The Blue Book

by A. L. Kennedy

  And after I have written and felt sick, I will seal up my failure in a hotel envelope and I’ll need to be inside with it and sent to meet her – to let her lift me, hold me – but instead I will tear up my effort, throw it away. Might as well speak to the dead.

  Might as well be truthful and say I’m the dead speaking – writing.

  I can say anything – she won’t hear.

  Then I will stare at the mirror and what it shows of a sepiaed spilling light and wallpaper that’s turned alien, that seems older than it should. I will think I could be peering back into the 1950s – no, the 1940s, somewhere nicotine-stained and harsh and accustomed to loss. It’s not that I’m delusional, I am simply struck by how appropriate the feel of the forties could be – that they will assist me in the work – and I have to work, have only the work and will be the work and will love the work and the work will not leave me or find me inadequate, insignificant. I will be busy with drinking my own blood and I will have nothing because nothing lasts and I will last – I will be busy to death – I will be busy with death – I will be busy.

  And tonight I will shave – no more beard, or moustache – short back and sides in the morning from somewhere traditional and cheap and begin improvising clothes that will fix me in a sympathetic decade – a time before I met her, before I was born, a time for the dead.

  I will be him: the man who could stand at the mirror, step into it and disappear.

  Elizabeth Caroline Barber is thinking – this is my birthday and so I should have what I like, that should be what happens, not this, which is what my dad likes, which is what my dad always likes – and my mum lets him always get away with it: they are not grown up.

  Elizabeth is ten which is double figures, which means she is grown up. Having double figures makes you grown up and only great efforts and acts of will can overturn your natural state into something that’s messy and less.

  Both her parents – but especially her dad – make constant efforts and acts of will.

  Today, in all this unrequested crowd – her dad’s too many guests – her dad is the one with the shiniest, curliest hair – black, black, black – and the long arms – also darkfurry and curly – and the mildly hitched up shoulders, as if he was hung on a peg by the back of his jacket and left to hang for a long while and has never quite got used to being freed – as if he expects it to happen again.

  Her dad is the man in a black suit.

  One of the men in a black suit.

  The living room is currently stifled with black-suited men: they grin and lean and bump against each other, they wave and gesture, scratch their ears, pat their pockets, cough, they are all over the furniture like a murmuring infestation. Amongst them are rainbow-coloured shirts, or wild ties, big cufflinks, startling waistcoats, garish and elongated shoes – like every time they step, they’re squeezing out something ahead of them from their feet, can’t help it, here it comes – like they’re walking on big shouts, embarrassing wails, or on being stupid – yes, like they’re walking two planks made of being stupid, stepping out along stupid and it’s holding them up – and they have striped socks, or checked socks, or idiot socks, or no socks, or too-short trousers, or turned-up trousers, or on-purposely odd-shaped trousers and their handkerchiefs are mad with colours, luminous, and their hats, should they possess hats, have been borrowed from cartoon characters, or old films.

  In short, if someone now takes a photograph – and her father may at any moment, he loves snapshots – then Elizabeth will look as if she’s caught inside a tasteless funeral, a bizarre wake: perhaps one to commemorate a clown. It will seem to have been a quite happy occasion – as if the deceased was not well loved. She will, in fact, appear to have been the only person there who was upset.

  Because it’s her birthday.

  But not her birthday – that’s been stolen, as usual.

  But here Beth is, dressed for celebration in her neat red tartan dress with the scratchy white lace at the front and wearing her new TickytickyTimex watch and standing on a small wooden box which is painted blue and with silver stars, and she is surrounded by her father’s friends and not one of her own – she could have invited a few, but she didn’t want to – and her hands are by her sides and she isn’t to close her eyes and isn’t to stare, she is simply to look about in the way anybody might at the men who loll and gesture with studied carelessness, who occasionally giggle, or sip drinks while they sing – as raggedly as ever – ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ over and over and over.

  Beth is not a Fellow – a fellow is a man.

  Beth is not jolly good – jolly good people do what their parents want – and she is only halfway to that. She is standing on the box, but she isn’t really joining in and enjoying yourself – she isn’t properly smiling and whenever her eyes meet her father’s she can see that he wants her, needs her, to be happy and that she is spoiling his treat. This makes her sad, which he notices and so he gets sadder.

  Her dad – Mr Barber – Michael Barber – everybody calls me Cloudy, Cloudy Barber, that’ll do fine – has arranged the same treat for her every year she can remember, which is seven years. What he did when she was very small, she has no idea, but he has certainly given her this for at least seven birthdays – this silliness for her with the blacksuitmen.

  Since 11.26 this morning when Elizabeth grew up, passed ten, she needn’t want this any more, but still she gets it – here it all is: for her, to her, at her. They are singing and grinning at her, aiming themselves too much in one direction – which is her direction – and, while they do, they pass her money. She does not understand precisely how this passing is achieved, but knows that the coins and even folded notes – the warm postal orders – do not arrive by magic. The blacksuitmen are, like her father, magicians – professional magicians – but they don’t have the kind of magic she reads about, the sort which is to do with wizards and talking animals and wonders. Her presents appear by the kind of magic which is her father’s job and which is for children – strangers’ children and their birthday parties, or sometimes grown-ups who are having weddings – it’s a magic which makes him tired and sometimes annoyed when she interrupts him practising things that are secrets. Her father’s magic is unmagical.

