Dead of Light (26 page)

Jamie must have told her, all the news that was fit to whisper. She hugged me for my sister, and also for my finding her; and she being Laura and me being me, because she knew I loved her, I thought she was hugging me also for my loss in love, for her going over to my cousin as completely as she had. Though she'd never been mine, she still had generosity enough to see the wounds of that in me. I thought.

And then she lifted her head and looked at me, her eyes squinnying a little and her nose atwitch. I looked away, looked past her at Jamie and then up in the air, looked anywhere but at her; I thought she could smell my guilt on me, all the sweat and secrets of the afternoon. But,

“White chocolate,” she said.

“Unh?”

“That's what you smell of. White chocolate. What have you been
doing
, for God's sake?”

You don't want to know. Or I don't want you to...

“It's cocoa butter,” I said, snatching at feeble shadows of the truth, heaping guilt on guilt. “Carol gave me a back-rub...”

“Who's Carol?”

But then her eyes moved to look beyond me, to find their own answer. Carol was the woman standing in the passage behind me, barefoot and pink from hot water, rubbing damp tendrils of blonde hair with the towel Laura had given me last Christmas.

“Uh,” I said, “do you two not know each other?”

I looked from one to the other; they both shook their heads, watching each other with what seemed a dangerous interest. Dangerous to me, at least.

“Carol, Laura. Uh, Laura's a medic, Carol's a musician... And that's Jamie, Carol, he's my cousin...”

They all nodded, said hullo. Very polite, very superficial. No one took much of a stab at smiling, but I guess it wasn't the time.

Then, “I left the water,” Carol said, back working on her hair again.

“Oh. Oh, that's okay. Thanks, but I don't think I'll...”
I don't think I'll leave you two alone together.

“Go on,” Laura said quietly. “Go and have a bath, Ben. You don't want to go out smelling of chocolate.”

“Are you going out?” Carol asked, eyebrows suddenly as high as her voice had gone.

“I don't know. I wasn't planning...”

“Yes, you were,” from Laura. “It's Friday, remember? Jamie's birthday? We
fixed
this.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. But...”

“We want you to come, Ben,” and that was Jamie putting his oar in at last and enjoying himself for sure, seeing me no doubt like old blind Phineas in
Jason and the Argonauts
, harried between two harpies. “You need a wake for Hazel, better than your family,”
or the rest of it
, “can give you. And we need to talk, anyway. We do.”

We did. And we should, and why not tonight? We could rage a little: get blasted for my sister, maybe build something from the rubble for ourselves.

“Okay,” I said. “Right. Can you just give us ten minutes?” Laura was right, I didn't want to visit any of our usual haunts smelling like the Milky Bar Kid.

“We'll give you twenty,” Laura said, smiling sweetly. And leading Jamie, leading Carol into the living-room; and again I was having dark fantasies that the reek of our bodies would still be hanging in the air there for her delicate nostrils to pick at. As they went, I could hear her asking: “So what do you play, Carol? What instrument, I mean...?”

All my life a coward, I wasn't going to reform now. Not for this. I almost ran to the bathroom, with maybe as much as half an hour to hide in, if I really stretched it.

o0o

Carol's second-hand water was opaque and a little scummy, and cooling fast. If I'd stretched, I could have cupped the last of the sun in the palm of my hand, and worked my little magic once more; but I settled for chill and hard scrubbing. When I was sure I smelt of nothing but soap and myself, no exotic fragrance nor any earthly weakness, I thought again about hiding, and decided not. The old Benedict would have hidden, yes; but I was reborn, was I not? Remade, in a brighter image? Might as well act like it, try not to embarrass myself in everything I did.

Just about to stand in the water and cast about for a towel, I did the other thing instead, sank suddenly as low as I could, to show face and knees and please God let the twice-dirtied water cover all else; because I hadn't bolted the bathroom door, of course, and it wasn't Carol who'd chosen to walk in on me.

“Come on, sit up,” Laura said impatiently, perching herself on the edge of the bath and shoving the sleeves of her silk shirt up past her elbows.

“Why, what do you want?”

“I'll do your back for you.” No
would you like me to...?
or anything so compromising. Just the fact, bald and undebatable.

