Blueeyedboy (33 page)

‘Lucky you, moving on. At least being dead gives closure.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.

‘Well, everyone sides with the victim, of course. Deserving or not, everyone mourns as soon as the mark is safely dead. But what about the rest of us? The ones with problems of our own? Being dead is pretty straightforward. Even my brothers managed that. But living with guilt is something else. It’s not easy being the bad guy—’

‘Is
that
what you are?’ she said mildly.

‘I think we’ve both established that.’

The ghost of a smile crossed her face, like a wisp of cloud on a summer’s day. ‘What happened between you and Nigel?’ she said. ‘He never talked about you much.’

Didn’t he? Good. ‘Does it matter now?’

‘I just want to understand. What was it between you two?’

I shrugged. ‘We had issues.’

‘Don’t we all?’

I laughed at that. ‘Our issues were different. The whole of our family was different.’

Her eyes skittered for a moment. She has remarkably beautiful eyes; blue as a fairy tale, flecked with gold. Mine are grey in comparison; chilly, they tell me; changeable.

‘Nigel didn’t tell me much about any of his family,’ she said, locating her cup of hot chocolate and bringing it carefully to her lips.

‘As I mentioned, we weren’t close.’

‘It wasn’t that. I know families. He couldn’t stay away, somehow. As if there were something keeping him here—’

‘That would be Ma,’ I told her.

‘But Nigel
hated
his mother—’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’re devoted to her.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ My voice was dry.

‘I just assumed – well, you live with her.’

‘Some people live with cancer,’ I said.

Albertine
hardly ever smiles. I think she finds it difficult to understand those tiny facial variables, the difference between a smile and a frown, a grimace of pain. Not that her face is expressionless. But social conventions are not for her, and she does not express what she does not feel.

‘So why do you stay?’ she said at last. ‘Why don’t you get away, like Nigel?’

‘Get away?’ I gave a sharp laugh. ‘Nigel didn’t get away. He ended up half a mile from home. And with the girl next door, no less. You think that counts as getting away? But then, you’re hardly an expert. You both ended up in the same gutter, but at least Nigel was looking up at the stars.’

She was silent for such a long time that I wondered if I’d gone too far. But she is tougher than she looks.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘Was that too direct?’

‘I think I’d like you to go now.’ She put down her cup of chocolate. I could hear the tension in her voice, still under control for the moment, but almost ready to escalate.

I stayed where I was. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But Nigel wasn’t an innocent. He was playing a game with you. He knew who you were, who you used to be. And he knew that when Dr Peacock died he’d have his ticket out of here.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘No, not this time,’ I said.

‘Nigel hated liars,’ she said. ‘That was why he hated you.’

Ouch. That was cruel, Albertine
.

‘No, he hated me because I was Ma’s favourite. He was always jealous of me. Anything I wanted,
he
had to have. Perhaps that’s why he wanted you.
And
Dr Peacock’s money, of course.’ I glanced at the still-untouched cinnamon bun. ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’

She ignored me. ‘I don’t believe you. Nigel would never have lied to me. He was the straightest person I know. That’s why I loved him.’

‘
Loved
him?’ I said. ‘You never did. What you loved was being someone else.’ I took a bite of the cinnamon bun. ‘As for Nigel – who knows? Maybe he wanted to tell you the truth. Maybe he thought you needed time. Or maybe he was enjoying the feeling of power it gave him over you—’

‘What?’

‘Oh, please. Don’t be disingenuous. Some men enjoy being in control. My brother was a control freak – and he had a temper, of course. An uncontrollable temper. I’m sure you must be aware of that.’

‘Nigel was a good man,’ she said in a low voice.

‘There’s no such thing,’ I told her.

‘He was! He was
good
!’ Now her voice distressed the air in jagged patterns of green and grey. Soon, I knew, they would bring that scent; but I let the silence roll awhile.

‘Sit down. Just for a moment,’ I said, and guided her hands towards my face.

