‘What does that mean?’ Emily says.
‘He experienced things in a special way. Or, at least, he said he could. Now concentrate on the notes, please—’
‘What kind of things did he see?’ she says.
‘I don’t think he saw anything.’
Until Emily’s appearance on the scene, Boy X had been Dr Peacock’s pet project. But between a young blind prodigy who can hear colours (and paint them), and a teenage boy with an affinity to smells, there could be no real competition. Besides, the boy was a freeloader, said Catherine; willing to fabricate any number of phoney symptoms to gain attention. The mother was even worse, she said; any fool could see that she’d put her son up to it in the hope of getting her hands on Dr Peacock’s money.
‘You’re too trusting, Gray,’ she said. ‘Anyone else would have spotted them a mile off. They saw you coming, dear. They had you fooled.’
‘But my tests clearly show that the boy responds—’
‘The boy responds to money, Gray. And so does his mother. A few quid here, a tenner there. It all builds up, and before you know it—’
‘But Cathy — she works on the market, for God’s sake — she’s got three kids, the father’s nowhere to be seen. She needs someone—’
‘So what? So do half the mothers on the estate. Are you going to pay this boy for the rest of his life?’
Under pressure, Dr Peacock admitted that he had already contributed to the boy’s school fees, plus a thousand pounds into a trust fund — For college, Cathy, the lad’s quite bright —
Catherine White was furious. It wasn’t her money, but she resented it as much as if it had been stolen from her own pocket. Besides, it was almost cruel, she said, to have led the boy to expect so much. He’d probably have been happy enough, if no one had tried to give him ideas. But Dr Peacock had encouraged him, had made him into a malcontent.
‘That’s what you get, Gray,’ she said, ‘trying to play Pygmalion. Don’t expect gratitude from the boy — in fact, you’re doing him a disservice, leading him to believe that he can sponge off you instead of getting a proper job. He could even end up being dangerous. Give money to these people, and what do they do? They buy drink and drugs. Things get out of hand. It wouldn’t be the first time that some poor benevolent soul has been murdered in his bed by the very people he’s trying to help—’
And so on. Finally, following heated discussions between Dr Peacock and Catherine, Boy X ceased his visits to the Fireplace House, never to return.
Catherine was magnanimous in victory. Boy X had been a mistake, she said. Paid handsomely for his cooperation in Dr Peacock’s experiments, it was only natural that a person of his type should try to exploit the situation. But now here was the real thing, that rarest of phenomena: a blind-from-birth true synaesthete, reborn to sight again through music. It was a fabulous story, and deserved to stand alone. There was to be no one to undermine the uniqueness of the Emily White Phenomenon. 215
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blueeyedboy: Ouch! That was rather below the belt —
Albertine: I’ll stop whenever you’ve had enough . . .
blueeyedboy: Do you really think you can?
Albertine: I don’t know, blueeyedboy . The question is: can you?
12
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
Posted at: 01.56 on Tuesday, February 12
Status: public
Mood: sorry
Listening to: Mark Knopfler: ‘The Last Laugh’
That marked the end for Benjamin. He’d sensed it almost immediately, that subtle shift in emphasis, and though it took some time to die, like a flower in a vase, he knew that something had ended for him that night in St Oswald’s Chapel. The shadow of little Emily White had eclipsed him almost from the start: from her story, which was sensational, to the undeniable media appeal of the blind girl, whose super-sense was to make her a national superstar.
Now Ben’s long days at the Mansion dwindled to an hourly session; time that he shared with Emily, sitting quietly on the couch while Dr Peacock showed her off as if she were some collector’s piece — a moth, perhaps, or a figurine — expecting Ben to admire her, to share in his enthusiasm. Worse still, Brendan was there again (to keep an eye on him, Ma said, while she went to work at the market); his gawping, grinning brother in brown with his greasy hair and hangdog look, who rarely spoke, but sat and stared, filling Ben with such hate and shame that sometimes he wanted nothing more than to run away and to leave Bren alone — awkward, boorish, out of place — in that house of delicate things.
Catherine White put a stop to that. It wasn’t right for those boys to be there, not without supervision. There were too many valuable things in that house; too many temptations. Benjamin’s visits dwindled once again, so that now he dropped by just once a month, and waited with Bren on the front steps until Mrs White was ready to leave, hearing piano music drift out across the lawn, laden with the scent of paint, so that every time blueeyedboy hears that sound — be it a Rachmaninoff prelude or the intro to ‘Hey Jude’ — it brings back the memory of those days and the sorry little lurch of the heart that he felt when he glanced through the parlour window and saw Emily sitting on the swing, pendulum-ing back and forth like a happy little bird —
At first, all he did was watch her. Like everyone else, he was dazzled by her, content to simply admire her ascent, much as Dr Peacock must have watched the Luna moth as she struggled out of the chrysalis, in awe and admiration, coloured, perhaps, with a little regret. She was so pretty, even then. So effortlessly lovable. There was something about the trusting way in which she held her father’s hand, face turned up towards him like a flower to the sun; or the monkeyish way in which she would scramble on to the piano stool, one leg tucked in, a sock at half-mast, half-eerie, half-enchanting. She was like a doll that had come to life, all porcelain and ivory, so that Mrs White, who had always liked dolls, could dress her daughter all year round in bright little outfits and matching shoes right out of an old-fashioned storybook.
As for our hero, blueeyedboy —
Puberty had hit him hard, with pimples on his back and face, and a half-broken voice that, even now, retains a slightly uneven tone. His childhood stammer had got worse. He lost it later, but that year it got so bad that on some days he could hardly speak. Smells and colours intensified, bringing with them migraines that the doctor promised would fade with time. They never did. He has them still, although his coping strategies have become somewhat more sophisticated.
After the Christmas concert, Emily seemed to spend most of her time at the Mansion. But with so many other people there, blueeyedboy rarely spoke to her; besides which, his stammer made him self-conscious, and he preferred to remain in the background, unregarded and unheard. Sometimes he would sit on the porch outside with a comic or a Western, content to be in her orbit, quietly, without fuss. Besides, reading was a pleasure seldom allowed Yours Truly at home, where Ma was always in need of help, and his brothers never left him alone. Reading was for sissies, they said, and whatever he chose — be it Superman, Judge Dredd or even just the Beano — would always incur the ridicule of blueeyedboy’s brother in black, who would pester him relentlessly — Look at the pretty pictures! Aww! So what’s your super-power, then? — until blueeyedboy was by turns shamed and coerced into doing something different.