o0o
Thinking so, I pounded along the strand hearing nothing but my own thoughts and my own blood pounding in my ears, my own aching gasps of pain and lack of breath; and at last I came to where the great pillar stood swirled by wild water, its fallen arch standing proud like a boulder dam between it and the cliff, with the sea washing against both flanks.
That’s where I found Jamie, though it took me some time to do it. I checked this side and then the other, scrambling on hands and knees across the shifting rock; I couldn’t see him on either side, and thought he must be gone already, utterly gone, carried away by tide and current to God alone knew where, what watery grave he would lie in. I walked the ridge of rock for the height it gave me, scanning, scanning; and almost trod on him then, almost tripped over his body and fell again.
Caught myself with an effort, staring down. There he was, lying sprawled and still at my feet, just meat and bone, I thought, flesh emptied of what was truly Jamie. I squatted beside him, reached to touch and found him cool already, spray-soaked and blood-soaked too, and not a twitch in his skin where my fingers lay against it.
No hurry now. I settled myself awkwardly on the sharp rocks, lifted the weight of him into my arms, cradled his wet head against my shoulder and didn’t cry, didn’t scream against the brutality of the world or my uncle or any world that could have my uncle in it. Only sat and held him, rocked him a little maybe, clutched him against me and waited for the world to catch up with us.
o0o
Which it did, though it seemed to take forever. The cold crept from him to me, I passed through shivering into an icy stillness that matched his own, and at some timeless point during that endless wait I became conscious of more than my own pulse beating between us, he had some faint threadbare pulse of his own.
Nothing I could do about it. I held him in an echo of his silence, watched for dawn.
Short northern summer nights: the day came blessedly fast, though it seemed eternally slow to me. The sky shifted from black through purple to blue, with a skim of clouds in cerise; then the first flare of light on the horizon, here comes the sun and it was my time again.
My head still swirled and shuddered around the single terrible thought, he’s gone or going and Laura’s free; my imagination was still feeding me glimpses of the future. Laura and I, Laura and I with the child, two and three of us cosy together, shaping a brave new world with all horrors put behind us. Telling the kid about its father, of course, giving it a handsome hero of a dead dad, never forget him but don’t grieve either, you’ve another father now. The kid content and Laura above all, Laura grieving as she must but coming through it, learning to love again and this time learning what she’d totally failed to learn before, learning to love me...
And the sun came up and touched me, my bruised and brutalised skin danced in response, I turned my eyes on Jamie’s waxen face and closed them not to hide it from me, not to hide behind but only to see more clearly.
o0o
Blindsight took me in, took me under his skin and through his flesh and bones to find that spark of life that I could feel; showed me how weak it was, how pale a flicker within the mass of him. I knew no way to feed it, to share my strength with him. But I could see the damage too, all the breaks and tears and blockages that were so slowly killing him, that saw no hurry in it. And what I could see wrong, I could by definition see where it should be put right; and I knew already that I could do that, I’d had the practice on Laura’s hand...
o0o
When the girls came, Laura and Janice running as I had run along the sand with Conor in their wake, I wasn’t aware of them. I was far gone, lost somewhere deep in Jamie’s blood and bone. I didn’t even hear their voices call my name. They couldn’t come close to touch me, they told me later, couldn’t pull me back by main force into my own body. They couldn’t get near. I was on fire, they said, pale flames leaping on every inch of my exposed skin and Jamie’s too, and a radiance of heat about us making our smart ruined suits smoke and char, all but making the air glow and the cracked rocks crack again.
Nothing they could do but stand and wait in a torment, in a fever of anxiety; and it was a long wait, and not relieved when at last the flames faded and died away and I slumped suddenly down like something boneless, like something quite burned out at the core, as seemingly dead as Jamie.
Thirteen: Ben and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Glorious lassitude: this I thought must run close to a true definition of heaven. Never mind the foie gras, never mind the trumpets. I was content, better than content with sipping lassi on a Tudor lawn.
Well, mock-Tudor, actually. But that was the house, and it was behind me. Before me, if I chose to lift my head and look—which I must do every now and then, to sip—was wooded valley with bone-bare hills beyond, under a sky baked white. I was clad in my Spanish swim-shorts and the rest of me was all skin, all absorption, practising photosynthesis without benefit of chlorophyll. Even my eyelids were doing their bit.
Someone opened a window, and music crept by me on the grass. Sounded good to me, but I still hadn’t caught up with all the new British bands despite days of this intensive-care programme, masses of food and nourishing drinks, all the sleep I could squeeze in and as much sun as I was allowed, which was almost as much as I wanted. In all truth I could have listened to the radio every hour I was conscious, I could have reeducated myself, Christ knew I was doing nothing else. Even listening felt like too much work, though, when not listening was so much easier, not being tied even to the weak thread of a DJ’s playlist so much of a relief.
I turned my head, or at least let it drop sideways, onto a cushion of bruised grass. Intense aroma, sweet and astringent both: smells were so potent suddenly. I hadn’t remembered the world so washed with scents.
