‘I love you, Ma—’
Back then, when Ben had gained some ground, he needed to consolidate his position. He was already shaken, already in tears. It didn’t take much to summon the rest. And as he clung to her, snivelling, his brothers still watching from the top of the stairs, it struck him that he was good at this, that if he played his cards right, he might just survive. Everyone has an Achilles heel. Ben had just found his mother’s.
Then, from behind the bars of the staircase he saw Brendan’s eyes go wide. For a moment Brendan held his gaze, and he was suddenly convinced that Bren, who never read anything, had read his mind as easily as he might read a Ladybird book.
His brother looked away at once. But not before Ben had seen that look; that look of understanding. Was it really so obvious? Or had he just been wrong about Bren? For years he had simply dismissed him as a fat and useless waste of space. But how much did Benjamin really know about his backward brother? How much had he taken for granted? He wondered now if he’d made a mistake; if Bren wasn’t brighter than he’d thought. Bright enough to have seen through his act. Bright enough to present a threat –
He freed himself from Ma’s embrace. Bren was still waiting on the stairs, looking scared and stupid once more. But Benjamin knew he was faking it. Beneath that drab plumage his brother in brown was playing some deeper game of his own. He didn’t know what it was – not yet. But from that moment, Benjamin knew that one day he might have to deal with Bren –
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Albertine: Are you sure you know where you’re going with this?
blueeyedboy: Quite sure. Are you?
Albertine: I’m following you. I always have.
blueeyedboy: Ah! The snows of yesteryear . . .
8
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 20.14 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: mendacious
Yes, that’s where it starts. With a little white lie. White, like the pretty snow. Snow White, like in the story – and who would think snow could be dangerous, that those little wet kisses from the sky could turn into something deadly?
It’s all about momentum, you see. Just as that one little, thoughtless lie took on a momentum of its own. A stone can set off an avalanche. A word can sometimes do the same. And a lie can become the avalanche, bringing down everything in its path, bludgeoning, roaring, smothering, reshaping the world in its wake, rewriting the course of our lives.
Emily was five and a half when her father first took her to the school where he taught. Until then it had been a mysterious place (remote and beguiling as all mythical places) which her parents sometimes discussed over the dinner-table. Not often, though: Catherine disliked what she called ‘Patrick’s shop-talk’ and frequently turned the conversation to other matters just as it became most interesting. Emily gathered that ‘school’ was a place where children came together – to learn, or so her father said, though Catherine seemed to disagree.
‘How many children?’
Buttons in a box; beans in a jar. ‘Hundreds.’
‘Children like me?’
‘No, Emily. Not like you. St Oswald’s School is just for boys.’
By now she was reading avidly. Braille books for children were hard to find, but her mother had created tactile books from felt and embroidery, and Daddy spent hours every day carefully transcribing stories – all typed in reverse, using the old embossing machine. Emily could already add and subtract as well as divide and multiply. She knew the history of the great artists; she had studied relief maps of the world and of the solar system. She knew the house inside and out. She knew about plants and animals from frequent visits to the children’s farm. She could play chess. She could play the piano, too – a pleasure she shared with her father – and her most precious hours were spent with him in his room, learning scales and chords and stretching her small hands in a vain effort to span an octave.
But of other children she knew very little. She heard their voices when she played in the park. She had once petted a baby, which smelt vaguely sour and felt like a sleeping cat. Her next-door neighbour was called Mrs Brannigan, and for some reason she was inferior – perhaps because she was Catholic; or perhaps because she rented her house, whilst theirs was bought and paid for. Mrs Brannigan had a daughter a little older than Emily, with whom she would have liked to play, but who spoke with such a strong accent that the first and only time they had spoken, Emily had not understood a word.
But Emily’s father worked in a place where there were hundreds of children, all learning maths and geography and French and Latin and art and history and music and science; as well as fighting in the yard, shouting, talking, making friends, chasing each other, eating dinners in a long room, playing cricket and tennis on the grass.
‘I’d like to go to school,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t.’ That was Catherine, with the warning note in her voice. ‘Patrick, stop talking shop. You know how it upsets her.’
‘It doesn’t upset me. I’d like to go.’
‘Perhaps I could take her with me one day. Just to see—’
‘Patrick!’
‘Sorry. Just – you know. There’s the Christmas concert next month, love. In the school chapel. I’m conducting. She likes—’
‘Patrick, I’m not listening!’
‘She likes music, Catherine. Let me take her. Just this once.’
And so, just once, Emily went. Perhaps because of Daddy; but mostly because Feather was in favour of the plan. Feather was a staunch believer in the healing powers of music; besides, she had recently read Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale, and felt that a concert might boost Emily’s flagging colour therapy.
