Blueeyedboy (42 page)

No prints will be found at the scene – he is wearing latex gloves, and has politely removed his shoes in the hall, like a good little boy on a visit. He checks the body. It looks OK. He mops the spilled water from the bathroom floor and leaves the candles burning.

Now he strips off his wet shirt and jeans, balls them up in his gym bag, puts on the clean clothes he has brought. He leaves the house as he found it – takes the wet clothes home with him and puts them in the washing machine.

There
, he thinks.
All gone
.

He waits for discovery – no one comes. He has managed it again. But this time, he feels no euphoria. In fact he feels a sense of loss; and that harsh and cuprous dead-vegetable taste, so like that of the vitamin drink, creeps into his throat and fills his mouth, making him gag and grimace.

Why is this one different? he thinks. Why should he feel her absence now, when everything is so close to completion, and why should he feel he has thrown away – to use his Ma’s habitual phrase – the baby with the bath water? 322

Post comment
:

ClairDeLune
:
Thank you for this,
blueeyedboy
.
It was wonderful to hear you read this in Group. I hope you won’t leave it so long next time! Remember we’re all there for you!

chrysalisbaby
:
wish i could have heard U read

Captainbunnykiller
:
Bitchin’ – LOL!

Toxic69
:
This is better than sex, man. Still, if you could find your way to writing a bit of both, some day
–

7

You are viewing the webjournal of
blueeyedboy
.

Posted at
:
23.59 on Tuesday, February 19

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
lonely

Listening to
:
Motorhead
: ‘The Ace Of Spades’

Well, of course, one has to allow for poetic licence. But sometimes fiction is better than life. Maybe that’s how it
should
have been. Murder is murder – be it by poison, by proxy, by drowning or by the thousand paper-cuts of the Press. Murder is murder, guilt is guilt, and under the fic beats a telltale truth as red and bloody as a heart. Because murder changes everyone – victim, culprit, witness, suspect – in so many unexpected ways. It’s a Trojan, which infects the soul, lying dormant for months and years, stealing secrets, severing links, corrupting memories and worse, and finally emerging at last in a system-wide orgy of destruction.

No, I don’t feel any remorse. Not for Catherine’s death, at least. It was instinct that led me to act as I did; the instinct of a baby bird struggling for survival. Ma’s response, too, was instinctive. I was, after all, the only child. I had to succeed, to be the best; discretion was no longer an option. I’d accepted Ben’s inheritance. I read his books. I wore his clothes. And when the Peacock scandal broke, I told my brother’s story – not as it really happened, of course, but how Ma had imagined it, revealing my brother once and for all as the saint, the victim, the star of the show –

Yes, I do feel sorry for that. Dr Peacock
had
been kind to me. But I had no choice. You know that, right? To refuse would have been unthinkable; I was already caught in the bottle trap, a trap of my own making, and I was fighting for my life by then, the life I’d stolen from Benjamin.

You understand,
Albertine
. You took a life from Emily. Not that I hold it against you. Quite the opposite, in fact. A person who knows how to take a life can always take another. And as I think I said before, what really counts – in murder, as in all affairs of the heart – is not so much knowledge as desire.

Well – may I still call you
Albertine
?
Bethan
never suited you. But the roses that grew up your garden wall –
Albertine
, with their wistful scent – were just the same variety as the ones that grew at the Mansion. I suppose I must have told you that. You always paid attention. Little Bethan Brannigan, with her bobbed brown hair and those slate-blue eyes. You lived next door to Emily, and in a certain kind of light you could almost have been her sister. You might even have been a friend to her, a child of her own age to play with.

But Mrs White was a terrible snob. She despised Mrs Brannigan, with her rented house and her Irish twang and suspiciously absent husband. She worked at the local primary school – in fact, she’d once taught my brother, who dubbed her Mrs Catholic Blue, and poured contempt on her beliefs. And though Patrick White was more tolerant than either Benjamin or Ma, Catherine kept Emily well away from the Irish girl and her family.

But you liked to watch her, didn’t you? The little blind girl from over the wall who played the piano so beautifully; who had everything you didn’t have, who had tutors and presents and visitors and who never had to go to school? And when I first spoke to you, you were shy; a little suspicious, at least at first, then flattered at the attention. You accepted my gifts first with puzzlement, then finally with gratitude.

Best of all, you never judged me. You never cared that I was fat. You never cared that I stammered, or thought of me as second-rate. You never asked a thing of me, or expected me to be someone else. I was the brother you’d never had. You were the little sister. And it never once occurred to you that you were just an excuse, a stooge; that the main attraction was somewhere else –

Well, now you know how I felt. We don’t always get what we want in life. I had Ben, you had Emily; both of us on the sidelines; extras; substitutes for the real thing. Still, I became quite fond of you. Oh, not in the way I loved Emily, the little sister I should have had. But your innocent devotion was something I’d never encountered before. It’s true that I was nearly twice your age; but you had a certain quality. You were engaging, obedient. You were unusually bright. And, of course, you desperately longed to be whatever it was that I wanted of you –

Oh,
please
. Don’t be disgusting. What kind of a pervert do you take me for? I liked to be with you, that was all, as I liked being close to Emily. Your mother never noticed me, and Mrs White, who knew who I was, never tried to intervene. On weekdays I’d call round after school, before your mother came home from work, and at weekends I’d meet you somewhere, either at the playground on Abbey Road or at the end of your garden, where we were less likely to be seen, and we’d talk about your day and mine; I’d give you sweets and chocolates, and I’d tell you stories about my Ma, my brothers, myself and Emily.