For a moment she resisted me. Perhaps it was too much intimacy. But then she must have changed her mind, because at that moment she closed her eyes and put her hands against my face, with cool fingertips that explored me from brow to chin, gently taking in the sutures under my left eye; the still-swollen bruise on my cheekbone; the cut lip, the broken nose –

‘Nigel did this?’ Her voice was small.

‘What do
you
think?’

Now her eyes were open again. God, but they were beautiful. No grief in them now, nor anger, nor love. Just beauty, blank and blameless.

‘Nigel was always unstable,’ I said. ‘I suppose he must have told you that. That he was prone to acts of violence? That he murdered his brother, no less?’

She winced. ‘Of course he told me. He said it was an accident.’

‘But he told you all about it, right?’

‘He got in a fight over twenty years ago. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted. ‘What does it matter how long ago? No one changes. It’s a myth. There’s no road to Damascus. No path to redemption. Not even the love of a good woman – assuming such a thing exists – can wash the blood from a killer’s hands.’

‘Stop it!’ Her own hands were shaking. ‘Can’t we just leave this alone?’ she said. ‘Can’t it just stay in the past, for once?’

The
past
? Don’t give me that,
Albertine
. You, of all people, should understand that the past is never over. We drag it behind us everywhere, like a can tied to a stray dog’s tail. Try to outrun it, it just makes more noise. Until it drives you crazy.

‘He never told you, did he?’ I said. ‘He never said what happened that day?’

‘Don’t. Please. Leave me alone.’

I could tell from the tone of her voice that she’d given me all she could today. Better than I’d expected, in fact; and besides, the essential part of a game is always knowing when to fold. I paid my bill with a twenty-pound note, leaving it tucked under my plate. She did not respond, or even look up, as I said goodbye to her and left. The last I saw of her as I opened the door and stepped out into the darkness was the fleeting flash of colour as she reached for her red duffel coat hanging behind the counter, and the crescent moon of her profile eclipsed behind the screen of her open hands –

Truth hurts, doesn’t it,
Albertine
? Lies are so much safer. But murderers run in our family, and Nigel was no exception. And who would have thought that nice young man could have ever done such a terrible thing? And who would have thought that a little white lie could snowball into murder?

2

You are viewing the webjournal of
blueeyedboy
.

Posted at
:
23.25 on Wednesday, February 13

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
rueful

Listening to
:
Freddie Mercury
: ‘The Great Pretender’

It was an accident, they said. A cracked skull, the result of a fall downstairs. Not even the main stairs, as it turned out, but the six stone steps at the front door. Somehow he’d come off the ramp that I’d built, or maybe he had tried to stand, as sometimes he did occasionally; to stand up miraculously and walk across the misty white lawn like Jesus on the water.

That was over three weeks ago. Lots of things have happened since then. My brother’s death; the loss of my job; my dialogue with
Albertine
. But don’t think I ever forgot. Dr Peacock was always on my mind. Old enough to have been forgotten by almost everyone he’d known; old enough to have outlived his fame, even his notoriety. A pathetic old man, half-blind and confused, who told the same stories again and again and barely recognized my face –

He wrote me into his will, you know. How ironic is that? You’ll find me at the end of the list, under
miscellaneous other
. I guess a man who can leave thirty thousand pounds to the animal shelter that supplied his dogs can well afford a couple of grand for the guy who used to clean up for him, and cook his mushy old-man’s meals, and wheel him around the garden.

A couple of grand. Less, with tax. Not nearly enough to qualify as a motive. But it’s rather nice to be, if not exactly
recognized
, then at least given
some
acknowledgement for all the work I did for him, for my tireless good cheer, for my honesty –

Did he recall my tenth birthday? The candle on the iced bun? I don’t suppose so – why should he care? I was nobody; nothing to him. If that day still survived within his damaged memory, it would have been as the day he buried poor old Rover, or Bowser, or Jock, or whatever the hell the dog’s name was. To pretend to myself that he might have cared for me, for
blueeyedboy
, is ludicrous. I was simply a project to him, not even the main act of the show. Still, I can’t help wondering –

