Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  ‘That’s the language of art, sweetheart,’ Mrs White would sometimes exclaim. She painted big, sloshy canvases in sugary pinks and ominous purples, upon which she would then superimpose pictures cut out of magazines – mostly heads of little girls – which she would then varnish heavily on to the canvas and adorn with ruffs of antique lace.

  Benjamin didn’t like them much, and yet it was from Mrs White that he learnt to distinguish between the colours; to understand that his own colour came in a legion of shades; to span the depths between sapphire and ultramarine, to see their textures, know their scents.

  ‘That one’s chocolate,’ he would say, pointing out a fat scarlet tube with a picture of strawberries on the side.

  Escarlata, the label said, and the scent was overwhelming, especially when placed in sunlight, filling his head with happiness and with motes that shone and floated like magic Maltesers up and away into the air.

  ‘How can red be chocolate?’

  By then he was nearly seven years old, and still he couldn’t really explain. It just was, he told her stoutly, just as Nut Brown (avellana) was tomato soup, which often made him feel anxious, somehow, and verde Veronese was liquorice, and amarillo naranja was the smell of boiled cabbage, which always made him feel sick. Sometimes just hearing their names would do it, as if the sounds contained some kind of alchemy, teasing from the volatile words a joyous explosion of colours and scents.

  At first he’d assumed that everyone had this ability; but when he mentioned it to his brothers, Nigel punched him and called him freak; and Brendan just looked confused and said, You can smell the words, Ben? After which he would often grin and scrunch up his nose whenever Benjamin was around, as if he could sense things the way Ben could, copying him, the way he often did, though never really in mockery. In fact, poor Brendan envied Ben; slow, tubby, frightened Bren, always lagging behind, always doing something wrong.

  Ben’s gift didn’t make any sense to Ma, but it did to Mrs White, who knew all about the language of colours, and who liked scented candles – expensive ones from France – which Ma said was like burning money, but which smelt wonderful, all the same; in violet and smoky sage and boudoir patchouli and cedar and rose.

  Mrs White knew someone – a friend of her husband’s, in fact – someone who understood these things, and she explained to Ben’s mother that Ben might be special, which his Ma had believed all along, of course, but that secretly he had doubted. Mrs White promised to put them in touch with this man, whose name was Dr Peacock, and who lived in one of the big old houses behind St Oswald’s playing fields, on the street Ma always called Millionaires’ Row.

  Dr Peacock was sixty-one, an ex-governor of St Oswald’s, the author of a number of books. We sometimes saw him in the Village, a bearded man in a tweed jacket and a floppy old hat, walking his dog. He was rather eccentric, said Mrs White with a rueful smile, and, thanks to some clever investments, was blessed with rather more money than sense –

  Certainly Ma didn’t hesitate. Being practically tone-deaf herself, she had never paid much attention to the way her son understood sounds and words, which, when she noticed it at all, she attributed to his being sensitive – her explanation for most things. But the thought that he might be gifted soon overcame her scepticism. Besides, she needed a benefactor, a patron for her blue-eyed boy, who was already having trouble at school, and needed a fatherly influence.

  Dr Peacock – childless, retired, and, best of all, rich – must have seemed like a dream come true. And so she went to him for help, thereby setting in place a series of events, like filters over a camera lens, that coloured the next thirty-odd years in ever-deepening shades.

  Of course, she couldn’t have known that. Well, how could any of them have known what would come of that meeting? And who could have known it would end this way, with two of Gloria’s children dead, and blueeyedboy helpless and trapped, like those scuttling things at the seaside that day, forgotten and dying in the sun?

  Post comment:

  ClairDeLune: This is quite good,

  blueeyedboy. I like your use of imagery. I notice you’re drawing on personal anecdotes rather more than usual. Good idea! I hope to read more!

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  blueeyedboy: My pleasure . . .

  4

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboyposting on :

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  Posted at: 01.15 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: public

  Mood: serene

  Listening to: David Bowie: ‘Heroes’

  He’d never met a millionaire. He’d imagined a man in a silk top hat, like Lord Snooty in the comic-books. Or maybe with a monocle and a cane. Instead, Dr Peacock was vaguely unkempt, in a tweedy, bow-tied, carpet-slippery way, and he looked at Ben with milk-blue eyes from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles and said: Ah. You must be Benjamin, in a voice like tobacco and coffee cake.

