Light Errant (28 page)

“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 were. 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.

Jamie took her from me, stilled her hand with a hesitant touch, did his own gaping now. I felt myself grin fatuously, hurting not at all; looked around for somewhere to sit as my treacherous legs began to fail and saw nothing like that, only Janice stepping to my side. So I hung on to her instead, felt the willowy strength of her stiffen against my weight and thought that would do, that was enough.

o0o

Enough for me and substantially better than sitting, actually, the living warmth of her and not too much stare in her eyes, she didn't really understand. Maybe only Jamie really understood, maybe it was only he who was truly shaken to the roots. Or he and I both, because I thought my own roots might rip out now. At last.

Enough for me, to stand and be held up; too much for Janice, too soon for me. She grunted after a minute or so, said, “Hey. You're too heavy, I'm too light. Whatever. Can we find somewhere to sit?”

“I don't know,” I said, glancing up and down the road. Locked and shuttered storefronts, litter-bins, lampposts. No seats. “Can we?”

“Come on.”

o0o

She nudged me into moving, though I wobbled like an old 'un and sighed softly at every step, every time my hollowed bones had to take the weight of flesh and weariness that comprised me.

Over to the wall of the shooting-range, one of the shooting-ranges: electronic guns these days and electronic targets, and no doubt it was as fiddled electronically as it always used to be with simple mechanics. Tip-up metal targets they were when Jamie and I used to come often, and you had to be super-accurate to make them tip, there was just this one spot you had to hit to get them to go all the way over; and of course, of
course
the guns didn't shoot straight. We never expected them to. That was the challenge, discovering any particular rifle's bias and learning to compensate, aiming to miss.

It sounded like a précis, I thought, an abstract of my life: low expectations, try to compensate, aim to miss. The trick, of course, was to get the compensation right, point fallible equipment in an appropriate direction so that luck or judgement can bring you back on course. Doesn't matter which. Luck flips the target over, you still claim the plaudits as your due. And the prizes, of course, never forget the prizes.

Me, I'd made a speciality it seemed of compensating wrong. All the way, one-eighty degrees wrong. Aim low and miss by a mile, every time. Call it stubbornness or stupidity, again it didn't really matter. The result's the same.

Whatever. This electronic shoot-'em-up gallery was as solid, as unvirtual as its predecessor. We sat on the ground and set our backs against it, where the sun had warmed the painted breeze block gaudy wall. Janice kept her arm around my neck, so that my head felt flesh and bone instead of concrete when it toppled backwards. Nice.

“What was that, then,” she murmured, “miracle healing?”

“Something like.” Then, more honestly, feeling the weary residues of it all through me, “Not a miracle, no. Just the ol' family magic.” Unless Jesus had been just a talented lad like me, good with sunshine? Maybe so. But he'd ended up crucified. I shivered in the warm there, into the warmth of her, and her arm tightened a little.

“So why are they all so gobsmacked?” she demanded. “They're family, they must have seen it all before.”

“Well. Not quite like that. Even I didn't know I could do that.” Nor did I want to talk about it, just then. I opened my eyes, looking for a change of subject, and found one easily. “Why's this place so empty, do you know?” It should have been teeming; the sun said it was midday or close to, and the Island hardly closed in summer. There should have been crowds, like there had been—Christ, was it only two days ago? How time crawls, when you're having a really, really bad time...

She shrugged, against my side. “I suppose they closed it, aye?”

“Suppose so. Someone should go see, though.”

Not Jamie, he was being private with Laura, heads together, hands together. One of the women, then: they were standing in a group, doing nothing, only gazing at her, at him, at me...

Not hard to catch someone's eye, though it was harder to hold it. I had to raise my voice in the end, call her over. Even shouting was difficult, took more energy than I could spare.

“Serena! Come here a sec.”

She came, a little reluctantly, I thought. Right choice, though. Somewhere in her thirties, solid and sensible, a lot less feeble than my female relations tended to be after years, after generations of repression by the male line.