Blueeyedboy

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You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.40 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restricted

Mood: tired

Listening to: Cyndi Lauper: ‘True Colours’

All right. You can call me Brendan. Does that make you happy now? Now do you think you know me? We choose our names, our identities; just as we choose the lives we lead. I have to believe that, Albertine. The alternative — that these things are allocated at birth, or even before, in utero — is far too appalling to contemplate.

Someone once told me that seventy per cent of all praise received in the course of an average lifetime is given before the age of five. At five years old, almost anything — eating a mouthful of food; getting dressed; drawing a picture in crayon — can earn the most lavish compliments. Of course, that stops eventually. In my case, when my brother was born — my brother in blue, that is — Benjamin.

Clair, with her love of psychobabble, sometimes speaks of what she calls the reverse halo effect; that tendency we all have to assign the colours of villainy on the basis of a single flaw: such as having swallowed a sibling, perhaps, or collected a bucket of sea creatures and left them to die in the scorching sun. When Ben was born, my halo reversed; and henceforth blueeyedboy was stripped of all his former privileges.

I saw it coming. At three years old, I already knew that the squalling blue package Ma had brought home would bring me nothing but misery. First came her decision to allocate colours to her three sons. That’s where it started, I realize, although she may not have known it then. But that’s how I became Brendan Brown — the dull one, neither fish nor fowl — eclipsed on one side by Nigel Black and on the other by Benjamin Blue. No one noticed me any more — unless, of course, I did something wrong, in which case the piece of electrical cord was only too quick to be deployed. No one thought I was special enough to merit any attention.

Still, I’ve managed to change all that. I’ve reclaimed my halo — in Ma’s eyes, at least. As for you, Albertine — or must I call you Bethan now? You always saw more than the others did. You always understood me. You never had the slightest doubt that I, too, was remarkable, that beneath my sensitivity beat the heart of a future murderer. Still —

Everyone knows it wasn’t my fault. I never laid a hand on him. In fact, I wasn’t even there. I was watching Emily. All those times I watched her, followed her to the Mansion and back, felt Dr Peacock’s welcoming hug, flew with her on her little swing, felt her mother’s hand in mine, heard her say: Well done, sweetheart —

My brother never did those things. Perhaps he never needed to. Ben was too busy feeling sorry for himself to take an interest in Emily. I was the one who cared for her; took pictures of her from over the hedge; shared the scraps of her strange little life.

Perhaps that was why I loved her then; because she had stolen Benjamin’s life just as he had stolen mine. My mother’s love; my gift; my chance; all of them passed to Benjamin, as if I’d simply held them in trust until the better man came along.

Ben, the blue-eyed boy. The thief. And what did he do with his big chance? He pissed it away in resentment because somebody else got a bigger break. Everything: his intelligence; his place at St Oswald’s; his chance at fame; even his time at the Mansion. All thrown to the winds because Benjamin didn’t just want a slice of the cake, he wanted the bloody bakery. Well, that’s what it looked like to Brendan Brown, left with only the few crumbs he managed to steal from his brother’s plate —

But now, the cake belongs to me. The cake, as well as the bakery. As Cap would say: Pure pwnage, man —

I got away with murder.

2

You are viewing the webjournal of: blueeyedboyposting on :

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 23.47 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: public

Mood: vulnerable

Listening to:Johnny Cash : ‘Hurt’

They call him Mr Brendan Brown. Too dull to be gifted; too dull to be seen; too dull even for murder. Shit-brown; donkey-brown; boring, butthead, bastard-brown. All his life he has tried to be blind, an unwilling spectator to everything, watching through interlaced fingers as the action unrolls without him, wincing at the slightest blow, the smallest hint of violence.

Yes, Brendan Brown is sensitive. Action movies frighten him. Wildlife documentaries are out; as are horror movies, video games, cowboy films or combat scenes. He even feels for the bad guy. Sports, too, are a discomfort to him, with their risk of injuries and collisions. Instead he watches cookery shows, or gardening shows, or travelogues, or porn, and dreams of other places; feels printed sunlight on his face —

It’s squeamishness, his mother says. He feels things more than the others do.

Perhaps he does, thinks Brendan Brown. Perhaps he feels things differently. Because if he watches someone in pain, it makes him so uncomfortable that sometimes he is physically sick, and he cries in frightened confusion at the things the images make him feel —

His brother in blue is aware of this, and makes him watch his experiments with flies and wasps, and then with mice; shows him pictures to make him squirm. Dr Peacock calls it mirror-touch synaesthesia, and it presents — in his case, at least — as a kind of pathological sensitivity, in which the optical part of the brain somehow mirrors the physical, so that he can experience what others feel — be it a touch, or a taste, or a blow — as clearly as if it were done to himself.

His brother in black despises him, scorns him for his weakness. Even his mother ignores him now: the middle child, the quiet one, caught between Nigel, the black sheep, and Benjamin, the blue-eyed boy —

Brendan hates his brothers. He hates the way they make him feel. One is angry all the time, the other smug and contemptuous. And Brendan feels for them — too much — whether or not he wants to. They itch; he wants to scratch. They bleed; and Brendan obediently bleeds for them. Truth told, it isn’t empathy. It’s only a mindless physical response to a series of visual stimuli. He wouldn’t care if they both died — as long as they did it far away, where he didn’t have to watch it.

Sometimes, when he’s alone, he reads. Slowly at first, and in private: books about travel and photography; poems and plays; short stories, novels and dictionaries. The printed word is different from what he sees around him. In his mind, the action unfolds without his body’s involvement. He reads in the cellar late at night by the light of the bare bulb; the cellar that, lacking a room of his own, he has secretly converted into a darkroom. Here he reads books that his teachers wouldn’t believe he had the wit to understand; books that, if his mates at school were to catch him reading, would make him a target for every joke, for every bully that came along.

But here, in his darkroom, he feels safe; there’s no one here to laugh at him when he follows the words with his finger. No one to call him retarded when he reads the words aloud. No, this is Brendan’s private place. Here he can do as he pleases. And sometimes, when he’s alone, he has dreams. Dreams of dressing in something other than brown, of having people notice him, of showing his true colours.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? All his life he has been Brendan Brown; doomed to be dull, to be stupid. In fact, he was never stupid. He simply hid it very well. At school, he did the minimum work, to protect himself from ridicule. At home, he has always pretended to be stolid and unimaginative. He knows that he is safer that way, now that Ben has taken his place, has robbed him of Ma’s affection, has swallowed him, as he himself swallowed Mal, in the desperate struggle for dominance —

It isn’t fair, thinks Brendan Brown. He, too, has blue eyes. He, too, has special skills. His shyness and his stammer leads them all to assume that he is inarticulate. But words have tremendous power, he knows. He wants to learn how to handle them. And he is good with computers. He knows how to process information. He is fighting his dyslexia with the aid of a special programme. Later, under cover of his part-time job at the fast-food place, he joins a creative-writing class. He isn’t very good at first, but he works hard; he wants to learn. Words and their meanings fascinate him. He wants to know more about them. He wants to strip the language down to the very motherboard.

Most importantly, he is discreet. Discreet and very patient. To nail his colours to the mast would be to declare his intentions. Brendan Brown knows better than this. Brendan values camouflage. That is why he has survived this far. By blending into the background; by letting other people shine; by standing on the sidelines to watch while the opposition destroys itself —

Sun Szu says in The Art Of War: All warfare is based on deception. Well, if there’s anything our boy knows, it’s how to deceive and obfuscate.

Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

He chooses his moment carefully. He has never been impulsive. Unlike Nigel, who could always be relied upon to act first and think later (if he thought at all), responding to triggers so obvious that even a child could have played him —

If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.

Easily done, where Nigel is concerned. A well-placed word could do it. In this case it leads to violence; to a chain reaction that no one can stop and which ends with the death of his brother in blue and the arrest of his brother in black, and Badass Brendan, free of them both and whiter than the driven snow —

Item One: a black Moleskine notebook.

Item Two: some photographs of his brother in black cavorting with Tricia Goldblum, aka Mrs Electric Blue — some of them nicely intimate, taken with a long lens from the back of the lady’s garden and developed in stealth in the darkroom, which no one, not even Ma, knows about —

Put them both together, like nitrogen and glycerine, and —

Wham!

In fact, it was almost too easy. People are so predictable. Nigel was especially, with his moods and his violent temper. Thanks to the reverse-halo effect (Nigel always hated Ben), all our hero had to do was to wind him up and put him in place, and the rest was a foregone conclusion. A casual word in Nigel’s ear, suggesting that Ben was spying on him; the mention of a secret cache; then planting the evidence for Nigel to find under his brother’s mattress, and after that the only thing our boy had to do was to remove himself from the premises while the sordid business of murder unfurled.

Ben denied all knowledge, of course. That was the fatal mistake. Brendan knew from experience that the only way to avoid serious hurt is to confess to the crime immediately, even when you’re innocent. He’d learnt that lesson early on — thereby earning himself the convenient reputation of being a hopeless liar, whilst taking the blame for a number of things for which he was not responsible. In any case, Ben had no time to explain. Nigel’s first blow cracked his skull. After that — well, suffice it to say that Benjamin never stood a chance.

Of course, our hero wasn’t there. Like Macavity, the Mystery Cat, he has mastered the difficult technique of eclipsing himself from unpleasantness. It was Brendan’s Ma who found her son, who called the police and the ambulance, and then who kept watch at the hospital, and who never cried, not even once, not even when they told her that the damage was irreversible, that Benjamin would never wake up —

Manslaughter, they called it.

Interesting word — man’s laughter — coloured in shades of lightning-blue and scented with sage and violet. Yes, he sees Ben’s colours now. After all, he took his place. It all belongs to Brendan now — his gift; his future; his colours.

It took a little time to adjust. At first our hero was sick for days. His stomach felt like a bottomless pit; his head ached so much that he thought he would die. In one sense, he feels he deserved it. Another part of him grins inside. It’s like an evil magic trick. He is innocent of any crime, and yet secretly guilty of murder.

But something is missing nevertheless. Violence is still beyond him. Which is somewhat unfortunate, given the extent of his rage. Without this poison gift, he thinks, anything would be possible. His thoughts are clear and objective. He has no conscience to trouble him. The most terrible things are in his mind, only a blink away from execution. But his body rejects the scenario. Only in fic can he act with impunity. Only then can he be truly free. In life, that surge of victory must always be paid for in the end; paid for in sickness and suffering, just as bad thoughts must be paid for in full —

She still has that piece of electrical cord. Of course, she doesn’t use it now. Instead she uses her fists; her feet; she knows that he will never fight back. But he dreams of that piece of electrical cord, and of the china dogs that gape so vapidly from the glass case. The cord would fit snugly around her throat six or seven times at least; after which, the glass case and the china dogs wouldn’t stand a fucking chance —

The thought makes him suddenly edgy again. It brings a taste to the back of his throat. It’s a taste he ought to know by now: a brackish taste that makes him gag; that makes his mouth go starchy with fear and his heart lurch like a landed fish.

A voice from downstairs. ‘Who’s there?’ she calls.

He gives a sigh. ‘It’s me, Ma.’

‘What are you doing? It’s time for your drink.’

He switches off the computer and reaches for his headphones. He likes to listen to music. It gives a different context to things. He wears his iPod all the time, and he has long since mastered the art of seeming to listen to what she says, while in his head something else is playing, the secret soundtrack to his life.

He goes downstairs. ‘What’s that, Ma?’

He watches her mouth moving soundlessly. In his head, the Man in Black sings in a voice so old and broken that he might already be dead. And Brendan feels so empty inside, consumed by such an emptiness, a craving that nothing can satisfy — not food, not love, not murder — like the snake that set out to swallow the world, and ended up by swallowing itself.

And he knows, deep down, that his time has come. Time to take his medicine. Time to do what he has longed to do for the past forty years — practically all of his life. To nail his colours to the mast and to turn and face his enemy. What has he got to lose, after all? His vitamin drink? His empire of dirt?

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blueeyedboy: Albertine?

