All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He turned and walked away, saying no more.

  Rebekah allowed him a respectful distance and then headed for the house also. ‘I seriously need a drink right now,’ she announced.

  Alexis stayed where she was, turning to watch Rebekah leaving as though to underline the fact that she wasn’t. When she turned back, her expression was troubled, indicating ‘we need to talk’ but clearly not looking forward to it.

  ‘You okay? Really?’ she asked quietly.

  Jane nodded. ‘I’m okay, my head’s clear. I don’t think it’s ever been so clear, in fact. If there’s any personal demons going to haunt me about what I did tonight, then they’re in a holding pattern right now. I should probably apologise to Rebekah, though. Old grumblebaws is right about that. Always right and never satisfied with what you do. You must love working for him.’

  Alexis looked away towards the house for a moment, that strained expression still tugging at her features when she returned her gaze to Jane.

  ‘He’s not right, not tonight,’ she said. ‘You did great in there. Your judgement calls were bang-on and they were your calls to make because you were the one on the spot. You made the plays and you got the name. More than the name: you got the Marledoq insider too. You can say thanks to Rebekah for getting both your asses out of there, but you’ve nothing to apologise to her for.’

  Alexis’s voice became quieter, as though to stress a humble meekness to her subsequent suggestion. ‘But maybe,’ she said, ‘if your head’s as clear as you say, you might find a conciliatory word to offer Bett.’

  ‘Bett? Why?’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t that I considered it such an improbable concept, I’d be tempted to say I think you just hurt his feelings.’

  Jane pictured his face, that look around at the three women, the anger subsiding, the nod of … what?

  ‘You’re not telling me a guy like that’s going to take a piece of petulant nonsense to heart.’

  ‘I think it was the sender, more than the message.’

  ‘What does he care what I think? He doesn’t even trust me. He was telling me to bail out before I’d even left the bar tonight.’

  ‘You’re new to this. He was trying to protect you.’

  ‘Ach, rubbish. You know fine that Bett uses people without concerning himself about what he’s getting them into. He was worried I’d blow the mission by getting into something I couldn’t handle.’

  Alexis nodded. ‘Okay, that was bullshit,’ she conceded. ‘He wasn’t trying to protect you, but not because he doesn’t care and not because he doesn’t trust you. He does trust you: he had no doubts that you knew what you were doing or about how far you were prepared to go. That was the problem. He was protecting himself: he was the one who couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘Handle what?’

  ‘What he might have been forced to watch.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be daft. I can’t see Bett getting suddenly squeamish about being the voyeur when—’

  ‘I was with Bett in the operations room,’ Alexis said. ‘And believe me, when you kissed Parrier …’ She left the sentence unfinished, a memory tapering off into the half-light.

  Jane sighed. ‘I should have a wee word,’ she said.

  ‘Better leave it a while. He’ll be off sulking in the forbidden zone.’

  ‘I killed people tonight, Alexis. The word “forbidden” doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to me right now.’

  Jane marched up the stairs, intent on taking the proscribed left turn, and feeling more defiant than she was conciliatory. It seemed absurd that this man could be so commanding, to the point of tyrannous, and yet run off to feel sorry for himself because he didn’t like something that was said. Quite simply, she wasn’t having it. If he had issues with her, he should be big and scary enough to have them out.

  She walked along the corridor, her footfalls not cushioned like the last time, but echoing off the tiles and plaster, intended to draw him forth and to hell with his self-important ire. All of the doors remained closed. When she stopped walking, stilled the clatter of her steps, she heard no sound from behind any of them, though light was visible from beneath two. It reminded her of Ross in his teens. When he was in cream-puff mode, he tended to brood in self-indulgently contemplative silence. Michelle opted more often for slamming doors and cranking up the record player.

  The thought made Jane that bit less defiant about the prospect of barging in, remembering how counterproductive any confrontational action tended to be. With a light touch learned from calming a thousand tantrums, she delicately twisted the nearest doorhandle and slowly inched it forward. Provoking no response, she pushed it open just wide enough to pass, and stepped inside.

  She found herself in a room lined with bookshelves, hundreds of volumes filed along two sides, tall three-paned windows dominating the outer wall. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting; perhaps something as gloomy and austere as the corridor. Instead she saw a place of solitude and reflection, somewhere she could imagine sitting on a rainy afternoon, losing herself in infinite lives. But she had need of escape to a more exciting life when she picked up a book; who would want to escape from Bett’s? Did he read tales of being a housewife, complete with Tom Clancy-style technical details of the latest state-of-the-art vacuuming hardware?

  She ran her eyes along the spines, found many of them to be in French. There were English ones too, the mix of titles so eclectic as to defy any attempt to draw even a shallow impression of taste. It was a collection testifying only to decades of a life.

  In the corner, beneath one window, there was a cabinet, three sides glass, standing a little less than waist height. It drew her eye but she caught only a glimpse of its contents before forcing herself to look away. She saw a toy car, grey metal, missing one front tyre; a model aeroplane, perhaps a Spitfire or a Hurricane, green on one side but scorched on the other as though it had come through a real dogfight; and a dog-eared paperback copy of Kidnapped. It was tempting to examine them closer, but Jane felt reluctant to look again, like it was some kind of sin, much worse than reading someone else’s diary. They were remnants of a childhood, frozen in time behind glass, preserved but untouchable.

