Oh, please. Don’t be disgusting. What kind of a pervert do you take me for? I liked to be with you, that was all, as I liked being close to Emily. Your mother never noticed me, and Mrs White, who knew who I was, never tried to intervene. On weekdays I’d call round after school, before your mother came home from work, and at weekends I’d meet you somewhere, either at the playground on Abbey Road or at the end of your garden, where we were less likely to be seen, and we’d talk about your day and mine; I’d give you sweets and chocolates, and I’d tell you stories about my Ma, my brothers, myself and Emily.
You were an excellent listener. In fact, I sometimes forgot your age and spoke to you as an equal. I told you about my condition — my gift. I showed you my cuts and bruises. I told you about Dr Peacock, and all the tests he’d performed on me before he chose my brother. I showed you some of my photographs, and confessed to you — as I could not to Ma — that all I’d ever wanted in life was to fly as far as Hawaii.
Poor little lonely girl. Who else did you have but me? Who else was there in your life? A working mother, an absent father, no grandparents, no neighbours, no friends. Except for Yours Truly, what did you have? And what wouldn’t you have done for me?
Don’t ever let them tell you that an eight-year-old child can’t feel this way. Those pre-adolescent years are filled with anguish and revolt. Adults try to forget this; to fool themselves into thinking that children feel less strongly than they; that love comes later, with puberty, a kind of compensation for the loss of a state of grace —
Love? Well, yes. There are so many kinds. There’s eros: simplest and most transient of all. There’s philia: friendship; loyalty. There’s storge: the affection a child gives its parents. There’s thelema: the desire to perform. Then there’s agape: platonic love; for a friend; for a world; love for a stranger you’ve never met; the love of all humanity.
But even the Greeks didn’t know everything. Love is like snow: there are so many words, all unique and untranslatable. Is there a word for the love you feel for someone you’ve hated all your life? Or the love for something that makes you sick? Or that sweet and aching tenderness for the one you’re going to kill?
Please believe me, Albertine. I’m sorry for all that happened to you. I never wanted you to be hurt. But madness is catching, isn’t it? Like love, it believes the impossible. Moves mountains; deals in eternity; sometimes even raises the dead.
You asked me what I wanted of you. Why I couldn’t just leave it alone. Well, Albertine, here it is. You are going to do for me what I can never do for myself. The single act that can set me free. The act I’ve been planning for over twenty years. An act I could never carry out, but which you could perform so easily —
Pick a card. Any card.
The trick is to make the mark believe that the card he has picked was his own choice, instead of the one that was chosen for him. Any card. My card. Which happens to be —
Haven’t you guessed?
Then pick a card, Albertine.
8
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.
Posted at: 23.32 on Tuesday, February 19
Status: restricted
Mood: tense
He’s playing games with me, of course. That’s what blueeyedboy does best. We’ve played so many games, he and I, that the line between truth and fiction has become permanently blurred. I ought to hate him, and yet I know that whatever he is, whatever he does, I am in part responsible.
Why is he doing this to me? What does he hope to achieve this time? Everyone in this story is dead — Catherine; Daddy; Dr Peacock; Ben; Nigel, and, most importantly, Emily. And yet as he read his story out loud I felt my throat begin to constrict, my nerves to jangle, my head to spin, and soon the chords of the Berlioz would start to tighten in my mind —
‘Bethan? Are you all right?’ he said. I could hear the little smile in his voice.
‘I’m sorry.’ I stood up. ‘I have to go.’
Clair looked slightly impatient behind her sympathetic façade. I’d interrupted the story, of course, and everyone else was riveted.
‘You don’t look terribly well,’ said Bren. ‘I hope it wasn’t something I said—’
‘Fuck you,’ I told him, and made for the door.
He gave me a rueful shrug as I passed. Strange that, after all he has done, I should feel that sorry little skip of the heart every time he looks at me. He’s crazy, and false, and deserves to die, yet there’s still something inside me that wants to believe, that still tries to find excuses for him. All that was such a long time ago. We were different people then. And both of us have paid a price, have left a part of ourselves behind, so that neither of us can ever be whole, or escape the ghost of Emily.
For a time, I thought I had escaped. Perhaps I might even have managed if he hadn’t been there to remind me. Every day in every way, taunting me with his presence until suddenly it all comes out, and the box of delights is broken, and all the demons are free at last, scourging the air with memories.
Funny, where these things can lead us. If Emily had lived, would we have been friends? Would she have worn that red coat? Would she have lived in my house? Would Nigel have fallen for her that night at the Zebra, instead of me? Sometimes I feel I’m in Looking Glass Land, living a life that’s not quite mine, a second-hand life that never quite fitted.
Emily’s life. Emily’s chair. Emily’s bed. Emily’s house.
But I like it there; it feels right somehow. Not like my old house from so long ago, which is now home to the Jacadees, and which rings with the noise of their cheery lives and the spices of their kitchen. Somehow I couldn’t have stayed there. No, Emily’s house was the place for me, and I have barely allowed it to change, as if she might come back some day and claim her rightful property.
Perhaps that’s why Nigel never settled there, preferring to keep to his flat in town. Not that he really remembered her — he missed that business entirely — but I suppose Gloria disapproved, as indeed she disapproved of everything about me. My hair; my accent; my body art; but most of all my proximity to whatever had happened to Emily White, a mystery only half-resolved, in which her son was also enmeshed.
I don’t believe in ghosts, of course. I’m not the one who’s crazy. But all my life I’ve seen her here: tapping her way round Malbry; walking in the park; by the church; vivid in her bright-red coat. I’ve seen her; I’ve been her in my mind. How could it have been otherwise? I’ve been living Emily’s life for longer than I have my own. I listen to her music. I grow her favourite flowers. I visited her father every Sunday afternoon, and right until the end he nearly always called me Emily.
Still, the time for nostalgia is long past. My journal now serves a new purpose. Confession is good for the soul, they say, and over time I have acquired the habit of the confessional. It’s so much easier this way, of course; there is no priest, no penance. Only the computer screen and the absolution of the Delete key. The moving finger writes, and, having writ, can be erased at the touch of a hand; unwriting the past, deleting blame, making the sullied spotless again —