Breaking Light

by Karin Altenberg

  ‘Michael … she’s your mother – she loves you.’

  ‘Ooh, look who’s talking.’ But there was a tremor in his voice.

  ‘Mr D has arrived, Fluff.’ They were both startled by Sam’s sudden reappearance.

  ‘Thanks,’ Michael said and stood up. ‘Will you excuse me for a minute, Gabe?’

  Sam remained behind for a moment, watching Gabriel. He was holding the silver tray, and a white cloth was folded over his arm. The light was behind him; Gabriel could not see his face.

  ‘Yes?’ Gabriel twitched involuntarily as he felt a shiver run down his spine.

  Sam stepped into the light. ‘Are you twins, or something? You look alike … except you’re bigger. I like your moustache.’ His smile seemed to insinuate something.

  ‘No, no we are not,’ he answered, in tight-lipped awkwardness.

  ‘A shame, that,’ Sam whispered, and smiled at him, before placing two large whiskies on the table. ‘These are on the house, compliments of the Pelican himself,’ he said, and winked, before moving away.

  Gabriel felt like crying. He finished his whisky; his hand was shaking as he put the empty glass down. He looked around the room. It seemed different all of a sudden – shabbier and yellow-tinted.

  Finally, Michael returned. His eyes seemed darker and there was something equivocal about him. ‘Now, where were we?’ he said, with a jaded smile, slurring slightly. As he reached out for his drink, Gabriel noticed that the cufflink on his right cuff was missing. He could have sworn it was there before.

  ‘Just get out of here, Michael! Get out of London.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He sounded depressed, and tired.

  ‘I’ll get you out.’

  Michael looked at him for a moment. ‘It’s not that simple, Gabe,’ he said grimly.

  ‘All right, all right, so it’s not simple. Nothing is simple, but you have got to realise—’

  ‘I realise,’ Michael said, abruptly. ‘Would you like another drink?’

  Gabriel shook his head. They sat for a while, looking.

  ‘You’ve got to understand,’ Gabriel said, ‘that I’d do anything to help you.’

  Michael shrugged; it was not clear if he was listening.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Oh, hell!’

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then you’re just an idiot.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘There are cures—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Look, Gabe, can we stop talking about me for a minute? It’s so bloody boring. This conversation is fucking hurting my head. How are you?’

  Gabriel did not know what to say. He wanted to cry. He sat there, biting his lower lip.

  ‘Happy, are you?’

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘I’m fine, Michael, really. It’s been a bit tough lately, but it’s nothing … I could tell you about it … I am happy to have found you. I thought, perhaps, we could do something together. Start a business, perhaps, or you could sign up for university too. It’s great fun, you know. You’re clever; you could make something of yourself. Apply to a conservatory – something that would make you happy, now that Jim of Blackaton is out of our hair—’

  ‘I’m happy where I am; never been happier in my life,’ Michael interrupted.

  ‘This – the drink, whatever – it will kill you.’

  ‘It’s the only thing that’s keeping me alive.’

  ‘It could be different.’

  ‘Yeah? You sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘Happy. What a word.’ Michael threw back his head and laughed an empty laugh. ‘Oh, Gabe. You were always so gullible – you always refused to see life for what it really is.’ He dropped his head into his hands and sat like that for a moment, rocking slightly from side to side, muttering unintelligibly until Gabriel thought he had fallen into some delirium.

  ‘Michael?’ He reached out to put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, but Michael pulled away and looked at him, a dreadful haggard expression in his eyes.

  ‘So vulnerable … So lonely. Don’t you see? I had to save you from the world – it was my duty. I too saw the horror reflected in that pool; I too walked through the corridor of mirrors – or have you forgotten? I thought I’d make it – that I had it in me – but I was just as weak as all the others. I too am a coward.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense, Michael.’

  ‘Nonsense; yes, of course, I’m talking nonsense,’ he mumbled with tenderness. ‘What other language is left to me?’ He closed his eyes and rested his cheek in his palm so that Gabriel thought he had fallen asleep.

  ‘Michael? Michael? You should go to bed; it’s very late. Where are you staying?’ He stood up and pulled at Michael’s arm.

