‘Very wise.’
I could hear his smile. His charm has a way of surprising me, even now, after all this time, and it makes me feel a little queasy to think that at my lover’s funeral I talked – I laughed – with another man, a man I found almost attractive . . .
‘I have to say, I’m relieved,’ he said. ‘I rather thought you’d blame me.’
‘Blame you for Nigel’s accident? Why?’
‘Well, maybe because of my letter,’ he said.
‘Your letter?’
Once more, I heard him smile. ‘The letter he opened the day he died. Why do you think he was driving so recklessly? My guess is he was coming for me. To deliver one of his – warnings.’
I shrugged. ‘Aren’t you the perceptive one? Nigel’s death was an accident—’
‘There’s no such thing as an accident as far as our family’s concerned.’
I stood up much too fast at that, and the chair clattered back against the parquet floor. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I said.
His voice was calm, still slightly amused. ‘It means we’ve had our share of bad luck. What did you want? A confession?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ I said.
‘Well, thanks. That puts me in my place.’
I was feeling strangely light-headed by then. Perhaps it was the heat, or the noise, or simply the fact of being so close to him, close enough to take his hand.
‘You hated him. You wanted him dead.’ My voice sounded plaintive, like a child’s.
A pause. ‘I thought you knew me,’ he said. ‘You really think I’m capable?’
And now I thought I could almost hear the first notes of the Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique with its patter of flutes and low caress of strings. Something dreadful was on its way. Suddenly there seemed to be no oxygen in the air I was breathing. I put out a hand to steady myself, missed the back of the chair and stepped out into the open. My throat was a pinprick; my head a balloon. I stretched out my arms and touched only empty space.
‘Are you OK?’ He sounded concerned.
I tried to find the chair again – I desperately needed to sit down – but I had lost my bearings in the suddenly cavernous room.
‘Try to relax. Sit down. Breathe.’ I felt his arm around me, guiding me gently towards the chair, and once again I thought of Nigel, and of Daddy’s voice, a little off-key, saying:
Come on, Emily. Breathe. Breathe!
‘Shall I take you outside?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing. It’s fine. It’s just the noise.’
‘As long as it wasn’t something I said—’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ I faked a smile. It felt like a dentist’s mask on my face. I had to get out. I pulled away, sending my chair skittering against the parquet. If only I could get some air, then everything would be all right. The voices in my head would stop. The dreadful music would be stilled.
‘Are you OK?’
Breathe, baby, breathe!
And now the music rose once more, lurching into a major key somehow even more dangerous, more troubling than the minor.
Then his voice through the static said: ‘Don’t forget your coat, Albertine.’
And at that I pulled away and ran, regardless of obstacles, and, finding my voice just long enough to shout – Let me through! – I fled once more, like a criminal, pushing my way through the milling crowd and out into the speechless air.
2
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy .
Posted at: 21.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status: restricted
Mood: caustic
Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Almost Human’
So, she finds me almost attractive. That moves me more than words can say. To know that she thinks of me that way – or that she did, for a moment, at least – makes it almost seem worthwhile –
When Nigel came round on the day he died I was developing photographs. My iPod was playing at full blast, which was why I missed the knock at the door.
‘B.B.!’ Ma’s voice was imperious.
I hate it when she calls me that.
‘What?’ Her hearing is eerily good. ‘What are you doing in there? It’s been hours.’
‘Just sorting out some negatives.’
Ma has a range of silences. This one was disapproving: Ma dislikes my photography, considers it a waste of time. Besides, my darkroom is private; the lock on the door keeps her out. It isn’t healthy, so she says; no boy should have secrets from his ma.
‘So what is it, Ma?’ I said at last. The silence was starting to get to me. For a moment it deepened; grew thoughtful. It is at these moments that Ma is at her most dangerous. She had something up her sleeve, I knew. Something that didn’t bode well for me.
