Dead of Light

by Chaz Brenchley

  “Talent,” I said. “Whoever did that to him had talent.” Unusual talent, to be sure, and more refined than anything I’d seen before, but talent none the less.

  “Yes. And you know what that means, Benedict Macallan?”

  “Yeah.” I was a good boy, me, or I had been once. I knew my catechism. “It means we’ve been wrong all these years. It means we’re not alone after all, we’re not the only ones...”

  And more than that, it meant whoever else was out there had come looking for us; and they weren’t friendly, and we didn’t have the first idea who they were...

  Six: Driving to Despair

  It was them and us, as ever: only that them had suddenly become us again, or seemed so. Particularly when I got back to Laura, and found Jamie chatting up my girl.

  Felt like coming home, that did. Felt like I’d never been away. All the fruits to the victor and the sweets to the strong, that was in the family catechism also, always had been; and I’d never been strong, rarely victorious.

  Already wasn’t either, with Laura. Folly even to think of her in those terms, as my girl, the one thing she indisputably was not. And it seemed nothing but normal to discover Jamie standing too close to her, concentrating too much, giving her more attention than he ought on such a day, in such a place as this. Likewise nothing but normal to see how she allowed it to happen, where with any other near-stranger she’d be backing off, powering down fast, shutting him altogether out.

  “Ben.” It was Jamie who noticed me first. He smiled and took an easy pace away from her, making room for me; but that was nothing to do with ceding territory, or acknowledging a prior claim. It was an expression of power and utterly Macallan, a message to Laura only: Look, he was saying, I’m interested, but not that interested. I write the definitions here, I set the parameters. Your choice, to accept that or reject it; but either way, it’s the last and only decision to fall to you.

  And there was a twitch of disappointment to her face as he took that step back, as he gave her space to breathe in; and I’d seen this so often before, and I knew what happened after, and I couldn’t bear it. Not for her, not for Laura...

  o0o

  “You can’t go,” I said, on the bus going home. “Not with him, not a Macallan. For God’s sake, Laura,” trying to set some parameters myself, trying to exercise a little power on my own behalf and hers, “you couldn’t be so stupid. You mustn’t. I’ve told you what they’re like, I’ve told you and told you...”

  “I’m curious,” she said, “that’s all. What’s wrong with that? You’ve been talking about them all this time, of course I’m curious to see them for myself. Who wouldn’t be?”

  Almost anyone else in this town wouldn’t be, I thought, they’ve all got more sense, they’re all scared shitless. Seeing Macallans for themselves, in the flesh, is the very last thing they’re curious to do, and quite right too. But I couldn’t say that aloud, she’d only look on it as a challenge.

  “I don’t talk about them,” I protested weakly. “Except to warn people, I mean. I never talk about them...”

  “You just think you don’t. You’re obsessed, Ben. You’re on about it all the time, how they run this town, how they’re behind everything that happens. Even when you’re not saying anything, I can see you thinking about them. And you do things just because they wouldn’t, or because they wouldn’t approve. Your whole life’s still mediated by being a Macallan. It’s just that these days you’re trying to be a bad Macallan, because you know you’ll never make a good one. Striving for the opposite only confirms the potency of the original state.”

  Oh my dear, darling Laura. She talked like that sometimes, when her psychology textbooks got the better of her. When she forgot about the sympathy thing, when she was irritated enough to go for honesty and just say what she saw.

  Oh my dear, darling, clear-sighted Laura...

  “And that being so,” she added, a little more gently and a lot too late, “I’m entitled to be curious, aren’t I? About my friend’s obsessions?”

  “That’s not,” I said thickly, “that’s not why. Is it? That’s just camouflage. You’re only trying to make me feel better.”

  “All right, yes. I’m trying to make you feel better. That’s allowed, isn’t it? That’s legitimate? It’s not as if I have to do it, I’m not obliged. You don’t have any lien over my activities. Try being grateful, why don’t you? Just for once?”

  “Grateful? Christ...”

