Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

“Please, yeah. And a smoke, and a box of matches.”

  I found a seat, a high bar-stool in a dark corner; and I sat sipping slowly and sucking on a rare cigar, and decided that the advertising was all wrong: happiness was a foolish, an unapproachable ambition. Not to be wasted time on.

  One more pint for luck, standing at the bar and watching carved wooden mechanical heads turn and gape above the mirrors, one of the landmarks on any pub-crawl in town but curiously fitting tonight, symbolic of something even if I couldn’t understand the symbols. There thanks to a graceless God, I thought, sit Suzie and Ellie and I, and perhaps Deverill also: each of us only a staring doll, turning and working at the promptings of some machine unseen, operated by we none of us know whose hand...

  Such thoughts in my head, and I wasn’t even stoned: time I was in bed, I thought. In futon.

  o0o

  So I turned and went back to the flat, barely in time to intercept Suzie, who was on the point of coming down to the club to find me. She tugged the cap off my head and tossed it aside, ran her fingers gently over my soft fuzz and the lines of my scars, said, “Your mum’s gone to bed.”

  A surprise, that; she was a nightbird, was Ellie. But I looked at Suzie looking at me from bare inches away, and a chill struck my heart. With Ellie in the spare bed, Suzie and I would be sharing again; and Suzie by the look of her meant business tonight. Which was perhaps why my mother had taken herself so conveniently, so unconvincingly out of the way. Perhaps they’d even talked about it, moving from abstract to specific, from sex in general to sex and Suzie and me. Neither one of them, I thought, would have had inhibitions about that. Ellie would have asked, and she would have been told.

  “You should do the same,” I said, “you look knackered.”

  “Yeah. You coming, then, or what?”

  I shook my head: buying time, prepared to pay dearly for it. “I’ll just get the computer, and have another crack at it out here.”

  “Jonty...”

  “I’ve got to get into that file somehow,” I said, entirely reasonably, “and it needs to be soon. We can’t go on wallowing in ignorance.”

  “Well. Okay, then. But don’t be long. You’ll wreck your eyes, staring at that thing all hours.”

  o0o

  Not only my eyes but my mind also, all capacity for rational thought. I was so sick of that message box, Enter Password and the flashing cursor, it was turning physical; I thought I might actually throw up if I sat with it for another hour. On the other hand, another hour would maybe buy me the night. Suzie would fall asleep waiting for me, and I could crash out on the sofa, and we’d both be miserable and stroppy as hell in the morning but at least I’d have made it through unviolated, with the banner of my integrity snarled into knots maybe but still flying, still flapping above my head...

  o0o

  I could always pretend, of course. I could use the computer as cover only and not even try to legitimise the excuse; I could just leave it sitting on the table in front of me humming and happy and telling lies, while I found something else to do with my fingers.

  Almost did it, too. I was casting around the room for inspiration—something else to do with my eyes, that was, and very welcome on its own account—when my gaze fell on Suzie’s cap, the logo almost glowing at me, blinking like neon in my head.

  I reached for the keyboard, my fingers stumbling with certainty as they typed Q’s.

  The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

  Okay, no trouble. Jack Q’s.

  The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

  Not a worry. I was only building up, creating a sense of climax, not to peak too soon. There was really no doubt at all in my mind; this was too beautiful, too clever, too appropriate to be anything other than the answer.

  J’accuse, I typed; and of course I had accused, and this file was the list of accusations and the proof both at once, and everything was going to be all right now...

  The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

  o0o

  No. I couldn’t believe it. This was too much, too cruel. I tried the same sequence again, in case I’d mistyped one of them, but I only got the same responses.

  It had to be right, though. Surely it had to be right? Everything fitted, and I famously loved puns. Maybe the program was corrupt, maybe it was failing to recognise a true password...

  Maybe I was floundering here, trying to blame a machine for my own shortcomings, my failure to think efficiently.

