Dispossession (16 page)

Closed, gripped,
squeezed
;
and never mind what the doctors said, that I had no fracture in my skull. I
swear I could feel all its separate pieces shifting, under that pressure. I
wanted to scream, but had no breath to do it; best I could manage was a gasp
and a whimper, too weak even to sob.

The squeezing was internal also. Not only my bones, my brain
felt crushed between his fingers, like a sponge in a vice. My head would be a
coconut, I thought, when he was finished, just a dry shell with no life in it;
it would rattle and hiss when he shook it, a percussive instrument, because
there’d be nothing inside but desiccated coconut.

But he only kept it up for a second or two, and amazingly I
could still think when he lifted his hands away, my eyes once they had finished
watering could still see; and when I shook my head now, it didn’t hurt. When I
slapped my forehead, that didn’t hurt either. Bone-ache and brain-ache, both
were gone. No migraine threatened now, I was just crazy-tired suddenly, my muscles
sucked of strength and my bones of solidity.

I twisted my head round to smile at him, and even that much
was major effort. “Thanks.”

He nodded, didn’t ask how I felt now or anything so
unnecessary. He knew how I felt. His hands moved more lightly down my arms and
over my chest and my crossed legs, and the bruises were not so sore and the
healing cuts didn’t itch so much any more.

Then, “Go and sleep,” he said, “you will need to.”

He was not wrong. I could barely manage the vertical without
help, which he didn’t offer; made it at last and staggered the dozen paces to
the open Airstream door and had to grip the frame to keep myself upright there,
for one last glance back at Luke.

He was looking into the fire, turned right away from me, not
watching, not concerned. He’d done his part, and I was on my own again.

Fair enough.

o0o

Luke might have a new caravan to adorn his hollow—“lifted”
he’d said, and I thought maybe that applied more ways than one: I’d never seen
him use money, and Airstreams come expensive, especially this side of the
pond—but once inside there was only the stretch of it, only the added space to
say so. Otherwise it looked just the same as the last one, or the one before.

The skin was intact, but nothing inside remained. The
interior had been gutted: walls and doors, furniture and facilities all gone,
all ripped out by a rough untimely hand before they were ready to go. There
were scars to say so, and holes uncouthly plugged with rags and plastic.

You never know how big something really is, until it’s
empty. This was
big
. And not at all cosy,
not homelike despite the rugs and blankets, the coats and curtains heaped like
an unruly sea across the floor. Luke’s nesting material, the only concession to
comfort I’d ever known him make; and oh, I was grateful for it that day. I
kicked a pile into a corner—at least insofar as an object cigar-shaped can have
corners, which is actually not a very great distance from not at all—and
tumbled down into it. Worked the deck shoes off my feet, tucked knees and
elbows up nice and tight and fœtal, and fell asleep in all my clothes and dirt.

o0o

Woke up sometime in the middle of the night, no watch so I
didn’t know when. It was dark, that was all that mattered, and I needed a piss
quite urgently.

No toilet, of course, that was gone along with all the
bathroom fittings. I got to my feet and blundered to the door, felt my way out
and then stood on the step for a minute, to let my eyes find some good in
starlight.

In fact what they found was the glow of the fire, not dead
yet; and Luke’s shadow sitting over it, just as I had left him, and he still
wasn’t turning around to look although certainly he would have heard me coming
out.

I made my way along the side of the caravan and then behind,
into an unlikely copse; emptied my bladder long and delightfully against a
tree; then went straight back inside and straight to sleep again, not pausing
even to wish Luke goodnight.

From the look of it, he wasn’t having one anyway. Actually,
I wasn’t sure that he ever did. I thought maybe the nights were his bad time,
his private Waterloo endlessly replaying. I’d certainly never seen him sleep
through one.

o0o

Me, barring that one brief break I slept sweeter than I had
in the hospital, even, under their chemical blanket. Some added value in Luke’s
magic fingers, perhaps, or else in this little bubble of strange that he
inhabited, the very air up here seeded with somnolence to keep mere mortals
quiet.

