Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  He flicked a piece of poppadum at her for that, but it would be a problem. Macallans were the next best thing to unemployable. I knew that from my own experience, especially when my uncle was being vindictive; and that was before things changed. I guessed it would be even harder now.

  That took the conversation on to college courses and future careers, which gave me the opportunity to catch up on feasting. They knew about me now, and no one thought to ask if I wanted a change. Janice was studying law, apparently. Jon—like all the art students I’d ever known—didn’t have a clue what he’d do when he graduated.

  o0o

  At last the foil containers were all empty, most wiped as clean as the plates with fingers or final shreds of naan. We sprawled, on furniture or carpet; Laura leaned back against Jamie’s knees, and he worked on her hair as I’d known he would; and Jon dropped the bombshell that our mutual intent had held back this long.

  Whether he knew its significance I wasn’t sure, but it was a fair bet that he did.

  “There was a man killed last night,” he said, “the whole street’s been buzzing with it. It was only just over the hill, on Laurel Drive, you know it?”

  Oh yes, I knew it. My parents lived on Laurel Drive, and last night my father had been out in the dark on his own, and crying.

  Six: Grolsch And Vomit™

  What a piece of work is my dad! How base in reason! how limited in faculty! in form, in moving, how lumbering and contemptible! in action how like a demon! in apprehension how like a stone! the foulness of the world! the debasement of animals...!

  Well, actually—at the time—I just thought, how like my dad, to shit in his own back yard. Comparisons came later. As did confession: of the four friends here, new and old, only Jamie knew my old address, and he was keeping mum. All but his speaking eyes, and I wasn’t listening to them, they were saying nothing I was not already telling myself.

  What I wanted—no, what I didn’t want, but what I needed most, I had to ask from Jon.

  “Killed how?”

  He might not know my father’s house, but he knew the hand of my family well enough, or else the rumours had been more explicit than he was saying. He flinched, he glanced at Janice, he didn’t want to tell me.

  “Jon? Killed how?”

  It was Janice who said, in the end.

  “He had his head bashed in. On the bricks, on the corner of his house. That’s what they’re saying. They found him this morning, they say, just lying on the ground there with his skull crushed, and blood all over the walls...”

  Just as if some irresistibly-strong hand had gripped the back of his neck, as I pictured it from her words, and pounded his head—no, his face, it would for sure have been his face—against the sharp angle, the bricks already red before his blood reddened them. Except that this would have been in the dark, of course, and the streetlights were sodium orange, that would have fucked up the colour as much as one man with a fucked-up head was fucking up the head of another...

  Ah, shit.

  It might even have been my fault, I supposed vaguely. Say my father had been crying only with the frustration of his new life, his family reduced and his pride trampled underfoot, sneered at by cattle. Say that I chance along to find him so, and even he knows that this is all my fault ab origine. Say he kicks seven kinds of shit out of me and is still not satisfied, he’s lost control now and he can’t get a grip again, blood has slicked his hands but not yet slaked his thirst...

  Say this, say that, say anything you like. I tried to blame myself twice over, but I couldn’t make it stick. Many things I could accuse myself of and with justice, with conviction; but not this.

  “Ben? Do you want to go round?”

  That was Jamie not keeping mum any longer, letting Mum and Dad too right out of the bag. Though the others weren’t seeing them yet, I guess they were just seeing us as a couple of ghouls, wanting to ogle.

  “No,” I said, already pushing up onto my feet, spotting an awkward but manageable path between bodies and discarded plates. Every journey begins with but a single step: this was a route that would take me to my parents’ door, the world’s most reluctant prodigal.

  “What’s with him?” That was Laura, and this might have been the first time in my life I heard her voice and didn’t turn to find her.

  “It’s his dad. Laurel Drive? Got to be.”

