‘I’m sorry,’ I began to say.
‘No. It’s me. I apologize. It’s just that I hate funerals. The hypocrisy. The platitudes. The food you’d never think of eating at any other time. The ritual of tiny fish-paste sandwiches and mini jam tarts and sausage rolls—’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry. Now I’m being rude. Would you like me to fetch you something to eat?’
I gave a shaky laugh. ‘You make it sound so appealing. I’ll pass.’
‘Very wise.’
I could hear his smile. His charm has a way of surprising me, even now, after all this time, and it makes me feel a little queasy to think that at my lover’s funeral I talked – I laughed – with another man, a man I found almost attractive . . .
‘I have to say, I’m relieved,’ he said. ‘I rather thought you’d blame me.’
‘Blame you for Nigel’s accident? Why?’
‘Well, maybe because of my letter,’ he said.
‘Your letter?’
Once more, I heard him smile. ‘The letter he opened the day he died. Why do you think he was driving so recklessly? My guess is he was coming for me. To deliver one of his –
warnings
.’
I shrugged. ‘Aren’t you the perceptive one? Nigel’s death was an
accident
—’
‘There’s no such thing as an accident as far as our family’s concerned.’
I stood up much too fast at that, and the chair clattered back against the parquet floor. ‘What the hell does
that
mean?’ I said.
His voice was calm, still slightly amused. ‘It means we’ve had our share of bad luck. What did you want? A confession?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ I said.
‘Well, thanks. That puts me in my place.’
I was feeling strangely light-headed by then. Perhaps it was the heat, or the noise, or simply the fact of being so close to him, close enough to take his hand.
‘You hated him. You wanted him dead.’ My voice sounded plaintive, like a child’s.
A pause. ‘I thought you knew me,’ he said. ‘You really think I’m capable?’
And now I thought I could almost hear the first notes of the Berlioz, the
Symphonie fantastique
with its patter of flutes and low caress of strings. Something dreadful was on its way. Suddenly there seemed to be no oxygen in the air I was breathing. I put out a hand to steady myself, missed the back of the chair and stepped out into the open. My throat was a pinprick; my head a balloon. I stretched out my arms and touched only empty space.
‘Are you OK?’ He sounded concerned.
I tried to find the chair again – I desperately needed to sit down – but I had lost my bearings in the suddenly cavernous room.
‘Try to relax. Sit down. Breathe.’ I felt his arm around me, guiding me gently towards the chair, and once again I thought of Nigel, and of Daddy’s voice, a little off-key, saying:
Come on, Emily. Breathe. Breathe!
‘Shall I take you outside?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing. It’s fine. It’s just the noise.’
‘As long as it wasn’t something I said—’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ I faked a smile. It felt like a dentist’s mask on my face. I had to get out. I pulled away, sending my chair skittering against the parquet. If only I could get some air, then everything would be all right. The voices in my head would stop. The dreadful music would be stilled.
‘Are you OK?’
Breathe, baby, breathe!
And now the music rose once more, lurching into a major key somehow even more dangerous, more troubling than the minor.
Then his voice through the static said: ‘Don’t forget your coat,
Albertine
.’
And at that I pulled away and ran, regardless of obstacles, and, finding my voice just long enough to shout –
Let me through!
– I fled once more, like a criminal, pushing my way through the milling crowd and out into the speechless air.
2
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Posted at
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21.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status
:
restricted
Mood
:
caustic
Listening to
:
Voltaire
: ‘Almost Human’
So, she finds me almost attractive. That moves me more than words can say. To know that she thinks of me that way – or that she did, for a moment, at least – makes it almost seem worthwhile –
When Nigel came round on the day he died I was developing photographs. My iPod was playing at full blast, which was why I missed the knock at the door.
‘B.B.!’ Ma’s voice was imperious.
I hate it when she calls me that.
‘What?’ Her hearing is eerily good. ‘What are you doing in there? It’s been hours.’
‘Just sorting out some negatives.’
