She never throws anything away, keeping them ‘for parts’, she says, although she belongs to that generation of women for whom technical ineptitude counts as a charming sign of feminine fragility rather than just laziness, and he knows for a fact that she hasn’t a clue. She is a parasite, he thinks, useless and manipulative, and no one will grieve very much for her, least of all her family.
He recognizes her voice at once. He has been working part-time in an electrical repair shop a couple of miles from where she lives. An old-fashioned place, rather obsolete now, its small front window packed with ailing TVs and vacuum cleaners, and dusty with the grey confetti of moths who have flown in there to die. She calls him out on his mobile number — at four on a Friday afternoon, no less — to look over her menagerie of dead appliances.
She is pushing fifty-five by now, but can look older or younger according to necessity. Ash-blonde hair, green eyes, good legs, a fluttering, almost girlish manner that can change to contempt at a moment’s notice — and she likes the company of nice young men.
A nice young man. Well, that’s what he is. Slim in his denim overalls, angular face, slightly over-long brown hair and eyes of that luminous, striking grey-blue. Not the stuff of magazines, but nice enough for Mrs Electric Blue — and besides, at her age, he thinks, she can’t afford to be particular.
She tells him at once that she is divorced. She makes him a cup of Earl Grey tea, complains about the cost of living, sighs deeply at her solitude — and at the gross neglect of her son, who works down in the City somewhere, and eventually, with the air of one about to confer an enormous privilege, offers him her collection for cash.
The stuff is totally worthless, of course. He says so as gently as he can, explaining that old electrical goods are fit for nothing but landfill now, that most of her collection doesn’t conform to present safety standards, and how his boss will kill him if he pays as much as a tenner for it.
‘Really, Mrs B.,’ he says. ‘The best I can do is dump it for you. I’ll take it down to the rubbish tip. The council would charge you, but I’ve got the van—’
She stares at him with suspicion. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Only trying to help,’ he says.
‘Well, if that’s the case, young man,’ she says in a voice that is crystalline with frost, ‘you can help by taking a look at my washing machine. I think it’s blocked — it hasn’t drained for nearly a week—’
He protests. ‘I’m due at another job—’
‘I think it’s the least you can do,’ she says.
Of course, he gives in. She knows he will. Her voice still has that blend of disdain and vulnerability, of helplessness and authority, that he finds irresistible . . .
The drive-belt has slipped, that’s all. He unbolts the drum, replaces the belt, wipes his hands on his overalls, and in the reflection from the glass door he sees her watching him.
She may have been attractive once. Now you’d call it well-preserved; a phrase his mother sometimes uses, and which to him conjures up images of formaldehyde jars and Egyptian mummies. And now he knows she is watching him with a strangely proprietary look; he can feel her eyes like soldering irons pressing into the small of his back — an appraising glance as careless as it is predatory.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he says, turning his head to meet her gaze.
She gives him that imperious look.
‘My mother used to clean your house.’
‘Did she really?’ The tone of her voice is meant to suggest that she couldn’t possibly remember all the people who have worked for her. But for a moment she seems to recall something, at least — her eyes narrow and her eyebrows — plucked into insignificance, then redrawn in brown pencil half an inch above where they should be — twitch in something like distress.
‘She used to bring me with her, sometimes.’
‘My God.’ She stares at him. ‘Blueeyedboy?’
He’s killed it now with that, of course. She’ll never look at him again. Not in that way, anyhow — her languid gaze moving down his back, gauging the distance between the nape of his neck and the base of his spine, checking out the taut curve of his ass in those faded blue overalls. Now she can see him — four years old, hair undarkened by the passage of time — and suddenly the weight of years drops back on her like a wet winter coat and she’s old, so terribly old —
He grins. ‘I think that’s fixed it,’ he says.
‘I’ll pay you something, of course,’ she says — too quickly, to hide her embarrassment — as if she believes he works for free, as if this might be some kind gesture of hers that will put him for ever in her debt.
But they both know what she’s paying him for. Guilt — maybe simple, but never pure, ageless and tireless and bittersweet.
Poor old Mrs B., he thinks.
And so he thanks her nicely, accepts another cup of lukewarm and vaguely fishy tea, and finally leaves with the certainty that he will be seeing a lot more of Mrs Electric Blue in the days and weeks to come.
Everyone’s guilty of something, of course. Not all of them deserve to die. But sometimes karma comes home to roost, and an act of God may sometimes require the touch of a helping human hand. And anyway, it’s not his fault. She calls him back a dozen times — to wire a plug, to change a fuse, to replace the batteries in her camera, and most recently, to set up her new PC (God only knows why she needs one, she’s going to die in a week or two), which prompts a flurry of urgent calls, which in their turn precipitate his current decision to remove her from the face of the earth.
It isn’t really personal. Some people just deserve to die — whether through evil, malice, guilt or, as in the present case, because she called him blueeyedboy —
Most accidents occur in the home. Easy enough to set one up — and yet, somehow he hesitates. Not because he is afraid — although he is, most terribly — but simply because he wants to watch. He toys with the idea of hiding a camera close to the scene of the crime, but it’s a vanity he can ill afford, and he discards the scheme (not without regret), and instead contemplates the method to use. Understand: he is very young. He believes in poetic justice. He would like her death to be somehow symbolic — electrocution, perhaps, from a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, or from one of the vibrators that she keeps in her bathroom cabinet (two of them modestly flesh-toned, the third a disquieting purple), amongst the bottles of lotions and pills.
For a moment he is almost seduced. But he knows that elaborate plans rarely work, and firmly dismissing the beguiling image of Mrs Electric Blue pleasuring herself into the grave with the aid of one of her own appliances, on his next visit he sets up the makings of a dull but efficient little electrical fire, and gets back home in time for a snack in front of the TV. While meanwhile, in another street, Mrs Electric gets ready for bed (with or without her purple pal), and dies there sometime during the night, probably of smoke inhalation, he thinks, although, of course, one can only hope —
The police call by the following day. He tells them how he tried to help, how every appliance in the house was some kind of accident waiting to happen, how she was always overloading the sockets with her junk, how all it might take was a little surge —
In fact, he finds them ludicrous. His guilt, he thinks, should be plain for them to see, and yet they do not; but sit on the couch and drink his mother’s tea and talk to him quite nicely, as if trying not to cause him distress, while his mother watches suspiciously, alert for any hint of blame.