Or else it was just that I was knackered and I needed sleep,
and sleep was there for the taking and so I took it. Could’ve been that to keep
the pragmatists happy, something that in my experience the world always tries
to do, even against the intent of angels.

Personally, I believe in miracles. Very small-scale, very
private little miracles like sleeping luxuriously late and then waking to find
your body better than it ought to be, stiff and sore but not hurting. Like warm
spring sunshine on the grass outside and the sky utterly blue above, very much
against the weather forecast; fruit for breakfast and damper fresh-baked in the
fire’s embers and a wonderful lethargy in me, a total contentment in simply
lying on the greensward and listening to birdsong, watching Luke with half an
eye as he moved around the hollow, barely talking at all.

Certainly not asking questions, not even thinking of taking
dictation.

o0o

That day and the next were my rest and recreation, while my
scabs peeled and my stubble grew and I didn’t even itch, I just felt massively
and marvellously settled in my body and in my head both, all questions put
aside.

On the third day I rose again from the dead, and became
human once more; and being human was plagued with anxiety and curiosity, itches
impossible to scratch.

And I had the car, and Luke seemed utterly disinterested in
what I did with my time; so I bumped slowly, gently down the track to the road
below and drove to Penrith, where I interviewed a sergeant of police.

Who gave me two facts to play with, each of a deep and
abiding strangeness.

The first was that I was wrong, completely one hundred per
cent—or no, better, one hundred and eighty degrees—wrong in the assumption I’d
made after Luke broke his little bombshell about my having been to see him that
day. No, I wasn’t on my way back to the city when I crashed. I’d been east of
the Lakes, for sure, but travelling
west
.
As if I’d driven halfway home and changed my mind, done a U-turn in the road
and headed back to Luke’s again.

“Any chance you could have forgotten something, sir?
Something important enough to go all that way back for?”

I shrugged. There was always the chance, I supposed—hell, in
this brave new world of mine,
anything
was
possible: I was a married man with a deeply crooked buddy, wasn’t I?—but it
certainly wasn’t likely. You didn’t take things to Luke, to be remembered or
forgotten.

“Anywhere else you might have been going, then?”

“Well, there’s always my mother’s house. Don’t know if she’d
have been there, but I’ve got keys.” I’d had keys, at least—and checking my
unreliable memory and then my pockets, yes, I still had keys. That much of my
history I hadn’t given away. And it wasn’t impossible, actually: in crisis, I
might have gone home to Mum. On a whim, even, late at night and heading in a
different direction. It was the sort of behaviour she’d approve, that she’d
always despaired of seeing in me: a handbrake turn on the highway, a race
through the dark towards some unsentimental dream of shelter.

Then he told me the second piece of news he had, that
changed the picture once again.

They’d found a witness, he said, a local lad on his way home
after seeing his girlfriend safe; a little drunk, a little high, he said, but
not enough to make him unreliable. It’s how they knew for sure which way I’d
been going, he said, this boy’s report: no clues otherwise to tell them, no
skid-marks on the tarmac or buckled and broken barriers. I couldn’t have braked
at all, he said, and the manufacturers needed to look at the aerodynamics
again, no car should fly so high, whatever speed it was doing.

But this boy, he said, of course the boy stopped to stare as
I’d driven past. A flash sports car on the road so late, what fifteen-year-old
would not?

I was travelling fast, the boy had said, apparently, but not
stupidly fast for such a road in darkness. Not flying-fast, not then.

So the boy had got a good look; and for all that he’d been
looking at the bonnet and the spoiler and trying to spot if it had twin
exhausts, he’d seen something else also that he’d mentioned to the police as a
positive fact, absolutely no question in his mind.

He’d seen two heads in that car as it passed him, driver and
passenger both.

Two men, he thought, though he wouldn’t swear to that. Only
a fleeting glimpse and no faces, a girl with short hair could’ve fooled him.

That was just two or three minutes from the smash, at the
likely speed I’d been travelling. The boy hadn’t heard the car stop to let the
passenger out, though he hadn’t heard it crash either: only its roar fading and
I guess the memories of his night rising to replace it, till he forgot to listen
any longer.

