Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  “Why do people do that?” Jamie demanded, seizing the other end of the stick as so often, right or wrong. “I mean, sitting in front of a camera and saying how you can’t get it up without a roll of clingfilm—why do they want to do that?”

  “Why do you want to watch?” I countered.

  “You’re watching too.”

  “Only because you turned it on. I wouldn’t have.”

  He looked at me then, not the screen; and after a second he said, “No, you wouldn’t, would you?” Which obviously meant something, and I was still trying to work out what when he danced through the channels again, found some adverts and decided those were easier.

  And he chuckled after a minute, and said, “Hey, Ben, you ever known a girl menstruate blue?”

  “No.”

  “Because they all do in the ads, have you noticed? Tampons, pads, they always show ’em soaking up blue. Maybe we just don’t sleep with the right quality of girl, did you ever consider that?”

  And when I didn’t answer he glanced at me again, and grunted, and said, “What, then, shall I turn it off before we get one about nappies? ’Cos we will, it’s daytime, they reckon it’s all women watching.”

  Always sharp, our Jamie. Right now, that wasn’t fair. It was like having my sister back, riding inside my head, leaving me nowhere to hide.

  Because he was right, of course he was right; menstruating led automatically for me to its opposite, to not menstruating, which was what Laura was doing right now because she was pregnant. By him. And I’d known for hours now, for a full day, and I still couldn’t get past it or round it or over it. Too big a fact, too big a bump, too too big a baby.

  Nothing I could say except I’m sorry, and if he was tracking me that closely he knew that much already. So I went on saying nothing, sipping sweet fizz and staring at the telly, and yes, here came a nappy ad right on cue. Unfair of me perhaps, but I left it to him to do the hard stuff, the talking.

  So he did, he said, “Christ, Ben, what are we going to do with you?”

  That was cheating, I thought, asking questions. Worse, he made it non-rhetorical, he played Brutus and paused for a reply.

  “Same as last time,” I said eventually, when he didn’t relent.

  “What, you mean wait till we’ve sorted the shit out here and then let you bugger off, watch you drive into the sunset like some homeless fucking drifter, is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” I couldn’t see any other hope for me. Much, much too big a baby.

  “Like fuck we will. You know your trouble? You don’t know family when it kicks you in the teeth.”

  Actually that was all my experience of family, my definition; but Laura had said something much the same to me two years before in the crisis, in the church, and it was too heartbreakingly strange to hear her words come back at me from his mouth. It said too much about them both, again I was stranded, I couldn’t reply.

  So he said, “I’ve got a different plan, mate. You’re godfather to the baby and best man at the wedding too if we have one, that’s my idea.”

  And Father Hamish would preside at both ceremonies, no doubt, and the pews would be full of scowling Macallans making the air spit and crackle. My parents and his, all the uncles and aunts and cousins. What joy. And me, no doubt I’d be praying that he wouldn’t turn up for the wedding; I might even fix it so that he didn’t, so I could do the traditional thing and take his place, marry her in lieu, I was sad enough to settle for that.

  Not Laura, though. She’d say I don’t instead of I do, she’d fight me off with her bouquet and storm off big-bellied to find what had happened to him; and the image of that in my mind had me giggling despite myself, shaking my head and reaching for my glass, trying to swallow against the rising laughter and snorting bubbles out through my nose like some incompetent kid.

  Jamie pounded me on the back till I could breathe again, then he grabbed me round the throat and squeezed until I couldn’t, and growled, “What, you don’t think she’d marry me, is that it?”

  Actually no, that wasn’t it at all, he was way off track now; but I said it was, of course. I croaked, “Yeah, that’s it. No chance. Do me a favour.”

  He grinned, pressed his stubbly cheek against my own and whispered, “Just you watch. You stay and watch, you’ll see.”

  And then he let me go. I massaged my throat gently, coughed a little, reached for my voice and found it. “Seriously, Jamie. How can I? I’m sorry, I’m not proud of it but it guts me, seeing the two of you together. And now she’s pregnant, and I can’t bear it. I love her...”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. Not the first to say that, either. “You only think you do. Just grow up a bit, can’t you? There are other girls. Some of them even want you, for God’s sake. What about Janice?”

