Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  Now, though: now shoulders that had been perennially slumped were tense instead, faces were drawn and watchful. When they saw me—when they saw my big nose, my heritage blazoned on my features—eyes didn’t look down or flicker away. They stared, they watched me, the people that owned the eyes stiffened and turned towards me, sometimes took half a step to follow. Voices muttered, there were even fingers that pointed.

  No one would have said that these people were doing well, that they were comfortable in their lives, in their city; but they were not the cowed folk that I had abandoned to a predictable fate. Undoubtedly, things had changed here.

  Changed so much, indeed, that I was grateful not to be alone. Not my presence that offered protection to Janice and Jon; the world had turned on its axis, everything was reversed, and I was very glad to have company.

  Glad also to be walking in sunshine, to have that tingle on my skin that said my own talent was active, on a hair-trigger, there to be reached for if tension and watchfulness resolved into genuine threat.

  My face was my fortune, as it always had been on these streets; and for the first time in my life, that fortune felt dangerously uncertain.

  A man coming towards me, glowering behind shades: as he passed his shoulder jarred mine, and there was nothing accidental about it. I whipped round, anger doing its traditional thing and overriding good sense and discomfort both. He likely heard me gasp as my bones jarred, but all the acknowledgement I got was to see him turn his head and spit aggressively into the gutter.

  And this no crop-headed yob, no tattooed youth with a fatal dose of bravado; he was a man in his forties, in a suit. In danger of his life, though he might not have known that.

  A hand closed on my arm in warning, but it wasn’t Jonathan’s, and it wasn’t saying don’t do it, Ben, don’t roast him, a little jostle isn’t worth a death sentence whatever your pride is demanding...

  Janice it was who was gripping me, tugging at me, hissing, “Don’t, Ben. Don’t get involved. Start trouble here, you’ll have a dozen of them on you as soon as they raise the yell, that there’s a Macallan caught out in daylight...”

  Maybe Jon hadn’t told her everything after all, what I could do in daylight; or maybe she was only trying to forestall my having to, fearful of a dozen human torches blazing my way through the city. Whichever, I didn’t want a showdown either. And true enough, a wee shove on a sore shoulder didn’t merit the sort of punishment my swift flare of anger might have sent after the man. I nodded, turned again, walked on with one of them on either side of me now, working in mute concert here to prevent the same thing happening again.

  “Can we get off the street, then?” I murmured. “If my face makes me a target, then some idiot’s going to go for it eventually. Last thing I want is a confrontation.” Actually, the last thing I wanted was a bloodbath. Never mind what it did to her, even assuming that she really was seeing it; that image of human torches scared the hell out of me. Spontaneous human combustion was not quite so spontaneous in my ambit, and my score was too high already. I could make it happen, and knew I would if I had to, to save my own life; and hated myself for the knowledge, and wanted never to hate myself for anything more substantial, the fact of it, knowledge made history.

  “Right. Good idea. Anywhere special you want to go?”

  “No. Coffee-shop. Not a caff.” Enough of instant: I wanted the bitter tang of strong fresh coffee, and the kick of it in my blood to supplement the sunshine. Also I wanted to talk, and it wasn’t possible out here, on the move, with my eyes jittering constantly from face to face to track that ever-swelling sense of risk. It was so odd, such an incredible change: resentment I’d been used to all my life, I was a Macallan, but all I knew of resentment was that it was twinned to fear, and fear was the stronger. Resentment sulked, it didn’t throw stones. But now suddenly I was resented and hated, and fear was subsumed or so it seemed, unless that was my own fear rising to mask it. Because I was afraid, where I’d never expected to be afraid again, and I was afraid too of my own reactions. Even if they literally started throwing stones, I had ways to protect myself and those around me; no call to torch the stonethrowers. But I was still afraid that that might happen, I had the strength to do it and I might not have the strength to stop myself. Power without responsibility, that had always been the family curse and I had it, full measure.

