Every village has one. The local do-gooder. The busybody. The one to whom everyone applies when in need of information. Eleanor Vine is Malbry’s: a poisonous toady who currently forms part of the toxic triumvirate that makes up my mother’s retinue. I suppose I ought to feel privileged. Mrs Vine rarely leaves her house, viewing the world through net curtains, occasionally condescending to welcome others into her immaculate sanctum for biscuits, tea and vitriol. She has a niece called Terri, who goes to my writing-as-therapy class. Mrs Vine thinks that Terri and I would make a charming couple. I think that Mrs Vine would make an even more charming corpse.
Today she was all sweetness. ‘You look exhausted, B.B.,’ she said, greeting me in the hushed voice of one addressing an invalid. ‘I hope you’re taking care of yourself.’
It is common knowledge in the Village that Eleanor Vine is something of a hypochondriac, taking twenty kinds of pills and disinfecting incessantly. Over twenty years ago, Ma used to clean her house, though now Eleanor reserves that privilege for herself, and can often be seen through her kitchen window, Marigolds on standby, polishing the fruit in the cut-glass dish that stands on the kitchen table, a mixture of joy and anxiety on her thin, discoloured face.
My iPod was playing a song from one of my current playlists. Through the earpiece, Voltaire’s darkly satirical voice expounded the various virtues of vice to the melancholy counterpoint of a gypsy violin.
And it’s so easy when you’re evil.
This is the life, you see,
The Devil tips his hat to me –
‘I’m quite all right, Mrs Vine,’ I said.
‘Not sickening for anything?’
I shook my head. ‘Not even a cold.’
‘Because bereavement can do that, you know,’ she said. ‘Old Mr Marshall got pneumonia four weeks after his poor wife passed on. Dead before the headstone went up. The Examiner called it a double tragedy.’
I had to smile at the thought of myself pining away for Nigel.
‘I hear they’re missing you at your class.’
That killed the smile. ‘Oh yes? Who says?’
‘People talk,’ said Eleanor.
I’ll bet they do. Toxic old cow. Spying on me for Ma, I don’t doubt. And now, thanks to Terri, a spy for my writing-as-therapy class, that little circle of parasites and headcases with whom I share – in supposed confidence – the details of my troubled life.
‘I’ve been preoccupied,’ I said.
She gave me a look of sympathy. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It must be hard. And what about Gloria? Is she all right?’ She glanced around the parlour, alert for any telltale sign – a smear of dust on the mantelpiece, a speck on any one of Ma’s collection of china dogs – to suggest that Ma might be cracking up.
‘Oh, you know. She manages.’
‘I brought her a little something,’ she said, handing me a paper bag. ‘It’s a supplement I sometimes use when I’m feeling under the weather.’ She gave her vinegary smile. ‘Looks like you could do with some yourself. Have you been in a fight, or something?’
‘Who, me?’ I shook my head.
‘No. Of course,’ said Eleanor.
No, of course. As if I would. As if Gloria Winter’s boy could ever be involved in a fight. Everyone thinks they know me. Everyone’s an authority. And it always irks me a little to think that she, like Ma, would never believe the tenth of what I am capable –
‘Oh, Eleanor, love, you should have come through!’ That was Ma, emerging from the kitchen with a tea-towel in one hand and a vegetable peeler in the other. ‘I was just making him his vitamin drink. D’you want some tea while you’re here?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘I just popped in to see how you were.’
‘Holding up all right,’ said Ma. ‘B.B.’s looking after me.’
Ouch. That was below the belt. But Ma is very proud of me. A taste like that of rotten fruit slowly crept into my mouth. Rotten fruit mixed with salt, like a cocktail of juice and sea water. From my iPod, Voltaire declaimed with murderous exuberance:
I do it all because I’m evil.
And I do it all for free –
Eleanor gave me a sidelong glance. ‘He must be such a comfort, love.’ She turned once more to look at me. ‘I don’t know how you can hear a word we’re saying with that thing in your ear. Don’t you ever take it out?’
