Dispossession (9 page)

It showed too much in future photos, very much closer than I’d
ever want to be. The hands still in their cuffs and the rope
in situ
; the elbows, the knees, the ribbed back
all pin-sharp, all eroded; the face and the back of the head, two pictures
almost indistinguishable, almost impossible to tell which bloodied mass was
which.

Barely enough flesh remained to say that this was a man;
certainly nothing from the photos I’d seen could ever have said that he was
Chinese, or young, or anything pertinent to the discovery that he was my
brother-in-law, albeit only by prolepsis. It had taken three or four days, I
remembered, to prove his identity by fingerprints and what was left of his
teeth, what remnants of his jaw hadn’t been ripped away while he presumably
screamed and screamed against the hard road.

That had been Jacky Chu’s prolonged departure, his difficult
way to death: scraped and grated and dragged at speed behind a stolen van, one
lap of the city and then abandoned before the police could catch up, though
motorists had been phoning all along the route to tell them what was going
down. Rumour said that the first callers had seen young Jacky running behind
the van, that it was going just slow enough to let him keep his feet for a
minute or two, before he fell one time too often and couldn’t recover. Then
they’d shifted to the fast lane and put their foot down, and not even the
pathologists could say how much of that our Jacky had survived, how far around
they’d got before he died.

Dead he was, when the good guys found him; and now his
sister my wife sat opposite me, smoking and staring deep into her tea, and even
these months on she was distressed enough not to be thinking straight, not to
be realising that if I’d known about it before—and she’d know that I had—then I
knew about it now, because that knowledge didn’t fall into the weeks that I’d
lost.

She stared and smoked, and breathed a bit hard, a bit
sniffily through her nose; and said, “He’d have been so scared, too. He wasn’t
any kind of hero, wasn’t Jacky. He disappeared from the club early evening, and
they didn’t do, do that to him till much later; so he will’ve had hours of
whatever they did to him before, and he must’ve known it was going to get
worse. Hours of being scared out of his wits, he must’ve had; and that’s worse,
almost. For me, anyway. Knowing he had all that to go through, even before they
killed him...”

“He doesn’t look the kind of guy who scared easily,” I said,
uncertain of my ground here but interested, ready to take risks.

“What, that photo? That’s just show,” she said, shrugging.
“He liked to look cool. Anyone can put on a pair of Ray-Bans and a leather
jacket; and he had the muscles for it, but it was only ever for show, not for
real. Did him good, I guess, with the club and stuff, but he was soft as shite
under his clothes.”

Not like his sister, then. She had the same predilection for
coolth in appearance, that much was clear, and she had the muscles too, in
appropriately female form; but I thought she was tough as wire underneath also,
hard and sharp to the core.

If I had to marry anyone—if I’d had to marry someone—and it
couldn’t be Carol, then I thought I’d picked a pretty good candidate. The more
I saw of her, the deeper I dug, the more Sue impressed me.

But that was a remote feeling, a stand-back-and-admire sort
of feeling, and nothing to make me hotfoot towards an altar.

My mother always said that nothing could ever stop me asking
questions, short of a hand across my mouth. I was slightly more sophisticated
now, perhaps, but legal training and an all-consuming curiosity still meant
that I tended to hammer away at something, anything I was interested in, until
I was directly told to shut up.

So: “Who was it, did that to your brother?” I asked. “Do
they know?” They didn’t, last I’d heard; but I was near three months out of
date, and things change.

She shook her head, and gave me another of those dispirited,
desolate shrugs. “Not a clue, as far as I know. As far as anyone’s said. You
said you’d ask around for me, see if the police had any ideas they weren’t
going public with, but you never came up with anything. Can we talk about
something else now? Please?”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry.” This must have been doubly hard on her,
I realised suddenly, mentally savaging myself for being so slow on the uptake.
She hadn’t just been telling the story of her brother’s death; she’d been
telling it to a man to whom she’d undoubtedly said it all at least once
already. And then having to tell him what he’d done in response, which must
feel deeply strange. And cope with the fact that that man, her husband—me—had
suddenly become a stranger: as weird for her, I supposed, as it was for me, and
probably more disturbing.

