Blueeyedboy (9 page)

Babe, tell me what happened
, she says, and today I think maybe I’ll humour her. Give a little, take a lot. Isn’t that the better deal?

All right then –
babe
. Whatever you say. See what you make of
this
little tale.

10

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

Posted at
:
14.35 on Thursday, January 31

Status
:
public

Mood
:
amorous

Listening to
:
Green Day
: ‘Letterbomb’

Blueeyedboy
in love. What? You don’t think a killer can fall in love? He has known her for ever, and yet she has never really seen him, not once. He might have been invisible as far as the woman he loves is concerned. But he sees
her
: her hair; her mouth; her small pale face with its straight dark brows; her bright-red coat in the morning mist like something out of a fairy tale.

Red is not her colour, of course – but he doesn’t expect her to know that. She doesn’t know how he likes to watch through his telephoto lens; noting the details of her dress; the way the wind catches her hair; the way she walks with such precision, marking her passage with near-imperceptible touches. A hand against this wall, here; brushing against this yew hedge, turning her face to catch the scent as she passes the village bakery.

He is not a voyeur, he thinks. He acts for his own protection. His instinct for self-preservation has been honed to a point of such accuracy that he can sense the danger in her, the danger behind the sweet face. It may be the danger he loves, he thinks. The fact that he is walking a dangerous line. The fact that every stolen caress through the lens of his camera is potentially lethal to him.

Or it may just be the fact that she belongs to somebody else.

Until now he has never been in love. It frightens him a little: the intensity of that feeling, the way her face intrudes on his thoughts, the way his fingers trace her name, the way everything somehow conspires to keep her always in his mind –

It changes his behaviour. It makes him contradictory; at the same time more accepting, and less so. He wants to do the right thing, but, so doing, thinks only of himself. He wants to see her, but when he does, flees. He wants it to last for ever, but at the same time longs for it to end.

Zooming closer, he brings her face into mystic, near-monstrous proportions. Now she is a single eye, its colour a hybrid of blue and gold, staring sightlessly through the glass like an orchid in a growing-tank –

But through the eye of love, of course, she always appears in shades of blue. Bruise-blue; butterfly-blue; cobalt, sapphire, mountain-blue. Blue, the colour of his secret soul; the colour of mortality.

His brother in black would have known what to say.
Blueeyedboy
lacks the words. But he dreams of them dancing under the stars, she in a ball dress of sky-blue silk, he in his chosen colours. In these dreams he is beyond words, and he can smell the scent of her hair, can almost feel her texture –

And then comes a sharp knock at the door.
Blueeyedboy
starts guiltily. It annoys him that he does this; he is in his own home, hurting no one, why should he feel this stab of guilt?

He puts away his camera. The knock is repeated; peremptory. Someone sounds impatient.

‘Who is it?’ says
blueeyedboy
.

A voice, not well-loved, but familiar, comes to him from the other side. ‘Let me in.’

‘What do you want?’ says
blueeyedboy
.

‘To talk to you, you little shit.’

Let’s call him Mr Midnight Blue. Bigger by far than
blueeyedboy
, and vicious as a mad dog. Today he is in a violent rage that
blueeyedboy
has never seen before, hammering at the front door, demanding to be let in. No sooner are the safety locks released, than he barges his way into the hall and, with no kind of preliminaries, head-butts our hero right in the face.

Blueeyedboy
’s trajectory sends him smashing into the hallway table; ornaments and a flower vase fly into shrapnel against the wall. He trips and falls at the bottom of the stairs, and then Midnight Blue is on top of him, punching him, shouting at him –

‘Fucking keep away from her, you twisted little bastard!’

Our hero makes no attempt to resist. He knows it would be impossible. Instead he just curls into himself like a hermit crab into its shell, trying to shield his face with his arms, crying in fear and hatred, while his enemy lands blow after blow to his ribs and back and shoulders.

‘Do you understand?’ says Midnight, pausing to recover his breath.

