Dead of Light (18 page)

But it was dark and it was cold, and we were both a long way from home; we could at least do something to get ourselves out of that.

“Got any money?” I asked, my voice rough in my throat, hard words jagging on soft flesh.

“What?”

“For a taxi. If we can find a phone.”

“Oh. Yeah. Maybe. Hang on...”

She checked pockets quickly and came up with a purse, still leaning into me so that I could feel the movement of her arms against my chest.

“Terrific.”

She unzipped the purse, peered inside, shook her head.

Showed me: no notes, little cash.

“Sorry...”

“Well, no matter.” I felt strange, disconnected, unravelled almost. My mind might be saying
taxi
, but my body didn't really care. “We can walk it. I can. You okay to walk?”

“Sure. Whatever.”
Whatever you do
, her eyes told me watchfully,
I'm sticking with.
“But, Ben...”

“What?”

“There's the bike. Your sister's, I suppose. I was looking at it, while I waited for you. Keys are in it, and I can drive it if you can't...”

Friends. Christ. What the hell would I do, what would I ever have done without my friends?

o0o

It hadn't gone away, that odd sense of detachment from the world. Gravity's grip was weaker suddenly; I had to watch my feet. They weren't a hundred per cent certain which way was down, or how far it was to ground.

But Carol held my hand, something better than physics to trust to. The needy don't let go, where they're truly needed. We didn't hurry, and we didn't talk; we just walked quietly back along the road, heads down, not to look into the dangerous future.

When we came to Hazel's bike, it was still ticking arhythmically. I laid my hand on the engine, and it was warm. Energy wasted in the combustion of gases, that was all, not Hazel's body's heat; nothing directly to do with Hazel.

Told myself that, loud in the privacy of my head, firm as I could be; and still stood a while not even stroking the metal, only with my fingertips touching, feeling for something that wasn't there. Never would be there again, the
animus
that had driven this machine this far.

Almost I didn't want to mount it.
Lèse-majesté
it felt like, to displace Hazel so thoroughly and so soon, to sit in her seat of power.

Carol wouldn't laugh, probably wouldn't even think me morbid if I said so. I was learning this woman quickly, and here she'd let me draw the lines, she'd see it as my right to say what was proper and what was not. If I insisted, she'd walk with me all the way back to town. Hand in hand for comfort and probably she'd watch my dubious feet for me when my eyes couldn't manage any more, she'd make sure I stepped right and didn't stumble.

But, what the hell. Not what Hazel would have wanted, probably the opposite exactly, herself dead and my riding her bike; and hadn't I set myself up in opposition to my sister, shouldn't I seize the chance?

o0o

Should or shouldn't, that's what I did. In a rush now, in a hurry — as Brutus must have stabbed Caesar, surely, delaying and delaying and then going in there hard and fast and heedless — I threw my leg over the bike and sat astride, turned the key and twisted the throttle and sent the engine's roar crashing into the night like something solid. Solid and alive and angry. This my inheritance and I claimed it now, echoed it more weakly. Felt none too solid and barely alive, and how I wanted, ach, how I yearned to be angry...

I could do it in seeming, at least: ride the riot and pretend that things were other than they were, that it echoed me, my fury made manifest. Silently in the noise, a jerk of my head gestured Carol onto the queen seat. When I felt her hands on my waist like a signal,
not letting go
, I kicked the stand up and we were away, movement's wind in our hair though the night had no wind of its own.

o0o

Hazel's bike was a Beamer, cool and raked and black as her bad heart, loud and strong as her soul, powerful like she'd always longed to be and never was. Sublimation, I guess, like everything in her life. Like her power over me. Lacking what she wanted, she took what she could, and why not? Nothing special in that, nothing different.

I turned deliberately the wrong way when we hit the dual carriageway, felt the question in Carol's hands and ignored it, hunched low and felt my way through unfamiliar gears until we were flying north, the road unreeling dizzily below us.

