That meant instant, and if she’d had anything to do with the shopping it’d be good instant, or as good as instant gets; but this was still not a credible position. “Hang on. Run that past me again. You’re off coffee?”
The Cappuccino Kid, we used to call her; Elle Espressa, in the evenings. Limitless capacity for caffeine in all its forms, endless enjoyment thereof.
She shrugged, smiled. “Makes me feel sick. Hormones, I suppose. Nasty girly stuff, you don’t want to know.”
Damn right I didn’t, but it was too late for that. This was suddenly, achingly, unbearably familiar. Good hot Catholic country, Spain, full of bad hot Catholic kids. Lots of sex, little contraception. “Laura, are you pregnant?”
“Clever boy. Do you think it shows?” She flattened her hands, her clothes across her stomach, peering down at it, exaggerating everything. Trying hard, doing no good at all.
No, I didn’t think it showed. She’d put on weight all over; there might be a little extra swelling, a little hardening of the belly to talk of the alien within, but I couldn’t tell without touching and I wasn’t going to touch. Even with an invitation, I wouldn’t have wanted to touch.
Thinking alien (though it wasn’t, not really, it was only part and part of two people I loved), thinking of foreign bodies stirring into life within concealing flesh, I felt something not at all foreign but bitterly unwelcome stirring in my own guts, a sudden sharp twist of a long-buried blade. The echo of an old cry, it should have been me!—and the echo returning brought all the old pain with it, cruelly renewed.
I’d thought—or no, maybe not that, but at least I’d vaguely hoped—that I might have been past this by now. Older and wiser, I’d thought myself (don’t laugh), infinitely more experienced. Marina and Sallah, a dozen girls in a dozen cities, more than. So cosmopolitan, I’d thought myself, so sophisticated. How could I possibly still be carrying a torch for a girl who’d never so much as kissed me with her mouth open?
I guess I had my mouth open just then. Laura was smiling at me, reaching to run her fingers through my hair, sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to be smart, you needed it breaking more gently, still doing what she could to make this easy: anxious for me perhaps, but not at all for herself or anything that came with her. Totally comfortable with that she seemed, with being pregnant and Jamie’s girlfriend and all that that implied; and I think that’s what flipped me over in the end. Pregnant—okay, that happened, though she was a medic, for God’s sake, she should have known better. Pregnant by Jamie—well, again okay, sort of. Somehow. I could find a way to handle that. He was always a careless bastard. The only real surprise was that it hadn’t happened before, that I knew of. But pregnant by Jamie and utterly content, all the weight of clan history hanging over her like the darkest of thunderclouds about to break and her still unfazed, blithely unheeding: I could never have wished her unhappy, but this was too much. This was a wedding-ring and more, this was I’ll take on all his cursed family, all their evil, past and future both; it’s worth it to me, so long as I can have him.
Grief enough to me that she had found him sexy, desirable, acceptable two years ago, and me not. The time between had changed me not enough, seemingly, and her too much, if she could make such a commitment. Laura had a solemn soul under her wild skin, she’d never make a baby without making promises to go with. Making and demanding, and just how changed must Jamie be, that they could make this work?
Didn’t matter. It was just a stray thought spinning through a mind sick and dizzy, hurting, reeling. What did matter, what could possibly matter? Answer, not a lot. Certainly not my own behaviour, that clearly didn’t matter a damn to her, she was only trying to be nice because she was a nice girl and it was the nice thing to do.
If it didn’t matter to her, it didn’t matter. Not a problem then that I was on my feet in a surge and blundering mutely for the door, jerking free of her staying hand and not listening, only distantly aware that she was talking, following, pleading with me almost as I took the stairs two and three at a time. Couldn’t hear a word, against the hiss and suck of a dark tide pulling at me that I had no will to fight.
To get out of there, that was all I wanted; not to see that radiant calm in her, not to look and look for any hint of a bulge in her waistline, not above all to wait for Jamie and see him, see him and her together. Been there, seen that already. I’d been carrying those pictures in my head all this time, wondering, imagining; didn’t want the truth of them acted out now before me, where it couldn’t be denied or dismissed as not important any more. The real truth was in me, impelling me through the door and slamming it behind me.
