Dead of Light

by Chaz Brenchley

  “You weren’t supposed to know about that,” I told him; and he laughed aloud.

  “I know a lot of things I’m not supposed to.”

  “Yeah, right.” About his family, I thought he knew it all.

  “Come on, sunshine. Let’s go and see what you’re made of. You can bring your glass, if you want to. Top it up first. Not to the brim, if you don’t mind...”

  o0o

  Not slugs and snails was I made of, that was certain. Neither magic in moonlight, to be on a par with the rest of my blood. As ever, I was not what I was supposed to be.

  He took me downstairs and out to the back, onto a broad lawn sheltered by trees and walls, where we couldn’t be overlooked. On the way he picked up an old leather football from a scullery full of kipple, a lifetime’s collection of stuff they had no use for but had never got around to throwing out; and even a ball could be potent in this house, could carry me further than I wanted to go. I remembered long summers of games we’d played out here on the grass, me always in goal because my sister put me there; and I remembered all the goals she’d blasted past me, all the many times I’d retrieved the ball from the borders while Aunt Jess frowned out at me from her window. Every damaged plant had been my own fault, for not doing better what I was there to do. And nothing new in that, I could never do anything right, for Jess or for my sister.

  Today, though, today for Allan I could do it right, I could show him what he wanted to see. He rolled the ball across the grass, and said, “All right, Ben. Let’s see that in the back of the net...”

  “Puns I can live without,” I muttered, dutifully scowling; but that was automatic, nothing at all. Already I could feel the heat in me, though the sun was still cool and low, barely making it down past the garden’s high defences. For a moment I was confused and uncertain; power I had but no control, I didn’t know what to do to use it. I’d been raving before on the road, it had all happened without thought.

  But, Christ, I’d had lessons enough from Jamie and Marty and other cousins back when I was sprouting hair and hormones, back when no one could believe I couldn’t do it. I dredged up those humiliating memories from where I’d buried them, deep in the back of my head; I must have been scowling ludicrously as I concentrated, as I reached to that place in my mind that had always been empty before...

  And there it was, the prickle inside my skin and the surge, the stretch like an extra limb thrusting out where my eyes sent it; and my hands were stupidly pointing and waving like some hack witch in a bad Macbeth, but Allan would be used to that, everyone did it first time out.

  Second time.

  Didn’t matter a damn, anyway, what I was looking like. Didn’t even matter to me.

  What mattered was the great blazing net of air and fire that scorched out ahead of me, branding his beautiful lawn with a brief neat chequerboard before thin flames caught dry grass and spread to smudge the pattern.

  Didn’t even matter that I missed the ball, though that made him laugh again.

  “Never were any use at football, were you, lad?”

  I grunted and dragged my net sideways, like an inept fisherman cocking up an easy catch. The net engulfed the ball and seared its mark in the leather; quickly burned all the way through, and left a deflated rag of brown and reeking black.

  I didn’t know how to stop, either, no one had ever tried to teach me that, they’d had no occasion; but I blinked hard, unfocused my eyes and let my hands fall, and the mesh of light frayed and faded in the sun, and was gone.

  Uncle Allan looked at the damage, and shook his head. “Well, I don’t know what Jess is going to say about her lawn. And then there’s the lad who comes in to do the mowing, he won’t be happy either. He loves this bit of grass...”

  Dry amusement, that’s what he was aiming at, and he made it, more or less; but for once I could actually hear the effort it cost him to make his voice dance so lightly. And something rioted within me, as I realised that for the first time in my life, I’d actually impressed — no, more, I’d startled and amazed my Uncle Allan.

  o0o

  Back inside, in the big kitchen now, chewing soft olive bread against the sour churning in my stomach, drinking black coffee against the brandy and the night:

  “In many ways,” Uncle Allan said, “this is what I’ve been looking and hoping for. What I’ve been working for, you might almost say. Certainly I encouraged the men of my generation to marry out. The older family was all against it, diluting the blood, they called it; but I thought the line needed strengthening. Too much inbreeding is always dangerous, we were becoming effete. Hybrids are more vigorous.

