Dead of Light (14 page)

“Haven't got a bucket, have you?”

“Somewhere, yeah. Why?”

“I saw that ladder in the yard there, thought maybe I'd go around and windle a bit. Get some cash together, for tonight.”

The ladder was the landlord's, left over from the last time he tried to save money by fixing the roof himself. Afterwards the rain had still leaked into our upstairs neighbours' flat, and from theirs on down into ours; so we clubbed together, paid to have the job done properly, and deducted it from the next month's rent. He wasn't happy, but he still hadn't come back for his ladder.

I laughed, and went to find the bucket.

“What about you,” he said, “you coming down the Duke?”

“No money.” Absolutely no money, I'd left all I had with my unwilling hosts last night.

“Well, me neither. That's why...”

And we looked at each other with a wild surmise; and so I spent all afternoon up and down ladders, begging buckets of hot water from cynical housewives and scraping long-dried birdshit off window glass for a handful of coins.

In the evening, we went to the Duke.

The Duke of Northumberland — colloquially known as Percy's Piss-Pot, but only to those who had personally met the current Duke, we had a
strict
rule about that — was a pub down at the river's edge, once surrounded by factories and housing both, thriving on the trade. Now it was surrounded by nothing, just a rubble wasteland, ‘scheduled for redevelopment' as soon as they could locate some investors stupid enough to put themselves willingly into my family's capacious pocket.

The Duke throve no longer. At least, not on its former clientèle. The brewery that had owned it sold up, the company that had taken it over went bust, a new landlord had bought it on a bank-loan with nothing left over for refurbishment. Bare boards and tobacco-stained walls, no juke and no video, no local trade: what he'd needed more than anything was a new customer base, and he'd found it at the university. Getting some real ales in and selling the Duke as an authentic, unreconstructed pub — making a feature, making a virtue of necessity — he'd made the place as popular with us as any drinking-hole in town, five nights a week.

Thursdays and Sundays were different. Thursdays and Sundays, the folkies took over in the back room. Musicians lined the walls and filled the tables, handing instruments around, singing and smoking and playing, playing, endlessly playing. Those few who had no gift for music and were there only to listen squeezed in where they could, rarely finding a seat and often giving it up unasked to a musician. The hierarchy was absolute.

This particular Thursday, anything that could move me faster or further from the night before was welcome; riding on jigs and alcohol fitted the bill quite neatly.

o0o

Jonathan and I arrived at about nine, the best of buddies, bonded by hard work equally shared. Our bellies were heavy with fish and chips, my classic veggie compromise, and our pockets were heavy with cash.

The back room didn't have a bar, only a hatch in the wall. Jonathan squeezed into the queue, after a quick consultation; I scanned the room, checking out who was there.

Jacko, of course, ensconced in a corner he'd probably established as his own way back at opening time. And Colin was with him, his elbow-cradling fiddle technique showing to advantage in these crowded quarters, where very likely it had been developed. Carol was there too but the other side of the room, on Squeezebox Bench with another piano-accordionist, an older woman with wicked fingers. True Irish, she was, and a fixture here.

For once, Carol didn't have Nicky in tow. I had seen him at a session here a couple of times, but I thought perhaps the landlord had had a quiet word. Babies were welcome, babies and dogs; teenagers were tolerated, so long as they sat quiet and at least made a pretence at drinking Coke until they were legal; but an eight-year-old was neither one thing nor the other, and certain trouble if authority poked its suspicious head around the door.

There were a dozen other familiar faces, but I started running out of names quite fast. I waved, smiled, nodded around, then found a narrow section of wall to lean against and thought I'd better decide that this was comfortable, because chances were I'd be there till closing. As usual there were too many people, not enough chairs.

Jonathan edged through the crush with two pints carefully held, handed one to me and squashed up at my side, turning his feet out sideways not to obstruct the narrow passage through to the hatch; but his eyes were already turning towards Jacko, shifting guiltily back to me and turning again.

