Blueeyedboy

1

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 15:06 on Wednesday, February 13

Status: restricted

Mood: mellow

Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Blue-eyed Matador’

I slept till long after midday today. Told Ma I’d taken some time off work. I don’t sleep much at the best of times. But recently I’ve been averaging only two or three hours a night, and the latest quid pro quo with Albertine must have taken more out of me than I’d thought. Still, it was worth it, don’t you think? After twenty silent years, suddenly she wants to talk.

Can’t say I really blame her. Traditionally, raising the dead has always had serious consequences. In her case, inevitably, the tabloids will come out in droves. Money, murder and madness always make for excellent Press. Can she survive the exposure? Or will she remain in hiding here; in tacit, furtive acceptance of a past that never happened?

When I’d showered and changed my clothes I went to look for Albertine. The Pink Zebra café on Mill Road; it’s where she goes when she feels the need to be someone else. It was six o’clock. She was sitting alone at the counter, with a cup of hot chocolate and a cinnamon bun. Underneath her red coat, I saw, she was wearing a sky-blue dress.

Albertine in blue, I thought. This may just be my lucky day.

‘May I join you?’

She gave a start at the sound of my voice.

‘If you’d rather not socialize, I promise I won’t say a word. But that hot chocolate looks wonderful, and—’

‘No. Please. I’d like you to stay.’

Grief always gives her face a kind of emotional nakedness. She held out her hand. I took it. A thrill ran through me; a tremor that moved from the soles of my feet right up into the roots of my hair.

I wonder if she felt it too; her fingertips were slightly cold, her small hand not quite steady in mine. There’s something almost childlike about her, a kind of passive acceptance that Nigel must have taken for vulnerability. I, of course, know better; but, as she must know, I’m a special case.

‘Thank you.’ I took a seat next to her. Ordered Earl Grey and whichever pastry was highest in calories. I hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours, and I was suddenly ravenous.

‘Lemon meringue pie?’ She smiled. ‘That seems to be your favourite.’

I ate the pie, and she drank her hot chocolate, leaving the cinnamon bun untouched. The process of eating makes a man look strangely inoffensive, somehow; all weapons laid down in a common purpose.

‘How are you coming to terms with it?’ I said, when the pie was finished.

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said.

At least she didn’t pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about. A few days more and she won’t have the choice any more. All it will take is a word to the Press, and the story will be out, whether she likes it or not.

‘I’m sorry, Albertine,’ I said.

‘It’s over, B.B. I’ve moved on.’

Well, that was a lie. No one moves on. The wheel just keeps on turning, that’s all, creating the illusion of momentum. Inside it, we are all rats; running in growing desperation towards a painted blue horizon that never gets any closer.

‘Lucky you, moving on. At least being dead gives closure.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.

‘Well, everyone sides with the victim, of course. Deserving or not, everyone mourns as soon as the mark is safely dead. But what about the rest of us? The ones with problems of our own? Being dead is pretty straightforward. Even my brothers managed that. But living with guilt is something else. It’s not easy being the bad guy—’

‘Is that what you are?’ she said mildly.

‘I think we’ve both established that.’

The ghost of a smile crossed her face, like a wisp of cloud on a summer’s day. ‘What happened between you and Nigel?’ she said. ‘He never talked about you much.’

Didn’t he? Good. ‘Does it matter now?’

‘I just want to understand. What was it between you two?’

I shrugged. ‘We had issues.’

‘Don’t we all?’

I laughed at that. ‘Our issues were different. The whole of our family was different.’

Her eyes skittered for a moment. She has remarkably beautiful eyes; blue as a fairy tale, flecked with gold. Mine are grey in comparison; chilly, they tell me; changeable.

‘Nigel didn’t tell me much about any of his family,’ she said, locating her cup of hot chocolate and bringing it carefully to her lips.

‘As I mentioned, we weren’t close.’

‘It wasn’t that. I know families. He couldn’t stay away, somehow. As if there were something keeping him here—’

‘That would be Ma,’ I told her.

‘But Nigel hated his mother—’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’re devoted to her.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ My voice was dry.

‘I just assumed — well, you live with her.’

‘Some people live with cancer,’ I said.

Albertine hardly ever smiles. I think she finds it difficult to understand those tiny facial variables, the difference between a smile and a frown, a grimace of pain. Not that her face is expressionless. But social conventions are not for her, and she does not express what she does not feel.

‘So why do you stay?’ she said at last. ‘Why don’t you get away, like Nigel?’

‘Get away?’ I gave a sharp laugh. ‘Nigel didn’t get away. He ended up half a mile from home. And with the girl next door, no less. You think that counts as getting away? But then, you’re hardly an expert. You both ended up in the same gutter, but at least Nigel was looking up at the stars.’

She was silent for such a long time that I wondered if I’d gone too far. But she is tougher than she looks.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘Was that too direct?’

‘I think I’d like you to go now.’ She put down her cup of chocolate. I could hear the tension in her voice, still under control for the moment, but almost ready to escalate.

I stayed where I was. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But Nigel wasn’t an innocent. He was playing a game with you. He knew who you were, who you used to be. And he knew that when Dr Peacock died he’d have his ticket out of here.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘No, not this time,’ I said.

‘Nigel hated liars,’ she said. ‘That was why he hated you.’

Ouch. That was cruel, Albertine.

‘No, he hated me because I was Ma’s favourite. He was always jealous of me. Anything I wanted, he had to have. Perhaps that’s why he wanted you. And Dr Peacock’s money, of course.’ I glanced at the still-untouched cinnamon bun. ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’

She ignored me. ‘I don’t believe you. Nigel would never have lied to me. He was the straightest person I know. That’s why I loved him.’

‘Loved him?’ I said. ‘You never did. What you loved was being someone else.’ I took a bite of the cinnamon bun. ‘As for Nigel — who knows? Maybe he wanted to tell you the truth. Maybe he thought you needed time. Or maybe he was enjoying the feeling of power it gave him over you—’

‘What?’

‘Oh, please. Don’t be disingenuous. Some men enjoy being in control. My brother was a control freak — and he had a temper, of course. An uncontrollable temper. I’m sure you must be aware of that.’

‘Nigel was a good man,’ she said in a low voice.

‘There’s no such thing,’ I told her.

‘He was! He was good!’ Now her voice distressed the air in jagged patterns of green and grey. Soon, I knew, they would bring that scent; but I let the silence roll awhile.

‘Sit down. Just for a moment,’ I said, and guided her hands towards my face.

For a moment she resisted me. Perhaps it was too much intimacy. But then she must have changed her mind, because at that moment she closed her eyes and put her hands against my face, with cool fingertips that explored me from brow to chin, gently taking in the sutures under my left eye; the still-swollen bruise on my cheekbone; the cut lip, the broken nose —

‘Nigel did this?’ Her voice was small.

‘What do you think?’

Now her eyes were open again. God, but they were beautiful. No grief in them now, nor anger, nor love. Just beauty, blank and blameless.

‘Nigel was always unstable,’ I said. ‘I suppose he must have told you that. That he was prone to acts of violence? That he murdered his brother, no less?’

She winced. ‘Of course he told me. He said it was an accident.’

‘But he told you all about it, right?’

‘He got in a fight over twenty years ago. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted. ‘What does it matter how long ago? No one changes. It’s a myth. There’s no road to Damascus. No path to redemption. Not even the love of a good woman — assuming such a thing exists — can wash the blood from a killer’s hands.’

‘Stop it!’ Her own hands were shaking. ‘Can’t we just leave this alone?’ she said. ‘Can’t it just stay in the past, for once?’

The past? Don’t give me that, Albertine. You, of all people, should understand that the past is never over. We drag it behind us everywhere, like a can tied to a stray dog’s tail. Try to outrun it, it just makes more noise. Until it drives you crazy.

‘He never told you, did he?’ I said. ‘He never said what happened that day?’

‘Don’t. Please. Leave me alone.’

I could tell from the tone of her voice that she’d given me all she could today. Better than I’d expected, in fact; and besides, the essential part of a game is always knowing when to fold. I paid my bill with a twenty-pound note, leaving it tucked under my plate. She did not respond, or even look up, as I said goodbye to her and left. The last I saw of her as I opened the door and stepped out into the darkness was the fleeting flash of colour as she reached for her red duffel coat hanging behind the counter, and the crescent moon of her profile eclipsed behind the screen of her open hands —

Truth hurts, doesn’t it, Albertine? Lies are so much safer. But murderers run in our family, and Nigel was no exception. And who would have thought that nice young man could have ever done such a terrible thing? And who would have thought that a little white lie could snowball into murder?

2

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.25 on Wednesday, February 13

Status: restricted

Mood: rueful

Listening to: Freddie Mercury: ‘The Great Pretender’

It was an accident, they said. A cracked skull, the result of a fall downstairs. Not even the main stairs, as it turned out, but the six stone steps at the front door. Somehow he’d come off the ramp that I’d built, or maybe he had tried to stand, as sometimes he did occasionally; to stand up miraculously and walk across the misty white lawn like Jesus on the water.

That was over three weeks ago. Lots of things have happened since then. My brother’s death; the loss of my job; my dialogue with Albertine. But don’t think I ever forgot. Dr Peacock was always on my mind. Old enough to have been forgotten by almost everyone he’d known; old enough to have outlived his fame, even his notoriety. A pathetic old man, half-blind and confused, who told the same stories again and again and barely recognized my face —

He wrote me into his will, you know. How ironic is that? You’ll find me at the end of the list, under miscellaneous other. I guess a man who can leave thirty thousand pounds to the animal shelter that supplied his dogs can well afford a couple of grand for the guy who used to clean up for him, and cook his mushy old-man’s meals, and wheel him around the garden.