3

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 00.15 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restricted

Mood: malcontent

Listening to: Cher: ‘Just Like Jesse James’

So that’s how a mirror-touch synaesthete got away with murder. A neat trick, you have to admit, which I carried off with my usual flair. Mirrors are very versatile. You can levitate; make things disappear; put swords through the naked lady. Yes, sometimes there are headaches. But blueeyedboy has helped me with that. Didn’t I say I preferred myself when I was writing as someone else? Blueeyedboy has no empathy. He rarely feels for anyone. His cold, dispassionate view of the world is a welcome foil for my tenderness.

Tenderness? I hear you say. Well, yes. I’m very sensitive. A mirror-touch synaesthete feels everything he witnesses. As a boy, it took me some time to realize that others did not function this way. Until Dr Peacock arrived on the scene, I’d assumed I was perfectly normal. These things sometimes run in families, I’m told; though even in identical twins the way in which the condition manifests itself is often completely different.

In any case, my brother Ben had no wish to share the limelight. The first time we went to the Mansion, he warned me that if I gave as much as a hint to Dr Peacock that I was not the everyday citizen, the vanilla flavour I seemed to be, then there would be consequences of the most unpleasant kind. At first, I defied the warning. If only because of that sepia print, the picture of Hawaii, and the way Dr Peacock spoke to me, and the thought that I might be remarkable —

I stood my ground for two whole weeks. Nigel was openly scornful — as if Brendan Brown could do anything — and Benjamin watched me resentfully, awaiting his chance to take me down. Even then, he was devious. A casual word or two to Ma; a hint that I was jealous of him; more hints that I was faking my gift and simply copying my brother.

Face it: I never had a chance. I was fat and ungainly; dyslexic; a joke; a stutterer; a disaster at school. Even my eyes were that chilly blue-grey whereas Ben’s were a luminous, summery shade that made people want to love him. Of course they believed him. Why wouldn’t they?

With the help of the piece of electrical cord, Ma extracted a full confession. In a way I think we were both relieved. I’d known I couldn’t compete with Ben. And as for Ma — she’d known from the start; she’d known I couldn’t be special. How dare I try to discredit Ben? How dare I tell such lies to her? I snivelled and howled my apologies while my brother watched with a smile on his face, and after that, all it took was the threat of a complaint to Ma to make me his obedient slave.

That was the last time I tried to tell anyone about my gift. Once more, Ben had eclipsed me. I tried to go back to being Brendan Brown, safely less-than-average. But something in Ma had shifted. Perhaps it was the reverse-halo effect. Perhaps the Emily White affair. In any case, from that moment forth, I became the whipping-boy, the butt of her frustration. When Dr Peacock stopped working with Ben, I found that she held me somehow to blame. The year Ben failed at St Oswald’s, I was the one who was punished — and yes, I had been planning to drop out of school, but both of us knew that if Ben had done well, then no one would have thought twice about me.

Food became my great escape — food, and later, Emily. I ate, not out of hunger or greed, but to cushion myself against a world where everything was dangerous; where every word was a false friend; where even to watch TV was a risk, and every scene a sharp edge just waiting for me to run into it.

Nowadays, I’ve learnt to cope. Music helps a little; and fic; and now, thanks to the Internet, I have found a means to enjoy my gift. The world online is a medium for every possible kind of porn. And of course, for a mirror-touch synaesthete, that’s as good as the real thing. A touch, a kiss, and sometimes I can almost forget that it isn’t me on that screen at all, that I am just an observer, a spy, and that the real action is going on somewhere else.

Medium. What an interesting word. It describes at the same time what I was — the middle child, the average Joe — and what I am now, a speaker in tongues, a living mouthpiece for the dead.

They say you only have one life. Look online, and you’ll see that’s not true. Try Googling your name one day, and see how many others share it. All those people who might have been you: the charity case; the sportsman; the almost-famous actor; the one on Death Row; the celebrity chef; the one who shares your birthday — all of them shadows of what might have been if things had been slightly different.

Well, I had the chance to be different. To step out of my own life and into one of my shadows. Wouldn’t anyone do the same? Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?

4

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 01.04 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restricted

Mood: reflective

Listening to: Sally Oldfield: ‘Mirrors’

Of course, Ma grieved for Benjamin. In silence, at first — an ominous calm that at first I took for acceptance. Then came the other symptoms; the rage; the forays into insanity. I’d hear her in the middle of the night, dusting the china dogs downstairs or simply walking around the house.

Sometimes she sobbed: It wasn’t your fault. Sometimes she mistook me for my brother, or ranted at me for my failures. Sometimes she screamed: It should have been you! Sometimes she woke me in the night, sobbing — Oh B.B, I dreamed you’d died — and it took me some time to understand that we were interchangeable, and that Benjamin Blue and blueeyedboy were often, to Ma, one and the same —

Then came the fallout. Inevitably. After the shock came the backlash, and suddenly I was the target once more for all kinds of expectations. With both of my brothers gone from the scene, my role had altered drastically. I was now Ma’s blue-eyed boy. I was now her only hope. And she felt that I owed it to her to try again, to go back to school; perhaps to study medicine — to do all the things that he should have done, and that only I could now achieve.

At first I tried to defend myself. I wasn’t cut out for medicine. I’d failed every science subject at Sunnybank Park, and I’d barely scraped through O-level maths. But Ma was having none of it. I had a responsibility. I’d been lazy and slack for far too long; now it was time for me to change . . .

Well, you know what happened then. I fell mysteriously sick. My belly was filled with writhing snakes, pouring their venom into my guts. By the end of it all, I’d lost so much weight that I looked like a clown in my old clothes. I flinched at loud noises, cringed at bright lights. And sometimes I barely remembered the terrible, marvellous thing that I’d done, or where Ben finished and Brendan began —

Well, that’s only natural, isn’t it? My memories are so nebulous, sneakily substituting second-hand smoke into this game of mirrors. I was feverish; I was in pain; I don’t know what I said to her. I don’t remember anything — lies, confessions, promises — but when I was fully recovered, and I left my bed for the first time, I knew that something about me had changed. I was no longer Brendan Brown, but something else entirely. And, truth be told, I no longer knew with any kind of certainty whether I had swallowed Ben, or whether he had swallowed me —

Of course I don’t believe in ghosts. I scarcely believe in the living. And yet, that’s just what I became, a shadow of my brother. When the Emily scandal broke, I reinvented his story. I already had his gift, of course, thanks to my own condition. Which made it so much easier to make them believe that I was telling the truth.

I started to wear Ben’s colour, his clothes. At first just for practicality’s sake, because my own clothes were too big. I didn’t wear blue all the time. A sweatshirt here, a T-shirt there. Ma didn’t seem to notice. The scandal surrounding Emily White had made me into a hero; people bought me drinks in pubs; girls suddenly found me attractive. I’d started at Malbry College that term. I let Ma believe I was studying medicine. My teenage skin had finally cleared; I’d even lost my stammer. Best of all, I was still losing weight. With my brothers gone, I seemed to have lost that ravenous need to consume, to collect, to swallow everything in sight. What started with Mal had ended with Ben. At last, my craving was satisfied.

5

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 21.56 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restrictedMood: wistful

Listening to: Judy Garland: ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’

Well, Clair — you got your way. I finally went back to Group today. With everything going so nicely to plan, I think I can allow myself a little harmless distraction. Besides, this may be the last time —

It’s a little powder-beige box of a room with a spider plant on a shelf by the door and a picture of Angel Blue on the wall. The chairs are orange, and have been arranged in a circle so that no one feels inferior. In the middle of the circle is a small table on which there is a flowered tray with a teapot, some cups, a plate of biscuits (Bourbon creams — which I hate, by the way), some lined A4 paper, a bundle of pens and the obligatory box of tissues.

Well, don’t expect any tears from me. Blueeyedboy never cries.

‘Hello! It’s so great to see you,’ said Clair. (She always says that to everyone.) ‘How are you feeling?’

‘OK, I guess.’

I’m rather less articulate in real life than I am online. One of the many reasons that I still prefer to stay at home.

‘What happened to your face?’ she said. She’d already forgotten my fic, of course — or decided it had to be all in my head.

I shrugged. ‘I had an accident.’

She gave me a look of fake sympathy. She looks like her mother, Maureen Pike; especially now that she’s reaching that age. Forty-one, forty-two; and suddenly it all moves south, no, not to Hawaii, but to some bleaker territory, a place of dry gulches and fallen rocks and holy rolling wilderness. A far cry, indeed, from ClairDeLune, who posts erotic fic on my site and who claims to be only thirty-five. Still, as you must have guessed, who we are on badguysrock can differ wildly from our real-life selves. As long as it stays a fantasy, who really cares which role we adopt? Cowboy or Indian, black hat or white, no one makes a judgement.

And yet, these games we like to play are linked to an underlying layer of truth — an untapped stratum of desire. We are what we dream. We know what we want. We know that we are worth it —

And if what we want is wickedness? If what we want is iniquity?

Well, maybe we are worth that, too. And the wages of sin is —

‘Tea?’ Clair indicated the flowered tray.

Tea. The poor man’s Prozac. ‘No, thanks.’

Terri, who takes her tea black and always ignores the biscuits — but who will eat a whole tub of chocolate-chip ice cream the moment she gets home — patted the chair beside her.

‘Hi, Bren,’ she simpered.

‘Fuck off,’ I told her.

I ran my eyes over the rest of the group. Yes, they were all there. Half a dozen assorted headcases; plus would-be writers; soapbox queens; failed poets (is there any other kind?); all desperate for a chance to be heard. But only one of them matters to me. Bethan, with the Irish eyes, watching me so hungrily —

Today she was wearing a sleeveless grey top that showed the stars tattooed down her arms. That Irish girl of Nigel’s, Ma calls her, refusing even to mention the name. The one with all those nasty tattoos.

Nasty is my mother’s word for those things over which she has no control. My photographs. My orchids. My fic. In fact, I rather like Bethan’s tattoos, which help to hide the silvery scars that she has had since adolescence, and which criss-cross her arms like spiders’ webs. Is that what Nigel saw in her? That passion for stars that echoed his own? That furtive, perpetual sense of distress?

In spite of her garish appearance, Bethan hates to be stared at. Perhaps that’s why she hides herself beneath so many layers of deception. Tattoos, piercings, identities. As a child, she was docile and shy; mousy; almost invisible. Well, that’s Catholicism for you, I suppose. A perpetual war between repression and excess. No wonder Nigel fell for her. She was that rare individual: someone more damaged than he was.

‘Stop staring at me, Brendan,’ she said.

I wish she wouldn’t call me that. Brendan has a sour smell, like something damp in the cellar. It makes my mouth go fuzzy-felt dry, and its colour is — well, you know what it is. Bethan is no better, with its snuffy scent of church incense. I preferred her as Albertine; colourless, immaculate —

Clair intervened. ‘Now, Bethan, please. You know what we said. I’m sure Bren didn’t mean to stare.’ She gave me one of her syrupy looks. ‘And seeing as you’re here, Bren, why don’t we start with you today? I hear you’ve been going out more. That’s good.’

I gave a shrug.

‘Where have you been going, Bren?’

‘Around. You know. Out. Town.’

She gave a wide, approving smile. ‘That’s really great to hear,’ she said. ‘And I’m so glad you’re writing again. Is there anything you’d like to read for us today?’

I shrugged again.

‘Now, don’t be shy. You know we’re here to help you.’ She turned towards the rest of the group. ‘Everyone, would you please show Bren how special he is to all of us? How much we want to help him?’

Oh no. Not the fucking group hug. Anything but that. Please.

‘I do have a little something—’ I said, more to divert their attention than because of any need to confess.

Clair’s eyes were fixed upon me now, hungry and expectant. It’s the look she gets on her face sometimes when she’s telling us about Angel Blue. And I do look rather like him, of course — that, at least, was not a lie — which means, thanks to the halo effect, that Clair has a soft spot for me, and a tendency to believe what I say.

‘Really? Can we hear it?’ she said.

I looked across at Bethan once more. I used to think she hated me, and yet, perhaps she’s the only one who really understands what it is to live every moment with the dead, to speak with the dead, to sleep with the dead —

‘We’d love to hear it, Bren,’ said Clair.

‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ I said, still directing my gaze towards Bethan. She was watching intently, her blue eyes narrowed like gas flames.