Opened my eyes and there he was as he had been all day and every day of this slow convalescence, promoted from coz to bro to twin, Thai twin perhaps, invisibly linked to me. Every time I turned my head, I found him. Even at night: they had us in a twin-bedded room, while the girls shared the double next door. I must ask about that, when we were going to change around, now we were near fit again. Only that actually I didn’t want to change. Not yet. I still had my moments, and a sight of Jamie was the best medicine we’d found thus far.
Even now, the sight of him made me smile. Dressed much as I was, just in the Calvin cyclers, he was lying on his belly with his face hidden in the crook of his elbow. His skin glistened lightly in the light; even his sweat I thought was having to sweat it, fighting through the Factor Millennial that Laura made us wear to wreck our tans with.
The image of golden youth he seemed just then: smooth and supple and unmarked, unscarred, the perfectibility of man.
“Jamie?”
I meant to ask him who the band was, that I could hear; but he just grunted, his bones seemed to settle a fraction further inside his skin. If he wasn’t actually asleep, he was as near as made no difference.
Fine, let it be. It didn’t matter. I could always ask Jan, she loved being shocked by my ignorance; only I wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t remember.
o0o
I remembered nothing clearly about the day that followed the night the arch came down. Nothing after the sunrise, after I plunged all my consciousness into a final, desperate attempt to save Jamie. Only a blur, a mess of mists and colours, my body nothing but a conduit to channel light and a sense of form, my self a speck of flame fighting to bring some order into chaos.
I got lost, I think, within that alien place: lost all touch with who I was or where to find myself, couldn’t discover a way back. There was terror, I think, a growing panic, the knowledge of Benedict as someone separate from Jamie slipping away from me; and at the last a feeling of surrender, of giving myself up almost willingly if only I could restore him.
I didn’t actually heal Jamie, or not then. There was just too much that needed mending, and I didn’t have the time or the strength.
All I could do, all I did was hold him together, keep the spirit in the shell, fix enough of the damage to ensure that his heart was still beating and his lungs taking air. Beyond that, the suck of his need was greater than my own sense of self-preservation. I would have drained myself and damned us both, I think, if the weather hadn’t intervened.
It was those clouds I’d seen that saved us. They massed up and covered the sun, barred my access to its light. That’s when I fell away from Jamie, when the girls could finally get to us.
That’s also what interrupted my reluctant sacrifice, barely in time. Cut off while I still had a thread of self-awareness, something in my subconscious must have reeled that thread in before it snapped, before my flame could fail altogether.
At any rate, they tell me that I opened my own eyes in my own body, somewhere on the beach there where Janice was struggling to carry me on her own, all along the shore to where they’d had to leave the car. Conor had gone ahead, they say, with Jamie; neither one would let Laura help to haul us, not in her condition, she’d risked too much already with all that running.
It was Laura, apparently, who saw me wake. She told Janice, who promptly dropped me on the sand. And dropped down herself a moment later, Laura says, onto her knees and crying.
I don’t remember, but they say I was quite rational for a moment there. They told me they were taking me to hospital, as soon as they could get me to the car; and it seems that I said no, don’t do that, hospitals can’t help. Wait for the sun, I said, and I’ll sort it.
Then I passed out again. Conor came back, and helped the girls with me; and being a true Macallan, trusting talent, he overcame their doubts. He brought us all to his house, on a new estate outside the city. The sun was out again by then, and burning brightly. I was awake and fretful, I’m told, insistent. Dreadfully pale and weak, Jan says, but they did what I told them, regardless. They helped me pull off the scorched rags I was wearing, to get more sun on my skin; whether I needed that I don’t know, but it felt good. Then I had them strip Jamie too and lay him out beside me on the lawn, though Laura had a phone in her hand all the time, ready to call an ambulance the moment she decided that I’d failed.
I put my hands on Jamie, and again we flamed together, we burned a great black patch in the grass; but it seems I’d learned from the last time, because I pulled away of my own will after ten minutes or so. Jamie seemed better, they say, he was less pale and breathing more easily. It was me that worried them more, losing what colour Jamie had gained, slumping almost into unconsciousness again.
But I roused myself after lying in the sunlight for a while, and then I did it again. And so the day wore on, brief passages of treatment interspersed with longer spells of recovery; and each time Jamie looked more healthy, his visible cuts closing and bruises fading, along with the dark swellings that spoke of broken bones or other internal wreckage.
Towards evening, it was his turn to open his eyes. He asked for water, they tell me; which was Laura’s cue, her turn to break down in tears after a day of stubborn denial. They put her to bed, Jan says, even before the two of us.
o0o
That’s all that I know of the day, all that they’ve told me. For myself, I retain nothing of it. My first true memory is waking sometime in the night, desperately thirsty on my own account; felt myself in a single bed, opened my eyes to a room I didn’t recognise that was filled with shifting shadows, glanced round wildly—and found Janice in a chair beside me, ruining her eyes with reading by a nightlight. She looked up as I shifted, and smiled magically in the gloom.
I remember asking what the book was, of all stupid questions. I’ve never managed to forget the answer. Criminal Law, by Smith & Hogan. A classic text, apparently, for law students to digest.