A couple of grand. Less, with tax. Not nearly enough to qualify as a motive. But it’s rather nice to be, if not exactly recognized, then at least given some acknowledgement for all the work I did for him, for my tireless good cheer, for my honesty —

Did he recall my tenth birthday? The candle on the iced bun? I don’t suppose so — why should he care? I was nobody; nothing to him. If that day still survived within his damaged memory, it would have been as the day he buried poor old Rover, or Bowser, or Jock, or whatever the hell the dog’s name was. To pretend to myself that he might have cared for me, for blueeyedboy, is ludicrous. I was simply a project to him, not even the main act of the show. Still, I can’t help wondering —

Did he know his murderer? Did he try to call for help? Or was it all just a blur to him, a heap of broken images? Personally, I like to think that, right at the end, he understood. That as he died, his senses returned for just long enough for him to know just how he was dying, and why. Not everyone gets to know those things. Not everyone gets that privilege. But I like to think that maybe he did, and that the last thing he ever saw, the picture that followed him into eternity, was a familiar face, a more-than-familiar pair of eyes —

The police came round to the house, of course. Eleanor Vine directed them there, though I still have no idea how she found out I was working at the Mansion. For a woman who spent most of her time shut up in her house, cleaning the floors, she seemed to have an uncanny knack for revealing embarrassing secrets. In this case, however, I realized, with some relief, that my cover was only partially blown: she knew I was working for Dr Peacock, but not about my hospital job, though she may have had her suspicions by then, and exposure might have been just a matter of time.

Did she believe I was involved? If so, she was disappointed. There were no handcuffs, there was no interrogation, no trip to the police station. Even the questions they asked me had a tired quality. After all, there was no sign of violence. The victim had merely suffered a fall. The death — the accidental death — of one old man (even if he had been famous once) was hardly a matter for much concern.

My mother took it badly, though. It wasn’t the thought that I might have killed Dr Peacock, but just the fact that I’d been in the house, had worked in that house for eighteen months without her even suspecting it — and worse, that Eleanor had known —

‘How could you?’ she said, when they had gone. ‘How could you set foot in that house again, after everything that’s happened?’

There was no point my denying what I’d done. But as any seasoned liar knows, a half-truth can screen a thousand lies. And so I confessed. I’d had no choice. I’d had to take on extra work. It was part of the hospital’s outpatient scheme. The fact that I’d got that particular case was nothing but coincidence.

‘You could have talked your way out of it. You could talk your way out of a locked room—’

‘It isn’t as easy as that, Ma—’

She slapped me then, across the mouth. One of her rings cut my lip. Probably the tourmaline. Its taste was Campari soda with an aluminium chaser of blood.

Tourmaline. Tour. Malign. It sounds like a place of imprisonment, an evil tower from a Perrault fairy tale, and its smell is the same as St Oswald’s, a reek of disinfectant and dust and polish and cabbage and chalk and boys.

‘Don’t you dare patronize me. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.’

My mother has a sixth sense. She always knows when I’ve done something wrong; when I’m thinking of doing something wrong.

‘You wanted to see him, didn’t you? After everything he’s done to us. You wanted his fucking approval.’ Her camelbacked foot in its sling-back heel began to tap a quick, irregular rhythm against the leg of the sofa. The sound of it made my throat go dry, and the vegetable stink of it was enough to make me want to gag.

‘Please, Ma.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Please, Ma, it’s not my fault—’

She is surprisingly quick with her hands. I was expecting the second blow, and still it caught me by surprise, knocking me sideways into the wall. The cabinet with the china dogs shivered once, but nothing fell.

‘Then whose fault is it, you little shit?’

I put a hand to my cut lip. I knew she hadn’t even begun; her face was almost expressionless, but her voice was charged like a battery. I took a step closer to the cabinet. I figured she wouldn’t risk anything so close to her china dogs.

When she’s dead, I thought to myself, I’m going to take every single one of those fucking dogs out into the back yard and stamp on them with my engineer boots.

She saw me looking. ‘B.B., come here!’

Just as I thought, I told myself. She wanted me clear of that cabinet. She’d acquired a new ornament, I saw; an Oriental specimen. I put out my hand and rested it very gently against the pane.

‘Don’t do that,’ my mother snapped. ‘You’ll leave fingerprints on the glass.’

I could tell she wanted to hit me again. But she didn’t — not then — because of those dogs. Still, I couldn’t stay there all day. I turned towards the parlour door, hoping to make it upstairs to my room, but Ma grabbed hold of the door-handle and, with one hand in the small of my back, yanked the door open into my face —

After that, it was easy. Once I was down, her feet did the rest, her feet in those fucking sling-backed heels. By the time she was done I was snivelling, and my face was laddered with scratches and cuts.

‘Now look at you,’ Ma said — the violent outburst over now, but still with a trace of impatience, as if this were something I’d brought on myself, some unrelated accident. ‘You’re a mess. What on earth were you playing at?’

I knew there was no point in trying to explain. Experience has taught me that when Ma gets like this, it’s better to stay quiet and hope for the best. Later, she’ll fill in the gaps with some kind of plausible story; a fall down the stairs, an accident. Or maybe this time I was mugged, or beaten up on my way from work. I should know. It’s happened before. And those sharp little breaks in her memory are getting increasingly frequent, more so since my brother’s death.

I tested my ribs. None seemed broken. But my back hurt where she’d kicked me, and there was a deep cut across my eyebrow where the edge of the door had struck. Blood drenched the front of my shirt, and I could already feel one of my headaches coming, arpeggios of coloured light troubling my vision.

‘I suppose you’ll need stitches now,’ said Ma. ‘As if I didn’t already have enough to do today. Oh, well.’ She sighed. ‘Boys will be boys. Always up to something. Lucky I was here, eh? I’ll come with you to the hospital.’

OK, so I lied. I’m not proud of the fact. It was Ma, and not Nigel, who messed up my face. Gloria Green; five foot four in her shoes, sixty-nine and built like a bird —

You’ll be fine in no time, love, said the pink-haired nurse as she fixed me up. Stupid bitch. As if she cared. I was just a patient to her. Patient. Penitent. Words that smell of citrus green and sting like a mouthful of needles. And I have been so patient, Ma, patient for so very long.

I had to quit my job after that. Too many questions; too many lies; too many snares in which to be caught. Having discovered one subterfuge, Ma could so easily have checked me out and exposed the pretence of the past twenty years —

Still, it’s a short-term setback. My long-term plan remains unchanged. Enjoy your china dogs, Ma. Enjoy them while you still can.

I suppose I ought to feel pleased with myself. I’m getting away with murder. A smile, a kiss, and — Whoops! All gone! — like a malignant conjuring trick. You don’t believe me? Check it out. Search me from all angles. Look for hidden mirrors, for secret compartments, for cards up my sleeve. I promise you I’m totally clean. And yet, it’s going to happen, Ma. Just you watch it blow up in your face.

These were my thoughts as I lay there on the hospital trolley, thinking about those china dogs and how I was going to stomp them into powder the minute — the second — Ma was dead. And as soon as I let the thought take shape without the comforting blanket of fic, it was almost as if a nuke had gone off inside my skull, tearing into me, wringing me like a wet rag and cramping my jaw in a silent scream —

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. Did that hurt?’ The pink-haired nurse, all three of her, swam briefly across my consciousness like a shoal of tropical fish.

‘He gets these headaches,’ said Ma. ‘Don’t worry. It’s only stress.’

‘I can get the doctor to prescribe something—’

‘No. Don’t bother. It’ll pass.’

That was nearly three weeks ago. Forgotten, if not quite forgiven, perhaps, the stitches removed, the bruises now veering from purple and blue to an oil-slick palette of yellows and greens. The headache took three days to subside, during which time Ma fed me home-made soup and watched by my bed as I shivered and moaned. I don’t think I said anything aloud. Even in my delirium, I think I was cleverer than that. In any case, by the end of the week, things were back to normal again, and blueeyedboy was, if not quite off the hook, then at least back in the net for another spell.

Meanwhile, on the bright side —

Eleanor Vine is most unwell. Taken ill last Saturday, she remains in hospital, on a respirator. Toxic shock, so Terri says, or maybe some kind of allergy. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised — with the number of pills Eleanor takes, apparently at random, something like this had to happen some day. Still, it’s an odd coincidence that a fic posted in my WeJay should have taken on such a life of its own. It’s not the first time this has happened, either; it’s almost as if, by some voodoo, I have acquired the ability to delete from the world all those who hurt or threaten me. A stroke of the keys — and pfft! Delete.

If only it were as easy as that. If this were simply a matter of wishful thinking, then my troubles would have been over more than twenty years ago. It began with the Blue Book — that catalogue of my hopes and dreams — and followed on into cyberspace, on to my WeJay, and badguysrock. But of course it’s only fiction. And although it may have been Catherine White in my fic — or Eleanor Vine, or Graham Peacock, or any of those parasites — there was only ever one face in my mind: battered and bleeding, bludgeoned to death, strangled with piano wire; electrocuted in the bath; poisoned; drowned; decapitated, dead in a hundred different ways.

One face. One name.