You were an excellent listener. In fact, I sometimes forgot your age and spoke to you as an equal. I told you about my condition – my gift. I showed you my cuts and bruises. I told you about Dr Peacock, and all the tests he’d performed on me before he chose my brother. I showed you some of my photographs, and confessed to you – as I could not to Ma – that all I’d ever wanted in life was to fly as far as Hawaii.

Poor little lonely girl. Who else did you have but me? Who else was there in your life? A working mother, an absent father, no grandparents, no neighbours, no friends. Except for Yours Truly, what did you have? And what wouldn’t you have done for me?

Don’t ever let them tell you that an eight-year-old child can’t feel this way. Those pre-adolescent years are filled with anguish and revolt. Adults try to forget this; to fool themselves into thinking that children feel less strongly than they; that love comes later, with puberty, a kind of compensation for the loss of a state of grace –

Love? Well, yes. There are so many kinds. There’s
eros
: simplest and most transient of all. There’s
philia
: friendship; loyalty. There’s
storge
: the affection a child gives its parents. There’s
thelema
: the desire to perform. Then there’s
agape
: platonic love; for a friend; for a world; love for a stranger you’ve never met; the love of all humanity.

But even the Greeks didn’t know everything. Love is like snow: there are so many words, all unique and untranslatable. Is there a word for the love you feel for someone you’ve hated all your life? Or the love for something that makes you sick? Or that sweet and aching tenderness for the one you’re going to kill?

Please believe me,
Albertine
. I’m sorry for all that happened to you. I never wanted you to be hurt. But madness is catching, isn’t it? Like love, it believes the impossible. Moves mountains; deals in eternity; sometimes even raises the dead.

You asked me what I wanted of you. Why I couldn’t just leave it alone. Well,
Albertine
, here it is. You are going to do for me what I can never do for myself. The single act that can set me free. The act I’ve been planning for over twenty years. An act I could never carry out, but which
you
could perform so easily –

Pick a card. Any card.

The trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his own choice, instead of the one that was chosen for him. Any card.
My
card. Which happens to be –

Haven’t you guessed?

Then pick a card,
Albertine
.

8

You are viewing the webjournal of
Albertine
.

Posted a
t:
23.32 on Tuesday, February 19

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
tense

He’s playing games with me, of course. That’s what
blueeyedboy
does best. We’ve played so many games, he and I, that the line between truth and fiction has become permanently blurred. I ought to hate him, and yet I know that whatever he
is
, whatever he
does
, I am in part responsible.

Why is he doing this to me? What does he hope to achieve this time? Everyone in this story is dead – Catherine; Daddy; Dr Peacock; Ben; Nigel, and, most importantly, Emily. And yet as he read his story out loud I felt my throat begin to constrict, my nerves to jangle, my head to spin, and soon the chords of the Berlioz would start to tighten in my mind –

‘Bethan? Are you all right?’ he said. I could hear the little smile in his voice.

‘I’m sorry.’ I stood up. ‘I have to go.’

Clair looked slightly impatient behind her sympathetic façade. I’d interrupted the story, of course, and everyone else was riveted.

‘You don’t look terribly well,’ said Bren. ‘I hope it wasn’t something I said—’

‘Fuck you,’ I told him, and made for the door.

He gave me a rueful shrug as I passed. Strange that, after all he has done, I should feel that sorry little skip of the heart every time he looks at me. He’s crazy, and false, and deserves to die, yet there’s still something inside me that wants to believe, that still tries to find excuses for him. All that was such a long time ago. We were different people then. And both of us have paid a price, have left a part of ourselves behind, so that neither of us can ever be whole, or escape the ghost of Emily.

For a time, I thought I
had
escaped. Perhaps I might even have managed if he hadn’t been there to remind me. Every day in every way, taunting me with his presence until suddenly it all comes out, and the box of delights is broken, and all the demons are free at last, scourging the air with memories.

Funny, where these things can lead us. If Emily had lived, would we have been friends? Would
she
have worn that red coat? Would she have lived in
my
house? Would Nigel have fallen for
her
that night at the Zebra, instead of me? Sometimes I feel I’m in Looking Glass Land, living a life that’s not quite mine, a second-hand life that never quite fitted.

Emily’s life. Emily’s chair. Emily’s bed. Emily’s house.

But I like it there; it feels right somehow. Not like my old house from so long ago, which is now home to the Jacadees, and which rings with the noise of their cheery lives and the spices of their kitchen. Somehow I couldn’t have stayed there. No, Emily’s house was the place for me, and I have barely allowed it to change, as if she might come back some day and claim her rightful property.

Perhaps that’s why Nigel never settled there, preferring to keep to his flat in town. Not that he really remembered her – he missed that business entirely – but I suppose Gloria disapproved, as indeed she disapproved of everything about me. My hair; my accent; my body art; but most of all my proximity to whatever had happened to Emily White, a mystery only half-resolved, in which her son was also enmeshed.

I don’t believe in ghosts, of course.
I’m
not the one who’s crazy. But all my life I’ve seen her here: tapping her way round Malbry; walking in the park; by the church; vivid in her bright-red coat. I’ve seen her; I’ve
been
her in my mind. How could it have been otherwise? I’ve been living Emily’s life for longer than I have my own. I listen to her music. I grow her favourite flowers. I visited her father every Sunday afternoon, and right until the end he nearly always called me Emily.