‘Ma?’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Your brother’s here to see you,’ she said.
Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I suppose she felt I deserved it. After all, I had forfeited her protection by keeping secrets from her. It didn’t quite happen as it did in my fic, but we have to allow for poetic licence, don’t we? And Nigel had a temper, and I was never the type to fight back.
I suppose I could have lied my way out of it, as I have so often before, but by then I think it was too late; something had been set in motion, something that could not be stopped. Besides, my brother was arrogant. So sure of his crude and bludgeoning tactics that he never considered the fact that there might be other, more subtle ways than brute force of winning the battle between us. Nigel was never subtle. Perhaps that’s why Albertine loved him. He was, after all, so different from her, so open and straightforward; loyal as a good dog.
Is that what you thought, Albertine? Is that what you saw in him? A reflection of lost innocence? What can I say? You were wrong. Nigel wasn’t innocent. He was a killer, just like me, though I’m sure he never told you that. After all, what would he have said? That for all his pretended honesty, he was as fake as both of us? That he’d taken the role you offered him, and played you like a professional?
The funeral lasted much too long. They always do, and when the sandwiches and the sausage rolls had finally been cleared away, there was still the coming home to endure, and the photographs to be brought out, and the sighs and the tears and the platitudes: as if she’d ever cared for him, as if Ma had cared for anyone in all her life but Gloria Green –
At least it was quick. The Number One, the greatest hit, the all-time favourite platitude, closely followed by such classic tracks as: At least he didn’t suffer, and It’s wicked, that road, how fast they drive. The scene of my brother’s death now bears a Diana-style floral display – though of somewhat more modest proportions, thank God.
I know. I went on the pilgrimage. My mother, Adèle, Maureen and I; Yours Truly in his colours, Ma regal, all in black, with a veil, reeking of L’Heure Bleue, of course, and carrying, of all things, a stuffed dog with a wreath in its mouth – putting the fun into funeral –
‘I don’t think I can bear to look,’ she says, face averted, her eagle eye taking in the offerings at the roadside shrine, mentally calculating the cost of a spray of carnations, a begonia plant, a bunch of sad chrysanthemums picked up at a roadside garage.
‘They’d better not be from her,’ she says, quite unnecessarily. Indeed, there is no indication that Nigel’s girl has ever even been there, still less that she brought flowers.
My mother, however, is unconvinced. She sends me to investigate and to purge any gift not bearing a card, and then deposits her stuffed dog by the side of the road with a teary sigh.
Flanked by Adèle and Maureen, who each hold an elbow, she totters away on six-inch heels that look like sharpened pencils, and produce a sound that makes my tastebuds cramp, like chalk against a blackboard.
‘At least you’ve got B.B., Gloria, love.’
Greatest Hits, Number Four.
‘Yes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’ Her eyes are hard and
expressionless. At the centre of each one is a small blue pinprick of light. It takes me some time to realize that this is my reflection. ‘B.B. would never let me down. He would never cheat on me.’
Did she really say those words? I may have just imagined it. And yet, that is exactly what she considers this betrayal to be. Bad enough, to lose her son to another woman, she thinks. But to lose him to that girl, of all girls –
Nigel should have known better, of course. No one escapes from Gloria Green. My mother is like the pitcher plant, Nepenthes distillatoria, which draws in its victims with sweetness, only to drown them in acid later when their struggles have exhausted them.
I ought to know; I’ve been living with her for forty-two years, and the reason I’ve stayed undigested so far is that the parasite needs a decoy, a lure: a creature that sits on the lip of the plant to persuade all the others there’s nothing to fear –
I know. It’s hardly a glorious task. But it certainly beats being eaten alive. It pays to be loyal to Ma, you see. It pays to keep up appearances. Besides, wasn’t I her favourite, trained in the womb as a murderer? And, having first disposed of Mal, why should I spare the other two?
