Dispossession (48 page)

That was another, the last and in some way the greatest of
my recent insights, memory or logic doing its wicked and unwelcome thing in my
head.
Protect the ones you love
, my
overriding impulse: and I’d loved Carol, and had to protect her somehow from
Scimitar’s casual brutality. Even if she suspected me, Mrs Tuck had to be made
certain I’d said nothing to Carol; and the best way to be sure of that was to
leave her. Leave her big, leave her publicly and permanently.

And I’d been manipulating a friendship with Suzie, getting
close to her to learn all I could about her brother and her brother’s death;
and Suzie had had the ill luck to fall in love with me, so what better way to
be convincing than to seem to do the same with her, in a
coup de foudre
that had me marrying her in
ridiculous haste?

Like mother like son
, I
thought acidly: sleep with the girl for information, marry her to win
protection for someone else...

“You’ve gone all quiet. What are you thinking?”

“I’ll trade favours with you,” I said slowly.

“What?”

“I promise I’ll never, ever tell you what I was thinking, if
you give these up. Right now and for good.” And my hand stretched out to
encompass her cigarettes.

She looked at me, her face puckered, she blew a cloud of
smoke right at me; she said, “I’ll be horrible. For
months
.”

“Nothing new there, then.”

No fist this time, no kick on the ankle, not even a scowl
and a promise of later retribution. Just a longer pause for thought, and then,
“Can I just finish this one first?”

“You can do what you like. You always do.”

“Yeah. Right.”

And she stubbed the cigarette out, barely smoked; and folded
her hands around mine in a silent permission, and together we crushed those
fags into a scrambled mess of card and cellophane, shreds of paper, shreds of
tobacco.

o0o

Something else I’ll never tell her, how surprised I was that
she would do that, that she could let me keep my secrets and take me so utterly
on trust. Lives pivot, I suppose, about such moments; or we find it convenient
to believe that they do, that monumental changes hang on quite obscure hooks.

I don’t want to kiss someone
who tastes like my mother
, I could have said in justification, only that
she never gave me the chance. Watching us, watching her work my hands like a
puppet’s, I saw her again as someone unknown, unknowable, utterly out of my
ken. Only a touch of existential wonder: another second and she was grunting,
scowling, brushing and blowing the debris off my skin and off the sheet with a
fierce concentration that was instantly and yearningly familiar to me, that had
me laughing once again and reaching to redirect her hands, her mouth and her
concentration too.

o0o

Even as I did that, though, I remember thinking that that
moment must surely prefigure others, that there would never come a time that I
could be completely sure of her; and there at least I was right, I had her
absolutely.

Sometimes I like to think I’m getting to know her well, but
dream on, Jonty
. Some mysteries are fractal:
doesn’t matter how deep you go, they just go deeper. You can engulf the whole
heart, but you never can come to the core.

Every day, every
day
I
wake up with a stranger.

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Dispossession

Chaz Brenchley

Book View Café Edition October 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-206-8
Copyright © 1996 Chaz Brenchley

Cover design by Jean Rogers
http://www.cornwellinternet.co.uk/

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Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers and several fantasy series, under the names of Daniel Fox and Ben Macallan as well as his own. Chaz has recently moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.

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Dead of Light

Chaz Brenchley

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
April 2010
ISBN: 978-1-61138-140-5
Copyright © 1995 Chaz Brenchley

It was a good night, the night my cousin Marty died.

Not a great night, by definition: a great night would see me
in bed with Laura, sated and sleepless and sublime. I didn’t have great nights.
By definition.

A good night, though. That, for sure.

Good night, bad bad morning.

o0o

Actually we’d been on a rage that evening, pre-arranged:
Rick and Angie, Dermot and Vanessa, Colin, Laura dark and lovely and me. Two
medics, two linguists, one lit-freak, one agric and one fine artist, not
necessarily in that order. Not necessarily in any order, rarely the same order
from one term’s end to the next. Always something of a group, though, always
coming back together at the last, however often or however violently we might
fall apart betweentimes.

Just then we were a peaceable kingdom, two steady couples
and three singletons and not a quarrel among us, not a bone to be picked,
seemingly no tensions: only my own long hunger that I’d long since learned to
hide. To tell truth I was never sure if any of them even remembered, these good
close friends of mine.

It was Laura who’d phoned that day — or at least had phoned
the upstairs neighbour, who’d come down to fetch me and then unashamedly
listened in, her perk for the service — Laura who’d set this particular ball to
roll. “Coming out to play, Ben?” she’d said; and not a question, that, it was a
command. Not allowed, to say no to that particular invitation. Impossible, in
any case, to say no to her.

So I only asked when, and where. Where was Albuquerque, a
glossy, glitzy video bar, far too pricey for every day but Laura didn’t,
wouldn’t talk to me every day and this was a rage anyway, we wouldn’t be there
long; when was six o’clock, cocktail hour. “If you’re going to mix your
drinks,” she said, “which we are,” she said, “you might as well start with a
mixture. Don’t be late.”

“Would I?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “you wouldn’t. Not you,” and for a moment
she sounded wistful, almost, and I thought that maybe one at least of my good
friends did remember. She ought to, she of all of them, she had most cause. She
was
the cause, damn it (but never
damn her
, never that; all unwitting, it was none
of it her fault), she was the be-all and end-all, she ought at least to
remember that.

o0o

I was early and she was late, and that might have been
deliberate but probably wasn’t. We spent enough time on our own together,
no need to get paranoid about this, Macallan.
Except that love is paranoid, it has to be, that’s how it works.
She doesn’t want to be alone with me,
my sweetly
treacherous mind was telling me,
she’s hanging
back to be sure the others are here.
And maybe she was, but there could
be other reasons. She always liked to make an entrance, Laura.

And she certainly did it that night, she swept in like a
star, a constellation of one. Dark star, all in black tonight and radiant,
pulsing, dangerously electric. Touched us all where we stood at the bar, a pat
on the bottom or a squeeze of the shoulder; I got a fist in the ribs, when I
passed her the drink that stood waiting.

“Don’t get clever, Macallan,” she said, growling, scowling,
sipping.

“I know what you drink,” I said,
and what you like best to eat, and to wear, and to dance
to; I know your shoe size and your bra size and the size of your slim, slim
waist.
“What’s your problem?”

Which was tempting fate, perhaps, she just might be in the
mood to answer that; but no, she let me off easy. She only said, “Don’t take me
for granted, right?” as if I ever would or could or had the grounds to, and
clinked her glass privately against mine before she drank again.

Too many messages in that, too complex to work out in
company; or else there was nothing at all, just a brief light-hearted
interchange between two friends in a bar at the start of a long light-headed evening.
I smiled, toasted her silently, more with my eyes than my glass, and turned to
talk to Angie; and if Laura didn’t know how hard that was for me, to turn those
few inches from one friend to another — well, it was only one more small entry
in the very comprehensive lists of things that Laura didn’t know about my sad
life, the long sad years before I met her and every sad and solitary hour
since.