Light Errant Read online

  Barely space for three of us on the little landing at the top, and here too an established routine played itself out. I wasn’t allowed to let go of either girl’s hand; it was Marina who grinned with an extra wickedness today as she slipped her fingers into my pocket and fished for the keys, as she worked the door open one-handed and tugged us all inside.

  Routine said we should cross the threshold kissing; at least she didn’t insist on that. Instead she let me go and took Sallah from me also, took both her hands and pulled her over to the bed. Marina sprawled, Sallah sat neatly, tightly on the edge, her small feet barely reaching the floor. They talked in soft Spanish, too fast for me to follow. Figuring that meant my attention was not immediately required, I went over to the corner of the room, where forethought had laid a bottle of rosado in my washbasin, keeping cool in water. Sighing one more time for the afternoon that wasn’t going to happen, I fished it out and fetched three glasses from a cupboard.

  Observant little creature of virtue that she was, Sallah hardly ever drank anything stronger than coffee, and never where she might be seen by another believer. The occasional glass of wine, though, with an infidel or two, that didn’t seem to be a problem: like other things forbidden to her—like the conjunction of bodies on a shuttered afternoon, an animal act without benefit of law or blessing—she would give it as much solemn attention as she gave to her prayers or her cooking or her English lessons, and take as much pleasure from the doing of it as she did from the taste or the touch or the tingle. And as much pleasure again from doing it not, back in the bosom of her family. It wasn’t a Catholic-style guilt thing, she didn’t sin the better to repent after; I thought it was a control thing mostly, Sallah demonstrating to herself that she did govern her own life, that even her religion was of her choosing and its rules subject to her willing acceptance, not she to their arbitrary diktat.

  Here in my room, a little light or sometimes concentrated sinning was second nature to us both. Today I didn’t even ask, I just poured her a glass along with Marina and myself. I thought she needed it. If she disagreed, the steely gears of her mind would lock that decision into place, and she’d set the glass aside and never think more about it.

  Ordinarily, at least. That was my expectation, but I’m good at getting things wrong. Scary sometimes how firm she could be, how certain in what seemed to me a highly debatable world; scary today how doubtful she seemed, how hesitant, how needful. There was a tremble in her fingers when I passed her the wine. I cupped my own hands around hers for a moment and pressed gently, warm palms against cold fingers against cool beaded glass. Her smile was unconvincing, her eyes were not. Ridiculously big always in her small, fine-boned face, today they were to die in, deep dark pools of danger rimmed with red where she’d spent half the night crying by the look of her. Crying silently, I was sure, crying face-down into her pillow not to wake anyone else, not to worry her family...

  I kissed her fleetingly, squeezed her hands again and went to fetch Marina’s wine, and my own. Autre temps, autre moeurs: if this had panned out the way I’d planned it, I might have been sinking to the floor at her feet right now in one of those deliberate, delicious moments of delay, resting my head against her thigh, feeling her long fingers in my hair teasing and twisting, starting to tug...

  But the two girls filled the bed: space enough for three, perhaps, but emotional room there was not. I retreated to the window, and perched there.

  “Come on, then,” I said softly. “Who’s going to tell me about it?”

  Actually, I already knew the answer to that. Sallah came to me for private tuition, and she worked hard, but her English wasn’t strong enough to hold against such tension as I could see in her now. Nor could my Spanish keep up anywhere off the phrase-book paths of dalliance, even if it could have handled her immigrant accent.

  One mute glance she gave, towards Marina; but that was for form only, and quite redundant. They’d worked this out already. They might even have rehearsed.

  “Ben,” Marina began, “you know Sallah’s family, that they are not lawful here?”

  Yes, I did know that. A little I’d had from Sallah, what exchanges of confidence we could manage in alien tongues; more I’d picked up from gossip with staff and students at the college. Sallah’s parents had come here from Morocco years ago, and long outstayed their visas. They didn’t hide, they sold leatherwork from a stall right on the promenade; and they had a longstanding and easy relationship with the chief of police, I’d heard, paying a gentle bribe every month to be sure he continued to overlook their lack of official papers.

