Mark is a blue word, like market; like murder. He likes it much better than victim, which appears to him as a feeble eggy shade, or even prey, with its nasty undertones of ecclesiastical purple, and distant reek of frankincense. He sees them all in blue now, these people who are going to die, and despite his impatience to repeat the act, he allows some time for the high to wear off, for the colours to drain from the world again, for the knot of hatred that is permanently lodged just beneath his solar plexus to swell to the point at which he must act, must do something, or die of it —
But some things are worth the wait, he knows. And he has waited a long time for this. That little scene at the market was well over a decade ago; no one remembers Mrs White, or her friend with the stupid name.
Let’s call her Ms Stonewash Blue. She likes to smoke a joint or two. At least, she did, when she was young, when she weighed in at barely ninety-five pounds and never, ever wore a bra. Now, past fifty, she watches her weight, and grass gives her the munchies.
So she goes to the gym every day instead, and to t’ai chi and salsa class twice a week, and still believes in free love, though nowadays even that, she thinks, is getting quite expensive. A one-time radical feminist, who sees all men as aggressors, she thinks of herself as free-spirited; drives a yellow 2CV; likes ethnic bangles and well-cut jeans; goes on expensive Thai holidays; describes herself as spiritual; reads Tarot cards at her friends’ parties; and has legs that might pass for those of a thirty-year-old, though the same cannot be said of her face.
Her current squeeze is twenty-nine — almost the same age as blueeyedboy. A blonde and cropped-haired androgyne, who parks her motorbike by the church, just far enough away from the Stonewash house to keep the neighbours from whispering. From which our hero deduces that Ms Stonewash Blue is not quite the free spirit she pretends to be.
Well, things have changed since the sixties. She knows the value of networking, and opting out of the rat race somehow seems far less appealing now that her passion for Birkenstocks and flares has given way to stocks and shares —
Not that he is implying that this is why she deserves to die. That would be irrational. But — would the world really miss her, he thinks? Would anyone really care if she died?
The truth, is, no one really cares. Few are the deaths that diminish us. Apart from losses within our own tribe, most of us feel nothing but indifference for the death of an outsider. Teenagers stabbed over drug money; pensioners frozen to death at home; victims of famine or war or disease; so many of us pretend to care, because caring is what others expect, though secretly we wonder what all the fuss is really about. Some cases affect us more profoundly. The death of a photogenic child; the occasional celebrity. But the fact is that most of us are more likely to grieve over the death of a dog or a soap opera character than over our friends and neighbours.
So thinks our hero to himself, as he follows the yellow 2CV into town, keeping a safe distance between them. Tonight he is driving a white van, a commercial vehicle stolen from a DIY retailer’s forecourt at six fifteen that evening. The owner has gone home for the night, and will not notice the loss before morning, by which time it will be too late. The van will have been torched by then, and no one will link blueeyedboy with the serious incident that night, in which a local woman was run down on the way to her salsa class.
The incident — he likes that word, its lemony scent, its tantalizing colour. Not quite an accident, but something incidental, a diversion from the main event. He can’t even call it a hit-and-run, because no one does any running.
In fact, Ms Stonewash sees him coming, hears the sound of his engine rev. But Ms Stonewash ignores him. She locks the yellow 2CV, having parked it just across the road, and steps on to the pedestrian crossing without a look to left or right, heels clicking on the tarmac, skirt hem positioned just high enough to showcase those more-than-adequate legs.
Ms Stonewash subscribes to the view expressed in the slogan of a well-known line of cosmetics and hair products, a slogan he has always despised and which, to him, sums up in four words all the arrogance of those well-bred female parasites with their tinted hair and their manicured nails and their utter contempt for the rest of the world, for the young man in blue at the wheel of the van, no pale horseman by any means, but did she think Death would call by in person just because she’s worth it?
He has to stop, she thinks to herself as she steps into the road in front of him. He has to stop at the red light. He has to stop at the crossing. He has to stop because I’m me, and I’m too important to ignore —
The impact is greater than he expects, sending her sprawling into the verge. He has to mount the kerb in order to reverse over her, and by then his engine is complaining vigorously, the suspension shot, the exhaust dragging on the ground, the radiator leaking steam —
Good thing this isn’t my car, he thinks. And he gives himself time for one more pass over something that now looks more like a sack of laundry than anything that ever danced the salsa, before driving away at a decent speed, because only a loser would stay to watch; and he knows from a thousand movie shows how arrogance and vanity are so often the downfall of bad guys. So he makes his modest getaway as the witnesses gather open-mouthed; antelopes at the water-hole watching the predator go by —
Returning to the scene of the crime is a luxury he cannot afford. But from the top of the multi-storey car park, armed with his camera and a long lens, he can see the aftermath of the incident: the police car; the ambulance; the little crowd; then the departure of the emergency vehicle, at far too leisurely a pace — he knows that they need a doctor to declare the victim dead at the scene, but there are instances, such as this one, when any layman’s verdict would do.
Officially, Ms Stonewash Blue was pronounced dead on arrival.
Blueeyedboy knows that, in fact, she had expired some fifteen minutes earlier. He also knows that her mouth was turned down just like the mouth of a baby flatfish, and that the police kicked sand over the stain, so that in the morning there would be nothing to show that she’d ever been there, except for a bunch of garage flowers Sellotaped to a traffic sign —
How appropriate, he thinks. How mawkish and how commonplace. Litter on the highway now counts as a valid expression of grief. When the Princess of Wales was killed, some months before this incident, the streets were piled high with offerings, taped to every lamp post, left to rot on every wall, flowers in every stage of decay, composting in their cellophane. Every street corner had its own stack of flowers, mouldering paper, teddy bears, sympathy cards, notes and plastic wrappers, and in the heat of that late summer it stank like a municipal tip —
And why? Who was this woman to them? A face from a magazine; a walk-on part in a soap opera; an attention-seeking parasite; a woman who, in a world of freaks, just about qualified as normal?
Was she really worth all that? Those outpourings of grief and despair? The florists did well from it, anyway; the price of roses went through the roof. And in the pub later that week, when blueeyedboy dared to suggest that perhaps it was somewhat unnecessary, he was taken into a back street by a punter and his ugly wife, where he was given a serious talking-to — not quite a beating, no, but with enough slapping and shoving to bring it close — and told he wasn’t welcome, and strongly advised to fuck of —