Light Errant (7 page)

It was strange to sit at that table, to look around at that dirty paintwork, that chipped enamel on the cooker and the sink, so much that my eyes knew the look and my fingers the feel of, and to see other people's things everywhere. Familiarity and change, both at once: there was an eerie sense of slippage here, of no longer belonging in a place that had once been my own.

I thought that might become a theme, for the duration.

“Better now?” Jon asked.

“A bit. I will be.” A little better for five minutes in the bathroom, for a tentative wash and a vigorous session on my teeth. I'd have liked a shave too, I never felt truly clean without, but there hadn't been any question of that. Too sore, too many cuts and bruises on my face.
Thanks, Dad...

Fizzy the cat had been nosing indignantly at a food-bowl on the floor, apparently outraged by its emptiness. Now he lifted his head, turned sharply, focused in on me. Leaped easily from floor to table and paced towards me, met me nose-to-nose and sniffing—and suddenly snogged me without invitation, serious french-kissing and in public too.

I jerked back, coughing, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand—his breath was
disgusting
—while the other two hugged each other with delight, their crowing laughter echoing in my skull like some smart electronic effect, setting my headache off again.

“Jon,” I groaned, “is your cat gay or what?”

“Don't blame me, he's not my cat.”

“It's the toothpaste,” Janice said, still giggling. “You used the spearmint, didn't you?”

“Yes?” I'd used the fuller of the two tubes on the shelf above the sink. Good manners, I'd thought, to take a little of what they could best spare.

“He's got a passion for it. Any kind of mint. You can't even suck a Polo around Fizzy, he'll be down your throat for his share. We have to use herbal toothpaste, it's just too gross else, or too much like hard work fighting him off. Someone left the spearmint. We ought to give it away, I suppose, but...”

“But you like to watch your visitors being orally molested?”

She grinned, nodded. “Something like that. It'd be such a shame to spoil Fizzy's fun altogether.”

I glowered at her, took a mouthful of coffee and swilled it around my teeth, gave Fizzy the benefit of that; breathed out fiercely in his direction, and watched him recoil across the table. And then of course coaxed him back and tickled his ears until he jumped heavily down into my lap, pawed my groin for a few seconds in a way that I really wished he wouldn't, and finally nestled into a warm furry, purry heap with occasional sharp bits.

Fun over, his and mine both. I sipped coffee, waited for the questions. Here they came.

o0o

“Who was it, then? Beat you up like that?”

“My father.” Easy one, for starters; easy now, at least, in the clear fluorescent light of a kitchen morning. Though I'd expected it to be Jon doing the interrogating. It was still pretty easy, saying it to a stranger. I even managed a romantically-twisted smile to go with.

“Jesus. What for?”

“I don't know, he didn't say. We're not on speaking terms.”

“Don't be flippant, Ben. That's pretty serious, what he's done to you.”

“Yeah, well. I'm hardly going to sue him for assault, am I?”

A quirk of her head acknowledged the point, though I don't think either one of us knew quite which I meant, that I wouldn't sue him because he was my father or that I couldn't sue him because he was a Macallan and legal remedy was not a viable option in this town.

“Do you really not know why he did it?”

“Not really. I mean, something I did before I left,”
I killed his brother, the family's main man
, “he's not going to be happy about that; but he must know by now, why I did it. This was, what, a fairly extreme reaction? After so long, I mean...” And he'd been in tears when I found him, or I thought so, and that didn't fit either with my long-held image of my father. Okay, all kids expect their parents to be adult all the time, to cope with anything; but something drastic must have happened to bring him to this, weeping in a public place, even where he thought he was alone. I couldn't get my head around it.

“There've been a lot of changes here,” Jon said. “It's not the same town any more.”

No. On one level that was hard to believe, for anyone who grew up in the place; tyranny enforced by absolute power makes for stable government, by and large. Things don't tend to change. But what I'd done must have shaken my family to its roots, hence by definition the city to its foundations; I should never have expected to find it just as it had been.

“What's different?” I asked; and was answered by Janice, with one final question of her own.

“Have you got any plans for the day?”

“No.”

“All right, then. We'll show you.”