  “James wouldn’t listen to me. James knew what he wanted, for himself and for his children, and he wasn’t prepared to take risks. But your father and I, we both found wives from outside the family. So did a couple of my cousins, the ones I could persuade against the traditionalists.

  “Since then I’ve been watching, waiting, and I suppose measuring the children of your generation against each other; and up to now, all the evidence has said that the traditionalists had the right of it. Jess and I proved unable to have children at all; your parents managed only the one pregnancy, for all that your mother produced twins; and you both developed... unusually.”

  “A pair of freaks,” I said without heat. “That’s how the family’s always seen us. There was Hazel, a girl for God’s sake and she had talent, however sickly thin it was; and here was I, I was the boy and I had nothing at all.”

  “Except that clearly we were wrong about you. Totally and bewilderingly wrong. I wanted to bring some strength back into the family blood, and I thought things might manifest themselves a little differently; but talent in daylight...” He shook his head, gazed at me across the table then picked up my own word and gave it back to me, dusted with a teasing respect. “A freak indeed, Benedict my boy. Something unique in this family. And such potent talent, too...”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, laughing, uncomfortable under his assessing eyes. “It was only a football, for crying out loud...”

  “It was only the second time you’ve tried to use your talent; and that totally without training.” And his manner, suddenly grave and not at all teasing, reminded me that the first time, a man had died. “You’re a strength in this family now, Benedict; you must understand your own worth, or you could do yourself and us a great deal of harm.”

  “Yeah, right. Lethal weapon, me.”

  “Exactly.”

  And he meant it, and he was right; just now I was a loose cannon, charged and deadly. If in doubt, ask a policeman. But resolving that would have to come down to politics in the end — worse, it would be family politics — and I didn’t want to think about it, then or preferably ever.

  “But where did it come from, Uncle? All my life I’ve had nothing, and now suddenly this...” Ten years too late, my talent was in arriving. It was supposed to show with puberty and develop slowly, like chest-hair and acne and such. This was wicked, to give me a decade of zilch and then overnight to fill my cup to overflowing, to make me a heady threat even in my own headstrong and threatening clan.

  “I can only give you a theory, Ben; but think on this, and see if it makes sense to you. It was all in your head, it seems to me. No, hear me out,” as I made a move to protest that, to laugh it to scorn. “We’re no more immune than anyone else to psychological pressures. If anything, we’re possibly more vulnerable. Like any high achievers. It’s hard to be top.

  “Luckily, the Macallans have always been strong on confidence. I used to think it was in our genes, unless it’s just a consequence of a long history of success. Whatever the cause, we believe in ourselves, very greatly; and we constantly confirm that belief, and underscore it, and reinforce it. It’s a snake that feeds on itself.

  “But it’s also a snake that eats itself, by definition.

  “You were unlucky, you were born second to a domineering twin who made sure that you stayed second. She never gave you any chance to belie
ve in yourself, all through your childhood; so why should you ever believe you could inherit something that she could not? All right, the family history said you should, though we’ve never had twins before that I know of; but she said not, and it was always Hazel you believed. Even if you didn’t talk about it directly, everything that you knew to be so said not, said she was queen and you were nowhere.

  “And then, of course, she hit puberty first, because girls do, by and large; and she manifested talent herself. Unheard of, but inarguable.

  “No wonder, then, if you thought that she had yours. She’d spent a lifetime oppressing you; subconsciously, I think that you oppressed yourself also. That you felt nothing in the night light would only have confirmed what was already obvious, that you were a freak born without talent. I think you blocked out the truth, and it never had a chance to break free until last night, when Hazel died. She was the keystone in the dam, if dams have keystones; with her gone, the whole edifice crumbled.

  “You lived in your sister’s shadow all your life, Benedict. You know that. But say it the other way, and it all comes clear. I could still be wrong, of course; but this is what I think. I think that all your life thus far, your sister’s simply been standing in your light.

  “You were always the one with the significant talent; all she had was the leakage, that she probably picked up in the womb you shared. That’s fascinating, it has a lot to tell us about the nature of talent, but it’s not relevant now. What counts is that now, at last, the nonsense is over and you can see yourself, we can all see you for what you really are.”

