Blueeyedboy

by Джоан Харрис

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Greatest Hits, Number Four.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The universe owes me a murder.

  3

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:

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  Posted at: 22.03 on Saturday, February 2

  Status: public

  Mood: murderous

  Listening to: Peter Gabriel: ‘Family Snapshot’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How can red be chocolate?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Post comment:

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

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  blueeyedboy: My pleasure . . .

  4

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

  badguysrock@webjournal.com

  Posted at: 01.15 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: public

  Mood: serene

  Listening to: David Bowie: ‘Heroes’

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