‘Did you go into my stuff?’ he said.
‘Why? Did you lose something?’
He gave me a look.
‘Well?’
He hesitated. ‘No.’
I shrugged, but I was grinning inside. Whatever was in that book, I thought, must be something very important. But rather than attract attention to something he clearly wanted to hide, my brother played indifference, hoping perhaps that the notebook would lie for ever undisturbed —
As if. As soon as I could, I retrieved it from its hiding-place. It looked like an astronomy notebook at first; but in between the lists of figures, of sightings of planets and shooting stars and lunar eclipses, I found something else: a journal like mine, but of poetry —
Poetry? Nigel? Gleefully I read on. Nigel, the poet. What a joke. But my brother was full of contradictions, as well as being almost as cautious as I, and I learnt that behind his sullen façade there lay a few surprises.
The first was that he favoured haikus, those deceptively simple little rhymeless poems of only seventeen syllables. If anything, I would have expected Nigel to have gone for blowsy verses, thumping rhymes, sonnets with rhythms that thundered and rang, bludgeoning blocks of blank verse —
The second surprise was that he was in love — desperately, fiercely in love. It had been going on for months — ever since he’d bought the telescope, in fact, which hobby gave him the perfect excuse to come and go at night as he pleased.
That in itself was amusing enough. I hadn’t seen Nigel as the type for romance. But the third surprise was the greatest of all — the thing that killed my amusement cold and made my heart quicken with delayed fear.
I flicked back through the notebook again, my fingers suddenly cold and numb, a cottony, chemical taste in my mouth. Of course, I’d always known that to be caught in possession of Nigel’s book might have had serious consequences. But as I read further I understood the terrible risk I’d taken. Because this was something far more incriminating than just a few poems and scribblings. And if Nigel suspected that I was the thief, I’d earn myself more than a beating. If anyone ever found out what I knew —
For that, my brother would kill me.
4
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 21.30 on Thursday, February 14
Status: restricted
Mood: disappointed
Listening to: Blondie: ‘Picture This’
No Valentine yet from Albertine. I wonder, did he love her? Did they lie side by side in bed, his arm thrown carelessly around her shoulders, her face pressed into the curve of his neck? Did he wake to find her there, and wonder at his good fortune? Did he sometimes forget who he was, imagine that through love of her, some day he could be someone good?
But love is a treacherous animal, a shape-shifter by nature, making the poor man king for a day; transforming the most volatile into paragons of stability; a crutch for the weak, a shield for the craven — at least, until the buzz wears off.
He got it badly. I knew he would. My erstwhile tormentor, who used to force-feed me spiders, had finally, fatally, fallen in love. And with the least likely candidate, in one of those random encounters that even I could not have foreseen.
I suppose you could have called her attractive. Not at all my type, of course; but Nigel had always been perverse, and the boy who had spent his childhood trying to escape one older woman had fallen straight into the clutches of another. Her name was Tricia Goldblum; and she was an ex-employer of Ma’s. An elegant fifty-something; ice-blonde; and with that air of helplessness that makes them irresistible. Still, there’s no accounting for taste, is there? And I suppose she must have felt flattered. Mrs Electric Blue, as was, now divorced from her husband and free to indulge her predilection for nice young men.
Does that sound familiar yet? They always say to write what you know. And fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie —
He’d never really known her from the days when Ma worked as a cleaner. Perhaps he’d encountered her once or twice in one of the cafés or shops in town. But he’d never had reason to speak to her, to understand her, as I had. And as for that day at the market, the day I remembered so vividly —
As far as I was able to tell, Nigel had no memory of it at all. Perhaps that was why he chose her — Malbry’s Mrs Robinson, whose furtive collection of young men had coloured her reputation, not blue, but scarlet in the eyes of such folk as Catherine White, Eleanor Vine and, most judgemental of all, Gloria Green.
Not that Nigel cared about that at the time. Nigel was besotted. But Mrs Goldblum valued discretion, and their affair was conducted in secret at first, with Mrs Goldblum calling the shots. Still, of course, that journal of his was enough to tell me everything: how cleverly she had reeled him in; even her penchant for sex toys was there, among the haikus and star charts.
My first impulse, of course, was to tell Ma, who had hated Mrs Goldblum ever since she’d abandoned us, and whose venom was no less lethal for having been stored away. But then I seriously believed that Nigel would have killed me. I knew his temper; and I guessed that Nigel in love, like Nigel at war, was capable of anything.
And so I nursed my discovery until such time as it could be of use. I never told Ma, never mentioned it, not even obliquely, to either of them. I was alone with my secret, a hoard of stolen banknotes that I could never spend without incriminating myself.
But enough of that for the moment. We’ll get to that in due course. Suffice it to say that as time passed, the Moleskine diary revealed its use. And now I realized how easily, with the help of a few judicious props, I could set a bottle trap, which hopefully would set me free —
5
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 22.15 on Thursday, February 14
Status: restricted
Mood: malevolent
Playing: Pulp: ‘I Spy’
When Nigel was released from jail, I’d expected him, now he was free, to try again, to rebuild his life, to do all those things he’d always planned, to take the chance he’d been given, and run. But Nigel was never predictable; he was more than usually perverse, seeking out the opposite of whatever he was expected to do. And something in my brother had changed. Not something you could quantify, but something that I recognized. Like a ship in the Sargasso Sea, he had become entangled; enmeshed in himself, swallowed up by the pitcher plant that was Malbry, and our mother.
Oh, yes. Our mother. In spite of it all, he came back home — not to the house, but to Malbry; to Ma. Certainly he had no one else. His friends — such as they were — had moved on. All he had was his family.