Light Errant Read online

  But once gone, once irrevocably somewhere else—Manchester as it had happened, but it might have been anywhere: I’d simply driven until I wanted to stop, not looking ahead at all, only making a trailer for the road-movie of my future life—the air and the tarmac and everything I touched had been suddenly gluey, and my toes were growing roots. I wasn’t finished with the going yet, I knew that, I might be gone but I wasn’t gone nearly far enough; but it was suddenly impossibly hard to go further. Once stopped, I couldn’t get started again. Took me months to get out of the country, though I’d known all along I had to go. Things to do and people to see, I had, people to find: and there couldn’t be many of them and the world was broad, and I was damn sure they were none of them on this small archipelago with me. With us.

  If they had been, my Uncle Allan would have found them, long since.

  o0o

  Two years ago, that was: me with my eyes wide and all my antennae outstretched, gazing at the far horizons. Looking and looking but too stupid scared to leap, perhaps; clinging, at any rate, finding excuses, finding months’-worth of things to do, people to see, anything that would keep me yonder side of the Channel a week or two longer.

  And here I was now, most reluctant of prodigal kids returning, in no kind of hurry to see the old homestead one more time but hurrying none the less. A slow going I’d made of it to be sure, but the coming back was manic, taken at a sprint, longest possible distance in the shortest possible time.

  Always is the longest in distance, this particular journey. Count it, measure it. Name it. Heaven to hell? Freedom to slavery, fantasy to reality, there to here? They say you can’t go home again, you can’t step twice into the same river; sometimes I say that you have to. And it’s one mother of a slog getting back there, so much ground to cover and the roads not built for returning traffic.

  Hard work also, swimming against the rush of your life. I was tired after just the run up the coast to Santander, which was always going to be the easiest stretch of the journey. Tired but not sleepy, no question of sleeping: I caught the overnight ferry but never for a moment thought of joining the crashed-out backpackers on the banquettes. I munched a cheap burger—no BSE scare for me, I knew how bad my blood was, what madness I carried in my veins—and chugged my way slowly through a giant bottle of Coke for the caffeine kick of it; spent a lot of time up on deck, watching lights define the darkness on the water; finally found my way to the video lounge for the in-float entertainment and watched The Dirty Dozen for what might have been the dozenth time in a world that liked to round things off nicely, but almost certainly wasn’t.

  I’d never noticed the world do that, not of its own accord. Neat endings, patterns and symmetries, things coming together at the last: we say it’s so, what goes around comes around we say, and history repeats and all of that, but that we say it doesn’t make it true.

  We make it true, sometimes. Not history, but we repeat. We go around, and we come around; and occasionally, very occasionally—fighting hard, driving hard—we go away and then we come home again. We draw our own line in the sand, and drag it round in a circle before the sucking tide can break it.

  Or we lose our metaphor entirely, scrape it deeper and call it a moat, wait for the tide to fill it and hope we can hide inside. All the world’s a wooden O, and O is for oyster and it had I thought been mine, or so I’d been pretending, but I was maybe discovering a disaffinity with shellfish.

  o0o

  You can run, but you really can’t hide.

  o0o

  Go slowly, come back quickly. We disembarked at Plymouth, the bike and I, and the bike was full of cheap Spanish petrol and I was virtuously empty of cheap Spanish wine but sloshingly full of Coke, dizzy only with a night’s sleeplessness and a caffeine kick and the soul’s wrack of the day before, and maybe a little dizzy with setting my feet one more time on good English concrete, with all that that implied.

  Customs was a breeze, there was no one there even to wave me through, let alone to check me, check my papers, tell me I was a deeply undesirable citizen and lock me away in darkness, out of the sun’s potent glare.

  It was sunlight that kept me going, kept me quick. If I’d landed in the dark I might have stopped for the night, sought out some cheap boarding-house and slept, been sensible. And then I might have lost my nerve, or at least recovered my wits and taken my time, gone slow and careful.

