Blueeyedboy (39 page)

Saxophone Man with the dreadlocks was sitting close by with a pot of coffee at his elbow; he gave me a look designed to convey his contempt for such as I. Maybe Bethan has mentioned me. From time to time she does, you know, in a vain attempt to prove to herself how much she now detests me.
Creepy Dude
, she calls me. I’d hoped for something more imaginative.

I sat down in my usual place; ordered Earl Grey, no lemon, no milk. She brought it on a flowered tray. Lingered just long enough for me to suspect her of having something on her mind, then came to a decision; sat down squarely beside me, looked into my eyes and said:

‘What the hell do you
want
from me?’

I poured out the tea. It was fragrant and good. I said: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Hanging around here all the time. Posting those stories. Raking things up—’

I had to laugh. ‘Me? Raking things up? I’m sorry, but when the details of Dr Peacock’s will come out, everything you do is going to be news. That isn’t my fault,
Albertine
.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘You chose it yourself,’ I pointed out.

She shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Well, that’s where you’re wrong
, Albertine.
I understand it all too well. The heart’s desire to be someone else, to take on a new identity. In a way I’ve done it myself –

‘I don’t want his money,’ she said. ‘I only want to be left alone.’

I grinned. ‘Hope
that
works out for you.’

‘You talked him into it, didn’t you?’ Her eyes were dark with anger now. ‘Working there, you had the chance. He was old, suggestible. You could have told him anything.’

‘Believe me, Bethan, if I had, don’t you think I’d have done it for myself?’ I let the thought sink in for a while. ‘’Dear old Dr Peacock. Still trying, after all these years, to make amends. Still half-convinced he could raise the dead. With Patrick gone, there was only you left. Nigel must have been over the moon—’

She looked at me. ‘Not
that
again. I tell you, Nigel didn’t care about that.’

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Love may be blind, but you’d have to be
really
stupid to think that someone like Nigel wouldn’t have cared that his girlfriend was about to inherit a fortune—’

‘You told him about Dr Peacock’s will?’

‘Who knows? I may have let something slip.’

‘When?’ Her voice was paper-thin.

‘Eighteen months ago, maybe more.’

Silence. Then: ‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘Are you trying to make me believe that this was a set-up from the start?’

‘I don’t care what you believe,’ I said. ‘But I’m guessing that he was protective. He didn’t like you living alone. He hadn’t mentioned marriage yet, but if he had, you would have said yes.’ I paused. ‘How am I doing so far?’

She fixed me with eyes the colour of murder. ‘You know, this is pointless,’ she said. ‘You’re never going to sell me this. Nigel didn’t
care
about money.’

‘Really? How romantic,’ I said. ‘Because according to the credit-card statements I came across when I cleared out his flat, when Nigel died he was badly in debt. To the tune of nearly ten thousand pounds – it can’t have been easy, making ends meet. Maybe he got impatient. Maybe he got desperate. Dr Peacock was old and sick, but his illness was far from terminal. He could have lived another ten years—’

Now her face was colourless. ‘Nigel didn’t kill Dr Peacock,’ she said, ‘any more than you could have done. He wouldn’t do a thing like that—’ Her voice was wavering. It hurt me to cause her such distress, but she needed to know. To understand.

‘Why couldn’t he, Bethan? He’s done it before.’

She shook her head. ‘That was different.’

‘Is
that
what he said?’

‘Of course it was!’

I grinned.

She stood up abruptly, sending her chair clattering. ‘Why on earth does it
matter
?’ she cried. ‘All that was such a long time ago, so why do you always keep bringing it up? Nigel’s
dead
, it’s
over
now, so why can’t you just leave me alone?’

Her distress was strangely moving, I thought. Her face was bleak and beautiful. The emerald stud in her eyebrow winked at me like an open eye. Suddenly, all I wanted was for her to hold me, to comfort me, to tell me the lies that everyone secretly most wants to hear.

