Blueeyedboy Read online

  ‘Was my son alone in the car?’

  ‘Ma’am?’ said the older officer.

  ‘Wasn’t there – a girl – with him?’ said Ma, with the special contempt she always reserves for any discussion of Nigel’s girl.

  The officer shook his head. ‘No, ma’am.’

  Ma dug her fingers into my arm. ‘He never used to be careless,’ she said. ‘My son was an excellent driver.’

  Well, that just shows how little she knows. Nigel brought to his driving the same temperance and subtlety that he did to his relationships. I should know; I still have the marks. But now he’s dead, he’s a paragon. That hardly seems fair, does it now, after all I’ve done for her?

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Ma.’ Anything to get out of here. I made for the kitchen, only to find the officer obstructing my way.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re going to need you to come with us to the station, sir.’

  My mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘The station?’ I said.

  ‘Formalities, sir.’

  For a moment I saw myself under arrest, leaving the house in handcuffs. Ma in tears; the neighbours in shock; myself in an orange jumpsuit (really, not my colour); locked up in a room without windows. In fic I’d make a run for it: knock out the officer, steal his car and be over the border before the police could circulate my description. In life –

  ‘What kind of formalities?’

  ‘We’ll need you to ID the body, sir.’

  ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  Ma made me do it, of course. Waited outside while I put a name to what was left of Nigel. I tried to make it fictional, to see it all as a film set; but even so, I passed out. They took me home in an ambulance. Still, it was worth it. To have him dead; to be free of the bastard for ever –

  All this is fic, you understand. I never murdered anyone. I know they tell you to write what you know, as if you could ever write what you know, as if knowing were the essential thing, when the most essential thing is desire. But wishing that my brother were dead is not the same as committing a crime. It’s not my fault if the universe follows my WebJournal. And so life goes on – for most of us – much the same as it ever did, and blueeyedboy sleeps the sleep of the just – if not quite that of the innocent.

  3

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

  Posted at: 18.04 on Monday, January 28

  Status: restricted

  Mood: blah

  Listening to: Del Amitri: ‘Nothing Ever Happens’

  That was just two days ago. Already we’re back to normal, apart from planning the funeral. Back to our comfort rituals, our little everyday routines. With Ma, it’s dusting the china dogs. With me, of course, it’s the Internet: my WeJay, my playlists, my murders.

  Internet. An interesting word. Like something brought up from the deep. A net for something that has been interred, or something as yet to be interred; a holding-place for all the things we’d rather keep secret in our real lives. And yet, we like to watch, don’t we? Through a glass, darkly, we watch the world turn: a world peopled with shades and reflections, never more than a mouse-click away. A man kills himself – live, on cam. It’s disgusting, but strangely compulsive. We wonder if it was a fake. It could be a fake; anything could. But everything looks so much more real when you’re watching it on a computer screen. Thus even the things we see every day – perhaps especially those things – gain an extra significance when glimpsed through the eye of a camera.

  That girl, for instance. The girl in the bright-red duffel coat who walks past my house nearly every day, windswept and oblivious to the camera’s eye that watches her. She has her habits, as do I. She knows the power of desire. She knows that the world turns not on love, or even money, but on obsession.

  Obsession? Of course. We are all obsessed. Obsessed with TV; with the size of our dicks; with money and fame and the love-lives of others. This virtual – though far from virtuous – world is a reeking midden of mind-trash, mish-mash, slash; car dealerships and Viagra sales, and music and games and gossip and lies and tiny personal tragedies lost in transit down the line, waiting for someone to care, just once, waiting for someone to connect –

  That’s where WeJay comes in. WebJournal, the site for all seasonings. Restricted entries for private enjoyment; public – well, for everyone else. On WeJay I can vent as I please, confess without fear of censure; be myself – or indeed, someone else – in a world where no one is quite what they seem, and where every member of every tribe is free to do what they most desire.

