Blueeyedboy

by Joanne Harris

  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: restricted

  Mood: 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 Wh
ite 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.

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow

  Snow on snow –

  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?’