Light Errant (11 page)

I had to stick to the track on my heavy roadster, he didn't; we might be racing again, but at least we weren't side by side any more.

I took stupid risks on the climb, hauling my machine around the sharp zigzags, perilously close to losing it altogether and sliding off, broken bones and a broken bike guaranteed if I let it happen. Even so, all I saw of him was his dust as he ploughed straight up the hillside, and when I got to the top he was there already, his bike on its stand and the helmet off his head, himself standing waiting for me.

Well, that was written, that was inherent, both in the bikes and in us. Of course he won, didn't he always?

I switched off my engine, kicked my stand down, stood up to meet him. Walked across, even, with no thought in my head, what I should or could or wanted to say to him; and then it didn't matter anyway, because he didn't want to talk at all, he just hit me.

A hard round-arm slap it was, the hand cupped for added impact, plenty of time to see it coming if I'd only had the wit to duck. I didn't, and he made sweet contact with my cheek, jarred all my teeth and the bones that held them. And I still wasn't thinking, I just felt a hot spur of relief underlying the shock of it. And reacted a second late, perhaps, but still too fast for him as I swung my fist in return.

Caught him right on the chin, knuckle-crunchingly hard. I don't believe I'd ever knocked anyone down before, in all the fights of my youth; but he went over like a target on a trip, straight down he went without even a stagger to try to catch himself. He lay still in the shadow of his bike, and I felt a moment's panic as my head cleared.

“
Jamie...?
”

I crouched over him and saw the glitter of his open eyes, slitting against the sun; huffed with relief as he brought a cautious hand up to touch his jaw, where his skin was already staining red.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Was that all you?”

I had to stop and work it out, but, “Yes,” I said. “I think so. Unless just being in the sun gives me something.” If there'd been any talent in that punch, it wasn't deliberate. Or not conscious, at any rate. I couldn't speak for my id.

“Fuck. You been working out, or what?”

All those gyms, in all those separate cities: I knew I'd put on weight, I knew I had more muscle to show the girls, I'd never known till now that I could actually use it.

“Are you getting up,” I said, “or what?”

“Think I'll stay here, thanks. You might hit me again.”

I grinned and lay down to join him, side by side and easy touching distance. All passion spent, it seemed, in one blow each.

“Was that male bonding, d'you reckon?”

“No.” I had my eyes closed, sunlight heavy on the lids, tingling everywhere it touched. “Didn't go on long enough. You want to try again?”

“No.” I heard him breathing deeply, working up to something, waiting till his head felt straight enough to handle it; and then, “Brother, thou hast my Laura much offended.”

“Brother,” coming straight back at him, “you have
my
Laura much offended.”

A pause, while he did me the grace to consider that; and there was nothing challenging in his tone, only strict neutrality when he said, “Do you really think so?”

“No,”
damn it
, “of course I don't. She isn't, never has been,”
not my Laura.
“It's her choice, who the hell am I to criticise? I just acted like a shit, that's all. I'm sorry.”

“Good,” he said, sounding oddly cheerful. “That's what I thought, what I told her.”

“What, that I was a shit?”

“A sorry shit. Don't worry.”

That was stupid; how could I not worry? “She seems happy,” I said tentatively. “About the baby, I mean.” Meaning,
how about you, are you happy?

“Yeah. Mad cow. Too many burgers, I reckon,” but there was a grin in his voice that seemed to be an answer.

I heard him move then, beside me. Cracked my eyes open, and saw him take a mobile phone out of a pouch on his belt. He flipped it open, punched a number, waited, winked at me when he saw me watching; and then said, “Hi, it's me. Told you I'd find him... Yeah, he's fine. He says he's a sorry shit. I'll bring him back later, okay? You can kiss and make up then... No. No can do. We've got to go and play first. It's a boy thang. See you...”

