Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  Parlour. I always hated that word, with all its fake middle-class resonances, and its stink of citrus potpourri. Now I hate it even more, with her faded chintz and her china dogs and her reek of desperation. Of course, I couldn’t leave her. She knew that from the very first; knew that her decision to stay kept me here, chained to her, a prisoner, a slave. And I am a dutiful son to her. I make sure her garden is always neat. I see to her medication. I drive her to her salsa class (Ma drives, but prefers to be driven). And sometimes, when she’s not there, I dream . . .

  My mother is a peculiar blend of conflicts and contradictions. Marlboros have ruined her sense of smell, but she always wears Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. She despises novels, but loves to read dictionaries and encyclopaedias. She buys ready meals from Marks & Spencer, but fruit and veg from the market in town – and always the cheapest fruit and veg, bruised and damaged and past their prime.

  Twice a week, without fail (even the week of Nigel’s death), she puts on a dress and her high-heeled shoes and I drive her to her salsa class at Malbry College, after which she meets up with her friends in town, and has a cup of fancy tea, or maybe a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and speaks to them in her half-bred voice about me and my job at the hospital, where I am indispensable (according to her) and save lives on a daily basis. Then at eight I pick her up, although it’s only a five-minute walk from the bus stop. Those hoodies from the estates, she says. They’d stab you soon as look at you.

  Maybe she’s right to be cautious. The members of our family seem unusually prone to accidents. Still, I pity the hoodie who tries to mess with my mother. She knows how to look after herself. Even now, at sixty-nine, she’s sharp enough to draw blood. What’s more, she knows how to strike back at anyone who threatens us. She is a little more subtle, perhaps, than in the days of the electrical cord, but even so, it isn’t wise to antagonize Gloria Winter. I learnt that lesson very young. In that, if nothing else, I was a precocious pupil. Not as smart as Emily White, the little blind girl whose story has coloured so much of my life, but smart enough to have survived when neither of my brothers did.

  Still, isn’t that all over now? Emily White is long dead; her plaintive voice silenced, her letters burnt, the blurry flashgun photographs curled away in secret drawers and on bookshelves in the Mansion. And even if she were not, somehow, the Press have almost forgotten her. There are other things to squawk about; newer scandals over which to obsess. The disappearance of one little girl, over twenty years ago, is no longer cause for public concern. Folk have moved on. Forgotten her. Time for me to do the same.

  The problem is this. Nothing ends. If ever Ma taught me anything, it is that nothing is ever truly over. It just works its way slyly into the centre, like yarn in a ball. Round and round and round it goes, crossing and re-crossing, until eventually it is almost hidden beneath the tangle of years. But just to be hidden is not enough. Someone will always find you out. Someone is always lying in wait. Drop your guard for even a second and – wham! That’s when it all blows up in your face.

  Take that girl in the duffel coat. The one who looks like Red Riding Hood, with her rosy cheeks and her blameless air. Would you believe that she is not what she seems? That beneath that cloak of innocence beats the heart of a predator? Looking at her, would you ever think that she could take a person’s life?

  You wouldn’t, would you? Well, think again.

  But nothing’s going to happen to me. I’ve thought this out too carefully. And when it does go up – as we know it must – blueeyedboy will be half a world away, sitting in the shade by a beach, listening to the sound of the surf and watching the seagulls overhead –

  Still, that’s for tomorrow, isn’t it? Right now I have other things on my mind. Time for another fic, I think. I like myself better as a fictional character. The third-person voice adds distance, says Clair; gives me the power to say what I like. And it’s nice to have an audience. Even a murderer loves praise. Maybe that’s why I write these things. It certainly isn’t a need to confess. But I do admit to a leap of the heart every time someone posts a comment, even someone like Chryssie or Cap, who wouldn’t know genius if it poked them in the eye.