‘Of course,’ said Clair. ‘Don’t we, everyone?’

Nods all around the circle. I noticed that Bethan stayed perfectly still.

‘It may be a little — edgy,’ I said. ‘Another murder, I’m afraid.’ I smiled at Clair’s expression and at the way the others leaned forward, just like pugs at feeding time. ‘Sorry about that, guys,’ I said. ‘You’re going to think that’s all I do.’

6

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy , posting on:

badguysrock@webjournal.com

Posted at: 22.31 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: public

Mood: clean

Listening to: The Four Seasons: ‘Bye Bye Baby’

He calls her Mrs Baby Blue. She thinks she is an artist. Certainly, she looks like one: her dirt-blonde hair is artistically tousled; she wears paint-spattered jumpsuits and long strings of beads and likes to burn scented candles, which help the creative process, she says (plus they get rid of the smell of paint).

Not that she has accomplished much. No, all her creative passion has gone into raising her daughter. A child is like a work of art, and this one is perfect, she tells herself; perfect and talented and good —

He has been watching her from afar. He thinks how beautiful she is, with her neat little bob and her blanched-almond skin and her little red coat with the pointed hood. She looks nothing like her mother. Everything about her is self-contained. Even her name is beautiful. A name that smells of roses.

Her mother, on the other hand, is everything he most dislikes. Inconstant; pretentious; a parasite, feeding off her daughter, living through her, stealing her life with her expectations —

Blueeyedboy despises her. He thinks of all the harm she has done — to him, to both of them — and he wonders: Would anyone really care?

All things considered, he thinks maybe not. The world would be cleaner without her.

Cleaner. What a wonderful word. In blue, it maps out what he does, what he is and what he will achieve, in one. Cleaner.

The perfect crime comes in four stages. Stage One is obvious. Stage Two takes time. Stage Three is a little harder, but by now he is getting used to it. Five murders, counting Diesel Blue, and he wonders if he can call himself a serial killer yet, or if he first needs to refine his style.

Style is important to blueeyedboy. He wants to feel there’s a poetry, a greater purpose in what he does. He would like to do something intricate: a dissection; a beheading; something dramatic, eccentric and strange. Something that will make them shiver; something that will set him apart from the rest. Most importantly, he would like to watch; to see the expression in her eyes; to have her know at last who he is —

He knows from his observation that when she is alone in the house, Mrs Baby Blue likes to take long baths. She stays in the bath for an hour at least, reading magazines — he has seen the telltale watermarks in the bundles of papers she puts out for recycling. He has seen the flicker of candles against the frosted window glass and caught the scent of her bath oil as the water rushes into the drain. Baby Blue bathtime is sacrosanct. She never answers the telephone; never even answers the door. He knows this. He has tried it. She doesn’t even lock herself in —

He waits in the garden. He watches the house. Waits for the glow of candles and the sound of water in the pipes. Waits for Mrs Baby Blue; and then, very quietly, lets himself in.

The house has been redecorated. There are new paintings on the walls — abstracts for the most part — a scarlet and brown Axminster carpet in the hall.

Axminster. Ax. Minster. A red word. What does it mean? Axe-murderer. Axe. Minster. Murder in the Cathedral. The thought distracts him for a moment, makes him feel dizzy and remote, brings that taste into his mouth again, that fruity, rotting sweetness that heralds the worst of his headaches. He concentrates on the colour blue; its soothing properties, its calm. Blue is the blanket he reaches for whenever he feels alone or afraid; he closes his eyes, clenches his fists and thinks to himself —

It’s not my fault.

When he opens them, the taste and the headache are both gone. He looks around the silent house. The layout is as he remembers it; there’s the same lurking scent of turpentine; and those china dollies, not thrown away, but under glass in the parlour, all starey-eyed and sinister among their faded ringlets and lace.

The bathroom is tiled in aqua and white. Mrs B is reclining, eyes closed, in the water. Her face is a startling turquoise — some beauty mask, he conjectures. There is a copy of Vogue on the floor. Something smells of strawberries. Mrs B favours bath bombs that leave a sparkly residue: a layer of stardust on her skin.

Stellatio: the act of unconsciously transferring bath-bomb glitter on to another person without their knowledge or consent.

Stellata: the tiny fragments of sparkly stuff that find their way into his hair, his skin; three months later, he’s still finding those bright flecks around the house, signalling his guilt in Morse code.

He watches her in silence. He could do it now, he tells himself; but sometimes the urge to be seen is too strong; and he wants to see the look in her eyes. He lingers for a moment; and then, some sense alerts her to him. She opens her eyes — for a moment there is no shock at all, just a wide, blank amazement, like that of those dollies in the hall — and then she is sitting up, a surge of water pulling at her, making her heavy, making her slow, and the smell of strawberries is suddenly overwhelming, and the glittery water splashes his face, and he is leaning into the bathtub, and she’s punching at him with her helpless fists, and he grabs her by her soapy hair and pushes her under the surface.

It is surprisingly easy. Even so, he dislikes the mess. The woman is covered with glittery stuff that transfers on to his skin. The scent of synthetic strawberry intensifies. She heaves and struggles beneath his weight, but gravity is against her, and the weight of the water holds her down.

He waits for several minutes, thinking of those pink wafers in the tins of Family Circle, and another scent emerges from the lightning chain of words — Wafer. Communion. Holy Ghost. He allows himself to relax; gives his breathing time to slow down, then carefully, methodically, he goes about his housework.

No prints will be found at the scene — he is wearing latex gloves, and has politely removed his shoes in the hall, like a good little boy on a visit. He checks the body. It looks OK. He mops the spilled water from the bathroom floor and leaves the candles burning.

Now he strips off his wet shirt and jeans, balls them up in his gym bag, puts on the clean clothes he has brought. He leaves the house as he found it — takes the wet clothes home with him and puts them in the washing machine.

There, he thinks. All gone.

He waits for discovery — no one comes. He has managed it again. But this time, he feels no euphoria. In fact he feels a sense of loss; and that harsh and cuprous dead-vegetable taste, so like that of the vitamin drink, creeps into his throat and fills his mouth, making him gag and grimace.

Why is this one different? he thinks. Why should he feel her absence now, when everything is so close to completion, and why should he feel he has thrown away — to use his Ma’s habitual phrase — the baby with the bath water? 322

Post comment:

ClairDeLune: Thank you for this, blueeyedboy. It was wonderful to hear you read this in Group. I hope you won’t leave it so long next time! Remember we’re all there for you!

chrysalisbaby: wish i could have heard U read

Captainbunnykiller: Bitchin’ — LOL!

Toxic69: This is better than sex, man. Still, if you could find your way to writing a bit of both, some day —

7

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.59 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restricted

Mood: lonely

Listening to: Motorhead: ‘The Ace Of Spades’

Well, of course, one has to allow for poetic licence. But sometimes fiction is better than life. Maybe that’s how it should have been. Murder is murder — be it by poison, by proxy, by drowning or by the thousand paper-cuts of the Press. Murder is murder, guilt is guilt, and under the fic beats a telltale truth as red and bloody as a heart. Because murder changes everyone — victim, culprit, witness, suspect — in so many unexpected ways. It’s a Trojan, which infects the soul, lying dormant for months and years, stealing secrets, severing links, corrupting memories and worse, and finally emerging at last in a system-wide orgy of destruction.

No, I don’t feel any remorse. Not for Catherine’s death, at least. It was instinct that led me to act as I did; the instinct of a baby bird struggling for survival. Ma’s response, too, was instinctive. I was, after all, the only child. I had to succeed, to be the best; discretion was no longer an option. I’d accepted Ben’s inheritance. I read his books. I wore his clothes. And when the Peacock scandal broke, I told my brother’s story — not as it really happened, of course, but how Ma had imagined it, revealing my brother once and for all as the saint, the victim, the star of the show —

Yes, I do feel sorry for that. Dr Peacock had been kind to me. But I had no choice. You know that, right? To refuse would have been unthinkable; I was already caught in the bottle trap, a trap of my own making, and I was fighting for my life by then, the life I’d stolen from Benjamin.

You understand, Albertine. You took a life from Emily. Not that I hold it against you. Quite the opposite, in fact. A person who knows how to take a life can always take another. And as I think I said before, what really counts — in murder, as in all affairs of the heart — is not so much knowledge as desire.

Well — may I still call you Albertine?Bethan never suited you. But the roses that grew up your garden wall — Albertine, with their wistful scent — were just the same variety as the ones that grew at the Mansion. I suppose I must have told you that. You always paid attention. Little Bethan Brannigan, with her bobbed brown hair and those slate-blue eyes. You lived next door to Emily, and in a certain kind of light you could almost have been her sister. You might even have been a friend to her, a child of her own age to play with.

But Mrs White was a terrible snob. She despised Mrs Brannigan, with her rented house and her Irish twang and suspiciously absent husband. She worked at the local primary school — in fact, she’d once taught my brother, who dubbed her Mrs Catholic Blue, and poured contempt on her beliefs. And though Patrick White was more tolerant than either Benjamin or Ma, Catherine kept Emily well away from the Irish girl and her family.

But you liked to watch her, didn’t you? The little blind girl from over the wall who played the piano so beautifully; who had everything you didn’t have, who had tutors and presents and visitors and who never had to go to school? And when I first spoke to you, you were shy; a little suspicious, at least at first, then flattered at the attention. You accepted my gifts first with puzzlement, then finally with gratitude.

Best of all, you never judged me. You never cared that I was fat. You never cared that I stammered, or thought of me as second-rate. You never asked a thing of me, or expected me to be someone else. I was the brother you’d never had. You were the little sister. And it never once occurred to you that you were just an excuse, a stooge; that the main attraction was somewhere else —

Well, now you know how I felt. We don’t always get what we want in life. I had Ben, you had Emily; both of us on the sidelines; extras; substitutes for the real thing. Still, I became quite fond of you. Oh, not in the way I loved Emily, the little sister I should have had. But your innocent devotion was something I’d never encountered before. It’s true that I was nearly twice your age; but you had a certain quality. You were engaging, obedient. You were unusually bright. And, of course, you desperately longed to be whatever it was that I wanted of you —

Oh, please. Don’t be disgusting. What kind of a pervert do you take me for? I liked to be with you, that was all, as I liked being close to Emily. Your mother never noticed me, and Mrs White, who knew who I was, never tried to intervene. On weekdays I’d call round after school, before your mother came home from work, and at weekends I’d meet you somewhere, either at the playground on Abbey Road or at the end of your garden, where we were less likely to be seen, and we’d talk about your day and mine; I’d give you sweets and chocolates, and I’d tell you stories about my Ma, my brothers, myself and Emily.

You were an excellent listener. In fact, I sometimes forgot your age and spoke to you as an equal. I told you about my condition — my gift. I showed you my cuts and bruises. I told you about Dr Peacock, and all the tests he’d performed on me before he chose my brother. I showed you some of my photographs, and confessed to you — as I could not to Ma — that all I’d ever wanted in life was to fly as far as Hawaii.

Poor little lonely girl. Who else did you have but me? Who else was there in your life? A working mother, an absent father, no grandparents, no neighbours, no friends. Except for Yours Truly, what did you have? And what wouldn’t you have done for me?

Don’t ever let them tell you that an eight-year-old child can’t feel this way. Those pre-adolescent years are filled with anguish and revolt. Adults try to forget this; to fool themselves into thinking that children feel less strongly than they; that love comes later, with puberty, a kind of compensation for the loss of a state of grace —

Love? Well, yes. There are so many kinds. There’s eros: simplest and most transient of all. There’s philia: friendship; loyalty. There’s storge: the affection a child gives its parents. There’s thelema: the desire to perform. Then there’s agape: platonic love; for a friend; for a world; love for a stranger you’ve never met; the love of all humanity.

But even the Greeks didn’t know everything. Love is like snow: there are so many words, all unique and untranslatable. Is there a word for the love you feel for someone you’ve hated all your life? Or the love for something that makes you sick? Or that sweet and aching tenderness for the one you’re going to kill?

Please believe me, Albertine. I’m sorry for all that happened to you. I never wanted you to be hurt. But madness is catching, isn’t it? Like love, it believes the impossible. Moves mountains; deals in eternity; sometimes even raises the dead.