“No, it's okay. I'm fine...”

“For God's sake, Ben. I want to, all right? Now sit up...”

And just to encourage me, she grabbed a handful of my wet hair and tugged at it. Not painfully hard, just hard enough to remind me that it could be painful.

I sat up, but, “You'll get water-spots on your shirt,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said, “and pass the soap.”

So I did that; and again I had a woman's strong and slender fingers kneading at my naked flesh, second time in an afternoon after God knew how long without. And this time it was Laura whom I loved, whom I so hungered for; and I had no appetite for her now, nothing but embarrassment and shame. As though I had betrayed her, though she was never mine to betray.

She not mine but I hers, she knew that and perhaps she liked it, perhaps that's what this was about: that she was reclaiming what she thought she might otherwise lose, washing me clean of what Carol had put upon me.

Or perhaps not, because she wasn't aggressive now, and didn't seem possessive either. This could as likely be a message for Jamie, or for Jamie and Carol both: that Laura and I were two old friends who could be private and easy with each other, bodies not a problem. News to me, my body had always been a problem between me and Laura, but perhaps others weren't to know that. Or else I was meant to rise above it, now that so much had changed...

“Wow,” she said thoughtfully, drumming her fingertips on my shoulders. “This is new, isn't it?”

“What?”

“You fizz. Like Jamie fizzes. You never used to...”

“It's in the blood,” I said, and left her to work out why my blood should suddenly have woken up. She couldn't conceivably get it right, but I had no mind to explain. Let her build what theories she liked: contact with Jamie and the rest of the family, perhaps, or seriously-close contact with Carol, maybe she'd think bonking set it off...

“I asked Carol to come with us tonight,” Laura said suddenly, working the lather up my neck and virtuously behind my ears, and showing how our minds tracked each other's.

“Oh. Did you?”

“Mm-hmm.” And then she chuckled, put both hands on the top of my head and pressed down hard, submerging me without warning; and when I surged up again, coughing and spluttering and rubbing soapy water out of my eyes, she was gone.

So was the towel also gone from the rail, because Carol had taken that, of course; and the sun was gone now from the window, and I could either yell for help or else make a dash for my bedroom, wet and naked as I was.

I dashed, and the living-room door was wide open, and I didn't look through in my dashing but I heard all three of them laughing suddenly, and I thought that I could hate them all, I could definitely learn to do that...

o0o

Ten minutes later, damp-dried on a dirty towel out of the bin-bag I kept my washing in and dressed in the cleanest going-out clothes I could find, I went through to join them with a watchful smile faked on my face: showing my teeth, I guess you could call it. Ready to bite, if I needed to.

Carol was standing on one leg close by the living-room door, hands in pockets, shoulders and her other foot flat against the wall. Body-language loud and clear, only that I couldn't understand it; but she gazed at me thoughtfully, unsmilingly, as I walked into the room, and then took a hand from her pocket to slap my rump as I passed. A message for me, a message for Laura? Christ knew.

Laura was sitting side-saddle on the floor, her legs getting acquainted with a carpet that Carol and I knew better; she was resting her back against the sofa and her head against the arm of the sofa. Jamie had spread himself all along that same sofa, looking lean and lazy and arrogant as shit, with his head propped on one arm and his free hand playing with Laura's hair. He also looked half cut already, as if his birthday celebrations had started early; but it wasn't all comfort and joy. Something more than gravity and the pressure of his head on his hand was twisting his face out of true. There were dark purple shadows under his eyes; and this room was full of messages, and it was all too much for me.

“Where are we going, then?” I demanded, falsely jovial.

“Somewhere we can talk,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. Yeah, right...”

“And somewhere we can eat,” from Laura, with a disapproving glance over her shoulder,
somewhere this stupid boy can get something other than alcohol into his system.

“Suits me,” I said. “I'm starving.” And I heard a confirmatory grunt from Carol behind me, and only just bit down on a genuine smile. Come to think of it, though, I couldn't remember eating at all today, and I doubted she'd had much appetite either. No surprise if we were both suddenly ravenous, it was perfectly understandable...

“
Il Milano
, then,” Laura said; and no question-mark on the end of that, she wasn't offering it for discussion.

