Read this.
3
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Posted at: 01.53 on Friday, February 22
Status: public
Mood: hungry
Listening to: The Zombies: ‘She’s Not There’
He calls her Miss Chameleon Blue. You can call her Albertine. Or Bethan. Or even Emily. Whatever you choose to name her, she has no colour of her own. Like the chameleon, she adapts to suit the situation. And she wants to be all things to all men — saviour, lover, nemesis. She gives them what she thinks they want. She gives them what she thinks they need. She likes to cook, and in this way she feeds her need to nurture. She can recognize all of their favourites: knows when to add or hold the cream; senses their cravings almost before they themselves are aware of them.
It is of course for this very reason that blueeyedboy avoids her. Blueeyedboy used to be fat, and though that was twenty years ago, he knows how easily he could go back to the boy he used to be. Chameleon knows him too well. His fears, his dreams, his appetites. And he knows that certain cravings were never meant to be satisfied. To look at them directly would be to risk the most terrible consequences. So he uses a series of mirrors, like Perseus with the Gorgon. And, safe behind the darkened glass, he watches, waits, and bides his time.
Some people are born to watch, he knows.
Some people are mirrors, born to reflect.
Some people are weapons, trained to kill.
Does the mirror choose what to reflect? Does the weapon select the victim? Chameleon doesn’t know about that. She never had any ideas of her own, not even when she was a child. Let’s face it, she barely has memories. She has no idea of who she is, and she changes her role from day to day. But she’s trying to make an impression, he knows. She wants to leave her mark on him.
Impress. Impression. Impressionist. What interesting words. To provoke admiration; to make a statement; to leave an indentation. One who pretends to be someone else. One who paints a picture using only little dabs of light. One who creates an illusion — with smoke and mirrors, with portents and dreams.
Yes, dreams. That’s where it all begins. In dreams, in fic, in fantasy. And blueeyedboy’s business is fantasy; his territory, cyberspace. A place for all seasons, all seasonings; a place for all flavours of desire. Desire creates its own universe; or at least it does here, on badguysrock. The name is nicely equivocal — is it an island on to which penitents are cast away, or is it a haven for villains worldwide, in which to indulge our perversions?
Everyone here has something to hide. For one, it is his helplessness, his cowardice, his fear of the world. For another, an upright citizen with a responsible job, a lovely home and a husband as bland as low-fat spread, it’s a secret craving for dark meat: for the troubled, the wicked, the dangerous. For a third, who yearns to be thin, it’s the fact that her weight is just a kind of excuse; a blubbery blanket against a world she knows will eat her otherwise. For a fourth, it’s the girl he killed the day he crashed his motorbike: eight years old, on her way to school, crossing on a blind bend. And along he comes at fifty an hour, still tanked up from last night, and when he skids and hits the wall he thinks: That’s it, game over, dude. Except that the game keeps on going, and just at the moment he feels his spine give way like a piece of string, he notices a single shoe lying on its side in the road and wonders vaguely who the hell would leave a perfectly good shoe in the gutter like that, and then he sees the rest of her, and twenty years later, that’s all he can see; and the dreams still come with such clarity, and he hates himself, and he hates the world, but most of all what he really hates is their terrible, fucking sympathy —
And what about blueeyedboy? Well, like the rest of the tribe, of course, he’s not exactly what he seems. He tells them as much; but the more he does, the more they’re prepared to believe the lie.
I never murdered anyone. Of course, he’d never admit the truth. That’s why he parades himself online; strutting and strumming his base desires like a peacock’s courtship ritual. The others admire his purity. They love him for his candour. Blueeyedboy acts out what others barely dare to dream; an avatar, an icon for a lost tribe that even God has turned away —
And what of Chameleon, you ask? She is not one of blueeyedboy’s closest friends, but he sees her, if sporadically. They do have a kind of history, but there’s nothing much here to move him now; nothing to hold his attention. And yet, as he comes to know her again, he finds her more and more interesting. He used to think she was colourless. In fact, she is merely adaptable. She has been a follower all her life, collecting ideologies; although so far she has never had a single idea of her own. But give her a cause, give her a flag, and she’ll give you her devotion.
First she followed Jesus, and prayed to die before she woke. After that, she followed a boy who taught her a different gospel. Then, when she was twelve years old she followed a madman into the snow just for the sake of his blue eyes, and now she follows blueeyedboy, like the rest of his little army of mice, and wants nothing more than to dance to his tune all the way to oblivion.
They meet again at her writing class when she is just fifteen years old. Not so much a writing class as a kind of soft-therapy group, which her counsellor recommended to her as a means of better expressing herself. Blueeyedboy attends this group primarily to improve his style, of which he has always been ashamed, but also because he has learnt to exploit the appeal of the fictional murder.
There’s a woman he knows in the Village. He calls her Mrs Electric Blue. And she’s old enough to be his Ma, which makes it quite disgusting. Not that he knows what’s in her mind. But Mrs Electric is known to have a predilection for nice young men, and blueeyedboy is an innocent — at least, he is in matters of love. A nice young man of twenty or so; working in an electrical shop to pay his way through college. Slim in his denim overalls, no pin-up, but still, a far cry from the fat boy he was only a couple of years ago.
Our heroine, in spite of her youth, is far more adept in the ways of the world. After all, she has had to endure a great many things over the years. The death of her mother; her father’s stroke; that hellish blaze of publicity. She has been taken into care; she is staying with a family in the White City estate. The man is a plumber; his ugly wife has tried and failed many times to conceive. They are both fervent royalists: the house is filled with images of the Princess of Wales, some of them texturized photographs, others paint-by-numbers kits in acrylic on cheap canvas. Chameleon dislikes them, but says very little, as always. She’s found that it pays to keep silent now; to let other people do the talking. This suits the family just fine. Our heroine is a good little girl. Of course, they ought to know by now: it’s the good little girls you need to watch.
The man, whom we shall call Diesel Blue and who will die with his wife in a house fire some five or six years later, likes to be seen as a family man; calls Chameleon Princess and at weekends takes her to work with him, where she carries his big box of tools and waits while he chats with a series of jaded housewives and their vaguely aggressive husbands, who all think that plumbers are rip-off merchants and that they themselves, if they so desired, could easily fix that gasket, that tap, or put in that new storage heater.