly miss him. I know it’s a terrible thing to say. We were friends as well as lovers, and in spite of everything — his black moods, his restlessness, his ceaseless tapping and fidgeting — I cared for him. I know I did. And yet I really don’t feel much as his coffin slides into the furnace. Does that make me a bad person?

I think that maybe, yes, it does.

It was an accident, they said. Nigel was an appalling driver. Always over the speed limit; always losing his temper, always tapping, rapping, gesturing. As if by his own movements he could somehow compensate for the stolid inactivity of others. And there was always his silent rage: rage at the person in front of him; rage at always being left behind; rage at the slow drivers; rage at the fast drivers, the clunkers, the kids, the SUVs.

No matter how fast you drive, he said — fingers tapping the dashboard in that way that drove me crazy — there’s always someone ahead of you, some idiot shoving his back bumper into your face like a randy dog showing its arse.

Well, Nigel. You’ve done it now. Right at the junction of Mill Road and Northgate, sprawled across two lanes of traffic, overturned like a Tonka toy. A patch of ice, they said. A truck. No one really knew for sure. A relative identified you. Probably your mother, although I have no way of knowing, of course. But it feels like the truth. She always wins. And now she’s here, all dressed up, weeping into the arms of her son — her one surviving son, that is — while I stand dry-eyed, at the back of the hall.

There wasn’t much left of the car, or of you. Dog food in a battered tin. You see, I am trying to be brutal here. To make myself feel something — anything — but this eerie calm at the heart of me.

I can still hear the machinery working behind the curtain; the swish of cheap velvet (asbestos-lined) as the little performance ended. I didn’t cry a single tear. Not even when the music began.

Nigel didn’t really like classical music. He’d always known what he wanted them to play at his funeral, and they obliged with the Rolling Stones’

‘Paint It Black’ and Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, songs that, whilst dark enough in this context, have no power over me.

Afterwards I followed the crowd blindly to the reception room, where I found a chair and sat down away from the mill of people. His mother did not speak to me. I wouldn’t have expected her to; but I could sense her presence near by, baleful as a wasps’ nest. I do believe she blames me; although it seems hard to imagine how I could have been responsible.

But the death of her son is less of a bereavement to her than an opportunity to parade her grief. I heard her talking to her friends — her voice staccato with outrage:

‘I can’t believe she’s here,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe she had the nerve—’

‘Come on, lovey,’ said Eleanor Vine. I recognized her colourless voice. ‘Calm down, it isn’t good for you.’

Eleanor is Gloria’s friend as well as her ex-employer. The other two in her entourage are Adèle Roberts, another ex-employer of Mother’s, who used to teach at Sunnybank Park, and who everyone assumes is French (because of the accent in her name), and Maureen Pike, the bluff and somewhat aggressive woman who runs the local Neighbourhood Watch. Her voice carries most of all; I could hear her rallying the troops.

‘That’s right. Settle down. Have another piece of cake.’

‘If you think I could eat a thing—’

‘Cup of tea, then. Do you good. Keep your strength up, Gloria, love.’

Once more I thought of the coffin, the flowers. By now they would be blackening. So many people have left me this way. When will I start caring?

It all began seven days ago. Seven days ago, with the letter. Until then, we — that is, Nigel and I — existed in a soft cocoon of small daily pleasures and harmless routines; two people pretending to themselves that things are normal — whatever that means — and that neither of them is damaged, flawed, possibly beyond repair.

And what about love? That too, of course. But love is a passing ship at best, and Nigel and I were castaways, clinging together for comfort and warmth. He was an angry poet, gazing from the gutter at the stars. I was always something else.

I was born here in Malbry. On the outskirts of this unfashionable Northern town. It’s safe here. No one notices me. No one questions my right to be here. No one plays the piano any more, or the records Daddy left behind, or the Berlioz, the terrible Symphonie fantastique that still haunts me so. No one talks about Emily White, the scandal and the tragedy. Almost no one, anyway. And all that was so long ago — over twenty years, in fact — that if they think of it at all, it is simply as a coincidence. That one such as I should move into this house — Emily’s house — notorious by association, or, indeed, that of all the men in Malbry it should be Gloria Winter’s son who found himself a place in my heart.

I met him almost by accident, one Saturday night at the Zebra. Till then I had been almost content, and the house, which had been in need of repair, was finally clear of workmen. Daddy had been dead three years. I’d gone back to my old name. I had my computer; my online friends. I went to the Zebra for company. And if I still sometimes felt lonely, the piano was still there in the back room, now hopelessly out of tune, but achingly familiar, like the scent of Daddy’s tobacco, caught in passing down a street, like a kiss from a stranger’s mouth —

Then, Nigel Winter came along. Nigel, like a force of Nature, who came and disrupted everything. Nigel, who came looking for trouble, and somehow found me there instead.

There’s rarely any unpleasantness at the Pink Zebra. Even on a Saturday, when bikers and Goths sometimes come through on their way to a concert in Sheffield or Leeds, it’s nearly always a friendly crowd, and the fact that the place shuts early means that they’re usually still sober.

This time was an exception. At ten a group of women — a hen party from out of town — had still not cleared the premises. They’d had a few bottles of Chardonnay, and the talk had turned to scandals past. I pretended not to listen to them; I tried to be invisible. But I could feel their eyes on me. Their morbid curiosity.

‘You’re her, aren’t you?’ A woman’s voice, a little too loud, divulging in a boozy stage whisper what no one else dared mention. ‘You’re that What’s-her-name.’ She put out a hand and touched my arm.

‘Sorry. I don’t know who you mean.’

‘You are, though. I saw you. You’ve got a Wiki page, and everything.’

‘You shouldn’t believe what you read on the Net. Most of it’s just a pack of lies.’

Doggedly, she went on. ‘I went to see those paintings, you know. I remember my mum taking me. I even had a poster once. What was it called? French name. All those crazy colours. Still, it must have been terrible. Poor kid. How old were you? Ten? Twelve? I tell you, if anyone touched one of my kids I’d fucking kill the bastard—’

I’ve always been prone to panic attacks. They creep up on me when I least expect them, even now, after all these years. This was the first I’d suffered in months, and it took me completely unawares. Suddenly I could hardly breathe; I was drowning in music, even though there was no music playing . . .

I shook the woman’s hand from my arm. Flailed out at the empty air. For a second I was a little girl again — a little girl lost among walking trees. I reached for the wall and touched nothing but air; around me, people jostled and laughed. The party was leaving. I tried to hold on. I heard someone call for the bill. Someone asked: Who had the fish? Their laughter clattered around me.

Breathe, baby, breathe! I thought.

‘Are you OK?’ A man’s voice.

‘I’m sorry. I just don’t like crowds.’

He laughed. ‘Then you’re in the wrong place, love.’

Love. The word has potency.

People tried to warn me at first. Nigel was unstable. He had a criminal past, they said; but after all, my own past could hardly be said to bear scrutiny, and it was so good to be with him — to be with someone real, at last — that I ignored the warnings and plunged straight in.

You were so lovely, he told me later. Lovely and lost. Oh, Nigel.

That night we drove out to the moors and he told me all about himself, about his time in prison and the youthful mistake that had sent him there; and then we lay for hours on the heath in the overwhelming silence of the stars, and he tried to make me understand about all those little pins of light scattered across the velvet —

There, I thought. Now for the tears. Though not for Nigel as much as for myself and for that starry night. But even at my lover’s funeral, my eyes remained stubbornly dry. And then I felt a hand on my arm and a man’s voice said:

‘Excuse me. Are you all right?’

I’m very sensitive to voices. Every one, like an instrument, is unique, with its own individual algorithm. His voice is attractive: quiet, precise, with a slight pull on certain syllables, like someone who used to stammer. Not at all like Nigel’s voice; and yet I could tell they were brothers.

I said: ‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘ “Fine”,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t that a useful word? In this case, it means: “I don’t want to talk to you. Please go away and leave me alone.” ’

There was no malice in his tone. Just a cool amusement; maybe even a touch of sympathy.

‘I’m sorry,’ I began to say.

‘No. It’s me. I apologize. It’s just that I hate funerals. The hypocrisy. The platitudes. The food you’d never think of eating at any other time. The ritual of tiny fish-paste sandwiches and mini jam tarts and sausage rolls—’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry. Now I’m being rude. Would you like me to fetch you something to eat?’

I gave a shaky laugh. ‘You make it sound so appealing. I’ll pass.’

‘Very wise.’

I could hear his smile. His charm has a way of surprising me, even now, after all this time, and it makes me feel a little queasy to think that at my lover’s funeral I talked — I laughed — with another man, a man I found almost attractive . . .

‘I have to say, I’m relieved,’ he said. ‘I rather thought you’d blame me.’

‘Blame you for Nigel’s accident? Why?’

‘Well, maybe because of my letter,’ he said.

‘Your letter?’

Once more, I heard him smile. ‘The letter he opened the day he died. Why do you think he was driving so recklessly? My guess is he was coming for me. To deliver one of his — warnings.’

I shrugged. ‘Aren’t you the perceptive one? Nigel’s death was an accident—’

‘There’s no such thing as an accident as far as our family’s concerned.’

I stood up much too fast at that, and the chair clattered back against the parquet floor. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I said.

His voice was calm, still slightly amused. ‘It means we’ve had our share of bad luck. What did you want? A confession?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ I said.

‘Well, thanks. That puts me in my place.’

I was feeling strangely light-headed by then. Perhaps it was the heat, or the noise, or simply the fact of being so close to him, close enough to take his hand.

‘You hated him. You wanted him dead.’ My voice sounded plaintive, like a child’s.

A pause. ‘I thought you knew me,’ he said. ‘You really think I’m capable?’

And now I thought I could almost hear the first notes of the Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique with its patter of flutes and low caress of strings. Something dreadful was on its way. Suddenly there seemed to be no oxygen in the air I was breathing. I put out a hand to steady myself, missed the back of the chair and stepped out into the open. My throat was a pinprick; my head a balloon. I stretched out my arms and touched only empty space.

‘Are you OK?’ He sounded concerned.

I tried to find the chair again — I desperately needed to sit down — but I had lost my bearings in the suddenly cavernous room.

‘Try to relax. Sit down. Breathe.’ I felt his arm around me, guiding me gently towards the chair, and once again I thought of Nigel, and of Daddy’s voice, a little off-key, saying:

Come on, Emily. Breathe. Breathe!

‘Shall I take you outside?’ he said.

‘It’s nothing. It’s fine. It’s just the noise.’

‘As long as it wasn’t something I said—’

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ I faked a smile. It felt like a dentist’s mask on my face. I had to get out. I pulled away, sending my chair skittering against the parquet. If only I could get some air, then everything would be all right. The voices in my head would stop. The dreadful music would be stilled.

‘Are you OK?’

Breathe, baby, breathe!

And now the music rose once more, lurching into a major key somehow even more dangerous, more troubling than the minor.

Then his voice through the static said: ‘Don’t forget your coat, Albertine.’

And at that I pulled away and ran, regardless of obstacles, and, finding my voice just long enough to shout — Let me through! — I fled once more, like a criminal, pushing my way through the milling crowd and out into the speechless air.

2

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 21.03 on Saturday, February 2

Status: restricted

Mood: caustic

Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Almost Human’

So, she finds me almost attractive. That moves me more than words can say. To know that she thinks of me that way — or that she did, for a moment, at least — makes it almost seem worthwhile —

When Nigel came round on the day he died I was developing photographs. My iPod was playing at full blast, which was why I missed the knock at the door.

‘B.B.!’ Ma’s voice was imperious.

I hate it when she calls me that.

‘What?’ Her hearing is eerily good. ‘What are you doing in there? It’s been hours.’

‘Just sorting out some negatives.’

Ma has a range of silences. This one was disapproving: Ma dislikes my photography, considers it a waste of time. Besides, my darkroom is private; the lock on the door keeps her out. It isn’t healthy, so she says; no boy should have secrets from his ma.

‘So what is it, Ma?’ I said at last. The silence was starting to get to me. For a moment it deepened; grew thoughtful. It is at these moments that Ma is at her most dangerous. She had something up her sleeve, I knew. Something that didn’t bode well for me.

‘Ma?’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Your brother’s here to see you,’ she said.

Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I suppose she felt I deserved it. After all, I had forfeited her protection by keeping secrets from her. It didn’t quite happen as it did in my fic, but we have to allow for poetic licence, don’t we? And Nigel had a temper, and I was never the type to fight back.

I suppose I could have lied my way out of it, as I have so often before, but by then I think it was too late; something had been set in motion, something that could not be stopped. Besides, my brother was arrogant. So sure of his crude and bludgeoning tactics that he never considered the fact that there might be other, more subtle ways than brute force of winning the battle between us. Nigel was never subtle. Perhaps that’s why Albertine loved him. He was, after all, so different from her, so open and straightforward; loyal as a good dog.

Is that what you thought, Albertine? Is that what you saw in him? A reflection of lost innocence? What can I say? You were wrong. Nigel wasn’t innocent. He was a killer, just like me, though I’m sure he never told you that. After all, what would he have said? That for all his pretended honesty, he was as fake as both of us? That he’d taken the role you offered him, and played you like a professional?

The funeral lasted much too long. They always do, and when the sandwiches and the sausage rolls had finally been cleared away, there was still the coming home to endure, and the photographs to be brought out, and the sighs and the tears and the platitudes: as if she’d ever cared for him, as if Ma had cared for anyone in all her life but Gloria Green —

At least it was quick. The Number One, the greatest hit, the all-time favourite platitude, closely followed by such classic tracks as: At least he didn’t suffer, and It’s wicked, that road, how fast they drive. The scene of my brother’s death now bears a Diana-style floral display — though of somewhat more modest proportions, thank God.

I know. I went on the pilgrimage. My mother, Adèle, Maureen and I; Yours Truly in his colours, Ma regal, all in black, with a veil, reeking of L’Heure Bleue, of course, and carrying, of all things, a stuffed dog with a wreath in its mouth — putting the fun into funeral —

‘I don’t think I can bear to look,’ she says, face averted, her eagle eye taking in the offerings at the roadside shrine, mentally calculating the cost of a spray of carnations, a begonia plant, a bunch of sad chrysanthemums picked up at a roadside garage.

‘They’d better not be from her,’ she says, quite unnecessarily. Indeed, there is no indication that Nigel’s girl has ever even been there, still less that she brought flowers.

My mother, however, is unconvinced. She sends me to investigate and to purge any gift not bearing a card, and then deposits her stuffed dog by the side of the road with a teary sigh.

Flanked by Adèle and Maureen, who each hold an elbow, she totters away on six-inch heels that look like sharpened pencils, and produce a sound that makes my tastebuds cramp, like chalk against a blackboard.

‘At least you’ve got B.B., Gloria, love.’

Greatest Hits, Number Four.

‘Yes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’ Her eyes are hard and expressionless. At the centre of each one is a small blue pinprick of light. It takes me some time to realize that this is my reflection. ‘B.B. would never let me down. He would never cheat on me.’

Did she really say those words? I may have just imagined it. And yet, that is exactly what she considers this betrayal to be. Bad enough, to lose her son to another woman, she thinks. But to lose him to that girl, of all girls —

Nigel should have known better, of course. No one escapes from Gloria Green. My mother is like the pitcher plant, Nepenthes distillatoria, which draws in its victims with sweetness, only to drown them in acid later when their struggles have exhausted them.

I ought to know; I’ve been living with her for forty-two years, and the reason I’ve stayed undigested so far is that the parasite needs a decoy, a lure: a creature that sits on the lip of the plant to persuade all the others there’s nothing to fear —

I know. It’s hardly a glorious task. But it certainly beats being eaten alive. It pays to be loyal to Ma, you see. It pays to keep up appearances. Besides, wasn’t I her favourite, trained in the womb as a murderer? And, having first disposed of Mal, why should I spare the other two?

I always thought when I was a boy that the justice system was the wrong way round. First, a man commits a crime. Then (assuming he’s caught) comes the sentence. Five, ten, twenty years, depending on the crime, of course. But as so many criminals fail to anticipate the cost of repaying such a debt, surely it makes more sense, rather than crime on credit, to pay for one’s felony up front, and to do the time before the crime, after which, without prosecution, you could safely wreak havoc at your leisure.

Imagine the time and money saved on police investigations and on lengthy trials; not to mention the unnecessary anxiety and distress suffered by the perpetrator, never knowing if he’ll be caught, or has got away with it. Under this system I believe that many of the more serious crimes could actually be avoided — as only a very few would accept to spend a lifetime in prison for the sake of a single murder. In fact, it’s far more likely that, halfway through the sentence, the would-be offender would opt to go free — still innocent of any crime, though he might have to lose his deposit. Or maybe by then he would have earned enough time to pay for a minor felony — an aggravated assault, perhaps, or maybe a rape or a robbery —

See? It’s a perfect system. It’s moral, cheap and practical. It even allows for that change of heart. It offers absolution. Sin and redemption all in one; cost-free karma at the Jesus Christ superstore.

