Dead of Light (22 page)

People were talking in murmurs, all through the house; Allan and Jess were at it now, heads together with Uncle James. Only my parents weren't speaking, seemingly, or being spoken to.

Jamie cocked his head in greeting, then did what my mother couldn't manage or was frightened to try. Prised one hand off the sofa-back, transferred it to my shoulder.

Christ, his grip hurt. We used to do circuits at the gym together — with Marty again, the three of us, unless it was the two of them and me — way back when, and probably he still did. Me, I'd abandoned that when I abandoned my family and all its works.

I don't think he knew he was hurting. All his body was tense; his face was tight and white, sheened with sweat though the morning wasn't even warm yet. His eyes looked blind to the room, focused only on me.

“Have you seen her?” His voice was tight too, pitched high and hoarse.

I shook my head, remembering how he'd been when Marty died, how angry. This was the same again. He was blazing, raging at what had been done to us. “Not here. Last night, I saw her.”

That checked him, even in his fury. I saw him blink, saw him consider; and then, “How?”

“I found her, Jamie. She called me.”

“I didn't know that.” He understood, though. He was one of the few who'd been close enough to know how Hazel could lean on my mind.

“I was too late,” I said, “too slow. Couldn't get there.”

He grunted, and his hand slackened on my shoulder; his arm came round me in a hug that caught at my throat as much as my body. “Shit, Ben...”

“Yeah.” Shit it had been, shit it was; but it had brought me up equal with Jamie now, at least in his eyes. I could read him, easy. He'd lost his big brother, I'd lost my twin. More, I'd had the chance to save her, maybe; that I'd failed didn't rub out the fact that I'd tried. He'd have expected my failure. He knew what I was.

What I had been, at least. What I was now, I hadn't really had the chance to find out even for myself; and Jamie wasn't my mother, however close we'd been once. He wasn't noticing anything different in me. No blame, the state he was in. But I thought I might tell him, later. He might be one of the few.

o0o

Turned out this wasn't a meeting, in the sense that Uncle James had held a meeting after Marty's death. Perhaps the third death somehow didn't count for as much as the first; unless it was that my father's daughter didn't count for so much as my uncle's son. Whatever, there were no speeches, nor would have been any even if there were a room fit size to give them in. The family turn-out this morning was only to show solidarity, to murmur in cliques and to look for leadership: Uncle James held court by the fireplace, and I think everyone there came for a shake of the hand or a clap on the shoulder, a quiet word or two. Meanwhile Uncle Allan was mingling, drifting from room to room and again talking briefly with just about everybody. Promises and reassurance, I guessed at from both of them, undertakings and dark oaths of vengeance. Tonight, I thought, the streets would be very full of Macallans doing a detective job. Going in pairs and playing bad cop, bad cop, if I knew my family. Bullying was all they had to fall back on, they'd never bank on the efficacy of kindness. Nor of cash: Uncle James would never believe that you could buy true witness.
Fear keeps cattle honest
, he used to say, and he wouldn't have changed on that.

What had changed, what was very strange was to see fear on the faces of my family. It was suppressed, perhaps, they were ashamed and trying to hide it; but it was there, none the less. Not Jamie was frightened, only angry he; and not Allan either, I thought, though he would be cat-cautious till this was resolved, a man careful of his life and health. Uncle James, though, I thought Uncle James was a little frightened, beneath his bluster and his offended pride. On others it was more clearly to be seen: a nervous glitter to their movements, eyes shifting in search of a reassurance they couldn't find, a fidget in their fingers. Someone was biting his nails, someone else biting his lip. This was hard for them, an insidious and unknown enemy with power that was supposed to be private, for family use only; and they weren't coming through it too well. No experience, I supposed, they'd never learnt how to handle themselves in a crisis. Never expected to face one, being who they were.

They were facing one now, right enough: three cousins dead, murder stalking the streets of their own home town with their blood in its nostrils, and it could have been anyone next on the list. No way of telling, nothing to link Marty and Tommy and my sister to predict who might be written down to follow, unless it was simply what Hazel had pointed out herself yesterday morning, that they were none of them the brightest stars in our constellation of talent. Maybe our enemy in the shadows was following a basic strategy here, picking off the weakest first, just to reduce the numbers...