“Sorry,” I said again, trying to apologise for what was
non-specific but all-encompassing:
sorry I drove
badly and crashed the car and started all this off
, or maybe
sorry I came into your parents’ takeaway that night and
started all this off.

And what the hell had I been doing out there in Limboland,
starving hungry at midnight and not going home? It wasn’t only other people I
needed to be bullying with questions, if I was going to resolve any part of
what had happened to me. I’d be having to put myself on the rack also. There
were answers to be squeezed out somewhere in my subconscious, there had to be:
motivations that had nothing to do with memory. I needed to understand myself,
a whole lot better than currently I did. I’d thought I knew it all; and I’d
proved myself so very, very wrong...

Sue smiled, shook her head, glanced at her watch and reached
for a remote control unit on the table, only faking a little, truly connecting
other gears and turning her mind to other things.

“I have to take you back soon,” she said, “but I didn’t drag
you up here for the view. This was on the BBC last night and I thought you’d
want to see it, so I turned over for the News at Ten and they had it too, and I
taped it...”

She had it all set up already, the right tape in the machine
and at the right place, rewound and ready to go. She punched buttons and there
was a click and a whirr, TV and video coming to life simultaneously; and the
screen showed a news presenter behind a desk, and behind her the magic of
television faded the prime minister’s face into a helicopter-shot of
broad-leaved English woodland.

“At the Colburne Valley protest in Cumbria,” the presenter
said, “an environmental activist had an amazing escape today, surviving a
fifty-foot fall and walking away apparently without a bruise to show for it.
Malcolm Hardy reports.”

The woodland filled the screen and started moving, as the
helicopter carried the camera down the valley to zoom in on a long scar of
cleared trees and rutted earth, giant yellow machines standing idle.

A man’s voice, laid over the pictures: “An uneasy peace has
returned to this remote spot, after the violence and confrontation of the last
few days. But it’s the false peace of a stand-off, both sides shocked and
disturbed by what took place here at first light...”

Cut to a camera on the ground, showing a small group of men
clustered at the foot of a tree, just where the ravaged ground met still-virgin
wood.

“The under-sheriff and his men, assisted by police and
professional climbers, were continuing with the operation begun on Monday. The
idea has been to clear protestors and their makeshift shelters from the wood
tree by tree, cutting their skyways of rope and bringing them down by force if
necessary. Officials insist that safety has always been the prime
consideration, and that nothing would be done to endanger life; but this
morning that assurance had a hollow ring to it, as something went dangerously,
desperately wrong.”

The camera panned slowly upwards, looking for action and
finding it high in the branches. Close to the trunk, a man bedecked in bright
orange look-at-me gear was clipping his safety harness to a rope that ran at
handrail-height from that tree to the next. Another rope made the bridge, the
skyway for those who dared to walk upon. The camera watched the man set his
feet judiciously on the rope and begin to crab across; and then it moved ahead
of him, to find another man already halfway over.

Much younger he looked, this second man, little more than a
boy from this distance; and he wore no harness, no safety ropes, and he didn’t
bother to cling or sidle. He walked the rope bridge without a handhold, with
total confidence, like a circus act, all show.

And he fell.

He fell without warning, without any effort to save himself
from falling. He rolled and tumbled in the air, and though it was a long way
down it seemed to take him longer than was natural, he seemed to fall in
slo-mo.

And he hit the earth rolling, tumbling, right in front of
the camera; and in the appalled silence around him there was nothing to hear
but the impact of that fall and the scuffing sounds of his body bucking on soft
earth. Even the reporter had had wit enough to be still, to add no commentary
now.

And then, full in the camera’s stare and just as distant
voices began to clamour—in oddly foreign tongues, I couldn’t hear a word of
English spoken—he pulled himself slowly and impossibly to hands and knees, and
then up onto his feet.

And again there was silence, those people who’d been rushing
to help stood frozen, and even I felt a chill as his eyes met the lens and
moved on.

He looked around, then turned around, and didn’t say a word;
only walked slowly and deliberately away into the wood, and not a person there
lifted a finger to delay him.

o0o

Sue hit a button and the picture died, the slight sound of
the winding tape clicked off.

