Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  o0o

  I wasn’t always so wise. Once I’d thought of Luke as a trophy, to be shown off. Sixteen and buzzing with it, first girlfriend and desperate to impress: of course I’d taken her to meet him, to be overwhelmed by magic, myth made flesh.

  Julia, her name was. A small-town girl who liked discos and glitter, she was not much impressed by the long bus-ride and the longer slog uphill to Luke’s hollow, less so by his cool unwelcome and the chipped mug of hot water that was all he had to offer. I hadn’t warned her, not to spoil the wonder of him; it was too soon apparent that all she was wondering was how soon we could head back to civilisation. Recognising my mistake but too shy to admit it, never any good at leaving Luke even in the face of disaster, I sat as silent as the pair of them around his smoky fire until he got abruptly to his feet, said he was off walking.

  My cue, my opportunity to rescue something from the day; but still I didn’t take it. I only scrambled up, puppy-eager to trail him around the bounds of his territory and ignoring the speaking glare Julia shot at me, get us out of this...

  Stupid with the hungers of youth, I guess I was praying for a miracle, for him to give us a glimpse of his true nature.

  That at least I got, an early revelation that men should be careful what they pray for.

  He led us tramping over the hill and into a wooded valley, while she followed sulking at my back, refusing to take my hand even down the muddy slides between the trees. Flocks of birds fled us, screaming. At the bottom the path ran parallel to a fence closing off a great tract of land that must have had a gamekeeper to patrol it, because the barbs on the wire were decorated with the desiccating corpses of his hunting.

  Weasels and crows I knew, other predators I was less certain of naming in the mess of ripped fur or feather, exposed bone; but last in the long line was a raven, today’s kill by the look of it, fresh blood on its broken chest and its wings splayed out in a grisly crucifixion.

  Luke stood a long time, looking at that dead bird. I heard muttering behind me, and looked round to see Julia making faces, this is horrid, this is disgusting, I’m bored and fed up and I want to go home. All I could give her was a shrug, I don’t know the way home from here, we’ll have to stick with him for a while yet.

  Then her face changed, no more messages for me; she was staring past me and the wire was vibrating beside me, and there was the rustle of long-dead creatures falling apart, falling away. I twisted around and saw Luke tugging and tearing, yanking the raven savagely from the barbs, doing more damage and I couldn’t see the point.

  Until he lifted the body to his mouth and breathed on it, spat on it, licked its dusty spattered feathers, the dark-edged holes in its flesh. Distantly I was aware of Julia retching, and it sounded real, a reaction not a comment; but all my focus was on Luke, on his hands where they were not cradling but clutching the bird, almost crushing it, threatening more damage still.

  Its wings hung outside his clenched hands, moving as his fingers moved. He had its dead head in his mouth now, working it between tongue and teeth; and its wings moved, scratching at the air, but his fingers were entirely still.

  He held it away from his face and its head was glistening, running wet, and its eyes were dull with death yet its beak opened and it shrieked at him.

  Julia shrieked too, and clutched at me.

  Luke opened his locked hands and the bird, I suppose, flew. It fumbled into the air, at least, slow and mechanical-seeming, a travesty of life. Not skill or nature that kept it aloft, not the effort of its muscles or its feathers’ spread. This was vile, and Luke felt that as we did: his face said so, shifting from detachment to something too complex for me to read, a cocktail perhaps of grief and anger and despair. This was the best that he could do, and it was pathetic, cruel, heart-rivingly sad.

  We watched the bird-thing he had made blundering its way between the trees, catching on twigs and creepers and leaving feathers wherever it got caught; and I wondered how many more of these there were in the woods, how many dead creatures that still crawled or slithered or hacked at the wind with dishevelled, rotting wings.

