Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  The boy is actually pleased to see me.

  “Marty,” I say.

  I’m not prepared for his voice. “Hi Lola,” it says, and it’s hoarse, scoured, as if someone took a tool and scraped and scraped it dry. They said he could talk again; the doctors said he had his voice back. They lied. This isn’t his voice.

  “How are you?” Marty says.

  Marty thinks I’m a grown-up. I have no business showing him a weak face.

  “Well enough, kiddo,” I say. “Good to see you sitting up again.”

  He smiles back. I wish I’d brought flowers. “Doctor says my voice come back fine.” He chokes on the C of come, swallowing the previous word.

  “How are you bearing up, kid?” I say. I say bearing up rather than how are you. Bearing up is what he’s going to have to do.

  Marty shrugs. “Okay.” His face is pale; his eyes don’t quite meet mine when he says this.

  “Managing okay? I mean, apart from the injuries and the nightmares?”

  He gives me a startled, caught-out look.

  “We all have nightmares, Marty.” I lay my hand on his foot. It’s as close as I can get to gentleness.

  Marty bites his lip. If he had his voice I think he’d say something. There’s nothing he can say, though, not really. What they did to his throat is keeping him from filling the air with polite chit-chat.

  “This is just what happens,” I say into the silence. “You learn to live with it.”

  He plucks at the blanket.

  “I know,” I say, “the last thing you want is some patronizing woman telling you your life’s going to be no good.”

  Marty makes a whispering sound, noncommittal.

  I draw hospital air into my lungs. “I’m sorry about what happened,” I say. “It was mostly my fault.”

  “S’okay,” Marty croaks. “Mine too.”

  “Well,” I grip his foot, “you’d have been better armed if you hadn’t listened to me. Except you didn’t have much choice in that either.”

  “Nor did you,” Marty says. He speaks quietly. He could just be being friendly, or it could be he’s already resigning himself. With so few words, it’s hard to know.

  I breathe in again. “We’ve got one of the prowlers who did it,” I say. “Not the other ones. We’re checking hospitals for people coming in with a silver-bullet injury, the one you shot in the leg, but nothing yet.”

  Marty doesn’t say anything. It’s quiet as a moon night in here.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Your throat will heal up, and you’ll be okay. You’ll just have a few scars. Maybe you can grow a beard.”

  Marty feels his face. He has such a sweet smile.

  “I’m sorry.” I keep on saying it.

  The hand feeling his young-skinned, beardless face shivers in the air. Marty gives it a hunted look, clenches it and drops it by his side. He gives me a look to see if I noticed.

  I’m sitting right here, I can’t pretend I didn’t. “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It’s just catcher’s twitch.” I try to make it sound minor.

  “I’m going to have that?” Marty’s voice comes out in a thin wail.

  I pat him, cursing myself. I should have ignored it. “Everyone gets it. It passes. Anyway, it’s not such a bad thing. If a shrink objects to it, then you just get some moon nights off. That can’t be bad, right, kiddo?”

  Marty bites his lip. I shouldn’t have said anything. There are twitchers in every building. You see them, restless, contorting, their faces rippling constantly like a puddle when it rains. Most of us are nice to them, most of us know it’s one way we could end up, but they’re not popular. Talking to them feels ill-fated. And Marty’s not out of his teens; he’s a baby, still not sure of his looks, his manner, his luck. I don’t see him getting many dates if he gets the twitch.

  “Everyone gets it sometimes,” I tell him. “Ask around. Me included, one time. It passes.” It was only for a few hours I had it.

  I remember hospital sheets, a thin pillow too small for its case. Moldings around the light fitting in the ceiling, and no lightbulb in it. I stared at those moldings for hours. The pain was hanging over me, threatening, just an inch away from my flesh, and if I moved, I knew it might settle back in. I kept almost moving, and then stopping. Then my face contracted and I felt it setting in. The left side of my face was tugging, buzzing. Twitching. I pulled myself out of bed, bandages trailing, and stared at myself in the mirror, watching my left eye jump, standing straight-backed. I stood there for three hours, breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, staring at the eye. My stitched-up flesh pulsed, and my legs went numb, but I did not go back to bed. I stood on my cold feet, watching. I don’t let myself remember any other pain. Three hours, and I made it go away.