  ‘No, no; leave me alone. I want to stay here,’ Michael slurred, without opening his eyes.

  He tugged again at Michael’s sleeve.

  ‘Will you ever leave me alone?’

  Gabriel felt desperate; he didn’t know what to do. He had to get out; this was killing him. ‘Perhaps we could meet for lunch tomorrow? When you’re feeling … better. Would you like that?’ Gabriel hesitated for a moment, looking down at Michael. ‘Well, I’ll come back tomorrow, then, and look for you …’ he continued tentatively.

  ‘Gabe,’ Michael said then, with sudden clarity, ‘stay away from me, will you? I’m no good; do you hear me? Promise me you won’t come here again.’ He reached up and took hold of Gabriel’s face, pulling it down towards him. His hands were chilly against Gabriel’s cheeks. There was a strange metallic smell around him. ‘Promise me, Gabe.’

  Gabriel could not say a word for the lump in his throat, but he nodded and closed his eyes so that Michael would not see the black thing, peering out at him.

  ‘And would you do one more thing for me, please? Will you find Mother and check that she’s … okay? Look after her for me?’

  He nodded again and felt Michael’s hands relaxing.

  ‘That’s my boy.’ Michael patted him weakly on the cheek and let him go. ‘Bye-bye, now.’

  Gabriel pushed through the crowd towards the exit but, as he reached the bar area, somebody stepped out in front of him. Gabriel looked up into the face of Jim of Blackaton. He looked much the same as he had the last time they met at the Moor Cross Inn, but he had the puffed-up, pallid look of somebody who spent little time in daylight. He had taken off his black tie and his shirt was open at the collar.

  ‘Well, well, well. I hadn’t realised that we were going to have such fine guests tonight. Let me take a look at you.’ His voice was darker and more guttural, as if he was trying to hide his rural accent, and he had the manner of speech of a man who was seldom interrupted. As he studied Gabriel’s face, he lifted a big cigar to the soft lips, which seemed to kiss rather than suck. He blew the smoke away from Gabriel, like a gentleman, and smiled, almost sweetly. ‘Who would have thought that Bunny-boy would grow up looking quite handsome, eh?’

  Gabriel felt a cold sweat seeping through his shirt and looked around for the door.

  Blackaton’s smile broadened. ‘What’s the hurry? Come and sit down for a minute; have a drink with my associate and me. I’m sure he would love to meet you … absolutely love it.’ He took hold of Gabriel’s shoulder and steered him towards one of the booths. Gabriel did not have any choice but to move along. He recognised the man from the other day and straight away he realised that it was Jim of Blackaton he had seen from the back, talking to this man, who smiled as they approached. He was sinewy and with a ginger complexion; his gaze was at once roguish and cunning. His movements, the way he sipped his cocktail slowly, elegantly, seemed deliberate and calculated, as if it was a skill he had learnt quite recently.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Bunny-boy –’ that same west country accent – ‘Sam told us you were here. I didn’t actually recognise you when you popped in the other day … but then it has been a while.’ That sniggering face – Billy Dunford – no longer a
boy, but still cowering behind his master. An image of Billy’s hairy cock pissing into the bucket surfaced in Gabriel’s mind, but he managed to push it away.

  Jim of Blackaton smiled. ‘Sit down, please.’ He gestured to the seat next to him. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you; I was just on my way home.’

  ‘Very wise … But, tell me, where is “home” these days? My sources tell me that you have been living rather frugally lately. Student life is not so flush, is it?’

  Gabriel blushed, but did not reply.

  ‘There’s no shame in it, lad, no shame at all; we all have to rough it at times, don’t we, Billy?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right; we do,’ the lieutenant replied, cheerfully.

  ‘And now you have come looking for your brother – to get a bit of help, eh? Is that it? No?’

  ‘No. Michael can’t help me. I came to take him away from … all this. From you.’

  Blackaton laughed. ‘Did you hear that, Billy? He’s come to take Fluffy away from us.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Billy tutted. ‘We can’t have that, can we?’

