Dispossession (44 page)

So many fresh-painted patches on the walls, so many
obliterated names; I couldn’t suppress a shudder. Carol and I had visited
Belsen once. Now, for the first time, I thought I’d found a place I could
shrine beside that in my head,
nothing truly
changes
. If I lived long enough to make a memory of it...

“What,” I said lightly, “and no one’s noticed? You’re
stealing schoolkids and killing them after, and it’s not front page
shock-horror news in every tabloid?”

“We only take runaways,” she said, “off the street. Pick
them up with a promise of food and shelter, it’s easy. No one much misses a kid
who’s already missing. I daresay there’s a file on some police computer, but it’ll
not be much more than a list of names and queries. The bodies don’t turn up.”

“Why not?”

“I own a fishing trawler,” she said, “under another company
name, and the seas are deep.”

“Okay, so you deal in flesh and butchery. What else? Drugs,
I expect? It must be a convenient way to move them around, in a fleet of
security vans.”

“Actually,” she said, “I didn’t come here to answer your
questions, only to make sure you weren’t going to be stupid with your wife’s
life.”

Perhaps so, but she’d seemed to enjoy answering the
questions none the less. The urge to confession is well documented, as is the
frustration of the clever criminal who can’t claim their just recognition. I
thought perhaps I could get away with just a couple more.

“That truck that nearly killed us,” I said, “when I was in
the hospital. Was that your man did that?”

“Yes, it was. He was stupid. I’d set him to keep an eye on
you, and I had said that if he saw an opportunity to finish you quietly, an
accident I’d said, that would be all right. Vernon would have written you off,
I think, as a bad investment, and simply cut his losses. But the man had to go
for the big gesture,”
like with Jacky?
I
wondered, and thought probably yes.
So there’s your
revenge, Suzie love, he died just as bad as your brother
, “and he chose
to do it while Vernon was in the room. That was unacceptable. I’m very
protective of Vernon.”

Indeed. And that left me just the one more question. “Why do
you do it?” I demanded, as politely as I could manage. “What’s the point? It’s
not for profit, your legit business is worth millions...”

“You should never turn your back on profit,” she said
sententiously. “But largely, I do it because I enjoy it.”

Most people do only what they want to do. At least she had
the grace to admit it.

o0o

She left me, and I went back to sitting and thinking.
Useless, probably, but not fruitless: though the fruits of my thinking were
hard and ugly, bitter and misshapen and unwelcome.

o0o

After a while there were voices again, keys in locks, doors
opening. This time two of Deverill’s men had come to visit me, but not to talk.
One carried a side-handled baton, with the casual ease of trained proficiency.
The other was wrapping a length of inner tubing around his knuckles as he
stepped into my cell.

“This is for Dean,” he said. “First instalment.”

“I don’t think Vernon’s going to be too pleased,” I said,
getting slowly to my feet, “when he finds you’ve beaten me up, just for your
own private vengeance.”

The other man laughed. “Don’t be thick, mate. Vernon sent
us.”

Oh, fuck. “Look,” I said desperately, “before you do
anything he’ll regret later, would you take him a message for me? Tell him I
really do need to talk to him, in private and right now?”

“He’ll talk to you,” the first man said, “when he’s good and
ready. When
you’re
good and ready to be
talked to. You’re not, yet. You only think you are.”

And then he lifted his hand, and kicked me. Very hard, very
professionally, and right on the kneecap with his steel-tipped shoes.

o0o

Did I struggle? A little, I suppose. For the gesture, for
honour’s sake. But I’ve always been a realist, and never a willing fighter.
They had the training and the equipment, and I don’t believe I made a mark on
either one of them.

They laid many a mark on me. The guy with the rubber
knuckleduster didn’t get to use it much, except when he dragged me up onto my
knees purely for the sake of landing a punch or two; mostly I spent my time
fœtal in a corner with my arms wrapped around my vulnerable head while they
used their feet, pausing only occasionally for the other man to be inventive
with his baton.