Which is just my way of saying this: I’ve already done my time. Over forty years of it. And now, with my release date due —

The universe owes me a murder.

3

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 22.03 on Saturday, February 2

Status: public

Mood: murderous

Listening to: Peter Gabriel: ‘Family Snapshot’

His brothers never liked him much. Perhaps he was too different. Perhaps they were jealous of his gift and of all the attention it brought him. In any case, they hated him — well, maybe not Brendan, his brother in brown, who was too thick to genuinely hate anyone, but certainly Nigel, his brother in black, who, the year of Benjamin’s birth, underwent such a violent personality change that he might have been a different boy.

The birth of his youngest brother was attended by outbursts of violent rage that Ma could neither control nor understand. As for Brendan, aged three — a placid, stolid, good-natured child — his first words on hearing that he had a baby brother were: Why, Ma? Send him back!

Not promising words for Benjamin, who found himself thrown into the cruel world like a bone to a pack of dogs, with no one but Ma to defend him and to keep him from being eaten alive.

But he was her blue-eyed talisman. Special, from the day he was born. The others went to the junior school, where they played on the swings and the climbing frames, risked life and limb on the football pitch, and came home every day with grazes and cuts that Ma seemed never to notice. But with Ben, she was always fretful. The smallest bruise, the slightest cough, was enough to awaken his mother’s concern, and the day he came home from nursery school with a bloody nose (earned in a fight over control of the sandpit), she withdrew him from the school and took him on her rounds instead.

There were four ladies on Ma’s cleaning round, all of them now coloured blue in his mind. All of them lived in the Village; no more than half a mile from each other, in the long tree-lined alleys between Mill Road and the edge of White City.

Apart from Mrs Electric Blue, who was to die so very unexpectedly some fifteen or twenty years later, there was: Mrs French Blue, who smoked Gauloises and liked Jacques Brel; Mrs Chemical Blue, who took twenty kinds of vitamins and who cleaned the house before Ma arrived (and probably after she left); and finally, Mrs Baby Blue, who collected porcelain dolls, and had a studio under the roof, and was an artist, so she said, and whose husband was a music teacher at St Oswald’s, the boys’ grammar school down the road, where Ma also went to clean and vacuum the classrooms on the Upper Corridor at four thirty every school day, and to run the big old polisher across what seemed miles of parquet floor.

Benjamin didn’t like St Oswald’s. He hated the fusty smell of it, the reek of disinfectant and floor polish, the low hum of mould and dried-up sandwiches, dead mice, wormy wood and chalk that got into the back of his throat and caused a permanent catarrh. After a while, just the sound of the name — that gagging sound, Os-wald’s — would conjure up the smell. From the very start he dreaded the place: he was afraid of the Masters in their big black gowns, afraid of the boys with their striped caps and their blue blazers with the badges on them.

But he liked his mother’s ladies. To begin with, anyway.

He’s so cute, they said. Why doesn’t he smile? Do you want a biscuit, Ben? Do you want to play a game?

He found he enjoyed being wooed in this way. To be four years old is to wield great power over women of a certain age. He soon learnt how to exploit this power: how even a half-hearted whimper could cause those ladies real concern, how a smile could earn him biscuits and treats. Each lady had her speciality: Mrs Chemical Blue gave him chocolate biscuits (but made him eat them over the sink); Mrs Electric Blue offered him coconut rings; Mrs French Blue, langues de chat. But his favourite was Mrs Baby Blue, whose real name was Catherine White, and who always bought the big red tins of Family Circle biscuits, with their jam sandwiches, chocolate digestives, iced rings, pink wafers — which always seemed especially decadent, somehow, by virtue of their flimsiness, like the flounces on her four-poster bed and her collection of dolls, with their blank and somehow ominous faces staring out from nests of chintz and lace.

His brothers hardly ever came. On the rare occasions that they did, at weekends or holidays, they never showed to advantage. Nigel, at nine, was already a thug: sullen and prone to violence. Brendan, still on the cusp of cute, had also once been privileged, but was now beginning to lose his infant appeal. Besides which he was a clumsy child, always knocking things over, including, on one occasion, a garden ornament — a sundial — belonging to Mrs White, which smashed on to the flagstones and had to be paid for by Ma, of course. For which both he and Nigel were punished — Bren for doing the actual damage, Nigel for not preventing him — after which neither of them came round again, and Benjamin was left with the spoils.

What did Ma make of all this attention? Well, perhaps she thought that someone, somewhere, might fall in love; that in one of those big houses might be found a benefactor for her son. Ben’s ma had ambitions, you see; ambitions she barely understood. Perhaps she’d had them all along; or perhaps they were born from those long days polishing other people’s silverware, or looking at pictures of their sons in graduation gowns and hoods. And he understood almost from the start that his visits to those big houses were meant to teach him something more than how to beat the dust from a rug or wax a parquet floor. His mother made it clear from the start that he was special; that he was unique; that he was destined for greater things than either of his brothers.

He never questioned it, of course. Neither did she. But he sensed her expectations like a halter round his young neck. All three of them knew how hard she worked; how her back ached from bending and standing all day long; how often she suffered from migraines; how the palms of her hands cracked and bled. From the earliest age, they went shopping with her, and long before they got to school they could add up a grocery list in their heads and know just how little of that day’s earnings was left for all their other expenses —

She never voiced it openly. But even unvoiced, they always felt that weight on their backs: the weight of their ma’s expectations; her terrifying certainty that they would make her sacrifice worthwhile. It was the price they had to pay, never spoken aloud, but implied; a debt that could never be paid in full.

But Ben was always the favoured one. Everything he did strengthened her hopes. Unlike Bren, he was good at sports, which made him suitably competitive. Unlike Nigel, he liked to read, which fostered her belief that he was gifted. He was good at drawing, too, much to the delight of Mrs White, who had no expectations, who’d always wanted a child of her own, and who fussed over him and gave him sweets; who was pretty and blonde and bohemian, who called him sweetheart, who liked to dance; and who laughed and cried for no reason sometimes and who all three boys secretly wished could have been their Ma —

And the White house was wonderful. There was a piano in the hall, and a big piece of stained glass above the front door, which on sunny days would cast reflections of red and gold on to the polished floorboards. When his mother was working, Mrs White would show Ben her studio, with its stacked canvases and its rolls of drawing paper, and teach him how to draw horses and dogs, and show him the tubes and palettes of paint, and read out their names, like incantations.

Viridian. Celadon. Chromium. Sometimes they had French or Spanish or Italian names, which made them even more magical. Violetto. Escarlata. Pardo de turba. Outremer.

‘That’s the language of art, sweetheart,’ Mrs White would sometimes exclaim. She painted big, sloshy canvases in sugary pinks and ominous purples, upon which she would then superimpose pictures cut out of magazines — mostly heads of little girls — which she would then varnish heavily on to the canvas and adorn with ruffs of antique lace.

Benjamin didn’t like them much, and yet it was from Mrs White that he learnt to distinguish between the colours; to understand that his own colour came in a legion of shades; to span the depths between sapphire and ultramarine, to see their textures, know their scents.

‘That one’s chocolate,’ he would say, pointing out a fat scarlet tube with a picture of strawberries on the side.

Escarlata, the label said, and the scent was overwhelming, especially when placed in sunlight, filling his head with happiness and with motes that shone and floated like magic Maltesers up and away into the air.

‘How can red be chocolate?’

By then he was nearly seven years old, and still he couldn’t really explain. It just was, he told her stoutly, just as Nut Brown (avellana) was tomato soup, which often made him feel anxious, somehow, and verde Veronese was liquorice, and amarillo naranja was the smell of boiled cabbage, which always made him feel sick. Sometimes just hearing their names would do it, as if the sounds contained some kind of alchemy, teasing from the volatile words a joyous explosion of colours and scents.

At first he’d assumed that everyone had this ability; but when he mentioned it to his brothers, Nigel punched him and called him freak; and Brendan just looked confused and said, You can smell the words, Ben? After which he would often grin and scrunch up his nose whenever Benjamin was around, as if he could sense things the way Ben could, copying him, the way he often did, though never really in mockery. In fact, poor Brendan envied Ben; slow, tubby, frightened Bren, always lagging behind, always doing something wrong.

Ben’s gift didn’t make any sense to Ma, but it did to Mrs White, who knew all about the language of colours, and who liked scented candles — expensive ones from France — which Ma said was like burning money, but which smelt wonderful, all the same; in violet and smoky sage and boudoir patchouli and cedar and rose.

Mrs White knew someone — a friend of her husband’s, in fact — someone who understood these things, and she explained to Ben’s mother that Ben might be special, which his Ma had believed all along, of course, but that secretly he had doubted. Mrs White promised to put them in touch with this man, whose name was Dr Peacock, and who lived in one of the big old houses behind St Oswald’s playing fields, on the street Ma always called Millionaires’ Row.

Dr Peacock was sixty-one, an ex-governor of St Oswald’s, the author of a number of books. We sometimes saw him in the Village, a bearded man in a tweed jacket and a floppy old hat, walking his dog. He was rather eccentric, said Mrs White with a rueful smile, and, thanks to some clever investments, was blessed with rather more money than sense —

Certainly Ma didn’t hesitate. Being practically tone-deaf herself, she had never paid much attention to the way her son understood sounds and words, which, when she noticed it at all, she attributed to his being sensitive — her explanation for most things. But the thought that he might be gifted soon overcame her scepticism. Besides, she needed a benefactor, a patron for her blue-eyed boy, who was already having trouble at school, and needed a fatherly influence.

Dr Peacock — childless, retired, and, best of all, rich — must have seemed like a dream come true. And so she went to him for help, thereby setting in place a series of events, like filters over a camera lens, that coloured the next thirty-odd years in ever-deepening shades.

Of course, she couldn’t have known that. Well, how could any of them have known what would come of that meeting? And who could have known it would end this way, with two of Gloria’s children dead, and blueeyedboy helpless and trapped, like those scuttling things at the seaside that day, forgotten and dying in the sun?

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: This is quite good, blueeyedboy. I like your use of imagery. I notice you’re drawing on personal anecdotes rather more than usual. Good idea! I hope to read more!

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: My pleasure . . .

4

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 01.15 on Sunday, February 3

Status: public

Mood: serene

Listening to: David Bowie: ‘Heroes’

He’d never met a millionaire. He’d imagined a man in a silk top hat, like Lord Snooty in the comic-books. Or maybe with a monocle and a cane. Instead, Dr Peacock was vaguely unkempt, in a tweedy, bow-tied, carpet-slippery way, and he looked at Ben with milk-blue eyes from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles and said: Ah. You must be Benjamin, in a voice like tobacco and coffee cake.

Ma was nervous; dressed to the nines, and she’d made Ben wear his new school clothes — navy trousers, sky-blue sweater, something like the St Oswald’s colours, although his own school had no uniform code, and most of the other kids just wore jeans. Nigel and Bren were with them, too — she didn’t trust them home alone — both under orders to sit still, shut up, and not to dare touch anything.

She was trying to make an impression. Ben’s first year at junior school had not been a brilliant one, and by then most of White City knew that Gloria Winter’s youngest son had been sent home for sticking a compass into the hand of a boy who had called him a fucking poofter, and that only his mother’s aggressive intervention had prevented him from being expelled.

Whether that information had reached the Village was yet to be determined. But Gloria Winter was taking no risks, and it was a most angelic Benjamin who now found himself on the steps of the Mansion on that mellow October day, listening to the door-chimes, which were pink and white and silvery, and observing the toes of his sneakers as Dr Peacock came to the door.

Of course he had no real understanding of what a poofter actually was. But there was, he recalled, quite a lot of blood, and even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he hadn’t shown any remorse — had actually seemed to enjoy the fracas — quite upset his class teacher, a lady we shall call Mrs Catholic Blue, who (quite publicly, it seemed) subscribed to such amusing beliefs as the innocence of childhood, the sacrifice of God’s only son and the watchful presence of angels.

Sadly, her name smelt terrible, like cheap incense and horse shit, which was often distracting in lessons, and which led to a number of incidents, culminating at last in Ben’s exclusion; for which his mother blamed the school, pointing out that it wasn’t his fault that they weren’t able to cope with a gifted child, and promising retribution at the hands of the local newspapers.

Dr Peacock was different. His name smelt of bubblegum. An attractive scent for a little boy, besides which Dr Peacock spoke to him as an adult, in words that slipped and rolled off his tongue like multicoloured balls of gum from a sweetshop vending machine.

‘Ah. You must be Benjamin.’

He nodded. He liked that certainty. From behind Dr Peacock, where a door led from the porch into the hall, a shaggy black-and-white shape hurtled towards our hero, revealing itself to be an elderly Jack Russell dog, which frolicked about them, barking.

‘My learned colleague,’ said Dr Peacock by way of explanation. Then, addressing the dog, he said: ‘Kindly allow our visitors to gain access to the library,’ at which the dog stopped barking at once, and led the way into the house.

‘Please,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘Come on in and have some tea.’

They did. Earl Grey, no sugar, no milk, served with shortbread biscuits, now fixed in his mind for ever, like Proust’s lime-blossom tea, a conduit for memories.

Memories are what blueeyedboy has instead of a conscience nowadays. That’s what kept him here for so long, pushing an old man’s wheelchair around the overgrown paths of the Mansion; doing his laundry; reading aloud; making toast soldiers for soft-boiled eggs. And even though most of the time the old man had no idea who he was, he never complained, or failed him — not once — remembering that first cup of Earl Grey tea and the way Dr Peacock looked at him, as if he, too, were special —

The room was large and carpeted in varying tones of madder and brown. A sofa; chairs; three walls of books; an enormous fireplace, in front of which lay a basket for the dog; a brown teapot as big as the Mad Hatter’s; biscuits; some glass cases filled with insects. Most curious of all, perhaps, a child’s swing suspended from the ceiling, at which the three boys stared with silent longing from their place on the sofa near Ma, wanting, but hardly daring, to speak.

‘Wh-what are those?’ said blueeyedboy, indicating a glass case.

‘Moths,’ said the doctor, looking pleased. ‘So like the butterfly in many ways, but so much more subtle and fascinating in design. This one here, with the furry head’ — he pointed a finger at the glass — ‘is the Poplar hawk-moth, Laothoe populi. This scarlet and brown one next to it is Tyria jacobaeae, the Cinnabar. And this little chap’ — he indicated a ragged brown something that looked like a dead leaf to blueeyedboy — ‘is Smerinthus ocellata, the Eyed Hawk-moth. Can you see its blue eyes?’

Blueeyedboy nodded again, awed into silence not merely by the moths themselves, but by the calm authority with which Dr Peacock uttered the words, then indicated another case, hanging above the piano, in which blueeyedboy could see resting a single, enormous lime-green moth, all milk and dusty velvet.

‘And this young lady,’ said Dr Peacock affectionately, ‘is the queen of my collection. The Luna moth, Actias Luna, all the way from North America. I brought her here as a pupa, oh, more than thirty years ago, and sat in this room as I watched her hatch, capturing every stage on film. You can’t imagine how moving it is, to watch such a creature emerge from the cocoon, to see her spread her wings and fly—’

She can’t have gone far, thought blueeyedboy. Just as far as the killing jar —

Wisely, however, he held his tongue. His ma was getting restless. Her hands clicked together in her lap, shooting cheap fire from her rings.

‘I collect china dogs,’ she said. ‘That makes us both collectors.’

Dr Peacock smiled. ‘How nice. I must show you my T’ang figurine.’ Blueeyedboy grinned to himself as he saw the expression on Ma’s face. He had no idea what a T’ang figurine looked like, but he guessed it was something as different from Ma’s collection of china dogs as the Luna moth was from that creature curled up like a dead leaf over its gaudy, useless eyes.

Ma gave him a dirty look, and blueeyedboy understood that sooner or later he would have to pay for making her look foolish. But for now, he knew he was safe, and he looked around Dr Peacock’s house with growing curiosity. Apart from the cases of moths, he saw that there were pictures on the walls — not posters, but actual paintings. Aside from Mrs White, with her pink and purple collages, he had never met anyone who owned paintings before.

His eyes came to rest on a delicate study of a ship in faded sepia ink, behind which lay a long, pale beach, with a background of huts and coconut palms and cone-shaped mountains adrift with smoke. It drew him; though he didn’t know why. Perhaps the sky, or the tea-coloured ink, or the blush of age that shone through the glass like the bloom on a luscious golden grape —

Dr Peacock caught him staring again. ‘Do you know where that is?’ he said.

Blueeyedboy shook his head.

‘That’s Hawaii.’

Ha-wa-ii.

‘Maybe you’ll get to go there some day,’ Dr Peacock told him, and smiled.

