My brother was twenty-five by then. He had no money, no prospects, no job. He was taking stabilizing drugs, though he was far from stable. And he blamed me for what had happened to him — blamed me unfairly, but doggedly — although even a headcase like Nigel should have been able to see that it wasn’t my fault that he had committed murder —
All that didn’t come out at once, of course. But Nigel had never liked me, and now he liked me even less. I suppose he had good reason. To him, I must have seemed a success. By then I was studying — or so he believed — at Malbry Polytechnic, as was, though its status was upgraded a year later to that of a university, much to Ma’s satisfaction. I still had money from my part-time job at the electrical shop, though, since I was a student, Ma allowed me to keep all of my salary. The Emily White affair was over, and Ma and I had already moved on.
To look at, Nigel hadn’t changed much. His hair was longer than before, and sometimes it was greasy. He had a new tattoo on his arm — a single Chinese character, the symbol for ‘courage’ in basic black. He was thinner, and somehow smaller, too, as if part of him had been worn away like the end of a pencil eraser. But he still wore black all the time, and he liked the girls as he always had, although, as far as I ever knew, he never kept with the same one for more than a couple of weeks or so, as if trying to keep himself in check; as if he was afraid, somehow, that the rage that had killed a man might some day spring out at someone else.
At first he had no contact with Ma. No surprise, after what he had done. He moved into a flat in town, found himself a job there, and over the next few years lived alone — not happy, perhaps, but free.
And then, somehow, she reeled him back in. That freedom was just an illusion. One day I came home to find him there, sitting with Ma in the parlour, looking like a dead man, and along with that sneaking Schadenfreude I felt a sinking sense of doom.
No one escapes the pitcher plant. Not Nigel, not me, not anyone.
It was not a true rapprochement. But over the next eighteen years or so, we saw Nigel three or four times a year. At Christmas; on Ma’s birthday; at Easter; on my birthday — and every time he came round, he would sit in the same place in the parlour, and stare at the shelf of china dogs — Mal’s statuette had been repaired, of course, and had now been joined by a similar one, in the shape of a sleeping puppy.
And every time Nigel visited, he would stare at those fucking china dogs and drink tea from Ma’s visitors’ cups and listen to her carry on about how much the church had raised this year, and how the hedge needed clipping. And every other Sunday night he would phone at precisely eight thirty (which was when Ma’s soaps were over), and stay on until she had finished with him, while the rest of the time he tried to make sense of what was left of his life with therapy and Prozac, working days and spending the nights in his attic flat watching stars that seemed increasingly remote each time, or cruising the streets in his black Toyota and waiting for someone, for something . . .
And then, along came Albertine. She should never have been there, of course. She didn’t belong in that new café, the oddly named Pink Zebra, with its gassy, soporific scent and primary-school colours. And she certainly didn’t belong with Nigel, who should have been out of the picture by then, but who had messed up his escape.
Maybe I ought to have stopped it then. I knew she was dangerous. But Nigel had already brought her home, like a little stray cat from out of the cold. Nigel was in love, he said. Needless to say, he had to go —
And though it looked like an accident, you and I know better, of course. I swallowed him, as I swallowed Mal, as I swallowed all of my brothers. Swallowed them down like the vitamin drink — One, two, three, gone! — and the taste may be sour, but the victory is sweeter than a summer rose —
6
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
Posted at: 23.25 on Thursday, February 14
Status: public
Mood: baroque
Listening to: The Rolling Stones: ‘Paint It Black’
Let’s call him Mr Midnight Blue. A man of moods and mysteries. A poet and a lover, she thinks; a gentle man with a head full of stars. The truth is, she’s living in fantasy. A fantasy in which two lost souls may find each other by happenstance, and be saved from themselves through true love —
What a joke. Poor girl. In fact her man is a headcase with blood on his hands; a liar; a coward; an arrogant thug. What’s more, though she thinks he has chosen her, the truth is she was chosen for him.
You think that isn’t possible? People are just like cards, you know. Pick a card. Any card. And the trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his choice, his own particular Queen of Spades —
He drives a black Toyota. He uses it to cruise the streets, as he used to do, in the days before. Still thinks of it as before and after — as if such a cataclysmic event could change the predestined orbit of a man’s life, like two planets in collision, which then go off their separate ways.
Of course, that isn’t possible. There is no way to cheat Fate. His crime has become a part of him, like the shape of his face, and the scar on his hand that runs across his heart line, the only physical reminder of that nasty interlude. A shallow cut that healed fast; unlike his victim, poor bastard, who died of a cracked skull a fortnight later.
But of course, Midnight Blue doesn’t think of himself as a murderer. It was an accident, he says; an altercation that got out of hand. He never meant to do it, he says — as if that could somehow raise the dead, as if it makes a difference that he acted on impulse, that he was misled, that he was only twenty-one —
His lawyer was inclined to agree. Cited his mental state, which was poor; claimed there were special circumstances, and finally tried for a verdict of misadventure. A piebald word, half-red, half-black, that smells distinctly fishy to me, and sounds almost as if it could be a name: Miss Adventure, like Boy X, a comic-book adventuress —
Can any sentence compensate for the loss of a human life? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. All those snivelling, wretched excuses. A five-year stretch — much of it spent in the quilted comfort of a psychiatric ward — discharged Midnight Blue’s debt to society — which doesn’t mean to say he was cured; or that he didn’t deserve to die —
Reader, I killed him. I had no choice. That black Toyota was just too alluring. And I wanted something poetic this time: something to mark the victim’s death with a final, triumphant fanfare.
There is a CD deck under the dashboard, on which he likes to play music as he drives. Midnight Blue favours loud bands, rock music that rants and rails. He likes his music noisy, his vocals raucous, the squeal of guitars; likes to feel the deep punch of the bass in his eardrums and that kick of response in his lower belly, like something there could still be alive.
Some might say that, at his age, he ought to have turned down the volume by now; but Midnight Blue knows that rebellion is something born from experience, a lesson learnt the hard way, wasted on adolescents. Midnight Blue has always been a kind of existentialist; brooding on mortality; taking out on the rest of the world the fact that he is going to die.