Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  Suzie’s hand had clenched itself tight around my belt; I could feel her breath on my neck, as she peered at him over my shoulder. Standing on tiptoe she must have been, to do that.

  And me, I was reaching behind to detach her hand almost without thinking about it, to put my palm against her belly and press her gently backwards and away from danger even as I said, “Luke, what is it, what’s up? What are you doing here?”

  “I want you,” he said, and his voice was hard like a rain is hard in the falling.

  “Yes,” I said, “but for what?”

  “You have to show me Arlen Bank,” he said, meaning you have to take me there. And his timing was beautiful, because this time yesterday I couldn’t have done it, but now I could count the turnings in my head, I could pick it out on any map that marked it. Though maps were no use to Luke, of course, which was why he wanted me.

  Arlen Bank was Vernon Deverill’s house, where I’d had lunch and sparred with him and Mrs Tuck, and then watched something halfway to murder done on a girl whose name I didn’t know.

  Luke would know her name. She was on his list of visitors, of comrades in the struggle. By now, I thought, a day on—a day late—he would likely know what had happened to her. Which would likely be why he was here now and raging like ice on fire, and wanting to put himself on the list of Mr Deverill’s visitors. Avenging angel was this face he wore; and oh, I was torn.

  For her sake and for my own soul’s ease, I wanted to be the most help I could to Luke today. It came too late, but not he alone was interested in vengeance.

  I’d been here before, though, or close enough. Years ago, I had brought him to this house because he could find nothing on his own, and then I’d watched him go off with others on a mission of light; and the results of that haunted me as though my guilt were greatest. I wouldn’t willingly see even Deverill exposed to the kind of damage that had been done that day, so how could I bring him Luke?

  “How is she?” I asked, sure that he’d know who I meant and hopeful that his answer might give me some kind of clue, which way to jump. She’d been hurt past bearing, or past what I could bear; but she was tough inside, she’d have to be to survive the life she’d chosen. Maybe if he said she was okay, recovering, coming through, maybe then I could stand up to him and say no. First time in my life that would be, but there’s a first time for everything.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  Just that, two brief words and everything turned again. Gravity sucked harder, the poles shifted, not my world any more and I was dizzy with it. Not the wall that grabbed me, though, and stopped me sliding; that was Suzie, her arms tight about me and her body hard against mine, holding me up, keeping me here when my mind wanted to spin into a place where no light came.

  “Who? What’s he talking about, who’s dead? Jonty, what gives with you two?”

  Nothing much gave with us, in all honesty, and we gave little back; but this she was entitled to. Besides, I had a ghost to requite, and she was nearest.

  “This girl I saw them working over yesterday, at Deverill’s. They said they’d let her go...” But they hadn’t, they’d worked her over and then killed her, regardless of Dean’s intentions; unless he’d simply misjudged her strength and tagged her as tougher than she was. That could have been it, maybe she died under his ministrations without his intending her to.

  But Luke was here, and they wouldn’t have taken her all that way just to lose a body. So, “Where?” I demanded.

  “Leavenhall.”

  And that made it worse, the worst possible, that meant they must have done everything that Dean intended and then killed her anyway. Or simply let her die, but that was the same thing. Her blood on their hands and very much on mine, her life I’d let slip through my fingers because I’d trusted my buddy, my lifesaving friend Dean to be cruel but true. I’d done what was easier, and so a girl was dead; and now I too was blazingly, killingly angry, and against Deverill because again that was easier than being killingly angry against myself.

  “I’ll take you to Arlen Bank,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  And tried to walk, and couldn’t: not because my legs wouldn’t carry me, fury was a great stiffener of weak joints, but because Suzie was still holding hard, holding me still.

  “Why don’t you just give him directions, Jonty?” Or better yet have nothing to do with it, her eyes were saying, but she didn’t bother to put that into words. No one, not even Carol suggested the police.