  ‘No,’ Jim of Blackaton said, the smile gone from his face, ‘we most certainly cannot, and you listen to me, pal –’ he leant forward and stared into Gabriel’s eyes, the mischief suddenly replaced by grit – ‘if you want to help your brother, you’d better work for it; do you hear me?’

  Gabriel swallowed and, without meaning to do it, he pressed his finger against his upper lip. ‘What kind of work, Jim?’

  ‘Oh, a bit of this and that, lad,’ Jim said, benevolently. ‘Just a bit of this and that. Ain’t that right, Billy?’

  ‘Sure is, boss. A bit of this and that is all we’re asking for.’

  Gabriel felt a fevered rush inside his head. He realised he was caught. Closing his eyes, he tried to bring things into some kind of order, attempting to make sense of his situation. He looked up. Jim of Blackaton was studying him with those sly, cold eyes.

  ‘Well, then?’

  He took a deep breath and plunged. ‘No, Blackaton; I’d never work for you – or for your echoing sidekick here –’ he inclined his head towards Billy, his eyes fixed on Blackaton. ‘Your business stinks. I’ll get Oakstone back for my … my family’s sake and I’ll do everything I can to help Michael out of this shit hole,’ he said in a level voice, his heart pounding.

  Jim of Blackaton looked away.

  ‘Oooh, Bunny-boy’s stirring,’ Billy mocked. But Jim remained silent; he only shifted slightly in his seat, the way a gambler might tense when a new hand is dealt. He took a drag from his cigar. Some ashes fell on to his trouser leg.

  ‘And how exactly do you propose to do this?’ Billy asked, sarcastically.

  ‘Wait and see,’ Gabriel answered, quite calmly now, smiling to himself as Rey’s voice surfaced somewhere in his mind. ‘You just wait and see.’

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  Something in the way Billy’s eyes flickered as he said this made Gabriel laugh.

  ‘What’s so bloody funny?’

  ‘You’re just so deluded, Billy, you know that?’

  ‘What the fuck—?’

  ‘Shut up, Billy,’ Jim of Blackaton said, brushing the ashes from his trousers without looking up.

  Gabriel got to his feet. For a moment, he thought he might have to steady himself against the table. But he didn’t. He stood up straight.

  ‘Hey, Gabriel?’ Blackaton had never said his name before.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You make sure you don’t stand in my way,’ he said through his teeth. ‘You fucking make sure.’

  Gabriel left them, without looking back, and walked into the night.

  *

  ‘After that episode, I was quite determined,’ Mr Askew told Mrs Ludgate, as he stood up and crossed the room to turn on the main light. ‘I just knew that I had to get Oakstone back, for Michael’s sake – and for Mrs Bradley’s and even Mother’s. It was like … like a way of reuniting the whole family. That’s what I realised as I was sitting there, thinking it all through the following morning in St James’s Park.’

  The sudden brightness blinded them both for a moment. She looked away, embarrassed, hiding her face, but he had stopped noticing. As he sat back in his armchair again, he might have smiled to himself, a bit smug now, as he remembered Jim of Blackaton spilling the ashes on his trousers.

  ‘Their house of cards was bound to come down eventually – I didn’t have to do very much. It was clearly rotten. They were getting quite fraught around that time. There had even been a couple of murders of rival club owners – covered up, of course, but the police were getting irked, just the same.’

  She was listening to this with a withdrawn expression, eyes downcast.

  ‘But, somehow, I think he realised that evening,’ he continued, ‘that I’d testify against him when the time came. I had nothing to lose, you see. I could no longer be scared into silence. For some reason, this dawned on him in the club that night.’

  ‘Were you never scared for your life?’

  ‘My life … no. I suppose I never thought … It’s impossible to imagine those things.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I never knew what he was doing up in London. I suppose that makes me an even bigger fool …’

  He leant over and patted her hand. She twitched, but let it happen.

  ‘What I needed was proof of an actual crime,’ he continued. ‘But where was I going to get that?’

  They were both silent for a moment, before he asked, ’One thing I’ve never understood is why Blackaton wanted Oakstone so badly.’

