Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  “Seriously.”

  “You don’t want to go in, try to remember? Mum’ll be there, if Dad isn’t.”

  “No. I’m sorry, Sue, but... No. I don’t want to do that. Not yet.”

  “Fair enough. I suppose.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I don’t want to move at all, unless it’s towards a bed.”

  She looked at me sharply, anxiously. “Not feeling good?”

  “Not very.”

  “Shall I take you back?”

  I shook my head, slowly and carefully. My neck was as stiff and sore as the rest of me. Lucky not to be in a surgical collar, I thought; but that was only a side-effect of the big one. The bone-deep discomfort of sitting in a cramping car was a constant and increasing reminder, how lucky I was to be alive.

  “No,” I said when the headshake didn’t seem to be enough, she didn’t look persuaded. “Truly, I don’t want to go back. It’s only the body getting through to me, nothing to worry about. The head’s fine. And I hate hospitals, I’m dead glad to get out.”

  “Yes, but you hate being driven, too,” she said. Scoring points again, I thought, making demonstration, how well she knew me.

  It was true enough. Normally I loathed being a passenger in someone, anyone else’s car. But, “I’m in no condition to drive,” I said, “and I’d sooner be out than in. Besides, I’ve just discovered one major advantage to sitting this side.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “The seat belt goes the other way.”

  It took her a second, but she caught on; she’d seen the diagonal bar of bruising on my chest, when she helped me into these utterly comfortable, utterly unfamiliar clothes. I’d tried to chase her out, but, “I’m your wife, for God’s sake, Jonty,” and I couldn’t argue with that. Or with her, really, she was adamantine with spikes on.

  Come to think of it, she’d have seen all the damage before that. Three days she’d sat by my bedside, they’d told me; and I couldn’t see her leaving the room at their request if she wouldn’t leave at mine. She’d have seen them washing me, changing the dressings, whatever. Likely she’d have joined in, if she was allowed.

  So yes, she’d know where I was hurting. She’d understand how relieved I was, not to have the belt lie tight across the worst of it. And of course she’d accuse herself, I could see her doing it; she would say, as she did say, “Have I been driving too fast?”

  “No. It’s just the nature of seat belts, you feel them. Stop fretting. You were going to tell me how we met?”

  “Oh. Yes. All right...” She gazed across the street at the takeaway, and a smile touched her lips. Genuine amusement, I thought, rather than just the romance of nostalgia. And sure enough,

  “You were awful,” she said. “Or I thought you were, at first. It was late, it was my night off so I was helping here, I used to do that. Back then, I used to,” with a sidelong glance at me, before you changed things. “And you came in, it was only ten minutes before closing and there was no one else in, it’s quiet here even at the weekends. Not like the other side of town, we don’t get the closing-time trade out here.”

  “No, I can imagine.” Looking up and down the street, I couldn’t see a pub. A hotel down on the corner, yes, offering B & B no doubt to the genteel; they’d have a public bar, but probably little enough custom.

  “Right. Anyway, there you were, coming in and asking if you were too late. Which you were, almost; but it was nice of you to ask, so I said no, it was okay. And you looked knackered, and you ordered dead quick, first thing you saw on the menu, almost, so I figured you were starving hungry with it.

  “So I called the order through the hatch to Dad, and turned the telly back on to give you something to look at while you waited; but when I turned round it was me you were looking at. Staring at. It was creepy. I mean, I’m used to it, sort of, you weren’t exactly the first; but with you being the only person in, and it was dark outside and there was no traffic on the street or anything, and you just stood there not saying anything, just watching every move I made, catching my eye every time I looked at you, not even blinking when I tried to stare you down. And you weren’t even smiling, just, just looking... I got scared, a bit.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I murmured. I couldn’t relate this to me at all, it was a story about a stranger; but I wanted to know the ending, so, “What did you do?”

  “Went back to help clean up in the kitchen, and asked Mum to take your meal out when it was ready.” Smiling again, she added, “I told her you were another kinky white boy hot for little yellow sister. She still doesn’t like you very much.”

