Dispossession (24 page)

Hard on myself always, however rightly so, I was ordinarily
hard on my mother also; but I was not ordinarily in my mother’s company.
Confronted with her reality rather than only the shadows of her that lurked
malevolently in my mind, it was hard now as it often was to reconcile image and
substance, and particularly hard to be hard on her as I wanted, as I needed to
be, as she in her turn deserved.
Come on, then,
mother: tell us about your fancy-man the embezzler, the man who stole from
charities and ran away to Spain. Tell us why you never told me, tell us how
involved you were and where you’ve been hiding out since...

“Come on, then,” I said, and didn’t even call her “mother”
though I knew she hated it, though I felt like doing it all day long. “Tell us
how you are.”

“The same as ever,” she said robustly, “why should I change?
Because you did, finally? You’ve seen the light, boy; I’ve been bathing in it,
God knows how long. Shove that ashtray over.”

“I’ve changed how?”

She snorted. “Look around you. Look what you’ve got here,
look what you’re doing, compared to what you were. A milksop you’ve been all
your life, and now this; and never was a mother better pleased, I can tell you.
Ashtray, please.”

Obediently, I pushed the ashtray across. “I mean how did it
happen, though? From your perspective? How much have you seen or heard of me
recently, what do you know?”

“He’s serious,” Suzie said, appearing round the corner from
the kitchen, kettle in hand, clearly and quite rightly not after all trusting
us to wait. “He’s lost his memory, Ellie, crashed the car and can’t remember a
thing.”

“Crashed the
car
?” For a
moment she was wondrously still, squinting at me through her smoke. “Are you
all right, Jonty?”

“He’s fine,” Suzie said, answering for me when I showed no
signs of answering for myself. Too busy drinking it in, me, this moment of
traditionally maternal concern from my most untraditional, unmaternal and
ordinarily unconcerned parent. “Had a nasty bang on the head, but that’s all.”

“Ah. Hence the haircut.”

“Hence the haircut,” Suzie confirmed maliciously, twitching
the cap off my head to show her the full horror now we were private, just a
cosy family threesome. “But it’s as well he looks like a weirdo, he’s been
acting like one. Can’t even remember me, thank you very much, he thinks he’s
still shacked up with that Carol.”

“Oh, God.” The cry of outrage, of despair; and then,
typically, the percipient question after. “Does he want to be?”

“Christ knows. Ask him.”

No good asking me, ladies, I
don’t know what the fuck I want any more.
But I wanted them to stop
talking about me like this, at least to my face; that much I knew.

“Will you two leave it out?” I demanded. Quickly, before one
or the other—most likely my mother—could actually ask that impossible question.
“We’ve got more important things.” And hearing myself say that and flinching a
little, and then pressing on regardless over the top of Suzie’s muttered, “Oh,
thanks a bunch, big fella, love you too,” and my mother’s strident challenge,
“Like what?”

“Like where you’ve been and why,” I insisted. “Like what I’ve
been doing, and why; and how come we’re both suddenly standing up to our chins
in shit, and people are lobbing rocks; and what we’re going to do about it,”
though the notion of combining forces with my mother was enough to give me the
screaming abdabs. I’d almost sooner hand her to the police and myself to Vernon
Deverill to be his plaything. Almost.

“Hold your breath,” my mother advised, “close your eyes and
start swimming.”

“Yes,” from Suzie, her voice much amused, “but which
direction?”

“Away from the rocks, darling. Obviously.”

o0o

Times like that, information is a great flotation aid. “Tell
us,” Suzie said; and,

“What, have you got amnesia too?” my mother said to her.

“Nah, but he’s dead secretive, him. Never tells me
anything.”

Which was seemingly true and curiously telling, though I’d
never tell her that I found it so.

She sat at my mother’s feet now instead of mine, to share
the ashtray; and maybe that was all it was, pure practicality, but it felt like
a declaration, them against me, and that felt like punishment again.

And then, at last, my mother told her story.

In brief, almost in a sentence, and to my great confusion.

