more likely that, halfway through the sentence, the would-be offender would opt to go free – still innocent of any crime, though he might have to lose his deposit. Or maybe by then he would have earned enough time to pay for a minor felony – an aggravated assault, perhaps, or maybe a rape or a robbery –
See? It’s a perfect system. It’s moral, cheap and practical. It even allows for that change of heart. It offers absolution. Sin and redemption all in one; cost-free karma at the Jesus Christ superstore.
Which is just my way of saying this: I’ve already done my time. Over forty years of it. And now, with my release date due –
The universe owes me a murder.
3
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :
[email protected]
Posted at : 22.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status : public
Mood : murderous
Listening to : Peter Gabriel : ‘Family Snapshot’
His brothers never liked him much. Perhaps he was too different. Perhaps they were jealous of his gift and of all the attention it brought him. In any case, they hated him – well, maybe not Brendan, his brother in brown, who was too thick to genuinely hate anyone, but certainly Nigel, his brother in black, who, the year of Benjamin’s birth, underwent such a violent personality change that he might have been a different boy.
The birth of his youngest brother was attended by outbursts of violent rage that Ma could neither control nor understand. As for Brendan, aged three – a placid, stolid, good-natured child – his first words on hearing that he had a baby brother were: Why, Ma? Send him back!
Not promising words for Benjamin, who found himself thrown into the cruel world like a bone to a pack of dogs, with no one but Ma to defend him and to keep him from being eaten alive.
But he was her blue-eyed talisman. Special, from the day he was born. The others went to the junior school, where they played on the swings and the climbing frames, risked life and limb on the football pitch, and came home every day with grazes and cuts that Ma seemed never to notice. But with Ben, she was always fretful. The smallest bruise, the slightest cough, was enough to awaken his mother’s concern, and the day he came home from nursery school with a bloody nose (earned in a fight over control of the sandpit), she withdrew him from the school and took him on her rounds instead.
There were four ladies on Ma’s cleaning round, all of them now coloured blue in his mind. All of them lived in the Village; no more than half a mile from each other, in the long tree-lined alleys between Mill Road and the edge of White City.
Apart from Mrs Electric Blue, who was to die so very unexpectedly some fifteen or twenty years later, there was: Mrs French Blue, who smoked Gauloises and liked Jacques Brel; Mrs Chemical Blue, who took twenty kinds of vitamins and who cleaned the house before Ma arrived (and probably after she left); and finally, Mrs Baby Blue, who collected porcelain dolls, and had a studio under the roof, and was an artist, so she said, and whose husband was a music teacher at St Oswald’s, the boys’ grammar school down the road, where Ma also went to clean and vacuum the classrooms on the Upper Corridor at four thirty every school day, and to run the big old polisher across what seemed miles of parquet floor.
Benjamin didn’t like St Oswald’s. He hated the fusty smell of it, the reek of disinfectant and floor polish, the low hum of mould and dried-up sandwiches, dead mice, wormy wood and chalk that got into the back of his throat and caused a permanent catarrh. After a while, just the sound of the name – that gagging sound, Os-wald’s – would conjure up the smell. From the very start he dreaded the place: he was afraid of the Masters in their big black gowns, afraid of the boys with their striped caps and their blue blazers with the badges on them.
But he liked his mother’s ladies. To begin with, anyway.
He’s so cute , they said. Why
See? It’s a perfect system. It’s moral, cheap and practical. It even allows for that change of heart. It offers absolution. Sin and redemption all in one; cost-free karma at the Jesus Christ superstore.
Which is just my way of saying this: I’ve already done my time. Over forty years of it. And now, with my release date due –
The universe owes me a murder.
3
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on :
[email protected]
Posted at : 22.03 on Saturday, February 2
Status : public
Mood : murderous
Listening to : Peter Gabriel : ‘Family Snapshot’
His brothers never liked him much. Perhaps he was too different. Perhaps they were jealous of his gift and of all the attention it brought him. In any case, they hated him – well, maybe not Brendan, his brother in brown, who was too thick to genuinely hate anyone, but certainly Nigel, his brother in black, who, the year of Benjamin’s birth, underwent such a violent personality change that he might have been a different boy.
The birth of his youngest brother was attended by outbursts of violent rage that Ma could neither control nor understand. As for Brendan, aged three – a placid, stolid, good-natured child – his first words on hearing that he had a baby brother were: Why, Ma? Send him back!
Not promising words for Benjamin, who found himself thrown into the cruel world like a bone to a pack of dogs, with no one but Ma to defend him and to keep him from being eaten alive.
But he was her blue-eyed talisman. Special, from the day he was born. The others went to the junior school, where they played on the swings and the climbing frames, risked life and limb on the football pitch, and came home every day with grazes and cuts that Ma seemed never to notice. But with Ben, she was always fretful. The smallest bruise, the slightest cough, was enough to awaken his mother’s concern, and the day he came home from nursery school with a bloody nose (earned in a fight over control of the sandpit), she withdrew him from the school and took him on her rounds instead.
There were four ladies on Ma’s cleaning round, all of them now coloured blue in his mind. All of them lived in the Village; no more than half a mile from each other, in the long tree-lined alleys between Mill Road and the edge of White City.
Apart from Mrs Electric Blue, who was to die so very unexpectedly some fifteen or twenty years later, there was: Mrs French Blue, who smoked Gauloises and liked Jacques Brel; Mrs Chemical Blue, who took twenty kinds of vitamins and who cleaned the house before Ma arrived (and probably after she left); and finally, Mrs Baby Blue, who collected porcelain dolls, and had a studio under the roof, and was an artist, so she said, and whose husband was a music teacher at St Oswald’s, the boys’ grammar school down the road, where Ma also went to clean and vacuum the classrooms on the Upper Corridor at four thirty every school day, and to run the big old polisher across what seemed miles of parquet floor.
Benjamin didn’t like St Oswald’s. He hated the fusty smell of it, the reek of disinfectant and floor polish, the low hum of mould and dried-up sandwiches, dead mice, wormy wood and chalk that got into the back of his throat and caused a permanent catarrh. After a while, just the sound of the name – that gagging sound, Os-wald’s – would conjure up the smell. From the very start he dreaded the place: he was afraid of the Masters in their big black gowns, afraid of the boys with their striped caps and their blue blazers with the badges on them.
But he liked his mother’s ladies. To begin with, anyway.
He’s so cute , they said. Why
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