Blueeyedboy Read Free Page B

unusually sensitive to words, to their sounds and resonances. That’s why I don’t have an accent now, and have lost my childhood stammer. The predominant trend here in Malbry is for exaggerated vowels and clumsy glottals, coating every word in a grimy sheen. You can hear them on the estate all the time: teenage girls with scraped-back hair, shouting hiyaaa in shades of synthetic strawberry. The boys are less articulate, mouthing freak and loser at me as I pass, in half-broken voices that yodel and boom in notes of lager and locker-room sweat. Most of the time I don’t hear them. My life has a permanent soundtrack, provided by my iPod, into which I have downloaded more than twenty thousand tracks and forty-two playlists, one for every year of my life, each with a specific theme –
    Freak . They say it because they think it hurts. In their world, to be labelled a freak is obviously the worst kind of fate. To me, it’s just the opposite. The worst thing is surely to be like them: to have married too young; to have gone on the dole; to have learnt to drink beer and smoke cheap cigarettes; to have had kids doomed to be just like themselves, because if these people are good at anything, it’s reproduction – they don’t live long, but, by God, they populate – and if not wanting any of that has made me into a freak in their eyes –
    In truth, I’m very ordinary. My eyes are my best feature, I’m told, though not everyone appreciates their chilly shade. For the rest, you’d hardly notice me. I’m nicely inconspicuous. I don’t talk much, and when I do, it’s only when strictly necessary. That’s the way to survive in this place; to keep my privacy intact. Because Malbry is one of those places where secrets and gossips and rumours abound, and I have to take exceptional care to avoid the wrong kind of exposure.
    It’s not that the place is so terrible. The old Village is actually very nice, with its crooked York stone cottages and its church and its single row of little shops. There’s rarely any trouble here; except perhaps on Saturday nights, when the kids hang around outside the church while their parents go to the pub down the road, and buy chips from the Chinese takeaway and push the wrappers into the hedge.
    To the west, there’s what Ma calls Millionaires’ Row: an avenue of big stone houses shielded from the road by trees. Tall chimneys; four-by-fours; gates that work by remote control. Beyond that there’s St Oswald’s, the grammar school, with its twelve-foot wall and heraldic gate. To the east, the brick terraces of Red City, where my mother was born, then to the west, White City, all privet and pebble-dash. It’s not as genteel as the Village, though I’ve learnt to avoid the danger zones. This is where you’ll find our house, at the edge of the big estate. A square of grass; a flowerbed; a hedge to keep out the neighbours. This is the house where I was born; hardly anything has changed.
    I do have a few extra privileges. I drive a blue Peugeot 307, registered in my mother’s name. I have a study lined with books, an iPod dock, a computer and a wall of CDs. I have a collection of orchids, most of them just hybrids, but with one or two rare Zygopetala , whose names bear the scent of the South American rainforests from which they were sourced, and whose colours are astonishing: violent shades of priapic green, and mottled, acidic butterfly-blue that no chart could possibly duplicate. I have a darkroom in the basement, where I develop my photographs. I don’t display them here, of course. But I like to think I have a gift.
    At 5 a.m. on weekdays I clock in at Malbry Infirmary – or I did, until very recently – wearing a suit and a blue striped shirt and carrying a briefcase. My mother is very proud of this, of the fact that her son wears a suit to work. What I actually do at work is a matter of far less importance to her. I am single, straight, well-spoken, and, if this were a TV drama of the