Dead of Light (27 page)

And Jamie seemingly had acquiesced, which must be something of a first for him, was pretty much of a first for the entire male Macallan line. Given the chance, Laura would probably try to reform the lot of them — the lot of us — and that thought tickled me up into a grin, almost into a giggle. The whole town had been resisting my family one way or another for generations, and losing all down the line. Call me a romantic, but me, I reckoned one slim girl, five foot seven and not twenty-two yet, I reckoned she could take us all on and win.

Except someone's doing that already
, my mind skittering uncomfortably away from the thought,
someone out there's got a hat-trick already, and there's no reason to suppose that they've stopped, no sign at all that we're going to be able to stop them...

Actually, it seemed like nothing in my life could be stopped just at the moment. Since the day I'd walked out on my family, I'd never felt quite so lacking in control. Great events were in train, world-shaking things were happening to me and around me, and I couldn't get a fingertip's-weight of my own will operating on any of them.

Which should have depressed me, I suppose, but right then it didn't. I only felt curiously footloose, freed from responsibility. I stepped deliberately sideways, from a dim red sunlight into shadow; the back of my neck stopped prickling — reluctantly, I thought — and now there really was nothing I could do to affect anything.

And my muscles twitched regardless, my blood bubbled lightly on its own account, no sunlight necessary. I tugged free of Carol's grip, kicked against the unyielding concrete and sprinted down the hill for the sheer hell of it, to feel wind in my hair and tense anxiety left however briefly behind me, with the calling voices of my friends. I ran hard and laughing, recklessly down the steep hill until the sun was lost behind it not to rise again tonight and the time of my strength was irrevocably over. I was sweating again and staggering before I got to the bottom, whooping and stumbling like I was mad or drunk, like I was both at once; but I ran until the ground was level beneath my feet, until I fetched up against a lamppost and just clung, needing that good help to hold myself upright now that movement couldn't do it any longer.

When they finally caught up with me — taking their time, maybe even slowing a little to show how much they weren't hurrying — Carol looked at me quizzically and said, “Uh-huh. So what was that all about, then?”

“Not to go gently,” I said, and left her to read what she liked into it.

o0o

Sharp left opposite the station, up a narrow alley that looked like it was leading nowhere, only drab backs to the glossy fronts on the street beyond; but the alley turned a corner and suddenly it was little Italy, two or three pizzerias on each side and
il Milano
nothing like the biggest of them. Nor the trendiest nor the most popular, but only the best: a perfect combination.

We walked in as a group and got our usual table
pronto
, though other people were standing at the bar and waiting, with an obvious prior claim. Mario the
maitre d'
might have done that in any case, because he loved us and wouldn't recognise the concept of formal queueing, not in his own restaurant; but the service was both sharper and much more polite than we were used to, and poor Gino looked positively scared as he handed menus around. His hands were trembling so much, three times his match went out before he managed to light a couple of candles for us: and him a good Catholic, so used to doing that. Or an observant Catholic, at least, even since we'd teased and tempted the goodness out of him.

He was praying now by the look of him, by the way his lips twitched as his eyes slid from the table to his hands to the floor and back to the table, our friend Gino trying not to look at any of us and very much not looking at Jamie.

What it was, I thought suddenly, no one here had ever made the connection before. Okay, I had the family features, maybe they might have wondered once or twice; but I'd not behaved Macallan, and I'd certainly not used the name. If I phoned up to book a table, I only ever gave my name as Ben.

Jamie they knew, though. It was important, for people with businesses in town to know Jamie. Important also that they should be properly afraid,
ab initio
; and here they were doing that, our wise friends, and I didn't like it at all and so far as I could see Jamie didn't even notice.

We should have gone somewhere else, I realised now, too late: anywhere else, not to risk what we'd had and were probably losing here. Even if this stupid, perilous visit didn't draw further Macallan attention to the place, the staff would never be easy with us again. How could they be, after we'd put them through this? There were no conceivable rewards for them here, nothing to justify the danger. I simply hadn't thought, that was all. Too focused on myself and Carol, on Jamie and Laura and on the night ahead, what needed saying and what avoiding, what ground I dare not tread on and what I must, I'd spared nothing for the side-effects of my being out with my cousin, taking him to my haunts and showing him my life. Which inherently meant letting my life see him, letting people who'd trusted me hitherto see him and me together.

