Perhaps I have no choice, I type. It’s closer to the truth than she thinks.
A pause. I’m used to her silences. This one goes on a little too long, and I know that she is somehow distressed.
You didn’t like my last fic.
It isn’t a question. The silence grows. Alone of all my online tribe, Albertine has no icon. Where all the others display an image — Clair’s picture of Angel Blue, Chryssie’s winged child, Cap’s cartoon rabbit — she keeps to the default setting: a silhouette in a plain blue square.
The result is oddly disconcerting. Icons and avatars are part of the way we interact. Like the shield designs of mediaeval times, they serve both as a defensive tool and as the image of ourselves we show to the world, cheap escutcheons for those of us with no honour, no king, no country.
So how does Albertine see herself?
Time passes, lingering, ticking off the seconds like an impatient schoolmistress. For a while I am sure she has gone.
Then at last she replies. Your story disturbed me a little, she says. The woman reminds me of someone I know. A friend of your mother’s, actually.
Funny, how fact and fic intertwine. I say as much to Albertine.
Eleanor Vine’s in hospital. She was taken ill late last night. Something to do with her lungs, I heard —
Really? What a coincidence.
If I didn’t know any better, she says, I could almost believe you were somehow involved.
Could you really? I had to smile.
It sounds just a touch sarcastic to me. But in the absence of facial expressions, there is no way of knowing for sure. If this had been Chryssie or Clair, then she would have followed her comment with a symbol — a smile, a wink, a crying face — to eliminate ambiguity. But Albertine does not use emoticons. Their absence makes conversation with her curiously expressionless, and I am never entirely sure if I have understood her fully.
Do you feel guilty, blueeyedboy?
Long pause.
Truth or dare?
Blueeyedboy hesitates, weighing the joy of confiding in her against the danger of saying too much. Fiction is a dangerous friend; a smokescreen that could dissipate and blow away without warning, leaving him naked.
Finally he types: Yes.
Maybe that’s why you write these things. Maybe you’re assuming guilt for something you’re not really guilty of.
Hm. What an interesting idea. You don’t think I’m guilty of anything?
Everyone’s guilty of something, she says. But sometimes it’s easier to confess to something we haven’t done than to face up to the truth.
Now she’s trying to profile me. I told you she was clever.
So — why do you come here, Albertine? What do you think you’re guilty of?
Silence, then, for so long that I’m almost sure she has broken the connection. The cursor blinks, relentlessly. The mailbox bips. Once. Twice.
I wonder what I would do now if she simply told the truth. But nothing’s ever that easy. Does she even know what she did? Does she know that it all started then, at the concert in St Oswald’s Chapel, a word that conjures up for me the Christmassy colours of stained glass and the scent of pine and frankincense?
Who are you really, Albertine? Plain-vanilla or bad guy at heart? A killer, a coward, a fraudster, a thief? And when I reach the centre of you, will I know if there’s anyone home?
And then she replies, and quickly logs off before I can comment or ask for more. In the absence of icons or avatars, I cannot be sure of her motives, but I sense that she is running away, that I have finally touched her somehow —
Truth or dare, Albertine? What have you come here to confess?
Her message to me is just four words long. It simply says:
I told a lie.
7
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
Posted at: 04.38 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: confiding
Listening to: Hazel O’Connor: ‘Big Brother’
Everyone does it. Everyone lies. Everyone colours the truth to fit: from the fisherman who exaggerates the length of the carp that got away, to the politician’s memoir, transmuting the metal of base experience into the gold of history. Even blueeyedboy’s diary (hidden under his mattress at home) was far more wish-fulfilment than fact, detailing with pathetic hopefulness the life of a boy he could never be — a boy with two parents, a boy with friends, a boy who did ordinary things, who went to the seaside on his birthday, a boy who loved his Ma — knowing that the bleaker truth was hiding there under the surface, patiently waiting to be exposed by some casual turn of the tide.
Ben failed the St Oswald’s entrance exam. He should have seen it coming, of course, but he’d been told so many times that he would pass that everyone took it for granted, like crossing a friendly border, nothing more than a token gesture to ensure his passage into St Oswald’s, and subsequently, his success —
It wasn’t that the paper was hard. In fact, he found it quite easy — or would have done, if he’d finished it. But that place, with its smells, unmanned him; and the cavernous room filled with uniforms; and the lists of names tacked to the wall; and the cheesy, hostile faces of the other scholarship boys.
A panic attack, the doctor said. A physical reaction to stress. It began with a nervous headache, which, halfway through the first paper, rapidly grew into something more: a turbulence of colour and scent that drenched him like a tropical storm and bludgeoned him into unconsciousness, there on St Oswald’s parquet floor.
They took him to Malbry Infirmary, where he pleaded to be given a bed. He knew his scholarship had sailed, and that Ma was going to be furious, and that the only way to avoid real trouble was by getting the doctors on his side.
But once again, his luck was out. The nurse called Ma straight away, and the teacher who had accompanied him — a Dr Devine, a thin man whose name was a murky dark green — told her what had happened to him.
‘You’ll let him retake the exam, though?’ Ma’s first anxious thought was of the longed-for scholarship. To make things worse, by then Ben was feeling fine, with hardly a trace of a headache left. Her berry-black eyes locked briefly on his; long enough, at least, to convey that he was in a world of hurt.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Dr Devine. ‘That’s not St Oswald’s policy. Now, if Benjamin were to sit the common exam—’
‘You mean he won’t get the scholarship?’ Her eyes were narrowed almost to slits.
Dr Devine gave a little shrug. ‘I’m afraid the decision isn’t mine. Perhaps he could try again next year.’
Ma started forward. ‘You don’t understand—’
But Dr Devine had had enough. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Winter,’ he said, heading for the infirmary door. ‘We can’t make exceptions for just one boy.’