  I sometimes feel like a king of cats, presiding over an army of mice – half-predatory, half in need of those worshipful voices. It’s all about approval, you see, and when I log on in the morning and see the list of messages waiting for me I feel absurdly comforted –

  Losers, victims, parasites – and yet I can’t stop myself from collecting them, as I do my orchids; as I once collected scuttling things in my blue bucket on the beach; as I was once collected.

  Yes, it’s time for another murder. A public post on my WeJay, to balance these private reflections of mine. Better still, a murderer. Because, although I say he –

  You and I know this is all about me.

  5

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboyposting on:

  badguysrock@webjournal.com

  Posted at: 03:56 on Tuesday, January 29

  Status: public

  Mood: sick

  Listening to: Nick Lowe: ‘The Beast In Me’

  Most accidents occur in the home. He knows this only too well; has spent much of his childhood avoiding those things that might potentially do him harm. The playground with its swings and roundabouts, and the litter of needles along the edge. The fishpond with its muddy banks on which a small boy might so easily slip, to be dragged to his death in the weedy depths. Bikes that might spill him on to the tarmac to skin his knees and hands – or worse, under the wheels of a bus, to be skinned all over like an orange and left in segments on the road. Other children, who might not understand how special he is, how susceptible – nasty boys who might bloody his nose, nasty girls who might break his heart –

  Accidents happen so easily.

  That’s why, if there’s anything he should know by now, it’s how to create an accident. Maybe a car accident, he thinks, or a fall down a flight of stairs, or a simple, homely electrical fire. But how do you cause an accident – a fatal accident, of course – to happen to someone who doesn’t drive, who doesn’t indulge in dangerous sports, and whose idea of a wild night out is popping into town with her friends (they always pop, they never just go), for gossip and a glass of wine?

  It isn’t that he fears the act. What he fears are the consequences. He knows the police will call him in. He knows he will be a suspect, however accidental the deed, and he will have to answer to them, to plead his innocence, to convince them that it isn’t his fault –

  That’s why he has to choose his time. There can be no margin of error. He knows that murder is a lot like sex: some people know how to take their time; to enjoy the rituals of seduction, rejection, reconciliation; the joy of suspense; the thrill of the chase. But most of them just need to see it done; to get the need of it out of themselves as quickly as they possibly can; to distance themselves from the horrors of that intimacy; to know release above all things.

  Great lovers know it’s not about that.

  Great murderers know it, too.

  Not that he is a great murderer. Just an aspiring amateur. With no established modus operandi, he feels like an unknown artist who yet has to find a style of his own. That’s one of the hardest things to do – for an artist or for a murderer. Murder, like all acts of self-affirmation, requires a tremendous self-confidence. And he still feels like a novice: shy; uncertain; protective of his talents and hesitant to make himself known. In spite of it all, he is vulnerable; fearing not just the act itself, but also the reception it may have to endure; those people who will, inevitably, judge, condemn and misunderstand –

  And of course, he hates her. He would never have planned it otherwise; he is no Dostoyevskian killer, acting at random and thoughtlessly. He hates her with a passion that he has never felt for anything else; a passion that blooms within him like blood; that sweeps him away on a bitter blue wave –

  He wonders what it would be like. To be free of her for
once and for all; free of the presence that envelops him. To be free of her voice, of her face, of her ways. But he is afraid, and untested; and so he plans the act with care, selecting his subject (he refuses to use the word victim) according to the rules, preparing it all with the neatness and precision that he extends to all things –

  An accident. That’s all it was.

  A most unfortunate accident.

  To challenge the boundaries, he understands, you first have to learn to follow the rules. To approach such an act, one has to train, to hone one’s art on some baser element, just as a sculptor works in clay – discarding anything that is not perfect, repeating the experiment until the desired result is achieved – before creating the masterpiece. It would be naïve, he tells himself, to expect great things of his first attempt. Like sex, like art, the first time is often inelegant, clumsy and embarrassing. He has prepared himself for this. His aim is merely not to be caught. It has to be an accident – and his relationship with the subject must, though real, be distant enough to defy those who will come looking for him.

