Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  It’s squeamishness, his mother says. He feels things more than the others do.

  Perhaps he does, thinks Brendan Brown. Perhaps he feels things differently. Because if he watches someone in pain, it makes him so uncomfortable that sometimes he is physically sick, and he cries in frightened confusion at the things the images make him feel –

  His brother in blue is aware of this, and makes him watch his experiments with flies and wasps, and then with mice; shows him pictures to make him squirm. Dr Peacock calls it mirror-touch synaesthesia, and it presents – in his case, at least – as a kind of pathological sensitivity, in which the optical part of the brain somehow mirrors the physical, so that he can experience what others feel – be it a touch, or a taste, or a blow – as clearly as if it were done to himself.

  His brother in black despises him, scorns him for his weakness. Even his mother ignores him now: the middle child, the quiet one, caught between Nigel, the black sheep, and Benjamin, the blue-eyed boy –

  Brendan hates his brothers. He hates the way they make him feel. One is angry all the time, the other smug and contemptuous. And Brendan feels for them – too much – whether or not he wants to. They itch; he wants to scratch. They bleed; and Brendan obediently bleeds for them. Truth told, it isn’t empathy. It’s only a mindless physical response to a series of visual stimuli. He wouldn’t care if they both died – as long as they did it far away, where he didn’t have to watch it.

  Sometimes, when he’s alone, he reads. Slowly at first, and in private: books about travel and photography; poems and plays; short stories, novels and dictionaries. The printed word is different from what he sees around him. In his mind, the action unfolds without his body’s involvement. He reads in the cellar late at night by the light of the bare bulb; the cellar that, lacking a room of his own, he has secretly converted into a darkroom. Here he reads books that his teachers wouldn’t believe he had the wit to understand; books that, if his mates at school were to catch him reading, would make him a target for every joke, for every bully that came along.

  But here, in his darkroom, he feels safe; there’s no one here to laugh at him when he follows the words with his finger. No one to call him retarded when he reads the words aloud. No, this is Brendan’s private place. Here he can do as he pleases. And sometimes, when he’s alone, he has dreams. Dreams of dressing in something other than brown, of having people notice him, of showing his true colours.

  But that’s the problem, isn’t it? All his life he has been Brendan Brown; doomed to be dull, to be stupid. In fact, he was never stupid. He simply hid it very well. At school, he did the minimum work, to protect himself from ridicule. At home, he has always pretended to be stolid and unimaginative. He knows that he is safer that way, now that Ben has taken his place, has robbed him of Ma’s affection, has swallowed him, as he himself swallowed Mal, in the desperate struggle for dominance –

  It isn’t fair, thinks Brendan Brown. He, too, has blue eyes. He, too, has special skills. His shyness and his stammer leads them all to assume that he is inarticulate. But words have tremendous power, he knows. He wants to learn how to handle them. And he is good with computers. He knows how to process information. He is fighting his dyslexia with the aid of a special programme. Later, under cover of his part-time job at the fast-food place, he joins a creative-writing class. He isn’t very good at first, but he works hard; he wants to learn. Words and their meanings fascinate him. He wants to know more about them. He wants to strip the language down to the very motherboard.

  Most importantly, he is discreet. Discreet and very patient. To nail his colours to the mast would be to declare his intentions. Brendan Brown knows better than this. Brendan values camouflage. That is why he has survived this far. By blending into the background; by letting other people shine; by standing on the sidelines to watch while the opposition destroys itself –

  Sun Szu says in The Art Of War: All warfare is based on deception. Well, if there’s anything our boy knows, it’s how to deceive and obfuscate.

  Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

  He chooses his moment carefully. He has never been impulsive. Unlike Nigel, who could always be relied upon to act first and think later (if he thought at all), responding to triggers so obvious that even a child could have played him –

  If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.

