‘Can I assume I should number the words from one to eleven?’
She thinks that she would be afraid to see his face and that she also misses him. ‘Please if you could. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Please.’
It is impossible to take his hand, because it’s too late.
‘The words that I have for you are
‘PALM
‘BOY
‘BLUE
‘SWEET
‘BOOK
‘DROP
‘BURN
‘FIND
‘SPEAK
‘RIGHT
‘BLOOD.’
So no one is touching him or looking after him and he is by himself when he says, ‘I don’t understand your list.’
‘Please, Arthur . . . just . . .’
‘I will.’ He doesn’t shout, but is near to it.
‘Pick a number between one and ten.’
Winding quickly, quickly round from the rail and his hands high and, ‘Christ, Beth . . . just . . . what do you want to . . . you can tell me . . . Christ. You let me . . . Beth, you let me.’ Before he shakes his head and is soft, ‘I’d pick seven. I would always pick seven. Seven.’
‘So I count from BLOOD, RIGHT, SPEAK, FIND, BURN, DROP and BOOK is the seventh word and that means I give you BOOK.’
He addresses the bulkhead behind her, ‘But seven wouldn’t be right, not for today. I ought to pick six.’ Testing the trick, extending it, because he knows that when it’s over something bad will have followed it in and because this will make it tell him more and he’s always the man who wants to know.
‘Then I count off BLOOD, RIGHT, SPEAK, FIND, BURN, DROP and that makes six and you are left with BOOK.’
She watches anxieties hit him in flickers: skull, muscle, breath.
‘Or three’s the magician’s number. I could take that.’
‘And then I’d count PALM, BOY, BLUE.’ She sounds angry, she shouldn’t be angry, isn’t angry. ‘And the third word is BLUE. I give you BLUE.’ He’s the one who should be angry – she wishes he’d be furious.
‘Two was for me, was for man. What I used to be.’ Flat statement.
‘Please, Arthur . . .’
‘Two.’
‘Then.’ She’s shaking – her hands, throat, breathing. ‘Then I take away PALM and BOY and I give you BLUE.’ All untrustworthy now.
He cradles his forehead with one hand, rubs his hair with the other. ‘But in the beginning, I didn’t lie.’ And then he looks at her and seems tired, tired, tired. ‘I’ll always pick seven. I have no choice. Seven.’
Arthur smiles the way a human being does when they understand tricks – there never really is a choice.
‘I know.’ And Beth looks at him and keeps looking because this is a kind of holding and because she understands tricks, too and because she wants more than tricks this morning. Just this morning, just once, she wants the miracle and she has asked before and didn’t get one, so she’s owed.
There ought to be magic, just this once.
And in her pocket there’s the prop.
There has to be a prop. Self-working.
And she reaches to find it, fingers blind with the cold. ‘I have something for you. I made it.’
‘Beth, please—’
And he stops when she brings out the book – it’s in her hand, a kind weight in her hand, less than a pigeon, or a plimsoll, or a wholemeal loaf. ‘It’s yours, Art. I made it for you.’
And, ‘I can’t.’
Because it might hurt him like fuck.
‘Beth.’ But he takes it from her anyway and both of them are unsteady and the camera flashes keep firing, saving the moments as they die, and the shining statue is overblown on its island and falling behind and Beth only has one instruction still to give.
Too fast. The end always catches you too fast.
Then she has to leave him.
But I’ll go where he can find me, where it would be possible to find me, where it would be possible.
And Beth tells him, ‘Read the end first. Please.’ Wishing the night would press the words back and into the quiet of her mouth. ‘You always read the ends first.’ Wishing.
‘If you want me to read it then, please, I do have to know what it is, Beth. Please. Because I can’t . . .’
Every moment racing down and disappearing.
‘It’s your book, Art. That’s what it is – it’s your book. Because I know you and I learned you and it’s your story. It’s the story that I wrote for you and it’s your story and all the parts of it that matter, they’re all true.’
Read the end first.
And I promise, everything that matters here is true.
This is for you.
This is for you, your blue book.
And it’s here in your hands and it wants to feel like touching and like trust and it wants to tell you everything, but it’s scared and in your hands and incomplete unless you’re with it and can see. It wants to be able to live and see you back.
And it wants to start gently, evade just a little and remind you about blue books – that they are secrets.
Blue books keep the privacies of trades and crafts and carry years of practices made perfect and they are cheats and tricks and shameful and denied.
And no medium will ever say they have one. No medium will ever say they’ve stolen what they need of you and noted it, kept a record to help them lie at you.
But this blue book is true.
Built of one life.
This is your book. This is your blue book.