Ma has a range of silences. This one was disapproving: Ma dislikes my photography, considers it a waste of time. Besides, my darkroom is private; the lock on the door keeps her out. It isn’t healthy, so she says; no boy should have secrets from his ma.
‘So what is it, Ma?’ I said at last. The silence was starting to get to me. For a moment it deepened; grew thoughtful. It is at these moments that Ma is at her most dangerous. She had something up her sleeve, I knew. Something that didn’t bode well for me.
‘Ma?’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Your brother’s here to see you,’ she said.
Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I suppose she felt I deserved it. After all, I had forfeited her protection by keeping secrets from her. It didn’t quite happen as it did in my fic, but we have to allow for poetic licence, don’t we? And Nigel had a temper, and I was never the type to fight back.
I suppose I could have lied my way out of it, as I have so often before, but by then I think it was too late; something had been set in motion, something that could not be stopped. Besides, my brother was arrogant. So sure of his crude and bludgeoning tactics that he never considered the fact that there might be other, more subtle ways than brute force of winning the battle between us. Nigel was never subtle. Perhaps that’s why
Albertine
loved him. He was, after all, so different from her, so open and straightforward; loyal as a good dog.
Is that what you thought,
Albertine
? Is that what you saw in him? A reflection of lost innocence? What can I say? You were wrong. Nigel wasn’t innocent. He was a killer, just like me, though I’m sure he never told you that. After all, what would he have said? That for all his pretended honesty, he was as fake as both of us? That he’d taken the role you offered him, and played you like a professional?
The funeral lasted much too long. They always do, and when the sandwiches and the sausage rolls had finally been cleared away, there was still the coming home to endure, and the photographs to be brought out, and the sighs and the tears and the platitudes: as if she’d ever cared for him, as if Ma had cared for anyone in all her life but Gloria Green –
At least it was quick.
The Number One, the greatest hit, the all-time favourite platitude, closely followed by such classic tracks as:
At least he didn’t suffer
, and
It’s wicked, that road, how fast they drive
. The scene of my brother’s death now bears a Diana-style floral display – though of somewhat more modest proportions, thank God.
I know. I went on the pilgrimage. My mother, Adèle, Maureen and I; Yours Truly in his colours, Ma regal, all in black, with a veil, reeking of L’Heure Bleue, of course, and carrying, of all things, a stuffed dog with a wreath in its mouth – putting the
fun
into
fu
neral –
‘I don’t think I can bear to look,’ she says, face averted, her eagle eye taking in the offerings at the roadside shrine, mentally calculating the cost of a spray of carnations, a begonia plant, a bunch of sad chrysanthemums picked up at a roadside garage.
‘They’d better not be from
her
,’ she says, quite unnecessarily. Indeed, there is no indication that Nigel’s girl has ever even been there, still less that she brought flowers.
My mother, however, is unconvinced. She sends me to investigate and to purge any gift not bearing a card, and then deposits her stuffed dog by the side of the road with a teary sigh.
Flanked by Adèle and Maureen, who each hold an elbow, she totters away on six-inch heels that look like sharpened pencils, and produce a sound that makes my tastebuds cramp, like chalk against a blackboard.
‘At least you’ve got B.B., Gloria, love.’
Greatest Hits
, Number Four.
‘Yes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’ Her eyes are hard and expressionless. At the centre of each one is a small blue pinprick of light. It takes me some time to realize that this is my reflection. ‘B.B. would never let me down. He would never cheat on me.’
Did she really say those words? I may have just imagined it. And yet, that is exactly what she considers this betrayal to be. Bad enough, to lose her son to another woman, she thinks. But to lose him to
that
girl, of all girls –
Nigel should have known better, of course. No one escapes from Gloria Green. My mother is like the pitcher plant,
Nepenthes distillatoria
, which draws in its victims with sweetness, only to drown them in acid later when their struggles have exhausted them.