I always thought when I was a boy that the justice system was the wrong way round. First, a man commits a crime. Then (assuming he’s caught) comes the sentence. Five, ten, twenty years, depending on the crime, of course. But as so many criminals fail to anticipate the cost of repaying such a debt, surely it makes more sense, rather than crime on credit, to pay for one’s felony up front, and to do the time before the crime, after which, without prosecution, you could safely wreak havoc at your leisure.
Imagine the time and money saved on police investigations and on lengthy trials; not to mention the unnecessary anxiety and distress suffered by the perpetrator, never knowing if he’ll be caught, or has got away with it. Under this system I believe that many of the more serious crimes could actually be avoided – as only a very few would accept to spend a lifetime in prison for the sake of a single murder. In fact, it’s far more likely that, halfway through the sentence, the would-be offender would opt to go free – still innocent of any crime, though he might have to lose his deposit. Or maybe by then he would have earned enough time to pay for a minor felony – an aggravated assault, perhaps, or maybe a rape or a robbery –
See? It’s a perfect system. It’s moral, cheap and practical. It even allows for that change of heart. It offers absolution. Sin and redemption all in one; cost-free karma at the Jesus Christ superstore.
Which is just my way of saying this: I’ve already done my time. Over forty years of it. And now, with my release date due –
The universe owes me a murder.
3
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 22.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status: public
Mood: murderous
Listening to: Peter Gabriel: ‘Family Snapshot’
His brothers never liked him much. Perhaps he was too different. Perhaps they were jealous of his gift and of all the attention it brought him. In any case, they hated him – well, maybe not Brendan, his brother in brown, who was too thick to genuinely hate anyone, but certainly Nigel, his brother in black, who, the year of Benjamin’s birth, underwent such a violent personality change that he might have been a different boy.
The birth of his youngest brother was attended by outbursts of violent rage that Ma could neither control nor understand. As for Brendan, aged three – a placid, stolid, good-natured child – his first words on hearing that he had a baby brother were: Why, Ma? Send him back!
Not promising words for Benjamin, who found himself thrown into the cruel world like a bone to a pack of dogs, with no one but Ma to defend him and to keep him from being eaten alive.
But he was her blue-eyed talisman. Special, from the day he was born. The others went to the junior school, where they played on the swings and the climbing frames, risked life and limb on the football pitch, and came home every day with grazes and cuts that Ma seemed never to notice. But with Ben, she was always fretful. The smallest bruise, the slightest cough, was enough to awaken his mother’s concern, and the day he came home from nursery school with a bloody nose (earned in a fight over control of the sandpit), she withdrew him from the school and took him on her rounds instead.
There were four ladies on Ma’s cleaning round, all of them now coloured blue in his mind. All of them lived in the Village; no more than half a mile from each other, in the long tree-lined alleys between Mill Road and the edge of White City.
Apart from Mrs Electric Blue, who was to die so very unexpectedly some fifteen or twenty years later, there was: Mrs French Blue, who smoked Gauloises and liked Jacques Brel; Mrs Chemical Blue, who took twenty kinds of vitamins and who cleaned the house before Ma arrived (and probably after she left); and finally, Mrs Baby Blue, who collected porcelain dolls, and had a studio under the roof, and was an artist, so she said, and whose husband was a music teacher at St Oswald’s, the boys’ grammar school down the road, where Ma also went to clean and vacuum the classrooms on the Upper Corridor at four thirty every school day, and to run the big old polisher across what seemed miles of parquet floor.
Benjamin didn’t like St Oswald’s. He hated the fusty smell of it, the reek of disinfectant and floor polish, the low hum of mould and dried-up sandwiches, dead mice, wormy wood and chalk that got into the back of his throat and caused a permanent catarrh. After a while, just the sound of the name – that gagging sound, Os-wald’s – would conjure up the smell. From the very start he dreaded the place: he was afraid of the Masters in their big black gowns, afraid of the boys with their striped caps and their blue blazers with the badges on them.
