by Джоан Харрис
‘Stop staring at me, Brendan,’ she said.
I wish she wouldn’t call me that. Brendan has a sour smell, like something damp in the cellar. It makes my mouth go fuzzy-felt dry, and its colour is — well, you know what it is. Bethan is no better, with its snuffy scent of church incense. I preferred her as Albertine; colourless, immaculate —
Clair intervened. ‘Now, Bethan, please. You know what we said. I’m sure Bren didn’t mean to stare.’ She gave me one of her syrupy looks. ‘And seeing as you’re here, Bren, why don’t we start with you today? I hear you’ve been going out more. That’s good.’
I gave a shrug.
‘Where have you been going, Bren?’
‘Around. You know. Out. Town.’
She gave a wide, approving smile. ‘That’s really great to hear,’ she said. ‘And I’m so glad you’re writing again. Is there anything you’d like to read for us today?’
I shrugged again.
‘Now, don’t be shy. You know we’re here to help you.’ She turned towards the rest of the group. ‘Everyone, would you please show Bren how special he is to all of us? How much we want to help him?’
Oh no. Not the fucking group hug. Anything but that. Please.
‘I do have a little something—’ I said, more to divert their attention than because of any need to confess.
Clair’s eyes were fixed upon me now, hungry and expectant. It’s the look she gets on her face sometimes when she’s telling us about Angel Blue. And I do look rather like him, of course — that, at least, was not a lie — which means, thanks to the halo effect, that Clair has a soft spot for me, and a tendency to believe what I say.
‘Really? Can we hear it?’ she said.
I looked across at Bethan once more. I used to think she hated me, and yet, perhaps she’s the only one who really understands what it is to live every moment with the dead, to speak with the dead, to sleep with the dead —
‘We’d love to hear it, Bren,’ said Clair.
‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ I said, still directing my gaze towards Bethan. She was watching intently, her blue eyes narrowed like gas flames.
‘Of course,’ said Clair. ‘Don’t we, everyone?’
Nods all around the circle. I noticed that Bethan stayed perfectly still.
‘It may be a little — edgy,’ I said. ‘Another murder, I’m afraid.’ I smiled at Clair’s expression and at the way the others leaned forward, just like pugs at feeding time. ‘Sorry about that, guys,’ I said. ‘You’re going to think that’s all I do.’
6
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy , posting on:
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Posted at: 22.31 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: public
Mood: clean
Listening to: The Four Seasons: ‘Bye Bye Baby’
He calls her Mrs Baby Blue. She thinks she is an artist. Certainly, she looks like one: her dirt-blonde hair is artistically tousled; she wears paint-spattered jumpsuits and long strings of beads and likes to burn scented candles, which help the creative process, she says (plus they get rid of the smell of paint).
Not that she has accomplished much. No, all her creative passion has gone into raising her daughter. A child is like a work of art, and this one is perfect, she tells herself; perfect and talented and good —
He has been watching her from afar. He thinks how beautiful she is, with her neat little bob and her blanched-almond skin and her little red coat with the pointed hood. She looks nothing like her mother. Everything about her is self-contained. Even her name is beautiful. A name that smells of roses.
Her mother, on the other hand, is everything he most dislikes. Inconstant; pretentious; a parasite, feeding off her daughter, living through her, stealing her life with her expectations —
Blueeyedboy despises her. He thinks of all the harm she has done — to him, to both of them — and he wonders: Would anyone really care?
All things considered, he thinks maybe not. The world would be cleaner without her.
Cleaner. What a wonderful word. In blue, it maps out what he does, what he is and what he will achieve, in one. Cleaner.
The perfect crime comes in four stages. Stage One is obvious. Stage Two takes time. Stage Three is a little harder, but by now he is getting used to it. Five murders, counting Diesel Blue, and he wonders if he can call himself a serial killer yet, or if he first needs to refine his style.
Style is important to blueeyedboy. He wants to feel there’s a poetry, a greater purpose in what he does. He would like to do something intricate: a dissection; a beheading; something dramatic, eccentric and strange. Something that will make them shiver; something that will set him apart from the rest. Most importantly, he would like to watch; to see the expression in her eyes; to have her know at last who he is —
He knows from his observation that when she is alone in the house, Mrs Baby Blue likes to take long baths. She stays in the bath for an hour at least, reading magazines — he has seen the telltale watermarks in the bundles of papers she puts out for recycling. He has seen the flicker of candles against the frosted window glass and caught the scent of her bath oil as the water rushes into the drain. Baby Blue bathtime is sacrosanct. She never answers the telephone; never even answers the door. He knows this. He has tried it. She doesn’t even lock herself in —
He waits in the garden. He watches the house. Waits for the glow of candles and the sound of water in the pipes. Waits for Mrs Baby Blue; and then, very quietly, lets himself in.
The house has been redecorated. There are new paintings on the walls — abstracts for the most part — a scarlet and brown Axminster carpet in the hall.
