Light Errant (15 page)

“Anyway,” from Jamie, “we did it, it's done now...”

“And we can't go home, as a result.”

“No, we can't.”

Not tonight, at any rate. There'd be someone watching for us. And Jamie wouldn't use his talent against family, that went without saying; and probably whoever his father sent would have no such inhibitions. He'd be under orders to do so if necessary, to bring us in. Uncle James hated to be defied.

“So what do we do now?” Laura demanded.

Camp out with friends
was the obvious answer, but the way they were looking at each other, I had a sudden doubt. There was an unspoken question between them,
who can we go to?
, and neither one of them was coming up with a solution.

My heart ached briefly, for them and for myself. I'd seen this before with couples, how they could turn inward to each other so strongly that they let old friendships, sometimes all their friendships drift and ultimately die of neglect. Jamie of course had suffered from the usual Macallan complaint, too few friends outside the family. Laura had been the compleat student, a social animal
par excellence
; but that was a picture two years old, and from the uncertain face of her I guessed that it no longer applied.

“Keep away from your own circle,” I said, more to help them out with an excuse than by way of genuine advice. “Just to be safe. He may have been keeping tabs on who you hang out with, especially if you've been in his bad books recently. He never lets anyone go.”

“Who, then?”

I looked down at my hand and said, “Give us your phone, Jamie.”

He passed it across; I called the number that was scribbled on my skin. It rang half a dozen times, and I was just getting anxious when the phone was picked up at the other end.

“Yes, hullo?”

“Hi, is that Janice?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Um, this is Ben. Sorry I ran out on you like that...”

“That's okay.” For someone who'd tasted what was likely her first experience of Macallan magic that morning, when I'd smashed the bar window, she sounded admirably cool. “How's it going, are you all right? We've been worried about you.”

“I'm fine. Only, we've got a problem. Can I impose on you again tonight?”

“Of course. The bed's there, it's not an imposition.”

“It may be, this time. There's three of us.”

“Three in a bed?” she suggested sweetly.

Ouch.
And double ouch, as I realised how inevitable the sleeping arrangements were. “I'll take the sofa,” I said. “If you don't mind...”

“Ben, we don't mind. You come. Have you eaten?”

Lunch was a long time ago now. “We'll pick something up on the way. For you, too. For you two too. Indian or Chinese?”

“Indian,” definitely. “Please,” added just for form's sake. And “Veggie for me, though,” with no hesitation, no anxiety about being awkward.

o0o

Laura rode pillion behind Jamie, though she'd have been a lot more comfortable with me. She and I were helmetless, in defiance of good law and good sense; I looked in my mirror more often than I needed to as I led them by devious ways through the dusk light, saw how her hair was being blown into rats' tails, and saw in my head how she'd sit on the floor at Jamie's feet and curse his clumsiness while he gently teased it out with fingers and comb.

Food came first, though, geographically and chronologically and otherwise. I thought this was a hopeful sign, that I could watch them together and imagine them at play and still feel hungry. I never used to eat, when I was grieving over Laura. Not unless she was watching, when I would eat and eat, not to let her know that I was grieving.

The city had changed, but not this much: not that I should drive down a certain cobbled alley in a certain shady quarter and fail to find the Hole. Technically
Al-Halal
, we knew it by many names,
Halalujah
and
Halal on Earth
and
The Black Halal of Calcutta
, but mostly it was just the Hole. It was dark, it was dingy, you descended many steps to find it and you didn't like the look of it when you got there, what little of it you could see; but it produced the best Kashmiri takeaway this or any other side of the Karakorams.