  Easily done, where Nigel is concerned. A well-placed word could do it. In this case it leads to violence; to a chain reaction that no one can stop and which ends with the death of his brother in blue and the arrest of his brother in black, and Badass Brendan, free of them both and whiter than the driven snow –

  Item One: a black Moleskine notebook.

  Item Two: some photographs of his brother in black cavorting with Tricia Goldblum, aka Mrs Electric Blue – some of them nicely intimate, taken with a long lens from the back of the lady’s garden and developed in stealth in the darkroom, which no one, not even Ma, knows about –

  Put them both together, like nitrogen and glycerine, and –

  Wham!

  In fact, it was almost too easy. People are so predictable. Nigel was especially, with his moods and his violent temper. Thanks to the reverse-halo effect (Nigel always hated Ben), all our hero had to do was to wind him up and put him in place, and the rest was a foregone conclusion. A casual word in Nigel’s ear, suggesting that Ben was spying on him; the mention of a secret cache; then planting the evidence for Nigel to find under his brother’s mattress, and after that the only thing our boy had to do was to remove himself from the premises while the sordid business of murder unfurled.

  Ben denied all knowledge, of course. That was the fatal mistake. Brendan knew from experience that the only way to avoid serious hurt is to confess to the crime immediately, even when you’re innocent. He’d learnt that lesson early on – thereby earning himself the convenient reputation of being a hopeless liar, whilst taking the blame for a number of things for which he was not responsible. In any case, Ben had no time to explain. Nigel’s first blow cracked his skull. After that – well, suffice it to say that Benjamin never stood a chance.

  Of course, our hero wasn’t there. Like Macavity, the Mystery Cat, he has mastered the difficult technique of eclipsing himself from unpleasantness. It was Brendan’s Ma who found her son, who called the police and the ambulance, and then who kept watch at the hospital, and who never cried, not even once, not even when they told her that the damage was irreversible, that Benjamin would never wake up –

  Manslaughter, they called it.

  Interesting word – man’s laughter – coloured in shades of lightning-blue and scented with sage and violet. Yes, he sees Ben’s colours now. After all, he took his place. It all belongs to Brendan now – his gift; his future; his colours.

  It took a little time to adjust. At first our hero was sick for days. His stomach felt like a bottomless pit; his head ached so much that he thought he would die. In one sense, he feels he deserved it. Another part of him grins inside. It’s like an evil magic trick. He is innocent of any crime, and yet secretly guilty of murder.

  But something is missing nevertheless. Violence is still beyond him. Which is somewhat unfortunate, given the extent of his rage. Without this poison gift, he thinks, anything would be possible. His thoughts are clear and objective. He has no conscience to trouble him. The most terrible things are in his mind, only a blink away from execution. But his body rejects the scenario. Only in fic can he act with impunity. Only then can he be truly free. In life, that surge of victory must always be paid for in the end; paid for in sickness and suffering, just as bad thoughts must be paid for in full –

  She still has that piece of electrical cord. Of course, she doesn’t use it now. Instead she uses her fists; her feet; she knows that he will never fight back. But he dreams o
f that piece of electrical cord, and of the china dogs that gape so vapidly from the glass case. The cord would fit snugly around her throat six or seven times at least; after which, the glass case and the china dogs wouldn’t stand a fucking chance –

  The thought makes him suddenly edgy again. It brings a taste to the back of his throat. It’s a taste he ought to know by now: a brackish taste that makes him gag; that makes his mouth go starchy with fear and his heart lurch like a landed fish.

  A voice from downstairs. ‘Who’s there?’ she calls.

  He gives a sigh. ‘It’s me, Ma.’

  ‘What are you doing? It’s time for your drink.’

  He switches off the computer and reaches for his headphones. He likes to listen to music. It gives a different context to things. He wears his iPod all the time, and he has long since mastered the art of seeming to listen to what she says, while in his head something else is playing, the secret soundtrack to his life.

  He goes downstairs. ‘What’s that, Ma?’

