“No.” Laura would chance it, and I thought probably one of my cousins also; but the others not, they’d be useless.
“Your turn now,” she said, but I shook my head.
“Not yet. They left you unguarded, you said, but you must’ve been locked in,” and stripped of anything useful as I had been, keys and penknives, purses, credit cards. “You found a way out, you said, but how?”
“Oh.” She smiled slightly, a touch of happy memory, what I’d been working for. Pleased with herself, she was; very pleased she would be later, when the rest had a little faded and this shone out. “They had us in the cells to start with, yeah? I just asked the wrong guy the wrong question, I suppose. I never thought the police might be involved... They locked us up with the others, me and Laura. But then they took us out of there in a hurry, brought us here and just shoved us into this arcade, it must have been the first place they could think of. They barred the doors on us and there weren’t any windows, of course, those places, it was like being locked into a safe. But all the lights were on and the machines were running, there were dumpers in the ashtrays, they’d only just cleared the people out before we came, it was that sudden. All I really wanted to do was smoke those dumpers right down to the filter, I was desperate for a fag; but no one had a light, they’d taken everything off us. So I was going round almost on my hands and knees, looking for a live match someone might have dropped; and the other thing I did, every slot machine I came to, I dipped my hand into the tray. I do that, it’s just instinct. And I found a quid, you almost always do. Stuck it in my jeans and forgot it, and went on looking for a light.
“But when they moved us, after the Island had closed up for the night, they put us in some kind of breezeblock office over the way. And it had windows, little ones with these big metal bars over them,” glancing down at her big metal bar with its speaking stain, “but the bars were on the inside, our side, and they were bolted into the walls, and the bolts had these great big screw heads on them, and the pound fitted the slot? So me and one of the others, Serena, we took turns all night and half the morning, and we got two bars off in the end. And then we broke the window, and nobody came; so I slithered out and had a look, and there weren’t any guards, so I jemmied the door open and let the others out. And then...”
And then she faltered, but I knew the rest. A couple of guards, a couple of girls with iron bars and desperation on their side.
“Show me,” I said; and she thought I meant the quid, she dug it out and showed me a buckled, scarred piece of shrapnel the Queen would not have recognised as coin of her realm. But I took her hands and turned them, and saw the damage to her nails and fingertips and knuckles; and just as I was wincing in sympathy with that, I couldn’t help it, I remembered break a finger and a girl’s scream. Janice’s fingers weren’t in prime condition, but none of them was broken. And she hadn’t mentioned Laura in her list of martyr-heroines, and Laura wasn’t the girl to sit idly by and let others work her rescue for her...
Janice gasped, and I realised just how tightly I was squeezing her poor hurt hands.
“Shit, sorry,” I muttered, blushing for other reasons entirely. “Come on, can we get out of here now?”
“Mm,” she said, eyeing me thoughtfully and then leading me by the hand, not allowing me to let go. “You’ll want to see Laura, see how she is.”
Ten: Ben Behaving Madly
How Laura was, was busy. Focused.
And distressed, and in pain, and anxious, and infinitely relieved; and dealing with all of those by stepping aside from them, leaving them lie for later. Focusing hard.
Not quite hard enough, I thought. Jamie was beside her and just a little behind—where I thought he’d been told to stand: don’t get in my light, I thought she’d said, or something like it—and she couldn’t forget, couldn’t ignore him, couldn’t focus him out. Kept turning her head to check before she turned back, focused in.
What she was focusing on, of course—this was after all Laura, medic Laura, wannabe doc and mother-to-be Laura, little-friend-of-all-the-world Laura who disapproved of any pain on principle, except perhaps my own—what she was kneeling over was the fallen body of our foe. One of our foes. Not the man who made puns in tunnels, just a heavy: who looked particularly heavy now, sprawled face-down in the dust and sand and garbage that covered the road. Who looked dead indeed, his flesh slumping flaccidly on its cage of bone and his head seeming bent out of true at the back, a mess of hair and blood and I thought broken bone.
