Mood: good
Listening to: Genesis: ‘The Lady Lies’
I knew from that moment she was faking it. Not quite eight years old, and yet already she was cleverer than any of those others: the ones in charge of the media hype; the ones who thought they’d created her.
What’s it like? That — thing you do.
She was so beautiful, even then. Skin like vanilla ice cream, that smooth dark hair and those sibyl’s eyes. Good breeding makes for good skin. Her breeding went right down to the bone: forehead, cheekbones, wrists and neck, collarbones chiselled and lovely. But —
What’s it like? That thing you do?
She would never have asked me otherwise. Not if she’d been telling the truth. These things we feel — these things we sense — are deeply embedded inside us, like razor blades in a bar of soap: sharp, inexplicable edges that cut as keenly as beauty.
That lie of hers confirmed it; but already I knew she belonged with me. Both of us soulmates in deceit; both of us bad guys, for ever, at heart. There was no point in my asking her when — or if — I could see her again. It would have been difficult enough with an ordinary child to arrange the kind of clandestine meeting that I had in mind — with this now-famous blind girl, I didn’t stand a chance.
That was when the dreams began. No one had really explained to me about hormones, or growing up, or sex. For a woman with three teenage sons, Ma had proved curiously prudish on the subject, and when the relevant time had come, I’d learnt most of the truth from my brothers, a bike-shed education at best, which did not entirely prepare me for the magnitude of the experience.
I’d been a late developer. But that spring I caught up with a vengeance. I grew three inches taller, my skin cleared, and suddenly I was acutely and uncomfortably aware of myself, of the intensity of all my sensations — which seemed, if anything, even stronger than before — to the way I awoke in the mornings with a hard-on that sometimes took hours to subside.
My emotions veered from plummeting misery to absurd elation; all my senses were enhanced; I wanted desperately to be in love, to touch, to kiss, to feel, to know —
And through it all were those dreams: vivid, plosive, passionate dreams that I wrote down in my Blue Book, dreams that filled me with shame and despair and a dreadful, lurking sense of joy.
Nigel had told me some months before that it might soon be time for me to do my own laundry. I saw what he meant now, and took his advice, airing my room and washing my bedsheets three times a week in the hope of dispersing the civet smell. Ma never commented; but I felt her disapproval grow, as if it were somehow my fault that I was leaving my boyhood behind.
Ma was looking old, I thought, hard and sour as an under-ripe apple; and there was a sense of desperation in her now, in the way she watched me at the dinner-table, telling me to sit up, to eat properly, to stop slouching, for God’s sake —
At her insistence I had stayed in school, and had so far managed to conceal the fact that I was lagging far behind. But by Easter the public exams loomed close, and I was failing in most of my subjects. My spelling was awful; maths made my head ache, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more the headaches assaulted me, so that even the sight of my school clothes laid out on the back of a chair was enough to bring it on; torture by association.
There was no one to whom I could go for help. My teachers — even the more well-disposed among them — were inclined to take the view that I just wasn’t cut out for academic work. I could hardly explain to them the true reason for my anxiety. I could hardly admit to them that I was afraid of Ma’s disappointment.
And so I hid the evidence. I faked my mother’s signature on a variety of absence notes. I hid my school reports; I lied; I forged my end-of-term results. But she must have suspected something was wrong, because she began a covert investigation — she must have known that I would lie — first contacting the school by phone to find out what story I’d told, and then making an appointment with my form-teacher and the Head of Year. In which she learnt that since Christmas I had barely attended school at all, due to a prolonged bout of flu which had led to my missing the exams —
I remember the night of that meeting. Ma had cooked my favourite meal — fried chilli chicken and corn on the cob — which I suppose should have alerted me that something serious was afoot. I should have noticed her clothes, too — the dark-blue dress and those high-heeled shoes — but I guess I’d become complacent. I never suspected that I was being lulled into a false sense of security, and I had no inkling of the reprisals that were about to descend on my unsuspecting head.
Maybe I was careless. Maybe I’d underestimated Ma. Or maybe someone saw me in town with my stolen camera —
Anyway, my mother knew. She knew, she watched and she bided her time; then, when she’d spoken to the Head of Year and my teacher, Mrs Platt, she came back home in her interview clothes and cooked me my favourite dinner, and when I’d finished eating it, she left me on the sofa and turned the television on, and then she went into the kitchen (I presumed it was to wash the dishes), and then she came back silently and the first thing I knew was the scent of L’Heure Bleue and her voice in my ear, hissing at me —
‘You little shit.’
I turned abruptly at the sound, and that was when she hit me. Hit me with the dinner-plate; hit me right in the face with it, and for a second I was torn between the shock of the impact against my eyebrow and cheekbone and simple dismay at the mess of it — at the chicken grease and corn kernels in my face and in my hair, more dismayed at that than the pain, or the blood that was running into my eyes, colouring the world in shades of escarlata —
Half-dazed I tried to back away; hit the couch with the small of my back, sending a glassy pain up my spine. She hit me again, in the mouth this time, and then she was on top of me, punching and slapping and screaming at me —
‘You lying little shit, you cheating little bastard!’
I know you think I could have fought back. With words, if not with my fists and feet. But for me there were no magic words. No specious declaration of love could ward off my mother’s fury, and no declaration of innocence could stem the tide of her violent rage.
It was that rage that frightened me — the mad, ballistic anger of her — far, far worse than those punches and slaps, and the sludgy stink of the vitamin drink that was somehow a terrible part of it all, and the way she screamed those things in my ears. Until finally I was crying — Ma! Please! Ma! — curled up in a corner beside the couch with my arms wrapped around my head, and blood in my eyes, and blood in my mouth, and that weak and fearful baby-blue word, like the helpless cry of a newborn, punctuating every blow, until the world went by degrees from blood-red to blue-black, and the outburst was finally over.
Afterwards, she made it clear how badly I’d disappointed her. Sitting on the couch with a cloth held up to my cut mouth and another to my eyebrow, I listened to my long list of crimes, and sobbed as I heard the sentence passed.
‘I’m going to keep my eye on you, B.B.’
I spy. My mother’s eye, like the watchful Eye of God. I felt it like a fresh tattoo, like a graze on my bare skin. Sometimes I see it in my mind: and it’s bruise-blue, hospital-blue, faded prison-overall-blue. It marks me, inescapably — the mark of my mother; the mark of Cain, the mark that can never be erased.
Yes, I had disappointed her. First, she told me, with my lies — as if by telling the truth I might have spared myself all this. Then with my many failures: failure to excel at school; failure to be a good son; failure to live up to what she’d always expected of me.