Jonathan twitched at that, like he wasn't sure of the wisdom. Fair enough. I was in no position to take offence. Even if people didn't remember me, they'd know me for what I was, a full-blooded Macallan with the face to prove it; if they did remember me, they might know that I wasn't after all the harmless sport I'd thought and advertised myself and tried so hard to be. In either case, being seen out and about with me might be good protection if Jon or Janice ever needed it, might accord them a little influence if they ever chose to use it, but it wouldn't be conducive to making friends.

o0o

It was a hot day, they said, though it felt fresh to me after the heavy humidity of the Spanish coast. Not a day for leathers, though. It was a change, a pleasure to feel too cool in loose shirt and shorts, so that was what I did.

How many times had I walked this way, this exact route down the hill into town? I couldn't say; but I'd lived the best part of a year in that flat, while my studies and my social life were both focused around the town centre. Hundreds of times, then, for sure. Given the way I used to dash around, hectically determined to be so much a student, so involved—and given that I never caught buses, every penny saved had been crucial and I could save pounds in a week by walking everywhere—it might be pushing a thousand.

The same streets a thousand times, and not so long ago: too recent for my feet to forget, at any rate. Sore muscle-memory took over again, following tracks I'd laid in my head more than on the pavement. I let it get on with things, never gave a thought to turning left or right at corners; my eyes and mind were busy searching, scanning, trying to spot what was different.

Not much
seemed to be the early answer. A few shopfronts on the long hill were boarded up, or dark behind their locked security grilles; but this had always been the shady side of town, businesses came and went overnight almost, empty properties simply emphasised the status quo. Or seemed to. People used to open unannounced and not bother with fixtures and fittings, or signage outside; they'd fill the window with gear that was dodgy or hot or usually both, sell cheap and buy cheaper and hope to get in two or three weeks' trading before the police or the Macallans came to call. Either one would put them out of business. No slack in the turnover, nothing spare to pay bribes or fines or protection money.

It didn't matter, seemingly to anyone. Even the traders themselves didn't noticeably worry. A mayfly trade it was: live for a day here, a day there. Follow a shop with a market stall, a stall with a van, each progressively more mobile, better able to keep ahead of the chase; when the van dies, run an insurance scam on the carcase and rent a shop again with the proceeds. They made a living, and never seriously troubled anybody.

So I'd have expected changes, departures and new arrivals on that stretch. Even right in the heart of the city, where we came ten minutes later, it was no great surprise to find a couple of what had been major retail sites shuttered and for rent. It was ever thus. Long-time businessmen would tire eventually of the peculiar economy here, the extra overheads imposed by my family's demands and the failures of the police; they'd find some gullible entrepreneur—usually from outside, often from a long way outside—to sell up to, and make tracks rapidly for a less interesting environment. The new boy would often last no more than a year or two, before selling on usually at a loss; and so it would go, fly-by-nights and failures following each other in ever-decreasing circles until at last some cousin of mine (or Uncle James, often Uncle James but never, ever my father, he had no eye for this) would pick the place up for a song or else—more likely—seize it in lieu of unpaid debts that might or might not be genuine or legitimate. They'd install their own man, there were always plenty of collaborators in the queue for Macallan backing; and that was the
status quo ante
comfortably restored, for the next decade or the next generation or however long it took before constant friction broke it down again.

So a couple of dead sites, yes, but only a couple that I passed, that I saw. That was pretty much average, for any time these twenty years. No mass exodus, then, no stampede or cattle-drive; and I'd half expected one or the other. With Uncle James head of the family now, I'd thought greed might finally unbalance what had always teetered on a very fine edge. I'd thought disaster was all but guaranteed, and one of my favourite scenarios would have brought me back to a ghost town, with all the civilians fled or chased away and Macallans taking in each other's washing for lack of anyone else to do the work.

Not so, the streets were heaving. Serious contrast to the night before, when my father had been apparently the one, the only, the odd man out.

