‘What?’
‘Now! Get out! I have my life here, and it doesn’t involve any of you.’
‘What about your family?’
‘I have a family; you just met them.’
‘Is that woman your wife?’
I laughed. ‘She’s a working woman or couldn’t you tell?’
‘That girl, she’s not your daughter; you must have been fourteen when she was born.’
‘I was sixteen, actually.’
‘Even so, I know what you were doing when you were sixteen, and you weren’t fucking a whore.’
‘Get out.’
‘Why is she calling you daddy?’
‘Just leave and don’t come back. Let me live my life free of you all.’
‘But ...’
‘And give your son a message from me.’ I leaned forward. ‘Tell him to fuck off as well! He may just understand that – since you obviously don’t.’
He left, and I wept.
***********************
When Tanya came home, she found me in quite a state. She said nothing, but she didn’t go back to work as she had said she would; instead, she stayed. ‘Why are you still here?’ I murmured.
‘I was going to ask you the same question.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s very beautiful.’
I smiled. ‘Everyone says that.’
‘So what happened to you?’
‘Every family has to have a freak.’
She sighed impatiently. ‘David, we all love you very much. You have the capacity to attract love like no one else I know. You have a family. I never realised they existed. Don’t turn your back on them.’
‘I’ve no choice. You know what I’m doing. You know how dangerous this all is. I won’t put them in danger. I won’t risk their lives. They’re all I have. I love them too much.’
‘I think it’s already too late for that,’ she said.
***********************
She was right; it didn’t end there. A few days later I had an unexpected visitor. He made quite a stir and he stayed with me for a month. Everyone assumed he was my boyfriend. He was the man I called brother, my brother’s son. He came and I knew it was already too late; my family had become involved. When he went home I went with him. It was the hardest thing I had ever done; it almost killed me, literally.
Chapter 63
The truck driver keeps his own counsel. He drives his large vehicle and watches the antics of the smaller insects around him – and he smiles.
He switches on his media, listens to his music, turns up the volume – and he smiles.
He drives around the world, deals with bureaucrats and officials, completes petty paper work and trivial forms – and he smiles.
He sits back in his air-conditioned cab and looks down at the world – and still he smiles.
He smiles and he thinks. He thinks more than you can possibly imagine, because he can; he has the time and he has the leisure.
He has chosen his path. He is waiting for the call.
When he passes the road works and waves, it means something else now.
When he sees the men collecting the rubbish from the big houses and gives them a grave nod, it means something else now.
When he sees the road sweepers and gives them a wide berth, it means something else now.
When in a roadside cafe and a troop of bikers come in wet from the rain and wind, he glances across and feels different; for the first time, he feels kinship because, for the first time, it means something else.
It means something else because something else is happening.
He is waiting for the call.
He is waiting with everybody else.
***********************
September 2039
Going home was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It meant confronting my hidden past, meeting people who had only ever known the other me and pretending that I didn’t care that they were shocked at what I had become.
My brother was wonderful; after that first meeting, he accepted me completely. He made no judgements. He asked no questions. He simply accepted me. He made it easy to go home and almost impossible to come back.
But I had no choice. I had to come back and I had to come back promptly. It soon became apparent that my previous home was not a safe place to be. So, I had to hitch a lift to Scotland earlier than I had intended. Rushed plans can lead to mistakes. This one did for me. My lift decided they didn’t want a Fabian in their van and they dumped me in Bradford. It was the ethnic area and it was the middle of the night.
I found myself alone, in a city I hardly knew, on the night the police decided to clean up the streets.
Not that they needed much cleaning, Twenty-six gave us relatively few homeless. But they found a few. They found me.
The police tactics were simple. They had two choices when rounding up the drunk and the destitute: to section them or to soften them up and dump them back on the streets. Luckily for me, they chose the second option. They chose this option because the officer in charge was a bastard by the name of Skinner and he enjoyed beating the shit out of bound men. Sectioning them involved too much boring paperwork, and the whole point of the night’s clean up was to entertain his men.
I was hauled into the police station along with half a dozen other men. We were all lined up against the wall, and Skinner walked in. He was a non-descript sort of man, short, bald and strong. He had the unnerving habit of cracking his finger joints as he walked. He moved along the line of seven men. He stopped in front of me.
‘Holy shit!’ he said, looking me in the eye. He turned to one of his men. ‘We have a wild, yellow-eyed animal in our station, gentlemen!’ Everyone laughed. He leaned in close. ‘This one is mine!’ he breathed.
They dragged me into a cell for my softening up. They strung me up, and they took their clubs and whips to me. They beat me, then they left me hanging there, and then they beat me again, concentrating on all the soft parts. ‘This little sodomite was never going to have kids anyway!’ they jeered.
I did what they asked of me. I begged them to stop. Eventually they did. Then they drove us all to a wasteland and dumped our bodies. As I lay in a pool of blood, the other drunks and pen pushers clustered around me. I looked up at the circle of faces. ‘We finish the Fabian bastard off!’ said a voice.
