Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  Ma was overjoyed, of course. St Oswald’s was the culmination of all her hopes, of her unvoiced ambitions, of all the dreams she’d ever had. The entrance exam was in three years’ time, but she spoke as if it were imminent; promised to save every penny she earned; fussed over Ben more than ever before, and made it very clear that he was being given an incredible chance; a chance that he owed it to her to take –

  He was less enthusiastic. He still didn’t like St Oswald’s. In spite of its navy-blue blazer and tie (just perfect for him, she said), he had already seen enough to be conscious of being unsuitable: unsuitable face, unsuitable hair, unsuitable house, unsuitable name –

  St Oswald’s boys were not called Ben. St Oswald’s boys were called Leon, or Jasper, or Rufus or Sebastian. A St Oswald’s boy can pass off a name like Orlando, can make it sound like peppermint. Even Rupert sounds somehow cool when attached to a navy-blue St Oswald’s blazer. Ben, he knew, would be the wrong blue, smelling of his mother’s house, of too much disinfectant and too little space and too much fried food and not enough books and the harsh, inescapable stink of his brothers.

  But Dr Peacock said not to worry. Three years was a long time. Time for him to prepare Ben; to make him into a St Oswald’s boy. Ben had potential, so he said – a red word, like a stretched rubber band, ready to fly into someone’s face –

  And so, he accepted. What choice did he have? He was, after all, Ma’s greatest hope. Besides, he wanted to please them both – to please Dr Peacock, most of all – and if that meant St Oswald’s, then he was prepared to take up the challenge.

  Nigel went to Sunnybank Park, the big comprehensive at the edge of White City. A series of concrete building blocks, with razor wire along the roof, it looked like a prison. It stank like a zoo. Nigel didn’t seem to mind. Brendan, nine and also destined for Sunnybank Park, showed no sign of unusual ability. Both boys had been tested by Dr Peacock; neither seemed to interest him much. Nigel he discarded at once; Brendan, after three or four weeks, finding him uncooperative.

  Nigel was twelve, aggressive and moody. He liked heavy rock music and films where things exploded. No one bullied him at school. Brendan was his shadow, spineless and soft; surviving only through Nigel’s protection, like those symbiotic creatures that live around sharks and crocodiles, safe from predators by virtue of their usefulness to the host. Whereas Nigel was quite intelligent (though he never bothered to do any work), Bren was useless at everything: hopeless at sports, clueless in lessons, lazy and inarticulate, a prime candidate for the dole queue, said Ma, or, at best, a job flipping burgers –

  But Ben was destined for better things. Every other Saturday, while Nigel and Brendan rode their bikes or played with their friends out on the estate, he went to Dr Peacock’s house – the house that he called the Mansion – and in the mornings sat at a big desk upholstered in bottle-green leather and read from books with hardback covers, and learnt geography from a painted globe with the names written on it in tiny scrolled lettering – Iroquois, Rangoon, Azerbaijan – arcane, obsolete, magical names just like Mrs White’s paints, that smelt vaguely of gin and the sea, of peppery dust and acrid spices, like an early taste of some mysterious freedom that he had yet to experience. And if you spun the globe fast enough, the oceans and the continents would chase each other so fast that at last all the colours merged into one, into one perfect shade of blue: ocean blue, heavenly blue, Benjamin blue –

  In the afternoons they would do other things, like look at pictures and listen to sounds, which was part of Dr Peacock’s research, and which Ben found incomprehensible, but to which he submitted obediently.

  There were books and books of letters and numbers arranged in patterns that he had to identify. There was a library of recorded sounds. There were questions like: What colour is Wednesday? What number is green? – and shapes with intriguing made-up names, but there were never any wrong answers, which meant that Dr Peacock was pleased, and that Ma was always proud of him.

  And he liked to go to that big old house, with its library and its studio and its archive of forgotten things; records, cameras, bundles of yellow photographs, weddings and family groups and long-dead children in sailor suits with anxious, watch-the-birdie smiles. He was wary of St Oswald’s, but it was nice to study with Dr Peacock, to be called Benjamin; to listen to him talk about his travels, his music, his studies, his roses.