“You came to me,” she said, her cigarette stabbing in my
direction, “and told me to get the hell out, dig a hole and pull the earth down
on top of me, go somewhere nobody could find me or my life wasn’t worth a small
packet of dry roasted peanuts, you said.”

“Yes, but why? Surely I must have told you why?”

“Because of Suzie,” she said, or I heard her say, or I
thought so.

She saw or heard Suzie’s bewilderment and my own, in grunts
and glances and shrugs; and for a second she wasn’t with us, as we were not
with her.

Then she cottoned to what we’d heard, and sighed, and said,
“Not
Sue
, you stupid boy,” as though the
misunderstanding were entirely my fault. “Ess you ess eye,” she spelled slowly,
patiently, to her idiot child. “SUSI. It’s an acronym.”

“What for?”

“God knows. You told me. I forget. Security firm, though.
After Lindsey, you said, and they might come after me. What it stands for, who
cares?”

Brilliant. Some weird organisation was threatening her life,
apparently—my own hectic imagination was thinking SPECTRE or SMERSH, cheap
Sixties Bond-substitutes, sinister foreigners in distinctive clothing—and she
couldn’t remember who they were.

But sitting below her, Suzie had gone very still, while the
smoke rose like drawn silk from her cigarette with never a waver from the
vertical line; and when I tried to catch her eye, to share this most unfunny of
jokes, I saw instead how she was staring at nothing at all, and how her skin
had paled from its normal indescribable colour to something indescribable and
sick.

“Suzie? What’s up?”

My voice, it seemed, called her back from wherever she had
gone, though not quickly. She turned her head to find me, though her gaze was
still unfocused; and she said, “I know who they are.”

“Yeah? Come on, then. Who?”

She shook her head at that, said only, “I can show you.”

And stood up, and walked to the door like a zombie, no life
or grace in her, only purpose; and there turned to look back at us both, and
snapped, “Are you fucking coming, then, or what?”

No, it’s just the way I’m
sitting.
But there was a tremor in her voice and a terrible tension in
her fingers, where they had closed around the handle of the door; and this was
not the time to be stupid. Not the time to comfort either, to utter inanities
or ask unnecessary questions. I went to her, my mother followed me and we all
trooped down the stairs again.

For once even my mother didn’t talk, she could find that
much sensitivity. And Suzie, who tried so hard to hide sometimes under a run of
words: Suzie was achingly, shiveringly silent, and I didn’t know if this was
anger or fear or what, or where the hell she was taking us.

We went in the car;
too far to
walk, then, or she’d have been storming, working this off on the pavement and
dragging us all but unheeded at her sparking heels...
Which deduction
was about the limit of my acuity, and no, I really wasn’t cut out for detective
work, my mind didn’t see round corners.

Certainly it didn’t see this coming, where Suzie was driving
us.

o0o

Actually it wasn’t that far, the other side of town but
still within the city limits. Suzie could have stormed it in less than a
quarter of an hour, even pulling us in her wake. Might have felt better for the
doing of it, also; hard walking can grind down the hardest of feelings.

But she wasn’t thinking of herself, wasn’t looking for
therapy here or was just in too much of a hurry for us to see this. And when we
got there, when we saw, when she told us—yes, then I could understand the rush
in her, though no more than she could I understand the story.

o0o

She drove us to a compound, and a church.

The compound was wide, and its fence was high: steel mesh
topped with three ranks of razor-wire coils, angled out. Notices warned of
guard dogs, and for once I didn’t disbelieve them.

Inside the compound were some one-storey brick buildings,
petrol and diesel pumps sheltered under a canopy, a couple of Portakabins and
half a dozen vehicles with spaces for a dozen more. The company name and logo
was on the wall of one building, on the sides of each cabin and each vehicle,
on a sign raised in one corner of the compound where it could be seen easily
from the road; barring one or two light vans, the vehicles were armoured
trucks; and the name of the company was Scimitar Security.

The logo had a great curved sword crossing a shield, and on
the shield were the letters
SUSI
.

That much I could see even through the Mini’s dark-tinted
glass. When Suzie wound her window down, I could lean across her and read the
small print that ran all along the bottom of the sign.

Scimitar Security is a division of Scimitar Universal
Securities, International.