  Well, no. I could see that. Six or eight weeks was not very long to win over a doubting mother-in-law. Especially one who’d been however briefly encouraged to think of you—of me—as a toe-rag only interested in her daughter for the basest of reasons. Parents and children traditionally have problems with each other’s sex-lives; no blame to her if Mrs Chu still saw only slobber and lust when she looked at me, still watched my fingers and wondered where they’d been and what they’d done, on or inside her daughter’s blessed body.

  Me too, I looked at my fingers and wondered. Like everything else, my sex-life had been settled and familiar for a long time now, comfortable and contented, no risks sought or taken. It seemed unlikely somehow that the same would apply or be allowed to apply with Sue. Sleeping with a new partner was always different; but this was not only a question of a different body, a different nature, different habits learned. Sue’s soul, I thought, inhabited another realm from Carol’s. Their genes, I thought, were perhaps the least part of their difference; and vive la différence, I thought, and...

  And what the hell was I doing, thinking this way? Proving Sue right, perhaps, showing that I was after all only a kinky white boy with the hots for little yellow sister; because Sue might impossibly be my wife but Carol was my partner still, I’d been faithful to her through all the years we’d been together and maybe I’d had a brainstorm a couple of months back but I’d recovered now, the knock on the head had maybe knocked things back into shape again and I wasn’t, I was not even going to fantasise about sleeping with Sue.

  Even if I’d already done it. Some crazy variant on wanking with a mirror, that would be, fantasising about my own sex-life...

  “So was that it?” I asked, dragging my attention back to the story before she read my thoughts on my face, infinitely scrutable Westerner that I knew myself to be. “You sold me a meal and then hid out in the kitchen, and that was that?”

  “No,” she said, “that wasn’t that. You were really going for the dirty-old-man act that night, I could’ve called the cops on you. We got everything ready for next day, and then we locked up. Mum and Dad went off home, they only live round the corner from here; and I walked down to where I’d parked, and on the way I had to walk past this Volvo, and I got the shock of my life because I was just doing that when the door opened and you jumped out. With all the wrappings and containers in your hands, you’d bought a fork from Mum and eaten your dinner in the dark, just sitting in your car there watching for me. I think you were trying to pretend you’d just finished and you’d only got out to dump the leftovers, but you didn’t do it very well. Just stood there staring at me again.

  “And I wasn’t going to scream or run away, I’ve got my pride and I’ve done defence classes, and anyway I figured you weren’t that much of a threat with your hands full of rubbish. So I glared at you, fierce as I could manage, and said, ‘Well, what, then? What do you want?’ And you said you were sorry, you couldn’t think straight and you knew you weren’t handling this very well, you must look like a right creep, you said. And I said yes, you did, and you said you weren’t really, really you weren’t, you said, only you just desperately wanted to talk to me but you couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “That made me smile, at least. And then you asked if I’d go for a drink with you, right then. So I said the pubs were shut, and you said you knew this place, sort
of a private club we could go to; but I didn’t fancy that, not with a stranger. I didn’t trust you at all, only you looked so defenceless suddenly, all broken was how you looked, like Humpty Dumpty. So I said no, I wouldn’t go to your club, but you could come to mine. I’m safe there, with people who know me, and I didn’t mind that.”

  “What club’s that, then?” I asked. I knew where she meant when she talked about my club; if I wanted to drink late in the city, I went to Salome’s. I was curious to know where she went, what circles she moved in.

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “Next stop on the tour.”

  And she put the car in gear and pulled out into the traffic, taking her time about it, not going until she could go nice and slow and easy: sick person’s drive, this was, and very obviously not her usual style. I could hear her muttering, cursing under her breath, “Come on, get on with it, bloody Sunday drivers, what are you doing out on the road, it’s not even bloody Sunday...”

  o0o

  Next stop on the tour didn’t at first appear to be clubland. Next stop was Chinatown.