  “Yeah?” says Marty, and I reenter the hospital, the present day.

  I can’t look at such hope. “Yeah,” I say, with as much firmness as I can invoke. “You’re going to be just dandy.”

  It isn’t long before a nurse comes along and ushers me out. I get halfway down the ward before I remember that Paul Kelsey is waiting for me.

  The nurse gives me a look as I go back for him. I let him. Of the things I could feel right now, feeling ridiculous is the easiest.

  Kelsey is waiting patiently at the end of Marty’s bed. The curtains have been drawn again. “Sorry,” I say, and we go out together, the nurse hanging over us until we get out into the corridor.

  We stand in the elevator. I don’t have a thing to say.

  “What’s catcher’s twitch?” It’s a shock to hear a healthy male voice after Marty’s husked-out croak and my subdued alto.

  “You were listening?” I snap before I can stop myself.

  Kelsey bites a fingernail. “Well, I was right on the other side of the room.”

  “And you can’t bother to pretend you didn’t hear?”

  “Oh.” This seems to clear the matter up for him. I can’t believe I said anything so stupid. “Sorry.”

  I glare at him, and he keeps looking at me. He shrugs, looking helpless.

  I steady myself on the elevator wall. I may as well tell him. “What it sounds like,” I say. “We get worked over by lyco shrinks once a year to see if we’ve got it. It isn’t always much, just a twitching eye or a shaking hand. It’s not that uncommon, really. No one deals well with dogcatching, at least no one you can trust. The ones who don’t get bothered by it, they’re the people you should be worried about. And it passes.” I hold on to that thought. “It does pass.”

  “That’s okay then, isn’t it?”

  I can’t have him think Marty’s making a fuss about nothing. I lower my voice a little, speaking carefully. “It’s not good if it gets into your brain. You can get paranoid, unreliable. Not so useful anymore. I guess you’d call it posttraumatic syndrome or something like that. There…There have been incidents.”

  “Oh.”

  The bell rings, and the elevator door opens. We step out, head toward the exit. I can feel my heart beating all through my chest and stomach.

  We get as far as the foyer, and then stop. I lean against the ocher-painted wall, next to a plastic-coated sign warning me about the dangers of meningitis. There’s a picture on it of someone cradling their head in their hands.

  I lean against the wall, rest my head against it.

  “He’ll be okay,” says Paul Kelsey. I hear him through my closed eyes. At the sound of his voice, I lift my head up and look at him.

  “Kelsey,” I say. “Do you have any scars?”

  “Scars?”

  All I can do is say it again. “Do you have any scars?”

  He keeps looking at me. “I’ve got one on my head, I guess. Under my hair. Hit my head on a window frame…it’s not a very interesting story. Look.” He bends his head, parts his hair. There’s just a little glimmer of white among the black locks.

  “Big ones? Any scars over two inches long?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, looking at me. Curious
.

  I inhale, draw a deep, long breath, and look back at him. “Why don’t you ask me out to dinner?”

  EIGHT

  We’re huddled into a little alcove, white-painted bricks and red-cushioned seats. It’s dark in the restaurant. Mood lighting, or just forty-watt bulbs. There’s a candle on the table, a red one stuck into a wine bottle already thick with trickles of melted wax, and we actually need it to see. As I pull out a cigarette, Paul reaches out and picks up the bottle to light it for me.

  “Thank you.” I find that as I say this, my shoulders untense a little. It’s been so long since I was polite.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Want one?” I proffer the pack.

  He shakes his head.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re a nonsmoker.” Lyco or not, I hope he smokes. He has to have vices. I can’t get along with someone who doesn’t have vices.