Ah, shit...

Nothing to be done about it now. Not here, at least. When we went on after, I'd do my best to steer us somewhere we wouldn't normally have gone; although Laura might have something to say about that. Laura wasn't local, she wouldn't understand. She might know intellectually how my family ran the town, but she'd never really met it except the once at Morry's, when she'd met Aunt Bella in my sister's web. She'd probably be forgetting that as efficiently as she could manage, shovelling it into some dusty corner of her mind, turning hard away from it every time she felt herself straying back in that direction. Certainly she wouldn't be connecting it with her new beau, this bright and intriguing young man at her elbow; and far from avoiding her normal friends in her normal world, she'd more likely want to seek them out to show him off a little.

So if we fought, we'd just have to fight. One of us would win, or the other would; there'd be more damage done, or there wouldn't. Most likely there would, one way or another. Wherever I went now, it seemed as though I brought damage.

o0o

Subsumed with guilt, I couldn't have concentrated on the menu. Luckily, here I didn't have to. I could order on auto:
gamberoni
in their shells and my usual sad pizza, the one that had my friends shaking their heads and muttering anxiously about my digestion and my mental health both, that I could do such a thing to my stomach.

Jamie was doing that now, indeed: staring extravagantly, manipulating his jaw back into position, saying, “Mussels, prawns, squid, tuna, anchovies, garlic and
what
was that?”

“Chilli,” Laura told him cheerfully, apparently oblivious or immune to the atmosphere that had shaken me and taken me so very far from cheerful. “He always has the same. Seafood nut, Ben is, and he pays extra to have it stacked up high, or he does when someone else is paying; only then he gets them to do it so hot you can't taste any of it anyway.
And
he sprinkles parmesan all over, which is blasphemy with seafood. I tried a slice once, but never again. It's disgusting.”

Actually, it isn't, though it sounds it. Like so much in my life, this had started as a gesture: looking for a way to eat out that would be a significant change from my diet at home and at the same time put no money of mine into my family's pocket — or at least as little as possible — I'd remembered that this was a coastal town that no longer had any fishing fleet at all. All the boats' owners had taken advantage of their inherent mobility, and moved to other ports where no one demanded a cut of their profits for protection. Since when I'd eaten as much fish as I could stomach or afford. Obviously someone had to bring it in, somewhere there was a wholesaler no doubt handing over just a little less than the maximum he could afford to lose — good accountants, my family, with an excellent nose for what the market could bear: no percentage for them in getting too greedy, putting people out of business — but at least I could salve my conscience a little. Fishermen were heroes on this coast, middlemen not.

o0o

So I burned my fingers peeling giant prawns, and drizzled garlic juices on my jeans, and remembered my paper napkin too late for more than an ineffectual dab; and after that came my fierce pizza mounded high, dribbling cheese and tomato and chunks of sea life barely dead; and I ate that with my fingers also, while Jamie watched me with all the fascination of an aristocrat meeting a peasant's manners for the first time. I ignored him. I'd seen him tear a roast chicken apart with his hands, when he was so stoned he could barely control what his hands were doing; but if he wanted to play the high sophisticate to impress his girl, who was I to tell her it was all fraud? Not mine to interfere, where I held no investment or interest...

But as we ate we talked, and that I couldn't ignore. That's what we were here for, after all. Birthday celebrations had slipped a long way down the list of tonight's priorities; it barely cost me a pang, that I hadn't remembered to find Jamie a present. Couldn't have bought him a good one anyway, had no idea what he was into these days — except Laura, of course, he was visibly and very much into her, his sweet Laura and not mine after all and never would be, never could be now — so let it go, better no present than the wrong one.

