Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  “And if your dad’s got people waiting for us?”

  He just shrugged. “They can’t take us. You by day and me by night, they can’t touch us. And I want to talk to Dad anyway, see if he’s got any ideas.”

  Yes, I thought. We were that desperate, that devoid of ideas of our own.

  o0o

  We walked to the nearest taxi firm and took a cab across town, saying nothing; we wouldn’t have talked anyway, with the driver listening in, but we had nothing to say to each other. We’d screwed things dreadfully, lost what we valued most; what was there to talk about?

  There was no noticeable watch being kept on Jamie’s flat. We let ourselves in and just slumped mutely, too low to think about eating or getting drunk or any other way to pass a little time, to keep our minds from dwelling on what we’d done. Jamie didn’t even make a move towards his phone. Uncle James could wait, it seemed, as we were waiting.

  For what, I wasn’t clear. Just something to happen, I guess, looking back: something to take the burden of action off our inadequate shoulders.

  When it came, we all startled. Waiting or not, we weren’t ready. There was a thunderous knocking on the door downstairs; even Jamie went pale, and Jon looked about fit to cry or maybe scream with the tension and the anxiety. Janice was his flatmate, I reminded myself sharply, and his friend; newly my friend also, and a good and uninvolved person, the most innocent victim in this. It was easy to lose sight of that, in my overriding, obsessive panic over Laura.

  Panic doesn’t have to be a mad hectic fight-or-flee response, all adrenalin and everything in motion. Panic can be a stillness also, a stifling terror of making any choice or any voluntary movement, in the utmost certainty that it will be the wrong choice or the wrong movement and doom will come.

  I’ve always known that. What I didn’t know until that day was that even where there is no choice, panic can still hold you frozen. We knew we had to go to answer that knocking, but for a long minute none of us dared.

  Oddly, it was me who moved in the end. Oddly, because I had no intention, I didn’t make the choice; I guess it was just the situation made it for me, lifted me slowly and shakily to my feet, walked me across the carpet towards the landing and the stairs down.

  The other two followed me with their eyes only, not a muscle else twitching to go with me.

  Landing; stairs. One at a time I took them, old-man style, gripping the banister hard. There seemed no hurry in the world; the knocker had not knocked again, though I’d been an age getting even this far. Gone away, perhaps, given up and gone away? Perhaps, but I didn’t believe it. Not so much urgent they’d sounded, as imperative: you will answer this. Not the sort of people to give up and go away. Just the sort of people to knock once and be satisfied with that, be certain they were heard and would be answered.

  Sounded like my Uncle James, I thought; but this was daylight, and while he might venture out behind dark glass and a shield of lesser lights, I thought he wouldn’t do so in person to come fetch an errant son. He’d just send the shield, or some part of it. With, perhaps, rifles. Not to point them at his boy, of course, good lord no: for your protection, Jamie, that’s all, we’ve got to look after the lad, that’s what he said...

  Amazing, how your mind can fillet all the bones out of a situation in the space of a second or so, leave it soft and flabby in your mind, no threat at all. I knew, oh, I knew that was not what was happening here. I wasn’t going to open the front door to find a couple of cousins there, come to take us home to Uncle James. I’d welcome them, I thought, I’d all but fall into their arms and say yes please, take us home, make us safe; and fetch the girls too, you’re grown-ups, you can do it. But they wouldn’t be there, it wasn’t that kind of world. We’d tried to be grown-ups on our own and we’d cocked that appallingly; we weren’t going to be rescued now, by family or any other tool of some capricious but ultimately merciful deity. No chance, that wasn’t the way the bastard worked.

  I opened the door, and there was no one there. Left, right, across the road: no one at all. Wrong again, Ben, they didn’t wait. They didn’t have the patience after all.

  What there was, I could hear the sound of a car cruising slowly down the hill and away. Could have been them, very likely was; I stepped forward to see if I could spot the car, if I could identify it. If I wanted to wave.

  Stepped forward, and my foot nudged something on the step.