Pain is relative, I suppose, first cousin to an agony aunt
when you can’t cry uncle, but this was the mother of all beatings. No time, no
space to worry about my cracking ribs, or the deep damage those feet were doing
to my gut; it was more instinct than sense that kept me protecting my
vulnerable head against the jabbing baton or the sharp stab of a shoe. I wasn’t
thinking. All I could do was hurt, and wait.

And scream a little, I think, until I had no breath left for
screaming. I did hear screams, at least, though they seemed quite distant and
not at all connected to me. I can’t imagine anyone else was screaming, even in
that place and on that night.

But screams went to grunts quite quickly, and I did know
that I was grunting, because I could feel the grunts coming up and they hurt
too, hard little bubbles of air and pain that burst in my throat every time a
foot drove into my belly.

So I hurt, likely I screamed and certainly I grunted; and
all the time I waited, and at last the thing happened that I was waiting for.

They stopped.

They spat on me, once each, I wasn’t looking but I felt warm
spit land on my cheek and dribble; and then they went away, locking the door
behind them.

I was unexpectedly glad of that lock, so glad to be locked
in and alone again.

For a while, for a good sweet while I didn’t move a single
voluntary muscle. My skin twitched and jumped a little of its own accord, my
lungs and heart went on doing their individual things—though I rather wished
they’d stop, because even my heartbeat hurt my ribs and breathing was like
being kicked again, every shallow and irregular breath—but nothing shifted more
than that. Even my eyes I kept closed, to save blinking.

There must be some still-primitive corner of the human mind,
some enduring vestige of the hunter-gatherer soul which goes on believing that
stillness equals safety. I lay curled in my corner, still as I could manage,
feeling the edges of pain dull slowly as they sawed at my bones, feeling them
fade into constant warning aches,
don’t move or we’ll
all start up again, bright and new and refreshed
; and it wasn’t only
that I didn’t hurt so much with my muscles slack and unresisting. There was
something in my head also, and more than a simple relief at its being over.
Over for the moment, at least. I held no illusions now, nor wanted them. There
was a contentment in being utterly still, perhaps a contentment in being
itself, that I’d been too busy to discover until I was battered into it. And
never mind if it was only a chemical state, some mix of adrenalin and
endorphins conspiring to mush my mind so that I didn’t care too much about the
damage. Feelings are real, as long as you feel them.

Sweet irony, of course, that I should finally learn to feel
relaxed and easy with life, in what would most likely be the last few hours of
my life. Unless it was better-grade irony even than that, and actually I was
hurt worse than I knew and dying here: starting to drift, losing all connection
with the world and that was why it seemed so good suddenly, all for the best in
the best of all possible and not at all a burden simply to lie here and not
hurt worse than I did.

Remembering all those people who claim afterlife experiences
and the overall uniformity of their vision, I think I wouldn’t have been at all
surprised to open my eyes to a tunnel, a bright light and a figure of welcome,
all suffused with this same sense of wellbeing. Be it God drawing His souls to
heaven or just the common hallucination of a mind contracting, there were
enough witnesses to give it credence, to make it again a genuine experience. I
think maybe I figured that I’d earned it, that I’d done enough, that it would
be no shame to fail now.

But not God hailed me in that white cell, not God’s voice
summoned or sent me back into my body, into my pain and fear.

Another voice altogether it was that snagged at me, light
and dark, young and old and the most unlikely of voices.

“Jonty,” it said; and that was all but that was enough, that
was plenty. I opened my eyes.

Swirling giddy sickness and a stabbing white glare, the
consequences of that deep vertiginous plunge from metaphysical floating into
brutalised flesh, a cage of bones locked in a cage of light. My mouth flooded
with an acrid saliva and I had to swallow hard, to spare my ribs the agony of
throwing up. Still didn’t try to move, wasn’t that stupid, only focused my mind
on the impossible sounds of tearing above my head.

The walls were steel, I knew that. I’d touched them all. And
there were steel bars also over the slit of a window; and still I could hear
that steel being ripped away like cardboard, and I could feel the sudden rush
of cool air into this airless box.

