Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  ‘You had a b-baby,’ said blueeyedboy.

  ‘Yes. Her name’s Emily.’

  ‘Em-i-ly.’ He tried it out. ‘C-can I hold her? I’ll be careful.’

  Feather gave her narrow smile. ‘No, a baby isn’t a toy. You wouldn’t want to hurt Emily.’

  Wouldn’t? blueeyedboy thought to himself. He wasn’t as sure as she seemed to be. What use was a baby, anyhow? It couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk; all it could do was eat, sleep or cry. Even a cat could do more than that. He didn’t know why a baby should be so important, anyway. Surely he was more so.

  Something stung at his eyes again. He blamed the scent of patchouli. He tore a leaf from a nearby cabbage and crushed it secretly into his hand.

  ‘Emily’s a – special baby.’ It sounded like an apology.

  ‘The doctor says I’m special,’ said Ben. He smirked at Feather’s look of surprise. ‘He’s writing a book about me, you know. He says I’m remarkable.’

  Ben’s vocabulary had greatly improved thanks to Dr Peacock’s tuition, and he uttered the word with a certain flourish.

  ‘A book?’ said Feather.

  ‘For his research.’

  Both of them looked surprised at that, and turned to stare at Benjamin in a way that was not entirely flattering. He bridled a little, half-sensing, perhaps, that at last he had snagged their attention. Mrs White was really watching him now, but in a thoughtful, suspicious way that made blueeyedboy uncomfortable.

  ‘So – he’s been – helping you out?’ she said.

  Ma looked prim. ‘A little,’ she said.

  ‘Helping out financially?’

  ‘It’s part of his research,’ said Ma.

  Blueeyedboy could tell that Ma was offended by the suggestion that they needed help. That made it sound like charity, which was not at all the case. He started to tell Mrs White that they were helping Dr Peacock, not the other way around. But then Ma shot him a look, and he could see from her expression that he shouldn’t have spoken out of turn. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Her hands were very strong. He winced.

  ‘We’re very proud of Ben,’ she said. ‘The doctor says he has a gift.’

  Gift. Gift, thought blueeyedboy. A green and somehow ominous word, like radioactivity. Giffft, like the sound a snake makes when it sinks its fangs into the flesh. Gift, like a nicely wrapped grenade, all ready to explode in your face –

  And then it hit him like a slap: the headache, and the stink of fruit that seemed to envelop everything. Suddenly he felt queasy and sick, so sick that even Ma noticed, and relaxed her grip on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’

  ‘I d-don’t feel so good.’

  She shot him a look of warning. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll give you something to whine about.’

  Blueeyedboy clenched his fists and reached for the thought of blue skies, of Feather in a body bag, dismembered and tagged for disposal, of Emily lying blue in her cot with Mrs White wailing in anguish –

  The headache subsided a little. Good. The awful smell receded, too. And then he thought of his brothers and Ma lying dead in the mortuary, and the pain kicked back like a wild horse, and his vision was crazed with rainbows –

  Ma gave him a look of suspicion. Blueeyedboy tried to steady himself against the nearest market stall. His hand caught the side of a packing case. A pyramid of Granny Smiths stood, ready to form an avalanche.

  ‘Anything drops on the floor,’ said Ma, ‘and I swear I’ll make you eat it.’

  Blueeyedboy withdrew his hand as if the box might be on fire. He knew that this was his fault; his fault for swallowing his twin; his fault for wishing Ma dead. He was born bad, bad to the bone, and this sickness was his punishment.

  He thought he’d got away with it. The pyramid trembled, but did not fall. And then a single apple – he can still see it in his mind, with the little blue sticker on the side – nudged against its companion, and the whole of the front of the fruit stall seemed to slide, apples and peaches and oranges bouncing gleefully against each other, then off the AstroTurf apron and rolling on to the concrete floor.

