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You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 01.37 on Friday, February 1
Status: restricted
Mood: melancholy
Listening to: Voltaire: ‘Born Bad’
Well, no. It wasn’t quite like that. But not too far from the truth, all the same. The truth is a small, vicious animal biting and clawing its way towards the light. It knows that if it wants to be born, something — or someone — else has to die.
I started life as a twin-set, you know. The other half — who, if he had lived, Ma would have christened Malcolm — was stillborn at nineteen weeks.
Well, that’s the official tale, anyway. Ma told me when I was six that I’d swallowed my sibling in utero — most probably at some point between the twelfth and the thirteenth weeks — in the course of some dispute over Lebensraum. It happens more often than people think. Two bodies, one soul; floating in Nature’s developing fluid, fighting for the right to live —
She kept the memory of him alive as an ornament on the mantel-piece — a statuette of a sleeping dog, engraved with his initials. The same piece, in fact, that I broke as a boy, and tried to lie about to protect myself. For which I was thrashed with the piece of electrical cord and told that I was born bad — a killer, even in embryo — that I owed it to both of them to be good, to make something of my stolen life —
In fact, she was secretly proud of me. The fact that I’d swallowed my twin to survive made her believe that I was strong. Ma despised weakness. Hard as tempered steel herself, she couldn’t stand a loser. Life’s what you make it, she used to say. If you don’t fight, you deserve to die.
After that I often used to dream that Malcolm — whose name appears to me in sickly shades of green — had won the fight and taken my place. Even now I still have that dream: two little ravenous tadpoles, two piranhas side by side, two hearts in a bloodbath of chemicals just clamouring to beat as one. If he had lived instead of me, I wonder, would Mal have taken my place? Would he have become blueeyedboy?
Or would he have had his own colour? Green perhaps, to go with his name? I try to imagine a wardrobe in green: green shirts, green socks, dark-green V-necked sweater for school. All of it identical to mine (except for the colour, of course), all of it in my size, as if a lens had been placed on the world, painting my life a different shade.
Colours make a difference. Even after so many years, I still follow my mother’s colour schemes. Blue jeans, hoodie, T-shirt, socks — even my trainers have a blue star on the side. A black roll-necked sweater, a birthday present from last year, lies unworn in a bottom drawer, and whenever I think to try it on, there’s a sudden stab of unreasonable guilt.
That’s Nigel’s sweater, a sharp voice says, and although I know it’s irrational, I still can’t bring myself to wear his colour, not even for his funeral.
Perhaps that’s because he hated me. He blamed me for everything that went wrong. He blamed me for causing Dad to leave; blamed me for his stretch in jail; for his breakdown; for his ruined life; resented the fact that Ma liked me best. Well, that, at least, was justified. Without a doubt, she favoured me. Or at least, she did at first. Perhaps because of my dead twin; the anguish of her delivery; perhaps because of Mr Blue Eyes, who was, as she said, the love of her life.
But Nigel made sibling rivalry into a major art form. His brothers lived in terror of his uncontrollable rages. His brother in brown escaped the worst, being vulnerable in so many ways. Nigel held him in contempt, a willing slave when it suited him, a human shield against Ma’s wrath, the rest of the time a whipping-boy, taking the blame for everyone.
But bullying Bren was too easy. There was no satisfaction to be gained from hitting such a target. You could punch Brendan and make him cry, but no one ever saw him fight back. Perhaps he’d learnt from experience that the best way to deal with Nigel, as with a charging elephant, is to lie still and play dead, hoping to avoid the stampede. And he never seemed to bear a grudge, not even when Nigel tormented him, confirming Ma’s belief that Bren was not the sharpest tool in the box, and that if anyone were to give them their fairy-tale ending, then it would be Benjamin.
Well, yes. Ma liked her clichés. Brought up on tales of the Lottery, of younger sons who end up marrying princesses, of eccentric millionaires who leave all their wealth to the sweet little urchin who captures their heart — Ma believed in destiny. She saw these things in black and white. And though Bren submitted without complaint, preferring safe mediocrity to the treacherous burden of brilliance, Nigel, who was no fool, must have felt a certain resentment to find that he had been cast from birth in the role of the ugly stepsister, perpetually the man in black.
And so, Nigel was angry. Angry at Ma; angry at Ben; even angry at poor, fat Brendan, who tried so hard to be quiet and good, and who found increasing solace in food, as if through the comfort of sweet things he might provide himself with some measure of protection in a world too full of sharp edges.
And so when Nigel was playing outside, or riding his bike around the estate, and Bren was sitting watching TV with a Wagon Wheel in each hand and a six-pack of Pepsi at his side, Benjamin was going to work with his Ma, a duster clutched in one chubby hand, eyes wide at the opulence of other people’s houses; at their broad stairs and neat driveways, sprawling sound systems and walls of books; at their well-stocked fridges and hallway pianos and shagpile carpets and bowls of fruit on dining-room tables as shiny and broad as a ballroom floor.
‘Look at this, Ben,’ she would say, pointing at some photograph of a boy or girl in school uniform, grinning gap-toothed from a leather frame. ‘That’ll be you in a few years’ time. That’ll be you, at the big school, making me so proud of you—’
Like so many of Ma’s endearments, it sounded eerily like a threat. She was in her thirties by then — already worn down to the canvas by the years.
Or so I thought when I was young. Now, looking at her photographs, I see that she was beautiful, perhaps not in the conventional way, but striking with her black hair and dark eyes, and the full lips and high cheekbones that made her look French, though she was British to the bone.
Nigel looked just like her, with his dark espresso eyes. But I was always different: blond hair that faded to brown with time; a thin and rather suspicious mouth; eyes of a curious blue-grey, so large that they almost ate up my face —
Would Mal and I have been identical? Would he have had my blue eyes? Or do I have his, as well as my own, looking for ever inwards?
In oriental languages, or so Dr Peacock used to say, there is no distinction between blue and green. Instead, there is a compound word, something that expresses both shades, and that translates as ‘sky-coloured’, or ‘leaf-coloured’. It made a kind of sense to me. From my earliest infancy, I’d always thought of blue as being primarily ‘Ben-coloured’, or brown as ‘Brendan-coloured’, or black as ‘Nigel-coloured’, without ever stopping to ask myself if others perceived things differently.
Dr Peacock changed all that. He taught me a new way of looking at things. With his maps and his recordings and his books and his cases of butterflies, he taught me to expand my world, to trust in my perception. For that I’ll always be grateful to him, even though he let me down. Let us all down, in the end: me, my brothers, Emily. You see, for all his kindness, Dr Peacock didn’t care. When he’d had enough of us he simply threw us back on the pile. Albertine understands, even though she never makes any reference to that time; pretends, in fact, to be someone else —