Luke just shrugged at that. I groaned, slapping the side of my own head in apology and then yelping at the stab of pain that rightly followed, and maybe there was more wrong with my memory than the doctors knew. Forgetting my bad head was stupid, but forgetting Luke’s limitations was worse than stupid, it was offensive. To me, if not to him. I’d known him all my adult life and longer; and no, he wouldn’t know the colour of the car. How could he?
But logic said yes, I had been driving a green sports car. Logic was blushing, in fact, logic was humiliated. Suzie had located the crash in Cumbria and I hadn’t thought beyond that; there’d been so many questions some of them had to get away, and that one had finished up free and clear, totally overlooked. But it shouldn’t have. It was no great mental leap from Cumbria to Lakes; and from Lakes to Luke was no leap at all, it was apple pie and Wensleydale, a natural connection in my head.
Put it plain: I’d driven over to see Luke, and then I’d crashed the car.
Afterwards...
“Luke,” I said, “what did I say? What did I tell you?”
“You told me that you’d got married. In a church,” added with sublime distaste, a curl of the lip that was part sneer and part physical revulsion, as at something rank and rotting.
I grunted. “What else?”
“That you were working for Vernon Deverill now.”
“Yes? Doing what?”
“Trying to get a crooked accountant out of jail, you said.”
“Right, I figured that. But did I say why? Or how?”
“No. I didn’t ask.”
No. He wouldn’t have. “So what did I come over for, anything special?” There must have been a reason, I thought. Young man a few weeks married, ex-solicitor living it up on a villain’s petty cash: whichever role counted for more, neither one fitted comfortably with my driving all this way to spend a day, just a single day with Luke.
“You asked me questions about the Leavenhall Bypass protest, and Scimitar Security.”
“Shit. Did I? And I suppose I didn’t tell you why?”
A smile, a shake of the head. Motives didn’t interest Luke, it was only the thing done that mattered. Which left me little better off than I had been. I knew that the Leavenhall protest had happened, was happening still; and that Luke was involved, and that the bypass was going ahead regardless—which last actually didn’t need saying, given what had gone before. Luke was involved in the protest, therefore the protest was failing. He had a demonic eye for lost causes, had Luke.
But why I should have been interested in a new road or the opposition to it, I couldn’t imagine. Vernon Deverill had a connection, yes, he owned the company that was building the road, as well as the councillors who had given him the contract; but so what? There were few major projects in the region that didn’t bear his fingerprints, somewhere along the line. And Scimitar Security rang several bells with me on a personal level, but none of them seemed to have a particularly relevant chime.
“Can you remember what I asked you? Exactly?”
“Yes.”
Of course he could, I was only making noises in my confusion. Luke did this to me sometimes: just a few minutes in his company and I’d be working to assert my humanity, my fallibility. Asking questions when I already knew the answers, saying things twice although he’d heard the first time, that sort of thing. Making mistakes that in retrospect had to be deliberate, though only on some far-down level I couldn’t consciously access. Telling him, maybe also telling myself that I really wouldn’t want a memory etched in anodised steel, not a word or a moment ever to be lost.
I’d take dictation from him if he’d sit still that long, I’d write down every question I asked him and his every response; but not today, I decided. Maybe not tomorrow, either.
“Your head hurts,” he told me.
“No kidding.” That slap on the skull I’d given myself had started a throbbing curse of a headache, which would likely build into a sweet little migraine ninety-odd miles from my stock of Migraleve.
If I still had any stock of Migraleve. If Suzie hadn’t changed it all for a bagful of Chinese herbs.
Here and now, migraines were an anxiety but not a problem, Migraleve not actually an issue. What need chemicals with Luke at hand, Luke’s hands to hold and help me?
He never fixed anything for good, mind, never for real. I still got migraines, and bronchitis in the winter, and arthritic pains in my hip whenever the weather turned wet, where I’d broken it as a kid. But right here and for now, Luke’s touch would be better than any analgesic.