There must have been a stop, though, the sergeant said. The
passenger must have debussed. They’d had another look at the wreckage, he said,
and found it hard once more to believe that I’d survived at all, let alone come
out of it with so little damage. Comparatively little, he insisted, when I
murmured about ten weeks of my life lost. I could have been dead, he said; I
should surely have been laid up for months, with many bones broken and all my
innards tangled.

But what was sure, he said, was that no one—no matter how
lucky—could have been in that smash and walked away and left me. They’d been
checking bloodstains, he said, and those few they’d found on the passenger side
were my own.

So, I must have stopped to let this other person out, somewhere
not a mile from where I’d crashed. There was nothing there, no home, no
habitation: which had them wondering about the accident again. Especially in
the light of this report from the city, about an attack with a runaway truck,
he said.

They were double-checking the brakes and the steering, he
said, but there were no signs of tampering, or any mechanical problem.

Their best bet, he said, was that I’d had a row with my
unknown passenger, and stopped the car to throw them out; and then driven off
in high dudgeon and at high speed, and swerved to avoid some fluffy bunny or
other obstruction in the road, and—
whee!
—blasted
into Britain’s controlled airspace without filing a flight plan. Which was an
offence, he said jovially, but they wouldn’t be pursuing me for it, they didn’t
think they could keep up.

Basically, I suppose he was saying
help!
—and I couldn’t do that, all I could do was
reply in kind,
sorry, not a clue, none of it makes
any sense to me either.

So at last he let me go, once I’d signed a couple of forms
and shrugged off his doubts and prognostications about the likelihood of a
speedy insurance settlement. Reminded about money and the general worldly need
for it, I went into the nearest bank to raise some cash on my gold card. No
problems. God alone knew what my credit limit was these days, but clearly I
hadn’t reached it yet. Once back in the city, that was one more thing I’d have
to sort out, I supposed; a serious talk with the manager at my own bank must be
on the cards.

From the bank to the hospital, where I inveigled a young
houseman into checking my stitches. As I’d anticipated, the wounds had closed
well enough that he ended up taking them all out. From there to Smith’s for a
dictaphone and a writing pad, spare tapes and batteries and a couple of
coloured biros—starting a new job, I always liked to start clean, with gear
dedicated to that job and that alone—and then I pigged out on steak and kidney
pie and chips in a greasy spoon before I drove back to Luke. I never did notice
it when I was there, when I was with him; but once out of his bubble, water and
plant-life seemed suddenly desperately inadequate to sustain a man, and I was
always ragingly hungry for meat.

He smelled it on my breath, of course, when I got back. I
caught the full blast of his displeasure, contempt and revulsion in a single
facial twist, but he didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t. If he’d been with me, he’d
have snatched the pie from the plate or the fork from my mouth—he’d done both
of those to me before, when I was younger—but he was always a creature of
action, never words. He’d never really seen the point of words.

I wanted words from him now. I wanted access to a certain
address on his hard-storage silicon-chip many many megabytes of memory, so infinitely
reliable, not like mine; I wanted all the data that he’d stored and I’d so
carelessly lost.

“Just repeat it for me, Luke? Word for word, everything we
said?”

“Why? It was just talk. I gave you the facts.”

“There might be other facts,” I said, “hidden in the actual
words I used, clues I can pick up on now.” Or else in the way I’d said things,
excited or cynical or sarcastic; but no use asking him to repeat tones of voice
or other subtleties. I think he also heard in black and white.

He frowned over that, said nothing, was doubtless trying to
defeat me with silence the way he always used to. But I was older now, and more
resistant.

“I was working for Vernon Deverill,” I said. “Right. But I
don’t know why, and neither do you. Maybe there’s something I said to you then,
that I can use now to work out what was going on, why I’d get involved in
something like that. Come on, Luke. Just read it out like a playscript, yeah?
Won’t take you that long.” There would have been many pauses from me, many
silences from him; even half a day’s-worth of talking would compress into an
hour or two of tape.