Ice Blue Eyes

Is she cold?

No, I don’t think she is. I think it’s only the eyes. But I’ve seen them when they cry, and I’ve seen her full of anger, full of grief, accusation. I know that she’s capable of passion. Her speech at the trial was filled with passion, her pale blue eyes were swimming, her voice was shrill, broken, harrowing. It sliced through the jury, through the judge, through the public gallery. Through me, of course. Through Ben.

Ben. It hurts to touch the memories.

Poor Ben. Though more people than not might condemn me for thinking that.

She had only ice for Ben. But I know that makes sense. And I know there was emotion spilling out of her, naked, for everyone to see. Gutted on this modern alter. So much, such palpable pain.

I believe it sealed his fate.

The eyes though. Sitting across from them for all those weeks. Sometimes meeting them. Nearly felled by hatred. Those eyes were a mix of winter and frost, ice, crystal. There were so many times when I saw those eyes and all I could see was the cold.

I’m never going to forget those eyes.

#

And then there was the day when Ben was arrested.

There are days, hours, that you set your life by: where everything is sorted in before or after. Before you began that new job. Before covid. Before moving from this house to another. The day Ben was arrested is one of those markers. It felt as if the world had changed, as if reality had been re-written. Our Ben. Our little boy, Ben.

He was twenty-two at the time.

I came home to the shouting that was going on between them, Mum and Dad. They were arguing about what to do, what would be best, how to not make the wrong mistake, how in all Hell they were going to be able to afford this. This. I didn’t understand what they were shouting about straight away, I tried to make sense of it by listening. But it was going too fast back and forth between them.

“Well, we’ll have to go over to America.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“We have to go over. We have to go over.”

“We need to spend it all on the lawyers.”

“But he needs us.”

I had to butt in. What the hell was going on?

“It’s your brother, he’s been arrested.”

“Okay, what for?”

Silence. Too much of it.

What for?

“Murder.”

#

There was no way to reconcile it. Not in those first moments of hearing it, and not in the days that followed, the days of hearing it over and over and over in my head. What could have happened to have led to something like this?

“Is he guilty?” I asked Mum.

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

“Well, he can’t be. He wouldn’t be.” But I had just asked her if he was. “What did he say to you? Have you spoken to him? What did he say?”

“He said he was sorry.”

Something cold slid down my spine. “Just, sorry?”

She swallowed, struggled, could only nod.

“Did he say that he did it?”

She shook her head.

“So perhaps he didn’t do it. What about self-defence?”

“No. No, Daphne, it was just a kid. Just a kid.”

“There must be more to it. We do need to go.”

“The money.”

“You can get a loan on the house. I’ve got money…”

“For the deposit…”

“It doesn’t matter. Maybe Uncle Alfred?”

“Joe’s going to ask. We just have to get over there. You understand, don’t you?”

#

It might have been beautiful. Or fun. Exciting. I had never been overseas, my parents hadn’t either. First time on a plane. Floating through the clouds, like cotton wool, soft and billowy, surreal, romantic. But that’s not what it was all about. We could only think about Ben. How he was surviving in some high security US prison. How was he being protected from the other inmates? Would some sympathetic guard leave a door unlocked, a camera turned off? You heard about such things.

Ben had been on the news. News anchors talking about a callous murder. A studious young man of not-quite-eighteen. Walking home from the library. Set upon by thugs. Ben amongst the thugs. Ben the one with the knife.

“Ben, he’s never carried a knife, he’d have no idea what to do with one,” I said, my memory filled with the young Ben, the child, the kid with the tip of his tongue bit between his teeth in determined concentration as he tried to master riding his bike. Ben who’d stepped on that plane aged nineteen, scared and excited, all ready to see the world. No, that Ben would never have been carrying a knife.

#

“He’s my son!” Mum, protesting. “You need to let me see my son!”

He was her son. He was my brother. But there were no words to describe the difference, the yawning gulf between the son/brother and the man who sat opposite us, separated by clear Perspex. The man we couldn’t touch, could only hold hands up against the barrier so that he could press his against them. And he did so slowly, almost with reluctance, there was a distance between him and us that was more than just the security.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He had a deep bruise on his chin.

“We’re getting lawyers, we’re going to get you freed.”

A hard nod. A face that bore so little resemblance… His hair was different, cut shorter, and there was a piercing in his eyebrow that was empty now of whatever jewellery he’d once worn there. There was something about his face that was darker, more chiselled. The boy had grown in to a man, but the man he’d grown into seemed like a hard-bitten stranger. Where was my little Ben?

Can you tell us what happened? But I didn’t know if I dared. Not unless there was the safety of a lawyer present. What if I made him confess something? But what did it mean for any of us if there was something to be confessed.

“Is there anything we can get for you?”

He shook his head.

“Anyone we should contact?”

Another headshake.

Mum, in frustration: “Can’t you just say something?”

“I’m sorry.”  Just like on the phone.

“I know you are. I know, but I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened.”

“I don’t know either.”

“You’re a good boy, and I know you would never hurt some innocent kid. You’re not that kind of man, and we’re going to sort this out and we’re going to take you home. I promise.”

Already. Already, I didn’t know.

#

The man from the embassy told us that the news wasn’t good. The evidence stacked up hard against Ben.

“But he must have had a reason. Extenuating circumstances.”

The man shook his head.

Mum said, “They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?”

Dad tried to soothe her with the stroke of his fingers against her shoulder, but he looked at the man from the embassy the whole time.