Scimitar Security was also, I remembered, the company Vernon
Deverill had used to protect his interests, viz and to wit his bodyguard Dean
and his rogue solicitor wild card me when we were in hospital after the
fire-truck, before I’d wangled my escape to Luke. Also and again Scimitar
Security was the company Luke had talked about, protecting the Leavenhall
Bypass construction site and other projects under protest, all of them Deverill’s
developments.

Two occurrences, one coincidence I could cope with; Scimitar
was a big player in the security business, and not just locally. Not so strange
to come across them twice, especially if Vernon Deverill was involved in both
events.

This was number three, though, and seemed to link Suzie to
my mother and myself in a way that had nothing to do with a marriage; and then
there was my own previous experience of Scimitar, when young Marlon had died;
and this web was too tangled, had too many threads to be coincidental any more.

o0o

A hundred metres down the road, right next to the compound
stood the church.

Stood in its own compound now, and not a graveyard: pretty
much in a building site, indeed. The low stone wall that used to separate it
from the road lay in a line of rubble, replaced by a high mesh fence. Where
once perhaps dead people had been planted against a hoped-for resurrection, the
land between fence and church proper was all churned mud, softstanding for a
Portakabin and some heavy plant, a JCB and a little earthmover, a giant
generator closed off against the possibility of weather.

Just inside the fence, another sign:
This site acquired for Scimitar Securities, a SUSI
company. Caution! Demolition in progress—Parents keep your children out!

And Suzie drew up there also and held us sitting in the car,
held us looking; and after a cold, hard while I said gently, “Come on, then.
What’s the story?”

“This was my brother’s next project,” she said, and you
could hear, I could hear and maybe even my ridiculous mother could hear how
difficult these words were for her, how sharp their shapes in her mouth, how
she bled to speak them. “He was bored with the club, once it was up and
running. He was going to give it to me anyway, to look after. Manager and
junior partner, he said. And him, he was going to buy this place and do it out
the same way. It wouldn’t be the same, it’s not our community over here, but
there’s no snooker club this side of town. And he was going to have a gym here
too, he thought it was big enough; and aerobics classes, Weight Watchers, the works.
He was full of it, really excited and bubbling with ideas, like he hadn’t been
since the flat was finished...”

And she was full of it too, the precipitation of undissolved
grief mingling with dark suspicion, her brother and my mother, all too much and
I hadn’t even told her about me yet, where I’d had a SUSI guard standing over
me in hospital; nor about Marlon; nor yet about Luke’s encounters with Scimitar
at the roads protests. If the video of his tree-tumbling stunt showed the
security firm’s badge anywhere, I didn’t remember and Suzie, I thought, hadn’t
noticed.

No need to tell her right now. She’d been guttingly open
with us, but I didn’t have to reciprocate. First time for everything, I guess,
and that was the first time I’d felt even fleetingly grateful to be amnesiac.
Suzie wouldn’t expect me to know anything. Even now it was my mother she wanted
to interrogate, not me.

“He warned you, you said,” and she twisted round in her
seat, the better to stare my mother down. If anyone could, I thought, Suzie
could; but I didn’t really believe it even of her, I didn’t expect to see it
now. “So what did he say, exactly? How much did he tell you?”

“Oh, he told me enough, dear. He said that these people
could be after me, probably were; and he said they were killers and I couldn’t
possibly fight them, so I should run and hide somewhere they wouldn’t think to
look. And if I ever saw a van or a uniform with Scimitar or SUSI on the side,
that was them and they’d found me. They might come in plain clothes, he said,
so I shouldn’t trust any strangers, just in case; but if they came in uniform,
I could be absolutely rock-solid sure.”

“Okay. Okay,” Suzie kicking hard, rising brilliantly through
the clouds and not saying a word, not saying
no
one warned Jacky, how come you got lucky and he didn’t, why didn’t someone,
Jonty, anyone warn my poor bloody brother?
“Why, though? You must have
asked him why.”

“Because of Lindsey,” she said. “Because whatever it was
that man was mixed up in that had made him run, they thought I was mixed up in
it too.”