  But that complaisant policeman had retired, Marina told me, his pension no doubt comfortably swollen by all those backhanders; and, “The new man,” she said, “he is not so convenient.”

  “He can’t want to deport them, surely?” I demanded; then, when she frowned, “Not to send them back, Marina? After so long?”

  “No,” she said slowly. “But he threats this, yes? Unless...”

  Threatens, but I didn’t say it. There are times to worry about a pupil’s grammar, and times definitely not. “Unless what?”

  Now she was awkward, she was embarrassed—for Sallah, not for herself: I read that in the glance aside, in the hand that reached for her friend’s—and she didn’t want to answer. And that reluctance was answer enough, I could read the truth also, I wasn’t that naïve.

  “Jesus...!”

  Marina the sometimes-good Catholic girl scowled at me for the blasphemy, but nodded also. “He has seen Sallah, and he says, he says he will not take money, but...”

  He would take her instead, a tribute to his new-won authority. Regularly, no doubt; monthly, perhaps, his own version of a mensal bribe; very much against her will, it went without saying. Sallah would do a great deal for her family, that I knew. I had thought before that she might even marry according to their choice and not her own, though it would be her own choice to do so. This, though—no. Or I thought not; or that was my first thought, at least. But for her parents’ livelihood, for her parents’ life—and what was it, after all? The conjunction of bodies, only an animal act, and no more than she did with me already, and sweetly, fiercely more than once a month...

  The impossibility of decision, she couldn’t and yet she must: this, then, was the thing too great even for her mind to encompass, what had forced her gears out of mesh.

  “Does your brother know?” I asked her directly. She shook her head, mute and appealing, don’t tell him. I nodded my understanding. Her brother Mahmout was at the college, though she was not. I knew him by sight, and by reputation: a hothead, too streetwise too young, a charmer with a ready smile and a knife just as ready, or so rumour said.

  “Mahmout would kill him,” Marina murmured. I believed that, as absolutely as they did. For his family’s honour, he would kill; and with that killing his family would be destroyed, himself jailed and perhaps his parents also, for a year or two before they were deported.

  So no, Mahmout was not to know. They had come to me instead, with or more likely without her parents’ consent or knowledge. What was I? Publicly, Sallah’s English tutor; privately, her lover; more private still, I was a young man who knew too much about bribes and blackmail and all the excesses of power. My own family was expert in such practices. Marina knew something of that, if Sallah didn’t. This must have been her idea; she’d be looking to me for a solution, a way out of a brutal maze.

  And yes, I could give them that, I had it in me. There would be a price, of course, and it would be mine to pay; and yes, I owed them. I owed them both, more than they knew; so what matter if they were asking more than they could possibly know?

  Besides, I was angry. Coldly, furiously angry, sick with anger in a way I’d not felt for years. I knew vileness, I was an old hand at recognising the stink of it; and oh, this was vile, this was worthy of a Macallan.

  “What’s his name?” I demanded; and almost wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d said Macallan.

 
; o0o

  I left the girls in my room, with instructions to finish the wine and sleep after if they wanted, share the bed, they were welcome to it; then go, I said, go out to the beach, enjoy the sun, have a coffee, have dinner, have fun. Lock up when you leave, I said, stick the key under one of the geraniums.

  Where was I going? Never mind, I said. And don’t worry, I said that too. I’ll sort this out, I said.

  o0o

  Hot and eager the bike was, under my hard hands; hot and ready I was, even in the chill blast of wind it made as I devilrode it. Bareback under the sun’s lash, I could never be anything else.