  She waited there until he’d retrieved every single piece of fruit. Some were almost intact; some had been trodden into the dirt. She paid for it at the market stall with an almost gracious insistence. And then, that night, she stood over him with a dripping plastic bag in one hand and the piece of electrical cord in the other, and made him eat it: piece by piece; core and peel and dirt and rot. As his brothers watched through the banisters, forgetting even to snigger as their brother sobbed and retched. To this day, blueeyedboy thinks, nothing very much has changed. And the vitamin drink always brings it back, and he struggles to stop himself retching; but Ma never notices. Ma thinks he is delicate. Ma knows he would never do anything to anyone –

  Post comment:

  chrysalisbaby: Aw babe that makes me want 2 cry

  Captainbunnykiller: Forget the tears, man, where’s the blood ?

  Toxic69: I concur. Roll out those freakin body bags – and by the way, dude, where’s the bedroom action?

  ClairDeLune: Well done, blueeyedboy! I love the way you tie these stories in with each other. Without wanting to intrude, I’d love to know how much of this ongoing fic is autobiographical, and how much is purely fictional. The third person voice adds an intriguing sense of distance. Perhaps we could discuss it at Group some day?

  8

  You are viewing the webjournal of

  blueeyedboy posting on:

  badguysrock@webjournal.com

  Posted at: 19.15 on Monday, February 4

  Status: public

  Mood: pensive

  Listening to: Neil Young: ‘After The Gold Rush’

  After Mrs Electric Blue, he finds it so much easier. Innocence, like virginity, is something you can only lose once, and its departure leaves him with no feeling of loss, but only a vague sense of wonder that it should have turned out to be such a small thing, after all. A small thing, but potent; and now it colours every aspect of his life, like a grain of pure cyan in a glass of water, dyeing the contents deepest blue –

  He sees them all in blue now, each potential subject, quarry or mark. Mark. As in something to be erased. Black mark. Laundry mark. He is very sensitive to words; to their sounds, their colours, their music, their shapes on the page.

  Mark is a blue word, like market; like murder. He likes it much better than victim, which appears to him as a feeble eggy shade, or even prey, with its nasty undertones of ecclesiastical purple, and distant reek of frankincense. He sees them all in blue now, these people who are going to die, and despite his impatience to repeat the act, he allows some time for the high to wear off, for the colours to drain from the world again, for the knot of hatred that is permanently lodged just beneath his solar plexus to swell to the point at which he must act, must do something, or die of it –

  But some things are worth the wait, he knows. And he has waited a long time for this. That little scene at the market was well over a decade ago; no one remembers Mrs White, or her friend with the stupid name.

  Let’s call her Ms Stonewash Blue. She likes to smoke a joint or two. At least, she did, when she was young, when she weighed in at barely ninety-five pounds and never, ever wore a bra. Now, past fifty, she watches her weight, and grass gives her the munchies.

  So she goes to the gym every day instead, and to t’ai chi and salsa class twice a week, and still believes in free love, though nowadays even that, she thinks, is getting quite expensive. A one-time radical feminist, who sees all men as aggressors, she thinks of herself as free-spirited; drives a yellow 2CV; likes ethnic bangles and well-cut jeans; goes on expensive Thai holidays; describes herself as spiritual; reads Tarot cards at her friends’ parties; and has legs that might pass for those of a thirty-year-old, though the same cannot be said of her face.

  Her current squeeze is twenty-nine – almost the same age as blueeyedboy. A blonde and cropped-haired andro
gyne, who parks her motorbike by the church, just far enough away from the Stonewash house to keep the neighbours from whispering. From which our hero deduces that Ms Stonewash Blue is not quite the free spirit she pretends to be.

  Well, things have changed since the sixties. She knows the value of networking, and opting out of the rat race somehow seems far less appealing now that her passion for Birkenstocks and flares has given way to stocks and shares –

  Not that he is implying that this is why she deserves to die. That would be irrational. But – would the world really miss her, he thinks? Would anyone really care if she died?

  The truth, is, no one really cares. Few are the deaths that diminish us. Apart from losses within our own tribe, most of us feel nothing but indifference for the death of an outsider. Teenagers stabbed over drug money; pensioners frozen to death at home; victims of famine or war or disease; so many of us pretend to care, because caring is what others expect, though secretly we wonder what all the fuss is really about. Some cases affect us more profoundly. The death of a photogenic child; the occasional celebrity. But the fact is that most of us are more likely to grieve over the death of a dog or a soap opera character than over our friends and neighbours.