I know. It’s unforgivable. To wish for my mother’s death in this way — to long for it, as one might long for a cool drink on a hot day, to wait with racing heart for the sound of her key in the front door, to hope that today might be the one —

Accidents happen so easily. A hit-and-run; a fall down the stairs; a random act of violence. Then there are the health issues. At sixty-nine, she is already old. Her hands are thick with arthritis; her blood pressure is sky-high. Cancer runs in the family: her own mother died at fifty-five. And the house itself is filled with potential hazards: overloaded electrical sockets; loose carpet runners; plant pots balanced precariously on bedroom window-ledges. Accidents happen all the time; but never, it seems, to Gloria Green. It’s enough to drive a boy to despair.

And yet I continue to live in hope. Hope, the most spiteful of all the demons in Pandora’s little box of tricks —

3

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 09.55 on Thursday, February 14

Status: restricted

Mood: romantic

Listening to: Boomtown Rats: ‘I Never Loved Eva Braun’

It’s February the 14th, Valentine’s Day, and love, true love, is in the air. That’s why I’ve left that envelope on the corner of the china cabinet next to the chocolates and flowers. Not roses, thank God, nor even orchids, but a nice arrangement nonetheless, lavish enough to be expensive, though not enough to be vulgar.

The card itself is selected with care: no jokey cartoons, no sexual innuendo, no promises of undying affection. Ma knows me better than that. It’s the gesture that matters; the triumph that she will feel on her next outing with — for instance — Maureen, Eleanor, or Adèle, whose son lives in London and who rarely even telephones.

We do not fool ourselves, Ma and I. But still the game goes on. We’ve played the game a long, long time; this game of stealth and strategy. Each of us has had our share of victories and defeats. But now comes the chance to own the field — which is why right now I can’t afford to take unnecessary risks. She’s suspicious enough of me as it is. Unstable, too, and growing worse. It was bad enough when my brothers were here, but now I am the only one, the last, and she keeps me like one of her china dogs, on display from all angles —

She expresses surprise at the gifts and the card. This, too, is part of the game. If there had been no Valentine, she would have made no comment, but in a few days there would have been consequences. And so it pays to observe the conventions, to play along, to remember the stakes. That’s why I’ve made it this far, of course. By always giving the devil his due.

Online, my friends remember me, too. There are six virtual Valentine’s cards, innumerable pictures and banners, including one from Clair, hoping to see me soon, she says, and hoping I find love this year —

Why, how sweet of you, ClairDeLune. As it happens I hope so, too. But you have other concerns today — not least, the e-mail you sent from your hotmail account to Angel Blue, bearing a message of undying love, as well as the extra little surprise delivered to his New York address.

I knew that password would come in useful. And, as it happens, I’ve changed it now, from clairlovesangel to clairhatesangie, Angie being Mrs Angel Blue. It’s cruel, I know. It may cause grief. But as we enter this new phase together, I have become increasingly impatient of time spent away from my main focus. I no longer need my army of mice. Their squeaking has become tiresome. They were a pleasant diversion once. And I needed them to build up this place, to bait my virtual bottle trap, my own private pitcher plant.

But now that Albertine and I are entering the final phase of the game, the last thing I want is her wasting her time. Time to concentrate on what really matters; to move in for the tête-à-tête —

And so, of today, all of badguysrock has become our private battleground. Site under construction, it says, which ought to keep most of our visitors out, while I send out my personal Valentines to deal with the more persistent ones.

Clair’s you already know about. Chryssie’s takes a different form; that of a dieting challenge — lose 10lbs in only 3 days! — a drop in the ocean for Chryssie, of course, but it should keep her out of my hair for a while.

As for Cap, a careless word dropped in his name on a gang message board, followed up by an e-mail inviting him to meet a friend at a certain place, at a certain time, in one of Manhattan’s less pleasant districts —

Meanwhile, what of Albertine? I hope I haven’t upset her. She’s very sensitive, of course; recent events must have shaken her. She isn’t answering her phone, which implies that she is screening calls. And maybe she lacks the energy, today of all days, when the nation honours a festival, which, though riddled with the pox of merchandising, purports to celebrate true love —

Somehow I don’t see Nigel as the type. Then again, I wouldn’t. It’s hard to visualize one’s childhood tormentor as the kind of person who would buy a bunch of red roses, make up a playlist of love songs, or send a Valentine’s card to a girl.

Maybe he was, though. Who can say? He may have had hidden depths. He was certainly moody enough as a boy — spending hours alone in his room, looking at his maps of the sky, writing his verses, and listening to rock music that ranted and railed.

Nigel Winter, the poet. Well — you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. But I found some of his poetry, in a book at the bottom of his wardrobe, among the clothes in charcoal and black. A Moleskine notebook — slightly worn — in my brother’s colour.

I couldn’t help it. I stole the book. Removed myself from the scene of the crime to scrutinize it at leisure. Nigel didn’t notice at first; and later, when he discovered the loss, he must have known that there could have been any number of places in which he might have mislaid a small, unobtrusive black notebook. Under his mattress; under the bed; under a fold of carpet. I played the innocent as I watched him search the house in stealth; but I’d hidden the notebook safely away in a box at the back of the garage. Nigel never mentioned to either of us what it was he was looking for, though his face was dark with suspicion as he questioned us — obliquely, and with uncommon restraint.

‘Did you go into my stuff?’ he said.

‘Why? Did you lose something?’

He gave me a look.

‘Well?’

He hesitated. ‘No.’

I shrugged, but I was grinning inside. Whatever was in that book, I thought, must be something very important. But rather than attract attention to something he clearly wanted to hide, my brother played indifference, hoping perhaps that the notebook would lie for ever undisturbed —

As if. As soon as I could, I retrieved it from its hiding-place. It looked like an astronomy notebook at first; but in between the lists of figures, of sightings of planets and shooting stars and lunar eclipses, I found something else: a journal like mine, but of poetry —

Poetry? Nigel? Gleefully I read on. Nigel, the poet. What a joke. But my brother was full of contradictions, as well as being almost as cautious as I, and I learnt that behind his sullen façade there lay a few surprises.

The first was that he favoured haikus, those deceptively simple little rhymeless poems of only seventeen syllables. If anything, I would have expected Nigel to have gone for blowsy verses, thumping rhymes, sonnets with rhythms that thundered and rang, bludgeoning blocks of blank verse —

The second surprise was that he was in love — desperately, fiercely in love. It had been going on for months — ever since he’d bought the telescope, in fact, which hobby gave him the perfect excuse to come and go at night as he pleased.

That in itself was amusing enough. I hadn’t seen Nigel as the type for romance. But the third surprise was the greatest of all — the thing that killed my amusement cold and made my heart quicken with delayed fear.

I flicked back through the notebook again, my fingers suddenly cold and numb, a cottony, chemical taste in my mouth. Of course, I’d always known that to be caught in possession of Nigel’s book might have had serious consequences. But as I read further I understood the terrible risk I’d taken. Because this was something far more incriminating than just a few poems and scribblings. And if Nigel suspected that I was the thief, I’d earn myself more than a beating. If anyone ever found out what I knew —

For that, my brother would kill me.

4

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 21.30 on Thursday, February 14

Status: restricted

Mood: disappointed

Listening to: Blondie: ‘Picture This’

No Valentine yet from Albertine. I wonder, did he love her? Did they lie side by side in bed, his arm thrown carelessly around her shoulders, her face pressed into the curve of his neck? Did he wake to find her there, and wonder at his good fortune? Did he sometimes forget who he was, imagine that through love of her, some day he could be someone good?

But love is a treacherous animal, a shape-shifter by nature, making the poor man king for a day; transforming the most volatile into paragons of stability; a crutch for the weak, a shield for the craven — at least, until the buzz wears off.

He got it badly. I knew he would. My erstwhile tormentor, who used to force-feed me spiders, had finally, fatally, fallen in love. And with the least likely candidate, in one of those random encounters that even I could not have foreseen.

I suppose you could have called her attractive. Not at all my type, of course; but Nigel had always been perverse, and the boy who had spent his childhood trying to escape one older woman had fallen straight into the clutches of another. Her name was Tricia Goldblum; and she was an ex-employer of Ma’s. An elegant fifty-something; ice-blonde; and with that air of helplessness that makes them irresistible. Still, there’s no accounting for taste, is there? And I suppose she must have felt flattered. Mrs Electric Blue, as was, now divorced from her husband and free to indulge her predilection for nice young men.

Does that sound familiar yet? They always say to write what you know. And fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie —

He’d never really known her from the days when Ma worked as a cleaner. Perhaps he’d encountered her once or twice in one of the cafés or shops in town. But he’d never had reason to speak to her, to understand her, as I had. And as for that day at the market, the day I remembered so vividly —

As far as I was able to tell, Nigel had no memory of it at all. Perhaps that was why he chose her — Malbry’s Mrs Robinson, whose furtive collection of young men had coloured her reputation, not blue, but scarlet in the eyes of such folk as Catherine White, Eleanor Vine and, most judgemental of all, Gloria Green.

Not that Nigel cared about that at the time. Nigel was besotted. But Mrs Goldblum valued discretion, and their affair was conducted in secret at first, with Mrs Goldblum calling the shots. Still, of course, that journal of his was enough to tell me everything: how cleverly she had reeled him in; even her penchant for sex toys was there, among the haikus and star charts.

