Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  Dead he was, when the good guys found him; and now his sister my wife sat opposite me, smoking and staring deep into her tea, and even these months on she was distressed enough not to be thinking straight, not to be realising that if I’d known about it before—and she’d know that I had—then I knew about it now, because that knowledge didn’t fall into the weeks that I’d lost.

  She stared and smoked, and breathed a bit hard, a bit sniffily through her nose; and said, “He’d have been so scared, too. He wasn’t any kind of hero, wasn’t Jacky. He disappeared from the club early evening, and they didn’t do, do that to him till much later; so he will’ve had hours of whatever they did to him before, and he must’ve known it was going to get worse. Hours of being scared out of his wits, he must’ve had; and that’s worse, almost. For me, anyway. Knowing he had all that to go through, even before they killed him...”

  “He doesn’t look the kind of guy who scared easily,” I said, uncertain of my ground here but interested, ready to take risks.

  “What, that photo? That’s just show,” she said, shrugging. “He liked to look cool. Anyone can put on a pair of Ray-Bans and a leather jacket; and he had the muscles for it, but it was only ever for show, not for real. Did him good, I guess, with the club and stuff, but he was soft as shite under his clothes.”

  Not like his sister, then. She had the same predilection for coolth in appearance, that much was clear, and she had the muscles too, in appropriately female form; but I thought she was tough as wire underneath also, hard and sharp to the core.

  If I had to marry anyone—if I’d had to marry someone—and it couldn’t be Carol, then I thought I’d picked a pretty good candidate. The more I saw of her, the deeper I dug, the more Sue impressed me.

  But that was a remote feeling, a stand-back-and-admire sort of feeling, and nothing to make me hotfoot towards an altar.

  My mother always said that nothing could ever stop me asking questions, short of a hand across my mouth. I was slightly more sophisticated now, perhaps, but legal training and an all-consuming curiosity still meant that I tended to hammer away at something, anything I was interested in, until I was directly told to shut up.

  So: “Who was it, did that to your brother?” I asked. “Do they know?” They didn’t, last I’d heard; but I was near three months out of date, and things change.

  She shook her head, and gave me another of those dispirited, desolate shrugs. “Not a clue, as far as I know. As far as anyone’s said. You said you’d ask around for me, see if the police had any ideas they weren’t going public with, but you never came up with anything. Can we talk about something else now? Please?”

  “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” This must have been doubly hard on her, I realised suddenly, mentally savaging myself for being so slow on the uptake. She hadn’t just been telling the story of her brother’s death; she’d been telling it to a man to whom she’d undoubtedly said it all at least once already. And then having to tell him what he’d done in response, which must feel deeply strange. And cope with the fact that that man, her husband—me—had suddenly become a stranger: as weird for her, I supposed, as it was for me, and probably more disturbing.

  “Sorry,” I said again, trying to apologise for what was non-specific but all-encompassing: sorry I drove badly and crashed the car and started all this off, or maybe sorry I came into your parents’ takeaway that night and started all this off.

  And what the hell had I been doing out there in Limboland, starving hungry at midnight and not going home? It wasn’t only other people I needed to be bullying with questions, if I was going to resolve any part of what had happened to me. I’d be having to put myself on the rack also. There were answers to be squeezed out somewhere in my subconscious, there had to be: motivations that had nothing to do with memory. I needed to understand myself, a whole lot better than currently I did. I’d thought I knew it all; and I’d proved myself so very, very wrong...

  Sue smiled, shook her head, glanced at her watch and reached for a remote control unit on the table, only faking a little, truly connecting other gears and turning her mind to other things.

  “I have to take you back soon,” she said, “but I didn’t drag you up here for the view. This was on the BBC last night and I thought you’d want to see it, so I turned over for the News at Ten and they had it too, and I taped it...”

  She had it all set up already, the right tape in the machine and at the right place, rewound and ready to go. She punched buttons and there was a click and a whirr, TV and video coming to life simultaneously; and the screen showed a news presenter behind a desk, and behind her the magic of television faded the prime minister’s face into a helicopter-shot of broad-leaved English woodland.

  “At the Colburne Valley protest in Cumbria,” the presenter said, “an environmental activist had an amazing escape today, surviving a fifty-foot fall and walking away apparently without a bruise to show for it. Malcolm Hardy reports.”

  The woodland filled the screen and started moving, as the helicopter carried the camera down the valley to zoom in on a long scar of cleared trees and rutted earth, giant yellow machines standing idle.

  A man’s voice, laid over the pictures: “An uneasy peace has returned to this remote spot, after the violence and confrontation of the last few days. But it’s the false peace of a stand-off, both sides shocked and disturbed by what took place here at first light...”

  Cut to a camera on the ground, showing a small group of men clustered at the foot of a tree, just where the ravaged ground met still-virgin wood.

  “The under-sheriff and his men, assisted by police and professional climbers, were continuing with the operation begun on Monday. The idea has been to clear protestors and their makeshift shelters from the wood tree by tree, cutting their skyways of rope and bringing them down by force if necessary. Officials insist that safety has always been the prime consideration, and that nothing would be done to endanger life; but this morning that assurance had a hollow ring to it, as something went dangerously, desperately wrong.”

