Blueeyedboy Read online

  Ma was nervous; dressed to the nines, and she’d made Ben wear his new school clothes — navy trousers, sky-blue sweater, something like the St Oswald’s colours, although his own school had no uniform code, and most of the other kids just wore jeans. Nigel and Bren were with them, too — she didn’t trust them home alone — both under orders to sit still, shut up, and not to dare touch anything.

  She was trying to make an impression. Ben’s first year at junior school had not been a brilliant one, and by then most of White City knew that Gloria Winter’s youngest son had been sent home for sticking a compass into the hand of a boy who had called him a fucking poofter, and that only his mother’s aggressive intervention had prevented him from being expelled.

  Whether that information had reached the Village was yet to be determined. But Gloria Winter was taking no risks, and it was a most angelic Benjamin who now found himself on the steps of the Mansion on that mellow October day, listening to the door-chimes, which were pink and white and silvery, and observing the toes of his sneakers as Dr Peacock came to the door.

  Of course he had no real understanding of what a poofter actually was. But there was, he recalled, quite a lot of blood, and even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he hadn’t shown any remorse — had actually seemed to enjoy the fracas — quite upset his class teacher, a lady we shall call Mrs Catholic Blue, who (quite publicly, it seemed) subscribed to such amusing beliefs as the innocence of childhood, the sacrifice of God’s only son and the watchful presence of angels.

  Sadly, her name smelt terrible, like cheap incense and horse shit, which was often distracting in lessons, and which led to a number of incidents, culminating at last in Ben’s exclusion; for which his mother blamed the school, pointing out that it wasn’t his fault that they weren’t able to cope with a gifted child, and promising retribution at the hands of the local newspapers.

  Dr Peacock was different. His name smelt of bubblegum. An attractive scent for a little boy, besides which Dr Peacock spoke to him as an adult, in words that slipped and rolled off his tongue like multicoloured balls of gum from a sweetshop vending machine.

  ‘Ah. You must be Benjamin.’

  He nodded. He liked that certainty. From behind Dr Peacock, where a door led from the porch into the hall, a shaggy black-and-white shape hurtled towards our hero, revealing itself to be an elderly Jack Russell dog, which frolicked about them, barking.

  ‘My learned colleague,’ said Dr Peacock by way of explanation. Then, addressing the dog, he said: ‘Kindly allow our visitors to gain access to the library,’ at which the dog stopped barking at once, and led the way into the house.

  ‘Please,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘Come on in and have some tea.’

  They did. Earl Grey, no sugar, no milk, served with shortbread biscuits, now fixed in his mind for ever, like Proust’s lime-blossom tea, a conduit for memories.

  Memories are what blueeyedboy has instead of a conscience nowadays. That’s what kept him here for so long, pushing an old man’s wheelchair around the overgrown paths of the Mansion; doing his laundry; reading aloud; making toast soldiers for soft-boiled eggs. And even though most of the time the old man had no idea who he was, he never complained, or failed him — not once — remembering that first cup of Earl Grey tea and the way Dr Peacock looked at him, as if he, too, were special —

  The room was large and carpeted in varying tones of madder and brown. A sofa; chairs; three walls of books; an enormous fireplace, in front of which lay a basket for the dog; a brown teapot as big as the Mad Hatter’s; biscuits; some glass cases filled with insects. Most curious of all, perhaps, a child’s swing suspended from the ceiling, at which the three boys stared with silent longing from their place on the sofa near Ma, wanting, but hardly daring, to speak.

  ‘Wh-what are those?’ said blueeyedboy, indicating a glass case.

  ‘Moths,’ said the doctor, looking pleased. ‘So like the butterfly in many ways, but so much more subtle and fascinating in design. This one here, with the furry head’ — he pointed a finger at the glass — ‘is the Poplar hawk-moth, Laothoe populi. This scarlet and brown one next to it is Tyria jacobaeae, the Cinnabar. And this little chap’ — he indicated a ragged brown something that looked like a dead leaf to blueeyedboy — ‘is Smerinthus ocellata, the Eyed Hawk-moth. Can you see its blue eyes?’