My first impulse, of course, was to tell Ma, who had hated Mrs Goldblum ever since she’d abandoned us, and whose venom was no less lethal for having been stored away. But then I seriously believed that Nigel would have killed me. I knew his temper; and I guessed that Nigel in love, like Nigel at war, was capable of anything.

And so I nursed my discovery until such time as it could be of use. I never told Ma, never mentioned it, not even obliquely, to either of them. I was alone with my secret, a hoard of stolen banknotes that I could never spend without incriminating myself.

But enough of that for the moment. We’ll get to that in due course. Suffice it to say that as time passed, the Moleskine diary revealed its use. And now I realized how easily, with the help of a few judicious props, I could set a bottle trap, which hopefully would set me free —

5

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 22.15 on Thursday, February 14

Status: restricted

Mood: malevolent

Playing: Pulp: ‘I Spy’

When Nigel was released from jail, I’d expected him, now he was free, to try again, to rebuild his life, to do all those things he’d always planned, to take the chance he’d been given, and run. But Nigel was never predictable; he was more than usually perverse, seeking out the opposite of whatever he was expected to do. And something in my brother had changed. Not something you could quantify, but something that I recognized. Like a ship in the Sargasso Sea, he had become entangled; enmeshed in himself, swallowed up by the pitcher plant that was Malbry, and our mother.

Oh, yes. Our mother. In spite of it all, he came back home — not to the house, but to Malbry; to Ma. Certainly he had no one else. His friends — such as they were — had moved on. All he had was his family.

My brother was twenty-five by then. He had no money, no prospects, no job. He was taking stabilizing drugs, though he was far from stable. And he blamed me for what had happened to him — blamed me unfairly, but doggedly — although even a headcase like Nigel should have been able to see that it wasn’t my fault that he had committed murder —

All that didn’t come out at once, of course. But Nigel had never liked me, and now he liked me even less. I suppose he had good reason. To him, I must have seemed a success. By then I was studying — or so he believed — at Malbry Polytechnic, as was, though its status was upgraded a year later to that of a university, much to Ma’s satisfaction. I still had money from my part-time job at the electrical shop, though, since I was a student, Ma allowed me to keep all of my salary. The Emily White affair was over, and Ma and I had already moved on.

To look at, Nigel hadn’t changed much. His hair was longer than before, and sometimes it was greasy. He had a new tattoo on his arm — a single Chinese character, the symbol for ‘courage’ in basic black. He was thinner, and somehow smaller, too, as if part of him had been worn away like the end of a pencil eraser. But he still wore black all the time, and he liked the girls as he always had, although, as far as I ever knew, he never kept with the same one for more than a couple of weeks or so, as if trying to keep himself in check; as if he was afraid, somehow, that the rage that had killed a man might some day spring out at someone else.

At first he had no contact with Ma. No surprise, after what he had done. He moved into a flat in town, found himself a job there, and over the next few years lived alone — not happy, perhaps, but free.

And then, somehow, she reeled him back in. That freedom was just an illusion. One day I came home to find him there, sitting with Ma in the parlour, looking like a dead man, and along with that sneaking Schadenfreude I felt a sinking sense of doom.

No one escapes the pitcher plant. Not Nigel, not me, not anyone.

It was not a true rapprochement. But over the next eighteen years or so, we saw Nigel three or four times a year. At Christmas; on Ma’s birthday; at Easter; on my birthday — and every time he came round, he would sit in the same place in the parlour, and stare at the shelf of china dogs — Mal’s statuette had been repaired, of course, and had now been joined by a similar one, in the shape of a sleeping puppy.

And every time Nigel visited, he would stare at those fucking china dogs and drink tea from Ma’s visitors’ cups and listen to her carry on about how much the church had raised this year, and how the hedge needed clipping. And every other Sunday night he would phone at precisely eight thirty (which was when Ma’s soaps were over), and stay on until she had finished with him, while the rest of the time he tried to make sense of what was left of his life with therapy and Prozac, working days and spending the nights in his attic flat watching stars that seemed increasingly remote each time, or cruising the streets in his black Toyota and waiting for someone, for something . . .

And then, along came Albertine. She should never have been there, of course. She didn’t belong in that new café, the oddly named Pink Zebra, with its gassy, soporific scent and primary-school colours. And she certainly didn’t belong with Nigel, who should have been out of the picture by then, but who had messed up his escape.

Maybe I ought to have stopped it then. I knew she was dangerous. But Nigel had already brought her home, like a little stray cat from out of the cold. Nigel was in love, he said. Needless to say, he had to go —

And though it looked like an accident, you and I know better, of course. I swallowed him, as I swallowed Mal, as I swallowed all of my brothers. Swallowed them down like the vitamin drink — One, two, three, gone! — and the taste may be sour, but the victory is sweeter than a summer rose —

6

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 23.25 on Thursday, February 14

Status: public

Mood: baroque

Listening to: The Rolling Stones: ‘Paint It Black’

Let’s call him Mr Midnight Blue. A man of moods and mysteries. A poet and a lover, she thinks; a gentle man with a head full of stars. The truth is, she’s living in fantasy. A fantasy in which two lost souls may find each other by happenstance, and be saved from themselves through true love —

What a joke. Poor girl. In fact her man is a headcase with blood on his hands; a liar; a coward; an arrogant thug. What’s more, though she thinks he has chosen her, the truth is she was chosen for him.

You think that isn’t possible? People are just like cards, you know. Pick a card. Any card. And the trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his choice, his own particular Queen of Spades —

He drives a black Toyota. He uses it to cruise the streets, as he used to do, in the days before. Still thinks of it as before and after — as if such a cataclysmic event could change the predestined orbit of a man’s life, like two planets in collision, which then go off their separate ways.

Of course, that isn’t possible. There is no way to cheat Fate. His crime has become a part of him, like the shape of his face, and the scar on his hand that runs across his heart line, the only physical reminder of that nasty interlude. A shallow cut that healed fast; unlike his victim, poor bastard, who died of a cracked skull a fortnight later.

But of course, Midnight Blue doesn’t think of himself as a murderer. It was an accident, he says; an altercation that got out of hand. He never meant to do it, he says — as if that could somehow raise the dead, as if it makes a difference that he acted on impulse, that he was misled, that he was only twenty-one —

His lawyer was inclined to agree. Cited his mental state, which was poor; claimed there were special circumstances, and finally tried for a verdict of misadventure. A piebald word, half-red, half-black, that smells distinctly fishy to me, and sounds almost as if it could be a name: Miss Adventure, like Boy X, a comic-book adventuress —

Can any sentence compensate for the loss of a human life? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. All those snivelling, wretched excuses. A five-year stretch — much of it spent in the quilted comfort of a psychiatric ward — discharged Midnight Blue’s debt to society — which doesn’t mean to say he was cured; or that he didn’t deserve to die —

Reader, I killed him. I had no choice. That black Toyota was just too alluring. And I wanted something poetic this time: something to mark the victim’s death with a final, triumphant fanfare.

There is a CD deck under the dashboard, on which he likes to play music as he drives. Midnight Blue favours loud bands, rock music that rants and rails. He likes his music noisy, his vocals raucous, the squeal of guitars; likes to feel the deep punch of the bass in his eardrums and that kick of response in his lower belly, like something there could still be alive.

Some might say that, at his age, he ought to have turned down the volume by now; but Midnight Blue knows that rebellion is something born from experience, a lesson learnt the hard way, wasted on adolescents. Midnight Blue has always been a kind of existentialist; brooding on mortality; taking out on the rest of the world the fact that he is going to die.

A small glass jar under the seat is blueeyedboy’s contribution. The rest is all from Midnight Blue: for he is the one who turns up the sound; turns on the heater; drives home in his usual way, by his usual route, at his usual speed. Inside the open jar, a single wasp makes its way sluggishly towards freedom.

A wasp, you say? At this time of year? They are not impossible to find. Under the roof there are often nests, left over from summer, in which the insects lie dormant, waiting for the temperature to rise. Not so hard to climb up there, to ease one out of its padded cell, to transfer it into a glass jar and wait —

The car begins to warm up. Slowly the insect comes to life in an amplified burr of synths and guitars. It crawls towards the source of heat; its stinger begins to pump in time to the rhythm of the bass and drums. Midnight Blue does not hear it. Nor does he see it crawling up the back of the car seat and on to the window, where it slowly unfolds its wings and begins to stutter against the glass —

Two minutes later, the wasp is alert. A combination of music, warmth and light has fully awakened it at last. It takes flight for a moment, hits the glass, rebounds and stubbornly tries again. And then it flies into the windscreen, just at the moment when Midnight Blue approaches the junction, driving with his usual impatience, cursing the other road users, the road, tapping out his frustration on the padded dashboard —

He sees the wasp. It’s instinctive. He raises a hand towards his face. The insect, sensing the movement, veers a little closer. Midnight Blue strikes out, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. But the wasp has nowhere to go. It flies back into the windscreen, where it buzzes balefully. Midnight Blue, panicked now, fumbles for the window controls. He misses, and hits the volume instead, bumping up the sound and —

Wham! The volume kicks up from merely loud to an ear-buzzing burst of decibels; a sudden cataclysm of sound that shocks the steering wheel from his hand, sends it jerking spastically, and as Midnight Blue fights for control he slams right across the two lanes, his car tyres squealing soundlessly across the hard shoulder to hell, to the sound of a wailing wall of guitars —

I like to think he thought of me. Right at that moment, when his head smashed through the windscreen, I like to think he saw something more than just a cartoon trail of stars or the shadow of the Reaper. I’d like to think he saw a familiar face, that he knew in that flashgun moment of death who had murdered him, and why.

