He went on taking photographs, though he learnt to do it with greater stealth. He got two after-school jobs — a newspaper round, a couple of nights washing dishes at a local café — and with his wages he bought himself a second-hand enlarger, a stack of photographic paper and some trays and chemicals. Using books from the library, he learnt to develop the photographs himself, eventually converting the cellar, which his mother never used, into a little darkroom.
He felt like someone who had missed the winning lottery number by a single digit — and it didn’t help that Ma never failed to make him feel that somehow it had all been his fault, that if he’d been smarter, quicker, better, then it could have been one of her boys scooping up the attention, the praise.
That year, Ma made it clear to her sons that all of them had let her down. Nigel, for failing so miserably to keep the other two in line; Brendan, for his stupidity; but most especially Benjamin, on whom so many hopes had been placed, but who had failed his Ma in every way. At the Mansion; at home; but most of all at St Oswald’s. Ben’s schooling at that exclusive establishment had proved the greatest setback of all, confounding Ma’s expectations that her son was destined for great things. In fact, he’d hated it from the start, and only his relationship with Dr Peacock had prevented him from saying so.
But now everything about it was inimical to him: from the boys, who, just like the ones from the estate, called him freak and loser and queer (albeit in more refined accents), to the pretentious names of the buildings themselves — names like Rotunda and Porte-Cochère — names that tasted of rotten fruit, plummy with self-satisfaction and ripe with the odour of sanctity.
Like the vitamin drink, St Oswald’s was meant to be good for his health; to help him achieve his potential. But after three miserable years there, where to some extent he had tried to fit in, he still wanted Dr Peacock’s house, with the fireplace and the smell of old books. He missed the Earth globes with their magical names; and most of all he missed the way Dr Peacock used to talk to him, as if he really cared —
No one at St Oswald’s cared. It was true that no one bullied him — well, not the way his brother did — but all the same he could always feel that undercurrent of contempt. Even the Masters had it, although some were better than others at concealing it.
They called him by his surname, Winter, like an Army cadet. They drilled him with tables and irregular verbs. They gave huge, dramatic sighs at his displays of ignorance. They set him to copying lines.
I will keep my schoolbooks in immaculate condition. (Nigel always found them, however well he hid them away.) My uniform represents the school. I will wear it always with pride. (This was when Nigel had scissored his tie, leaving nothing but a stub.) I will at least pretend to pay attention when a senior Master enters the room. (This from the ever-sarcastic Dr Devine, who came into his form-room one morning to find him asleep at his desk.)
The worst of it was that he really tried. He tried to excel at his schoolwork. He wanted his teachers to be proud of him. Whereas some boys failed through laziness, he was acutely aware of the hated privilege of attending St Oswald’s Grammar School, and he tried very hard to deserve it. But Dr Peacock, with his fine disregard for the curriculum, had coached him in only the subjects he himself valued — art, history, music, English literature — neglecting maths and the sciences, with the result that Ben had lagged behind ever since his first term at school and, in spite of all his efforts, had never recovered the deficit.
When Dr Peacock withdrew from their lives, Benjamin had expected Ma to withdraw him from the grammar school. In fact he prayed for it fervently, but the one time he dared mention the matter to her, she whacked him with the length of electrical cord.
‘I’ve already put too much into you,’ she said, as she folded the cord away. ‘Far too much, in any case, to let you drop out at this stage.’
After that, he knew better than to complain. He sensed another shift in things as adolescence claimed him. His brothers were growing up fast, and Ma, like an October wasp sensing the coming of winter, had turned vicious overnight, making her sons the target of her frustrations. Suddenly they were all under fire, from the way they spoke to the length of their hair, and blueeyedboy realized with growing dismay that Ma’s devotion to her sons had been part of a long-term investment plan that now was expected to bear fruit.
Nigel had left school some three months ago, and the urge to make Ben suffer had begun to take second place to finding a flat, a girl, a job, an escape — from Ma, from his brothers, from Malbry.
Now he seemed suddenly older, more distant, more given to dark moods and silences. He’d always been moody and withdrawn. Now he became almost a recluse. He’d bought himself a telescope, and on cloudless nights he took to the moors, coming home in the early hours, which was no bad thing as far as Ben was concerned, but which made Ma anxious and irritable.
If Nigel’s escape was in the stars, Brendan had found another route. At sixteen he already outweighed Ben by fifty pounds, and, far from losing his puppy fat, now supplemented his confectionary habit with alarming amounts of junk food. He too had a part-time job, at a fried-chicken place in Malbry town centre, where he could snack all day if he liked, and from which he returned on weekday nights with the Bargain Bucket Meal Deal, which, if he wasn’t hungry then, he would have cold for breakfast the following morning, along with a quart of Pepsi, before setting off for Sunnybank Park, where he was in his final year. Ma had hoped that he would at least stay on until his A-levels, but nothing Ma could say or do had any effect on Ben’s voracious brother, who seemed to have made it his mission in life to eat his way out of her custody. Ben reckoned it was only a matter of time before Brendan failed his exams and dropped out, then moved away altogether.
Benjamin felt some relief at this. Ever since the St Oswald’s entrance exam, he’d had a growing suspicion that Bren was keeping tabs on him. It wasn’t anything Ben had said; just the way he looked at him. Sometimes he suspected Bren of following him when he went out; sometimes when he went to his room he was sure his things had been moved about. Books he’d left under his bed would migrate, or vanish for a day or two, then reappear somewhere else. It didn’t really make sense, of course. What did Brendan care about books? And yet it made him uneasy to think of someone else going through his things.
But Bren was the least of his worries by then. So much had been invested in him. So much money; so much hope. And now that the returns were about to pay off, there could be no question of retreat. His mother would not submit to the humiliation of hearing the neighbours say that Gloria Winter’s boy had dropped out of school —
‘You’ll do what I tell you and like it,’ she said. ‘Or I swear I’ll make you pay.’
I’ll make you pay was Ma’s refrain throughout the whole of that year, it seemed. And so, throughout the whole of that year, her sons ran in fear of Gloria.
Blueeyedboy knew he deserved it, at least; blueeyedboy knew that he was bad. How bad, no one understood. But his mother made it clear to him that there was to be no going back: that to disappoint her at this stage would result in the worst kind of punishment.