Blueeyedboy (6 page)

Of course, she was neither imaginative nor particularly bright – she left school with only five CSEs – but Gloria Green was determined enough to compensate for her failings, and instead turned all of her considerable willpower and energy towards finding a means of escape from the grime and small-mindedness of Red City into that TV world of clean babies and shiny floors and numbers that can change your life.

It wasn’t easy, keeping the faith. Red City was all she had ever known. A rat trap, that lures you in, but seldom lets you out again. Her friends all married in their teens; found jobs, had kids. Gloria stayed with her parents, helping her mother keep house and waiting day after tedious day for a prince who never came.

Finally she gave in. Chris Moxon was a friend of her dad’s; he ran a fish-and-chip shop and lived on the edge of White City. He wasn’t exactly Catch of the Day – being older and balder than she’d planned – but he was kind and attentive, and by then she was getting desperate. She married him at All Saints’ Church in white tulle and carnations, and for a while she almost believed that she had somehow escaped the rat trap –

But she found that the smell of frying fat crept into everything she owned – her dresses, her stockings, even her shoes. And however many Marlboros she smoked, however much scent she dabbed on to her skin, there was always that stink –
his
stink – underlying everything; and she realized that she
hadn’t
escaped the rat trap, she had simply fallen deeper inside.

Then she met Peter Winter at a Christmas party later that year. He worked at a local car dealership and drove a BMW. Heady stuff for Gloria Green, embarking on her first affair with the coolness of a professional poker player. Certainly, the stakes were high. Gloria’s Pa thought the world of Chris. But Peter Winter looked promising: he was solvent, ambitious, untroubled, unwed. He spoke of moving out of White City; of finding a house in the Village, perhaps –

It was good enough for Gloria. She made him her personal project. Within twelve months she was divorced, and pregnant with her first child. She swore that the boy was Peter’s, of course, and when she was able, she married him, in spite of her family’s protests.

This time, there was no fanfare. Gloria had shamed them all. No one attended the ceremony, which was held on a dismal November day at the local Register Office. And when things started to fall apart – when Peter started drinking, when the dealership went broke – Gloria’s parents refused to back down, or even to see the little boy that she’d named after her father –

But Gloria was undaunted. She took an evening job in town, as well as her daily cleaning shift; and when she became pregnant again she hid it, wearing a girdle right up until the eighth month, so that she could keep earning money. When her second son was born she took in mending work and ironing too, so that the house was always filled with the steam and the smell of other people’s washing. The dream of a house in the Village had become increasingly remote; but at least in White City there were schools, and a park for the kids, and a job at the local laundrette. Things looked good for Gloria, and she faced her new life with optimism.

But two years of unemployment had wrought a change in Peter Winter. Once a charmer, now he’d grown fat, spending his days in front of the TV, smoking Camels and drinking beer. Gloria was carrying him, much to her resentment; and unbeknownst to her, by then she was pregnant once again.

I never knew my real father. Ma seldom spoke of him. He was handsome, though. I have his eyes. I think Gloria secretly thought that he might turn out to be her ticket out of White City. But Mr Blue Eyes had other ideas, and by the time Ma learnt the truth, her ship had sailed for sunnier shores, leaving her to weather the storm.

No one knows how Peter found out. Perhaps he saw them together somewhere. Perhaps someone talked. Perhaps he just guessed. But Nigel remembered the night he left – or at least, he said he did, though he can’t have been five years old at the time. A night of broken crockery, of shouted oaths, of insults – and then the sound of the car starting, the slammed door, the squeal of rubber on the road – a sound that to me always conjures up the smell of fresh popcorn and cinema seats. Then, later, the crash, the broken glass, the howl of sirens in the air –

Of course Nigel never heard all that. That was the way she told it, though; that was Ma’s version of the tale. Peter Winter took three weeks to die, leaving his widow pregnant and alone. But Gloria Green was tough. She found a childminder in White City and simply worked harder, pushed herself more, and when she left her job at last, two weeks before the baby was due, her employers took a collection that raised a total of forty-two pounds. Gloria spent some of it on a washing machine and banked the rest, to make it last. She was still only twenty-seven.

