“No. What? What are you talking about?” His eyes were still on his silent son, not on me. I hoped to change that.
“I’m talking about you, and this city. The blackmail, the violence, all of it. It’s finished. I’m holding you to account for everything our family does hereafter. This time, you’re the hostage. You can’t touch me in daylight but I can touch you, I can do what I like to you; and I wouldn’t like it, but I would do it. If I had to. And if you come after us at night, well, we’ve got Jamie,” and he’d just been reminded what Jamie could do, that his talent was stronger than anyone’s in the new generation. Stronger and broader far now, under my tutelage. “And Conor, and others too,” taking doubts for certainties, which I figured I could afford to do. “We’re the police now,” I told him, “Only you can’t buy us off or bully us, or threaten anything against us. We’re stronger than you are, we make the rules. So you just stop, right? I’ll know, if you don’t. I’ve got friends, I’ve got contacts. And we will stop you, if you make a move on anyone again. That’s a promise.”
My uncle blustered, of course, he stepped forward, imposing in his sheer bulk; and he came to an abrupt halt as Jamie pushed against him with just a whisker’s-width of talent. And then he walked backwards, straining and struggling all the way, his eyes bulging as he fought uselessly at the air, as he had his own first taste of what he’d spent so many years administering to others.
No chance he had to use his own talent, nor my father either. Jamie had learned this from me, he’d fogged the air before their eyes so that they couldn’t see to get a mental grip.
He forced Uncle James right up against the parapet and then pushed just a tad harder, bending him backwards over the edge, giving him a taste of terror, just a hint, an echo of the other night. Not as dangerous a gesture as it seemed; if Uncle James should overbalance, I knew Jamie could catch him by the feet and pull him back. And I was sure—fairly sure—that he would.
If I was a mite uncertain, though, my uncle was craven with doubt. His hands flailed, his voice broke a couple of octaves higher than usual, I couldn’t hear the words but there was pleading in his frantic yell.
“Let him up, Jamie,” I said. Jamie did; I looked at my sweating, gasping uncle and thought he seemed shrunken suddenly, bereft of the power that had always made him loom so large.
“That’s it, uncle,” I said. “No more pay-offs, no more protection. Your hand is off this town, as of now and permanently. Us to answer to, if you don’t listen.”
I didn’t wait for his response, or to exact a promise. He wouldn’t respect that. I just told him; then I slipped back inside the car, slammed the door, and Conor drove us home.
o0o
“Ben?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You conscious?”
“You want to call it that, I’m conscious.”
“Yeah, right. Why does it feel so good, to feel so fucked?”
Because we’re still breathing, bro. But he didn’t need telling that. “Always feels good, to be fucked.”
“Yeah, that’s a point. Why aren’t we being fucked, damn it? We deserve it. And I’m up for it, if she’s gentle. Why aren’t the girls all over us?”
He knew the answer to that one too, I could hear him smiling through the complaint, even while he tried to sound peevish. In fact we were still all over each other, and there wasn’t room for the girls. Sometimes I had nightmares, waking or sleeping, when I was suddenly back in his bones and lost again, spinning slowly in broken colours, pulled by the ebb of his blood; then I needed to open my eyes and see not Janice but him, to hear his breathing out of synch with mine.
“Maybe they just get off on playing nurses,” I said.
He snorted. “Good nurses get into bed with their patients. That’s my definition of a miracle cure.”
“You want to tell them?”
“I already did. I was in the bath. Janice shoved the soap in my mouth, and Laura pushed me under.”
I laughed. Bathtimes were the best times, the only fun we were allowed, but even there we never got just one girl at once. They were scrupulous about that. Being careful, I guess, not quite trusting themselves to keep this pact they must have made, not to come between us till we were ready.
o0o
Other things, other people had come briefly between us, when the girls really couldn’t keep them out. Jamie’s mother had come, my Aunt Lucy, slipping away from the icy fury of her stymied husband. Jamie had held her hands and talked to her for an hour, down the far end of the garden. He’d been quiet for a long time after, only shaking his head at me and at Laura when we’d asked him questions. I didn’t fancy his chances long-term, Laura could out-stubborn a mountain given time, but time was what we silently and mutually determined to give him.
Another time, my own mother came. My turn to be private with a pale and fretful parent, down where the garden fell away into a wild dene; my turn still to be private after, scowling at interrogations. To be frank I didn’t much fancy my chances either, Janice had a steely look in her eye when at last she gave over with the questions already; but for now, no, I didn’t want to rehearse the words I’d said or she had. He’s a shit, I’d said inter alia, you should leave him. She’d only shaken her head, no, I couldn’t do that or maybe no, I’m not listening, you mustn’t say such things. Whichever, it was too personal, none of it bore repeating even among so small and close a public. And it did me good to find one secret I could keep from Jamie, it defined another difference between us. Or I could pretend that it did, that what I’d said to my mother was not only an echo of what he’d said to his. So long as we didn’t tell, we could both of us pretend we didn’t know.
o0o
“Seriously, Ben. What are you going to do, have you decided?”
“Oh. Yes,” I said. Had to tell him sometime. “I’m going away.”
“You’re bloody not.”
“I bloody am.”
“Ben, you can’t!”
“Try and stop me.”
“I will, and all. I’ll trash your bike, mate. I mean it. I’m up for that. You can’t go. Not again. I thought you had it sussed now, I thought that’s why you came back. You can’t just keep running away...”
Distantly, I heard the cue that said it was time to relent, time to stop teasing. “I’m not,” I said. “Not this time. I’ll be back. I have to be, term starts in September.”
“Unh? So what?”
With the roar of the bike’s returning loud in my ears, I had to raise my voice to confess. “So I’m not exactly going alone.”
The bike’s engine cut abruptly, nicely timed to match his own silence. Me, I held my breath also, grinning broadly as I waited for the storm to break.
Copyright and Credits
Light Errant
Chaz Brenchley
Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
May 24, 2011
Copyright © 1997 Chaz Brenchley
ISBN: 978 1 61138 064 4
First publication:Hodder and Stoughton, UK
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.
Cover Design by C.E. Murphy
V. 20110518vnm
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Also from Chaz Brenchley: Dead of Light
; Chaz Brenchley, Light Errant
Light Errant Page 30