I ought to know; I’ve been living with her for forty-two years, and the reason I’ve stayed undigested so far is that the parasite needs a decoy, a lure: a creature that sits on the lip of the plant to persuade all the others there’s nothing to fear –
I know. It’s hardly a glorious task. But it certainly beats being eaten alive. It pays to be loyal to Ma, you see. It pays to keep up appearances. Besides, wasn’t I her favourite, trained in the womb as a murderer? And, having first disposed of Mal, why should I spare the other two?
I always thought when I was a boy that the justice system was the wrong way round. First, a man commits a crime. Then (assuming he’s caught) comes the sentence. Five, ten, twenty years, depending on the crime, of course. But as so many criminals fail to anticipate the cost of repaying such a debt, surely it makes more sense, rather than crime on credit, to pay for one’s felony up front, and to do the time
before
the crime, after which, without prosecution, you could safely wreak havoc at your leisure.
Imagine the time and money saved on police investigations and on lengthy trials; not to mention the unnecessary anxiety and distress suffered by the perpetrator, never knowing if he’ll be caught, or has got away with it. Under this system I believe that many of the more serious crimes could actually be avoided – as only a very few would accept to spend a lifetime in prison for the sake of a single murder. In fact, it’s far more likely that, halfway through the sentence, the would-be offender would opt to go free – still innocent of any crime, though he might have to lose his deposit. Or maybe by then he would have earned enough time to pay for a minor felony – an aggravated assault, perhaps, or maybe a rape or a robbery –
See? It’s a perfect system. It’s moral, cheap and practical. It even allows for that change of heart. It offers absolution. Sin
and
redemption all in one; cost-free karma at the Jesus Christ superstore.
Which is just my way of saying this: I’ve already done my time. Over forty years of it. And now, with my release date due –
The universe owes me a murder.
3
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blueeyedboy
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Posted at
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22.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status
:
public
Mood
:
murderous
Listening to
:
Peter Gabriel
: ‘Family Snapshot’
His brothers never liked him much. Perhaps he was too different. Perhaps they were jealous of his gift and of all the attention it brought him. In any case, they hated him – well, maybe not Brendan, his brother in brown, who was too thick to genuinely hate anyone, but certainly Nigel, his brother in black, who, the year of Benjamin’s birth, underwent such a violent personality change that he might have been a different boy.
The birth of his youngest brother was attended by outbursts of violent rage that Ma could neither control nor understand. As for Brendan, aged three – a placid, stolid, good-natured child – his first words on hearing that he had a baby brother were:
Why, Ma? Send him back!
Not promising words for Benjamin, who found himself thrown into the cruel world like a bone to a pack of dogs, with no one but Ma to defend him and to keep him from being eaten alive.
But he was her blue-eyed talisman. Special, from the day he was born. The others went to the junior school, where they played on the swings and the climbing frames, risked life and limb on the football pitch, and came home every day with grazes and cuts that Ma seemed never to notice. But with Ben, she was always fretful. The smallest bruise, the slightest cough, was enough to awaken his mother’s concern, and the day he came home from nursery school with a bloody nose (earned in a fight over control of the sandpit), she withdrew him from the school and took him on her rounds instead.
There were four ladies on Ma’s cleaning round, all of them now coloured blue in his mind. All of them lived in the Village; no more than half a mile from each other, in the long tree-lined alleys between Mill Road and the edge of White City.
Apart from Mrs Electric Blue, who was to die so very unexpectedly some fifteen or twenty years later, there was: Mrs French Blue, who smoked Gauloises and liked Jacques Brel; Mrs Chemical Blue, who took twenty kinds of vitamins and who cleaned the house before Ma arrived (and probably after she left); and finally, Mrs Baby Blue, who collected porcelain dolls, and had a studio under the roof, and was an artist, so she said, and whose husband was a music teacher at St Oswald’s, the boys’ grammar school down the road, where Ma also went to clean and vacuum the classrooms on the Upper Corridor at four thirty every school day, and to run the big old polisher across what seemed miles of parquet floor.