‘I always knew she was an exceptional child,’ Emily heard above the noise. ‘Who knows? Maybe she’s the next step on the evolutionary ladder. One of the Tomorrow Children.’
The Tomorrow Children
. God, that phrase. Feather used it in her
Aquarius Moon
interview (for all I know she may have coined it herself), and it alone spawned a dozen theories of which Emily remained mercifully ignorant – at least until the final collapse.
Now it only jarred, and she stood up from her chair and began to move towards the open door, following the smooth line of the wall, feeling soft air on her upturned face. It was warm outside; she could feel the evening sun against her eyelids and smell magnolia from the park across the road.
A white smell
, said her mother’s voice in her mind.
Magnolia white
. To Emily it sounded soft and chocolatey, like a Chopin nocturne, like
Cinderella
, a scent of magic. The heat from within the gallery was oppressive by comparison; the voices of all those people – guests, academics, journalists, all talking at once and at the tops of their voices – pushing at her like a hot wind. She’d never had an exhibition before. She’d never even had a proper birthday party. She sat down on the gallery step – there was a cast-iron railing, and she pressed her hot cheek against its pockmarked surface and lifted her face towards the white smell.
‘Hello, Emily,’ someone said.
She turned towards the sound of his voice. He was standing a dozen feet away. A boy – older than she was, she thought; maybe as old as sixteen. His voice sounded oddly flat and tight, like an instrument playing in the wrong register, and Emily could hear caution in it, combined with interest, and something close to hostility.
‘What’s your name?’
‘B.B.,’ he said.
‘That’s not a name,’ Emily said.
His shrug was implicit in his tone. ‘It’s what they call me at home,’ he said. There was a rather lengthy pause. Emily could feel him wanting to speak, and sensed he was staring at her. She wished he would either ask his question, or go away and leave her alone. The boy did neither, but just stood there, opening his mouth and then closing it again, like a shop door on a busy day.
‘Watch out,’ she said. ‘You’re catching flies.’
She heard his teeth click together. ‘I thought you were supposed to be b-blind.’
‘I am, but I can
hear
you all right. You make a noise when you open your mouth. Your breathing changes—’ Emily turned away, feeling suddenly impatient. Why did she bother explaining things? He was just another tourist, here to see the freak. In a moment, if he dared, he’d ask her about the colours.
When he did, it took Emily a moment to understand what he was saying. The stammer she’d already noticed in his voice had intensified; not, she realized, through nerves, but from some real conflict that knotted his words into a tangle that for a few seconds even he could not undo.
‘You can really
h-
you can
h-h-
you can
hear
c-c—’ Emily could hear the frustration in his voice as he struggled with the words. ‘You can really hear c-colours?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘So. What colour am I?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain. It’s like a kind of extra sense.’
The boy laughed. Not a happy sound. ‘Malbry smells of shit,’ he said in a fast and toneless voice. ‘Dr Peacock smells of bubblegum. Mr Pink smells of dentist’s gas.’ Emily noticed that he hadn’t stuttered once throughout this speech, the longest she’d heard him make so far.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, puzzled.
‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘All those times I watched you play, or sit in your s-swing in the living-room—’
The penny dropped. ‘You’re him?
You’re Boy X?
’
For a long time he said nothing. Perhaps he’d nodded – people forget – and then he just said: ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘I remember hearing about you,’ she said, not wanting him to know that her mother thought he was a fake. ‘Where did you go? After Dr Peacock—’
‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘We live in White City. The bottom end of the village. Ma works on the m-market. S-selling f-fruit.’
There was a long silence. This time she couldn’t hear him struggling to speak, but she could feel his eyes on her. It was uncomfortable; it made her feel indignant and a little guilty at the same time.
‘I fucking hate fruit,’ he said.
There was another long pause, during which she closed her eyes and wished the boy would go away. Mother was right, she told herself. He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t even friendly. And yet . . .
‘What’s it like?’ She had to ask.
‘What, selling fruit?’
‘That – thing you do. The taste-smell-word thing. I don’t know the name.’
There was a long silence as, once more, he struggled to explain. ‘I don’t d-
do
anything,’ he said at last. ‘It’s like – it’s just
there
, somehow. Like yours, I guess. I see something, I hear something, and then I get a feeling. Don’t ask me why. Weird things. And
it hurts
—’
Another pause. Inside the gallery the sound of voices had dimmed; Emily guessed that someone was getting ready to make a speech.
‘You’re lucky,’ said B.B. ‘Yours is a gift. It makes you special. Mine, I’d do without it any day. It hurts, I get these headaches
here
—’ He placed a hand on her temple, and another one at the nape of her neck. She felt a tremor go through him then, as if he were actually in pain.
‘Plus everyone thinks you’re m-mad, or worse, that you’re faking it to get attention. I mean, do
you
think I’m faking it?’
For a second she faltered. ‘I don’t know—’
That laugh again. ‘Well, there you go.’ Suddenly the pent-up anger Emily had heard in his voice was overlaid with a tremendous weariness. ‘At the end, even
I
thought I’d been faking it. And Dr Peacock – don’t blame him. I mean, they say it’s a gift. But what’s it
for
? Yours I can understand. Seeing colours when you’re blind. Painting music. It’s like a b-bloody miracle. But mine? Imagine what it’s like for me, every d-day—’ Now he was stuttering again. ‘Some d-days it’s so bad I can hardly think, and what’s it for? What’s it even
for
?’
He stopped, and Emily could hear him breathing harshly. ‘I used to think there was a cure,’ he said finally. ‘I used to think that if I did the tests, then Dr Peacock would find a cure. But there isn’t a way. It gets everywhere. It gets into everything. TV. Films. You can’t get away. From it. From
them
—’
‘The smells, you mean?’