Jamie wasted an eyebrow-quirk at the back of her disregarding head, then glanced over at me. “What's it like?”

I blinked, before recalling that Jamie might be my age but he lived very differently. I suppose I'd known intellectually that there were people in town for whom
il Milano
was not a gravitational centre, but it felt a little odd to discover that I knew one. “Food's good,” I said, “prices are good, and we can stay all night if we want to.”

“Fair enough. I'll give it a shot.” He sounded unimpressed by what to me were major recommendations, and I thought probably he'd expect all three from any restaurant he chose to patronise. Nor would he be disappointed, at least anywhere that his face or name was known. Come to think of it, he probably didn't expect to pay at all...

And just as that thought meandered uncritically through my head, Laura tilted her own head right back, trying to fix him with a steely if inverted gaze. “You're paying, by the way.”

Her inflection was entirely neutral, so that I couldn't work out whether she meant
you're picking up the bill for all of us tonight
or
you're not getting this one for nothing, they're our friends
. Whichever, Jamie wasn't bothered; he just shrugged, and said, “Better be good, then, hadn't it?”

“Yeah, yeah. Tough guy.”

He grinned, and his hand slid over from her hair to her face, took her nose between two fingers and tweaked lightly. I looked away, to find Carol watching me with what seemed to be a purely scientific interest. Weighing and assessing, I thought she was; and I wondered vaguely how I measured up. Personally, I thought I was coping pretty well.

o0o

Ten minutes later, out in the street and on our way at last, I did better still: walked up to where the two girls were strolling side by side ahead of me and Jamie, forced my way between them and took an arm of each.

Carol just smiled; Laura scowled.

“Bog off, Ben. We were talking.”

“Too bad,” I said, and kissed her cheek.

“What was that for?” she demanded.

I grinned. “A benediction. Obviously.”

A groan from my left, from Carol; nothing so pacific from Laura. I was going to have to wear some protection for the rib area, if I went on inviting trouble: not slow with their fists, either of these two.

But Laura smiled, to sweeten the smart of it; and then she peeled away, dropped back a pace or two and linked up with Jamie. I tried not to look round, not to see where their hands had settled; but sideways spying into shop windows resolved that for me, far against my better judgement. His arm was round her neck, his hand hanging down at breast-caressing height. And guessing at what I couldn't see, calculating angles, I figured her own hand was most likely tucked neatly into the back pocket of his Calvin Kleins.
Between his wallet and his arse
, I thought bitterly; and then repented the thought a moment later, a moment too late. Money wasn't a factor here. Not that shallow, my Laura.
His Laura. And must've been his body, babe, if it wasn't his cash. Or his power, or his status, or his charisma or any of the other stuff he's got and you haven't...

Vicious things sometimes, interior voices — but inaccurate sometimes also, or simply out of date. Late sun flashed off a window, bright into my eyes; I felt my blood spangle, and just for a moment I wanted to flash back. I wanted to see that window buckle and melt, just because I could. And I wanted Laura to see it too, to know what I could after all do; and I wanted to see what she would do thereafter. I didn't seriously think she'd instantly detach herself from Jamie's side and adhere instead to my own — but a guy can dream, can't he? I'd had a lot of practice, dreaming.

Wasn't room for her anyway right now, not if she wanted me solo. I had Carol there already, her body bumping against mine as we walked, reminding me of smoother frictions an hour or two since; and where that was heading I couldn't imagine, I had no space in my head to fit her into. Only a sense of awkward anticipation, of waiting to see what she would ask of me, as against what I could offer...

Jamie and Laura had come for me by taxi, they'd said; but the sky was clear and the breeze was warm, and there was no harm in walking. Town was only a stroll down the hill, in any case. Taxis home looked probable later; but thinking about that I could find a little private amusement even in watching the other two so tightly bonded, legging it along with us. I thoguht this was Laura's work: “No, you're not driving, Jamie, and nor am I. You'll want to get pissed, it's your birthday; and I'm not sipping orange juice all night. I don't care if the police ignore us, that's not the point. If you're with me you can drink or you can drive, but not both, it's not safe. And you drive like a zipped-up barracuda anyway, in that flash fuckmobile. We'll go by taxi...”