Watching, I felt suddenly disgusted, a surge of my old loathing for everything my family stood for. Gangsters and cowards, scared of the dark now because someone was doing to them what they'd spent so long doing to other people...

I turned away, and caught Jamie's eye in passing. Gave him a hint of a smile, a hint of a wink; if he'd read any of my thoughts on my face, I didn't want him appropriating them to himself. Jamie had always been a little different, a little better than the herd in my critical judgement, even at its most harsh; today he outshone them by factors of brilliance, a man prepared to be angry along with me rather than fearful with them.

“I'll be back,” I murmured. “I'm going upstairs.”

He nodded, misunderstanding as I'd meant him to. Hazel would be laid out on display up there as Marty had been,
look what they've done to our girl
; but I didn't need to look. I wasn't going anywhere near her bedroom. I was more interested in my own.

o0o

Others had been up, and were coming down. I waited politely at the foot of the stairs, nodding quiet gratitude when they touched me in turn, in sympathy, and said what a dreadful thing it was. Then I squeezed my way up past the overflow of people standing on the steps for lack of anywhere else to stand, accepting the same from them and thinking it strange, so many of my family touching me and seemingly none of them noticing what their hands were coming into contact with, that tingle in my skin. Like Jamie, I supposed, they had excuse enough; or else simply no standards of comparison. So long since most of them had touched me or talked to me or wanted to be seen anywhere near me, they'd likely forgotten how dead and cold I used to feel, my blood unstirred by magic. Looking at me now they'd see only another Macallan lad, strayed perhaps but properly brought home by grief; and that's what their other senses would be feeling also, that ripple in the ether that marks out any Macallan lad. Small wonder if none of them remembered that I wasn't supposed to do that, that I had always been a eunuch among studs...

On the upstairs landing and blessedly alone at last, even unwatched once I got around the corner from the stairhead and the toilet door, I stopped, took a breath, ran both hands through my hair to hide their trembling —
not scared, huh, Benedict? Like fuck, lad. That's your past in there, and what could be scarier?
— and pushed open the door to my bedroom. What had been my bedroom.

I was half expecting, and I think half hoping, that the room would have been cleared: that everything that was mine would have been packed away or given away, the walls stripped and the cupboards emptied. At least then there would have been nothing to confront.

I should have known better. I did know better; it had only ever been half a hope, and not really an expectation. My father would have been squeezed, leant on from two directions at once, his two brothers:
he's gone, he's a traitor, throw it out
from Uncle James and
no, keep it all; he's still your son, he'll come home in time
from Uncle Allan. Allan was senior, his words carried far the more weight; and I thought my mother also would have said no. Would have asserted herself, perhaps, even against James in his offended outrage, chin to chin and her frail arms blocking the door,
¡no pasaran!

Strangest thing was to find my door closed. When I lived here bedroom doors never were, unless we were behind them. Even now, with the house full of people, the door to my parents' room stood a little ajar; and, yes, so did my sister's. No secrets now or ever, no privacy for Hazel.

I turned the handle on my own door, closed but not locked, at least, not that; and then I was inside and closing it again behind me, and oh, this was a trap, it was a time machine. I was sixteen again and hurting, hurting all the time: hating myself, hating my life, hating everyone I was meant to love. Never had got past that here. Even at nineteen pushing twenty, I'd still been sixteen. Still hurting, still hating.

I'd taken little with me, when I left. A bag of books and tapes scooped almost at random from the shelves; a rucksack stuffed with clothes; nothing else but bad memories and a lifetime's burden of failure. All else that had been mine was here still, dusty but still fresh as tears, fresh as pain.

Posters on the walls:
camshafts and camiknickers
, my mother used to describe my taste in decoration. Sisterless, I'd have had motorbikes up there also; but sisterless I never was, and had never thought to be. So there were cars but no bikes, Bugattis and Porsches and no BMWs. Among the motors were the models, the actresses and the rock stars: some qualified by beauty, some by raunchiness or sheer sex appeal, embarrassingly many simply by the skimpiness of what they were wearing, those snipped from magazines as close to soft porn as I dared to go in a room that I couldn't lock behind me when I left. Anything I didn't want to share, I had to carry.
Everyone needs secrets
, my mother used to say,
but you don't need secret things. Keep your secrets in your head, not in your bedroom.

