Dead of Light (6 page)

And I waited, I did my solo dance on the pavement as before, and was hailed by Dermot and Vanessa coming for lunch, for friendship and conversation and not at all for this. I explained again, I had to; and they waited with me, of course, and wanted to talk, to wonder, to guess; and all I wanted was to wait, to jig, to change my name and my bad, bad blood.

o0o

When Laura came back she came slowly, dragging a heavy weight with her up those steep steps. Barely a nod of greeting she had for our friends, and only a whisper of voice for me.

“You got a, a cousin Marty, Ben?”

“Yeah, sure.” And then, remembering,
I had a cousin Marty
, “Why, what's he got to do with this?” Coming out sharper than I meant, perhaps, because even Laura flinched; but the true question, what I wanted answered actually went the other way,
What's this got to do with him?

“They said, they said you were kin to him. And he's done them so much damage...”

There'd been damage done, that much was certain. I'd seen it, scabbed black on Marty's skin. I might have forgotten it temporarily, I might have tried to scratch myself out of that picture altogether,
family business, no business of mine
, but that probably wouldn't have worked in any case; and here were people, my friends, drawing me firmly back in again. So okay, they wanted me there, I'd be there. Consequences would be on their heads, not on mine.

“What,” I said, and my voice sounded harsh even to myself, was surely harsher far than Laura had ever heard it, “are you talking about, for God's sake? Damage, what damage?”

“I think you'd better come and see,” she said. “It'll be all right, Morry said so...”

“Oh, he did, did he? What did he say? Exactly?”

“Exactly?” She didn't like this, from me; she was getting nasty herself now. “He said,
exactly
, ‘You can tell that little bastard I won't hurt him. He's not really a part of it, I know that. He hasn't got the guts.' Okay?”

Yeah, fine. Pretty good judge of character, our Morry. Only the one thing he had wrong: it wasn't lack of guts that kept me from participating in the family business. I did lack guts, that was sure, that was evident every time I met my sister; but there were other chickenhearts among us, and they found a role for themselves. What had always sidelined me wasn't my cowardice, it wasn't even my deep disgust. That was subsequent, maybe consequent. No, what had put me and kept me on the other side of the fence was my total lack of talent.

The family couldn't use me: which was the only reason they had let me go even so far out of their orbit.

But if I couldn't work as my kin did, all open and upfront, maybe I could spy for them on my own account. Never mind that they frightened and disgusted me. Marty had had some kind of face-off with Morry Green, and now Marty was dead; and that was important, that mattered. Whoever it was took Marty's life had taken some part of my own also, and I was feeling the loss of it badly.

And Laura didn't know. Remembering that, I took some kind of grip on my turbulent soul. I'd been wrenched too far to manage my usual neutral, the masque I kept for Laura; but I nodded slowly, found half a smile from somewhere, and said, “Come down with me?”

She stiffened. “I don't want to do that,” she said, and it had nothing to do with me. That much was clear.

“Please?”

“We'll come,” from Dermot, behind me.

“Laura?” I said. “
Please?
”

She hesitated, then nodded in her turn. “All right. Just the two of us, though,” over my shoulder, “this isn't a circus turn. You guys wait here, okay? I don't, I don't think we'll be long...”

We'll go somewhere else for lunch
, she was saying.
If any of us wants to eat.

We wouldn't want to stay
, she was saying,
even if we were wanted, and we won't be.

And she took my hand and held it all the way down the steps, which was meant for comfort but only underlined how all things were turned perverse: that what I had dreamed about so often should come to me with such very bad timing, Laura's hand in mine when my head was all with Marty and with Morry, all questions, hungry for explanation and wanting nothing from, having nothing to offer to her.

o0o

Went back down, down and down, it had never felt so far; down and in, to where Morry waited behind the counter.

Not exactly welcoming, Morry. He stood there staring, and his broad hands twitched on the white melamine like they wanted to twitch on my flesh again, to close and grind and pulp, get themselves coated with my dirty Macallan blood.