  “They wouldn’t. Would they? Not at night? They couldn’t. And we’d have heard...” The flow of her words died slowly, as she understood him at last, too late. I almost expected her to go on then, Well, so what’s he so upset about? It’s hardly the first time. Macallan men kill people as a puberty rite, and then they just keep on going. Wankers all their lives. So his dad’s added another to his list, so what?

  She wouldn’t have been that callous, of course; she’d have cared too much about the victim. But the question was still there, albeit unspoken and kinder put. I could have said, because this time his killing killed one of ours also, and he knew it would, and he did it anyway; or I could have said, because I’ve been away, and I came back looking for a miracle, a family I could love. But neither would have earned me what I needed, her empathy, her understanding. No point fishing for it, so I said nothing to her. I stood in the doorway and looked back, looked at Jamie, said, “You coming?”

  Please?

  “Yeah, I’m coming.”

  Actually he was one stage short of coming, still disentangling Laura from his legs and making room to stand.

  “I’m not going in, mind. I just...” I just have to be there for a bit, I just had to stand there on the street where they lived, Lerner and Loewe and the Hon Freddie twisting to destruction in my head while my eyes scanned the walls to find the bloodstain. Very like a ghoul, I thought, and walked out.

  Fizzy the cat sneaked between my legs as I opened the front door. I felt a moment’s anxiety, but it would have been too too bathetic to go back and enquire, is it okay if the cat goes out?

  Besides, he was gone now; and not in any sense seeming like a truant, pausing in the middle of the pavement to wash himself briskly before sniffing the air and positively sauntering down the hill, very much king of the road. Should’ve called him Ozymandias, I thought, and wondered if cats understood the concept of hubris, and decided not. Of course not. Nothing to do with intellect, it’s a matter of genetics. Some creatures are simply born superior, and that’s that.

  Must be why I felt such a kinship, I thought bitterly. And then out to join me came the guy for whom I felt so much more than a kinship, call it a twinship, a truer sharing than ever I’d had with my twin; and off we went up the hill, and not sauntering at all.

  This was one route not embedded in my muscle-memories, one I’d hardly walked at all although the way was obvious, short and easy. When I left home I did so in disgrace and in disgust, and for three years I had no willing contact with my family. I’d been as careful as I could manage, even to avoid accidental encounters. That most particularly included keeping well away from my father’s house. I used to go so far as not to go to parties, if they were inside a quarter-mile radius of Laurel Drive.

  Still. Up the hill, over the main road (look left, look right, look left again; don’t look ahead, never anticipate) and carry straight on, take a left and then a right and here we were, just where we didn’t want to be, and what was new?

  Well, it must still be something of a new experience for Jamie, to find himself so much the outsider where he always used to be the heart, the new generation, the smart young hopeful boy. I thought he was coping pretty well, from what I’d seen: better than ever I had, at any rate.

  Right now he was coping brilliantly, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with me, saying nothing. Attaching himself to someone even more outcast from his father’s favour, demanding nothing except the right to go with me, being his cousin’s keeper. Whither thou goest I will go, because thou art my bro.

  On his face, even in the harsh chiaroscuro of the streetlights, I could see the
mark where I’d hit him because he’d made his girlfriend pregnant. I had also earlier seen Laura touch it with questioning fingers. Hadn’t been able to hear or read what he’d said in reply, but I guessed that my name had been no part of it. She hadn’t turned to find me, to stare or glare or come across in fury. Fell off my bike, he might have said, or something like it.

  I reached out to touch him in my turn, gripped his arm in lieu of words. He misunderstood entirely, grunting softly and coming to a halt with his eyes fixed firmly on the other side of the road, seeing what we’d come to see.

  Reluctantly, I followed his gaze.

  There was my father’s house, with all lights burning; and there beside it was my father’s neighbour’s house, with no lights burning and broad tape stretched across the gateway. There were words printed on the tape, but I didn’t need to cross the road to read them. POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS those words would say, or something like it. The police had little enough to do in this town, but here was something they’d dared to get involved in.

