Light Errant (32 page)

“They were scared, Jan. They've been scared a long time.”

“Aye, all their goddamn lives,” she said, eerily echoing my own thought that I'd so deliberately dismissed. “And it's your fault, all of you.”

Not me
, but I didn't say so, I thought she might not recognise the distinction. “They're bred that way,” I said instead,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I tried to think of the plural of that, but I couldn't remember enough Latin. Father Hamish would have been ashamed. “
Inter
bred that way. Selected for subservience.”

“It's disgusting.”

Of course it was disgusting, it was Macallan at its purest. What could I say? Too late to work backwards, to shuffle genes and reschedule the training to produce bright, vivacious, determined girls, sisters and cousins who could meet the world on its own terms and tell their menfolk to go hang.

Instead I pushed myself to my feet, found them steadier than they had been and my legs willing to bear my weight once more. Walked across to where she stood, gazing out but not I thought keeping watch just now, not seeing the wide and empty sea; put my arms around her waist, nudged her ear with my chin, murmured, “I'm sorry.”

She snorted. “Not me you should be apologising to, boy.” But the wrath ebbed away from her, I could feel her slowly relaxing, her body leaning into me, some kind of forgiveness; then her head toppled back against my shoulder, her mouth twisted into a wry smile, and she said, “You're feeling better, aye?”

“Aye.”

“That's good.”

Good that I was feeling better, she might have meant, no more than that; but maybe she was meaning also the way my hands were moving, gently over her stomach, finding ridges of firm muscle to belie how flat and soft it seemed to the eye. Not a surprise, that, I knew it already from our one night together, just a couple of nights ago. And by imputation from things that had happened since, how she'd hauled me about in my weakness. The confirmation, though, the rediscovery now in this moment of ease, that surely felt good to me.

Nice to learn that there were advantages, there were positive results to be had from butchery. Me, I'd only ever seen the other side.

And me, I was snorting suddenly, choking on a shameful giggle; and she was frowning suspiciously, saying, “What?”

“Nothing. Cheap puns, doesn't matter.”

“
What?
” she repeated, demanded, turning in my arms to skewer me with a glare.

“Only, I'm grateful to your Mr Moncrieff...”

And I could say no more, just bury my foolish mouth in her hair and hug her hard; and that of course was how bloody Jamie found us as he came running light and fast up the stairs and into the lantern before either one of us could find the wit or the will to break away.

o0o

“Unh... Oh, hi, Jamie...”

“Hel-
lo!
Sorry to bust in like that,” though he looked not sorry at all, he looked bright and delighted to have bust in like that, “only I just thought you two might like a break from all this grand-old-Andy stuff.”

“Unh?” God, I was being so articulate; but it's hard to articulate when all the blood you have is in your skin, so that your jaw- and tongue-moving muscles are suffering severe oxygen-deprivation, like every muscle else, like your lungs and your brain also so that you haven't the breath to talk proper even if you had the control, even if you had the mind-power to figure out what to say.

“Duke of York,” he said, beaming. “Marching up and down. Doing sentry-go. Shepherds, guarding their flock. You've done your share, do you want me to spell you?”

“Well...”

“No,” Janice said, flat and emphatic. Janice's arm, I noticed, was still or again around my waist, under my jacket, against my bare skin; must have been just me, doing the pulling-away-too-late bit. “No, it's okay, thanks, Jamie. We're fine.”

“Yeah, right. Laura said you'd probably rather not be disturbed; I just thought I'd check.”
Check up on what she was telling me
, I thought he meant, and felt the blood rise one more time. “Here, Jan, she sent these up for you...”

And he pulled a miracle from his pocket, or what I deduced to be a miracle from Janice's gasping, grasping glee: a pack of Regal King-Size.

“There's a machine in the café,” he said smugly, watching her tear into it. “Laura smashed it open. All for you. Plenty more down there if you need them, but you have to fetch them yourself, I'm not running those stairs again.”

I laughed, or tried to, tried to sound casual and sarky after my finest manner. “Come on, Jamie, even Jan's not going to smoke her way through twenty in an afternoon...”