And that’s how, with a single word, blueeyedboy was collected.

Post comment:

Captainbunnykiller: Man, I think you’re losing it. Two posts in as many days, and you haven’t murdered anyone

blueeyedboy: Give me time. I’m working on it . . .

ClairDeLune: Very nice,

blueeyedboy. You show genuine courage in writing down these painful memories! Perhaps you could discuss them more fully at our next session?

chrysalisbaby: yay I love this so much (hugs)

5

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 02.05 on Sunday, February 3

Status: public

Mood: poetic

Listening to: The Zombies: ‘A Rose For Emily’

Next he took the three boys out into the rose garden, while their mother drank tea in the library and the dog ran about on the lawn. He showed them his roses and read out their names from the metal tags clipped to the stems. Adelaide d’Orléans. William Shakespeare. Names with magical properties, that made their nostrils tingle and flare.

Dr Peacock loved his roses; especially the oldest ones, the densely-packed-with-petal ones, the flesh-toned, blue-rinse, off-white, old-lady ones that, according to him, had the sweetest scent. In Dr Peacock’s garden the boys learnt to tell a moss rose from an Alba, a damask from a Gallica, and Benjamin collected their names as once he had collected the names inscribed on tubes of paint, names that made his head spin, that echoed with more than just colours and scents, from Rose de Recht, a dark-red rose that smelt of bitter chocolate, to Boule de Neige, Tour de Malakoff, Belle de Crécy and Albertine, his favourite, with a musky, pale-pink, old-fashioned scent, like girls in white summer dresses and croquet and iced pink lemonade on the lawn; which, to Ben, smelt of Turkish Delight —

‘Turkish Delight?’ said Dr Peacock, his eyes alight with interest. ‘And this one? Rosa Mundi?’

‘Bread.’

‘This one? Cécile Brunner?’

‘Cars. Petrol.’

‘Really?’ Dr Peacock said, looking, not angry, as blueeyedboy might have expected, but genuinely fascinated.

In fact, everything about Benjamin was fascinating to Dr Peacock. It turned out that most of his books were about something he called synaesthesia, which sounded like something they might do to you in hospital, but that was actually a neurological condition, so he said, which actually meant that Ma was right, and that Ben had been special all along.

The boys didn’t understand it all, but Dr Peacock said that it was something to do with the way the sensory parts of the brain worked: that something in there was cross-wired, somehow, sending mixed signals from those complex bundles of nerves.

‘You mean, like a s-super-sense?’ interrupted blueeyedboy, thinking vaguely of Spider-Man, or Magneto, or even Hannibal Lecter (you see that he was already moving away from the vanilla end of the spectrum into bad-guy territory).

‘Precisely,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘And when we find out how it works, then maybe our knowledge will be able to help people — stroke victims, for instance, or people who have suffered head trauma. The brain is a complex instrument. And in spite of all the achievements of science and modern medicine, we still know so little about it: how it stores and accesses information, how that information is translated—’

Synaesthesia can manifest in so many ways, Dr Peacock explained to them. Words can have colours; sounds can have shapes, numbers can be illuminated. Some people were born with it; others acquired it by association. Most synaesthetes were visual. But there are other kinds of synaesthesia, where words can translate as tastes or smells; or colours be triggered by migraine pain. In short, said Dr Peacock, a synaesthete might see music; taste sound; experience numbers as textures or shapes. There was even mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which, by some extreme of empathy, the subject could actually experience physical sensations felt by someone else —

‘You mean, if I saw someone getting hit, then I’d be able to feel it too?’

‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

‘But — how could they watch gangster films, where people get killed and beaten up?’

‘I don’t think they’d want to, Benjamin. They’d find it too upsetting. It’s all about suggestion, you see. This type of synaesthesia would make one very sensitive.’

‘Ma says I’m sensitive.’

‘I’m sure you are, Benjamin.’

By then Benjamin had become increasingly sensitive, not just to words and names, but to voices, too; to their accents and tones. Of course, he’d been aware before of the fact that people had accents. He’d always preferred Mrs White’s voice to Ma’s, or to the voice of Mrs Catholic Blue, who spoke with a caustic Belfast twang that grated at his sinuses.

His brothers spoke like the boys at school. They said ta instead of thank you, and sithee instead of goodbye. They swore at each other in ugly words that stank of the monkey-house at the zoo. His mother made an effort, but failed; her accent came and went depending on the company. It was particularly bad with Dr Peacock — aitches inserted all over the place like needles into a ball of wool.

Blueeyedboy sensed how very hard she worked at trying to impress, and it made him gag with embarrassment. He didn’t want to sound like that. He copied Dr Peacock instead. He liked his vocabulary. The way Dr Peacock said: If you please; or Kindly turn your attention to this; or To whom am I speaking? on the phone. Dr Peacock could speak Latin and French and Greek and Italian and German and even Japanese; and when he spoke English he made it sound like a different language, a better one, one that distinguished between watt and what; witch (a green-grey, sour word) and which (a sweet and silvery word), like an actor reading Shakespeare. He even spoke like that to the dog, saying: Kindly desist from chewing the rug, or Would my learned colleague like to take a stroll round the garden? The strangest thing, thought blueeyedboy, was that the dog seemed to respond; which made him wonder whether he, too, could be trained to lose his uncouth habits.

From his point of view, Dr Peacock was so impressed with Ben’s gift that he promised to tutor the boy himself — as long as he behaved at school — to prepare him for the St Oswald’s scholarship exam, in exchange for what he called a few tests, and the understanding that anything that transpired from their sessions could be used in the book he was writing, the culmination of a lifetime’s study, for which he had interviewed many subjects, though none as young or as promising as little Benjamin Winter.

Ma was overjoyed, of course. St Oswald’s was the culmination of all her hopes, of her unvoiced ambitions, of all the dreams she’d ever had. The entrance exam was in three years’ time, but she spoke as if it were imminent; promised to save every penny she earned; fussed over Ben more than ever before, and made it very clear that he was being given an incredible chance; a chance that he owed it to her to take —

He was less enthusiastic. He still didn’t like St Oswald’s. In spite of its navy-blue blazer and tie (just perfect for him, she said), he had already seen enough to be conscious of being unsuitable: unsuitable face, unsuitable hair, unsuitable house, unsuitable name —

St Oswald’s boys were not called Ben. St Oswald’s boys were called Leon, or Jasper, or Rufus or Sebastian. A St Oswald’s boy can pass off a name like Orlando, can make it sound like peppermint. Even Rupert sounds somehow cool when attached to a navy-blue St Oswald’s blazer. Ben, he knew, would be the wrong blue, smelling of his mother’s house, of too much disinfectant and too little space and too much fried food and not enough books and the harsh, inescapable stink of his brothers.

But Dr Peacock said not to worry. Three years was a long time. Time for him to prepare Ben; to make him into a St Oswald’s boy. Ben had potential, so he said — a red word, like a stretched rubber band, ready to fly into someone’s face —

And so, he accepted. What choice did he have? He was, after all, Ma’s greatest hope. Besides, he wanted to please them both — to please Dr Peacock, most of all — and if that meant St Oswald’s, then he was prepared to take up the challenge.

Nigel went to Sunnybank Park, the big comprehensive at the edge of White City. A series of concrete building blocks, with razor wire along the roof, it looked like a prison. It stank like a zoo. Nigel didn’t seem to mind. Brendan, nine and also destined for Sunnybank Park, showed no sign of unusual ability. Both boys had been tested by Dr Peacock; neither seemed to interest him much. Nigel he discarded at once; Brendan, after three or four weeks, finding him uncooperative.

Nigel was twelve, aggressive and moody. He liked heavy rock music and films where things exploded. No one bullied him at school. Brendan was his shadow, spineless and soft; surviving only through Nigel’s protection, like those symbiotic creatures that live around sharks and crocodiles, safe from predators by virtue of their usefulness to the host. Whereas Nigel was quite intelligent (though he never bothered to do any work), Bren was useless at everything: hopeless at sports, clueless in lessons, lazy and inarticulate, a prime candidate for the dole queue, said Ma, or, at best, a job flipping burgers —

But Ben was destined for better things. Every other Saturday, while Nigel and Brendan rode their bikes or played with their friends out on the estate, he went to Dr Peacock’s house — the house that he called the Mansion — and in the mornings sat at a big desk upholstered in bottle-green leather and read from books with hardback covers, and learnt geography from a painted globe with the names written on it in tiny scrolled lettering — Iroquois, Rangoon, Azerbaijan — arcane, obsolete, magical names just like Mrs White’s paints, that smelt vaguely of gin and the sea, of peppery dust and acrid spices, like an early taste of some mysterious freedom that he had yet to experience. And if you spun the globe fast enough, the oceans and the continents would chase each other so fast that at last all the colours merged into one, into one perfect shade of blue: ocean blue, heavenly blue, Benjamin blue —

In the afternoons they would do other things, like look at pictures and listen to sounds, which was part of Dr Peacock’s research, and which Ben found incomprehensible, but to which he submitted obediently.

There were books and books of letters and numbers arranged in patterns that he had to identify. There was a library of recorded sounds. There were questions like: What colour is Wednesday? What number is green? — and shapes with intriguing made-up names, but there were never any wrong answers, which meant that Dr Peacock was pleased, and that Ma was always proud of him.

And he liked to go to that big old house, with its library and its studio and its archive of forgotten things; records, cameras, bundles of yellow photographs, weddings and family groups and long-dead children in sailor suits with anxious, watch-the-birdie smiles. He was wary of St Oswald’s, but it was nice to study with Dr Peacock, to be called Benjamin; to listen to him talk about his travels, his music, his studies, his roses.

Best of all, he mattered there. There he was special — a subject, a case. Dr Peacock listened to him; noted down his reactions to various kinds of stimuli; then asked him precisely what he felt. Often he would record the results on his little Dictaphone, referring to Ben as Boy X, to protect his anonymity.

Boy X. He liked that. It made him sound impressive, somehow, a boy with special powers — a gift. Not that he was very gifted. He was an average pupil at school, never ranking especially high. As for his sensory gifts, as Dr Peacock called them — those sounds that translated to colours and smells — if he’d thought about them at all, he’d always just assumed that everyone experienced them as he did, and even though Dr Peacock assured him that this was an aberration, he continued to think of himself as the norm, and everyone else as freakish.

The word serenity is grey [says Dr Peacock in his paper entitled ‘Boy X and Early Acquired Synaesthesia’], though serene is dark blue, with a slight flavour of aniseed. Numbers have no colours at all, but names of places and of individuals are often highly charged, sometimes overwhelmingly so, often both with colours and with flavours. There exists in certain cases a distinct correlation between these extraordinary sense-impressions and events that Boy X has experienced, which suggests that this type of synaesthesia may be partly associative, rather than merely congenital. However, even in this case a number of interesting physical responses to these stimuli may be observed, including salivation as a direct response to the word scarlet, which to Boy X smells of chocolate, and a feeling of dizziness associated with the colour pink, which to Boy X smells strongly of gas.

He made it sound so important then. As if they were doing something for science. And when his book was published, he said, both he and Boy X would be famous. They might even win a research prize.

In fact Ben was so preoccupied with his lessons at Dr Peacock’s house that he hardly ever thought about the ladies from Ma’s cleaning round who had wooed him so assiduously. He had more pressing concerns by then, and Dr Peacock’s research had taken the place of paintings and dolls.

That was why, six months later, when he finally saw Mrs White one day at the market, he was surprised to see how fat she’d got, as if, after his departure, she’d had to eat for herself all the contents of those big red tins of Family Circle biscuits. What had happened? he asked himself. Pretty Mrs White had grown a prominent belly; and she waddled through the fruit and veg, a big, silly smile on her face.

His mother told them the good news. After nearly ten years of trying and failing, Mrs White was finally pregnant. For some reason, this excited Ma, possibly because it meant more hours, but blueeyedboy was filled with unease. He thought of her collection of dolls, those eerie, ruffled, not-quite-children, and wondered if she’d get rid of them, now she was getting the real thing.

It gave him nightmares to think of it: all those staring, plaintive dollies in their silks and antique lace abandoned on some rubbish tip, clothes gone to tatters, rain-washed white, china heads smashed open among the bottles and tins.

‘Boy or girl?’ said Ma.

‘A little girl. I’m going to call her Emily.’

Emily. Em-il-y, three syllables, like a knock on the door of destiny. Such an odd, old-fashioned name, compared to those Kylies and Traceys and Jades — names that reeked of Impulse and grease and stood out in gaudy neon colours — whilst hers was that muted, dusky pink, like bubblegum, like roses —

But how could blueeyedboy have known that she would one day lead him here? And how could anyone have guessed that both of them would be so close — victim and predator intertwined like a rose growing through a human skull — without their even knowing it?

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: I really like where this is going. Is it part of something longer?

chrysalisbaby: is that 4 real with the colours? how much did U have 2 research it?

blueeyedboy: Not as much as you might thinkGlad you liked it, Chryssie!

chrysalisbaby: aw hunny (hugs)

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

6

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 02.54 on Sunday, February 3

Status: restricted

Mood: blank

I cried a river when Daddy died. I cry at bad movies. I cry at sad songs. I cry at dead dogs and TV advertisements and rainy days and Mondays. So — why no tears for Nigel? I know that Mozart’s Requiem or Albinoni’s Adagio would help turn on the waterworks, but that’s not grief; that’s self-indulgence, the kind that Gloria Winter prefers.

Some people enjoy the public display. Emily’s funeral was a case in point. A mountain of flowers and teddy bears; people wept openly in the streets. A nation mourned — but not for a child. Perhaps for the loss of innocence; for the grubbiness of it all, for their own collective greed, that in the end had swallowed her whole. The Emily White Phenomenon that had caused so much fanfare over the years ended with a whimper: a little headstone in Malbry churchyard and a stained-glass window in the church, paid for by Dr Peacock, much to the indignation of Maureen Pike and her cronies, who felt it was inappropriate for the man to be linked in any way to the church, to the Village, to Emily.

No one really mentions it now. People tend to leave me alone. In Malbry I am invisible; I take pleasure in my lack of depth. Gloria calls me colourless; I overheard her once on the phone, back in the days when she and Nigel talked.

I don’t see how it can last, she said. She’s such a colourless little thing. I know you must feel sorry for her, but —

Ma, I do not feel sorry for her!

Well, of course you do. What nonsense—

Ma. One more word and I’m hanging up.

You feel sorry for her because she’s—

Click.

Overheard in the Zebra one day: God knows what he sees in her. He pities her, that’s all it is.

How gently, politely incredulous that one such as I might attract a man through something more than compassion. Because Nigel was a good-looking man, and I was somehow damaged. I had a past, I was dangerous. Nigel was open wide — he’d told me all about himself that night as we lay watching the stars. One thing he hadn’t told me, though — it was Eleanor Vine who pointed it out — is that he always wore black: an endless procession of black jeans, black jackets, black T-shirts, black boots. It’s easier to wash, he said, when I finally asked him. You can put everything in together.

Did he call my name at the end? Did he know I was to blame? Or was it all just a blur to him, a single swerve into nothingness? It all began so harmlessly. We were children. We were innocent. Even he was, in his way — blueeyedboy, who haunts my dreams.

Maybe it was guilt, after all, that triggered yesterday’s panic attack. Guilt, fatigue and nerves, that was all. Emily White is long gone. She died when she was nine years old, and no one remembers her any more, not Daddy, not Nigel, not anyone.

Who am I now? Not Emily White. I will not, cannot be Emily White. Nor can I be myself again, now that Daddy and Nigel are gone. Perhaps I can just be Albertine, the name I give myself online. There’s something sweet about Albertine. Sweet and rather nostalgic, like the name of a Proustian heroine. I don’t quite know why I chose it. Perhaps because of blueeyedboy, still hidden at the heart of all this, and whom I have tried for so long to forget . . .

But part of me must have remembered. Some part of me must have known this would come. For among all the herbs and flowers in my garden — the wallflowers, thymes, clove pinks, geraniums, lemon balm, lavenders and night-scented stocks — I never planted a single rose.

7

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 03.06 on Sunday, February 3

Status: public

Mood: poetic

Listening to: Roberta Flack: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

Benjamin was seven years old the year that Emily White was born. A time of change; of uncertainty; of deep, unspoken forebodings. At first he wasn’t sure what it meant; but ever since that day at the market, he’d been aware of a gradual shift in things. People no longer looked at him. Women no longer wooed him with sweets. No one marvelled at how much he’d grown. He seemed to have moved a step beyond the line of their perception.

His mother, busier than ever with her cleaning jobs and her shifts at St Oswald’s, was often too tired to talk to the boys, except to tell them to brush their teeth and work hard at school. His mother’s ladies, who had once been so attentive to Ben, flocking around him like hens around a single chick, seemed to have vanished from his life, leaving him vaguely wondering whether it was something he had done, or if it was simply coincidence that no one (except for Dr Peacock) seemed to want him any more.