At this point I think I might have gone home to my parents. She had no job, hardly any savings, no friends. Her looks, too, had begun to fade, and little remained of the Gloria Green who had left Red City with such high hopes. But to crawl back to her family – defeated, with two children, a baby and no husband – was unthinkable. And so she stayed in White City. She worked from home; looked after her sons; washed and ironed and mended and cleaned, while all the time she was searching for another escape, even as her youth left her and White City closed around her like a drowning man’s arms.

And then Ma had a stroke of luck. Peter’s insurance paid out. Turns out he was worth more dead than he’d ever been worth alive; and finally, Ma had some money. Not enough – there was
never
enough – but now she could see a light ahead. And that piece of good fortune had come along just as her youngest entered the world, making him her lucky charm; her chance at the winning ticket.

In certain parts of the world, you know, blue eyes are thought to be bad luck, the sign of a demon in disguise. But to carry a blue-eye talisman – a glass bead on a piece of string – is to divert the path of malchance, to send back evil to its source; to banish demons to their lair and to bring good fortune in their place –

Ma, with her love of TV drama, believed in easy solutions. Fiction works to formula. The victim is always a pretty girl. And the answers are always right under your nose, to be revealed in the penultimate scene: by accident, or perhaps by a child – tying up all the loose ends in a pretty birthday-party bow.

Life, of course, is different. Life is nothing but loose ends. And sometimes the thread that seemed to lead so clearly into the heart of the labyrinth turns out to be nothing but tangled string, leaving us alone in the dark, afraid and consumed with the growing belief that the
real
action is still going on somewhere without us, just around the corner –

So much for luck. I came very close. Almost close enough to touch before it was taken away from me. It wasn’t my fault. But still she blames me. And ever since, I have tried to be everything she expects of me; and still it’s never quite enough, never enough for Gloria Green –

Is that what you feel?
says Clair, from Group.
Don’t you think you’re good enough?

Bitch. Don’t even go there.

You’re not the first to try it, you know. You women, with your questions. You think it’s so easy to judge cause and effect, to analyse and to excuse. Do you think you can fit me into one of your little boxes, a neatly labelled specimen? That, armed with a few choice details, you can pencil in the rest of my soul?

Not much chance of that here,
ClairDeLune
. You people really have nothing on me. You think I’m new to this game? I’ve been in and out of groups like yours for the greater part of twenty years. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of fun: recalling childhood incidents; inventing dreams, spinning straw into fantasy –

In this way, Clair has come to believe that she knows the man behind the avatar. Fat Chryssie – aka
chrysalisbaby
– also thinks she understands. In actual fact, I know more about them than they could ever know about me; knowledge that may come in useful some day if ever I choose to exploit it.

Clair thinks she is trying to help me. I think she is in denial. Clair’s therapeutic writing class is really nothing but a disguised attempt at amateur psychoanalysis. And Clair’s online fascination for all things damned and dangerous suggests that she, too, feels damaged. I’m guessing an early experience of abuse, perhaps by a family member. Her fixation with the actor Angel Blue – a man so much older than herself – suggests that she may have daddy issues. Well, of course, I can sympathize. But it’s hardly reassuring in a lecturer. Plus it makes her so vulnerable. I hope it doesn’t end in tears.

As for Fat Chryssie’s interest in me – it seems to be purely romantic. Well, it makes a change from her usual posts, which normally consist of a series of lists detailing her calorie consumption –
Diet Coke: 1.5 cals; Skinny Cow: 90 cals; nacho chips, lo-fat cheese: prolly about 300 cals
– punctuated by agonizing monologues on how ugly she feels, or interminable pictures of skinny, fragile Goth girls that she refers to as
thinspiration
.

