That’s why he has to choose his time. There can be no margin of error. He knows that murder is a lot like sex: some people know how to take their time; to enjoy the rituals of seduction, rejection, reconciliation; the joy of suspense; the thrill of the chase. But most of them just need to see it done; to get the need of it out of themselves as quickly as they possibly can; to distance themselves from the horrors of that intimacy; to know release above all things.
Great lovers know it’s not about that.
Great murderers know it, too.
Not that he is a great murderer. Just an aspiring amateur. With no established modus operandi, he feels like an unknown artist who yet has to find a style of his own. That’s one of the hardest things to do — for an artist or for a murderer. Murder, like all acts of self-affirmation, requires a tremendous self-confidence. And he still feels like a novice: shy; uncertain; protective of his talents and hesitant to make himself known. In spite of it all, he is vulnerable; fearing not just the act itself, but also the reception it may have to endure; those people who will, inevitably, judge, condemn and misunderstand —
And of course, he hates her. He would never have planned it otherwise; he is no Dostoyevskian killer, acting at random and thoughtlessly. He hates her with a passion that he has never felt for anything else; a passion that blooms within him like blood; that sweeps him away on a bitter blue wave —
He wonders what it would be like. To be free of her for once and for all; free of the presence that envelops him. To be free of her voice, of her face, of her ways. But he is afraid, and untested; and so he plans the act with care, selecting his subject (he refuses to use the word victim) according to the rules, preparing it all with the neatness and precision that he extends to all things —
An accident. That’s all it was.
A most unfortunate accident.
To challenge the boundaries, he understands, you first have to learn to follow the rules. To approach such an act, one has to train, to hone one’s art on some baser element, just as a sculptor works in clay — discarding anything that is not perfect, repeating the experiment until the desired result is achieved — before creating the masterpiece. It would be naïve, he tells himself, to expect great things of his first attempt. Like sex, like art, the first time is often inelegant, clumsy and embarrassing. He has prepared himself for this. His aim is merely not to be caught. It has to be an accident — and his relationship with the subject must, though real, be distant enough to defy those who will come looking for him.
You see, he thinks like a murderer. He feels its glamour in his heart. He would never harm someone who does not already deserve to die. He may be bad, but he is not unfair. Nor is he degenerate. He will not be a commonplace, bludgeoning, thoughtless, messy, remorse-sodden killer. So many people die futile deaths — but in her case, at least, there will be reason, order and — yes, a kind of justice. One less parasite on the world, making it a better place.
A strident call from downstairs intrudes upon the fantasy. He feels an annoying tremor of guilt. She hardly ever comes into his room. Besides, why should she climb the stairs when she knows that a call will bring him down?
‘Who’s there?’ she says.
‘No one, Ma.’
‘I heard a noise.’
‘I’m working online.’
‘Talking to your imaginary friends?’
Imaginary friends. That’s good, Ma.
Ma. The sound a baby makes, the sound of sickness, of lying in bed; a feeble, milky, helpless sound that makes him feel like screaming.
‘Well, come on down. It’s time for your drink.’
‘Hang on. I’ll be right there.’
Murder. Mother. Such similar words. Matriarch. Matricide. Parasite. Parricide, something used to get rid of parasites. All of them coloured in shades of blue, like the blue of the blanket she tucked around his bed every night when he was a boy, and smelling of ether and hot milk —
Night night. Sleep tight.
Every boy loves his mother, he thinks. And his mother loves him so much. So much I could swallow you up, B.B. And maybe she has, because that’s how it feels, as if something has swallowed him, something slow but relentless, something inescapable, sucking him down into the belly of the beast —
Swallow. There’s a blue word. Flying south, into the blue. And it smells of the sea and tastes like tears, and it makes him think of that bucket again, and the poor, trapped, scuttling things dying slowly in the sun —
She’s so proud of him, she says; of his job; of his intellect; of his gift. Gift means poison in German, you know. Beware of Germans bearing gifts. Beware of swallows flying south. South to the islands of his dreams: to the blue Azores, the Galapagos, Tahiti and Hawaii —
Hawaii. Awayyy. The southernmost edge of his mental map, scented with distant spices. Not that he’s ever been there, of course. But he likes the lullaby lilt of the word, a name that sounds like laughter. White sands and palm beaches and blue skies fat with fair-weather clouds. The scent of plumeria. Pretty girls in coloured sarongs with flowers in their long hair —
But really, he knows he’ll never fly south. His mother, for all her ambitions, has never been a traveller. She likes her small world, her fantasy, the life she has carved for them piece by piece into the rock of suburbia. She will never leave, he knows; clinging to him, the last of her sons, like a barnacle, a parasite —
‘Hey!’ She calls to him from downstairs: ‘Are you coming down, or what? I thought you said you were coming down.’
‘Yes, I’m coming down, Ma.’
Of course I am. I always do. Would I ever lie to you?
And the plunge of despair as he goes downstairs into the parlour that smells of some kind of cheap fruit-flavoured air-freshener — grapefruit, maybe, or tangerine — is like going down into the belly of some huge, fetid, dying animaclass="underline" a dinosaur or a beached blue whale. And the smell of synthetic citrus makes him almost want to gag —
‘Come in here. I’ve got your drink.’
She’s sitting in the kitchenette, arms folded across her chest, feet camel-backed in her high heels. For a moment he is surprised, as always, at how very small she is. He always imagines her larger, somehow; but she is smaller than he is by far, except for her hands, which are surprisingly large compared to the bird-bony rest of her, the knuckles misshapen, not just with arthritis, but with the rings she has collected over the years — a sovereign, a diamond cluster, a Campari-coloured tourmaline, a piece of polished malachite and a flat blue sapphire gated with gold.
Her voice is at the same time both brittle and oddly penetrating. ‘You look terrible, B.B.,’ she says. ‘You’re not coming down with something, are you?’ She says coming down with a certain suspicion, as if he has brought it on himself.
‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ he says.
‘You need to take your vitamin drink.’
‘Ma, I’m fine.’
‘It’ll do you good. Go on — take it,’ she says. ‘You know what happens when you don’t.’
And take it he does, as he always does, and its taste is a murky, rotten mess, like fruit and shit in equal parts. And she looks at him with that terrible look of tenderness in her dark eyes, and kisses him gently on the cheek. The scent of her perfume — L’Heure Bleue — envelops him like a blanket.
‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while? Get some sleep before tonight? They work you so hard at that hospital, it’s a crime they get away with it—’