Give it up, Laura, I wanted to tell her, let his ghost go.
She was groping awkwardly one-handed, left-handed—she who was so determinedly dextrous—for any pulse she could find at his wrist or at his neck, and then and not for the first time feeling with already-blooded fingers at the soft giving spot on his skull which shouldn’t have given so much even when he was a baby.
At last she did give it up. She twisted her head aside and tried to stand, pushing at the ground with her one hand while she kept the other cradled against her stomach; and couldn’t do it, and reached instead up and behind, for Jamie’s instant aid. He helped her to her feet, turned her gently towards him, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her mucky hair. Not enough, I thought, he couldn’t kiss away her failure; but then Janice at my side made a sound, a soft and guilty choke in her throat, and it was my turn to focus, to hold and hug and try to give an impossible comfort.
I thought vaguely that there was an irony here, I who had wanted no more killing seeking to succour someone who had just killed for the first and worst time, even though she’d had better reason for it than ever I’d had; but she didn’t give me time or space to pursue the thought, burrowing her face into my neck, demanding the attention of more than my body. Her shoulders shook under my hands, I felt her tears trickle down under the collar of my shirt. I did what little I could, working my fingers into tense muscles pressing my cheek against her hair and murmuring platitudes, “It’s all right, Jan, it’s okay, you did what you had to, it was just self-defence,” and really, really didn’t want to lift my head even for a moment, to spy on my coz where he was doing much the same thing for his beloved, my beloved Laura.
o0o
There were questions and more than questions, there were urgencies clamouring at the fringes of my mind, beating dark wings at my windows; but they had no more impact than a butterfly’s wings. If they were stirring up a storm it would come later, I could deal with it later. Right now it was easy just to turn right in on Jan, engulf her the best I could, be her shell against the world for a while.
And so I was, till she chose to open us up: and that came only after she’d sniffed, snorted, knocked her forehead meaningfully against my ear for whatever meaning I could extract from that, shuffled a few inches over to rub her face dry against my other shoulder and then glanced up and taken another kiss from me, that I was by no means loth to give her.
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” she said, eye to eye with me, nose to nose, other eye to other eye and holding my head tipped down at the requisite angle with both hands dug well into my hair, “I’ve been shut up with four of your relatives for the best part of a day and a night, and that just made me feel queasy and ill; and now here I am with you, and whatever it is it’s much stronger with you, you’re absolutely crackling, and it makes me feel better. How is that?”
The question startled me, more ways than one. Macallan women didn’t usually upset anyone very much, even en masse. Maybe Janice was hypersensitive to whatever it was, the aura, the disturbance in the ether that hung about us like a curse, like a blessing, actually only another fact of life to be endured or enjoyed in whatever measures came along. Maybe she’s been hypersensitised, a dry thought whispered in the back of my head. Maybe too-close exposure could do that to a girl, maybe the friction of mucous membranes could leave her with more than one legacy to remember a Macallan man by. I’d have to ask my mother. Or Laura, of course. I could ask Laura, she should know...
&n
bsp; But Janice wanted me answering her question, not sliding off into a private and tedious morbidity. She gave my head a wee shake, to remind me; and, “Patterns of interference,” I said, traditionally. “Pack a lot of us together and everyone’s out of synch, everything clashes. Like an orchestra where no one’s in tune with any of their neighbours, yes? Get one of us solo, especially a bloke, and it’s just a buzz on a single frequency. Like a TENS machine, some people kind of like it. Gets louder in the light, too. Like now,” for me, I could feel myself crackling as she’d said; and I was pleased that it helped her, because it made me feel wonderful.
“Hmm,” she said, as if she wasn’t entirely persuaded or satisfied by that bog-standard answer. But she didn’t chase it any further, not just then. She turned to face the road and so did I, though I was very aware of her also: how her eyes were drawn back instantly to that still, abandoned weight of flesh that lay in the dust, that had been a man before she changed it, made it what it was.
