And through it all were those dreams: vivid, plosive, passionate dreams that I wrote down in my Blue Book, dreams that filled me with shame and despair and a dreadful, lurking sense of joy.
Nigel had told me some months before that it might soon be time for me to do my own laundry. I saw what he meant now, and took his advice, airing my room and washing my bedsheets three times a week in the hope of dispersing the civet smell. Ma never commented; but I felt her disapproval grow, as if it were somehow my fault that I was leaving my boyhood behind.
Ma was looking old, I thought, hard and sour as an under-ripe apple; and there was a sense of desperation in her now, in the way she watched me at the dinner-table, telling me to sit up, to eat properly, to stop slouching, for God’s sake –
At her insistence I had stayed in school, and had so far managed to conceal the fact that I was lagging far behind. But by Easter the public exams loomed close, and I was failing in most of my subjects. My spelling was awful; maths made my head ache, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more the headaches assaulted me, so that even the sight of my school clothes laid out on the back of a chair was enough to bring it on; torture by association.
There was no one to whom I could go for help. My teachers – even the more well-disposed among them – were inclined to take the view that I just wasn’t cut out for academic work. I could hardly explain to them the true reason for my anxiety. I could hardly admit to them that I was afraid of Ma’s disappointment.
And so I hid the evidence. I faked my mother’s signature on a variety of absence notes. I hid my school reports; I lied; I forged my end-of-term results. But she must have suspected something was wrong, because she began a covert investigation – she must have known that I would lie – first contacting the school by phone to find out what story I’d told, and then making an appointment with my form-teacher and the Head of Year. In which she learnt that since Christmas I had barely attended school at all, due to a prolonged bout of flu which had led to my missing the exams –
I remember the night of that meeting. Ma had cooked my favourite meal – fried chilli chicken and corn on the cob – which I suppose should have alerted me that something serious was afoot. I should have noticed her clothes, too – the dark-blue dress and those high-heeled shoes – but I guess I’d become complacent. I never suspected that I was being lulled into a false sense of security, and I had no inkling of the reprisals that were about to descend on my unsuspecting head.
Maybe I was careless. Maybe I’d underestimated Ma. Or maybe someone saw me in town with my stolen camera –
Anyway, my mother knew. She knew, she watched and she bided her time; then, when she’d spoken to the Head of Year and my teacher, Mrs Platt, she came back home in her interview clothes and cooked me my favourite dinner, and when I’d finished eating it, she left me on the sofa and turned the television on, and then she went into the kitchen (I presumed it was to wash the dishes), and then she came back silently and the first thing I knew was the scent of L’Heure Bleue and her voice in my ear, hissing at me –
‘You little shit.’
I turned abruptly at the sound, and that was when she hit me. Hit me with the dinner-plate; hit me right in the face with it, and for a second I was torn between the shock of the impact against my eyebrow and cheekbone and simple dismay at the mess of it – at the chicken grease and corn kernels in my face and in my hair, more dismayed at that than the pain, or the blood that was running into my eyes, colouring the world in shades of escarlata –
Half-dazed I tried to back away; hit the couch with the small of my back, sending a glassy pain up my spine. She hit me again, in the mouth this time, and then she was on top of me, punching and slapping and screaming at me –
‘You lying little shit, you cheating little bastard!’
I know you think I could have fought back. With words, if not with my fists and feet. But for me there were no magic words. No specious declaration of love could ward off my mother’s fury, and no declaration of innocence could stem the tide of her violent rage.
It was that rage that frightened me – the mad, ballistic anger of her – far, far worse than those punches and slaps, and the sludgy stink of the vitamin drink that was somehow a terrible part of it all, and the way she screamed those things in my ears. Until finally I was crying – Ma! Please! Ma! – curled up in a corner beside the couch with my arms wrapped around my head, and blood in my eyes, and blood in my mouth, and that weak and fearful baby-blue word, like the helpless cry of a newborn, punctuating every blow, until the world went by degrees from blood-red to blue-black, and the outburst was finally over.
Afterwards, she made it clear how badly I’d disappointed her. Sitting on the couch with a cloth held up to my cut mouth and another to my eyebrow, I listened to my long list of crimes, and sobbed as I heard the sentence passed.
‘I’m going to keep my eye on you, B.B.’
I spy. My mother’s eye, like the watchful Eye of God. I felt it like a fresh tattoo, like a graze on my bare skin. Sometimes I see it in my mind: and it’s bruise-blue, hospital-blue, faded prison-overall-blue. It marks me, inescapably – the mark of my mother; the mark of Cain, the mark that can never be erased.
Yes, I had disappointed her. First, she told me, with my lies – as if by telling the truth I might have spared myself all this. Then with my many failures: failure to excel at school; failure to be a good son; failure to live up to what she’d always expected of me.
‘Please, Ma.’ My ribs hurt; later we found out that two of them were broken. My nose, too, was broken – you can see it isn’t quite straight – and if you look closely at my lips you can still see the scars, tiny silvery threadneedle scars, like someone’s schoolboy stitching.
