Dispossession
Page 36
o0o
Later, after storm and tempest came the inevitable calm; and she lay with her head on my chest, idly licking salt from my nipple, and said, “Your mum phoned, by the way.”
“Did she?” It was hard to drag my mind back, to start asking questions again. I was infinitely weary, infinitely comfortable; yesterday was behind us, and I wished it could stay that way.
“Yeah. She said she’s been to see Nolan, and he told her everything.”
Of course he did. She wouldn’t have offered him the choice, any more than Suzie was offering it to me. My hand made a suggestion to her spine, leave it till later, but she just grunted, shifted a little and went on determinedly.
“They had this scam they’d been running, he told her, Deverill and Mrs Tuck between them, they’d been at it for years. Something to do with smuggling gold; they bought it on the continent, brought it into the country in Scimitar vans and sold it here. That way they could dodge the VAT, she said. Only Nolan didn’t trust Mrs Tuck, he thought she might be ripping Deverill off; so he hacked into her computers to check up on her, and figured out that she was bringing hard drugs in from Amsterdam on the same runs. He knew Deverill would go ape about that, he’d seen him kill a woman for dealing drugs on his premises, and another just for knowing about it and keeping quiet. But he was scared to blow the whistle himself, he’d already guessed it was Mrs Tuck who killed Jacky, just for being a nuisance to her business. Any way this went, it was going to end with killing, he thought, and he just wanted to protect himself. So he set it up to look like he’d pinched all that money, and then he put this dossier together, apparently, with enough about Scimitar to get the Customs to run an investigation. He reckoned he’d got Deverill covered, he said, and he’d be safe enough himself in Spain. He thought she’d never know where the leak had come from.”
“Uh-huh.” That was more or less the way I’d guessed it. “So what did he do with the dossier?”
Oddly, she giggled. Then, “He put it all on a computer,” she said, “and he sent it to a solicitor by e-mail. Anonymously. Someone he didn’t know, someone dead straight, who he was sure would pass it all on to the right people.”
Oh, fuck. “Me?”
“Yeah. You. Ellie talks about you, you know. Boasts about you. Her son the solicitor. She wouldn’t tell you, but she’s dead proud.”
Hard to believe, but let that go. I was busy remembering.
“Wait a minute, I did get something—but that was months ago, before Christmas.”
She was nodding cheerfully. “Just at the time he flitted, yes? He said it was the last thing he did, before he went.”
“Yes, but it was all encoded, I couldn’t read it.”
“That’s right. He’s a computer freak, of course he put it in code. If Mrs Tuck ever heard that the leak went to the Customs just when Nolan went to Spain, his life wouldn’t be worth fuck. He set it up with an engine, I think your mum said, so that it would all unravel itself later, when he was safely in jug and excommunicado and couldn’t possibly be accused of leaking things he couldn’t possibly have known about.”
Yes. The gobbledygook had come with one instruction in clear, to save it all on a floppy until February, then put the disk into a cold machine and switch on. Weird, but solicitors do get asked to do some weird things; I’d done exactly what I was told, with a live tendril of curiosity running in my mind all through January to make sure I didn’t forget.
And clearly I hadn’t forgotten, though I didn’t remember now. I must have run the program pretty much on the first day I could; seen the information decode, read the dossier, and...
“Bastard.”
“What?”
“Lindsey Nolan, that’s what.” Chicken-hearted, chickenshit Lindsey Nolan, who was so concerned about his own safety he can’t have given much thought to my mother’s. I did that for him. I’d have had two separate strands coming together in my head, in my life at pretty much the same time, Nolan’s dossier and my own sighting of Marlon Thomas who was meant to be dead, for whom some other boy had died. And then, what, most likely my mother’s traditional Christmas card arrived, traditionally six or seven weeks late, with all her news to bring me up to date; and no question but that the news would have included her screwing Nolan. She’d have loved the notoriety of that.
And if Mrs Tuck ever learned that the leak that exposed her had reached Customs via a solicitor whose mother had been bonking Lindsey Nolan, she was going to add two and two and come up with an answer that was totally, fatally wrong; and the inevitable consequence of her mathematics would be Ellie very quickly, very nastily dead.
So no, I hadn’t passed the dossier on to Customs or anyone else. I’d stashed it somewhere safe, undoubtedly—should’ve gone for that talk with your bank manager, Jonty, he’s probably got it in his vault—and set myself up to look like a patsy in her eyes, a man who knew nothing, was no danger at all. Giving her a message, like son like mother, neither one of us any kind of threat.
Meanwhile I’d gone on digging into Scimitar, learning all I could, most likely stashing any physical evidence alongside Nolan’s to keep it safe until I had enough to be absolutely certain. What I’d have been trying to put together would be a dossier of my own, something that could go anonymously to the police with enough facts and figures to have Mrs Tuck and all her crew arrested and tried and sent to jail without ever involving me. So much evidence, so many different facets that I wouldn’t have Nolan’s worry, there’d be no obvious track back to where it had all come from. And then maybe I’d have taken Ellie off round the world and picked up some plastic surgery en route to make assurance doubly sure, change our names and our faces both, protect the ones you love...
o0o
Now it was Suzie’s fingers on my skin, making slow, gentle suggestions that I was happy to fall in with. No hard weather this time, everything leisurely, tender, laughing; and afterwards she nestled close again, going nowhere, and said, “Still wondering why you married me, then?”