By then, I’d noticed that mine was not the only bed in the room, nor was the other empty.
“Is that...?”
“Yes,” she said, and the smile was in her voice also. “He’s going to be fine, we reckon. Laura still says he’s got to see a doctor tomorrow, but he’s all right. How are you feeling?”
Knackered was largely how I felt, scooped out to the bones of me; but wonderful also, utterly content to be lying in a warm bed and warmly smiled at. Thirsty was all I told her, though. She passed me a glass of water, I drained it, I lay back on the pillow and thought it might be nice to hold her hand until I fell asleep again, but I fell asleep before I could suggest it.
o0o
“Hey.”
“Mmm?”
“Look.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes,” and her toe worked its way firmly into my ribs, forcing my eyes open.
She stood above me, smelling of petrol, her oily hands wrapped around something that gleamed metallically in the light.
“I just want to know if I’ve put this together right.”
I reached out and took a grip on her leg, used that to pull against, to draw myself up. Her knees folded, trapping my hand as she sank down beside me; I made no attempt to recover it. We grinned at each other, and she stole a quick kiss before she showed me the carburettor.
This was the way, I thought, to self-service a motorbike: have a neophyte do the work while you soak up the sun and advise occasionally, criticise and comment. I approved wholeheartedly of learning-curves, the steeper the better.
“Looks okay to me,” I said, turning the carburettor over in my one hand, reclaiming the other to test its solidity. “Does it work?”
“Wouldn’t know, would I?”
“Well,” I suggested, “why don’t you put it back in and try it?”
She looked uncertain for a moment, then, “Can I?”
I just smiled, lay back in the grass and closed my eyes again. After a moment, I heard her stand and walk away; the smell of petrol faded, except for what was on my hands now. I liked that, that residues remained. Lovers’ bodies should smell of each other, and ours were getting little enough chance.
Some brief time later, I heard the throaty roar of a big bike come down at me from the road. It revved and faded, revved again, settled to a muted grumble and then picked up again and this time didn’t die, it only moved away.
I smiled privately, checked that Jamie was sleeping still, and joined him.
o0o
It was Conor who’d collected both bikes from the flat and driven them out here one by one. We were neither of us capable yet, even if we’d had the resolution to go so far.
That same day, Janice had vanished for a couple of hours without warning, giving me worries I didn’t need. She came back before I was frantic, though, before my imagination could persuade me that it all had to be done again, that she was hostage or worse.
She came back with a bag of clothes from her flat, and news of little comfort.
Fizzy sent his love, she told me, weaving her fingers in between mine, stroking the hairs on my forearm, giving us both a tingle. Jon didn’t. She told me that too, just to be clear.
“How is Jon?”
She sighed, shrugged; said, “Static.” Said, “He was just sitting. Didn’t move at all, all the time I was packing. He just sat there, stroking Fizz.”
“Cats are good,” I said slowly. “When you’re grieving.”
“Yeah. I guess Fizzy’s not my cat any more. That’s not my flat now, either. He said a friend of his is pretty much living there, and he sort of made it obvious that he’d rather I wasn’t. I’ll fetch the rest of my stuff when I can organise a car, I haven’t got much. Conor won’t mind, will he?”
“Shouldn’t think so.”
“I’ll find somewhere else, it’s not hard.”
“No.” What was hard was Jon, Charlie, the damage we’d done. But, “He’ll be okay, love,” I said. “If his friends are looking after him. It just takes time, that’s all.”
“Sure.” Neither of us looked at each other, for the better avoidance of doubt.
o0o
Jamie and I, we’d only left Conor’s house once so far. In his car
one evening, the two of us sitting together in the back while he drove.
Conor had been a revelation, at least to me—or he’d had a revelation, rather, that night on the cliff-top. Nor was he the only one, from what he’d said to us. Uncle James had made a fatal error in trying to kill his own, his only son; the cousins had been deeply traumatised, seeing family turn against itself. Even the hardest of them, the ones who had never stopped to question a Macallan’s innate rights and privileges, even they were full of questions now. Conor was a convert, a rebel, one with us.
So he drove us to a meeting he’d arranged on the roof of a multi-storey car park. It was meant to be just us and Uncle James, but my uncle came with protection, or he thought so. Although it was night-time, his time, at his insistence, he still brought my father with him. And my father brought a gun.
For what good that did him, which was not a lot. Jamie was still appallingly weak, not fit really to be let out of bed; but Jamie leaned out of the car’s window, leaned into moonlight and just twitched the rifle out of my father’s grasp, sent it flying through the air and bent its barrel double before it fell with a clatter onto the concrete.
My father swore horribly, rubbed his wrung hands together, glared at him, at me. Not a problem.
Uncle James wasn’t much of a problem either, when it came to it. I guess Conor hadn’t told him his son was still alive. He stared in at Jamie, his mouth working like a fish out of water, all confidence ripped from him.
Me, I got slowly out of the car, rested against the roof only hoping that that just looked cool and not needful, and said, “Uncle James, I’ll keep this short. I haven’t got much to say to you anyway, only that it’s over, really. Do you understand?”
Light Errant Page 29