‘You’ve got no one to blame but yourself,’ she said, as if all she’d given me was a maternal slap, something to get my attention. ‘And what about that girl, eh?’
The lie was automatic. ‘What girl?’
‘Don’t you look so innocent—’ She gave a thin-lipped, vinegary smile, and a finger of ice went down my back. ‘I know what you’ve been up to. Following that blind girl.’
Had Mrs White spoken to her? Had Ma got into my darkroom? Had one of her friends mentioned seeing me with a camera?
But she knew. She always does. The photographs of Emily; the graffiti on Dr Peacock’s front door; the weeks of playing truant from school. And the Blue Book, I thought in sudden alarm – could it be that she’d found that, too?
Now my hands began to shake.
‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’
There was no way I could explain it to her. ‘Please, M-Ma. I’m s-sorry.’
‘What is it with you and that blind girl? What have you two been doing?’
‘Nothing. Really. Nothing, Ma. I’ve never even t-talked to her!’
She gave me one of her freezing smiles. ‘So – you’ve never talked to her? Never – not once – in all this time?’
‘Just once. Once, in front of the gallery—’
My mother’s eyes narrowed abruptly, I saw her hand move upwards, and I knew she was going to slap me again. The thought of those aggressive hands anywhere near my mouth again was suddenly unbearable, and I flinched away defensively and said the first thing that came into my mind:
‘Emily’s a f-fake,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t hear any colours. She doesn’t even know what they are. She’s making it up – she told me so – and everybody’s c-cashing in—’
Sometimes it takes a new idea to stop a charging juggernaut. She looked at me with those narrowed eyes, as if she were trying to see through the lie. Then, very slowly, she lowered her hand.
‘What did you say?’
‘She makes it up. She tells them what they want to hear. And Mrs White set her up to it—’
The silence simmered around her awhile. I could see the idea taking root in her, supplanting her disappointment, her rage.
‘She told you that?’ she said at last.
‘She told you she was making it up?’
I nodded, feeling braver now. My mouth still hurt, and my ribs were sore, but now there was a taste of victory behind that of my suffering. In spite of what my brothers believed, invention at short notice had always been a talent of mine; and now I used it to free myself from my mother’s terrible scrutiny.
I told her the lot. I fed her the line. All the things you’ve ever read about the Emily White affair: every rumour; every gibe; every piece of vitriol. All of that began with me – and, like the speck of irritant at the heart of the oyster that hardens to become a pearl, it grew, and bore fruit, and was harvested.
You knew I was a bad guy. What you don’t yet know is how bad: how there and then I set the course towards this final, fatal act; how little Emily White and I came to be fellow-travellers on this road –
This tortuous road to murder.
16
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 08.37 on Wednesday, February 13
Status: public
Mood: despondent
It all began to decline right then, the night of that first exhibition. It took some time for me to realize it, but that was when the Emily White Phenomenon began to take on a disquieting turn. It seemed nothing more than a ripple at first, but especially after the success of Dr Peacock’s book, there were more and more people ready to take notice, to believe the worst, to scorn, to envy or to sneer.
In France, a country fond of its child prodigies, L’Affaire Emily had attracted more than its share of attention. One of Emily’s first patrons – an old Paris friend of Dr Peacock – sold several of her paintings from his gallery on the Left Bank. Paris-Match had seized the story, as had Bild magazine in Germany, and all of England’s tabloid press – not to mention Feather’s piece in Aquarius Moon.
But then came the scandal. The swift decline. Exposure by the media. Less than six months after that triumphant launch, Emily’s career was already foundering.
I never saw it coming, of course. How could I possibly have known? I didn’t read papers or magazines. Gossip and rumours passed me by. If there was something in the air, I was too self-absorbed to notice; so deep inside my masquerade that I barely saw what was happening. Daddy knew – he’d known from the start – but he couldn’t stop the avalanche. Accusations had been made. Investigations were under way. The papers were filled with conflicting reports, a book was being launched, there was even a film – but one thing was clear to everyone. The bubble had burst. The wonder had gone. The Emily White Phenomenon was well and truly over. And so, with nothing left to lose, like the Snow Child in the fairy tale, we melted away, Daddy and I, leaving no trace of ourselves behind.
At first it seemed like a holiday. Just until we get back on our feet. An endless succession of B & Bs. Bacon for breakfast, birdsong at dawn, fresh clean sheets on strange, narrow beds. A holiday from Malbry, he said; and for the first few weeks I believed him, following like a tame sheep until finally we came to rest in a remote little place near the Scottish border, where no one, he said, would recognize us.
I didn’t miss my mother at all. I know that must sound terrible. But to have Daddy all to myself like this was such an unusual pleasure that Malbry and my old life seemed to me like something that had happened to someone else, to quite a different girl, long ago. And when finally it became clear to me that something was wrong, that Daddy was slowly losing his mind, that he would never get back on his feet, I covered for him as best I could, until at last they came for us.