  The police station was a modern concrete block on the outskirts of town, the ugly side, appropriately wreathed as often as not with a thick yellow hellsmoke, the downfall from a gross of industrial chimneys. I gave it a glance as I drove past, only hoping that Inspector de Policía Mañuel Garcia de Ramos found himself on duty and available this fine afternoon. If he was there, he would make himself available, I thought. If not, I thought I could get a message to him regardless. Good policemen—ambitious, promotable policemen—always stay in touch; and he would declare himself on special duty when that message arrived, I thought, whatever private pleasure he might previously have been pursuing.

  Past the police station and a long way past, past the factories and the processing plant, through the burnt-chemicals-and-fishguts fug and at last out to where I could breathe again; and now the road was increasingly rough, breaking up for lack of use or care, as I came to the next headland. No town here, no usable harbour so no village, even, no human habitation. Just a ness, rocks and shale and grass like wire and a far fall down to the sea; God alone knew why they’d built a road this far in the first place, no blame that they hadn’t bothered to maintain it. At night, I knew, teenagers came out here in their fathers’ cars, wrecking the suspension with the potholes and the jig-a-jig. You could see all the headlights from town sometimes, lighting the place like a carnival, beaming like a signal out to sea. There was little action in daylight, though, and none at all right now, in the muggy heart of the day.

  I checked that, then turned and retraced my tracks for half a mile, to the last of the industrial estates. Here were bus-stops, and here also public phones; in my head, the number Sallah had given me.

  “Inspector Ramos, please?” No trouble to sound like a young English traveller, tense and nervous and a little excited; I pretty much was all of those, for real.

  “Si.”

  “Er, do you speak English?”

  “A little. You speak, I understand.”

  “Okay, good. Great. Listen, there’s a girl, out on the Munchial? You know where I mean?”

  “Si. Yes, I know. What girl?”

  “She’s standing right on the edge there, and she says she’s going to jump. She says she wants to talk to you. No one else, she said, only you...”

  “Her name?”

  “Sallah, she said. That’s all, she said you’d know...”

  “Yes. Your name, please?”

  I gave him a false one and said I was just passing through, not staying in town, I’d only stopped for the view and a doze in the sun. Better hurry, I said, the girl looked desperate...

  He said thank you and goodbye, told me not to go back to the headland, not to go near the girl; then he hung up. I drove a couple of hundred metres down the road and then pulled off it, parked in the shade of a high wall and waited.

  o0o

  Ten minutes, twenty, and here he came. Not in a jam sandwich, a coche-patrulla, a police car with sirens blaring and lights aflare (the Mexican kids at college just called them coches, with a particular twist of the lip to tell you they weren’t talking about ordinary cars but they did indeed mean pigs, which the word also meant to them): fast but quiet he came in what was probably his private car, unmarked and unremarkable, barely breaking the speed limit. But he was still in uniform, he’d had no time or chance to change that. I was certain of him.

  I gave him a fifty-metre start, and followed. It occurred to me then, briefly, that I didn’t actually know why he had come, though I’d been absolutely sure that he would. To gloat? To bully or persuade or entice Sallah back from the edge—or else to push her over, literally or metaphorically, to cut his small losses and be assured of silence?

  I couldn’t say, I didn’t know the man. I knew only the one thing about him, indeed, that he was spiritually flesh of my flesh, all my family incarnate in one man when I thought I’d left them a thousand miles behind.

  Dangerous as a Macallan, ugly inside and no main beauty on the surface either; and stupid with it, stupid with arrogance, that was another trait shared between my kin and him. One phone-call from a stranger had fetched him, alone and unquestioning; he wasn’t even watching for a tail.

  I drove behind him, hating him, all the way back to the point. A heavy-set man, mid-thirties, glossy black hair and a five o’clock shadow; that much I’d registered, even through the windscreen and his hurry. The interior view concerned me more, though. Whatever he was hurrying towards, it was meant to be his own benefit and none of Sallah’s. Already he’d broken what had seemed so strong in her, the absolute conviction that the world worked, that what was right was clear to be seen and engaging with it simply a matter of choice. She was wrong, of course, but admirably so and I’d loved her for it; and that was gone now, shattered like the movement of a sprung clock and probably irreparable.