But, “I want you to see this,” he said. “I want you to see what your filthy family has done to us. Come with me.”

And he swung back the hatch in the counter-top and let it bang flat, to make a passage through for us. Difficult to hold hands, going single file through that narrow gap; but Laura managed it somehow, she kept a precarious hold on my fingers.

Through the kitchens: bright lights and white walls, smells of frying. Warren watching uneasily from the sink, rubber gloves on his hands and
I'm not serving, I'm not going out there again
on his face, and who could blame him? He might meet more Macallans.

Through a door and then through another, and into a different world: from tiles and lino to wallpapers and carpets, pictures on the walls and the dust-smell of recent hoovering, a staircase going up.

Up we went too, following Morry's broad back.
Not too close
, his shoulders said,
don't get too close to me.
And I was being careful, I was alert and obedient to unspoken messages; I was getting them from Laura too, feeling the reluctance in her, how heavy her body had become and how weak her legs,
help me, Ben. I'm only here to help you.

I slipped an arm round her waist on the landing, and there wasn't a thought in my head except to help her, to hold her against the threat of what was coming. She knew what it was, I didn't; she was welcome to lean on my ignorance.

o0o

One more door and we were in a bedroom, and now I could understand, and I didn't want to be here any more than Laura.

Second time today, this had happened to me: a bedroom not my own, something I didn't want to see, a big man saying
Look.

o0o

“Look,” Morry said. “See? This is what your stinking cousin Marty has done to us, to our family, to our life...”

Yes, but what have you done to Marty in return?
That was the last aggressive, the last responsive thought I had for a while. Feeling Morry's strength, feeling his anger, thinking that if not he, then someone in his community might have the knowledge.

Then I crossed the threshold; then — obedient again — I looked, and I saw.

Smelt, too. Not only the deli, this whole building was a place for smells, seemingly; and here without eyes I would never have thought
bedroom
, only
sickroom.
Flowers and herbs I could smell, not strong enough to overcome the stinging astringency of disinfectant; and that in its turn not able to do its proper job, not able to mask what underlay it all, the slow and heavy smell of old corrupted meat.

o0o

A woman's bedroom, this. Lace at the windows, lace around the bed, lace at the neckline of her nightie. Shadows of lace on her skin, too, it seemed, overlying her twisted face and the backs of her hands where they lay on the flowery duvet.

But not shadows, no. I looked again and saw lines, a network of creases deep-drawn in the soft flesh of her cheeks, as though a fine mesh were hidden in the folds.

A mesh, or a web: and nothing natural.

Nothing to do with Marty, either.

Almost the worst of this was that I knew the woman in the bed. Everyone knew Aunt Bella. Again, you'd need to be an expert to understand her position in the family tree. Even Morry called her Aunt, but she couldn't conceivably be an aunt to all of them. Just a courtesy title, then, at least from some; but why anyone would choose to be courteous to such a wickedly sharp-tongued old harridan, I never had been able to work out.

She had her place, did Bella: down in the deli, on the customer side, just where the counter met the wall. She'd stand there, leaning on one elbow dunking pieces of doughnut into a bowl of coffee and talking, talking. She'd be the first thing you'd see, coming in, and the only thing about Morry's that could ever make your heart sink. Not enough to keep you away, of course — after all, she wasn't always there; and she was a character, a part of the ambience almost, well worth putting up with for the sake of the food and the company and the Friday prices — but enough to take the gloss off if you weren't in the mood for excoriation.

Old motormouth
, Rick called her once; but that was only half of it. It wasn't just the engine that drove her tongue, it was the landscape she drove through, and the mud she so liberally spattered on everyone in hearing. You walked in and she looked at you, up and down in one jerk of her head, like a bird getting your measure; and then it began.