Onto the bike, and only realising then that I’d left jacket, helmet, rucksack behind me. Too late to worry, I wasn’t going back. Keys were in my jeans pocket, that was all that counted.
I blasted away from her door like all the demons of hell were behind me, and I thought they were. Looking back was a no-no, whether she came or not; she might be standing there in the street screaming my name, but I couldn’t hear and I didn’t want to know.
Where to go? Again it was a question, and likely the answer eventually would be back to Jon’s, but not yet. I wanted speed, I wanted to stare open-eyed into the wind to drive incipient tears back into my skull. Only one route to take, then, the same way I’d always gone when this fierce need was on me; once more it didn’t need thinking about, it didn’t require decision.
o0o
Adolescence famously has its agonies. Adolescents famously try to run away from them, into drink or drugs or whatever mind-blasting high can numb the pain awhile. Me, I’d tried and used them all, but driving at speed was always the fall-back position, if only because it did the thing twice: it gave you an experience to escape into and at the same time it actually took you away from there, it brought you physical escape. Whatever shit I took with me in my head, I always reckoned geographical distance had a lot to recommend it.
Which I guess is why I’d gone eventually to Europe, looking for escape on the grand scale; I might have picked America or Australia, only that there would have been problems getting the bike across and I never would have left it.
And now I’d come back, thinking myself so grown-up, grown out at last of those teenage clothes, albeit a few years late; and here I was doing it all again, racing shadows of the past down a long straight road, trying to outrun what I carried with me.
o0o
Ten miles the road ran with hardly a kink in it, thanks to the Romans who built it first. Never mind what else they’d ever done for me, Latin classes and toga parties and walks along the wall, this was enough to earn and keep my gratitude. This was plenty.
Jamie and I used to race this road. Sometimes I used to race this road alone, when the need to get away was stronger. Later, after I left the family home in my first weak rebellion, I used to yearn for it; loving and losing Laura, never truly having Laura to lose, could have driven me this way a dozen times a month, except that then I had no bike.
And now here I was and there was Laura and she’d done it to me again, or I’d done it to myself because of her; and I did have the bike, and I did crouch over the handlebars and gun the engine to the max, and pity any poor fool who got in my way because I was truly in no condition to be driving at all, let alone driving like this, but oh, I was going to drive.
o0o
And did; and nobody did get in my way, because actually there was a dual carriageway now from city to coast, had been the best part of my life, and that tracked the river and took most of the traffic. The old Military Road didn’t really go anywhere any more, only past a defunct industrial estate and a lot of farms to the site of a Roman camp long since buried under sand-dunes. Good beaches beyond, and a very good hill just before the sea came in sight: boy racers loved this road, but no one else used it much.
So I wasn’t really a danger to anyone but myself, once I got past the city limits. That was fine, that was just the way I wanted it. I cooled down fast, in the chill of
the drive; didn’t take long before it was only myself I was hating here.
Or so I thought, slacking off on the speed at last. But suddenly there was another wheel nosing into sight, catching at the corner of my eye, another bike unexpectedly keeping pace with me. I glanced across, scowling, wanting no competitor—and all but lost control of the BMW as I found myself staring at Jamie from only a metre’s distance.
Oh, fuck it! My head jerked forward again, I squeezed another kick of power out of my bike, and still couldn’t leave him behind. Virtuously helmeted, he was riding a stripped-down Japanese scrambler that shouldn’t have been able to match me this way on a clear road. He must have tweaked the engine for racing; racing me on tarmac was going to knack his tyres, but that was small comfort.
Jamie my cousin, my blood-brother, always my rival and always the victor, now more than ever so: right then hating him was no problem, no burden at all.
We screamed along that road, wheel to wheel and head to head, no advantage except that he always did have the advantage over me; and it can’t have been more than a minute or so but it seemed like an age before at last we came to the gravelled lay-by that was the turning onto Hob’s Hill.