Then again, maybe he didn’t. These things are so ephemeral. And Midnight Blue died instantly, or at least within seconds of impact, as the car turned into a fireball, consuming everything inside.

Well — maybe the wasp made it out alive.

It didn’t even sting the guy.

Post comment:

Captainbunnykiller: And he’s back!!!

Toxic69: You rock!

chrysalisbaby: woot woot

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JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Albertine? Is that you?

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Albertine?

7

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 22:46 on Friday, February 15

Status: restricted

Mood: awake

It’s only fiction, he protests. He never murdered anyone. And yet, there they are — his confessions in fic. Too close to be lies, too vile to be real; Valentines from the other side, picture postcards from the dead.

It is only fiction, isn’t it? How could it possibly be anything else? This virtual life is so nicely secure, battened against reality. These virtual friends, too, are safely confined behind this screen, this mouse mat. No one expects to encounter the truth in these worlds we build for ourselves. No one expects to feel it this way, through a glass, darkly.

But blueeyedboy has a special way of shaping the truth to his purpose. He does the same with people, too: winds them up like clockwork toys and sends them crashing into . . .

Walls? Articulated lorries on a busy main road?

Reader, I killed him. What dangerous words. What am I meant to do with them? Does he believe what he’s telling me, or is he just trying to mess with my mind? Nigel drove a black Toyota. And I know the style in which he drove, and his fear of wasps, and his favourite tracks, and the CD deck under the dashboard. Most of all, I remember how much that letter troubled him, and how he set off to his mother’s house to deal with his brother once and for all . . .

Blueeyedboy has been trying to reach me all day. There are five unopened e-mails from him waiting in my inbox. I wonder what he wants from me. Confessions? Lies? Declarations of love?

Well, this time I won’t react. I refuse. Because that’s what he wants. A dialogue. He’s played this game so many times. He admits that he is manipulative. I’ve watched him do it with Chryssie and Clair. He likes to subject them to mind games, to push them into declaring themselves. Thus, Chryssie is besotted with him; Clair thinks she can heal him; Cap wants to be him, and as for myself . . .

What do you want of me, blueeyedboy? What kind of reaction do you expect? Anger? Scorn? Confusion? Distress? Or could this be something more than that, some declaration of your own? Could it be that, after watching the world through a glass for so long, you finally, desperately want to be seen?

At ten o’clock the Zebra shuts. I’m always the last one out of the door. I found him waiting for me outside, under the shelter of the trees.

‘Walk you home?’ said blueeyedboy.

I ignored him. He followed me. I could hear his footsteps behind me, as I’ve heard them so many times.

‘I’m sorry, Albertine,’ he said. ‘Obviously I shouldn’t have posted that fic. But you wouldn’t answer my e-mails, and—’

‘I don’t care what you write,’ I said.

‘That’s the spirit, Albertine.’

We walked in silence for a while.

‘Did I tell you I collect orchids?’

‘No.’

‘I’d like to show them to you some day. The Zygopetala are particularly fragrant. Their scent can fill a whole room. Perhaps I could offer you one as a gift. By way of an apology—’

I shrugged. ‘My house plants never survive.’

‘Neither do your friends,’ he said.

‘Nigel’s death was an accident.’

‘Of course it was. Like Dr Peacock’s and Eleanor Vine’s—’

I felt my heart give a sick lurch.

‘You didn’t know?’ He sounded surprised. ‘She passed away the other night. Passed away. What a strange expression. Makes her sound like a parcel. Anyway, she’s dead meat. Poor Terri will be inconsolable.’

We walked in silence after that, crossing Mill Road by the traffic lights, listening as the trees came alive over our heads in the rising wind. No snow this year — in fact it is unusually mild, and the air has a milky quality, as if a storm were coming. We passed by the silent nursery school; the shuttered and empty bakery; the Jacadees’ house, with its scent of fried garlic and yams and roasting chillies.

At last we paused at the garden gate. By then it felt almost companionable: victim and predator side by side, close enough to touch.

‘Can you still do it?’ I said at last. ‘That — you know — that thing you do.’

He gave a short, percussive laugh. ‘It’s not a skill you lose,’ he said. ‘In fact, it gets easier every time.’

‘Like murder,’ I said.

He laughed again.

I fumbled for the catch on the gate. Around me, the milky, troubled air smelt of fresh earth and rotting leaves. I struggled with myself to keep calm, but I could feel myself slipping away, becoming someone else, as I do every time he looks at me.

‘You aren’t going to ask me in? Very wise. People might talk.’

‘Another time, perhaps,’ I said.

‘Whenever you want, Albertine.’

As I moved towards the house I could feel him watching me, sensed his eyes on the back of my neck as I fumbled for the door key. I can always tell when I am being watched. People give themselves away. He was too silent, too motionless, to be doing anything else but staring.

‘I know you’re there,’ I said, without turning round.

Not a word from blueeyedboy.

I was almost tempted to ask him in, then, just to hear his reaction. He thinks I am afraid of him. In fact, the opposite is true. He is like a little boy playing with a wasp in a jar: fascinated, but terribly afraid that at some point the trapped creature will escape its confinement and take revenge. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that something so small could inspire such unease? And yet, Nigel, too, was afraid of wasps. Such a little thing, you’d think, to drive a man into a panic. A blob of fuzz; a drone of wings; armed with nothing more than a sting and a tiny amount of irritant.

You think I don’t see how you’re playing me. Well, maybe I see more than you think. I see your self-hatred. I see your fear. Most of all, I see what you want, deep down in your secret heart. But what you want and what you need are not necessarily the same. Desire and compulsion are two different things.

I know you’re still out there, watching me. I can almost feel your heart. I can tell how fast it’s beating now, like that of an animal caught in a trap. Well, I know how that feels. To have to pretend I’m someone else; to live every moment in fear of the past. I’ve lived this way for over twenty years, hoping to be left alone . . .

But now I’m ready to show myself. At last, from this dried-up chrysalis, something is about to emerge. So — if you’re as guilty as you say, you’d better run, while there’s still time. Run, like the helpless rat you are. Run as far and as fast as you can —

Run for your life, blueeyedboy.

8

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.18 on Saturday, February 16

Status: restricted

Mood: cynical

Listening to: Wheatus: ‘Teenage Dirtbag’

I told you before. Nothing ends. Nothing really begins either, except in the kind of story that starts with Once upon a time, long, long ago, and in which, in blatant defiance of the human condition, they all live happily ever after. My tastes are rather more humble. I’d settle for outliving Ma. Oh, and the chance to stamp on those dogs. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. The rest of them — my brothers, the Whites, even Dr Peacock — are simply the icing on the cake; a cake long past its sell-by date, and sour under the frosting.

But before I can hope for forgiveness, I have to make the confession. Perhaps that’s why I’m here, after all. This screen, like that of the confessional, serves a double purpose. And yes, I’m aware that the fatal flaw in most of our fictional bad guys is that common desire to confess; to strut; to reveal to the hero his master plan, only to be foiled at last —

That’s why I’m not going public on this. Not yet, anyway. All of these restricted posts are accessible only by password. But maybe later, when it’s done and I’m sitting on a beach somewhere, drinking Mai Tais and watching the pretty girls go by, I’ll mail you the password; I’ll give you the truth. Maybe I owe you that, Albertine. And maybe one day you’ll forgive me for everything I did to you. Most likely you won’t. But that’s OK. I’ve been living with guilt for a long time. A little more won’t kill me.

Things really began to fall apart the summer that followed my brother’s death. A long and turbulent summer, all dragonflies and thunderstorms. I was still only seventeen, a month from my eighteenth birthday, and the weight of my mother’s attention now sat like a permanent thundercloud over my life. She had always been demanding. Now that my brothers were out of the way, she was viciously critical of every little thing I did, and I dreamed of running away, like Dad —

Ma had been through a difficult patch. The business with Nigel had done something to her. Nothing you would have noticed at first; but living with her as I did, I knew that all was not right with Gloria Green. It had started with lethargy at first; a slow, dull state of recovery. She would sit staring into space for hours; would eat whole packets of biscuits; would talk to people who weren’t there; or sleep away whole afternoons before going to bed at eight or nine . . .

Grief sometimes does that to you, Maureen Pike explained to me. Of course, Maureen was in her element then, coming to see us every day, bringing home-made cakes and sound advice. Eleanor, too, offered support, recommending St John’s Wort and group therapy. Adèle brought gossip and platitudes. Time heals all things. Life must go on.

Tell that to the cancer ward.

Then, as the summer waned, Ma had entered another phase. The lethargy had given way to a manic kind of activity. Maureen explained the phenomenon, which she said was called displacement; and welcomed it as necessary to the healing process. At that time, Maureen’s daughter was doing a degree in psychology, and Maureen had embraced the world of psychoanalysis with the same self-important, lolloping zeal she gave to church fêtes, Junior Fun Days, collections for the elderly, her book group, her work at the coffee shop and ridding Malbry of paedophiles.

In any case, Ma was busy that month: working five days on the market stall, cooking, cleaning, making plans, ticking off time like an impatient schoolmistress — and, of course, keeping an eye on Yours Truly.