You asked me what I wanted of you. Why I couldn’t just leave it alone. Well, Albertine, here it is. You are going to do for me what I can never do for myself. The single act that can set me free. The act I’ve been planning for over twenty years. An act I could never carry out, but which you could perform so easily —

Pick a card. Any card.

The trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his own choice, instead of the one that was chosen for him. Any card. My card. Which happens to be —

Haven’t you guessed?

Then pick a card, Albertine.

8

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 23.32 on Tuesday, February 19

Status: restricted

Mood: tense

He’s playing games with me, of course. That’s what blueeyedboy does best. We’ve played so many games, he and I, that the line between truth and fiction has become permanently blurred. I ought to hate him, and yet I know that whatever he is, whatever he does, I am in part responsible.

Why is he doing this to me? What does he hope to achieve this time? Everyone in this story is dead — Catherine; Daddy; Dr Peacock; Ben; Nigel, and, most importantly, Emily. And yet as he read his story out loud I felt my throat begin to constrict, my nerves to jangle, my head to spin, and soon the chords of the Berlioz would start to tighten in my mind —

‘Bethan? Are you all right?’ he said. I could hear the little smile in his voice.

‘I’m sorry.’ I stood up. ‘I have to go.’

Clair looked slightly impatient behind her sympathetic façade. I’d interrupted the story, of course, and everyone else was riveted.

‘You don’t look terribly well,’ said Bren. ‘I hope it wasn’t something I said—’

‘Fuck you,’ I told him, and made for the door.

He gave me a rueful shrug as I passed. Strange that, after all he has done, I should feel that sorry little skip of the heart every time he looks at me. He’s crazy, and false, and deserves to die, yet there’s still something inside me that wants to believe, that still tries to find excuses for him. All that was such a long time ago. We were different people then. And both of us have paid a price, have left a part of ourselves behind, so that neither of us can ever be whole, or escape the ghost of Emily.

For a time, I thought I had escaped. Perhaps I might even have managed if he hadn’t been there to remind me. Every day in every way, taunting me with his presence until suddenly it all comes out, and the box of delights is broken, and all the demons are free at last, scourging the air with memories.

Funny, where these things can lead us. If Emily had lived, would we have been friends? Would she have worn that red coat? Would she have lived in my house? Would Nigel have fallen for her that night at the Zebra, instead of me? Sometimes I feel I’m in Looking Glass Land, living a life that’s not quite mine, a second-hand life that never quite fitted.

Emily’s life. Emily’s chair. Emily’s bed. Emily’s house.

But I like it there; it feels right somehow. Not like my old house from so long ago, which is now home to the Jacadees, and which rings with the noise of their cheery lives and the spices of their kitchen. Somehow I couldn’t have stayed there. No, Emily’s house was the place for me, and I have barely allowed it to change, as if she might come back some day and claim her rightful property.

Perhaps that’s why Nigel never settled there, preferring to keep to his flat in town. Not that he really remembered her — he missed that business entirely — but I suppose Gloria disapproved, as indeed she disapproved of everything about me. My hair; my accent; my body art; but most of all my proximity to whatever had happened to Emily White, a mystery only half-resolved, in which her son was also enmeshed.

I don’t believe in ghosts, of course. I’m not the one who’s crazy. But all my life I’ve seen her here: tapping her way round Malbry; walking in the park; by the church; vivid in her bright-red coat. I’ve seen her; I’ve been her in my mind. How could it have been otherwise? I’ve been living Emily’s life for longer than I have my own. I listen to her music. I grow her favourite flowers. I visited her father every Sunday afternoon, and right until the end he nearly always called me Emily.

Still, the time for nostalgia is long past. My journal now serves a new purpose. Confession is good for the soul, they say, and over time I have acquired the habit of the confessional. It’s so much easier this way, of course; there is no priest, no penance. Only the computer screen and the absolution of the Delete key. The moving finger writes, and, having writ, can be erased at the touch of a hand; unwriting the past, deleting blame, making the sullied spotless again —

Blueeyedboy would understand. Blueeyedboy, with his online games. Why does he do it? Because he can. And equally, because he can’t. And also, of course, because Chryssie believes in happy-ever-after; because Clair buys Bourbon biscuits instead of Family Circle; and because Cap is a fucktard who wouldn’t know tough if it jumped up and tore out what’s left of his guts —

I know. I’m beginning to sound like him now. I suppose it comes with the territory. And besides, I’ve always been very good at mimicking other people. It is, you might say, my only skill. My one successful party piece. But this is no time for complacency. This is the time to be most aware. Even at his most vulnerable, blueeyedboy is dangerous. He is far from stupid, and he knows how to hit back. Nigel — poor Nigel — is a case in point, deleted just as effectively as if blueeyedboy had hit a key.

That’s how he does it. That’s how he copes. He said as much in his story. That’s how a mirror-touch synaesthete orchestrated the death of one brother, by using another as proxy. And that’s how he managed to kill Nigel, with the help of an insect in a jar. And if I am to believe him now, that’s how he caused those other deaths, shielding himself from the consequences by watching it all in reverse, through his fic, like Perseus slaying the Gorgon.

I’ve thought of going to the police. But it sounds so absurd, doesn’t it? I can imagine their faces now; their looks of sympathetic amusement. I could show them his online confessions — if that’s what they really are — and I’d be the one to look crazy, lost in a world of fantasy. Like a stage magician as he prepares to saw the lady in half, blueeyedboy scrupulously invites us to check that there has been no subterfuge.

Look, no tricks. No hidden trapdoor. There’s nothing hidden up his sleeve. His crimes are public, for all to see. To speak up now would simply be to turn the spotlight on myself; to add another scandalous strand to a tale already barbed with lies. I imagine my life with Nigel placed under their scrutiny; I can already see the Press coming like starving rodents out of their holes, swarming over everything, and every little scrap of my life torn up and nibbled at and used to line their filthy nests.

I walked home via the Fireplace House. I knew it so well from his stories. In fact I’d only seen it once, in secret, when I was ten years old. I remembered the garden, all roses, and the bright green lawns, and the big front door, and the fish pond with its fountain. Of course I’d never been inside. But Daddy had told me everything. Over twenty years later, I found my way back with eerie, unsurprising ease. Class had finished at eight o’clock, and a murky dark had fallen, smelling of smoke and sour earth, bracketing the houses and cars in a halo of streetlight-orange.

The house was shut, as I’d thought it would be, but the front gate opened easily and the path had been recently weeded and cleared. Bren’s work, I told myself. He has always hated disorder.

Security lights came on as I passed. White spotlights against the green. I could see my giant shadow against the wall of the rose garden, pointing like a finger down the path and across the lawn.

I tried to imagine the house as my own. That gracious house, those gardens. If Emily had lived, I thought, they would have belonged to her now. But Emily had not lived, and the fortune had gone to her family, or at least what was left of it — to her father, Patrick White — and then, at last, from Daddy to me. I wish I could refuse the gift. But it’s too late: wherever I go, Emily White will follow me. Emily White and her circus of horrors: the gloaters, the haters, the stalkers, the Press . . .

The upstairs windows were boarded up. Across the fading front door someone had recently sprayed in blue paint: ROT IN HELL U PERVERT.

Nigel? No, surely not. I don’t believe Nigel would have harmed the old man, whatever the provocation. And as for Bren’s other suggestion — that Nigel had never loved me at all, that it had all been because of the money —

No. That’s blueeyedboy playing games again, trying to poison everything. If Nigel had lied to me, I would have known. And yet I can’t help wondering — what was in that letter he got? The letter which sent him off in such a rage? Could Brendan have been blackmailing him? Had he threatened to reveal his plans? Could Nigel really have been involved in something that led to murder?

Click.

A small, but quite familiar sound. For a moment I stood listening, the sound of my blood like surf in my ears, my skin a-prickle with nervous heat. Could they have found me already? I thought. Was this the exposure I’d feared?

‘Is anyone there?’

No answer. The trees hisshed and whispered with the wind.

‘Brendan!’ I called. ‘Bren? Is that you?’

Still nothing moved. There was silence. And yet I could feel him watching me as I’ve felt him watch me so often before, and the hackles stood up at the back of my neck, and my mouth was suddenly sour and dry.

Then I heard it again. Click.

The shutterclick sound of a camera, so dreadfully innocuous, weighted with menace and memories. Then the furtive sound of his retreat, almost inaudible, back through the bushes. He is very quiet, of course. But I can always hear him.

I took a step towards the sound, parted the bushes with my hands.

‘Why are you following me?’ I said. ‘What is it you want, Bren?’

I thought I heard him behind me then, a furtive sound in the under-growth. I made my voice seductive now, a velvet cat’s-paw of a voice, to coax an unsuspecting rat. ‘Brendan? Please. We need to talk.’

There was a piece of rock at my feet by the edge of the border. I hefted it. It felt good. I imagined myself bringing it down on his head as he hid there in the bushes.

I stood there, holding the rock in my hand, looking out for a sign of him. ‘Brendan? Are you there?’ I said. ‘Come out. I want to talk to you—’

Once more I heard a rustling, and this time I reacted. I took a step, spun round, and then, as hard as I could, I pitched the rock towards the source of the rustling sound. There came a thud and a muffled cry — and then a terrible silence.

There. You’ve done it, I told myself.

It didn’t feel real; my hands were numb. My ears were filled with white noise. Was this all I had to do? Is it so easy to kill a man?

And then it hit me; the horror, the truth. Murder was easy, I realized; as easy as throwing a casual punch; as easy as lifting up a stone. I felt empty, amazed at my emptiness. Could this really be all there was?

Then came the opening chords of grief; a swell of love and sickness. I heard a dreadful wounded cry, which for a moment I took to be his voice, but later understood was my own. I took a step towards the place where I’d thrown the rock at Brendan. I called his name. There was no reply. He could be hurt, I told myself. He could be alive, but unconscious. He could be faking it; lying in wait. I didn’t care; I had to know. There, behind the rose hedge — the briars tore my hands bloody.

And then came a movement behind me. He must have been very silent. He must have crawled on his hands and knees between the herbaceous borders. As I turned I caught a glimpse of his face, his look of pain and disbelief.

‘Bren?’ I called. ‘I didn’t mean—’

And then he was running away through the trees, a flash of blue parka against the green. I heard him slip on the dead leaves, sprint across the gravel path, vault over the garden wall and jump down into the alleyway. My heart was pounding furiously. I was shaking with adrenalin. Relief and bitterness warred in me. I hadn’t crossed the line, after all. I was not a murderer. Or could it be that the fateful line was not the act, but the intent?

Of course, that’s academic now. I’ve shown my hand. The game is on. Like it or not, if he gets the chance, he will try to kill me.

9

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 00.07 on Wednesday, February 20

Status: restricted

Mood: hurt

Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘Run Like Hell’

Bitch. You got me. Right on the wrist — I’m lucky it isn’t broken. If you’d hit me in the head — as you undoubtedly meant to — it would have been goodnight, sweet prince, or pick the cliché of your choice.

I have to say I’m a little surprised. I didn’t mean any harm, you know. I was only taking photographs. I certainly hadn’t expected you to react quite so aggressively. Fortunately I know that garden very well. I know how to move between the beds, and where to watch unnoticed. I knew how to make my escape, too — as I had so many times before — over the wall into the street, with my hurt wrist pressed hard against my stomach and tears of pain half-blinding me, so that everything seemed garlanded with dirty-orange rainbows.

I ran home, trying to tell myself that I wasn’t running home to Ma, and got back just as she was finishing up in the kitchen.

‘How was class?’ she called through the door.

‘Fine, Ma,’ I told her, hoping to get upstairs before she saw me. Mud on my trainers; mud on my jeans; my wrist beginning to swell and throb — that’s why I’m still typing with one hand — and my face a map of where I’d been; of places Ma had warned me against —

‘Did you talk to Terri?’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’s upset about Eleanor.’

Surprisingly, Ma has taken it well. Far better than I had expected. Spent most of today looking at hats and choosing hymns for the funeral. Ma enjoys her funerals, of course. She relishes the drama. The trembling hand; the tearful smile; the handkerchief pressed to the lipsticked mouth. Tottering by with Adèle and Maureen, each supporting an elbow:

Gloria’s such a survivor.

