Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  Today she had a drink, a real drink. She was apparently celebrating her reappearance with a brandy and soda and I supposed we could be grateful for the soda, her concession to the clock, still reading a distance short of midday.

  And she might have had more than one already despite the hour, because her chair skidded across the floor and her cigarette missed the ashtray and her voice hit the roof as she saw us.

  “Darlings! How wonderful—but you, Jonty, let me look at you, what have you been doing with yourself? This can’t be honeymooner’s pallor, surely, not still? And I hate the hat. You’ve had all your hair cut off, haven’t you? Who are you pretending to be?”

  Jonty Marks, married man and associate of villains. I didn’t say that, but I came very close to saying something acid, some reminder that I’d been sick and she hadn’t come to see me. And caught myself just in time, remembering that she’d apparently been in hiding and apparently on my own instructions. She might have been anywhere in the country, a long way out of our local media’s reach; likely she didn’t even know about the car smash or the amnesia, let alone anything that underlay or derived from them.

  She hugged me, fragrant and light in my arms though her hands gripped tightly; and then she moved on to Suzie, and I found the space to be surprised at that little premature stirring of bitterness in me, that she hadn’t come to the hospital. Even without the excuse, I wouldn’t have expected her. Why be bitter, at something so utterly in character? I’d thought myself immune to any harm now. And was seemingly wrong. Wrong again, Jonty.

  My mother, the curse of my rational years, all the years since I’d hit double figures: I watched her embrace my wife, and wondered what more damage she could do me, how much more to expect.

  “Sit, sit,” she said. “Have a drink, let’s talk. How’s he been, my stupid son, has he been a good husband, Sue love?”

  “No,” Suzie said confidently, publicly, nothing confidential about this information, “he’s been crap. I’m giving up on him, the moment I find anything better. But listen, Ellie, we need to talk to you; and not here. There’s all sorts of stuff been going on, and some of it’s nasty. The police really are looking for you, you know. So I think we should just go straight back to the flat, yes?”

  And somehow she had my mother out of there, very quickly and with no fuss at all; and five minutes later we were climbing the stairs again, single file and me bringing up the rear and not having said a word, Suzie had done it all; and I thought that maybe there could be advantages to being married to this girl, and the obvious nudge-nudge attractions perhaps the least of them.

  o0o

  Stupidly, I was expecting Suzie to play hostess for my mother, to show her all around the flat; but of course Ellie had been here before, she was more at home than I was. Or seemed so, at least; and I who’d known her twenty-seven years could never tell what with my mother was seeming and what was real, so I just treated everything as real and showed no surprise if it inverted.

  She tossed her straw bag onto the nearest sofa, ran a hand through her hair—dark curls hinting towards grey, worn short and loose this year, barely collar-length: cut for the wedding, perhaps, a new hairstyle to greet a new daughter?—and said, “So what’s with this police stuff, then? Bad enough that I should be hounded from my home by big business and its corruptions; now it’s the police?”

  “Seems so,” I said. “What big business, what are you mixed up with?”

  She stared at me, took a breath; and Suzie dived in there quick, grabbed my mother’s breathing-space and used it. I’d never seen the trick done better, rarely seen it done at all. My mother’s no politician, but she’s picked up some of their less admirable habits, and bulldozing a conversation is one she’s particularly fond of. She breathes in the middle of sentences once she’s going, gives no one any chance to interrupt.

  “Look,” Suzie said, interrupting as if to the manner born, and she should have been my mother’s child, not I, “you both need to listen to each other, you’ve both got stories we need to hear,” and that was clever, that “we”, slipping herself into both teams at once, “so you might as well sit down and get comfy. I’ll make some tea, but I want to hear too, so don’t start without me.”

  “Coffee,” my mother said, settling herself neatly beside her bag, feet together and hands folded in her lap as my grandmother must have taught her. Great if you’re a little old lady in tweeds, as my grandmother had been; doesn’t look so well in a rangy woman who carries half a century’s history mapped on her face and body but seems fit still for the other half to come.

