Light Errant (19 page)

He'd been neither invited along with the girls nor told to stay with us, and both of those omissions were right, I thought, proactive and sensible; he'd only be in the way, on either side. But what else could we ask him to do? An art student, an ex-window cleaner, he had nothing to offer that I could see, and I couldn't think how to tell him.

And didn't need to, because he made a move himself, and this time not to bring us toast. We all of us watched him, with more or less guilty eyes, all of us more or less relieved that he wasn't waiting to be told; and when he reached the door he glanced back—right at me, it seemed, which hardly seemed fair to me—and said, “I'll ask around too, some of my old friends. If there's any word on the street, they'll know.”

Who
, I wanted to ask him nastily,
the window cleaners, the street sweepers? The housewives you dunned for coins?

And perhaps he read the thought on my face, or else I was broadcasting so loud he picked it up mind-to-mind, perhaps I was shouting at him as silently, as clearly as my sister used to shout at me; because he was, he was definitely looking straight at me as he went on, “I wasn't just a windler, not all the time. There wasn't the work. I did other things, when I really needed money.”

To my shame, I couldn't figure what he meant.

o0o

He left, though, before I could ask. Perhaps he didn't want to tell; or else he thought I ought to know, it ought to be easy. Perhaps it was, and I was stupid.

He left, at any rate, and the girls left too. Which left Jamie and me on our own again as so often before, and this wasn't like any of the other times that I could remember. A lifetime—no, two, his and mine both—of being alone with each other, being bloodbrothers and cousins, friends often and occasionally great foes; and still there were surprises, there were new ways for two young men to be together. There was a feeling of impotence, of being utterly in other people's hands now, that was endlessly familiar to me, but I couldn't conceive how Jamie would begin to handle it.

He stretched his legs under the table, cocked his head to one side and smiled self-mockingly, said, “You know, if they hadn't taken the mobile, I could have phoned my father.”

“Why?”

“Find out what he's up to, of course. He's got to be doing something.”

Sure. Frowning momentously and uttering threats, if I knew Uncle James. Waiting for the dark, when his threats might have some value. But, “There's a phone in the hall,” I said.

“If I use that, he can trace the call. Dial 1471, and some helpful machine will give him this number; and he's got friends enough, even now, someone'll find the address for him. There's another code you can dial first to stop 1471 from working, only I can't remember what it is; and I wouldn't trust it anyway. He's probably got someone at the exchange who'll cough regardless.”

Never mind machines, my family always had people just where they wanted them. I shrugged. “He wouldn't tell you anything useful. You've signed up with the enemy, remember?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

There's nothing useful you can do, Jamie
, was on the tip of my tongue to say,
nothing useful for either one of us to do, till Laura phones.
But then I remembered a promise from last night, and didn't say a word; I just got to my feet and rummaged till I found a bucket and a J-cloth. Filled the bucket with steaming water, and carried it and the cloth to the front door.

Jamie followed curiously, just what I didn't want him to do. But I opened the door regardless, and yes, there below the step was the wide pool of my vomit, dried at the edges now and crusted all over. One heelmark had broken the crust and skidded a little; Jon's, most likely. I could see Janice clearly in my head, remembering and skipping over it, with Laura shadowing her and both girls laughing, perhaps, as they headed off down the street, Janice perhaps telling her about how she'd found me, not needing to say what she'd done with me after...

The same sunlight that had baked that broken crust was working its familiar magic on my skin, but there was no magic to fix this. Only me to get down on my knees with cloth and water while Jamie watched; and I didn't need to look up to see his smile.
Poor Ben, can't take his liquor.

I heard him walk away, didn't look up even to see the back of him; but he came back a minute later, while I was still dabbing with the cloth and thinking I needed another, maybe several more, the way this one was abrading on the concrete and still not shifting the stain.

“Not like that, Ben,” he said, above my head. “Like this. You slosh, I'll scrub.”