She stopped me halfway up the stairs. Looking down I could see the top of her head; the parting in her black hair that over time has grown from a narrow path into a four-lane motorway. Ma dyes her hair, of course; it’s one of the things I’m not supposed to know about, like the Tena pads in the bathroom, and what happened to my father. But I’m not allowed to have secrets from her, and she levelled the force of her scrutiny on to my guilty profile as I stood like a deer in the headlights, waiting for the hammer to fall.

But when she spoke, I found that Ma still sounded surprisingly cheery. ‘Why don’t you have a nice bath?’ she said. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven. There’s some of that chilli chicken you like, and some home-made lemon pie.’ No mention of the mud on the stairs, or even the fact that I was half an hour late.

Sometimes that’s the worst part. I can live with her when she’s evil. It’s when she’s normal that it hurts, because that’s when the guilt comes creeping back, bringing the headache, the sickness. It’s when she’s normal that I can feel the bulbs of arthritis in her hands and the way her back aches when she stands up, and that’s when I remember what it was like in the old days, before my brother was born, in the days when I was her blueeyeedboy —

‘I’m not really hungry right now, Ma.’

I expected her to react to that. But this time Ma just smiled and said: ‘All right, B.B., you get some rest,’ and went back into the kitchen. I was surprised (and oddly disturbed) to be let off the hook so easily; but still, it’s good to be back in my room, with a glass of wine and a sandwich, and an ice-pack on my injured hand.

The first thing I did was log on. Badguysrock was deserted, although my inbox was filled with messages, mostly from Clair and Chryssie. Nothing from Albertine. Oh, well. Perhaps she is feeling shaken. It isn’t easy to face the fact that you’re capable of murder. But she was always so keen to believe in absolutes. In actual fact the line between good and evil is so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable; and it’s only long after you’ve crossed it that you become aware that it even existed at all.

Albertine, oh Albertine. I feel very close to you today. Through the throbbing of my wrist, I can feel the beat of your heart. I wish you all the best, you know. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And when it’s over, I hope you can find a little place in your heart for me, for blueeyedboy, who understands far more than you imagine —

10

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 23.32 on Wednesday, February 20S

tatus: restricted

Mood: impatient

Not a word from blueeyedboy. Not that I expected one — not so soon, anyway. I’m guessing he’ll lie low for a while, like an animal driven to earth. I’m guessing three days before he comes out. The first, to check out the area. The second, to establish a plan of action. The third, to finally make his move. Which is why I made my move today — emptying my bank account, setting my things in order, packing away my belongings in preparation for the inevitable.

Don’t think this is going to be easy for me. These things are never straightforward. Even less so for him, of course; but his methods are chosen to fool his uniquely cross-wired brain into thinking his actions are not his fault, while the victim walks straight into the trap carefully laid out for them.

What will it be, I wonder? Having now made my intentions so clear, I cannot expect him to make an exception in my case. He’ll try to kill me. He has no choice. And his feelings for me — such as they are — are founded on guilt and nostalgia. I’ve always known what I was to him. A shade; a ghost; a reflection. A substitute for Emily. I knew that, and I didn’t care; that was how much he meant to me.

But people are lines of dominoes: one falls, then all the others follow. Emily and Catherine; Daddy, Dr Peacock and me. Nigel and Bren and Benjamin. Where it begins is seldom clear; we own only part of our personal story.

It doesn’t seem fair, does it? We all imagine our lives as a story in which we ourselves take centre stage. But what about the extras? What about the substitutes? For every leading role there exist a multitude of expendables, hanging around in the background, never in the spotlight, never speaking a line of dialogue, sometimes not even making the final edit, ending their lives as a single frame on the cutting-room floor. Who cares when an extra bites the dust? Who owns the story of their life?

For me it begins at St Oswald’s. I can’t have been more than seven years old, but I do remember what happened in remarkably vivid detail. Every year my mother and I would go to the Christmas concert in the chapel at St Oswald’s at the end of the long winter term. I liked the music, the carols, the hymns, and the organ like a hydra with its shining tongues of brass. She liked the solemnity of the Masters in their black gowns, and the sweetness of the choristers with their angel smocks and candles.

I saw things with such clarity then. The memory loss came afterwards. One moment I was in sunlight; the next in chequered shadows, with only a few flecks of brilliance left to prove that the memories had ever been there. But that day, everything was clear. I remember all of it.

It begins with a little girl crying in the row just in front of me. That was Emily White, of course. Two years younger than I was, and already stealing the limelight. Dr Peacock was there, as well — a large, kind-looking, bearded man with an affable voice like a French horn, whilst elsewhere — another small drama played out, unseen by the major protagonists.

It wasn’t much of a drama. Just a blue-eyed boy in the choir pitching forward on to his face. But there was a minor commotion; the music wavered, but did not stop, and a woman — the boy’s mother, I assumed — rushed forward into the stalls, her high shoes skidding on the polished floor, her face a lipstick blur of dismay.

My own mother looked disapproving. She wouldn’t have rushed forward. She would never have made such a fuss — especially not here, in chapel, with everyone so ready to judge and to spread those hateful rumours.

‘Gloria Winter. I should have known—’

It was a name I’d heard before. She’d told me the boy had caused trouble at school. In fact, the whole family was bad news: godless, wicked and profane.

Irredeemable, she’d said. It was the word Mother reserved for the worst kind of sinners: rapists, blasphemers, matricides.

Gloria was holding her son. He had cut his head on the side of the pew. Blood — a surprising amount of it — spattered his chorister’s surplice. Behind her, two boys, one in black, one in brown, stood by like extras in a game. The black one looked sullen; even bored. The one in brown — a clumsy-looking boy with long, lank hair over his eyes and an oversized sweatshirt that emphasized, rather than hid, his gut — looked distressed, almost dazed.

He put a shaking hand to his head. I wondered if he’d fallen, too.

‘What do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you see I need help?’ Gloria Winter’s voice was sharp. ‘B.B., get a towel, or something. Nigel, call an ambulance.’

Nigel, at sixteen; an innocent. I wish I could say I remembered him. But frankly, I never noticed him; my attention was all on Bren. Perhaps because of the look in his eyes: that trapped and helpless expression. Perhaps because I sensed, even then, a kind of bond between us. First impressions matter so much; they shape us for what comes later.

He raised his hand to his head again. I saw his expression, a rictus of pain as if he’d been hit by something falling from the sky, and then he stumbled against the step and fell to his knees almost at my feet.

My mother had already moved to help, guiding Gloria through the crowd.

I looked down at the boy in brown. ‘Are you all right?’

He stared at me in open surprise. To tell the truth, I’d surprised myself. He was so much older than I. I rarely spoke to strangers. But there was something about him that moved me, somehow: an almost childlike quality.

‘Are you all right?’ I repeated.

He had no time to answer me. Gloria turned impatiently, one arm still supporting Benjamin. It struck me then how tiny she was: wasp-waisted in her pencil skirt, stiletto heels barely grazing the floor. My mother disliked stiletto heels — which she called slutilloes — and which, she claimed, were responsible for a variety of conditions ranging from chronic back pain to hammer toes and arthritis. But Gloria moved like a dancer, and her voice was as sharp as those six-inch heels as she snapped at her ungainly son:

‘Brendan, get over here right now, or, God help me, I’ll wring your fucking neck—’

I saw my own mother flinch at that. The F-word was strictly outlawed in our house. And coming from the boy’s mother, too — I couldn’t help but feel sympathy. He scrambled clumsily to his feet, his face now flushing a dull red. And I could see how troubled he was, how scared and self-conscious and filled with hate.

He wishes she were dead, I thought, with sudden, luminous certainty.

It was a dangerous, powerful thought. It lit up my mind like a beacon. That this boy should wish his mother dead was almost beyond imagining. Surely this was a mortal sin. It meant that he would burn in hell; that he was damned for eternity. And yet, I was drawn to him somehow. He looked so lost and unhappy. Maybe I could save him, I thought. Maybe he was redeemable . . .

11

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 02.04 on Thursday, February 21

Status: restricted

Mood: anxious

Let me explain. It’s not easy. As a child I was very shy. I was bullied at school. I had no friends. My mother was religious, and her disapproval weighed upon every aspect of my life. She showed me little affection, making it clear to me from the start that only Jesus deserved her love. I was my mother’s gift to Him; a soul for His collection, and though I was far from perfect, she said, with His grace and my efforts I might one day be good enough to meet the Saviour’s exacting standards.

I don’t remember my father at all. Mother never spoke of him, though she wore a wedding ring, and I was left with the vague impression that he had disappointed her, and that she had sent him away, as I too would be sent away if I failed to be good enough.

Well, I tried. I said my prayers. I did my chores. I went to Confession. I never spoke to strangers, or raised my voice, or read comic-books, or took a second slice of cake if Mother invited a friend to tea. But even so, it was never enough. I always fell short of perfection, somehow. There was always a fault in my stubborn clay. Sometimes it was my carelessness; a tear in the hem of my school skirt; a smear of mud on my white socks. Sometimes it was bad thoughts. Sometimes, a song on the radio — Mother detested rock music and called it Satan’s flatulence — or a passage from a book I’d read. There were so many dangers, Mother said; so many pits on the road to hell. But she tried, in her fashion; she always tried. It wasn’t her fault I turned out this way.

There were no toys or dolls in my room, just a blue-eyed Jesus on the cross and a plaster angel (slightly cracked) that was meant to drive away bad thoughts and make me feel safe at night.

In fact, it made me nervous. Its face, neither male nor female, looked like a dead child’s. And as for the blue-eyed Jesus, with his head thrown back and his bleeding ribs, he looked neither kind nor compassionate, but angry, tortured and frightening — and why not, I asked myself? If Jesus died to save us all, why wouldn’t He be angry? Wouldn’t He be furious at what He’d had to endure for our sakes? Wouldn’t He want vengeance somehow — for the nails, and the spear, and the crown of thorns?

If I die before I wake, I pray, dear Lord, my soul to take —

And so at night I would lie sleepless for hours, terrified to close my eyes in case the angels took my soul, or, worse still, that Jesus Himself would rise from the dead and come for me, ice-cold and smelling of the grave, and hiss in my ear:

It should have been you.

Bren was dismissive of my fears, and indignant that Mother encouraged them.

‘I thought my Ma was bad enough. But yours is a fucking fruitcake.’

I sniggered at that. The F-word again. I’d never dared to use it. But Bren was so much older than I; so very much more daring. Those stories he told me about himself — stories of cunning and secret revenge — far from being horrified, I felt a sneaking admiration. My mother believed in humility, Bren in getting even. This was an entirely new concept to me — accustomed as I was to one kind of creed, I was secretly both thrilled and appalled to hear the Gospel of Brendan.

The Gospel of Brendan was simple. Hit back as hard and as low as you can. Forget about turning the other cheek; just get the first punch in and run away. If in doubt, blame someone else. And never confess to anything.

Of course I admired him. How could I not? His words made a great deal of sense to me. I was slightly anxious for his soul, but secretly it seemed to me that if Our Saviour had adopted some of Brendan’s attitude instead of being quite so meek, it might have been better for everyone. Brendan Winter kicked ass. Bren would never let himself be bullied or intimidated. Bren never lay awake in bed, paralysed by fear. Bren hit back at his enemies with the force of angels.

Well, none of that was strictly true. I realized that soon enough. Bren told me things as they ought to have been, and not precisely as they were. Still, I liked him better that way. It made him — if not quite innocent, then at least redeemable. And that’s what I wanted — or thought I did. To save him. To fix what was broken inside. To shape him like a piece of clay into the face of innocence.

And I liked to listen. I liked his voice. When he was reading his stories to me, he never used to stutter. Even his tone was different — quiet and cynically humorous, like a woody cor anglais. The violence never troubled me; besides, it was fiction. What harm could it do? The Brothers Grimm had written far worse: babies devoured by ogres, by wolves; mothers deserting their children; sons sent into exile or killed, or cursed by wicked witches.

The moment I first saw him I knew that Bren had a problem with his mother. I’d seen Gloria in the Village, though we didn’t have much to do with her. But I knew her through Bren, and hated her — not for my own sake, but for his.