  “So what am I?” I demanded. “Apart from a murderer, I mean?”

  But he only shook his head, refusing comfort on this hardest of paths. “That remains to be seen. You’ve spent twenty-odd years having someone else tell you what you are; it’s time you wrote your own description. Have a good look at yourself in the light, and then you tell me.”

  Thirteen: In My Father’s House

  In my father’s life were many mansions, but none of them was his.

  My parents had bought their house back when Mum was pregnant and they’d never moved since, don’t know why. Might have been my mother being very unwifely — at least for a Macallan wife — and putting her foot down, I was born in the next street over, these are my roots; I like it here, all my friends are here and I don’t want to leave. Might just have been that Dad was no smarty, nothing like his brothers, never got a fair share of the family wealth.

  Whatever, this was where they’d always lived with Hazel, where I’d lived when I was living with them. It was just an ordinary post-war semi among a dozen streets of semis, little garden at the front and a bigger one behind, and a one-car garage for Dad’s one car when he could be bothered to put it away, which wasn’t often. Three bedrooms inside, woodchip and Anaglypta on the walls and Artex on the ceilings, everything about it dull and suburban and altogether a seriously strange place to find Macallans.

  I drove there that day on the bike, my bike now, trailing Allan and Jess in the Volvo. What with exhaustion and too much of Allan’s Armagnac, I was in no state to drive, and knew it; but I’d insisted anyway, almost tearfully, like a toddler with a new toy that he wouldn’t let go. “Follow us, then,” Allan had said; and he led me slow and cautious, watching over me as he always had done, constant and reliable and careful of me in a way that my father never had been, even in those days when I depended on him for my care.

  The street my parents lived on was lined with cars, although it was still early. The family was gathering again, as it had for Marty and no doubt for Tommy too. This time, though, I had a true place there and meant to claim it. Not by burning footballs out the back to prove my belonging — I’d asked Uncle Allan not to talk about that, and he hadn’t even mentioned it to Jess, unless he was doing it now in the car — but by right of blood. Cousins were one thing, and I’d felt the loss of them far more than I’d wanted to; my own womb-sister was something else entirely, for all that I’d feared and even hated her for so much of our lives.

  God help me, I wanted revenge. I wanted to see someone cracked and splintered, whoever it was had cracked and splintered her. Shattered mirrors of each other I wanted them, my sister and her assassin; and God help me, I could do it now.

  Crowded with cars the street might be, but the family has always respected seniority; there was a space left in front of the house for Uncle Allan to park in. He drove by and stopped, his reversing light came on; and I nipped into the gap quick, up onto the kerb and through the open gateway, past my father’s beloved Cortina and onto the patchy oil-stained grass of the front lawn, bringing the bike home to where Hazel had always left it. Quietly killed the engine, no final wild revving the way she used to, not to spook the people inside by invoking her ghost too loudly; quietly got off and stood waiting for my uncle and aunt to join me. The door of the house was standing open, but I wasn’t going in alone.

  o0o

  People, too many people: even the hallway and the stairs were crowded with the family’s lesser lights, who couldn’t claim a place any closer to my father’s hearth. No big room here, to accommodate all my relatives in comfort. The air seethed with static, though I could bear it more easily now, it seemed, having found power of my own.

  The pack pressed back, to allow my uncle passage; Jess and I went through in his wake. Past the telephone table where Hazel’s black helmet was standing just where it always used to stand, it come home no less than she, and into the front room where the luminaries were gathered. Both my parents were there on the sofa, my father’s bulk strangely shrunken as he sat in a room of people standing; my mother looked pale except for her reddened eyes, evidence of what might have been the only other tears shed for Hazel. Hers and my own, and only one of us had ever loved her. What I felt was a tearing at the heart of things, a sense of slippage, but not a loss of love.

  Uncle James was there too, of course, standing portentously in front of the gas fire. He greeted Allan with a nod, as though he were host here, Jess with a dry kiss and myself with only a stare. I gazed back, neutral as I could manage, then turned my back on him and went to my mother.