But I had to go on. I owed it to her. ‘It’s never over, Bethan,’ I said. ‘There’s no going back from murder. Especially when it’s a relative – and Benjamin was only sixteen—’

She eyed me with hatred, and now, for the first time, I could almost believe her capable of the act that had already deleted two of Gloria Winter’s boys permanently from existence.

‘Nigel was right,’ she said at last. ‘You
are
a twisted bastard.’

‘That hurt my feelings,
Albertine
.’

‘Don’t play the innocent, Brendan.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s hardly fair,’ I said. ‘It was
Nigel
who murdered Benjamin. I was lucky I wasn’t there. If things had been different, it could have been me.’

PART FIVE

mirrors

1

You are viewing the webjournal of

blueeyedboy
.

Posted at
:
23.40 on Tuesday, February 1
9

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
tired

Listening to
:
Cyndi Lauper
: ‘True Colours’

All right. You can call me Brendan. Does that make you happy now?
Now
do you think you know me? We choose our names, our identities; just as we choose the lives we lead. I have to believe that,
Albertine
. The alternative – that these things are allocated at birth, or even before,
in utero
– is far too appalling to contemplate.

Someone once told me that seventy per cent of all praise received in the course of an average lifetime is given before the age of five. At five years old, almost anything – eating a mouthful of food; getting dressed; drawing a picture in crayon – can earn the most lavish compliments. Of course, that stops eventually. In my case, when my brother was born – my brother in blue, that is – Benjamin.

Clair, with her love of psychobabble, sometimes speaks of what she calls
the reverse halo
effect; that tendency we all have to assign the colours of villainy on the basis of a single flaw: such as having swallowed a sibling, perhaps, or collected a bucket of sea creatures and left them to die in the scorching sun. When Ben was born, my halo reversed; and henceforth
blueeyedboy
was stripped of all his former privileges.

I saw it coming. At three years old, I already knew that the squalling blue package Ma had brought home would bring me nothing but misery. First came her decision to allocate colours to her three sons. That’s where it started, I realize, although she may not have known it then. But that’s how I became Brendan Brown – the dull one, neither fish nor fowl – eclipsed on one side by Nigel Black and on the other by Benjamin Blue. No one noticed me any more – unless, of course, I did something wrong, in which case the piece of electrical cord was only too quick to be deployed. No one thought I was special enough to merit any attention.

Still, I’ve managed to change all that. I’ve reclaimed my halo – in Ma’s eyes, at least. As for you,
Albertine
– or must I call you Bethan now? You always saw more than the others did. You always understood me. You never had the slightest doubt that I, too, was remarkable, that beneath my sensitivity beat the heart of a future murderer. Still –

Everyone knows it wasn’t my fault. I never laid a hand on him. In fact, I wasn’t even there. I was watching Emily.
All
those times I watched her, followed her to the Mansion and back, felt Dr Peacock’s welcoming hug, flew with her on her little swing, felt her mother’s hand in mine, heard her say:
Well done, sweetheart
–

My brother never did those things. Perhaps he never needed to. Ben was too busy feeling sorry for himself to take an interest in Emily.
I
was the one who cared for her; took pictures of her from over the hedge; shared the scraps of her strange little life.

Perhaps that was why I loved her then; because she had stolen Benjamin’s life just as he had stolen mine. My mother’s love; my gift; my chance; all of them passed to Benjamin, as if I’d simply held them in trust until the better man came along.

Ben, the blue-eyed boy. The thief. And what did he do with his big chance? He pissed it away in resentment because somebody else got a bigger break. Everything: his intelligence; his place at St Oswald’s; his chance at fame; even his time at the Mansion. All thrown to the winds because Benjamin didn’t just want a slice of the cake, he wanted the bloody bakery. Well, that’s what it looked like to Brendan Brown, left with only the few crumbs he managed to steal from his brother’s plate –

But now, the cake belongs to me. The cake, as well as the bakery. As Cap would say:
Pure pwnage, man
–

I got away with murder.