Slowly, I came to know her more: the vitamin drink, and the china dogs, and the piece of electrical cord. Sometimes Bren showed me the marks she had left: the scratches, welts and bruises. He was so much older than I was, and yet on these occasions I felt as if I were the grown-up. I comforted him. I listened to him. I gave him unconditional love, sympathy and admiration. And it never once occurred to me that while I thought I was shaping him, he was really shaping me . . .

12

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 13.57 on Thursday, February 21

Status: restricted

Mood: melancholy

Brendan Winter and I became friends five months after the concert. I was going through a difficult time; Mother was always busy at work, and at school I was bullied more than ever. I didn’t really understand why. There were other fatherless children in Malbry. Why was I so different? Perhaps it was my fault, I thought, that my Dad had gone away. Perhaps he’d never wanted me in the first place. Maybe neither of my parents had.

That was when Brendan turned up again. I recognized him immediately. Mother was busy, as always. I was alone in the garden. And Emily was in her house, playing the piano — something by Rachmaninov, something sweet and melancholy. I could hear her through the window, which was open, and around which a tangle of roses were in bloom. It looked like a fairy-tale window to me, in which a princess ought to appear: Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White, or maybe the Lady of Shalott.

Brendan was no Lancelot. He was wearing brown cords, and a beige canvas jacket that made him look like a padded envelope. He was carrying a satchel. His hair was longer than before, almost covering his face. He passed by the house, heard the music and stopped, not ten feet away from the garden gate. He hadn’t seen me; I was on my swing under the weeping willow tree. But I saw his face as he heard her play, the little smile that touched his mouth. He took out a camera from his satchel, a camera with a long lens; and with a deftness that looked out of place, he clicked off a dozen shots of the house — clickclickclick, like dominoes falling — before slipping the camera back into his satchel almost without breaking step.

I left my place on the swing. ‘Hey.’

He turned, looking hunted; then seemed to relax when he saw who I was.

‘Hey, I’m Bethan,’ I said.

‘B-Brendan.’

I leaned my elbows on the gate. ‘Brendan, why were you taking pictures of the Whites’ house?’

He looked alarmed at that. ‘Please. If you t-tell anyone, I’ll get into trouble. I — just like taking pictures, that’s all.’

‘Take a picture of me,’ I said, showing my teeth like the Cheshire Cat.

Bren looked round, then grinned. ‘OK. Just as long as you promise, B-Bethan. Not a word to anyone.’

‘Not even Mother?’

‘Especially not Mother.’

‘All right, I promise,’ I told him. ‘But why do you like taking pictures so much?’

He looked at me and smiled. Behind that graceless curtain of hair his eyes were really quite beautiful, with lashes as long and thick as a girl’s. ‘This isn’t an ordinary camera,’ he said, this time, I noticed, without stuttering. ‘Through this, I can see right into your heart. I can see what you’re hiding from me. I can tell if you’re good or bad, if you’ve said your prayers, if you love your mother—’

My own eyes opened wide at this.

‘You can see all that?’

‘Of course I can.’

And at that he gave an enormous grin.

And that’s how I was collected.

Of course, I didn’t see it that way. Not until much later. But that was when I decided that Brendan Winter would be my friend: Bren, whom nobody wanted; Bren, who had asked me to lie for him to keep him out of trouble.

It began like that; with a little white lie. Then, with my curiosity about someone so unlike myself. Then came the wary affection that a child may feel for a dangerous dog. Then, a sense of affinity, in spite of our many differences; and lastly a feeling that blossomed at length into something like infatuation.

I never believed he cared much for me. I knew from the start where his interest lay. But Mrs White was protective. Emily was never alone, never allowed to talk to strangers. A glimpse over the garden wall; a photograph; a vicarious touch was all that Bren could hope for. As far as he was concerned, Emily might as well have been on Mars.

The rest of the time, Brendan was mine; and that was quite enough for me. He didn’t even like her, I thought. In fact, I believed he hated her. I was naïve. I was very young. And I believed in him — in his gift. I’d failed to meet my mother’s standards; but maybe, with Bren, I could succeed. I was his guardian angel, he said. Watching him. Protecting him. And so, stepping through the looking glass, I entered the world of blueeyedboy, where everything exists in reverse and every sense is twisted and turned, and nothing ever really begins, and nothing ever comes to an end . . .

I was three months shy of twelve years old the summer Brendan’s brother died. No one told me what happened, although rumours of varying wildness had been circulating around Malbry for weeks. But the Village has always considered itself above events in White City. Brendan was ill, and at first I assumed that Ben had died of the same sickness. After that, the Emily affair swallowed up most of the details. The scandal, the public breakdown — all of that kept the Press in business for more than long enough to eclipse one dirty little domestic.

Meanwhile, the Fireplace House had become the focus of everything. Emily White’s brief moment of fame would have fizzled out long ago, but for the blast of oxygen delivered to it that autumn by Brendan Winter. Those allegations of fraud and abuse did more to raise Emily’s profile than Catherine White ever did. Not that Catherine cared by then — her family was breaking apart. She hadn’t seen her daughter for weeks, not since the Social Services had decided that the child was at risk. Instead, Emily had been sent to live with Mr White, at a B & B in the Village, with twice-weekly visits from a counsellor, until such time as the business could be properly concluded. Left at home, Catherine was self-medicating with a mixture of alcohol and antidepressants, which Feather — never a stabilizing influence — supplemented with a variety of herbal remedies, both legal and illegal.

Someone should have noticed the signs. Amazingly, nobody did. And when the thing exploded at last, we were all of us caught by the shrapnel.

Although we were next-door neighbours, I didn’t know much about Mr White. I knew he was a quiet man who only played music when Mrs White wasn’t around; who sometimes smoked a pipe (again, when his wife wasn’t there to nag him); who wore little steel-rimmed glasses and a coat that made him look like a spy. I’d heard him play the organ in church and conduct the choir at St Oswald’s. I’d often watched him from over the wall, as he sat in the garden with Emily. She liked him to read aloud to her, and, knowing I liked to listen, Mr White would project his voice so that I could hear the story as well — but for some reason Mrs White disapproved, and always used to call them indoors if ever she noticed me listening, so I never really got the chance to get to know either of them.

After he’d moved, I’d seen him once, in the autumn that followed Benjamin’s death. A season, not of mists, but of winds, that stripped the trees of their leaves and made gritty work of the pavements. I was walking home from school through the park that separates Malbry from the Village; the weather was half a degree away from snow, and even in my warmest coat I was already shivering.

I’d heard he’d given up his job to care full-time for Emily. This decision had met with a mixed response: some praised his devotion; others (for instance, Eleanor Vine) felt it wasn’t appropriate for a man to be left alone with a girl of Emily’s age.

‘He’ll be having to bathe her, and everything,’ she said, with clear disapproval. ‘The thought of it! No wonder there’s talk.’

Well, if there was, you can bet that Mrs Vine was behind it somehow. Even then, she was poisonous: spreading slime wherever she went. My mother had always blamed her for spreading rumours about my dad; and when once or twice I played truant from school, it was Eleanor Vine who informed the school, rather than telling my mother.

Perhaps that was why I felt a link between myself and Mr White; and when I saw him in the park, Mr White in his Russian-spy coat pushing Emily on the swing, I stopped for a moment to watch them both, thinking how very happy they looked, as if there were no one else in the world.

That’s what I remember most. Both of them looking so happy.

I stood on the path for a minute or so. Emily was wearing a red coat, with mittens and a knitted cap. Dead leaves crackled under her feet each time the swing reached its lowest arc. Mr White was laughing, his profile slightly averted so that I had time to look at him; to see him with his defences down.

I’d thought him quite an old man. Older by far than Catherine, with her long, loose hair and girlish ways. Now I saw that I’d been wrong. I’d simply never heard him laugh. It was a young and summery sound, and Emily’s voice against it was like a seagull crossing a cloudless sky. I realized that the scandal, far from driving them apart, had strengthened the bond between these two, all alone against the world and glad to be together.

It’s snowing outside. Wild, yellow-grey flakes caught in the cone of the corner streetlight. Later, if it settles, then maybe there will be peace over Malbry; all sins past and present reprieved for the day beneath that merciful dusting of white.

It was snowing the night that Emily died. Perhaps if it hadn’t been snowing then, Emily wouldn’t have died at all. Who knows? Nothing ends. Everybody’s story starts in the middle of someone else’s tale, with messy skeins of narrative just waiting to be unravelled. And whose story is this anyway? Is it mine, or Emily’s?

13

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 23.14 on Thursday, February 21

Status: restrictedMood: wakeful

Listening to: Phil Collins: ‘In The Air Tonight’

They should have seen it coming, of course. Catherine White was unstable. Ready to lash out at the cause of her pain — rather like me, if you think about it. And when Patrick White brought Emily home after her performance —

Well, there was an argument.

I suppose they should have expected it. Tension had been building for months. Emotions ran high in the household. In her husband’s absence, Mrs White had been joined by Feather, who, with her alternative therapies, her conspiracy theories, her walk-ins and ghosts and Tomorrow Children, had pushed Catherine White from her volatile state into a full-blown neurosis.

Not that I knew that then, of course. It was late September when Emily left home. Now it was mid-January, with the snowdrops just beginning to push their little green heads through the frozen ground. In all those months of observing the house, I’d barely seen Mrs White. Just once or twice, through the window — a window still hung with Christmas lights, although Twelfth Night was long gone, and the Christmas tree with the tinsel on it was turning brown on the back lawn — I’d seen her standing, looking out, a cigarette trembling at her lips, gazing at nothing but snow and a sky that hissed like white noise.

Feather, on the other hand, was always hanging around the place. I saw her almost every day: fetching the groceries; bringing the mail; dealing with the reporters that still turned up from time to time, hoping for an interview, a word, a picture of Emily —

In actual fact, Emily had barely been seen by anyone. Released by the Social Services when the Peacock case collapsed, she had since moved in with her father, who, every alternate weekend, took her to see her mother in the presence of a social worker, who made careful notes and wrote a report, the gist of which was always that Mrs White was, as yet, unfit to be left alone with Emily.

That night, however, was different. Mr White wasn’t thinking clearly. It wasn’t the first time that Catherine had threatened to kill herself, but it was her first realistic attempt; averted by Feather’s intervention, and by the swift action of the paramedics who had hauled her out of the cooling bath and performed first aid on her slashed wrists.

It could have been worse, the doctor said. It takes a lot of aspirin to actually kill someone outright, and the cuts on her wrists, though fairly deep, had not touched the artery. But it had been a serious attempt, grave enough to cause concern — and by the next morning, which happened to be the day of Emily’s final performance — the story had reached such giant proportions that it could no longer be contained.

How small are the building-blocks of our fate! How intricate their workings! Remove just one component, and the whole machine ceases to function. If Catherine had not chosen that particular day to make her suicidal gesture — and who knows what sequence of events led to that final decision — bringing Bodies A, B and C into malign conjunction; if Emily’s performance that day had not been quite so compelling; if Patrick White had been stronger, and had not given in to his daughter’s pleas; if he hadn’t defied the court ruling and taken Emily to see her without a social worker being present; if Mrs White had been in a brighter mood; if Feather had not left them alone; if I had worn a warmer coat; if Bethan had not come outside to look at the newly fallen snow —

If. If. If. A sweetly deceptive word, as light as a snowflake on the tongue. A word that seems too small to contain such a universe of regret. In French, if is the yew tree, symbol of mourning and the grave. If a yew tree falls in the woods —

I suppose Mr White meant well. He still loved Catherine, you see. He knew what she meant to Emily. And even though they were living apart, he’d always hoped to move back in, that Feather’s influence would fade and that Emily, once the scandal had died, could go back to being a real child instead of a phenomenon.

I’d been watching the house since lunchtime from the coffee shop across the road. I caught it all on camera; the shop had closed at five o’clock, and I was hiding in the garden, where an overgrown clump of leylandii right up by the living-room window offered suitable cover. The trees had a sour and vegetable smell, and where the branches touched my skin they left red marks that itched like nettlerash. But I was nicely shielded from view — on one side by trees — whilst at the window the curtains were drawn, leaving just a tiny gap through which I was able to watch the scene.

