by Джоан Харрис
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 of 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 maths. 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.
5
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 21.56 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restrictedMood: wistful
Listening to: Judy Garland: ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’
Well, Clair — you got your way. I finally went back to Group today. With everything going so nicely to plan, I think I can allow myself a little harmless distraction. Besides, this may be the last time —
It’s a little powder-beige box of a room with a spider plant on a shelf by the door and a picture of Angel Blue on the wall. The chairs are orange, and have been arranged in a circle so that no one feels inferior. In the middle of the circle is a small table on which there is a flowered tray with a teapot, some cups, a plate of biscuits (Bourbon creams — which I hate, by the way), some lined A4 paper, a bundle of pens and the obligatory box of tissues.
Well, don’t expect any tears from me. Blueeyedboy never cries.
‘Hello! It’s so great to see you,’ said Clair. (She always says that to everyone.) ‘How are you feeling?’
‘OK, I guess.’
I’m rather less articulate in real life than I am online. One of the many reasons that I still prefer to stay at home.
‘What happened to your face?’ she said. She’d already forgotten my fic, of course — or decided it had to be all in my head.
I shrugged. ‘I had an accident.’
She gave me a look of fake sympathy. She looks like her mother, Maureen Pike; especially now that she’s reaching that age. Forty-one, forty-two; and suddenly it all moves south, no, not to Hawaii, but to some bleaker territory, a place of dry gulches and fallen rocks and holy rolling wilderness. A far cry, indeed, from ClairDeLune, who posts erotic fic on my site and who claims to be only thirty-five. Still, as you must have guessed, who we are on badguysrock can differ wildly from our real-life selves. As long as it stays a fantasy, who really cares which role we adopt? Cowboy or Indian, black hat or white, no one makes a judgement.
And yet, these games we like to play are linked to an underlying layer of truth — an untapped stratum of desire. We are what we dream. We know what we want. We know that we are worth it —
And if what we want is wickedness? If what we want is iniquity?
Well, maybe we are worth that, too. And the wages of sin is —
‘Tea?’ Clair indicated the flowered tray.
Tea. The poor man’s Prozac. ‘No, thanks.’
Terri, who takes her tea black and always ignores the biscuits — but who will eat a whole tub of chocolate-chip ice cream the moment she gets home — patted the chair beside her.
‘Hi, Bren,’ she simpered.
‘Fuck off,’ I told her.
I ran my eyes over the rest of the group. Yes, they were all there. Half a dozen assorted headcases; plus would-be writers; soapbox queens; failed poets (is there any other kind?); all desperate for a chance to be heard. But only one of them matters to me. Bethan, with the Irish eyes, watching me so hungrily —
Today she was wearing a sleeveless grey top that showed the stars tattooed down her arms. That Irish girl of Nigel’s, Ma calls her, refusing even to mention the name. The one with all those nasty tattoos.
Nasty is my mother’s word for those things over which she has no control. My photographs. My orchids. My fic. In fact, I rather like Bethan’s tattoos, which help to hide the silvery scars that she has had since adolescence, and which criss-cross her arms like spiders’ webs. Is that what Nigel saw in her? That passion for stars that echoed his own? That furtive, perpetual sense of distress?
In spite of her garish appearance, Bethan hates to be stared at. Perhaps that’s why she hides herself beneath so many layers of deception. Tattoos, piercings, identities. As a child, she was docile and shy; mousy; almost invisible. Well, that’s Catholicism for you, I suppose. A perpetual war between repression and excess. No wonder Nigel fell for her. She was that rare individual: someone more damaged than he was.