Perhaps that’s what drew me to badguysrock. It’s a place for people like me, I suppose; a place to confess, if needs be; to tell those stories that ought to be true, even if they are really not. As for blueeyedboy — well, I’ll admit he draws me too. We fit together so well, he and I; folded together like tissue paper in an album of old photographs, our lives touch in so many ways that we might almost be lovers. And the fiction he writes is so much more true than the fiction on which I have built my life.
I heard his mobile phone beep. In retrospect I think it was the first of those texts of condolence; the messages from his WeJay announcing that his brother was dead.
‘Sorry. Got to go,’ he said. ‘Ma’s got lunch on the table. But try to think about what I said. You can’t outrun the past, you know.’
When he had gone I considered his words. Perhaps he was right, after all. Perhaps even Nigel would understand. After so many years of seeing the world through a glass darkly, perhaps it was time to face myself; to take back my past and remember . . .
But all I can really be sure of now is the impending static in the air, and the first movement of the Berlioz, the ‘Rêveries — Passions’, gathering like clouds.
Part Three
white
1
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Posted at: 21.39 on Thursday, February 7
Status: public
Mood: tense
Her first recorded memory is of a chunk of potter’s clay. Bland as butter, later drying to a rough scale on her arms and elbows, it smells of the river behind her house, of the rain on the pavements, of the cellar where she must never, ever go, where her mother keeps the winter potatoes in their little coffins, growing their long blind eyes up to the light.
Blue clay, her mother says. She squishes it between starfish fingers. Make something, Emily. Make a shape.
The clay is soft; beneath her hands it feels like slippery skin. She brings it to her mouth; it tastes like the side of the bathtub when she puts her tongue against it: warm, soapy, a little sour. Make a shape, her mother says; and the little girl’s hands begin to explore the piece of slippery blue clay, to stroke it like a wet puppy, to fondle and find the shape inside.
But that’s nonsense, of course. She doesn’t remember the piece of clay. In fact, there are no memories at all of those years that she can altogether trust. She has learnt by imitation; she can reel off every word. And she knows that there was a piece of clay; for years it stood in the studio, hard and dense as a fossilized head.
Later, it sold to a gallery, nicely mounted and cast in bronze. Rather overpriced, perhaps; but there’s always a market for that kind of thing. Murder memorabilia, hangman’s nooses, pieces of bone; the trappings of notoriety, sold to collectors everywhere.
She had hoped for a better memorial. But this, she thinks, will have to do. For want of proper memories, she will take the clay head cast in bronze, and the letters chiselled into the brass nearly thirty years ago.
First Impressions (the inscription says).
Emily White, aged 3.
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: Albertine, I’m speechless. You have no idea how much this means to me. Will there be more of this? Please?
Albertine: Maybe. If you want it so badly . . .
2
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Posted at: 22.45 on Thursday, February 7
Status: public
Mood: determined
Her mother was an artist. Colours were her whole life. Emily White learnt to crawl on the floor of her mother’s workshop; before she could speak she already knew the powdery smell of the watercolours and the chalks, the metallic scent of the acrylics, the smoky reek of the oils. Her mother smelt of turpentine; the child’s first word was ‘paper’; her first playthings were the rolls of parchment kept under the desk; she remembered their fascinating crinkle, their dusty smell.
As her mother worked Emily learnt to know the sounds of her progress: the fat sloshing of the background brushes; the scratching of nibs; the soft hishh of pastels and sponges; the scree of scissors; the scrubbing of pencils on art paper.
These were the rhythms of her mother; sometimes accompanied by small sounds of irritation or satisfaction, sometimes by pacing, most often by a running commentary of colour and shade. By the time she was a year old, Emily had still not learnt to walk, but could name all the colours in her mother’s box of paints. Their names rang out like chimes in her head: damson, umber, ochre, gold; madder, violet, crimson, rose.
Violet was her favourite; the tube had been squeezed almost empty, then curled up like a party favour to eke out the rest. White was full, but only because the tube was new; black was dry and seldom used, pushed to the back of the paintbox among the hairless brushes and cleaning-rags.
‘Pat, she’s a slow developer. Einstein was the same.’ That must be a false memory, she thinks, like so many from those early days: her mother’s voice high above her, Daddy’s tentative reply.
‘But sweetheart, the doctor—’
‘Damn the doctor! She can name every colour in the box.’
‘She’s just repeating what you tell her.’
‘She is not!’
A familiar high note quivers in her mother’s voice, a vinegary note that catches at her sinuses and makes her eyes water. She does not know its name — not yet, though later she will know it as F sharp — but she can pick it out on Daddy’s piano. But that’s a secret even from her mother; the hours spent together at the old Bechstein, Daddy with his pipe in his mouth, Emily sitting in his lap with her small hands just touching the keyboard as he plays the Moonlight Sonata or Für Elise and her mother thinks she is in bed.
‘Catherine, please—’
‘She can see perfectly!’
The smell of turpentine intensifies. It is the smell of her mother’s distress, and of her terrible disappointment. She scoops the child up in her arms — Emily’s face pressed into the front of her overalls — and as she turns, Emily’s feet drag across the work-bench, scattering tubes and pots and paintbrushes, rat-tat-tat over the parquet floor.
‘Catherine, listen—’ Her father’s voice, as always, is humble, almost apologetic. As always, he smells faintly of Clan tobacco, though officially he never smokes in the house. ‘Catherine, please—’