  He watches her mouth moving soundlessly. In his head, the Man in Black sings in a voice so old and broken that he might already be dead. And Brendan feels so empty inside, consumed by such an emptiness, a craving that nothing can satisfy – not food, not love, not murder – like the snake that set out to swallow the world, and ended up by swallowing itself.

  And he knows, deep down, that his time has come. Time to take his medicine. Time to do what he has longed to do for the past forty years – practically all of his life. To nail his colours to the mast and to turn and face his enemy. What has he got to lose, after all? His vitamin drink? His empire of dirt?

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  3

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

  Posted at: 00.15 on Tuesday, February 19

  Status: restricted

  Mood: malcontent

  Listening to: Cher: ‘Just Like Jesse James’

  So that’s how a mirror-touch synaesthete got away with murder. A neat trick, you have to admit, which I carried off with my usual flair. Mirrors are very versatile. You can levitate; make things disappear; put swords through the naked lady. Yes, sometimes there are headaches. But blueeyedboy has helped me with that. Didn’t I say I preferred myself when I was writing as someone else? Blueeyedboy has no empathy. He rarely feels for anyone. His cold, dispassionate view of the world is a welcome foil for my tenderness.

  Tenderness? I hear you say. Well, yes. I’m very sensitive. A mirror-touch synaesthete feels everything he witnesses. As a boy, it took me some time to realize that others did not function this way. Until Dr Peacock arrived on the scene, I’d assumed I was perfectly normal. These things sometimes run in families, I’m told; though even in identical twins the way in which the condition manifests itself is often completely different.

  In any case, my brother Ben had no wish to share the limelight. The first time we went to the Mansion, he warned me that if I gave as much as a hint to Dr Peacock that I was not the everyday citizen, the vanilla flavour I seemed to be, then there would be consequences of the most unpleasant kind. At first, I defied the warning. If only because of that sepia print, the picture of Hawaii, and the way Dr Peacock spoke to me, and the thought that I might be remarkable –

  I stood my ground for two whole weeks. Nigel was openly scornful – as if Brendan Brown could do anything – and Benjamin watched me resentfully, awaiting his chance to take me down. Even then, he was devious. A casual word or two to Ma; a hint that I was jealous of him; more hints that I was faking my gift and simply copying my brother.

  Face it: I never had a chance. I was fat and ungainly; dyslexic; a joke; a stutterer; a disaster at school. Even my eyes were that chilly blue-grey whereas Ben’s were a luminous, summery shade that made people want to love him. Of course they believed him. Why wouldn’t they?

  With the help of the piece of electrical cord, Ma extracted a full confession. In a way I think we were both relieved. I’d known I couldn’t compete with Ben. And as for Ma – she’d known from the start; she’d known I couldn’t be special. How dare I try to discredit Ben? How dare I tell such lies to her? I snivelled and howled my apologies while my brother watched with a smile on his face, and after that, all it took was the threat of a complaint to Ma to make me his obedient slave.

  That was the last time I tried to tell anyone about my gift. Once more, Ben had eclipsed me. I tried to go back to being Brendan Brown, safely less-than-average. But something in Ma had shifted. Perhaps it was the reverse-halo effect. Perhaps the Emily White affair. In any case, from that moment forth, I became the whipping-boy, the butt of her frustration. When Dr Peacock stopped working with Ben, I found that she held me somehow to blame. The year Ben failed at St Oswald’s, I was the one who was punished – and yes, I had been planning to drop out of school, but both of us knew that if Ben had done well, then no one would have thought twice about me.

  Food became my great escape – food, and later, Emily. I ate, not out of hunger or greed, but to cushion myself against a world where everything was dangerous; where every word was a false friend; where even to watch TV was a risk, and every scene a sharp edge just waiting for me to run into it.

  Nowadays, I’ve learnt to cope. Music helps a little; and fic; and now, thanks to the Internet, I have found a means to enjoy my gift. The world online is a medium for every possible kind of porn. And of course, for a mirror-touch synaesthete, that’s as good as the real thing. A touch, a kiss, and sometimes I can almost forget that it isn’t me on that screen at all, that I am just an observer, a spy, and that the real action is going on somewhere else.