  The camera panned slowly upwards, looking for action and finding it high in the branches. Close to the trunk, a man bedecked in bright orange look-at-me gear was clipping his safety harness to a rope that ran at handrail-height from that tree to the next. Another rope made the bridge, the skyway for those who dared to walk upon. The camera watched the man set his feet judiciously on the rope and begin to crab across; and then it moved ahead of him, to find another man already halfway over.

  Much younger he looked, this second man, little more than a boy from this distance; and he wore no harness, no safety ropes, and he didn’t bother to cling or sidle. He walked the rope bridge without a handhold, with total confidence, like a circus act, all show.

  And he fell.

  He fell without warning, without any effort to save himself from falling. He rolled and tumbled in the air, and though it was a long way down it seemed to take him longer than was natural, he seemed to fall in slo-mo.

  And he hit the earth rolling, tumbling, right in front of the camera; and in the appalled silence around him there was nothing to hear but the impact of that fall and the scuffing sounds of his body bucking on soft earth. Even the reporter had had wit enough to be still, to add no commentary now.

  And then, full in the camera’s stare and just as distant voices began to clamour—in oddly foreign tongues, I couldn’t hear a word of English spoken—he pulled himself slowly and impossibly to hands and knees, and then up onto his feet.

  And again there was silence, those people who’d been rushing to help stood frozen, and even I felt a chill as his eyes met the lens and moved on.

  He looked around, then turned around, and didn’t say a word; only walked slowly and deliberately away into the wood, and not a person there lifted a finger to delay him.

  o0o

  Sue hit a button and the picture died, the slight sound of the winding tape clicked off.

  “That was him, wasn’t it?” she said. “T
hat was Luke?”

  “Yes, that was Luke.” No mistaking Luke. I’d known him, even up on the rope, too high to see; I’d known him falling, only a blur of impossible motion; and now all the country knew him by his dirty-blond hair and his chill, beautiful face, his ice-green eyes and his anger and his eternal, untouchable youth.

  “I thought it was. Just from what you’ve said, and him being there. There couldn’t be two of them. But, but even if he’s what you said he was, how did he...?”

  “Luke hates to fly,” I said, quoting him indirectly, “but when he must, the air will bear him up.” And then, against her doubting look, “Time that fall with a stopwatch, if you want to. It’s too slow. Like he’s falling through honey. That’s how. He fell fast enough to look good, not fast enough to do him any hurt.”

  I didn’t think any fall could actually hurt Luke, but if he hated to fly, he must hate more to fall. Too much resonance in that. No surprise if he’d reached for and found that mongrel compromise, neither the one thing nor the other. That was Luke all through, in this his second life.

  “Well. I thought you’d want to see it, anyway...”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  She nodded, and we were both of us mute for a moment, both caught up in separate concerns. Then she stirred, shook her head slightly against whatever thoughts had clouded it, and pushed herself lightly to her feet.

  “Come on, invalid. I have to get you back. Do you want to go down and see the club first, though? Just in case?”

  In case it fires some circuit in your dim head, she meant. Privately, I thought there was little point in hoping. Visual stimuli clearly weren’t going to work, or something would be happening by now, surely. If Sue and her flat together could trigger nothing, her club wasn’t likely to be any more effective. But I shrugged an acquiescence, and levered myself up from the sofa; shook my head at her offered hand, resisting the habit of dependence; and followed her slowly down the stairs and through the emblazoned double doors where she held them open for me, into the hush and half-dark of a snooker club all but empty in mid-afternoon.

  One vast space it was down here, though the ceiling was propped up on fat brick pillars at judicious points, hinting at interior walls now gone. Directly ahead of us was a long bar, with a computer in among the bottles; otherwise nothing but snooker tables and the walls lined with scoreboards, cues in racks, zoetropic photographs of impossible shots in action. Only a couple of the tables were lit up and in use.

  Behind the bar, a Chinese boy grinned at me broadly, said, “Lookin’ good, Jonty. Dig the bandage.” And then he added something I couldn’t follow in a language I didn’t speak, guttural and tonal and signifying nothing. And he was still looking at me as he said it.

  “It’s no good, Lee,” Sue said from behind me. “He doesn’t remember a thing.”

  A stare, a grin less certain, you’ve got to be joking, followed by slow acceptance as his eyes flicked between us. “What, nothing?”

  “I’m sorry. Not even your name,” I said, with a depressing suspicion that this would prove to be a scene all too familiar in the next few weeks. Right now I was embarrassed, but soon I’d be bored and embarrassed both, telling it and telling it again.

  “Christ on a bicycle. What, that bang on the head let all your brains out, did it? Well, hullo, Jonty. I’m Lee Kwan Yu,” holding a hand across the bar to shake mine. “I’ve been teaching you Cantonese for the last month. Wasted effort, I guess. Start again tomorrow?”

  Which was not a bad recovery in the circumstances, and I was sorry not to give him more than a vague smile and a slight cock of my head, a murmured, “Maybe. We’ll see,” which we both knew meant almost certainly not.

