Dead of Light

Chaz Brenchley

Two: My Family, and Other Cruelties of God

Actually the roads were blocked by death, near enough. There were cars parked down the private lane, all the way back to the junction; and the lane is narrow, for all that the civic authorities very kindly keep it well maintained. On four wheels, we’d never have got through to the house. Such a crush, such a gathering: even if I hadn’t known already, there would have to have been a death. Nothing else could have brought them all together this way.

Jags and Micras, old Ford Escorts and new Volvo estates: I was seeing symbols in everything, and this long line of cars said that there was nothing united about my family, nothing shared beyond the blood. Blood was enough, though. It fetched them in.

Besides, there was the family business too: what paid for the cars and kept bread on the table, the wolf from the door. Everyone had a share in that.

Everyone except me. Some weeks I ate pride more than bread, and the wolf scratched deep runnels in the paintwork. But in extremis, friends would see me through; and I’d take my friends any day, over the people who’d bred me and fed me and held me within the shelter of their strong, strong arms all the years of my childhood.

My sister’s strong arms steered her mean, lean black machine past the cars and through the high stone gateway into my uncle’s grounds. Gravel spat around us, onto lawns and flower-beds; I didn’t look back to see but the way Hazel drove, the way Hazel did everything, hard and fast and heedless, we’d be digging ditches in the drive. Not to worry, though. My uncle employed people to rake and tidy. That was how he lived, he walked a road constantly made smooth before his feet.

That was how he tried to live, at least. Might not find it so easy now. Hard to smooth away the death of a son so many years too soon, so very much out of proper order.

o0o

There were maybe a dozen people in sight as we approached the house. In twos and threes they stood about, darkly dressed, all with something of black about them. The men wore suits, even the cousins of our own generation, Martin’s cohorts, as comfortable in collar and tie as they would have been in stilettos and lace. A family in mourning, though. doing the thing properly, as my family did everything properly. Even my sister’s leathers were unadorned black; and I might be wearing Hazel’s helmet but I was wearing my own clothes: padded ski jacket in electric pink, maroon jeans with purple pockets and turn-ups, scarlet boots.

Ah, well. Maybe they’d think it was a message, maybe they’d read it right. I don’t belong here, I don’t belong with you.

They were reading something from me, at any rate: staring and glaring, treating me like an open book with dodgy illustrations. Maybe I should wave, say, “Hi, guys,” something like that. Family, after all. Cousins and aunts. Nobody would want to kiss these particular cousins, but maybe I should offer to kiss the aunts...

Maybe not. I kept Hazel’s helmet on, dark visor down. Let my clothes say what they liked, that was all the information I was giving out for free. The rest was silence. A young man’s entitled to some privacy, even from his family.

Especially from his family.

o0o

Hands in cool nylon pockets, trying to look oh so casual and not at all like a man with a Daniel complex, hi, cats, remember me? Nice den you got here, I followed my sister’s eloquent, contemptuous back through that gauntlet of gazes and on into the house.

Uncle James met us in the hallway, fat and fifty-odd, pale in his dark suit; and just for a moment, just briefly he wasn’t family at all, he was only a man whose son was dead, and I could feel for him.

But then a girl came to my elbow, to take my jacket and my sister’s helmet. She was fifteen, sixteen maybe, and it was a struggle, because I wouldn’t have seen her since she was twelve; but I felt the spark in her, my skin tingled when our fingers touched, and eventually I placed her as a second cousin some little distance removed. And my perspective shifted again. Of course Uncle James would be using cousins for his maids today, aunts no doubt for his cooks. He wouldn’t want unrelated staff in the house, people not bound by blood; this was family business, and a stranger is by definition a spy.

And that was too much access to his mind, it was all too familiar. Sympathy shrivelled, in the light of such logic. I gave up the shadowing helmet and the proclaiming jacket both, faced him as I was: nephew and rebel, in the family but not of the family, never that.

Held my hand out to shake his like a stranger, like a spy; and he took it briefly, coldly, none of the warmth due to family. No hug, no kiss of greeting for the boy who’d done half his growing up in this house, who’d been practically an adopted son sometimes when things were a little too hot at home.

“Benedict. Welcome,” each syllable hard and detached, pebbles dropped individually into silence, hard to imagine anything less welcoming. Hard to hear that from my uncle’s fleshy lips, and to see how quickly he pulled his hand back from mine.

