“No,” she said. “Hurry up. Or do I have to do it for you?”
She would, she’d do that; I knew, from past experience. A few years back now, when I was seventeen and only starting to rebel; she’d crammed my feet into Docs and my arms into sleeves and dragged me out by main force, and she’d do just the same again if she chose to. And I might be older now, I might have a body significantly larger than hers, but I still wouldn’t use it against her. Couldn’t possibly.
So I stared at her, starting to sulk, feeling my grip sliding to nothing; and said, “I don’t have a helmet.”
“It’s my bike,” she snorted. “We won’t be pulled over.”
“Not the point. People have accidents, on bikes. That’s what the law’s for. I won’t ride a bike without a helmet, I’ve got too much respect for my head.”
So she picked her helmet off the table and chucked it over, and I didn’t have an excuse any more; and I went to the family meeting because that was what Hazel wanted me to do, and it had been inevitable ever since the decision was made in her hard and efficient head, same size as mine but so much stronger.
o0o
We passed a patrol car on the way, not even on the dual carriageway yet and Hazel was doing upwards of a hundred with no helmet on; and the car just went on quietly trawling the kerb, the one glance to spot who we were and they didn’t so much as look our way again, the brief time they could see us.
No sensible policeman was going to stop a Macallan in a hurry. One of the laws of nature, that; along with I always do what Hazel wants. Or you could substitute any other member of my family, more or less, in either position there. Most people did what Hazel wanted, relatives no exception; and me, I could never come face to face with any of them without kowtowing in the end. Among other notable absences in my make-up, I seemed to be missing a spine. Even my escape, my renunciation was only on sufferance; they let me go because they had no need of me. If that should change, they’d whistle me back soon enough.
As now. I couldn’t believe that they needed me, I thought that they were whistling only as a matter of form: this is a family crisis, the whole family should be here and that includes Benedict; Hazel, will you fetch him, please? And of course she’d be only too pleased to renew her influence over her renegade, her spineless twin.
Influence? Dominion, more like. And she’d always enjoyed that, Hazel. She might have left me alone, but she had never let go of the leash.
o0o
And so we came to my uncle’s house that fine and sunny Friday, and my head was snug in my sister’s helmet and hammering louder than the engine of my sister’s BMW as she raced it down the valley, down and down, all downhill from here. And I sat with my arms around her, but it was she who held me, as she always had; and I watched the swift road unwind in a hurry beneath my booted feet, and I thought it was dappled with death.
Two: My Family, and Other Cruelties of God
Actually the roads were blocked by death, near enough. There were cars parked down the private lane, all the way back to the junction; and the lane is narrow, for all that the civic authorities very kindly keep it well maintained. On four wheels, we’d never have got through to the house. Such a crush, such a gathering: even if I hadn’t known already, there would have to have been a death. Nothing else could have brought them all together this way.
Jags and Micras, old Ford Escorts and new Volvo estates: I was seeing symbols in everything, and this long line of cars said that there was nothing united about my family, nothing shared beyond the blood. Blood was enough, though. It fetched them in.
Besides, there was the family business too: what paid for the cars and kept bread on the table, the wolf from the door. Everyone had a share in that.
Everyone except me. Some weeks I ate pride more than bread, and the wolf scratched deep runnels in the paintwork. But in extremis, friends would see me through; and I’d take my friends any day, over the people who’d bred me and fed me and held me within the shelter of their strong, strong arms all the years of my childhood.
My sister’s strong arms steered her mean, lean black machine past the cars and through the high stone gateway into my uncle’s grounds. Gravel spat around us, onto lawns and flower-beds; I didn’t look back to see but the way Hazel drove, the way Hazel did everything, hard and fast and heedless, we’d be digging ditches in the drive. Not to worry, though. My uncle employed people to rake and tidy. That was how he lived, he walked a road constantly made smooth before his feet.