  “Coffee, right. Sorry, I forgot.” My mother doesn’t drink tea: too insipid, too traditional, too colonial, whatever. “Jonty?”

  “Bring us a beer,” I said, sprawling on the other sofa.

  No response to that, beyond a moment’s stillness; she didn’t so much as frown or glare or give me any other sign of her undoubted disapproval, sun’s a long way short of the yard-arm, boy, do you want to grow up like your mother? But when she did bring me a beer, an Oranjeboom in its bottle as I like it and ice-cold from the fridge, she brought an ashtray also and laid it on the floor where clearly she intended to smoke right beneath my nose, and I was fairly sure this was punishment. And no doubt condign, for surely I deserved this and worse, far worse. Whatever the motives were that underlay what I’d done—whatever it actually was that I had done—finding myself subsequently or consequently married to a fire-breathing, tobacco-tasting Anglo-Chinese beauty who could actually talk to my mother seemed like the least of my deserts.

  Hard on myself always, however rightly so, I was ordinarily hard on my mother also; but I was not ordinarily in my mother’s company. Confronted with her reality rather than only the shadows of her that lurked malevolently in my mind, it was hard now as it often was to reconcile image and substance, and particularly hard to be hard on her as I wanted, as I needed to be, as she in her turn deserved. Come on, then, mother: tell us about your fancy-man the embezzler, the man who stole from charities and ran away to Spain. Tell us why you never told me, tell us how involved you were and where you’ve been hiding out since...

  “Come on, then,” I said, and didn’t even call her “mother” though I knew she hated it, though I felt like doing it all day long. “Tell us how you are.”

  “The same as ever,” she said robustly, “why should I change? Because you did, finally? You’ve seen the light, boy; I’ve been bathing in it, God knows how long. Shove that ashtray over.”

  “I’ve changed how?”

  She snorted. “Look around you. Look what you’ve got here, look what you’re doing, compared to what you were. A milksop you’ve been all your life, and now this; and never was a mother better pleased, I can tell you. Ashtray, please.”

  Obediently, I pushed the ashtray across. “I mean how did it happen, though? From your perspective? How much have you seen or heard of me recently, what do you know?”

  “He’s serious,” Suzie said, appearing round the corner from the kitchen, kettle in hand, clearly and quite rightly not after all trusting us to wait. “He’s lost his memory, Ellie, crashed the car and can’t remember a thing.”

  “Crashed the car?” For a moment she was wondrously still, squinting at me through her smoke. “Are you all right, Jonty?”

  “He’s fine,” Suzie said, answering for me when I showed no signs of answering for myself. Too busy drinking it in, me, this moment of traditionally maternal concern from my most untraditional, unmaternal and ordinarily unconcerned parent. “Had a nasty bang on the head, but that’s all.”

  “Ah. Hence the haircut.”

  “Hence the haircut,” Suzie confirmed maliciously, twitching the cap off my head to show her the full horror now we were private, just a cosy family threesome. “But it’s as well he looks like a weirdo, he’s been acting like one. Can’t even remember me, thank you very much, he thinks he’s still shacked up with that Carol.”

  “Oh, God.” The cry of outrage, of de
spair; and then, typically, the percipient question after. “Does he want to be?”

  “Christ knows. Ask him.”

  No good asking me, ladies, I don’t know what the fuck I want any more. But I wanted them to stop talking about me like this, at least to my face; that much I knew.

  “Will you two leave it out?” I demanded. Quickly, before one or the other—most likely my mother—could actually ask that impossible question. “We’ve got more important things.” And hearing myself say that and flinching a little, and then pressing on regardless over the top of Suzie’s muttered, “Oh, thanks a bunch, big fella, love you too,” and my mother’s strident challenge, “Like what?”

  “Like where you’ve been and why,” I insisted. “Like what I’ve been doing, and why; and how come we’re both suddenly standing up to our chins in shit, and people are lobbing rocks; and what we’re going to do about it,” though the notion of combining forces with my mother was enough to give me the screaming abdabs. I’d almost sooner hand her to the police and myself to Vernon Deverill to be his plaything. Almost.

