Light Errant (24 page)

I guess I'd put the package down. I didn't remember, didn't want to look. But I heard Jamie's gasp, his grunt; then—always braver than me, always willing to face what I only wanted to run from—I heard him crouch and breathe, and tear the plastic wider.

A slow hissing breath now, that didn't have much to do with lungs or an oxygen debt; something like a whimper, though again it came or seemed to come from somewhere other than his voice; a rustle as he wrapped it up again.

“It's Charlie,” I said, largely into the crook of my elbow. “Isn't it?”

“Yeah.” Pause, breathe a while, speak: “Guess the poor kid just couldn't run fast enough.”

“No, right,” I said bitterly. “He ran straight into us fucking Macallans, and got stopped dead.”

I'd seen as little as I had to, as much as I could bear. Jamie had seen more, enough to be sure; Jon had seen nothing at all, nor did any one of the three of us want him to.

Nor could any one or any two or all the three of us together stop him from seeing all there was, all that we'd been given.

Charlie was—had been—his friend; someone had to look after Charlie.

Jon stood in the doorway behind us, where we were sitting on the landing. Jamie had his arms hooked through the balusters. I was looking at him now because that was marginally better than closing my eyes and looking at Charlie disembodied, floating accusingly behind my lids.

“Charlie?” Jon whispered. Neither one of us turned round.

“I'm sorry, Jon.” It was Jamie actually who was speaking, but it might have been either one of us. It didn't matter. “We really fucked this bad.”

“Show me,” though his thin voice was also saying
I don't want to see
, and for sure neither of us wanted to show him.

Jamie stood up and lifted the wrapped head as reverently as he could, which wasn't very. It's hard to be reverent, with a torn bin-liner that in all honesty you absolutely do not want to touch.

But he carried it through into the living-room, Jon following his every movement with a bleached face and eyes that were sinking and bruising almost by the second. There was a coffee table in the middle of the floor, with nothing on it but a bowl of fruit and a box of Kleenex; Jamie set his burden down there, carried the fruit away into the kitchen. I heard the banging of cupboard doors, and for a moment thought he was going to come back with a plate to stand the head on, like a trophy or a chef's excess,
specialité de la maison.

Should have known him better; he came back with a plain white linen tablecloth. He knelt down, spread that out, then looked up at Jonathan.

“Jon, are you sure? Ben and me, this isn't so new to us, we've both seen hard things before. And we didn't know Charlie, either. You don't have to be macho, it's not a challenge you lose cred for if you don't look...”

“Show him to me,” Jon said.

o0o

So Jamie showed him, showed us both, showed us all. He still tried to mask the moment, getting his body between it and us as he ripped the plastic away and lifted the head onto the spread white cloth. I guess it was the raw stump he didn't want to share, the hacked meat and scabby wet red look of it, the hard lumps of bone and trailing stringy sinews: no neat headsman's axe had done this, just some bastard butcher with a blunted blade.

Jamie tried not to let us see that and failed, very much the order of the day; he placed the head carefully, sickeningly upright on its severed neck, and it toppled instantly over to give us a great view of its underside. So ill-cut, it was never going to balance. Jamie half-reached to try again anyway, glanced at us, shrugged and left it lie.

What he did instead, he did close Charlie's dulled eyes for us, and that was a blessing. Then he flipped a corner of the cloth over the ruin of the neck, and I wanted to pretend it looked like he was only sleeping, like we saw him only in head-shot with a sheet drawn up to his chin.

Couldn't do it, it was too obscene, just the head of him on the table there; and there were streaks of dried blood all over his pretty, battered face and in his hair and his skin was as pale as Jon's, near as pale as the cloth he lay on for want of all that blood. Never mind the absence of his body, he couldn't have looked anything but dead.

Jon snorted, sucking snot, fighting tears uselessly; but he came forward and knelt down beside Jamie, and reached with shaking hands guided by half-blind eyes to take a handful of Kleenex and wipe away what blood he could shift, not much, and then to fold the cloth quite neatly over and around all that we had of Charlie.

“He's mine,” he said, aggressively for him. “Okay?”

