Blueeyedboy

1

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 21.39 on Thursday, February 7

Status: public

Mood: tense

Her first recorded memory is of a chunk of potter’s clay. Bland as butter, later drying to a rough scale on her arms and elbows, it smells of the river behind her house, of the rain on the pavements, of the cellar where she must never, ever go, where her mother keeps the winter potatoes in their little coffins, growing their long blind eyes up to the light.

Blue clay, her mother says. She squishes it between starfish fingers. Make something, Emily. Make a shape.

The clay is soft; beneath her hands it feels like slippery skin. She brings it to her mouth; it tastes like the side of the bathtub when she puts her tongue against it: warm, soapy, a little sour. Make a shape, her mother says; and the little girl’s hands begin to explore the piece of slippery blue clay, to stroke it like a wet puppy, to fondle and find the shape inside.

But that’s nonsense, of course. She doesn’t remember the piece of clay. In fact, there are no memories at all of those years that she can altogether trust. She has learnt by imitation; she can reel off every word. And she knows that there was a piece of clay; for years it stood in the studio, hard and dense as a fossilized head.

Later, it sold to a gallery, nicely mounted and cast in bronze. Rather overpriced, perhaps; but there’s always a market for that kind of thing. Murder memorabilia, hangman’s nooses, pieces of bone; the trappings of notoriety, sold to collectors everywhere.

She had hoped for a better memorial. But this, she thinks, will have to do. For want of proper memories, she will take the clay head cast in bronze, and the letters chiselled into the brass nearly thirty years ago.

First Impressions (the inscription says).

Emily White, aged 3.

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: Albertine, I’m speechless. You have no idea how much this means to me. Will there be more of this? Please?

Albertine: Maybe. If you want it so badly . . .

2

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 22.45 on Thursday, February 7

Status: public

Mood: determined

Her mother was an artist. Colours were her whole life. Emily White learnt to crawl on the floor of her mother’s workshop; before she could speak she already knew the powdery smell of the watercolours and the chalks, the metallic scent of the acrylics, the smoky reek of the oils. Her mother smelt of turpentine; the child’s first word was ‘paper’; her first playthings were the rolls of parchment kept under the desk; she remembered their fascinating crinkle, their dusty smell.

As her mother worked Emily learnt to know the sounds of her progress: the fat sloshing of the background brushes; the scratching of nibs; the soft hishh of pastels and sponges; the scree of scissors; the scrubbing of pencils on art paper.

These were the rhythms of her mother; sometimes accompanied by small sounds of irritation or satisfaction, sometimes by pacing, most often by a running commentary of colour and shade. By the time she was a year old, Emily had still not learnt to walk, but could name all the colours in her mother’s box of paints. Their names rang out like chimes in her head: damson, umber, ochre, gold; madder, violet, crimson, rose.

Violet was her favourite; the tube had been squeezed almost empty, then curled up like a party favour to eke out the rest. White was full, but only because the tube was new; black was dry and seldom used, pushed to the back of the paintbox among the hairless brushes and cleaning-rags.

‘Pat, she’s a slow developer. Einstein was the same.’ That must be a false memory, she thinks, like so many from those early days: her mother’s voice high above her, Daddy’s tentative reply.

‘But sweetheart, the doctor—’

‘Damn the doctor! She can name every colour in the box.’

‘She’s just repeating what you tell her.’

‘She is not!’

A familiar high note quivers in her mother’s voice, a vinegary note that catches at her sinuses and makes her eyes water. She does not know its name — not yet, though later she will know it as F sharp — but she can pick it out on Daddy’s piano. But that’s a secret even from her mother; the hours spent together at the old Bechstein, Daddy with his pipe in his mouth, Emily sitting in his lap with her small hands just touching the keyboard as he plays the Moonlight Sonata or Für Elise and her mother thinks she is in bed.

‘Catherine, please—’

‘She can see perfectly!’

The smell of turpentine intensifies. It is the smell of her mother’s distress, and of her terrible disappointment. She scoops the child up in her arms — Emily’s face pressed into the front of her overalls — and as she turns, Emily’s feet drag across the work-bench, scattering tubes and pots and paintbrushes, rat-tat-tat over the parquet floor.

‘Catherine, listen—’ Her father’s voice, as always, is humble, almost apologetic. As always, he smells faintly of Clan tobacco, though officially he never smokes in the house. ‘Catherine, please—’

But she is not listening. Instead she holds the child and moans: ‘You can see, can’t you, Emily, my darling? Can’t you?’

It must be a false memory. Emily was barely a year old; surely she could not have understood or remembered anything so well. And yet she seems to recall it so clearly: her bewildered tears, her mother’s cries, and her father’s mumbled counterpoint. The smell of the studio and the paint from her mother’s overalls sticking her fingertips together, and all the time that high F sharp tremor in her mother’s voice, the note of her thwarted expectations, like a persistent harmonic on an over-tightened string.

Daddy knew almost from the first. But he was a meek, reflective little man, a foil to her mother’s rages. Even as a small child Emily sensed that she thought him inferior; that he had disappointed her. Perhaps because of his lack of ambition; perhaps because it had taken him ten years to give her the child she longed for. He was a music teacher at St Oswald’s; he played several instruments, but the piano was the only one her mother tolerated in the house, and the rest were sold, one by one, to pay for her treatments and therapies.

It was no real sacrifice, Daddy said. After all, he had access to all his department’s resources. It was only fair; Emily’s mother suffered from headaches, and Emily was a restive infant, apt to wake at the slightest noise. As a result he transferred his records and his music to the school; he could always listen to them at lunchtimes or Break, and besides, school was where he spent most of his time.

You have to understand what it was like for her.

That’s Daddy speaking; always making excuses, always ready to stand in her defence, like a tired old knight in the service of a mad queen who has lost her empire. It took Emily a long time to understand the cause of Daddy’s subservience. Daddy had been unfaithful once, with a woman who meant nothing to him, but to whom he had given a child. And now he owed Catherine a debt — a debt that could never be repaid — which meant that for the rest of his life he would always accept second place, never complaining, never protesting, never seeming to hope for anything more than to serve her, to give her what she wanted, to redeem the irredeemable.

Babe, you have to understand.

They managed on his salary; she took it as her natural right to pursue her artistic ambitions while Daddy worked to keep them both. From time to time a little gallery sold one of her mother’s collages. Little by little her mother’s ambition shifted. She was born before her time, she said. Future generations would know her. What might have turned her inwards made her fiercely determined; she threw her heart into having a baby, long after Daddy’s small expectations had ceased.

Finally, Emily came. Oh, the plans we made — that’s Daddy talking, though I doubt whether he was allowed any part in the planning of Emily’s young life — The dreams we had for you, Emily. For seven and a half months Emily’s mother became almost domesticated: knitted bootees in pastel colours; played whale music for a stress-free delivery; wanted a natural birth but took gas at the final moment. So that it was Daddy who counted Emily’s fingers and toes, holding his breath at the squalling amazement at his fingertips; the hairless monkey with its eyes squinched shut and its tiny fists clenched.

Darling, she’s perfect.

Oh, my God —

But she was nearly two months premature. They gave her too much oxygen; the process detached her retinas. No one noticed straight away; in those days it was enough to know that Emily had all her limbs. When later her blindness became more apparent, Catherine denied it.

Emily was a special child, she said. Her gifts would take time to develop. Her mother’s friend Feather Dunne — an amateur astrologer — had already predicted a brilliant future: a mystical union between Saturn and the Moon confirmed that she was exceptional. When the doctor became impatient, Emily’s mother removed herself to an alternative therapist, who recommended eyebright, massage and colour therapy. For three months she lived in a haze of incense and candles; lost interest in her canvases; never even combed her hair.

Daddy suspected post-natal depression. Catherine denied it, but veered periodically from one extreme to the other: one day protective, refusing to allow him near; the next sitting unresponsive, heedless of the bundle at her side that squalled and squalled.

Sometimes it was worse than that, and Daddy had to turn to the neighbours for help. There had been a mistake, said Catherine; the hospital had mixed up the babies; had somehow given away her perfect baby for this damaged one.

Look at it, Patrick, she would say. It doesn’t even look like a baby. It’s hideous. Hideous.

She told Emily that when she was five. There could be no secrets between them, she said; they were part of each other. Besides, love is a kind of madness, isn’t it, darling? Love is a kind of possession.

Yes, that was her voice; that was Catherine White. She feels things more than the rest of us, so Emily’s father used to say, as if in apology for apparently feeling so much less. And yet it was Daddy who kept things going, during her breakdown and afterwards; Daddy who paid the bills, who cooked and cleaned; who changed and fed; who every day guided Catherine gently into her abandoned studio and showed her the brushes and paints and her baby crawling among the rolls of paper and the crunchy curls of wood.

One day she picked up a paintbrush, inspected it for a moment, then put it down again; but it was the first interest she had shown for months, and Daddy took it as a sign of improvement. It was: by the time Emily was two years old, her mother’s creative passion had returned; and although now it was channelled almost exclusively through the child, it was no less ardent than before.

It began with that head in blue clay. But clay, though interesting enough, did not retain her attention for long. Emily wanted new things; she wanted to touch, to smell, to feel. The studio had become too small to contain her; she learnt to follow walls into other rooms; to find the good place under the window where the sun shone; to use the tape-recorder to listen to stories; to open up the piano and to play the notes one-fingered. She loved to play with her mother’s tin of loose buttons; to push her hands deep inside; to slither them out on to the floor and arrange them by size, shape and texture.

In every way but one, you see, Emily was an ordinary child. She loved stories, which her father would record for her; she loved to walk in the park; she loved her parents; she loved her dolls. She had a small child’s small, infrequent tantrums; she enjoyed her visits to the farm in Pog Hill, and dreamed of getting a puppy.

By the time Emily learnt to walk, her mother had almost accepted her blindness. Specialists were expensive, and their conclusions were inevitably variations on the same theme. Her condition was irreversible; she responded only to the brightest of direct lights, and then only a very, very little. She could not distinguish shapes; could barely recognize movement, and had no awareness of colour.

But Catherine White was not to be defeated. She flung herself into Emily’s education with all the energy she had once given to her work. First, clay, to develop spatial awareness and encourage creativity. Next, numbers, on a large wooden abacus with beads that clicked and clacked. Then letters, using a Braille slate and an embossing machine. Then, on Feather’s advice, ‘colour therapy’, designed, so she said, to stimulate the visual parts of the cortex by image association.

‘If it can work for Gloria’s boy, then why can’t it work for Emily?’

This was the phrase she used every time Daddy tried to protest. It didn’t matter that Gloria’s boy was a different case entirely; all that mattered to Catherine White was that Ben — or Boy X, as Dr Peacock called him, with typical pretentiousness — had somehow acquired an extra sense; and if the son of a cleaner could do it, then why not little Emily?

Little Emily, of course, had no idea what they were talking about. But she wanted to please; she was eager to learn, and the rest just followed naturally.

The colour therapy worked, to a point. Although the words themselves held no more meaning for Emily than the names of the colours in her paintbox, green brings back the memory of summer lawns and cut grass. Red is the scent of Bonfire Night; the sound of crackling wood; the heat. Blue is water; silent; cool.

‘Your name is a colour, too, Emily,’ said Feather, who had long, tickly hair that smelt of patchouli and cigarette smoke. ‘Emily White. Isn’t that lovely?’

White. Snow white. So cold it is almost hot at the fingertips, freezing, burning.

‘Emily. Don’t you love the pretty snow?’

No, I don’t, Emily thinks. Fur is pretty. Silk is pretty. Buttons are pretty in the tin, or rice, or lentils slipping frrrrrrpp through the fingers. There’s nothing pretty about snow, which hurts your hands and makes the steps slippery. Anyway, white isn’t a colour. White is the ugly brrrrr you get between radio stations, when the sound breaks up and there’s nothing left but noise. White noise. White snow. Snow White, half-dead, half-sleeping under glass.

When she was four, Daddy suggested that Emily might go to school. Maybe in Kirby Edge, he said, where there was a facility. Catherine refused to discuss it, of course. With Feather’s help, she said, her teaching had already worked a near-miracle. She had always known Emily was an exceptional child; she was not to waste her gifts in a school for blind children where she would be taught rug-making and self-pity, nor in a mainstream school where she would always be second-rate. No, Emily was to continue to receive tuition from home, so that when she eventually regained her sight — and there was no doubt at all in Catherine’s mind that this would happen some day — she would be ready to face whatever the world chanced to offer her.

Daddy protested as strenuously as he could. It was not nearly enough; Feather and Catherine barely heard him. Feather believed in past lives, and thought that if the correct parts of Emily’s brain were stimulated, then she would regain her visual memory; and Catherine believed . . .

Well, you know what Catherine believed. She could have lived with an ugly child; even a deformed child. But a blind child? A child with no understanding of colours?

Colours, colours, colours. Green, pink, gold, orange, purple, scarlet, blue. Blue alone has a thousand variations: cerulean, sapphire, cobalt, azure; from sky-blue to deepest midnight, passing through indigo and navy, powder-blue to electric-blue, forget-me-not, turquoise and aqua and Saxe. You see, Emily could understand the notation of colours. She knew their terms and their cadences; she learnt to repeat the notes and arpeggios of their seven-tone scale. And yet the nature of colours still eluded her. She was like a tone-deaf person who has learnt to play the piano, knowing that what he hears is nothing like music. But she could perform; oh yes; she could.

‘See the daffodils, Emily.’

‘Pretty daffodils. Sunny yellow-golden daffodils.’ As a matter of fact, they felt ugly to the touch; cold and somehow meaty, like slices of ham. Emily much preferred the fat silky leaves of the lamb’s tongue, or the lavenders with their nubbly flower-heads and sleepy smell.

‘Shall we paint the daffodils, sweetheart? Would you like Cathy to help you?’

The easel was set up in the studio. There was a big paintbox on the left, with the colours labelled in Braille. Three pots of water stood to the right, and a selection of brushes. Emily liked the sable brushes best. They were the best quality, and soft as the end of a cat’s tail. She liked to run them along the place just underneath her lower lip, a place of such sensitivity that she could feel every hair on a paintbrush, and where the nap of a piece of velvet ribbon was the most exquisitely discerned. The paper — thick, glossy art paper with its new, clean-bedclothes smell — was fastened to the easel with bulldog clips, and was sectioned into squares like a chessboard, by means of wires stretched across the paper. That way, Emily could be sure of not straying outside the picture, or confusing sky with trees.

