Blueeyedboy (12 page)

Benjamin didn’t like St Oswald’s. He hated the fusty smell of it, the reek of disinfectant and floor polish, the low hum of mould and dried-up sandwiches, dead mice, wormy wood and chalk that got into the back of his throat and caused a permanent catarrh. After a while, just the sound of the name – that gagging sound,
Os-wald’s
– would conjure up the smell. From the very start he dreaded the place: he was afraid of the Masters in their big black gowns, afraid of the boys with their striped caps and their blue blazers with the badges on them.

But he liked his mother’s ladies. To begin with, anyway.

He’s so cute
, they said.
Why doesn’t he smile? Do you want a biscuit, Ben? Do you want to play a game?

He found he enjoyed being wooed in this way. To be four years old is to wield great power over women of a certain age. He soon learnt how to exploit this power: how even a half-hearted whimper could cause those ladies real concern, how a smile could earn him biscuits and treats. Each lady had her speciality: Mrs Chemical Blue gave him chocolate biscuits (but made him eat them over the sink); Mrs Electric Blue offered him coconut rings; Mrs French Blue,
langues de chat
. But his favourite was Mrs Baby Blue, whose real name was Catherine White, and who always bought the big red tins of Family Circle biscuits, with their jam sandwiches, chocolate digestives, iced rings, pink wafers – which always seemed especially decadent, somehow, by virtue of their flimsiness, like the flounces on her four-poster bed and her collection of dolls, with their blank and somehow ominous faces staring out from nests of chintz and lace.

His brothers hardly ever came. On the rare occasions that they did, at weekends or holidays, they never showed to advantage. Nigel, at nine, was already a thug: sullen and prone to violence. Brendan, still on the cusp of cute, had also once been privileged, but was now beginning to lose his infant appeal. Besides which he was a clumsy child, always knocking things over, including, on one occasion, a garden ornament – a sundial – belonging to Mrs White, which smashed on to the flagstones and had to be paid for by Ma, of course. For which both he and Nigel were punished – Bren for doing the actual damage, Nigel for not preventing him – after which neither of them came round again, and Benjamin was left with the spoils.

What did Ma make of all this attention? Well, perhaps she thought that someone, somewhere, might fall in love; that in one of those big houses might be found a benefactor for her son. Ben’s ma had ambitions, you see; ambitions she barely understood. Perhaps she’d had them all along; or perhaps they were born from those long days polishing other people’s silverware, or looking at pictures of their sons in graduation gowns and hoods. And he understood almost from the start that his visits to those big houses were meant to teach him something more than how to beat the dust from a rug or wax a parquet floor. His mother made it clear from the start that he was special; that he was unique; that he was destined for greater things than either of his brothers.

He never questioned it, of course. Neither did she. But he sensed her expectations like a halter round his young neck. All three of them knew how hard she worked; how her back ached from bending and standing all day long; how often she suffered from migraines; how the palms of her hands cracked and bled. From the earliest age, they went shopping with her, and long before they got to school they could add up a grocery list in their heads and know just how little of that day’s earnings was left for all their other expenses –

She never voiced it openly. But even unvoiced, they always felt that weight on their backs: the weight of their ma’s expectations; her terrifying certainty that they would make her sacrifice worthwhile. It was the price they had to pay, never spoken aloud, but implied; a debt that could never be paid in full.

But Ben was always the favoured one. Everything he did strengthened her hopes. Unlike Bren, he was good at sports, which made him suitably competitive. Unlike Nigel, he liked to read, which fostered her belief that he was gifted. He was good at drawing, too, much to the delight of Mrs White, who had no expectations, who’d always wanted a child of her own, and who fussed over him and gave him sweets; who was pretty and blonde and bohemian, who called him
sweetheart
, who liked to dance; and who laughed and cried for no reason sometimes and who all three boys secretly wished could have been
their
Ma –

And the White house was wonderful. There was a piano in the hall, and a big piece of stained glass above the front door, which on sunny days would cast reflections of red and gold on to the polished floorboards. When his mother was working, Mrs White would show Ben her studio, with its stacked canvases and its rolls of drawing paper, and teach him how to draw horses and dogs, and show him the tubes and palettes of paint, and read out their names, like incantations.