  Blueeyedboy nodded again, awed into silence not merely by the moths themselves, but by the calm authority with which Dr Peacock uttered the words, then indicated another case, hanging above the piano, in which blueeyedboy could see resting a single, enormous lime-green moth, all milk and dusty velvet.

  ‘And this young lady,’ said Dr Peacock affectionately, ‘is the queen of my collection. The Luna moth, Actias Luna, all the way from North America. I brought her here as a pupa, oh, more than thirty years ago, and sat in this room as I watched her hatch, capturing every stage on film. You can’t imagine how moving it is, to watch such a creature emerge from the cocoon, to see her spread her wings and fly—’

  She can’t have gone far, thought blueeyedboy. Just as far as the killing jar —

  Wisely, however, he held his tongue. His ma was getting restless. Her hands clicked together in her lap, shooting cheap fire from her rings.

  ‘I collect china dogs,’ she said. ‘That makes us both collectors.’

  Dr Peacock smiled. ‘How nice. I must show you my T’ang figurine.’ Blueeyedboy grinned to himself as he saw the expression on Ma’s face. He had no idea what a T’ang figurine looked like, but he guessed it was something as different from Ma’s collection of china dogs as the Luna moth was from that creature curled up like a dead leaf over its gaudy, useless eyes.

  Ma gave him a dirty look, and blueeyedboy understood that sooner or later he would have to pay for making her look foolish. But for now, he knew he was safe, and he looked around Dr Peacock’s house with growing curiosity. Apart from the cases of moths, he saw that there were pictures on the walls — not posters, but actual paintings. Aside from Mrs White, with her pink and purple collages, he had never met anyone who owned paintings before.

  His eyes came to rest on a delicate study of a ship in faded sepia ink, behind which lay a long, pale beach, with a background of huts and coconut palms and cone-shaped mountains adrift with smoke. It drew him; though he didn’t know why. Perhaps the sky, or the tea-coloured ink, or the blush of age that shone through the glass like the bloom on a luscious golden grape —

  Dr Peacock caught him staring again. ‘Do you know where that is?’ he said.

  Blueeyedboy shook his head.

  ‘That’s Hawaii.’

  Ha-wa-ii.

  ‘Maybe you’ll get to go there some day,’ Dr Peacock told him, and smiled.

  And that’s how, with a single word, blueeyedboy was collected.

  Post comment:

  Captainbunnykiller: Man, I think you’re losing it. Two posts in as many days, and you haven’t murdered anyone

  blueeyedboy: Give me time. I’m working on it . . .

  ClairDeLune: Very nice,

  blueeyedboy. You show genuine courage in writing down these painful memories! Perhaps you could discuss them more fully at our next session?

  chrysalisbaby: yay I love this so much (hugs)

  5

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  Posted at: 02.05 on Sunday, February 3

  Status: public

  Mood: poetic

  Listening to: The Zombies: ‘A Rose For Emily’

  Next he took the three boys out into the rose garden, while their mother drank tea in the library and the dog ran about on the lawn. He showed them his roses and read out their names from the metal tags clipped to the stems. Adelaide d’Orléans. William Shakespeare. Names with magical properties, that made their nostrils tingle and flare.

  Dr Peacock loved his roses; especially the oldest ones, the densely-packed-with-petal ones, the flesh-toned, blue-rinse,
off-white, old-lady ones that, according to him, had the sweetest scent. In Dr Peacock’s garden the boys learnt to tell a moss rose from an Alba, a damask from a Gallica, and Benjamin collected their names as once he had collected the names inscribed on tubes of paint, names that made his head spin, that echoed with more than just colours and scents, from Rose de Recht, a dark-red rose that smelt of bitter chocolate, to Boule de Neige, Tour de Malakoff, Belle de Crécy and Albertine, his favourite, with a musky, pale-pink, old-fashioned scent, like girls in white summer dresses and croquet and iced pink lemonade on the lawn; which, to Ben, smelt of Turkish Delight —

  ‘Turkish Delight?’ said Dr Peacock, his eyes alight with interest. ‘And this one? Rosa Mundi?’

  ‘Bread.’

  ‘This one? Cécile Brunner?’

  ‘Cars. Petrol.’