I wasn't going anywhere, only going for its own sake, only wanting to be gone. Travelling without hope, because that had to be better than the other thing, being hopelessly still.

That I could do this at all, that I could drive a bike tonight was something else I had to thank my closest cousins for. Mostly, whatever Hazel chose to take up I'd gone out of my way to avoid. But Jamie was all teenager with none of my hang-ups, he'd wanted the thrill of speed and noise, he'd wanted to be dark and hot and ultimately cool in leathers; and when Marty had offered to teach him I'd tagged along, not eager but invited, never good at saying no. We'd spent a Sunday afternoon in an abandoned quarry, wrecking the gears of an old Bristol; and we'd gone back to their house high as kites, with bruises and torn jeans and a new skill in our skinned and filthy hands. After that Jamie had taken up scrambling with a passion, and again he'd taken me with him as often as I was around. I'd been mechanic and mud-scraper much more than driver, not to be thought to be competing with my sister; but once learned, it wasn't a knack that went away. Long years since I'd touched any bike at all, and I could still find the old kick lurking somewhere in my bones, still lose myself in recklessness and rush.

Couldn't lose the night, not entirely. Couldn't drive out of my skin, and wasn't remotely tempted to drive altogether out of my life, to throw the bike in a screaming skid under the wheels of an oncoming juggernaut. Even if Carol hadn't been with me and clinging tight, that wouldn't have been an option. I'd seen Hazel cruelly dead tonight; however weak I felt, however useless, weak and useless was better than that.

o0o

Somewhere over the border — and I'd crossed more than one border that night, but this at least was physical and clear, territory well marked, explored and explicit — Carol drummed with both fists on my back, patient no longer. I turned my head, and she yelled above the engine's roar: “I need a piss, Ben! Can we stop? Please?”

I nodded, suddenly feeling stiffness in my shoulders and a pressure in my own bladder also, and a pounding ache behind my eyes.

I could have pulled over on the hard shoulder there, we could have used the bushes; but I recognised this road now that I was looking to do that, wanting to know where we were. There was a service station, I remembered, just a couple of miles ahead. More comfort for Carol, a drink of water and with any luck some paracetamol for me...

I throttled back just a little, from crazy down to mere urgent, matching the swing of my mood. Unlocked from a near-trance I was coming down fast, only in a hurry to stop now; the lights of the service station rising ahead were nothing but relief.

I pulled up on the forecourt and Carol was instantly away, looking for the toilets before I'd even switched the engine off. I followed her more slowly, stretching and swinging my arms, grunting at the snag of muscles too long tensed.

Empty my bladder and fill the tank, two priorities; but first I fished in all my pockets, gleaning what coins I could find. My throat was achingly dry, but I didn't have enough for coffee and pills both; so I bought the pills, and washed three down with water from the tap in the gents'.

When I came out, Carol was waiting.

“Okay?” I asked her.

She nodded. “How are you?”

I shrugged. “Sorry about the hell-ride.”

“No problem.” She gave me a quick hug, gentle now, with the fever of horror drained into the night and the wind. “What now, what do you want to do?”

“Go back,” I lied. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but, “I need to talk to Uncle Allan.”

“Ben...”

“It'll be all right.” Now, it would be all right. I'd established something by walking away from him, some ghost of independence, for which I thanked her with a silent, speaking arm around her shoulders.

Back at the bike, I rolled it over to the petrol pumps and unlocked the cap.

“Um, Ben...” Carol was looking worried, checking her purse again. “I can't help, I've got nothing left, hardly...”

I grinned at her wearily. “Then I guess your criminal career begins tonight. This morning,” I corrected, noting the first faint tinges of light on the horizon. “I'm a Macallan, remember? We don't pay for mundane things like petrol, it's a family tradition...” And this was Hazel's bike, after all. It probably wouldn't recognise, would refuse to run on fuel honestly bought and paid for.

“Christ. Won't they send the police after us?”