Axminster. Ax. Minster. A red word. What does it mean? Axe-murderer. Axe. Minster. Murder in the Cathedral. The thought distracts him for a moment, makes him feel dizzy and remote, brings that taste into his mouth again, that fruity, rotting sweetness that heralds the worst of his headaches. He concentrates on the colour blue; its soothing properties, its calm. Blue is the blanket he reaches for whenever he feels alone or afraid; he closes his eyes, clenches his fists and thinks to himself —
It’s not my fault.
When he opens them, the taste and the headache are both gone. He looks around the silent house. The layout is as he remembers it; there’s the same lurking scent of turpentine; and those china dollies, not thrown away, but under glass in the parlour, all starey-eyed and sinister among their faded ringlets and lace.
The bathroom is tiled in aqua and white. Mrs B is reclining, eyes closed, in the water. Her face is a startling turquoise — some beauty mask, he conjectures. There is a copy of Vogue on the floor. Something smells of strawberries. Mrs B favours bath bombs that leave a sparkly residue: a layer of stardust on her skin.
Stellatio: the act of unconsciously transferring bath-bomb glitter on to another person without their knowledge or consent.
Stellata: the tiny fragments of sparkly stuff that find their way into his hair, his skin; three months later, he’s still finding those bright flecks around the house, signalling his guilt in Morse code.
He watches her in silence. He could do it now, he tells himself; but sometimes the urge to be seen is too strong; and he wants to see the look in her eyes. He lingers for a moment; and then, some sense alerts her to him. She opens her eyes — for a moment there is no shock at all, just a wide, blank amazement, like that of those dollies in the hall — and then she is sitting up, a surge of water pulling at her, making her heavy, making her slow, and the smell of strawberries is suddenly overwhelming, and the glittery water splashes his face, and he is leaning into the bathtub, and she’s punching at him with her helpless fists, and he grabs her by her soapy hair and pushes her under the surface.
It is surprisingly easy. Even so, he dislikes the mess. The woman is covered with glittery stuff that transfers on to his skin. The scent of synthetic strawberry intensifies. She heaves and struggles beneath his weight, but gravit
y is against her, and the weight of the water holds her down.
He waits for several minutes, thinking of those pink wafers in the tins of Family Circle, and another scent emerges from the lightning chain of words — Wafer. Communion. Holy Ghost. He allows himself to relax; gives his breathing time to slow down, then carefully, methodically, he goes about his housework.
No prints will be found at the scene — he is wearing latex gloves, and has politely removed his shoes in the hall, like a good little boy on a visit. He checks the body. It looks OK. He mops the spilled water from the bathroom floor and leaves the candles burning.
Now he strips off his wet shirt and jeans, balls them up in his gym bag, puts on the clean clothes he has brought. He leaves the house as he found it — takes the wet clothes home with him and puts them in the washing machine.
There, he thinks. All gone.
He waits for discovery — no one comes. He has managed it again. But this time, he feels no euphoria. In fact he feels a sense of loss; and that harsh and cuprous dead-vegetable taste, so like that of the vitamin drink, creeps into his throat and fills his mouth, making him gag and grimace.
Why is this one different? he thinks. Why should he feel her absence now, when everything is so close to completion, and why should he feel he has thrown away — to use his Ma’s habitual phrase — the baby with the bath water? 322
Post comment:
ClairDeLune: Thank you for this, blueeyedboy. It was wonderful to hear you read this in Group. I hope you won’t leave it so long next time! Remember we’re all there for you!
chrysalisbaby: wish i could have heard U read
Captainbunnykiller: Bitchin’ — LOL!
Toxic69: This is better than sex, man. Still, if you could find your way to writing a bit of both, some day —
7
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 23.59 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restricted
Mood: lonely
Listening to: Motorhead: ‘The Ace Of Spades’
Well, of course, one has to allow for poetic licence. But sometimes fiction is better than life. Maybe that’s how it should have been. Murder is murder — be it by poison, by proxy, by drowning or by the thousand paper-cuts of the Press. Murder is murder, guilt is guilt, and under the fic beats a telltale truth as red and bloody as a heart. Because murder changes everyone — victim, culprit, witness, suspect — in so many unexpected ways. It’s a Trojan, which infects the soul, lying dormant for months and years, stealing secrets, severing links, corrupting memories and worse, and finally emerging at last in a system-wide orgy of destruction.
No, I don’t feel any remorse. Not for Catherine’s death, at least. It was instinct that led me to act as I did; the instinct of a baby bird struggling for survival. Ma’s response, too, was instinctive. I was, after all, the only child. I had to succeed, to be the best; discretion was no longer an option. I’d accepted Ben’s inheritance. I read his books. I wore his clothes. And when the Peacock scandal broke, I told my brother’s story — not as it really happened, of course, but how Ma had imagined it, revealing my brother once and for all as the saint, the victim, the star of the show —
Yes, I do feel sorry for that. Dr Peacock had been kind to me. But I had no choice. You know that, right? To refuse would have been unthinkable; I was already caught in the bottle trap, a trap of my own making, and I was fighting for my life by then, the life I’d stolen from Benjamin.
You understand, Albertine. You took a life from Emily. Not that I hold it against you. Quite the opposite, in fact. A person who knows how to take a life can always take another. And as I think I said before, what really counts — in murder, as in all affairs of the heart — is not so much knowledge as desire.