  But no, I came out onto the road in bright morning, and my blood sang in the light and it was like drinking pure energy, my mind might be exhausted but my body was up for this, no question. Four hundred miles, four fifty? Not a problem...

  So I drove, all day I drove north and east, stopping only to refuel my belly and my bike.

  So I was stupid, and what’s new?

  o0o

  Sun was sinking, even so far north and high summer, so late I was on the road; tide was ebbing as I came at last to the last bridge over the last river and saw the glow of my city right ahead. Mud flats below me, glistening darkly and striped with shadow; council flats before me, grey concrete towers tinged pink and striped with light. Catch me living in one of those: I had a pretty good idea how much the constructors had paid my family for the contract, which meant I could make a pretty good guess just how pre-stressed that concrete was. They had to make their profit somewhere, after all...

  The girders of the bridge sang to me as I crossed, high and strange and ethereal. They always did at sunset. Something to do with temperature differentials, Jamie said; me, tonight, I thought they were singing me a welcome. Welcome home Benedict, black sheep Macallan. Or a white sheep, I thought myself, from a family flock of black; but that was old imagery, a teenage habit and utterly redundant now. Bleached or blackened, I thought I was. Parade me with my peers, my kin; count the cops I’d killed and my other victim also, a life claimed not in heat or clumsiness but in cold, deliberate justice or revenge, if there’s a difference; look from my family’s faces to my own, and see if there’s a difference...

  o0o

  I came back into town like a bat into hell, quick no more: coasting on the updraught, very circumspect, very cautious of my widespread wings, not to flurry the sulphurous smoke and draw eyes upward, not to show my silhouette against the flames.

  Something like that, at least. If I’d gone roaring through the streets, boy in black leathers on a big black bike, even two years on someone would have whispered, the whisper would have spread, there would have been phone-calls made and “Benedict? Are you sure? No? Well, check it out anyway...”

  I did not, I very emphatically did not want to meet any member of my clan tonight, nor tomorrow either. I suppose that’s what I’d come back for ultimately, to face the family and exorcise some ghosts, but I’d been haunted a long time and a few days more wouldn’t hurt. I wanted to ease myself back, slip in under the skin unfelt, spend a little quality time with the bones of this city and my history.

  Put it bluntly, I wanted to put it off, all the hard stuff I was here for. Still running, Ben? I asked myself, sneering; and yes, still running I was, but at least I was running on the spot now. The right spot.

  Actually I felt like a ghost myself, like my own ghost or my sister’s; and I could have been taken for either as I slid the murmuring bike through quiet streets no louder for our passing, up unlit alleys where I could.

  Where was I going, exactly? I didn’t know, I hadn’t thought; I should do that now, of course, I should make some decisions. But I felt stranded on a time-lag, Rip van Winkle in miniature. Rip van Tiddleywinks, perhaps. I’d kept in touch with no one, this time I’d been away—or almost so: I’d sent the occasional postcard, but never a return address—and I might have no friends left here now, or none that I could find. Students move, some students graduate and move away. I might be forced to my family after all...

  No. Sooner than that, I’d try the boarding-house option, even in my own home town. Sooner than either, I put it off again. Just for an hour, just for a breath of familiar air
and the touch of known ground beneath my feet.

  Gravity sucked me downhill, back to the slow dark of the river. The town seemed grave-quiet; not so odd, perhaps, with the students away, though I remembered it as showing more life than this even in the long vac.

  They’d greened a stretch of the quayside since I’d left, made a little park of it with grass and saplings, swings and a seesaw for the kids, benches for their parents. I parked the bike on some hardstanding and stripped off rucksack, helmet, jacket; stretched and twisted for a minute against the aches and weariness of a full day in the saddle after a night of no sleep, and then walked slowly along by the bollards and chains that marked the river’s edge.

  Walked, and saw that I was not after all alone. There was a man on the furthest bench, there were sodium lights and a bright moon to show him to me: a man running to fat in middle age, losing a little of his hair, sitting huddled with his face in his hands. Not so rare in this town, fear and depression were common currency. I checked, thought perhaps I should walk the other way, not to disturb a stranger in his misery; but too late for that, he’d heard my footsteps on the flags, he lowered his hands and lifted his head and turned his eyes to find me.