“Tcha, look at that, now. Warren, would you
look
at that? Does he call those decent clothes for going out in, to show himself in the streets, to come to eat lunch in a nice establishment? Does he call himself
dressed?
That shirt's not clean, I can see the tidemark from here. Look at those cuffs. Doesn't he know how to launder a shirt? Of course he doesn't; and his mother's not here to do it for him, so does he bother? He does not. He just walks around in filthy clothes. Unshaven, too. And not enough beard to boast about, such a fuzz, he should hide his embarrassment, not flaunt it...”

And like that, and she really didn't stop. No one was safe; the only protection was to come in groups and talk louder than she did, sit with your backs to the monologue and override it. Worked well enough, though it didn't work well.

Ah, she was bad, was Bella.

Had been bad.

o0o

Would be bad no longer. That sharp and savage tongue hung from slack lips now, one all-seeing eye drooped and had a milky glaze across it, her neck couldn't lift the weight of her head to seek a target, she had to have it propped up on a pillow; and God alone knew what was going on in her skull, we didn't have access to that any more.

She'd have looked like a stroke victim, more or less, if it wasn't for the web.

This was no stroke, though. Just another deathbed scene, this, and my second of the morning; there'd be no clawing-back from here, no territory reclaimed. Gone this far, she was gone for good, only that her corpse still breathed. If she were thinking still —
look at that, call this fit company for a woman passed away, what do they think they're doing, Morry coming up here straight from his stoves and the reek of the fat still on him, does he have no respect for the dead?
— then she might as well quit now. No more use to her than if she were in her coffin already, thinking away six feet under.

I'd seen those webs before, I knew what they did. I'd even felt them, more than a time or two when I was younger.

At first, the feeling like a plastic bag had been pulled tight over your head; a moment's blind panic before you realised that you could still breathe, even still see a little through the blurring shock of it, and the pain that rode in after.

Then came the slow panic of understanding, and actually that was worse.

This was a binding, like in a dream when you have to move and you can't move: only that there was never any question of this being a dream.

And then it pulled a little tighter, came in under your skin and then there was nothing to see or hear, no world outside and nothing but overarching pain within, your body just a bag of hurting flesh around the bones that shaped it and you just the register of hurt.

And that was a child playing games, no more; and no, it was nothing to do with Marty.

o0o

Bella didn't look to be hurting any more, that was something. Though it wasn't really possible to tell. Maybe pain was a kernel, a core of volcanic fire somewhere deep inside: invisible from here, buried too deep but burning, burning.

“What happened, Morry?” I asked, the wrong question again. I knew what, and I knew who. What I wanted was why. Might get that, might not. Morry might not even know.

“Your bastard family
happened
,” he said, and his voice was all bile and bitterness; and I wondered how many hundreds, how many thousands of people in this city could only ever speak of the Macallans like that, with that level of hatred and despair.

“Yes, but specifically, I mean...?”
If you can bear to tell me...

“You want specifics? I'll give you specifics.
Specifically
, your shithead cousin Marty came here three times last week, dunning me for cash. I've always been sensible, I've always paid you off and there's never been trouble. But now he wants more, suddenly he's demanding a lot more, and I haven't got it. And I wouldn't give it anyway, such a sum, it would ruin my business to pay such sums; and so I told him. Yesterday he came the third time, and I told him out there,” a jerk of his head, “in the street, I wouldn't have him in the shop. And he went away with threats, promising trouble; and that was only yesterday, and last night this.”

“This wasn't Marty,” I said instantly, unthinkingly, only wanting the record to be straight.

“Oh, what, this just happened, did it, a healthy woman is struck down and it's coincidence, it's nothing to do with you, is that it?”

That's it, it's nothing to do with me. I disinvested.
But, “I didn't say that,” I said. “It wasn't Marty, that's all.” If Marty had been leaning on them, things would have got broken. Bricks, bones, like that. This was altogether too light a touch for Marty, not his fingerprints at all. Not his style, and not his gift. Webbing was unique, even in our family.