Finally he understood. He’d been a distraction; that was all. It’s hard to talk to the person who cleans around the back of your fridge, and scrubs around the toilet bowl, and hand-washes your lace-trimmed delicates, and goes away at the end of the week with hardly enough money in her purse to buy even a single pair of those expensive panties. His mother’s ladies knew that. Guardian readers, every one, who believed in equality, to a point, and who maybe felt a touch of unease at having to hire a cleaner — not that they would have admitted it; they were helping the woman, after all. And compensated in their way by making much of the sweet little boy, as visitors to an open farm may ooh and ahh over the young lambs — soon to reappear, nicely wrapped, on the shelves as (organic) chops and cutlets. For three years he’d been a little prince, spoilt and praised and adored, and then —

And then, along came Emily.

Sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? Such a sweet, old-fashioned name, all sugared almonds and rose water. And yet she’s the start of everything: the spindle on which their life revolved, the weathervane that moves from sunshine to storm in a single turn of a cockerel’s tail. Barely more than a rumour at first, but a rumour that grew and gained in strength until at last it became a juggernaut; crushing everyone beneath the Emily White Phenomenon.

Ma told them he cried when he heard. How sorry he felt for the poor baby; how sorry, too, for Mrs White — who had wanted a child more than anything and, now that she had her wish at last, had succumbed to a case of the baby blues, refusing to come out of her house, to nurse her child, or even to wash, and all because her baby was blind —

Still, that was Ma all over; exaggerating his sensitivity. Benjamin never shed a tear. Brendan cried. It was more his style. But Ben didn’t even feel upset; only a little curious, wondering what Mrs White was going to do now. He’d heard Ma and her friends talking about how sometimes mothers harmed their children when under the influence of the baby blues. He wondered whether the baby was safe, whether the Social would take her away, and if so, whether Mrs White would want him back —

Not that he needed Mrs White. But he’d changed a lot since those early days. His hair had darkened from blond to brown; his baby face had grown angular. He was aware even then that he had outgrown his early appeal, and he was filled with resentment against those who had failed to warn him that what is taken for granted at four can be cruelly taken away at seven. He’d been told so often that he was adorable, that he was good — and now here he was, discarded, just like those dolls she had put away when her new, living doll had appeared on the scene —

His brothers showed little sympathy at his sudden fall from grace. Nigel was openly gleeful; Bren was his usual, impassive self. He may not even have noticed at first; he was too busy following Nigel about, copying him slavishly. Neither really understood that this wasn’t about wanting attention, either from Ma or from anyone else. The circumstances surrounding Emily’s birth had taught them that no one is irreplaceable; that even one such as Ben Winter could be stripped unexpectedly of his gilding. Only his sensory peculiarities now set him apart from the rest of the clan — and even that was about to change.

By the time they got to see her at last, Emily was nine months old. A fluffy thing in rosebud pink, furled tightly in her mother’s arms. The boys were at the market, helping Ma with the groceries, and it was blueeyedboy who saw them first, Mrs White wearing a long purple coat — violetto, her favourite colour — that was meant to look bohemian, but made her look too pale instead, with a scent of patchouli that stung at his eyes, overwhelming the smell of fruit.

There was another woman with her, he saw. A woman of his mother’s age, in stonewash jeans and a waistcoat, with long, dry, pale hair and silver bangles on her arms. Mrs White reached for some strawberries, then, seeing Benjamin waiting in line, gave a little cry of surprise.

‘Sweetheart, how you’ve grown!’ she said. ‘Has it really been so long?’ She turned to the woman at her side. ‘Feather. This is Benjamin. And this is his mother, Gloria.’ No mention of Nigel or Brendan. Still, that was to be expected.

The woman she’d addressed as Feather — What a stupid name, thought blueeyedboy — gave them a rather narrow smile. He could tell she didn’t like them. Her eyes were long and wintry-green, devoid of any sympathy. He could tell she was suspicious of them, that she thought they were common, not good enough —

‘You had a b-baby,’ said blueeyedboy.

‘Yes. Her name’s Emily.’

‘Em-i-ly.’ He tried it out. ‘C-can I hold her? I’ll be careful.’

Feather gave her narrow smile. ‘No, a baby isn’t a toy. You wouldn’t want to hurt Emily.’

Wouldn’t? blueeyedboy thought to himself. He wasn’t as sure as she seemed to be. What use was a baby, anyhow? It couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk; all it could do was eat, sleep or cry. Even a cat could do more than that. He didn’t know why a baby should be so important, anyway. Surely he was more so.

Something stung at his eyes again. He blamed the scent of patchouli. He tore a leaf from a nearby cabbage and crushed it secretly into his hand.

‘Emily’s a — special baby.’ It sounded like an apology.

‘The doctor says I’m special,’ said Ben. He smirked at Feather’s look of surprise. ‘He’s writing a book about me, you know. He says I’m remarkable.’

Ben’s vocabulary had greatly improved thanks to Dr Peacock’s tuition, and he uttered the word with a certain flourish.

‘A book?’ said Feather.

‘For his research.’

Both of them looked surprised at that, and turned to stare at Benjamin in a way that was not entirely flattering. He bridled a little, half-sensing, perhaps, that at last he had snagged their attention. Mrs White was really watching him now, but in a thoughtful, suspicious way that made blueeyedboy uncomfortable.

‘So — he’s been — helping you out?’ she said.

Ma looked prim. ‘A little,’ she said.

‘Helping out financially?’

‘It’s part of his research,’ said Ma.

Blueeyedboy could tell that Ma was offended by the suggestion that they needed help. That made it sound like charity, which was not at all the case. He started to tell Mrs White that they were helping Dr Peacock, not the other way around. But then Ma shot him a look, and he could see from her expression that he shouldn’t have spoken out of turn. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Her hands were very strong. He winced.

‘We’re very proud of Ben,’ she said. ‘The doctor says he has a gift.’

Gift. Gift, thought blueeyedboy. A green and somehow ominous word, like radioactivity. Giffft, like the sound a snake makes when it sinks its fangs into the flesh. Gift, like a nicely wrapped grenade, all ready to explode in your face —

And then it hit him like a slap: the headache, and the stink of fruit that seemed to envelop everything. Suddenly he felt queasy and sick, so sick that even Ma noticed, and relaxed her grip on his shoulder.

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘I d-don’t feel so good.’

She shot him a look of warning. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll give you something to whine about.’

Blueeyedboy clenched his fists and reached for the thought of blue skies, of Feather in a body bag, dismembered and tagged for disposal, of Emily lying blue in her cot with Mrs White wailing in anguish —

The headache subsided a little. Good. The awful smell receded, too. And then he thought of his brothers and Ma lying dead in the mortuary, and the pain kicked back like a wild horse, and his vision was crazed with rainbows —

Ma gave him a look of suspicion. Blueeyedboy tried to steady himself against the nearest market stall. His hand caught the side of a packing case. A pyramid of Granny Smiths stood, ready to form an avalanche.

‘Anything drops on the floor,’ said Ma, ‘and I swear I’ll make you eat it.’

Blueeyedboy withdrew his hand as if the box might be on fire. He knew that this was his fault; his fault for swallowing his twin; his fault for wishing Ma dead. He was born bad, bad to the bone, and this sickness was his punishment.

He thought he’d got away with it. The pyramid trembled, but did not fall. And then a single apple — he can still see it in his mind, with the little blue sticker on the side — nudged against its companion, and the whole of the front of the fruit stall seemed to slide, apples and peaches and oranges bouncing gleefully against each other, then off the AstroTurf apron and rolling on to the concrete floor.

She waited there until he’d retrieved every single piece of fruit. Some were almost intact; some had been trodden into the dirt. She paid for it at the market stall with an almost gracious insistence. And then, that night, she stood over him with a dripping plastic bag in one hand and the piece of electrical cord in the other, and made him eat it: piece by piece; core and peel and dirt and rot. As his brothers watched through the banisters, forgetting even to snigger as their brother sobbed and retched. To this day, blueeyedboy thinks, nothing very much has changed. And the vitamin drink always brings it back, and he struggles to stop himself retching; but Ma never notices. Ma thinks he is delicate. Ma knows he would never do anything to anyone —

Post comment:

chrysalisbaby: Aw babe that makes me want 2 cry

Captainbunnykiller: Forget the tears, man, where’s the blood ?

Toxic69: I concur. Roll out those freakin body bags — and by the way, dude, where’s the bedroom action?

ClairDeLune: Well done, blueeyedboy! I love the way you tie these stories in with each other. Without wanting to intrude, I’d love to know how much of this ongoing fic is autobiographical, and how much is purely fictional. The third person voice adds an intriguing sense of distance. Perhaps we could discuss it at Group some day?

8

You are viewing the webjournal of

blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 19.15 on Monday, February 4

Status: public

Mood: pensive

Listening to: Neil Young: ‘After The Gold Rush’

After Mrs Electric Blue, he finds it so much easier. Innocence, like virginity, is something you can only lose once, and its departure leaves him with no feeling of loss, but only a vague sense of wonder that it should have turned out to be such a small thing, after all. A small thing, but potent; and now it colours every aspect of his life, like a grain of pure cyan in a glass of water, dyeing the contents deepest blue —

He sees them all in blue now, each potential subject, quarry or mark. Mark. As in something to be erased. Black mark. Laundry mark. He is very sensitive to words; to their sounds, their colours, their music, their shapes on the page.

Mark is a blue word, like market; like murder. He likes it much better than victim, which appears to him as a feeble eggy shade, or even prey, with its nasty undertones of ecclesiastical purple, and distant reek of frankincense. He sees them all in blue now, these people who are going to die, and despite his impatience to repeat the act, he allows some time for the high to wear off, for the colours to drain from the world again, for the knot of hatred that is permanently lodged just beneath his solar plexus to swell to the point at which he must act, must do something, or die of it —

But some things are worth the wait, he knows. And he has waited a long time for this. That little scene at the market was well over a decade ago; no one remembers Mrs White, or her friend with the stupid name.

Let’s call her Ms Stonewash Blue. She likes to smoke a joint or two. At least, she did, when she was young, when she weighed in at barely ninety-five pounds and never, ever wore a bra. Now, past fifty, she watches her weight, and grass gives her the munchies.

So she goes to the gym every day instead, and to t’ai chi and salsa class twice a week, and still believes in free love, though nowadays even that, she thinks, is getting quite expensive. A one-time radical feminist, who sees all men as aggressors, she thinks of herself as free-spirited; drives a yellow 2CV; likes ethnic bangles and well-cut jeans; goes on expensive Thai holidays; describes herself as spiritual; reads Tarot cards at her friends’ parties; and has legs that might pass for those of a thirty-year-old, though the same cannot be said of her face.

Her current squeeze is twenty-nine — almost the same age as blueeyedboy. A blonde and cropped-haired androgyne, who parks her motorbike by the church, just far enough away from the Stonewash house to keep the neighbours from whispering. From which our hero deduces that Ms Stonewash Blue is not quite the free spirit she pretends to be.

Well, things have changed since the sixties. She knows the value of networking, and opting out of the rat race somehow seems far less appealing now that her passion for Birkenstocks and flares has given way to stocks and shares —

Not that he is implying that this is why she deserves to die. That would be irrational. But — would the world really miss her, he thinks? Would anyone really care if she died?

The truth, is, no one really cares. Few are the deaths that diminish us. Apart from losses within our own tribe, most of us feel nothing but indifference for the death of an outsider. Teenagers stabbed over drug money; pensioners frozen to death at home; victims of famine or war or disease; so many of us pretend to care, because caring is what others expect, though secretly we wonder what all the fuss is really about. Some cases affect us more profoundly. The death of a photogenic child; the occasional celebrity. But the fact is that most of us are more likely to grieve over the death of a dog or a soap opera character than over our friends and neighbours.

So thinks our hero to himself, as he follows the yellow 2CV into town, keeping a safe distance between them. Tonight he is driving a white van, a commercial vehicle stolen from a DIY retailer’s forecourt at six fifteen that evening. The owner has gone home for the night, and will not notice the loss before morning, by which time it will be too late. The van will have been torched by then, and no one will link blueeyedboy with the serious incident that night, in which a local woman was run down on the way to her salsa class.

The incident — he likes that word, its lemony scent, its tantalizing colour. Not quite an accident, but something incidental, a diversion from the main event. He can’t even call it a hit-and-run, because no one does any running.

In fact, Ms Stonewash sees him coming, hears the sound of his engine rev. But Ms Stonewash ignores him. She locks the yellow 2CV, having parked it just across the road, and steps on to the pedestrian crossing without a look to left or right, heels clicking on the tarmac, skirt hem positioned just high enough to showcase those more-than-adequate legs.

Ms Stonewash subscribes to the view expressed in the slogan of a well-known line of cosmetics and hair products, a slogan he has always despised and which, to him, sums up in four words all the arrogance of those well-bred female parasites with their tinted hair and their manicured nails and their utter contempt for the rest of the world, for the young man in blue at the wheel of the van, no pale horseman by any means, but did she think Death would call by in person just because she’s worth it?

He has to stop, she thinks to herself as she steps into the road in front of him. He has to stop at the red light. He has to stop at the crossing. He has to stop because I’m me, and I’m too important to ignore —

The impact is greater than he expects, sending her sprawling into the verge. He has to mount the kerb in order to reverse over her, and by then his engine is complaining vigorously, the suspension shot, the exhaust dragging on the ground, the radiator leaking steam —

Good thing this isn’t my car, he thinks. And he gives himself time for one more pass over something that now looks more like a sack of laundry than anything that ever danced the salsa, before driving away at a decent speed, because only a loser would stay to watch; and he knows from a thousand movie shows how arrogance and vanity are so often the downfall of bad guys. So he makes his modest getaway as the witnesses gather open-mouthed; antelopes at the water-hole watching the predator go by —

Returning to the scene of the crime is a luxury he cannot afford. But from the top of the multi-storey car park, armed with his camera and a long lens, he can see the aftermath of the incident: the police car; the ambulance; the little crowd; then the departure of the emergency vehicle, at far too leisurely a pace — he knows that they need a doctor to declare the victim dead at the scene, but there are instances, such as this one, when any layman’s verdict would do.

Officially, Ms Stonewash Blue was pronounced dead on arrival.

Blueeyedboy knows that, in fact, she had expired some fifteen minutes earlier. He also knows that her mouth was turned down just like the mouth of a baby flatfish, and that the police kicked sand over the stain, so that in the morning there would be nothing to show that she’d ever been there, except for a bunch of garage flowers Sellotaped to a traffic sign —

How appropriate, he thinks. How mawkish and how commonplace. Litter on the highway now counts as a valid expression of grief. When the Princess of Wales was killed, some months before this incident, the streets were piled high with offerings, taped to every lamp post, left to rot on every wall, flowers in every stage of decay, composting in their cellophane. Every street corner had its own stack of flowers, mouldering paper, teddy bears, sympathy cards, notes and plastic wrappers, and in the heat of that late summer it stank like a municipal tip —

And why? Who was this woman to them? A face from a magazine; a walk-on part in a soap opera; an attention-seeking parasite; a woman who, in a world of freaks, just about qualified as normal?

Was she really worth all that? Those outpourings of grief and despair? The florists did well from it, anyway; the price of roses went through the roof. And in the pub later that week, when blueeyedboy dared to suggest that perhaps it was somewhat unnecessary, he was taken into a back street by a punter and his ugly wife, where he was given a serious talking-to — not quite a beating, no, but with enough slapping and shoving to bring it close — and told he wasn’t welcome, and strongly advised to fuck of —

At which point in the story this punter — shall we call him Diesel Blue? — a family man, a respected member of the community, twenty years older than blueeyedboy and outweighing him by a hundred pounds — raised one of his loyal fists and smacked our hero right in the mouth, while the ugly wife, who smelled of cigarettes and cheap antiperspirant, laughed as blueeyedboy spat out blood, and said: She’s worth more dead than you’ll ever be —

Six months later, Diesel’s van is traced through security camera footage to a hit-and-run incident in which a middle-aged woman is killed crossing the road to get to her car. The van, which since has been set on fire, still bears traces of fibre and hair, and although Diesel Blue is adamant that he is not responsible, that the van was stolen the night before, he fails to convince the magistrate, especially in the light of a previous history of drunkenness and violence. The case goes to the criminal court, where, after a four-day trial, Diesel Blue is acquitted, mostly for lack of evidence. The camera footage proves disappointing, failing as it does to confirm the identity of the driver of the van — a figure in a hoodie and baseball cap, whose bulk may be due to an oversized coat and whose face is never visible.

But to be acquitted in court is not everything. Graffiti on the walls of the house; hostile murmurs in the pub; letters to the local Press; all suggest that Diesel Blue got away with it on a technicality, and when, a few weeks later, his house catches fire (with Diesel and his wife inside), no one grieves especially.