That was how it happened. I swear. I never meant to hurt anyone. But standing outside, I heard it all: the recriminations; Mr White’s attempt to calm Mrs White down; Feather’s interjections; Mrs White’s hysterical tears; Emily’s hesitant protests. Or maybe I just thought I did — in retrospect, Mrs White’s voice in my memory now sounds a lot like Ma’s voice, and the other voices resonate like something heard from inside a fish tank; creating booming bubbles of sound that burst in nonsense syllables against the whitened glass.

Clickclick. That was the camera. A long lens resting on the sill; the fastest exposure the shot can take. Even so, the pictures, I knew, would be blurry, nebulous, unclear; the colours blooming around the scene like phosphorescence around a shoal of tropical fish.

Clickclick. ‘I want her back! You can’t keep her away — not now!’

That was Mrs White, pacing the room, cigarette in one hand, hair like a dirty flag down her back. The bandages on her cut wrists stood out a ghostly, unnatural white.

Clickclick. And the sound tastes like Christmas, with the sappy blue scent of the leylandii, and the numbing cold of the falling snow. Snow Queen weather, I thought to myself, and remembered Mrs Electric Blue and the cabbagey reek of the market that day, and the sound her heels had made on the path — click-click-click, like my mother’s.

‘Cathy, please,’ said Mr White. ‘I had to think of Emily. None of this is good for her. Besides, you needed to rest, and—’

‘Don’t you fucking dare patronize me!’ Her voice was rising steadily. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. You want to get some distance from me. You want to ride the scandal. And when you’ve pinned the blame on me, then you’ll cash in, like all the rest—’

‘No one’s trying to blame you.’ He tried to touch her; she flinched away. Underneath the window, I too flinched; and Emily, her hand at her mouth, stood helplessly to one side, flying her distress like a red flag that only I could see.

Clickclick. I felt the touch on my mouth. I could feel her fingers there. They felt like little butterflies. The intimacy of the gesture made me shiver with tenderness.

Emily. Em-il-y. The scent of roses everywhere. Flecks of light shone through the curtains and scattered the fallen snow with stars.

Em-il-y.A million lei.

Clickclick — and now I could almost feel my soul rising out of my body. A million tiny points of light, racing towards oblivion —

And now Feather was joining in, her strident voice drilling through the glass. Somehow, once more, it reminds me of Ma, and the scent that always accompanies her. Cigarette smoke and the lurking scent of L’Heure Bleue and the vitamin drink.

Clickclick, and Feather was in the can.

I imagined her trapped and drowning inside.

‘No one asked you to come here,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough?’

For a moment I thought she was talking to me. You little shit, I expected her to say. Don’t you know it’s all your fault? And maybe this time it is, I thought. Maybe this time she knows it, too.

‘Don’t you think you’ve humiliated Cathy enough, with your bastard living right next door?’

A pause, as cold as snow on snow.

‘What?’ said Mr White at last.

‘That’s right,’ said Feather triumphantly. ‘She knows — we know — everything. Did you think you could get away with it?’

‘I didn’t get away with it,’ said Mr White to Catherine. ‘I told you all about it. I told you straight away, a mistake I’ve been paying for these past twelve years—’

‘You told me it was over!’ she cried. ‘You told me it was a woman at work, a supply teacher who moved away—’

For a moment he looked at her, and I was struck by his air of calm. ‘Yes, that was a lie,’ he said. ‘But all the rest of it was true.’

I took a step back. My heart gave a lurch. My breath bloomed huge and monstrous. I knew that I shouldn’t be there, that by now Ma would be wondering where I was. But the scene was too much for Yours Truly. Your bastard. What a fool I’d been.

‘How many other people knew?’ That was Mrs White again. ‘How many people were laughing at me, while that Irish bitch and her fucking brat—’

Once more I approached the glass, feeling Emily’s hand on my cheek. It was cold, but I could feel her heart beating like a landed fish.

Mum, please. Daddy, please —

No one but I could hear her. No one but I could know how she felt. I stretched out my hand like a starfish, pressing the fingers against the glass.

‘Who told you, Cathy?’ said Mr White.

Catherine blew smoke into the air. ‘You really want to know, Pat?’ Her hands were fluttering like birds. ‘You want to know who gave you away?’

Behind the window, I shook my head. I already knew who had told her. I knew why I’d seen Mr White giving money to Ma that day; I understood his pity when I’d asked him if he were my father —

‘You hypocrite,’ she hissed at him. ‘Pretending you cared about Emily. You never really wanted her. You never really understood how special, how gifted Emily was—’

‘Oh yes, I did,’ said Mr White. His voice was as calm as ever. ‘But because of what happened twelve years ago, I’ve allowed you far too much control. You’ve made our daughter into a freak. Well, after today’s performance, I’m going to stop all that once and for all. No more interviews. No more TV. It’s time she had a normal life, and time you learnt to face the facts. She’s just a little blind girl who wants to please her mother—’

‘She isn’t normal,’ said Mrs White, her voice beginning to tremble. ‘She’s special! She’s gifted! I know she is! I’d rather see her dead than be just another handicapped child—’

And at that, the subject under discussion stood up and began to scream: a desperate, penetrating cry that sharpened into a bright point of sound, a laser that sliced through reality with a taste like copper and rotting fruit —

I dropped the camera.

Muuuuuu-uuuuuuu-uuuuuuuum!

For a moment, she and I are one. Twins, two hearts that beat as one; a single oscillation. For a moment I know her perfectly; just as Emily knows me. And then, as suddenly, silence. The volume falls. I’m suddenly aware of the vicious cold; I’ve been standing here for an hour or more. My feet are numb; my hands are sore. Tears are running down my face, but I can barely feel them.

I’m having trouble breathing. I try to move, but it’s too late. My body has turned to concrete. The illness I suffered after Ben’s death has left me wasted and vulnerable. I have lost too much weight over too short a time; my body’s resources are used up.

A wave of terror engulfs me. I could die here, I tell myself. No one knows where I am. I try to call out, but no sound escapes; my mouth is starchy with fear. I can hardly breathe; my vision is blurred —

Should have listened to Ma, Bren. Ma always knows when you’re up to no good. Ma knows you deserve to die —

Please, Ma, I whisper through lips that are papery with cold.

Silence has enveloped me. Snow deadens everything: sound; light; sensation —

All right, then let me die, I think. Let me die right here, by her door. At least I’d be free then. Free of her —

The thought is weirdly exhilarating. To be free of Ma — of everything — seems like the culmination of every desire. Forget Hawaii; all I need is a moment longer in the snow. Just a moment, and then, sleep. Sleep, without hope, without memory —

And then from behind me comes a voice.

‘Brendan?’

I open my eyes and turn my head. And it’s little Bethan Brannigan, in her red coat and her bobble hat, looking at me from over the wall like something out of a fairy tale. Little Bethan, otherwise known as Patrick’s brat from next door, and whose parentage — kept secret for years — Ma must have threatened to reveal —

She scrambles over the garden wall. She says: ‘Bren, you look awful.’

The snow has stolen my voice. Once more I try to move, but my feet are frozen to the ground.

‘Wait here. You’ll be all right.’ Bethan, even at twelve years old, knows how to cope in a crisis. I hear her run to the front door. She rings the bell. Someone comes out. Snow falls from the burdened porch with a dull ch-thump on to the step.

Mr White’s voice cuts through the night. ‘What’s happened, Bethan? Is something wrong?’

Bethan’s voice: ‘It’s my friend. He needs help.’

Mrs White, shrill with hysteria: ‘Patrick! Don’t you dare let her in!’

‘Cathy. Someone’s in trouble—’

‘I’m warning you, Patrick!’

‘Cathy, please—’

And now, at last, my legs give way. I fall on to my hands and knees. I lift my head and see Emily, at an angle by the door. Syrupy light spills languidly on to the unblemished snow. She is wearing a blue dress, sky-blue, Virgin-blue, and at that moment I love her so much that I would be happy to die in her place —

‘Emily,’ I manage to say.

And then the world shrinks to a speck; the cold rushes in to engulf me, footsteps come running towards me and —

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

14

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 00.23 on Friday, February 22

Status: restricted

Mood: drained

The Press has a poor vocabulary. It works according to certain rules. A house fire is always described as a blaze; a blonde is always bubbly. Murders are always brutal, as if to distinguish from the more compassionate kind. And the death of a child (better still, a tot) is invariably a tragedy.

In this case it was almost true: a mother’s love tested beyond endurance; friends who failed to notice the signs; a husband too willing to rally round; a freak combination of circumstances.

They blamed the media, of course, as they would for the death of Diana. The ultimate tabloid accolade of being known by one’s first name alone is reserved for Jesus, royalty, rock stars, supermodels and little girls who have been kidnapped or killed. Headlines love those dismembered names — those Hayleys and Maddies and Jessicas — implying some kind of shared intimacy, inviting the nation’s collective grief. Wreaths and angels and teddy bears; flowers piled knee-high on the street. Emily’s legend was reinstated, of course, in the wake of that terrible tragedy.

Tragedy? Well, maybe it was. She had so much to live for. Her talent. Her beauty. Her money. Her fame. So many legends had already grown about her little person. Afterwards, those legends grew into something almost approaching a cult. And the surge of grief that surrounded her death was like a group ululation that mourned and repeated: Why Emily? Why not some other little girl?

Well, I, for one, never mourned for her. As blueeyedboy might say, shit happens. And she was nothing special, you know; nothing out of the ordinary. He told me himself that she was a fake — a rumour that was buried with her under that white headstone — but death made her untouchable, just one step removed from the holy choir. No one doubts an angel. Emily’s status was assured.

Everyone knows the official tale. It needed little embellishment. After her TV performance that night, Emily went home with her father. A quarrel — the cause of which remains unknown — flared up between the estranged couple. Then came one of those incidents that no one could have predicted. A young man — a boy, a neighbour of theirs — collapsed outside the Whites’ house. It had been a cold night; snow lay thickly on the ground. The boy — who might have died, they said, if his young friend hadn’t asked them for help — was suffering from exposure. Patrick White took both children inside and made them cups of hot tea, and while Feather tried to determine why they’d been there in the garden at all, Catherine White was left alone — for the first time in months — with Emily.

At this point, the time-scale becomes unclear. The sequence of events that night may never be fully understood. Feather Dunne always claimed that she last saw Emily at six o’clock, though forensic evidence suggests that the child was still alive up to an hour later. And Brendan Winter, who saw it all, claims not to remember anything —

In any case, the facts are these. At six or maybe six thirty, while the others were dealing with Brendan, Catherine White ran a bath, in which she drowned nine-year-old Emily before getting in herself and taking a bottle of sleeping pills. And when Patrick went to look for them later, he found them curled up together in the bath, stellated with fragments of glitterbomb —

Oh yes. I was there. I’d refused to leave Brendan alone. And when they discovered Emily, we were peering around the bathroom door; invisible as only children can be in such traumatic circumstances . . .

It took me some time to understand. First, that Emily was dead; next, that her death was no accident. My memory of things exists in a series of images bound together by hindsight; a scent of strawberry bubble bath; glimpses of naked flesh seen through a bathroom mirror; Feather’s useless peacock screams and Patrick repeating, Breathe, baby, breathe!

And Brendan, watching silently, his eyes reflecting everything . . . In the bathroom, Patrick White was trying to revive his daughter. Breathe, dammit, baby, breathe! — accenting each word with a hard push aimed at the dead girl’s heart, as if, by the force of his own desire, he might somehow restart the mechanism. The pushes, increasingly desperate, degenerated into a series of blows as Patrick White lost control and began to flail at the dead girl, thumping her like a pillow.

Brendan pressed his hands to his chest.

‘Breathe, baby. Breathe!’

Brendan began to gasp for air.

‘Patrick!’ said Feather. ‘Stop it. She’s gone.’

‘No! I can do it! Emily! Breathe!’

