Blueeyedboy Read Online Free PDF

blanket she tucked around his bed every night when he was a boy, and smelling of ether and hot milk –
    Night night. Sleep tight.
    Every boy loves his mother, he thinks. And his mother loves him so much. So much I could swallow you up, B.B . And maybe she has, because that’s how it feels, as if something has swallowed him, something slow but relentless, something inescapable, sucking him down into the belly of the beast –
    Swallow . There’s a blue word. Flying south, into the blue. And it smells of the sea and tastes like tears, and it makes him think of that bucket again, and the poor, trapped, scuttling things dying slowly in the sun –
    She’s so proud of him, she says; of his job; of his intellect; of his gift. Gift means poison in German, you know. Beware of Germans bearing gifts. Beware of swallows flying south. South to the islands of his dreams: to the blue Azores, the Galapagos, Tahiti and Hawaii –
    Hawaii. Awayyy . The southernmost edge of his mental map, scented with distant spices. Not that he’s ever been there, of course. But he likes the lullaby lilt of the word, a name that sounds like laughter. White sands and palm beaches and blue skies fat with fair-weather clouds. The scent of plumeria. Pretty girls in coloured sarongs with flowers in their long hair –
    But really, he knows he’ll never fly south. His mother, for all her ambitions, has never been a traveller. She likes her small world, her fantasy, the life she has carved for them piece by piece into the rock of suburbia. She will never leave, he knows; clinging to him, the last of her sons, like a barnacle, a parasite –
    ‘Hey!’ She calls to him from downstairs: ‘Are you coming down, or what? I thought you said you were coming down.’
    ‘Yes, I’m coming down, Ma.’
    Of course I am. I always do. Would I ever lie to you?
    And the plunge of despair as he goes downstairs into the parlour that smells of some kind of cheap fruit-flavoured air-freshener – grapefruit, maybe, or tangerine – is like going down into the belly of some huge, fetid, dying animal: a dinosaur or a beached blue whale. And the smell of synthetic citrus makes him almost want to gag –
    ‘Come in here. I’ve got your drink.’
    She’s sitting in the kitchenette, arms folded across her chest, feet camel-backed in her high heels. For a moment he is surprised, as always, at how very small she is. He always imagines her larger, somehow; but she is smaller than he is by far, except for her hands, which are surprisingly large compared to the bird-bony rest of her, the knuckles misshapen, not just with arthritis, but with the rings she has collected over the years – a sovereign, a diamond cluster, a Campari-coloured tourmaline, a piece of polished malachite and a flat blue sapphire gated with gold.
    Her voice is at the same time both brittle and oddly penetrating. ‘You look terrible, B.B.,’ she says. ‘You’re not coming down with something, are you?’ She says coming down with a certain suspicion, as if he has brought it on himself.
    ‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ he says.
    ‘You need to take your vitamin drink.’
    ‘Ma, I’m fine.’
    ‘It’ll do you good. Go on – take it,’ she says. ‘You know what happens when you don’t.’
    And take it he does, as he always does, and its taste is a murky, rotten mess, like fruit and shit in equal parts. And she looks at him with that terrible look of tenderness in her dark eyes, and kisses him gently on the cheek. The scent of her perfume – L’Heure Bleue – envelops him like a blanket.
    ‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while? Get some sleep before tonight? They work you so hard at that hospital, it’s a crime they get away with it—’
    And now he’s really feeling sick, and he thinks that maybe he will lie down, go back to bed and lie down with the blanket pulled around his head, because nothing could be worse than this; this feeling of drowning in tenderness –
    ‘See?’ she says.