Blue MaHaughlin

Blue MaHaughlin — formerly Blue Cheese, and still answering to the old name on most days — runs a mechanic shop and a sister-business with her husband. Her route to that quiet sentence has been long, dark in several stretches, and held together at the end of it by one person.

Three sisters

She grew up in a loving family alongside her two sisters, Lady and Gwendolyn. They were inseparable — the kind of siblings who shared a room by choice as well as by floor plan.

Blue's relationship with the family was the complicated one. Lady was the academic — top of her class, perfect grades, the kind of daughter who came home with another certificate to put on the fridge. Blue saw the way her parents looked at those certificates, and the look stayed with her. The fridge had a hierarchy.

Blue was, by her own admission, the naughty one. She shoplifted on principle, partly because her parents — concerned about the shape that naughtiness was taking — had stopped giving her pocket money. Pocket money for Lady and Gwendolyn. None for Blue. So Blue got herself what she wanted, from the shelves.

The juvenile detention incident

At twelve, on a street she has refused to identify ever since, a grown man wolf-whistled at her.

Blue did not have the temperament for that.

She found a piece of something heavy and proceeded to redecorate his car with it, in front of him, for as long as it took for the neighbourhood to fetch a uniform. She went to juvenile detention for the result.

She has never apologised for it.

The fire

When she was fifteen, she and her sisters woke to a cloud of smoke pushing under their bedroom door. The girls got out. Their parents did not.

The three of them stood on the street and listened. The firefighters worked as hard as the building would let them. The parents did not stop screaming for a long time. Then they did.

That morning is, by Blue's own private estimation, the morning that ended one version of her and started another.

Foster care, divided

The system took all three of them. The system also separated them.

Lady and Gwendolyn were placed together, with kind people.

Nobody took Blue.

She was passed through one home, then another, then another. A significant number of those homes were not safe. The full shape of what she lived through during those years she has not told anybody, and she does not have to. What's known is what came out of it: somewhere in that stretch, the symptoms she would later be diagnosed with — schizophrenia — started becoming the loudest voice in the room.

She was alone with them for a long time.

The first garage

At eighteen she walked into a run-down mechanic shop and walked out with a job. The owner was an old man who knew engines and was, separately, the kind of man you didn't turn your back on. She made the trade anyway. She needed the skill. She got the skill.

She rented a flat she could afford. It had mould on the walls and silverfish in the bathroom. She didn't tell anybody she lived there.

Phil

When she had enough on her CV she applied to a better workshop in town, and that is where she met Phil.

Phil was kind. Phil was sweet. Phil also had a dark side of his own, which he didn't bother hiding from her after about the second week. He looked at the dark side of Blue the way most people look at the colour of someone's eyes — fine, that's just what that is. He stayed.

Together, then, they became what they still describe as partners in crime, in both halves of the phrase.

The hardest stretch

In the years before Blue's medication was right, her illness ran the show more than she did, and Phil ran the cleanup. When she hurt somebody — and there were people, more than once, that she hurt past repair — Phil was the one who made the worst of it not findable. He kept her stable enough to stay out of an institution. He kept her loved enough to want to.

Alongside that, the two of them ran their own thing — robbing houses, robbing banks, drawing more attention from the police than was strictly comfortable. They got away with most of it. Some of it they didn't.

Eventually a doctor got her on the right combination of medication. The worst of the symptoms quieted. The killing, in her own measured phrase, happened less.

It is one of the few things she will say out loud about that chapter.

The pet shop

In a softer year they tried something gentler together. They opened a pet shop. It did well at first — Phil at the counter, Blue in the back room with the rabbits — and for a while the days looked like other people's days.

Then the customers stopped coming. Nobody could quite say why. They closed the shop, sold it, and pocketed the rest.

The wedding

They put the money into themselves. A small venue. Close friends only. Blue took the surname MaHaughlin from Phil, kept Blue because nothing else was going to fit her, and walked out of the ceremony in better shape than she had walked into most of her adult life.

Plue Performance, and PlueNoos

The business they actually knew was always going to be the next one. They opened Plue Performance — a mechanic shop named for the two of them — and then, when it took off, the sister-company PlueNoos next door.

Blue is the one with her head under the bonnet. Phil is the one out front. The two shops sit next to each other on the same street, painted the same colour, and at any hour of the working day at least one of them is open.

Now

Blue still answers to Blue Cheese if a friend uses it. Lady and Gwendolyn are back in her life. The medication holds. The flat with the mould is a story she tells now, not a thing she lives in.

Phil is still kind. Phil is still sweet. He keeps her sane.

She keeps him interesting.

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