‘You owe it to me,’ Ma said, with a glance at the green ceramic dog. ‘What’s more, you owe it to him. You owe it to your brother.’
Would Malcolm have been a success if he had lived? Blueeyedboy often asked himself that. It made him nervous to think of it. As if he were living two lives at once. One for himself, and one for Mal, who would never have the chances he’d had. Fear gnawed at him like a rat in a cage. What if he failed her? What would she do?
His escape from it all was in writing. He kept the Blue Book in the darkroom, where neither Ma nor his brothers would find it, and every night, when things got too bad, he would spin his fear into stories. Always from the point of view of a bad guy, a villain, a murderer —
His victims were many, his methods diverse. No simple shootings for blueeyedboy. His style may have been questionable, but his imagination was limitless. His victims died in colourful ways: caught in complex torture machines; buried in wet sand up to their necks; snared in fiendish death traps.
He used the Blue Book as a record of his fictional killings, along with a few actual experiments: Ben had recently moved on from wasps to moths, and later to mice, which were quite easy to obtain, using a simple bottle trap, and whose trapped and fluttering heartbeats — amplified by the resonant glass — echoed the frantic rhythm of his own.
The trap was made from a milk bottle, in which Ben would place a quantity of bait. It was his way of selecting victims; of isolating the guilty from the innocent. The mouse climbs into the bottle, eats the bait, but is unable to climb back up the frictionless wall. It dies quite quickly — of exhaustion and shock — its little pink feet pedalling against the glass as if on an invisible wheel.
The point is, though: they chose to die. They chose to enter the baited trap. Their deaths were therefore not his fault —
But all that was about to change.
Post comment:
JennyTricks: (post deleted).
blueeyedboy: Jenny? How I’ve missed you . . .
14
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on :
Posted at: 03.12 on Tuesday, February 12
Status: public
Mood:restless
A lie has a rhythm of its own. Emily’s began with a rousing overture; mellowed into a solemn andante; elaborated on several themes and variations; and finally emerged into a triumphant scherzo, to standing ovations and lengthy applause.
It was her grand opening. Her formal presentation to the media. Girl Y had served her purpose; now she was ready to take the stage. She was three weeks shy of her eighth birthday; she was clever and articulate; her work was practice-perfect and ready to stand up to scrutiny. As part of the fanfare, the Press had been informed; there was to be an auction of her paintings in a small gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate; Dr Peacock’s new book was about to come out, and suddenly, or so it seemed, the whole world was talking about Emily White.
This small figure [said the Guardian], with her bobbed brown hair and wistful face, hardly strikes one as a typical prodigy. [Why? you wonder. What did they expect?] In fact at first sight she seems very much like any other eight-year-old, but for the way her eyes skid and skitter, giving this writer the uncomfortable impression that she can see deep into his soul.
The writer was an ageing journalist called Jeffrey Stuarts, and if he had a soul at all, she never caught a sniff of it. His voice was always a trifle too loud, with a percussive attack like dried peas in a bowl — and his smell was Old Spice aftershave trying too hard to overwhelm an under-scent of sweat and thwarted ambition. That day he was all affability.
It hardly seems conceivable [he goes on to say] that the canvases that sing and soar from the walls of this tiny gallery off Malbry’s Kingsgate can be the unaided work of this shy little girl. And yet there is something eerie about Emily White. The small pale hands flutter restlessly, like moths. The head is cocked just a little to one side, as if she hears something the rest of us do not.
As a matter of fact she was simply bored.
‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘that you can actually see the music?’
Obediently she nodded; behind him she could hear Dr Peacock’s plush laughter above a twittering of white noise. She wondered where her father was; listened for his voice and thought for a second she heard it, all snarled up in the growing cacophony.
‘And all these paintings — they actually represent what you see?’
Again, she nodded.
‘So, Emily. How does it feel?’
I may be over-dramatizing, but I feel that there is something of the blank canvas about her; an other-worldly quality that both captivates and repels. Her paintings reflect this; as if the young artist has somehow gained access to another plane of perception.
Oh, my. But the man enjoyed his alliteration. There was much more in the same vein; Rimbaud was mentioned (inevitably); Emily’s work was compared to that of Münch and Van Gogh, and it was even suggested that she had experienced what Feather liked to call channelling, which meant that she had somehow tuned into some open frequency of talent (possibly linked to artists long-dead) to produce these astonishing paintings.
At first glance[writes Mr Stuarts], all her canvases seem to be abstracts. Big, bold blocks of colour, some so highly textured as to be almost sculpture. But there are other influences here that surely cannot be coincidental. Emily White’s Eroica has a look of Picasso’s Guernica; Birthday Bach is as busy and intricate as a Jackson Pollock, and Starry Moonlight Sonata bears more than a passing resemblance to Van Gogh. Could it be, as Graham Peacock suggests, that all art has a common basis in the collective unconscious? Or is this little girl a conduit to something beyond the sensitivity of ordinary mortals?
There was more — much more — in this vein. A digested version found its way into the Daily Mirror under the headline: BLIND GIRL’S SUPER-SENSE. The Sun ran it too, or something very similar, flanked with a photo of Sissy Spacek taken from the film Carrie. Shortly afterwards a more extended version was published in a journal called Aquarius Moon, alongside an interview with Feather Dunne. The myth was well on its way by then; and although on that particular day there were no signs of the knives that would soon come out in response, I think that even so the attention made her uneasy. Emily hated crowds; hated noise, and all the people who came and went, their voices pecking at her like hungry chickens.
Mr Stuarts was talking to Feather now; Emily could hear her throaty patchouli-dark voice saying something about how differently able children were often ideal hosts for benevolent spirits. To her left was her mother, sounding just a little drunk; her laughter too loud in the smoke and the noise.