He paused. ‘Yeah. The smells.’
‘What about me?’ Emily said. ‘Do I have a smell?’
‘Sure you do, Emily,’ he said, and now she could hear the tiniest hint of a smile in his voice. ‘
Emily White
smells of roses. That rose that grows by the wall at the edge of the doctor’s garden.
Albertine
, that was its name. That’s what your name smells like to me.’
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15
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blueeyedboy
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Genesis
: ‘The Lady Lies’
I knew from that moment she was faking it. Not quite eight years old, and yet already she was cleverer than any of those others: the ones in charge of the media hype; the ones who thought they’d created her.
What’s it like? That – thing you do.
She was so beautiful, even then. Skin like vanilla ice cream, that smooth dark hair and those sibyl’s eyes. Good breeding makes for good skin. Her breeding went right down to the bone: forehead, cheekbones, wrists and neck, collarbones chiselled and lovely. But –
What’s it like? That thing you do?
She would never have asked me otherwise. Not if she’d been telling the truth. These things we feel – these things we
sense
– are deeply embedded inside us, like razor blades in a bar of soap: sharp, inexplicable edges that cut as keenly as beauty.
That lie of hers confirmed it; but already I knew she belonged with me. Both of us soulmates in deceit; both of us bad guys, for ever, at heart. There was no point in my asking her when – or if – I could see her again. It would have been difficult enough with an ordinary child to arrange the kind of clandestine meeting that I had in mind – with this now-famous blind girl, I didn’t stand a chance.
That was when the dreams began. No one had really explained to me about hormones, or growing up, or sex. For a woman with three teenage sons, Ma had proved curiously prudish on the subject, and when the relevant time had come, I’d learnt most of the truth from my brothers, a bike-shed education at best, which did not entirely prepare me for the magnitude of the experience.
I’d been a late developer. But that spring I caught up with a vengeance. I grew three inches taller, my skin cleared, and suddenly I was acutely and uncomfortably aware of myself, of the intensity of all my sensations – which seemed, if anything, even stronger than before – to the way I awoke in the mornings with a hard-on that sometimes took hours to subside.
My emotions veered from plummeting misery to absurd elation; all my senses were enhanced; I wanted desperately to be in love, to touch, to kiss, to feel, to
know
–
And through it all were those dreams: vivid, plosive, passionate dreams that I wrote down in my Blue Book, dreams that filled me with shame and despair and a dreadful, lurking sense of joy.
Nigel had told me some months before that it might soon be time for me to do my own laundry. I saw what he meant now, and took his advice, airing my room and washing my bedsheets three times a week in the hope of dispersing the civet smell. Ma never commented; but I felt her disapproval grow, as if it were somehow my fault that I was leaving my boyhood behind.
Ma was looking old, I thought, hard and sour as an under-ripe apple; and there was a sense of desperation in her now, in the way she watched me at the dinner-table, telling me to sit up, to eat properly, to stop
slouching
, for God’s sake –
At her insistence I had stayed in school, and had so far managed to conceal the fact that I was lagging far behind. But by Easter the public exams loomed close, and I was failing in most of my subjects. My spelling was awful; maths made my head ache, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more the headaches assaulted me, so that even the sight of my school clothes laid out on the back of a chair was enough to bring it on; torture by association.
There was no one to whom I could go for help. My teachers – even the more well-disposed among them – were inclined to take the view that I just wasn’t cut out for academic work. I could hardly explain to them the true reason for my anxiety. I could hardly admit to them that I was afraid of Ma’s disappointment.
And so I hid the evidence. I faked my mother’s signature on a variety of absence notes. I hid my school reports; I lied; I forged my end-of-term results. But she must have suspected something was wrong, because she began a covert investigation – she must have known that I would lie – first contacting the school by phone to find out what story I’d told, and then making an appointment with my form-teacher and the Head of Year. In which she learnt that since Christmas I had barely attended school at all, due to a prolonged bout of flu which had led to my missing the exams –
I remember the night of that meeting. Ma had cooked my favourite meal – fried chilli chicken and corn on the cob – which I suppose should have alerted me that something serious was afoot. I should have noticed her clothes, too – the dark-blue dress and those high-heeled shoes – but I guess I’d become complacent. I never suspected that I was being lulled into a false sense of security, and I had no inkling of the reprisals that were about to descend on my unsuspecting head.
Maybe I was careless. Maybe I’d underestimated Ma. Or maybe someone saw me in town with my stolen camera –
Anyway, my mother knew. She knew, she watched and she bided her time; then, when she’d spoken to the Head of Year and my teacher, Mrs Platt, she came back home in her interview clothes and cooked me my favourite dinner, and when I’d finished eating it, she left me on the sofa and turned the television on, and then she went into the kitchen (I presumed it was to wash the dishes), and then she came back silently and the first thing I knew was the scent of L’Heure Bleue and her voice in my ear, hissing at me –
‘You little
shit
.’
I turned abruptly at the sound, and that was when she hit me. Hit me with the dinner-plate; hit me right in the face with it, and for a second I was torn between the shock of the impact against my eyebrow and cheekbone and simple dismay at the mess of it – at the chicken grease and corn kernels in my face and in my hair, more dismayed at that than the pain, or the blood that was running into my eyes, colouring the world in shades of
escarlata
–
Half-dazed I tried to back away; hit the couch with the small of my back, sending a glassy pain up my spine. She hit me again, in the mouth this time, and then she was on top of me, punching and slapping and screaming at me –
‘You lying little shit, you cheating little
bastard
!’
I know you think I could have fought back. With words, if not with my fists and feet. But for me there were no magic words. No specious declaration of love could ward off my mother’s fury, and no declaration of innocence could stem the tide of her violent rage.