That was how he tried to live, at least. Might not find it so easy now. Hard to smooth away the death of a son so many years too soon, so very much out of proper order.
o0o
There were maybe a dozen people in sight as we approached the house. In twos and threes they stood about, darkly dressed, all with something of black about them. The men wore suits, even the cousins of our own generation, Martin’s cohorts, as comfortable in collar and tie as they would have been in stilettos and lace. A family in mourning, though. doing the thing properly, as my family did everything properly. Even my sister’s leathers were unadorned black; and I might be wearing Hazel’s helmet but I was wearing my own clothes: padded ski jacket in electric pink, maroon jeans with purple pockets and turn-ups, scarlet boots.
Ah, well. Maybe they’d think it was a message, maybe they’d read it right. I don’t belong here, I don’t belong with you.
They were reading something from me, at any rate: staring and glaring, treating me like an open book with dodgy illustrations. Maybe I should wave, say, “Hi, guys,” something like that. Family, after all. Cousins and aunts. Nobody would want to kiss these particular cousins, but maybe I should offer to kiss the aunts...
Maybe not. I kept Hazel’s helmet on, dark visor down. Let my clothes say what they liked, that was all the information I was giving out for free. The rest was silence. A young man’s entitled to some privacy, even from his family.
Especially from his family.
o0o
Hands in cool nylon pockets, trying to look oh so casual and not at all like a man with a Daniel complex, hi, cats, remember me? Nice den you got here, I followed my sister’s eloquent, contemptuous back through that gauntlet of gazes and on into the house.
Uncle James met us in the hallway, fat and fifty-odd, pale in his dark suit; and just for a moment, just briefly he wasn’t family at all, he was only a man whose son was dead, and I could feel for him.
But then a girl came to my elbow, to take my jacket and my sister’s helmet. She was fifteen, sixteen maybe, and it was a struggle, because I wouldn’t have seen her since she was twelve; but I felt the spark in her, my skin tingled when our fingers touched, and eventually I placed her as a second cousin some little distance removed. And my perspective shifted again. Of course Uncle James would be using cousins for his maids today, aunts no doubt for his cooks. He wouldn’t want unrelated staff in the house, people not bound by blood; this was family business, and a stranger is by definition a spy.
And that was too much access to his mind, it was all too familiar. Sympathy shrivelled, in the light of such logic. I gave up the shadowing helmet and the proclaiming jacket both, faced him as I was: nephew and rebel, in the family but not of the family, never that.
Held my hand out to shake his like a stranger, like a spy; and he took it briefly, coldly, none of the warmth due to family. No hug, no kiss of greeting for the boy who’d done half his growing up in this house, who’d been practically an adopted son sometimes when things were a little too hot at home.
“Benedict. Welcome,” each syllable hard and detached, pebbles dropped individually into silence, hard to imagine anything less welcoming. Hard to hear that from my uncle’s fleshy lips, and to see how quickly he pulled his hand back from mine.
Harder still not to do the same thing, in response or in revenge. Harder to be civilised, to say what was right and due and proper, what I owed both to the living and the dead despite all divorces.
“Uncle James
. I can’t, I can’t believe that Marty’s gone. He was such a friend to me when we were younger, it’ll never be the same world without him...”
You ought to be glad of that, his eyes accused me, the things you’ve said of the family, of men like Marty and me. And I agreed with him, or some part of me agreed; but that was all he was seeing, my rejection and my walking out. Where I stood there was a wider picture, and it had a great gaping hole torn in it, edges fraying in a bad wind.
“You’ll want to view the body,” he said, and now I couldn’t agree with him at all, no part of me wanted to view the body. But, “You’re the last,” he said, “I’ll take you up myself.” And he was already turning towards the stairs, and spineless Benedict Macallan asserted himself exactly as much as he usually did, and followed quietly in his uncle’s wide wake.