Sometimes she posts pictures of herself – always body shots, never the face – taken on a mobile phone in front of the bathroom mirror, and encourages people to rant at her. Very few indulge her in this (with the exception of Cap, who hates fatties), but some of the other girls leave
ana – love
, or saccharine messages of support –
Babe, you’re doing great. Stay strong!
– or half-baked advice about dieting.

Thus Chryssie has acquired an almost evangelical faith in the properties of green tea as a metabolism booster, and in ‘negative calorie foods’ (which to her mind include carrots, broccoli, blueberries, asparagus and many other things that she rarely eats). Her avatar is a manga drawing of a little girl dressed in black with butterfly wings growing out of her shoulders, and her signature line – at the same time hopeful and unutterably sad – reads:
One day I’ll be lighter than air . . .

Well, maybe she will. There’s always hope. But not all Body Freaks die thin. Maybe she’ll end up as some of them do, dead of a stroke or a heart attack on the porcelain phone to God.

One of her online friends –
Azurechild
– has been urging her to try something called syrup of ipecac. It’s a well-known purgative, with potentially fatal side effects, but which causes rapid weight loss. Of course it’s irresponsible, one might say downright criminal, to encourage someone with Chryssie’s weight problem, and with her already weakened heart, to take such a dangerous substance.

Still, it’s her choice, isn’t it? No one is forcing her to take the advice. We do not create these situations. All we do is hit the keys.
Control
.
Alt
.
Delete
. Gone. A fatal error. An accident –

So –
How Well Do You Think You Know Me Now?

That’s this week’s
meme
, posted by Clair, snagged by Chryssie, who always tags me, like a child in a crowded playground trying to summon a circle of friends.

Clair and Chryssie, like so many of our online clan, are addicted to
memes
: Internet chain-letters, whose purpose is to simulate interest and conversation, often in the form of a questionnaire. Sweeping the Net like a schoolyard craze –
Post three facts about yourself! What did you dream about last night?
– passing from one person to another, disseminating information both useful and otherwise; these things behave like viruses, some going global, some dying out, some ending up on
badguysrock
, where talking about oneself –
Me! Me!
– is always a popular pastime.

When tagged, I tend to reciprocate. Not because I enjoy self-promotion, but I find these exercises intriguing for what they reveal – or not – about the recipient. The questions – to be answered at speed – are designed to create the illusion of intimacy, and to answer them correctly sometimes requires a level of detail that might challenge even the closest friend.

Thanks to this medium I know that Chryssie has a cat called Chloë and likes to wear pink socks in bed; that Cap’s favourite film is
Kill Bill
, but that he despises
Kill Bill 2
; that Toxic likes black girls with big breasts; and that
ClairDeLune
likes modern jazz and has a collection of ceramic frogs.

Of course, you don’t have to tell the truth. And yet, so many people do. The details are designed to be trivial enough to make the lie seem unnecessary – and yet, from those details a picture emerges, the little things that make up a life –

For instance, I know that Clair’s computer password is
clairlovesangel
. It’s her hotmail password too, which means that now I can open her mailbox. It’s so easy to do these things online; and fragments of gleaned information – names of pets, children’s birth dates, mothers’ maiden names – all make it so much easier. Armed with such seemingly innocuous data, I can access more intimate things. Bank details. Credit cards. It’s like nitrogen and glycerine. Each fairly harmless on its own, but pair the two together, and –
Wham!

Tagged by
chrysalisbaby
posting on
[email protected]

Posted at
:
12:54 on Tuesday, January 29

If you were an animal, what would you be?
A rat
.

Favourite smell?
Petrol
.

Tea or coffee?
Coffee. Black
.

Favourite flavour of ice cream?
Bitter chocolate.

What are you wearing right now?
A dark-blue hooded top, jeans, blue Converses
.

What are you afraid of?
Heights
.

What’s the last thing you bought?
Music for my iPod
.

What’s the last thing you ate?
A toasted sandwich
.