  Best of all, he mattered there. There he was special – a subject, a case. Dr Peacock listened to him; noted down his reactions to various kinds of stimuli; then asked him precisely what he felt. Often he would record the results on his little Dictaphone, referring to Ben as Boy X, to protect his anonymity.

  Boy X. He liked that. It made him sound impressive, somehow, a boy with special powers – a gift. Not that he was very gifted. He was an average pupil at school, never ranking especially high. As for his sensory gifts, as Dr Peacock called them – those sounds that translated to colours and smells – if he’d thought about them at all, he’d always just assumed that everyone experienced them as he did, and even though Dr Peacock assured him that this was an aberration, he continued to think of himself as the norm, and everyone else as freakish.

  The word serenity is grey [says Dr Peacock in his paper entitled ‘Boy X and Early Acquired Synaesthesia’], though serene is dark blue, with a slight flavour of aniseed. Numbers have no colours at all, but names of places and of individuals are often highly charged, sometimes overwhelmingly so, often both with colours and with flavours. There exists in certain cases a distinct correlation between these extraordinary sense-impressions and events that Boy X has experienced, which suggests that this type of synaesthesia may be partly associative, rather than merely congenital. However, even in this case a number of interesting physical responses to these stimuli may be observed, including salivation as a direct response to the word scarlet, which to Boy X smells of chocolate, and a feeling of dizziness associated with the colour pink, which to Boy X smells strongly of gas.

  He made it sound so important then. As if they were doing something for science. And when his book was published, he said, both he and Boy X would be famous. They might even win a research prize.

  In fact Ben was so preoccupied with his lessons at Dr Peacock’s house that he hardly ever thought about the ladies from Ma’s cleaning round who had wooed him so assiduously. He had more pressing concerns by then, and Dr Peacock’s research had taken the place of paintings and dolls.

  That was why, six months later, when he finally saw Mrs White one day at the market, he was surprised to see how fat she’d got, as if, after his departure, she’d had to eat for herself all the contents of those big red tins of Family Circle biscuits. What had happened? he asked himself. Pretty Mrs White had grown a prominent belly; and she waddled through the fruit and veg, a big, silly smile on her face.

  His mother told them the good news. After nearly ten years of trying and failing, Mrs White was finally pregnant. For some reason, this excited Ma, possibly because it meant more hours, but blueeyedboy was filled with unease. He thought of her collection of dolls, those eerie, ruffled, not-quite-children, and wondered if she’d get rid of them, now she was getting the real thing.

  It gave him nightmares to think of it: all those staring, plaintive dollies in their silks and antique lace abandoned on some rubbish tip, clothes gone to tatters, rain-washed white, china heads smashed open among the bottles and tins.

  ‘Boy or girl?’ said Ma.

  ‘A little girl. I’m going to call her Emily.’

  Emily. Em-il-y, three syllables, like a knock on the door of destiny. Such an odd, old-fashioned name, compared to those Kylies and Traceys and Jades – names that reeked of Impulse and grease and stood out in gaudy neon colours – whilst hers was that muted, dusky pink, like bubblegum, like roses –

  But how could blueeyedboy have known that she would one day lead him here? And how could anyone have guessed that both of them would be so close – victim and predator intertwined like a r
ose growing through a human skull – without their even knowing it?

  Post comment:

  ClairDeLune: I really like where this is going. Is it part of something longer?

  chrysalisbaby: is that 4 real with the colours? how much did U have 2 research it?

  blueeyedboy: Not as much as you might thinkGlad you liked it,

  Chryssie!

  chrysalisbaby: aw hunny (hugs)

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  6

  You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.