Did
he know his murderer? Did he try to call for help? Or was it all just a blur to him, a heap of broken images? Personally, I like to think that, right at the end, he understood. That as he died, his senses returned for just long enough for him to know just
how
he was dying, and
why
. Not everyone gets to know those things. Not everyone gets that privilege. But I like to think that maybe he did, and that the last thing he ever saw, the picture that followed him into eternity, was a familiar face, a more-than-familiar pair of eyes –

The police came round to the house, of course. Eleanor Vine directed them there, though I still have no idea how she found out I was working at the Mansion. For a woman who spent most of her time shut up in her house, cleaning the floors, she seemed to have an uncanny knack for revealing embarrassing secrets. In this case, however, I realized, with some relief, that my cover was only partially blown: she knew I was working for Dr Peacock, but not about my hospital job, though she may have had her suspicions by then, and exposure might have been just a matter of time.

Did she believe I was involved? If so, she was disappointed. There were no handcuffs, there was no interrogation, no trip to the police station. Even the questions they asked me had a tired quality. After all, there was no sign of violence. The victim had merely suffered a fall. The death – the
accidental
death – of one old man (even if he had been famous once) was hardly a matter for much concern.

My mother took it badly, though. It wasn’t the thought that I might have killed Dr Peacock, but just the fact that I’d been in the house, had worked in that house for eighteen months without her even suspecting it – and worse, that
Eleanor
had known –

‘How could you?’ she said, when they had gone. ‘How could you set foot in that house again, after everything that’s happened?’

There was no point my denying what I’d done. But as any seasoned liar knows, a half-truth can screen a thousand lies. And so I confessed. I’d had no choice. I’d had to take on extra work. It was part of the hospital’s outpatient scheme. The fact that I’d got that particular case was nothing but coincidence.

‘You could have talked your way out of it. You could talk your way out of a locked
room
—’

‘It isn’t as easy as that, Ma—’

She slapped me then, across the mouth. One of her rings cut my lip. Probably the tourmaline. Its taste was Campari soda with an aluminium chaser of blood.

Tourmaline. Tour. Malign
. It sounds like a place of imprisonment, an evil tower from a Perrault fairy tale, and its smell is the same as St Oswald’s, a reek of disinfectant and dust and polish and cabbage and chalk and boys.

‘Don’t you dare patronize me. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.’

My mother has a sixth sense. She always knows when I’ve done something wrong; when I’m
thinking
of doing something wrong.

‘You wanted to see him, didn’t you? After everything he’s done to us. You wanted his fucking
approval
.’ Her camelbacked foot in its sling-back heel began to tap a quick, irregular rhythm against the leg of the sofa. The sound of it made my throat go dry, and the vegetable stink of it was enough to make me want to gag.

‘Please, Ma.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Please, Ma, it’s not my fault—’

She is surprisingly quick with her hands. I was expecting the second blow, and still it caught me by surprise, knocking me sideways into the wall. The cabinet with the china dogs shivered once, but nothing fell.

‘Then whose fault
is
it, you little shit?’

I put a hand to my cut lip. I knew she hadn’t even begun; her face was almost expressionless, but her voice was charged like a battery. I took a step closer to the cabinet. I figured she wouldn’t risk anything so close to her china dogs.

When she’s dead
, I thought to myself,
I’m going to take every single one of those fucking dogs out into the back yard and stamp on them with my engineer boots.

She saw me looking. ‘B.B., come
here
!’

Just as I thought
, I told myself. She wanted me clear of that cabinet. She’d acquired a new ornament, I saw; an Oriental specimen. I put out my hand and rested it very gently against the pane.

‘Don’t do that,’ my mother snapped. ‘You’ll leave fingerprints on the glass.’

I could tell she wanted to hit me again. But she didn’t – not then – because of those dogs. Still, I couldn’t stay there all day. I turned towards the parlour door, hoping to make it upstairs to my room, but Ma grabbed hold of the door-handle and, with one hand in the small of my back, yanked the door open into my face –