I’d had an easy time until then. For nearly a month, enshrouded with grief, she’d barely even noticed me. Now she made up for that in spades: questioning my every move; making the vitamin drink twice a day and worrying about everything. If I coughed, she assumed I was at death’s door. If I was late, I’d been murdered or mugged. And when she wasn’t fretting over all the things that might happen to me, she was rigid with fear over what I might do — that I’d find myself in trouble, somehow, that she’d lose me to drink, or drugs, or a girl —

But there was no escape for blueeyedboy. Three months had passed since the incident when Ma had hit me with the plate, and after Nigel failed her, Ma’s obsession with success had grown to monstrous proportions. I’d missed my school exams, of course; but an appeal by Ma (on compassionate grounds) had earned me a review of my case. Malbry College was where she believed I should continue my studies. She had it all planned out for me. A year to re-sit those exams; and then I could start afresh, she said. She’d always dreamed of one of her boys entering the medical profession. I was her only hope, she said; and with a ruthless disregard for my wishes — indeed, for my ability — she began to mark out my future career.

I tried to argue with her at first. I had no qualifications. Besides, I wasn’t cut out for medicine. Ma was saddened, but took it well — or so I thought in my innocence. I’d expected an outburst at the very least; one of Ma’s violent attacks. What I got was a week of redoubled affection and lavishly home-cooked dinners — always my favourites — which she laid on the table with the virtuous air of a long-suffering guardian angel.

Soon after that I fell violently ill, with acute stomach cramps and a fever that brought me to my knees. Even to sit up in bed was to precipitate the most awful spasms of pain and vomiting, and to stand — still less to walk — was wholly out of the question. Ma cared for me with a tenderness that might have made me suspicious if I hadn’t been suffering so much. Then, after almost a week, she reverted suddenly to type.

I’d been getting better. I’d lost pounds in weight; I was weak, but at last the pain had gone, and I was able to eat simple food in small quantities. A cup of noodle soup; some bread; a tablespoonful of plain rice; soldiers dipped in egg yolk.

She must have been worried by then, of course. Ma was no doctor; she had no concept of dosage, and the violence of my reaction must have been alarming. Waking up a few nights before from a sleep that was part delirium, I’d heard her talking to herself, arguing fiercely with someone not there:

It serves him right. He needs to learn.

But he’s in pain. He’s sick —

He’ll live. Besides, he should have listened to me —

What had she put in those lavish meals? Ground glass? Rat poison? Whatever it had been, it had worked fast. And the day I was finally able to sit up in bed, even to stand, Ma came in, not with a tray, but with an application form — a form from Malbry College, which she had already filled in for me.

‘I hope you’ve had time to think,’ she said in a suspiciously cheery voice. ‘Lying in bed doing nothing all day, letting me fetch and carry for you. I hope you’ve had time to think about everything I’ve done for you. Everything you owe me—’

‘Please. Not now. My stomach hurts—’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘In a day or two you’ll be good as new, eating me out of house and home, like the ungrateful little bastard you are. Now, have a look at these papers.’ Her expression, which had begun to darken, once more took on that look of relentless cheeriness. ‘I’ve been looking at those courses again, and I think you should do the same.’

I looked at her. She was smiling at me, and I felt a pang of guilt in my stomach for letting the thought even cross my mind —

‘What was wrong with me?’ I said.

I thought her eyes flickered. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you think it was something I ate?’ I went on. ‘You didn’t get sick at all, did you, Ma?’

‘I can’t afford to get sick,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you to look after, haven’t I?’ Then she moved in close to me and fixed me with her espresso eyes. ‘I think it’s time you got up now,’ she said, shoving the papers into my hand. ‘You’ve got a lot of work to do.’

That time I knew better than to protest. I signed up without a word for three subjects I knew nothing about, knowing I could change them later. I was already an accomplished liar; rather than actually take the courses and risk my mother finding out when I failed, I waited until the beginning of term and secretly changed my subject choices to something more suited to my personal talents, then found myself a part-time job in an electrical shop a few miles away, and let her believe I was studying.

After that, it was simply a question of forging my certificates — easy, on a computer — after which I hacked into the Malbry Examiner’s computer files and added a single name — my own — to a soon-to-be-published list of results.

I’ve tried to do my own cooking ever since. But there’s always the vitamin drink, of course, which Ma prepares with her own hands, and which keeps me well — or so she says, with a kind of sly innuendo. Every eighteen months or so I come down with a sudden, violent illness characterized by terrible stomach cramps, and my mother cares for me lovingly, and if these bouts of sickness always seem to coincide with moments of tension between Ma and myself, that’s just because I am sensitive, and these things have an effect on my health.

I never got away, of course. Some things are inescapable. Even London is too far to go — Hawaii, an impossible dream.

Well, maybe not quite impossible. That old blue lamp is still alight. And although it has taken more time than even I imagined it would, I begin to sense that at long last my patience is about to be rewarded.

Patience, too, is a game, of course, a game of skill and endurance. Solitaire, the Americans call it, a far less optimistic name, tinged with the grey-green of melancholy. Well, a solitary game it may be; but in my case that’s surely a blessing. Besides, in a game that one plays with oneself, can anyone be said to lose?

9

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.49 on Saturday, February 16

Status: restricted

Mood: trapped

Listening to: Boomtown Rats: ‘Rat Trap’

‘You’ve got a lot of work to do.’

I’d assumed at first that she meant school. In fact, school was only a part of it. My mother’s plans ran deeper than that. It began just after my illness, and hers, in the last days of September, and I remember it all in greys and blues, with a thundery light that hurt my eyes, and a heat that pressed down on to my head, giving me a penitent’s slouch, a habit that I never quite lost.

When the police called round for the first time, I assumed it was because of something I’d done. The camera I’d stolen, perhaps; the graffiti on Dr Peacock’s door; or maybe finally someone had guessed how I’d disposed of my brother.

But I was not arrested. Instead I sweated it out of doors while Ma entertained in the parlour, bringing out the good biscuits, and the visitors’ teacups that usually took pride of place in the cabinet under the china dogs. Then, after what seemed like an interminable wait, the two officers — a man and a woman — came out looking very serious, and the woman said: ‘We need to talk.’ And I could have passed out with terror and guilt, except that Ma was watching me with that look of expectant pride, and I knew that it wasn’t something I’d done, but something she expected of me —

Of course, you know what that was. Ma never lets anything go. And what I’d revealed about Emily the day Ma hit me with the plate had festered and borne fruit in her mind, so that now, at last, it was ready for use.

She fixed me with her berry-black eyes. ‘I know you don’t want to tell them,’ she said in a voice like a razor blade hidden inside a toffee apple. ‘But I’ve brought you up to respect the law, and everyone knows it’s not your fault—’

For a moment I didn’t understand. I must have looked scared, because the policewoman put her arm around me and whispered. ‘That’s right, son. It’s not your fault—’ And then I remembered what I’d written that night on Dr Peacock’s door, and all the components fell in place like the pieces of a Mouse Trap game, and I understood what my mother had meant —

You’ve got a lot of work to do.

‘Oh, please,’ I whispered. ‘Please, no.’

‘I know you’re afraid,’ my mother said — in that voice that sounded sweet, but was not. ‘But everybody’s on your side. No one’s going to blame you.’ Her eyes, as she spoke, were like steel pins. Her hand on my arm looked gentle, but the next day there would be bruises. ‘All we want is the truth, B.B. Just the truth. How hard can that be?’

Well, what could I do? I was alone. Alone with Ma, trapped and afraid. I knew that if I called her bluff, if I disgraced her publicly, she’d find a way to make me pay. So I played the game, telling myself that it was just a white lie; that their lies had been much worse than mine; that in any case, I had no choice —

The policewoman’s name was Lucy, she said. I guessed her to be very young, maybe just out of training school, still fired with hopeful ideals and convinced that children have no reason to lie. The man was older, more cautious; less likely to show sympathy; but even so, he was gentle enough, allowing her to question me, making notes in his notepad.

‘Your mother says you’ve been ill,’ she said.

I nodded, not daring to say it aloud. Beside me, Ma, like a granite cliff face, one arm around my shoulders.

‘She says you were delirious. Talking and shouting in your sleep.’

‘I guess,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t too bad.’

I felt my mother’s bony fingers tighten on my upper arm. ‘You say that now you’re better,’ she said. ‘But you don’t know the half of it. Until you’ve got children of your own, you can’t imagine how it feels,’ she said, without releasing my arm. ‘To see my boy in such a bad way, crying like a baby.’ She flashed me a brief, unsettling smile. ‘You know I lost my other boy,’ she said, with a glance at Lucy. ‘If anything happened to B.B. now, I think I might go crazy.’

I saw the two officers exchange glances.

‘Yes, Mrs Winter. I know. It must have been a terrible time.’

Ma frowned. ‘How could you know? You’re not much older than my son. Do you have any children?’

Lucy shook her head.

‘Then don’t presume to empathize.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Winter.’

For a moment, Ma was silent, staring vacantly into space. She looked like an unplugged fruit machine; for a second I wondered if she’d had a stroke. Then she went on in a normal voice — at least what passes for normal with her.

‘A mother knows these things,’ she said. ‘A mother senses everything. I knew there was something wrong with him. He started to talk and cry in his sleep. And that’s when I began to suspect that something funny was going on.’