‘I wasn’t doing anything. I’ve never even
spoken
to her—’

‘Don’t give me that,’ says Midnight Blue. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. And what about those photographs?’

‘Ph-photographs?’ says
blueeyedboy
.

‘Don’t even think of lying to me.’ He pulls them from one of his inside pockets. ‘
These
photographs, taken by you, developed right here, in your darkroom—’

‘How did you get those?’ says
blueeyedboy
.

Midnight gives him a final punch. ‘Never mind how I got them. If you ever go anywhere near her again, if you talk to her, write to her – hell, if you even
look
at her – I’ll make you sorry you were born. This is your final warning—’

‘Please!’ Our hero is whimpering, his arms thrown up to protect his face.

‘I mean it. I’ll kill you—’

Not if I kill you first
,
blueeyedboy
thinks, and before he can protect himself, the hateful aroma of rotting fruit fills his throat with its hot-house stench, and a lance of pain drives into his head, and he feels as though he is dying.

‘Please—’

‘You’d better not lie to me. You’d better not hold out on me.’

‘I won’t,’ he gasps, through blood and tears.

‘You’d better not,’ says Midnight Blue.

Lying dazed on the carpet,
blueeyedboy
hears the door slam. Warily, he opens his eyes and sees that Midnight Blue has gone. Even so he waits until he hears the sound of Midnight’s car setting off down the driveway before slowly, carefully, standing up and going into the bathroom to investigate the damage.

What a mess. What a fucking mess.

Poor
blueeyedboy
; nose broken, lip split, blue eyes blacked and swollen shut. There’s blood down the front of his shirt; blood still trickles from his nose. The pain is bad, but the shame is worse, and the worst of it is, this isn’t his fault. In this case, he is innocent.

How strange, he thinks, that for all his sins, he should have escaped retribution so far, whereas this time, when he has done nothing wrong, punishment should descend on him.

It’s karma
, he thinks. Kar-
ma
.

He looks at his reflection, looks at it for a long time. He feels very calm, watching himself, an actor on a small screen. He touches his reflection and feels the answering sting from the abrasions on his face. Nevertheless he feels strangely remote from the person in the looking glass; as if this were simply a reconstruction of some more distant reality; something that happened to someone else many, many years ago.

I mean it. I’ll kill you –

Not if I kill you first
, he thinks.

And would it be so impossible? Demons are made to be overcome. Maybe not with brute strength, but with intelligence and guile. Already he senses the germ of a plan beginning to form at the back of his mind. He looks at his reflection once more, squares his shoulders, wipes blood from his mouth and, finally, begins to smile.

Not if I kill you first –

Why not?

After all, he has done it before.

Post comment
:

chrysalisbaby
:
awesome wow was that 4 real?

blueeyedboy
:
As real as anything else I write . . .

chrysalisbaby
:
aw poor
blueeyedboy
i
just wanna give him a great big hug

Jesusismycopilot
:
BASTARD YOU DESERVE TO DIE.

Toxic69
:
Oh, man. Don’t we all?

ClairDeLune
:
This is fantastic
,
blueeyedboy
.
You are finally beginning to come to terms with your rage. I think we should discuss this further, don’t you?

Captainbunnykiller
:
Bitchin’, dude! This fic pwns. Can’t wait to see the payback.

JennyTricks
: (
post deleted
).

JennyTricks
: (
post deleted
).

JennyTricks
: (
post deleted
).

blueeyedboy
:
You’re very persistent,
JennyTricks
.
Tell me – do I know you?

11

You are viewing the webjournal of
blueeyedboy
.

Posted at
:
01.37 on Friday, February 1

Status
:
restricted

Mood
:
melancholy

Listening to
:
Voltaire
: ‘Born Bad’

Well, no. It wasn’t
quite
like that. But not too far from the truth, all the same. The truth is a small, vicious animal biting and clawing its way towards the light. It knows that if it wants to be born, something – or
someone
– else has to die.