“Sixteen,” she corrected me. “They short-change you, in machines. And I wouldn't bet on it, bro.”

That brought me up short. No one but Jamie ever called me that. Before I could think it through, though—idle picking-up of what one boy called another or something more definite, a message, meaning what? meaning it as Jamie did, or literally, or more?—she had a cigarette in her mouth and was waving her hands dramatically. “Someone got a light, then?”

Jamie's jaw dropped, his hand lifted to his lips, his eyes swivelled involuntarily behind him, to that endless circle of steps. Grand old Duke indeed:
down and up again
, his face was saying,
and then down one more bloody time...

Janice was groaning with a throaty desperation, to hold the gates of heaven in her hand and have no key. I chuckled. He was doing it awfully well, but I knew this boy of old. Sweet joy it was, to spoil his charade. “Here,” I said, and clicked my fingers in the refracted sunlight as though I sparked a Zippo. A pale little flame danced in the air between finger and thumb. I held it out towards her, and it took her only a moment of bulging eyes and sagging cigarette to get control, to stoop, to swallow her slightly manic giggle at the way the obedient flame bent and stretched to meet her, and to light her fag.

Jamie nodded sober approval towards her, winked cheerfully at me, and I wondered if maybe I had misread him after all. But when he did the see-you-later bit, followed by the turning-to-go bit, I still snapped my fingers at him—without fire this time, nothing to light but Jan's laughter which didn't need a flame, only the joke of one—and said, “No, you don't. Come on, hand them over. What if the sun goes in?”

He stood still, sighed loudly, didn't look back. “It's all just wool off a sheep's back with you, isn't it, Ben? Pull it over someone else's eyes, then...”

And he lobbed a small rattling thing high over his shoulder, and I caught it as he trotted off, down and out of sight.

And I grinned at Janice and said, “That boy never forgot a box of matches in his life, love.”

She grunted, glared down through obscuring floorboards to drop a mute malediction on his head, then inhaled deeply, cocked her head to one side and gazed at me, breathing out, letting a slow veil of smoke cloud the little distance between us.

“Why don't you hate him, Ben?”

One pace of sharp mental retreat, before I caught my balance or anything like it; then, “Oh, I do,” I said lightly.

“Yeah, right. Sure you do. But come on: he steals this girl you adore, he gets her pregnant, she worships the water he walks on—and so do you. How come?”

“Habit, I suppose. He always did get everything I wanted, and you sort of get used to that in the end. It's not his
fault
, he's just glossier, shinier, sexier than I am...”

“Well, his nose is smaller,” she said consideringly, “I'll give you that. And he dresses better.”

“He can afford to.” Could afford to once, on Uncle James' money. Could still, I supposed, on the profit from his redundant cars, if Laura would only let him. At the moment he was likely wearing the Armani out, with no promise of anything but Levi to follow.

“So?”

“So what?”

“Money, looks, charisma. You say he got it, you didn't. He certainly got the girl. Why don't you hate him?”

“Oh. I did, actually,” often and often, through childhood and teenage and since, with very different degrees of raging passion. “But I can't keep it up. I love him too, I always have. He's—he's
Jamie
, that's all. He's my coz, my bro, my blood brother, my best mate...” And I was inarticulate again, pinned like a pawn, floundering like a flounder on the floor. “Is that what you want to hear? 'Cos I can't do any better, that's it. He's Jamie, I'm Benedict, I don't hate him except sometimes, when I really really do.”

“No,” she said, stepping closer, “that's not what I want to hear. Never mind, though. We'll try it again later.”

