Emily was a
special
child, she said. Her gifts would take time to develop. Her mother’s friend Feather Dunne – an amateur astrologer – had already predicted a brilliant future: a mystical union between Saturn and the Moon confirmed that she was exceptional. When the doctor became impatient, Emily’s mother removed herself to an alternative therapist, who recommended eyebright, massage and colour therapy. For three months she lived in a haze of incense and candles; lost interest in her canvases; never even combed her hair.
Daddy suspected post-natal depression. Catherine denied it, but veered periodically from one extreme to the other: one day protective, refusing to allow him near; the next sitting unresponsive, heedless of the bundle at her side that squalled and squalled.
Sometimes it was worse than that, and Daddy had to turn to the neighbours for help. There had been a mistake, said Catherine; the hospital had mixed up the babies; had somehow given away her perfect baby for this damaged one.
Look at it
,
Patrick
, she would say.
It doesn’t even
look l
ike a baby. It’s hideous. Hideous
.
She told Emily that when she was five. There could be no secrets between them, she said; they were part of each other.
Besides, love
is
a kind of madness, isn’t it, darling? Love is a kind of possession.
Yes, that was her voice; that was Catherine White.
She feels things more than the rest of us
, so Emily’s father used to say, as if in apology for apparently feeling so much less. And yet it was Daddy who kept things going, during her breakdown and afterwards; Daddy who paid the bills, who cooked and cleaned; who changed and fed; who every day guided Catherine gently into her abandoned studio and showed her the brushes and paints and her baby crawling among the rolls of paper and the crunchy curls of wood.
One day she picked up a paintbrush, inspected it for a moment, then put it down again; but it was the first interest she had shown for months, and Daddy took it as a sign of improvement. It was: by the time Emily was two years old, her mother’s creative passion had returned; and although now it was channelled almost exclusively through the child, it was no less ardent than before.
It began with that head in blue clay. But clay, though interesting enough, did not retain her attention for long. Emily wanted new things; she wanted to touch, to smell, to feel. The studio had become too small to contain her; she learnt to follow walls into other rooms; to find the good place under the window where the sun shone; to use the tape-recorder to listen to stories; to open up the piano and to play the notes one-fingered. She loved to play with her mother’s tin of loose buttons; to push her hands deep inside; to slither them out on to the floor and arrange them by size, shape and texture.
In every way but one, you see, Emily was an ordinary child. She loved stories, which her father would record for her; she loved to walk in the park; she loved her parents; she loved her dolls. She had a small child’s small, infrequent tantrums; she enjoyed her visits to the farm in Pog Hill, and dreamed of getting a puppy.
By the time Emily learnt to walk, her mother had almost accepted her blindness. Specialists were expensive, and their conclusions were inevitably variations on the same theme. Her condition was irreversible; she responded only to the brightest of direct lights, and then only a very, very little. She could not distinguish shapes; could barely recognize movement, and had no awareness of colour.
But Catherine White was not to be defeated. She flung herself into Emily’s education with all the energy she had once given to her work. First, clay, to develop spatial awareness and encourage creativity. Next, numbers, on a large wooden abacus with beads that clicked and clacked. Then letters, using a Braille slate and an embossing machine. Then, on Feather’s advice, ‘colour therapy’, designed, so she said, to stimulate the visual parts of the cortex by image association.
‘If it can work for Gloria’s boy, then why can’t it work for Emily?’
This was the phrase she used every time Daddy tried to protest. It didn’t matter that Gloria’s boy was a different case entirely; all that mattered to Catherine White was that Ben – or
Boy X
, as Dr Peacock called him, with typical pretentiousness – had somehow acquired an extra sense; and if the son of a cleaner could do it, then why not little Emily?
Little Emily, of course, had no idea what they were talking about. But she wanted to please; she was eager to learn, and the rest just followed naturally.
The colour therapy worked, to a point. Although the words themselves held no more meaning for Emily than the names of the colours in her paintbox,
green
brings back the memory of summer lawns and cut grass.