Would be, and was. He said, “Come here,” and I said, “Would you?” when I already knew that he would; and I shifted around the fire to sit with my back to him like he was going to give me a massage, and instead his hands closed tight and hard around my head.
Closed, gripped, squeezed; and never mind what the doctors said, that I had no fracture in my skull. I swear I could feel all its separate pieces shifting, under that pressure. I wanted to scream, but had no breath to do it; best I could manage was a gasp and a whimper, too weak even to sob.
The squeezing was internal also. Not only my bones, my brain felt crushed between his fingers, like a sponge in a vice. My head would be a coconut, I thought, when he was finished, just a dry shell with no life in it; it would rattle and hiss when he shook it, a percussive instrument, because there’d be nothing inside but desiccated coconut.
But he only kept it up for a second or two, and amazingly I could still think when he lifted his hands away, my eyes once they had finished watering could still see; and when I shook my head now, it didn’t hurt. When I slapped my forehead, that didn’t hurt either. Bone-ache and brain-ache, both were gone. No migraine threatened now, I was just crazy-tired suddenly, my muscles sucked of strength and my bones of solidity.
I twisted my head round to smile at him, and even that much was major effort. “Thanks.”
He nodded, didn’t ask how I felt now or anything so unnecessary. He knew how I felt. His hands moved more lightly down my arms and over my chest and my crossed legs, and the bruises were not so sore and the healing cuts didn’t itch so much any more.
Then, “Go and sleep,” he said, “you will need to.”
He was not wrong. I could barely manage the vertical without help, which he didn’t offer; made it at last and staggered the dozen paces to the open Airstream door and had to grip the frame to keep myself upright there, for one last glance back at Luke.
He was looking into the fire, turned right away from me, not watching, not concerned. He’d done his part, and I was on my own again.
Fair enough.
o0o
Luke might have a new caravan to adorn his hollow—“lifted” he’d said, and I thought maybe that applied more ways than one: I’d never seen him use money, and Airstreams come expensive, especially this side of the pond—but once inside there was only the stretch of it, only the added space to say so. Otherwise it looked just the same as the last one, or the one before.
The skin was intact, but nothing inside remained. The interior had been gutted: walls and doors, furniture and facilities all gone, all ripped out by a rough untimely hand before they were ready to go. There were scars to say so, and holes uncouthly plugged with rags and plastic.
You never know how big something really is, until it’s empty. This was big. And not at all cosy, not homelike despite the rugs and blankets, the coats and curtains heaped like an unruly sea across the floor. Luke’s nesting material, the only concession to comfort I’d ever known him make; and oh, I was grateful for it that day. I kicked a pile into a corner—at least insofar as an object cigar-shaped can have corners, which is actually not a very great distance from not at all—and tumbled down into it. Worked the deck shoes off my feet, tucked knees and elbows up nice and tight and fœtal, and fell asleep in all my clothes and dirt.
o0o
Woke up sometime in the middle of the night, no watch so I didn’t know when. It was dark, that wa
s all that mattered, and I needed a piss quite urgently.
No toilet, of course, that was gone along with all the bathroom fittings. I got to my feet and blundered to the door, felt my way out and then stood on the step for a minute, to let my eyes find some good in starlight.
In fact what they found was the glow of the fire, not dead yet; and Luke’s shadow sitting over it, just as I had left him, and he still wasn’t turning around to look although certainly he would have heard me coming out.
I made my way along the side of the caravan and then behind, into an unlikely copse; emptied my bladder long and delightfully against a tree; then went straight back inside and straight to sleep again, not pausing even to wish Luke goodnight.
From the look of it, he wasn’t having one anyway. Actually, I wasn’t sure that he ever did. I thought maybe the nights were his bad time, his private Waterloo endlessly replaying. I’d certainly never seen him sleep through one.
o0o
Me, barring that one brief break I slept sweeter than I had in the hospital, even, under their chemical blanket. Some added value in Luke’s magic fingers, perhaps, or else in this little bubble of strange that he inhabited, the very air up here seeded with somnolence to keep mere mortals quiet.
