Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  “All right, love. You sit there and prattle all you like, I’ll stand watch. Black boats like doughnuts. Anything else?”

  “Oh, any boat that comes close. Or helicopter, I suppose, they’ve got a helicopter,” but I couldn’t see them using it, except to spy out the ground, perhaps. Zodiacs were loud enough, unless they paddled in; what were they going to do with a helicopter, not to attract attention? Paddle that? Or dress it up as a cloud, perhaps, with its own internal hailstorm, clatter clatter that somehow never made it down to earth?

  Besides, there was nowhere on the Island that I could think of, flat enough to land a chopper on. Nor did I think any of their heroes was going to dangle his way down on a rope, only a thread’s thickness from falling and me below. No, I was not expecting trouble.

  o0o

  Nor was I expecting to sleep, knackered though I was. But that crept up on me as I sat, had me nodding and jerking my heavy head up again, forcing my eyes wide against its lure, not to embarrass myself while Janice paced and gazed all around me; and a minute later I was nodding again, nod and jerk until the jerk was too much to achieve and never mind how much a jerk she thought me, it was so much easier just to let it all slip, to slide down under this cool shadow I sat in, to tumble into darker shadows still.

  o0o

  No dreams down there, or none that I remembered. Nothing at all until there were voices I seemed to be listening to without understanding, girls’ voices in a void. And then a touch, a hand on my cheek and my name spoken, drawing me up again.

  Slow memory, where I was and who was with me, or who’d been with me when I left her, when I went away. I opened my eyes and she was there still, Janice smiling at me, close enough to blur; and my head was skewed awkwardly sideways on my shoulder and my mouth was open and the stubble on my chin felt wet where it pressed against my jacket, where I must have been dribbling in my sleep.

  Brilliant, Ben. Even the hypersmart prattle would have been preferable to this, drooling and probably snoring also, while she did what was needful. God, what a picture I must have made, no wonder she was smiling...

  I eased my head up against a stab of pain in my twisted neck, grunted, dragged a hand across my chin. “Sorry. Sorry, Jan, I...”

  “It’s all right. We’ve got doughnuts.”

  “What?” I tried to scramble up, dizzy and stupid still; she laughed, and her hands on my shoulders had no trouble holding me down.

  “Not black ones. Doughnuts with jam in. Coffee too, and burgers...”

  I stared round wildly, uncomprehending; and saw little cousin Christa standing in the doorway with a tray in her hands, steam rising about her.

  o0o

  Ordinarily I hate eating just after I’ve woken up. Dunno how far back that actually goes—way back to baby maybe, something my mother did to me, a good yawn interrupted by a vast choking leaking nipple, who knows?—but I can date it certainly to a well-established antipathy ten years ago. Sunday afternoons, Dad would come banging in from the pub yelling for his lunch; Mum would have everything ready; she’d send Hazel upstairs to fetch me.

  Who would be still in bed, still sleeping, hiding from the grisly twin realities of family life and a Sunday teenage hangover. Who would be thumped awake by my darling twin; stood over while I clambered into Saturday night’s drinking clothes, the first my bleary eyes could find on the bedroom floor; dragged down to face roasted meats and boiled vegetables in insistent profusion while my mouth still felt as slimed and foul as if I’d been licking fresh cowpats all night, while my head throbbed to the beat of a mistimed diesel and my brain spasmed and flinched inside my skull, while my stomach lurched in counterpoint and sent burning acid reminders up to my gullet. Every Sunday, this; and was it any wonder if I’d picked up a wee phobia about food and the proper times for ingesting it? I liked half an hour at least between dream and diet, though double that was better. And I had to have clean teeth and a damp towel, I had to have scrubbed off the clagginess of sleeping, inside and out...

  And that applied to a midday doze as much as a night’s virtuous slumber, but it didn’t apply today. Janice woke me, showed me food; and oh I was starving, I was there and able for it, I’d have jumped up and snatched the tray from little scared Christa if Jan hadn’t been holding me down still.

  “You stay there,” she said, “I’ll pass you.”

  And did: a skinny mean burger in a soggy white bun, lashings of ketchup that wasn’t Heinz by a distance, not even a copy of a copy, but did she, did either of those girls hear me complaining? They did not. All they’d have heard if they’d been listening was the tearing and gulping sounds of a predator not equipped for chewing. Christa was listening, maybe. At any rate, she did seem to be watching; Janice was attending to her own appetite. She might have been, oh, say half as hungry as me? Which made her ravenous, lupine, slow only in comparison.