And your book has to tell you about a boy – that he was funny and clever and when he was born his hair was honey-coloured and warm and would have made you want to touch it and his eyes were the blue of love, blue enough to shock. And, as he grew, his hair would change, become more coppery and complicated, but his eyes were perpetually a startle, like a light caught in glass.
During his earliest hours the boy beguiled his nurses. Then he moved on to charm elsewhere, although he was an unflamboyant baby, generally ruminative, like an old man returned to little bones, starting again and lolling and lying in state – that, or else he would panic with all of himself, be expressed to the soles of his feet in his distress.
His mother learned what would rescue him: sometimes motion, sometimes holding, sometimes music and sometimes his own exhaustion would defeat him – and in this she knew that he was like his father.
His father who wasn’t there – the boy coming home from the hospital to his granny and grandpa’s house. His accommodation had been problematic to arrange, had involved shouting and types of breakages and disbelief. But then the boy turned up one afternoon, as fresh as milk and in his mother’s arms – new to her arms – a wonder shifting in her arms – and finger-gripping and nodding and looking and looking and looking more than any human person ever had – eating each of them whole: grandmother, grandfather, mother – and almost immediately the household fell into kinds of peace and comfort and the enjoyment of strange hours and occupations. He made everything different.
And he became their fascination and they brought him their best. His gran fed him puréed versions of whatever the household was eating and sang to him and attempted knitting, became as compulsive a photographer as her husband had once been. The boy’s grandfather resurrected old illusions to offer him – could hardly be kept from producing silks and sparkles unless the child was sleeping – and even then there were moves to practise for him, there were novelties to invent.
The boy took disappearances, substitutions and transformations quite for granted, but was amazed by his grandad’s eyebrows and by faces in general, and by a toy purple dog made of corduroy who had embroidered features, because buttons or anything like them might be dangerous, might work loose. The boy adored h
is dog. Later he was going to have a pup he would grow tall and run about with. By the time he was almost two, he’d expressed this opinion. He had many often vigorous opinions.
His mother seemed best at worrying: the boy fed nicely, but he was long-boned, basically skinny from the outset, so he didn’t look like the other babies being checked at the surgery, or the ones trundled up and down in shops. He also wasn’t turnip-headed and sluggish or ugly the way they were. He was extraordinary. And extraordinary isn’t always good. It is outspoken and unusual, which may come to be a problem later on. And he was quick – maybe walking too soon and damaging his legs – but no way to stop him walking, pottering, tumbling – another worry – although he was usually unconcerned by falls unless he caught sight of her fretting – then he would yowl. And his mother wasn’t sure if a grandfather and no father would be enough.
She wanted her boy to have enough. At least enough. If not everything.
But she wasn’t with his father any more and it had been too difficult, so difficult, to leave and she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t. It would have hurt everyone.
His father having been who she’d lived with and worked with and thought with for months, years – not very long, not all that long, but years, five years – and his father was extraordinary and his being extraordinary wasn’t always good. His heart was clean and hot and right, but other things weren’t good.
And, almost as soon as she’d left the extraordinary man, the first signs of their boy were irrefutable and more arriving, along with this sense of the child puzzling, assembling himself, coming clearer and clearer.
But it had seemed there was no fair, or kind, or always good way for the mother to say what she ought.
You have a son. We made a son together. We have excelled ourselves.
But don’t see him. Don’t see us. Don’t hurt yourself that way.
Don’t hurt us.
Don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt him.
Except when she first met the boy and took him up, all alive and thinking and who he was going to be there and sharp in him already – and his father in him, too, clean and hot and right – she could have made the phone call then.
She would have.
But she was busy.
The boy made her very busy. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
And he was a summer child, born on the 14th of June – 14th of June 1995 – and his grandpa full of plans for birthdays, although his mother did try to restrain them.
When the boy turns one, there is cake and there are balloons which he receives graciously, as his due, along with the way his granny and grandpa’s hands throw shadows up on a white wall – small magics, making animals and adventures – these he studies in deep silence and then screams about when they go. And his grandpa works through an elegant effect involving a butterfly which bores the child until he can hold the butterfly and suck it. He does not have his little friends round – they aren’t real friends yet, they’re simply random people of his age who are stupid and unattractive and who waste everybody’s time. His mother feels their first year is something to celebrate with his own people and in his own home.
He does keep often with his own people and talks to them and asks them for only red jam and how to say hospital and what dark is for and he kisses them goodnight and goodbye, but not hello. And he totters and jumps about naked in front of them between bath time and pyjamas, because there are few things finer than being naked when nobody else is allowed it, because of being old. And these are the people who love him, the people who go to sleep thinking of what he’ll do next and of how he’ll be slightly more of himself in the morning, more every day.