Red
is the scent of Bonfire Night; the sound of crackling wood; the heat.
Blue
is water; silent; cool.
‘Your name is a colour, too, Emily,’ said Feather, who had long, tickly hair that smelt of patchouli and cigarette smoke. ‘Emily White. Isn’t that lovely?’
White
. Snow white. So cold it is almost hot at the fingertips, freezing, burning.
‘Emily. Don’t you love the pretty snow?’
No, I don’t, Emily thinks. Fur is pretty. Silk is pretty. Buttons are pretty in the tin, or rice, or lentils slipping
frrrrrrpp
through the fingers. There’s nothing pretty about snow, which hurts your hands and makes the steps slippery. Anyway, white isn’t a colour. White is the ugly
brrrrr
you get between radio stations, when the sound breaks up and there’s nothing left but noise. White noise. White snow. Snow White, half-dead, half-sleeping under glass.
When she was four, Daddy suggested that Emily might go to school. Maybe in Kirby Edge, he said, where there was a facility. Catherine refused to discuss it, of course. With Feather’s help, she said, her teaching had already worked a near-miracle. She had always known Emily was an exceptional child; she was not to waste her gifts in a school for blind children where she would be taught rug-making and self-pity, nor in a mainstream school where she would always be second-rate. No, Emily was to continue to receive tuition from home, so that when she eventually regained her sight – and there was no doubt at all in Catherine’s mind that this would happen some day – she would be ready to face whatever the world chanced to offer her.
Daddy protested as strenuously as he could. It was not nearly enough; Feather and Catherine barely heard him. Feather believed in past lives, and thought that if the correct parts of Emily’s brain were stimulated, then she would regain her visual memory; and Catherine believed . . .
Well, you know what Catherine believed. She could have lived with an ugly child; even a deformed child. But a blind child? A child with no understanding of colours?
Colours, colours, colours. Green, pink, gold, orange, purple, scarlet, blue. Blue alone has a thousand variations: cerulean, sapphire, cobalt, azure; from sky-blue to deepest midnight, passing through indigo and navy, powder-blue to electric-blue, forget-me-not, turquoise and aqua and Saxe. You see, Emily could understand the
notation
of colours. She knew their terms and their cadences; she learnt to repeat the notes and arpeggios of their seven-tone scale. And yet the
nature
of colours still eluded her. She was like a tone-deaf person who has learnt to play the piano, knowing that what he hears is nothing like music. But she could perform; oh yes; she could.
‘See the daffodils, Emily.’
‘Pretty daffodils. Sunny yellow-golden daffodils.’ As a matter of fact, they felt ugly to the touch; cold and somehow
meaty
, like slices of ham. Emily much preferred the fat silky leaves of the lamb’s tongue, or the lavenders with their nubbly flower-heads and sleepy smell.
‘Shall we paint the daffodils, sweetheart? Would you like Cathy to help you?’
The easel was set up in the studio. There was a big paintbox on the left, with the colours labelled in Braille. Three pots of water stood to the right, and a selection of brushes. Emily liked the sable brushes best. They were the best quality, and soft as the end of a cat’s tail. She liked to run them along the place just underneath her lower lip, a place of such sensitivity that she could feel every hair on a paintbrush, and where the nap of a piece of velvet ribbon was the most exquisitely discerned. The paper – thick, glossy art paper with its new, clean-bedclothes smell – was fastened to the easel with bulldog clips, and was sectioned into squares like a chessboard, by means of wires stretched across the paper. That way, Emily could be sure of not straying outside the picture, or confusing sky with trees.
‘Now for the trees, Emily. Good. That’s good.’
Trees are tall, Emily thinks. Taller than my father. Catherine lets her touch them, puts her face to their rough sides, like hugging a beardy man. There’s a smell, too, and a hint of movement, far away but still connected, still touching somehow. ‘It’s windy,’ Emily suggests, trying hard. ‘The tree’s moving in the wind.’