  Posted at: 02.54 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: restricted

  Mood: blank

  I cried a river when Daddy died. I cry at bad movies. I cry at sad songs. I cry at dead dogs and TV advertisements and rainy days and Mondays. So – why no tears for Nigel? I know that Mozart’s Requiem or Albinoni’s Adagio would help turn on the waterworks, but that’s not grief; that’s self-indulgence, the kind that Gloria Winter prefers.

  Some people enjoy the public display. Emily’s funeral was a case in point. A mountain of flowers and teddy bears; people wept openly in the streets. A nation mourned – but not for a child. Perhaps for the loss of innocence; for the grubbiness of it all, for their own collective greed, that in the end had swallowed her whole. The Emily White Phenomenon that had caused so much fanfare over the years ended with a whimper: a little headstone in Malbry churchyard and a stained-glass window in the church, paid for by Dr Peacock, much to the indignation of Maureen Pike and her cronies, who felt it was inappropriate for the man to be linked in any way to the church, to the Village, to Emily.

  No one really mentions it now. People tend to leave me alone. In Malbry I am invisible; I take pleasure in my lack of depth. Gloria calls me colourless; I overheard her once on the phone, back in the days when she and Nigel talked.

  I don’t see how it can last, she said. She’s such a colourless little thing. I know you must feel sorry for her, but –

  Ma, I do not feel sorry for her!

  Well, of course you do. What nonsense—

  Ma. One more word and I’m hanging up.

  You feel sorry for her because she’s—

  Click.

  Overheard in the Zebra one day: God knows what he sees in her. He pities her, that’s all it is.

  How gently, politely incredulous that one such as I might attract a man through something more than compassion. Because Nigel was a good-looking man, and I was somehow damaged. I had a past, I was dangerous. Nigel was open wide – he’d told me all about himself that night as we lay watching the stars. One thing he hadn’t told me, though – it was Eleanor Vine who pointed it out – is that he always wore black: an endless procession of black jeans, black jackets, black T-shirts, black boots. It’s easier to wash, he said, when I finally asked him. You can put everything in together.

  Did he call my name at the end? Did he know I was to blame? Or was it all just a blur to him, a single swerve into nothingness? It all began so harmlessly. We were children. We were innocent. Even he was, in his way – blueeyedboy, who haunts my dreams.

  Maybe it was guilt, after all, that triggered yesterday’s panic attack. Guilt, fatigue and nerves, that was all. Emily White is long gone. She died when she was nine years old, and no one remembers her any more, not Daddy, not Nigel, not anyone.

  Who am I now? Not Emily White. I will not, cannot be Emily White. Nor can I be myself again, now that Daddy and Nigel are gone. Perhaps I can just be Albertine, the name I give myself online. There’s something sweet about Albertine. Sweet and rather nostalgic, like the name of a Proustian heroine. I don’t quite know why I chose it. Perhaps because of blueeyedboy, still hidden at the heart of all this, and whom I have tried for so long to forget . . .

  But part of me must have remembered. Some part of me must have known this would come. For among all the herbs and flowers in my garden – the wallflowers, thymes, clove pinks, geraniums, lemon balm, lavenders and night-scented stocks – I never planted a single rose.

  7

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

  badguysrock@webjournal.com

  Posted at: 03.06 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: public

  Mood: poetic

  Listening to: Roberta Flack: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

  Benjamin was seven years old the year that Emily White was born. A time of change; of uncertainty; of deep, unspoken forebodings. At first he wasn’t sure what it meant; but ever since that day at the market, he’d been aware of a gradual shift in things. People no longer looked at him. Women no longer wooed him with sweets. No one marvelled at how much he’d grown. He seemed to have moved a step beyond the line of their perception.

  His mother, busier than ever with her cleaning jobs and her shifts at St Oswald’s, was often too tired to talk to the boys, except to tell them to brush their teeth and work hard at school. His mother’s ladies, who had once been so attentive to Ben, flocking around him like hens around a single chick, seemed to have vanished from his life, leaving him vaguely wondering whether it was something he had done, or if it was simply coincidence that no one (except for Dr Peacock) seemed to want him any more.