  Far more than Bett’s previous wrath or admonishments, the cabinet made Jane feel she was trespassing somewhere she instinctively knew she ought not to be. She withdrew quietly, crossed the hall and gently opened the other door beneath which light could be seen. Once again, there was no reaction from within. She stepped inside, just to be sure Bett wasn’t doing what Ross used to, blanking her intrusion and pretending she wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t, but the room – his bedroom – seemed sufficiently infused with his presence for her to feel a little nervous about being there alone, uninvited. It was sparsely furnished and simply decorated compared to her own quarters, and though this made it seem spacious, it was a good deal smaller than her room. There was a brass-framed double bed: large, sturdy and, she guessed, antique, but not quite the king-sized, carved-oak four-poster with billowing silk canopies she had half assumed the master’s bedroom ought to boast. Nor was there a coffin to lie in or a rail for him to hang upside down from, so that was two more notions out the window. The only concession to the possibility that he was a member of the night-walking undead was an absence of mirrors, but there was an imposingly large wardrobe against one wall, that could well contain a full-length pane on the back of any of its doors.

  There was no dressing table here, nothing so frivolous or girly, but there was a low chest of drawers next to the windows, upon which sat a few grooming essentials. It also supported a narrow vase containing a single red rose, and a pewter frame, inside which there was a black and white photograph of a smiling woman holding a baby. She looked young, Jane thought, maybe twenty at most. She remembered a time when twenty seemed old, but that was long before she reached it herself. By the time she had, she felt a lot older than she would ever have believed.

  She took a few steps to have a closer look. The
photograph wasn’t recent, going by the condition, but whether ten years old or twenty or even fifty, she couldn’t have said. The woman’s long dark hair was swept back behind a band, in a style that had drifted in and out of fashion since Jane could remember, and of her clothes, all but a glimpse of a penny collar was obscured by the child: a podgy and baffled-looking thing, no more than a month old.

  Drawn to it, Jane reached to pick up the frame, but never got there, a voice from behind causing her to shudder in startlement and turn around.

  ‘Mrs Fleming.’

  Bett was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame with his hands folded.

  Jane’s earlier defiance was all drained away, her appetite for confrontation diminished utterly.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were up here,’ she offered rapidly.

  ‘I was working downstairs,’ he said, his voice subdued, as though he didn’t have much fight left in him either. ‘Putting out Marius Roth’s name to a few resourceful acquaintances. I’ve already got the name of his boat, and with any luck, in a few hours I should have a whole lot more.’

  ‘Good,’ Jane said. ‘Great.’

  She couldn’t think of anything more to say. For all that she’d done tonight, this was the first time she felt truly vulnerable.

  Neither of them spoke for a while, another stand-off like outside, but without the aggression. She felt less uncomfortable while Bett was looking silently at her, because when he looked elsewhere it served to emphasise where she was standing. His gaze alighted on the chest of drawers, specifically upon the portrait, then significantly returned to Jane. There was no accusation in his face, but she knew a confession had been extracted from her own eyes.

  She glanced at the portrait again by way of coming clean. ‘Who is she?’ she asked, her voice softer, drier than she’d anticipated.

  He simply stared back at first, long enough for Jane to think he wouldn’t say. His face was impassive but there was a lot going on behind it, she could tell. His mouth opened and closed, a final false start, then he answered.

  ‘My mother,’ he said.

  ‘And you?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘My father took it. I don’t have any of him, though. He died when I was one, killed on active service. Nothing heroic, it was a bloody motorcycle accident at an army base in Germany. My mother was left to raise me and my new-born sister alone.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ Jane said sincerely.

  ‘Strong woman,’ Bett replied. ‘And courageous. Too courageous.’

  He swallowed. Jane looked at his face, saw eyes that would never be permitted to cry; trained and disciplined but suffering in their denial.

  ‘She died too,’ he said flatly, the absence of emotion in his voice strangely conveying more than a volley of baying sobs, for sobs were a noisy trickling stream and this seemed the placid surface of a pool whose depths of sorrow might never be known. ‘I was eleven. A house fire. She got out with my sister and she’d have been fine, but she went back in for me.’

  He ceased, offering no more details. None were necessary. She pictured a child’s ash-smeared face, stricken and disbelieving, pictured the salvaged toys, a favourite book she’d read to him, saved by a lost eleven-year-old for their connection to a world gone forever. Childhood abruptly ended; love, care, certainty replaced with a fight for survival, the first scarring battles taking place on the inside.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, her voice crumbling to a whisper.

  ‘That’s the reason I sought you out, why I knew how far you’d be prepared to go. I was certain there was no risk you wouldn’t take, no sacrifice you would refuse. And that’s why I didn’t want you to go to Parrier’s suite. I was scared of what I might end up watching.’

  ‘If it had come to that, I’d have insisted we go to the bedroom.’

  Bett shook his head sadly.

  ‘No, Jane. Don’t you understand? I was scared I’d end up watching you die.’