  Luke had turned and run then, off and away; and when he was gone, when the sounds of his going had faded to nothing, I’d taken Julia’s unresisting hand and we’d made our way along the path and along the road it led us to, until we found a village with a bus stop and an eventual journey home.

  o0o

  I’d taken Luke no visitors since, though apparently I’d promised to take Suzie. Twice, now. And I’d talked about him as little as I had to and boasted not at all, not made a hero of him; and if not of him, then of whom?

  Lacking true heroes, I played instead with any names I could drag easily from my memory, be they good teachers from school or college, authors and bands whose work I’d loved or hated, athletes or artists or famous lawgivers from Solon to Judge Jeffries to Lord Denning; but I had to look back to my adolescence for most of them, and over that distance none seemed to stand out more than the others, and it was no surprise that none produced what I was looking for, none was the key to unlock all my so-carefully-guarded secrets.

  Fantasy figures, then? Again I was looking back ten years or more; I pictured my room as it had been then, all the pin-ups and posters on the walls; the bands I’d tried already, but I named as many of the women as I could and tried them all, and failed with them all.

  And again was not surprised, because this didn’t feel any more right than using Suzie’s notions of what mattered most. It was me who’d set this up, a radically-altered me but me none the less; and I wouldn’t have scouted a long-abandoned past for a brief but crucial phrase, I’d have used something current. Something relevant, either to my life or to the project...

  Chinatown? No. MR2? No. Nor Deverill nor Vernon nor Vern, Dean nor Leavenhall nor—of course—Scimitar nor SUSI. Nolan I tried, and Lindsey Nolan and Spain and Spanish Jail and Spanish Gaol, and had no joy of them.

  Passwords, books I’d loved; suddenly two paths of memory crossed, and threw me a new idea. In The Lord of the Rings, even the wiser-than-wise Gandalf had been stymied by this exact same problem, though the solution had been staring him in the face; he’d been caught by a pun, or else a bad translation. What he’d read as an invitation, ‘Speak, friend, and enter’ had really been an instruction, ‘Say “Friend” and enter’. And I loved cleverness, I loved puns, and I loved that moment as much as any in literature...

  So I tried Friend, and I tried Mellon which was Elvish for ‘friend’ and actually the word that Gandalf used to get them in; and neither one worked and I was furious with myself, my former self for not having thought of that, it would have been such a neat solution.

  o0o

  I was still stabbing that keyboard with sweaty fingertips, wearing my prints away, when Suzie came back; and no, she didn’t knock this time either, nor would I have expected her to. It was the door’s banging open that dragged my eyes up from the screen. She stood framed, akimbo, imperative.

  “Come and eat,” she said.

  “In a minute.” I was hopelessly pursuing some desperate strand of thought, the names of my regular, favourite or most recent clients: expecting nothing, getting nothing, unable to stop.

  “No, not in a minute. Right now.” And she swiftly bent and unplugged the computer’s lead; which made no difference at all, it switched automatically to battery power. I thought probably she knew that, because she didn’t so much as grunt her disappointment, let alone try to wrest the machine from my grasp, which would most likely have been her next move if she were serious. She was only making a point, not genuinely trying to cut me off mid-word.

  Point made, she nevertheless hammered it hard home. “I’ve been entertaining Ellie all afternoon,” she said. “Your turn now, she’s your mother.”

  “Thought you liked her?”

  “I do; but there are limits. These are they,” in a phrase stolen indirectly from Ellie, directly from me.

  My mouth twitched into a reluctant
smile; she beckoned me with a flick of her head, and I put the computer down on the futon, switched it off and stood up with an effort, went to join this awkward, unexpected family at dinner.

  o0o

  Suzie had cooked Chinese, and the table was laid only with chopsticks and soupspoons and bowls.

  “Can I have a knife and fork?” I pleaded, sitting where she told me.

  “No.”

  “I can’t use these,” picking up the chopsticks to prove it.

  “Yes, you can. I taught you.”

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  “So I’ll teach you again.”

  “It’s an impossible task. Dozens have failed before you. I’m cack-handed.”