Brendan leaned against the door. His face was pale and shiny with sweat; his breathing, rapid and shallow. I knew all about his condition, of course — the mirror-response that made him flinch at the sight of a graze on my knee, and which had caused him such distress the time his brother collapsed in St Oswald’s Chapel — but I’d never seen him like this before. It was like a kind of voodoo, I thought; as if, even though she was already dead, Emily was killing him —

Now I knew what I had to do. It was like in the fairy story, I thought, where the boy gets the ice mirror in his eye and can only see everything twisted and warped. The Snow Queen, that was the story’s name. And the little girl had to save him . . .

I took a step in front of him, blocking his view of Emily. Now it was I who was in his eyes, mirrored there in winter-blue. I could see myself: my little red coat; my bobbed hair, so like Emily’s.

‘Bren, it wasn’t your fault,’ I said.

He flung out a hand to ward me off. He looked very near to passing out.

‘Brendan, look at me,’ I said.

He closed his eyes.

‘I said look at me!’ I grabbed him by the shoulders and held on to him as hard as I could. I could hear him struggling to breathe —

‘Please! Just look at me, and breathe!’

For a moment I thought I’d lost him. His eyelids fluttered; his legs gave way, and we fell together against the door. And then he opened his eyes again, and Emily was gone from them. Instead there was only my face, reflected in miniature in his eyes. My face, and his eyes. The abyss of his eyes.

I held him at arms’ length and breathed, just breathed, steadily in and out, and gradually his breathing slowed and shifted gently to match my own, and the colour began to return to his face, and tears spilled from my eyes — and his — and I thought once again of the story where the girl’s tears melt the fragment of mirror and free the boy from the Snow Queen’s curse — I felt a surge of fierce joy.

I’d saved Brendan. I’d saved his life.

I was there now, in his eyes.

For a moment, I saw myself there, like a mote inside a teardrop. And then he pushed me away and said:

‘Emily’s dead. It should have been you.’

15

You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

Posted at: 00.40 on Friday, February 22

Status: restricted

Mood: intense

I really don’t remember much about the rest of that evening. I remember running outside in the snow; falling to my knees by the path; seeing the snow angel that Brendan had left by the front door. I ran to my room; lay down on my bed under the blue-eyed Jesus. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I was dead; a thing with no voice. My mind kept going back to the fact that Bren had chosen her, not me; that in spite of everything I’d done, Emily had beaten me.

And then I heard the music . . .

Perhaps that’s why I avoid it now. Music brings too many memories. Some mine, some hers, some belonging to both of us. Maybe it was the music that brought me back to life that day. The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, played so loudly from inside the car — a dark-blue four-door Toyota sedan parked in the drive of the White house — that the windows trembled and bulged with the sound, like a heart that was close to breaking.

By then, the ambulance had gone. Feather must have gone with it. Mother was working late that night — something to do with the church, I think. Bren was nowhere to be seen, and the lights were out in Emily’s house. But then came this gust of music, like a black wind set to blow open all the padlocked doors in the world, and I stood up, put on my coat and went outside to the parked car. The engine was running, I noticed, and a rubber pipe fixed on to the exhaust led into the driver’s side window, and there was Emily’s father, sitting quietly in the driver’s seat; not crying, not ranting, just sitting there, listening to music and watching the night.

Through the car window, he looked like a ghost. So did I, against the glass; my pale face reflecting his. All around him, the music swelled. I remember that especially; the Berlioz that haunts me still, and the snow that covered everything.

And I realized that he, too, blamed himself; he thought that if things had been different, then maybe he could have saved Emily. If he hadn’t let me in; if he’d left Brendan outside in the snow; if someone else could have taken her place.

Emily’s dead. It should have been you.

And now I thought I understood. I saw how I could save us both. Perhaps I could make this my story, I thought, instead of it being Emily’s. The story of a girl who died, and somehow made it back from the dead. I had no thought of revenge — not then. I didn’t want to take her life. All I wanted was to start again, to turn on to a clean page and never think of that girl any more, the girl who had seen and heard too much.

Patrick White was looking at me. He had taken off his glasses, and without them, I thought he looked lost and confused. His eyes without the lenses were a bright — and oddly familiar — blue. Yesterday he had been someone’s daddy — someone who read stories, played games, gave kisses at bedtime, someone who was needed and loved — and who was he now? No one; nothing. A reject, an extra — just like me. Left on the pile while the story goes on somewhere else, without us.

I opened the passenger door on his side. The air was warm inside the car. It smelt of roads and motorways. The hose, attached to the car exhaust, fell out as I released the door.

The music stopped. The engine went off. Patrick was still looking at me. He seemed unable to speak, but his eyes told me all I needed to know.

I closed the door.

I said: ‘Daddy, let’s go.’

We drove away in silence.

16

You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

Posted at: 01.09 on Friday, February 22

Status: restricted

Mood: contrite

Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘The Final Cut’

No, it wasn’t exactly my finest hour. Don’t think I’m proud of what I said. But, in my own defence, let me say that I’d suffered a great deal already that day, and that suffering gets passed around in ever-increasing circles, like the ripples from a flung stone as it strikes the water’s surface —

It should have been you. Yes, that’s what I said. I even meant it at the time. I mean, who would have missed Bethan Brannigan? Who was she in the scheme of things? Emily White was unique; a gift; Bethan was nothing; nobody. Which is why, when Bethan disappeared, she was caught in the headlines, pipped at the Post, eclipsed in the mourning for Emily.

Front-page headlines: EMILY DROWNED! MYSTERY DEATH OF CHILD PRODIGY.

In the wake of such momentous news, everything else takes second place. LOCAL GIRL DISAPPEARS barely makes it to page six. Even Bethan’s mother waited until morning before reporting her daughter’s absence to the police —

I have very little memory of what happened after that. I made it home; that much I know. Ma noticed I was feverish. She put me to bed, where I was to stay. Headaches, stomach cramps, fever. The police came round eventually, but in the circumstances I was unable to tell them much. As for Mr White, it took them forty-eight hours to realize that he, too, had vanished —

By then, of course, the fugitives were long gone. The trail was cold. And why, they thought, would Patrick White have kidnapped a child he hardly knew? Feather revealed a motive, confirmed by Mrs Brannigan. The news that Bethan was Patrick’s child delivered a much-needed blast of oxygen to the story — and once again, the hunt was on for the missing girl and her father.

Patrick’s car was found by the road fifty miles north of Hull. Brown hairs taken from the back seat confirmed that Bethan had been in the car, although of course there was no way of knowing how long ago that had been. Meanwhile, bank receipts showed Patrick White emptying his savings account. Then, after three cash withdrawals of ten thousand pounds each, the credit trail stopped abruptly. Patrick was running on cash now. Cash is nicely untraceable. Sightings of a man and a girl were reported to the police from Bath. Two weeks and a city-wide search later, these reports were dismissed as a hoax. More sightings, this time in London, were also judged unreliable. An appeal from Mrs Brannigan met with a similar lack of result.

Nearly three months later, with no solid evidence to the contrary, folk were beginning to wonder whether Patrick, unhinged by the tragedy, hadn’t staged a murder-suicide of his own. Ponds were dredged; cliffs investigated. In the Press, Bethan acquired the first-name status that often precedes a grisly discovery. Candles were lit in Malbry church, To Angel Beth God Loves You, et al. Mrs Brannigan led a series of prayer campaigns. Maureen Pike held a jumble sale. Still the Almighty stayed silent. Now they kept the story alive merely on speculation; the life-support of the world’s Press, a machine that can be kept running indefinitely (as in the case of Diana — twelve years gone, and still in the headlines) or switched off at the public’s whim.

In Bethan’s case, the decline was fast. A cut rose swiftly loses its scent. BETH — STILL MISSING wasn’t a story. Months passed. Then a year. A candlelit vigil in Malbry church marked the anniversary. Mrs Brannigan was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as if her God hadn’t tortured her enough. That made the papers for a while — TRAGIC BETH’S MUM IN CANCER SHOCK — but everyone knew the story was dead, covered in bedsores and waiting for someone brave enough to turn off the machine at last —

And then they found them. By accident; living in the back of beyond. A man had been rushed to hospital after suffering a sudden stroke. The man had refused to give his name, but the young girl accompanying him had identified him as Patrick White, and herself as his daughter, Emily.

A STROKE OF LUCK! blazoned the Press, never at a loss for a suitable cliché. But the story itself was less easy. Eighteen months had passed since Bethan Brannigan had disappeared. During most of that time she and Patrick had been living in a remote Scottish village, where Patrick had home-schooled the child, and where no one had even suspected that this bookish man and his little girl might be anything other than what they had appeared to be.

And this child — this shy and reticent fourteen-year-old who insisted her name was Emily — was so unlike Bethan Brannigan that even her mother — now bedridden, in the terminal stages of her disease — was hesitant to identify her.

Yes, there were similarities. The colouring was similar. But she played the piano beautifully, although she never had at home; referred to Patrick as Daddy and professed to remember nothing at all of the life she had led eighteen months ago —

The papers had a field day. Rumours of sexual abuse were the most common, of course, although there was no reason for any such assumption. Next came the conspiracy theories, digested versions of which were disseminated in all the best journals. After that, the deluge — dumbed-down diagnoses from possession to psychic transference; from schizophrenia to Stockholm syndrome.

Our tabloid culture favours simple solutions. Quick fics. Open-and-shut cases. This case was unsatisfactory; messy and unfathomable. Six weeks into the investigation, Bethan had still not opened up; Patrick White was in hospital, unable — or unwilling — to speak.

Meanwhile Mrs Brannigan — still known to the tabloids as Bethan’s Mum — had sadly since given up the ghost, giving the papers one more excuse to misappropriate the word tragedy, which left poor Bethan alone in the world, except for the man she called Daddy —

It must have come as a shock to learn that Patrick really was her father. Certainly, they mishandled it; and then Dr Peacock compounded the harm, changing his will in her favour, as if that could somehow erase the past and banish the ghost of Emily —

It can’t have been easy for her, poor thing. It took years to recover even the semblance of normality. Taken into care at first, then into a foster home, she learnt to fake what she did not feel. Her foster parents, Jeff and Tracey Jones, lived on the White City estate. They’d always wanted a daughter. But Jeff’s good humour turned sour when he’d had too many drinks, and Tracey, who’d dreamed of a little girl to dress up in her own image, saw nothing of herself in the silent, sullen teenager. All emotion suppressed and concealed, Bethan found her own ways of coping. You can still see the scars of those early years, their silvery traces down her arms, beneath the ink and filigree.

Talking to her, looking at her, there’s always the sense that she’s playing a part; that Bethan, just like Albertine, is only one of her avatars, a shield thrown up against a world in which nothing is ever certain.

She never told them anything. They assumed she had blocked the memory. I know better, of course; her recent posts confirm it. But her silence ensured Mr White’s release; the charges against him were quietly dropped. And although the Malbry gossips never stopped believing the worst, father and daughter were finally left to get on with their lives as best they could.

It was years before I saw her again. By then, like myself, she was someone else. We met almost as strangers; made no reference to the past; talked every week at our creative-writing group; then she wheedled her way into my life until she found the right place to strike —

You thought she was in danger from me? Quite the opposite, I fear. I told you, I’m incapable of harming as much as a hair on her head. In fiction, I can do as I please; in real life, I’m condemned to grovel before those people I most hate and despise.

Not for very much longer, though. My death list gets shorter day by day. Tricia Goldblum; Eleanor Vine; Graham Peacock; Feather Dunne. Rivals, enemies, parasites — all struck down by the friendly hand of Fate. Well, Fate, or Destiny, or whatever you want to call it. The point is it’s never my fault. All I do is write the words.

The moving finger writes, and, having writ —

But that’s not strictly true, is it? To wish for the death of an enemy, however well-crafted the fantasy, is not the same as taking a life. Perhaps this is my real gift — not the synaesthesia that has caused me so much misery, but this — the power to unleash disaster on those who have offended me —

Have you guessed what I want of you yet, Albertine? It really is very simple, you know. As I said, you’ve done it before. The line between the word and the deed is all about execution.

Execute. Interesting word, with its spiky wintergreen syllables. But the cute makes it strangely appealing; sentence to be carried out, not by a man in a black hood, but by an army of puppies . . .

You mean you really haven’t guessed what you’re going to do for me? Oh, Albertine. Shall I tell you? After everything you’ve done so far, after all we’ve been through together — Pick a card, any card —

You’re going to kill my mother.