‘Now for the trees, Emily. Good. That’s good.’

Trees are tall, Emily thinks. Taller than my father. Catherine lets her touch them, puts her face to their rough sides, like hugging a beardy man. There’s a smell, too, and a hint of movement, far away but still connected, still touching somehow. ‘It’s windy,’ Emily suggests, trying hard. ‘The tree’s moving in the wind.’

‘Good, darling! Very good!’

Splosh, splash. Now the white, no-colour paper is green. She knows this because her mother hugs her. Emily feels her trembling. There is a note in her voice, too — not F sharp this time, but something less shrill and teary — and something in Emily swells with pride and happiness, because she loves her mother; she loves the smell of turpentine because it is the smell of her mother; she loves the painting lessons because they make her mother proud — although later, when it is over and she creeps back to the studio and tries in vain to understand why it makes her so happy, Emily can feel only the tiniest roughening and crinkling of the paper, like hands after washing-up. That’s all she can feel, even with her lower lip. She tries not to feel too disappointed. There must be something there, she thinks. Her mother says so.

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: That was beautiful, Albertine.

Albertine: Glad you liked it, blueeyedboy . . .

3

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 04.16 on Friday, February 8

Status: public

Mood: creative

Listening to: The Moody Blues: ‘The Story In Your Eyes’

Poor Emily. Poor Mrs White. So close and yet so far apart. What had started with Mr White and our hero’s abortive quest for his father had broadened into a kind of obsession with the whole of the household: with Mrs White, her husband, and most of all, with Emily, the little sister he might have had if things had turned out differently.

And so, all through that summer, the summer of his eleventh year, blueeyedboy followed them in secret, ritually noting their comings and goings; their clothes; the things they liked to do; their haunts, in the cloth-backed Blue Book that served him as a journal.

He followed them to the sculpture park where little Emily liked to play; to the open farm with its piglets and lambs; to the pottery workshop café in town, where for the price of a cup of tea you could buy and shape a lump of clay, to be baked in the oven the same day, then painted and taken home to take pride of place on some mantelpiece, in some cabinet.

The Saturday of the blue clay, Emily was four years old. Blueeyedboy had spotted her with Mrs White, walking slowly down the hill into Malbry, Emily in a little red coat that made her look like an unseasonal Christmas bauble, her little dark head bobbing up and down, Mrs White in boots and a blue print dress, her long blonde hair trailing down her back. He followed them all the way into town, keeping close to the hedges that lined the road. Mrs White never noticed him, not even when he ventured close, shadowing her blue silhouette with the doggedness of a junior spy.

Blueeyedboy, junior spy. He liked the stealthy sound of the phrase, its pearly string of sibilants, its secret hint of gunsmoke. He followed them into Malbry town centre, and into the pottery workshop, where Feather was waiting at a table for four, a cup of coffee in front of her, a half-smoked cigarette between her elegant fingers.

Blueeyedboy would have liked to have joined them there, but Feather’s presence daunted him. Since that first day at the market, he had sensed that she didn’t like him somehow, that she thought he wasn’t good enough for Mrs White or Emily. So he sat at a table behind them, trying to look casual, as if he had money to spend there and business of his own to conduct.

Feather eyed him suspiciously. She was wearing a brown ethnic-print dress and a lot of tortoiseshell bangles that clattered as she moved the hand holding the half-smoked cigarette.

Blueeyedboy avoided her gaze and pretended to look out of the window. When he dared to look back again, Feather was talking quite loudly to Mrs White, elbows on the table, occasionally tapping a little cone of cigarette ash into her empty teacup.

The pretty waitress came up to him. ‘Are you all together?’ she said. Blueeyedboy realized that she had assumed that he had come in with Mrs White, and before he could stop himself, he’d said yes. Against the sound of Feather’s voice, his small deception went unnoticed, and in a few moments the waitress had brought him a Pepsi and a lump of clay, with the kindly instruction to call for her if ever he needed anything more.

He was not sure what he’d intended to make. A dog for Ma’s collection, perhaps; something to put on the mantelpiece. Something — anything — to draw her away, even for an instant, from the Mansion, Dr Peacock’s work, and aspects of synaesthesia.

He watched them over his Pepsi, looking askance at Emily with her starfish hands splayed around her lump of blue clay. Feather was encouraging her, saying: Make something, darling. Make a shape. Mrs White was leaning forward, tensed with hope and expectancy, her long hair hanging so close to the clay that it looked as if it might stick there.

‘What’s it going to be? A face?’

There came a sound from Emily that might have been acquiescence.

‘And those are the eyes, and there’s the nose—’ said Feather, sounding ecstatic, though blueeyedboy couldn’t see anything much to provoke such rapt excitement.

Emily’s hands moved on the clay, gouging a hole here and there, exploring with her fingertips, scraping her nails around the back to form the semblance of hair. Now he could see it was a head, though primitive and misshapen, with bat’s ears and a ludicrous pseudo-scientist’s brow that dwarfed the other features. The eyes were shallow thumbprints; barely even visible.

But Feather and Mrs White crowed in delight, and blueeyedboy drew closer to them, trying to see what it was in their eyes that made it so remarkable.

Feather gave him a dirty look. He pulled away from the table at once. But Mrs White had noticed him, and instead of pleased recognition, he saw a look of alarm in her eyes, as if she thought he might hurt Emily, as if he could be dangerous —

‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

He gave a shrug. ‘N-nothing.’

‘Where are your brothers? Your mother?’

He shrugged. Faced with his long-pursued quarry at last, he found that speech had abandoned him, leaving nothing but broken syllables and a stammer that rendered him helpless.

‘You’re following me,’ said Mrs White. ‘What do you want?’

Again, he shrugged. He couldn’t have explained it to her even if they had been alone, and Feather’s presence by her side made it even less possible. He twisted on the seat of his chair, feeling trapped and foolish, with the taste of the vitamin drink in his throat, and his forehead like a squeezed balloon —

Feather narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You know this counts as harassment,’ she said. ‘Catherine could call the police.’

‘He’s only a boy,’ said Mrs White.

‘Boys grow up,’ said Feather darkly.

‘What do you want?’ said Mrs White again.

‘I-I just w-wanted to s-see E-Emily,’ said blueeyedboy, feeling nauseous. He looked at the lump of untouched clay and the half-drunk Pepsi at his side. He hadn’t intended to order them. He had no money to pay for them. And now here was Mrs White’s friend talking about calling the police —

He really meant to tell her the truth. But now he hardly knew what that was. He had thought that when he spoke to her he would know what it was that he wanted to say. But now, as the vegetable stink increased and the ache in his head intensified, he knew that what he wanted from her was something far closer to the bone; a word that came clothed in shades of blue . . .

Late that night, alone in his room, he took out the Blue Book from under his bed and, instead of his journal, began to write a story.

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: Interesting, how this fic explores the evolution of the creative process. If you don’t mind, I’d like to circulate this to some of my other students — or maybe we could discuss it here?

4

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 22.40 on Friday, February 8

Status: restricted

Mood: ominous

Listening to: Jarvis Cocker: ‘I Will Kill Again’

Eleanor Vine called round early tonight while Ma was getting ready to go out, and took the opportunity to take Yours Truly to task again. It seems that my continuing absence from our writing-as-therapy group has been noted and commented upon. She doesn’t attend herself, of course — too many people; too much dirt — but I guess Terri must have talked.

People talk to Eleanor. She seems to invite confidences, somehow. And I can see how it’s killing her that she has known me all this time and still has no more knowledge of me than when I was four years old —

‘You really should go back, you know,’ she says. ‘You need to get out more. Make new friends. Besides, you owe it to your Ma—’

Owe it to Ma? Don’t make me laugh.

I adjusted my iPod earpiece. It’s the only way I can deal with her. Through it, in his rasping voice, Jarvis Cocker confided to me what, if given half a chance, he would do to someone like Eleanor —

She gave me a look of fish-eyed reproach. ‘I hear there’s someone who’s missing you.’

‘Really?’ I feigned innocence.

‘Don’t be coy. She likes you.’ She gave me a nudge. ‘You could do worse.’

‘Yeah. Thanks, Mrs Vine.’

Interfering old trout. As if that collection of fucktards and losers could ever throw up a live one. I know who she means; I’m not interested. In my earpiece Cocker’s voice shifted registers, now soaring plaintively towards the octave:

But Eleanor Vine is persistent as glue. ‘You could be a nice-looking young man, once those bruises have disappeared. You don’t want to be selling yourself short. I’ve seen you hanging around that girl, and you know as well as I do that if your Ma knew, there’d be hell to pay.’

I flinched at that. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘That girl in the Pink Zebra. The one with all the tattoos,’ she said.

‘Who, Bethan?’ I said. ‘She hates me.’

Eleanor raised an eyebrow that was mostly skin and wire. ‘On first-name terms, then, are we?’ she said.

‘I hardly ever speak to her, except to order Earl Grey.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ said Eleanor.

That’ll be Terri, I told myself. She sometimes goes into the Zebra. In fact, I think she follows me. It’s getting quite hard to avoid her.

‘Bethan’s not my type,’ I said.

Eleanor seemed to calm down after that, the roguish expression returning to her sharp and avid features. ‘So — you’ll think about what I said, then? A girl like our Terri won’t wait around for ever. You’re going to have to do something soon—’

I gave a sigh. ‘All right,’ I said.

She gave me an approving look. ‘I knew you’d see sense. Now — I have to go. I know your Ma’s got her salsa class. But keep me up to date, won’t you? And remember what they always say—’

I wondered what cliché she would use this time. Faint heart never won fair lady? Or: Best strike while the iron’s hot?

As it was, she didn’t have the chance, because Ma came in just at that moment, all in black, with sequins. Her dancing shoes had six-inch heels. I didn’t envy her partner.

‘Eleanor! What a surprise!’

‘Just having a chat with B.B.,’ she said.

‘That’s nice.’ I thought Ma’s eyes narrowed a little.

‘I’m surprised he doesn’t have a girlfriend,’ said Eleanor, with a sideways glance. ‘If I were twenty years younger,’ she said, addressing her words to my mother now, ‘I swear I’d marry him myself.’

I considered Mrs Vine in blue. It suited her.

‘Really,’ said Ma.

I suppose she means well, I told myself, even though she has no idea what she’s dealing with. She’s only trying to do what’s best, as Ma always tries to do what’s best for me. But Our Terri, as she calls her, is hardly the stuff of fantasy. Besides, I have no time for romance. I have other fish to fry.

Mrs Vine gave me something that I guessed was meant to be a smile. ‘Can you drop me off at home? I’d walk, but I know you’ll be driving your ma, and—’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You have to go.’

5

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 23.49 on Saturday, February 9

Status: public

Mood: clean

Listening to: Genesis: ‘One For The Vine’

He calls her Mrs Chemical Blue. Hygiene and neatness are her concern; something that, in fifteen years, has gone beyond reason — or even a joke. Biscuits eaten over the sink; windows washed daily; dusting ten, twenty times a day; ornaments on the mantelpiece rearranged every quarter of an hour. She was always house-proud — and what an odd word, he thinks to himself, recalling what he knows of that house, and the way she used to watch his Ma at work, thin hands clenched in fearful distress, her face rigid with anxiety that a dishtowel might be left disastrously unaligned, or a mat slightly askew to the door, or a speck of dust left on a rug, or even a knick-knack out of place.

Mr Chemical Blue has long gone, taking their teenage son with him. Perhaps she regrets it a little, sometimes; but children are so messy, she thinks, and she never could make him understand how hiring a cleaner only complicated things; caused her, not less, but more work; meant something else to supervise, another person in the house, another set of fingerprints — and although she knew no one was to blame, she found their presence unbearable — yes, even that sweet little boy — until finally they had to go —

Since then, of course, it has worsened. With no one to keep her under control, obsession has taken over her life. No longer content with her spotless house, she has progressed to compulsive handwashing and near-toxic doses of Listerine. Always slightly neurotic, fifteen years of alcohol and antidepressants have taken their toll on her personality so that now, at fifty-nine years old, she is nothing but twitches and tics, a nervous system out of control, thinly upholstered in wan flesh.

No one would miss her, he tells himself. In fact, it would probably be a relief. An anonymous gift to her family: to her son, who visits twice a year and who can hardly bear to see her like this; to her husband, who has moved on, and whose guilt has grown like a tumour; to her niece, who lives in despair of her perpetual interference and her well-meant but disastrous attempts to fix her up with a nice young man.

Besides, she, too, deserves to die; if only for the waste of time, for sunny days spent indoors, for words unspoken, for smiles unnoticed, for all the things she could have done if only she could have settled for less —

Only gossip sustains her now. Gossip, rumour and speculation, disseminated via telephone lines on to the parish grapevine. Behind her lace curtains, she sees all. Nothing goes unnoticed to her; no lingering speck of human dirt. No crime, no secret, no petty aberration goes unreported. Nothing escapes examination. No one evades judgement. Does she ever sometimes wish that she could put it all aside, throw open the door and breathe the air? Does she sometimes wonder whether her obsessive attention to cleanliness does not hide a different kind of dirt?

She may have done so, long ago. But now all she can do is watch. Like a crab in its shell, like a barnacle, battened tight against the world. What does she do in there all day? No one is allowed to enter the house unless they leave their shoes outside. Teacups are disinfected before and after use. Groceries are delivered to the front porch. Even the postman deposits the mail, not through the door, but into a metal box by the gate, to be retrieved furtively, and at speed, by Mrs Chemical Blue, wearing Marigolds, her pale eyes wide with the daily unease of traversing six feet of unsanitized space . . .

It’s a challenge he cannot resist. To erase her like a difficult stain; to oust her like a parasite; to winkle her out of her shell and force her into the open again.

