by Джоан Харрис
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 —
The sweet curve of your back,
Your neck — my fingers walk
A dangerous line.
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.
The sweet curve of your back,
Your neck —
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 h
ow 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:
[email protected]
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 ha
ve 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 —