‘Please, the music—’
Your mother doesn’t care much for music. Daddy’s voice; remote but clear.
But what did Catherine care for? What for her was the language of command?
They were half-out of their seats now. Emily tried to struggle; a seam ripped under the arm of her too-tight dress. Her coat, with its fur collar, smothered her. More of the turpentine smell, the smell of her mother’s fever, her madness.
And suddenly Emily understood, with a maturity far beyond her years, that she would never visit her father’s school, never go to another concert, just as she would never play with other children in case they hurt or pushed her, never run in the park in case she fell.
If they left now, Emily thought, then her mother would always have her way, and the blindness, which had never really troubled her, would finally drag her down like a stone tied to a dog’s tail, and she would drown.
There must be words, she told herself; magic words, to make her mother stay. But Emily was five years old; she didn’t know any magic words; and now she was moving down the aisle with her mother on one side and Feather on the other, and the lovely voices rolling over them like a river.
And then it came to her. So simple that she gasped at her own audacity. She did know magic words, she realized. Dozens of them; she had learnt them almost from the cradle, but had never really found a use for them until now. She knew their fearsome energy. Emily opened her mouth, stricken with a sudden, demonic inspiration.
‘The colours,’ she whispered.
Catherine White stopped mid-stride. ‘What did you say?’
‘The colours. Please. I want to stay.’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘I want to listen to the colours .’
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: How brave of you to post this, Albertine. You know I’ll have to reciprocate . . .
9
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
Posted at: 23.03 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: scornful
Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘Any Colour You Like’
Listen to the colours. Oh, please. Don’t tell me she was innocent; don’t tell me that, even then, she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Mrs White knew all about Boy X and his synaesthesia. She knew Dr Peacock would be near by. Easy enough to feed her the line; easier still to believe it when Emily responded by starting to hear the colours.
Ben was in his first year at school. Imagine him then: a chorister, all scrubbed and clean and ready to go in his blue St Oswald’s uniform under the frilled white cassock.
I know what you’re thinking. He failed the exam. But that was just the scholarship. With money she had set aside, as well as with help from Dr Peacock, Ma had managed to get him into St Oswald’s after all, not as a scholar, but as a fee-paying pupil, and here he was in the front row of the school choir, hating every moment of it. And if they didn’t already have good enough cause to despise him, he knew that the other boys in his form would never leave him alone after this, not to mention Nigel, who had been dragged along most reluctantly, and who would take it out on him later, he knew, in gibes and kicks and punches.
He’d prayed in vain for puberty to break his voice and release him. But whilst the other boys in his class were already thickening like palm trees, reeking of teenage civet, Ben remained slim and girlish and pale, with an eerie, off-key treble voice.
He could see his mother three rows back, listening for the sound of his voice, and Dr Peacock, behind her; and Nigel, going on seventeen, sprawled and scowling across the bench; and sweaty and malodorous Bren, looking terribly uncomfortable with his lank hair and his pursed-up face, like the world’s most enormous baby.
Blueeyedboy tried not to look; to concentrate on the music, but now he caught sight of Mrs White, just a few seats away from him, with Emily by her side — Emily, in her little red coat and her dress of rose-pink, with her hair in bunches and her face illuminated with something half-distress, half-joy —
For a moment he thought her eyes caught his; but the eyes of the blind are like that, aren’t they? Emily couldn’t see him. Whatever he did, however he tried — Emily never would. And yet, those eyes drew him, skittering from side to side like marbles in a doll’s head, like a couple of blue-eye beads, reflecting ill-luck back to the sender.
Blueeyedboy’s head was beginning to spin, throbbing in time to the music. A headache was coming; a bad one. He searched for the means to protect himself, imagining a capsule of blue, hard as iron, cold as stone, blue as a block of Arctic ice. But the pain was inescapable. A headache that would escalate until it wrung him like a rag —
It was hot in the choir stalls. Red-faced in their white smocks, the choristers sang like angels. St Oswald’s takes its choir seriously: the boys are drilled in obedience. Like soldiers, they are trained to stand and keep their position for hours on end. No one complains. No one dares. Sing your hearts out, boys, and smile! bugles the choirmaster during rehearsals. This is for God and St Oswald’s. I don’t want to see a single boy letting down the team.
But now Ben Winter was looking pale. Perhaps the heat; the incense; perhaps the strain of keeping that smile. Remember, he was delicate; Ma always said so. More sensitive than the other two; more prone to illness and accidents —
The angel voices rose again, sweeping towards the crescendo.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow —
And that was when it happened. Almost in slow motion; a thud: a movement in the front row; a pale-faced boy collapsing unseen on to the floor of the chapel; striking his head on the side of a pew, a blow that would require four stitches to mend, a crescent moon on his forehead.
Why did no one notice him? Why was Ben so wholly eclipsed? No one saw him — not even Ma — for just as he fell, a little blind girl in the crowd suffered a kind of panic attack, and all eyes turned to Emily White, Emily in the rose-coloured dress, flailing her arms and shouting out: Please. I want to stay. I want to —
Listen to the colours.
Post comment:
Albertine: Nice comeback, blueeyedboy.
blueeyedboy: Glad you liked it, Albertine.
Albertine: Well, liked is maybe not the word —
blueeyedboy: Nice comeback, Albertine . . .