But in the end, it’s easy. It requires only subterfuge and some small expense. A hired white minivan, bearing the insignia of an imaginary firm; a baseball cap and a dark-blue jumpsuit with the same firm’s logo embroidered on the top pocket; sundry items ordered via the Internet, paid on a borrowed credit card and delivered to a PO box in town; plus a clipboard to give him authority, and a glossy illustrated brochure (wholly produced on his desktop PC) extolling the virtues of an industrial cleaning product of such efficiency that it has only now been granted a licence for (strictly limited) domestic use.

He explains all this through a crack in the door, from which Mrs Chemical Blue’s eye watches him with a jellyfish glaze. For a moment, fear outstrips her desire; and then she caves in, as he knows she will, and invites the nice young man inside.

This time, he really wants to watch. So he wears a mask for the crucial part, bought from an Army surplus store. The gas, purchased from a US website claiming to deal with unwanted parasites, remains officially untested on humans, as yet — although a local dog has already contributed to his research, with very promising results. Mrs Chemical Blue should last longer, he thinks; but given her poor immunity and the nervous rise and fall of her chest, he is fairly sure of the outcome.

Still, he expects to feel something more. Guilt, perhaps; even pity. Instead he feels only scientific curiosity mixed with that childlike sense of wonder at the smallness of it all. Death is no big deal, he thinks. The difference between life and its opposite can be as small as a blood clot, as insignificant as a bubble of air. The body is, after all, a machine. He knows a little about machines. The greater the number of moving parts, the greater the chance of things going wrong. And the body has so many moving parts —

Not for long, he tells himself.

The agonal phase (this being the term used by clinicians to describe the visible part of life’s attempt to detach itself from protoplasm too compromised to sustain it) lasts for slightly less than two minutes according to his Seiko watch. He tries to observe dispassionately, to avoid the twitching hands and feet of the dying woman on the floor and to try to determine the goings-on behind those peculiar jellyfish eyes, the final, barking gasps for breath —

For a moment the sound makes him queasy, as for a fleeting moment (is there any other kind?) a phantom taste accompanies it — a taste of rotten fruit and dead cabbage — but he forces himself to ignore it by concentrating on Mrs Chemical Blue, whose agonal phase is coming to an end, her floating eyes beginning to glaze, her lips now a shade between cyan and mauve.

In the end, he does not know enough about anatomy to be absolutely certain of the true cause of death. But as Hippocrates used to say: Man is an obligate aerobe. Which probably means, he later concludes, that Mrs Chemical Blue died because her aerobically obligated cells failed to receive enough oxygen, thereby resulting in lethal shock.

In other words, therefore, not my fault.

His latex gloves have left no prints on the well-polished surfaces. His boots are new, right out of the box, and leave no telltale traces of mud. A window left open will disperse the smell from the offending canister, which he will toss into a skip as he passes the municipal dump before returning the van — minus its logo — to the firm from which he hired it. Her death will look like an accident — a seizure, a stroke, a heart attack — and even if they suspect foul play, there’s nothing to make them suspect him.

He burns the jumpsuit and the workman’s cap on the bonfire of leaves in his back yard, and the scent of that burning — like Bonfire Night — reminds him of toffee and candyfloss and the turning of fair-ground wheels in the dark; things that his mother always denied him, though his brothers went to the fair, coming home sticky-fingered and stinking of smoke, and queasy from the carnival rides, while he remained safely indoors, where nothing bad could happen to him.

Today, however, he is free. He rakes the heart of the bonfire and feels its heat against his face; and he feels a surge of sudden release —

And he knows he’s going to do it again. He even knows who the next one will be. He breathes in that scent of bonfire smoke, thinks of her face, and smiles to himself —

And all around him, the colours flare like fireworks exploding in the sky.

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: We need to talk about this, blueeyedboy. I think the way in which your fiction is developing sheds interesting insights on your family relationships. Why don’t you message me later today? I’d really like to discuss it with you.

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Hello again. Do I know you?

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Please, Jenny. Do I know you?

6

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 14.38 on Sunday, February 10

Status: restricted

Mood: sleepless

Listening to: Van Morrison: ‘Wild Night’

Lots of love to my journal today. Mostly in response to my fic, which Clair believes is a breakthrough in style, Toxic assures me pwns ass, Cap summarizes as fuckin’ resplendent, man, and Chryssie, who is still sick, thinks is awesome (and really hott!).

Well, sick she may be, but Chryssie is happy. She has lost six pounds this week — which means, according to her online calorie counter, that, assuming she keeps to her present rate, she will achieve her weight loss goal by this August, rather than July of next year — and she sends love and virtual hugs to her friend azurechild, who has always been so supportive.

Clair, however, is upset. She has received an e-mail from Angel Blue. Or rather, from a representative, telling her to cease her correspondence with Angel forthwith, and threatening legal action.

Poor Clair is hurt and indignant. She has never sent any offensive letters or suspicious packages, either to Angel or to his wife. Why would she? She worships Angel. She respects his privacy. She is certain his wife is behind all this. Angel is too nice, she says, to do this to someone who has become, over the months, a friend.

Mrs Angel’s jealousy is proof of what she has long since suspected: that Angel’s marriage is in crisis; or may even have been a sham from the start. Her online pleas to Angel Blue have begun to attract an audience. Some post to tell her to get a life. Some encourage her to pursue her dream. Some have tales of their own to tell of disappointment, love and revenge. One correspondent, Hawaiianblue, urges her to hold fast, to gain her man’s attention by force, to show him some token of her love that no one could possibly mistake —

And Albertine has been posting fic. I take this as a good sign; now that she has in some way recovered from the shock of my brother’s death, she has been online every day.

During their time together, of course, her presence was far less regular. Sometimes several weeks would pass without her even logging on. As webmaster, I can track her movements: how many times she visits the site; what she posts there; what she reads.

I know that she follows everything I write, even the comments. She reads Clair’s entries, too, and Chryssie’s — I know she is concerned about Chryssie’s dieting. She doesn’t talk to Cap much — I sense he makes her uncomfortable — but Toxic69 is a regular correspondent, perhaps because of his handicap. To some, these online friendships can take on a disproportionate significance, especially for those of us for whom the world on screen is more real, more tangible than what lies outside.

Today, she wanted to talk to me. Perhaps it was because of Nigel’s funeral, or my last fic. She may have found it disturbing. In fact, I was rather hoping she would. In any case, she came to me, via our private messaging service. Hesitant, shaken, slightly indignant, a child in need of comforting.

Where do you get these stories you write? Why do you have to tell them here?

Ah. The perennial question. Where do stories come from? Are they like dreams, shaped by our subconscious? Do goblins bring them in the night? Or are they all simply forms of the truth, mirror versions of what could have been, twisted and plaited like corn dollies into a plaything for children?

Perhaps I have no choice, I type. It’s closer to the truth than she thinks.

A pause. I’m used to her silences. This one goes on a little too long, and I know that she is somehow distressed.

You didn’t like my last fic.

It isn’t a question. The silence grows. Alone of all my online tribe, Albertine has no icon. Where all the others display an image — Clair’s picture of Angel Blue, Chryssie’s winged child, Cap’s cartoon rabbit — she keeps to the default setting: a silhouette in a plain blue square.

The result is oddly disconcerting. Icons and avatars are part of the way we interact. Like the shield designs of mediaeval times, they serve both as a defensive tool and as the image of ourselves we show to the world, cheap escutcheons for those of us with no honour, no king, no country.

So how does Albertine see herself?

Time passes, lingering, ticking off the seconds like an impatient schoolmistress. For a while I am sure she has gone.

Then at last she replies. Your story disturbed me a little, she says. The woman reminds me of someone I know. A friend of your mother’s, actually.

Funny, how fact and fic intertwine. I say as much to Albertine.

Eleanor Vine’s in hospital. She was taken ill late last night. Something to do with her lungs, I heard —

Really? What a coincidence.

If I didn’t know any better, she says, I could almost believe you were somehow involved.

Could you really? I had to smile.

It sounds just a touch sarcastic to me. But in the absence of facial expressions, there is no way of knowing for sure. If this had been Chryssie or Clair, then she would have followed her comment with a symbol — a smile, a wink, a crying face — to eliminate ambiguity. But Albertine does not use emoticons. Their absence makes conversation with her curiously expressionless, and I am never entirely sure if I have understood her fully.

Do you feel guilty, blueeyedboy?

Long pause.

Truth or dare?

Blueeyedboy hesitates, weighing the joy of confiding in her against the danger of saying too much. Fiction is a dangerous friend; a smokescreen that could dissipate and blow away without warning, leaving him naked.

Finally he types: Yes.

Maybe that’s why you write these things. Maybe you’re assuming guilt for something you’re not really guilty of.

Hm. What an interesting idea. You don’t think I’m guilty of anything?

Everyone’s guilty of something, she says. But sometimes it’s easier to confess to something we haven’t done than to face up to the truth.

Now she’s trying to profile me. I told you she was clever.

So — why do you come here, Albertine? What do you think you’re guilty of?

Silence, then, for so long that I’m almost sure she has broken the connection. The cursor blinks, relentlessly. The mailbox bips. Once. Twice.

I wonder what I would do now if she simply told the truth. But nothing’s ever that easy. Does she even know what she did? Does she know that it all started then, at the concert in St Oswald’s Chapel, a word that conjures up for me the Christmassy colours of stained glass and the scent of pine and frankincense?

Who are you really, Albertine? Plain-vanilla or bad guy at heart? A killer, a coward, a fraudster, a thief? And when I reach the centre of you, will I know if there’s anyone home?

And then she replies, and quickly logs off before I can comment or ask for more. In the absence of icons or avatars, I cannot be sure of her motives, but I sense that she is running away, that I have finally touched her somehow —

Truth or dare, Albertine? What have you come here to confess?

Her message to me is just four words long. It simply says:

I told a lie.

7

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 04.38 on Monday, February 11

Status: public

Mood: confiding

Listening to: Hazel O’Connor: ‘Big Brother’

Everyone does it. Everyone lies. Everyone colours the truth to fit: from the fisherman who exaggerates the length of the carp that got away, to the politician’s memoir, transmuting the metal of base experience into the gold of history. Even blueeyedboy’s diary (hidden under his mattress at home) was far more wish-fulfilment than fact, detailing with pathetic hopefulness the life of a boy he could never be — a boy with two parents, a boy with friends, a boy who did ordinary things, who went to the seaside on his birthday, a boy who loved his Ma — knowing that the bleaker truth was hiding there under the surface, patiently waiting to be exposed by some casual turn of the tide.

Ben failed the St Oswald’s entrance exam. He should have seen it coming, of course, but he’d been told so many times that he would pass that everyone took it for granted, like crossing a friendly border, nothing more than a token gesture to ensure his passage into St Oswald’s, and subsequently, his success —

It wasn’t that the paper was hard. In fact, he found it quite easy — or would have done, if he’d finished it. But that place, with its smells, unmanned him; and the cavernous room filled with uniforms; and the lists of names tacked to the wall; and the cheesy, hostile faces of the other scholarship boys.

A panic attack, the doctor said. A physical reaction to stress. It began with a nervous headache, which, halfway through the first paper, rapidly grew into something more: a turbulence of colour and scent that drenched him like a tropical storm and bludgeoned him into unconsciousness, there on St Oswald’s parquet floor.

They took him to Malbry Infirmary, where he pleaded to be given a bed. He knew his scholarship had sailed, and that Ma was going to be furious, and that the only way to avoid real trouble was by getting the doctors on his side.

But once again, his luck was out. The nurse called Ma straight away, and the teacher who had accompanied him — a Dr Devine, a thin man whose name was a murky dark green — told her what had happened to him.

‘You’ll let him retake the exam, though?’ Ma’s first anxious thought was of the longed-for scholarship. To make things worse, by then Ben was feeling fine, with hardly a trace of a headache left. Her berry-black eyes locked briefly on his; long enough, at least, to convey that he was in a world of hurt.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Dr Devine. ‘That’s not St Oswald’s policy. Now, if Benjamin were to sit the common exam—’

‘You mean he won’t get the scholarship?’ Her eyes were narrowed almost to slits.

Dr Devine gave a little shrug. ‘I’m afraid the decision isn’t mine. Perhaps he could try again next year.’

Ma started forward. ‘You don’t understand—’

But Dr Devine had had enough. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Winter,’ he said, heading for the infirmary door. ‘We can’t make exceptions for just one boy.’

She kept her calm until they got home. Then she unleashed her rage. First with the piece of electrical cord, then afterwards with her fists and feet, while Nigel and Brendan watched like caged monkeys from the upstairs landing, their faces pressed silently against the bars.

It wasn’t the first time she’d beaten him. She’d beaten them all at some time or another — mostly Nigel, but Benjamin too, and even stupid Brendan, who was too scared of everything to ever put a foot wrong — it was her way of keeping them under control.

But this time it was something else. She’d always thought him exceptional. Now, it seemed, he was just one boy. The knowledge must have come as a shock, a terrible disappointment to her. Well, that’s what blueeyedboy thinks now. In fact, he must have known even then that his mother was going insane.

‘You lying, malingering little shit!’

‘No, Ma, please,’ whimpered Ben, trying to shield his face with his arms.

‘You blew that exam on purpose, Ben! You let me down on purpose!’ She grabbed him with one hand by the hair and forced his arm away from his face in readiness for another blow.

He closed his eyes and reached for the words, the magic words to tame the beast. Then came inspiration —

‘Please. Ma. It’s not my fault. Please, Ma. I love you—’

She stopped. Fist raised like a gauntlet of gems, one eye levelled malignantly.

‘What did you say?’

‘I love you, Ma—’

Back then, when Ben had gained some ground, he needed to consolidate his position. He was already shaken, already in tears. It didn’t take much to summon the rest. And as he clung to her, snivelling, his brothers still watching from the top of the stairs, it struck him that he was good at this, that if he played his cards right, he might just survive. Everyone has an Achilles heel. Ben had just found his mother’s.

Then, from behind the bars of the staircase he saw Brendan’s eyes go wide. For a moment Brendan held his gaze, and he was suddenly convinced that Bren, who never read anything, had read his mind as easily as he might read a Ladybird book.