There would be a wake, I realised suddenly, a wake for Marty from now until the dawn. I hadn’t been invited, though, not for that. This was a blood meeting upcoming and I was blood, I had a duty to attend; but the mourning party after would be for true mourners only, not for the likes of me.
Not that there were any others like me. I was renegade, I was outcast, I was alone.
By my own choice, and apparently forever; and oh Laura, Laura, not fair to send me into this alone, where’s your compassion?
o0o
Up the stairs to the first landing, and I turned automatically to the next flight, thinking of Marty’s old room in the attic, thinking they would have put him there. But Uncle James was going the other way, along the corridor where I almost was a stranger, where children had never been welcomed when I had the run of this house, when I was a child. That made it easier, a little. I didn’t want to see Marty still and dead in the room where I’d seen him so often death’s opposite, so full of life, laughing or wrestling or hustling me out with hard hands and hard words and a girl mysteriously half-seen in the shadows behind him, perfume in the air.
And if they’d changed the room, or he had — if there were no posters on the walls now, no sports teams or women posed half-naked and provocative; no broken childhood toys gathering dust in cupboards; no adolescent trophies, this girl’s bra and that girl’s knickers; no clothes kicked in corners, no reek of sweat and aftershave, no Marty — I didn’t want to see that either, like an underlining that there was no Marty in the world.
o0o
I followed Uncle James, hustling a little to catch up; and he took me past half a dozen doors firmly closed, and brought me to one that stood a little open.
He pushed it wider, gestured with his head; and I hardly hesitated, hardly paused for one last breath and a momentary eye-contact, I don’t want to do this, before I went obediently in to Marty.
o0o
It was dim in there, heavy lace curtains over the windows and no lights on. My stupid hand was already reaching for the switch before I caught it and dragged it down again, feeling Uncle James’ eyes still watching me.
This must have been a guest-room ordinarily, there was nothing personal in it. Pale blue wallpaper, a couple of prints, heavy furniture with china doodahs on lace doilies, an ashtray on the window-sill. Only a single spray of flowers, white lilies and orchids on a low table by the bed.
Queen-size, the bed, and in the middle of the room; and on the bed, of course, my cousin Marty.
Naked to the waist, he was; or naked all the way, rather, but there was a sheet drawn neatly up for decency, only its weight to shadow the shape of him from the chest down.
I was surprised, I’d thought to find him in his best clothes like the rest of them, suit and tie and a flower in his buttonhole; and what surprised me more, someone had spilt ink on his shoulder.
No, couldn’t be ink. Get real, Macallan. But something there was, a black stain on his skin; and I was leaning closer, trying to make it out in this uncertain light — better to look at a little part of him than the whole, better a small puzzle than the big one, who and how and why — when someone did flick that switch on the wall behind me.
Then the light was certain, the light was definite and unambiguous and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I turned quickly, half to see and half to protest; but seeing was enough, the protest died somewhere between tongue and teeth.
It was Marty’s brother stood there in the doorway. Marty’s kid brother, young Jamie. My age, my playmate; often my shield and defender against Hazel, and for a long time my very best-loved friend.
No friend now, we had the whole family between us; and after today I thought we’d have Marty too, the way Jamie looked, the way he was looking at me. Once we used to unite against Marty, two allies under constant threat of war. Now he was going to lie between us, cold and dead and irrecoverable, like so much else.
“Go on,” Jamie said, soft and sibilant and chilling, lean and tense in his tight suit, hard-trained and utterly out of any control but his own. “Have a closer look, you were going to anyway. That’s what you’re here for, that’s why you’ve come...”
That’s why I was brought, I thought; and, that’s why he’s got no clothes on, I thought that too, suddenly seeing clearly, bright as the light around me now.
And I turned away from Jamie, more for escape than to satisfy my curiosity, because he looked too dangerous to bear. But the one led to the other, not looking at Jamie meant looking at Marty, no other choices in that room that morning; and again I looked at the shoulder more than the face, thought about the skin sooner than think about what that skin contained, cooling bones and heavy flesh already part putrescent.