If I could have killed her then, right then, without risk, I would have snapped her neck like a stick of Blackpool rock without so much as a tremor of guilt – but as it was I had to smile so hard it made my fillings ache, and to take out one of my iPod plugs, and to promise to go back to my class next week, where everyone is missing me –
‘What did she mean, go back to your class? Have you been skipping sessions again?’
‘No, Ma. Just the one.’ I did not quite dare meet her eyes.
‘Those classes are for your own good. I don’t want to hear you’re skipping them.’
Of course, I should have known that sooner or later she would find out. With friends like Eleanor Vine, her net covers all of Malbry. Besides, I quite enjoy my class, which gives me the chance to disseminate all kinds of misinformation –
‘Besides, it helps you cope with stress.’
If only you knew, Ma.
‘OK, I’ll go.’
7
You are viewing the WebJournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 01.44 on Wednesday, January 30
Status: restricted
Mood: creative
Listening to: Breaking Benjamin: ‘Breath’
Most accidents occur in the home. I’m guessing that’s how I came about; one of three boys, all born within five years. Nigel, then Brendan, then Benjamin, though by then she’d stopped using our real names, and I was always B.B.
Benjamin. It’s a Hebrew name. It means Son Of My Right Hand. Not so very flattering, really, when you consider what guys actually do with their right hand. But then, the man we knew as Dad was hardly a dutiful father. Only Nigel remembered him, and then only as a series of vague impressions: a big voice; a rough face; a scent of beer and cigarettes. Or maybe that’s memory doing what it does sometimes, filling in the gaps with plausible detail while the rest turns over in darkness, like a spindle laden with black sheep’s wool.
Not that Nigel was the black sheep – all of that came later. But he was destined to always wear black, and with time, it affected his character. Ma worked as a cleaner in those days: dusting and vacuuming rich people’s homes, doing their laundry, ironing their clothes, washing their dishes and polishing their floors. Time spent on our own house was unpaid work, and so of course it took second place. Not that she was slovenly. But time was always an issue with her, and had to be saved at every turn.
And so, with three sons so close to each other in age and so much laundry to do every week, she hit upon an ingenious system. To ensure that items could be easily identified, she allocated to each of her sons a colour, and bought our clothes accordingly from the local Oxfam shop. Thus Nigel wore shades of charcoal, even down to his underwear; Brendan always wore brown and Benjamin –
Well, I’m sure you can guess.
Of course, it never crossed her mind what such a decision might do to us. Colours make a difference; any hospital worker can tell you that. That’s why the cancer unit in the hospital where I work is painted in cheery shades of pink; the waiting rooms in soothing green; the maternity wards in Easter-chick yellow –
But Ma never really understood the secret power of colours. To Ma, it was just a practical means of sorting laundry. Ma never asked herself what it might be like to have to wear the same colour day in, day out: boring brown or gloomy black or beautiful, wide-eyed, fairy-tale blue –
But then, Ma always was different. Some boy’s mothers are sugar and spice. Mine was – well – she was something else.
Born Gloria Beverley Green, the third child of a factory girl and a steelworker, Ma spent her childhood in Malbry town, in the maze of little brick
terraces known locally as Red City. Washing strung across the streets; soot on every surface; cobbled alleyways leading to nothing but blind and litter-lined spray-painted walls.
Ambitious even then, she dreamed of far pavilions, distant shores and working girls rescued by millionaires. Even now, Ma believes in true love, in the lottery, in self-help books, in boosting your word power, in magazine columns and agony aunts and TV advertisements in which the floors are always clean and women always worth it –
Of course, she was neither imaginative nor particularly bright – she left school with only five CSEs – but Gloria Green was determined enough to compensate for her failings, and instead turned all of her considerable willpower and energy towards finding a means of escape from the grime and small-mindedness of Red City into that TV world of clean babies and shiny floors and numbers that can change your life.
It wasn’t easy, keeping the faith. Red City was all she had ever known. A rat trap, that lures you in, but seldom lets you out again. Her friends all married in their teens; found jobs, had kids. Gloria stayed with her parents, helping her mother keep house and waiting day after tedious day for a prince who never came.
