Джоан Харрис: Blueeyedboy

To Kevin,

who also has blue eyes.

Some books are easy to write. Some are rather more difficult. And some books are just like Rubik’s cubes, with no apparent solution in sight. This particular Rubik’s cube would never have been solved without the help of my editor, Marianne Velmans, and my agent, Peter Robinson, who encouraged me to persevere. Thanks, too, to my PA, Anne Riley; to publicist Louise Page-Lund; to Mr Fry for the loan of Patch; to copy-editor Lucy Pinney; to Claire Ward and Jeff Cottenden for the cover art; to Francesca Liversidge; Manpreet Grewal; Sam Copeland; Kate Tolley; Jane Villiers; Michael Carlisle; Mark Richards; Voltaire; Jennifer and Penny Luithlen. Thanks, too, to the unsung heroes: the proofreaders; sales executives; book reps and booksellers who are so often forgotten when it comes to handing out the laurels. Special thanks to my friends in fic and fandom, especially to: gl-12; ashlibrooke; spicedogs; mr_henry_gale; marzella; jade_melody; henry_holland; divka; benobsessed. And, of course, to the man in Apartment 7, whose voice was in my mind from the start.

Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest, moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother’s favourite. And he was a murderer.

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Posted at: 02.56 on Monday, January 28

Status: public

Mood: nostalgic

Listening to: Captain Beefheart: ‘Ice Cream For Crow’

The colour of murder is blue, he thinks. Ice-blue, smokescreen blue, frostbite, post-mortem, body-bag blue. It is also his colour in so many ways, running through his circuitry like an electrical charge, screaming blue murder all the way.

Blue colours everything. He sees it, senses it everywhere, from the blue of his computer screen to the blue of the veins on the backs of her hands, raised now and twisted like the tracks of sandworms on Blackpool beach — where they used to go, the four of them, every year on his birthday, and he would have an ice-cream cone, and paddle in the sea, and search out the little scuttling crabs from under the piles of seaweed, and drop them into his bucket to die in the heat of the simmering birthday sun.

Today he is only four years old, and there is a peculiar innocence in the way he carries out these small and guiltless slayings. There is no malice in the act, merely a keen curiosity for the scuttling thing that tries to escape, sidling round and round the base of the blue plastic bucket; then, hours later, giving up the fight, claws splayed, and turning its vivid underbelly upwards in a futile show of surrender, by which time he has long since lost interest and is eating a coffee ice cream (a sophisticated choice for such a little boy, but vanilla has never been his taste), so that when he rediscovers it at the end of the day, when the time comes to empty his bucket and to go home, he is vaguely surprised to find the creature dead, and wonders, indeed, how such a thing could ever have been alive at all.

His mother finds him wide-eyed on the sand, poking the dead thing with a fingertip. Her main concern is not for the fact that her son is a killer, but for the fact that he is suggestible, and that many things upset him in a way that she does not understand.

‘Don’t play with that,’ she tells him. ‘It’s nasty. Come away from there.’

‘Why?’ he says.

Good question. The creatures in the bucket have been standing undisturbed all day. He gives it some thought. ‘They’re dead,’ he concludes. ‘I collected them all, and now they’re dead.’

His mother scoops him into her arms. This is precisely what she dreads. Some kind of outburst: tears, perhaps; something that will make the other mothers look down their noses at her and sneer.

She comforts him. ‘It’s not your fault. It was just an accident. Not your fault.’

An acciden t, he thinks to himself. Already, he knows that this is a lie. There was no accident, it was his fault, and the fact that his mother denies this confuses him more than her shrill voice and the feverish way she clasps him in her arms, smearing his T-shirt with suntan oil. He pulls away — he hates mess — and she fixes him with a fretful gaze, wondering if he is going to cry.

He wonders whether perhaps he should. Maybe she expects it of him. But he can sense how very anxious she is, how hard she tries to protect him from pain. And the scent of his ma’s distress is like the coconut of her suntan oil mixed with the taste of tropical fruit, and suddenly it hits him — Dead! Dead! — and he really does begin to cry.

And so she kicks sand over the rest of his catch — a snail, a shrimp, a baby flatfish all landed and gasping, with its little mouth pulled down in a tragic crescent — smiling and singing; Whoops! All gone! — trying to make a game of it, holding him tightly as she does, so that no possible taint of guilt may darken the gaze of her blue-eyed boy.

He is so sensitive, she thinks. So startlingly imaginative. His brothers are another race, with their scabbed knees and their uncombed hair and their wrestling matches on the beds. His brothers do not need her protection. They have each other. They have their friends. They like vanilla ice cream, and when they play at cowboys (two fingers cocked to make a gun) they always wear the white hats, and make the bad guys pay.

But he has always been different. Curious. Impressionable. You think too much , she tells him sometimes, with the look of a woman too much in love to admit to any real fault in the object of her devotion. He can already see how she worships him, wants to protect him from everything, from every shadow that may pass across the blue skies of his life, from every possible injury, even the ones he inflicts on himself.

For a mother’s love is uncritical, selfless and self-sacrificing; a mother’s love can forgive anything: tantrums, tears, indifference, ingratitude or cruelty. A mother’s love is a black hole that swallows every criticism, absolves all blame, excuses blasphemy, theft and lies, transmuting even the vilest deed into something that is not his fault —

Whoops! All gone!

Even murder.

Post comment:

Captainbunnykiller: LOL, dude. You rock!

ClairDeLune: This is wonderful,blueeyedboy. I think you ought to write more fully about your relationship with your mother and the way it has affected you. I don’t believe that anyone is born bad. We simply make bad choices, that’s all. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

JennyTricks: (post deleted).

blueeyedboy: Why, thank you...

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Posted at: 17.39 on Monday, January 28