  You see, he thinks like a murderer. He feels its glamour in his heart. He would never harm someone who does not already deserve to die. He may be bad, but he is not unfair. Nor is he degenerate. He will not be a commonplace, bludgeoning, thoughtless, messy, remorse-sodden killer. So many people die futile deaths – but in her case, at least, there will be reason, order and – yes, a kind of justice. One less parasite on the world, making it a better place.

  A strident call from downstairs intrudes upon the fantasy. He feels an annoying tremor of guilt. She hardly ever comes into his room. Besides, why should she climb the stairs when she knows that a call will bring him down?

  ‘Who’s there?’ she says.

  ‘No one, Ma.’

  ‘I heard a noise.’

  ‘I’m working online.’

  ‘Talking to your imaginary friends?’

  Imaginary friends. That’s good, Ma.

  Ma. The sound a baby makes, the sound of sickness, of lying in bed; a feeble, milky, helpless sound that makes him feel like screaming.

  ‘Well, come on down. It’s time for your drink.’

  ‘Hang on. I’ll be right there.’

  Murder. Mother. Such similar words. Matriarch. Matricide. Parasite. Parricide, something used to get rid of parasites. All of them coloured in shades of blue, like the blue of the blanket she tucked around his bed every night when he was a boy, and smelling of ether and hot milk –

  Night night. Sleep tight.

  Every boy loves his mother, he thinks. And his mother loves him so much. So much I could swallow you up, B.B. And maybe she has, because that’s how it feels, as if something has swallowed him, something slow but relentless, something inescapable, sucking him down into the belly of the beast –

  Swallow. There’s a blue word. Flying south, into the blue. And it smells of the sea and tastes like tears, and it makes him think of that bucket again, and the poor, trapped, scuttling things dying slowly in the sun –

  She’s so proud of him, she says; of his job; of his intellect; of his gift. Gift means poison in German, you know. Beware of Germans bearing gifts. Beware of swallows flying south. South to the islands of his dreams: to the blue Azores, the Galapagos, Tahiti and Hawaii –

  Hawaii. Awayyy. The southernmost edge of his mental map, scented with distant spices. Not that he’s ever been there, of course. But he likes the lullaby lilt of the word, a name that sounds like laughter. White sands and palm beaches and blue skies fat with fair-weather clouds. The scent of plumeria. Pretty girls in coloured sarongs with flowers in their long hair –

  But really, he knows he’ll never fly south. His mother, for all her ambitions, has never been a traveller. She likes her small world, her fantasy, the life she has carved for them piece by piece into the rock of suburbia. She will never leave, he knows; clinging to him, the last of her sons, like a barnacle, a parasite –

  ‘Hey!’ She calls to him from downstairs: ‘Are you coming down, or what? I thought you said you were coming down.’

  ‘Yes, I’m coming down, Ma.’

  Of course I am. I always do. Would I ever lie to you?

  And the plunge of despair as he goes downstairs into the parlour that smells of some kind of cheap fruit-flavoured air-freshener – grapefruit, maybe, or tangerine – is like going down into the belly of some huge, fetid, dying animal: a dinosaur or a beached blue whale. And the smell of synthetic citrus makes him almost want to gag –

  ‘Come in here. I’ve got your drink.’

  She’s sitting in the kitchenette, arms folded across her chest, feet camel-backed in her high heels. For a moment he is surprised, as always, at how very small she is. He always imagines her larger, somehow; but she is smaller than he is by far, except for her hands, which are surprisingly large compared to the bird-bony rest of her, the knuckles misshapen, not just with arthritis, but with the rings she has collected over the years – a sovereign, a diamond cluster, a Campari-coloured tourmaline, a piece of polished malachite and a flat blue sapphire gated with gold.

  Her voice is at the same time both brittle and oddly penetrating. ‘You look terrible, B.B.,’ she says. ‘You’re not coming down with something, are you?’ She says coming down with a certain suspicion, as if he has brought it on himself.

  ‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ he says.

  ‘You need to take your vitamin drink.’

  ‘Ma, I’m fine.’

  ‘It’ll do you good. Go on – take it,’ she says. ‘You know what happens when you don’t.’

  And take it he does, as he always does, and its taste is a murky, rotten mess, like fruit and shit in equal parts. And she looks at him with that terrible look of tenderness in her dark eyes, and kisses him gently on the cheek. The scent of her perfume – L’Heure Bleue – envelops him like a blanket.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while? Get some sleep before tonight? They work you so hard at that hospital, it’s a crime they get away with it—’

  And now he’s really feeling sick, and he thinks that maybe he will lie down, go back to bed and lie down with the blanket pulled around his head, because nothing could be worse than this; this feeling of drowning in tenderness –

  ‘See?’ she says. ‘Ma knows best.’

  Ma-ternal. Ma-stiff. Ma-stodon. The words swim around inside his head like piranhas scenting blood. It hurts, but he already knows that it will hurt much more later; already the edges of things are garlanded with rainbows that in the next minutes will blossom and swell, driving a spike into his skull just behind his left eye –

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ his mother says. ‘Shall I sit beside you?’

  ‘No.’ The pain is bad enough, he thinks, but her presence would be so much worse. He forces a smile. ‘I just need to sleep. I’ll be fine in an hour or two.’

  And then he turns and goes upstairs, holding on to the banisters, the filthy taste of the vitamin drink lost in a sudden surge of pain, and he almost falls, but does not, knowing that if he falls, she will come, and she will stay at his bedside for hours or days, for as long as the terrible headache lasts –

  He collapses on to his unmade bed. There is no escape, he tells himself. This is the verdict. Guilty as charged. And now he must take his medicine, as he has done every day of his life; medicine to purge him of bad thoughts, a cure for what’s hidden inside him –

  Night night. Sleep tight.

  Sweet dreams, blueeyedboy. 34

  Post comment:

  chrysalisbaby: wow this is awesome

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  ClairDeLune: This is quite intriguing, blueeyedboy. Would you say it represents your true inner dialogue, or is it a character portrait you’re planning to develop at some later stage? In any case, I’d love to read more!

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  6

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

  Posted at: 22.40 on Tuesd
ay, January 29

  Status: restricted

  Mood: vitriolic

  Listening to: Voltaire: ‘When You’re Evil’

  The perfect crime comes in four separate stages. Stage One: identification of the subject. Stage Two: observation of the subject’s daily routine. Stage Three: infiltration. Stage Four: action.

  So far there’s no hurry, of course. She is barely a Stage Two. Walking past the house each day, the collar of her bright red coat turned up against the cold.

  Red isn’t her colour, of course – but I don’t expect her to know that. She doesn’t know how I like to watch: noting the details of her dress; the way the wind catches her hair; the way she walks with such precision, marking her passage with almost imperceptible touches. A hand against this wall, here; brushing against this yew hedge; pausing to lift her face to the sound of schoolchildren playing in the yard. Winter has stripped the leaves from the trees, and on dry days their percussion underfoot still smells dimly of fireworks. I know she thinks that too; I know how she likes to walk in the park with its alleys and walled gardens and listen to the sound of the naked trees shushing to themselves in the wind. I know how she turns her face to the sky, mouth open to catch the droplets of rain. I know the unguarded look of her; the way her mouth twists when she is upset; the turn of her head when she listens; the way her face tilts towards a scent.

  She notices scents especially: lingers in front of the bakery. Eyes closed, she likes to stand by the door and catch the aroma of warm bread. I wish I could talk to her openly, but Ma’s spies are everywhere; watching; reporting; examining . . .

  One of these is Eleanor Vine, who called round early this evening. Ostensibly to check on Ma, but really to enquire after me, to search for signs of grief or guilt in the wake of my brother’s death; to sniff out what was happening at home, and to collect any news that was going.