Verdict — accidental death, possibly caused by a cigarette.

Blueeyedboy is unsurprised. He’d had the guy down as a smoker.

Post comment:

Captainbunnykiller: You are totally sick, dude. I love it!

chrysalisbaby:woot woot yay for blueeyedboy

ClairDeLune : Very interesting. I sense your mistrust of authority. I’d love to hear the story behind this story. Is it also based on real life events? You know I’d love to know more!

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

9

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 21.06 on Monday, February 4

Status: public

Mood: prickly

Listening to: Poison: ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’

The birth of little Emily White saw a change in blueeyedboy’s Ma. She’d always been quick-tempered, but by the end of the summer she seemed perpetually on the brink of some kind of violent eruption. Part of the cause was financial stress: growing boys are expensive, and by unfortunate coincidence, fewer and fewer people in the Village seemed to need any household help. Mrs French Blue had joined the ranks of her ex-employers, and Mrs Chemical Blue, claiming poverty, had reduced her hours to two per week. Perhaps, now Ben was back at school, people felt less charitably inclined to offer work to the fatherless family. Or perhaps they’d simply had enough of listening to tales of how talented and special Ben was.

And then, just before Christmas, they ran across Mrs Electric Blue near Tandy’s in the covered market, but she didn’t seem to notice them, even when Ma spoke to her.

Perhaps Mrs Electric Blue didn’t like being seen so close to the market, where there were always people shouting, and torn-off cabbage leaves on the floor, and everything peppered with brown grease, and where people always called you luv. Perhaps all that was too common for her. Perhaps she was ashamed of knowing Ma, with her old coat on and her hair scraped back and her three scruffy boys, and her bags full of shopping that she had to carry home on the bus, and her hands with palms all tattooed with dirt from other people’s housework.

‘Morning,’ said Ma, and Mrs Electric Blue just stared, looking weirdly like one of Mrs White’s dolls, half-surprised and half-not-quite alive, with her pink mouth pursed and her eyebrows raised and her long white coat with the fur collar making her look like the Snow Queen, even though there wasn’t any snow.

It seemed at first as if she hadn’t heard. Ben shot her the smile that had once earned him treats. Mrs Electric didn’t smile back, but turned away and pretended to look at some clothes that were hanging on a stall near by, although even blueeyedboy could see that they weren’t at all the kind of clothes she’d wear, all baggy blouses and cheap, shiny shoes. He wondered if he should call her name —

But Ma went red and said: Come on, and started to drag him away by the arm. He tried to explain, which was when Nigel punched him, just above the elbow, where it hurts most, and he hid his face in his cry-baby sleeve, and Ma slapped Nigel across the head. And he saw Mrs Electric Blue walk away towards the shops, where a young man — a very young man — dressed in a navy pea coat and jeans, was awaiting her impatiently, and would perhaps have kissed her, he thought, had it not been for the presence of the cleaner and her three kids, one of whom was still watching her with that look of reproach, as if he knew something he shouldn’t. And that made her walk a little faster, clipping the ground with her high heels, a sound that smells of cigarettes and cabbage leaves and cheap perfume at knock-off prices.

Then, a week later, she let Ma go — making it sound like a generous gesture, saying that she’d imposed too long — which left just two of her ladies, plus a couple of shifts at St Oswald’s per week; hardly enough to pay the rent, let alone feed three boys.

So Ma took another job, working on a market stall, from which she would return frozen and exhausted, but carrying a plastic bag filled with half-rotten fruit and other stuff they couldn’t sell, which she would serve up in various guises over the course of the week, or worse still, put in the blender to make what she called ‘the vitamin drink’, which might be made up of such diverse ingredients as cabbage, apple, beetroot, carrot, tomato, peach or celery, but which always tasted to blueeyedboy like a sweet-rotten slurry of sludge-green. The tube of paint might be labelled Nut Brown, but shit smells like shit all the same, and it always made him think of the market, so that in time even the word made him retch — mark-et — with its barking twin syllables, like an engine that won’t start, and all that was because they happened to see Mrs Electric Blue with her fancy-boy in the market that day.

That was why, when they saw her again, six weeks later, in the street, that sickly taste rushed into his mouth, a sharp pain stabbed at his temple, objects around him began to acquire a bevelled, prismic quality —

‘Why, Gloria,’ said Mrs Electric Blue in that sweetly venomous manner of hers. ‘How lovely to see you. You’re looking well. How’s Ben doing at school?’

Ma gave her a sharp look. ‘Oh, he’s doing very well. His tutor says he’s gifted—’

It was common knowledge in Malbry that Mrs Electric Blue’s son was not gifted; that he had tried for St Oswald’s, but hadn’t got in, then had failed to get into Oxford, in spite of private tutoring. A big disappointment, so they said. Mrs Electric’s hopes had been high.

‘Really?’ said Mrs Electric Blue. She made the word sound like some new and frosty brand of toothpaste.

‘Yes. My son’s got a tutor. He’s trying for St Oswald’s.’

Blueeyedboy hid a grimace behind his hand, but not before Ma had noticed.

‘He’s going to be a scholarship boy.’ That was bending the truth a little. Dr Peacock’s offer to tutor Ben was payment for his cooperation in his research. His ability remained, as yet, a matter for conjecture.

Still, Mrs Electric Blue was impressed, which was probably Ma’s intention.

But now blueeyedboy was trying not to be sick as waves of nausea washed over him, flooding him with that market smell, that sludgy-brown stink of the vitamin drink; of split tomatoes gone to white-lipped mush, and half-gone apples (The brown’s the sweetest part, she’d say), and black bananas and cabbage leaves. It wasn’t just the memory, or the sound of her heels on the cobbled street, or even her voice with its high-bred yarking syllables —

It’s not my fault, he told himself. I’m not a bad person. Really, I’m not.

But that didn’t stop the sick smell, or the colours, or the pain in his head. Instead it made it weirdly worse, like driving past something dead in the road and wishing you’d looked at it properly —

Blue is the colour of murder, he thought, and the sick, panicky feeling abated — a little. He thought of Mrs Electric Blue lying dead on a mortuary slab with a tag on her toe, like a nicely labelled Christmas present; and every time he thought of it, the sludgy stink receded again, and the headache dimmed to a dull throb, and the colours around him brightened a little, all merging together to make one blue — oxygen blue, gas-jet blue, circuit-board blue, autopsy blue —

He tried a smile. It felt OK. The rotten-fruit smell had disappeared, although it did come back at regular intervals throughout the whole of blueeyedboy’s childhood, as did the phrases his mother spoke that day to Mrs Electric Blue —

Benjamin’s a good boy.

We’re so proud of Benjamin.

And always with the same, sick knowledge that he was not a good boy; that he was crooked in every cell — that, worse still, he liked it that way —

And even then, he must have known —

That one day he would kill her.

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: Very good, blueeyedboy!

chrysalisbaby: awesome U R so cool

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

10

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 21.43 on Monday, February 4

Status: public

Mood: deluded

Listening to: Murray Head: ‘So Strong’

That year, things went from bad to worse. Ma was mean, money was tight and no one, not even Benjamin, seemed to be able to please her. She no longer worked for Mrs White, and if Mrs White ever came to her stall at the market, Ma made sure someone else served her instead, and pretended not to notice.

Then there were the rumours that had begun to circulate. Blueeyedboy was never sure what exactly was being said, but he was aware of the whispers and of the sudden silences that sometimes fell whenever Mrs White approached, and of the way the neighbours looked at him when he was at the market. He thought it might have something to do with Feather Dunne, a gossip and a busybody who had moved into the Village last spring, who had befriended Mrs White and who often helped out with Emily, although why she should scorn blueeyedboy’s ma was still a mystery to him. But whatever it was, the poison spread. Soon, everyone seemed to be whispering.

Blueeyedboy wondered if he should try to talk to Mrs White, to ask her what had happened. He’d always liked her best of Ma’s ladies, and she had always been nice to him. Surely, if he approached her, she’d change her mind about letting Ma go, and they could be friends again —

One day he came home from school early and saw Mrs White’s car parked outside. A surge of relief came over him. They were talking again, he told himself. Whatever their quarrel had been, it was over.

But when he looked through the window he saw, instead of Mrs White, Mr White standing there beside the china cabinet.

Blueeyedboy had never had much to do with Mr White. He’d seen him in the Village, of course, and at St Oswald’s, where he worked, but never like this, never at home, and never without his wife, of course —

He must have come straight from St Oswald’s. He was wearing a long coat and carrying a satchel. A man of middle height and build; darkish hair turning to grey; small, neat hands; blue eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses. A mild, soft-spoken, diffident man, never taking centre stage. But now Mr White was different. Blueeyedboy could feel it. Living with Ma had given him a special sensitivity to any sign of tension or rage. And Mr White was angry; blueeyedboy could see it in the way he stood, tensed, immobile, under control.

Blueeyedboy edged closer, making sure to keep well out of sight under the line of the privet hedge. Through a gap in the branches he could see Ma, her profile slightly averted, standing next to Mr White. She was wearing her high-heeled shoes — he could tell, they always made her look taller. Even so, her head only reached the curve of Mr White’s shoulder. She raised her eyes to his, and for a moment they stood without moving, Ma smiling, Mr White holding her gaze.

And then Mr White reached into his coat and pulled out something that blueeyedboy thought at first was a paperback. Ma took it, split the spine, and then blueeyedboy realized that it was a wad of banknotes, snappy and fresh and unmarked —

But why was Mr White paying Ma? And why did it make him so angry?

It was then that a thought came to blueeyedboy; one of curiously adult clarity. What if the father he had never known — Mr Blue Eyes — was Mr White? What if Mrs White had found out? It would explain her hostility as well as the talk in the Village. It would explain so many things — Ma’s job at St Oswald’s, where he taught; her open resentment of his wife; and now this gift of money —

Shielded from view by the privet hedge, blueeyedboy craned his neck to see; to detect in this man’s features the faintest reflection of his own —

The movement must have alerted him. For a moment their eyes met. Mr White’s eyes widened suddenly, and blueeyedboy saw him flinch — which was when our hero turned and fled. The question of whether Mr White could have been his father or not was entirely secondary to the fact that Ma would certainly flay him alive if she caught him spying on her.

But as far as he could tell, Mr White said nothing to Ma about seeing a boy at the window. Instead Ma seemed in good spirits, and ceased to complain about money, and as the weeks and months passed without any further disruption, blueeyedboy’s suspicions increased, at last becoming a certainty —

Patrick White was his father.

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: I like the way your stories combine ‘real-life’ events with fiction. Perhaps you’d like to come back to Group and discuss the process of writing this? I’m sure the others would appreciate an insight into your emotional journey.

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Jenny, do I know you?

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Seriously. Do I know you?

11

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 22.35 on Monday, February 4

Status: restricted

Mood: amused

Listening to: Black Sabbath: ‘Paranoid’

Well, if you won’t answer me, I’ll simply delete your entries. You’re on my turf now, JennyTricks, and my rules apply. But it feels as if I know you. Could it be that we’ve met before? Could it be that you’re stalking me?

Stalking. Now there’s a sinister word. Like part of a plant, a bitter-green stalk that will one day bloom into something sickening. But online, things are different. Online, as fictional characters, we can sometimes allow ourselves the luxury of antisocial behaviour. I’m sick of hearing about how so-and-so felt so violated at such-and-such’s comments, or how somebody else felt sexually besmirched at some harmless innuendo. Oh, these people with their sensitivities. Excuse me, but writing a comment in capitals isn’t the same as shouting. Venting a little vitriol isn’t the same as a physical blow. So vent away, JennyTricks. Nothing you say can touch me. Although I’ll admit, I’m curious. Tell me, have we met before?

The rest of my online audience shows a pleasing level of appreciation — especially ClairDeLune, who sends me a critique (her word) of every single fic I write, with comments on style and imagery. My last attempt, she tells me, is both psychologically intuitive and a breakthrough into a new and more mature style.

Cap, less subtle, as always, pleads for more drama, more anguish, more blood. Toxic, who thinks about sex all the time, urges me to write more explicitly. Or, as he puts it: Whatever gets your rocks off, dude. Just try to think about mine some time . . .

As for Chryssie, she just sends me love — adoring, uncritical, slavish love — with a message that says: Ur made of awesome! on a banner made up of little pink hearts —

Albertine does not comment. She rarely does on my stories. Perhaps they make her uncomfortable. I hope so. Why post them otherwise?

I saw her again this afternoon. Red coat, black hair, basket over her arm, walking down the hill into Malbry town. I had my camera with me this time, the one with the telephoto lens, and I managed to get a few clear shots from the little piece of waste ground at the top of Mill Road before a man walking his dog forced me to curtail my investigation.

He gave me a suspicious look. He was short, bow-legged, muscular; the type of man who always seems to hate and distrust me on sight. His dog was the same; bandy, off-white; big teeth and no eyes. It growled when it saw me. I took a step back.

‘Birds,’ I said, by means of explanation. ‘I like to come here and photograph birds.’

The man eyed me with open contempt. ‘Aye, I’ll bet.’

He watched me go with no further comment, but I could feel his eyes in the small of my back. I’ll have to be more careful, I thought. People already think I’m a freak — and the last thing I want is for someone to remember later how Gloria Winter’s boy was seen lurking around Mill Road with a camera —

And yet, I can’t stop watching her. It’s almost a compulsion. God knows what Ma would do if she knew. Still, Ma has other fish to fry in the wake (ha!) of Nigel’s funeral, though the task of clearing out his flat has fallen to Yours Truly.

Not that there is much to find. His telescope; a few clothes; his computer; half a shelf of old books. Some papers from the hospital in a shoebox under the bed. I’d expected more — a journal, at least — but maybe experience had made him more cautious. If Nigel kept a journal at all, it was probably at Emily’s house, where he’d been staying most of the time, and where he could almost certainly rely on its safety from prying eyes.

There is no sign of Nigel’s girl here. Not a trace, not a hair, not a photograph. The narrow bed is still unmade, the quilt pulled roughly over the dubious sheet, but she has never slept here. There is no fleeting scent of her, no toothbrush of hers in the bathroom, no coffee cup in the sink bearing the imprint of her mouth. The flat smells of unaired bed, of stale water, of damp, and it will take me less than half a day to clear the contents into the back of a van and to drive it to the refuse site, where anything of value will be sorted and recycled, and the rest consigned to landfill, to the misery of future generations.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how little a life amounts to? A few old clothes, a box of papers, some dirty plates in the sink? A half-smoked packet of cigarettes, tucked away in a bedside drawer — she doesn’t smoke, so he kept them here, for those nights when, unable to sleep, he would look out through the skylight with his telescope, trying to see, through the light pollution, the crystal webwork of the stars.

Yes, my brother liked stars. That was pretty much all he liked. Certainly, he never liked me. Well, neither of them did, of course, but it was Nigel I feared; Nigel, who had suffered most in the face of Ma’s expectations —

Oh, those expectations. I wonder what Nigel made of them. Watching from the sidelines, pallid in his black shirts, bony fists perpetually clenched, so that when he opened up his hands you’d see the little crescents of red that his fingernails had left in his palm, marks he transferred on to my skin whenever he and I were alone —

Nigel’s flat is monochrome. Grey sheets under a black-and-white quilt; a wardrobe in shades of charcoal and black. You’d have thought he might have quit that by now, but time has made no difference to my brother’s colour scheme. Socks, jackets, sweaters, jeans. Not a shirt, not a T-shirt, not even a pair of underpants that is not the official black or grey —

Nigel was five when Dad left home. I’ve often wondered about that. Did he remember wearing colours, when he was still the only child? Did he sometimes go to the beach and play on the salty yellow sand? Or did he lie there with Dad at night and point out the constellations? What was he really looking for, scanning the skies with his Junior Telescope (paid for with money from his newspaper round)? Where did his anger come from? Most of all, why was it decreed that he should be black, or Ben should be blue? And if our roles had been reversed, would things have turned out differently?

I guess I’ll never know now. Maybe I should have asked him. But Nigel and I never really talked, not even back when we were kids. We coexisted side by side, waging a kind of guerrilla war in defiance of Ma’s disapproval, each one inflicting as much damage as he could on to the hated enemy.

My brother never knew me, except as the focus of his rage. And the only time I ever found out anything intimate about him, I kept the knowledge to myself, fearing the possible consequences. But if each man kills the thing he loves, must not the opposite also be true? Does each man love the thing he kills? And is love the ingredient that I lack?

I turned on his computer. Skimmed briefly through his favourites. The result was as I’d suspected: links to the Hubble telescope; to images of galaxies; to webcams at the North Pole; to chat rooms in which photographers discussed the latest solar eclipse. Some porn, all of it plain-vanilla; some legally downloaded music. I went into his e-mail — he’d left the password open — but found nothing of interest there. Not a word from Albertine; no e-mails, no photographs, no sign that he’d ever known her.