“No.”
She chuckled contentedly, and reached across me to where a half-smoked pack of cigarettes lay on the floor with an ashtray and too many stubs, evidence of how anxious she’d been this morning.
I watched her light up, and thought, It was because I didn’t love you, kitten. I’m sorry...
That was another, the last and in some way the greatest of my recent insights, memory or logic doing its wicked and unwelcome thing in my head. Protect the ones you love, my overriding impulse: and I’d loved Carol, and had to protect her somehow from Scimitar’s casual brutality. Even if she suspected me, Mrs Tuck had to be made certain I’d said nothing to Carol; and the best way to be sure of that was to leave her. Leave her big, leave her publicly and permanently.
And I’d been manipulating a friendship with Suzie, getting close to her to learn all I could about her brother and her brother’s death; and Suzie had had the ill luck to fall in love with me, so what better way to be convincing than to seem to do the same with her, in a coup de foudre that had me marrying her in ridiculous haste?
Like mother like son, I thought acidly: sleep with the girl for information, marry her to win protection for someone else...
“You’ve gone all quiet. What are you thinking?”
“I’ll trade favours with you,” I said slowly.
“What?”
“I promise I’ll never, ever tell you what I was thinking, if you give these up. Right now and for good.” And my hand stretched out to encompass her cigarettes.
She looked at me, her face puckered, she blew a cloud of smoke right at me; she said, “I’ll be horrible. For months.”
“Nothing new there, then.”
No fist this time, no kick on the ankle, not even a scowl and a promise of later retribution. Just a longer pause for thought, and then, “Can I just finish this one first?”
“You can do what you like. You always do.”
“Yeah. Right.”
And she stubbed the c
igarette out, barely smoked; and folded her hands around mine in a silent permission, and together we crushed those fags into a scrambled mess of card and cellophane, shreds of paper, shreds of tobacco.
o0o
Something else I’ll never tell her, how surprised I was that she would do that, that she could let me keep my secrets and take me so utterly on trust. Lives pivot, I suppose, about such moments; or we find it convenient to believe that they do, that monumental changes hang on quite obscure hooks.
I don’t want to kiss someone who tastes like my mother, I could have said in justification, only that she never gave me the chance. Watching us, watching her work my hands like a puppet’s, I saw her again as someone unknown, unknowable, utterly out of my ken. Only a touch of existential wonder: another second and she was grunting, scowling, brushing and blowing the debris off my skin and off the sheet with a fierce concentration that was instantly and yearningly familiar to me, that had me laughing once again and reaching to redirect her hands, her mouth and her concentration too.
o0o
Even as I did that, though, I remember thinking that that moment must surely prefigure others, that there would never come a time that I could be completely sure of her; and there at least I was right, I had her absolutely.
Sometimes I like to think I’m getting to know her well, but dream on, Jonty. Some mysteries are fractal: doesn’t matter how deep you go, they just go deeper. You can engulf the whole heart, but you never can come to the core.
Every day, every day I wake up with a stranger.
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Copyright & Credits
Dispossession
Chaz Brenchley
Book View Café Edition October 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-206-8
Copyright © 1996 Chaz Brenchley
Cover design by Jean Rogers http://www.cornwellinternet.co.uk/
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About the Author
Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers and several fantasy series, under the names of Daniel Fox and Ben Macallan as well as his own. Chaz has recently moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.
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Sample Chapter: Dead of Light
Dead of Light
Chaz Brenchley
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Book View Café Edition
April 2010
ISBN: 978-1-61138-140-5
Copyright © 1995 Chaz Brenchley
One: Good Night Marty
It was a good night, the night my cousin Marty died.
Not a great night, by definition: a great night would see me in bed with Laura, sated and sleepless and sublime. I didn’t have great nights. By definition.
A good night, though. That, for sure.
Good night, bad bad morning.
o0o
Actually we’d been on a rage that evening, pre-arranged: Rick and Angie, Dermot and Vanessa, Colin, Laura dark and lovely and me. Two medics, two linguists, one lit-freak, one agric and one fine artist, not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily in any order, rarely the same order from one term’s end to the next. Always something of a group, though, always coming back together at the last, however often or however violently we might fall apart betweentimes.
Just then we were a peaceable kingdom, two steady couples and three singletons and not a quarrel among us, not a bone to be picked, seemingly no tensions: only my own long hunger that I’d long since learned to hide. To tell truth I was never sure if any of them even remembered, these good close friends of mine.