  Ma was nervous; dressed to the nines, and she’d made Ben wear his new school clothes – navy trousers, sky-blue sweater, something like the St Oswald’s colours, although his own school had no uniform code, and most of the other kids just wore jeans. Nigel and Bren were with them, too – she didn’t trust them home alone – both under orders to sit still, shut up, and not to dare touch anything.

  She was trying to make an impression. Ben’s first year at junior school had not been a brilliant one, and by then most of White City knew that Gloria Winter’s youngest son had been sent home for sticking a compass into the hand of a boy who had called him a fucking poofter, and that only his mother’s aggressive intervention had prevented him from being expelled.

  Whether that information had reached the Village was yet to be determined. But Gloria Winter was taking no risks, and it was a most angelic Benjamin who now found himself on the steps of the Mansion on that mellow October day, listening to the door-chimes, which were pink and white and silvery, and observing the toes of his sneakers as Dr Peacock came to the door.

  Of course he had no real understanding of what a poofter actually was. But there was, he recalled, quite a lot of blood, and even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he hadn’t shown any remorse – had actually seemed to enjoy the fracas – quite upset his class teacher, a lady we shall call Mrs Catholic Blue, who (quite publicly, it seemed) subscribed to such amusing beliefs as the innocence of childhood, the sacrifice of God’s only son and the watchful presence of angels.

  Sadly, her name smelt terrible, like cheap incense and horse shit, which was often distracting in lessons, and which led to a number of incidents, culminating at last in Ben’s exclusion; for which his mother blamed the school, pointing out that it wasn’t his fault that they weren’t able to cope with a gifted child, and promising retribution at the hands of the local newspapers.

  Dr Peacock was different. His name smelt of bubblegum. An attractive scent for a little boy, besides which Dr Peacock spoke to him as an adult, in words that slipped and rolled off his tongue like multicoloured balls of gum from a sweetshop vending machine.

  ‘Ah. You must be Benjamin.’

  He nodded. He liked that certainty. From behind Dr Peacock, where a door led from the porch into the hall, a shaggy black-and-white shape hurtled towards our hero, revealing itself to be an elderly Jack Russell dog, which frolicked about them, barking.

  ‘My learned colleague,’ said Dr Peacock by way of explanation. Then, addressing the dog, he said: ‘Kindly allow our visitors to gain access to the library,’ at which the dog stopped barking at once, and led the way into the house.

  ‘Please,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘Come on in and have some tea.’

  They did. Earl Grey, no sugar, no milk, served with shortbread biscuits, now fixed in his mind for ever, like Proust’s lime-blossom tea, a conduit for memories.

  Memories are what blueeyedboy has instead of a conscience nowadays. That’s what kept him here for so long, pushing an old man’s wheelchair around the overgrown paths of the Mansion
; doing his laundry; reading aloud; making toast soldiers for soft-boiled eggs. And even though most of the time the old man had no idea who he was, he never complained, or failed him – not once – remembering that first cup of Earl Grey tea and the way Dr Peacock looked at him, as if he, too, were special –

  The room was large and carpeted in varying tones of madder and brown. A sofa; chairs; three walls of books; an enormous fireplace, in front of which lay a basket for the dog; a brown teapot as big as the Mad Hatter’s; biscuits; some glass cases filled with insects. Most curious of all, perhaps, a child’s swing suspended from the ceiling, at which the three boys stared with silent longing from their place on the sofa near Ma, wanting, but hardly daring, to speak.

  ‘Wh-what are those?’ said blueeyedboy, indicating a glass case.

  ‘Moths,’ said the doctor, looking pleased. ‘So like the butterfly in many ways, but so much more subtle and fascinating in design. This one here, with the furry head’ – he pointed a finger at the glass – ‘is the Poplar hawk-moth, Laothoe populi. This scarlet and brown one next to it is Tyria jacobaeae, the Cinnabar. And this little chap’ – he indicated a ragged brown something that looked like a dead leaf to blueeyedboy – ‘is Smerinthus ocellata, the Eyed Hawk-moth. Can you see its blue eyes?’