  Tribe? Yes, everyone here has a tribe; each with its divisions and subdivisions, binary veins and capillaries branching out into a near-infinity of permutations as they distance themselves from the mainstream. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, the pervert with his webcam. No one has to hunt alone, however far from the pack they have strayed. Everyone has a home here, a place where someone will take them in, where all their tastes are catered for –

  Most people go with the popular choice. They choose vanilla every time. Vanillas are the good guys, common as Coca-Cola. Their conscience is as white as their perfect teeth; they are tall and bronzed and presentable; they eat at McDonald’s; they take out the trash; they come with a PG certificate and they’d never shoot a man in the back.

  But bad guys come in a million flavours. Bad guys lie; bad guys cheat; bad guys make the heart beat faster – or sometimes come to a sudden stop. Which is why I created badguysrock: originally a WeJay community devoted to villains throughout the fictional universe; now a forum for bad guys to celebrate beyond the reach of the ethics police; to glory in their crimes; to strut; to wear their villainy with pride.

  Membership is open right now; the price of admission a single post – be it a fic, an essay or just a drabble. Though if there’s something you’d like to confess, this is just the place for it: no names, no rules, no colours – but one.

  No, not black, as you might expect. Black is far too limiting. Black presupposes a lack of depth. But blue is creative, melancholy. Blue is the music of the soul. And blue is the colour of our clan, embracing all shades of villainy, all flavours of unholy desire.

  So far, it’s a small clan, with less than a dozen regulars.

  First comes Captainbunnykiller: Andy Scott of New York. Cap’s blog is a mixture of jackass humour, pornographic fantasy and furious invective – against niggers, queers, fucktards, the fat, Christians and, most recently, the French – but I doubt he’s ever killed anything.

  Next comes chrysalisbaby. Aka Chryssie Bateman, of California. This one’s a typical Body Freak – has been on a diet since she was twelve, and now weighs over three hundred pounds. Has a history of falling for vicious men. Never learns. Never will.

  After that there’s ClairDeLune; Clair Mitchell, to her friends. This one’s a local; she teaches a course on creative self-expression at Malbry College (which explains her slightly superior tone and her addiction to literary psychobabble) and runs an online writers’ group as well as a sizeable fansite devoted to a certain middle-aged character actor – let us call him Angel Blue – with whom she is infatuated. Angel is an irregular choice, an actor specializing in louche individuals, damaged types, serial killers, and other assorted bad-guy roles. Not A-list, but you’d know his face. She often posts pictures of him on here. Curiously enough, he looks something like me.

  Then there’s Toxic69, aka Stuart Dawson, of Leeds. Left crippled in a motorbike crash, he spends his angry life online, where no one needs to pity him; and Purepwnage9, of Fife, who lives for Warcraft and Second Life, oblivious of the fact that his own life is surely but swiftly slipping away; plus any number of lurkers and irregulars – JennyTricks; BombNumber20, Jesusismycopilot, and so on, who exhibit a diverting range of responses to our various entries, from admiration to outrage; from cheeriness to profanity.

  And then, of course, there’s Albertine. Definitely not like the rest, there’s a confessional tone
to her entries that I find more than a little promising, a hint of danger, a dark undertone, a style perhaps more akin to my own. And she lives right here in the Village, no more than a dozen streets away –

  Coincidence?

  Not quite. Of course, I have been watching her. Especially so since my brother’s death. Not with malice, but with curiosity, even a measure of envy. She seems so self-possessed. So calm. So safely cocooned in her little world, so unaware of what’s happening. Her online posts are so intimate, so naked and so oddly naïve that you’d never believe she was one of us, a bad guy among bad guys. Her fingers on the piano keys danced like little dervishes. I remember that, and her gentle voice, and her name, which smelt of roses.

  The poet Rilke was killed by a rose. How very Sturm und Drang of him. A scratch with a thorn that got infected; a poison gift that keeps on giving. Personally, I don’t see the appeal. I feel more kinship with the orchid tribe: subversives of the plant world, clinging to life wherever they can, subtle and insidious. Roses are so commonplace, with their whorls of sickening bubblegum pink; their scheming scent; their unwholesome leaves, their sly little thorns that poke at the heart –

  O rose, thou art sick –

  Still, aren’t we all?

  4

  You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.