No sign of anyone else, either; no official correspondence, except for the monthly line or two from his therapist; no proof of some clandestine affair; not even a quick note from a friend. My brother had fewer friends than I, and the thought is strangely touching. But now isn’t the time to feel sympathy. My brother knew the risks from the start. He shouldn’t have got in the way, that’s all. It wasn’t my fault that he did.

I found the cleanest mug he had and made a cup of tea. It wasn’t Earl Grey, but it would do. Then I logged on to badguysrock.

Albertine wasn’t online. But Chryssie, as always, was waiting for me, her avatar blinking forlornly. Beneath it, an emoticon, coupled with the plaintive message: chrysalisbaby is feeling sick.

Well, I’m not entirely surprised. Syrup of ipecac can have some unpleasant side effects. Still, that’s hardly my fault, and today I have more pressing concerns.

I glanced quickly through my mailbox. Captainbunnykiller is feeling good. BombNumber20 is feeling bored. A meme from Clair entitled: Try this simple test to know — What kind of a psycho are you?

Mmm. Cute. And typical Clair, whose knowledge of human psychology — such as it is — is mostly gleaned from cop shows, shows with names like Blue Murder, in which feisty female profilers hunt down bed-wetting sociopaths by Getting Inside the Criminal Mind —

So what kind of psycho am I, Clair? Let’s look at the results.

Mostly Ds. Congratulations! You are a malignant narcissist. You are glib, charming, manipulative, and have little or no regard for others. You enjoy notoriety, and are willing to commit acts of violence to satisfy your craving for instant gratification, although secretly you may harbour feelings of inadequacy. You may also suffer from paranoia, and you have a tendency to live in a dream world in which you are the perpetual centre of attention. You need to get professional help, as you are a potential danger to yourself and others.

Dear Clair. I’m very fond of her. And it’s really rather touching that she thinks that she can analyse me. But she has a junior social-worker mentality at best, for all her spit and psychobabble, and besides, she’s none too stable herself, as we may discover in due course.

You see, even Clair takes risks online. During what passes for her ‘real’ work — handing out praise to the talentless and platitudinous comfort to the existentially challenged — she secretly spends hours online updating her fansite on Angel Blue, making banners, searching the Net for pictures, comments, interviews, rumours, guest appearances or any information regarding his current whereabouts. She also writes to him regularly, and has posted on her own website a small collection of his handwritten replies, which are courteous but impersonal, and which only someone truly obsessed would ever take as encouragement . . .

Clair, however, is truly obsessed. Thanks to my link to her WeJay, I know that she writes fan fiction about his characters — and sometimes about the man himself — erotic fics that, over the months, are becoming increasingly daring. She also paints portraits of her loved one, and makes cushions on to which she prints his face. Her bedroom at home is filled with these cushions, mostly in pink — her favourite colour — some of them also depicting her face next to his, inside a printed heart.

She follows his wife’s career, too — an actress to whom he has been happily married for the past five or six years — although recently Clair may have begun to indulge in hopeful speculation. An online friend — who logs on under the name sapphiregirl — has informed her of a liaison between Angel’s wife and a co-worker on the set of her new film.

This has led to a spate of attacks on Mrs Angel in some of Clair’s recent journal posts. Her last post makes her feelings more than clear. She does not want to see Angel hurt; and she is slightly bewildered that a man of his intelligence has not yet come to terms with the fact that his wife is — well, unworthy.

The fact that there was no such liaison is surely no fault of sapphire-girl — these rumours are so easily spread, and how could she possibly have known that Clair would respond so impulsively? It will be interesting to see how Clair reacts if — when — Angel’s lawyers write to her.

How can I be so sure, you ask? Well, Internet mail can be ignored, but a letter to Mrs Angel’s address, and the accompanying box of chocolates (in this case containing an unexpected surprise), all traceable to ClairDeLune and posted within five miles of her house — are altogether more sinister.

She will, of course, deny it. But will Angel Blue believe her? And Clair is such a devoted fan: she travels to America to see her idol on the stage; she goes to every convention where she might get a glimpse of him. What might she do on receipt of — let’s say, a court order, or even just a rebuke from her man? I suspect her to be volatile — perhaps even slightly deranged. What would it take to make her flip? And wouldn’t it be fun to find out?

But for now I have other things on my mind. A man should always clean up after himself. And Nigel is, after all, my mess — my mess, if not my murder.

Does murder run in families? I can almost think it does. Who’s next, I wonder? Myself, perhaps, dead of an overdose, maybe, or found beaten to death in an alleyway? A car crash? A hit-and-run? Or will it look like suicide, a bottle of pills by the side of the bath, a bloodstained razor on the tiles?

It could be anything, of course. The killer could be anyone. So play it safe. Don’t take any risks. Remember what happened to the other two —

Watch your back, blueeyedboy.

12

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 01.22 on Tuesday, February 5

Status: public

Mood: cautious

Listening to: Altered Images: ‘Happy Birthday’

He has always been good at watching his back. Over the years, he has had to learn. Accidents happen so easily, and the men in his family have always been particularly prone to them. It turns out that even his dad, whom blueeyedboy had always assumed had simply gone out to buy cigarettes and never bothered to come back, had met with a fatal accident: in his case, a car crash, no one’s fault — the kind that the folks at Malbry Infirmary call a Saturday Night Special. Too much alcohol; too little patience, maybe a marital crisis and —

— Wham!

And so it should come as no surprise that blueeyedboy should have turned out this way. No guiding paternal influence; a controlling, ambitious mother; an elder brother who tended to solve all problems with his fists. It’s hardly rocket science, is it? And he is more than familiar with the rudiments of psychoanalysis.

Congratulations! You are an Oedipal. Your unusually close relationship with your mother has stifled your ability to grow into an emotionally balanced human being. Your ambivalence towards her emerges in violent fantasies, often sexual in nature.

Well — duh, as Cap might say.

Nigel may have missed his dad, but the man meant nothing to blueeyedboy. He wasn’t even blueeyedboy’s real father — certainly, from his photographs, he sees no resemblance to himself. To Nigel, perhaps: the big, square hands; the black hair falling across the face; the slightly over-pretty mouth, with its hidden threat of violence. Ma often hinted that Peter Winter was possessed of a nasty streak; and if one of them misbehaved, she’d say — whilst wielding that piece of electrical cord — It’s a good thing for you your father’s not here. He’d soon sort you out.

And so the word father came to have — shall we say — negative connotations. A loose-lipped, greenish, bilious sound, like the murky water under Blackpool pier, where they used to go on his birthday. Blueeyedboy always liked the beach, but the pier itself frightened him, looking as it did like a fossilized animal — a dinosaur maybe — all bones, but still quite dangerous with its muddy feet and broken teeth.

Pier. Peter. Pierre, in French. Sticks and stones may break my bones —

After seeing Mr White with his ma, our hero’s curiosity regarding Patrick White had increased. He found himself watching Mr White whenever he saw him in the Village — walking to St Oswald’s with his satchel in one hand and a pile of exercise books in the other; in the park on Sundays with Mrs White and Emily — now two years old and learning to walk — playing games, making her laugh —

It occurred to him that if Mr White were his father, then Emily must be his sister. He imagined himself with a little sister: helping his Ma look after her; reading her stories at bedtime. He began to follow them; to sit in the park where they liked to go, pretending to read a book while he watched —

He hadn’t dared ask Ma for the truth. Besides, he didn’t need to. He could feel it in his heart. Patrick White was his father. Sometimes our hero liked to dream that one day his father would come and take him somewhere far away —

He would have shared, he tells himself. He would have shared him with Emily. But Mr White went out of his way to avoid even having to look at him. A man who, until then, had always greeted him genially in the street; had always called him young man and asked how he was doing at school.

It wasn’t just because Emily was so much more appealing. There was something in Mr White’s face, in his voice whenever our hero approached him; a look of wariness, almost of fear —

But what could Mr White possibly fear from a boy of only nine years old? Our hero had no way of knowing. Was he afraid that blueeyedboy might want to harm Emily? Or was he afraid that Mrs White would one day discover his secret?

He started skipping classes at school to hang around St Oswald’s. He would hide behind the utility shed and watch the yard as lessons changed: the stream of boys in blue uniforms; the Masters in their flapping black gowns. On Tuesdays it was Mr White who supervised the schoolyard, and blueeyedboy would watch him avidly from his hiding-place as he moved across the asphalt, stopping every now and again to exchange a few words with a pupil —

‘String quartet tonight, Jones. Don’t forget your music.’

‘No, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘Tuck your shirt in, Hudson, please. You’re not on the beach at Brighton, you know.’

Blueeyedboy remembers one Tuesday, which happened to be his tenth birthday. Not that he expected much in the way of celebration. That year had been especially grim, except for his trips to the Mansion; money was tight; Ma was stressed, and a trip to Blackpool was out of the question — there was too much work to do. Even a birthday cake, he thought, was probably too much to hope for. Even so, that morning, there seemed to be something special in the air. He was ten years old. The big one-oh. His life was in double digits. Perhaps it was time, he told himself, as he headed towards St Oswald’s, to find out the truth about Patrick White —

He found him in the schoolyard, a couple of minutes before the end of School Assembly. Mr White was standing by the entrance to the Middle School Quad, his faded gown slung over his arm, a mug of coffee in one hand. In a minute or two the yard would be filled with boys; now it was deserted, except, of course, for blueeyedboy, made instantly conspicuous by dint of his lack of uniform, standing beneath the entrance gate with the school’s motto emblazoned on it in Latin — Audere, agere, auferre — which, thanks to Dr Peacock, he knows means: to dare, to strive, to conquer.

Suddenly, our blueeyedboy did not feel very daring. He was desperately sure he would stutter; that the words he so badly wanted to speak would break and crumble in his mouth. And even without the black robe, Mr White looked forbidding: taller and sterner than usual, watching our hero’s determined approach, listening to the sound of his shoes on the cobbled courtyard —

‘What are you doing here, boy?’ he said, and his voice, though soft, was glacial. ‘Why have you been following me?’

Blueeyedboy looked at him. Mr White’s blue eyes seemed a very long way up. ‘M-Mr White—’ he began. ‘I — I—’

Stuttering begins in the mind. It’s the curse of expectation. That’s why he was able to speak perfectly normally at certain times, while at others his words turned to Silly String, tangling him uselessly in a web of his own making.

‘I — I—’ Our hero could feel his face turning red.

Mr White regarded him. ‘Look, I don’t have time for this. The bell’s going to ring any moment now—’

Blueeyedboy made a final effort. He had to know the truth, he thought. After all, today was his birthday. He tried to see himself in blue: St Oswald’s blue, or butterfly blue. He saw the words like butterflies coming out of his open mouth, and said, with barely a stutter at all —

‘Mr White, are you my dad?’

For a moment the silence bound them. Then, just as the morning bell sounded through St Oswald’s, blueeyedboy saw Patrick White’s face change from shock to astonishment, and then to a kind of stunned pity.

‘Is that what you thought?’ he said at last.

Blueeyedboy just looked at him. Around them, the courtyard was filling up with blue St Oswald’s blazers. Chirping voices all around, circling like birds. Some of the boys gaped at him, a single sparrow in a flock of budgerigars.

After a moment, Mr White seemed to come out of his stupor. ‘Listen,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘I don’t know where you got this idea. But it isn’t true. Really, it’s not. And if I catch you spreading these rumours—’

‘You’re n-not my f-father?’ said blueeyedboy, his voice beginning to tremble.

‘No,’ said Mr White. ‘I’m not.’

For a moment the words seemed to make no sense. Blueeyedboy had been so sure. But Mr White was telling the truth; he could see it in his blue eyes. But then — why had he given money to Ma? And why had he done it in secret?

And then it fell into place in his mind like the moving parts of a Mouse Trap game. He supposed it had been obvious. Ma was blackmailing Mr White — blackmail, a sinister word; the Black and White Minstrels under their paint. Mr White had transgressed, and Ma had somehow found out about it. That would explain the whisperings; the way Mrs White looked at Ma; Mr White’s anger, and now his contempt. This man was not his father, he thought. This man had never cared for him.

And now blueeyedboy could feel the tears beginning to prick at his eyelids. Terrible, helpless, childish tears of disappointment and of shame. Please, not in front of Mr White, he begged of the Almighty, but God, like Ma, was implacable. Like Ma, Our Father sometimes needs that gesture of contrition.

‘Are you OK?’ said Mr White, reluctantly putting a hand on his arm.

‘Fine, thanks,’ said blueeyedboy, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

‘I don’t know how you got the idea that—-’

‘Forget it. Really. I’m fine,’ he said, and very calmly walked away, keeping his spine as straight as he could, although he was a mess inside, although it felt like dying.

It’s my birthday, he told himself. Today, I deserve to be special. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, whatever punishment God or Ma can possibly inflict on me —

And that’s how, fifteen minutes later, he found himself, not back at school, but at the end of Millionaires’ Row, looking towards the Mansion.

It was the first time that blueeyedboy had been to the Mansion unsupervised. His visits with his brothers and Ma were always strictly controlled, and he knew that if Ma found out what he’d done, she’d make him sorry he’d ever been born. But today he wasn’t afraid of Ma. Today, a breath of rebellion seemed to have taken hold of him. Today, for once, blueeyedboy was in the mood for a spot of trespass.

The garden was shielded from the road by a set of cast-iron railings. At the far end there was a stone wall, and all around, a blackthorn hedge. On the whole, it didn’t look promising. But blueeyedboy was determined. He found a space through which to crawl, mindful of the twigs and thorns that snagged at his hair and stuck through his T-shirt, and emerged on the other side of the hedge into the grounds of the Mansion.

Ma always called it ‘the grounds’. Dr Peacock called it ‘the garden’, although there was over four acres of it, orchard and kitchen garden and lawns, plus the walled rose garden in which Dr Peacock took so much pride, the pond and the old conservatory, where pots and gardening tools were kept. Most of it was trees, though, which suited blueeyedboy just fine, with alleys of rhododendrons that flared brief glory in springtime and in late summer grew skeletal, encroaching darkly across the path, the perfect cover for anyone wishing to visit the garden unseen —

Blueeyedboy did not question the impulse that had driven him to the Mansion. He couldn’t go back to St Oswald’s, though, not now, after what had happened. He dared not go back home, of course, and at school he’d be punished for being late. But the Mansion was quiet, and secret, and safe. Simply to be there was enough; to dive into the undergrowth; to hear the summery sounds of the bees high up in the leafy canopy, and to feel the beating of his heart slow down to its natural cadence. He was still so immersed in his agitated thoughts that, walking along an alley of trees, he almost ran into Dr Peacock, who was standing, secateurs in hand, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, at the entrance to the rose garden.

‘And what brings you here this morning?’

For a moment blueeyedboy was quite unable to answer. Then he looked past Dr Peacock and saw: the newly dug grave; the mound of earth, the rolled square of turf laid aside on the ground —

Dr Peacock smiled at him. It was a rather complex smile; sad and complicit at the same time. ‘I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the act,’ he said, indicating the fresh grave. ‘I know how this may look to you, but as we grow older our capacity for sentiment expands to an exponential degree. To you it may look like senility—’

Blueeyedboy stared at him with a perfect lack of comprehension.

‘What I mean is,’ Dr Peacock said, ‘I was just bidding a last goodbye to a very loyal old friend.’

For a moment blueeyedboy was still unsure of what he’d meant. Then he remembered Dr Peacock’s Jack Russell, over which the old man always made such a fuss. Blueeyedboy didn’t like dogs. Too eager; too unpredictable.

He shivered, feeling vaguely sick. He tried to remember the name of the dog, but all he could think of was Malcolm, the name of his would-have-been-sibling, and his eyes filled with tears for no reason, and his head began to ache —

Dr Peacock put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t be upset, son. He had a good life. Are you all right? You’re shivering.’

‘I don’t feel so w-well,’ said blueeyedboy.

‘Really? Well, then, we’d better get you in the house, hadn’t we? I’ll get you something cool to drink. And then perhaps I should call your mother—’

‘No! Please!’ said blueeyedboy.

Dr Peacock gave him a look. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I understand. You don’t want to alarm her. A fine woman in many ways, but somewhat over-protective. And besides—’ His eyes creased in a mischievous smile. ‘Am I correct in assuming that on this bright summer morning, the delights of the school curriculum were not enough to keep you indoors when all of Nature’s syllabus demanded your urgent attention?’

Blueeyedboy took this to mean that his truancy had been noted. ‘Please, sir. Don’t tell Ma.’

Dr Peacock shook his head. ‘I see no reason to tell her,’ he said. ‘I was a boy myself, once. Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. Fishing in the river. Are you fond of fishing, young man?’