  “I know. But I did it before. You got pretty good, in the end. For a cack-handed white boy, I mean. Do it once, I can do it again.”

  o0o

  So she did it again, and it was too easy. Just a minute of uncertain fumbling, a single crack of her knuckles on my unprotected skull when I dropped a stick and offered that as proof, “See? Told you I couldn’t do it, you’re wasting your time,” and then suddenly I understood, or my fingers did. I reached for a prawn and the sticks found it, gripped it, lifted it; almost dropped it deliberately, at the smug told-you-so expression on her face; but carried it to my mouth in generosity, chewed and swallowed. Hot and juicy and sharp with flavour, it stirred an appetite I didn’t know I had. Soon I was snatching food into my bowl without thinking about it, scooping rice urgently into my mouth, altogether too much at home with these alien instruments.

  “You must be a good teacher,” said my mother, expertly clicking her own chopsticks like a crab its claws. “Heaven knows I tried, but I never got anywhere with him.”

  That, I thought, could be the reason I’d never managed to learn before: that my mother had been the first to try to teach me, that my body had rebelled as much as my mind. As my body seemed now to be remembering lessons that my mind could not, demonstrating an acquired skill though the acquisition was lost to me.

  Suzie looked so pleased with herself, was so patronisingly pleased with me I wanted to bite her.

  Instead, I said, “Ellie?”

  “What?”

  “Tell us about Lindsey Nolan.”

  My deceptive mother turned her narrow, baleful glare onto me full force, said, “He’s a man, an accountant, a crook. What can I tell you that you don’t know?”

  “For a start, you could tell us what was your interest in him.”

  “What he kept between his legs, of course,” she said. “He was hung like a donkey.”

  Suzie choked; I didn’t even blink. “No,” I said.

  “He was.”

  Past tense, she used, likely without even thinking about it. That was the only thing she was telling me here that I was ready to believe: that he was dead to her, that she had no ongoing interest. Trouble lifts its head, my mother departs the scene so thoroughly she’d probably swear herself she was never there at all.

  “That’s not what you were after,” I said patiently.

  “Listen, Jonty, I know children never like to think of their parents having a sex-life, but—”

  “Mother,” I said, “you can sleep with every thoroughbred racing animal in the Queen’s stables, for all I care. Do it on Horse Guards, do it in daylight, I don’t give a damn. Just don’t lie to me, don’t try to put me off, don’t make yourself out to be more stupid or frivolous than you are. I think you must have told me once before, so try being honest with me twice in a row, why don’t you? Tell me what the hell’s been going on?”

  And my deceitful, dishonest mother did just that: she came clean and told us both what her involvement was, in two simple, clear sentences, and why the hell couldn’t she have done that hours earlier?

  “I’m doing Vernon Deverill,” she said, “for the Journal. Of course I wanted to sleep with his accountant, how not?”

  o0o

  Jonathan’s Journal she called it, she named it after me though I never had a hand in its production, never contributed a word to its copy or a fact or a whisper of gossip to its proprietor. It sounded trivial, it sounded like a joke and she meant it to; but subscriptions cost a thousand pounds an issue, and she had dozens of subscribers. Every national newspaper was on the list and a good number of foreign papers also, along with every magazine which took a serious interest in current affairs; all the political parties, and not a few MPs on their own accounts; Ellie even claimed MI5 and the CIA among her readership, and I believed her.

  Almost no one knew who researched, who wrote, who published and who reaped the substantial profits from Jonathan’s Journal. That’s why it carried the foolish name: to offer no hostages to fortune, to give no useful clues to its authorship. Those few who did know—close friends, her bank manager, her accountant—thought that her louche lifestyle, her heedless amorality was only cover for the profoundly serious journalist she was at heart, whose every irregular issue stirred up scandal and controversy, exposing the bone of British corruption with dates and figures and names precisely documented, and a withering analysis of causes and motivations.

  Myself who knew her better than anyone, I had always maintained that the profoundly serious journalist was another joke, an artificial creation, only cover to give some credibility to the chaotic, instinctive, selfish demon creature she seemed to be, that in fact she truly was.