  Although once, really once, it did amaze her – did terrify. She was sitting in the bath and little – five, or six – and she could hear her father’s walking up to the door and then his shout, ‘And now – let there be no light at all!’ After which there was a brief, dense pause and then the sound of him clapping – a sound like her nice, warm, aftershavey dad clapping his hands – and after that it was, indeed, absolutely and violently dark.

  And she had seen that the bathroom door was shut, she had closed it herself when she came inside and pulled the bolt across – she likes her privacy, Beth, and to never have draughts, and has drawn the bolt across for as long as she’s known how to manage it without letting her fingers get nipped – and she plans, when she is older, to own many locked and bolted doors with secrets packed behind them: she will think up secrets. But this was not her secret, this was the door safe shut and her father not touching it, not opening it, and the light switch being in here with her – on her side of the door – but the light still going out – magic – the darkness coming – magic – the room dropping into magic – and it was winter, an evening in November and deep night outside and she was alone in her bath of suddenly thickened water, the threat of it against her – magic.

  And she had seen it: the real magic, like in books. She had seen, honestly seen, her father’s hand reaching in right through the door – like a horrible grey dream thing – this pale and unnatural hand pressed through the wood of the door and reaching the light switch and – click – off it went.

  Except there was no click, just the pause and then her dad’s hands together – normal, normal, normal hands to hold and know and mend things – her dad’s palms t
ogether and safe outside the bathroom – clap – and then her voice being very loud and screaming and echoes and splashes and this choke of wet lostness reaching into her and through her.

  And then the light came back.

  Good.

  No signs of how.

  Just a different magic – the kind to restore things, save them when they’re lost.

  Good.

  And the door was still bolted and there was still no noise except her own, only then her dad’s voice was there also, sounding worried and gentle beyond the bathroom and she couldn’t hear his exact words, because of the din of herself, how it bounced against the tiles, and her mum audible next, joining her father with footfalls and then shouting, not letting him get away with anything, not this time.

  Their fight coaxed Beth into quietness – a dreadful, large silence – before both of them called and promised and argued and reassured her up out of the bath and past the haunted light switch and close to the door frame. They spoke to her until she could believe that she was brave and pull back the bolt – her fingers shivering and the metal pinching her for spite: when one thing goes wrong, then all things go wrong – and she opened the door for them and they fell in at her and half tumbled and half lifted her into this thump of a hug.

  Shaking and dripping with magic – this marvellous, terrible thing.

  Her dad rushed a towel around her – always quick as snap when her mother is unhappy with him and means it, always cowed and puzzled and, somewhere, faintly pleased.

  Beth was put into fresh pyjamas – something healing about fresh pyjamas, not that she was wounded, not exactly. And she was given hot chocolate and then brushed her teeth with her mum in the bathroom in case it was scary to be there and then she went to bed – her bedroom door open and not with a bolt even attached and no secrets inside it except that she sometimes listened to the old wireless under her covers, went to sleep with the mewling and whispers of static between stations, trying to make a new language out of them – and this wasn’t a secret: everyone knew.

  She sat up in bed feeling not frightened – more happy, racing, sleepless. She had survived and now she wanted to survive again, be proved impregnable. Beyond her in the corridor she could hear her father saying, ‘I thought she’d like it . . .’

  Beth did like it. Afterwards, she loved it. She wanted more.

  ‘Idiot.’ Her mother’s voice angry and slightly amused, which was confusing, but also familiar and to do with who her parents were.

  Because of her parents, Beth will never quite understand arguments – the first she saw being so pleasant, a form of flirting: raised voices and helpless glances, touches at arms and shoulders, lips trying not to part, to give themselves away. Her mother and father offered each other rows as a concentrated kind of affection. Their silences were the bad thing – the infrequent, but very bad thing. When they made each other sad, there were no words.

  ‘I thought . . .’ Her father shuffling his feet in the corridor, wriggling – she could tell – with small pleasures, as well as concern, ‘Well, she might have . . . I thought.’

  ‘You didn’t think. Because you’re an idiot.’ Her mother pauses. ‘Go in and make it all right . . .’ This is a voice which Beth knows she is meant to hear and believe. ‘You’re the magician – you can make it all right.’ And then softer, but not so soft as to disappear, ‘Or you’ll be dealing with it when she wakes up full of nightmares for a month.’

  ‘It’ll not be a month.’

  ‘How do you know? Anyway – you’ll be the one who copes, because I’ll be asleep. You’re the one who gets the lie-ins in the morning, the bloody night owl . . .’

  ‘Because of my not-proper-job . . .’

  ‘Because of your not-proper-job. Slacker.’ Her voice with a grin underneath it.

  ‘Always wanted to be a kept man.’ His, too.