I started life as a twin-set, you know. The other half – who, if he had lived, Ma would have christened Malcolm – was stillborn at nineteen weeks.

Well, that’s the official tale, anyway. Ma told me when I was six that I’d swallowed my sibling
in utero
– most probably at some point between the twelfth and the thirteenth weeks – in the course of some dispute over
Lebensraum
. It happens more often than people think. Two bodies, one soul; floating in Nature’s developing fluid, fighting for the right to live –

She kept the memory of him alive as an ornament on the mantel-piece – a statuette of a sleeping dog, engraved with his initials. The same piece, in fact, that I broke as a boy, and tried to lie about to protect myself. For which I was thrashed with the piece of electrical cord and told that I was born bad – a killer, even in embryo – that I owed it to both of them to be good, to make something of my stolen life –

In fact, she was secretly proud of me. The fact that I’d swallowed my twin to survive made her believe that I was strong. Ma despised weakness. Hard as tempered steel herself, she couldn’t stand a loser.
Life’s what you make it
, she used to say.
If you don’t fight, you deserve to die.

After that I often used to dream that Malcolm – whose name appears to me in sickly shades of green – had won the fight and taken my place. Even now I still have that dream: two little ravenous tadpoles, two piranhas side by side, two hearts in a bloodbath of chemicals just clamouring to beat as one. If he had lived instead of me, I wonder, would Mal have taken my place? Would
he
have become
blueeyedboy
?

Or would he have had his own colour? Green perhaps, to go with his name? I try to imagine a wardrobe in green: green shirts, green socks, dark-green V-necked sweater for school. All of it identical to mine (except for the colour, of course), all of it in my size, as if a lens had been placed on the world, painting my life a different shade.

Colours make a difference. Even after so many years, I still follow my mother’s colour schemes. Blue jeans, hoodie, T-shirt, socks – even my trainers have a blue star on the side. A black roll-necked sweater, a birthday present from last year, lies unworn in a bottom drawer, and whenever I think to try it on, there’s a sudden stab of unreasonable guilt.

That’s Nigel’s sweater
, a sharp voice says, and although I know it’s irrational, I still can’t bring myself to wear his colour, not even for his funeral.

Perhaps that’s because he hated me. He blamed me for everything that went wrong. He blamed me for causing Dad to leave; blamed me for his stretch in jail; for his breakdown; for his ruined life; resented the fact that Ma liked me best. Well, that, at least, was justified. Without a doubt, she favoured me. Or at least, she did at first. Perhaps because of my dead twin; the anguish of her delivery; perhaps because of Mr Blue Eyes, who was, as she said, the love of her life.

But Nigel made sibling rivalry into a major art form. His brothers lived in terror of his uncontrollable rages. His brother in brown escaped the worst, being vulnerable in so many ways. Nigel held him in contempt, a willing slave when it suited him, a human shield against Ma’s wrath, the rest of the time a whipping-boy, taking the blame for everyone.

But bullying Bren was too easy. There was no satisfaction to be gained from hitting such a target. You could punch Brendan and make him cry, but no one ever saw him fight back. Perhaps he’d learnt from experience that the best way to deal with Nigel, as with a charging elephant, is to lie still and play dead, hoping to avoid the stampede. And he never seemed to bear a grudge, not even when Nigel tormented him, confirming Ma’s belief that Bren was not the sharpest tool in the box, and that if anyone were to give them their fairy-tale ending, then it would be Benjamin.

Well, yes. Ma liked her clichés. Brought up on tales of the Lottery, of younger sons who end up marrying princesses, of eccentric millionaires who leave all their wealth to the sweet little urchin who captures their heart – Ma believed in destiny. She saw these things in black and white. And though Bren submitted without complaint, preferring safe mediocrity to the treacherous burden of brilliance, Nigel, who was no fool, must have felt a certain resentment to find that he had been cast from birth in the role of the ugly stepsister, perpetually the man in black.