  “Directions?” I repeated vaguely, my mind slow to absorb and slower to find a response, clumsy suddenly with words. “Luke doesn’t know his left from his right.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t want you going with him, whatever’s happened. I don’t want you getting involved.”

  “So am I serious,” I said. “He can’t tell left from right, he can’t read maps, he can’t read anything at all. His mind doesn’t work that way. It’s no good just telling him, he has to be taken places. And I am involved. I said, I was there, I saw what they were doing; and now she’s dead,” and how much more involved could you possibly be?

  “Okay,” Suzie said then, “but I’m coming too. You’re not going off on your own. I’ll drive.”

  “No.” That was Luke, not me; and it wasn’t her he was saying no to, it was the driving. The being driven.

  “He doesn’t go in cars,” I explained, oddly anxious that she shouldn’t take offence. “Not if he can help it. Or in buses or trains or any kind of transport.”

  “How the hell did he get here, then?” Carol demanded, in a mutter from behind us. “It’s a long bloody walk from the Lakes.”

  And he couldn’t have set off before yesterday evening, at the earliest: time enough for Dean and whoever else to finish with the girl at Arlen Bank, put her back in the van and drive fifty-odd miles to Leavenhall, put her through her paces there and then kill her. And that last they would have done in private, in the dark most likely; and then someone would have to find the body, however casual they’d been about disposal... No, chances were he hadn’t left till midnight at the earliest.

  But yes, he’d have walked it. Or run if he’d felt that he had to, if there was that much urgency on him. Luke hates to fly.

  I shrugged, unwilling to put all or any of that into words. But Suzie seemed to have been reading my thoughts on my face. She glanced once at the mud on Luke’s jeans and on his trainers, and grunted; then she looked down at her own feet, and sighed.

  Soft black desert boots, lacing to the ankles: eminently practical, no excuse at all. And if she let me go alone, off to adventures unknown without her, she’d be forsworn. My turn now, to be reading her secrets on her face; she wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “Let’s go,” she said, as I had said before her; which left me nothing to say but goodbye to Carol.

  And “I’m sorry,” I managed that too, as Luke pushed past her on his way to the door. And it wasn’t for the rudeness of my asocial friend that I was apologising, or not that alone; nor only for that and for the greater intrusion, a part of my life thrusting once more and very much uninvited into hers. So much I had to say sorry for, to a woman who’d refused to listen. At least she seemed to be listening now. At any rate she nodded slightly, a gesture of thanks or acceptance or at least something less than the contemptuous rage of our last meeting. That was the best she could manage, beyond following us down the passage to be sure the door was closed good and hard behind us. For now, I thought it was enough.

  o0o

  Out in the street, both Luke and Suzie stood waiting for me to point the way. Luckily, we didn’t have to go by the main roads. There was a back path, past some allotments and through a tunnel under a railway embankment, that would take us out of town and roughly in the right direction. Luke must have come here along the A-roads, the way that I had brought him, the only way that he would know; I didn’t fancy such a walk myself. Leading Luke through a crowd, or on roads with heavy traffic, sounded to me like a definition of a sl
ow walk through hell.

  Down to the dead end of the street, then, and here was the footpath; and talking of hell, here also was Shaitan the cat, sitting black and neat and erect in a tussock of grass. Shaitan my cat, Carol’s cat, it just depended what perspective you took, how you cut it. Obviously Carol had custody; and with so much else gone from my life, so many other and greater losses, I’d hardly given him a thought. But I was glad to see him now, even in passing. I crouched down and held my hand out to him and sucked air gently through my teeth, making the little chirruping sounds he always came to.

  And he arched his back and hissed, and all his fur was standing up as if he were only a cartoon cat and nothing real; and not I his eyes were fixed on as one paw felt for safer earth behind him, as he backed slowly along the fence. Not I but Luke, of course Luke, though I felt bitterly to blame because I had brought Luke here.