I grinned. “For Christ's sake, you don't have to talk to the one you came in with. It's not an obligation.”

“Sorry?”

“Go see Jacko, will you? He's what you came for.”

“Well, but... You'll be on your own...”

“Never alone with a good pint,” and Conciliation is a fine bloody pint. “Besides, I'm used to it. Go on, I'll see you later.”

That was all the encouragement he needed. I watched him slide between tables and knees, greet Jacko just with a touch on the shoulder and then settle to the floor at his feet; and I felt the usual pang,
it should have been me. It should have been me and Laura...
But Laura was I knew not where and doing I knew not what, I could only hope not with Jamie; and I was here, on my own and used to that, boasting about it. No time for pangs.
Get your head straight, Macallan.

Straight wasn't really an available option, though, that evening. Not thinking about Laura meant thinking about Marty, thinking about Tommy, thinking about someone out there with the power and the will to kill. That had its own magnetic flux that could warp any head out of true, let alone a Macallan head. Here was something we really weren't used to. My father wouldn't be a factor, he only ever did what he was told and very much preferred not to have to think at all; but I wondered how the uncles were handling it. How they were keeping the family calm, while Uncle Allan presumably played Holmes, while Uncle James played the Godfather. That's how I'd cast it, anyway; but maybe I'd ask Jamie on Friday, if I went. If I could bear to go...

But there was Laura again, turning thoughts sharply away from straight; and the only other choice tonight was not to think at all, or not at all clearly.

Conciliation deserves more respect than chug-a-lug, untasted down the throat; but that's all that happened to the first pint. First flesh it touched was my tonsils.

Then I headed for the hatch, with just a glance down the tables to confirm that Jonathan wasn't ready for another yet, nowhere near. Got a couple anyway, while I was there, and a double Jameson's for added bite. Fingered the change in my pocket, thinking that at this rate it might not last the evening; and shrugged, and went to reclaim my piece of wall, lining the drinks up along the mantelpiece beside.

o0o

Drinking alone, you drink faster. It's a universal law.

Whether you get drunk faster, that's more open to debate. I think company gets you drunk, as much as alcohol. Certainly that night I was going for it hard but not getting anywhere much, so far as I could tell.

Then Carol swam up beside me, and all right, maybe I wasn't so sober after all. Talking was the acid test, and I hadn't been doing any of that hitherto. My teeth felt strange in my jaw as I smiled, and they were a little hard to work when I said hullo.

“Hi.” Maybe she was getting somewhere herself, the way she tucked her arm through mine, more contact than I was used to. “Are you all right?”

“Sure, fine. Why not?”

“Stuck here on your own. I was worried about you.”

“No, really. I came with Jonathan, but...”

A twitch of my head, all I needed to point out where Jonathan sat, still on the floor, hugging Jacko's knee now while Jacko's long fingers played with his hair, those brief periods between tunes.

Carol nodded. “I saw you come in. It's not fair, him abandoning you like this.”

“I told him to,” I said. “I don't feel abandoned.” Only isolated by blood and temperament and habit, all three.

“Well, come and join us. What are you drinking?” as Mike the landlord bellowed loudly, “Last orders now, please!” from the hatch, while someone in the other bar jangled a hand-bell hard.

“No, it's okay...”

“No, it's
not
okay, Ben. What are you
drinking?
”

“Um, Conciliation, then...”

“Right. Since when has buying a man a drink been such hard work? Wait here,” and she was gone, pushing into the pack, short and aggressively blonde and always a pleasure.

In fact I didn't wait where she told me, I followed her towards the hatch, and took the drinks she passed back to me one by one; then, obedient again, I let her tug me through to Squeezebox Bench and stood quiescent while she bullied the others into crushing up a little tighter, to make room for me on the end.

“That's better,” nodding with more than a hint of triumph to her voice. “Now you won't be standing over us like a, like a hawk over a flock of rabbits.”

“Do rabbits flock?”