  ‘Really?’ Dr Peacock said, looking, not angry, as blueeyedboy might have expected, but genuinely fascinated.

  In fact, everything about Benjamin was fascinating to Dr Peacock. It turned out that most of his books were about something he called synaesthesia, which sounded like something they might do to you in hospital, but that was actually a neurological condition, so he said, which actually meant that Ma was right, and that Ben had been special all along.

  The boys didn’t understand it all, but Dr Peacock said that it was something to do with the way the sensory parts of the brain worked: that something in there was cross-wired, somehow, sending mixed signals from those complex bundles of nerves.

  ‘You mean, like a s-super-sense?’ interrupted blueeyedboy, thinking vaguely of Spider-Man, or Magneto, or even Hannibal Lecter (you see that he was already moving away from the vanilla end of the spectrum into bad-guy territory).

  ‘Precisely,’ said Dr Peacock. ‘And when we find out how it works, then maybe our knowledge will be able to help people — stroke victims, for instance, or people who have suffered head trauma. The brain is a complex instrument. And in spite of all the achievements of science and modern medicine, we still know so little about it: how it stores and accesses information, how that information is translated—’

  Synaesthesia can manifest in so many ways, Dr Peacock explained to them. Words can have colours; sounds can have shapes, numbers can be illuminated. Some people were born with it; others acquired it by association. Most synaesthetes were visual. But there are other kinds of synaesthesia, where words can translate as tastes or smells; or colours be triggered by migraine pain. In short, said Dr Peacock, a synaesthete might see music; taste sound; experience numbers as textures or shapes. There was even mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which, by some extreme of empathy, the subject could actually experience physical sensations felt by someone else —

  ‘You mean, if I saw someone getting hit, then I’d be able to feel it too?’

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

  ‘But — how could they watch gangster films, where people get killed and beaten up?’

  ‘I don’t think they’d want to, Benjamin. They’d find it too upsetting. It’s all about suggestion, you see. This type of synaesthesia would make one very sensitive.’

  ‘Ma says I’m sensitive.’

  ‘I’m sure you are, Benjamin.’

  By then Benjamin had become increasingly sensitive, not just to words and names, but to voices, too; to their accents and tones. Of course, he’d been aware before of the fact that people had accents. He’d always preferred Mrs White’s voice to Ma’s, or to the voice of Mrs Catholic Blue, who spoke with a caustic Belfast twang that grated at his sinuses.

  His brothers spoke like the boys at school. They said ta instead of thank you, and sithee instead of goodbye. They swore at each other in ugly words that stank of the monkey-house at the zoo. His mother made an effort, but failed; her accent came and went depending on the company. It was particularly bad with Dr Peacock — aitches inserted all over the place like needles into a ball of wool.

  Blueeyedboy sensed how very hard she worked at trying to impress, and it made him gag with embarrassment. He didn’t want to sound like that. He copied Dr Peacock instead. He liked his vocabulary. The way Dr Peacock said: If you please; or Kindly turn your attention to this; or To whom am I speaking? on the phone. Dr Peacock could speak Latin and French and Greek and Italian and German and even Japanese; and when he spoke English he made it sound like a different language, a better one, one that distinguished between watt and what; witch (a green-grey, sour word) and which (a sweet and silvery word), like an actor reading Shakespeare. He even spoke like that to the dog, saying: Kindly desist from chewing the rug, or Would my learned colleague like to take a stroll round the garden? The strangest thing, thought blueeyedboy, was that the dog seemed to respond; which made him wonder whether he, too, could be trained to lose his uncouth habits.

  From his point of view, Dr Peacock was so impressed with Ben’s gift that he promised to tutor the boy himself — as long as he behaved at school — to prepare him for the St Oswald’s scholarship exam, in exchange for what he called a few tests, and the understanding that anything that transpired from their sessions could be used in the book he was writing, the culmination of a lifetime’s study, for which he had interviewed many subjects, though none as young or as promising as little Benjamin Winter.