He’d always been a quiet man. Now, depression claimed him. At first I’d thought it was loneliness, and I’d tried my best to make it up to him. But as time passed, he grew more remote, more couched in his eccentricities, dependent on his music to such an extent that he forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, telling the same old stories, playing the same old pieces again on the piano in the hall, or on the cracked old stereo, Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata, and of course the Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique and especially ‘The March to the Scaffold’ – while I did my best to care for him, and he slipped into silence.
Eighteen months later, he had his first stroke. Lucky I’d been there, they said; lucky I’d found him when I had. It was a mild one, the doctor said; affecting just his speech and his left hand. They didn’t seem to understand how important his hands were to Daddy – it was the way he spoke to me when he couldn’t express himself with words.
But that was the end of our hideaway. At last, the world had discovered us. They took us to different places – Daddy to a care centre near Malbry, me to another kind of home, where I endured for the next five years without a moment’s realization that someone had to be paying the bills; that someone was looking out for us, and that Dr Peacock had tracked us down.
Later I learnt of the correspondence between them; of Dr Peacock’s repeated attempts to make contact; of Daddy’s refusal to answer him. Why did Dr Peacock care? Perhaps it was from a feeling of guilt; or loyalty to an old friend; or pity for the little girl caught up in the tragedy.
In any case, he paid our bills, watched over us from afar, while the house still stood empty, unused and unloved, boxed-up like an unwanted gift, packed to the rafters with memories.
I turned eighteen. I found my own place. There in the centre of Malbry: a tiny cube on a fourth floor, with a living-room-slash-bedroom, a kitchenette and a half-tiled bathroom that smelt of damp. I visited Daddy every week – sometimes he even knew who I was. And though for a while I was sure I’d be recognized, finally I understood. No one cared about Emily White. No one even remembered her.
But nothing ever disappears. Nothing ever really ends. For all the safety and love that Nigel gave me, I realize now – if a little late – that all I had done in following him was to substitute one golden cage for a different set of bars.
But now, at last, I am free of them all. Free of my parents, free of the doctor, free of Nigel. So who am I now? Where do I go? And how many others have to die before I am free of Emily?
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: Very moving, Albertine. I sometimes ask myself the same thing –
PART FOUR
smoke
1
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 15:06 on Wednesday, February 13
Status: restricted
Mood: mellow
Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Blue-eyed Matador’
I slept till long after midday today. Told Ma I’d taken some time off work. I don’t sleep much at the best of times. But recently I’ve been averaging only two or three hours a night, and the latest quid pro quo with Albertine must have taken more out of me than I’d thought. Still, it was worth it, don’t you think? After twenty silent years, suddenly she wants to talk.
Can’t say I really blame her. Traditionally, raising the dead has always had serious consequences. In her case, inevitably, the tabloids will come out in droves. Money, murder and madness always make for excellent Press. Can she survive the exposure? Or will she remain in hiding here; in tacit, furtive acceptance of a past that never happened?
When I’d showered and changed my clothes I went to look for Albertine. The Pink Zebra café on Mill Road; it’s where she goes when she feels the need to be someone else. It was six o’clock. She was sitting alone at the counter, with a cup of hot chocolate and a cinnamon bun. Underneath her red coat, I saw, she was wearing a sky-blue dress.
Albertine in blue, I thought. This may just be my lucky day.
‘May I join you?’
She gave a start at the sound of my voice.
‘If you’d rather not socialize, I promise I won’t say a word. But that hot chocolate looks wonderful, and—’
‘No. Please. I’d like you to stay.’
Grief always gives her face a kind of emotional nakedness. She held out her hand. I took it. A thrill ran through me; a tremor that moved from the soles of my
feet right up into the roots of my hair.
I wonder if she felt it too; her fingertips were slightly cold, her small hand not quite steady in mine. There’s something almost childlike about her, a kind of passive acceptance that Nigel must have taken for vulnerability. I, of course, know better; but, as she must know, I’m a special case.
‘Thank you.’ I took a seat next to her. Ordered Earl Grey and whichever pastry was highest in calories. I hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours, and I was suddenly ravenous.
‘Lemon meringue pie?’ She smiled. ‘That seems to be your favourite.’
I ate the pie, and she drank her hot chocolate, leaving the cinnamon bun untouched. The process of eating makes a man look strangely inoffensive, somehow; all weapons laid down in a common purpose.
‘How are you coming to terms with it?’ I said, when the pie was finished.
‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said.
At least she didn’t pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about. A few days more and she won’t have the choice any more. All it will take is a word to the Press, and the story will be out, whether she likes it or not.
‘I’m sorry, Albertine,’ I said.
‘It’s over, B.B. I’ve moved on.’
Well, that was a lie. No one moves on. The wheel just keeps on turning, that’s all, creating the illusion of momentum. Inside it, we are all rats; running in growing desperation towards a painted blue horizon that never gets any closer.
‘Lucky you, moving on. At least being dead gives closure.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.
‘Well, everyone sides with the victim, of course. Deserving or not, everyone mourns as soon as the mark is safely dead. But what about the rest of us? The ones with problems of our own? Being dead is pretty straightforward. Even my brothers managed that. But living with guilt is something else. It’s not easy being the bad guy—’