  Mrs Ludgate grimaced and shook her head. ‘It’s hard to tell …’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps he had a silly dream of another life too.’ But, from somewhere in the depth of her mind’s dark well, a memory surfaced, so faint and insubstantial that it might have been myth, of a spring day, early on, in those very first months when they had walked, arm in arm, in the sun, through the bright village. She had made them stop, briefly, by a low wall, peering through a screen of trees and bushes at the house that was Oakstone. She had teased him, laughing, saying that this was where she wanted to live one day – not with her parents-in-law on the moor, in that filth. He had laughed, too, and there had been happiness in his face – real happiness. She furrowed her brow now at the memory. Vanity. Where would such happiness have fitted in her life? What a fool she had been.

  ‘Mrs Ludgate, are you all right? I haven’t made you sad, talking like this about your husband? You must forgive me; I didn’t mean to be so insensitive.’

  She tried to smile, but managed only a wince. How could other people stand it, this helpless staggering into marriage, hoping to escape themselves by putting their trust in another person? She struggled to contain her feelings. ‘Not to worry, Professor; I’m as perky as a pin,’ she said, cheerfully.

  ‘Oh – that’s a relief,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I would never hold it against you that you married a bleeding bastard!’

  ‘I should bloody well hope not.’ Mrs Ludgate chuckled, feeling that dry ripple, like the tearing of old sheets, spreading from her breast towards her throat, so that, in the end, she could not help but let fall a sob.

  Mr Askew stirred and looked up at her. ‘Sorry, did you say something? I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘Humph!’ she managed, grimacing again through her desolation.

  He looked at her closely, sensing that something was wrong. ‘Have you no sense of – of – of –’ he stumbled – ‘no feeling of – of anger towards me for what I have done – processing against him through the courts, that is?’ He wasn’t proud of what he had done, hunting like a bloodhound for intelligence and putting the case together, slowly, painstakingly. At first, he had only been able to gather evidence for tiny misdemeanours, but over time they added up until he had enough to make a case.

  Mrs Ludgate ignored his question; it seemed too banal, under the circumstances; she only looked at him with
a kind of sadness and asked, ‘What happened to Michael? Did you manage to save him?’

  ‘I …’ He faltered, looking around the room, as if for a gesture of support and understanding, but the walls that stared back at him were numb, the furniture frozen. He looked suddenly old, dulled and defenceless. ‘I was too late,’ he whispered at the floor. ‘He was beyond saving.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, breathlessly.

  ‘An overdose –’ he looked at her straight – ‘self-orchestrated … only weeks after I met him that last time.’

  ‘He died?’

  He didn’t answer. They could not have been torn apart so brutally if they had not been so closely entwined.

  ‘So all this,’ she gasped, ‘all your … plotting, Jim’s money, our fields – to get Oakstone back – all was in vain?’

  He nodded his head slowly.

  ‘Then you’re as great a loser as I am.’

  He looked up at her in surprise, gaunt with shadowed eyes.

  ‘All things to all men and nothing to yourself.’ She laughed, but sadly.

  ‘I suppose you’re right, yes.’

  ‘Your own brother …’ she said with a gentleness he hadn’t heard in her before. ‘Was there any other family?’

  ‘Yes,’ he remembered now, only too well. ‘Yes, there was Mother, of course. In fact, it was she who gave me the evidence I needed to begin the search.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘She even talked about you, that time … I remember it now.’ He wished he could remember more clearly; the young woman that Mrs Ludgate had been was still a rather pale reflection. But he smiled at her, encouragingly, as he thought about that visit to his mother, many years ago.

  *

  Most summer afternoons, the path that traced along the backs of the cottage gardens was left forgotten. It might just as well have been a track broken by deer, flitting through the woods at dawn, looking for water. The smells were secret and musky. It was clear that it was not frequently used. As a boy, he had sometimes been afraid of this undergrowth and the things that spurted out of it: stinging nettles, coils of barbed wire or the angry lids of rusting cans. Back then, the path had been outside the boundary of his enclosed world. But on that occasion when he came back, on that clammy summer afternoon, he had stood alone, looking back into the long, narrow garden, which had been brimming with enamel light.