Blueeyedboy (45 page)

‘Take a picture of me,’ I said, showing my teeth like the Cheshire Cat.

Bren looked round, then grinned. ‘OK. Just as long as you promise, B-Bethan. Not a word to anyone.’

‘Not even Mother?’

‘
Especially
not Mother.’

‘All right, I promise,’ I told him. ‘But why do you like taking pictures so much?’

He looked at me and smiled. Behind that graceless curtain of hair his eyes were really quite beautiful, with lashes as long and thick as a girl’s. ‘This isn’t an ordinary camera,’ he said, this time, I noticed, without stuttering. ‘Through this, I can see right into your heart. I can see what you’re hiding from me. I can tell if you’re good or bad, if you’ve said your prayers, if you love your mother—’

My own eyes opened wide at this.

‘You can see all that?’

‘Of course I can.’

And at that he gave an enormous grin.

And that’s how I was collected.

Of course, I didn’t see it that way. Not until much later. But that was when I decided that Brendan Winter would be my friend: Bren, whom nobody wanted; Bren, who had asked me to lie for him to keep him out of trouble.

It began like that; with a little white lie. Then, with my curiosity about someone so unlike myself. Then came the wary affection that a child may feel for a dangerous dog. Then, a sense of affinity, in spite of our many differences; and lastly a feeling that blossomed at length into something like infatuation.

I never believed he cared much for me. I knew from the start where his interest lay. But Mrs White was protective. Emily was never alone, never allowed to talk to strangers. A glimpse over the garden wall; a photograph; a vicarious touch was all that Bren could hope for. As far as he was concerned, Emily might as well have been on Mars.

The rest of the time, Brendan was mine; and that was quite enough for me. He didn’t even
like
her, I thought. In fact, I believed he hated her. I was naïve. I was very young. And I believed in him – in his
gift
. I’d failed to meet my mother’s standards; but maybe, with Bren, I could succeed. I was his guardian angel, he said. Watching him. Protecting him. And so, stepping through the looking glass, I entered the world of
blueeyedboy
, where everything exists in reverse and every sense is twisted and turned, and nothing ever really begins, and nothing ever comes to an end . . .

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 White 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—’