  “Morry’s Deli, then?” from Jon; and it was flashback time for me, just at the name. Memories of being thrown out of Morry’s Deli for my face, for my name, for the crime of my inheritance; and then allowed back in again, but only to be shown what my sweet late sister had done to poor Aunt Bella.

  “No,” I said. A bad time, that, and building up to worse. Nostalgia’s thorns lay everywhere, I couldn’t hope to escape them, but that didn’t mean I had to throw myself onto the spikes. Besides, “Morry might not be so pleased to see me, actually.” If strangers had taken to staring Macallans down and shoulder-barging them for fun, then I for one was not walking into Morry’s. He had better cause than many, to hold a grudge against my blood; and his deli was down below ground-level, almost a basement, only a couple of high windows and precious little sunlight to work with. I was going to be cautious, at least until I knew what was going on.

  Jon and Janice pulled faces at each other, looking for inspiration.

  “Some of the pubs do coffee in the mornings...”

  “Or there’s that new place, the bistro thing down by the station...”

  “That’ll do,” I said quickly. Anything that end of town would take us out of the crush, though it did mean pushing our way through it first.

  “All right. We’ll go the back way,” Janice said firmly, tucking her arm through mine. “Less chance of trouble, in the alleys.”

  Less chance of rescue also if trouble came regardless; but by the collective look of them, there was precious little rescue to be had in any case from the people thronging the streets today. Not when the young man needing rescue carried the Macallan imprint on his face as deeply as I did. Old friends and strangers both knew me for what I was, no disguising it.

  o0o

  ‘The bistro thing down by the station’ turned out to be a tapas bar. I couldn’t believe it; Mediterranean culture, come this far? To my little insular pocket of the north?

  There it was, though, and looking legitimately Spanish, too: cheap and a little sordid, very basic, nothing spent on the decor. No Costa glitz, but this place could have been lifted whole from any town in the hinterland. Even the menu in the window was authentic, hand-written on a dirty piece of paper that had been there so long it was fraying at the edges. Tortillas and salads, mejillones and calamares and gambas, or if you wanted meat rather than seafood there was chorizo picante, jamon serrano, albondigas diablo...

  “Okay?” Jon asked.

  “Terrific, so far.” Except that you had to buy food if you wanted to drink, I’d forgotten Britain’s extraordinary licensing laws; but then, why go to a tapas bar if you didn’t want to eat tapas?

  Because you want to drink decent coffee, I reminded myself, with a brief prayer offered up that there too this place might be reasonably authentic.

  o0o

  Inside, the image took something of a hammering. The TV on the wall was right enough, tuned to Eurosport, though the English commentary took the gloss off it; but the owners were a couple of Geordies, the business presumably a hangover from years of package holidays at Torremolinos or Benidorm.

  I didn’t want to sit in the window, though I’d have liked the promise of sunlight on my skin. It was a case of balancing one insecurity against another, and in the end caution won out over strength: better not to precipitate a problem, than to be ready to meet it. We took a table at the back, ordered tea and coffee for now with a thought towards maybe beer and tapas later, and waited almost without speaking until we had steaming cups in front of us and the privacy to talk undisturbed.

  “Come on, then,” I said, getting straight down to it against the tem
ptation to prevaricate. “What the hell is going on?”

  They looked at each other; Janice made a gesture. “It’s your town, not mine. I’m an incomer, what do I know?” Her smile said that actually she knew a lot, or she thought she did, but she was holding back here for reasons of her own. Sort of smile I’d seen before, usually on girls; learned ’em in girlschool, I guess, or from each other. Sometimes they were even justified, but I thought likely not here. However quick to pick things up you might be, understanding the soul of this city was genetic, I thought; you had to be born here. Unless it was environmental but you still had to be born here, it had to soak like a stain into your soft baby bones, it had to come to you like a taint in your mother’s milk. I thought.