  I looked down, the only direction I hadn’t thought to check; and my eyes jerked away before they’d even registered what they were actually looking at. Something about the immediate image, glossy black criss-crossed with pale stripes, hinted at me strongly that I really, really didn’t want to see.

  I was sweating, even, as I stood there in restorative sunlight, in my element: sweating coldly once again, and that made more than once too often. I stared upwards into bright sky, forced my lungs to breathe slow and deep against a scared asthmatic panting, and at last dragged my eyes back down.

  A black bin-liner, that’s what it was, wrapped around something about the size and shape of a football, and sealed with what looked like half a roll of parcel-tape.

  Josie’s body, that’s what it reminded me of, wrapped in black plastic sheeting and sealed with waterproof tape, bound with rope, addressed and delivered on the tide right to our feet. As this was, right at my feet and saying try me, weigh me, pick me up and carry me.

  Which I did, in the end, though it took a while. It was heavier than it looked, as heavy as I’d feared; and it weighed more in my mind even than in my hands as I bore it slowly back up the stairs.

  I didn’t want to take it in, to present it like a prize to Jamie and Jon, to play pass-the-parcel and make us all guess as I was having to. So in the end I didn’t, I just sat on the top step and cradled it in my lap, trying not even to feel through the plastic to find the shape of whatever lay within.

  I guess everyone’s reactions were running at panic-slow pace, or else they’d been biting their tongues in there, not to ask for fear of being told. It took an age, it seemed to take forever before Jamie called through to me, “Who was it, Ben?”

  However long it seemed it hadn’t been long enough, or so it seemed; I couldn’t answer him. Couldn’t tell him, either. Not yet. I just stared at what I held between my hands, and finally, finally drew a section tight and worked my thumb through the plastic. Fair’s fair, and he’d done it last time; and maybe I was trying to assert my rights here, just in case.

  The other thumb went in, and tugged in opposition. I tore a hole in the bin-liner as small as I could make it, as slow as I could manage; just so I’d know first, so I could tell him if he came. When he came, if it was.

  My thumbs touched something infinitely familiar, and I jerked them out with a gasp. The plastic settled slowly, and even in the dim light and through the small tear I’d made I could see hair, human hair, dirty-blond and boyish. Also the tip of an ear; and some of the hair was clotted dark and there were stains on the skin of the ear, and the copper-red metallic smell of clotted blood came wafting out and there must—of course there must—have been a mass of it, a mess of it, I’d never smelt it so strong.

  I groaned; and God forgive me, there was more relief than anything else in that groan, and in the sob that followed it. I’d thought, feared, dreaded that I was holding Laura in my lap.

  Shock at being right, or half right; horror and disgust; they all came after, they’d all had to wait. When they came, though, they came good, so that when at last Jamie came he found me huddled up tight against the wall, fœtal as I could achieve without an immersion tank and a supply of amniotic fluid.

  I guess I’d put the package down. I didn’t remember, didn’t want to look. But I heard Jamie’s gasp, his grunt; then—always braver than me, always willing to face what I only wanted to run from—I heard him crouch and breathe, and tear the plastic wider.

  A slow hissing breath now, that didn’t have much to do with lungs or an oxygen debt; something like
a whimper, though again it came or seemed to come from somewhere other than his voice; a rustle as he wrapped it up again.

  “It’s Charlie,” I said, largely into the crook of my elbow. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Pause, breathe a while, speak: “Guess the poor kid just couldn’t run fast enough.”

  “No, right,” I said bitterly. “He ran straight into us fucking Macallans, and got stopped dead.”

  Nine: With One Pound They Were Free

  I’d seen as little as I had to, as much as I could bear. Jamie had seen more, enough to be sure; Jon had seen nothing at all, nor did any one of the three of us want him to.

  Nor could any one or any two or all the three of us together stop him from seeing all there was, all that we’d been given.

  Charlie was—had been—his friend; someone had to look after Charlie.

  Jon stood in the doorway behind us, where we were sitting on the landing. Jamie had his arms hooked through the balusters. I was looking at him now because that was marginally better than closing my eyes and looking at Charlie disembodied, floating accusingly behind my lids.

  “Charlie?” Jon whispered. Neither one of us turned round.

