I don’t see how it can last, she said. She’s such a colourless little thing. I know you must feel sorry for her, but —
Ma, I do not feel sorry for her!
Well, of course you do. What nonsense—
Ma. One more word and I’m hanging up.
You feel sorry for her because she’s—
Click.
Overheard in the Zebra one day: God knows what he sees in her. He pities her, that’s all it is.
How gently, politely incredulous that one such as I might attract a man through something more than compassion. Because Nigel was a good-looking man, and I was somehow damaged. I had a past, I was dangerous. Nigel was open wide — he’d told me all about himself that night as we lay watching the stars. One thing he hadn’t told me, though — it was Eleanor Vine who pointed it out — is that he always wore black: an endless procession of black jeans, black jackets, black T-shirts, black boots. It’s easier to wash, he said, when I finally asked him. You can put everything in together.
Did he call my name at the end? Did he know I was to blame? Or was it all just a blur to him, a single swerve into nothingness? It all began so harmlessly. We were children. We were innocent. Even he was, in his way — blueeyedboy, who haunts my dreams.
Maybe it was guilt, after all, that triggered yesterday’s panic attack. Guilt, fatigue and nerves, that was all. Emily White is long gone. She died when she was nine years old, and no one remembers her any more, not Daddy, not Nigel, not anyone.
Who am I now? Not Emily White. I will not, cannot be Emily White. Nor can I be myself again, now that Daddy and Nigel are gone. Perhaps I can just be Albertine, the name I give myself online. There’s something sweet about Albertine. Sweet and rather nostalgic, like the name of a Proustian heroine. I don’t quite know why I chose it. Perhaps because of blueeyedboy, still hidden at the heart of all this, and whom I have tried for so long to forget . . .
But part of me must have remembered. Some part of me must have known this would come. For among all the herbs and flowers in my garden — the wallflowers, thymes, clove pinks, geraniums, lemon balm, lavenders and night-scented stocks — I never planted a single rose.
7
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :
Posted at: 03.06 on Sunday, February 3
Status: public
Mood: poetic
Listening to: Roberta Flack: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’
Benjamin was seven years old the year that Emily White was born. A time of change; of uncertainty; of deep, unspoken forebodings. At first he wasn’t sure what it meant; but ever since that day at the market, he’d been aware of a gradual shift in things. People no longer looked at him. Women no longer wooed him with sweets. No one marvelled at how much he’d grown. He seemed to have moved a step beyond the line of their perception.
His mother, busier than ever with her cleaning jobs and her shifts at St Oswald’s, was often too tired to talk to the boys, except to tell them to brush their teeth and work hard at school. His mother’s ladies, who had once been so attentive to Ben, flocking around him like hens around a single chick, seemed to have vanished from his life, leaving him vaguely wondering whether it was something he had done, or if it was simply coincidence that no one (except for Dr Peacock) seemed to want him any more.
Finally he understood. He’d been a distraction; that was all. It’s hard to talk to the person who cleans around the back of your fridge, and scrubs around the toilet bowl, and hand-washes your lace-trimmed delicates, and goes away at the end of the week with hardly enough money in her purse to buy even a single pair of those expensive panties. His mother’s ladies knew that. Guardian readers, every one, who believed in equality, to a point, and who maybe felt a touch of unease at having to hire a cleaner — not that they would have admitted it; they were helping the woman, after all. And compensated in their way by making much of the sweet little boy, as visitors to an open farm may ooh and ahh over the young lambs — soon to reappear, nicely wrapped, on the shelves as (organic) chops and cutlets. For three years he’d been a little prince, spoilt and praised and adored, and then —
And then, along came Emily.
Sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? Such a sweet, old-fashioned name, all sugared almonds and rose water. And yet she’s the start of everything: the spindle on which their life revolved, the weathervane that moves from sunshine to storm in a single turn of a cockerel’s tail. Barely more than a rumour at first, but a rumour that grew and gained in strength until at last it became a juggernaut; crushing everyone beneath the Emily White Phenomenon.
Ma told them he cried when he heard. How sorry he felt for the poor baby; how sorry, too, for Mrs White — who had wanted a child more than anything and, now that she had her wish at last, had succumbed to a case of the baby blues, refusing to come out of her house, to nurse her child, or even to wash, and all because her baby was blind —
Still, that was Ma all over; exaggerating his sensitivity. Benjamin never shed a tear. Brendan cried. It was more his style. But Ben didn’t even feel upset; only a little curious, wondering what Mrs White was going to do now. He’d heard Ma and her friends talking about how sometimes mothers harmed their children when under the influence of the baby blues. He wondered whether the baby was safe, whether the Social would take her away, and if so, whether Mrs White would want him back —
Not that he needed Mrs White. But he’d changed a lot since those early days. His hair had darkened from blond to brown; his baby face had grown angular. He was aware even then that he had outgrown his early appeal, and he was filled with resentment against those who had failed to warn him that what is taken for granted at four can be cruelly taken away at seven. He’d been told so often that he was adorable, that he was good — and now here he was, discarded, just like those dolls she had put away when her new, living doll had appeared on the scene —
His brothers showed little sympathy at his sudden fall from grace. Nigel was openly gleeful; Bren was his usual, impassive self. He may not even have noticed at first; he was too busy following Nigel about, copying him slavishly. Neither really understood that this wasn’t about wanting attention, either from Ma or from anyone else. The circumstances surrounding Emily’s birth had taught them that no one is irreplaceable; that even one such as Ben Winter could be stripped unexpectedly of his gilding. Only his sensory peculiarities now set him apart from the rest of the clan — and even that was about to change.
By the time they got to see her at last, Emily was nine months old. A fluffy thing in rosebud pink, furled tightly in her mother’s arms. The boys were at the market, helping Ma with the groceries, and it was blueeyedboy who saw them first, Mrs White wearing a long purple coat — violetto, her favourite colour — that was meant to look bohemian, but made her look too pale instead, with a scent of patchouli that stung at his eyes, overwhelming the smell of fruit.