And he dangled a stiff broom before my eyes, and he was so obviously right I tried to swear in disgust at myself and ended up laughing instead. And standing up and hurling the remains of the J-cloth into the gutter, and sloshing water while Jamie scrubbed with all the energy of conspicuous virtue,
I didn't even make this particular puddle and here I am doing the hard part
, and fetching fresh water and sloshing and swilling to be certain of pristine purity of pavement; and by the time we were done his boots and my deck-shoes were splattered and soaked respectively, I hoped only with cleanish water, and we'd sloshed and scrubbed a path from door to gutter that you could have seen from the end of the street.

We kicked off our footwear and left it to dry in the sun on the step, though I could have done that in a moment with a weave of light and fire; I might be home but I still wasn't thinking Macallan, thought it likely I never would. And we went inside grinning and matey, fetched a couple of glasses and what was left of Laura's Coke from last night, and kicked bedding off the sofa to make slumping space for two in the living-room.

“Aah. That's better. That's
good.
Coke was invented as a hangover cure, did you know? Think about it, it's got everything you need: caffeine, sugar. Cocaine. Well, it used to have cocaine. And it's carbonated, so it gets into your bloodstream quicker...”

“Yes, of course I know, moron. It was me told you.”

“Never was. Was it?”

“'Course it was. I taught you all you know.”

“Ah, right. They keep telling me I'm ignorant. That'll be why, then...”

And actually I'd been wrong before, this was just like a hundred other mornings tasted and tested and tried again, ten years ago. I'd forgotten the aimlessness of teenagers without an immediate target, nothing to fill the next hour's awful void. There might be an added tension underlying us today, a sense of waiting for something more crucial than lunch, but you'd never have known from watching and even I had to jerk myself consciously into remembering. Too easy to forget, to let the years slip, to be suddenly fifteen again and so much closer to something that I used to think of as happy.

Jamie picked up a remote control, and thumbed buttons. Daytime TV,
morning
TV—it was like being back in Spain again, any time, day or night. Colours too bright, volume too loud and I simply didn't see the point. Why would people want to watch cookery competitions or asinine quizzes all day, or listen to ineffectual strangers exposing their fascist opinions or else their most intimate problems?

“Why do people do that?” Jamie demanded, seizing the other end of the stick as so often, right or wrong. “I mean, sitting in front of a camera and saying how you can't get it up without a roll of clingfilm—why do they want to
do
that?”

“Why do you want to watch?” I countered.

“You're watching too.”

“Only because you turned it on. I wouldn't have.”

He looked at me then, not the screen; and after a second he said, “No, you wouldn't, would you?” Which obviously meant something, and I was still trying to work out what when he danced through the channels again, found some adverts and decided those were easier.

And he chuckled after a minute, and said, “Hey, Ben, you ever known a girl menstruate blue?”

“No.”

“Because they all do in the ads, have you noticed? Tampons, pads, they always show 'em soaking up blue. Maybe we just don't sleep with the right quality of girl, did you ever consider that?”

And when I didn't answer he glanced at me again, and grunted, and said, “What, then, shall I turn it off before we get one about nappies? 'Cos we will, it's daytime, they reckon it's all women watching.”

Always sharp, our Jamie. Right now, that wasn't fair. It was like having my sister back, riding inside my head, leaving me nowhere to hide.

Because he was right, of course he was right; menstruating led automatically for me to its opposite, to not menstruating, which was what Laura was doing right now because she was pregnant. By him. And I'd known for hours now, for a full day, and I still couldn't get past it or round it or over it. Too big a fact, too big a bump, too too big a baby.

Nothing I could say except
I'm sorry
, and if he was tracking me that closely he knew that much already. So I went on saying nothing, sipping sweet fizz and staring at the telly, and yes, here came a nappy ad right on cue. Unfair of me perhaps, but I left it to him to do the hard stuff, the talking.

So he did, he said, “Christ, Ben, what are we going to do with you?”

That was cheating, I thought, asking questions. Worse, he made it non-rhetorical, he played Brutus and paused for a reply.

“Same as last time,” I said eventually, when he didn't relent.

