But now everything about it was inimical to him: from the boys, who, just like the ones from the estate, called him
freak
and
loser
and
queer
(albeit in more refined accents), to the pretentious names of the buildings themselves – names like Rotunda and Porte-Cochère – names that tasted of rotten fruit, plummy with self-satisfaction and ripe with the odour of sanctity.
Like the vitamin drink, St Oswald’s was meant to be good for his health; to help him achieve his potential. But after three miserable years there, where to some extent he had tried to fit in, he still wanted Dr Peacock’s house, with the fireplace and the smell of old books. He missed the Earth globes with their magical names; and most of all he missed the way Dr Peacock used to talk to him, as if he really
cared
–
No one at St Oswald’s cared. It was true that no one bullied him – well, not the way his brother did – but all the same he could always feel that undercurrent of contempt. Even the Masters had it, although some were better than others at concealing it.
They called him by his surname,
Winter
, like an Army cadet. They drilled him with tables and irregular verbs. They gave huge, dramatic sighs at his displays of ignorance. They set him to copying lines.
I will keep my schoolbooks in immaculate condition
. (Nigel always found them, however well he hid them away.)
My uniform represents the school. I will wear it always with pride
. (This was when Nigel had scissored his tie, leaving nothing but a stub.)
I will at least pretend to pay attention when a senior Master enters the room
. (This from the ever-sarcastic Dr Devine, who came into his form-room one morning to find him asleep at his desk.)
The worst of it was that he really tried. He tried to excel at his schoolwork. He wanted his teachers to be proud of him. Whereas some boys failed through laziness, he was acutely aware of the hated privilege of attending St Oswald’s Grammar School, and he tried very hard to deserve it. But Dr Peacock, with his fine disregard for the curriculum, had coached him in only the subjects he himself valued – art, history, music, English literature – neglecting maths and the sciences, with the result that Ben had lagged behind ever since his first term at school and, in spite of all his efforts, had never recovered the deficit.
When Dr Peacock withdrew from their lives, Benjamin had expected Ma to withdraw him from the grammar school. In fact he prayed for it fervently, but the one time he dared mention the matter to her, she whacked him with the length of electrical cord.
‘I’ve already put too much into you,’ she said, as she folded the cord away. ‘Far too much, in any case, to let you drop out at this stage.’
After that, he knew better than to complain. He sensed another shift in things as adolescence claimed him. His brothers were growing up fast, and Ma, like an October wasp sensing the coming of winter, had turned vicious overnight, making her sons the target of her frustrations. Suddenly they were all under fire, from the way they spoke to the length of their hair, and
blueeyedboy
realized with growing dismay that Ma’s devotion to her sons had been part of a long-term investment plan that now was expected to bear fruit.
Nigel had left school some three months ago, and the urge to make Ben suffer had begun to take second place to finding a flat, a girl, a job, an escape – from Ma, from his brothers, from Malbry.
Now he seemed suddenly older, more distant, more given to dark moods and silences. He’d always been moody and withdrawn. Now he became almost a recluse. He’d bought himself a telescope, and on cloudless nights he took to the moors, coming home in the early hours, which was no bad thing as far as Ben was concerned, but which made Ma anxious and irritable.
If Nigel’s escape was in the stars, Brendan had found another route. At sixteen he already outweighed Ben by fifty pounds, and, far from losing his puppy fat, now supplemented his confectionary habit with alarming amounts of junk food. He too had a part-time job, at a fried-chicken place in Malbry town centre, where he could snack all day if he liked, and from which he returned on weekday nights with the Bargain Bucket Meal Deal, which, if he wasn’t hungry then, he would have cold for breakfast the following morning, along with a quart of Pepsi, before setting off for Sunnybank Park, where he was in his final year. Ma had hoped that he would at least stay on until his A-levels, but nothing Ma could say or do had any effect on Ben’s voracious brother, who seemed to have made it his mission in life to eat his way out of her custody. Ben reckoned it was only a matter of time before Brendan failed his exams and dropped out, then moved away altogether.
Benjamin felt some relief at this. Ever since the St Oswald’s entrance exam, he’d had a growing suspicion that Bren was keeping tabs on him. It wasn’t anything Ben had said; just the way he looked at him. Sometimes he suspected Bren of following him when he went out; sometimes when he went to his room he was sure his things had been moved about. Books he’d left under his bed would migrate, or vanish for a day or two, then reappear somewhere else. It didn’t really make sense, of course. What did Brendan care about books? And yet it made him uneasy to think of someone else going through his things.
But Bren was the least of his worries by then. So much had been invested in him. So much money; so much hope. And now that the returns were about to pay off, there could be no question of retreat. His mother would not submit to the humiliation of hearing the neighbours say that Gloria Winter’s boy had dropped out of school –
‘You’ll do what I tell you and like it,’ she said. ‘Or I swear I’ll make you pay.’
I’ll make you pay
was Ma’s refrain throughout the whole of that year, it seemed. And so, throughout the whole of that year, her sons ran in fear of Gloria.
Blueeyedboy
knew he deserved it, at least;
blueeyedboy
knew that he was bad.
How
bad, no one understood. But his mother made it clear to him that there was to be no going back: that to disappoint her at this stage would result in the worst kind of punishment.
‘You owe it to me,’ Ma said, with a glance at the green ceramic dog. ‘What’s more, you owe it to
him
. You owe it to your brother.’
Would Malcolm have been a success if he had lived?