But Catherine didn’t like the idea. I think now that part of it was guilt; the same guilt that had pushed her to remove all traces of Daddy’s passion for music from the house. The piano was an exception; even so, it had been relegated to a spare room, where it sat amongst boxes of forgotten papers and old clothes, where Emily was not supposed to venture. But Feather’s enthusiasm tipped the balance, and on the evening of the concert they all walked down towards St Oswald’s, Catherine smelling of turpentine and rose (a pink smell, she tells Emily, pretty pink roses), Feather talking high and very fast, and Emily’s father guiding her gently by the shoulder, taking care not to let her slip in the wet December snow.
‘OK?’ he whispered, as they neared the place.
‘Mm-mm.’
She had been disappointed to hear that the concert was not to take place in the school itself. She would have liked to see Daddy’s place of work; to have entered the classrooms with their wooden desks, smelt the chalk and the polish; heard the echo of their footsteps against the wooden floors. Later, she was allowed those things. But this event was to take place in the nearby chapel, with the St Oswald’s choristers, and her father conducting, which she understood to mean guiding, somehow; showing the singers the way.
It was a cold, damp evening that smelt of smoke. From the road came the sounds of cars and bicycle bells and people talking, muffled almost to nothing in the foggy air. In spite of her winter coat she was cold; her thin-soled shoes squelching against the gravel path, and droplets of moisture in her hair. Fog makes the outside feel smaller, somehow; just as the wind expands the world, making the trees rustle and soar. That evening Emily felt very small, squashed down almost to nothing by the dead air. From time to time someone passed her – she felt the swish of a lady’s dress, or it might have been a Master’s gown – and heard a snatch of conversation before they were once more swept away.
‘Won’t it be crowded, Patrick? Emily doesn’t like crowds.’ That was Catherine again, her voice tight as the bodice of Emily’s best party dress, which was pretty (and pink) and which had been brought from storage for one last outing before she outgrew it completely.
‘It’s fine. You’ve got front-row seats.’
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As a matter of fact Emily didn’t mind crowds. It was the noise she didn’t like: those flat and blurry voices that confused everything and turned everything around. She took hold of her father’s hand, rather tightly, and squeezed. A single pump meant I love you. A double-pump, I love you, too. Another of their small secrets, like the fact that she could almost span an octave if she bounced her hand over the keys, and play the lead line of Für Elise while her father played the chords.
It was cool inside the chapel. Emily’s family didn’t attend church – though their neighbour, Mrs Brannigan, did – and she had been inside St Mary’s once, just to hear the echo. St Oswald’s Chapel sounded like that; their steps slap-slapped on the hard, smooth floor, and all the sounds in the place seemed to go up, like people climbing an echoey staircase and talking as they went.
Daddy told her later that it was because the ceiling was so high, but at the time she imagined that the choir would be sitting above her, like angels. There was a scent, too; something like Feather’s patchouli, but stronger and smokier.
‘That’s incense,’ said her father. ‘They burn it in the sanctuary.’
Sanctuary. He’d explained that word. A place to go where you can be safe. Incense and Clan tobacco and angels’ voices. Sanctuary.
There was movement all around them now. People were talking, but in lower voices than usual, as if they were afraid of the echoes. As Daddy went to join the choristers and Catherine described the organ and pews and windows for her, Emily heard wishwishwish from all around the hall, then a series of settling-down noises, then a hush as the choir began to sing.
It was as if something had broken open inside her. This, and not the piece of clay, is Emily’s first memory: sitting in St Oswald’s Chapel with the tears running down her face and into her smiling mouth, and the music, the lovely music, surging all around her.
Oh, it was not the first time that she had ever heard music; but the homely rinkety-plink of their old piano, or the tinny transistors of the kitchen radio, could not convey more than a particle of this. She had no name for what she could hear, no terms with which to describe this new experience. It was, quite simply, an awakening.
Later her mother tried to embellish the tale, as if it needed embellishment. She herself had never really enjoyed religious music – Christmas carols least of all, with their simple tunes and mawkish lyrics. Something by Mozart would have been much more suitable, with its implication of like calling to like, though the legend has a dozen variations – from Mozart to Mahler and even to the inevitable Berlioz – as if the complexity of the music had any bearing on the sounds themselves, or the sensations they evoked.
In fact the piece was nothing more than a four-part a cappella version of an old Christmas carol.
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
But there is something unique about boys’ voices; a tremulous quality, not entirely comfortable, perpetually on the brink of losing pitch. It is a sound that combines an almost inhuman sweetness of tone with a raw edge that is nearly painful.
She listened in silence for the first few bars, unsure of what she was hearing. Then the voices rose again:
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow –
And on the second snow the voices grazed that note, the high F sharp that had always been a point of mysterious pressure in her, and Emily began to cry. Not from sorrow or even from emotion; it was simply a reflex, like that cramping of the tastebuds after eating something very sour, or the gasp of fresh chilli against the back of the throat.
Snow on snow, snow on snow they sang, and everything in her responded. She shivered; she smiled; she turned her face to the invisible roof and opened her mouth like a baby bird, half-expecting to feel the sounds like snowflakes falling on her tongue. For almost a minute Emily sat trembling on the edge of her seat, and every now and then the boys’ voices would rise to that strange F sharp, that magical ice-cream-headache note, and the tears would spill once more from her eyes. Her lower lip tingled; her fingers were numb. She felt as if she were touching God –
‘Emily, what is it?’