  “I…” He plays with the wax on the bottle. He isn’t fidgeting; for some reason it really does interest him. “I used to smoke. Just about everyone I work with does, after a while. But I kept waking up in the night.” He detaches a little red stalactite and fingers it.

  “Craving or coughing?” Both of these are situations I know.

  “Craving, mostly. It was more that if I woke up, rather than just going back to sleep like a sensible man, I’d decide that I wanted a cigarette instead.” He looks rueful, as if this habit of his is beyond his understanding.

  “So you quit?” I blow the smoke away from him.

  “No.” He sighs. “That would have been making a production of it. I would have got fed up with not being allowed any cigarettes, I would have just ended up smoking again. I made a pact with myself. I could smoke, but I was only allowed to smoke Gauloise brand.”

  I cough, a giggle entangling itself in my mouthful of smoke. I don’t know why this seems so funny. “Gauloise? They go with artistic temperament and iron lungs, don’t they?”

  “Yeah.” He smiles, like he’s achieved something. “They’re not very nice. And I feel like a jerk smoking them. It kind of discouraged me.”

  I let myself laugh, pressing back against the hard, smooth wall. I’m still shaky but it feels good to laugh. Some of the cold starts to leave me.

  He’s still toying with his little piece of wax. He turns it round, rolling it to and fro. His fingertips are a little weathered, flat at the ends like a workman’s.

  “Enjoying your piece of wax?” I say.

  He looks at me. There’s something ingenuous about his expression, and I wish I hadn’t said that. Why am I bothering him about the wax? He can play with it if he wants to.

  Then he lifts it up and shows it to me. “Look how wavy it is,” he says. It’s a bumpy piece of wax, uneven on one side because it’s set in droplets. I suppose it’s kind of pretty, if you’re determined to find things to be pleased about.

  “It’s a nice shape,” I say. It’s as easy to say something nice about it as something sarcastic.

  “Here, feel how smooth.” He takes my hand and touches it to the surface. A little nub of wax presses into my skin, and his fingertips are resting lightly on my thumb. Our hands stop. Both of us sit and look out, not at each other but at our touching hands, raised high in front of us, holding on to a scrap of red candle.

  One of us has to pull away. I’m about to lower my hand, because if someone has to break the moment I’d rather it was me, when he takes hold of my fingers. He picks up the index finger, then releases it and takes the middle one, handling it as if it were candle wax, studying it. Then he spreads my hand over his like a palm reader.

  I look away. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a non’s hands before,” I say. Because my palm is lying open across his, smooth-skinned, a tenderfoot palm, unmistakably bareback.

  “I’ve seen this one,” he says, playing with it. “You showed it to me the first time you saw me, remember?”

  I stare into my lap. I showed him my hands to make him go away. Is he reminding me of that?

  He bends the fingers back a little. “You’re double-jointed,” he says. His voice is quiet.

  My heart speeds up. How can I be so exposed when it’s only my hand? “Only my fingers,” I say. “My thumb doesn’t bend at all.”

  Paul tests it, finds it straight, and lays his own next to it. His thumb bends back at the joint. Hitchhiker’s thumb, I’ve heard it called.

  I touch his hand, turn it over. It’s callused at the edges, the palm is tough-skinned. A lyco’s hand. I see hardened palms at a distance on every stranger in the world. At a distance. He has a funny-shaped hand, this man, the palm narrows at the top so it’s a sort of spade shaped. A callused hand. A funny-shaped hand. He’s letting me touch it. Faintly, cautiously, I run a finger across it.

  Skin. Dry and warm, a little ridged. My fingertip slips easily across it as across a polished surface. I reach the end of it, and at the edges of his palm it softens. There’s a crease in between his thumb and index finger where it folds, a wrinkle of flexible skin, and my fingertip sinks into it, immersed in fine, pliable flesh.

  I’m shaking again. My eyes are unfocusing, my eyelids weigh down and I can feel my lips pressing against each other. This is too much closeness. I take hold of his hand, grasp it to stop it from searching my own any further, to stop me from searching his. And I’m sitting in a cheap restaurant, holding hands with a man.