His brother looked away at once. But not before Ben had seen that look; that look of understanding. Was it really so obvious? Or had he just been wrong about Bren? For years he had simply dismissed him as a fat and useless waste of space. But how much did Benjamin really know about his backward brother? How much had he taken for granted? He wondered now if he’d made a mistake; if Bren wasn’t brighter than he’d thought. Bright enough to have seen through his act. Bright enough to present a threat —

He freed himself from Ma’s embrace. Bren was still waiting on the stairs, looking scared and stupid once more. But Benjamin knew he was faking it. Beneath that drab plumage his brother in brown was playing some deeper game of his own. He didn’t know what it was — not yet. But from that moment, Benjamin knew that one day he might have to deal with Bren —

Post comment:Albertine: Are you sure you know where you’re going with this?

blueeyedboy: Quite sure. Are you?

Albertine: I’m following you. I always have.

blueeyedboy: Ah! The snows of yesteryear . . .

8

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 20.14 on Monday, February 11

Status: public

Mood: mendacious

Yes, that’s where it starts. With a little white lie. White, like the pretty snow. Snow White, like in the story — and who would think snow could be dangerous, that those little wet kisses from the sky could turn into something deadly?

It’s all about momentum, you see. Just as that one little, thoughtless lie took on a momentum of its own. A stone can set off an avalanche. A word can sometimes do the same. And a lie can become the avalanche, bringing down everything in its path, bludgeoning, roaring, smothering, reshaping the world in its wake, rewriting the course of our lives.

Emily was five and a half when her father first took her to the school where he taught. Until then it had been a mysterious place (remote and beguiling as all mythical places) which her parents sometimes discussed over the dinner-table. Not often, though: Catherine disliked what she called ‘Patrick’s shop-talk’ and frequently turned the conversation to other matters just as it became most interesting. Emily gathered that ‘school’ was a place where children came together — to learn, or so her father said, though Catherine seemed to disagree.

‘How many children?’

Buttons in a box; beans in a jar. ‘Hundreds.’

‘Children like me?’

‘No, Emily. Not like you. St Oswald’s School is just for boys.’

By now she was reading avidly. Braille books for children were hard to find, but her mother had created tactile books from felt and embroidery, and Daddy spent hours every day carefully transcribing stories — all typed in reverse, using the old embossing machine. Emily could already add and subtract as well as divide and multiply. She knew the history of the great artists; she had studied relief maps of the world and of the solar system. She knew the house inside and out. She knew about plants and animals from frequent visits to the children’s farm. She could play chess. She could play the piano, too — a pleasure she shared with her father — and her most precious hours were spent with him in his room, learning scales and chords and stretching her small hands in a vain effort to span an octave.

But of other children she knew very little. She heard their voices when she played in the park. She had once petted a baby, which smelt vaguely sour and felt like a sleeping cat. Her next-door neighbour was called Mrs Brannigan, and for some reason she was inferior — perhaps because she was Catholic; or perhaps because she rented her house, whilst theirs was bought and paid for. Mrs Brannigan had a daughter a little older than Emily, with whom she would have liked to play, but who spoke with such a strong accent that the first and only time they had spoken, Emily had not understood a word.

But Emily’s father worked in a place where there were hundreds of children, all learning maths and geography and French and Latin and art and history and music and science; as well as fighting in the yard, shouting, talking, making friends, chasing each other, eating dinners in a long room, playing cricket and tennis on the grass.

‘I’d like to go to school,’ she said.

‘You wouldn’t.’ That was Catherine, with the warning note in her voice. ‘Patrick, stop talking shop. You know how it upsets her.’

‘It doesn’t upset me. I’d like to go.’

‘Perhaps I could take her with me one day. Just to see—’

‘Patrick!’

‘Sorry. Just — you know. There’s the Christmas concert next month, love. In the school chapel. I’m conducting. She likes—’

‘Patrick, I’m not listening!’

‘She likes music, Catherine. Let me take her. Just this once.’

And so, just once, Emily went. Perhaps because of Daddy; but mostly because Feather was in favour of the plan. Feather was a staunch believer in the healing powers of music; besides, she had recently read Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale, and felt that a concert might boost Emily’s flagging colour therapy.

But Catherine didn’t like the idea. I think now that part of it was guilt; the same guilt that had pushed her to remove all traces of Daddy’s passion for music from the house. The piano was an exception; even so, it had been relegated to a spare room, where it sat amongst boxes of forgotten papers and old clothes, where Emily was not supposed to venture. But Feather’s enthusiasm tipped the balance, and on the evening of the concert they all walked down towards St Oswald’s, Catherine smelling of turpentine and rose (a pink smell, she tells Emily, pretty pink roses), Feather talking high and very fast, and Emily’s father guiding her gently by the shoulder, taking care not to let her slip in the wet December snow.

‘OK?’ he whispered, as they neared the place.

‘Mm-mm.’

She had been disappointed to hear that the concert was not to take place in the school itself. She would have liked to see Daddy’s place of work; to have entered the classrooms with their wooden desks, smelt the chalk and the polish; heard the echo of their footsteps against the wooden floors. Later, she was allowed those things. But this event was to take place in the nearby chapel, with the St Oswald’s choristers, and her father conducting, which she understood to mean guiding, somehow; showing the singers the way.

It was a cold, damp evening that smelt of smoke. From the road came the sounds of cars and bicycle bells and people talking, muffled almost to nothing in the foggy air. In spite of her winter coat she was cold; her thin-soled shoes squelching against the gravel path, and droplets of moisture in her hair. Fog makes the outside feel smaller, somehow; just as the wind expands the world, making the trees rustle and soar. That evening Emily felt very small, squashed down almost to nothing by the dead air. From time to time someone passed her — she felt the swish of a lady’s dress, or it might have been a Master’s gown — and heard a snatch of conversation before they were once more swept away.

‘Won’t it be crowded, Patrick? Emily doesn’t like crowds.’ That was Catherine again, her voice tight as the bodice of Emily’s best party dress, which was pretty (and pink) and which had been brought from storage for one last outing before she outgrew it completely.

‘It’s fine. You’ve got front-row seats.’

As a matter of fact Emily didn’t mind crowds. It was the noise she didn’t like: those flat and blurry voices that confused everything and turned everything around. She took hold of her father’s hand, rather tightly, and squeezed. A single pump meant I love you. A double-pump, I love you, too. Another of their small secrets, like the fact that she could almost span an octave if she bounced her hand over the keys, and play the lead line of Für Elise while her father played the chords.

It was cool inside the chapel. Emily’s family didn’t attend church — though their neighbour, Mrs Brannigan, did — and she had been inside St Mary’s once, just to hear the echo. St Oswald’s Chapel sounded like that; their steps slap-slapped on the hard, smooth floor, and all the sounds in the place seemed to go up, like people climbing an echoey staircase and talking as they went.

Daddy told her later that it was because the ceiling was so high, but at the time she imagined that the choir would be sitting above her, like angels. There was a scent, too; something like Feather’s patchouli, but stronger and smokier.

‘That’s incense,’ said her father. ‘They burn it in the sanctuary.’

Sanctuary. He’d explained that word. A place to go where you can be safe. Incense and Clan tobacco and angels’ voices. Sanctuary.

There was movement all around them now. People were talking, but in lower voices than usual, as if they were afraid of the echoes. As Daddy went to join the choristers and Catherine described the organ and pews and windows for her, Emily heard wishwishwish from all around the hall, then a series of settling-down noises, then a hush as the choir began to sing.

It was as if something had broken open inside her. This, and not the piece of clay, is Emily’s first memory: sitting in St Oswald’s Chapel with the tears running down her face and into her smiling mouth, and the music, the lovely music, surging all around her.

Oh, it was not the first time that she had ever heard music; but the homely rinkety-plink of their old piano, or the tinny transistors of the kitchen radio, could not convey more than a particle of this. She had no name for what she could hear, no terms with which to describe this new experience. It was, quite simply, an awakening.

Later her mother tried to embellish the tale, as if it needed embellishment. She herself had never really enjoyed religious music — Christmas carols least of all, with their simple tunes and mawkish lyrics. Something by Mozart would have been much more suitable, with its implication of like calling to like, though the legend has a dozen variations — from Mozart to Mahler and even to the inevitable Berlioz — as if the complexity of the music had any bearing on the sounds themselves, or the sensations they evoked.

In fact the piece was nothing more than a four-part a cappella version of an old Christmas carol.

But there is something unique about boys’ voices; a tremulous quality, not entirely comfortable, perpetually on the brink of losing pitch. It is a sound that combines an almost inhuman sweetness of tone with a raw edge that is nearly painful.

She listened in silence for the first few bars, unsure of what she was hearing. Then the voices rose again:

And on the second snow the voices grazed that note, the high F sharp that had always been a point of mysterious pressure in her, and Emily began to cry. Not from sorrow or even from emotion; it was simply a reflex, like that cramping of the tastebuds after eating something very sour, or the gasp of fresh chilli against the back of the throat.

Snow on snow, snow on snow they sang, and everything in her responded. She shivered; she smiled; she turned her face to the invisible roof and opened her mouth like a baby bird, half-expecting to feel the sounds like snowflakes falling on her tongue. For almost a minute Emily sat trembling on the edge of her seat, and every now and then the boys’ voices would rise to that strange F sharp, that magical ice-cream-headache note, and the tears would spill once more from her eyes. Her lower lip tingled; her fingers were numb. She felt as if she were touching God —

‘Emily, what is it?’

She could not reply. Only the sounds mattered.

‘Emily!’

Every note seemed to cut into her in some delicious way; every chord a miracle of texture and shape. More tears fell.

‘Something’s wrong.’ Catherine’s voice came from a great distance. ‘Feather, please. I’m taking her home.’ Emily felt her starting to move; tugging at her coat, which she had been using as a cushion. ‘Get up, sweetheart, we shouldn’t have come.’

Was that satisfaction in her voice? Her hand on Emily’s forehead was feverish and clammy. ‘She’s burning up. Feather, give me a hand—’

‘No!’ whispered Emily.

‘Emily, darling, you’re upset.’

‘Please—’ But now her mother was picking her up; Catherine’s arms were around her. She caught a fleeting smell of turpentine behind the expensive perfume. Desperately she searched for something, some magic, to make her mother stop: something that would convey the urgency, the imperative to stay, to listen . . .

‘Please, the music—’

Your mother doesn’t care much for music. Daddy’s voice; remote but clear.

But what did Catherine care for? What for her was the language of command?

They were half-out of their seats now. Emily tried to struggle; a seam ripped under the arm of her too-tight dress. Her coat, with its fur collar, smothered her. More of the turpentine smell, the smell of her mother’s fever, her madness.

And suddenly Emily understood, with a maturity far beyond her years, that she would never visit her father’s school, never go to another concert, just as she would never play with other children in case they hurt or pushed her, never run in the park in case she fell.

If they left now, Emily thought, then her mother would always have her way, and the blindness, which had never really troubled her, would finally drag her down like a stone tied to a dog’s tail, and she would drown.

There must be words, she told herself; magic words, to make her mother stay. But Emily was five years old; she didn’t know any magic words; and now she was moving down the aisle with her mother on one side and Feather on the other, and the lovely voices rolling over them like a river.

And then it came to her. So simple that she gasped at her own audacity. She did know magic words, she realized. Dozens of them; she had learnt them almost from the cradle, but had never really found a use for them until now. She knew their fearsome energy. Emily opened her mouth, stricken with a sudden, demonic inspiration.

‘The colours,’ she whispered.

Catherine White stopped mid-stride. ‘What did you say?’

‘The colours. Please. I want to stay.’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘I want to listen to the colours .’

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: How brave of you to post this, Albertine. You know I’ll have to reciprocate . . .

9

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 23.03 on Monday, February 11

Status: public

Mood: scornful

Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘Any Colour You Like’

Listen to the colours. Oh, please. Don’t tell me she was innocent; don’t tell me that, even then, she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Mrs White knew all about Boy X and his synaesthesia. She knew Dr Peacock would be near by. Easy enough to feed her the line; easier still to believe it when Emily responded by starting to hear the colours.

Ben was in his first year at school. Imagine him then: a chorister, all scrubbed and clean and ready to go in his blue St Oswald’s uniform under the frilled white cassock.

I know what you’re thinking. He failed the exam. But that was just the scholarship. With money she had set aside, as well as with help from Dr Peacock, Ma had managed to get him into St Oswald’s after all, not as a scholar, but as a fee-paying pupil, and here he was in the front row of the school choir, hating every moment of it. And if they didn’t already have good enough cause to despise him, he knew that the other boys in his form would never leave him alone after this, not to mention Nigel, who had been dragged along most reluctantly, and who would take it out on him later, he knew, in gibes and kicks and punches.

He’d prayed in vain for puberty to break his voice and release him. But whilst the other boys in his class were already thickening like palm trees, reeking of teenage civet, Ben remained slim and girlish and pale, with an eerie, off-key treble voice.

He could see his mother three rows back, listening for the sound of his voice, and Dr Peacock, behind her; and Nigel, going on seventeen, sprawled and scowling across the bench; and sweaty and malodorous Bren, looking terribly uncomfortable with his lank hair and his pursed-up face, like the world’s most enormous baby.

Blueeyedboy tried not to look; to concentrate on the music, but now he caught sight of Mrs White, just a few seats away from him, with Emily by her side — Emily, in her little red coat and her dress of rose-pink, with her hair in bunches and her face illuminated with something half-distress, half-joy —

For a moment he thought her eyes caught his; but the eyes of the blind are like that, aren’t they? Emily couldn’t see him. Whatever he did, however he tried — Emily never would. And yet, those eyes drew him, skittering from side to side like marbles in a doll’s head, like a couple of blue-eye beads, reflecting ill-luck back to the sender.

Blueeyedboy’s head was beginning to spin, throbbing in time to the music. A headache was coming; a bad one. He searched for the means to protect himself, imagining a capsule of blue, hard as iron, cold as stone, blue as a block of Arctic ice. But the pain was inescapable. A headache that would escalate until it wrung him like a rag —

It was hot in the choir stalls. Red-faced in their white smocks, the choristers sang like angels. St Oswald’s takes its choir seriously: the boys are drilled in obedience. Like soldiers, they are trained to stand and keep their position for hours on end. No one complains. No one dares. Sing your hearts out, boys, and smile! bugles the choirmaster during rehearsals. This is for God and St Oswald’s. I don’t want to see a single boy letting down the team.