  Medium. What an interesting word. It describes at the same time what I was – the middle child, the average Joe – and what I am now, a speaker in tongues, a living mouthpiece for the dead.

  They say you only have one life. Look online, and you’ll see that’s not true. Try Googling your name one day, and see how many others share it. All those people who might have been you: the charity case; the sportsman; the almost-famous actor; the one on Death Row; the celebrity chef; the one who shares your birthday – all of them shadows of what might have been if things had been slightly different.

  Well, I had the chance to be different. To step out of my own life and into one of my shadows. Wouldn’t anyone do the same? Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?

  4

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

  Posted at: 01.04 on Tuesday, February 19

  Status: restricted

  Mood: reflective

  Listening to: Sally Oldfield: ‘Mirrors’

  Of course, Ma grieved for Benjamin. In silence, at first – an ominous calm that at first I took for acceptance. Then came the other symptoms; the rage; the forays into insanity. I’d hear her in the middle of the night, dusting the china dogs downstairs or simply walking around the house.

  Sometimes she sobbed: It wasn’t your fault. Sometimes she mistook me for my brother, or ranted at me for my failures. Sometimes she screamed: It should have been you! Sometimes she woke me in the night, sobbing – Oh B.B, I dreamed you’d died – and it took me some time to understand that we were interchangeable, and that Benjamin Blue and blueeyedboy were often, to Ma, one and the same –

  Then came the fallout. Inevitably. After the shock came the backlash, and suddenly I was the target once more for all kinds of expectations. With both of my brothers gone from the scene, my role had altered drastically. I was now Ma’s blue-eyed boy. I was now her only hope. And she felt that I owed it to her to try again, to go back to school; perhaps to study medicine – to do all the things that he should have done, and that only I could now achieve.

  At first I tried to defend myself. I wasn’t cut out for medicine. I’d failed every science subject at Sunnybank Park, and I’d barely scraped through O-level mat
hs. But Ma was having none of it. I had a responsibility. I’d been lazy and slack for far too long; now it was time for me to change . . .

  Well, you know what happened then. I fell mysteriously sick. My belly was filled with writhing snakes, pouring their venom into my guts. By the end of it all, I’d lost so much weight that I looked like a clown in my old clothes. I flinched at loud noises, cringed at bright lights. And sometimes I barely remembered the terrible, marvellous thing that I’d done, or where Ben finished and Brendan began –

  Well, that’s only natural, isn’t it? My memories are so nebulous, sneakily substituting second-hand smoke into this game of mirrors. I was feverish; I was in pain; I don’t know what I said to her. I don’t remember anything – lies, confessions, promises – but when I was fully recovered, and I left my bed for the first time, I knew that something about me had changed. I was no longer Brendan Brown, but something else entirely. And, truth be told, I no longer knew with any kind of certainty whether I had swallowed Ben, or whether he had swallowed me –

  Of course I don’t believe in ghosts. I scarcely believe in the living. And yet, that’s just what I became, a shadow of my brother. When the Emily scandal broke, I reinvented his story. I already had his gift, of course, thanks to my own condition. Which made it so much easier to make them believe that I was telling the truth.

  I started to wear Ben’s colour, his clothes. At first just for practicality’s sake, because my own clothes were too big. I didn’t wear blue all the time. A sweatshirt here, a T-shirt there. Ma didn’t seem to notice. The scandal surrounding Emily White had made me into a hero; people bought me drinks in pubs; girls suddenly found me attractive. I’d started at Malbry College that term. I let Ma believe I was studying medicine. My teenage skin had finally cleared; I’d even lost my stammer. Best of all, I was still losing weight. With my brothers gone, I seemed to have lost that ravenous need to consume, to collect, to swallow everything in sight. What started with Mal had ended with Ben. At last, my craving was satisfied.