“God knows. Ask Nicky, he'd know. He knows everything.”

“Where is he tonight?”

Crushing the spirit out of some poor baby-sitter, if his mother were any guide; but, “With his father,” she said. “We swap him around, on a mutual-convenience basis. He handles it pretty well, we think. He's not noticeably psychotic, at any rate. Probably helps that we still get on, Richard and I...”

“I'm sure.” Family breakdowns were a mystery to me; they didn't happen to Macallans. Except of course for the big breakdown, the big failure, the one they still talked about: the boy who turned his back on the whole business, who would have changed the very blood in his veins if it had been medically achievable.

But then I was a mystery to me too, as I was a mystery to everyone, inside the family or out.

A mystery to Carol too, seemingly; she was looking at me askance, obviously working up to one of the big questions.

“Go on, then,” I said, barely even on a sigh. “Ask us. If you don't ask, I'll never tell you.”

“Does that mean that if I do, you will?”

I shrugged. “No promises. But I usually do.” That was one of the important things in being free, supposedly: the chance to be honest, to tell the truth without fear or favour. Particularly, in this case, without fear.

“Well, then. You've done this brilliant thing, right, you've walked out on something that revolted you, which couldn't have been easy; you've done the hard part, so why are you mucking it all up now? Why aren't you
happy
, Ben?”

For a second I just stared at her, knocked right out of kilter. Then, “I'm happy enough,” I muttered, into my glass.

“No, you're not. Don't bullshit me. I've watched you, and I've talked to Jacko.”

Jacko was in trouble, then. I glared at his unseeing head, promising retribution; then shrugged, said, “So what's happy?”

“Happy is measuring your life against the options,” she said decidedly, “and not wanting to change it. It's getting the best of a series of bargains, bad or otherwise. And you've worked for that, so what's spoiling it?”

“Christ.” Not sober enough to resist, I ran her criteria through my mind; and shook my head hard at the results, couldn't tell her that. “Aren't you supposed to be playing a tune, or something?”

They were playing a tune all around us; but her turn to shake her head now, as she said, “Right now, I'm supposed to be getting your head sorted out. Self-appointed duty, and I never let myself down if I can help it. Come on, give.”

Someone's killing off my family. And never mind that I despise everything they stand for, they're still my family and I can't break free after all.
And not being free, I couldn't tell her that either; Macallan business was private business, always. So in the end, when her hard stare still offered no compromise, I copped out and told her the other thing, that should have been just as private.

“The girl I love is going out with my cousin,”
whom I love, whose values I despise
, “is that enough for you?”

She only snorted. “Love how? How long for?”

“More than two years now,” and barely one-eleventh of my life; but all of it that counted, sometimes.

“Uh-huh. And what, you split up, is that it?”

“No.” Never got that far, Laura and I.

“Ben, man, for God's sake,” as she caught on, or started to. “Have you ever slept with this girl?”

“No.”

“Ever been out with her?”

“No.” Well, yes, often; but even those times we were alone it was never a date in the way that Carol meant, only ever as friends on the piss or a cultural jag or whatever; and I wasn't up to dishonesty tonight.

“For crying out loud, and you call that love? Ben, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three, right, and you sound like a fucking sixteen-year-old...”

I shook my head mutely. I'd been a lot more sussed than this, when I was sixteen. It was having to start again that was the killer, and not knowing what was babies and what was bathwater.

I liked the feel of that in my head, so I said it aloud; and she said, “Explain.” So I tried to tell her how it felt, to reject not only everyone you'd grown up with but also everything they'd ever taught you was true: to lose all your value systems at a stroke, and end up floundering. And she said that just sounded like classic teenage rebellion, and I said no, I thought it was more than that; but even if she was right, I said, a lot of teenagers got well fucked up in the course of their rebelling, didn't they? And that certainly had happened to me, and to some extent I was floundering still. But I'd found or built myself a couple of rocks to cling to, and Laura was one of those, I said...