But now Ben Winter was looking pale. Perhaps the heat; the incense; perhaps the strain of keeping that smile. Remember, he was delicate; Ma always said so. More sensitive than the other two; more prone to illness and accidents —

The angel voices rose again, sweeping towards the crescendo.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow —

And that was when it happened. Almost in slow motion; a thud: a movement in the front row; a pale-faced boy collapsing unseen on to the floor of the chapel; striking his head on the side of a pew, a blow that would require four stitches to mend, a crescent moon on his forehead.

Why did no one notice him? Why was Ben so wholly eclipsed? No one saw him — not even Ma — for just as he fell, a little blind girl in the crowd suffered a kind of panic attack, and all eyes turned to Emily White, Emily in the rose-coloured dress, flailing her arms and shouting out: Please. I want to stay. I want to —

Listen to the colours.

Post comment:

Albertine: Nice comeback, blueeyedboy.

blueeyedboy: Glad you liked it, Albertine.

Albertine: Well, liked is maybe not the word —

blueeyedboy: Nice comeback, Albertine . . .

10

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 23.49 on Monday, February 11

Status: public

Mood: raw

Listen to the colours. Maybe you remember the phrase. Glib coming from the mouth of an adult, it must have seemed unbearably poignant from that of a five-year-old blind girl. In any case, it did the trick. Listen to the colours. All unknowing, Emily White had opened up a box of magic words, and was drunk with their power and her own, issuing commands like a diminutive general, commands which Catherine and Feather — and later, of course, Dr Peacock — obeyed with unquestioning delight.

‘What do you see?’

Diminished chord of F minor. The magic words unfurl like wrapping-paper, every one.

‘Pink. Blue. Green. Violet. So pretty.’

Her mother claps her hands in delight. ‘More, Emily. Tell me more.’

A chord of F major.

‘Red. Orange. Ma-gen-ta. Black.’

It was like an awakening. The infernal power she had discovered in herself had blossomed in an astonishing way, and music was suddenly a part of her curriculum. The piano was brought out of the spare room and re-tuned; her father’s secret lessons became official, and Emily was allowed to practise whenever she liked, even when Catherine was working. Then came the local newspapers, and the letters and gifts came pouring in.

The story had plenty of potential. In fact, it had all the ingredients. A Christmas miracle; a photogenic blind girl; music; art; some man-in-the-street science, courtesy of Dr Peacock, and a lot of controversy from the art world that kept the papers wondering on and off for the next three years or so, caught up in speculation. The TV eventually caught on to it; so did the Press. There was even a single — a Top Ten hit — by a rock band whose name I forget. The song was later used in the Hollywood film — an adaptation of the book — starring Robert Redford as Dr Peacock and a young Natalie Portman as the blind girl who sees music.

At first Emily took it for granted. After all, she was very young, and had no basis for comparison. And she was very happy — she listened to music all day long; she studied what she loved most, and everyone was pleased with her.

Over the next twelve months or so Emily attended a number of concerts, as well as performances of The Magic Flute, the Messiah and Swan Lake. She went to her father’s school several times, so that she could get to know the instruments by feel.

Flutes, with their slender bodies and intricate keys; pot-bellied cellos and double basses; French horns and tubas like big school canteen-jugs of sound; narrow-waisted violins; icicle bells; fat drums and flat drums; splash cymbals and crash cymbals; triangles and timpani and trumpets and tambourines.

Sometimes her father would play for her. He was different when Catherine was not there: he told jokes; he was exuberant, dancing Emily round and round to the music, making her dizzy with laughter. He would have liked to have been a professional musician: clarinet, and not piano, had been his preferred instrument, but there was little call for a classically trained clarinet player with a lurking passion for Acker Bilk, and his small ambitions had gone unvoiced and unnoticed.

But there was another side to Catherine’s conversion. It took Emily months to discover it; longer still to understand. This is where my memories lose all cohesion; reality merges with myth so that I cannot trust myself to be either accurate or truthful. Only the facts speak for themselves; and even they have been so much disputed, queried, misreported, misread that only scraps remain of anything that might show me how it really was.

The facts, then. You must know the tale. In the audience that evening, sitting three rows from the front, at the end, was a man called Graham Peacock. Sixty-seven years old; a well-known local personality; a noted gourmet; a likeable eccentric; a generous patron of the arts. That evening in December, during a recital of Christmas songs in St Oswald’s Chapel, Dr Peacock found himself party to an incident that was to change his life.

A small girl — the child of a friend of his — had suffered a kind of panic attack. Her mother began to carry her out, and in the scuffle that ensued — the child struggling valiantly to stay, the mother trying with equal fortitude to remove her — he heard the child speak a phrase that struck at him like a revelation.

Listen to the colours.

At the time Emily barely understood the significance of what she had said. But Dr Peacock’s interest left her mother in a state of near-euphoria; at home, Feather opened a bottle of champagne, and even Daddy seemed pleased, though that might just have been because of the change in Catherine. Nevertheless he did not approve; later, when the thing had begun, his was the only dissenting voice.

Needless to say, no one listened. The very next day little Emily was summoned to the Fireplace House, where every possible test was run to confirm her special talents.

Synaesthesia [writes Dr Peacock in his paper ‘Aspects of Modularity’] is a rare condition where two — or sometimes more — of the five ‘normal’ senses are apparently fused together. This seems to be related to the concept of modularity. Each of the sensory systems has a corresponding area, or module, of the brain. While there are normal interactions between modules (such as using vision to detect movement), the current understanding of human perception cannot account for the stimulation of one module inducing brain activity in a different module. However, in a synaesthete, this is precisely the case.In short, a synaesthete may experience any or all of the following: shape as taste, touch as scent, sound or taste as colour.

All this was new to Emily, if not to Feather and Catherine. But she understood the idea — they all knew about Boy X, after all — and from what she’d heard of his special gift, it was not too far removed from the word associations and art lessons and colour therapies she had learnt from her mother. She was five and a half at the time; eager to please; even more so to perform.

The arrangement was simple. In the mornings Emily would go to Dr Peacock’s house for her music lesson and her other subjects; and in the afternoons she would play the piano, listen to records, and paint. That was her only duty, and as she was allowed to listen to music as she performed it, it was no great burden. Sometimes Dr Peacock would ask her questions, and record what she said.

Emily, listen. What do you see?

A single note picked out on the clunky old piano in the Fireplace House. G is indigo, almost black. A simple triad takes it further; then a chord — G minor, with a diminished seventh in the bass — resolves in a velvety violet caress.

He marks the result in his notebook.

Very good, Emily. That’s my good girl.

Next comes a series of soft chords; C sharp minor; D diminished; E flat minor seventh. Emily points out the colours, marked in Braille on the paintbox.

To Emily it feels almost like playing an instrument, her hands on the little coloured keys; and Dr Peacock notes it down in his scratchy little notepad, and then there is tea by the fireplace, with Dr Peacock’s Jack Russell, Patch II, snuffling hopefully after biscuits, tickling Emily’s hands, making her laugh. Dr Peacock speaks to his dog as if he, too, is an elderly academic; which makes Emily laugh even more, and which soon becomes part of their lessons together.

‘Patch II would like to enquire,’ he says in his bassoony voice, ‘whether today Miss White feels inclined to peruse my collection of recorded sounds—’

Emily giggles. ‘You mean listen to records?’

‘My furry colleague would appreciate it.’

On cue, Patch II barks.

Emily laughs. ‘OK,’ she says.

Over the thirty months that followed, Dr Peacock became an increasingly large part of all their lives. Catherine was deliriously happy; Emily was an apt pupil, spending three or four hours at the piano every day, and suddenly there was a much-needed focus to all of their lives. I doubt Patrick White could have stopped it, anyway, even if he had wanted to; after all, he too had a stake in the affair. He, too, wanted to believe.

Emily never asked herself why Dr Peacock was so generous. To her he was simply a kind and funny man who spoke in long and ponderous phrases and who never came to see them without bringing some gift of flowers, wine, books. On Emily’s sixth birthday he gave her a new piano to replace the old, battered one on which she had learnt; throughout the year there were concert tickets, pastels, paints, easels, canvas, sweets and toys.

And music, of course. Always music. Even now that hurts most of all. To think of a time when Emily could play every day for as long as she liked, when every day was a fanfare, and Mozart, Mahler, Chopin, even Berlioz would line up like suitors for her favour, to be chosen or discarded at whim . . .

‘Now, Emily. Listen to the music. Tell me what you hear.’

That was Mendelssohn, Lieder ohne Worte, Opus 19, Number 2, in A minor. The left-hand part is difficult to master, with its tight blocks of semi-quavers, but Emily has been practising, and now it’s almost perfect. Dr Peacock is pleased. Her mother, too.

‘Blue. Quite a dark blue.’

‘Show me.’

She has a new paintbox now, sixty-four colours arranged like a chessboard, almost as broad as the desk-top. She cannot see them, but knows them by heart; arranged in order of brightness and tone. F is violet; G is indigo; A is blue; B is green; C is yellow; D is orange; E is red. Sharps are lighter; flats darker. Instruments, too, have their own colours within the orchestral palette: the woodwind section is often green or blue; the strings, brown and orange; the brass, red and yellow.

She picks up her thick brush and daubs it in the paint. She is using watercolours today, and the scent is chalky and grannyish, like Parma violets. Dr Peacock stands to one side, Patch II curled up at his feet. Catherine and Feather stand on the opposite side, ready to pass Emily anything she may need. A sponge; a brush; a smaller brush, a sachet of glitter powder.

The Andante is a leisurely abstract, like a day at the seaside. She dabbles her fingers in the paint and strokes them across the smooth untreated paper so that it contracts into ridges, like shallow-water sand, and the paint melts and slides into the gullies her fingers have left. Dr Peacock is pleased; she can hear the smile in his bassoony voice, although much of what he says is incomprehensible to her, swept aside by the lovely music.

Sometimes, other children come by. She remembers a boy, rather older than she is, who is shy, and stammers, and doesn’t talk much, but sits on the sofa and reads. In the parlour there are sofas and chairs, a window seat and (her favourite) a swing, suspended from the ceiling on two stout ropes. The room is so large that Emily can swing as high as she likes without hitting anything; besides, everyone knows to keep out of her way, and there are no collisions.

Some days she does not paint at all; instead she sits on her swing in the Fireplace House and listens to sounds. Dr Peacock calls it the Sound Association Game, and if Emily works hard, he says, there will be a present at the end. All she has to do is sit on the swing, listen to the records and tell him the colours she can see. Some are easy — she already has them sorted in her mind like buttons in a box — others not. But she likes Dr Peacock’s sound machines, and the records, especially the old ones, with their long-dead voices and wind-up scratchy gramophone strings.

Sometimes there is no music at all, but just a series of sound effects, and these are hardest of all. But Emily still tries her best to satisfy Dr Peacock, who writes down everything she says in a series of cloth-backed notebooks, sometimes with such force that his pencil goes through the paper.

‘Listen, Emily. What do you see?’

The sound of a thousand Westerns; a gun fires, a bullet ricochets against a canyon wall; Gunsmoke; Bonfire Night and charred potatoes. ‘Red.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Madder red. With a trail of crimson.’

‘Good, Emily. Very good.’

It’s really very easy; all she has to do is let her mind go. A penny dropped; a man whistling off-key; a single thrush; a door-knocker; the sound of one hand clapping. She goes home with her pockets crammed with sweets. Dr Peacock clack-clacks up his findings every night on a typewriter with a Donald Duck voice. His papers have names like ‘Induced Synaesthesia’, ‘The Colour Complex’ and ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’. His words are like the gas the dentist gives her when he has to drill a tooth; she slides away under its shivery caress, and all the perfumes of the Orient cannot save her.

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: Oh, yes!

Albertine: You mean you want more?

blueeyedboy: If you can bear it, then so can I . . .

11

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 01.45 on Tuesday, February 12

Status: public

Mood: culpable

Most of this, of course, is speculation. Those memories are not mine; they belong to Emily White. As if Emily could be a reliable witness to anything. And yet her voice — her plaintive treble — calls to me from over the years. Help me, please! I’m still alive! You people buried me alive!

‘Red. Dark red. Oxblood, with purple streaks.’

Chopin’s Nocturne Number 2 in E flat major. She has a good ear for music, and at six years old she can already pick out most of the chords, although the fretful double-rows of chromatics are still beyond the skill of her stubby fingers. This does not trouble Dr Peacock. He is far more interested in her painting skills than in any musical talent.

According to Catherine, he has already framed and hung half a dozen of Emily’s canvases on the walls of the Fireplace House — including her Toreador; her Goldberg Variations; and (her mother’s favourite) her Nocturne in Violet Ochre.

‘There’s so much energy in them,’ says Catherine, in a trembling voice. ‘So much experience. It’s almost mystic. The way you take the colours from the music and bring them on to the canvas — do you know, Emily? I envy you. I wish I could see what you see now.’

No child could fail to be flattered by such praise. Her paintings make people happy; they earn her rewards from Dr Peacock and the approval of his many friends. She understands that he is planning another book, much of it based on his recent findings.

She knows that she is not the only person he has befriended in his search for synaesthetes. In his book Beyond Sense, he explains, he has already written at length about the case of a teenage boy, referred to throughout simply as Boy X, who appeared to exhibit signs of olfactory-gustatory acquired synaesthesia.

‘What does that mean?’ Emily says.

‘He experienced things in a special way. Or, at least, he said he could. Now concentrate on the notes, please—’

‘What kind of things did he see?’ she says.

‘I don’t think he saw anything.’

Until Emily’s appearance on the scene, Boy X had been Dr Peacock’s pet project. But between a young blind prodigy who can hear colours (and paint them), and a teenage boy with an affinity to smells, there could be no real competition. Besides, the boy was a freeloader, said Catherine; willing to fabricate any number of phoney symptoms to gain attention. The mother was even worse, she said; any fool could see that she’d put her son up to it in the hope of getting her hands on Dr Peacock’s money.

‘You’re too trusting, Gray,’ she said. ‘Anyone else would have spotted them a mile off. They saw you coming, dear. They had you fooled.’