  I didn’t know what about Janice. Whether she wanted me or not, whether she’d have done the same for Jamie or any other drunk boy in her bed last night. All I knew was that she occupied a totally separate part of my head, her and every girl I’d slept with since I’d met Laura; and yes, I knew how I felt about Laura wasn’t safe or sensible, wasn’t even sane maybe, but it was the thing I’d labelled ‘love’ a long time ago and it hadn’t faded with the years and hadn’t changed, it was still sharp as wire and cutting deep, still making me bleed.

  “I’d swap,” I said bleakly.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  She Laura, or she Janice? Didn’t matter. Swapping was not on anybody’s agenda, not even mine; I wasn’t that much of a fantasist.

  Wasn’t much of a fantasist at all, in all honesty. I saw the world and my place in it pretty clearly, I thought. I’d had enough practice. I might yearn for things to be different, but I never really expected that they would be. Except occasionally, like when you’ve been two years away and you can tell yourself that you’ve changed and sound fairly convincing...

  “All right,” I said. “You get her to marry you, and I’ll be best man.”

  “Promise?”

  “Safest promise I ever made. It’ll never happen.”

  I said nothing about godfather to the baby, and neither did he. Barring disasters which even I couldn’t wish for, the baby was a certainty; the need for a godfather less certain, but at least in Jamie’s thoughts if not Laura’s. We’re an observant family, in our own sweet way. I couldn’t do it, though. I couldn’t pledge any kind of responsibility for this particular baby, and it would be nothing short of brutality if they asked me to. Laura would know that, if Jamie didn’t; but I thought he probably did. He hadn’t meant it as a serious proposal, only a way to batter at my defences, make me bleed a little more. He probably thought bleeding was healthy. Better to bleed than fester, he was probably saying to himself.

  o0o

  Whatever. We killed the bottle of Coke between us, and soon we were talking again: bikes and films, bad jokes and long involved stories, anything we could think of and nothing that could hurt. And it was all so like being teenage once again, thick-tongued and thin-skinned, it was easy; and when the phone rang the first time it was afternoon already and neither one of us had noticed.

  Jamie answered, came back with a shrug.

  “Laura says they’ve done the hospital, but all tests came up negative. People are gossiping, but no one knows anything for sure even about Cousin Josie, it’s all rumour; and there’s not a word about the hostages.”

  I nodded. No surprise. In honesty we were drawing a bow at a venture here, and a pretty distant venture at that.

  “They’re going to have lunch now, before they try the cops and the courts. You want lunch?”

  “Sure.” Not so very long since breakfast and breakfast had been big, eating against the ravages of the night just gone; but we were still playing teenagers, and adolescents can always eat. “What is there?”

  “Dunno, I’ll go see.”

  Sounds of fridge and cupboard doors opening and closing, with increasing violence; then he appeared tossing a tin fretf
ully in one hand.

  “Bloody students, you’d think they were up for an award, how cliché can you get?”

  “Beans on toast, then?” Not a guess; I’d been a student and a broke one myself, in this very flat yet. I could recognise that particular label in the dark with my eyes closed and a black cat sitting on my face.

  “Beans on toast,” he confirmed gloomily, retreating. I couldn’t keep from grinning. Poor Jamie, he was not used to being poor. But then, anything more elaborate, I wasn’t sure he’d have been capable of cooking. Unless Laura had been at him there too.

  o0o

  We ate off our knees in front of the TV news, and actually Laura must have been at him, because what we ate was some distance from Mr Heinz’s original variety. Jamie had added spices, mostly cumin and coriander, I thought, and a little chilli; and he’d found some cheese also, to grate over the top. Tasted good.

  There was nothing on either the national or the local news about Cousin Josie, but neither one of us had expected that there would be. Journalists still kept their noses out of family business, it seemed.

  Jamie took the plates away, muttering about mugs of tea. I heard washing-up noises also and decided yes, Laura had definitely been at him.