Well — may I still call you Albertine?Bethan never suited you. But the roses that grew up your garden wall — Albertine, with their wistful scent — were just the same variety as the ones that grew at the Mansion. I suppose I must have told you that. You always paid attention. Little Bethan Brannigan, with her bobbed brown hair and those slate-blue eyes. You lived next door to Emily, and in a certain kind of light you could almost have been her sister. You might even have been a friend to her, a child of her own age to play with.
But Mrs White was a terrible snob. She despised Mrs Brannigan, with her rented house and her Irish twang and suspiciously absent husband. She worked at the local primary school — in fact, she’d once taught my brother, who dubbed her Mrs Catholic Blue, and poured contempt on her beliefs. And though Patrick White was more tolerant than either Benjamin or Ma, Catherine kept Emily well away from the Irish girl and her family.
But you liked to watch her, didn’t you? The little blind girl from over the wall who played the piano so beautifully; who had everything you didn’t have, who had tutors and presents and visitors and who never had to go to school? And when I first spoke to you, you were shy; a little suspicious, at least at first, then flattered at the attention. You accepted my gifts first with puzzlement, then finally with gratitude.
Best of all, you never judged me. You never cared that I was fat. You never cared that I stammered, or thought of me as second-rate. You never asked a thing of me, or expected me to be someone else. I was the brother you’d never had. You were the little sister. And it never once occurred to you that you were just an excuse, a stooge; that the main attraction was somewhere else —
Well, now you know how I felt. We don’t always get what we want in life. I had Ben, you had Emily; both of us on the sidelines; extras; substitutes for the real thing. Still, I became quite fond of you. Oh, not in the way I loved Emily, the little sister I should have had. But your innocent devotion was something I’d never encountered before. It’s true that I was nearly twice your age; but you had a certain quality. You were engaging, obedient. You were unusually bright. And, of course, you desperately longed to be whatever it was that I wanted of you —
Oh, please. Don’t be disgusting. What kind of a pervert do you take me for? I liked to be with you, that was all, as I liked being close to Emily. Your mother never noticed me, and Mrs White, who knew who I was, never tried to intervene. On weekdays I’d call round after school, before your mother came home from work, and at weekends I’d meet you somewhere, either at the playground on Abbey Road or at the end of your garden, where we were less likely to be seen, and we’d talk about your day and mine; I’d give you sweets and chocolates, and I’d tell you stories about my Ma, my brothers, myself and Emily.
You were an excellent listener. In fact, I sometimes forgot your age and spoke to you as an equal. I told you about my condition — my gift. I showed you my cuts and bruises. I told you about Dr Peacock, and all the tests he’d performed on me before he chose my brother. I showed you some of my photographs, and confessed to you — as I could not to Ma — that all I’d ever wanted in life was to fly as far as Hawaii.
Poor little lonely girl. Who else did you have but me? Who else was there in your life? A working mother, an absent father, no grandparents, no neighbours, no friends. Except for Yours Truly, what did you have? And what wouldn’t you have done for me?
Don’t ever let them tell you that an eight-year-old child can’t feel this way. Those pre-adolescent years are filled with anguish and revolt. Adults try to forget this; to fool themselves into thinking that children feel less strongly than they; that love comes later, with puberty, a kind of compensation for the loss of a state of grace —
Love? Well, yes. There are so many kinds. There’s eros: simplest and most transient of all. There’s philia: friendship; loyalty. There’s storge: the affection a child gives its parents. There’s thelema: the desire to perform. Then there’s agape: platonic love; for a friend; for a world; love for a stranger you’ve never met; the love of all humanity.
But even the Greeks didn’t know everything. Love is like snow: there are so many words, all unique and untranslatable. Is there a word for the love you feel for someone you’ve
hated all your life? Or the love for something that makes you sick? Or that sweet and aching tenderness for the one you’re going to kill?
Please believe me, Albertine. I’m sorry for all that happened to you. I never wanted you to be hurt. But madness is catching, isn’t it? Like love, it believes the impossible. Moves mountains; deals in eternity; sometimes even raises the dead.
You asked me what I wanted of you. Why I couldn’t just leave it alone. Well, Albertine, here it is. You are going to do for me what I can never do for myself. The single act that can set me free. The act I’ve been planning for over twenty years. An act I could never carry out, but which you could perform so easily —
Pick a card. Any card.
The trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his own choice, instead of the one that was chosen for him. Any card. My card. Which happens to be —
Haven’t you guessed?
Then pick a card, Albertine.
8
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.
Posted at: 23.32 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restricted
Mood: tense
He’s playing games with me, of course. That’s what blueeyedboy does best. We’ve played so many games, he and I, that the line between truth and fiction has become permanently blurred. I ought to hate him, and yet I know that whatever he is, whatever he does, I am in part responsible.
Why is he doing this to me? What does he hope to achieve this time? Everyone in this story is dead — Catherine; Daddy; Dr Peacock; Ben; Nigel, and, most importantly, Emily. And yet as he read his story out loud I felt my throat begin to constrict, my nerves to jangle, my head to spin, and soon the chords of the Berlioz would start to tighten in my mind —