He put the phone away, then grinned down at me and said, “Come on, we'll go to the Island.”

o0o

Pirate's Island had been a part of our lives for as long as I could remember. Ditto for my older cousins, ditto maybe for my parents' generation too, though I'd never asked. Neither one of my uncles, perhaps, but I could see my dad there: demanding as a kid, drunk and sweating and demanding as a teenager, fumbling at girls and cheating clumsily with the air-rifles and getting away with it because of who he was.

Pretty much like us, really.

Well, like we used to be. The Island was a semi-permanent funfair with cheap rides and tacky stalls, open from Easter to August Bank Holiday. It was an easy place for parents to take their children, and easy too for lads to take their girls, individually or en masse. Two totally separate sets of memories it had given me: ten years of candy floss and roundabouts, dodgem cars and toffee-apples, goldfish in plastic bags and being sick with sweets and excitement; then another ten years of warm lager and the roller coaster, sweet cider and would-she-or-wouldn't-she, finding out in shadows and being sick with alcohol and excitement.

In winter it was a skeleton, everywhere closed and dead and dusty, again an easy place to come for kids or adolescents. Climb the gates and you could roller-blade or skateboard in and out of the attractions (or actually on the attractions, if you broke a lock or a shutter to get through; no one bothered, no one watched the place in winter, they just trusted us not to burn it down and patched up lesser damage come the spring), you could take your best girl or any willing girl into some dark and quiet corner and do all those things you didn't dare try at home. If it was raining, not to worry, there was plenty of shelter; if it was snowing, so what? You'd keep each other warm...

Actually that last was more Jamie's story than mine. He'd been lucky with girls as with everything, where I'd had too many hang-ups even to keep up with the average family score. Even before Laura. But that was the Island's reputation, and it was more than an urban myth. Even I'd copped the odd snog and feel, usually with someone provided for that purpose by Jamie or his big bastard brother Marty or else some other cousin taking pity, showing concern.

o0o

The Island wasn't really quite an island, except at the top of the tide. It was only a couple of hundred metres offshore and there was a causeway exposed at low water, a tarmac'd road with a sort of watchtower affair in the middle, a platform on high stilts that had a ladder up and a roof above for the convenience of anyone stupid enough to get caught by the incoming sea when they were only halfway across. That was another place good for girling, according to Jamie, if you could only time it right: take them up for a fag and a cuddle and a look at the view, and before you know it the tide's come in and you can't leave, all you can do is watch the water cover the road and giggle a lot, find a quarter-bottle of vodka in your pocket, share that between you and suggest some friendly way to kill the next few hours...

There's a road, but there's no great point in driving along it. Not in a car, at least, and not even on a bike in high summer. Too many pedestrians coming and going, and nowhere to park once you've crossed. Acres of free parking on the mainland, though, so we left the bikes there as so often before, locked his helmet in my box and walked past the anxious knot of visitors reading the tide tables on the noticeboard,
better safe than sorry, dear, we don't want to get stranded, now do we?
and onto and over the causeway. Going with the flow, just two young men in a crowd, nothing to mark us out.

Except our faces, of course. Jamie didn't carry the family features so forcefully marked as mine, but in my company there wasn't any question, his genetic inheritance was there to be seen. Maybe people just weren't looking for it, though, not here. This was still very much Macallan territory but there wasn't the same edge, the same sense of tension unresolved. I supposed the Island had always been a refuge, a place to forget your troubles for a while; which in this area meant a place to forget my family for a while. Maybe recognition just got left on the mainland, with the car.

Whatever. I took what precautions I could, weaving a fine web of sunlight like a halo around us, gossamer-thin and utterly immaterial, just so that anyone who glanced at us casually was going to be a little dazzled by the light, would have to blink water from their eyes before they could see clearly again. It wouldn't fool a concentrated glare, but why should we invite one?

Jamie twigged what I was doing, after a minute or two. “Neat idea,” he murmured. “Where'd you learn that?”

“Made it up.” I'd taught myself a lot of new tricks in the first month or two after I left home, before I forswore the talent. Now I was forsworn they were all available to me again; and Christ, I'd missed them so much...

“Ben,” Jamie said, “I think you are going to be a revelation. Could be just what this family needs.”