  And now Jane did understand, though a little too late to undo certain hurts. She took an involuntary step towards him.

  ‘I’m sorry for what I said about the helicopter,’ she told him.

  Bett put out a hand, though whether to halt her approach or halt her apology was not clear. He closed the door behind him and half sat, half leaned on the near end of the bedstead.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly as though I’ve earned the right to be offended. In fact when you said it, I found myself looking at you, at Rebekah, at Alexis, and realised what you were all looking back at. I thought about what I’d done to each of you: the situations I’d placed you in, the things I’d made you do. And I understood why you said what you did. I realised none of you could possibly see me as anything other than a monster.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, nobody—’

  ‘I am a monster. I’ve turned kids into assassins, press-ganged runaways … I’ve stolen innocence, Jane. Stolen it from youth like it was stolen from me. They hate me for it and it’s right that they should.’

  Jane took a cautious step towards him and, not being waved away, took another until she was standing against the brass frame, a foot to Bett’s right.

  ‘Whether they should or not, the fact is, they don’t hate you,’ she told him. ‘Oh, sure, you piss them off, probably more than any living soul, but they care about you. The reason I came up here was that Alexis thought you might have had it pretty rough tonight.’

  ‘Alexis,’ he said, managing a sad little smile. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her.’

  ‘Well, that’s a question I think you’d better start to seriously consider soon, because you can’t keep her.’

  ‘She wants to leave? She never said anything to me.’

  ‘She never dared. Though perhaps she might have if she thought there was anywhere she could go. But she could go anywhere, couldn’t she? With the help of a man with … contacts.’

  Bett nodded solemnly.

  Jane reached down and very slowly, very tenderly, touched his hand, placing her fingers on the backs of his, then interlocking them.

  ‘You’re not a monster, Bett. You’re a lost wee boy. I should know. I came here looking for one. And I wouldn’t have had a hope of finding him without you.’

  She lifted her other hand to his face and turned it towards her, then placed her lips against his. Bett’s mouth remained still, unresponsive. He turned his face away, briefly closing his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Jane insisted, flustered and catching a glimpse of how embarrassed she was going to feel about this in the very near future. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

  Jane went directly back to her room and ran herself a bath. Reckoning she’d never felt quite so in need of one, other than post-labour, and given that she had such a capacity at her disposal, she decided she both required and deserved the biggest, deepest one of her life. She ran the taps, balancing them to regulate the temperature, until the water reached a level that she estimated would just about accommodate her without spilling over the top. Then she undressed, got in and lay back. Her estimate was way out. She closed her eyes and listened to the splash of water pouring down on to the tiles, concentrating on that and the sensation of warmth in order to keep a thousand other, more complicated thoughts at bay.

  She lay with her neck resting on the rim, her hair hanging over the side. Every tiny movement, even the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, caused a further displacement and resultant downpour, the trickling sound echoing around the tiled walls. That, perhaps, was why she didn’t hear him approach. Or perhaps she did hear him, but pretended to herself that she hadn’t, for she certainly didn’t jump like she ought to when she felt his touch, and no bath was relaxing enough to so anaesthetise the reflexes.

  She did start a little, moving her neck off the edge and thus pouring another volume over the rim, but his hands steadied her head.

  ‘Shhh,’ was all he said.

/>   He pulled her hair to one side and kissed the back of her neck, the sensation sending a charge all along her spine. His lips remained there, his tongue gently brushing the tiny hairs on her skin, all of which seemed to be standing up, stretching and competing for the privilege. Bett’s hands rested upon her shoulders, gently pressing and cupping his fingers to describe their shape. They moved slowly down along her upper arms, the pressure light, firm, exquisite; then they moved inwards. Jane felt as though the skin on her chest was rising to meet his fingers, until she realised she was arching her back, impatiently bringing the moment forward.

  She sighed, even the outrush of breath feeling like part of a caress.

  He continued fondly kissing her neck, but its very tenderness, its affection, made it no longer enough. She turned her head to pull his face to hers, and this time met no indifference. He kissed her deeply, thirstily, like they were lovers long denied.

  She broke off eventually, but only to get to her feet, in order to climb out.

  ‘I need to hold you,’ she said. ‘Skin to skin.’

  He pulled his shirt over his head and stepped out of his trousers, leaving them to soak up some of the puddles on the drenched floor. Watching him undress, Jane caught a glimpse of herself standing naked before him, involuntarily prompting images of the young women Bett had entertained here. She swiftly banished them again, dispatching the harpies as clinically as any of the evening’s other foes. She’d always been fairly tall, fairly skinny, and even after two kids there had never been that far south her B-cup breasts could have gone. So she was forty-six. So she had stretch-marks and cellulite. She was through being self-conscious, through being too old, through being not good enough.

  She pulled him to her, burying her face in his neck for a moment, just relishing the sensation of his body pressed against hers. His arms clasped her, taut and powerful but holding her so gently. She could feel his cock stiffen against her stomach, and that was how she thought of it: his cock. There’d been so many coy, infantile terms between her and a man whose sexuality had been so damaged by religion that he couldn’t directly refer to his own penis, but that was in the past, that was so in the past.