  “I’m sorry, Jon.” It was Jamie actually who was speaking, but it might have been either one of us. It didn’t matter. “We really fucked this bad.”

  “Show me,” though his thin voice was also saying I don’t want to see, and for sure neither of us wanted to show him.

  Jamie stood up and lifted the wrapped head as reverently as he could, which wasn’t very. It’s hard to be reverent, with a torn bin-liner that in all honesty you absolutely do not want to touch.

  But he carried it through into the living-room, Jon following his every movement with a bleached face and eyes that were sinking and bruising almost by the second. There was a coffee table in the middle of the floor, with nothing on it but a bowl of fruit and a box of Kleenex; Jamie set his burden down there, carried the fruit away into the kitchen. I heard the banging of cupboard doors, and for a moment thought he was going to come back with a plate to stand the head on, like a trophy or a chef’s excess, specialité de la maison.

  Should have known him better; he came back with a plain white linen tablecloth. He knelt down, spread that out, then looked up at Jonathan.

  “Jon, are you sure? Ben and me, this isn’t so new to us, we’ve both seen hard things before. And we didn’t know Charlie, either. You don’t have to be macho, it’s not a challenge you lose cred for if you don’t look...”

  “Show him to me,” Jon said.

  o0o

  So Jamie showed him, showed us both, showed us all. He still tried to mask the moment, getting his body between it and us as he ripped the plastic away and lifted the head onto the spread white cloth. I guess it was the raw stump he didn’t want to share, the hacked meat and scabby wet red look of it, the hard lumps of bone and trailing stringy sinews: no neat headsman’s axe had done this, just some bastard butcher with a blunted blade.

  Jamie tried not to let us see that and failed, very much the order of the day; he placed the head carefully, sickeningly upright on its severed neck, and it toppled instantly over to give us a great view of its underside. So ill-cut, it was never going to balance. Jamie half-reached to try again anyway, glanced at us, shrugged and left it lie.

  What he did instead, he did close Charlie’s dulled eyes for us, and that was a blessing. Then he flipped a corner of the cloth over the ruin of the neck, and I wanted to pretend it looked like he was only sleeping, like we saw him only in head-shot with a sheet drawn up to his chin.

  Couldn’t do it, it was too obscene, just the head of him on the table there; and there were streaks of dried blood all over his pretty, battered face and in his hair and his skin was as pale as Jon’s, near as pale as the cloth he lay on for want of all that blood. Never mind the absence of his body, he couldn’t have looked anything but dead.

  Jon snorted, sucking snot, fighting tears uselessly; but he came forward and knelt down beside Jamie, and reached with shaking hands guided by half-blind eyes to take a handful of Kleenex and wipe away what blood he could shift, not much, and then to fold the cloth quite neatly over and around all that we had of Charlie.

  “He’s mine,” he said, aggressively for him. “Okay?”

  Okay, fine; we weren’t about to dispute possession. But, “What will you do?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t keep it, nor could he turn up at the crem with a head and no body to ask for a short service. They didn’t come that short, I thought, hating myself for thinking it.

  “I’ll take him to some friends,” he said, wiping his own face now with another wad of tissues from the box. “We’ll try to find out what they’ve done with the, with the rest of him. Got to be somewhere, hasn’t it?”

  “Jonathan, be careful.” If Charlie had died for talking to us—and there was no ‘if’ about that, it was as plain as the nose on Jamie’s face or mine, the bloody nose on his own—then anyone identifying themselves as a friend of Charlie’s was running a terrible risk.

  “I will. Don’t worry, we’ll move in a pack. We can look after ourselves,” he said, with a glance at the bundle that was all regret, we couldn’t look after our own. “Have you got something I can, you know, carry him in?”

  Not a carrier bag was the subtext there, and we both got it instantaneously. Jamie went off to rummage. I would have offered my rucksack, still sitting where I’d dumped it in the corner under my jacket and helmet, where I’d left them all when I’d run out on Laura, but that didn’t seem appropriate either.

  Nothing did, nothing could; but Jamie came back with a choice, a smaller backpack that Laura used to carry her schoolbooks around in and a coolbox for beers.