  One of those moments it was, when the world stills on its axis. Even in this most silent of nights, a greater silence fell. I lost the sounds of the river and the distant sounds of traffic to the south, even the sounds of my own breathing and the blood in my body. Lost the will to motion, any grip on good sense.

  Got my breath back first, a slow, juddering draw of air, just enough to speak with.

  “Dad?”

  He didn’t speak. No Benedict, son, how are you? or Where did you spring from, what are you doing home again, why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Not even Where’ve you been, your mother’s missed you, boy, she’s been worried as hell...

  No, he only stirred, stood, walked heavily towards me. Like his body, his face was puffing out, losing the definition of my childhood years; his skin glistened, and briefly I thought his flesh was all dissolving on his bones. I’d seen it happen. But no, that was only mind and memory and the night, the being back. He was sweating, that was all, surely. It was a warm night, and fat men sweat. I’m not fat and I was sweating myself, I could feel my skin sticky with it under my leathers and under my hair...

  But the first noise he made was a sniff—nothing neat or disdainful, this was a wet and raucous snot-sucking mother of a sniff—and the first gesture was a dash of his hand across his face, and maybe that wasn’t sweat after all. But why would my father, my father be sitting out in the city, in the night—his time, the night—and crying? It made no sense. Couldn’t be, that was all. Couldn’t be. I was misunderstanding.

  o0o

  He didn’t speak, he didn’t touch me, or not yet. Not with his hands or his heart, no silent hugging welcome for the strayed sheep straying home, the prodigal son unwashed, unclean but wanted none the less.

  He stood there in the moonlight, my loving father, three, maybe four metres away—close enough to be sure of me, not close enough to touch—and he didn’t lift a finger, but he hit me.

  Something hit me, at least. Or nothing did, but I was hit regardless. There was nothing there: no shape or shadow glimpsed in the corner of my eye, no breath of displaced air, but an intangible force slapped furiously against the side of my head and sent me reeling. The right way, thank God, away from the river, or there might have been a young man drowned that night.

  As it was, I staggered and stopped, gasped in confusion, lifted a hand to my pounding skull and was struck again, a thudding blow into my belly.

  All doubled up now, breathless and desperate and utterly muddled, I lifted my head to find my father, to look for help. Stupidly, I looked to him to help me; and saw the savage contentment on his face a moment before a brutal sideswipe against my jaw had me sprawling on my back.

  Then he really went to work on me.

  o0o

  Do what thou wilt, but not against blood kin. That was pretty much the whole of the law, any law that my family would recognise: that all things were open to them, except to use their talent on each other. That was a universal, it was Medes and Persians stuff, ineradicable from the fabric of what we were, except that it seemed to fall into utter disuse around me. All my life I’d been my sister’s soft target, until she died; and then Uncle James had done it, taken control of my body from me and tugged my strings like a malevolent puppeteer. Uncle Allan had been the great exception, acknowledging no laws nor common practice. And now it was my father’s turn, third and slowest of the brothers but he hurt me most, inside and out.

  o0o

  I lay on the ground, on the grass and he loomed above me with that dangerous moon hanging over his shoulder, feeding his intent. Nothing but nothing I could do in the dark, no sun to work with; nothing but roll and grunt and suffer, yell and bleed.

  I did yell a lot, more than I needed to, even, but no one came. Of course no one came, what was I thinking? No one in this town would go near a Macallan in his wrath. And anyone in trouble, anyone yelling in the night, likely there’d be a Macallan making him yell...

  No, the good citizenry would be drawing their curtains tighter, turning the television up, trying so hard not to hear me. See no evil, hear no evil: it was a survival trait, and this town was full of survivors. By definition, no one else could take it.

  Ach, and I was a survivor myself, again by definition; I was here, wasn’t I? And he wasn’t going to kill me, my own father, he might do me some damage but he’d stop, for sure he’d stop, he’d have to...