  She tried to smile, to let that speak for her in her grief, to say that I was welcome. Crouching down, I put a hand on her knee, my silence matching hers; and saw her eyes widen briefly, as though she felt something more in my touch. Probably she did: even in that crush of Macallans, even with the headache and sickness so much family had to be causing her — which, typically, none of them seemed to have remembered; grieving wife and mother, her place to be here at the heart of the gathering and never mind the damage it would do her, the damage that Jess was already escaping, slipping out of the room in search of some zone Macallan-free — she’d have known the touch of her own child, I guess. Would have noticed how it was changed.

  She still didn’t say anything, though. Just that moment of perception, and her own hand moving towards me and falling short. Wariness or weariness, one or the other, I couldn’t say which and maybe neither could she.

  Whatever. I patted her knee and stood up, went to stand behind her where Jamie was stationed already, his hands on the back of the sofa. Clenched hard, I saw, knuckles showing white.

  People were talking in murmurs, all through the house; Allan and Jess were at it now, heads together with Uncle James. Only my parents weren’t speaking, seemingly, or being spoken to.

  Jamie cocked his head in greeting, then did what my mother couldn’t manage or was frightened to try. Prised one hand off the sofa-back, transferred it to my shoulder.

  Christ, his grip hurt. We used to do circuits at the gym together — with Marty again, the three of us, unless it was the two of them and me — way back when, and probably he still did. Me, I’d abandoned that when I abandoned my family and all its works.

  I don’t think he knew he was hurting. All his body was tense; his face was tight and white, sheened with sweat though the morning wasn’t even warm yet. His eyes looked blind to t
he room, focused only on me.

  “Have you seen her?” His voice was tight too, pitched high and hoarse.

  I shook my head, remembering how he’d been when Marty died, how angry. This was the same again. He was blazing, raging at what had been done to us. “Not here. Last night, I saw her.”

  That checked him, even in his fury. I saw him blink, saw him consider; and then, “How?”

  “I found her, Jamie. She called me.”

  “I didn’t know that.” He understood, though. He was one of the few who’d been close enough to know how Hazel could lean on my mind.

  “I was too late,” I said, “too slow. Couldn’t get there.”

  He grunted, and his hand slackened on my shoulder; his arm came round me in a hug that caught at my throat as much as my body. “Shit, Ben...”

  “Yeah.” Shit it had been, shit it was; but it had brought me up equal with Jamie now, at least in his eyes. I could read him, easy. He’d lost his big brother, I’d lost my twin. More, I’d had the chance to save her, maybe; that I’d failed didn’t rub out the fact that I’d tried. He’d have expected my failure. He knew what I was.

  What I had been, at least. What I was now, I hadn’t really had the chance to find out even for myself; and Jamie wasn’t my mother, however close we’d been once. He wasn’t noticing anything different in me. No blame, the state he was in. But I thought I might tell him, later. He might be one of the few.

  o0o

  Turned out this wasn’t a meeting, in the sense that Uncle James had held a meeting after Marty’s death. Perhaps the third death somehow didn’t count for as much as the first; unless it was that my father’s daughter didn’t count for so much as my uncle’s son. Whatever, there were no speeches, nor would have been any even if there were a room fit size to give them in. The family turn-out this morning was only to show solidarity, to murmur in cliques and to look for leadership: Uncle James held court by the fireplace, and I think everyone there came for a shake of the hand or a clap on the shoulder, a quiet word or two. Meanwhile Uncle Allan was mingling, drifting from room to room and again talking briefly with just about everybody. Promises and reassurance, I guessed at from both of them, undertakings and dark oaths of vengeance. Tonight, I thought, the streets would be very full of Macallans doing a detective job. Going in pairs and playing bad cop, bad cop, if I knew my family. Bullying was all they had to fall back on, they’d never bank on the efficacy of kindness. Nor of cash: Uncle James would never believe that you could buy true witness. Fear keeps cattle honest, he used to say, and he wouldn’t have changed on that.