  Luke stood stock-still, as Suzie did behind him; only Shaitan was moving, creeping blindly backwards until a fractional gap under the fence gave him a hole he could squirm through. Then he was away, sprinting through the cabbages, terror clothed in flesh. That was much as Carol had reacted, much as most people and all animals did. Off her own territory, I thought, not in her own house Carol also would have run, or at least got the hell away from Luke as fast as she could manage.

  For a fraction, it seemed to me that Luke looked utterly bereft, standing there watching where the cat had fled from him. And I thought perhaps that was why he loved trees so much, because they didn’t run, because they couldn’t.

  Then I reminded myself that this was anthropomorphism at its stupidest, trying to ascribe normal human emotions to Luke. After all, I’d never run from him, I was one of the few who felt his magnetism the other way, who felt drawn and not repulsed; and not for years had I made the mistake of ever thinking that Luke loved me.

  And indeed Luke stalked on now along the path ahead of us, and there was only bright anger in his face and in his carriage, reminding me what he was here for: that a girl had died, was dead, and she also had been one of his few, his crazy few, his band of siblings. She more so than me, even: I might have been there first, but I’d never been one with the tree-lovers, I couldn’t work up the passion. And Luke I guessed was here for justice or vengeance or whatever he wanted to call it, to call that crime home to its originator; and I’d give him all the help he needed in that good cause, and maybe he did love us after all, or why would he be so passionate about this?

  o0o

  Walking with Luke was like walking with a determined dog, not at all a social activity. So long as the route was obvious he ploughed ahead, sometimes far ahead, never a thought for companionship or conversation; as soon as there was a question over which way to go, he would stand and wait to be told.

  I’d known him wait patiently, serenely almost, though Luke was never truly serene. Today he waited furiously, pale and tense and enraged apparently by our slowness. I took to pointing the way as soon as I was sure myself, so as not to face too nearly the glare of his glacier eyes.

  Suzie and I weren’t strolling, we weren’t dawdling, this was a serious march for us as much as for Luke. Even so he left us a distance behind him, again and again; which left her free to grip my arm and talk to me as we walked.

  Or to ask questions, rather, to demand to know. “Why did he go to Carol, then, if he wanted you?”

  “Didn’t know where to find me,” I said. “Obviously.”

  “It’s not obvious.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. The way you talk about him, he knows everything.”

  “No. I told you already, he doesn’t know his way about, places he hasn’t been. He has a different kind of spatial awareness,” he used to dwell in the heavens, “he can’t get around on the ground, and he hates to fly.” She didn’t look persuaded; I tried a different way. “Take the wings off a bumble-bee, it’ll never get back to the hive. Luke’s like that. No navigational skills in two dimensions,” and God only knew how many dimensions Luke had lost. “He doesn’t see the world that way.”

  “He found Carol all right.”

  “He’s been there before.”

  “How come?”

  “I took him.” The confession earned me nothing but an anticipatory silence, well? Go on, then, I’m waiting. Took me a minute, because I didn’t like to think back to that night, it was a memory I could very happily have lost; but in the end she won. If you could call it winning, if the prize was something that anyone could want. She won the story, first time ever I’d told it to anyone but Carol.

  “It was years ago,” I said, “we’d just bought the place, me and Carol, and I think that level of commitment had us both scared shitless. At any rate we were fighting all the time, over stupid things, the way we never did; and we had a week’s holiday booked that we’d been going to spend playing house together. Nesting, you know? But we couldn’t, we’d have killed each other; so she went to stay with her parents for a few days, and I went to see Luke.”

  Young I’d been, young and grown-up both at once, car keys and house keys and so much worry in my pockets; what I needed most was a spell of total dispossession, nothing at all in my pockets or on my mind.

  So I camped with Luke, drank water and ate what he picked from the hedgerows, leaves and fungi and fruits; and after a couple of days there was an old Beetle came bumping up the track and half a dozen kids squeezed out of it, younger even than me.

  I was too young then, not wise enough to leave. So I stayed and listened to them talking horror to Luke, talking vivisection. They were students, it seemed, nice ordinary middle-class kids who smoked dope and took acid and didn’t eat meat because that was the culture they’d found when they came to college, that’s what their new friends did and so they did it also.