Later it would have to be; she apparently had totally other plans for now. Like one hand on the back of my neck to hold me, one on my cheek to guide me, and just that little hint of stretching up to kiss me.

o0o

Okay, we'd kissed before, and more; we'd danced in the dark fantastic. I used to think—back when I was a kid, ten or eleven, when my older cousins had done their familial duty and enlightened me a laughing little about some interesting few of the facts of life—I used to think that kissing was an essential part of the act of love, that you couldn't actually do one without the other: that you had to be kissing while you bonked. I remember a long dispute I had with Jamie about it. He'd got hooked on another aspect entirely and maintained that doggy-style was the only sensible, maybe the only possible way the wondrous but peculiar thing could be achieved, on account of the absolute necessity of keeping one's hands on the girl's breasts throughout. I of course insisted that what he proposed was simply out of the question, because her mouth would be in the pillow; we fought like Lilliputians, Big-Enders versus Little-Enders, for weeks before a raid on his brother's room produced magazines and
The Joy of Sex
to prove us both wrong. Gobsmacked we were after that, the pair of us. I can't speak for him but my own night-time fantasies took some very bewildering turns for a while, before individual investments in our own picture-libraries and judicious swapping of material settled things down for the traditional long wait, the certainties of pubescent and impatient boys who have yet to discover how anything really feels or happens or results.

Janice and I had kissed but only fleetingly,
en passant
, in pursuit of something greater. Just now, kissing was all there was; we weren't going to tug each other's clothes off and do the whole show right there, make the beast with two backs on the dusty lantern floor. At least I wasn't, and this time I was determined not to be overruled. No lock on the door, and too much chance of someone else pattering up the steps with drinks or news or questions. God, just think if it were Laura...

So we kissed, with no physical goal beyond the kissing. That made it slow and deep and patient, exploratory, promissory, revelatory. Her tobacco tongue posed questions; mine proposed answers, which she seemed to find acceptable. I wondered if she tasted tobacco also, but I thought probably not. Her taste-buds would be numb or inured to it, or her brain would tune it out. She probably just tasted me, or a version of me: like colours seen through coloured shades, some skewed untrue but most clinging hard to what they were.

o0o

We kissed, and at last we stopped kissing. Stopped at that level, at least, when lockjaw threatened. Fell back on whisper-kisses, soft touches, teasing nibbles; and she murmured, “Still want to know why you don't hate Jamie, then?”

“Go on, then. Tell us.”

“Later...”

o0o

As it happened, it
was
Laura who came next up the stairs. Climbing for two: climbing for curiosity mainly, I thought, checking out Jamie's report for accuracy or us for staying-power. Luckily, by the time she got so far, we had exhausted all the obvious possibilities of kissing in isolation, and I was still being firm—not to say rigid—about breaking that quarantine. It was kissing or nothing, and at last the kissing had had to stop. I was down on the ground again, she'd got me that far, sitting wedged once more like an angle iron between floor and wall; Janice was no longer kneeling athwart me, straddling my hips, her folded arms a pillow for my head and all her body there within my ambit and accessible, brutally tempting in defiance of my resolution...

She'd moved from there to sit side by side with me, shoulder to shoulder, skin to skin; but then a sudden post-noncoital hunger had sent her crawling over to where she'd left her cigarettes, and when she'd come back she'd settled a couple of feet away, consideration for the non-smoker or some other motive keeping her just at hand-holding distance.

Which is what we were doing when Laura came in, we were holding hands, our fingers loosely, passively interlinked, no intent in the world.

So quite why I scrambled so hastily, so awkwardly, so blushingly, so
guiltily
to my feet is not a question I care to think about overmuch, even now. It's prone to have me doing my madness-in-public act: kicking at the air, muttering, shaking my head hard, anything to dislodge the memory and stop me dwelling there.

At the time I just babbled inside my furious skin, all too aware that I had amused and superior female eyes watching me from both sides, though I was trying to twist away from all of them, talking to the windows, to the walls, to the foetus: “Laura, hi, what are you doing, all the way up here, should you be doing that stuff with, with the, you know, the baby coming?”

“It's not coming yet, Ben. Exercise is good for me. Good for us both. Actually, I thought maybe you'd both appreciate a pee-break?”

Actually, she was right. The moment she'd said it, I was bursting. I glanced at Janice; my first reaction was on the tip of my tongue already,
I'll go first, okay? You stay, talk to Laura
, and was blocked only by the sudden panicked thought that maybe I really didn't want her talking to Laura, not just now, not with that wicked smiling light in her eyes.