Or else it was just that I was knackered and I needed sleep, and sleep was there for the taking and so I took it. Could’ve been that to keep the pragmatists happy, something that in my experience the world always tries to do, even against the intent of angels.
Personally, I believe in miracles. Very small-scale, very private little miracles like sleeping luxuriously late and then waking to find your body better than it ought to be, stiff and sore but not hurting. Like warm spring sunshine on the grass outside and the sky utterly blue above, very much against the weather forecast; fruit for breakfast and damper fresh-baked in the fire’s embers and a wonderful lethargy in me, a total contentment in simply lying on the greensward and listening to birdsong, watching Luke with half an eye as he moved around the hollow, barely talking at all.
Certainly not asking questions, not even thinking of taking dictation.
o0o
That day and the next were my rest and recreation, while my scabs peeled and my stubble grew and I didn’t even itch, I just felt massively and marvellously settled in my body and in my head both, all questions put aside.
On the third day I rose again from the dead, and became human once more; and being human was plagued with anxiety and curiosity, itches impossible to scratch.
And I had the car, and Luke seemed utterly disinterested in what I did with my time; so I bumped slowly, gently down the track to the road below and drove to Penrith, where I interviewed a sergeant of police.
Who gave me two facts to play with, each of a deep and abiding strangeness.
The first was that I was wrong, completely one hundred per cent—or no, better, one hundred and eighty degrees—wrong in the assumption I’d made after Luke broke his little bombshell about my having been to see him that day. No, I wasn’t on my way back to the city when I crashed. I’d been east of the Lakes, for sure, but travelling west. As if I’d driven halfway home and changed my mind, done a U-turn in the road and headed back to Luke’s again.
“Any chance you could have forgotten something, sir? Something important enough to go all that way back for?”
I shrugged. There was always the chance, I supposed—hell, in this brave new world of mine, anything was possible: I was a married man with a deeply crooked buddy, wasn’t I?—but it certainly wasn’t likely. You didn’t take things to Luke, to be remembered or forgotten.
“Anywhere else you might have been going, then?”
“Well, there’s always my mother’s house. Don’t know if she’d have been there, but I’ve got keys.” I’d had keys, at least—and checking my unreliable memory and then my pockets, yes, I still had keys. That much of my history I hadn’t given away. And it wasn’t impossible, actually: in crisis, I might have gone home to Mum. On a whim, even, late at night and heading in a different direction. It was the sort of behaviour she’d approve, that she’d always despaired of seeing in me: a handbrake turn on the highway, a race through the dark towards some unsentimental dream of shelter.
Then he told me the second piece of news he had, that changed the picture once again.
They’d found a witness, he said, a local lad on his way home after seeing his girlfriend safe; a little drunk, a little high, he said, but not enough to make him unreliable. It’s how they knew for sure which way I’d been going, he said, this boy’s report: no clues otherwise to tell them, no skid-marks on the tarmac or buckled and broken barriers. I couldn’t have braked at all, he said, and the manufacturers needed to look at the aerodynamics again, no car should fly so high, whatever speed it was doing.
But this boy, he said, of course the boy stopped to stare as I’d driven past. A flash sports car on the road so late, what fifteen-year-old would not?
I was travelling fast, the boy had said, apparently, but not stupidly fast for such a road in darkness. Not flying-fast, not then.
So the boy had got a good look; and for all that he’d been looking at the bonnet and the spoiler and trying to spot if it had twin exhausts, he’d seen something else also that he’d mentioned to the police as a positive fact, absolutely no question in his mind.
He’d seen two heads in that car as it passed him, driver and passenger both.
Two men, he thought, though he wouldn’t swear to that. Only a fleeting glimpse and no faces, a girl with short hair could’ve fooled him.
That was just two or three minutes from the smash, at the likely speed I’d been travelling. The boy hadn’t heard the car stop to let the passenger out, though he hadn’t heard it crash either: only its roar fading and I guess the memories of his night rising to replace it, till he forgot to listen any longer.