  Irreparable from his side also, his fault unredeemable. Anger had worked this ambush, my anger had fetched him to me; now, now was the time to unleash it.

  Second time today I’d broken all the vows in the world, reclaimed my heritage, made myself monstrous. On the football sand it had been a momentary inspiration, pure ego, weakness disguised; here it was cold and deliberate, and for cause. This I could live with, and its consequences also.

  Actually, I could live with the other also. Being weak was not a worry, it was an old and half-forgotten habit that felt like coming home.

  o0o

  The road here hugged the cliff-edge, before petering out among rocks and grass. The sun was bright in my eyes, hot on my skin but my blood was hotter beneath, remembering the chill on Sallah’s face.

  All I needed to do, all I did was to focus, to reach out with my mind’s hidden strength, to allow my fury a moment’s release.

  As God is my witness, was my only witness that day—if there is a God, which I doubt, which I usually deny—all I meant to do was bring pain and ruin to a vile man, to destroy his life and his career, to save Sallah by putting him in hospital and on the pension list. The rocks were my targets, not the sea. A tumbling wreck I wanted, and I was ready to nudge, to push, to bend steel if necessary to make it happen.

  All I did was use my talent to set his tyres alight. No more than that. Just a touch, just a thought of pale flame in sunlight and there it was, a fierce shimmer in the car’s shadow and soft explosions after.

  Not my fault, surely not my fault that he was stupid or unlucky or just surprised and not thinking straight: that when he lost control, when he felt the car veer he turned the wheel left instead of right.

  Nothing I could do then, nothing but watch as the car skirred the wrong way, left the road to hit air and not rocks, seemed to hang like a cartoon joke for a moment before it plunged out of my sight.

  Nothing to do but slam on the brakes and skid a little myself, fight the Beemer to a halt on the bad road and sit still for a breathless second before I kicked the stand down and set reluctant sandals to the tarmac, walked slowly and shakily to where blackened tracks marked a fatal take-off.

  I stood and looked, looked down; saw a crushed chaos of metal and presumptive flesh, saw it tip and roll in the tidal suck, saw it sucked under.

  o0o

  Not wanting to count, but that made two policemen I’d killed in my life, and neither one intentionally. This should have been easier to live with than the other, but not then was it, nor later. Still not. Among other lacks, I
don’t have my family’s traditional insouciance.

  o0o

  A few minutes I guess I stood there, not really thinking, only tasting defeat and acceptance, not justice but a just return for arrogance. Mine, as much as his. Then I mounted the bike again and drove slowly back to town with a sense of finality riding my shoulders all the way, a barrier between the sun and me.

  This much at least I had expected and planned for, that I would be packed and gone by sunset. Even if my designs had worked as they were meant to, I couldn’t have stayed. Room and job both were sacrifices to the day’s necessity; Marina and Sallah both, and all my easy pleasures. A bad man’s unintended death didn’t even add urgency, only bitterness.

  I parked in the courtyard, in the shade; trotted up the stairs, bent to find the key beneath a geranium pot, let myself in. Shoved armfuls of clothes into a rucksack, carried the rest of my gear down—little enough: a few books, a few folders, a few precious mementos—to stow in the bike’s panniers; went back up for one last look round, nostalgia and practicality mixed, then locked the door, dropped the key through my landlord’s letterbox and drove away with no more farewell than that.

  Hit the road as so often before, but no longer pretending I was rootless, or a free spirit, or young and alone in a wide and wonderful world. Comes a time when running and hiding can’t cut it any more, even for a craven soul like mine.

  Where was I going? I was going home.

  Two: Ill-Lit By Moonlight

  Go slowly, come back quickly.

  That hadn’t been the plan, actually, neither part of it: I’d left home, left town, left friends and family and life behind me in a roar and a hurry, hurry fury, and I hadn’t planned to come back at all.