She gazed at it, and I felt the shiver of it in her yet. But she turned her head firmly away to find Laura, nothing morbid in her, and I thought good, great; you’re going to be okay, girl.
Which was actually not a surprise, I’d have been surprised if she’d been anything other than okay, ultimately.
o0o
Laura also was looking better than she had, much improved by my cousin’s closeness; but though she still held his with her left, her right hand she still held painfully pressed against her.
Was I following Janice across the road towards them, or was I leading her? And which would it look like, and did it matter to anyone except me? No time to figure out an answer, any answers. Here we were.
Janice detached herself from me, where I hadn’t actually noticed that we were still attached. I noticed the loss of her, though, and so it seemed did Jamie. I saw his eyebrows twitch, but that was peripheral. I was watching the girls.
Janice touched Laura lightly, carefully on the shoulder, like a message, thanks for trying, sweetheart, and I’m sorry I didn’t leave you the chance to do better. Laura gave her a fragile smile in return, and then passed it on to me.
“Ben, how are you, did they give you a hard time?” This bastard won’t tell me, her eyes were saying, and her fit hand squeezing his.
How was I? I was hungry, murderously thirsty, exhausted and still shaky with reprieve; but, “No, I’m fine,” I said, not to betray whatever lying reassurance Jamie had been giving her. Besides, it was true. I felt terrific in despite of all my troubles. In any case they seemed trivial, they were trivial next to what she’d been through. I’d heard her pain down the phone, and that had been bad enough. Not a random victim, worse than random: her suffering had been for us, in place of us, as a demonstration to us, which had made it weigh far more grievously on us than our own hurts did. And now it wasn’t digits coming down the line, or pictures in my head. Now I was seeing it, seeing the lines of it drawn on her face and in every angle of her body; seeing the cause of it on her hand there, where her two middle fingers were bound together with strips of cloth, the one doing its best to splint the other; seeing it and being weak as ever, thinking I can’t stand this, wanting to run away.
Responsibility always takes me that way. I want to get right out of its reach, where no one can point a finger and say ‘Guilty, guilty...’
Wanted to run and couldn’t run, not until we all ran together; so I did the next best chicken thing. Just the one moment of staring, what I had done to Laura—or the latest thing that I had done to Laura, perhaps, I couldn’t claim to be innocent or uninvolved in other minor matters: like Jamie, her pregnancy, everything that was her life now I had brought to pass, and none of it my intent and most of it far, so far from my desire—just long enough of looking to brand it forever in my memory, and then I closed my eyes.
And saw it still, burning, ineradicable, that long slender hand with the crude cloth splint; and under the cloth I thought I could see the flesh of her, swollen and torn and tender, and inside that misshapen flesh there was the bone and I thought I could see that too, snapped cruelly against the joint.
Yeah, sure, Ben. Since when have your eyes had X-ray vision?
Well, since the afternoon of the previous day, sort of. Potentially for years, perhaps, since I’d learned what to do, begun to learn how much I could do with sunlight.
Not serious, I wasn’t being serious. Nothing healthy, nothing positive ever came from any kind of talent. But.
But I had done that, seen through concrete with my mind’s eye and found the bloodbeat of power, the throb of the building’s circulation within it.
Electricity, Ben, not blood. Cables, not broken bones and tendons.
But I had been brutally beaten up by my father just a few days ago, and the following morning I’d lain in bed in sunlight and felt so much better so quickly; and had told myself it was coincidence or the cat that worked the magic, or truly that I hadn’t been so much hurt after all, nothing more to it than that.
And neither there was. Who did the X-rays that time, who told you about the broken ribs?
I hadn’t needed telling, I’d felt them, damn it, tried to breathe inside them.
Yeah yeah, sure. And how many times have you been dying from heart attacks or strokes, how many times has a cough been pneumonia or worse, when did you stop believing that those flickery spots in front of your eyes sometimes are the first symptom of a brain tumour?