Oh, she was clever. She fed them the line. Fed it to them like poisoned bait, watching as I wriggled and squirmed. And the facts were indisputable. Between the ages of seven and thirteen, Ma’s youngest son Benjamin had enjoyed a special relationship with Dr Graham Peacock. As payment for helping in his research, the doctor had befriended him, had taken charge of his schooling, had even offered financial aid to Ma, a single parent —

Then suddenly, without warning, Ben had ceased to cooperate. He had become introverted and secretive; had started doing badly at school; had begun to misbehave; above all, he had flatly refused to go back to the Mansion, giving no good reason for his behaviour, so that Dr Peacock had withdrawn his support, leaving Ma to fend alone.

She should have suspected there and then that something had gone seriously wrong, but anger had blinded her to her son’s needs, and when, later, graffiti had been scrawled on the door of the Mansion, she had simply seen it as another proof of his growing delinquency. Ben had denied the vandalism. Ma had not believed him. It was only now that she realized what that gesture had really been; a cry for help; a warning —

‘What did you write on the door, B.B.?’ Her voice was chequered with menace and love.

I looked away. ‘Please, M-ma. It was so long ago. I d-don’t really think—’

‘B.B.’ Only I could hear the change in her voice: the vinegary, sour-vegetable tone that brought back the reek of the vitamin drink. Already my head was beginning to throb. I reached for the word that would drive it away. A word that sounds vaguely French, somehow, that makes me think of green summer lawns and the scent of cut grass in the meadows —

‘Pervert,’ I whispered.

‘What?’ she said.

I said it again, and she smiled at me.

‘And why did you write that, B.B.?’ she said.

‘Because he is.’ I was still feeling trapped, but behind the fear and the guilt of it all there was something almost pleasurable: a sense of perilous ownership.

I thought of Mrs White, and of the way she had looked that day on the steps of the Mansion. I thought of the pity on Mr White’s face, that day in St Oswald’s schoolyard. I thought of Dr Peacock’s face peering through the curtains, and his sheepish smile as I crept away. I thought of the ladies who had spoiled and petted me as a child, only to scorn me when I grew up. I thought of my teachers at school, and my brothers, who’d treated me with such contempt. Then I thought of Emily —

And I saw how easy it would be to take revenge on all those people, to make them pay attention to me, to make them suffer as I had. And for the first time since my earliest childhood, I was conscious of an exhilarating sensation. A feeling of power; an energy rush; a force; a current; a surge; a charge.

Charge. Such an ambivalent word, with its implications of power and blame, attack and detention, payment and cost. And it smells of burnt wiring and solder, and its colour is like a summer’s sky, thundery and luminous.

Don’t think I’m trying to absolve myself. I told you I was a bad guy. No one forced me to do what I did. I made a conscious decision that day. I could have done the right thing. I could have pulled the plug on it all. Told the truth. Confessed the lie. I had the choice. I could have left home. I could have escaped the pitcher plant.

But Ma was watching, and I knew that I would never do those things. It wasn’t that I was afraid of her — although I was, most terribly. It was simply the lure of being in charge — of being the one to whom eyes turned —

I know. Don’t think I’m proud of this. It’s not exactly my greatest moment. Most crimes are annoyingly petty, and I’m afraid mine was no exception. But I was young, too young in any case to see how cleverly she had handled me, guiding me through a series of hoops to a reward that would ultimately reveal itself to be the worst kind of punishment.

And now she was smiling — a genuine smile, radiating approval. And, at that moment, I wanted it, wanted to hear her say: well done, even though I hated her —

‘Tell them, B.B.,’ she said, pinning me with that brilliant smile. ‘Tell them what he did to you.’

10

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 03.58 on Sunday, February 17

Status: restricted

Mood: perverse

Listening to: 10cc: ‘I’m Not In Love’

The first thing that happened after that was that Emily was taken into protective care. Just as a precaution, they said; just to ensure her safety. Her reluctance to incriminate Dr Peacock was seen as proof of long-term abuse rather than simple innocence, and Catherine’s rage and bewilderment when faced with the accusations was seen as further evidence of some kind of collusion. Something had clearly been going on. At best, a cynical fraud. At worst, a large-scale conspiracy.

And now came Yours Truly’s testimony. It had started so harmlessly, I said. Dr Peacock had been very kind. Private lessons, cash now and then — that was how he’d reeled us in. And that was how he’d approached Catherine White, a woman with a history of depression, ambitious and easily flattered, so eager to believe that her child was special that she’d managed to blind herself to the truth.

The books in Dr Peacock’s library did much to support my claim, of course. Biographies of literature’s most notorious synaesthetes. Nabokov; Rimbaud; Baudelaire; De Quincey — self-confessed drug-users, homosexuals, paedophiles. Men whose pursuit of the sublime took precedence to the petty morality of their day. The material seized as evidence was not directly incriminating, but the police are no great connoisseurs of art, and the sheer volume of material in Dr Peacock’s collection was enough to convince them that they had the right man. Class photographs of St Oswald’s boys taken whilst he was a governor. Volumes of Greek and Roman art; engravings of statues of naked young men. A first edition of Beardsley’s Yellow Book; a collection of Ovenden prints from Lolita; a pencil drawing of a young male nude (attributed to Caravaggio); a lavishly illustrated copy of The Perfumed Garden; books of erotic poetry by Verlaine, Swinburne, Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade —

‘You showed this stuff to a seven-year-old?’

Dr Peacock tried to explain. It was part of the boy’s education, he said. And Benjamin was interested; he wanted to know what he was —

‘And what was he, according to you?’

Once more, Dr Peacock struggled to enlighten his audience. But while Boy X had been fascinated by case studies of synaesthetes, of music and migraines and orgasms that manifested themselves in trails of colour, the police seemed far more interested in finding out precisely what he and Boy X had talked about during all those private lessons. Whether he’d ever been tempted to touch Benjamin; whether he’d ever given him drugs; whether he’d ever spent time alone with him — or his brothers.

And when Dr Peacock finally broke, and vented his rage and frustration, the officers looked at each other and said: ‘That’s a nasty temper you’ve got. Did you ever strike the boy? Slap him, correct him in any way?’

Numbly, the doctor shook his head.

‘And what about the little girl? It must have been frustrating, having to work with such a young child. Especially when you’ve been used to teaching boys. Was she ever uncooperative?’

‘Never, said Dr Peacock. ‘Emily’s a sweet little girl.’

‘Eager to please?’

He nodded.

‘Eager enough to fake a result?’

The doctor denied it vehemently. But the damage was already done. I had painted a more than plausible picture. And if Emily failed to confirm his tale, then that was simply because she was young, confused, and in denial of the way in which she had been used —

They tried to keep it from the Press. Might as well try to stop the tide. The wave of speculation broke just in the wake of the film’s release. By the end of that year Emily White was national news; and then, just as suddenly, infamous.

The tabloid headlines came out in force. The Mail: ABUSE CLAIMS IN SUPER-SENSE CASE. The Sun: SEE EMILY PLAY! Best of all, from the Mirror: EMILY — WAS SHE A FAKE?

Jeffrey Stuarts, the journalist who had followed Emily’s case throughout, living with the family, attending sessions at the Mansion, answering the sceptics with the keenness of a true fanatic, saw what was coming and quickly changed course, hastily rewriting his book — to be entitled The Emily Experiment — to include, not only rumours of sleaze at the Mansion, but strong hints of a darker truth behind the Emily Phenomenon.

The hard, ambitious mother; the weak, ineffectual father; the influential New Age friend; the child-victim, trained to perform; the predatory old man, consumed by his obsessions. And, of course, Boy X. Redeemed by what he’d had to endure, he was in it to the hilt. The guileless victim. The innocent. Once again, the blue-eyed boy.

Of course, it never went to court. It never even made it to the magistrate. Whilst still under investigation, Dr Peacock suffered a heart attack that landed him in intensive care. The case was postponed indefinitely.

But just the faintest whiff of smoke was enough to convince the public. Trial by tabloid is swift and sure. Within three months, it was over. The Emily Experiment went straight to the top of the best-seller lists. Patrick and Catherine White agreed to a trial separation. Investors withdrew their money; galleries ceased to display Emily’s work. Feather moved in with Catherine, while Patrick removed himself to a hostel just outside Malbry.

It wasn’t a permanent move, he said. It was simply to give them a little space. A twenty-four-hour police guard was stationed outside the Mansion in the wake of several arson attempts. And the papers were all over Catherine. A row of photographers flanked the house, snapping up anyone who crossed the threshold.

Graffiti appeared on the front door. Hate mail came by the sackful. The News of the World ran a picture of Catherine, in tears, with a story (confirmed by Feather, to whom they paid five thousand pounds) that she had suffered a mental breakdown.

Christmas brought little improvement, though Emily was allowed home for the day. Before that the child had remained in the custody of the Social Services, who, failing to detect any signs of abuse, interrogated her kindly but relentlessly until even she began to wonder if she, too, wasn’t losing her mind.

Try to remember, Emily.

I know the technique. I know it well. Kindness is a weapon, too, a padded cartoon goofy-stick that batters away at the memory, turning it all into candyfloss.

It’s all right. It’s not your fault.

Just tell us the truth, Emily.

Imagine what it was like for her. Everything was going wrong. Dr Peacock was under investigation. Her parents were suddenly living apart. People kept asking her questions, and although they kept saying it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help thinking that somehow it was. That somehow, that little snow-white lie had turned into an avalanche —

Listen to the colours.