Blueeyedboy nodded, even though he’d never tried it; never would. ‘Excellent pastime. Gets you outdoors. Of course, I have my gardening—’ He glanced over his shoulder at the mound of earth and the open grave. ‘Give me a moment, will you?’ he said. ‘Then I’ll fix us both a drink.’

Blueeyedboy watched in silence as Dr Peacock filled in the grave. He didn’t really want to look, but he found that he couldn’t look away. His chest was tight, his lips were numb, his head was spinning dizzily. Was he really ill, he thought? Or was it the sound of digging, he thought; the tinny rasp of the spade as it bit, the sour-vegetable scent, the crazy thump as each packet of earth clattered into the open grave?

At last Dr Peacock put down the spade, but he did not turn immediately. Instead he stood by the burial mound, hands in pockets, head bowed, for such a long time that blueeyedboy wondered if he had been forgotten.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ he said at last.

At his voice, Dr Peacock turned. He had taken off his gardening hat, and without it the sunlight made him squint. ‘How sentimental you must find me,’ he said. ‘All this ceremony over a dog. Have you ever kept a dog?’

Blueeyedboy shook his head.

‘Too bad. Every boy should have one. Still, you’ve got your brothers,’ he said. ‘Bet that’s lot of fun, eh?’

For a moment, blueeyedboy tried to imagine the world as Dr Peacock saw it: a world where brothers were lots of fun; where boys went fishing, kept dogs; played cricket on the green —

‘It’s my birthday today,’ he said.

‘Is that so? Today?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Dr Peacock smiled. ‘Ah. I remember birthdays. Jelly and ice cream and birthday cake. Not that I tend to celebrate nowadays. August the twenty-fourth, isn’t it? Mine was on the twenty-third. I’d forgotten until you reminded me.’ Now he looked thoughtfully at the boy. ‘I think we should mark the occasion,’ he said. ‘I can’t claim to offer much in the way of refreshments, but I do have tea, and some iced buns, and anyway—’ At this he grinned, suddenly looking mischievous, like a young boy wearing a false beard and a very convincing old-man’s disguise: ‘We Virgos should stick together.’

It doesn’t sound much, does it? A cup of Earl Grey, an iced bun and the stub of a candle burning on top. But to blueeyedboy that day stands out in memory like a gilded minaret against a barren landscape. He remembers every detail now with perfect, heightened precision: the little blue roses on the cup; the sound of spoon against china; the amber colour and scent of the tea; the angle of the sunlight. Little things, but their poignancy is like a reminder of innocence. Not that he ever was innocent; but on that day he approached it; and looking back, he understands that this was the last of his childhood, slipping like sand through his fingers —

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: I’m glad to see you exploring this theme in more detail, blueeyedboy. Your central character often appears as cold and emotionless, and I like the way you hint at his hidden vulnerability. I’m sending you a reading-list of books you may find useful. Perhaps you’d like to make a few notes before our next meeting. Hope to see you back here soon!

chrysalisbaby: wish i could be there too (cries)

13

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 01.45 on Tuesday, February 5

Status: public

Mood: predatory

Listening to: Nirvana: ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’

After that, Dr Peacock became a kind of hero to blueeyedboy. It would have been surprising had he not: Dr Peacock was everything he admired. Dazzled by his personality, hungry for his approval, he lived for those brief interludes, his visits to the Mansion; hanging on to every word Dr Peacock addressed to him —

All blueeyedboy remembers now are fragments of benevolence. A walk through the rose garden; a cup of Earl Grey; a word exchanged in passing. His need had not yet turned to greed, or his affection to jealousy. And Dr Peacock had the gift of making them all feel special — not just Ben, but his brothers, too; even Ma, who was hard as nails, was not beyond the reach of his charm.

Then came the year of the entrance exam. Benjamin was ten years old. Three and a half years had passed since his first visit to the Mansion. Over that time, many things had changed. He was no longer bullied at school (since the compass incident, the others had learnt to leave him alone), but he was unhappy, nevertheless. He had acquired the reputation of being stuck-up — a cardinal sin in Malbry — which, added to his early status as a freak and a queer, amounted to social suicide.

It didn’t help that, thanks to Ma, word of his gift had got around. As a result, even the teachers had come to think of him differently — some of them with resentment. A different child is a difficult child, or so thought the teachers at Abbey Road, and, far from being curious, many were suspicious, some openly sarcastic, as if his Ma’s expectations and his own inability to conform to the mediocrity of the place were somehow an attack on them.

Ma, and her expectations. Grown stronger than ever, of course, now that the gift was official, now that there was a name for it — an official name, a syndrome, that smelt of sickness and sanctity, with its furry dark-grey sibilants and its fruity Catholic undertint.

Not that it mattered, he told himself. Another year and he would be free. Free to attend St Oswald’s, which Ma had painted in such attractive colours for him that he was almost taken in, and of which Dr Peacock spoke with such affection that he had put his fears aside and thrown himself into the task of becoming what Dr Peacock expected of him: to be the son he’d never had, a chip, as he said, off the old block —

Sometimes Benjamin wondered what would happen if he failed the entrance exam. But since Ma had long ago come to believe that the exam was merely a formality, a series of documents to sign before he entered the hallowed gates, he knew that his worries were best left unvoiced.

His brothers were both at Sunnybank Park. Sunnybanker. Rhymes with wanker, as he used to say to them, which made Brendan laugh but infuriated Nigel, who — when he could catch him — would sometimes pin him between his knees and punch him till he cried, shouting — Fuck you, you little freak! — until at last he’d exhausted himself, or Ma heard and came running —

Nigel was fifteen, and hated him. He’d hated him from the very first, but by then his hatred had blossomed. Perhaps he was jealous of the attention his brother received; perhaps it was merely testosterone. In any case, the more he grew, the more he turned his whole being towards making his brother suffer, regardless of the consequences.

Ben was skinny and undersized. Nigel was already big for his age, sheathed in adolescent muscle, and he had all kinds of virtually untraceable ways of inflicting pain — Chinese burns, nips and pinches, sly shin-kicks under the table — though when he got angry, he forgot discretion and, without any fear of retribution, laid into his brother with fists and feet —

Telling tales only made it worse. Nigel seemed oblivious to punishment: it simply fed his resentment. Beatings made him worse. If he was sent to bed hungry, he would force-feed his brothers toothpaste, or dirt, or spiders, carefully harvested in the attic and put aside for just such an eventuality.

Brendan, always the cautious one, accepted the natural order of things. Perhaps he was brighter than they’d thought. Perhaps he feared retribution. He was also ridiculously squeamish, and if Nigel or Ben got a hiding from Ma, he would cry just as much as either of them — but at least he wasn’t a threat, and sometimes even shared his sweets with Ben when Nigel was safely out of the way.

Brendan ate a lot of sweets, and now it was really beginning to show. A soft white roll of underbelly hung over the waistband of his donkey-brown cords, and his chest was plump and girly beneath his baggy brown jumpers, and although he and Ben might have had a chance if they’d stood together against Nigel, Brendan never had the nerve. And so Ben learnt to look after himself, and to run when his brother in black was around.

Other things had changed as well. Blueeyedboy was growing up. Always prone to headaches, now he began to suffer from migraines, too, which began as strobing lights shot through with lurid colours. After that would come the tastes and smells, stronger than any he’d known before: rotten eggs; creosote; the lurking stink of the vitamin drink; and then, at last, the sickness, the pain, rolling over him like a rock, burying him alive.

He couldn’t sleep; couldn’t think; could hardly concentrate at school. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his speech, which had always been hesitant, had developed into a full-blown stammer. Blueeyedboy knew what it was. His gift — his sensitivity — had now become a poison to him. A poison creeping slowly through his body, changing him as it went from healthy, wholesome blood and bone to something with which even Ma found it difficult to sympathize.

She called the doctor in, of course, who at first put down the headaches to growing pains, and then, when they persisted, to stress.

‘Stress? What has he got to be stressed about?’ she cried in exasperation.

His silence annoyed her even more, and finally led to a series of uncomfortable interrogations, which left him feeling even worse. He quickly learnt not to complain; to pretend that there was nothing wrong with him, even when he was sick with pain and almost ready to collapse.

Instead, he evolved his own system of coping. He learnt which medicine to steal from Ma’s cabinet. He learnt how to combat the phantom sensations with magic words and images. He took them from Dr Peacock’s maps; from books; from the dark places of his heart —

Most of all, he dreamed in blue. Blue, the colour of control. He had always associated it with power, power like electricity; now he learnt to visualize himself encased in a shell of burning blue, untouchable, invincible. There, he was safe from everything. There, he could replenish himself. Blue was secure. Blue was serene. Blue, the colour of murder. And he wrote down his dreams in the same Blue Book in which he wrote his stories.

But there are other ways than fic to cope with adolescent stress. All you need is a suitable victim, preferably one who can’t fight back: a scapegoat who will take the blame for everything you’ve suffered.

Benjamin’s earliest victims were wasps, which he’d hated since he’d been stung in the mouth as he swigged from a half-empty can of Coke left unguarded in the summer sun. From then on, all wasps were guilty. His revenge was to catch them using traps made from jars half-filled with sugar water, and later to impale them on the tip of a needle and watch as each creature struggled and died, pumping its pale stinger in and out and writhing its horribly corseted body like the world’s most diminutive pole dancer.

He showed them to Brendan, too, and watched him writhe in discomfort.

‘Ah, don’t, that’s disgusting—’ said Bren, his face contorted with dismay.

‘Why, Bren? It’s only a wasp.’

He shrugged. ‘I know. But please—’

Ben pulled the needle free of the wasp. The insect, almost severed now, began to turn sticky somersaults. Bren flinched.

‘Happy now?’

‘It’s still m-moving,’ Brendan said, his face awry with fear and disgust.

Ben tipped the contents of the jar on to the table in front of Brendan. ‘So kill it,’ he said.

‘Ah, please, Ben—’

‘Go on. Kill it. Put it out of its misery, you fat bastard.’

Brendan was almost crying now. ‘I c-can’t,’ he said. ‘I just—’

‘Do it!’ Ben punched him in the arm. ‘Do it, kill it, kill it now—’ Some people are born to be killers. Brendan was not one of them. And Benjamin revelled sourly in Brendan’s stupid helplessness, his whimpering cries as Ben punched him again, his retreat into the corner, arms wrapped around his head. Brendan never tried to fight back. Ben was three years younger, thirty pounds lighter, and still he beat Brendan easily. It wasn’t that he hated him; but his weakness was infuriating, making Ben want to hurt him more, to see him squirm like a wasp in a jar —

It was a little cruel, perhaps. Brendan had done nothing wrong. But it gave Ben the sense of control that he lacked, and it helped him to manage his growing stress. It was as if by tormenting his brother he could relocate his own suffering; evade the thing that imprisoned him in its cage of scents and colours.

Not that he thought about it much. His actions were purely instinctive, a self-defence against the world. Later, blueeyedboy was to learn that this process was called transference. An interesting word, coloured a muddy blue-green, that reminds him of the transfers his brothers used to stick on their arms: cheap and messy fake tattoos that stained the sleeves of their school shirts and got them into trouble in class. But somehow, at last, he learnt to cope. First, with the wasp traps, then with the mice, and finally, with his brothers.

And look at your blueeyedboy now, Ma. He has exceeded all expectations. He wears a suit to go to work — or at least, to maintain the pretence. He carries a leather briefcase. The word technician is in his job title, as is the word operator, and if no one knows quite what he does, it is merely because most ordinary people have no idea how complicated these operations can be.

Doctors rely on machines nowadays, Gloria says to Adèle and Maureen, when she meets them on Friday night. There are millions of pounds invested there in scanners and MRI machines, and someone has to operate them —

Never mind that the closest he has ever come to any one of those clever machines is vacuuming the dust underneath. You see, words do have power, Ma: power to camouflage the truth, to colour it in peacock shades.

Oh, if she knew, she’d make him pay. But she won’t find out. He’s too careful for that. She may have her suspicions, of course — but he thinks he can get away with it. It’s just a question of nerve, that’s all. Nerve and timing and self-control. That’s all a murderer needs, in the end.

Besides, as you know, I’ve done it before.

Post comment:

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

ClairDeLune: Jenny, don’t you ever get tired of coming here to criticize? This is intriguing, blueeyedboy. Did you look at the reading-list I sent you? I’d love to know what you thought of it . . .

14

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 01.55 on Tuesday, February 5

Status: restricted

Mood: awake

Nothing in my mailbox tonight. Just a meme from blueeyedboy, tempting me to come out and play. I’m almost certain he’s waiting for me; he often logs on at about this time and stays online into the early hours of the morning. I wonder what he wants from me. Love? Hate? Confessions? Lies? Or is it simply the contact he craves, the need to know I’m still listening? In the small hours of the night, when God seems like a cosmic joke and no one seems to be listening, don’t we all need someone to touch? Even you, blueeyedboy. Watching me, watching you, through a glass darkly, tapping out on this ouija board my letters to the dead.

Is this why he writes these stories of his, posting them here for me to read? Is it an invitation to play? Does he expect me to answer him with a confession of my own?

Tagged by blueeyedboy posting on badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at : 01.05 on Tuesday, February 5

If you were an animal, what would you be? An eagle soaring over the mountains.

Favourite smell? The Pink Zebra café, on a Thursday lunchtime.

Tea or coffee? Why have either, when you can have hot chocolate with cream?

Favourite flavour of ice cream? Green apple.

What are you wearing right now? Jeans, trainers and my favourite old cashmere sweater.

What are you afraid of? Ghosts.

What’s the last thing you bought? Mimosa. It’s my favourite flower.

What’s the last thing you ate? Toast.

Favourite sound? Yo-Yo Ma playing Saint-Saëns.

What do you wear in bed? An old shirt that belonged to my boyfriend.

What’s your pet hate? Being patronized.Your worst trait? Evasiveness.

Any scars or tattoos? More than I want to remember.

Any recurring dreams? No.

There’s a fire in your house. What would you save? My computer.

When did you last cry?

Well — I’d like to say it was when Nigel died. But both of us know that isn’t true. And how could I explain to him that sly, irrational surge of joy that overshadows the bulk of my grief, this knowledge that something is missing in me, some sense that has nothing to do with my eyes?

You see, I am a bad person. I don’t know how to cope with loss. Death is a heady cocktail of one part sorrow to three parts relief — I felt it with Daddy, with Mother, with Nigel — even with poor Dr Peacock . . .

Blueeyedboy knew — we both knew — that I was just deluding myself. Nigel never stood a chance. Even our love was a lie from the start, sending out its green shoots like those of a cut branch in a vase; shoots, not of recovery, but of desperation.

Yes, I was selfish. Yes, I was wrong. Even from the start I knew that Nigel belonged to someone else. Someone who never existed. But after years of running away, part of me wanted to be that girl; to sink into her like a child into a feather pillow; to forget myself — and everything — in the circle of Nigel’s arms. Online friendships were no longer enough. All of a sudden I wanted more. I wanted to be normal: to encounter the world, not through a glass, but through my lips and my fingers. I wanted more than the world online; more than a name at my fingertips. I wanted to be understood, not by someone at a keyboard far away, but by someone I could touch . . .

But sometimes a touch can be fatal. I should know; it’s happened before. Less than a year later, Nigel was dead, poisoned by proximity. Nigel’s girl has proved herself just as toxic as Emily White, sending out death with a single word.

Or, in this case, a letter.

15

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 15.44 on Tuesday, February 5

Status: restricted

Mood: apprehensive

The letter arrived on a Saturday, as we were having breakfast. By then Nigel was more or less living here, though he still kept his flat in Malbry, and we had established a kind of routine that almost suited both of us. He and I were nocturnal creatures, happiest at night. Thus Nigel came over at ten o’clock; shared a bottle, talked, made love, slept over and left by nine in the morning. At weekends he stayed longer, sometimes till ten or eleven o’clock, which was why he was there in the first place, and why the letter came to him. On a weekday he wouldn’t have opened it, and I could have dealt with it privately. I suppose that, too, was part of the plan. But right then I had no idea of the letter bomb about to explode in our unsuspecting faces —

That morning I was eating cereal, which ticked and popped as the milk sank in. Nigel wasn’t eating, or even speaking to me much. Nigel hardly ever ate breakfast, and his silences were ominous, especially in the mornings. Sounds orbiting a central silence like satellites around a baleful planet; the creak of the pantry door; the clatter of spoon against coffee jar; the chink of mugs. A second later, the fridge door opened; rattled; slammed. The kettle boiled; a brief eruption followed by a click of military finality. Then, the clack of the letter box and the stolid double-thump of the post.

Most of my mail is junk mail, though I rarely get mail of any kind. My bills are paid by direct debit. Letters? Why bother. Greetings cards? Forget it.

‘Anything interesting?’ I said.

For a moment Nigel said nothing at all. I heard the unfolding of paper. A single sheet, unfurled with a dry rasp, like the unsheathing of a sharpened knife.