  Then the phone rang again. Jamie yelled something from the kitchen, went on clattering plates; my turn, I guessed. Maybe he thought it would be Janice this time, and I had some kind of lien on her conversation as he did on Laura’s.

  It wasn’t Janice. I picked up the receiver and said hullo, and,

  “Hi, is that Ben? This is Jonathan.”

  “Yeah, Jon, it’s me. What gives?”

  “There’s someone here I think you ought to talk to,” he said, all tension and TV dialogue, product of his age.

  Behind his voice I could hear the yammer of a commentator, high on an undistinguishable sport. “Where’s here?” I asked obligingly, though I thought I already knew.

  “Solara, the tapas bar, remember?”

  “Yes. Jon. I broke their big window for them, remember?”

  “Oh. Yes. They’ve fixed it now...”

  “But they might not be so keen on seeing my big ugly face in there again, you know?”

  “Right. Okay. Um, how’s about the station bar, then?”

  Truth to tell, I wasn’t so keen on showing my big ugly Macallan face anywhere in town, daylight or no; I didn’t want to have to break any more windows. But he sounded urgent, he sounded wired. So, “Okay, we’ll come. Twenty minutes all right?”

  “Sure. See you...”

  We hung up; I looked up from where I was sitting on the hall carpet, to find Jamie standing over me.

  “Something?”

  “Well, Jon thinks so. Station bar, we said. Are you fit?”

  “I’ll turn the kettle off.”

  He went to do that, then came back and claimed the phone, dialled a number.

  “Me, sweets. Jonathan’s got a bite, he thinks. We’re meeting him at the station bar... Well, I’m not sure. Hang on.”

  He looked across at me. “Should the girls come too?”

  “Um. I don’t know. A crowd might spook the witness, whoever it is.”

  “Yeah.” Into the phone again, “We think better not. We’ll call you, okay? ... Yeah, right, you do that. Listen for the phone. I love you.” And to me, “They’re going on as planned. Hedge our bets, cover all bases, that sort of stuff.”

  “Right.”

  We put our feet into sun-dried, sun-warmed footwear on the step, pinched a couple of baseball caps from a hook in the hall to make up an elementary disguise, slammed the door with a prayer for no burglars today because this time I didn’t have keys to Chubb up behind us, and set off down the hill.

  o0o

  The station was an edifice, almost a monument, lurking in the shadow of its massive Palladian portico. The bar was fake-Victorian, where the building was genuine: imitation oak veneer everywhere, imitation crimson plush on all the seats, little shaded lamps on all the walls and the repro prints between them interspersed with odd gleaming fitments, the railway equivalents of horse-brasses.

  It was awful, but it sold beer, and from a genuine hand-pump yet. That was good. What was better, at a table in an alcove was Jon; and he was waving us over, and he was not alone.

  Just a kid, the lad who was with him. Sixteen, maybe? Too young to buy a legal drink, at least. Or he looked it, at least. That might have been part of his stock-in-trade, I thought, as pennies tumbled in my head.

  He sat there sipping Coke, his dirt-blond hair in spikes and his shoulders hunched into a ripped leather jacket despite the sun, and he looked young and pretty and used in the bar’s shadows, beaten and bruised when he turned into the light. Street for sure, a runaway run too far ever to go back. At first glance he looked homeless also, I almost looked around for his sleeping-bag and his dog on a string. But his fingers glittered with rings of gold, and his ears too; he’d a stud in his nose and another through his eyebrow, and a pile of notes and change on the table in front of him that suggested he’d paid for Jon’s drink and his own, though most likely it was Jon fetched them from the bar.

  Stock-in-trade, I thought, and never trust a first impression. Images can be so deceptive...

  I slipped onto the bench seat beside Jon, patted his shoulder, said hullo.

  “Hi. Ben, this is Charlie, he’s a friend of mine, from before...”

  “Before what?” I asked. Not that I didn’t know. Before I gave up renting, obviously; but I was moved by what I guess you’d call a spirit of mean curiosity, I wanted to know which of them was going to say it first.