Finally she gave in. Chris Moxon was a friend of her dad’s; he ran a fish-and-chip shop and lived on the edge of White City. He wasn’t exactly Catch of the Day – being older and balder than she’d planned – but he was kind and attentive, and by then she was getting desperate. She married him at All Saints’ Church in white tulle and carnations, and for a while she almost believed that she had somehow escaped the rat trap –
But she found that the smell of frying fat crept into everything she owned – her dresses, her stockings, even her shoes. And however many Marlboros she smoked, however much scent she dabbed on to her skin, there was always that stink – his stink – underlying everything; and she realized that she hadn’t escaped the rat trap, she had simply fallen deeper inside.
Then she met Peter Winter at a Christmas party later that year. He worked at a local car dealership and drove a BMW. Heady stuff for Gloria Green, embarking on her first affair with the coolness of a professional poker player. Certainly, the stakes were high. Gloria’s Pa thought the world of Chris. But Peter Winter looked promising: he was solvent, ambitious, untroubled, unwed. He spoke of moving out of White City; of finding a house in the Village, perhaps –
It was good enough for Gloria. She made him her personal project. Within twelve months she was divorced, and pregnant with her first child. She swore that the boy was Peter’s, of course, and when she was able, she married him, in spite of her family’s protests.
This time, there was no fanfare. Gloria had shamed them all. No one attended the ceremony, which was held on a dismal November day at the local Register Office. And when things started to fall apart – when Peter started drinking, when the dealership went broke – Gloria’s parents refused to back down, or even to see the little boy that she’d named after her father –
But Gloria was undaunted. She took an evening job in town, as well as her daily cleaning shift; and when she became pregnant again she hid it, wearing a girdle right up until the eighth month, so that she could keep earning money. When her second son was born she took in mending work and ironing too, so that the house was always filled with the steam and the smell of other people’s washing. The dream of a house in the Village had become increasingly remote; but at least in White City there were schools, and a park for the kids, and a job at the local laundrette. Things looked good for Gloria, and she faced her new life with optimism.
But two years of unemployment had wrought a change in Peter Winter. Once a charmer, now he’d grown fat, spending his days in front of the TV, smoking Camels and drinking beer. Gloria was carrying him, much to her resentment; and unbeknownst to her, by then she was pregnant once again.
I never knew my real father. Ma seldom spoke of him. He was handsome, though. I have his eyes. I think Gloria secretly thought that he might turn out to be her ticket out of White City. But Mr Blue Eyes had other ideas, and by the time Ma learnt the truth, her ship had sailed for sunnier shores, leaving her to weather the storm.
No one knows how Peter found out. Perhaps he saw them together somewhere. Perhaps someone talked. Perhaps he just guessed. But Nigel remembered the night he left – or at least, he said he did, though he can’t have been five years old at the time. A night of broken crockery, of shouted oaths, of insults – and then the sound of the car starting, the slammed door, the squeal of rubber on the road – a sound that to me always conjures up the smell of fresh popcorn and cinema seats. Then, later, the crash, the broken glass, the howl of sirens in the air –
Of course Nigel never heard all that. That was the way she told it, though; that was Ma’s version of the tale. Peter Winter took three weeks to die, leaving his widow pregnant and alone. But Gloria Green was tough. She found a childminder in White City and simply worked harder, pushed herself more, and when she left her job at last, two weeks before the baby was due, her employers took a collection that raised a total of forty-two pounds. Gloria spent some of it on a washing machine and banked the rest, to make it last. She was still only twenty-seven.
At this point I think I might have gone home to my parents. She had no job, hardly any savings, no friends. Her looks, too, had begun to fade, and little remained of the Gloria Green who had left Red City with such high hopes. But to crawl back to her family – defeated, with two children, a baby and no husband – was unthinkable. And so she stayed in White City. She worked from home; looked after her sons; washed and ironed and mended and cleaned, while all the time she was searching for another escape, even as her youth left her and White City closed around her like a drowning man’s arms.
