Light Errant (20 page)

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 fretfully 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 balanced 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?”

I think we all nodded. We all knew. Jon perhaps better than the rest of us, he'd probably had personal experience, but Jamie and I had grown up knowing how this town worked.

“Well, they kept us in for the night, 'cos they know I hate that. It's stupid, they lose as much as I do, but you can't tell them. They think it keeps me sweet. Or that's what they say. Anyway, come the morning, they got me to carry breakfast to the other cells, and they had five or six women locked up there. They never said a word, the custody sergeant was with me and they were dead scared of him, you could see; but it looked like they'd been in a while. And I dunno who they were exactly, but they were your blood,” looking away from the river now, looking at me and Jamie. “They had your faces, you know?”

“Jesus wept,” Jamie whispered. “The
police?
I don't believe it.”

“Don't you?” I did. Who better, to take and hide hostages? They had the organisation and the facilities both, they had the temperament and the cause; oh, they'd love the chance to hit back at the family that had kept them down so long. Nor would they have any qualms about killing, some of them, if they only saw an excuse.

“Yeah,” Jamie conceded, back on track with the way my thoughts were trekking. “All right. But—fuck, Ben, the
girls...!
”

Laura and Janice, gone to ask questions.
I've got friends at court
, Janice had said; but her friends might not prove so friendly, once they understood where the questions were leading.

“I've got to find a phone,” Jamie said, and I could see him sweating in the sunlight, could feel the cold prickle of the same sweat on my skin.

“Here.” Charlie had a mobile in his pocket: a tool of the trade, no doubt. “Just don't say my name, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jamie took it, turned it on, punched his own phone's number with fevered fingers. And stood listening, the embodiment of stillness; and then slowly, too slowly took the phone from his ear, gazed blankly down at it, said, “There's no answer, it's been switched off.”

I guess we all blanked for a moment, just like Jamie; then leapt to awful conclusions, just as Jamie so clearly had; and then some of us at least tried to scramble back from there, tried to find any other reason that would at least go halfway to making sense.