  “Well, before I knew you, for a start,” Jon said. Chicken, I thought. But in this context, ‘chicken’ had more than one meaning; and if Charlie was anywhere near as young as he looked now, and if he’d been doing what he clearly did even before I met Jonathan, he must have been scandalously young when he started, so much a chicken he was barely out of the egg.

  “Jon used to look after me,” he said. “When I first come here, when I didn’t know the rules.”

  He looked like a boy who knew all the rules intimately now, who bore even his bruises like an advertisement. But yes, I could see Jon doing the elder-brother bit and doing it well, if he found someone four, five years younger than him playing the same unchancy game.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “So what about now?”

  “Oh, now he just gets right up my fucking nose, doesn’t he?” With a sideways scowl at Jonathan, who smiled easily back, and I thought that made sense too. No doubt Jon thought he still needed looking after, and no doubt Charlie violently disagreed.

  Jamie came over with two pints in his hands. I introduced him to Charlie, who nodded brusquely. “Yeah, I know. Jamie Macallan, I seen you, loads of times. You too,” to me, “before you went away. Heard you were back, though. Before Jon told us.”

  “Seen me where?” Jamie demanded.

  “On the street, in the clubs—all over. You’re known, mate.” And if Charlie was nervous at meeting someone so well known and for such reasons, if he was at all faced down by the danger, he was determinedly not showing it.

  Come on, catch up, Jamie. I took my pint from him, and slid along the bench to make room.

  “Tell Ben what you told me,” Jon said.

  Too early, too precipitate; Charlie shook his head, one harsh hissing jerk of denial. “Not here. Christ, I work here! That’s my pitch,” with a nod towards a video game ruining the counterfeit ambience in the opposite corner. “It’s a good pitch, everyone knows me; I’m not blowing it for anyone. It’s okay to talk here, if they don’t think you’re tricks they’ll think you’re missionaries, but I’m not saying anything that matters.”

  Fair enough. These alcoves weren’t exactly soundproof, and you couldn’t see who might be sitting in the next one over. I drank, gazed thoughtfully at the flickering lights of the game machine, had no trouble at all picturing Charlie of an evening: thumbing coins into the slot, sipping at a Coke balan
ced on the top, playing with a feverish concentration and looking every inch the lost lad adrift in a world too wide, scowling so hard at the screen because he didn’t dare look over his shoulder. Image again, but pure seduction that would be, for the clients he wanted to attract. And once they’d known him a time or two, the wise ones would know the image for what it was, clever fakery and nothing more; but I was willing to bet they’d keep coming back. Charlie, I thought, was probably very good at what he did.

  “So how come you ended up here?” I asked him. We were trapped by our drinks, we couldn’t leave yet for somewhere he deemed safer; and if he wouldn’t talk business, I thought he’d probably talk trade.

  “I was thirteen,” he said, “I was on the run, where’s better than here? No one’s going to follow me up, even down south people know what this place is like; and the local filth don’t give a fuck as long as they get a share. Christ, they’d have paid my train fare in if I’d asked them, if I’d known.”

  Likely they would. Rendered impotent by my family’s malign influence, the police had turned malign themselves; after so many years of helpless inadequacy, they were now immeasurably corrupt, almost as much a burden on the town as we were. Or no, not that, because we were the major players; all we left for them was the small stuff. As, for example, the rent boys working the station.

  o0o

  We sat and drank, and didn’t once mention what we were there for, though it was a visible tension between us, an urgency muted by awkward necessity. As soon as all our glasses were empty, Jon turned to Charlie and said, “Where, then?”

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  So we walked, out of the station and down a long run of old stone steps to the riverside. There at last he felt comfortable, where he could see there was no one close enough to overhear. Jamie and I had our caps pulled low and I was making the air dance with light again around us, the best we could manage for our own protection and his.

  The tide was coming in, pushing against the river’s flow; Charlie watched the murky swirls in the water and said, “I was in the cop shop three, four nights ago. That’s where I got this,” touching his cheek, where a significant bruise was yellowing. “They do that sometimes, take us in and knock us about a bit, just to make sure we’re not holding out on them, you know?”