  And he did at last, though he went on for a while with his feet after he let his talent rest. He kicked me and walked away, and hesitated, and came back to kick me again. Several times he did this; and even in the dark and through the blood and mess that was clagging up my eyes, that my tears couldn’t wash away, I could see that I wasn’t the only one here who was crying. His face was twisted with it, and his nose was running.

  Didn’t stop him kicking me, though.

  Exhausted and shocked and soaking up pain like tissue-paper soaks up blood, I just lay there and let him do it to me, didn’t try to evade it or escape it or fight back. He kicked me in the back and the ribs and the head, kicked me in the kidneys and the gut like he wanted to kick me out of the family, out of the city, out of his life and the world altogether.

  But that he didn’t do, he did stop in the end, whatever he wanted. For a minute longer he stood above me, breathing heavily, noisily, like some animal barely checked; and then he turned and blundered away across the grass and out of my hearing, well out of my wet sight.

  And I lay breathing shallowly, breathing softly like some animal barely alive; and I tried, I did my best to draw my soul together in my battered body and be me again. But oh! it was hard, it was cruel. My body was no shelter for a wounded spirit then, and my spirit was bleeding more than my body was.

  o0o

  Didn’t try to move, not for a while. Not for a long time. Breathing was movement enough, and almost too much for me. Air had never been so hard-won nor hurt so badly, going in and coming out. If I tried anything more adventurous—shifting a hand, say, laying it flat to earth, only thinking about taking a little weight onto it in a minute or two—all my muscles went into spasm, and then I couldn’t even breathe.

  Strange thoughts found me, as I lay in stasis. I thought the grass was tangling around me, drawing me down under; I thought I was sinking through soil and gravel and ancient pipe to a prisoned, poisoned stream that fed the river; I thought I was flowing against the stream’s flow, swimming up to the buried heart of the city, all its hidden history. I thought I found a time before my family came, before the Macallan tribe twisted this place out of true, and I thought I could be happy there. I could lie still and listen to lost voices, forgotten lives, a freedom long gone from here. Only a dream, perhaps, only a mind dissociating, detaching itself from what was too terrible to be borne; but it seemed real enough for
a while, it seemed enough.

  Only another chance to run away, I realised at last.

  o0o

  Strange thoughts found me, but no person did. No policeman passed that way that night, no romancing teenagers drifted down to play on the swings or each other’s budding bodies, no good Samaritan came to offer rescue. I was on my own, and nothing new there.

  Time passed, more slowly than I was used to. A time came when I could move my fingers, move hand and arm without those paralysing cramps; when I could roll over and push myself cautiously onto all fours. I could hold that, though my bones ached and my flesh trembled and my breath came in racking sobs and that was the best of it, there was blood also and stabbing pains and under it all the constant droning, deadening chorus, my father, my own father it was did this to me, and took a pleasure in it...

  Go so far, I could go further. Of course I could. I could stand up. If I concentrated, if I focused...

  Did that, feeling my face twist with intent, feeling the blood run. And made it, shaking and giddy and hurting dreadfully but on my feet and stumbling, taking steps. Leaving a dark trail, I was sure, over grass and flagstones and staggering dangerously close to the drop into darker water; wouldn’t take a dog’s nose or a hunter’s skills to track me in the betraying moonlight if my father chose to come back, or if he told anyone else who might come looking.

  I didn’t, I did not want to be found again tonight. Once was more than enough. Only one way to get safe, to break the trail. I headed back to the horsepower, my international rescue, my beautiful Beemer. Snails famously carried their homes on their backs; mine carried me. Not this city was my home any more, though I longed for it and loathed it in equal measure, though I thought of it that way from old habit. Home was speed and balance, those times when I hung my helmet on my head.

  Could I drive? Not fast, for sure, and not safely; not seeingly, with blood and water in my eyes and the constant vision of my father’s face behind them. But I knew the roads, at least, and there was no traffic. I could try.