  Try again. The pun was lovely, and it was relevant; I wouldn’t have overlooked that. Could I have buried it one layer deeper, for security’s sake? Given that the pun had been Suzie’s own, and therefore accessible to her?

  Hide a tree in a forest, a letter among other letters; bury a pun in another pun. I’d been, what, fourth form when we learned about Dreyfus and Zola and J’accuse. There’d been another boy two desks over from me, not a friend exactly but we had a love of words in common, we did crosswords together sometimes and created incredibly complex puns for each other’s amusement.

  And I remembered that history lesson well, how our eyes had been suddenly, irresistibly drawn to each other, how we’d snapped simultaneously, sniggering and choking, trying to swallow the howling laughter that seizes boys sometimes; how we’d only survived because the teacher had dropped a dry little joke of his own at just that point, and he of course assumed it was his wit that was convulsing us.

  Grinning again at the memory, I leaned forward and typed that other boy’s name:

  Jack Hughes.

  The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document, and again I couldn’t believe it. My reasoning seemed impeccable to me; I had nowhere to go from here, no more ideas, no hope.

  I could take the file to a genuine computer whizz, I supposed, someone who would know how to crack uncrackable passwords. Some teenage genius with spots and adequacy problems, no doubt, whose contemptuous fingers would unriddle this in moments.

  But I didn’t know any, nor where to look to find them; and I was reluctant even to step outside the flat with the computer on my shoulder, in case anyone was watching. There were burglars out there who wanted something, after all. My money was on this.

  Maybe I could copy the file onto a floppy, and take that? I didn’t know if protected files would copy; I should find out. I should do that right now, top priority.

  But I didn’t, I only sat there staring at that uncooperative screen, utterly defeated. Every time I looked away from it, all I saw was a girl in a stable yard being kicked unconscious and whipped awake while a man stood watching in a window. So I looked back at the screen again, better defeat than disgust. And then a figure caught my eye, moving beyond it; and that was Suzie come to fetch me to the futon.

  “You’ve been ages,” she said. “And you’re not getting anywhere, are you?”

  “No.”

  By then she was sitting beside me on the sofa, reaching to dig her thumbs into my shoulders. “Stiff as a board,” she grunted. “Uncle Han’s for you in the morning, you can’t treat your body this way. Turn that thing off, have a shower, clean your teeth and come to bed.”

  No fight in me, I was all surrender. And when I’d done what she told me in the order that she said, I found her lying naked under the duvet and waiting for me, wide awake and intentional.

  Most people do what they want to do; in a world without choices, you only do what you must. I shucked off the kimono and joined her, naked as she was and craven with doubt.

  “Suzie...”

  “It’s all right,” she said, “it is allowed. We’re married, remember?”

  Which was the problem, of course: that I didn’t remember, that I was a monogamous man by instinct and still none of my physical loyalty lay with her, that it didn’t seem all right at all and shouldn’t have been allowed.

  Only that she was there, all too much there suddenly. Warm and hungry, lithe and alien, exotic and unfamiliar; and God in
my confusion I needed something to cling to, something tonight I needed that wasn’t failure or fear or disgust. My hands closed on her slender shoulders, and not I think to push her away.

  She may have been unsure herself, just for a moment, whether my touch meant yes or no, acceptance or its opposite. At any rate she grinned into my eyes, just at the moment that I touched her, and she said, “Besides, you know, we have done it before.”

  Ten: Luke, Back in Anger

  Damn right we’d done it before, that was self-evident. These at least of my secrets she’d been made free of, she knew all the private touches that could chase my soul like silver in the light.

  Briefly I felt at a tremendous disadvantage, unable to reciprocate, knowing nothing of her body beyond what was obvious, what was universal. But cooperative or competitive, whichever it was, that sense of inadequacy slipped away; I stopped feeling anything beyond her fingers and her mouth, sharp teeth and hair and hot slippery flesh and the mind-numbing generosity of her.