It wasn’t only his shoulder, I saw that now, although his shoulder was worst affected. There were black marks on his arms too, in little patches; and on his knuckles, where his hands lay folded atop the white sheet. I thought of ink again, understanding the pattern of them suddenly.
Marty had made his first tattoo at school, done it himself with a needle set in a wine-cork and Art Department inks. He was maybe fifteen then but already a big lad, already a bruiser, loving his own reputation; when he’d picked the scabs off there was a crude face on his forearm, with a black eye and missing teeth, and THE OTHER GUY in wobbly capitals around it. I was staying in the house just then, so I got to witness the row, and the week of cold silences after; and neither of us ever let on that Marty had used my idea and my original sketch to work from.
That early amateur effort had been removed inside the month, and was never mentioned again. But Marty left school the following year and left home temporarily, to establish at least a little independence; and that was when he started paying for his tattoos.
Last time I’d seen him he’d had LOVE and HATE across his fingers, like any self-respecting thug; and he’d had any number of designs up his arms, flags and football teams, impossible women; but his pride and joy, his new acquisition, what he’d taken his shirt off to show me was a dragon.
No ordinary dragon, this. Brazen and bejewelled, it had clung to his back with all four legs and its wings outstretched, claws dug in and beads of blood dribbling down. Its tail wrapped around his buttock and arrowed into his groin, he said, though he didn’t show me that; its head peered over his left shoulder, and its eyes were laughing.
That’s how it was, that’s what he wore under his clothes last time we met. He carried a dragon on his back, between his skin and him.
No longer. What he carried now — except that he carried nothing, would never carry anything again — what marked his body was a puffy, crusted black blister where the dragon’s head had been, and lesser scabs to cover all his other tattoos.
I thought they were burns, perhaps. I thought Uncle James had come after him with a blowtorch, flames to scrub him clean of filthy pictures. Or I didn’t, I only wanted to; from first understanding, I knew that this was something entirely other, something entirely worse.
“Don’t piss about,” Jamie said behind me, coldly vicious. “Have a proper look, why don’t you?”
And his hand reached past me, gripped his brother’s chilly shou
lder and heaved.
Awkwardly, ungainly in death as he never had been in life even with all the weight he had on him, Marty shifted; Marty stirred under his brother’s ungentle hand, fell back and stirred again, finally rolled over with that fine white sheet only a tangle now between his legs.
o0o
Not good, this. Not a kind thing to do to a cousin, an old friend, an adoptive brother. But that was the crux, of course, because I wasn’t any more. That’s why he was so angry, so set against me; whatever the summons of blood, I was the closest he could find right now to someone from the other world, outside the family. And someone outside family had done this, and I represented them all...
First glance, Marty’s back looked like a Mandelbrot in bad colours, black with livid purple edges. It wasn’t, of course, the shape was wrong; but it still looked fractal, it had that regularity and the sense of depth, the feeling that however close you got you still wouldn’t reach the bottom of it.
Second glance and it just looked foul, it looked like a dreadful way to die.
The hard smooth crust of black scab had fractured under his weight, shattered almost, into a craquelure that showed harsh red in the cracks. Maybe it wasn’t his weight that had done that after all, maybe it was his writhing and bucking as he died; because he surely must have done that, he would never have gone easy and this must have hurt.
Whatever this was, that much I was ready to bet on, that it must have hurt. My cousin Marty, whose major ambition in life was to learn how to eat beer-glasses for fun and profit, who’d hold his finger in a lighter-flame for effect and laugh as the blister came up after; I was ready to bet that he’d screamed as these blisters came up.
“Jamie?”
“What?”
“How did they, how did they ever do this?”
“Don’t know,” he said, softening a little suddenly, standing beside me; allowing the question, allowing me to be us instead of them. “Nobody knows. Allan’s on his way, though. He’ll find out.”
Dead of Light Page 2