Okay, fine; we weren't about to dispute possession. But, “What will you do?” I asked. I couldn't imagine. He couldn't keep it, nor could he turn up at the crem with a head and no body to ask for a short service. They didn't come that short, I thought, hating myself for thinking it.

“I'll take him to some friends,” he said, wiping his own face now with another wad of tissues from the box. “We'll try to find out what they've done with the, with the rest of him. Got to be somewhere, hasn't it?”

“Jonathan, be careful.” If Charlie had died for talking to us—and there was no ‘if' about that, it was as plain as the nose on Jamie's face or mine, the bloody nose on his own—then anyone identifying themselves as a friend of Charlie's was running a terrible risk.

“I will. Don't worry, we'll move in a pack. We can look after ourselves,” he said, with a glance at the bundle that was all regret,
we couldn't look after our own.
“Have you got something I can, you know, carry him in?”

Not a carrier bag
was the subtext there, and we both got it instantaneously. Jamie went off to rummage. I would have offered my rucksack, still sitting where I'd dumped it in the corner under my jacket and helmet, where I'd left them all when I'd run out on Laura, but that didn't seem appropriate either.

Nothing did, nothing could; but Jamie came back with a choice, a smaller backpack that Laura used to carry her schoolbooks around in and a coolbox for beers.

“Either of these do?” he asked diffidently. “Best I can manage...”

Jon nodded, and took the backpack. He put the wrapped head into it carefully, gently, as tenderly as seemed appropriate; then he stood up, slipped his arms through the straps and said, “Uh, I'll be off, then.”

“Right. Go well, Jon.”

Jamie hugged him, and so did I. He left us, walking gingerly out of the room, as if what he carried was heavier far than it ought to be; we stood listening as he made his slow way down the stairs and out of the door, closing it quietly behind him.

Then, “What's next?” I asked helplessly.

“I don't know, bro. It's their move, I guess.”

“Yeah, right.” We'd made ours, and it had gone horribly, unimaginably wrong. “You going to call your dad?”

“I guess.” He didn't go to the phone, though. I think he felt as I did, like a puppet with its strings cut, no movement left in either one of us. “It's a funny thing,” he said, “Jon didn't even seem angry, he never said a word about the people who'd done that to Charlie.”

“He's not family,” I said wearily. Indeed he was the opposite of family, he was cattle in my family's lovely phrase; he'd lived all his life under our hard rule, he likely expected monstrous things to happen to him and his, without any hope of payback. Never mind that this time it had come from another player in the game, he simply wasn't tuned to look for retribution.

“Well. It's something else added to the account,” Jamie grunted, taking Jon's debts to lie alongside our own.

“I suppose.” Me, I felt much like Jon, suddenly; I wanted this to end. I'd do anything to see Laura and the others safe, but I was more sickened than vengeful. It seemed odd, but I realised that I really, really didn't want any more killing.

And couldn't say so, not to Jamie, not just then. His loss, his fear was greater far than my own, or more cruelly grounded; he had what I only yearned for, and my doubts and qualms didn't amount to even a can of beans against his need. Laura's danger cut at us both, but the knife in my guts was a phantom conjured of my own obsessive dreaming. He'd had years of living with her, where all I'd had was wanting; now she carried his child inside her; in him that knife twisted deeper with every moment.

Engulfed by twin horrors, what had been done to Charlie coupled with what was threatened against Laura, against Janice and our cousins, I didn't in any case see how we could get out of this without more killing. Especially given the Macallan temper, honed by generations of kicking the weak. Anyone dares to kick back, you just kick the harder. Instinct or training, nature or nurture, it was there, it was imprinted; look at Uncle James. Even better, look at my dad. Knowing what would follow, he still couldn't control himself, and so Josie had died; and they'd want their revenge for that, and how long they could deny themselves a rampage was anybody's guess.

So yes, I expected more killing. I was just deeply uncertain now that my family would actually come out on top at the end. Wasn't sure that I wanted them to, either, wasn't sure what I wanted. Just not heads on spikes, that's all. No more heads, no more sacrifices. Innocent or guilty, no more deaths...