It was Laura who’d phoned that day — or at least had phoned the upstairs neighbour, who’d come down to fetch me and then unashamedly listened in, her perk for the service — Laura who’d set this particular ball to roll. “Coming out to play, Ben?” she’d said; and not a question, that, it was a command. Not allowed, to say no to that particular invitation. Impossible, in any case, to say no to her.
So I only asked when, and where. Where was Albuquerque, a glossy, glitzy video bar, far too pricey for every day but Laura didn’t, wouldn’t talk to me every day and this was a rage anyway, we wouldn’t be there long; when was six o’clock, cocktail hour. “If you’re going to mix your drinks,” she said, “which we are,” she said, “you might as well start with a mixture. Don’t be late.”
“Would I?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “you wouldn’t. Not you,” and for a moment she sounded wistful, almost, and I thought that maybe one at least of my good friends did remember. She ought to, she of all of them, she had most cause. She was the cause, damn it (but never damn her, never that; all unwitting, it was none of it her fault), she was the be-all and end-all, she ought at least to remember that.
o0o
I was early and she was late, and that might have been deliberate but probably wasn’t. We spent enough time on our own together, no need to get paranoid about this, Macallan. Except that love is paranoid, it has to be, that’s how it works. She doesn’t want to be alone with me, my sweetly treacherous mind was telling me, she’s hanging back to be sure the others are here. And maybe she was, but there could be other reasons. She always liked to make an entrance, Laura.
And she certainly did it that night, she swept in like a star, a constellation of one. Dark star, all in black tonight and radiant, pulsing, dangerously electric. Touched us all where we stood at the bar, a pat on the bottom or a squeeze of the shoulder; I got a fist in the ribs, when I passed her the drink that stood waiting.
“Don’t get clever, Macallan,” she said, growling, scowling, sipping.
“I know what you drink,” I said, and what you like best to eat, and to wear, and to dance to; I know your shoe size and your bra size and the size of your slim, slim waist. “What’s your problem?”
Which was tempting fate, perhaps, she just might be in the mood to answer that; but no, she let me off easy. She only said, “Don’t take me for granted, right?” as if I ever would or could or had the grounds to, and clinked her glass privately against mine before she drank again.
Too many messages in that, too complex to work out in company; or else there was nothing at all, just a brief light-hearted interchange between two friends in a bar at the start of a long light-headed evening. I smiled, toasted her silently, more with my eyes than my glass, and turned to talk to Angie; and if Laura didn’t know how hard that was for me, to turn those few inches from one friend to another — well, it was only one more small entry in the very comprehensive lists of things that Laura didn’t know about my sad life, the long sad years before I met her and every sad and solitary hour since.
If she didn’t know.
o0o
It’s a short step from Albuquerque to Milan. Or in this case il Milano, which is the best Italian restaurant in town, and therefore the one that knows us best. We got our regular table and our regular waiter, young Gino with the big eyes and the cherubic smile, the party soul and just as well his mother’s in Treviso, she wouldn’t want to see what we’ve made of her cute son or what he does for fun these days. She really, really wouldn’t want to see it.
Two litr
es of the house red to get us started, orders for gamberoni — “shells on, for Christ’s sake, Gino, I shouldn’t need to tell you that, where’ve you been, sodding Treviso?” — and antipasti and sardines; and the cigarettes came out while we were waiting, and already the lights were starting to shine a little brighter, we were sharp and witty and laughing loud, we loved ourselves and each other and too bad if the rest of the world didn’t love us, what the hell did they know?
o0o
No need to hurry: no pressure from the staff, and we weren’t going anywhere that wouldn’t wait for us. So we ate through the menu, and idled over espressos and liqueurs, amaretto or sambucca a la mocha, pale blue flames and three coffee-beans floating, “like drowned flies,” Vanessa said, because she always did say that, it was the ritual.
And then it was out into the street and into the first pub we came to, one quick pint and on to the next; and now we were hurrying suddenly, last orders like a whip to sting us on. Not a problem, last orders, this was a rage and we weren’t going to stop, we weren’t going home at eleven o’clock like good little children ought. It was a challenge, that was all, something to be defied, to be stared down and defeated.
o0o
After the pubs, the clubs. We wanted to dance, we needed to dance; with such a load aboard, on such a night, we needed to move and sweat in a hard light, we needed each other’s hot bodies as a counter to our own.
Rites of Passage is a queer club, by and large; Gay Rites they call it, as they would. But they’re a tolerant crowd, they give us rights of passage, in and out as we choose most nights and welcome on Thursdays. This was a Thursday; a good rage doesn’t happen by chance, it just has to feel as if it did.
So we pulsed and thundered, music in our bones and every cell awoken. Between dances we drank Red Stripe viciously cold and straight from the cans, and then hauled each other back to the dance floor again. And yes, I danced with Laura, how not? Been doing it for years. Warm body, fine bones, skin oiled with her own sweat and mine and five hundred others’, the air was sodden with it. And oh, it was cruel to hold her, separated by so little and so much; and oh, what the hell, it was just my life, that was all. And so much better than the other thing, not to dance with her, not to see or speak, not to touch or hold or sweat with her at all.