  Posted at: 23.30 on Monday, January 28

  Status: restricted

  Mood: contemplative

  Listening to: Radiohead: ‘Creep’

  Call me B.B. Everyone does. No one but the police and the bank ever use my real name. I’m forty-two and five foot eight; I have mousy hair, blue eyes and I’ve lived here in Malbry all my life.

  Malbry – pronounced Maw-bry. Even the word smells of shit. But I am unusually sensitive to words, to their sounds and resonances. That’s why I don’t have an accent now, and have lost my childhood stammer. The predominant trend here in Malbry is for exaggerated vowels and clumsy glottals, coating every word in a grimy sheen. You can hear them on the estate all the time: teenage girls with scraped-back hair, shouting hiyaaa in shades of synthetic strawberry. The boys are less articulate, mouthing freak and loser at me as I pass, in half-broken voices that yodel and boom in notes of lager and locker-room sweat. Most of the time I don’t hear them. My life has a permanent soundtrack, provided by my iPod, into which I have downloaded more than twenty thousand tracks and forty-two playlists, one for every year of my life, each with a specific theme –

  Freak. They say it because they think it hurts. In their world, to be labelled a freak is obviously the worst kind of fate. To me, it’s just the opposite. The worst thing is surely to be like them: to have married too young; to have gone on the dole; to have learnt to drink beer and smoke cheap cigarettes; to have had kids doomed to be just like themselves, because if these people are good at anything, it’s reproduction – they don’t live long, but, by God, they populate – and if not wanting any of that has made me into a freak in their eyes –

  In truth, I’m very ordinary. My eyes are my best feature, I’m told, though not everyone appreciates their chilly shade. For the rest, you’d hardly notice me. I’m nicely inconspicuous. I don’t talk much, and when I do, it’s only when strictly necessary. That’s the way to survive in this place; to keep my privacy intact. Because Malbry is one of those places where secrets and gossips and rumours abound, and I have to take exceptional care to avoid the wrong kind of exposure.

  It’s not that the place is so terrible. The old Village is actually very nice, with its crooked York stone cottages and its church and its single row of little shops. There’s rarely any trouble here; except perhaps on Saturday nights, when the kids hang around outside the church while their parents go to the pub down the road, and buy chips from the Chinese takeaway and push the wrappers into the hedge.

  To the west, there’s what Ma calls Millionaires’ Row: an avenue of big stone houses shielded from the road by trees. Tall chimneys; four-by-fours; gates that work by remote control. Beyond that there’s St Oswald’s, the grammar school, with its twelve-foot wall and heraldic gate. To the east, the brick terraces of Red City, where my mother was born, then to the west, White City, all privet and pebble-dash. It’s not as genteel as the Village, though I’ve learnt to avoid the danger zones. This is where you’ll find our house, at the edge of the big estate. A square of grass; a flowerbed; a hedge to keep out the neighbours. This is the house where I was born; hardly anything has changed.

  I do have a few extra privileges. I drive a blue Peugeot 307, registered in my mother’s name. I have a study lined with books, an iPod dock, a computer and a wall of CDs. I have a collection of orchids, most of them just hybrids, but with one or two rare Zygopetala, whose names bear the scent of the South American rainforests from which they were sourced, and whose colours are astonishing: violent shades of priapic green, and mottled, acidic butterfly-blue that no chart could possibly duplicate. I have a darkroom in the basement, where I develop my photographs. I don’t display them here, of course. But I like to think I have a gift.

  At 5 a.m. on weekdays I clock in at Malbry Infirmary – or I did, until very recently – wearing a suit and a blue striped shirt and carrying a briefcase. My mother is very proud of this, of the fact that her son wears a suit to work. What I actually do at work is a matter of far less importance to her. I am single, straight, well-spoken, and, if this were a TV drama of the type favoured by ClairDeLune, my blameless lifestyle and unsullied reputation would probably make me a prime suspect.

  In the real world, however, only the kids notice me. To them, any man who still lives with his mother is either a paedo or a queer. But even this assumption comes more from habit than real belief. If they thought I was dangerous, they would behave very differently. Even when that schoolboy was killed, a St Oswald’s boy, so close to home, no one thought me remotely worthy of investigation.