  Jonathan was native, Janice was not; Jon said, “Things changed, right after you went away, I suppose it was. That’s when it started. Your Uncle James was in charge suddenly, he was running the place; and boy, did he let everyone know it.”

  My Uncle James was a bully and a bastard. Nothing new there, nothing to make him stand out much among my male relations; but Uncle James with the power, with the dominance he’d always been denied before and with a major grudge to work out of his system—yes, I’d pretty much predicted this, that under his charge the hand of the Macallans would fall more heavily than ever on the shoulders of their victims.

  “Even my dad,” Jon said, “he had his little business, cleaning windows round about, clearing gutters, a bit of housepainting on the side. One-man show it was, there wasn’t enough work for me to join him, yeah? But they put the sting on him, even. And he couldn’t pay it, of course he couldn’t, not so much of his take. When he told them, they just came round at night and trashed all his gear. Burnt his van out, and wrecked the garage where he kept his ladders and stuff.”

  “Jesus, Jon, I’m sorry,” and I was; though I’d spent a lifetime being sorry for what my family did, I still felt it fresh every time. “What happened after, what did he do?”

  “Well, he really couldn’t pay them then, could he? He tried to find a job, but there just weren’t any; so him and my mam, they left in the end. Went to Liverpool, he’s working for a garage over there, doing resprays.”

  Yeah, right. That was an old story, often retold; people ran into the brick wall that was the Macallans’ inflexible greed, they packed their bags and departed. A desert of dreams, this city could be, under my family’s rule. They never used to bother before with the really small beer, but the principle was painfully familiar.

  “You stayed, though,” I said, looking to find some good in the dreary waste of lives, some hint of a silver lining.

  He smiled. “That was Tim. He said I could move in with him, only I had to stop dossing around and try for college. I did a year’s foundation course, and they let me in to do art. It’s brilliant,” the smile stretching to a grin now, an expression of absolute content. “Even with Tim gone, even with all the shit that’s going on, it’s still brilliant.”

  “So tell me about the shit,” I said, sighing inside. “My uncle got heavy, okay, that’s not a surprise. He never did have any sense of proportion. There’s more than that, though. Isn’t there?”

  “Well, yes. People stood it for a while, but in the end it got too much. There were so many businesses going under, a lot worse than my dad. They had meetings in the town hall, they talked a lot, but no one thought anything would happen...”

  No. Again, this was nothing new. Uncle James wouldn’t have been worried by a few town meetings, he thought he was invulnerable, him and all his kind. He probably wouldn’t even bother to send spies along. “But?”

  “But there must have been some group having meetings in secret too, making plans. Don’t know who, I don’t think anyone does know; only one day, about a month ago this was, the last week of term, we all got sent home from college and told to keep our heads down, not to go out that night. There were all kinds of rumours, no one knew anything for sure, only that it was something to do with Macallans and they were going to be out for trouble. It was dead scary. We locked the doors and turned all the lights off, went to bed and listened to local radio all night, didn’t we?”

  He glanced at Janice, she nodded; I pictured them huddled together for comfort, in the dark with the curtains pulled against any stray intrusion of starlight. But he was doing that deliberately, I thought, giving me pictures to avoid giving me the truth.

  “What was the radio saying?” I asked, thinking myself ready for anything; expecting news of another cousin murdered, some futile rebellion.

  “More than usual,” he said. “You know what it’s like, Macallans aren’t news usually, the station doesn’t dare; but this time it did. They’d taken hostages, it said,” he said, and I wasn’t anything like ready for that, and he knew it. “Half a dozen, women and girls. They’d snatched them all from their homes, all at the same time, all over the city. It was really organised...”

  “Hang on. Macallan women?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Christ.” That was clever, it was wickedly clever. Except for my freaky twin sister—my freaky dead sister, culled by my late Uncle Allan—the family talent had never run down the distaff side. Macallan women would be no threat to their kidnappers. “Who?”

  “Wives and sisters,” Janice said.