I'd made promises and stuck to them, more or less; made only token efforts to conceal those things a mother shouldn't find. There were often cigarettes or cans of lager in the bottom of the wardrobe, barely hidden by an artfully-fallen jacket; quarter-bottles of vodka and the porn that Jamie passed on to me went classically under the mattress. I never could be sure if my mother snooped or not. If she did, she never challenged me with what she'd uncovered. My father snooped for sure, he made no secret of it; but he wasn't looking for smuggled contraband, all he wanted was clues to help him understand his wayward son. Alcohol and fags would have been reassurance to him: signs of a youth being properly misspent, my actions speaking — he would have hoped — more truly than my words.

What real secrets I was coming back to here weren't in the room at all, only in my memories, where my mother would have hoped to find them. Where I'd spent three years trying to bury them, and never was time more foolishly and uselessly wasted. One otuch of eye or hand on the triggers that surrounded me now and out they came, toothed and eager, breaking through what thin crusts I'd coated over them...

o0o

My books: not as I'd left them, those that I'd left behind. Not tumbled across the carpet or tossed onto the bed. Nor put back the way they were before, in categories and alphabetical order; only shelved at random, as my mother must have picked them up. Even at random, though, and even with the curtains drawn against the light to make it hard to read titles, I knew them all by sight. And it seemed to me they spoke too loudly, of the boy I'd been back then. I'd left all my juvenilia, of course, the Enid Blytons and
The Wind in the Willows
and Biggles and
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Most of the science fiction had been left also, dog-eared paperbacks bought second-hand and read late into the night, swapped with Jamie and read again when they came back to me. No fantasy, nor any horror: we'd never needed those.

And scattered through the fiction was the hard science, physics and genetics and biology, mostly stolen from school or from the library during a few cruel months as I struggled to become Uncle Allan in a hurry, to understand about my family's talent and my own clear lack of it. I'd made no headway, no surprise; and those had been the books I'd been most glad to leave behind me.

o0o

My tapes: again stacked neatly and not in any order, not as I'd ever left them. And the headphones on the shelf beside, with its cable neatly coiled as I never would have dreamt of coiling it; and these seemed like icons of my life or a shrine to the departed, and it was blasphemy almost for me to be back among them. Long hours, uncountable hours I'd spent with my eyes shut against the night and those headphones bonded to my ears, doing God only knew what long-term damage to my hearing but saving me surely in the then-and-there: blasting my mind with music, isolating me from my life whenever I couldn't bear it longer.

o0o

My photos: not the fantasies, not the cars or the sex-goddesses that had teased my adolescent hunger. These were snapshots, blu-tacked onto the wall in a tight little cluster just by the head of the single bed, where I could lie in my depression and see them ganging up on me, truly tormenting.

They were nothing really, only a diary in pictures, evidence of how I spent my days. It was pure masochism, that kept me taking my camera along; I knew what I was and what I did, I didn't need reminders. Except perhaps reminders that I could be happy: and I had some of those, photos of me with Jamie mostly, moments of brotherhood where I felt I really belonged. Out on the scrambling circuit, both of us grinning through filth, celebrating some triumph of his not now remembered; or candid-camera snaps at a party with the two of us out of our heads, pawing unknown girls and drinking from whatever bottle was handy, smoking tobacco and anything else that came around, looking pale and sweaty and bare seconds from throwing up. Which we usually were. That was the summer we were fifteen, we hadn't learnt to take it but still we couldn't get enough. My voice was deeper than Jamie's by then, we'd proved that on some piece of electronic wizardry we whipped up between us in his basement den; but his talent had shown itself that spring already, and I was still dead and flat and nothing. He had all his future to celebrate, I had bad feelings growing into almost-certainty, and good enough reason to spend the summer drunk. Marty helped, he was good to us all through those holidays, taking us to parties we wouldn't have got into without him — getting me into at least one bed I wouldn't have got into without him, starting me off on the trail that had led to Laura and my practising to be a virgin, not getting into her bed or anyone else's any more — and I had Marty on my wall there also, in his role as adoptive big brother and all-too-fallible hero.