Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris Page A

hasn’t drained for nearly a week—’
    He protests. ‘I’m due at another job—’
    ‘I think it’s the least you can do,’ she says.
    Of course, he gives in. She knows he will. Her voice still has that blend of disdain and vulnerability, of helplessness and authority, that he finds irresistible . . .
    The drive-belt has slipped, that’s all. He unbolts the drum, replaces the belt, wipes his hands on his overalls, and in the reflection from the glass door he sees her watching him.
    She may have been attractive once. Now you’d call it well-preserved ; a phrase his mother sometimes uses, and which to him conjures up images of formaldehyde jars and Egyptian mummies. And now he knows she is watching him with a strangely proprietary look; he can feel her eyes like soldering irons pressing into the small of his back – an appraising glance as careless as it is predatory.
    ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he says, turning his head to meet her gaze.
    She gives him that imperious look.
    ‘My mother used to clean your house.’
    ‘Did she really?’ The tone of her voice is meant to suggest that she couldn’t possibly remember all the people who have worked for her. But for a moment she seems to recall something , at least – her eyes narrow and her eyebrows – plucked into insignificance, then redrawn in brown pencil half an inch above where they should be – twitch in something like distress.
    ‘She used to bring me with her, sometimes.’
    ‘My God.’ She stares at him. ‘ Blueeyedboy? ’
    He’s killed it now with that, of course. She’ll never look at him again. Not in that way, anyhow – her languid gaze moving down his back, gauging the distance between the nape of his neck and the base of his spine, checking out the taut curve of his ass in those faded blue overalls. Now she can see him – four years old, hair undarkened by the passage of time – and suddenly the weight of years drops back on her like a wet winter coat and she’s old, so terribly old –
    He grins. ‘I think that’s fixed it,’ he says.
    ‘I’ll pay you something, of course,’ she says – too quickly, to hide her embarrassment – as if she believes he works for free, as if this might be some kind gesture of hers that will put him for ever in her debt.
    But they both know what she’s paying him for. Guilt – maybe simple, but never pure, ageless and tireless and bittersweet.
    Poor old Mrs B ., he thinks.
    And so he thanks her nicely, accepts another cup of lukewarm and vaguely fishy tea, and finally leaves with the certainty that he will be seeing a lot more of Mrs Electric Blue in the days and weeks to come.
    *
    Everyone’s guilty of something, of course. Not all of them deserve to die. But sometimes karma comes home to roost, and an act of God may sometimes require the touch of a helping human hand. And anyway, it’s not his fault. She calls him back a dozen times – to wire a plug, to change a fuse, to replace the batteries in her camera, and most recently, to set up her new PC (God only knows why she needs one, she’s going to die in a week or two), which prompts a flurry of urgent calls, which in their turn precipitate his current decision to remove her from the face of the earth.
    It isn’t really personal. Some people just deserve to die – whether through evil, malice, guilt or, as in the present case, because she called him blueeyedboy –
    Most accidents occur in the home. Easy enough to set one up – and yet, somehow he hesitates. Not because he is afraid – although he is, most terribly – but simply because he wants to watch. He toys with the idea of hiding a camera close to the scene of the crime, but it’s a vanity he can ill afford, and he discards the scheme (not without regret), and instead contemplates the method to use. Understand: he is very young. He believes in poetic justice. He would like her death to be somehow symbolic – electrocution, perhaps, from a malfunctioning vacuum