  So thinks our hero to himself, as he follows the yellow 2CV into town, keeping a safe distance between them. Tonight he is driving a white van, a commercial vehicle stolen from a DIY retailer’s forecourt at six fifteen that evening. The owner has gone home for the night, and will not notice the loss before morning, by which time it will be too late. The van will have been torched by then, and no one will link blueeyedboy with the serious incident that night, in which a local woman was run down on the way to her salsa class.

  The incident – he likes that word, its lemony scent, its tantalizing colour. Not quite an accident, but something incidental, a diversion from the main event. He can’t even call it a hit-and-run, because no one does any running.

  In fact, Ms Stonewash sees him coming, hears the sound of his engine rev. But Ms Stonewash ignores him. She locks the yellow 2CV, having parked it just across the road, and steps on to the pedestrian crossing without a look to left or right, heels clicking on the tarmac, skirt hem positioned just high enough to showcase those more-than-adequate legs.

  Ms Stonewash subscribes to the view expressed in the slogan of a well-known line of cosmetics and hair products, a slogan he has always despised and which, to him, sums up in four words all the arrogance of those well-bred female parasites with their tinted hair and their manicured nails and their utter contempt for the rest of the world, for the young man in blue at the wheel of the van, no pale horseman by any means, but did she think Death would call by in person just because she’s worth it?

  He has to stop, she thinks to herself as she steps into the road in front of him. He has to stop at the red light. He has to stop at the crossing. He has to stop because I’m me, and I’m too important to ignore –

  The impact is greater than he expects, sending her sprawling into the verge. He has to mount the kerb in order to reverse over her, and by then his engine is complaining vigorously, the suspension shot, the exhaust dragging on the ground, the radiator leaking steam –

  Good thing this isn’t my car, he thinks. And he gives himself time for one more pass over something that now looks more like a sack of laundry than anything that ever danced the salsa, before driving away at a decent speed, because only a loser would stay to watch; and he knows from a thousand movie shows how arrogance and vanity are so often the downfall of bad guys. So he makes his modest getaway as the witnesses gather open-mouthed; antelopes at the water-hole watching the predator go by –

  Returning to the scene of the crime is a luxury he cannot afford. But from the top of the multi-storey car park, armed with his camera and a long lens, he can see the aftermath of the incident: the police car; the ambulance; the little crowd; then the departure of the emergency vehicle, at far too leisurely a pace – he knows that they need a doctor to declare the victim dead at the scene, but there are instances, such as this one, when any layman’s verdict would do.

  Officially, Ms Stonewash Blue was pronounced dead on arrival.

  Blueeyedboy knows that, in fact, she had expired some fifteen minutes earlier. He also knows that her mouth was turned down just like the mouth of a baby flatfish, and that the police kicked sand over the stain, so that in the morning there would be nothing to show that she’d ever been there, except for a bunch of garage flowers Sellotaped to a traffic sign –

  How appropriate, he thinks. How mawkish and how commonplace. Litter on the highway now counts as a valid expression of grief. When the Princess of Wales was killed, some months before this incident, the streets were piled high with offerings, taped to every lamp post, left to rot on every wall, flowers in every stage of decay, composting in their cellophane. Every street corner had its own stack of flowers, mouldering paper, teddy bears, sympathy cards, notes and plastic wrappers, and in the heat of that late summer it stank like a municipal tip –

  And why? Who was this woman to them? A face from a magazine; a walk-on part in a soap opera; an attention-seeking parasite; a woman who, in a world of freaks, just about qualified as normal?