  It wasn’t a big place, this particular Chinatown. Lacking a large community to serve, it wasn’t a significant factor in the city, unless I guess if you happened to be Chinese. Or married to a Chinese girl, perhaps...?

  Basically what we had here was just one long street, lined with restaurants. One gable-end overlooking a car park had a neon mural twenty feet high, a pair of Chinese dragons who glowed brilliantly at night but looked only dusty and rather drab by day. Pagoda-like arches surmounted the entrance and exit of the car park; that was about the limit of public decoration except at New Year, when they hung lanterns all along the street, there were firecrackers and burning incense and a dragon danced for the punters. Probably nine out of ten punters were white, and I’d always avoided the festivities myself. Too much of a feeling of Indians dancing for tourists on the reservation, perhaps, though my boycott on their behalf was probably as patronising as the TV cameras and the gawping Caucasian faces. They had their own sensitivity; in my rational moments, I figured that they probably didn’t need mine.

  On one side, all those restaurants backed onto what remained of the old city wall. There was nothing between but a dark, dank, evil-smelling alley, slimy cobbles underfoot and blackened stone on the one hand, blackened brick and high barred windows on the other, fire exits and loading-doors that were next to useless because you couldn’t get a truck within fifty metres, everything had to be dragged along on a trolley. Any time I had visitors seeing the city for the first time, that was always a necessary part of the tour: very Gothic, very mediaeval, and a delicious contrast to all the glittering, savage modernity upthrusting elsewhere.

  On the other side, the restaurants themselves made a wall, a final barrier to the encroachment of that rapacious new development. Even here there were a couple of new car parks, where buildings used to be; visible through those gaps was pale new housing, built with narrow mullioned windows and set around a quad of patchy grass in poor imitation of the fourteenth-century friary just beyond, converted now into a café and craft centre.

  I hadn’t realised that there was anything here bar places to eat, and a couple of Chinese supermarkets supplying stuff in the raw for those who knew what to do with it. But Sue twitched the Mini into the kerb and parked it, then got out before I could ask questions. She walked around to my side, opened the door and stood there, very obviously waiting to help me up. I said, “I’d rather not. Really.”

  “Come on, Jonty,” she said gently, implacably. “If it’s just muscles and skin that are hurting, a bit of exercise’ll do you the world of good. Besides, I want to show you something, and I can’t bring it down.”

  Down didn’t sound so good, down implied up and I wasn’t in any condition; but she wasn’t brooking any denial on this one, so eventually I levered myself slowly out of the car, she tucked herself under my shoulder for a welcome and necessary support, and she brought me to a door between King Crab and The Peking Wall.

  God alone knows how many times I’d walked that street, and never seen the door. No major surprise, perhaps. I was always hungry, coming down here, always in a party and arguing where to eat: there were probably a dozen, two dozen similar doors I’d never thought to look at, to notice or remember. But it was big enough, in all conscience, and it had half a dozen business plaques screwed to the wall around it, and not all of them were in Chinese. The transom was of darkened glass, with a silver-blue Q’s cut into it; lit from behind at night—and it always was night, when I came down here—it would blaze like a beacon.

  And I’d been so cocky, you can’t show me anywhere new, not in this city... I winced a little at the memory as we shuffled sideways through the door, and for penance didn’t even groan when I saw nothing ahead of me but a steep flight of stairs, rising.

  There were a couple of doors on the first landing. One was blank, the other held a sign picked out in ideograms, with an English translation below: Oriental Herbalist, it said, Please ring buzzer and wait.

  “Uncle Han,” Sue said in my ear. “As soon as you’re out of hospital, I’m taking you to see him. He’ll fix you up.”

  As soon as I’m out of hospital, I thought, I’m going home to Carol. But I said nothing, only grunted and turned my attention to the next flight of stairs.

  On the second floor, I had to stop to rest. I leaned against the banister, breathing hard, and tried to disguise that with a question. “So what’s Q’s, then, what does it mean?”