  Whichever way you read it, she lived two wholly separate lives: one forever superficial and demanding, the other drilling always to the core of things, ever questioning, ever wanting to know why. Again demanding, perhaps the only aspect her bifurcated personality could share between its divided parts.

  “Heaven knows,” she was saying, “he was the world’s most boring man. In bed or out of it. But he kept a lot of secrets in his house, and he was careless about security.”

  Not like me, I thought bleakly, reminded. “Learn much, did you?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Like, why he’s in jail in Spain? Who set him up?”

  “Not that, no. There was something big on his mind for a few weeks before he disappeared, but that’s where he kept it, in his mind. It wasn’t money, though. All that about him stashing cash for himself, that’s nonsense. He was greedy, yes, but not that way. Information was his thing. When he got a sniff of something, he wouldn’t let it go. Wouldn’t talk about it either, though, and I couldn’t find anything on paper. Even the note he left me when he vanished, that didn’t tell me anything except to go home and keep my head down. I didn’t do that, of course, I searched his house from top to bottom first; but there was nothing there, I didn’t find a thing.”

  “How frustrating for you.”

  “Darling, you’ve no idea.”

  That was stupid; of course I had a very good idea, and she knew it, and she was trying to blanket herself in a distorting image again, so that I wouldn’t see her straight. Automatic I thought that was, the defences developed over many years cutting in because that was what they did, any time anyone penetrated close to the heart of her.

  I would have dug deeper, to be sure. There were many questions I wanted to ask my mother, a great deal I needed to know about Lindsey Nolan. Suzie spoiled the moment, though, saying, “I don’t know how you can do that. Sleep with a man, I mean, just to get something you want. If you don’t want him, I mean. It’s like volunteering to be raped or something, I just can’t get my head around it.”

  “Not at all,” said my mother, slipping into slut-mode with gratitude and grace. “It’s a business transaction, is all; he may not know it, but I do. I give him what he wants, I take what I want. I’m a natural whore, I suppose. I’m very good at it.”

  She’s also very good at self-portraiture, she does it often, and every separate portrait is a lie. “Come on, Ellie,” I said, for Suzie’s sake. “Be straight with the girl. How often have you done this, twice in twenty years? Or was there a third time, was there one I didn’t hear about? She does most of her work in public records
offices,” I told Suzie directly, “not in hotel rooms on her back. She’s not that kind of spy, she just wants you to think she is. Mostly, she sleeps around just because she likes it.”

  My mother looked at me, pushed her bowl away and took out a cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke across the table at me, made it exceedingly obvious that we would learn no more from her tonight.

  o0o

  Neither from my computer, which no more than she was in a giving mood. I battled it for another hour after dinner, feeling that the whole endeavour was increasingly pointless, that I must have chosen some random sequence of letters or numbers or both for precisely this reason, to stop anyone who knew me—Suzie, perhaps? my mother, perhaps?—from working out the password and cracking the file open. Then I wasted another hour searching through papers in the spare bedroom in case I’d written the sequence down, but the same logic applied. If I’d gone that far to keep my secrets safe, I wouldn’t have left the key to them lying around where any snoop might find it.

  o0o

  Back in the living-room they were smoking and drinking tea and still talking about sex, trying to bridge a gulf that was philosophical, generational, impossible. To Ellie a tool, to Suzie still a revelation: no, they weren’t going to come together anywhere on this one.

  I sat and listened for a while, had nothing to say and couldn’t settle. So I lied to Suzie, told her I was just going down to the club for half an hour, a drink and boys’ talk with Lee, I said; and instead I went all the way down and out onto the street, into the evening clamour of a young city having a good time with itself.

  There was a pub at the end of the street where I’d been drinking on and off for years, whenever I was meeting people for a meal this side of town. Even in the crush, they knew me: “Pint of Guinness, then, is it?”