  Was she really worth all that? Those outpourings of grief and despair? The florists did well from it, anyway; the price of roses went through the roof. And in the pub later that week, when blueeyedboy dared to suggest that perhaps it was somewhat unnecessary, he was taken into a back street by a punter and his ugly wife, where he was given a serious talking-to – not quite a beating, no, but with enough slapping and shoving to bring it close – and told he wasn’t welcome, and strongly advised to fuck of –

  At which point in the story this punter – shall we call him Diesel Blue? – a family man, a respected member of the community, twenty years older than blueeyedboy and outweighing him by a hundred pounds – raised one of his loyal fists and smacked our hero right in the mouth, while the ugly wife, who smelled of cigarettes and cheap antiperspirant, laughed as blueeyedboy spat out blood, and said: She’s worth more dead than you’ll ever be –

  Six months later, Diesel’s van is traced through security camera footage to a hit-and-run incident in which a middle-aged woman is killed crossing the road to get to her car. The van, which since has been set on fire, still bears traces of fibre and hair, and although Diesel Blue is adamant that he is not responsible, that the van was stolen the night before, he fails to convince the magistrate, especially in the light of a previous history of drunkenness and violence. The case goes to the criminal court, where, after a four-day trial, Diesel Blue is acquitted, mostly for lack of evidence. The camera footage proves disappointing, failing as it does to confirm the identity of the driver of the van – a figure in a hoodie and baseball cap, whose bulk may be due to an oversized coat and whose face is never visible.

  But to be acquitted in court is not everything. Graffiti on the walls of the house; hostile murmurs in the pub; letters to the local Press; all suggest that Diesel Blue got away with it on a technicality, and when, a few weeks later, his house catches fire (with Diesel and his wife inside), no one grieves especially.

  Verdict – accidental death, possibly caused by a cigarette.

  Blueeyedboy is unsurprised. He’d had the guy down as a smoker.

  Post comment:

  Captainbunnykiller: You are totally sick, dude. I love it!

  chrysalisbaby:woot woot yay for blueeyedboy

  ClairDeLune : Very interesting. I sense your mistrust of authority. I’d love to hear the story behind this story. Is it also based on real life events? You know I’d love to know more!

  JennyTricks: (post deleted).

  9

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :

  badguysrock@webjournal.com

  Posted at: 21.06 on Monday, February 4

  Status: public

  Mood: prickly

  Listening to: Poison: ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’

  Th
e birth of little Emily White saw a change in blueeyedboy’s Ma. She’d always been quick-tempered, but by the end of the summer she seemed perpetually on the brink of some kind of violent eruption. Part of the cause was financial stress: growing boys are expensive, and by unfortunate coincidence, fewer and fewer people in the Village seemed to need any household help. Mrs French Blue had joined the ranks of her ex-employers, and Mrs Chemical Blue, claiming poverty, had reduced her hours to two per week. Perhaps, now Ben was back at school, people felt less charitably inclined to offer work to the fatherless family. Or perhaps they’d simply had enough of listening to tales of how talented and special Ben was.

  And then, just before Christmas, they ran across Mrs Electric Blue near Tandy’s in the covered market, but she didn’t seem to notice them, even when Ma spoke to her.

  Perhaps Mrs Electric Blue didn’t like being seen so close to the market, where there were always people shouting, and torn-off cabbage leaves on the floor, and everything peppered with brown grease, and where people always called you luv. Perhaps all that was too common for her. Perhaps she was ashamed of knowing Ma, with her old coat on and her hair scraped back and her three scruffy boys, and her bags full of shopping that she had to carry home on the bus, and her hands with palms all tattooed with dirt from other people’s housework.

  ‘Morning,’ said Ma, and Mrs Electric Blue just stared, looking weirdly like one of Mrs White’s dolls, half-surprised and half-not-quite alive, with her pink mouth pursed and her eyebrows raised and her long white coat with the fur collar making her look like the Snow Queen, even though there wasn’t any snow.

  It seemed at first as if she hadn’t heard. Ben shot her the smile that had once earned him treats. Mrs Electric didn’t smile back, but turned away and pretended to look at some clothes that were hanging on a stall near by, although even blueeyedboy could see that they weren’t at all the kind of clothes she’d wear, all baggy blouses and cheap, shiny shoes. He wondered if he should call her name –