But this was where the difference lay, in the people, in their faces and the way they carried themselves. Not for nothing had my family named them cattle, all these years; and not for arrogance either, or not entirely. Arrogant it was, to be sure, but perceptive also. Generations of repression left their mark. When I left this city, the citizenry had been subdued, passive, a people long defeated and only making what poor best of life they could manage beneath a tyrannical heel. Oh, there had been hotheads, of course, there had been rebels; but never many at once, and never for long. Few indeed, among those born here. They learned young, in the cradle maybe, maybe even in the womb, picking up vibes from the amniotic fluid. Trouble usually came in from outside, and never lasted.

Now, though: now shoulders that had been perennially slumped were tense instead, faces were drawn and watchful. When they saw me—when they saw my big nose, my heritage blazoned on my features—eyes didn't look down or flicker away. They stared, they watched me, the people that owned the eyes stiffened and turned towards me, sometimes took half a step to follow. Voices muttered, there were even fingers that pointed.

No one would have said that these people were doing well, that they were comfortable in their lives, in their city; but they were not the cowed folk that I had abandoned to a predictable fate. Undoubtedly, things had changed here.

Changed so much, indeed, that I was grateful not to be alone. Not my presence that offered protection to Janice and Jon; the world had turned on its axis, everything was reversed, and I was very glad to have company.

Glad also to be walking in sunshine, to have that tingle on my skin that said my own talent was active, on a hair-trigger, there to be reached for if tension and watchfulness resolved into genuine threat.

My face was my fortune, as it always had been on these streets; and for the first time in my life, that fortune felt dangerously uncertain.

A man coming towards me, glowering behind shades: as he passed his shoulder jarred mine, and there was nothing accidental about it. I whipped round, anger doing its traditional thing and overriding good sense and discomfort both. He likely heard me gasp as my bones jarred, but all the acknowledgement I got was to see him turn his head and spit aggressively into the gutter.

And this no crop-headed yob, no tattooed youth with a fatal dose of bravado; he was a man in his forties, in a suit. In danger of his life, though he might not have known that.

A hand closed on my arm in warning, but it wasn't Jonathan's, and it wasn't saying
don't do it, Ben, don't roast him, a little jostle isn't worth a death sentence whatever your pride is demanding...

Janice it was who was gripping me, tugging at me, hissing, “Don't, Ben. Don't get involved. Start trouble here, you'll have a dozen of them on you as soon as they raise the yell, that there's a Macallan caught out in daylight...”

Maybe Jon hadn't told her everything after all, what I could do in daylight; or maybe she was only trying to forestall my having to, fearful of a dozen human torches blazing my way through the city. Whichever, I didn't want a showdown either. And true enough, a wee shove on a sore shoulder didn't merit the sort of punishment my swift flare of anger might have sent after the man. I nodded, turned again, walked on with one of them on either side of me now, working in mute concert here to prevent the same thing happening again.

“Can we get off the street, then?” I murmured. “If my face makes me a target, then some idiot's going to go for it eventually. Last thing I want is a confrontation.” Actually, the last thing I wanted was a bloodbath. Never mind what it did to her, even assuming that she really was seeing it; that image of human torches scared the hell out of me. Spontaneous human combustion was not quite so spontaneous in my ambit, and my score was too high already. I could make it happen, and knew I would if I had to, to save my own life; and hated myself for the knowledge, and wanted never to hate myself for anything more substantial, the fact of it, knowledge made history.

“Right. Good idea. Anywhere special you want to go?”

“No. Coffee-shop. Not a caff.” Enough of instant: I wanted the bitter tang of strong fresh coffee, and the kick of it in my blood to supplement the sunshine. Also I wanted to talk, and it wasn't possible out here, on the move, with my eyes jittering constantly from face to face to track that ever-swelling sense of risk. It was so odd, such an incredible change: resentment I'd been used to all my life, I was a Macallan, but all I knew of resentment was that it was twinned to fear, and fear was the stronger. Resentment sulked, it didn't throw stones. But now suddenly I was resented and hated, and fear was subsumed or so it seemed, unless that was my own fear rising to mask it. Because I was afraid, where I'd never expected to be afraid again, and I was afraid too of my own reactions. Even if they literally started throwing stones, I had ways to protect myself and those around me; no call to torch the stonethrowers. But I was still afraid that that might happen, I had the strength to do it and I might not have the strength to stop myself. Power without responsibility, that had always been the family curse and I had it, full measure.