  How they’d come to this, how they were friends of Luke’s I couldn’t gather and didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. Somewhere, sometime they’d met, the kids had met whatever criteria Luke used, had been admitted to his circle; and today they were all abuzz with outrage and conspicuous virtue.

  None of them would do such work, they said, but a friend of a friend of theirs was a technician in the animal labs at the university’s medical school. Unbearable stories they heard from him, they said, unimaginable cruelty.

  Luke listened, nodded at the stumble-tongued examples they gave, and I thought how foolish they were, how young, not to realise that Luke had seen more cruelty than ever man could imagine. But then they came to the point of all this, they said the labs’ cages were full just now with a new term starting and they wanted to raid, they said, they wanted to smash and to rescue.

  But it had to be tonight, they said, terrible things were scheduled for the morning—because we’re worked up for it now, I thought they meant, and we’ll lose our nerve by morning—and they wanted Luke to lead them. Someone with experience, they said.

  God knows what they were thinking, or why Luke said yes. Perhaps they thought that rules of wysiwyg applied, that all they were getting was a young drop-out who lived apart from unacceptable men and did as little harm as he could to the world around him. Perhaps Luke even thought he could do that for them, he could keep his nature caged within the weak containment of his skin. He learned to do it later, after all, for the tree-protestors and almost for the cameras, falling with only that slightest hint of flight. Perhaps this evening was to be a trial run, where Luke would touch the lives of men again and pray—no, hope that all they felt was the touch of another man.

  At any rate, they did ask and he did say yes; and then the only trouble was how to get Luke from his caravan to the lab, because there wasn’t time for him to walk or run it.

  Luke hates cars with a passion, but even worse than cars he hates to fly.

  No room for him in their ramshackle Beetle, even if he’d been prepared to squash, if they’d been prepared to squash with him. Everyone in the caravan was looking at me now, and what the hell else could I do? I’d taken enough from him o
ver the years in escape and shelter, never had the chance before to give anything in return.

  “I’ll drive you,” I said. Had to go back sometime, after all. Better to spend a day or two in the house alone, before Carol came home and we started fighting again.

  o0o

  So I’d had Luke in my car, a once-and-only experience that was, and definitely not for sharing. He rode in the back for the extra space, and spent the entire journey with the window wound full down and his face pressed into the wind like a travel-sick dog; but it wasn’t the wind, I thought, that made the car so cold despite the heater on full all the way. It wasn’t the road, I thought, that made it judder so, that had the steering wheel wrench against my hands and almost had us flying off at the bumps and the humpback bridges.

  Some kind of hell-drive that was, with me never feeling quite in control of the car and going faster than I wanted, stopping harder, however lightly I touched my foot to the pedals. I wanted to tell him to behave, to sit still and leave the driving to me. But every glance in the mirror only showed me his face turned out into the air and his eyes tight shut, not to see the steel box he rode in. He wasn’t doing this, or not consciously. Things happened around Luke, that was all, and I was learning something new today, how machinery reacted to his proximity.

  Never had the chance before, never seen him get near to so much as a battery shaver. He had old broken engines rusting in his garden of trees behind the caravan, but they weren’t there to work.

  Still, we survived. We made it to the house, though I made it swearing privately that never would I drive Luke anywhere again. I’d given the kids my address as a place to meet, and as well that I had; they were meant to be following right behind my car, but they arrived fifteen minutes later than we did, eyeing me askance even as they murmured how brave I was to drive so hard on such a road, they wouldn’t like to try it.

  For brave read stupid, I understood, and shrugged and said nothing about it. Settled them in the front room with Luke, insofar as it was ever possible to settle Luke within walls; made them coffee and left them to it. They had plans to make and hours to kill, and they were welcome to use my front room for those purposes, in Carol’s absence. I wanted no closer role than that. Smashing labs wasn’t my business, I wasn’t even sure how much I sympathised.