  “Or if you can’t do that,” and she was pulling herself back now, reining in the sharpening anger and making one last effort to keep things peaceable between us, “at least try being sensible. It’s not like he asked me for a date or anything,” with just a hint of wistfulness in her voice, as though her curiosity stretched further than she were willing to admit even to herself. “I only said I’d go, we’d go,” touching my hand where it gripped the back of the seat in front, “I said we’d go out for a drink with him, for his birthday. What’s wrong with that, for God’s sake? It’s you he wants anyway, not me. I was just a tool, to make sure you said yes. Because you wouldn’t have, would you? If he hadn’t asked me first?”

  I wasn’t sure. A week ago, no, definitely not; but things had changed, were changing. Old loyalties were resurgent, old feelings coming to life again. I might have said yes, I thought. Or I might not, couldn’t be certain.

  But Laura had said yes, with no equivocation. “Yes,” she’d said, “I’d like to. Very much,” she’d said; and after that again I didn’t have the option. Call it jealousy, call it chivalry, call it what you will: no way was Laura going out with Jamie without me there to sit between them. I could act as a blanket, at least, even if she thought me a wet one. I could use the advantages of my blood as a weapon against the advantages of his, to keep between her and the tingle of his touch. To keep curiosity from turning to fatal fascination. For her own good, I could act as insulation.

  “He said you were like brothers,” she told me, “when you were kids. And it was almost like losing a brother, when you walked out. He said that. He said, when Marty died, he said it was almost like the second time around. He wants you back, Ben, that’s all. What’s wrong with that?”

  There was plenty wrong with that, and she should have known it without asking. Hard to believe that she could be so naïve.

  If it were true, if Jamie did want me back, he wasn’t the only one. Allan would welcome this straying sheep’s return, that was clear. Jamie might simply be his missionary, his message-bearer...

  I sat there on the bus, silent for the rest of the journey, thinking about the implications; but when Laura nudged me, “Wake up, guy. I want to get off, if you don’t,” I still hadn’t come to any resolutions.

  Specifically, I still hadn’t worked out which scared me more: that Jamie had been telling the truth, that he simply wanted me back and was using Laura as a means to that end; or that it worked the other way, that he wanted Laura and was using me to get her.

  Either one was possible; and either one, I thought, spelled disaster. For me, or else for her and me together. Laura’s disasters were my disasters, that was foreordained. Whatever happened here, I couldn’t escape it; and it couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be to the good.

  o0o

  Off the bus and into school like good children, she to her lectures and I to mine. That was likely to be my last sight of her for a few days, and I didn’t like leaving her like this. I should never have taken her with me, that was obvious; if I were honest, it had been obvious all along, only that I hadn’t been seeing clearly or hadn’t chosen to. One selfish or wrong decision, and suddenly she was dangerously exposed, and wouldn’t let me protect her.

  I’d been anxious earlier about their effect on her, and I’d let bad sense override my judgement. What I hadn’t had the wit even to wonder about was her effect on them. Perhaps I’d been too long away, perhaps I had genuinely forgotten a dozen, two dozen minor humiliations during the long agony of my adolescence. I remembere
d them well enough now, too late, when they should have been hot in my mind before. I should have known, no way could I turn up at any family gathering with a girl in tow, and not have one of the cousins see that as a challenge. It had always been one of their games, let’s take his new toy away from Benedict. They could do it, they always had been able to do it; and because they could, they did.

  And now it was happening again, and that it was Jamie making the moves and Laura the target only added to my grief.

  o0o

  I did no good work that day. I barely listened in the lectures, made no notes and no contribution to that afternoon’s seminar. I should have gone to the library as soon as we were out, to sweat for an hour over an essay already overdue; instead I drifted off into the park, watched little kids hurl bread and gravel at the ducks, and let my feet slowly take me back to the flat.

  Walking in, I heard music. Through to the kitchen and it got loud, fiddle and whistle riding a relentless rhythm: Jacko and his posse, playing jigs and reels in the back yard. I glanced out of the window to see Jacko himself perched on the wall eight feet up, hammering his bodhrán with vigour.