‘But my tests clearly show that the boy responds—’

‘The boy responds to money, Gray. And so does his mother. A few quid here, a tenner there. It all builds up, and before you know it—’

‘But Cathy — she works on the market, for God’s sake — she’s got three kids, the father’s nowhere to be seen. She needs someone—’

‘So what? So do half the mothers on the estate. Are you going to pay this boy for the rest of his life?’

Under pressure, Dr Peacock admitted that he had already contributed to the boy’s school fees, plus a thousand pounds into a trust fund — For college, Cathy, the lad’s quite bright —

Catherine White was furious. It wasn’t her money, but she resented it as much as if it had been stolen from her own pocket. Besides, it was almost cruel, she said, to have led the boy to expect so much. He’d probably have been happy enough, if no one had tried to give him ideas. But Dr Peacock had encouraged him, had made him into a malcontent.

‘That’s what you get, Gray,’ she said, ‘trying to play Pygmalion. Don’t expect gratitude from the boy — in fact, you’re doing him a disservice, leading him to believe that he can sponge off you instead of getting a proper job. He could even end up being dangerous. Give money to these people, and what do they do? They buy drink and drugs. Things get out of hand. It wouldn’t be the first time that some poor benevolent soul has been murdered in his bed by the very people he’s trying to help—’

And so on. Finally, following heated discussions between Dr Peacock and Catherine, Boy X ceased his visits to the Fireplace House, never to return.

Catherine was magnanimous in victory. Boy X had been a mistake, she said. Paid handsomely for his cooperation in Dr Peacock’s experiments, it was only natural that a person of his type should try to exploit the situation. But now here was the real thing, that rarest of phenomena: a blind-from-birth true synaesthete, reborn to sight again through music. It was a fabulous story, and deserved to stand alone. There was to be no one to undermine the uniqueness of the Emily White Phenomenon. 215

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: Ouch! That was rather below the belt —

Albertine: I’ll stop whenever you’ve had enough . . .

blueeyedboy: Do you really think you can?

Albertine: I don’t know, blueeyedboy . The question is: can you?

12

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 01.56 on Tuesday, February 12

Status: public

Mood: sorry

Listening to: Mark Knopfler: ‘The Last Laugh’

That marked the end for Benjamin. He’d sensed it almost immediately, that subtle shift in emphasis, and though it took some time to die, like a flower in a vase, he knew that something had ended for him that night in St Oswald’s Chapel. The shadow of little Emily White had eclipsed him almost from the start: from her story, which was sensational, to the undeniable media appeal of the blind girl, whose super-sense was to make her a national superstar.

Now Ben’s long days at the Mansion dwindled to an hourly session; time that he shared with Emily, sitting quietly on the couch while Dr Peacock showed her off as if she were some collector’s piece — a moth, perhaps, or a figurine — expecting Ben to admire her, to share in his enthusiasm. Worse still, Brendan was there again (to keep an eye on him, Ma said, while she went to work at the market); his gawping, grinning brother in brown with his greasy hair and hangdog look, who rarely spoke, but sat and stared, filling Ben with such hate and shame that sometimes he wanted nothing more than to run away and to leave Bren alone — awkward, boorish, out of place — in that house of delicate things.

Catherine White put a stop to that. It wasn’t right for those boys to be there, not without supervision. There were too many valuable things in that house; too many temptations. Benjamin’s visits dwindled once again, so that now he dropped by just once a month, and waited with Bren on the front steps until Mrs White was ready to leave, hearing piano music drift out across the lawn, laden with the scent of paint, so that every time blueeyedboy hears that sound — be it a Rachmaninoff prelude or the intro to ‘Hey Jude’ — it brings back the memory of those days and the sorry little lurch of the heart that he felt when he glanced through the parlour window and saw Emily sitting on the swing, pendulum-ing back and forth like a happy little bird —

At first, all he did was watch her. Like everyone else, he was dazzled by her, content to simply admire her ascent, much as Dr Peacock must have watched the Luna moth as she struggled out of the chrysalis, in awe and admiration, coloured, perhaps, with a little regret. She was so pretty, even then. So effortlessly lovable. There was something about the trusting way in which she held her father’s hand, face turned up towards him like a flower to the sun; or the monkeyish way in which she would scramble on to the piano stool, one leg tucked in, a sock at half-mast, half-eerie, half-enchanting. She was like a doll that had come to life, all porcelain and ivory, so that Mrs White, who had always liked dolls, could dress her daughter all year round in bright little outfits and matching shoes right out of an old-fashioned storybook.

As for our hero, blueeyedboy —

Puberty had hit him hard, with pimples on his back and face, and a half-broken voice that, even now, retains a slightly uneven tone. His childhood stammer had got worse. He lost it later, but that year it got so bad that on some days he could hardly speak. Smells and colours intensified, bringing with them migraines that the doctor promised would fade with time. They never did. He has them still, although his coping strategies have become somewhat more sophisticated.

After the Christmas concert, Emily seemed to spend most of her time at the Mansion. But with so many other people there, blueeyedboy rarely spoke to her; besides which, his stammer made him self-conscious, and he preferred to remain in the background, unregarded and unheard. Sometimes he would sit on the porch outside with a comic or a Western, content to be in her orbit, quietly, without fuss. Besides, reading was a pleasure seldom allowed Yours Truly at home, where Ma was always in need of help, and his brothers never left him alone. Reading was for sissies, they said, and whatever he chose — be it Superman, Judge Dredd or even just the Beano — would always incur the ridicule of blueeyedboy’s brother in black, who would pester him relentlessly — Look at the pretty pictures! Aww! So what’s your super-power, then? — until blueeyedboy was by turns shamed and coerced into doing something different.

Midweek, between visits to the Mansion, he would sometimes walk past Emily’s house in the hope of seeing her playing outside. Occasionally, he saw her in town, but always with her mother: standing to attention like a good little soldier, sometimes flanked by Dr Peacock, who had become her protector, her mentor, her second father. As if she needed another one, as if she didn’t already have everything.

It probably sounds like he envied her. That isn’t altogether true. But somehow he couldn’t stop thinking about her, studying her, watching her. His interest gathered momentum. He stole a camera from a second-hand shop, and taught himself to take pictures. He stole a long lens from the same shop, almost getting caught that time, but managing to get away with his trophy before the fat man at the counter — surprisingly speedy for all his bulk — finally gave up the pursuit.

When his mother told him at last that he was no longer welcome at the Mansion, he didn’t quite believe her. He’d become so accustomed to his routine — sitting quietly on the couch, reading books, drinking Earl Grey tea, listening to Emily’s music — that to be dismissed after all this time felt like an unfair punishment. It wasn’t his fault — he’d done nothing wrong. It was surely a misunderstanding. Dr Peacock had always been so kind; why would he turn against him now?

Later, blueeyedboy understood. Dr Peacock, for all his kindness, had been just another version of his mother’s ladies, who’d been so friendly when he was four, but who had so quickly lost interest. Friendless, starved of affection at home, he’d read too much into those affable ways: the walks around the rose garden; the cups of tea; the sympathy. In short, he’d fallen into the trap of mistaking compassion for caring.

Calling round that evening in the hope of finding out the truth, Yours Truly was met, not by Dr Peacock, but by Mrs White, in a black satin dress with a string of pearls round her long neck, who told him that he shouldn’t be there; that he was to leave and never come back, that he was trouble, that she knew his type —

‘Is that what Dr Peacock says?’

Well, that was what he meant to say. But his stammer was worse than ever that day, closing his mouth with clumsy stitches, and he found he could hardly say a word.

‘B-but why?’ he asked her.

‘Don’t try to pretend. Don’t think you can get away with it.’

For a moment, shame overwhelmed him. He didn’t know what he had done, but Mrs White seemed so sure of his guilt, and his eyes began to sting with tears, and the stink of Ma’s vitamin drink in his throat was almost enough to make him gag —

Please don’t cry, he told himself. Not in front of Mrs White.

She gave him a look of burning contempt. ‘Don’t think you can get around me like that. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

Blueeyedboy was. Ashamed and suddenly angry; and if he could have killed her then, he would have done it without hesitation or remorse. But he was only a schoolboy, and she was from a different sphere, a different class, to be obeyed, no matter what — his mother had trained her sons well — and the sound of her words was like a spike being driven into the side of his head —

‘Please,’ he said, without stammering.

‘Go away,’ said Mrs White.

‘Please. Mrs White. C-can’t we be friends?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Friends?’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your mother was my cleaner, that’s all. Not even a very good one. And if you think that gives you the right to harass me and my daughter, then think again.’

‘I wasn’t ha-ha—’ he began.

‘And what do you call those photographs?’ she said, looking him straight in the face.

The shock of it dried his tears at once.

‘Ph-photographs?’ he said shakily.

Turns out Feather had a friend who worked in the local photo shop. The friend had told Feather, who’d told Mrs White, who’d demanded to see the relevant prints and had taken them straight to the Mansion, where she’d used them to prove her argument that befriending the Winters had been a mistake, one from which Dr Peacock should distance himself without delay —

‘Don’t think you haven’t been seen,’ she said. ‘Creeping around after Emily. Taking pictures of us both—’

That wasn’t true. He never shot her. He only ever shot Emily. But he couldn’t say that to Mrs White. Nor could he beg her not to tell Ma —

And so he left, dry-eyed with rage, tongue stapled to the roof of his mouth. And as he looked over his shoulder for one last glimpse of the Mansion, he saw a movement in one of the upper windows. He moved away almost at once; but blueeyedboy had had time to see Dr Peacock, watching him, warding him off with a sheepish smile —

That was where it really began. That’s where blueeyedboy was born. Later that night he crept back to the house, armed with a can of peacock-blue paint, and, almost paralysed with fear and guilt, he scrawled his rage on the big front door, the door that had been cruelly shut in his face, and then, alone in his room again, he took out the battered Blue Book to draw up another murder.

Post comment:

Albertine: Oh please, not another murder. I really thought we were getting somewhere.

blueeyedboy: All right, but — you owe me one . . .

13

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 02.05 on Tuesday, February 12

Status: public

Mood: crushed

Listening to: Don Henley: ‘The Boys Of Summer’

It only started out as that. A journal of his fictional life. There is a kind of innocence in those early entries, hidden away between the lines of cramped, obsessive handwriting. Sometimes he remembers the truth: the daily disappointments; the rage; the hurt; the cruelty. The rest of the time he can almost believe that he was really blueeyedboy — that what was in the Blue Book was real, and Benjamin Winter and Emily White just figments of some other person’s imagination. The Blue Book helped him stay sane; in it he wrote his fantasies; his secret vengeance against all those who hurt and humiliated him.

As for little Emily —

He watched her more than ever now. In secret, in envy, in longing, in love. Over the months that followed his expulsion from the Peacock house, he followed Emily’s career, her life. He took hundreds of photographs. He collected newspaper clippings of her. He even befriended the little girl who lived next door to Mrs White, giving her sweets and calling on her in the hope of a glimpse of Emily.

For some time Dr Peacock had worked to keep Emily’s identity secret. In his papers she was simply Girl Y — a fitting replacement to Boy X — until such time as he and her parents chose to launch her into the world. But blueeyedboy knew the truth. Blueeyedboy knew what she was. A Luna moth in a glass case, just waiting to fly from the chrysalis straight into the killing jar —

He went on taking photographs, though he learnt to do it with greater stealth. He got two after-school jobs — a newspaper round, a couple of nights washing dishes at a local café — and with his wages he bought himself a second-hand enlarger, a stack of photographic paper and some trays and chemicals. Using books from the library, he learnt to develop the photographs himself, eventually converting the cellar, which his mother never used, into a little darkroom.

He felt like someone who had missed the winning lottery number by a single digit — and it didn’t help that Ma never failed to make him feel that somehow it had all been his fault, that if he’d been smarter, quicker, better, then it could have been one of her boys scooping up the attention, the praise.

That year, Ma made it clear to her sons that all of them had let her down. Nigel, for failing so miserably to keep the other two in line; Brendan, for his stupidity; but most especially Benjamin, on whom so many hopes had been placed, but who had failed his Ma in every way. At the Mansion; at home; but most of all at St Oswald’s. Ben’s schooling at that exclusive establishment had proved the greatest setback of all, confounding Ma’s expectations that her son was destined for great things. In fact, he’d hated it from the start, and only his relationship with Dr Peacock had prevented him from saying so.

But now everything about it was inimical to him: from the boys, who, just like the ones from the estate, called him freak and loser and queer (albeit in more refined accents), to the pretentious names of the buildings themselves — names like Rotunda and Porte-Cochère — names that tasted of rotten fruit, plummy with self-satisfaction and ripe with the odour of sanctity.

Like the vitamin drink, St Oswald’s was meant to be good for his health; to help him achieve his potential. But after three miserable years there, where to some extent he had tried to fit in, he still wanted Dr Peacock’s house, with the fireplace and the smell of old books. He missed the Earth globes with their magical names; and most of all he missed the way Dr Peacock used to talk to him, as if he really cared —

No one at St Oswald’s cared. It was true that no one bullied him — well, not the way his brother did — but all the same he could always feel that undercurrent of contempt. Even the Masters had it, although some were better than others at concealing it.

They called him by his surname, Winter, like an Army cadet. They drilled him with tables and irregular verbs. They gave huge, dramatic sighs at his displays of ignorance. They set him to copying lines.

I will keep my schoolbooks in immaculate condition. (Nigel always found them, however well he hid them away.) My uniform represents the school. I will wear it always with pride. (This was when Nigel had scissored his tie, leaving nothing but a stub.) I will at least pretend to pay attention when a senior Master enters the room. (This from the ever-sarcastic Dr Devine, who came into his form-room one morning to find him asleep at his desk.)

The worst of it was that he really tried. He tried to excel at his schoolwork. He wanted his teachers to be proud of him. Whereas some boys failed through laziness, he was acutely aware of the hated privilege of attending St Oswald’s Grammar School, and he tried very hard to deserve it. But Dr Peacock, with his fine disregard for the curriculum, had coached him in only the subjects he himself valued — art, history, music, English literature — neglecting maths and the sciences, with the result that Ben had lagged behind ever since his first term at school and, in spite of all his efforts, had never recovered the deficit.

When Dr Peacock withdrew from their lives, Benjamin had expected Ma to withdraw him from the grammar school. In fact he prayed for it fervently, but the one time he dared mention the matter to her, she whacked him with the length of electrical cord.