  ‘Don’t know if I will keep you. Might throw you back . . .’ And a noise which was the noise of them kissing – her mum and dad kissing – which they did a lot, more than other mums and dads. It was moderately shaming. ‘What on earth did you expect, Mike?’

  ‘That it would be . . .’

  And Beth will never know if he was going to say fun or beautiful or horrifying because he doesn’t finish the sentence, only makes another kissnoise and walks into her room straight afterwards and sits on the edge of her bed – give, give, give in the mattress – the feel she will always love, of somebody’s weight on her bed, such a kind and simple thing – and he tells her, ‘I’m so sorry, wee button. Really.’ And he holds her hand, eyes focused on the floor. He does mainly look away, her dad – unless it’s for something important. He’s paying attention, maybe too much attention, so that he can’t always look, except in darts and flinches. ‘Really. Your mum’s going to kill me later.’ And then he swallows loudly and stares as if he has made another bad mistake, while also smiling. ‘A bit – she’ll kill me a bit. She won’t really kill me dead. She is cross, though. With me. Not you.’ And he peers at her. ‘You all right, Beth?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She likes him being sorry and so is stern.

  ‘Sure, love?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  And his face, by this time, is pained, fretting, and so she relents, squeezes his fingers, hugs his arm.

  ‘Oh, good. Glad you’re OK.’ Relief lets him gaze away again and explain, ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. Not that much. Not much at all.’ And there’s this purr in under his voice, this bedtime story purr, that makes an ease, a peace, around them. ‘And the light will serve you now, I’ve told it and I’ve sprinkled it with magic powder and –’ he opens his fingers and wriggles them so that sparkles of white and green and blue fall to the coverlet and shine – ‘you get some too. And it’s all right.’ Beth knows the magic powder is out of a jar: she has gone with him to the special shop that sells it. The powder doesn’t do anything, is just pretty. It’s his voice that lets her rest. ‘I didn’t mean you to get a big scare.’ She expects the music of him will be for ever, permanent in her life – a sound to stroke in her spine, to be home, to be there, reliable. ‘Not a big bad one. Sorry.’ It will be wrong beyond all understanding if this isn’t true.

  When Beth is an adult full of PIN numbers and passwords and information and memories and preferences and doubts, then she won’t often consider how frightened she was in the bathroom, or how she saw what wasn’t there to explain her terror. She conjured a ghost: her father’s hand, but not her father’s: the way he would be if he were different, wrongly different, reaching in from somewhere else. And she won’t especially remember hoping for other shocks, further plummets into strangeness which never came – or being kissed by her father night-night – doesn’t sound the way it does when he kisses her mother – and rolling over while his weight on the side of the mattress stayed, guarded, kept the blankets tight.

  It will be years before one day she thinks, out of nowhere: Of course: the fuse box was in the cupboard beside the bathroom. He just took out the fuse. Nothing to it. I bet he had it planned for ages, waiting until I’d be old enough so I’d be impressed, or pleased, or something – not freak out. And I disappointed. I made it a much better, much worse trick. I made it the start of an appetite.

  Standing on a silly box – standing just over the edge of ten years – she knows nothing about her adult self: the strains and lines and likings of who she will be are settling quietly like sediment where she can’t see – later there will be fractures, extraordinary heats and metamorphoses, but she currently takes no interest, can predict none of them. She is simply miserable and glad that her friends aren’t here. She has never let them watch the blacksuitmen and their work which moves in the room like a series of bubbles, warmths that ripple towards her and fluster. If she were to be honest about them, she would say the men irritate her because what they do is close to being still pleasant, almost appropriate, it could drag her back
to being a baby, just a girl. Once she is older, she will be able to break it down into a series of benevolent deceptions: loading, ditching, passing, palming, misdirecting – an odd display of love. At present, it does seem enticing, appealing, that somehow – from hand to hand and man to man – intentions are approaching her in ways that aren’t explained, but it mainly makes her feel excluded and not clever enough.

  She will eventually become familiar with this sensation. When she is a jolly good and studious teenager, school dances will nag at her. Discos will be worrying – and the headmistress will insist on calling them discotheques, which will make them seem French and complicated and shady – and going out to clubs will be worse. Kisses – harmless old kisses – will suddenly be redescribed, for no clear reason, as French, and will change, become complicated and shady. Beth will find that ugly boys, boys she doesn’t like – and there are very few boys she does like, she already has quite particular tastes – any boys at all can still light her, trouble her with what they start in rushed and brave and slapdash kisses, in how they speak to her body, wake places she won’t let them see, in how they work transformations, imitation magics, have blunt but effective hands. Boys will startle her too much at first, or make her frighten herself with herself – she’ll gain a reputation for inviting and then bolting, running away.

  And the men in black suits help begin it: her confusion, resentment, fugitive nature. They stare at her while she stands out on her box and whoever is closest pulls gifts from her hair, or slips them – soft as whispers, as kisses, as lips - into her dress’s pockets, or tucks money into the air close round her father so that he can retrieve and then present it to her.