2

You are viewing the webjournal of
:
blueeyedboy
posting on
:
[email protected]

Posted at
:
23.47 on Tuesday, February 19

Status
:
public

Mood
:
vulnerable

Listening to
:
Johnny Cash
: ‘Hurt’

They call him Mr Brendan Brown. Too dull to be gifted; too dull to be seen; too dull even for murder. Shit-brown; donkey-brown; boring, butthead, bastard-brown. All his life he has tried to be blind, an unwilling spectator to everything, watching through interlaced fingers as the action unrolls without him, wincing at the slightest blow, the smallest hint of violence.

Yes, Brendan Brown is sensitive. Action movies frighten him. Wildlife documentaries are out; as are horror movies, video games, cowboy films or combat scenes. He even feels for the bad guy. Sports, too, are a discomfort to him, with their risk of injuries and collisions. Instead he watches cookery shows, or gardening shows, or travelogues, or porn, and dreams of other places; feels printed sunlight on his face –

It’s squeamishness
, his mother says.
He feels things more than the others do.

Perhaps he does, thinks Brendan Brown. Perhaps he feels things differently. Because if he watches someone in pain, it makes him so uncomfortable that sometimes he is physically sick, and he cries in frightened confusion at the things the images make him feel –

His brother in blue is aware of this, and makes him watch his experiments with flies and wasps, and then with mice; shows him pictures to make him squirm. Dr Peacock calls it
mirror-touch synaesthesia
, and it presents – in his case, at least – as a kind of pathological sensitivity, in which the optical part of the brain somehow mirrors the physical, so that he can experience what others feel – be it a touch, or a taste, or a blow – as clearly as if it were done to himself.

His brother in black despises him, scorns him for his weakness. Even his mother ignores him now: the middle child, the quiet one, caught between Nigel, the black sheep, and Benjamin, the blue-eyed boy –

Brendan hates his brothers. He hates the way they make him feel. One is angry all the time, the other smug and contemptuous. And Brendan feels for them – too much – whether or not he wants to. They itch; he wants to scratch. They bleed; and Brendan obediently bleeds for them. Truth told, it isn’t empathy. It’s only a mindless physical response to a series of visual stimuli. He wouldn’t care if they both died – as long as they did it far away, where he didn’t have to watch it.

Sometimes, when he’s alone, he reads. Slowly at first, and in private: books about travel and photography; poems and plays; short stories, novels and dictionaries. The printed word is different from what he sees around him. In his mind, the action unfolds without his body’s involvement. He reads in the cellar late at night by the light of the bare bulb; the cellar that, lacking a room of his own, he has secretly converted into a darkroom. Here he reads books that his teachers wouldn’t believe he had the wit to understand; books that, if his mates at school were to catch him reading, would make him a target for every joke, for every bully that came along.

But here, in his darkroom, he feels safe; there’s no one here to laugh at him when he follows the words with his finger. No one to call him retarded when he reads the words aloud. No, this is Brendan’s private place. Here he can do as he pleases. And sometimes, when he’s alone, he has dreams. Dreams of dressing in something other than brown, of having people notice him, of showing his true colours.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? All his life he has been Brendan Brown; doomed to be dull, to be stupid. In fact, he was never stupid. He simply hid it very well. At school, he did the minimum work, to protect himself from ridicule. At home, he has always pretended to be stolid and unimaginative. He knows that he is safer that way, now that Ben has taken his place, has robbed him of Ma’s affection, has swallowed him, as he himself swallowed Mal, in the desperate struggle for dominance –

It isn’t fair, thinks Brendan Brown. He, too, has blue eyes. He, too, has special skills. His shyness and his stammer leads them all to assume that he is inarticulate. But words have tremendous power, he knows. He wants to learn how to handle them. And he is good with computers. He knows how to process information. He is fighting his dyslexia with the aid of a special programme. Later, under cover of his part-time job at the fast-food place, he joins a creative-writing class. He isn’t very good at first, but he works hard; he wants to learn. Words and their meanings fascinate him. He wants to know more about them. He wants to strip the language down to the very motherboard.