“Three dead,” Jamie said, breaking a piece of good Italian bread and tearing it to fragments, rolling little balls of it unheeding. That was the refrain, that was where we were coming from and where we came back to time and again: three dead and everyone angry and afraid and no one doing anything because no one knew what to do, where to look for the blame.

“What does Uncle Allan say?”

“Uncle Allan says that if you burn a light in the darkness, you will attract insects; and some of those can sting. By definition, he says.”

“That's no help.”

“No,” he said, “it isn't. He also says that it had to happen sometime, it's not reasonable to suppose we're the only family with talent; and this is a trial of strength, he says. Winner take all, he says.”

“But we don't even know who they
are...
”

“No.”

“Brilliant. So what about Uncle James?”

“Your Uncle James,” his son said neutrally, “is filling the streets with family. Every bloke who'll listen, he's sending out on patrol; and you know what Dad's like. He just keeps yelling, until pretty much everyone listens.”

“Except for you,” Laura put in quietly, stroking his forearm where it lay on the table between them,
my hero.
Unless she was only doing it for the buzz,
my erotic hero
; but no, she wasn't that shallow. Was she?

“Except me. Right. In case you're interested,” and he turned to me but his hand turned also, went palm-up to capture hers and hold it loose against its lack of struggle, “Dad doesn't see how I can possibly forget my responsibilities and go out for a birthday binge with cattle and a mental defective, while my family is under attack.”

Oh, I was, I was very interested; but it was Carol beside me who spoke, who worked it out slowly on her fingers and said, “Presumably Ben's the mental defective, right, and Laura's the cattle? Given that he didn't know about me being here?”

“Uh-huh,” from Laura, with a savage grin to salt it. “He's a right charmer, is Jamie's dad. You'll love him.”

“I think I'll avoid him, thanks.”

Laura's eyebrows gave a little twitch,
you'll be lucky
, aimed neatly between the pair of us, as if she were already leaping to conclusions that I was fairly certain would prove to be hopelessly misplaced; but then, what did I know? I was leaping myself here, in the dark and utterly without looking.

“What's the point of patrolling, anyway?” I demanded. “If you don't know what you're looking for?”

“Exactly,” Laura said, backing up Jamie's shrug. “‘You men — strip-search that haystack, there's a needle in it somewhere.' ‘Please, sir, what's a needle?' ‘Damned if I know, but don't come back without it...'”

She was pretty good at voices, was Laura. Disregard the register, and her twit officer barked just like the Brigadier on reruns of
Doctor Who.

Couldn't make us laugh tonight, though. Just smiles round the table, and the faintest hint of a chuckle squeezed out of Carol. Jamie tightened his lips, tightened his grip on her hand, and took us round the mulberry-bush again.

“They've got to be somewhere in town, though. And if they can find us, why can't we find them?”

“Because you don't know what to look for, sweetheart,” and this was her top-girl voice, slow and smart and patronising, like the little pats she was giving his hand now. “Everyone knows you lot, can't miss you with those great ugly hooters in the middle of your faces. Wouldn't call them noses myself, more like cow-catchers...”

“Cattle-catchers,” he said, twitching his at her; though to be fair his nose didn't have the prominence of mine, that was traditional among my kin. Right shape, but significantly smaller: closer to young-man normal, really, even down to the kink where Marty had cracked it with a saucepan when they were kids. It was well within normal tolerance, at least. If you had a tolerant girlfriend.

Jamie, you bastard, she should have been mine...

o0o

All the evening was like that, us dropping with a desperate relief into mock-cheery banter, trying hard to play at young people out on the town whenever we allowed ourselves the opportunity, until some one of us would drag the talk heavily back to what mattered.

We were still doing it over late coffee and brandies, the restaurant all but empty around us and Gino laying tables for tomorrow, glancing our way every few seconds: not dropping hints like he might have done yesterday, nor showing any signs of coming over to chat and scrounge a cigarette, as he surely would have done yesterday; only checking, always checking that Jamie was content, he had everything he wanted and his friends likewise, no one was waiting for service.