And as with everything else I'd ever wanted, I thought I was only pissing into the wind. I never for a moment thought I'd get it.

o0o

If we'd had ideas, I don't think either one of us would have mentioned them to the other. Ideas were dangerous, ideas had brought us to this. As it was, though, I don't think either one of us was in any danger of being that creative, to find any way to make this worse. Myself certainly not, I was battered and numbed and beaten, and Jamie seemed no better. My best thought in that time was to change my clothes: to lose the shorts at last, and get into tough denim to face a tough world clad for thorns.

When the phone rang, it was salvation or doom for sure, it had to be. What we were waiting for, though we maybe hadn't known that we were waiting. Not a wrong number, not a telesales girl with her eyes double glazed and her voice well insulated. God, even God couldn't be so cruel. Could he?

The phone rang, and we looked at each other. Bleak, afraid, uncertain of God, knowing only a heap of broken promises: which of us was going to answer?

It seemed that we both were, though it was Jamie who moved. He could reach the phone from where he was sitting; he didn't lift the receiver, though, he just pressed a button on the base unit. The ringing cut off, and a voice said, “Hullo, who's that?”

“Jamie Macallan.” He didn't raise his voice, or even turn his head towards the phone.

“Is your cousin Benedict there with you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” The voice was male, smooth, assured. Unfamiliar, in tone as much as personality; people didn't generally sound so sure of themselves, speaking to Macallans. Even from the other end of a telephone line. “You know that we have your women; you will be pleased to know that they are still ... together.”

Something about that little pause made me very unhappy indeed. He didn't, I thought, mean that they were locked up together. He meant that neither one of them had been separated in the way that young Charlie had.

Yet
, was what he really meant.

“We think,” he said, “that it was you two who set that fire in the police station. You know, of course, that it was a waste of time. It is however proving very inconvenient for us, and we'd appreciate the chance to discuss it with you. In person.”

You wouldn't want us to separate your women.
He was too cool to say that explicitly, but he didn't need to. He wanted us, he could have us.

“Let the girls go,” Jamie said. “Straight swap. Okay?”

The man just laughed. “You misunderstand me. This is not a marketplace. I do not intend to bargain. Break a finger.”

For a moment, we simply didn't understand. Then we heard a high breathy gasp, a sudden scream, a sob cut off abruptly; then we understood, all too well.

“
Laura?
” That was Jamie, his voice jerking as every muscle in his body had jerked. Me, I couldn't have spoken. Just as I couldn't have told whether it was Laura or Janice had screamed, nor was I sure yet. Nor was he, I thought, in all honesty.

Nor did the man tell us, nor give us the chance to talk to her, to learn.

“Come down to the quayside,” he said, “to the pathway under the old bridge. Come now.”

And then the phone's speaker clicked and went silent, as he hung up.

o0o

Jamie did pick up the phone after a while, his big Macallan hands like trembling, misshapen claws, awkward on the buttons. I thought he was calling Uncle James, but no: he only hit four numbers. He listened for a moment, his face twisted, he put the receiver down again.

“What?”

“Didn't say where he was calling from. Doesn't matter. Let's go.”

No need to ask where we were going. I picked up my jacket as he collected his, and we were halfway down the stairs before I said, “Don't you want to call your dad, tell him what's happening?”

“No. He'd only tell us not to go.”

True enough, he would. I might have told him anyway, but it was Jamie's call and he was likely right. Safer, perhaps, fractionally safer if Uncle James didn't know. He might do something stupid, that would endanger the girls more. If that were possible.

o0o

Down the hill one more time we went, back down to where we'd come from: past the station and down the curving run of steps that was the shortest way to the river, chasing our own long shadows while the sun played on our shoulders, prelude to a farewell. That didn't matter, I reminded myself. Once the sun had gone, I'd still have Jamie. Night-time was his time, moonlight and starshine. And that didn't matter either, I reminded myself more hastily on the back of that thought; we were both of us helpless here, regardless of the light. We'd tried to make ourselves the protagonists, but we were only pawns after all and we'd been pinned so easily, we couldn't move at all, we couldn't risk it...