“What, you mean wait till we've sorted the shit out here and then let you bugger off, watch you drive into the sunset like some homeless fucking drifter, is that what you mean?”

“Yeah, that's what I mean.” I couldn't see any other hope for me. Much,
much
too big a baby.

“Like fuck we will. You know your trouble? You don't know family when it kicks you in the teeth.”

Actually that was all my experience of family, my definition; but Laura had said something much the same to me two years before in the crisis, in the church, and it was too heartbreakingly strange to hear her words come back at me from his mouth. It said too much about them both, again I was stranded, I couldn't reply.

So he said, “I've got a different plan, mate. You're godfather to the baby and best man at the wedding too if we have one, that's my idea.”

And Father Hamish would preside at both ceremonies, no doubt, and the pews would be full of scowling Macallans making the air spit and crackle. My parents and his, all the uncles and aunts and cousins. What joy. And me, no doubt I'd be praying that he wouldn't turn up for the wedding; I might even fix it so that he didn't, so I could do the traditional thing and take his place, marry her in lieu, I was sad enough to settle for that.

Not Laura, though. She'd say
I don't
instead of
I do
, she'd fight me off with her bouquet and storm off big-bellied to find what had happened to him; and the image of that in my mind had me giggling despite myself, shaking my head and reaching for my glass, trying to swallow against the rising laughter and snorting bubbles out through my nose like some incompetent kid.

Jamie pounded me on the back till I could breathe again, then he grabbed me round the throat and squeezed until I couldn't, and growled, “What, you don't think she'd marry me, is that it?”

Actually no, that wasn't it at all, he was way off track now; but I said it was, of course. I croaked, “Yeah, that's it. No chance. Do me a favour.”

He grinned, pressed his stubbly cheek against my own and whispered, “Just you watch. You
stay
and watch, you'll see.”

And then he let me go. I massaged my throat gently, coughed a little, reached for my voice and found it. “Seriously, Jamie. How can I? I'm sorry, I'm not proud of it but it guts me, seeing the two of you together. And now she's pregnant, and I can't bear it. I
love
her...”

“No, you don't,” he said. Not the first to say that, either. “You only think you do. Just grow up a bit, can't you? There are other girls. Some of them even want you, for God's sake. What about Janice?”

I didn't know what about Janice. Whether she wanted me or not, whether she'd have done the same for Jamie or any other drunk boy in her bed last night. All I knew was that she occupied a totally separate part of my head, her and every girl I'd slept with since I'd met Laura; and yes, I knew how I felt about Laura wasn't safe or sensible, wasn't even sane maybe, but it was the thing I'd labelled ‘love' a long time ago and it hadn't faded with the years and hadn't changed, it was still sharp as wire and cutting deep, still making me bleed.

“I'd swap,” I said bleakly.

“She wouldn't.”

She Laura, or she Janice? Didn't matter. Swapping was not on anybody's agenda, not even mine; I wasn't that much of a fantasist.

Wasn't much of a fantasist at all, in all honesty. I saw the world and my place in it pretty clearly, I thought. I'd had enough practice. I might yearn for things to be different, but I never really expected that they would be. Except occasionally, like when you've been two years away and you can tell yourself that you've changed and sound fairly convincing...

“All right,” I said. “You get her to marry you, and I'll be best man.”

“Promise?”

“Safest promise I ever made. It'll never happen.”

I said nothing about godfather to the baby, and neither did he. Barring disasters which even I couldn't wish for, the baby was a certainty; the need for a godfather less certain, but at least in Jamie's thoughts if not Laura's. We're an observant family, in our own sweet way. I couldn't do it, though. I couldn't pledge any kind of responsibility for this particular baby, and it would be nothing short of brutality if they asked me to. Laura would know that, if Jamie didn't; but I thought he probably did. He hadn't meant it as a serious proposal, only a way to batter at my defences, make me bleed a little more. He probably thought bleeding was healthy.
Better to bleed than fester
, he was probably saying to himself.