I closed my eyes again. Couldn’t hope to recapture what I’d
felt before, thought most likely that would be lost to me until the next time I
slipped close to death, in reality or expectation; but it was easier not to
look, and right then what was easy seemed irredeemably attractive.

I lay in my own created darkness, in my pain and
anticipation, listened to the sounds of destruction and didn’t dare to hope.
One moment at a time, that was all I could take now, and moment by moment I
heard my undreamed-of miracle take shape.

Heard him tear a hole big enough to step through, then heard
him do that thing: heard how he stepped into my cell, stepped over my prone
body, crouched down and talked to me.

“Jonty,” he said again, my unexpected angel. This time when
I opened my eyes all I could see was shadow, where his lean and perfect body
was blocking out the light.

“Luke,” I whispered; and if I hadn’t been crying before with
the pain and the fear and the brutal efficiency of the men who supplied them, I
was certainly crying now, and he was all the excuse that I needed.

“You’ve been hurt,” he said, showing again his major talent
for seeing and stating the immediate, the clear nature of the world.

I just grunted, letting myself slip into his simple vision,
not even trying to think through the pain any more. I lay like a child at his
feet, waiting and trusting; and saw him move, watched how he reached out his
hands to hold me.

Cold hands he had, and in all truth a cold heart to go with.
But ah, there was magic in his touch. A cold magic also, I suppose, a hard
magic with no kindness to it: if I’d been hurting before, his fingers dug away
that pain to find a deeper, truer layer underneath. This was pure agony, he
brought it to me like a gift and I was bathed in it. An icy fire filled my
hollow bones, flowed like slow oil through all my veins and tissues, lit me up
I was sure like a flaming glass. No screaming now: I needed to howl, and could
not. If I gasped, if I whimpered, that was as much as I could manage.

He held me tightly, and it seemed that every steel-ripping
finger was a conduit that channelled pain until I was more full of it than
human blood and bone was built to bear. I writhed in his grasp, my eyes
battered at him as my mouth could make no sense; and at last, at long last he
let me go and I fell back sobbing into my corner.

Wanted to lie still again, to curl up with my back to him
and the world and close my eyes and have it all, all of it go away. But that
was a child’s reaction again, and I could allow myself no more of that.

Slowly, slowly I stirred, I shifted on the hard flooring. I
put one hand and then the other down flat, and leaned my weight forward till I
was on all fours.

And my arms and legs held me up, and I found no pain, only a
terrible exhaustion. I lifted my head, and that didn’t hurt; I met him eye to
eye, and that didn’t hurt; I took my weight all on the one hand and ran the
other clumsily over my wet cheeks and running eyes, and even that didn’t hurt.

Everything ached and tingled, but nothing worse. My tongue
felt fat and awkward in my mouth, each of my teeth was separate and jittering
and electric, but somehow I worked them all together to make his name, and a
couple of slow and slurring words more.

“Luke—thank you...”

“Can you walk?” he asked.

Big
joke—and there was me,
thinking all these years that he had no sense of humour...

He’d learned to understand laughter, though, or some at
least of its many meanings. I wheezed at him faintly, and his hands reached out
to me again.

Not to hurt this time, not to heal. I did flinch, though, I
couldn’t help flinching. He ignored that and lifted me into his arms—like an
adult a child, I thought, and thought I might resent that later; but then, isn’t
all gratitude only an expression of resentment in different degrees?—and he
stood up from his crouch with all my weight costing him no visible effort
whatever. Why would it? His body was made of star-stuff less tired than our
own; he tore steel with his fingers.

Stooping, he stepped out through the hole he had made in the
cabin’s wall. Strips of steel curled and hung down like apple-peel, where they
hadn’t pulled and stretched like toffee.

Outside was clear and cool. With my head drooped against his
shoulder, looking up was easier than looking around. I saw stars like shards of
shattered light, and my mind was half ready to float again. It was an effort
not to, with my body safe at last and too numbingly tired to hold me.

I frowned, and even that was a physical effort, took
concentration to do it. I focused my eyes firmly on Luke’s and said, “What did
you come back for?” Couldn’t have been for me, I was sure of that.