  Generous once, at least, generous the first time. Then I was knackered, I wanted nothing but the comforts of sleep, though I was quite happy to sink into them with a friendly body pressed close and warm to mine. But not she was sleepy, she wanted more; I called her greedy, and she impugned my masculinity in a hissing whisper hard into my ear, and ultimately what the hell choice did I have?

  At some point during that unhasty, exploratory, all but sleepless night, I remember her groaning on a giggle, saying she supposed she was going to have to train me all over again, and she’d had no idea before that men could grow up so ignorant. In response I kissed her breathless, and she had fine breath control; and the touch of Carol that came into my head then—“Don’t, Jonty, you know I don’t like that. Like two oysters wrestling in a single shell. Gross. I like California kisses. Dry lips, no tongues, just sharing air...”—was suddenly itself alien, and unwelcome, and not at all guilt-inducing.

  o0o

  I guess we did both of us sleep in the end, or doze at least in the dawnlight. Me, I remember being too weary to move, too brain-dead to talk any more; but those memories are chopped into fragments, so most likely I was dipping in and out, barely there at all. And I remember her breathing too slow, too sonorous for consciousness. I also remember her wide-eyed and watching me, though I don’t remember the change, one to the other.

  No clocks in that room, nothing to stir us or tell us that we ought to stir. I gazed at the light, I tracked the sun across the window, I felt no inclination to shift at all; at last it was Suzie who awoke us to the day and the day’s demands. She stropped her cheek gently against my stubble, her hair tickled my nose and she said,

  “Will you come and watch me have my shower?”

  “I might,” I said; and she led me by the hand from futon to kimonos and so decently through the flat, and thank God we were decent because my mother was sitting on the sofa where I had sat last night. She had my computer in her lap and was playing or working or snooping, whichever; and however glad I was of the kimonos they felt actually like no defence, no decency at all because her acidly satisfied gaze seemed to burn heedlessly through to the flesh and bones and bruises underneath, all the physical history of the night just gone.

  o0o

  I watched Suzie shower, too weary to feel the slightest desire now even in my head as she twisted and lathered and rinsed under a scalding jet. She looked almost a boy, with her small tight body and her cropped hair in the blurring steam; nothing boyish in what my skin remembered of her, though, this last twelve hours. Sometime, somehow I was going to have to deal with this, to find how I felt about what she’d done and how I’d responded. For the moment, though, what I felt most was grateful. She’d done it without knowing what it was that she did, perhaps, she’d done it for reasons of her own—because she loves me, a hard accusatory whisper in my head, as though her love were my fault and therefore certain to be betrayed—but she’d found me a way through the tangled thorns of my self-loathing. And if that way only led eventually to a deeper valley and a darker sky, what of it? Sufficient unto last night particularly were the evils thereof, and she’d got me through them. The next lot I didn’t have to face till sunset came around again. For now, I’d sit with my face in the light and not worry.

  Which was absolutely my mother’s philosophy, and none of mine; but just then I felt it truly, which should have been enough in itself to throw me into a flat dizzy spin of panic. That it didn’t, I could only put down to exhaustion...

  Suzie stepped out of the shower, and I fetched her a towel. When I draped it around her shoulders she worked herself wordlessly like a cat against my hands. Senseless to be shy or wary of her body now, so I dried her quickly, then shucked off the kimono for my own shower while she sat on the toilet seat still rubbing at her hair but watching me, her face unreadable through steam and water.

  My turn to stand still and be dried off when I was done, though I flinched where she had not, earning a giggle and a gentler touch, and, “Hey, did I do that?”

  “Well, I didn’t do it myself. Will it scar?”

  “You’ll probably never play the euphonium again. What is a euphonium?”

  “Big and brassy,” where this wife I didn’t remember choosing was a flute, I thought, slender and quicksilver, light and breathy and surprising. And I wanted to play on her again, and wasn’t sure I’d ever let myself.

