Yes, Brendan Brown is sensitive. Action movies frighten him. Wildlife documentaries are out; as are horror movies, video games, cowboy films or combat scenes. He even feels for the bad guy. Sports, too, are a discomfort to him, with their risk of injuries and collisions. Instead he watches cookery shows, or gardening shows, or travelogues, or porn, and dreams of other places; feels printed sunlight on his face —
It’s squeamishness, his mother says. He feels things more than the others do.
Perhaps he does, thinks Brendan Brown. Perhaps he feels things differently. Because if he watches someone in pain, it makes him so uncomfortable that sometimes he is physically sick, and he cries in frightened confusion at the things the images make him feel —
His brother in blue is aware of this, and makes him watch his experiments with flies and wasps, and then with mice; shows him pictures to make him squirm. Dr Peacock calls it mirror-touch synaesthesia, and it presents — in his case, at least — as a kind of pathological sensitivity, in which the optical part of the brain somehow mirrors the physical, so that he can experience what others feel — be it a touch, or a taste, or a blow — as clearly as if it were done to himself.
His brother in black despises him, scorns him for his weakness. Even his mother ignores him now: the middle child, the quiet one, caught between Nigel, the black sheep, and Benjamin, the blue-eyed boy —
Brendan hates his brothers. He hates the way they make him feel. One is angry all the time, the other smug and contemptuous. And Brendan feels for them — too much — whether or not he wants to. They itch; he wants to scratch. They bleed; and Brendan obediently bleeds for them. Truth told, it isn’t empathy. It’s only a mindless physical response to a series of visual stimuli. He wouldn’t care if they both died — as long as they did it far away, where he didn’t have to watch it.
Sometimes, when he’s alone, he reads. Slowly at first, and in private: books about travel and photography; poems and plays; short stories, novels and dictionaries. The printed word is different from what he sees around him. In his mind, the action unfolds without his body’s involvement. He reads in the cellar late at night by the light of the bare bulb; the cellar that, lacking a room of his own, he has secretly converted into a darkroom. Here he reads books that his teachers wouldn’t believe he had the wit to understand; books that, if his mates at school were to catch him reading, would make him a target for every joke, for every bully that came along.
But here, in his darkroom, he feels safe; there’s no one here to laugh at him when he follows the words with his finger. No one to call him retarded when he reads the words aloud. No, this is Brendan’s private place. Here he can do as he pleases. And sometimes, when he’s alone, he has dreams. Dreams of dressing in something other than brown, of having people notice him, of showing his true colours.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? All his life he has been Brendan Brown; doomed to be dull, to be stupid. In fact, he was never stupid. He simply hid it very well. At school, he did the minimum work, to protect himself from ridicule. At home, he has always pretended to be stolid and unimaginative. He knows that he is safer that way, now that Ben has taken his place, has robbed him of Ma’s affection, has swallowed him, as he himself swallowed Mal, in the desperate struggle for dominance —
It isn’t fair, thinks Brendan Brown. He, too, has blue eyes. He, too, has special skills. His shyness and his stammer leads them all to assume that he is inarticulate. But words have tremendous power, he knows. He wants to learn how to handle them. And he is good with computers. He knows how to process information. He is fighting his dyslexia with the aid of a special programme. Later, under cover of his part-time job at the fast-food place, he joins a creative-writing class. He isn’t very good at first, but he works hard; he wants to learn. Words and their meanings fascinate him. He wants to know more about them. He wants to strip the language down to the very motherboard.
Most importantly, he is discreet. Discreet and very patient. To nail his colours to the mast would be to declare his intentions. Brendan Brown knows better than this. Brendan values camouflage. That is why he has survived this far. By blending into the background; by letting other people shine; by standing on the sidelines to watch while the opposition destroys itself —
Sun Szu says in The Art Of War: All warfare is based on deception. Well, if there’s anything our boy knows, it’s how to deceive and obfuscate.
Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
He chooses his moment carefully. He has never been impulsive. Unlike Nigel, who could always be relied upon to act first and think later (if he thought at all), responding to triggers so obvious that even a child could have played him —
If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.
Easily done, where Nigel is concerned. A well-placed word could do it. In this case it leads to violence; to a chain reaction that no one can stop and which ends with the death of his brother in blue and the arrest of his brother in black, and Badass Brendan, free of them both and whiter than the driven snow —
Item One: a black Moleskine notebook.
Item Two: some photographs of his brother in black cavorting with Tricia Goldblum, aka Mrs Electric Blue — some of them nicely intimate, taken with a long lens from the back of the lady’s garden and developed in stealth in the darkroom, which no one, not even Ma, knows about —
Put them both together, like nitrogen and glycerine, and —
Wham!
In fact, it was almost too easy. People are so predictable. Nigel was especially, with his moods and his violent temper. Thanks to the reverse-halo effect (Nigel always hated Ben), all our hero had to do was to wind him up and put him in place, and the rest was a foregone conclusion. A casual word in Nigel’s ear, suggesting that Ben was spying on him; the mention of a secret cache; then planting the evidence for Nigel to find under his brother’s mattress, and after that the only thing our boy had to do was to remove himself from the premises while the sordid business of murder unfurled.
Ben denied all knowledge, of course. That was the fatal mistake. Brendan knew from experience that the only way to avoid serious hurt is to confess to the crime immediately, even when you’re innocent. He’d learnt that lesson early on — thereby earning himself the convenient reputation of being a hopeless liar, whilst taking the blame for a number of things for which he was not responsible. In any case, Ben had no time to explain. Nigel’s first blow cracked his skull. After that — well, suffice it to say that Benjamin never stood a chance.
Of course, our hero wasn’t there. Like Macavity, the Mystery Cat, he has mastered the difficult technique of eclipsing himself from unpleasantness. It was Brendan’s Ma who found her son, who called the police and the ambulance, and then who kept watch at the hospital, and who never cried, not even once, not even when they told her that the damage was irreversible, that Benjamin would never wake up —
Manslaughter, they called it.
Interesting word — man’s laughter — coloured in shades of lightning-blue and scented with sage and violet. Yes, he sees Ben’s colours now. After all, he took his place. It all belongs to Brendan now — his gift; his future; his colours.