Harder still not to do the same thing, in response or in revenge. Harder to be civilised, to say what was right and due and proper, what I owed both to the living and the dead despite all divorces.

“Uncle James. I can’t, I can’t believe that Marty’s gone. He was such a friend to me when we were younger, it’ll never be the same world without him...”

You ought to be glad of that, his eyes accused me, the things you’ve said of the family, of men like Marty and me. And I agreed with him, or some part of me agreed; but that was all he was seeing, my rejection and my walking out. Where I stood there was a wider picture, and it had a great gaping hole torn in it, edges fraying in a bad wind.

“You’ll want to view the body,” he said, and now I couldn’t agree with him at all, no part of me wanted to view the body. But, “You’re the last,” he said, “I’ll take you up myself.” And he was already turning towards the stairs, and spineless Benedict Macallan asserted himself exactly as much as he usually did, and followed quietly in his uncle’s wide wake.

There would be a wake, I realised suddenly, a wake for Marty from now until the dawn. I hadn’t been invited, though, not for that. This was a blood meeting upcoming and I was blood, I had a duty to attend; but the mourning party after would be for true mourners only, not for the likes of me.

Not that there were any others like me. I was renegade, I was outcast, I was alone.

By my own choice, and apparently forever; and oh Laura, Laura, not fair to send me into this alone, where’s your compassion?

o0o

Up the stairs to the first landing, and I turned automatically to the next flight, thinking of Marty’s old room in the attic, thinking they would have put him there. But Uncle James was going the other way, along the corridor where I almost was a stranger, where children had never been welcomed when I had the run of this house, when I was a child. That made it easier, a little. I didn’t want to see Marty still and dead in the room where I’d seen him so often death’s opposite, so full of life, laughing or wrestling or hustling me out with hard hands and hard words and a girl mysteriously half-seen in the shadows behind him, perfume in the air.

And if they’d changed the room, or he had—if there were no posters on the walls now, no sports teams or women posed half-naked and provocative; no broken childhood toys gathering dust in cupboards; no adolescent trophies, this girl’s bra and that girl’s knickers; no clothes kicked in corners, no reek of sweat and aftershave, no Marty—I didn’t want to see that either, like an underlining that there was no Marty in the world.

o0o

I followed Uncle James, hustling a little to catch up; and he took me past half a dozen doors firmly closed, and brought me to one that stood a little open.

He pushed it wider, gestured with his head; and I hardly hesitated, hardly paused for one last breath and a momentary eye-contact, I don’t want to do this, before I went obediently in to Marty.

o0o

It was dim in there, heavy lace curtains over the windows and no lights on. My stupid hand was already reaching for the switch before I caught it and dragged it down again, feeling Uncle James’ eyes still watching me.

This must have been a guest-room ordinarily, there was nothing personal in it. Pale blue wallpaper, a couple of prints, heavy furniture with china doodahs on lace doilies, an ashtray on the window-sill. Only a single spray of flowers, white lilies and orchids on a low table by the bed.

Queen-size, the bed, and in the middle of the room; and on the bed, of course, my cousin Marty.

Naked to the waist, he was; or naked all the way, rather, but there was a sheet drawn neatly up for decency, only its weight to shadow the shape of him from the chest down.

I was surprised, I’d thought to find him in his best clothes like the rest of them, suit and tie and a flower in his buttonhole; and what surprised me more, someone had spilt ink on his shoulder.

No, couldn’t be ink. Get real, Macallan. But something there was, a black stain on his skin; and I was leaning closer, trying to make it out in this uncertain light—better to look at a little part of him than the whole, better a small puzzle than the big one, who and how and why—when someone did flick that switch on the wall behind me.

Then the light was certain, the light was definite and unambiguous and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I turned quickly, half to see and half to protest; but seeing was enough, the protest died somewhere between tongue and teeth.

It was Marty’s brother stood there in the doorway. Marty’s kid brother, young Jamie. My age, my playmate; often my shield and defender against Hazel, and for a long time my very best-loved friend.

No friend now, we had the whole family between us; and after today I thought we’d have Marty too, the way Jamie looked, the way he was looking at me. Once we used to unite against Marty, two allies under constant threat of war. Now he was going to lie between us, cold and dead and irrecoverable, like so much else.

“Go on,” Jamie said, soft and sibilant and chilling, lean and tense in his tight suit, hard-trained and utterly out of any control but his own. “Have a closer look, you were going to anyway. That’s what you’re here for, that’s why you’ve come...”