  He studies our hands for a moment. He can do anything here. He could keep hold of me, could push me away, pull me closer. I don’t know what I want him to do.

  What he does, I would not have been able to guess. He raises my hand to his mouth, kisses it. Just a light kiss, like a gentleman kissing a lady’s hand in greeting. And then he gives it back to me.

  I take my hand back into my lap, shield it. My head is full of silence.

  Risking a sideways glance at Paul, I see him bite his lip, then rub his forehead. “Well,” he says. “I guess that’s a start.”

  Of what, I want to say, but there’s no way I can say it. If you’re walking over a frozen lake, you don’t strike the ice to see if it’s stable.

  I sit without saying anything, hands folded in my lap. Symmetrical.

  After a minute of no speech, Paul elbows me. “Hello?”

  I jump. “Yes.”

  “I haven’t killed the conversation, have I?”

  He doesn’t look embarrassed. If he went all shy and inhibited now, that would be bad, because I can’t handle someone more awkward than me, but his expression reassures me. I think he just wants to know.

  “No.” I shake myself. “Just—taking a pause.”

  “Okay.” This seems to make sense to him, which is more than it does to me.

  “Okay,” I say. I can’t think of anything to talk about.

  “Do you think that’s the waiter?” He’s distracted by a little man in a red shirt carrying some plates by us.

  That’s good. I can talk about the waiter. “What, the one carrying the plates? Give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I don’t think they’re in a hurry to feed us.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He tilts his head to one side as if listening. “I’m thinking about it. Yeah, I am.”

  “Thinking about it?”

  He raises his hands in the air. “I haven’t eaten today, I think. At least, I don’t remember eating. I’m hungry now I think about it.”

  He says that, and I find I’m hungry, too. “I didn’t either. I had an apple for breakfast, I think.” What I did in the cells this morning comes back to me, and I know why I lost my appetite. I push it out of my mind and look back at Paul. Yes, I’m hungry. Suddenly I’m really hungry.

  “I’ve got a friend,” he informs me with a rather wide-eyed sincerity, “who says you have to eat bananas if you don’t have time to eat proper food.”

  This is easy talk; this I can handle. My body slackens in a rush. “Fond of bananas, is he?”

  “He says they’re slow-release energ
y. You get less hungry.” The look on his face suggests that he’s been told that several times, quite forcefully.

  “Oh. I’ve got a friend like that.” Though Bride will often make me share her chocolate bar to stop herself from eating it all, every now and again she gets an idea for my improvement in her head. “A few months ago she decided that I should eat oatmeal for breakfast, for basically the same reasons as your banana man,” I tell Paul. “She kept getting me samples in the hopes I’d find a brand I liked. She thought I was unhappy because—” Dear God, how did I come to say that? I backpedal with cautious haste. “If—if I was in a bad mood or wasn’t lively, she thought I must be hungry. It got so that I couldn’t tell her I was feeling run-down, or she’d tell me to eat oatmeal.”

  “Mm.” Paul leans his head back against the wall. Up close, he’s a little scruffier than I thought he was at first. There are rough patches on his neck where he hasn’t managed to shave properly. “You know,” he says, “I always thought I’d like bananas more if I wasn’t supposed to eat them. Hmp. You should have told her you’d eaten the oatmeal and you felt worse.”

  “You think that would have worked?”

  “Well, it did for me.” He gives a half laugh. “This friend of mine kept on at me about bananas, so I thought I’d try it. I made a three-course meal. Salad with bananas, and then banana curry—”

  “Banana curry?”

  “It’s nicer than it sounds. You fry onions and spice and add bananas and then yogurt—anyway. I had banana curry for a main course, and then a banana crumble for dessert.”

  “Your greengrocer must have thought it was his birthday.”

  “He did give me kind of a funny look. I think he thought there was no honest purpose that could need that many bananas.”

  I giggle again. I sound like a schoolgirl.

  “I think I thought I’d better make up for my bananaless life and have loads.”

  “So what happened?”