Blueeyedboy (46 page)

‘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?’

Bethan’s voice: ‘It’s my friend. He needs help.’

Mrs White, shrill with hysteria: ‘Patrick! Don’t you
dare
let her in!’

‘Cathy. Someone’s in trouble—’

‘I’m warning you, Patrick!’

‘Cathy, please—’

And now, at last, my legs give way. I fall on to my hands and knees. I lift my head and see Emily, at an angle by the door. Syrupy light spills languidly on to the unblemished snow. She is wearing a blue dress, sky-blue, Virgin-blue, and at that moment I love her so much that I would be happy to die in her place –

‘Emily,’ I manage to say.

And then the world shrinks to a speck; the cold rushes in to engulf me, footsteps come running towards me and –

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

14

You are viewing the webjournal of
Albertine
.

Posted at
:
00.23 on Friday, February 22

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
drained

The Press has a poor vocabulary. It works according to certain rules. A house fire is always described as a
blaze
; a blonde is always
bubbly
. Murders are always
brutal
, as if to distinguish from the more compassionate kind. And the death of a child (better still, a
tot
) is invariably a
tragedy
.

In this case it was almost true: a mother’s love tested beyond endurance; friends who failed to notice the signs; a husband too willing to rally round; a freak combination of circumstances.

They blamed the media, of course, as they would for the death of Diana. The ultimate tabloid accolade of being known by one’s first name alone is reserved for Jesus, royalty, rock stars, supermodels and little girls who have been kidnapped or killed. Headlines love those dismembered names – those Hayleys and Maddies and Jessicas – implying some kind of shared intimacy, inviting the nation’s collective grief. Wreaths and angels and teddy bears; flowers piled knee-high on the street. Emily’s legend was reinstated, of course, in the wake of that terrible tragedy.

Tragedy? Well, maybe it was. She had so much to live for. Her talent. Her beauty. Her money. Her fame. So many legends had already grown about her little person. Afterwards, those legends grew into something almost approaching a cult. And the surge of grief that surrounded her death was like a group ululation that mourned and repeated:
Why Emily? Why not some other little girl?

Well, I, for one, never mourned for her. As
blueeyedboy
might say, shit happens. And she was nothing special, you know; nothing out of the ordinary. He told me himself that she was a fake – a rumour that was buried with her under that white headstone – but death made her untouchable, just one step removed from the holy choir. No one doubts an angel. Emily’s status was assured.

Everyone knows the official tale. It needed little embellishment. After her TV performance that night, Emily went home with her father. A quarrel – the cause of which remains unknown – flared up between the estranged couple. Then came one of those incidents that no one could have predicted. A young man – a boy, a neighbour of theirs – collapsed outside the Whites’ house. It had been a cold night; snow lay thickly on the ground. The boy – who might have died, they said, if his young friend hadn’t asked them for help – was suffering from exposure. Patrick White took both children inside and made them cups of hot tea, and while Feather tried to determine why they’d been there in the garden at all, Catherine White was left alone – for the first time in months – with Emily.

At this point, the time-scale becomes unclear. The sequence of events that night may never be fully understood. Feather Dunne always claimed that she last saw Emily at six o’clock, though forensic evidence suggests that the child was still alive up to an hour later. And Brendan Winter, who saw it all, claims not to remember anything –

In any case, the facts are these. At six or maybe six thirty, while the others were dealing with Brendan, Catherine White ran a bath, in which she drowned nine-year-old Emily before getting in herself and taking a bottle of sleeping pills. And when Patrick went to look for them later, he found them curled up together in the bath, stellated with fragments of glitterbomb –

Oh yes. I was there. I’d refused to leave Brendan alone. And when they discovered Emily, we were peering around the bathroom door; invisible as only children can be in such traumatic circumstances . . .

It took me some time to understand. First, that Emily was dead; next, that her death was no accident. My memory of things exists in a series of images bound together by hindsight; a scent of strawberry bubble bath; glimpses of naked flesh seen through a bathroom mirror; Feather’s useless peacock screams and Patrick repeating,
Breathe, baby, breathe!

And Brendan, watching silently, his eyes reflecting everything . . . In the bathroom, Patrick White was trying to revive his daughter.
Breathe, dammit, baby, breathe!
– accenting each word with a hard push aimed at the dead girl’s heart, as if, by the force of his own desire, he might somehow restart the mechanism. The pushes, increasingly desperate, degenerated into a series of blows as Patrick White lost control and began to flail at the dead girl, thumping her like a pillow.

Brendan pressed his hands to his chest.

‘Breathe, baby. Breathe!’

Brendan began to gasp for air.

‘Patrick!’ said Feather. ‘Stop it. She’s gone.’

‘No! I can do it! Emily!
Breathe!
’

Brendan leaned against the door. His face was pale and shiny with sweat; his breathing, rapid and shallow. I knew all about his condition, of course – the mirror-response that made him flinch at the sight of a graze on my knee, and which had caused him such distress the time his brother collapsed in St Oswald’s Chapel – but I’d never seen him like this before. It was like a kind of voodoo, I thought; as if, even though she was already dead, Emily was killing him –

Now I knew what I had to do. It was like in the fairy story, I thought, where the boy gets the ice mirror in his eye and can only see everything twisted and warped.
The Snow Queen
, that was the story’s name. And the little girl had to save him . . .

I took a step in front of him, blocking his view of Emily. Now it was I who was in his eyes, mirrored there in winter-blue. I could see myself: my little red coat; my bobbed hair, so like Emily’s.

‘Bren, it wasn’t your fault,’ I said.

He flung out a hand to ward me off. He looked very near to passing out.