The bathroom is tiled in aqua and white. Mrs B is reclining, eyes closed, in the water. Her face is a startling turquoise — some beauty mask, he conjectures. There is a copy of Vogue on the floor. Something smells of strawberries. Mrs B favours bath bombs that leave a sparkly residue: a layer of stardust on her skin.
Stellatio: the act of unconsciously transferring bath-bomb glitter on to another person without their knowledge or consent.
Stellata: the tiny fragments of sparkly stuff that find their way into his hair, his skin; three months later, he’s still finding those bright flecks around the house, signalling his guilt in Morse code.
He watches her in silence. He could do it now, he tells himself; but sometimes the urge to be seen is too strong; and he wants to see the look in her eyes. He lingers for a moment; and then, some sense alerts her to him. She opens her eyes — for a moment there is no shock at all, just a wide, blank amazement, like that of those dollies in the hall — and then she is sitting up, a surge of water pulling at her, making her heavy, making her slow, and the smell of strawberries is suddenly overwhelming, and the glittery water splashes his face, and he is leaning into the bathtub, and she’s punching at him with her helpless fists, and he grabs her by her soapy hair and pushes her under the surface.
It is surprisingly easy. Even so, he dislikes the mess. The woman is covered with glittery stuff that transfers on to his skin. The scent of synthetic strawberry intensifies. She heaves and struggles beneath his weight, but gravity is against her, and the weight of the water holds her down.
He waits for several minutes, thinking of those pink wafers in the tins of Family Circle, and another scent emerges from the lightning chain of words — Wafer. Communion. Holy Ghost. He allows himself to relax; gives his breathing time to slow down, then carefully, methodically, he goes about his housework.
No prints will be found at the scene — he is wearing latex gloves, and has politely removed his shoes in the hall, like a good little boy on a visit. He checks the body. It looks OK. He mops the spilled water from the bathroom floor and leaves the candles burning.
Now he strips off his wet shirt and jeans, balls them up in his gym bag, puts on the clean clothes he has brought. He leaves the house as he found it — takes the wet clothes home with him and puts them in the washing machine.
There, he thinks. All gone.
He waits for discovery — no one comes. He has managed it again. But this time, he feels no euphoria. In fact he feels a sense of loss; and that harsh and cuprous dead-vegetable taste, so like that of the vitamin drink, creeps into his throat and fills his mouth, making him gag and grimace.
Why is this one different? he thinks. Why should he feel her absence now, when everything is so close to completion, and why should he feel he has thrown away — to use his Ma’s habitual phrase — the baby with the bath water? 322
Post comment:
ClairDeLune: Thank you for this, blueeyedboy. It was wonderful to hear you read this in Group. I hope you won’t leave it so long next time! Remember we’re all there for you!
chrysalisbaby: wish i could have heard U read
Captainbunnykiller: Bitchin’ — LOL!
Toxic69: This is better than sex, man. Still, if you could find your way to writing a bit of both, some day —
7
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 23.59 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restricted
Mood: lonely
Listening to: Motorhead: ‘The Ace Of Spades’
Well, of course, one has to allow for poetic licence. But sometimes fiction is better than life. Maybe that’s how it should have been. Murder is murder — be it by poison, by proxy, by drowning or by the thousand paper-cuts of the Press. Murder is murder, guilt is guilt, and under the fic beats a telltale truth as red and bloody as a heart. Because murder changes everyone — victim, culprit, witness, suspect — in so many unexpected ways. It’s a Trojan, which infects the soul, lying dormant for months and years, stealing secrets, severing links, corrupting memories and worse, and finally emerging at last in a system-wide orgy of destruction.
No, I don’t feel any remorse. Not for Catherine’s death, at least. It was instinct that led me to act as I did; the instinct of a baby bird struggling for survival. Ma’s response, too, was instinctive. I was, after all, the only child. I had to succeed, to be the best; discretion was no longer an option. I’d accepted Ben’s inheritance. I read his books. I wore his clothes. And when the Peacock scandal broke, I told my brother’s story — not as it really happened, of course, but how Ma had imagined it, revealing my brother once and for all as the saint, the victim, the star of the show —
Yes, I do feel sorry for that. Dr Peacock had been kind to me. But I had no choice. You know that, right? To refuse would have been unthinkable; I was already caught in the bottle trap, a trap of my own making, and I was fighting for my life by then, the life I’d stolen from Benjamin.
You understand, Albertine. You took a life from Emily. Not that I hold it against you. Quite the opposite, in fact. A person who knows how to take a life can always take another. And as I think I said before, what really counts — in murder, as in all affairs of the heart — is not so much knowledge as desire.
Well — may I still call you Albertine?Bethan never suited you. But the roses that grew up your garden wall — Albertine, with their wistful scent — were just the same variety as the ones that grew at the Mansion. I suppose I must have told you that. You always paid attention. Little Bethan Brannigan, with her bobbed brown hair and those slate-blue eyes. You lived next door to Emily, and in a certain kind of light you could almost have been her sister. You might even have been a friend to her, a child of her own age to play with.
But Mrs White was a terrible snob. She despised Mrs Brannigan, with her rented house and her Irish twang and suspiciously absent husband. She worked at the local primary school — in fact, she’d once taught my brother, who dubbed her Mrs Catholic Blue, and poured contempt on her beliefs. And though Patrick White was more tolerant than either Benjamin or Ma, Catherine kept Emily well away from the Irish girl and her family.
But you liked to watch her, didn’t you? The little blind girl from over the wall who played the piano so beautifully; who had everything you didn’t have, who had tutors and presents and visitors and who never had to go to school? And when I first spoke to you, you were shy; a little suspicious, at least at first, then flattered at the attention. You accepted my gifts first with puzzlement, then finally with gratitude.
Best of all, you never judged me. You never cared that I was fat. You never cared that I stammered, or thought of me as second-rate. You never asked a thing of me, or expected me to be someone else. I was the brother you’d never had. You were the little sister. And it never once occurred to you that you were just an excuse, a stooge; that the main attraction was somewhere else —
Well, now you know how I felt. We don’t always get what we want in life. I had Ben, you had Emily; both of us on the sidelines; extras; substitutes for the real thing. Still, I became quite fond of you. Oh, not in the way I loved Emily, the little sister I should have had. But your innocent devotion was something I’d never encountered before. It’s true that I was nearly twice your age; but you had a certain quality. You were engaging, obedient. You were unusually bright. And, of course, you desperately longed to be whatever it was that I wanted of you —