High summer, few students, no queue. In twenty minutes we left with a warm, steaming and remarkably heavy box—well, there would be five of us; and besides, Jamie had paid—which Laura had to balance across her knees because my panniers were still full of my junk and it wouldn't balance itself across the queen seat behind me.

o0o

On to the flat, and to the welcome due anyone bearing such gifts. Myself I thought it might be a poisoned chalice we carried in with such pomp, we might be playing the Greeks here,
beware of us
; but I was weary of being a Jeremiah. I could worry later about antidotes. Right now I made brisk introductions—“Jon, did you meet Jamie or Laura? I don't remember. If not, these are they; and this is Janice, you two”—while the others ran around clearing space on the floor, finding plates and forks and pickles while Jamie cursed and slipped out again, up to the offie to fetch the essential cans.

We made a little ceremony of opening and unwrapping and passing around. I guess we always had. And with that ceremony came a renewal of the old unspoken law,
no shop in the mess
; it seemed to follow naturally, that you didn't spoil ceremony and good food and self-indulgence with conversation that dug too deep or turned up sour flavours.

So while we ate I did most of the talking, because I had the most to talk about that wasn't to do with the town. I told them about taking a TEFL course and teaching my way across Europe; and to give them a giggle I told them what else I'd been doing, though I didn't tell them why.

“Bit of journalism on the side,” I said.

“Oh, yes? Who for?”

“Oh,
Fortean Times
,” very casually. “
International Enquirer
, that sort of stuff. Any paper with a weird-and-wacky column.”

“What,” from Laura, “alien abductions and my-dog-made-me-pregnant, like that?”

“Actually, that was ‘my husband's ghost took possession of the dog and made me pregnant',” I said sternly. “Very important ground-breaking story.”

“Hey, I
read
that!” She looked delighted, but I wasn't at all surprised. We used to read them all the time but she was the most addicted, it was usually Laura who paid out for them. She loved the medical stories.

“Ben?”

“Jamie?”

“
Why?
”

Of all of them, he should have been able to answer that himself. He wasn't thinking; and
no shop in the mess
, I couldn't answer him. Not truthfully, at least.

“Pocket money,” I said. “Something fun to do, when you haven't really got a home to go to. And I met the
best
people. Vampires? I can do you vampires. And a were-bear, and
three
women who take musical dictation from Mozart, don't know why they're always women but they are, and any number of poltergeist babies...”

I kept them going with stories like that for a while. Then when I was tired of talking and wanted a chance to eat, I said, “Jamie, I know you've still got the jeep, I saw that; but what happened to the sports jobs?”

He'd had two or three that I remembered, one to drive and the others to store in a barn in a kind of serial monogamy; but it was his father's barn, and Uncle James was good at grudges.

“Sold 'em,” he said. “What do you think bought dinner?”

“We're living off the proceeds,” Laura confirmed. “Carefully.” Which was what I'd really been asking, and here it came. “Looks good on the bank statements, but I've got to take a year out from school for the baby, so we can't go wild. It's capital, really. I want Jamie to go into business. If we can figure out anything he can actually do...”

He flicked a piece of poppadum at her for that, but it would be a problem. Macallans were the next best thing to unemployable. I knew that from my own experience, especially when my uncle was being vindictive; and that was before things changed. I guessed it would be even harder now.

That took the conversation on to college courses and future careers, which gave me the opportunity to catch up on feasting. They knew about me now, and no one thought to ask if I wanted a change. Janice was studying law, apparently. Jon—like all the art students I'd ever known—didn't have a clue what he'd do when he graduated.

o0o

At last the foil containers were all empty, most wiped as clean as the plates with fingers or final shreds of naan. We sprawled, on furniture or carpet; Laura leaned back against Jamie's knees, and he worked on her hair as I'd known he would; and Jon dropped the bombshell that our mutual intent had held back this long.

Whether he knew its significance I wasn't sure, but it was a fair bet that he did.

“There was a man killed last night,” he said, “the whole street's been buzzing with it. It was only just over the hill, on Laurel Drive, you know it?”

Oh yes, I knew it. My parents lived on Laurel Drive, and last night my father had been out in the dark on his own, and crying.