Could be, perhaps. Could be just the opposite. I couldn't tell.

o0o

The Island was a place for having fun, reunions are a time for fun and laughter, for boyish folly and childish excess; but not that day. There was just too much other stuff around: behind us, between us, ahead of us. Inhibitions were in, exhibitions out. Despite what he'd said on the phone, we didn't really play at all. The half-hearted capture of a fluffy rhinoceros at a darts stall to take back for Laura—and bless him, he didn't say
for the baby
and showed no signs that he was even thinking it—satisfied us both, though Jamie had been throwing the arrows.

It was a big rhino. He slung it across his shoulders—
like a child
, and I could only hope my face wasn't saying so—and said, “Oy. Were you nudging those darts?”

“Might have been,” I said neutrally. “Maybe you're better than you think you are.”

“Ben,
nobody
could be better than I think I am. It's just that I don't often prove it.”

“Well. Does it matter? Laura deserves rhinos.”

He frowned at me, then shrugged beneath his burden. “No, you're right. It doesn't matter.”

It would matter to her, of course, we both knew that. But she wasn't here, and neither one of us was about to tell her.

o0o

We looked at some of the rides with a nostalgic eye, but indecision was a killer. Nothing tempted, nothing was strong enough to tug against the gravity of what we knew, what we weren't yet talking about, what we had to come to.

In the end it was Jamie as ever who took the lead, who sighed and said, “I'm hungry.”

“Yeah.”

Hungry on the Island meant fish and chips in a cone of newspaper, lager from a can to wash it down; it meant a scramble over seaweed-slippery rocks to get away from the noise and crush of the crowds, to sit with our feet dangling over grey-green depths too unchancy even for us to swim in; above all, it meant talking quietly and seriously, tackling the big issues, facing the facts. We used to do that all through our teenage years, I'd tell him my problems and he'd tell me his triumphs. What goes around, comes around. Here we were again, we had to talk, of course we'd talk like this.

o0o

I bought the food, he bought a four-pack, we headed for our private ground. Others had come this way before us, trespassers, intruders; but they'd peeled off left or right, looking for the rock-pools or the caves. We slipped and slithered around the great rock we called Greenbeard for the long tangles of weed that clung to its chin, and there was the boulder we always used to sit on, and there was the long view out with nothing to interrupt it bar the odd container vessel keeping her distance from our shore. This could have been ten years ago, easy, except that ten years ago my family was ever on the up and I was sinking, and right here, right now neither part of that was true.

My turn to lead off, then. Tang of salt in the air, salt and vinegar both on hot food in damp paper heavy in my hands; I chewed, swallowed, breathed, said, “Who was it, Jamie?”

“Who was it what?”

“Died. Which cousin?”

“Christ. Don't you even know that?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't be bloody asking, would I?”

The antagonism was all seeming, all defensive, both of us recognised that. He broke off a chunk of fish and threw it at a seagull, the bird dodged it in missile mode then came up beneath to catch it falling, treat it as a treat; Jamie said, “It was Karen. They cut her fucking
throat.
”

That much I knew; but, Karen? Karen, Karen Macallan... A moment's searching, and then I had her. Pale blonde, bit of a damp dishcloth to look at though that had not been her reputation, but I didn't know if her reputation was accurate because, “Jesus, Jamie, she was only a bloody kid...”

“Seventeen last birthday,” he said bleakly. “I saw her body, and her head was hanging off, nearly. There wasn't any blood in her at all. Father Hamish reckoned they'd maybe hung her upside down, to drain it all out. There were marks on her ankles, which might have been the rope. That meant they did it living, Hamish said.”

Oh, sweet. It had to be symbolic, draining her of Macallan blood; never mind that hers would have had no spark of magic in it, except the background buzz to mark her as a carrier. All our women had that, at least, but nothing else. Nothing of benefit, if talent was a benefit; and there were times—
like when they're hanging you upside down, bleeding you to death, maybe?
—when yes, for sure it was.