‘I always knew she was an exceptional child,’ Emily heard above the noise. ‘Who knows? Maybe she’s the next step on the evolutionary ladder. One of the Tomorrow Children.’
The Tomorrow Children. God, that phrase. Feather used it in her Aquarius Moon interview (for all I know she may have coined it herself), and it alone spawned a dozen theories of which Emily remained mercifully ignorant — at least until the final collapse.
Now it only jarred, and she stood up from her chair and began to move towards the open door, following the smooth line of the wall, feeling soft air on her upturned face. It was warm outside; she could feel the evening sun against her eyelids and smell magnolia from the park across the road.
A white smell, said her mother’s voice in her mind. Magnolia white. To Emily it sounded soft and chocolatey, like a Chopin nocturne, like Cinderella, a scent of magic. The heat from within the gallery was oppressive by comparison; the voices of all those people — guests, academics, journalists, all talking at once and at the tops of their voices — pushing at her like a hot wind. She’d never had an exhibition before. She’d never even had a proper birthday party. She sat down on the gallery step — there was a cast-iron railing, and she pressed her hot cheek against its pockmarked surface and lifted her face towards the white smell.
‘Hello, Emily,’ someone said.
She turned towards the sound of his voice. He was standing a dozen feet away. A boy — older than she was, she thought; maybe as old as sixteen. His voice sounded oddly flat and tight, like an instrument playing in the wrong register, and Emily could hear caution in it, combined with interest, and something close to hostility.
‘What’s your name?’
‘B.B.,’ he said.
‘That’s not a name,’ Emily said.
His shrug was implicit in his tone. ‘It’s what they call me at home,’ he said. There was a rather lengthy pause. Emily could feel him wanting to speak, and sensed he was staring at her. She wished he would either ask his question, or go away and leave her alone. The boy did neither, but just stood there, opening his mouth and then closing it again, like a shop door on a busy day.
‘Watch out,’ she said. ‘You’re catching flies.’
She heard his teeth click together. ‘I thought you were supposed to be b-blind.’
‘I am, but I can hear you all right. You make a noise when you open your mouth. Your breathing changes—’ Emily turned away, feeling suddenly impatient. Why did she bother explaining things? He was just another tourist, here to see the freak. In a moment, if he dared, he’d ask her about the colours.
When he did, it took Emily a moment to understand what he was saying. The stammer she’d already noticed in his voice had intensified; not, she realized, through nerves, but from some real conflict that knotted his words into a tangle that for a few seconds even he could not undo.
‘You can really h- you can h-h- you can hear c-c—’ Emily could hear the frustration in his voice as he struggled with the words. ‘You can really hear c-colours?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘So. What colour am I?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain. It’s like a kind of extra sense.’
The boy laughed. Not a happy sound. ‘Malbry smells of shit,’ he said in a fast and toneless voice. ‘Dr Peacock smells of bubblegum. Mr Pink smells of dentist’s gas.’ Emily noticed that he hadn’t stuttered once throughout this speech, the longest she’d heard him make so far.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, puzzled.
‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘All those times I watched you play, or sit in your s-swing in the living-room—’
The penny dropped. ‘You’re him? You’re Boy X?’
For a long time he said nothing. Perhaps he’d nodded — people forget — and then he just said: ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘I remember hearing about you,’ she said, not wanting him to know that her mother thought he was a fake. ‘Where did you go? After Dr Peacock—’
‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘We live in White City. The bottom end of the village. Ma works on the m-market. S-selling f-fruit.’
There was a long silence. This time she couldn’t hear him struggling to speak, but she could feel his eyes on her. It was uncomfortable; it made her feel indignant and a little guilty at the same time.
‘I fucking hate fruit,’ he said.
There was another long pause, during which she closed her eyes and wished the boy would go away. Mother was right, she told herself. He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t even friendly. And yet . . .
‘What’s it like?’ She had to ask.
‘What, selling fruit?’
‘That — thing you do. The taste-smell-word thing. I don’t know the name.’
There was a long silence as, once more, he struggled to explain. ‘I don’t d-do anything,’ he said at last. ‘It’s like — it’s just there, somehow. Like yours, I guess. I see something, I hear something, and then I get a feeling. Don’t ask me why. Weird things. And it hurts—’
Another pause. Inside the gallery the sound of voices had dimmed; Emily guessed that someone was getting ready to make a speech.
‘You’re lucky,’ said B.B. ‘Yours is a gift. It makes you special. Mine, I’d do without it any day. It hurts, I get these headaches here—’ He placed a hand on her temple, and another one at the nape of her neck. She felt a tremor go through him then, as if he were actually in pain.
‘Plus everyone thinks you’re m-mad, or worse, that you’re faking it to get attention. I mean, do you think I’m faking it?’
For a second she faltered. ‘I don’t know—’
That laugh again. ‘Well, there you go.’ Suddenly the pent-up anger Emily had heard in his voice was overlaid with a tremendous weariness. ‘At the end, even I thought I’d been faking it. And Dr Peacock — don’t blame him. I mean, they say it’s a gift. But what’s it for? Yours I can understand. Seeing colours when you’re blind. Painting music. It’s like a b-bloody miracle. But mine? Imagine what it’s like for me, every d-day—’ Now he was stuttering again. ‘Some d-days it’s so bad I can hardly think, and what’s it for? What’s it even for?’
He stopped, and Emily could hear him breathing harshly. ‘I used to think there was a cure,’ he said finally. ‘I used to think that if I did the tests, then Dr Peacock would find a cure. But there isn’t a way. It gets everywhere. It gets into everything. TV. Films. You can’t get away. From it. From them—’
‘The smells, you mean?’
He paused. ‘Yeah. The smells.’
‘What about me?’ Emily said. ‘Do I have a smell?’
‘Sure you do, Emily,’ he said, and now she could hear the tiniest hint of a smile in his voice. ‘Emily White smells of roses. That rose that grows by the wall at the edge of the doctor’s garden. Albertine, that was its name. That’s what your name smells like to me.’
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Albertine: Why, thank you . . .
15
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Posted at: 04.29 on Tuesday, February 12
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