One of them had a knife. He buried it in my side; I gasped. I could feel the blood seeping through my clothes. Another one stepped forward. He too buried his knife into my body. They were killing me; one by one, they each put their knife into me, and they would continue to do so until I was dead. The irony was not lost on me. I was going to die at the hands of substrata, at the hands of the very people I was trying to save. It didn’t matter that some of them called me a god; these men, who had just had the shit beaten out of them, had garnered enough strength to try and finish me off before going back to sleep.
I was going to die.
They weren’t particularly accurate – which was just as well. They didn’t all get a chance to place the knife in – which was also just as well. Something disturbed them. At least, I think so. I’m not sure because I lost consciousness then.
Chapter 64
I opened my eyes. Angus was looking down at me. ‘David!’ he said urgently. He never called me David. I tried to focus. My body felt numb yet full of pain at the same time. Angus was fiddling about. I could barely see him. He came back into focus. ‘David!’ he repeated.
I must be dying. ‘Am I dying?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ he said. He was wrapping bandages around me, trying to stem the bleeding. He took me in his arms. ‘But guess what? I’m not going to let you?’ I tried to smile but didn’t quite make it. I was in the back of our van. Someone had his arm wrapped around me. This wasn’t about affection. This is what we did to the discards on the edge, those who might not make it to the safe house. We did it to comfort, observe and sustain, or COSY.
Andr
ew had been sceptical about this, but the fact was COSY worked when nothing else did. It was strange to have my bright idea being used on me.
The van rocked about over rough roads, but the arm held onto me as if I was the most important person alive. I was not attached to life. I was not afraid to die; a huge part of me longed for it. But it was too soon. I hadn’t finished. I didn’t want to save a few of them; I wanted to save all of them. I didn’t care about revenge anymore. Once I had; now I just wanted them out of those places and somewhere safe, somewhere where they could lead their lives free from pain and fear. It was too soon to die.
A voice whispered in my ear. ‘Please, don’t die. We need you. You’re our inspiration. We can’t do it without you. Live, so that others can live.’ It was not the voice of a lover; it was the voice of my General. I smiled to myself. And he’s supposed to be the hard man, I thought.
***********************
When I woke up, it was not to find myself in paradise or hell but back in my own downstairs bedroom. Sonia was sitting at my bedside. ‘I think we’ve done this before,’ I whispered. I could do little else. My throat was parched. She jumped up and fetched some water. She held it to my mouth, and I drank greedily.
She sat back down again and gazed at me. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t scold you when you woke up. I promised them,’ she indicated the door, and I guessed the Mackay brothers were in the next room, ‘that I wouldn’t – but really, David!’ I waited for it anyway. ‘Why do you do it?’
I was too tired to answer; in any case, I had no answer.
‘When will you learn?’ she sobbed. ‘How could you? You nearly died, and you could be such a good man!’ She bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. I thought she had finished, but she hadn’t. She looked up again. ‘Would it make any difference if you had someone to come home to at night?’ she asked.
‘Judith’s dead.’
‘Of course.’ She sighed again. ‘Angus said he wanted to speak to you. He seems very worried about you – I’ll give him that.’
He wanted a report. He was being a good General. It was why I chose him. ‘Send him in,’ I said. She looked surprised. I amended my language. ‘Please, ask him to come in.’ She nodded miserably and left.
Angus came in warily, looked me up and down and gave a slow smile. ‘Decided to come back then?’
‘Thanks to you.’
‘What’s a good General for?’
‘How about a good friend?’
He looked at me with those eyes of his. Some have called them the eyes of a killer. Those people have never seen into his soul. I have. ‘Aye, that as well,’ he said.
‘You want my report.’
‘Time for that.’
‘Better have it now.’
‘Matrix, you’re not going to die on me now.’ I shook my head. No such luck. He frowned and asked me anyway. ‘What was his name?’
‘Whose?’
‘The bastard who arrested you.’
‘DCI Skinner.’
‘NF?’
‘I wouldn’t be here if he had been.’ Angus looked confused. ‘He was just a bastard, not a Fabian bastard,’ I said. I touched the brand on my neck. ‘If he’d been Fabian, he would’ve known I was a runaway. And he would’ve known which one.’ I touched the black spider web.
Angus nodded. ‘You must lead a charmed life.’
‘I must admit, it hadn’t occurred to me before,’ I said.
He laughed then glanced to the door. ‘Time to tell the wee lassie,’ he said.
‘Tell her what?’
‘Everything; she would be a grand addition to Bràithreachas.’
‘You must be joking!’
‘It’s time,’ he repeated. ‘We’re all agreed. She should know. She deserves it, and she could be useful.’
I was suddenly angry. ‘She’s not getting involved; it’s too dangerous!’
‘Feeling protective, are we?’
I scowled. ‘I won’t put her in danger.’
‘But have you not thought that she’s in more danger by not knowing?’
‘Frankly, no.’
‘Time to be honest, Matrix – to her and to yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you clearly have the hots for her.’ I snorted. ‘And she does for you. So, do us all a favour and tell her.’ He walked over to the door. ‘Get some sleep, Matrix,’ he said as he opened the door, ‘You need to look beautiful.’ And he walked out chuckling.
