Джоан Харрис: Blueeyedboy

I log on for the last time, just for luck, before I set off. Simply to read my messages; to see who hasn’t slept tonight; to check for any surprises; to find out who loves me and who wants me dead.

No surprises there, then.

‘What are you doing up there?’ she calls.

‘Hang on, Ma. I’ll be down in a sec.’

And now there’s time for one more mail — to albertine@yahoo.com — before I’m ready to go at last; by noon today I’ll be on that flight, watching TV and drinking champagne —

Champagne. Sham pain. As if sensation of any kind could ever be anything other than real. My guts are afizz with excitement. It almost hurts for me to breathe. I take a moment to relax and concentrate on the colour blue. Moon-blue, lagoon-blue, ocean, island, Hawaiian blue. Blue, the colour of innocence; blue, the colour of my dreams —

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Posted at: 04.45 on Friday, February 22

Status: public

Mood: anxious

Listening to: Queen : ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’

She must have taken off her shoes. He never even heard her. The first he heard was the door as it shut, and the sound of the key as she locked it.

Click .

‘Ma?’

No answer. He goes to the door. The keys were in his coat pocket. She must have taken them, thinks blueeyedboy , when he went back upstairs. The door is pitch pine; the lock, a Yale. He has always valued his privacy.

‘Ma? Please. Talk to me.’

Just that heavy silence, like something buried under snow. Then, the sound of her footsteps receding softly down the carpeted stairs.

Has she guessed? What does she know? A finger of ice slips down his back. A tremor creeps into his voice; the ghost of the stutter he thought was lost.

‘Please, Ma!’

In fiction, our hero would break down the door; or failing that, crash through the window to land unharmed on the ground below. In real life, the door is unbreakable — though, sadly, blueeyedboy is not, as a leap from the window would surely confirm, sprawling him in agony on to the icy concrete below.

No, he’s trapped. He knows that now. Whatever his Ma is planning, he thinks, he’s helpless to prevent it. He hears her downstairs; her steps in the hall; her shoes on the polished parquet floor. The rattle of keys. She’s going out.

‘Ma!’ There’s a desperate edge to his voice. ‘Ma! Don’t take the car! Please! ’

She hardly ever takes the car. Still, today, he knows she will. The café’s only a few streets away, down at the corner of Mill Road and All Saints’; but Ma can be so impatient sometimes — and she knows that girl is expecting him, that Irish girl with all the tattoos, the one who has broken her little boy’s heart —

How did she know what he was planning? Perhaps it was his mobile phone, left on the hall table. How stupid of him to have left it there so invitingly. So easy to open his inbox; so easy to find the recent dialogue between her son and Albertine .

Albertine , she thinks with a sneer. A rose by any other name. And she knows that it’s that Irish girl, already to blame for the death of one son, now daring to threaten the other. A wasp in a jar may have killed him, but Gloria knows that Nigel’s death would never have happened but for Albertine . Stupid, jealous Nigel, who first fell for that Irish girl and then, when he found out his brother had been following her, taking photographs, had first threatened, and then used his fists on poor, helpless blueeyedboy , so that Ma had had to take action at last, putting Nigel down like a rabid dog lest history repeat itself —

Dear Bethan (if I may),

I suppose you must have heard the news by now. Dr Peacock passed away the other night at the Mansion. Fell out of his wheelchair down the steps, leaving the bulk of his estate — last valued at three million pounds — to you. Congratulations. I suppose the old man felt he owed you something for the Emily White affair.

I have to say I’m surprised, though. Brendan never told me a thing. All that time he was working for Dr Peacock, and never thought to tell me about this. But maybe he mentioned something to you? After all, you’re such good friends.

I know our respective families have had our differences over the years. But now that you’re seeing both my sons, perhaps we can bury the hatchet. This business comes as a shock to us all. Especially if what I’ve heard is true; that they’re treating the death as suspicious.

Still, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. These things blow over in time, as you know.

Yours sincerely,

Gloria.

Yes, Ma wrote the letter, of course. She has never flinched from her duty. Knowing that Nigel would open it; knowing that he would take the bait. And when Nigel came round that day, demanding to talk to blueeyedboy , she was the one who deflected him, who sent him away with a flea in his ear — or at least, with a wasp in a jar —

But now her only surviving son owes her a debt that cannot be repaid. He can never leave her now. He can never belong to anyone else. And if he ever tries to run —

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blueeyedboy: Comments, anyone? Anyone here?

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Posted at: 04.47 on Friday, February 22

Status: public

Mood: devious

Listening to: My Chemical Romance : ‘Mama’

She ought to have seen it coming, of course. She ought to have known he would end up this way. But Gloria is no expert on child development. To her, developing is something he does in his darkroom, alone. She doesn’t like to think of it much. It’s like the nasty old Blue Book, she thinks, or the games he likes to play online with those invisible friends of his. She has looked into it once or twice, with the same faint dutiful distaste as when she used to wash his sheets, but only for his protection; because other people don’t understand that blueeyedboy is sensitive; that he is simply incapable of ever standing up for himself —

The thought makes her eyes mist over a little. For all her steely hard-headedness, Gloria can be strangely sentimental at times, and even in her anger, the thought of his helplessness touches her. It’s always been at these moments, she thinks, that she loves him best of all: when he’s sick, or in tears, or in pain; when everyone else is against him; when there’s no one to love him but her; when all the world thinks he’s guilty.

Of course, she knows he’s innocent. Well, of murder, anyway. What else he may be guilty of — what crimes of the imagination — is between blueeyedboy and his Ma, who has spent her whole life protecting him, even at her own cost. But that’s her son all over, she thinks: sitting in the nest she has built, like a fat and flightless cuckoo chick with his beak perpetually open.

No, he wasn’t her favourite. But he was always the luckiest of her three unlucky boys: a natural survivor in spite of his gift; a chip, she thinks, off the old block.

And a mother owes it to her son to protect him, no matter what. Sometimes he needs to be punished, she knows; but that’s between blueeyedboy and his Ma. No stranger raises a hand to him. No one — not his school, not the law — has the right to interfere. Hasn’t she always defended him? From bullies and thugs and predators?