Well, I had the chance to be different. To step out of my own life and into one of my shadows. Wouldn’t anyone do the same? Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?
4
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 01.04 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restricted
Mood: reflective
Listening to: Sally Oldfield: ‘Mirrors’
Of course, Ma grieved for Benjamin. In silence, at first — an ominous calm that at first I took for acceptance. Then came the other symptoms; the rage; the forays into insanity. I’d hear her in the middle of the night, dusting the china dogs downstairs or simply walking around the house.
Sometimes she sobbed: It wasn’t your fault. Sometimes she mistook me for my brother, or ranted at me for my failures. Sometimes she screamed: It should have been you! Sometimes she woke me in the night, sobbing — Oh B.B, I dreamed you’d died — and it took me some time to understand that we were interchangeable, and that Benjamin Blue and blueeyedboy were often, to Ma, one and the same —
Then came the fallout. Inevitably. After the shock came the backlash, and suddenly I was the target once more for all kinds of expectations. With both of my brothers gone from the scene, my role had altered drastically. I was now Ma’s blue-eyed boy. I was now her only hope. And she felt that I owed it to her to try again, to go back to school; perhaps to study medicine — to do all the things that he should have done, and that only I could now achieve.
At first I tried to defend myself. I wasn’t cut out for medicine. I’d failed every science subject at Sunnybank Park, and I’d barely scraped through O-level maths. But Ma was having none of it. I had a responsibility. I’d been lazy and slack for far too long; now it was time for me to change . . .
Well, you know what happened then. I fell mysteriously sick. My belly was filled with writhing snakes, pouring their venom into my guts. By the end of it all, I’d lost so much weight that I looked like a clown in my old clothes. I flinched at loud noises, cringed at bright lights. And sometimes I barely remembered the terrible, marvellous thing that I’d done, or where Ben finished and Brendan began —
Well, that’s only natural, isn’t it? My memories are so nebulous, sneakily substituting second-hand smoke into this game of mirrors. I was feverish; I was in pain; I don’t know what I said to her. I don’t remember anything — lies, confessions, promises — but when I was fully recovered, and I left my bed for the first time, I knew that something about me had changed. I was no longer Brendan Brown, but something else entirely. And, truth be told, I no longer knew with any kind of certainty whether I had swallowed Ben, or whether he had swallowed me —
Of course I don’t believe in ghosts. I scarcely believe in the living. And yet, that’s just what I became, a shadow of my brother. When the Emily scandal broke, I reinvented his story. I already had his gift, of course, thanks to my own condition. Which made it so much easier to make them believe that I was telling the truth.
I started to wear Ben’s colour, his clothes. At first just for practicality’s sake, because my own clothes were too big. I didn’t wear blue all the time. A sweatshirt here, a T-shirt there. Ma didn’t seem to notice. The scandal surrounding Emily White had made me into a hero; people bought me drinks in pubs; girls suddenly found me attractive. I’d started at Malbry College that term. I let Ma believe I was studying medicine. My teenage skin had finally cleared; I’d even lost my stammer. Best of all, I was still losing weight. With my brothers gone, I seemed to have lost that ravenous need to consume, to collect, to swallow everything in sight. What started with Mal had ended with Ben. At last, my craving was satisfied.
5
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 21.56 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restrictedMood: wistful
Listening to: Judy Garland: ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’
Well, Clair — you got your way. I finally went back to Group today. With everything going so nicely to plan, I think I can allow myself a little harmless distraction. Besides, this may be the last time —
It’s a little powder-beige box of a room with a spider plant on a shelf by the door and a picture of Angel Blue on the wall. The chairs are orange, and have been arranged in a circle so that no one feels inferior. In the middle of the circle is a small table on which there is a flowered tray with a teapot, some cups, a plate of biscuits (Bourbon creams — which I hate, by the way), some lined A4 paper, a bundle of pens and the obligatory box of tissues.
Well, don’t expect any tears from me. Blueeyedboy never cries.
‘Hello! It’s so great to see you,’ said Clair. (She always says that to everyone.) ‘How are you feeling?’
‘OK, I guess.’
I’m rather less articulate in real life than I am online. One of the many reasons that I still prefer to stay at home.
‘What happened to your face?’ she said. She’d already forgotten my fic, of course — or decided it had to be all in my head.
I shrugged. ‘I had an accident.’
She gave me a look of fake sympathy. She looks like her mother, Maureen Pike; especially now that she’s reaching that age. Forty-one, forty-two; and suddenly it all moves south, no, not to Hawaii, but to some bleaker territory, a place of dry gulches and fallen rocks and holy rolling wilderness. A far cry, indeed, from ClairDeLune, who posts erotic fic on my site and who claims to be only thirty-five. Still, as you must have guessed, who we are on badguysrock can differ wildly from our real-life selves. As long as it stays a fantasy, who really cares which role we adopt? Cowboy or Indian, black hat or white, no one makes a judgement.
And yet, these games we like to play are linked to an underlying layer of truth — an untapped stratum of desire. We are what we dream. We know what we want. We know that we are worth it —
And if what we want is wickedness? If what we want is iniquity?
Well, maybe we are worth that, too. And the wages of sin is —
‘Tea?’ Clair indicated the flowered tray.
Tea. The poor man’s Prozac. ‘No, thanks.’
Terri, who takes her tea black and always ignores the biscuits — but who will eat a whole tub of chocolate-chip ice cream the moment she gets home — patted the chair beside her.
‘Hi, Bren,’ she simpered.
‘Fuck off,’ I told her.
I ran my eyes over the rest of the group. Yes, they were all there. Half a dozen assorted headcases; plus would-be writers; soapbox queens; failed poets (is there any other kind?); all desperate for a chance to be heard. But only one of them matters to me. Bethan, with the Irish eyes, watching me so hungrily —
Today she was wearing a sleeveless grey top that showed the stars tattooed down her arms. That Irish girl of Nigel’s, Ma calls her, refusing even to mention the name. The one with all those nasty tattoos.