  Jacko was a drama student, but — unusually for that crowd — he seemed to have no strong vocation as an actor. Too much realism in his make-up, probably. You need more than talent to make it in any career so dependent on the public’s approval; and while I couldn’t speak for his ability, I’d never seen him act, I knew Jacko’s body too well ever to imagine his name in lights. Frail and pale, chicken-skin stretched over a frame of animated wires and topped with a face too crudely made: he didn’t stand a chance.

  And I thought perhaps he knew it, perhaps that was why he didn’t spend all his time talking or dreaming or studying theatre as so many of his cohorts did, what hours they weren’t rehearsing or performing. Jacko performed, just as much or more; but his passion was folk, pure Irish for preference but anything trad in a pinch. He was currently gigging with three separate bands, both student and semi-pro, and he’d travel miles for a casual session in a pub any night he happened to be free.

  He could play almost anything with strings, or so it seemed to me, who couldn’t find three chords on a guitar; but he’d put down the fiddle or the mandolin anytime, to pick up his bodhrán. He had an actor’s love of drums, there at least his training showed: inherent drama, speaking directly to the blood. He’d said to me once, “You don’t need melody at all, it’s rhythm that makes music work. Rhythm makes the bones. Like everything. Rhythm makes the world work. It’s all just a matter of timing.”

  “Nah,” I said, coldly certain. “Light,” I said. “Light makes the world work.”

  “That’s what I said,” he said. “Light is rhythm, didn’t you know? Go back to first principles. Everything is rhythm.”

  He was the one with the physics ‘A’ level, not me. I hadn’t argued any further. I knew what I knew, and I didn’t really want to persuade anyone else that I was right. Too, too depressing, for me and them both.

  I checked the time, then stepped through the open door into the yard to count heads.

  Jacko up on the wall, Colin leaning casually against it with his fiddle tucked into his elbow rather than under his chin; he always played like that, maddening the purists — including Jacko — and producing a sweet, swift sound they couldn’t criticise, that only maddened them more. Joe the guitarist, sitting on an upturned dustbin; Carol all but swamped by her giant squeezebox, while her eight-year-old Nicky strummed a washboard beside her, frowning with concentration, not to lose time; and Lynn on penny whistle made six in the band this afternoon.

  I filled the kettle and set it to boil in anticipation; tea-breaks were a regular feature of band practice. Then I filled the pressure-cooker, also with water, and set that also to boil. The seal was broken, so it didn’t actually work under pressure, but it was the largest pot we had.

  Outside the music thinned, just fiddle and penny whistle playing a measure together and playing it again, Colin teaching Lynn on the monkey-see monkey-do principle. The door opened and Carol came in, with Nicky at her heels.

  “Nick wants a drink,” she said. “Got any juice?”

  “Sure.” One certainty in this flat, there was always juice. We could be vicious with each other, waking up dry and desperate to find the fridge empty. There was a corner shop twenty yards down the street, but that was no use to us; juice needed to be shockingly cold, warm just didn’t do it.

  “Orange or grapefruit, Nicky? Or, what’s this, apple-juice, how’s about apple for a change?”

  Change wasn’t on the menu, apparently; Nicky wanted orange. I waited for Carol to see to it, then said, “What about the rest of you, then? Cup of tea?”

  “Love one. I’ll fetch the mugs in, shall I?”

  “No, me,” Nicky said. “I’ll do it.”

  He skipped off out, came back more cautiously with six mugs clutched in his two small hands. I emptied a mound of wet teabags out of our giant brown teapot, put in another handful from the box; Carol rinsed the mugs under the tap, and fetched milk from the fridge.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, I got back to working out the rice. Carol watched, asked, “What’s that for?”

  “Tea,” I said. “You lot get started, you’re not going home to eat. I mean, are you?”

  “Well, no. We don’t get many chances, all of us together like this; shame to waste them when they come. But isn’t it a bit early?” Checking her watch with one eyebrow already raised to underline what she knew she’d see, big hand on the six and little hand just past the four, not even Nicky’s tea-time yet.

  “Yeah, but I’m driving tonight. Have to be there at six. It’s silly for both of us to cook, and Jacko won’t want to stop anyway; so I’ll leave him a mound of rice and other stuff all ready, and when you’re hungry he can just chuck it in the wok and that’s that.”