  In my father’s drive was my father’s car, the old Ford that he loved and cared for very much more, it had always seemed, than he loved and cared for us. But the windscreen was smashed, the bonnet was buckled and bent, the roof looked like someone had danced on it. In boots.

  This was easy, alas, this was a story written in such big letters than no one would need to cross a road to read them. Not a popular man, my father. Especially on this street, where he liked to throw his weight around with all the weight of his name behind it. His neighbour in particular had many reasons, many years’-worth of reasons to hate him. And the Macallans are weak they must have been whispering, all up and down the street, the Macallans are on the run at last; and not quite daring to face down the man himself—my father would have a gun for sure, if guns were on the family agenda now—he must have come out in broad daylight, picked a time when Dad was out without his car, and trashed the thing. Petty vindictiveness, small change set against so long and strong a resentment, but it must have been irresistible.

  And Dad, dear Dad, what did he do? He waited, of course, for the dark. When the moon was high, when his skin tingled with his strength, he must have called or forced or dragged his neighbour out, never mind how. Perhaps the neighbour came willingly, perhaps he came laughing, bragging, knowing that Macallan women were hostage against my father’s good behaviour.

  But my raging father had not behaved well. That corner there, between the front door and the garage set back: that would be where the neighbour’s head had met the neighbour’s bricks, full frontal and in-your-face...

  o0o

  A shadow moved in a lighted window. I stiffened, and even as my eyes jerked to be sure of it I was wondering, can he see us, are we standing exposed here, or has good luck found us a shadow?

  But it wasn’t my father’s, that slender silhouette. Of course it wouldn’t be my father’s. He would be at Uncle James’ mansion just now, there would be a family council, they would all be preaching war. Someone will have had to pick him up, I thought, and grinned almost at the humiliation of that, how much he would have hated it. Someone I hoped would be interrogating him right now, forcing a confession from him, yes, it was me, it’s all my fault, I good as killed her myself. He’d hate that worse, and my grin only stretched the wider for it. My bones might have forgotten the beating he’d given me, but my mind not, my mind not at all.

  No, not Dad; that was my mother up there on the landing, gazing out. Lurking behind locked doors, abandoned without a thought: frightened for herself but probably frightened more for the future, for the terror that would surely come.

  My mother, my only relative whom I could love without reservation, and pity likewise.

  Almost I waved to catch her eye, if it wasn’t caught already; almost I went to her, to bring what poor comfort I could.

  Almost, but not quite. Once over that threshold, I knew I wouldn’t leave again. I couldn’t desert her as my father had, on such a night. I’d have to wait at least till he returned, which would likely not be till near dawn. Call me chicken, as I called myself, but I couldn’t face either part of that: neither the long hours of waiting for the inevitable nor the inevitable that must inevitably follow.

  My mother also, I told myself firmly, couldn’t be asked or expected to confront that. She wouldn’t want to see it, when Dad came home to find me there. Love her as I did, I couldn’t put her through it. She’d lost one child already, to the cold evaluation of her husband’s brother. Tried and found wanting, Hazel dear; and cui bono, who benefits but me? Did Uncle Allan no good at all, that much is for sure... How could I ask her to witness the hot uncalculating rage of her husband against her surviving son? He’d pulp me, I thought, as he had by the river only harder, longer, more lastingly. Everlastingly, maybe. He wasn’t good on control at the best of times, and right then would be pretty much the opposite of that. Him brought home shamed and sulking, guilty and desperate; him finding me there, the onlie begetter of his misery; and the sun not far from rising, him in his power but knowing he would lose it soon, while I would wax and grow strong in the light he hid from?

  No, I could die in such a story, and my mother do nothing but watch. I should let this happen to her? I thought not. Better to leave her as she was, alone and unprotected, a duck among geese. For her own sake, better to see her ignored and sorrowing than for her to see me murdered.