  Finally he understood. He’d been a distraction; that was all. It’s hard to talk to the person who cleans around the back of your fridge, and scrubs around the toilet bowl, and hand-washes your lace-trimmed delicates, and goes away at the end of the week with hardly enough money in her purse to buy even a single pair of those expensive panties. His mother’s ladies knew that. Guardian readers, every one, who believed in equality, to a point, and who maybe felt a touch of unease at having to hire a cleaner – not that they would have admitted it; they were helping the woman, after all. And compensated in their way by making much of the sweet little boy, as visitors to an open farm may ooh and ahh over the young lambs – soon to reappear, nicely wrapped, on the shelves as (organic) chops and cutlets. For three years he’d been a little prince, spoilt and praised and adored, and then –

  And then, along came Emily.

  Sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? Such a sweet, old-fashioned name, all sugared almonds and rose water. And yet she’s the start of everything: the spindle on which their life revolved, the weathervane that moves from sunshine to storm in a single turn of a cockerel’s tail. Barely more than a rumour at first, but a rumour that grew and gained in strength until at last it became a juggernaut; crushing everyone beneath the Emily White Phenomenon.

  Ma told them he cried when he heard. How sorry he felt for the poor baby; how sorry, too, for Mrs White – who had wanted a child more than anything and, now that she had her wish at last, had succumbed to a case of the baby blues, refusing to come out of her house, to nurse her child, or even to wash, and all because her baby was blind –

  Still, that was Ma all over; exaggerating his sensitivity. Benjamin never shed a tear. Brendan cried. It was more his style. But Ben didn’t even feel upset; only a little curious, wondering what Mrs White was going to do now. He’d heard Ma and her friends talking about how sometimes mothers harmed their children when under the influence of the baby blues. He wondered whether the baby was safe, whether the Social would take her away, and if so, whether Mrs White would want him back –

  Not that he needed Mrs White. But he’d changed a lot since those early days. His hair had darkened from blond to brown; his baby face had grown angular. He was aware even then that he had outgrown his early appeal, and he was filled with resentment against those who had failed to warn him that what is taken for granted at four can be cruelly taken away at seven. He’d been told so often that he was adorable, that he was good – and now here he was, discarded, just like those dolls she had put away when her new, living doll had appeared on the scene –

  His brothers showed little sympathy at his sudden fall from grace. Nigel was openly gleeful; Bren was his usual, impassive self. He may not even have noticed at first; he was too busy following Nigel about, copying him slavishly. N
either really understood that this wasn’t about wanting attention, either from Ma or from anyone else. The circumstances surrounding Emily’s birth had taught them that no one is irreplaceable; that even one such as Ben Winter could be stripped unexpectedly of his gilding. Only his sensory peculiarities now set him apart from the rest of the clan – and even that was about to change.

  By the time they got to see her at last, Emily was nine months old. A fluffy thing in rosebud pink, furled tightly in her mother’s arms. The boys were at the market, helping Ma with the groceries, and it was blueeyedboy who saw them first, Mrs White wearing a long purple coat – violetto, her favourite colour – that was meant to look bohemian, but made her look too pale instead, with a scent of patchouli that stung at his eyes, overwhelming the smell of fruit.

  There was another woman with her, he saw. A woman of his mother’s age, in stonewash jeans and a waistcoat, with long, dry, pale hair and silver bangles on her arms. Mrs White reached for some strawberries, then, seeing Benjamin waiting in line, gave a little cry of surprise.

  ‘Sweetheart, how you’ve grown!’ she said. ‘Has it really been so long?’ She turned to the woman at her side. ‘Feather. This is Benjamin. And this is his mother, Gloria.’ No mention of Nigel or Brendan. Still, that was to be expected.

  The woman she’d addressed as Feather – What a stupid name, thought blueeyedboy – gave them a rather narrow smile. He could tell she didn’t like them. Her eyes were long and wintry-green, devoid of any sympathy. He could tell she was suspicious of them, that she thought they were common, not good enough –