Joanne Harris - blueeyedboy

JOANNE HARRIS

LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND JOHANNESBURG

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781407056289

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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Frogspawn Ltd 2010

The extract from Buffalo Bill is reprinted from Complete Poems 19041962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage. Voltaire lyrics reproduced by kind permission of the artist. I Will Kill Again by Jarvis Cocker copyright Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Ltd 2006, all rights reserved. Sugar Baby Love by Wayne Bickerton and Tony Waddington copyright W. B. Music Corp. and Budde Music Inc, all rights reserved.

Joanne Harris has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBNs 9780385609500 (hb) 9780385609517 (tpb)

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

To Kevin,
who also has blue eyes.

Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat (made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) and seven other best-selling novels: the latest is The Lollipop Shoes. Her hobbies are listed in Whos Who as mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was sixteen, is currently studying Old Norse, and lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, about fifteen miles from the place where she was born.

www.joanne-harris.co.uk

Also by Joanne Harris

THE EVIL SEED

SLEEP, PALE SISTER

CHOCOLAT

BLACKBERRY WINE

FIVE QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE

COASTLINERS

HOLY FOOLS

JIGS & REELS

GENTLEMEN & PLAYERS

THE LOLLIPOP SHOES

With Fran Warde

THE FRENCH KITCHEN: A COOKBOOK

THE FRENCH MARKET: MORE RECIPES FROM

A FRENCH KITCHEN

For more information on Joanne Harris and her books,
see her website at www.joanne-harris.co.uk

Some books are easy to write. Some are rather more difficult. And some books are just like Rubiks cubes, with no apparent solution in sight. This particular Rubiks cube would never have been solved without the help of my editor, Marianne Velmans, and my agent, Peter Robinson, who encouraged me to persevere. Thanks, too, to my PA, Anne Riley; to publicist Louise Page-Lund; to Mr Fry for the loan of Patch; to copy-editor Lucy Pinney; to Claire Ward and Jeff Cottenden for the cover art; to Francesca Liversidge; Manpreet Grewal; Sam Copeland; Kate Tolley; Jane Villiers; Michael Carlisle; Mark Richards; Voltaire; Jennifer and Penny Luithlen. Thanks, too, to the unsung heroes: the proofreaders; sales executives; book reps and booksellers who are so often forgotten when it comes to handing out the laurels. Special thanks to my friends in fic and fandom, especially to: gl-12; ashlibrooke; spicedogs; mr_henry_gale; marzella; jade_melody; henry_holland; divka; benobsessed. And, of course, to the man in Apartment 7, whose voice was in my mind from the start.

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

e e cummings, Buffalo Bill

Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest, moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mothers favourite. And he was a murderer.

You are viewing the webjournal ofblueeyedboyposting on:

Posted at: 02.56 on Monday, January 28

Status: public

Mood: nostalgic

Listening to:Captain Beefheart: Ice Cream For Crow

The colour of murder is blue, he thinks. Ice-blue, smokescreen blue, frostbite, post-mortem, body-bag blue. It is also his colour in so many ways, running through his circuitry like an electrical charge, screaming blue murder all the way.

Blue colours everything. He sees it, senses it everywhere, from the blue of his computer screen to the blue of the veins on the backs of her hands, raised now and twisted like the tracks of sandworms on Blackpool beach where they used to go, the four of them, every year on his birthday, and he would have an ice-cream cone, and paddle in the sea, and search out the little scuttling crabs from under the piles of seaweed, and drop them into his bucket to die in the heat of the simmering birthday sun.

Today he is only four years old, and there is a peculiar innocence in the way he carries out these small and guiltless slayings. There is no malice in the act, merely a keen curiosity for the scuttling thing that tries to escape, sidling round and round the base of the blue plastic bucket; then, hours later, giving up the fight, claws splayed, and turning its vivid underbelly upwards in a futile show of surrender, by which time he has long since lost interest and is eating a coffee ice cream (a sophisticated choice for such a little boy, but vanilla has never been his taste), so that when he rediscovers it at the end of the day, when the time comes to empty his bucket and to go home, he is vaguely surprised to find the creature dead, and wonders, indeed, how such a thing could ever have been alive at all.