She could not reply. Only the sounds mattered.
‘Emily!’
Every note seemed to cut into her in some delicious way; every chord a miracle of texture and shape. More tears fell.
‘Something’s wrong.’ Catherine’s voice came from a great distance. ‘Feather, please. I’m taking her home.’ Emily felt her starting to move; tugging at her coat, which she had been using as a cushion. ‘Get up, sweetheart, we shouldn’t have come.’
Was that satisfaction in her voice? Her hand on Emily’s forehead was feverish and clammy. ‘She’s burning up. Feather, give me a hand—’
‘No!’ whispered Emily.
‘Emily, darling, you’re upset.’
‘Please—’ But now her mother was picking her up; Catherine’s arms were around her. She caught a fleeting smell of turpentine behind the expensive perfume. Desperately she searched for something, some magic, to make her mother stop: something that would convey the urgency, the imperative to stay, to listen . . .
‘Please, the music—’
Your mother doesn’t care much for music. Daddy’s voice; remote but clear.
But what did Catherine care for? What for her was the language of command?
They were half-out of their seats now. Emily tried to struggle; a seam ripped under the arm of her too-tight dress. Her coat, with its fur collar, smothered her. More of the turpentine smell, the smell of her mother’s fever, her madness.
And suddenly Emily understood, with a maturity far beyond her years, that she would never visit her father’s school, never go to another concert, just as she would never play with other children in case they hurt or pushed her, never run in the park in case she fell.
If they left now, Emily thought, then her mother would always have her way, and the blindness, which had never really troubled her, would finally drag her down like a stone tied to a dog’s tail, and she would drown.
There must be words, she told herself; magic words, to make her mother stay. But Emily was five years old; she didn’t know any magic words; and now she was moving down the aisle with her mother on one side and Feather on the other, and the lovely voices rolling over them like a river.
In the bleak midwinter,
Lo-ooong ago –
And then it came to her. So simple that she gasped at her own audacity. She did know magic words, she realized. Dozens of them; she had learnt them almost from the cradle, but had never really found a use for them until now. She knew their fearsome energy. Emily opened her mouth, stricken with a sudden, demonic inspiration.
‘The colours,’ she whispered.
Catherine White stopped mid-stride. ‘What did you say?’
‘The colours. Please. I want to stay.’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘I want to listen to the colours .’
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blueeyedboy: How brave of you to post this, Albertine. You know I’ll have to reciprocate . . .
9
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 23.03 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: scornful
Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘Any Colour You Like’
Listen to the colours. Oh, please. Don’t tell me she was innocent; don’t tell me that, even then, she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Mrs White knew all about Boy X and his synaesthesia. She knew Dr Peacock would be near by. Easy enough to feed her the line; easier still to believe it when Emily responded by starting to hear the colours.
Ben was in his first year at school. Imagine him then: a chorister, all scrubbed and clean and ready to go in his blue St Oswald’s uniform under the frilled white cassock.
I know what you’re thinkin
g. He failed the exam. But that was just the scholarship. With money she had set aside, as well as with help from Dr Peacock, Ma had managed to get him into St Oswald’s after all, not as a scholar, but as a fee-paying pupil, and here he was in the front row of the school choir, hating every moment of it. And if they didn’t already have good enough cause to despise him, he knew that the other boys in his form would never leave him alone after this, not to mention Nigel, who had been dragged along most reluctantly, and who would take it out on him later, he knew, in gibes and kicks and punches.
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan –
He’d prayed in vain for puberty to break his voice and release him. But whilst the other boys in his class were already thickening like palm trees, reeking of teenage civet, Ben remained slim and girlish and pale, with an eerie, off-key treble voice.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone –
He could see his mother three rows back, listening for the sound of his voice, and Dr Peacock, behind her; and Nigel, going on seventeen, sprawled and scowling across the bench; and sweaty and malodorous Bren, looking terribly uncomfortable with his lank hair and his pursed-up face, like the world’s most enormous baby.
Blueeyedboy tried not to look; to concentrate on the music, but now he caught sight of Mrs White, just a few seats away from him, with Emily by her side – Emily, in her little red coat and her dress of rose-pink, with her hair in bunches and her face illuminated with something half-distress, half-joy –
For a moment he thought her eyes caught his; but the eyes of the blind are like that, aren’t they? Emily couldn’t see him. Whatever he did, however he tried – Emily never would. And yet, those eyes drew him, skittering from side to side like marbles in a doll’s head, like a couple of blue-eye beads, reflecting ill-luck back to the sender.
Blueeyedboy’s head was beginning to spin, throbbing in time to the music. A headache was coming; a bad one. He searched for the means to protect himself, imagining a capsule of blue, hard as iron, cold as stone, blue as a block of Arctic ice. But the pain was inescapable. A headache that would escalate until it wrung him like a rag –