“They might. Whether the police will catch us, that's something else.” And nothing to worry about if they did. But it was a different world that Carol came from, hard to remember that sometimes; so I grinned at her again for reassurance, habits of childhood asserting themselves again. I'd had troubles and anxieties enough for any kid to cope with, but fretting about the law had never been a feature.

Tank full and bladders empty, “Hop on,” I said, “let's go home.”

Gunned out of there without even a glance towards the kiosk, where someone even now was probably reaching for the phone.
Don't waste your time, heart
, only I couldn't be bothered even to give them the message, even with just a flicker of my eyes.

o0o

Twenty minutes later, a policeman pulled us over.

As kids we always called it the Great South Road, at least when we were headed this way, back to town.
Roads run in both directions
, we used to tell our less-flexible elders,
why choose one and not the other?
And south was always downhill, it seemed to us, everything drained from Scotland.
Or England sucks
, we used to say, giggling. Whatever, there was always this impulse on the road that took us home,
hurry faster
, we felt it dragging at our wheels, drawing us on; and whatever they said, we knew the adults felt it also. Journeys back were always quicker.

Despite my intentions, my reluctance, my implied promise —
sorry about the hell-ride
, I'd said, and meant it— I felt that same urgency waiting again, lurking on this road as it always had. Not even a motorway, just a dual carriageway with bad sight-lines and a dreadful reputation, but it sang to me of speed, of rushing home under the paling sky, racing the dawn back to town.

So I was doing that regardless, crouched low again with a hard wind flattening my hair and the weight of Carol's head sheltering behind my shoulder. Her eyes closed, I guessed, only her tight grip anchoring her to me, to whatever reality I offered her this long, long night...

And then, like the final surreal joke, one last cast of a bent and weighted die by a malevolent god, there was another bike pulling slowly abreast of us. This one white as against our black, flaring with lights against our darkness; and just to complete the contrast, the bobby who bestrode it was decked out in all the gear we didn't have, helmet and gauntlets and luminous green bars on his jacket,
look at me!

I did that, I looked at him; and one leather finger jabbed towards the hard shoulder. Jabbed, and jabbed again.

I could have ignored him, I suppose. He wasn't going to ride me down, or shunt me off the road. I could have driven straight and true, all the way back to town with him at my shoulder like an escort. But I thought that if he was stupid enough for this, he was stupid enough for anything: to call up reinforcements, perhaps, to bring the helicopter over and radio in for road-blocks up ahead.

It was generosity, nothing more, that pulled me over. Not to blight the man's career with such a great, such an insurmountable mistake.

God, the mistakes we make...

o0o

He was a heavy, leering man with a thick moustache; and oh, he was enjoying himself this early early morning. He took his time, doing everything in slow order: gauntlets off, helmet off, notebook in one hand, pen in the other. He gestured for us to stay where we were, on the bike, but I wasn't planning to move anyway. I'd kicked its stand down to save my having to hold it, but I liked the warmth and the weight of it beneath me, the sense of power contained, controlled. I collected illusions of power sometimes, gathered them to me, treasured and hoarded them against a certain need; and I needed this now. Weak and angry both I felt, dangerous and useless.

“Is this your own motorcycle? Sir?”

I looked him in the eye, and told him yes. Felt Carol stir behind me, but she didn't say anything.

“Uh-huh. Well, I'll check that in a minute, on the radio. Won't help you much, even if it's true. Stealing a tankful of petrol, doing a hundred without lights, without helmets... Got any insurance?”

“No.”

“No.” He made a note, then said, “Can I see your licence, please?”

“No.”

“Left it at home, have we?”

“No. I don't have a licence.”

“Ah.” Another note, and, “Are you
sure
this is your own bike?”

I just shrugged and went on looking at him, waiting for the one question I wanted,
what's your name?
I was looking forward to that.

It was Carol who spoilt things, wanting to make them easier. Trying to appeal to some supposed better nature in the man, she said, “Look, go easy, will you? It's his sister's bike, and she's, she's dead, she's just died tonight...”

“Dead? How's that, then?”