He said, “With a foreign national, from a friendly country, the protocol is usually not to…”

#

But they did.

This case. It had captured the imagination, the anger, of the American public. And that was a beast that could not be easily contained. The baying for blood terrified me. It lived on in my dreams, and I felt as if it might at any moment fray onto me, onto Mum and Dad.

We had a nice hotel. There was a panoramic view out over the skyscrapers. A different me, in another time and circumstance, might just have stood against that huge plate of glass window staring out at that foreign, faraway view. The me I was now sat on my bed and stared at the carpet, tracing the twisty pattern of the wool, trying to work out at what point, if any, the green of this woven vine became the blue.

The case was on TV again – more over here. There were pictures of Ben being arrested. An ugly, ugly mugshot. And there was Christina, with her ice blue eyes.

That was the first time I saw her, looking out of the TV. I learnt that she was the victim’s older sister, and that she was devastated to lose her brother; she told the interviewer how much she had loved and what a good kid he’d been, a light in the darkness, an angel. “Looking down from us now out of Heaven. He knows we’re going to fight for justice for him, he knows we won’t let what happened to him go unanswered.”

Ben was a good kid. That was all that I could think.

Christina. With her almost-turquoise, nearly-white eyes. Such a pale and exotic blue. Captivating. The poster-woman for make-my-brother-pay. And by that they meant die. The prosecution were taking an unusual step when the accused was a foreigner from a friendly country that didn’t condone such penalties, but they were taking it.

The lawyer and the embassy man both said it was unusual, there was usually a diplomatic understanding of sorts.

Ben sat at one end of the table, Mum and Dad on either side. I sat at a right angle. The lawyer and the embassy guy sat on the other side. They talked about options, about how Ben should appear, what he should say, what to avoid. They never asked him outright did he murder, did he kill, did he wade in there wanting to see a life end? They asked him if he wanted to plead guilty or not guilty, and the potential consequences of either.

He said, “Not guilty,” but he didn’t sound sure of himself.

Then they asked him to tell them in his own words what had happened.

He sounded even less sure. A knife? He carried it, yes. Had he pulled it on the kid? Sort of. He took it out as a confrontation escalated. How many? He and his three friends, but it wasn’t the way it sounded? And then? Well, the kid had come at him, the kid had been aggressive…. How?  Just… aggressive. And he hadn’t been intending to knife the kid, the blade had just been in his hand. But slit, all the way from beneath the sternum, right down to his groin? Ben, shaking his head, no, he didn’t remember it that way.

The lawyer warned us that it didn’t look good.

#

Guilty.

I still believe Christina had a lot to do with that. She looked so wholesome, so respectable, with her blond hair clipped neatly to the side, in a pink suit, a pleated skirt. And she spoke so passionately about her brother, the precious thing that had been taken away from her. Her trauma was real and raw. We could all feel it. It seethed through the courtroom. You couldn’t look away from it, no matter what. You couldn’t do anything but see and hear and feel it.

She knew who I was. She looked at me with full force of the ice behind her eyes. This was you too. All of you. Me, Dad, Mum. Or at least it felt like that when her eyes were on me, barbed with ice and menace and accusation. And I could see it almost literally, the way they froze over when they touched Ben. He could feel it too, up there in the dock, flayed before the curiosity of the public. He had nowhere to run from her eyes, he had no escape at all.

I’m not religious.

But I prayed and prayed that night, for the outcome to be anything other than what I dreaded and knew it would be.

But in the morning, they announced it: lethal injection.

The lawyer sought immediate leave to appeal the sentence and the verdict.

The dance set into motion.

#

The dance ends, three years later.

A small room, with a window. Where we can see him from and where he can see us, or so they tell us. And they can only advise us that we should be strong for him, that we should face him bravely. Nod. Make eye contact. We’ve already been told to tell him that we forgive him, and that we’re all going to be all right. He doesn’t have to worry about.

“I’ll be there for Mum,” I say, though actually he hasn’t asked. He’s been almost silent since the verdict, as if the shock of it has never left him, like he’s frozen in that moment.

Christina, her brother and sister, her parents, are all in this little room too. I wonder what she thinks when she sees my parents clinging to each other and crying. I don’t know if it’s remorse or satisfaction, I don’t know if it’s terrible, wordless outrage; and I don’t know if we should shy away from her in cringing guilt and shame. Should we speak to her? What would we say to any of them?

#

It’s over. And the feeling is surreal. Has what I think just happened really happened? I’ve spent these years waiting for something to shift, for reality to fall back into its proper place. Something was going to happen that would set all the insanity to rights. Something must. And I’ve waited. But now the insanity hardens into reality, and its already happened. And it’s already happened for Ben. And where is he, beyond that moment? I can’t get my head around it; the enormity makes me want to drop down on my knees and throw up in the perfectly manicured grass.

Christina approaches from behind me. Her face is mild, sad, serene. She says in a perfect voice, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The words don’t sound like mine. “You fought tooth and nail for my loss,” begged the court for it, begged the jury, “But I understand why.”

Perhaps that’s the best that there can be between us, given everything. Maybe it was brave for her to stand before me, to speak. Was it her way of giving a forgiveness I hadn’t asked for and still don’t know if I should?

All I know is that I can ever forget her eyes. Or Ben’s, still wide and unbelieving, right up and through the moment. The eyes of another Ben, dark, half-lidded, drowsy, as he lay in my lap while I was twelve and he was just four. I still don’t know how it could all have come to this.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work