‘Ah. You must be Benjamin.’
He nodded. He liked that certainty. From behind Dr Peacock, where a door led from the porch into the hall, a shaggy black-and-white shape hurtled towards our hero, revealing itself to be an elderly Jack Russell dog, which frolicked about them, barking.
‘My learned colleague,’ said Dr Peacock by way of explanation. Then, addressing the dog, he said: ‘Kindly allow our visitors to gain access to the library,’ at which the dog stopped barking at once, and led the way into the house.
‘Please,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘Come on in and have some tea.’
They did. Earl Grey, no sugar, no milk, served with shortbread biscuits, now fixed in his mind for ever, like Proust’s lime-blossom tea, a conduit for memories.
Memories are what blueeyedboy has instead of a conscience nowadays. That’s what kept him here for so long, pushing an old man’s wheelchair around the overgrown paths of the Mansion; doing his laundry; reading aloud; making toast soldiers for soft-boiled eggs. And even though most of the time the old man had no idea who he was, he never complained, or failed him — not once — remembering that first cup of Earl Grey tea and the way Dr Peacock looked at him, as if he, too, were special —
The room was large and carpeted in varying tones of madder and brown. A sofa; chairs; three walls of books; an enormous fireplace, in front of which lay a basket for the dog; a brown teapot as big as the Mad Hatter’s; biscuits; some glass cases filled with insects. Most curious of all, perhaps, a child’s swing suspended from the ceiling, at which the three boys stared with silent longing from their place on the sofa near Ma, wanting, but hardly daring, to speak.
‘Wh-what are those?’ said blueeyedboy, indicating a glass case.
‘Moths,’ said the doctor, looking pleased. ‘So like the butterfly in many ways, but so much more subtle and fascinating in design. This one here, with the furry head’ — he pointed a finger at the glass — ‘is the Poplar hawk-moth, Laothoe populi. This scarlet and brown one next to it is Tyria jacobaeae, the Cinnabar. And this little chap’ — he indicated a ragged brown something that looked like a dead leaf to blueeyedboy — ‘is Smerinthus ocellata, the Eyed Hawk-moth. Can you see its blue eyes?’
Blueeyedboy nodded again, awed into silence not merely by the moths themselves, but by the calm authority with which Dr Peacock uttered the words, then indicated another case, hanging above the piano, in which blueeyedboy could see resting a single, enormous lime-green moth, all milk and dusty velvet.
‘And this young lady,’ said Dr Peacock affectionately, ‘is the queen of my collection. The Luna moth, Actias Luna, all the way from North America. I brought her here as a pupa, oh, more than thirty years ago, and sat in this room as I watched her hatch, capturing every stage on film. You can’t imagine how moving it is, to watch such a creature emerge from the cocoon, to see her spread her wings and fly—’
She can’t have gone far, thought blueeyedboy. Just as far as the killing jar —
Wisely, however, he held his tongue. His ma was getting restless. Her hands clicked together in her lap, shooting cheap fire from her rings.
‘I collect china dogs,’ she said. ‘That makes us both collectors.’
Dr Peacock smiled. ‘How nice. I must show you my T’ang figurine.’ Blueeyedboy grinned to himself as he saw the expression on Ma’s face. He had no idea what a T’ang figurine looked like, but he guessed it was something as different from Ma’s collection of china dogs as the Luna moth was from that creature curled up like a dead leaf over its gaudy, useless eyes.
Ma gave him a dirty look, and blueeyedboy understood that sooner or later he would have to pay for making her look foolish. But for now, he knew he was safe, and he looked around Dr Peacock’s house with growing curiosity. Apart from the cases of moths, he saw that there were pictures on the walls — not posters, but actual paintings. Aside from Mrs White, with her pink and purple collages, he had never met anyone who owned paintings before.
His eyes came to rest on a delicate study of a ship in faded sepia ink, behind which lay a long, pale beach, with a background of huts and coconut palms and cone-shaped mountains adrift with smoke. It drew him; though he didn’t know why. Perhaps the sky, or the tea-coloured ink, or the blush of age that shone through the glass like the bloom on a luscious golden grape —
Dr Peacock caught him staring again. ‘Do you know where that is?’ he said.
Blueeyedboy shook his head.
‘That’s Hawaii.’
Ha-wa-ii.
‘Maybe you’ll get to go there some day,’ Dr Peacock told him, and smiled.
And that’s how, with a single word, blueeyedboy was collected.
Post comment:
Captainbunnykiller: Man, I think you’re losing it. Two posts in as many days, and you haven’t murdered anyone
blueeyedboy: Give me time. I’m working on it . . .
ClairDeLune: Very nice,
blueeyedboy. You show genuine courage in writing down these painful memories! Perhaps you could discuss them more fully at our next session?
chrysalisbaby: yay I love this so much (hugs)
5
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :
Posted at: 02.05 on Sunday, February 3
Status: public
Mood: poetic
Listening to: The Zombies: ‘A Rose For Emily’
Next he took the three boys out into the rose garden, while their mother drank tea in the library and the dog ran about on the lawn. He showed them his roses and read out their names from the metal tags clipped to the stems. Adelaide d’Orléans. William Shakespeare. Names with magical properties, that made their nostrils tingle and flare.
Dr Peacock loved his roses; especially the oldest ones, the densely-packed-with-petal ones, the flesh-toned, blue-rinse, off-white, old-lady ones that, according to him, had the sweetest scent. In Dr Peacock’s garden the boys learnt to tell a moss rose from an Alba, a damask from a Gallica, and Benjamin collected their names as once he had collected the names inscribed on tubes of paint, names that made his head spin, that echoed with more than just colours and scents, from Rose de Recht, a dark-red rose that smelt of bitter chocolate, to Boule de Neige, Tour de Malakoff, Belle de Crécy and Albertine, his favourite, with a musky, pale-pink, old-fashioned scent, like girls in white summer dresses and croquet and iced pink lemonade on the lawn; which, to Ben, smelt of Turkish Delight —
‘Turkish Delight?’ said Dr Peacock, his eyes alight with interest. ‘And this one? Rosa Mundi?’
‘Bread.’
‘This one? Cécile Brunner?’
‘Cars. Petrol.’
‘Really?’ Dr Peacock said, looking, not angry, as blueeyedboy might have expected, but genuinely fascinated.
In fact, everything about Benjamin was fascinating to Dr Peacock. It turned out that most of his books were about something he called synaesthesia, which sounded like something they might do to you in hospital, but that was actually a neurological condition, so he said, which actually meant that Ma was right, and that Ben had been special all along.