  “Either of these do?” he asked diffidently. “Best I can manage...”

  Jon nodded, and took the backpack. He put the wrapped head into it carefully, gently, as tenderly as seemed appropriate; then he stood up, slipped his arms through the straps and said, “Uh, I’ll be off, then.”

  “Right. Go well, Jon.”

  Jamie hugged him, and so did I. He left us, walking gingerly out of the room, as if what he carried was heavier far than it ought to be; we stood listening as he made his slow way down the stairs and out of the door, closing it quietly behind him.

  Then, “What’s next?” I asked helplessly.

  “I don’t know, bro. It’s their move, I guess.”

  “Yeah, right.” We’d made ours, and it had gone horribly, unimaginably wrong. “You going to call your dad?”

  “I guess.” He didn’t go to the phone, though. I think he felt as I did, like a puppet with its strings cut, no movement left in either one of us. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, “Jon didn’t even seem angry, he never said a word about the people who’d done that to Charlie.”

  “He’s not family,” I said wearily. Indeed he was the opposite of family, he was cattle in my family’s lovely phrase; he’d lived all his life under our hard rule, he likely expected monstrous things to happen to him and his, without any hope of payback. Never mind that this time it had come from another player in the game, he simply wasn’t tuned to look for retribution.

  “Well. It’s something else added to the account,” Jamie grunted, taking Jon’s debts to lie alongside our own.

  “I suppose.” Me, I felt much like Jon, suddenly; I wanted this to end. I’d do anything to see Laura and the others safe, but I was more sickened than vengeful. It seemed odd, but I realised that I really, really didn’t want any more killing.

  And couldn’t say so, not to Jamie, not just then. His loss, his fear was greater far than my own, or more cruelly grounded; he had what I only yearned for, and my doubts and qualms didn’t amount to even a can of beans against his need. Laura’s danger cut at us both, but the knife in my guts was a phantom conjured of my own obsessive dreaming. He’d had years of living with her, where all I’d had was wanting; now she carried his child inside her; in him that knife tw
isted deeper with every moment.

  Engulfed by twin horrors, what had been done to Charlie coupled with what was threatened against Laura, against Janice and our cousins, I didn’t in any case see how we could get out of this without more killing. Especially given the Macallan temper, honed by generations of kicking the weak. Anyone dares to kick back, you just kick the harder. Instinct or training, nature or nurture, it was there, it was imprinted; look at Uncle James. Even better, look at my dad. Knowing what would follow, he still couldn’t control himself, and so Josie had died; and they’d want their revenge for that, and how long they could deny themselves a rampage was anybody’s guess.

  So yes, I expected more killing. I was just deeply uncertain now that my family would actually come out on top at the end. Wasn’t sure that I wanted them to, either, wasn’t sure what I wanted. Just not heads on spikes, that’s all. No more heads, no more sacrifices. Innocent or guilty, no more deaths...

  And as with everything else I’d ever wanted, I thought I was only pissing into the wind. I never for a moment thought I’d get it.

  o0o

  If we’d had ideas, I don’t think either one of us would have mentioned them to the other. Ideas were dangerous, ideas had brought us to this. As it was, though, I don’t think either one of us was in any danger of being that creative, to find any way to make this worse. Myself certainly not, I was battered and numbed and beaten, and Jamie seemed no better. My best thought in that time was to change my clothes: to lose the shorts at last, and get into tough denim to face a tough world clad for thorns.

  When the phone rang, it was salvation or doom for sure, it had to be. What we were waiting for, though we maybe hadn’t known that we were waiting. Not a wrong number, not a telesales girl with her eyes double glazed and her voice well insulated. God, even God couldn’t be so cruel. Could he?

  The phone rang, and we looked at each other. Bleak, afraid, uncertain of God, knowing only a heap of broken promises: which of us was going to answer?

  It seemed that we both were, though it was Jamie who moved. He could reach the phone from where he was sitting; he didn’t lift the receiver, though, he just pressed a button on the base unit. The ringing cut off, and a voice said, “Hullo, who’s that?”