Well, all right. I exaggerate sometimes, privately; I live with more interior foolishness than I’m prepared to admit to my friends. But mostly those times I know I’m being foolish. And I could remember vividly the pain, the vivid pain of my ribs and I thought that had not just been bruising; and what bruises I’d shown had gone so fast, too fast. Though I’d performed no mental X-rays, no deliberate bone-knitting operations on myself, I thought maybe sunlight could work that magic on its own, on or inside my own body; where maybe for anyone else it needed direction from me, it needed intent and positive, affirmative action.
Or maybe I was dreaming here, pissing into the wind once more: half-delirious after a long time of terror in the dark, hungry and crazy-thirsty and pushed somewhere beyond rationality. Loco, cuckoo, seeing things.
But I could see those things, so long as I kept my eyes shut, and seeing is pretty much believing. I could see Laura’s hand shift out of focus, out of view almost, and I could figure quickly what was happening, that she was twisting or being drawn into Jamie again, into the comforting shelter of his body against the world’s hard winds. Didn’t even need to open my eyes to find her. Hell, I could find Laura in a cellar in a blackout, just by inbuilt private radar; or I liked to think that I could, or I needed to believe it. I just reached out and gripped her shoulders, where I knew her shoulders had to be, without lifting my blinded eyes to see them. Reached and gripped and turned her towards me.
“Ben, what, what are you doing?”
Eyes and mind held in a fierce focus: I thought I was only a lens, nothing more than that, a device to seize all the sunlight my skin could reach and channel, retune it to a wavelength somewhere far beyond sight, make it hard and tight as a drill-bit and pierce through dull cloth and flesh till it found that savaged, splintered bone. And then to refract it, to scatter it through and through, penetrating every fibre; and then to draw all tight again, to weave in a different pattern a multitude of bright threads to make a coherent whole which not cuts off like a light extinguished but slips and slithers free, is reeled in, releases...
o0o
Fuck. All of that, so subtle and so new; I made it up or else it came to me, I held it there in my mind like an inspiration and then it was gone, frayed to nothing and gone, and I was so shaken I wanted to lie down right there on the road, to feel gritty sand under my palms and tarmac beneath my shoulders.
First, though—first I had to open my eyes. And that was hard, because I knew something at least of what I’d see, other people staring at me. But I did it, and yes, there they wer
e. Staring, gaping. Friends and family, and I wondered what they were seeing, if they could give it a name, if that name would have ‘friend’ or ‘family’ anywhere attached.
Didn’t matter, either way. I’d done what I’d done, what I’d had it in me to do. If I’d done anything at all beyond make an arse of myself, standing eyes-closed and scowling in the middle of the street, doing nothing...
I was holding something, I realised, in my hands. And of all the staring faces Laura’s was the closest, way closer than anyone’s else; and her eyes were widest, her skin was sweaty but her jaw was slack. She knew what the others didn’t, she knew what I’d done or tried to do; and that was the moment that I knew too, that I had at least done something.
It was her hand, I saw, that I was holding. Jamie had also seen that much, that I was gripping her poor maimed fingers between my own. His face was just beyond her shoulder, glaring not staring, and he was reaching around her now to shove me away. I shook my head at him hard, looked down and pulled off that crude bandage, confident suddenly because I had to be. The alternative—that I’d crunched her broken finger to no effect, that her slack staring was pain-induced and nothing more—was too awful, not possible, please not possible...
“Try it now,” I whispered, trying it for her, stroking gently all the length of pale flesh and bone, knuckle and nail, “see if that feels better.”
“Ben...” She took her hand from me and worked the fingers slowly, like a guitarist without her instrument, playing the air. “Ben, what did you do?”
“Christ, love, I don’t know.”
I wanted to jubilate regardless, I wanted to dance and frolic in the street there, for all that my body wanted only to slump bonelessly and weep. No swelling to be seen in her finger, no awkwardness in its motion; better yet no pain in her, only a dawning wonder.
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