  “Hold your breath,” my mother advised, “close your eyes and start swimming.”

  “Yes,” from Suzie, her voice much amused, “but which direction?”

  “Away from the rocks, darling. Obviously.”

  o0o

  Times like that, information is a great flotation aid. “Tell us,” Suzie said; and,

  “What, have you got amnesia too?” my mother said to her.

  “Nah, but he’s dead secretive, him. Never tells me anything.”

  Which was seemingly true and curiously telling, though I’d never tell her that I found it so.

  She sat at my mother’s feet now instead of mine, to share the ashtray; and maybe that was all it was, pure practicality, but it felt like a declaration, them against me, and that felt like punishment again.

  And then, at last, my mother told her story.

  In brief, almost in a sentence, and to my great confusion.

  “You came to me,” she said, her cigarette stabbing in my direction, “and told me to get the hell out, dig a hole and pull the earth down on top of me, go somewhere nobody could find me or my life wasn’t worth a small packet of dry roasted peanuts, you said.”

  “Yes, but why? Surely I must have told you why?”

  “Because of Suzie,” she said, or I heard her say, or I thought so.

  Eight: Lunching with the Enemy

  She saw or heard Suzie’s bewilderment and my own, in grunts and glances and shrugs; and for a second she wasn’t with us, as we were not with her.

  Then she cottoned to what we’d heard, and sighed, and said, “Not Sue, you stupid boy,” as though the misunderstanding were entirely my fault. “Ess you ess eye,” she spelled slowly, patiently, to her idiot child. “SUSI. It’s an acronym.”

  “What for?”

  “God knows. You told me. I forget. Security firm, though. After Lindsey, you said, and they might come after me. What it stands for, who cares?”

  Brilliant. Some weird organisation was threatening her life, apparently—my own hectic imagination was thinking SPECTRE or SMERSH, cheap Sixties Bond-substitutes, sinister foreigners in distinctive clothing—and she couldn’t remember who they were.

  But sitting below her, Suzie had gone very still, while the smoke rose like drawn silk from her cigarette with never a waver from the vertical line; and when I tried to catch her eye, to share this most unfunny of jokes, I saw instead how she was staring at nothing at all, and how her skin had paled from its normal indescribable colour to something indescribable and sick.

  “Suzie? What’s up?”

  My voice, it seemed, called her back from wherever she had gone, though not quickly. She turned her head to find me, though her gaze was still unfocused; and she said, “I know who they are.”

  “Yeah? Come on, then. Who?”

  She shook her head at that, said only, “I can show you.”

  And stood up, and walked to the door like a zombie, no life or grace in her, only purpose; and there turned to look back at us both, and snapped, “Are you fucking coming, then, or what?”

  No, it’s just the way I’m sitting. But there was a tremor in her voice and a terrible tension in her fingers, where they had closed around the handle of the door; and this was not the time to be stupid. Not the time to comfort either, to utter inanities or ask unnecessary questions. I went to her, my mother followed me and we all trooped down the stairs again.

  For once even my mother didn’t talk, she could find that much sensitivity. And Suzie, who tried so hard to hide sometimes under a run of words: Suzie was achingly, shiveringly silent, and I didn’t know if this was anger or fear or what, or where the hell she was taking us.

  We went in the car; too far to walk, then, or she’d have been storming, working this off on the pavement and dragging us all but unheeded at her sparking heels... Which deduction was about the limit of my acuity, and no, I really wasn’t cut out for detective work, my mind didn’t see round corners.

  Certainly it didn’t see this coming, where Suzie was driving us.

  o0o

  Actually it wasn’t that far, the other side of town but still within the city limits. Suzie could have stormed it in less than a quarter of an hour, even pulling us in her wake. Might have felt better for the doing of it, also; hard walking can grind down the hardest of feelings.