  Ach, I sicken myself sometimes, so pharisaical I can be. But even the self-disgust rising like gorge in my throat was not enough to drive me over that road and into my mother’s loving arms.

  o0o

  “What do you want to do?” Jamie asked at last.

  Not share my thoughts with you, bro, though I wondered how far he had tracked them anyway. Enough to build the same story in his head, I was sure. Enough to understand why I didn’t cross the street to see my mother, after so long a parting and so fraught a return? Maybe, maybe even that. He knew me well, did Jamie.

  “Let’s go back,” I said, with difficulty. “Dunno why we came, anyway. What’s to see? Couple of ghouls...”

  Your dad’s car is there to see, and your mother’s shadow, but bless him, he said none of that. He tucked his arm through mine and all but dragged me away, against the tug of my unresponsive feet that didn’t after all want to move.

  Up on the main road, on the corner was a pharmacy still open. Jamie steered us inside and bought toothbrushes, thinking ahead on a scale I couldn’t manage. On the opposite corner was the off-licence, an old friend of mine. Jamie had been in there once tonight already, and come back with a couple of four-packs to wash our dinner down; now he took me in for a second visit, stood me in the middle of the floor and waved an expansive arm at all those bottles, all those cans.

  “What would you like?” And when I just looked at him, “I think we should drink our way through at least one of my poor cars tonight. Don’t you?”

  “Laura won’t like it.”

  “Laura’s not getting it,” he said, grinning. “She’s off alcohol, remember?”

  Yes, I remembered; and no, I wasn’t going to argue any more. I turned my gaze back to the tempting, glittering displays. Forgetfulness lay there, perhaps, or standing here we could pretend that it did; and never mind the experience of a hundred other such binges that had never, ever produced a moment of much-desired amnesia. Didn’t matter, anyway. I was back with my best buddy after a long time gone, and what more excuse did we need?

  “Whisky?” Jamie suggested. “Brandy?”

  I shook my head. Laura had ruled herself out, but the other two not; and Jon was young and Janice was female, and in my experience either condition could apparently provoke a dislike of spirits. On the other hand, I knew they both drank lager. I’d watched them do it, earlier.

  So. Cans, bottles... Ah.

  “Grolsch,” I said.

  “Okay. How much?”

  “How much can we carry?”

  “In our arms, or in our heads?”
r />   “Whichever.”

  “Lots, then. Whichever.”

  o0o

  So we bought all the bottles they had and a giant Coke for Laura, and carried the haul home in bags whose stretching handles cut deep red grooves in our palms. We were welcomed back quietly, almost without questions, to a room cleared and lit by candles now. They must have been talking while we were gone, figuring out the facts and deciding discretion was the better part of valuing your friends.

  Laura was on tea already, but Jon and Janice were happy to drink with us. For a while, that’s all we really did. We talked a little about subjects carefully chosen not to matter; and we listened to music by bands I’d never heard of, so out of touch you can get in a couple of years abroad; but mostly, we just drank.

  Up to me, I thought, to make us cost what truly counted. I drained a bottle, fetched another round from the fridge where they were cooling nicely, and said, “Maybe you should’ve gone with your dad, Jamie.”

  “No,” from Laura, instantly; from him a slightly more considered, “Why?”

  “Just so’s we’d know what’s going on. We could use a spy.”

  “Well, there are people I can phone. Some of the cousins still talk to me. But I can tell you what’s going on anyway, I don’t need to be there. Nor do you, you know as well as I do. They’re having a wake, over Josie’s body. My dad demands action, he wants a fight; so does everyone else, more or less. Give or take. Only someone’s going to be sensible, they’re going to ask why this happened; and they’ll know about,” a gesture, “about Laurel Drive, they’re bound to by now. So your dad gets the third degree, and he confesses—”

  “Well, actually he blusters,” I said, “but yeah, it’s the same thing.”

  “Right. So in the end nothing happens, because nothing’s really changed. It’s still a life for a life, and there’s nothing anyone there can do about it.”