Blueeyedboy
often asked himself that. It made him nervous to think of it. As if he were living two lives at once. One for himself, and one for Mal, who would never have the chances he’d had. Fear gnawed at him like a rat in a cage. What if he failed her? What would she do?
His escape from it all was in writing. He kept the Blue Book in the darkroom, where neither Ma nor his brothers would find it, and every night, when things got too bad, he would spin his fear into stories. Always from the point of view of a bad guy, a villain, a murderer –
His victims were many, his methods diverse. No simple shootings for
blueeyedboy
. His style may have been questionable, but his imagination was limitless. His victims died in colourful ways: caught in complex torture machines; buried in wet sand up to their necks; snared in fiendish death traps.
He used the Blue Book as a record of his fictional killings, along with a few actual experiments: Ben had recently moved on from wasps to moths, and later to mice, which were quite easy to obtain, using a simple bottle trap, and whose trapped and fluttering heartbeats – amplified by the resonant glass – echoed the frantic rhythm of his own.
The trap was made from a milk bottle, in which Ben would place a quantity of bait. It was his way of selecting victims; of isolating the guilty from the innocent. The mouse climbs into the bottle, eats the bait, but is unable to climb back up the frictionless wall. It dies quite quickly – of exhaustion and shock – its little pink feet pedalling against the glass as if on an invisible wheel.
The point is, though: they
chose
to die. They chose to enter the baited trap. Their deaths were therefore
not his fault
–
But all that was about to change.
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enny? How I’ve missed you . . .
14
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03.12 on Tuesday, February 12
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A lie has a rhythm of its own. Emily’s began with a rousing overture; mellowed into a solemn andante; elaborated on several themes and variations; and finally emerged into a triumphant scherzo, to standing ovations and lengthy applause.
It was her grand opening. Her formal presentation to the media.
Girl Y
had served her purpose; now she was ready to take the stage. She was three weeks shy of her eighth birthday; she was clever and articulate; her work was practice-perfect and ready to stand up to scrutiny. As part of the fanfare, the Press had been informed; there was to be an auction of her paintings in a small gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate; Dr Peacock’s new book was about to come out, and suddenly, or so it seemed, the whole world was talking about Emily White.
This small figure
[said the
Guardian
],
with her bobbed brown hair and wistful face, hardly strikes one as a typical prodigy.
[Why? you wonder. What did they expect?]
In fact at first sight she seems very much like any other eight-year-old, but for the way her eyes skid and skitter, giving this writer the uncomfortable impression that she can see deep into his soul.
The writer was an ageing journalist called Jeffrey Stuarts, and if he had a soul at all, she never caught a sniff of it. His voice was always a trifle too loud, with a percussive attack like dried peas in a bowl – and his smell was Old Spice aftershave trying too hard to overwhelm an under-scent of sweat and thwarted ambition. That day he was all affability.
It hardly seems conceivable
[he goes on to say]
that the canvases that sing and soar from the walls of this tiny gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate can be the unaided work of this shy little girl. And yet there is something eerie about Emily White. The small pale hands flutter restlessly, like moths. The head is cocked just a little to one side, as if she hears something the rest of us do not.
As a matter of fact she was simply bored.
‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘that you can actually
see
the music?’
Obediently she nodded; behind him she could hear Dr Peacock’s plush laughter above a twittering of white noise. She wondered where her father was; listened for his voice and thought for a second she heard it, all snarled up in the growing cacophony.
‘And all these paintings – they actually
represent
what you see?’
Again, she nodded.
‘So, Emily. How does it feel?’
I may be over-dramatizing, but I feel that there is something of the blank canvas about her; an other-worldly quality that both captivates and repels. Her paintings reflect this; as if the young artist has somehow gained access to another plane of perception.
Oh, my. But the man enjoyed his alliteration. There was much more in the same vein; Rimbaud was mentioned (inevitably); Emily’s work was compared to that of Münch and Van Gogh, and it was even suggested that she had experienced what Feather liked to call
channelling
, which meant that she had somehow tuned into some open frequency of talent (possibly linked to artists long-dead) to produce these astonishing paintings.
At first glance
[writes Mr Stuarts],
all her canvases seem to be abstracts. Big, bold blocks of colour, some so highly textured as to be almost sculpture. But there are other influences here that surely cannot be coincidental. Emily White’s
Eroica
has a look of Picasso’s
Guernica; Birthday Bach
is as busy and intricate as a Jackson Pollock, and
Starry Moonlight Sonata
bears more than a passing resemblance to Van Gogh. Could it be, as Graham Peacock suggests, that all art has a common basis in the collective unconscious? Or is this little girl a conduit to something beyond the sensitivity of ordinary mortals?
There was more – much more – in this vein. A digested version found its way into the
Daily Mirror
under the headline: BLIND GIRL’S SUPER-SENSE. The
Sun
ran it too, or something very similar, flanked with a photo of Sissy Spacek taken from the film
Carrie
. Shortly afterwards a more extended version was published in a journal called
Aquarius Moon
, alongside an interview with Feather Dunne. The myth was well on its way by then; and although on that particular day there were no signs of the knives that would soon come out in response, I think that even so the attention made her uneasy. Emily hated crowds; hated noise, and all the people who came and went, their voices pecking at her like hungry chickens.
Mr Stuarts was talking to Feather now; Emily could hear her throaty patchouli-dark voice saying something about how
differently able
children were often ideal hosts for benevolent spirits. To her left was her mother, sounding just a little drunk; her laughter too loud in the smoke and the noise.