‘That’s the language of art, sweetheart,’ Mrs White would sometimes exclaim. She painted big, sloshy canvases in sugary pinks and ominous purples, upon which she would then superimpose pictures cut out of magazines — mostly heads of little girls — which she would then varnish heavily on to the canvas and adorn with ruffs of antique lace.
Benjamin didn’t like them much, and yet it was from Mrs White that he learnt to distinguish between the colours; to understand that his own colour came in a legion of shades; to span the depths between sapphire and ultramarine, to see their textures, know their scents.
‘That one’s chocolate,’ he would say, pointing out a fat scarlet tube with a picture of strawberries on the side.
Escarlata, the label said, and the scent was overwhelming, especially when placed in sunlight, filling his head with happiness and with motes that shone and floated like magic Maltesers up and away into the air.
‘How can red be chocolate?’
By then he was nearly seven years old, and still he couldn’t really explain. It just was, he told her stoutly, just as Nut Brown (avellana) was tomato soup, which often made him feel anxious, somehow, and verde Veronese was liquorice, and amarillo naranja was the smell of boiled cabbage, which always made him feel sick. Sometimes just hearing their names would do it, as if the sounds contained some kind of alchemy, teasing from the volatile words a joyous explosion of colours and scents.
At first he’d assumed that everyone had this ability; but when he mentioned it to his brothers, Nigel punched him and called him freak; and Brendan just looked confused and said, You can smell the words, Ben? After which he would often grin and scrunch up his nose whenever Benjamin was around, as if he could sense things the way Ben could, copying him, the way he often did, though never really in mockery. In fact, poor Brendan envied Ben; slow, tubby, frightened Bren, always lagging behind, always doing something wrong.
Ben’s gift didn’t make any sense to Ma, but it did to Mrs White, who knew all about the language of colours, and who liked scented candles — expensive ones from France — which Ma said was like burning money, but which smelt wonderful, all the same; in violet and smoky sage and boudoir patchouli and cedar and rose.
Mrs White knew someone — a friend of her husband’s, in fact — someone who understood these things, and she explained to Ben’s mother that Ben might be special, which his Ma had believed all along, of course, but that secretly he had doubted. Mrs White promised to put them in touch with this man, whose name was Dr Peacock, and who lived in one of the big old houses behind St Oswald’s playing fields, on the street Ma always called Millionaires’ Row.
Dr Peacock was sixty-one, an ex-governor of St Oswald’s, the author of a number of books. We sometimes saw him in the Village, a bearded man in a tweed jacket and a floppy old hat, walking his dog. He was rather eccentric, said Mrs White with a rueful smile, and, thanks to some clever investments, was blessed with rather more money than sense —
Certainly Ma didn’t hesitate. Being practically tone-deaf herself, she had never paid much attention to the way her son understood sounds and words, which, when she noticed it at all, she attributed to his being sensitive — her explanation for most things. But the thought that he might be gifted soon overcame her scepticism. Besides, she needed a benefactor, a patron for her blue-eyed boy, who was already having trouble at school, and needed a fatherly influence.
Dr Peacock — childless, retired, and, best of all, rich — must have seemed like a dream come true. And so she went to him for help, thereby setting in place a series of events, like filters over a camera lens, that coloured the next thirty-odd years in ever-deepening shades.
Of course, she couldn’t have known that. Well, how could any of them have known what would come of that meeting? And who could have known it would end this way, with two of Gloria’s children dead, and blueeyedboy helpless and trapped, like those scuttling things at the seaside that day, forgotten and dying in the sun?
Post comment:
ClairDeLune: This is quite good, blueeyedboy. I like your use of imagery. I notice you’re drawing on personal anecdotes rather more than usual. Good idea! I hope to read more!
JennyTricks: (post deleted).
blueeyedboy: My pleasure . . .
4
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :
Posted at: 01.15 on Sunday, February 3
Status: public
Mood: serene
Listening to: David Bowie: ‘Heroes’
He’d never met a millionaire. He’d imagined a man in a silk top hat, like Lord Snooty in the comic-books. Or maybe with a monocle and a cane. Instead, Dr Peacock was vaguely unkempt, in a tweedy, bow-tied, carpet-slippery way, and he looked at Ben with milk-blue eyes from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles and said: Ah. You must be Benjamin, in a voice like tobacco and coffee cake.
Ma was nervous; dressed to the nines, and she’d made Ben wear his new school clothes — navy trousers, sky-blue sweater, something like the St Oswald’s colours, although his own school had no uniform code, and most of the other kids just wore jeans. Nigel and Bren were with them, too — she didn’t trust them home alone — both under orders to sit still, shut up, and not to dare touch anything.
She was trying to make an impression. Ben’s first year at junior school had not been a brilliant one, and by then most of White City knew that Gloria Winter’s youngest son had been sent home for sticking a compass into the hand of a boy who had called him a fucking poofter, and that only his mother’s aggressive intervention had prevented him from being expelled.
Whether that information had reached the Village was yet to be determined. But Gloria Winter was taking no risks, and it was a most angelic Benjamin who now found himself on the steps of the Mansion on that mellow October day, listening to the door-chimes, which were pink and white and silvery, and observing the toes of his sneakers as Dr Peacock came to the door.
Of course he had no real understanding of what a poofter actually was. But there was, he recalled, quite a lot of blood, and even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he hadn’t shown any remorse — had actually seemed to enjoy the fracas — quite upset his class teacher, a lady we shall call Mrs Catholic Blue, who (quite publicly, it seemed) subscribed to such amusing beliefs as the innocence of childhood, the sacrifice of God’s only son and the watchful presence of angels.
Sadly, her name smelt terrible, like cheap incense and horse shit, which was often distracting in lessons, and which led to a number of incidents, culminating at last in Ben’s exclusion; for which his mother blamed the school, pointing out that it wasn’t his fault that they weren’t able to cope with a gifted child, and promising retribution at the hands of the local newspapers.
Dr Peacock was different. His name smelt of bubblegum. An attractive scent for a little boy, besides which Dr Peacock spoke to him as an adult, in words that slipped and rolled off his tongue like multicoloured balls of gum from a sweetshop vending machine.