She wanted to say it was all a mistake, but of course, it was far too late for that. They wanted a demonstration: a once-and-for-all display of her gift, well away from the influence of Dr Peacock or her mother, a performance to confirm or refute for ever the claim that she was a fake, a pawn in their game of deception and greed.

And that was how, in January, on a snowy morning in Manchester, she found herself with her easel and paints, on a sound stage surrounded by cameras, with hot lights battening down on her head and the sound of the Symphonie fantastique pouring out of the speakers. And right at that moment the miracle happens and Emily hears the colours —

It is by far her most famous work. Symphonie fantastique in Twenty-four Conflicting Colours looks something like a Jackson Pollock and something like a Mondrian, with that huge, grey shadow in the far corner reaching into the illuminated canvas like the hand of Death in a field of bright flowers . . .

So says Jeffrey Stuarts, at least, in the follow-up to his best-selling book: The Emily Enigma. That, too, raced to the top of the charts, although it was clearly a rehash of the previous one, with an afterword to include the events that followed its publication. After that, of course, the experts pursued the story, with professionals in every associated field from art to child psychology warring with each other to prove their conflicting theories.

Each camp had its adherents, be they cynics or believers. The child psychologists saw Emily’s work as a symbolic expression of her fear; the paranormal camp as a harbinger of death; the art experts saw in the change of style a confirmation of what many had already secretly suspected: that Emily’s synaesthesia had been a pretence from the start and that Catherine White, and not Emily, had been the creative influence behind such works as Nocturne in Scarlet Ochre and Starry Moonlight Sonata.

Symphonie fantastique is altogether different. Created in front of an audience on a piece of canvas eight feet square, it almost writhes with energy, so that even a dullard like Jeffrey Stuarts was able to feel its ominous presence. If fear has a colour, then this is it: menacing strings of red, brown and black overlaid with occasional violent patches of light, and that clanging square of blue-grey like the trapdoor to an oubliette —

To me, it smells of Blackpool pier, and my mother, and the vitamin drink. To Emily, it must have been the first step through a looking glass into a world in which nothing was sane, nothing was certain any more.

They tried to hide the truth from her. On compassionate grounds, the experts said. To tell her the truth at such a young age, especially in such circumstances, could prove traumatic in the extreme. But we heard it through the grapevine even before it hit the stands: that Catherine White was in hospital following a failed suicide attempt. And suddenly it seemed that every reporter in the world was heading straight for Malbry, the sleepy little Northern town where everything seemed to be happening, and where the clouds were still gathering for one more cosmic thunderstorm —

11

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 20.55 on Monday, February 18

Status: restricted

Mood: drained

Listening to: Johnny Nash: ‘I Can See Clearly Now’

Clair e-mailed me again today. Apparently, she is missing me. And the fic I posted on Valentine’s Day has caused more concern than usual. She urges me to return to the fold, to discuss my feelings of alienation and to face up to my responsibilities. The tone of her e-mail is neutral enough; but I sense her disapproval. Maybe she is feeling sensitive; or maybe she feels that my fiction provokes an inappropriate response in subjects such as Toxic and Cap, whose predilection for violence needs no further encouragement.

You need to come back to Group[she says].Talking online is no substitute. I’d rather see you face to face. Besides, I’m not sure these stories of yours are really very helpful. You need to confront these exhibitionist tendencies of yours and face up to reality —

Bip! Delete message.

Now she’s gone.

That’s the beauty of e-mail, Clair. That’s why I’d rather meet online than in your little drawing-room with its nice, non-threatening prints on the walls and its scent of cheap pot-pourri. And at the writing group, you’re in charge, whereas badguysrock belongs to me. Here, I ask the questions; here I am in complete control.

No, I think I’d rather stay and pursue my interests in the comfort and seclusion of my own room. I like myself so much better online. I can express so much more. It was here, and not at that awful school, that I received my classical education. And from here I can crawl into your mind, scent out your little secrets, expose your petty weaknesses, just as you try to find out mine.

Tell me — how is Angel Blue these days? I’m sure you must have heard from him. And Chryssie? Still sick? Well, that’s too bad. Shouldn’t you be talking to her, Clair, instead of cross-examining me?

The e-mail bips. New message from Clair.

I really think we should talk soon. I know you find our discussions uncomfortable, but I’m getting really worried about you. Please e-mail me back to confirm!

Bip! Delete message.

Whoops, all gone.

If only deleting Clair were as easy.

Still, I have other concerns right now, not least how I stand with Albertine. It’s not that I hope for forgiveness. Both of us have come too far for that. But her silence is disquieting; and it is all I can do to prevent myself from calling by at her house today. Still, I don’t think that would be wise. Too many potential witnesses. Already, I suspect we are being watched. All it would take is a word to Ma, and the house of cards would come tumbling down.

And so half an hour before closing time, I found myself back at the Zebra. My masochistic side so often drives me to that place, that safe little world of which Yours Truly is definitely not a part. In passing I noticed, to my annoyance, that Terri was sitting by the door. She looked up hopefully as I came in; I did my best to ignore her. So much for discretion, I thought. Like her aunt, she is an eager observer; a gossip, in spite of her diffidence; the kind of person who stops at the scene of a car crash, not to help, but to participate in the collective misery.

Saxophone Man with the dreadlocks was sitting close by with a pot of coffee at his elbow; he gave me a look designed to convey his contempt for such as I. Maybe Bethan has mentioned me. From time to time she does, you know, in a vain attempt to prove to herself how much she now detests me. Creepy Dude, she calls me. I’d hoped for something more imaginative.

I sat down in my usual place; ordered Earl Grey, no lemon, no milk. She brought it on a flowered tray. Lingered just long enough for me to suspect her of having something on her mind, then came to a decision; sat down squarely beside me, looked into my eyes and said:

‘What the hell do you want from me?’

I poured out the tea. It was fragrant and good. I said: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Hanging around here all the time. Posting those stories. Raking things up—’

I had to laugh. ‘Me? Raking things up? I’m sorry, but when the details of Dr Peacock’s will come out, everything you do is going to be news. That isn’t my fault, Albertine.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘You chose it yourself,’ I pointed out.

She shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Albertine. I understand it all too well. The heart’s desire to be someone else, to take on a new identity. In a way I’ve done it myself —

‘I don’t want his money,’ she said. ‘I only want to be left alone.’

I grinned. ‘Hope that works out for you.’

‘You talked him into it, didn’t you?’ Her eyes were dark with anger now. ‘Working there, you had the chance. He was old, suggestible. You could have told him anything.’

‘Believe me, Bethan, if I had, don’t you think I’d have done it for myself?’ I let the thought sink in for a while. ‘’Dear old Dr Peacock. Still trying, after all these years, to make amends. Still half-convinced he could raise the dead. With Patrick gone, there was only you left. Nigel must have been over the moon—’

She looked at me. ‘Not that again. I tell you, Nigel didn’t care about that.’

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Love may be blind, but you’d have to be really stupid to think that someone like Nigel wouldn’t have cared that his girlfriend was about to inherit a fortune—’

‘You told him about Dr Peacock’s will?’

‘Who knows? I may have let something slip.’

‘When?’ Her voice was paper-thin.

‘Eighteen months ago, maybe more.’

Silence. Then: ‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘Are you trying to make me believe that this was a set-up from the start?’

‘I don’t care what you believe,’ I said. ‘But I’m guessing that he was protective. He didn’t like you living alone. He hadn’t mentioned marriage yet, but if he had, you would have said yes.’ I paused. ‘How am I doing so far?’

She fixed me with eyes the colour of murder. ‘You know, this is pointless,’ she said. ‘You’re never going to sell me this. Nigel didn’t care about money.’

‘Really? How romantic,’ I said. ‘Because according to the credit-card statements I came across when I cleared out his flat, when Nigel died he was badly in debt. To the tune of nearly ten thousand pounds — it can’t have been easy, making ends meet. Maybe he got impatient. Maybe he got desperate. Dr Peacock was old and sick, but his illness was far from terminal. He could have lived another ten years—’

Now her face was colourless. ‘Nigel didn’t kill Dr Peacock,’ she said, ‘any more than you could have done. He wouldn’t do a thing like that—’ Her voice was wavering. It hurt me to cause her such distress, but she needed to know. To understand.

‘Why couldn’t he, Bethan? He’s done it before.’

She shook her head. ‘That was different.’

‘Is that what he said?’

‘Of course it was!’

I grinned.

She stood up abruptly, sending her chair clattering. ‘Why on earth does it matter?’ she cried. ‘All that was such a long time ago, so why do you always keep bringing it up? Nigel’s dead, it’s over now, so why can’t you just leave me alone?’

Her distress was strangely moving, I thought. Her face was bleak and beautiful. The emerald stud in her eyebrow winked at me like an open eye. Suddenly, all I wanted was for her to hold me, to comfort me, to tell me the lies that everyone secretly most wants to hear.

But I had to go on. I owed it to her. ‘It’s never over, Bethan,’ I said. ‘There’s no going back from murder. Especially when it’s a relative — and Benjamin was only sixteen—’

She eyed me with hatred, and now, for the first time, I could almost believe her capable of the act that had already deleted two of Gloria Winter’s boys permanently from existence.

‘Nigel was right,’ she said at last. ‘You are a twisted bastard.’

‘That hurt my feelings, Albertine.’

‘Don’t play the innocent, Brendan.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s hardly fair,’ I said. ‘It was Nigel who murdered Benjamin. I was lucky I wasn’t there. If things had been different, it could have been me.’