Viridian. Celadon. Chromium. Sometimes they had French or Spanish or Italian names, which made them even more magical.
Violetto
.
Escarlata
.
Pardo de turba
.
Outremer
.

‘That’s the language of art, sweetheart,’ Mrs White would sometimes exclaim. She painted big, sloshy canvases in sugary pinks and ominous purples, upon which she would then superimpose pictures cut out of magazines – mostly heads of little girls – which she would then varnish heavily on to the canvas and adorn with ruffs of antique lace.

Benjamin didn’t like them much, and yet it was from Mrs White that he learnt to distinguish between the colours; to understand that his own colour came in a legion of shades; to span the depths between sapphire and ultramarine, to see their textures, know their scents.

‘That one’s chocolate,’ he would say, pointing out a fat scarlet tube with a picture of strawberries on the side.

Escarlata
, the label said, and the scent was overwhelming, especially when placed in sunlight, filling his head with happiness and with motes that shone and floated like magic Maltesers up and away into the air.

‘How can red be chocolate?’

By then he was nearly seven years old, and still he couldn’t really explain. It just was, he told her stoutly, just as Nut Brown (
avellana
) was tomato soup, which often made him feel anxious, somehow, and
verde Veronese
was liquorice, and
amarillo naranja
was the smell of boiled cabbage, which always made him feel sick. Sometimes just hearing their names would do it, as if the sounds contained some kind of alchemy, teasing from the volatile words a joyous explosion of colours and scents.

At first he’d assumed that everyone had this ability; but when he mentioned it to his brothers, Nigel punched him and called him
freak
; and Brendan just looked confused and said,
You can smell the words, Ben?
After which he would often grin and scrunch up his nose whenever Benjamin was around, as if he could sense things the way Ben could, copying him, the way he often did, though never really in mockery. In fact, poor Brendan envied Ben; slow, tubby, frightened Bren, always lagging behind, always doing something wrong.

Ben’s gift didn’t make any sense to Ma, but it did to Mrs White, who knew all about the language of colours, and who liked scented candles – expensive ones from France – which Ma said was like burning money, but which smelt wonderful, all the same; in violet and smoky sage and boudoir patchouli and cedar and rose.

Mrs White knew someone – a friend of her husband’s, in fact – someone who understood these things, and she explained to Ben’s mother that Ben might be special, which his Ma had believed all along, of course, but that secretly he had doubted. Mrs White promised to put them in touch with this man, whose name was Dr Peacock, and who lived in one of the big old houses behind St Oswald’s playing fields, on the street Ma always called Millionaires’ Row.

Dr Peacock was sixty-one, an ex-governor of St Oswald’s, the author of a number of books. We sometimes saw him in the Village, a bearded man in a tweed jacket and a floppy old hat, walking his dog. He was rather eccentric, said Mrs White with a rueful smile, and, thanks to some clever investments, was blessed with rather more money than sense –

Certainly Ma didn’t hesitate. Being practically tone-deaf herself, she had never paid much attention to the way her son understood sounds and words, which, when she noticed it at all, she attributed to his being
sensitive
– her explanation for most things. But the thought that he might be gifted soon overcame her scepticism. Besides, she needed a benefactor, a patron for her blue-eyed boy, who was already having trouble at school, and needed a fatherly influence.

Dr Peacock – childless, retired, and, best of all, rich – must have seemed like a dream come true. And so she went to him for help, thereby setting in place a series of events, like filters over a camera lens, that coloured the next thirty-odd years in ever-deepening shades.

Of course, she couldn’t have known that. Well, how could
any
of them have known what would come of that meeting? And who could have known it would end this way, with two of Gloria’s children dead, and
blueeyedboy
helpless and trapped, like those scuttling things at the seaside that day, forgotten and dying in the sun?