Sonia came in straight away and immediately began fussing around the bed, tucking and smoothing. ‘I hate it when he calls you that,’ she confided.
‘Calls me what?’
‘That name; it’s a wicked cartoon and an ugly name.’
‘An ugly name for an ugly man, why not?’
‘It’s not your name, that’s why not!’
‘People have been calling me that since I was a child,’ I said. I smiled softly to myself. She was right though. I’d always hated it; but now, for the first time in my life, I was hearing it from people who cared. For the first time in my life, it sounded different. It was the name of defiance, the name of retribution and of deliverance. The name Matrix struck fear into the enemy. They knew I was there. They knew I would never stop and they were afraid – and if they weren’t afraid yet, they soon would be. Bràithreachas would make sure of that.
Sonia was watching me carefully. ‘You know I love you,’ she said simply.
She had said it. I could feel the relief in her. She carried on hurriedly before I could respond. ‘I didn’t want to fall in love with a wicked man. I tried so hard not to. I tried to ignore you. I tried to forget you, and I tried to change you. I could do none of those things; I still loved you.’ She dropped her gaze. ‘I still love you. I always will.’
‘Sonia, you don’t even know me.’
‘Better than Judith!’ she snapped back.
‘Don’t compare ...’
‘I can’t keep fighting a dead woman!’ she wailed. ‘I can’t compete with her! She never knew you; she made you up. She did it to satisfy her ego. She didn’t love you the way I do because she never knew you. Don’t you see? I don’t care about your trips to the whorehouse; I don’t care about the fact that you’re a drunk and a homosexual. None of that matters to me. I love you, and I would do anything for you!’ She was shouting in her passion. ‘Are you so sure that Judith would have done the same? Are you so sure that your precious Judith wouldn’t have turned you over to the police by now – coming home like this, getting into fights and God only knows what?’
‘Leave Judith out of this – don’t say something you’ll regret.’
‘Regret! You have no idea. I’ve turned down two offers of marriage because it was you I loved. Two good men who could have made me happy, and it’s all your fault!’ She stormed out, which was just as well because no one was allowed to criticise Judith, not Sonia, not Andrew, no one, only me – because only I really knew how little she had known me or had wanted to know me.
***********************
Sonia had stormed out of my house and, I assumed, out of my life. She didn’t come back to look after me, but she told Andrew what she’d done and he took her place. She did that much at least.
Andrew said nothing, which was very wise because I wouldn’t have been listening. I was too busy thinking. It struck me that Angus had been right; I couldn’t protect her anymore. She was in as much danger in her ignorance as she would be knowing the truth; it was time she knew.
When I was back on my feet again and fully mobile, I found myself knocking on her front door – the first time I had been there since her father had died.
She opened the door, saw it was me and shut it again. I stood there, perplexed at what to do next and glanced across to the Mackay brothers, who were sitting in and around our van grinning at me.
She opened her door again and stood back. I swung into her house, manoeuvring carefully around her furniture. I waited to be
asked to sit down; she simply glared at me angrily with her arms crossed.
The house looked different; it looked fresh, smelt clean, at peace and totally neutral. Her father had gone completely, but no one had taken his place. It was not a home; it was a house.
‘I suppose you’ve come to ask me whether I’m coming to clean your house again?’ she said belligerently.
‘You really do think I’m a shit don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, Sonia, that’s not why I’m here.’
‘So, why have you come?’
‘I thought you might like to come for a trip with us.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got ten minutes to pack a bag – nothing too big. We’ll be gone two or three days.’ I shuffled out.
She followed me. ‘Are you seriously asking me to come and visit your whorehouse with you?’
I was out of the door. ‘Yes.’
She was outraged. She looked across to our van and saw Angus leaning up against its side, smoking a cigarette. ‘With them?’
I turned around to her. ‘Yes.’
‘You are joking?’
‘You have ten minutes. If you’re not out by then, we’re going without you.’
‘Give me one good reason why I should?’ she shouted at my retreating back.
I turned around again and smiled my best smile. ‘Because you’ve fallen in love with a sinner,’ I said.
She was at the van in eight minutes. I know because Stewart told her so.
***********************
We drove in relative silence. Euan and Stewart were in the back, playing silly games to amuse themselves for the trip. They had boys’ gadgets and were giggling quietly. The two brothers were close; they were close in age and enjoyed each other’s company. Angus, who was driving the van, usually kept himself slightly apart from them. He had been closest to the eldest brother Hamish. They were, by all accounts, similar in looks and temperament. When Hamish had been sent to prison, Angus had been the most affected. He was the only one in the entire family who went to the prison every month to visit him. None of the other brothers or his mother ever went there.
Angus adored Hamish and, one night when we had got drunk together and slightly maudlin, he had told me of the bungled robbery, the shot in the dark, the man who had died and about Hamish who had then walked into a police station to give himself up.
The Dream Catcher Diaries Page 41