  “Time and motion,” she said, nodding. “Neat.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what are you driving? Van, taxi? Choo-choo train?”

  That brought me up short, briefly: just a quick reminder that not everyone I counted as a friend was familiar with the intimate details of my life. I only knew Carol through Jacko, through casual encounters like this; and I really only knew Jacko through his music. We shared a flat amiably enough, but we didn’t talk much. I tended to forget, family history doesn’t pass itself around by osmosis, even though it seems that way sometimes. People have to be interested enough to gossip.

  I shook my head. “Dangerous doctors.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The Doctors’ Deputising Service. DDS. Dangerous Doctors for short,” only the joke was too tired, sometimes too accurate even to smile at now. “Basically, if GPs are too lazy to do their own night calls, they pay the service to provide a locum. The service pays the company I work for to provide a car, a radio, and a driver; and that’s me. I do a couple of shifts a week, sometimes a double shift at weekends.”

  Carol nodded. She lived a student life, even though she was ten years past being a student; she was used to seeing her friends take any short-term, part-time work they could to eke out an uncertain income. “What’s the money like?”

  “Not brilliant.” Essential, though. It was more or less all I had now. No State benefits for students, and no grant for Benedict Macallan. Uncle James had seen to that, with my father nodding support somewhere in the background. I’d had life easy up to then, I’d been told flatly; if I wanted to go through with this ridiculous rebellion thing, then I could have it the other way. No middle course, ever, with Uncle James. If I wasn’t with them then I was utterly and irrevocably against them, and he’d see that I suffered for it.

  At the time, that had suited me perfectly. I’d wanted to make a martyr of myself. I had too much guilt and muddle on my back; poverty was a relief, an atonement almost.

  Now, it was just a bore. I’d taken all the loans I was entitled to, and as much more as I could screw from my bank manager before Uncle James g
ot to him too; but some weeks I could barely feed myself, and the rent was a major crisis every month.

  o0o

  Garlic, onion, courgette and tomato, and a little red pepper for a treat: fry ’em all up in the wok, add the rice, break an egg in and there you go. Eat with chopsticks and chilli sauce, to make it taste of something.

  Vegetarian by necessity, sometimes I longed for meat. I wanted to set up self-help groups for people with the same desperate cravings: ‘Hullo, my name’s Ben, I’m a carnivore’. Like any self-confessed addict, I didn’t dare allow myself the slightest taste of what I so desired; like many, I found in symbolism what bare strength I needed. It wasn’t just the cost that kept me a meat-free zone. Walking away from my family, I’d walked away too from the habits and traditions that bound us together, at least as far as I was able; and diet was one of the easiest to change. All my life I’d lived with bacon for breakfast and a roast at dinner, plenty of cold meat in the fridge for sandwiches between, and the constant impression that a meal wasn’t a meal unless some animal had died to provide it. It had been no hardship at first, to reject that along with other, more significant family values.

  Now, though — ah, now I hungered for the taste of blood in my mouth sometimes, and wouldn’t take it even when it was offered. Perverse or essential, it was one of the rules I’d lived by ever since I’d started writing my own rule-book, and not subject to change, even if I’d had the means to change it.

  Which at the moment I most emphatically did not; and I’d better hurry, if I wanted to cling on to the most basic means to live. They had a waiting-list of willing drivers for Medicall, despite the antisocial hours, so they could afford to be unpleasant if you turned up late.

  o0o

  A run for the bus at one end, a run from the stop at the other: I made it with three minutes to spare, before my six o’clock shift. Cutting it so fine brought its own punishments. No choice of cars, for a start. We drove white Fiestas with no markings, not to draw attention to the highly-marketable drugs we were carrying around in the boot; unfortunately, a fair few policemen also drove anonymous white Fiestas with whip aerials, just like ours. The local lads used to hot around the area in their stolen Sierras looking for cops to ram, and once a month or so they’d ram one of us by mistake. It didn’t do the cars too much good. They got serviced, of course, they got patched up as well as the garage could manage, but there were always one or two rogues in the pool, with erratic problems no one had sorted out yet.