  If the decision were ever left up to me...

  o0o

  My mother was still smug half an hour later, when we had come together to the table for breakfast. Suzie and I sipped tea and coffee respectively, clean and refreshed, haggard and unspeaking; Ellie seemed to regard this as some kind of personal triumph, unless she was simply amused by our youthful excess. Any minute now, I thought, she’d be offering unsolicited advice on how better to manage our sex-lives.

  To forestall that, I said, “What were you doing on my computer, then, what are you up to?”

  “An addendum,” she said, “for the Journal. I’ll send you a copy.”

  “That’s the issue about Deverill?” And when she nodded, “You’re not still going ahead with that, for God’s sake?”

  “Yes, of course I am. Why not?

  “Because it’s had you in hiding for weeks, is why not. Because it’s put you in fear for your life is why not.” Because sometimes you appal me and always you madden me and you’ve never been any good at it nor really cared that much but you’re still my mother, is why not...

  “I wouldn’t say fear,” she said. “It was you that was afraid. Touching in a son, but fortunately not catching. I’ve never killed an issue yet, and I don’t intend to start with this one. If ever a man needed stripping naked in public, that man is Vernon Deverill. Besides, I don’t believe it’s Deverill who’s been threatening my life. Do you?”

  After yesterday? I opened my mouth to say yes, but then never gave the word a shape. Oh, he was capable of killing, I was sure of that, and exposure in Jonathan’s Journal might do him enough damage to put him in a killing mood; but no, all the evidence said she was right, it wasn’t him she should be scared of.

  Not yet, at least, not till after she published. And she’d had other big fish killing-mad at her, but she’d always relied on anonymity for protection, and no one had ever broken through that to find her.

  Thus far.

  Her life, her choice; I wasn’t easy with it, but what did that matter? To her, not a whit.

  “Where’ve you been, anyway?” I demanded, abruptly shifting ground. “Where’ve you been hiding?”

  “With friends,” she said. “You told me not to tell you where.”

  “Can you go back?”

  “Of course.”

  No “of course” about it: not friends but self-immolating heroes in my book, if they were willing to put Ellie up, put up with Ellie for weeks at a stretch. Especially if they could pack her off one day and welcome her back the next, for another indeterminate stay.

  “I think you should, then,
” I said. “This morning. Right now,” as she glanced at her watch, as her mute comment pointed out that it was barely morning still, we’d been that late getting up.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Suzie butted in suddenly. “If you’ve got your passport with you, Ellie?”

  “My passport I’ve got,” she said. “For what?”

  My wife the wise woman had my mother sussed. Always she had her passport with her, always her eyes on the distant horizon; and very little it needed to send her away. “I think you should go to Spain,” Suzie said. “Mr Nolan’d like a visit, I’m sure, he won’t be seeing anybody except the consul and his lawyers and anyone Deverill sends, he’s probably dying for a friendly face out there. And you could ask him what he knows about SUSI. Whether it was them set him up, or what. As it’s you, he’ll tell you anything he knows, he’ll be so glad to see you; and I bet he knows a lot. He’s got to know something.”

  She was right, even my mother had to admit that. A minute’s thought, a brisk nod, and, “Yes, I’ll do that. Jonty, can you phone the airport while I pack? First plane to Madrid, please.”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. “The police are looking for you, remember? There’s not going to be a nationwide alert or anything, you’re not that important,” and oh, how I loved telling her that, “but Chief Inspector Dale might have asked the local airport to keep an eye out for you. He’ll be half expecting you to head to Spain, and I think he half suspects you’re around here somewhere. Better if you drive down to Manchester or London and fly from there.”

  “No car, darling.”

  “Take the one I hired. It’s a national firm, they’re sure to have an office, whichever airport you go to. Hand it in there. You might have to pay a bit extra, but...”

  “All right. Good. Has anyone got any cash? I’d rather not leave a trail behind me, if that nasty policeman’s put a trace on my credit cards.”

  Cash on that scale I didn’t have. The gold card would probably produce it; but before I could offer, Suzie went to the sideboard and rummaged among napery, coming back with a fat envelope. She glanced at me shamefaced as she handed it to my mother.