I twitched left and slammed on the brakes, coming to a savage halt on the rough ground. He did the same, and again we glared at each other. No words needed: he gestured up at the track and the scrubby slopes, I nodded, and we were off again.
I had to stick to the track on my heavy roadster, he didn’t; we might be racing again, but at least we weren’t side by side any more.
I took stupid risks on the climb, hauling my machine around the sharp zigzags, perilously close to losing it altogether and sliding off, broken bones and a broken bike guaranteed if I let it happen. Even so, all I saw of him was his dust as he ploughed straight up the hillside, and when I got to the top he was there already, his bike on its stand and the helmet off his head, himself standing waiting for me.
Well, that was written, that was inherent, both in the bikes and in us. Of course he won, didn’t he always?
I switched off my engine, kicked my stand down, stood up to meet him. Walked across, even, with no thought in my head, what I should or could or wanted to say to him; and then it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t want to talk at all, he just hit me.
A hard round-arm slap it was, the hand cupped for added impact, plenty of time to see it coming if I’d only had the wit to duck. I didn’t, and he made sweet contact with my cheek, jarred all my teeth and the bones that held them. And I still wasn’t thinking, I just felt a hot spur of relief underlying the shock of it. And reacted a second late, perhaps, but still too fast for him as I swung my fist in return.
Caught him right on the chin, knuckle-crunchingly hard. I don’t believe I’d ever knocked anyone down before, in all the fights of my youth; but he went over like a target on a trip, straight down he went without even a stagger to try to catch himself. He lay still in the shadow of his bike, and I felt a moment’s panic as my head cleared.
“Jamie...?”
I crouched over him and saw the glitter of his open eyes, slitting against the sun; huffed with relief as he brought a cautious hand up to touch his jaw, where his skin was already staining red.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Was that all you?”
I had to stop and work it out, but, “Yes,” I said. “I think so. Unless just being in the sun gives me something.” If there’d been any talent in that punch, it wasn’t deliberate. Or not conscious, at any rate. I couldn’t speak for my id.
“Fuck. You been working out, or what?”
All those gyms, in all those separate cities: I knew I’d put on weight, I knew I had more muscle to show the girls, I’d never known till now that I could actually use it.
“Are you getting up,” I said, “or what?”
“Think I’ll stay here, thanks. You might hit me again.”
I grinned and lay down to join him, side by side and easy touching distance. All passion spent, it seemed, in one blow each.
“Was that male bonding, d’you reckon?”
“No.” I had my eyes closed, sunlight heavy on the lids, tingling everywhere it touched. “Didn’t go on long enough. You want to try again?”
“No.” I heard him breathing deeply, working up to something, waiting till his head felt straight enough to handle it; and then, “Brother, thou hast my Laura much offended.”
“Brother,” coming straight back at him, “you have my Laura much offended.”
A pause, while he did me the grace to consider that; and there was nothing challenging in his tone, only strict neutrality when he said, “Do you really think so?”
“No,” damn it, “of course I don’t. She isn’t, never has been,” not my Laura. “It’s her choice, who the hell am I to criticise? I just acted like a shit, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
“Good,” he said, sounding oddly cheerful. “That’s what I thought, what I told her.”
“What, that I was a shit?”
“A sorry shit. Don’t worry.”
That was stupid; how could I not worry? “She seems happy,” I said tentatively. “About the baby, I mean.” Meaning, how about you, are you happy?
“Yeah. Mad cow. Too many burgers, I reckon,” but there was a grin in his voice that seemed to be an answer.
I heard him move then, beside me. Cracked my eyes open, and saw him take a mobile phone out of a pouch on his belt. He flipped it open, punched a number, waited, winked at me when he saw me watching; and then said, “Hi, it’s me. Told you I’d find him... Yeah, he’s fine. He says he’s a sorry shit. I’ll bring him back later, okay? You can kiss and make up then... No. No can do. We’ve got to go and play first. It’s a boy thang. See you...”