  But she wasn’t thinking of herself, wasn’t looking for therapy here or was just in too much of a hurry for us to see this. And when we got there, when we saw, when she told us—yes, then I could understand the rush in her, though no more than she could I understand the story.

  o0o

  She drove us to a compound, and a church.

  The compound was wide, and its fence was high: steel mesh topped with three ranks of razor-wire coils, angled out. Notices warned of guard dogs, and for once I didn’t disbelieve them.

  Inside the compound were some one-storey brick buildings, petrol and diesel pumps sheltered under a canopy, a couple of Portakabins and half a dozen vehicles with spaces for a dozen more. The company name and logo was on the wall of one building, on the sides of each cabin and each vehicle, on a sign raised in one corner of the compound where it could be seen easily from the road; barring one or two light vans, the vehicles were armoured trucks; and the name of the company was Scimitar Security.

  The logo had a great curved sword crossing a shield, and on the shield were the letters SUSI.

  That much I could see even through the Mini’s dark-tinted glass. When Suzie wound her window down, I could lean across her and read the small print that ran all along the bottom of the sign.

  Scimitar Security is a division of Scimitar Universal Securities, International.

  Scimitar Security was also, I remembered, the company Vernon Deverill had used to protect his interests, viz and to wit his bodyguard Dean and his rogue solicitor wild card me when we were in hospital after the fire-truck, before I’d wangled my escape to Luke. Also and again Scimitar Security was the company Luke had talked about, protecting the Leavenhall Bypass construction site and other projects under protest, all of them Deverill’s developments.

  Two occurrences, one coincidence I could cope with; Scimitar was a big player in the security business, and not just locally. Not so strange to come across them twice, especially if Vernon Deverill was involved in both events.

  This was number three, though, and seemed to link Suzie to my mother and myself in a way that had nothing to do with a marriage; and then there was my own previous experience of Scimitar, when young Marlon had died; and this web was too tangled, had too many threads to be coincidental any more.

  o0o

  A hundred metres down the road, right next to the compound stood the church.

  Stood in its own compound now, and not a graveyard: pretty much in a building site, indeed. The low stone wall that used to separate it from the road lay in a line of rubble, replaced by a high mesh fence. Where
once perhaps dead people had been planted against a hoped-for resurrection, the land between fence and church proper was all churned mud, softstanding for a Portakabin and some heavy plant, a JCB and a little earthmover, a giant generator closed off against the possibility of weather.

  Just inside the fence, another sign: This site acquired for Scimitar Securities, a SUSI company. Caution! Demolition in progress—Parents keep your children out!

  And Suzie drew up there also and held us sitting in the car, held us looking; and after a cold, hard while I said gently, “Come on, then. What’s the story?”

  “This was my brother’s next project,” she said, and you could hear, I could hear and maybe even my ridiculous mother could hear how difficult these words were for her, how sharp their shapes in her mouth, how she bled to speak them. “He was bored with the club, once it was up and running. He was going to give it to me anyway, to look after. Manager and junior partner, he said. And him, he was going to buy this place and do it out the same way. It wouldn’t be the same, it’s not our community over here, but there’s no snooker club this side of town. And he was going to have a gym here too, he thought it was big enough; and aerobics classes, Weight Watchers, the works. He was full of it, really excited and bubbling with ideas, like he hadn’t been since the flat was finished...”

  And she was full of it too, the precipitation of undissolved grief mingling with dark suspicion, her brother and my mother, all too much and I hadn’t even told her about me yet, where I’d had a SUSI guard standing over me in hospital; nor about Marlon; nor yet about Luke’s encounters with Scimitar at the roads protests. If the video of his tree-tumbling stunt showed the security firm’s badge anywhere, I didn’t remember and Suzie, I thought, hadn’t noticed.

  No need to tell her right now. She’d been guttingly open with us, but I didn’t have to reciprocate. First time for everything, I guess, and that was the first time I’d felt even fleetingly grateful to be amnesiac. Suzie wouldn’t expect me to know anything. Even now it was my mother she wanted to interrogate, not me.