“That was him, wasn’t it?” she said. “That was Luke?”

“Yes, that was Luke.” No mistaking Luke. I’d known him, even
up on the rope, too high to see; I’d known him falling, only a blur of
impossible motion; and now all the country knew him by his dirty-blond hair and
his chill, beautiful face, his ice-green eyes and his anger and his eternal,
untouchable youth.

“I thought it was. Just from what you’ve said, and him being
there. There couldn’t be two of them. But, but even if he’s what you said he
was, how did he...?”

“Luke hates to fly,” I said, quoting him indirectly, “but
when he must, the air will bear him up.” And then, against her doubting look,
“Time that fall with a stopwatch, if you want to. It’s too slow. Like he’s
falling through honey. That’s how. He fell fast enough to look good, not fast
enough to do him any hurt.”

I didn’t think any fall could actually hurt Luke, but if he
hated to fly, he must hate more to fall. Too much resonance in that. No
surprise if he’d reached for and found that mongrel compromise, neither the one
thing nor the other. That was Luke all through, in this his second life.

“Well. I thought you’d want to see it, anyway...”

“Yes. Thanks.”

She nodded, and we were both of us mute for a moment, both
caught up in separate concerns. Then she stirred, shook her head slightly
against whatever thoughts had clouded it, and pushed herself lightly to her
feet.

“Come on, invalid. I have to get you back. Do you want to go
down and see the club first, though? Just in case?”

In case it fires some circuit
in your dim head
, she meant. Privately, I thought there was little point
in hoping. Visual stimuli clearly weren’t going to work, or something would be
happening by now, surely. If Sue and her flat together could trigger nothing,
her club wasn’t likely to be any more effective. But I shrugged an
acquiescence, and levered myself up from the sofa; shook my head at her offered
hand, resisting the habit of dependence; and followed her slowly down the
stairs and through the emblazoned double doors where she held them open for me,
into the hush and half-dark of a snooker club all but empty in mid-afternoon.

One vast space it was down here, though the ceiling was
propped up on fat brick pillars at judicious points, hinting at interior walls
now gone. Directly ahead of us was a long bar, with a computer in among the
bottles; otherwise nothing but snooker tables and the walls lined with
scoreboards, cues in racks, zoetropic photographs of impossible shots in
action. Only a couple of the tables were lit up and in use.

Behind the bar, a Chinese boy grinned at me broadly, said,
“Lookin’ good, Jonty. Dig the bandage.” And then he added something I couldn’t
follow in a language I didn’t speak, guttural and tonal and signifying nothing.
And he was still looking at me as he said it.

“It’s no good, Lee,” Sue said from behind me. “He doesn’t
remember a thing.”

A stare, a grin less certain,
you’ve
got to be joking
, followed by slow acceptance as his eyes flicked
between us. “What,
nothing
?”

“I’m sorry. Not even your name,” I said, with a depressing
suspicion that this would prove to be a scene all too familiar in the next few
weeks. Right now I was embarrassed, but soon I’d be bored and embarrassed both,
telling it and telling it again.

“Christ on a bicycle. What, that bang on the head let all
your brains out, did it? Well, hullo, Jonty. I’m Lee Kwan Yu,” holding a hand across
the bar to shake mine. “I’ve been teaching you Cantonese for the last month.
Wasted effort, I guess. Start again tomorrow?”

Which was not a bad recovery in the circumstances, and I was
sorry not to give him more than a vague smile and a slight cock of my head, a
murmured, “Maybe. We’ll see,” which we both knew meant
almost certainly not
.

And then he turned to Sue, slipping back into Cantonese
again; she replied in the same, which meant they were surely talking about me.

I let my eyes stray around the club, I listened to the
solid, irregular
thunk!
of ball striking
ball and thought that that also could drive you mad, a contemporary version of
the classic water torture if you were listening for it; and I wondered how Sue
and her brother and apparently me could bear to live above it. But I’d heard
not a thing, upstairs; and glancing upward I saw a false ceiling of polystyrene
panels in an aluminium matrix, and deduced the existence of efficient
soundproofing above it.