  Ma was overjoyed, of course. St Oswald’s was the culmination of all her hopes, of her unvoiced ambitions, of all the dreams she’d ever had. The entrance exam was in three years’ time, but she spoke as if it were imminent; promised to save every penny she earned; fussed over Ben more than ever before, and made it very clear that he was being given an incredible chance; a chance that he owed it to her to take —

  He was less enthusiastic. He still didn’t like St Oswald’s. In spite of its navy-blue blazer and tie (just perfect for him, she said), he had already seen enough to be conscious of being unsuitable: unsuitable face, unsuitable hair, unsuitable house, unsuitable name —

  St Oswald’s boys were not called Ben. St Oswald’s boys were called Leon, or Jasper, or Rufus or Sebastian. A St Oswald’s boy can pass off a name like Orlando, can make it sound like peppermint. Even Rupert sounds somehow cool when attached to a navy-blue St Oswald’s blazer. Ben, he knew, would be the wrong blue, smelling of his mother’s house, of too much disinfectant and too little space and too much fried food and not enough books and the harsh, inescapable stink of his brothers.

  But Dr Peacock said not to worry. Three years was a long time. Time for him to prepare Ben; to make him into a St Oswald’s boy. Ben had potential, so he said — a red word, like a stretched rubber band, ready to fly into someone’s face —

  And so, he accepted. What choice did he have? He was, after all, Ma’s greatest hope. Besides, he wanted to please them both — to please Dr Peacock, most of all — and if that meant St Oswald’s, then he was prepared to take up the challenge.

  Nigel went to Sunnybank Park, the big comprehensive at the edge of White City. A series of concrete building blocks, with razor wire along the roof, it looked like a prison. It stank like a zoo. Nigel didn’t seem to mind. Brendan, nine and also destined for Sunnybank Park, showed no sign of unusual ability. Both boys had been tested by Dr Peacock; neither seemed to interest him much. Nigel he discarded at once; Brendan, after three or four weeks, finding him uncooperative.

  Nigel was twelve, aggressive and moody. He liked heavy rock music and films where things exploded. No one bullied him at school. Brendan was his shadow, spineless and soft; surviving only through Nigel’s protection, like those symbiotic creatures that live around sharks and crocodiles, safe from predators by virtue of their usefulness to the host. Whereas Nigel was quite intelligent (though he never bothered to do any work), Bren was useless at everything: hopeless at sports, clueless in lessons, lazy and inarticulate, a prime candidate for the dole queue, said Ma, or, at best, a job flipping burgers —

  But Ben was destined for better things. Every other Saturday, while Nigel and Brendan rode their bikes or played with their friends out on the est
ate, he went to Dr Peacock’s house — the house that he called the Mansion — and in the mornings sat at a big desk upholstered in bottle-green leather and read from books with hardback covers, and learnt geography from a painted globe with the names written on it in tiny scrolled lettering — Iroquois, Rangoon, Azerbaijan — arcane, obsolete, magical names just like Mrs White’s paints, that smelt vaguely of gin and the sea, of peppery dust and acrid spices, like an early taste of some mysterious freedom that he had yet to experience. And if you spun the globe fast enough, the oceans and the continents would chase each other so fast that at last all the colours merged into one, into one perfect shade of blue: ocean blue, heavenly blue, Benjamin blue —

  In the afternoons they would do other things, like look at pictures and listen to sounds, which was part of Dr Peacock’s research, and which Ben found incomprehensible, but to which he submitted obediently.

  There were books and books of letters and numbers arranged in patterns that he had to identify. There was a library of recorded sounds. There were questions like: What colour is Wednesday? What number is green? — and shapes with intriguing made-up names, but there were never any wrong answers, which meant that Dr Peacock was pleased, and that Ma was always proud of him.

  And he liked to go to that big old house, with its library and its studio and its archive of forgotten things; records, cameras, bundles of yellow photographs, weddings and family groups and long-dead children in sailor suits with anxious, watch-the-birdie smiles. He was wary of St Oswald’s, but it was nice to study with Dr Peacock, to be called Benjamin; to listen to him talk about his travels, his music, his studies, his roses.

  Best of all, he mattered there. There he was special — a subject, a case. Dr Peacock listened to him; noted down his reactions to various kinds of stimuli; then asked him precisely what he felt. Often he would record the results on his little Dictaphone, referring to Ben as Boy X, to protect his anonymity.