‘Good, darling! Very good!’
Splosh, splash. Now the white, no-colour paper is green. She knows this because her mother hugs her. Emily feels her trembling. There is a note in her voice, too – not F sharp this time, but something less shrill and teary – and something in Emily swells with pride and happiness, because she loves her mother; she loves the smell of turpentine because it is the smell of her mother; she loves the painting lessons because they make her mother proud – although later, when it is over and she creeps back to the studio and tries in vain to understand
why
it makes her so happy, Emily can feel only the tiniest roughening and crinkling of the paper, like hands after washing-up. That’s all she can feel, even with her lower lip. She tries not to feel too disappointed. There must be something there, she thinks. Her mother says so.
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:
blueeyedboy
:
That was beautiful,
Albertine
.
Albertine
:
Glad you liked it
,
blueeyedboy
. . .
3
You are viewing the webjournal of
blueeyedboy
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Posted at
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04.16 on Friday, February 8
Status
:
public
Mood
:
creative
Listening to
: The
Moody Blues
: ‘The Story In Your Eyes’
Poor Emily. Poor Mrs White. So close and yet so far apart. What had started with Mr White and our hero’s abortive quest for his father had broadened into a kind of obsession with the whole of the household: with Mrs White, her husband, and most of all, with Emily, the little sister he might have had if things had turned out differently.
And so, all through that summer, the summer of his eleventh year,
blueeyedboy
followed them in secret, ritually noting their comings and goings; their clothes; the things they liked to do; their haunts, in the cloth-backed Blue Book that served him as a journal.
He followed them to the sculpture park where little Emily liked to play; to the open farm with its piglets and lambs; to the pottery workshop café in town, where for the price of a cup of tea you could buy and shape a lump of clay, to be baked in the oven the same day, then painted and taken home to take pride of place on some mantelpiece, in some cabinet.
The Saturday of the blue clay, Emily was four years old.
Blueeyedboy
had spotted her with Mrs White, walking slowly down the hill into Malbry, Emily in a little red coat that made her look like an unseasonal Christmas bauble, her little dark head bobbing up and down, Mrs White in boots and a blue print dress, her long blonde hair trailing down her back. He followed them all the way into town, keeping close to the hedges that lined the road. Mrs White never noticed him, not even when he ventured close, shadowing her blue silhouette with the doggedness of a junior spy.
Blueeyedboy
, junior spy. He liked the stealthy sound of the phrase, its pearly string of sibilants, its secret hint of gunsmoke. He followed them into Malbry town centre, and into the pottery workshop, where Feather was waiting at a table for four, a cup of coffee in front of her, a half-smoked cigarette between her elegant fingers.
Blueeyedboy
would have liked to have joined them there, but Feather’s presence daunted him. Since that first day at the market, he had sensed that she didn’t like him somehow, that she thought he wasn’t good enough for Mrs White or Emily. So he sat at a table behind them, trying to look casual, as if he had money to spend there and business of his own to conduct.
Feather eyed him suspiciously. She was wearing a brown ethnic-print dress and a lot of tortoiseshell bangles that clattered as she moved the hand holding the half-smoked cigarette.
Blueeyedboy
avoided her gaze and pretended to look out of the window. When he dared to look back again, Feather was talking quite loudly to Mrs White, elbows on the table, occasionally tapping a little cone of cigarette ash into her empty teacup.
The pretty waitress came up to him. ‘Are you all together?’ she said.
Blueeyedboy
realized that she had assumed that he had come in with Mrs White, and before he could stop himself, he’d said yes. Against the sound of Feather’s voice, his small deception went unnoticed, and in a few moments the waitress had brought him a Pepsi and a lump of clay, with the kindly instruction to call for her if ever he needed anything more.
He was not sure what he’d intended to make. A dog for Ma’s collection, perhaps; something to put on the mantelpiece. Something – anything – to draw her away, even for an instant, from the Mansion, Dr Peacock’s work, and aspects of synaesthesia.