  Predictably, I was curious. A murder is always intriguing. Besides, I was already learning my craft, and I knew I could use any information, any hints that came my way. I’ve always appreciated a nice, neat murder. Not that many qualify. Most murderers are predictable, most murders messy and banal. It’s almost a crime in itself, don’t you think, that the splendid act of taking a life should have become so commonplace, so wholly devoid of artistry?

  In fiction, there is no such thing as the perfect crime. In movies, the bad guy – who is invariably brilliant and charismatic – always makes a fatal mistake. He overlooks the minutiae. He succumbs to vainglory; loses his nerve; falls victim to some ironic flaw. However dark the frosting, in film, the vanilla centre always shows through; with a happy ending for all who deserve it, and imprisonment, a shot through the heart, or better still, a dramatically pleasing – though statistically improbable – drop from a high building for the bad guy, thereby removing the burden to the State, and leaving the hero free of the guilt of having to shoot the bastard himself.

  Well, I happen to know that isn’t true, just as I know that most murderers are neither brilliant nor charismatic, but often subnormal and rather dull, and that the police force is so buried under its paperwork that the simplest murders can slip through the net – the stabbings, the shootings, the fist-fights gone wrong, crimes in which the perpetrator, if he has left the scene at all, can often be found in the nearest pub.

  Call me romantic, if you like. But I do believe in the perfect crime. Like true love, it’s just a matter of timing and patience; of keeping the faith; of not losing hope; of carping the diem, of seizing the day –

  That’s how my interests led me here, to my lonesome refuge on badguysrock. Harmless interests, to begin with at least, though soon I grew to appreciate the other possibilities. And at the beginning it was just curiosity: a means of observing others unseen; of exploring a world beyond my own, that narrow triangle between Malbry town, the Village and Nether Edge moors, beyond which I have never dared to aspire. The Internet, with its million maps, was as alien to me as Jupiter – and yet, one day, I was simply
there, almost by chance, a cast-away, watching the changing scenery with the slowly dawning awareness that this was where I truly belonged; that this would be my great escape, from Malbry, my life, and my mother.

  My mother. How it resonates. Mother is a difficult word; so dense with complex associations that I can barely see it at all. Sometimes its colour is Virgin-blue, like the statues of Mary; or grey like the dust-bunnies under the bed where I used to hide away as a child; or green like the baize of the market stalls; and it smells of uncertainty and loss, and of black bananas gone to mush, and of salt, and of blood, and of memory –

  My mother. Gloria Winter. She’s the reason I’m still here: stuck in Malbry all these years, like a plant too pot-bound ever to thrive. I have stayed with her. Like everything else. Apart from the neighbours, nothing has changed. The three-bedroomed house; the Axminster; the queasy flowered wallpaper; the gilt-edged mirror in the kitchen that hides a hole in the plaster; the faded print of the Chinese Girl; the lacquer vase on the mantel; the dogs.

  Those dogs. Those hideous china dogs.

  An affectation to start with, that since has got totally out of hand. There are dogs on every surface now: spaniels, Alsatians, chihuahuas, basset hounds, Yorkshire terriers (her favourites). There are musical dogs, portraits of dogs, dogs dressed up as people; dogs eager-tongued and lolloping, sitting to attention, paws lifted in silent appeal, heads topped with little pink bows.

  I broke one once, when I was a boy, and she beat me – though I denied the crime – with a piece of electrical cord. Even now, I still hate those dogs. She knows it, too – but they are her babies, she explains (with a terrible, girlish coyness), and besides, she tells me, she never complains about all my nasty stuff upstairs.

  Not that she even knows what I do. I have my privacy: rooms of my own, all of them with locks on the doors, from which she is excluded. The converted loft and study room, the bathroom, the bedroom; and the darkroom in the cellar. I’ve made a home for myself here, with my books, my playlists, my online friends, while she spends her days in the parlour, smoking, doing crosswords, dusting and watching daytime TV –