And then Ma had a stroke of luck. Peter’s insurance paid out. Turns out he was worth more dead than he’d ever been worth alive; and finally, Ma had some money. Not enough – there was never enough – but now she could see a light ahead. And that piece of good fortune had come along just as her youngest entered the world, making him her lucky charm; her chance at the winning ticket.
In certain parts of the world, you know, blue eyes are thought to be bad luck, the sign of a demon in disguise. But to carry a blue-eye talisman – a glass bead on a piece of string – is to divert the path of malchance, to send back evil to its source; to banish demons to their lair and to bring good fortune in their place –
Ma, with her love of TV drama, believed in easy solutions. Fiction works to formula. The victim is always a pretty girl. And the answers are always right under your nose, to be revealed in the penultimate scene: by accident, or perhaps by a child – tying up all the loose ends in a pretty birthday-party bow.
Life, of course, is different. Life is nothing but loose ends. And sometimes the thread that seemed to lead so clearly into the heart of the labyrinth turns out to be nothing but tangled string, leaving us alone in the dark, afraid and consumed with the growing belief that the real action is still going on somewhere without us, just around the corner –
So much for luck. I came very close. Almost close enough to touch before it was taken away from me. It wasn’t my fault. But still she blames me. And ever since, I have tried to be everything she expects of me; and still it’s never quite enough, never enough for Gloria Green –
Is that what you feel? says Clair, from Group. Don’t you think you’re good enough?
Bitch. Don’t even go there.
You’re not the first to try it, you know. You women, with your questions. You think it’s so easy to judge cause and effect, to analyse and to excuse. Do you think you can fit me into one of your little boxes, a neatly labelled specimen? That, armed with a few choice details, you can pencil in the rest of my soul?
Not much chance of that here, ClairDeLune. You people really have nothing on me. You think I’m new to this game? I’ve been in and out of groups like yours for the greater part of twenty years. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of fun: recalling childhood incidents; inventing dreams,
spinning straw into fantasy –
In this way, Clair has come to believe that she knows the man behind the avatar. Fat Chryssie – aka chrysalisbaby – also thinks she understands. In actual fact, I know more about them than they could ever know about me; knowledge that may come in useful some day if ever I choose to exploit it.
Clair thinks she is trying to help me. I think she is in denial. Clair’s therapeutic writing class is really nothing but a disguised attempt at amateur psychoanalysis. And Clair’s online fascination for all things damned and dangerous suggests that she, too, feels damaged. I’m guessing an early experience of abuse, perhaps by a family member. Her fixation with the actor Angel Blue – a man so much older than herself – suggests that she may have daddy issues. Well, of course, I can sympathize. But it’s hardly reassuring in a lecturer. Plus it makes her so vulnerable. I hope it doesn’t end in tears.
As for Fat Chryssie’s interest in me – it seems to be purely romantic. Well, it makes a change from her usual posts, which normally consist of a series of lists detailing her calorie consumption – Diet Coke: 1.5 cals; Skinny Cow: 90 cals; nacho chips, lo-fat cheese: prolly about 300 cals – punctuated by agonizing monologues on how ugly she feels, or interminable pictures of skinny, fragile Goth girls that she refers to as thinspiration.
Sometimes she posts pictures of herself – always body shots, never the face – taken on a mobile phone in front of the bathroom mirror, and encourages people to rant at her. Very few indulge her in this (with the exception of Cap, who hates fatties), but some of the other girls leave ana – love, or saccharine messages of support – Babe, you’re doing great. Stay strong! – or half-baked advice about dieting.
Thus Chryssie has acquired an almost evangelical faith in the properties of green tea as a metabolism booster, and in ‘negative calorie foods’ (which to her mind include carrots, broccoli, blueberries, asparagus and many other things that she rarely eats). Her avatar is a manga drawing of a little girl dressed in black with butterfly wings growing out of her shoulders, and her signature line – at the same time hopeful and unutterably sad – reads: One day I’ll be lighter than air . . .