Post comment:

ClairDeLune
:
This is quite good
,

blueeyedboy
.
I like your use of imagery. I notice you’re drawing on personal anecdotes rather more than usual. Good idea! I hope to read more!

JennyTricks
: (
post deleted
).

blueeyedboy
:
My pleasure . . .

4

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

Posted at
:
01.15 on Sunday, February 3

Status
:
public

Mood
:
serene

Listening to
:
David Bowie
: ‘Heroes’

He’d never met a millionaire. He’d imagined a man in a silk top hat, like Lord Snooty in the comic-books. Or maybe with a monocle and a cane. Instead, Dr Peacock was vaguely unkempt, in a tweedy, bow-tied, carpet-slippery way, and he looked at Ben with milk-blue eyes from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles and said:
Ah. You must be Benjamin
, in a voice like tobacco and coffee cake.

Ma was nervous; dressed to the nines, and she’d made Ben wear his new school clothes – navy trousers, sky-blue sweater, something like the St Oswald’s colours, although his own school had no uniform code, and most of the other kids just wore jeans. Nigel and Bren were with them, too – she didn’t trust them home alone – both under orders to sit still, shut up, and not to dare touch
anything
.

She was trying to make an impression. Ben’s first year at junior school had not been a brilliant one, and by then most of White City knew that Gloria Winter’s youngest son had been sent home for sticking a compass into the hand of a boy who had called him a
fucking poofter
, and that only his mother’s aggressive intervention had prevented him from being expelled.

Whether that information had reached the Village was yet to be determined. But Gloria Winter was taking no risks, and it was a most angelic Benjamin who now found himself on the steps of the Mansion on that mellow October day, listening to the door-chimes, which were pink and white and silvery, and observing the toes of his sneakers as Dr Peacock came to the door.

Of course he had no real understanding of what a poofter actually was. But there was, he recalled, quite a lot of blood, and even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he hadn’t shown any remorse – had actually seemed to
enjoy
the fracas – quite upset his class teacher, a lady we shall call Mrs Catholic Blue, who (quite publicly, it seemed) subscribed to such amusing beliefs as the innocence of childhood, the sacrifice of God’s only son and the watchful presence of angels.

Sadly, her name smelt terrible, like cheap incense and horse shit, which was often distracting in lessons, and which led to a number of incidents, culminating at last in Ben’s exclusion; for which his mother blamed the school, pointing out that it wasn’t his fault that they weren’t able to cope with a gifted child, and promising retribution at the hands of the local newspapers.

Dr Peacock was different. His name smelt of bubblegum. An attractive scent for a little boy, besides which Dr Peacock spoke to him as an adult, in words that slipped and rolled off his tongue like multicoloured balls of gum from a sweetshop vending machine.

‘Ah. You must be Benjamin.’

He nodded. He liked that certainty. From behind Dr Peacock, where a door led from the porch into the hall, a shaggy black-and-white shape hurtled towards our hero, revealing itself to be an elderly Jack Russell dog, which frolicked about them, barking.

‘My learned colleague,’ said Dr Peacock by way of explanation. Then, addressing the dog, he said: ‘Kindly allow our visitors to gain access to the library,’ at which the dog stopped barking at once, and led the way into the house.

‘Please,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘Come on in and have some tea.’

They did. Earl Grey, no sugar, no milk, served with shortbread biscuits, now fixed in his mind for ever, like Proust’s lime-blossom tea, a conduit for memories.

Memories are what
blueeyedboy
has instead of a conscience nowadays. That’s what kept him here for so long, pushing an old man’s wheelchair around the overgrown paths of the Mansion; doing his laundry; reading aloud; making toast soldiers for soft-boiled eggs. And even though most of the time the old man had no idea who he was, he never complained, or failed him – not once – remembering that first cup of Earl Grey tea and the way Dr Peacock looked at him, as if he, too, were special –