But he liked his mother’s ladies. To begin with, anyway.
He’s so cute, they said. Why doesn’t he smile? Do you want a biscuit, Ben? Do you want to play a game?
He found he enjoyed being wooed in this way. To be four years old is to wield great power over women of a certain age. He soon learnt how to exploit this power: how even a half-hearted whimper could cause those ladies real concern, how a smile could earn him biscuits and treats. Each lady had her speciality: Mrs Chemical Blue gave him chocolate biscuits (but made him eat them over the sink); Mrs Electric Blue offered him coconut rings; Mrs French Blue, langues de chat. But his favourite was Mrs Baby Blue, whose real name was Catherine White, and who always bought the big red tins of Family Circle biscuits, with their jam sandwiches, chocolate digestives, iced rings, pink wafers – which always seemed especially decadent, somehow, by virtue of their flimsiness, like the flounces on her four-poster bed and her collection of dolls, with their blank and somehow ominous faces staring out from nests of chintz and lace.
His brothers hardly ever came. On the rare occasions that they did, at weekends or holidays, they never showed to advantage. Nigel, at nine, was already a thug: sullen and prone to violence. Brendan, still on the cusp of cute, had also once been privileged, but was now beginning to lose his infant appeal. Besides which he was a clumsy child, always knocking things over, including, on one occasion, a garden ornament – a sundial – belonging to Mrs White, which smashed on to the flagstones and had to be paid for by Ma, of course. For which both he and Nigel were punished – Bren for doing the actual damage, Nigel for not preventing him – after which neither of them came round again, and Benjamin was left with the spoils.
What did Ma make of all this attention? Well, perhaps she thought that someone, somewhere, might fall in love; that in one of those big houses might be found a benefactor for her son. Ben’s ma had ambitions, you see; ambitions she barely understood. Perhaps she’d had them all along; or perhaps they were born from those long days polishing other people’s silverware, or looking at pictures of their sons in graduation gowns and hoods. And he understood almost from the start that his visits to those big houses were meant to teach him something more than how to bea
t the dust from a rug or wax a parquet floor. His mother made it clear from the start that he was special; that he was unique; that he was destined for greater things than either of his brothers.
He never questioned it, of course. Neither did she. But he sensed her expectations like a halter round his young neck. All three of them knew how hard she worked; how her back ached from bending and standing all day long; how often she suffered from migraines; how the palms of her hands cracked and bled. From the earliest age, they went shopping with her, and long before they got to school they could add up a grocery list in their heads and know just how little of that day’s earnings was left for all their other expenses –
She never voiced it openly. But even unvoiced, they always felt that weight on their backs: the weight of their ma’s expectations; her terrifying certainty that they would make her sacrifice worthwhile. It was the price they had to pay, never spoken aloud, but implied; a debt that could never be paid in full.
But Ben was always the favoured one. Everything he did strengthened her hopes. Unlike Bren, he was good at sports, which made him suitably competitive. Unlike Nigel, he liked to read, which fostered her belief that he was gifted. He was good at drawing, too, much to the delight of Mrs White, who had no expectations, who’d always wanted a child of her own, and who fussed over him and gave him sweets; who was pretty and blonde and bohemian, who called him sweetheart, who liked to dance; and who laughed and cried for no reason sometimes and who all three boys secretly wished could have been their Ma –
And the White house was wonderful. There was a piano in the hall, and a big piece of stained glass above the front door, which on sunny days would cast reflections of red and gold on to the polished floorboards. When his mother was working, Mrs White would show Ben her studio, with its stacked canvases and its rolls of drawing paper, and teach him how to draw horses and dogs, and show him the tubes and palettes of paint, and read out their names, like incantations.
Viridian. Celadon. Chromium. Sometimes they had French or Spanish or Italian names, which made them even more magical. Violetto. Escarlata. Pardo de turba. Outremer.