  And then he turned to Sue, slipping back into Cantonese again; she replied in the same, which meant they were surely talking about me.

  I let my eyes stray around the club, I listened to the solid, irregular thunk! of ball striking ball and thought that that also could drive you mad, a contemporary version of the classic water torture if you were listening for it; and I wondered how Sue and her brother and apparently me could bear to live above it. But I’d heard not a thing, upstairs; and glancing upward I saw a false ceiling of polystyrene panels in an aluminium matrix, and deduced the existence of efficient soundproofing above it.

  The incomprehensible sing-song went on beside me; I turned back to face them, frowning now, but Sue stilled me with just a touch on my elbow. “Are you feeling all right, Jonty? Maybe it’s the lighting in here, but you look disgusting. Colour of a dirty bandage.”

  I’ve no idea whether that was adroit or simply accurate, but it had what was probably its desired effect. On the verge of asking for a translation, I stopped for a moment to consider myself. And say I’d been nobly ignoring it hitherto or say the other thing, say it was all psychosomatic and came on only because she’d asked and I was looking for it; or what the hell, say it was pure hypochondria, because I liked being fussed by a beautiful girl; but she did ask and I did look inward, and I did find that my head ached momentously and my legs were trembling with the effort of balance, there was a cold slick of sweat on my skin and a sickness in my stomach, and I urgently wanted to sit down.

  Which I did, Sue’s strong shoulder helping me over to the nearest banquette. Lee fetched me a glass of water—ice and lemon going in there more by instinct than intent: he was at work, he was behind the bar, of course he put in ice and lemon—and I sat and sipped and she sat beside me with her anxiety hidden behind a cool efficiency, a cool hand on my brow; and Lee fidgeted, his eyes moving uncertainly between us.

  “I could nip down,” he said, “fetch Mr Han...”

  I shook my head, don’t need a doctor; and Sue reinforced that, with her own reasoning.

  “Not while Jonty’s still at the hospital. One or the other, but not both at once. Soon as he comes out, Uncle Han can look after him. There’s probably a herb,” she said to me, “brings your memory back. It’ll taste vile, mind. How’s your rotten head?”

  “Rotten,” I confirmed with half a smile, the best I could manage.

  “Poor lover,” with a touch of her lips to my ear, the closest she could come to kissing the sore bit better. “Are you going to manage those stairs for me?”

  “I think so. I was just giddy for a minute, is all.”

  Which she knew it wasn’t all, and her snort said so; but, “My fault,” she said. “They told me not to overdo you. Luke could’ve waited, he’s on tape; I didn’t have to haul you all that way up.”

  “Not to fret,” I said. “I’m glad to have seen the flat.”

  She looked at me as though she didn’t like the way I’d said that, and quite right too. But she didn’t challenge, and I didn’t explain.

  The two of them helped me up, and saw me watchfully down the stairs and over to the car. Sue unlocked the passenger door for me, then pushed hard down on my shoulders as I sat, to be sure I ducked low enough and my head went in cleanly. I leaned cautiously back, looking for a way to lean that didn’t hurt; closed my eyes against recurrent dizziness and barely heard the conversation outside:

  “You going to be okay with him the other end, then, Suzie?”

  “Yes, of course I am. All those nurses, they’ll be queueing up to get their hands on him. God knows why, mind, he’s a sorry piece of meat just now...”

  “Yeah, well. You take care of him, you hear?”

  “Why should I?”

  “He’s the only piece of meat in your fridge just now, pet.”

  My eyes opened then, without much intent on my part, just in time to see Lee jog-trotting back to his post, before someone could steal the club and all its contents. Sue walked around the bonnet and got in the driver’s side, settled herself and checked me over with a glance, had I done my seat belt up? Was I going to puke?

  Yes and no, if those were really the questions, if I wasn’t just fantasising meanings to apply to the expressions on her face. But I had a question too, and she wasn’t getting away wit
h this one left unasked.

  “Suzie?” I said.

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “So who calls you Suzie?”

  “Everyone.”

  “You told me Sue.”

  “Everyone but you. Don’t know why, you just wouldn’t. I nearly blew you out over it, that first night,” smiling as she remembered. “Nearly told you to stuff it, if you wouldn’t use my name the way I liked it.”

  “Why didn’t you? You thought I was a creep anyway, you said so.”

  A sideways glance, a hesitation; finally, “Not by then, I didn’t. You interested me, you seemed so screwed up and helpless, and that’s always attractive; and—oh, fuck it, Jonty, I wanted to get inside your shorts, all right? I’m kinky for long tall white boys, the rest was just a bonus. I didn’t care if you called me by a name I hated.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do me a favour. Sue Chu? Of course I hate it. It’s the only reason I married you. I sort of got to like Sue, from you; like a pet name you could use in public, yeah? So I had to change the other half somehow, and Sue Marks was the best on offer.”

  All this time she was driving, nipping neatly through the city; which prompted one more sneaky question from me, “Are you a local, then, you know this place so well?”

  “Sure am. Born and bred.”

  Which meant she hadn’t married me for my passport, nor I her to share it in an excess of generosity. Bugger. Another fine theory out of the tinted window.