  Christa might have borne the tray aloft, but Jamie had seen to the loading of it. On that I would have laid whatever fortune I could lay my hands upon. Three burgers each, a pile of doughnuts for afters, chocolate bars and biscuits and a pint of coffee per person. Amazing that wee skinny Christa could even carry so much....

  Often I’m slow, just then I was slower in everything but eating. It took me a shocking time to register that there was something odd going on here, that Christa having brought the trough to the pigsty should still be standing there, tray in hands, watching us consume. Waiting for the empties, perhaps? What, cardboard plates and polystyrene beakers? I didn’t think so.

  She hadn’t said a word since I’d woken, and whenever I looked at her she darted her eyes away; but by definition that meant that whenever I wasn’t looking, she was looking at me. And checking back, the first thing I’d thought about her, I thought she looked scared; and I did still think so.

  Not scared of me, surely, not that? Because she’d seen me tear the causeway up? Nah, she’d been around Macallan men all her life. Unless she was scared of us all, constantly, permanently.

  But I didn’t believe that either, I’d seen her happy enough. As good as it gets, at least, for the female of this particular sub-species.

  “Chrissie?”

  She jumped, stiffened, somehow seemed to glance up at me even though I was sitting a metre below her eyeline, almost seemed to salute. “Yes, Ben?”

  “You lot all right down there, are you? Nice and comfy, lots of food?”

  “Yes, we, we’re fine, Ben. Benedict.”

  “Just Ben, pet. No worries, then, eh?”

  “No, no. No worries. We’ve got Jamie, anyway. Only...”

  Only Jamie’s no use to you, is he? Not in daylight. Good for reassurance, sure, sure; he was a man, he was competent, confident, allowed no worries in himself. But that wasn’t enough, demonstrably. Not for little Chrissie, maybe not for the others either. I remembered suddenly how scared I’d been last night, how certain of facing death this morning; and these girls hadn’t had just the one night of it, they’d had days and nights and weeks. Amazing that any of them could function at all, in the circs. No blame at all if they got antsy when their prime protection wasn’t right there among them. And Christa couldn’t possibly be eighteen yet, she’d likely never faced anything more dangerous than a smoking joint, and she’d always been a shy wee thing who jumped at shadows if she didn’t have a dependable hand to hold...

  “What’s going to happen, Ben?” That was the closest she could get, seemingly, to I’m shit-scared, Ben, I have been for a terrible long time now and I’m not going to stop just yet, not till I’m home with all my teddy-bears around me.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, pet lamb. We’re going to sit around all afternoon, it’ll be boring as shit but never mind, eh? We can talk—you talk to Jamie, he’s a good listener,” you can hold his hand and feel better for it, he’s not been painted half as black as I have; and Laura’ll be there too, she can talk to you, she’ll know what to say where he doesn’t, “and no one’s going to hurt us any more, no one�
��s going to come near. And after it gets dark, we yell for help and Jamie leads us home. All right?”

  She nodded doubtfully. “I suppose...” If you say so was the underlying burden, as it must have been all her life, so used she was to serving Macallan men.

  “Trust me, love. Better yet, trust Jamie.” Trust Laura, she’s a doctor. “We’re fine now. Cancel red alert, resume stations. Real life picks up again tomorrow. You seeing anyone at the moment?”

  She hesitated, nodded, blushed a little.

  “Good. Well, sit down and work out just how many dates he owes you, and just how special the first one needs to be to make up for all of this.” I wasn’t going to ask who he was; a cousin for sure, she’d never have the nerve to date outside the family. And she was just the sort of girl most of my cousins would go for: pretty enough and quiet, willing, submissive with it. The sort of girl who’d say ‘obey’ and really truly mean it, really want to...

  She smiled faintly, shook her head.

  “No, I mean it. You deserve a treat.”

  “Tell him that means he owes you one,” Janice chimed in. “They fall for that, every time.”

  Took a little more cajoling, but at last Christa went away not looking scared so much as interested. Big improvement; I thought we deserved applause. Janice thought all the males of my family deserved shooting, Jamie included, and very possibly me too.

  “I mean, look at her! That poor wee watery broth of a girl—and they’re all like that, except Serena, maybe. They’re so passive...”

  “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. “Interbred 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.”