  Blueeyedboy nodded again, awed into silence not merely by the moths themselves, but by the calm authority with which Dr Peacock uttered the words, then indicated another case, hanging above the piano, in which blueeyedboy could see resting a single, enormous lime-green moth, all milk and dusty velvet.

  ‘And this young lady,’ said Dr Peacock affectionately, ‘is the queen of my collection. The Luna moth, Actias Luna, all the way from North America. I brought her here as a pupa, oh, more than thirty years ago, and sat in this room as I watched her hatch, capturing every stage on film. You can’t imagine how moving it is, to watch such a creature emerge from the cocoon, to see her spread her wings and fly—’

  She can’t have gone far, thought blueeyedboy. Just as far as the killing jar –

  Wisely, however, he held his tongue. His ma was getting restless. Her hands clicked together in her lap, shooting cheap fire from her rings.

  ‘I collect china dogs,’ she said. ‘That makes us both collectors.’

  Dr Peacock smiled. ‘How nice. I must show you my T’ang figurine.’ Blueeyedboy grinned to himself as he saw the expression on Ma’s face. He had no idea what a T’ang figurine looked like, but he guessed it was something as different from Ma’s collection of china dogs as the Luna moth was from that creature curled up like a dead leaf over its gaudy, useless eyes.

  Ma gave him a dirty look, and blueeyedboy understood that sooner or later he would have to pay for making her look foolish. But for now, he knew he was safe, and he looked around Dr Peacock’s house with growing curiosity. Apart from the cases of moths, he saw that there were pictures on the walls – not posters, but actual paintings. Aside from Mrs White, with her pink and purple collages, he had never met anyone who owned paintings before.

  His eyes came to rest on a delicate study of a ship in faded sepia ink, behind which lay a long, pale beach, with a background of huts and coconut palms and cone-shaped mountains adrift with smoke. It drew him; though he didn’t know why. Perhaps the sky, or the tea-coloured ink, or the blush of age that shone through the glass like the bloom on a luscious golden grape –

  Dr Peacock caught him staring again. ‘Do you know where that is?’ he said.

  Blueeyedboy shook his head.

  ‘That’s Hawaii.’

  Ha-wa-ii.

  ‘Maybe you’ll get to go there some day,’ Dr Peacock told him, and smiled.

  And that’s how, with a single word, blueeyedboy was collected.

  Post comment:

  Captainbunnykiller: Man, I think you’re losing it. Two posts in as many days, and you haven’t murdered anyone

  blueeyedboy: Give me time. I’m working on it . . .

  ClairDeLune: Very nice,

  blueeyedboy. You show genuine courage in writing down these painful memories! Perhaps you could discuss them more fully at our next session?

  chrysalisbaby: yay I love this so much (hugs)

  5

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  Posted at: 02.05 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: public

  Mood: poetic

  Listening to: The Zombies: ‘A Rose For Emily’

  Next he took the three boys out into the rose garden, while their mother drank tea in the library and the dog ran about on the lawn. He showed them his roses and read out their names from the metal tags clipped to the stems. Adelaide d’Orléans. William Shakespeare. Names with magical properties, that made their nostrils tingle and flare.

  Dr Peacock loved his roses; especially the oldest ones, the densely-packed-with-petal ones, the flesh-toned, blue-rinse, off-white, old-lady ones that, according to him, had the sweetest scent. In Dr Peacock’s garden the boys learnt to tell a moss rose from an Alba, a damask from a Gallica, and Benjamin collected their names as once he had collected the names inscribed on tubes of paint, names that made his head spin, that echoed with more than just colours and scents, from Rose de Recht, a dark-red rose that smelt of bitter chocolate, to Boule de Neige, Tour de Malakoff, Belle de Crécy and Albertine, his favourite, with a musky, pale-pink, old-fashioned scent, like girls in white summer dresses and croquet and iced pink lemonade on the lawn; which, to Ben, smelt of Turkish Delight –

  ‘Turkish Delight?’ said Dr Peacock, his eyes alight with interest. ‘And this one? Rosa Mundi?’