There must have been a stop, though, the sergeant said. The passenger must have debussed. They’d had another look at the wreckage, he said, and found it hard once more to believe that I’d survived at all, let alone come out of it with so little damage. Comparatively little, he insisted, when I murmured about ten weeks of my life lost. I could have been dead, he said; I should surely have been laid up for months, with many bones broken and all my innards tangled.
But what was sure, he said, was that no one—no matter how lucky—could have been in that smash and walked away and left me. They’d been checking bloodstains, he said, and those few they’d found on the passenger side were my own.
So, I must have stopped to let this other person out, somewhere not a mile from where I’d crashed. There was nothing there, no home, no habitation: which had them wondering about the accident again. Especially in the light of this report from the city, about an attack with a runaway truck, he said.
They were double-checking the brakes and the steering, he said, but there were no signs of tampering, or any mechanical problem.
Their best bet, he said, was that I’d had a row with my unknown passenger, and stopped the car to throw them out; and then driven off in high dudgeon and at high speed, and swerved to avoid some fluffy bunny or other obstruction in the road, and—whee!—blasted into Britain’s controlled airspace without filing a flight plan. Which was an offence, he said jovially, but they wouldn’t be pursuing me for it, they didn’t think they could keep up.
Basically, I suppose he was saying help!—and I couldn’t do that, all I could do was reply in kind, sorry, not a clue, none of it makes any sense to me either.
So at last he let me go, once I’d signed a couple of forms and shrugged off his doubts and prognostications about the likelihood of a speedy insurance settlement. Reminded about money and the general worldly need for it, I went into the nearest bank to raise some cash on my gold card. No problems. God alone knew what my credit limit was these days, but clearly I hadn’t reached it yet. Once back in the city, that was one more thing I’d have to sort out, I supposed; a serious talk with the manager at my own
bank must be on the cards.
From the bank to the hospital, where I inveigled a young houseman into checking my stitches. As I’d anticipated, the wounds had closed well enough that he ended up taking them all out. From there to Smith’s for a dictaphone and a writing pad, spare tapes and batteries and a couple of coloured biros—starting a new job, I always liked to start clean, with gear dedicated to that job and that alone—and then I pigged out on steak and kidney pie and chips in a greasy spoon before I drove back to Luke. I never did notice it when I was there, when I was with him; but once out of his bubble, water and plant-life seemed suddenly desperately inadequate to sustain a man, and I was always ragingly hungry for meat.
Six: And Then She Hit Me
He smelled it on my breath, of course, when I got back. I caught the full blast of his displeasure, contempt and revulsion in a single facial twist, but he didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t. If he’d been with me, he’d have snatched the pie from the plate or the fork from my mouth—he’d done both of those to me before, when I was younger—but he was always a creature of action, never words. He’d never really seen the point of words.
I wanted words from him now. I wanted access to a certain address on his hard-storage silicon-chip many many megabytes of memory, so infinitely reliable, not like mine; I wanted all the data that he’d stored and I’d so carelessly lost.
“Just repeat it for me, Luke? Word for word, everything we said?”
“Why? It was just talk. I gave you the facts.”
“There might be other facts,” I said, “hidden in the actual words I used, clues I can pick up on now.” Or else in the way I’d said things, excited or cynical or sarcastic; but no use asking him to repeat tones of voice or other subtleties. I think he also heard in black and white.
He frowned over that, said nothing, was doubtless trying to defeat me with silence the way he always used to. But I was older now, and more resistant.
“I was working for Vernon Deverill,” I said. “Right. But I don’t know why, and neither do you. Maybe there’s something I said to you then, that I can use now to work out what was going on, why I’d get involved in something like that. Come on, Luke. Just read it out like a playscript, yeah? Won’t take you that long.” There would have been many pauses from me, many silences from him; even half a day’s-worth of talking would compress into an hour or two of tape.
Dispossession Page 12