‘I’ve already put too much into you,’ she said, as she folded the cord away. ‘Far too much, in any case, to let you drop out at this stage.’

After that, he knew better than to complain. He sensed another shift in things as adolescence claimed him. His brothers were growing up fast, and Ma, like an October wasp sensing the coming of winter, had turned vicious overnight, making her sons the target of her frustrations. Suddenly they were all under fire, from the way they spoke to the length of their hair, and blueeyedboy realized with growing dismay that Ma’s devotion to her sons had been part of a long-term investment plan that now was expected to bear fruit.

Nigel had left school some three months ago, and the urge to make Ben suffer had begun to take second place to finding a flat, a girl, a job, an escape — from Ma, from his brothers, from Malbry.

Now he seemed suddenly older, more distant, more given to dark moods and silences. He’d always been moody and withdrawn. Now he became almost a recluse. He’d bought himself a telescope, and on cloudless nights he took to the moors, coming home in the early hours, which was no bad thing as far as Ben was concerned, but which made Ma anxious and irritable.

If Nigel’s escape was in the stars, Brendan had found another route. At sixteen he already outweighed Ben by fifty pounds, and, far from losing his puppy fat, now supplemented his confectionary habit with alarming amounts of junk food. He too had a part-time job, at a fried-chicken place in Malbry town centre, where he could snack all day if he liked, and from which he returned on weekday nights with the Bargain Bucket Meal Deal, which, if he wasn’t hungry then, he would have cold for breakfast the following morning, along with a quart of Pepsi, before setting off for Sunnybank Park, where he was in his final year. Ma had hoped that he would at least stay on until his A-levels, but nothing Ma could say or do had any effect on Ben’s voracious brother, who seemed to have made it his mission in life to eat his way out of her custody. Ben reckoned it was only a matter of time before Brendan failed his exams and dropped out, then moved away altogether.

Benjamin felt some relief at this. Ever since the St Oswald’s entrance exam, he’d had a growing suspicion that Bren was keeping tabs on him. It wasn’t anything Ben had said; just the way he looked at him. Sometimes he suspected Bren of following him when he went out; sometimes when he went to his room he was sure his things had been moved about. Books he’d left under his bed would migrate, or vanish for a day or two, then reappear somewhere else. It didn’t really make sense, of course. What did Brendan care about books? And yet it made him uneasy to think of someone else going through his things.

But Bren was the least of his worries by then. So much had been invested in him. So much money; so much hope. And now that the returns were about to pay off, there could be no question of retreat. His mother would not submit to the humiliation of hearing the neighbours say that Gloria Winter’s boy had dropped out of school —

‘You’ll do what I tell you and like it,’ she said. ‘Or I swear I’ll make you pay.’

I’ll make you pay was Ma’s refrain throughout the whole of that year, it seemed. And so, throughout the whole of that year, her sons ran in fear of Gloria.

Blueeyedboy knew he deserved it, at least; blueeyedboy knew that he was bad. How bad, no one understood. But his mother made it clear to him that there was to be no going back: that to disappoint her at this stage would result in the worst kind of punishment.

‘You owe it to me,’ Ma said, with a glance at the green ceramic dog. ‘What’s more, you owe it to him. You owe it to your brother.’

Would Malcolm have been a success if he had lived? Blueeyedboy often asked himself that. It made him nervous to think of it. As if he were living two lives at once. One for himself, and one for Mal, who would never have the chances he’d had. Fear gnawed at him like a rat in a cage. What if he failed her? What would she do?

His escape from it all was in writing. He kept the Blue Book in the darkroom, where neither Ma nor his brothers would find it, and every night, when things got too bad, he would spin his fear into stories. Always from the point of view of a bad guy, a villain, a murderer —

His victims were many, his methods diverse. No simple shootings for blueeyedboy. His style may have been questionable, but his imagination was limitless. His victims died in colourful ways: caught in complex torture machines; buried in wet sand up to their necks; snared in fiendish death traps.

He used the Blue Book as a record of his fictional killings, along with a few actual experiments: Ben had recently moved on from wasps to moths, and later to mice, which were quite easy to obtain, using a simple bottle trap, and whose trapped and fluttering heartbeats — amplified by the resonant glass — echoed the frantic rhythm of his own.

The trap was made from a milk bottle, in which Ben would place a quantity of bait. It was his way of selecting victims; of isolating the guilty from the innocent. The mouse climbs into the bottle, eats the bait, but is unable to climb back up the frictionless wall. It dies quite quickly — of exhaustion and shock — its little pink feet pedalling against the glass as if on an invisible wheel.

The point is, though: they chose to die. They chose to enter the baited trap. Their deaths were therefore not his fault —

But all that was about to change.

Post comment:

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Jenny? How I’ve missed you . . .

14

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 03.12 on Tuesday, February 12

Status: public

Mood:restless

A lie has a rhythm of its own. Emily’s began with a rousing overture; mellowed into a solemn andante; elaborated on several themes and variations; and finally emerged into a triumphant scherzo, to standing ovations and lengthy applause.

It was her grand opening. Her formal presentation to the media. Girl Y had served her purpose; now she was ready to take the stage. She was three weeks shy of her eighth birthday; she was clever and articulate; her work was practice-perfect and ready to stand up to scrutiny. As part of the fanfare, the Press had been informed; there was to be an auction of her paintings in a small gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate; Dr Peacock’s new book was about to come out, and suddenly, or so it seemed, the whole world was talking about Emily White.

This small figure [said the Guardian], with her bobbed brown hair and wistful face, hardly strikes one as a typical prodigy. [Why? you wonder. What did they expect?] In fact at first sight she seems very much like any other eight-year-old, but for the way her eyes skid and skitter, giving this writer the uncomfortable impression that she can see deep into his soul.

The writer was an ageing journalist called Jeffrey Stuarts, and if he had a soul at all, she never caught a sniff of it. His voice was always a trifle too loud, with a percussive attack like dried peas in a bowl — and his smell was Old Spice aftershave trying too hard to overwhelm an under-scent of sweat and thwarted ambition. That day he was all affability.

It hardly seems conceivable [he goes on to say] that the canvases that sing and soar from the walls of this tiny gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate can be the unaided work of this shy little girl. And yet there is something eerie about Emily White. The small pale hands flutter restlessly, like moths. The head is cocked just a little to one side, as if she hears something the rest of us do not.

As a matter of fact she was simply bored.

‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘that you can actually see the music?’

Obediently she nodded; behind him she could hear Dr Peacock’s plush laughter above a twittering of white noise. She wondered where her father was; listened for his voice and thought for a second she heard it, all snarled up in the growing cacophony.

‘And all these paintings — they actually represent what you see?’

Again, she nodded.

‘So, Emily. How does it feel?’

I may be over-dramatizing, but I feel that there is something of the blank canvas about her; an other-worldly quality that both captivates and repels. Her paintings reflect this; as if the young artist has somehow gained access to another plane of perception.

Oh, my. But the man enjoyed his alliteration. There was much more in the same vein; Rimbaud was mentioned (inevitably); Emily’s work was compared to that of Münch and Van Gogh, and it was even suggested that she had experienced what Feather liked to call channelling, which meant that she had somehow tuned into some open frequency of talent (possibly linked to artists long-dead) to produce these astonishing paintings.

At first glance[writes Mr Stuarts], all her canvases seem to be abstracts. Big, bold blocks of colour, some so highly textured as to be almost sculpture. But there are other influences here that surely cannot be coincidental. Emily White’s Eroica has a look of Picasso’s Guernica; Birthday Bach is as busy and intricate as a Jackson Pollock, and Starry Moonlight Sonata bears more than a passing resemblance to Van Gogh. Could it be, as Graham Peacock suggests, that all art has a common basis in the collective unconscious? Or is this little girl a conduit to something beyond the sensitivity of ordinary mortals?

There was more — much more — in this vein. A digested version found its way into the Daily Mirror under the headline: BLIND GIRL’S SUPER-SENSE. The Sun ran it too, or something very similar, flanked with a photo of Sissy Spacek taken from the film Carrie. Shortly afterwards a more extended version was published in a journal called Aquarius Moon, alongside an interview with Feather Dunne. The myth was well on its way by then; and although on that particular day there were no signs of the knives that would soon come out in response, I think that even so the attention made her uneasy. Emily hated crowds; hated noise, and all the people who came and went, their voices pecking at her like hungry chickens.

Mr Stuarts was talking to Feather now; Emily could hear her throaty patchouli-dark voice saying something about how differently able children were often ideal hosts for benevolent spirits. To her left was her mother, sounding just a little drunk; her laughter too loud in the smoke and the noise.

‘I always knew she was an exceptional child,’ Emily heard above the noise. ‘Who knows? Maybe she’s the next step on the evolutionary ladder. One of the Tomorrow Children.’

The Tomorrow Children. God, that phrase. Feather used it in her Aquarius Moon interview (for all I know she may have coined it herself), and it alone spawned a dozen theories of which Emily remained mercifully ignorant — at least until the final collapse.

Now it only jarred, and she stood up from her chair and began to move towards the open door, following the smooth line of the wall, feeling soft air on her upturned face. It was warm outside; she could feel the evening sun against her eyelids and smell magnolia from the park across the road.

A white smell, said her mother’s voice in her mind. Magnolia white. To Emily it sounded soft and chocolatey, like a Chopin nocturne, like Cinderella, a scent of magic. The heat from within the gallery was oppressive by comparison; the voices of all those people — guests, academics, journalists, all talking at once and at the tops of their voices — pushing at her like a hot wind. She’d never had an exhibition before. She’d never even had a proper birthday party. She sat down on the gallery step — there was a cast-iron railing, and she pressed her hot cheek against its pockmarked surface and lifted her face towards the white smell.

‘Hello, Emily,’ someone said.

She turned towards the sound of his voice. He was standing a dozen feet away. A boy — older than she was, she thought; maybe as old as sixteen. His voice sounded oddly flat and tight, like an instrument playing in the wrong register, and Emily could hear caution in it, combined with interest, and something close to hostility.

‘What’s your name?’

‘B.B.,’ he said.

‘That’s not a name,’ Emily said.

His shrug was implicit in his tone. ‘It’s what they call me at home,’ he said. There was a rather lengthy pause. Emily could feel him wanting to speak, and sensed he was staring at her. She wished he would either ask his question, or go away and leave her alone. The boy did neither, but just stood there, opening his mouth and then closing it again, like a shop door on a busy day.

‘Watch out,’ she said. ‘You’re catching flies.’

She heard his teeth click together. ‘I thought you were supposed to be b-blind.’

‘I am, but I can hear you all right. You make a noise when you open your mouth. Your breathing changes—’ Emily turned away, feeling suddenly impatient. Why did she bother explaining things? He was just another tourist, here to see the freak. In a moment, if he dared, he’d ask her about the colours.

When he did, it took Emily a moment to understand what he was saying. The stammer she’d already noticed in his voice had intensified; not, she realized, through nerves, but from some real conflict that knotted his words into a tangle that for a few seconds even he could not undo.

‘You can really h- you can h-h- you can hear c-c—’ Emily could hear the frustration in his voice as he struggled with the words. ‘You can really hear c-colours?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘So. What colour am I?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain. It’s like a kind of extra sense.’

The boy laughed. Not a happy sound. ‘Malbry smells of shit,’ he said in a fast and toneless voice. ‘Dr Peacock smells of bubblegum. Mr Pink smells of dentist’s gas.’ Emily noticed that he hadn’t stuttered once throughout this speech, the longest she’d heard him make so far.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, puzzled.

‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘All those times I watched you play, or sit in your s-swing in the living-room—’

The penny dropped. ‘You’re him? You’re Boy X?’

For a long time he said nothing. Perhaps he’d nodded — people forget — and then he just said: ‘Yes. That’s me.’

‘I remember hearing about you,’ she said, not wanting him to know that her mother thought he was a fake. ‘Where did you go? After Dr Peacock—’

‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘We live in White City. The bottom end of the village. Ma works on the m-market. S-selling f-fruit.’

There was a long silence. This time she couldn’t hear him struggling to speak, but she could feel his eyes on her. It was uncomfortable; it made her feel indignant and a little guilty at the same time.

‘I fucking hate fruit,’ he said.

There was another long pause, during which she closed her eyes and wished the boy would go away. Mother was right, she told herself. He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t even friendly. And yet . . .

‘What’s it like?’ She had to ask.

‘What, selling fruit?’

‘That — thing you do. The taste-smell-word thing. I don’t know the name.’

There was a long silence as, once more, he struggled to explain. ‘I don’t d-do anything,’ he said at last. ‘It’s like — it’s just there, somehow. Like yours, I guess. I see something, I hear something, and then I get a feeling. Don’t ask me why. Weird things. And it hurts—’

Another pause. Inside the gallery the sound of voices had dimmed; Emily guessed that someone was getting ready to make a speech.

‘You’re lucky,’ said B.B. ‘Yours is a gift. It makes you special. Mine, I’d do without it any day. It hurts, I get these headaches here—’ He placed a hand on her temple, and another one at the nape of her neck. She felt a tremor go through him then, as if he were actually in pain.

‘Plus everyone thinks you’re m-mad, or worse, that you’re faking it to get attention. I mean, do you think I’m faking it?’

For a second she faltered. ‘I don’t know—’

That laugh again. ‘Well, there you go.’ Suddenly the pent-up anger Emily had heard in his voice was overlaid with a tremendous weariness. ‘At the end, even I thought I’d been faking it. And Dr Peacock — don’t blame him. I mean, they say it’s a gift. But what’s it for? Yours I can understand. Seeing colours when you’re blind. Painting music. It’s like a b-bloody miracle. But mine? Imagine what it’s like for me, every d-day—’ Now he was stuttering again. ‘Some d-days it’s so bad I can hardly think, and what’s it for? What’s it even for?’

He stopped, and Emily could hear him breathing harshly. ‘I used to think there was a cure,’ he said finally. ‘I used to think that if I did the tests, then Dr Peacock would find a cure. But there isn’t a way. It gets everywhere. It gets into everything. TV. Films. You can’t get away. From it. From them—’

‘The smells, you mean?’