  “That’s the club. It doesn’t mean anything to you? Snooker club?”

  I shook my head. “No, nothing. Sorry. Why Q’s?”

  “Look,” she said, sighing hugely, “just because you’ve lost your memory doesn’t mean you can act stupid. It’s a pun, get it? Snooker cues?”

  “Oh. Right.” Sorry again, but I wasn’t going to apologise for missing that. I didn’t play snooker, and even my mind wasn’t looking for puns just now. Wasn’t looking for anything, really, was only trying to make sense of what it saw. “Do you work there, or something?”

  Her face twisted, just a fraction, before she nodded.

  “And this is where you brought me, that first night?”

  Another nod.

  “So that’s what you’re taking me up to see, is it?” She was wasting her time and more, wasting what little energy I had. If nothing had rung any bells so far—hell, if her face rang no bells with me—then no snooker club was going to work the magic. That much I was sure of, and so should she have been by now.

  And maybe she was, because this time she didn’t nod, she said no.

  “No, not that. Come on, up we go. Be a hero, be a man, you can make it...”

  I could and I did, though not without her help. On the third floor, dark double doors had the Q’s logo again, but we didn’t go through.

  “That’s work,” Sue said, with a sideways motion of her head. “This is home,” with a forward motion, a nod towards one more bloody flight of stairs.

  At the top of that was a single door, blank and unrevealing; to one side was a bellpush, with a name engraved on a wee plaque below it.

  I bent closer, to see.

  Jack Chu, it said. Not Sue Marks, or even Susan Chu.

  “So who’s Jack, then?” I asked, as she worked keys in locks to let us in.

  “My brother,” she said. “Jack Q’s, get it?”

  I got it, though I didn’t think I got it all. It was a pun again, and presumably it meant something to her because her face was fierce and intent and dangerous as she said it; but I couldn’t see the point myself. From Q’s to cues to snooker, sure; but Jack Q’s gave you J’accuse, which was properly groanworthy but nothing else, not relevant.

  Not as far as I could see, at any rate. And neither presumably could her brother, or he’d have used the whole thing on his logo. No, I thought this was a private, a personal pun, peculiar to Sue and with a meaning that she didn’t mean to share.

  “So does he live
here, then? Your brother?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “We do. Welcome home.”

  Three: How Like an Angel

  Home to Sue—to us?—was the building’s loft expensively converted, more New York than Newcastle: it made an extraordinary flat, all odd corners and angled ceilings, light and air and space you wouldn’t need to swing a whole coven of cats.

  There was no hallway. The door from the landing led directly into the living-room, long and broad and bent in an L-shape around the stairwell. There were windows in two walls, front and back; there was an open fireplace, with a massive cast-iron surround; the floor was stripped and polished and scattered with Bokhara rugs and kilims. There were also a couple of gaudy beanbags and enough books and magazines lying around, enough used teacups and ashtrays to make the place look lived-in.

  There was a long black leather sofa under the windows to my left with another at right angles to it against the wall, a black-and-gilt uplight in the small space between them and a square coffee-table close enough to both. On the floor by the opposite wall was a snooker-club employee’s annual salary in a few black boxes and LED displays, the smartest hi-fi set-up I’d seen in private hands. A big wide-screen television and a video too, all wired in to give incomparable stereo viewing.

  Walls and ceiling were plain and painted white, sweetly simple and freshly done. No scuff-marks, no nicotine stains. There were pictures here and there, hung in careful disorder: a couple of abstract originals in handmade wooden frames, otherwise art posters and photographs, mostly behind glass.

  There was a door in the wall opposite me; to my right the room changed direction and aspect and intent. Around the corner, there were no more rugs on the floor. There was a long, heavy table with wrought-iron candlesticks and a fruit-bowl for an epergne, ten upright chairs around; against the near wall was a fine Victorian sideboard, which at least presented every appearance of containing napery and cutlery, place mats and napkin-rings.