  ‘Bread.’

  ‘This one? Cécile Brunner?’

  ‘Cars. Petrol.’

  ‘Really?’ Dr Peacock said, looking, not angry, as blueeyedboy might have expected, but genuinely fascinated.

  In fact, everything about Benjamin was fascinating to Dr Peacock. It turned out that most of his books were about something he called synaesthesia, which sounded like something they might do to you in hospital, but that was actually a neurological condition, so he said, which actually meant that Ma was right, and that Ben had been special all along.

  The boys didn’t understand it all, but Dr Peacock said that it was something to do with the way the sensory parts of the brain worked: that something in there was cross-wired, somehow, sending mixed signals from those complex bundles of nerves.

  ‘You mean, like a s-super-sense?’ interrupted blueeyedboy, thinking vaguely of Spider-Man, or Magneto, or even Hannibal Lecter (you see that he was already moving away from the vanilla end of the spectrum into bad-guy territory).

  ‘Precisely,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘And when we find out how it works, then maybe our knowledge will be able to help people – stroke victims, for instance, or people who have suffered head trauma. The brain is a complex instrument. And in spite of all the achievements of science and modern medicine, we still know so little about it: how it stores and accesses information, how that information is translated—’

  Synaesthesia can manifest in so many ways, Dr Peacock explained to them. Words can have colours; sounds can have shapes, numbers can be illuminated. Some people were born with it; others acquired it by association. Most synaesthetes were visual. But there are other kinds of synaesthesia, where words can translate as tastes or smells; or colours be triggered by migraine pain. In short, said Dr Peacock, a synaesthete might see music; taste sound; experience numbers as textures or shapes. There was even mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which, by some extreme of empathy, the subject could actually experience physical sensations felt by someone else –

  ‘You mean, if I saw someone getting hit, then I’d be able to feel it too?’

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

  ‘But – how could they watch gangster films, where people get killed and beaten up?’

  ‘I don’t think they’d want to, Benjamin. They’d find it too upsetting. It’s all about suggestion, you s
ee. This type of synaesthesia would make one very sensitive.’

  ‘Ma says I’m sensitive.’

  ‘I’m sure you are, Benjamin.’

  By then Benjamin had become increasingly sensitive, not just to words and names, but to voices, too; to their accents and tones. Of course, he’d been aware before of the fact that people had accents. He’d always preferred Mrs White’s voice to Ma’s, or to the voice of Mrs Catholic Blue, who spoke with a caustic Belfast twang that grated at his sinuses.

  His brothers spoke like the boys at school. They said ta instead of thank you, and sithee instead of goodbye. They swore at each other in ugly words that stank of the monkey-house at the zoo. His mother made an effort, but failed; her accent came and went depending on the company. It was particularly bad with Dr Peacock – aitches inserted all over the place like needles into a ball of wool.

  Blueeyedboy sensed how very hard she worked at trying to impress, and it made him gag with embarrassment. He didn’t want to sound like that. He copied Dr Peacock instead. He liked his vocabulary. The way Dr Peacock said: If you please; or Kindly turn your attention to this; or To whom am I speaking? on the phone. Dr Peacock could speak Latin and French and Greek and Italian and German and even Japanese; and when he spoke English he made it sound like a different language, a better one, one that distinguished between watt and what; witch (a green-grey, sour word) and which (a sweet and silvery word), like an actor reading Shakespeare. He even spoke like that to the dog, saying: Kindly desist from chewing the rug, or Would my learned colleague like to take a stroll round the garden? The strangest thing, thought blueeyedboy, was that the dog seemed to respond; which made him wonder whether he, too, could be trained to lose his uncouth habits.

  From his point of view, Dr Peacock was so impressed with Ben’s gift that he promised to tutor the boy himself – as long as he behaved at school – to prepare him for the St Oswald’s scholarship exam, in exchange for what he called a few tests, and the understanding that anything that transpired from their sessions could be used in the book he was writing, the culmination of a lifetime’s study, for which he had interviewed many subjects, though none as young or as promising as little Benjamin Winter.