He put the phone away, then grinned down at me and said, “Come on, we’ll go to the Island.”
o0o
Pirate’s Island had been a part of our lives for as long as I could remember. Ditto for my older cousins, ditto maybe for my parents’ generation too, though I’d never asked. Neither one of my uncles, perhaps, but I could see my dad there: demanding as a kid, drunk and sweating and demanding as a teenager, fumbling at girls and cheating clumsily with the air-rifles and getting away with it because of who he was.
Pretty much like us, really.
Well, like we used to be. The Island was a semi-permanent funfair with cheap rides and tacky stalls, open from Easter to August Bank Holiday. It was an easy place for parents to take their children, and easy too for lads to take their girls, individually or en masse. Two totally separate sets of memories it had given me: ten years of candy floss and roundabouts, dodgem cars and toffee-apples, goldfish in plastic bags and being sick with sweets and excitement; then another ten years of warm lager and the roller coaster, sweet cider and would-she-or-wouldn’t-she, finding out in shadows and being sick with alcohol and excitement.
In winter it was a skeleton, everywhere closed and dead and dusty, again an easy place to come for kids or adolescents. Climb the gates and you could roller-blade or skateboard in and out of the attractions (or actually on the attractions, if you broke a lock or a shutter to get through; no one bothered, no one watched the place in winter, they just trusted us not to burn it down and patched up lesser damage come the spring), you could take your best girl or any willing girl into some dark and quiet corner and do all those things you didn’t dare try at home. If it was raining, not to worry, there was plenty of shelter; if it was snowing, so what? You’d keep each other warm...
Actually that last was more Jamie’s story than mine. He’d been lucky with girls as with everything, where I’d had too many hang-ups even to keep up with the average family score. Even before Laura. But that was the Island’s reputation, and it was more than an urban myth. Even I’d copped the odd snog and feel, usually with someone provided for that purpose by Jamie or his big bastard brother Marty or else some other cousin taking pity, showing concern.
o0o
The Island wasn
’t really quite an island, except at the top of the tide. It was only a couple of hundred metres offshore and there was a causeway exposed at low water, a tarmac’d road with a sort of watchtower affair in the middle, a platform on high stilts that had a ladder up and a roof above for the convenience of anyone stupid enough to get caught by the incoming sea when they were only halfway across. That was another place good for girling, according to Jamie, if you could only time it right: take them up for a fag and a cuddle and a look at the view, and before you know it the tide’s come in and you can’t leave, all you can do is watch the water cover the road and giggle a lot, find a quarter-bottle of vodka in your pocket, share that between you and suggest some friendly way to kill the next few hours...
There’s a road, but there’s no great point in driving along it. Not in a car, at least, and not even on a bike in high summer. Too many pedestrians coming and going, and nowhere to park once you’ve crossed. Acres of free parking on the mainland, though, so we left the bikes there as so often before, locked his helmet in my box and walked past the anxious knot of visitors reading the tide tables on the noticeboard, better safe than sorry, dear, we don’t want to get stranded, now do we? and onto and over the causeway. Going with the flow, just two young men in a crowd, nothing to mark us out.
Except our faces, of course. Jamie didn’t carry the family features so forcefully marked as mine, but in my company there wasn’t any question, his genetic inheritance was there to be seen. Maybe people just weren’t looking for it, though, not here. This was still very much Macallan territory but there wasn’t the same edge, the same sense of tension unresolved. I supposed the Island had always been a refuge, a place to forget your troubles for a while; which in this area meant a place to forget my family for a while. Maybe recognition just got left on the mainland, with the car.
Whatever. I took what precautions I could, weaving a fine web of sunlight like a halo around us, gossamer-thin and utterly immaterial, just so that anyone who glanced at us casually was going to be a little dazzled by the light, would have to blink water from their eyes before they could see clearly again. It wouldn’t fool a concentrated glare, but why should we invite one?
Light Errant Page 8