What a piece of work is my dad! How base in reason! how limited in faculty! in form, in moving, how lumbering and contemptible! in action how like a demon! in apprehension how like a stone! the foulness of the world! the debasement of animals...!

Well, actually—at the time—I just thought,
how like my dad, to shit in his own back yard.
Comparisons came later. As did confession: of the four friends here, new and old, only Jamie knew my old address, and he was keeping mum. All but his speaking eyes, and I wasn't listening to them, they were saying nothing I was not already telling myself.

What I wanted—no, what I didn't want, but what I needed most, I had to ask from Jon.

“Killed how?”

He might not know my father's house, but he knew the hand of my family well enough, or else the rumours had been more explicit than he was saying. He flinched, he glanced at Janice, he didn't want to tell me.

“Jon? Killed how?”

It was Janice who said, in the end.

“He had his head bashed in. On the bricks, on the corner of his house. That's what they're saying. They found him this morning, they say, just lying on the ground there with his skull crushed, and blood all over the walls...”

Just as if some irresistibly-strong hand had gripped the back of his neck, as I pictured it from her words, and pounded his head—no, his face, it would for sure have been his face—against the sharp angle, the bricks already red before his blood reddened them. Except that this would have been in the dark, of course, and the streetlights were sodium orange, that would have fucked up the colour as much as one man with a fucked-up head was fucking up the head of another...

Ah, shit.

It might even have been my fault, I supposed vaguely. Say my father had been crying only with the frustration of his new life, his family reduced and his pride trampled underfoot, sneered at by cattle. Say that I chance along to find him so, and even he knows that this is all my fault
ab origine
. Say he kicks seven kinds of shit out of me and is still not satisfied, he's lost control now and he can't get a grip again, blood has slicked his hands but not yet slaked his thirst...

Say this, say that, say anything you like. I tried to blame myself twice over, but I couldn't make it stick. Many things I could accuse myself of and with justice, with conviction; but not this.

“Ben? Do you want to go round?”

That was Jamie not keeping mum any longer, letting Mum and Dad too right out of the bag. Though the others weren't seeing them yet, I guess they were just seeing us as a couple of ghouls, wanting to ogle.

“No,” I said, already pushing up onto my feet, spotting an awkward but manageable path between bodies and discarded plates. Every journey begins with but a single step: this was a route that would take me to my parents' door, the world's most reluctant prodigal.

“What's with him?” That was Laura, and this might have been the first time in my life I heard her voice and didn't turn to find her.

“It's his dad. Laurel Drive? Got to be.”

“They wouldn't. Would they? Not at night? They couldn't. And we'd have heard...” The flow of her words died slowly, as she understood him at last, too late. I almost expected her to go on then,
Well, so what's he so upset about? It's hardly the first time. Macallan men kill people as a puberty rite, and then they just ke
ep on going. Wankers all their lives. So his dad's added another to his list, so what?

She wouldn't have been that callous, of course; she'd have cared too much about the victim. But the question was still there, albeit unspoken and kinder put. I could have said,
because this time his killing killed one of ours also, and he knew it would, and he did it anyway
; or I could have said,
because I've been away, and I came back looking for a miracle, a family I could love
. But neither would have earned me what I needed, her empathy, her understanding. No point fishing for it, so I said nothing to her. I stood in the doorway and looked back, looked at Jamie, said, “You coming?”

Please?

“Yeah, I'm coming.”

Actually he was one stage short of coming, still disentangling Laura from his legs and making room to stand.

“I'm not going in, mind. I just...”
I just have to be there for a bit,
I just had to stand there on the street where they lived, Lerner and Loewe and the Hon Freddie twisting to destruction in my head while my eyes scanned the walls to find the bloodstain.
Very like a ghoul
, I thought, and walked out.

Fizzy the cat sneaked between my legs as I opened the front door. I felt a moment's anxiety, but it would have been too too bathetic to go back and enquire,
is it okay if the cat goes out?