He paused. ‘Yeah. The smells.’

‘What about me?’ Emily said. ‘Do I have a smell?’

‘Sure you do, Emily,’ he said, and now she could hear the tiniest hint of a smile in his voice. ‘Emily White smells of roses. That rose that grows by the wall at the edge of the doctor’s garden. Albertine, that was its name. That’s what your name smells like to me.’

Post comment:

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

Albertine: Why, thank you . . .

15

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 04.29 on Tuesday, February 12

Status: restricted

Mood: good

Listening to: Genesis: ‘The Lady Lies’

I knew from that moment she was faking it. Not quite eight years old, and yet already she was cleverer than any of those others: the ones in charge of the media hype; the ones who thought they’d created her.

What’s it like? That — thing you do.

She was so beautiful, even then. Skin like vanilla ice cream, that smooth dark hair and those sibyl’s eyes. Good breeding makes for good skin. Her breeding went right down to the bone: forehead, cheekbones, wrists and neck, collarbones chiselled and lovely. But —

What’s it like? That thing you do?

She would never have asked me otherwise. Not if she’d been telling the truth. These things we feel — these things we sense — are deeply embedded inside us, like razor blades in a bar of soap: sharp, inexplicable edges that cut as keenly as beauty.

That lie of hers confirmed it; but already I knew she belonged with me. Both of us soulmates in deceit; both of us bad guys, for ever, at heart. There was no point in my asking her when — or if — I could see her again. It would have been difficult enough with an ordinary child to arrange the kind of clandestine meeting that I had in mind — with this now-famous blind girl, I didn’t stand a chance.

That was when the dreams began. No one had really explained to me about hormones, or growing up, or sex. For a woman with three teenage sons, Ma had proved curiously prudish on the subject, and when the relevant time had come, I’d learnt most of the truth from my brothers, a bike-shed education at best, which did not entirely prepare me for the magnitude of the experience.

I’d been a late developer. But that spring I caught up with a vengeance. I grew three inches taller, my skin cleared, and suddenly I was acutely and uncomfortably aware of myself, of the intensity of all my sensations — which seemed, if anything, even stronger than before — to the way I awoke in the mornings with a hard-on that sometimes took hours to subside.

My emotions veered from plummeting misery to absurd elation; all my senses were enhanced; I wanted desperately to be in love, to touch, to kiss, to feel, to know —

And through it all were those dreams: vivid, plosive, passionate dreams that I wrote down in my Blue Book, dreams that filled me with shame and despair and a dreadful, lurking sense of joy.

Nigel had told me some months before that it might soon be time for me to do my own laundry. I saw what he meant now, and took his advice, airing my room and washing my bedsheets three times a week in the hope of dispersing the civet smell. Ma never commented; but I felt her disapproval grow, as if it were somehow my fault that I was leaving my boyhood behind.

Ma was looking old, I thought, hard and sour as an under-ripe apple; and there was a sense of desperation in her now, in the way she watched me at the dinner-table, telling me to sit up, to eat properly, to stop slouching, for God’s sake —

At her insistence I had stayed in school, and had so far managed to conceal the fact that I was lagging far behind. But by Easter the public exams loomed close, and I was failing in most of my subjects. My spelling was awful; maths made my head ache, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more the headaches assaulted me, so that even the sight of my school clothes laid out on the back of a chair was enough to bring it on; torture by association.

There was no one to whom I could go for help. My teachers — even the more well-disposed among them — were inclined to take the view that I just wasn’t cut out for academic work. I could hardly explain to them the true reason for my anxiety. I could hardly admit to them that I was afraid of Ma’s disappointment.

And so I hid the evidence. I faked my mother’s signature on a variety of absence notes. I hid my school reports; I lied; I forged my end-of-term results. But she must have suspected something was wrong, because she began a covert investigation — she must have known that I would lie — first contacting the school by phone to find out what story I’d told, and then making an appointment with my form-teacher and the Head of Year. In which she learnt that since Christmas I had barely attended school at all, due to a prolonged bout of flu which had led to my missing the exams —

I remember the night of that meeting. Ma had cooked my favourite meal — fried chilli chicken and corn on the cob — which I suppose should have alerted me that something serious was afoot. I should have noticed her clothes, too — the dark-blue dress and those high-heeled shoes — but I guess I’d become complacent. I never suspected that I was being lulled into a false sense of security, and I had no inkling of the reprisals that were about to descend on my unsuspecting head.

Maybe I was careless. Maybe I’d underestimated Ma. Or maybe someone saw me in town with my stolen camera —

Anyway, my mother knew. She knew, she watched and she bided her time; then, when she’d spoken to the Head of Year and my teacher, Mrs Platt, she came back home in her interview clothes and cooked me my favourite dinner, and when I’d finished eating it, she left me on the sofa and turned the television on, and then she went into the kitchen (I presumed it was to wash the dishes), and then she came back silently and the first thing I knew was the scent of L’Heure Bleue and her voice in my ear, hissing at me —

‘You little shit.’

I turned abruptly at the sound, and that was when she hit me. Hit me with the dinner-plate; hit me right in the face with it, and for a second I was torn between the shock of the impact against my eyebrow and cheekbone and simple dismay at the mess of it — at the chicken grease and corn kernels in my face and in my hair, more dismayed at that than the pain, or the blood that was running into my eyes, colouring the world in shades of escarlata —

Half-dazed I tried to back away; hit the couch with the small of my back, sending a glassy pain up my spine. She hit me again, in the mouth this time, and then she was on top of me, punching and slapping and screaming at me —

‘You lying little shit, you cheating little bastard!’

I know you think I could have fought back. With words, if not with my fists and feet. But for me there were no magic words. No specious declaration of love could ward off my mother’s fury, and no declaration of innocence could stem the tide of her violent rage.

It was that rage that frightened me — the mad, ballistic anger of her — far, far worse than those punches and slaps, and the sludgy stink of the vitamin drink that was somehow a terrible part of it all, and the way she screamed those things in my ears. Until finally I was crying — Ma! Please! Ma! — curled up in a corner beside the couch with my arms wrapped around my head, and blood in my eyes, and blood in my mouth, and that weak and fearful baby-blue word, like the helpless cry of a newborn, punctuating every blow, until the world went by degrees from blood-red to blue-black, and the outburst was finally over.

Afterwards, she made it clear how badly I’d disappointed her. Sitting on the couch with a cloth held up to my cut mouth and another to my eyebrow, I listened to my long list of crimes, and sobbed as I heard the sentence passed.

‘I’m going to keep my eye on you, B.B.’

I spy. My mother’s eye, like the watchful Eye of God. I felt it like a fresh tattoo, like a graze on my bare skin. Sometimes I see it in my mind: and it’s bruise-blue, hospital-blue, faded prison-overall-blue. It marks me, inescapably — the mark of my mother; the mark of Cain, the mark that can never be erased.

Yes, I had disappointed her. First, she told me, with my lies — as if by telling the truth I might have spared myself all this. Then with my many failures: failure to excel at school; failure to be a good son; failure to live up to what she’d always expected of me.

‘Please, Ma.’ My ribs hurt; later we found out that two of them were broken. My nose, too, was broken — you can see it isn’t quite straight — and if you look closely at my lips you can still see the scars, tiny silvery threadneedle scars, like someone’s schoolboy stitching.

‘You’ve got no one to blame but yourself,’ she said, as if all she’d given me was a maternal slap, something to get my attention. ‘And what about that girl, eh?’

The lie was automatic. ‘What girl?’

‘Don’t you look so innocent—’ She gave a thin-lipped, vinegary smile, and a finger of ice went down my back. ‘I know what you’ve been up to. Following that blind girl.’

Had Mrs White spoken to her? Had Ma got into my darkroom? Had one of her friends mentioned seeing me with a camera?

But she knew. She always does. The photographs of Emily; the graffiti on Dr Peacock’s front door; the weeks of playing truant from school. And the Blue Book, I thought in sudden alarm — could it be that she’d found that, too?

Now my hands began to shake.

‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’

There was no way I could explain it to her. ‘Please, M-Ma. I’m s-sorry.’

‘What is it with you and that blind girl? What have you two been doing?’

‘Nothing. Really. Nothing, Ma. I’ve never even t-talked to her!’

She gave me one of her freezing smiles. ‘So — you’ve never talked to her? Never — not once — in all this time?’

‘Just once. Once, in front of the gallery—’

My mother’s eyes narrowed abruptly, I saw her hand move upwards, and I knew she was going to slap me again. The thought of those aggressive hands anywhere near my mouth again was suddenly unbearable, and I flinched away defensively and said the first thing that came into my mind:

‘Emily’s a f-fake,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t hear any colours. She doesn’t even know what they are. She’s making it up — she told me so — and everybody’s c-cashing in—’

Sometimes it takes a new idea to stop a charging juggernaut. She looked at me with those narrowed eyes, as if she were trying to see through the lie. Then, very slowly, she lowered her hand.

‘What did you say?’

‘She makes it up. She tells them what they want to hear. And Mrs White set her up to it—’

The silence simmered around her awhile. I could see the idea taking root in her, supplanting her disappointment, her rage.

‘She told you that?’ she said at last. ‘She told you she was making it up?’

I nodded, feeling braver now. My mouth still hurt, and my ribs were sore, but now there was a taste of victory behind that of my suffering. In spite of what my brothers believed, invention at short notice had always been a talent of mine; and now I used it to free myself from my mother’s terrible scrutiny.

I told her the lot. I fed her the line. All the things you’ve ever read about the Emily White affair: every rumour; every gibe; every piece of vitriol. All of that began with me — and, like the speck of irritant at the heart of the oyster that hardens to become a pearl, it grew, and bore fruit, and was harvested.

You knew I was a bad guy. What you don’t yet know is how bad: how there and then I set the course towards this final, fatal act; how little Emily White and I came to be fellow-travellers on this road —

This tortuous road to murder.

16

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 08.37 on Wednesday, February 13

Status: public

Mood: despondent

It all began to decline right then, the night of that first exhibition. It took some time for me to realize it, but that was when the Emily White Phenomenon began to take on a disquieting turn. It seemed nothing more than a ripple at first, but especially after the success of Dr Peacock’s book, there were more and more people ready to take notice, to believe the worst, to scorn, to envy or to sneer.

In France, a country fond of its child prodigies, L’Affaire Emily had attracted more than its share of attention. One of Emily’s first patrons — an old Paris friend of Dr Peacock — sold several of her paintings from his gallery on the Left Bank. Paris-Match had seized the story, as had Bild magazine in Germany, and all of England’s tabloid press — not to mention Feather’s piece in Aquarius Moon.

But then came the scandal. The swift decline. Exposure by the media. Less than six months after that triumphant launch, Emily’s career was already foundering.

I never saw it coming, of course. How could I possibly have known? I didn’t read papers or magazines. Gossip and rumours passed me by. If there was something in the air, I was too self-absorbed to notice; so deep inside my masquerade that I barely saw what was happening. Daddy knew — he’d known from the start — but he couldn’t stop the avalanche. Accusations had been made. Investigations were under way. The papers were filled with conflicting reports, a book was being launched, there was even a film — but one thing was clear to everyone. The bubble had burst. The wonder had gone. The Emily White Phenomenon was well and truly over. And so, with nothing left to lose, like the Snow Child in the fairy tale, we melted away, Daddy and I, leaving no trace of ourselves behind.

At first it seemed like a holiday. Just until we get back on our feet. An endless succession of B & Bs. Bacon for breakfast, birdsong at dawn, fresh clean sheets on strange, narrow beds. A holiday from Malbry, he said; and for the first few weeks I believed him, following like a tame sheep until finally we came to rest in a remote little place near the Scottish border, where no one, he said, would recognize us.

I didn’t miss my mother at all. I know that must sound terrible. But to have Daddy all to myself like this was such an unusual pleasure that Malbry and my old life seemed to me like something that had happened to someone else, to quite a different girl, long ago. And when finally it became clear to me that something was wrong, that Daddy was slowly losing his mind, that he would never get back on his feet, I covered for him as best I could, until at last they came for us.

He’d always been a quiet man. Now, depression claimed him. At first I’d thought it was loneliness, and I’d tried my best to make it up to him. But as time passed, he grew more remote, more couched in his eccentricities, dependent on his music to such an extent that he forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, telling the same old stories, playing the same old pieces again on the piano in the hall, or on the cracked old stereo, Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata, and of course the Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique and especially ‘The March to the Scaffold’ — while I did my best to care for him, and he slipped into silence.

Eighteen months later, he had his first stroke. Lucky I’d been there, they said; lucky I’d found him when I had. It was a mild one, the doctor said; affecting just his speech and his left hand. They didn’t seem to understand how important his hands were to Daddy — it was the way he spoke to me when he couldn’t express himself with words.

But that was the end of our hideaway. At last, the world had discovered us. They took us to different places — Daddy to a care centre near Malbry, me to another kind of home, where I endured for the next five years without a moment’s realization that someone had to be paying the bills; that someone was looking out for us, and that Dr Peacock had tracked us down.

Later I learnt of the correspondence between them; of Dr Peacock’s repeated attempts to make contact; of Daddy’s refusal to answer him. Why did Dr Peacock care? Perhaps it was from a feeling of guilt; or loyalty to an old friend; or pity for the little girl caught up in the tragedy.

In any case, he paid our bills, watched over us from afar, while the house still stood empty, unused and unloved, boxed-up like an unwanted gift, packed to the rafters with memories.

I turned eighteen. I found my own place. There in the centre of Malbry: a tiny cube on a fourth floor, with a living-room-slash-bedroom, a kitchenette and a half-tiled bathroom that smelt of damp. I visited Daddy every week — sometimes he even knew who I was. And though for a while I was sure I’d be recognized, finally I understood. No one cared about Emily White. No one even remembered her.

But nothing ever disappears. Nothing ever really ends. For all the safety and love that Nigel gave me, I realize now — if a little late — that all I had done in following him was to substitute one golden cage for a different set of bars.

But now, at last, I am free of them all. Free of my parents, free of the doctor, free of Nigel. So who am I now? Where do I go? And how many others have to die before I am free of Emily?

Post comment:

blueeyedboy: Very moving, Albertine. I sometimes ask myself the same thing —