His second birthday is different: there are plans, outsiders will be coming – not magicians – other children and their parents. And it’s hot, fully hot already, so there will be maybe a kind of picnic – which can happen indoors when it, naturally, rains – and there can be games and naps and, yes, some tricks, a small amount of tricks from Grandpa.
Because the boy is fond of splashing and having his skin in the air – with the jaunty hat and the sunblock: he’s ambivalent about the application of sunblock, but he gets it anyway, is protected anyway – because he wants water, there will be the paddling pool – a small thing, inflatable thing. He’s tried it before and been demented with how remarkable it is. It renders him speechless – and then compelled to sing.
‘Addle Pool.’ He demands this more often than he gets it.
‘Addle Pool.’ He can say paddling pool perfectly – his speech is well advanced and modulated and a gift. He just doesn’t want to say paddling pool – the Addle Pool is so magnificent it should have its own name. His purple dog is Uff and then there is Addle Pool – two glorious things.
The weekend before his party is sunny. Saturday afternoon is spent in the park with his family and judder- running after pigeons and dropping ice cream and the boy has a balloon – he does appreciate balloons – and this is a posh one with silver sides that bobs beyond his head as he walks with it. He will let no one else have it – until its string escapes him and it flies, soars.
The four of them are hypnotised by its ascent and the boy not unhappy – it climbs so marvellously, he is proud of it. But all the way back in the car he asks if his balloon will be waiting for him when they get home and where has it gone and what is it doing and when will it be home and it ought to come home. The balloon is his first trouble. It is the beginning of his being sad.
On Sunday, his mum and grandpa set up the Addle Pool and fill it, because – apart from being delightful – it may compensate for the lamented balloon and prove a distraction.
The boy does, indeed, splash and run and slide in the pool until he’s rendered fuzzy-headed by his undiluted pleasure and agrees – eventually – to be dressed and re-sunblocked and to lollop on his blanket with his cloth books and Uff.
And his grandmother’s in the kitchen and making a roast chicken dinner which she won’t again.
And his mother is in the garden and talking to his grandpa and also shouting towards the kitchen but not hearing any answer and – this will only take a moment – she trots to the kitchen door and peeks in and she is distracted, she gets distracted and she’s backing out to the garden again, because she’s asked what she wanted to about the dinner – when it will be ready – and this doesn’t matter, could never really matter, cannot be important – but then she’s thinking of what might come after, of how their evening could turn out to be. So she decides she’ll make arrangements for later and drifts in from the sun again, re-enters the kitchen and chats.
And it’s hard to tell if even a minute passes.
And then the child’s grandfather is standing in the doorway.
He is standing in the doorway and his arms are wet and the boy too – the clothes the boy has barely worn are soaking wet.
There is a confusion.
There has been a confusion.
The mother was distracted in the kitchen. The mother had said she would be a moment, would glance in and then be back, hardly gone.
The grandfather was misled. He thought he saw his daughter emerging – heading for the lawn – doing what she ought to and walking towards her son, seeing her son, calling him into the rest of the day, into the rest of their time, his time.
The grandfather had turned for the shed and left, as far as he believed, his daughter and grandson safely together. The grandfather kept his secrets in the shed and had intended to nip in and fetch some magic powder, bring a pinch of it back to the boy because it would look very fine for him in the sun.
And the boy had been on his stomach on the blanket, summer blanket, soft blanket and with his toys.
But he’s quick.
And maybe, maybe, maybe the boy had believed that Uff – who is very like him – would enjoy a swim and so he took Uff to the water and dropped him
in, saw him changing, sinking.
There is no way to know if this is how it happened.
It is impossible to ask the boy how everything was lost.
It will always be impossible to ask him.
The boy is called Peter.
The boy is called Peter Arthur Barber.
The boy is still warm.
The extraordinary boy.
Still warm.
They try everything.
It is unforgivable.
Peter Arthur Barber.
He shouldn’t have been alone.
It will always be impossible.
And you know this.
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Pleaselistenaccident
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3
Touch me
3
Loss
3 times 3 is 9
9
Pain
9
Meet me
You learned this.
You taught me this.
Where we could meet.
How we could meet.
And, Arthur, this isn’t a book. This is me and this is you and you were meant to see him. Once things were settled and he was confident in himself, then you would have been with him and known him.
I promise.
I thought there’d be time. There wasn’t any reason to think that there wouldn’t be time, but I stole him from you, because I was stupid. I stole every part of him from you and I lost him because I was stupid and now I’ll lose you.
And I’m a coward, so I didn’t tell you.
I didn’t want to lose you.
When you said I felt different, and I said I was, that was the closest I got to saying. But we were happy then and you were beautiful – we were beautiful – seemed it – and there hadn’t been anything beautiful for so long.
The Blue Book Page 32