  Jonathan nodded. “Sorry, Ben, I don’t know their names. I don’t think it was ever on the news, even. I mean, who are the reporters going to ask?”

  Not Macallans, that was for sure. They’d ask the police; but the police were an instrument of the family, pretty much, or else second-rate competition. They’d give out precious little more than the family.

  “Okay, doesn’t matter. I can find out. So what happened then?”

  “There was, I guess you’d call it an ultimatum. Your uncle had to lay off the town, or the hostages would suffer.”

  Obviously. And what followed, I thought, was equally obvious. “He didn’t, though. Right?”

  “Well, no. The guy who’d been leading the public protests, he’d been really brave,” really stupid, I thought, “making himself a target, almost; he had this big warehouse out of town, and it burned down that night. The fire brigade wouldn’t even go out till the morning. But when they did, they found his body in the ashes.”

  That was typical, that was how Uncle James thought: meet a threat with overmastering force, cow the cattle into submission. It had worked for years, for centuries maybe; no reason why it shouldn’t work now. Except that patently it hadn’t. I sat waiting, very still, very contained. At last, Jonathan gave me the really bad news.

  “That same day they found one of the hostages dumped by the road, out by your uncle’s house. She’d had her throat cut.”

  I nodded slowly. A life for a life: that was inevitable, the kidnappers wouldn’t have started this if they hadn’t meant business, and they must have known from the start that they’d have to prove they did indeed mean it.

  Any man’s death diminishes me, and any woman’s too; and more, far more when that death was in the family, when it was my own blood that had run. I’d lost another cousin, and it didn’t matter that I couldn’t yet put a name or a face to her. No matter whether I’d loved her or loathed her, she was mine, she was a part of me and she’d been ripped away from me, not innocent perhaps—hard to say that any Macallan was innocent, we were all tainted by association—but terrified and helpless, powerless, absolutely a victim of this war...

  I felt lethally angry. For a moment I wanted to run to my uncle, offer my unique services unconditionally to his support; but only for a moment. I still despised my uncle, he presumably would still despise me, and there were better places to run that were still not running away.

  “Thanks, Jon,” I said; and drained my coffee, pushed my chair back, ready to stand up and go. “Can one of you give us a key to the flat? Don’t bother to come back, I’ll just pick my stuff up, get the bike and go.”

  “Go where?” Janice demanded.

  “There�
��s someone I’ve got to see.” Someone I had to find, first; and I’d try a long shot to start with, keep as far as I could from Uncle James. “It’ll be better if I don’t come back to you, after. Unless there’s more you haven’t told me?”

  Another glance between them, and two heads shook as one. “It’s been a stalemate since then,” Jon said. “As far as we know, at least. There’s been no news. You don’t see Macallans out by day much, that’s why you were getting stared at; and everyone stays home at night. God knows what’s going to happen.”

  Maybe so; but I knew one thing that was going to happen, if any macho fool bastard did anything more than stare at me this morning. I had pictures in my head, five caged cousins and one murdered. I was not feeling temperate, and there were no clouds to mask the sun.

  “You shouldn’t go out there alone,” Janice said.

  “You shouldn’t come with,” I retaliated. “Trust me, you don’t want to be anywhere near.” I didn’t want them seen with me too much, either. There could so easily be a backlash against collaborators; I wouldn’t willingly put my friends in danger. Then, a late thought, “Is there a phone at the flat now?”

  “Yes,” from Janice, “I had one put in. Want the number?”

  “Please.”

  She wrote it on my hand, though there was paper in plenty lying around the bar. Then she gave me her keys, and said to lock up behind me and drop them back through the letter-box. I told them to stay where they were, enjoy their day, not to worry about me. Call us, she said, and I said I would, of course, soonest. Trust me, I said. And I walked out into hard hot sunshine on a hard hot city and felt no less hard and hot myself, steel-hard and furnace-hot; and had walked no more than a dozen paces past the bar’s big window before I heard a quick mutter from down the street behind me and then a single voice, yelling.