‘Nigel?’

‘What?’

He jiggled his foot when he was annoyed; I could hear it against the table leg. And now there was something in his voice; something flat and hard, like an obstacle. He tore the used envelope into halves, then he fingered the single sheet. Stropped it on his thumb, like a blade —

‘It isn’t bad news, or anything?’ I did not speak of what I dreaded most, though I could feel it hanging over me.

‘For fuck’s sake. Let me read,’ he said. Now the obstacle was within my reach; like a sharp-edged table-top in an unexpected place. Those sharp edges never miss; they have a gravity all of their own, pulling me every time into their orbit. And there were so many sharp edges in Nigel; so many zones of restricted access.

It wasn’t his fault, I told myself; I would not have had him otherwise. We completed each other in some strange way: his dark moods and my lack of temperament. I am wide open, as he used to say; there are no hidden places in me, no unpleasant secrets. All the better; because deceit, that essentially female trait, is the thing that Nigel despised most of all. Deceit and lies, so alien to him — so alien, he thought, to me.

‘I have to go out for an hour or so.’ His voice sounded oddly defensive. ‘Will you be OK for a while? I have to go to Ma’s house.’

Gloria Winter, née Gloria Green, sixty-nine years old and still clutching at the remains of her family with the tenacity of a hungry remora. I knew her as a voice on the line; a rimshot Northern accent; an impatient drumming on the receiver; an imperious way of cutting you off like a gardener pruning roses.

Not that we’ve ever been introduced. Not officially, anyway. But I know her from Nigel; I know her ways; I know her voice on the telephone and her ominous range of silences. There are other things, too, that he never told me, but that I know only too well. The jealousy; the rancour; the rage; the hatred mixed with helplessness.

He rarely spoke of her to me. He rarely even mentioned her name. Living with Nigel, I soon understood that some subjects were best left alone, and this included his childhood, his father, his brothers, his past and most especially Gloria, who shared, along with her other son, a talent for bringing out the worst in Nigel.

‘Can’t your brother deal with this?’

I heard him stop on the way to the door. I wondered if he were turning round, fixing me with his dark eyes. Nigel rarely mentioned his brother, and when he did it was all bad. Twisted little bastard was about the best I’d heard so far — Nigel never had much objectivity when it came to discussing his family.

‘My brother? Why? Has he spoken to you?’

‘Of course not. Why would he?’

Another pause. I felt his eyes on the top of my head.

‘Graham Peacock’s dead,’ he said. His voice was curiously flat. ‘An accident, by the sound of it. Fell out of his wheelchair during the night. They found him dead in the morning.’

I didn’t look up. I didn’t dare. Suddenly everything seemed enhanced; the taste of coffee in my mouth; the sound of the birds; the beat of my heart; the table at my fingertips with all its scars and scratches.

‘This letter’s from your brother?’ I said.

Nigel ignored the question: ‘It says that the bulk of Peacock’s estate — valued at something like three million pounds—’

Another silence. ‘What?’ I said.

That strangely uninflected voice was somehow more disturbing than rage. ‘He’s left it all to you,’ he said. ‘The house, the art, the collections—’

‘Me? But I don’t even know him,’ I said.

‘The twisted little bastard.’

No need for me to ask who he meant; that phrase was reserved for his brother. So very like him in so many ways, and yet, whenever his name arose, I could almost believe that Nigel could kill a man; could beat him to death with fists and feet . . .

‘This must be a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ve never met Dr Peacock. I don’t even know what he looks like. Why would he leave his money to me?’

‘Well — maybe because of Emily White.’ Nigel’s voice was colourless.

And now the coffee tasted like dust; the birds fell silent; my heart was a stone. That name had silenced everything — except for the buzz of feedback that began right at the base of my spine, erasing all of the past twenty years in a surge of deadly static . . .

I know I should have told him then. But I’d hidden the truth for so long; believing that Nigel would always be there; hoping for the perfect time; not knowing that this time was all we had —

‘Emily White,’ said Nigel.

‘Never heard of her,’ I said.

16

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 03.15 on Wednesday, February 6

Status: restricted

Mood: sleepless

When dealt one of life’s terrible blows — the death of a parent, the end of a relationship, the positive test result, the guilty verdict, the final step off the tall building — there comes a moment of light-headedness, almost of euphoria, as the string which tethers us to our hopes is cut and we bounce off in another direction, briefly powered by the momentum of release.

The penultimate movement of the Symphonie fantastique — ‘The March to the Scaffold’ — has a similar moment, when the condemned arrives within view of the gallows, and the minor key shifts into a triumphant major, as if at the sight of a friendly face. I know how it feels: that lurch of deliverance, the feeling that the worst has already happened and that the rest is merely gravity.

Not that the worst had happened — not yet. But the clouds were gathering. By the time that letter arrived, Nigel had less than an hour to live; and the last thing he ever said to me were the four little syllables of her name, Emily White, like a musical sting performed by the ghost of Beethoven . . .

And Dr Peacock was dead at last. Ex-Master of St Oswald’s School, eccentric, genius, charlatan, dreamer, collector, saint, buffoon. Unrelenting in death as in life; somehow it did not surprise me to learn that once more, with the kindest intent, he had torn my life apart.

Not that he could have harmed me. Not intentionally, anyway. Emily always loved him: a large, heavy man with a soft beard and a strangely childlike manner, who read from Alice in Wonderland and played old, scratchy records on a wind-up gramophone while she sat on the swing in the Fireplace House and talked about music and painting and poetry and sound. And now the old man was dead at last, and there was no escaping him, or the thing we had helped set in motion.

I don’t really know how old Emily was when she first went to the Fireplace House. All I know is that it must have been some time after the Christmas concert, because that is where my memory shorts out for good; one moment I’m there, with the music all around me like some fabulous velvet, the next . . .

Feedback and white noise. A long rush of static, broken occasionally by a sudden burst of perfect sound, a phrase, a chord, a note. I try to make sense of it, but I cannot; too much of it is hidden. Of course there were witnesses; from them I can, if I wish, piece together the variations, if not the fugue. But I trust them less than I trust myself — and besides, I’ve worked hard to forget all that. Why should I try to remember it now?

When I was a child, and the worst happened — toys broken, affection denied, the small but poignant sorrows of childhood recalled through the mist of adult grief — I always sought refuge in the garden. There was a tree where I loved to sit; I remember its texture, its elephant hide, the sappy, plush scent of dead leaves and moss. Nowadays, when I’m lost and confused, I head for the Pink Zebra. It’s the safest place in my world; an escape from myself, a sanctuary. Everything here seems expressly designed to fit my unique requirements.

To begin with, its comfortable size, with every table against a wall. Its menu lists all my favourites. Best of all, unlike the genteel Village, it has no affiliations or pretensions. I am not invisible here, and although that could have its dangers, it’s good to be able to walk in and to have people talk to you and not at you. Even the voices are different here: not reedy like Maureen Pike’s or breathy and sour like Eleanor Vine’s or affected like Adèle Roberts’s, but rich with the tones of jazz clarinet and sitar and steel drums, with lovely calypso rhythms and lilts, so that just sitting here is almost as good as music.

I headed there that Saturday after Nigel had gone. That name on his lips had unsettled me, and I needed a place to think things out. Somewhere noisy. Somewhere safe. The Zebra was always a refuge for me; always filled with people. Today there were more than usual, all waiting outside the café door; their voices surging around me like animals at feeding-time. Saxophone Man’s Jamaican accent. The Fat Girl, with her breathy tone. And orchestrating everything, Bethan, with her Irish lilt, cheery, speaking to everyone, pulling it all together:

‘Hey, what’s going on? You’re late. You should have been here ten minutes ago.’

‘Hello, darlin’! What’ll it be?’

‘You got any more of that chocolate cake?’

‘Hang on, I’ll have a look for you.’

Thank goodness for Bethan, I told myself. Bethan, my coat of camouflage. I don’t think Nigel really understood. He resented all the time I spent at the Pink Zebra; wondered how I could so often prefer the company of strangers to his own. But to understand about Bethan, you have to be able to penetrate the many disguises with which she surrounds herself: the voices, the jokes, the nicknames, the cheery Irish cynicism that hides something closer to the bone.

Underneath all that there’s someone else. Someone damaged and vulnerable. Someone trying desperately to make sense of something sad and senseless . . .

‘There you are, darlin’. Try that for size. Hot chocolate, with cardamom cream.’

The chocolate is one of my favourites. Served with milk in a tall glass, with coconut and marshmallows, or dark, with a clash of chilli.

‘Listen to this. Creepy Dude came in to the Zebra the other day. Sat down just where you’re sitting. Ordered the lemon meringue pie. I watched him eat it from over there, then he came back to the counter and ordered another. I watched him eat that, then when he’d finished, he called me over and ordered more pie. Honest to God, darlin’, your man must have et six pieces of pie in under half an hour. The Fat Girl was sitting right there opposite him, and I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head, so I did.’

I sipped my chocolate. It was tasteless. But the warmth was comforting. I carried on the conversation without really paying attention to it, against a wall of background noise as meaningless as waves on a shore.

‘Hey, babe, lookin’ good—’

‘Two espressos, Bethan, please.’

‘Six pieces of pie. Imagine that. I’ve been thinking that maybe he’s on the run, that he’s shot his lover and he’s planning to jump off Beachy Head before the police catch up with him, because six pieces of pie — Jesus God! — now there’s a man with nothing to lose—’

‘And I told her, I said, “I’m not ’avin’ that—” ’

‘Be with you in a minute, babe.’

Sometimes in a noisy room you can pick out the sound of a single voice — sometimes even a single word — that clatters against the wall of sound like an out-of-tune violin in an orchestra.

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

His voice is unmistakable. Soft and slightly nasal, perhaps, with a peculiar emphasis on the aspirates, like a theatre actor, or maybe a man who once stuttered. And now I could hear the music again, the opening chords of the Berlioz, never very far from my thoughts. Why it had to be that piece, I don’t know; but it’s the sound of my deepest fear, and it sounds to me like the end of the world.

I kept my own voice steady and low. No need to disturb the customers. ‘You’ve really done it now,’ I said.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m talking about your letter,’ I said.

‘What letter?’

‘Don’t bullshit me,’ I said. ‘Nigel got a letter today. Given the mood he was in when he left, and given the fact that I only know one person capable of winding him up to that level—’

‘I’m glad you think so.’ I heard his smile.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘But you know my brother. Impulsive. Always getting the wrong idea.’ He paused, and once more I heard his smile. ‘Perhaps he was shaken by the news of Dr Peacock’s legacy. Perhaps he just wanted Ma to be sure that he knew nothing about it—’ He took a sip of his Earl Grey. ‘You know, I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said. ‘It’s still a magnificent estate. Perhaps the property’s a little rundown. Still, nothing that can’t be fixed, eh? Then there’s the art. The collections. Three million pounds is conservative. I’d estimate it at closer to four—’

‘I don’t care,’ I hissed at him. ‘They can give it to someone else.’

‘There isn’t anyone else,’ he said.

Oh yes there is. There’s Nigel. Nigel, who trusted me —

How fragile are these things we build. How tragically ephemeral. In contrast, the house is solid as stone; as tiles and beams and mortar. How could we compete with stone? How could our little alliance survive?

‘I have to admit,’ he said mildly, ‘I thought you might show some gratitude. After all, Dr Peacock’s estate is likely to bring you a tidy sum — more than enough to get out of this place and buy yourself somewhere decent.’

‘I like my life as it is,’ I said.

‘Really? I’d kill to get out of here.’

I picked up my empty chocolate cup; turned it round and round in my hands. ‘So how did Dr Peacock die? And how much did he leave you?’

A pause. ‘That wasn’t very kind.’

I lowered my voice to a hiss. ‘I don’t care. It’s over. Everyone’s dead—’

‘Not quite.’

No, I thought. Well — maybe not.

‘So you do remember.’ I heard his smile.

‘Not much. You know how old I was.’

Old enough to remember, he means. He thinks I should remember more; but for me now most of those memories exist only as fragments of Emily, some at best contradictory, others, frankly impossible. But I know what everyone else knows: that she was famous; she was unique; college professors wrote theses on what they had begun to call The Emily White Phenomenon.

Memory [says Dr Peacock in his thesis ‘The Illuminated Man’], is, at best, an imperfect and highly idiosyncratic process. We tend to think of the mind as a fully functioning recording machine, with gigabytes of information — aural, visual and tactile — within easy recall. This could not be further from the truth. Although it is true that in theory, at least, I should be able to remember what I had for breakfast on any particular morning of my life, or the precise wording of a Shakespeare sonnet I had to study as a child, it is more probable that without recourse to drugs or deep hypnosis — both methods being, in any case, highly questionable, given the level of suggestibility in the subject — those particular memories will remain inaccessible to me and will finally degrade, like electrical equipment left in the damp, causing short-outs and cross-wiring until finally the system may default into alternative or backup memory, complete with sense-impressions and internal logic, which may in fact be drawn from a completely different set of experiences and stimuli, but which provides the brain with a compensatory buffer against any discontinuity or obvious malfunction.

Dear Dr Peacock. He always took so long to make a point. If I try hard I can still hear his voice, which was plush and plummy and just a little comic, like the bassoon in Peter and the Wolf. He had a house near the centre of town, one of those big, deep old houses with high ceilings, and worn parquet floors, and wide bay windows, and spiky aspidistra, and the genteel smell of old leather and cigars. There was a fireplace in the parlour, a huge thing with a carved overmantel and a clock that ticked; and in the evenings he would burn logs and pine cones in the giant hearth and tell stories to anyone who cared to walk in.

There was constant traffic at the Fireplace House. Students (of course); colleagues; admirers; vagrants on the scrounge for a bite to eat and a cup of tea. Everyone was welcome, as long as they behaved themselves; and as far as I knew, no one had ever abused Dr Peacock’s good nature, or caused him any embarrassment.

It was the kind of house where there is something for everyone. There was always a bottle of wine to hand, and a pot of tea standing on the hearth. There was food, too: usually bread and some kind of soup, several fat fruitcakes weighted with plums and brandy, and an enormous barrel of biscuits. There were several cats, a dog called Patch, and a rabbit that slept in a basket under the parlour window.

In the Fireplace House, time stood still. There was no television, no radio, no newspapers or magazines. There were gramophones in every room like great open lilies with tongues of brass; there were shelves and cupboards of records, some small, some as wide as serving dishes, scored close with ancient voices and yawning, scratchy, vinegary strings. There were marbles and bronzes on wobbly tables; strings of jet beads; powder compacts half-filled with fragrant dust; books with autumn pages; globes; fiddly collections of snuffboxes, miniatures, cups and saucers, clockwork dolls. That was home to Emily White, and to think that now I could join her there, a perpetual child in a house of forgotten things, free to do anything I liked . . .

Except, of course, to leave.

I thought I’d managed to get away. To make a new life for myself with Nigel. But I know that was all an illusion now; a game of smoke and mirrors. Emily White never got away. Nor did Benjamin Winter. How could I hope to be different? And do I even understand from what I’m trying to escape?

Emily White?

Never heard of her.

Poor Nigel. Poor Ben. And it hurts, doesn’t it, blueeyedboy? To be eclipsed by a brighter star, to be ignored and left in the dark, without even a name of your own? Well, now you know how I felt. How I’ve always felt. How I still feel —

‘That’s all in the past,’ I said. ‘I hardly remember it any more.’

He poured another cup of Earl Grey. ‘It’ll all come back eventually.’

‘And if I don’t want it all to come back?’

‘I don’t believe you’ll have the choice.’

Perhaps he was right about that, at least. Nothing ever vanishes. Even after all these years, Emily still shadows me. Now there’s an admission, blueeyedboy. I’m sure you can see the irony. But the tenor of our relationship is closer in some ways than friendship. Maybe because of the screen that divides us, so like the screen of the confessional.

Perhaps that’s what drew me to badguysrock. It’s a place for people like me, I suppose; a place to confess, if needs be; to tell those stories that ought to be true, even if they are really not. As for blueeyedboy — well, I’ll admit he draws me too. We fit together so well, he and I; folded together like tissue paper in an album of old photographs, our lives touch in so many ways that we might almost be lovers. And the fiction he writes is so much more true than the fiction on which I have built my life.

I heard his mobile phone beep. In retrospect I think it was the first of those texts of condolence; the messages from his WeJay announcing that his brother was dead.

‘Sorry. Got to go,’ he said. ‘Ma’s got lunch on the table. But try to think about what I said. You can’t outrun the past, you know.’

When he had gone I considered his words. Perhaps he was right, after all. Perhaps even Nigel would understand. After so many years of seeing the world through a glass darkly, perhaps it was time to face myself; to take back my past and remember . . .

But all I can really be sure of now is the impending static in the air, and the first movement of the Berlioz, the ‘Rêveries — Passions’, gathering like clouds.