That’s why I was brought, I thought; and, that’s why he’s got no clothes on, I thought that too, suddenly seeing clearly, bright as the light around me now.

And I turned away from Jamie, more for escape than to satisfy my curiosity, because he looked too dangerous to bear. But the one led to the other, not looking at Jamie meant looking at Marty, no other choices in that room that morning; and again I looked at the shoulder more than the face, thought about the skin sooner than think about what that skin contained, cooling bones and heavy flesh already part putrescent.

It wasn’t only his shoulder, I saw that now, although his shoulder was worst affected. There were black marks on his arms too, in little patches; and on his knuckles, where his hands lay folded atop the white sheet. I thought of ink again, understanding the pattern of them suddenly.

Marty had made his first tattoo at school, done it himself with a needle set in a wine-cork and Art Department inks. He was maybe fifteen then but already a big lad, already a bruiser, loving his own reputation; when he’d picked the scabs off there was a crude face on his forearm, with a black eye and missing teeth, and THE OTHER GUY in wobbly capitals around it. I was staying in the house just then, so I got to witness the row, and the week of cold silences after; and neither of us ever let on that Marty had used my idea and my original sketch to work from.

That early amateur effort had been removed inside the month, and was never mentioned again. But Marty left school the following year and left home temporarily, to establish at least a little independence; and that was when he started paying for his tattoos.

Last time I’d seen him he’d had LOVE and HATE across his fingers, like any self-respecting thug; and he’d had any number of designs up his arms, flags and football teams, impossible women; but his pride and joy, his new acquisition, what he’d taken his shirt off to show me was a dragon.

No ordinary dragon, this. Brazen and bejewelled, it had clung to his back with all four legs and its wings outstretched, claws dug in and beads of blood dribbling down. Its tail wrapped around his buttock and arrowed into his groin, he said, though he didn’t show me that; its head peered over his left shoulder, and its eyes were laughing.

That’s how it was, that’s what he wore under his clothes last time we met. He carried a dragon on his back, between his skin and him.

No longer. What he carried now—except that he carried nothing, would never carry anything again—what marked his body was a puffy, crusted black blister where the dragon’s head had been, and lesser scabs to cover all his other tattoos.

I thought they were burns, perhaps. I thought Uncle James had come after him with a blowtorch, flames to scrub him clean of filthy pictures. Or I didn’t, I only wanted to; from first understanding, I knew that this was something entirely other, something entirely worse.

“Don’t piss about,” Jamie said behind me, coldly vicious. “Have a proper look, why don’t you?”

And his hand reached past me, gripped his brother’s chilly shoulder and heaved.

Awkwardly, ungainly in death as he never had been in life even with all the weight he had on him, Marty shifted; Marty stirred under his brother’s ungentle hand, fell back and stirred again, finally rolled over with that fine white sheet only a tangle now between his legs.

o0o

Not good, this. Not a kind thing to do to a cousin, an old friend, an adoptive brother. But that was the crux, of course, because I wasn’t any more. That’s why he was so angry, so set against me; whatever the summons of blood, I was the closest he could find right now to someone from the other world, outside the family. And someone outside family had done this, and I represented them all...

First glance, Marty’s back looked like a Mandelbrot in bad colours, black with livid purple edges. It wasn’t, of course, the shape was wrong; but it still looked fractal, it had that regularity and the sense of depth, the feeling that however close you got you still wouldn’t reach the bottom of it.

Second glance and it just looked foul, it looked like a dreadful way to die.

The hard smooth crust of black scab had fractured under his weight, shattered almost, into a craquelure that showed harsh red in the cracks. Maybe it wasn’t his weight that had done that after all, maybe it was his writhing and bucking as he died; because he surely must have done that, he would never have gone easy and this must have hurt.

Whatever this was, that much I was ready to bet on, that it must have hurt. My cousin Marty, whose major ambition in life was to learn how to eat beer-glasses for fun and profit, who’d hold his finger in a lighter-flame for effect and laugh as the blister came up after; I was ready to bet that he’d screamed as these blisters came up.

“Jamie?”

“What?”

“How did they, how did they ever do this?”

“Don’t know,” he said, softening a little suddenly, standing beside me; allowing the question, allowing me to be us instead of them. “Nobody knows. Allan’s on his way, though. He’ll find out.”

Yes. Allan was the eldest of the brothers, Allan and then James and then my father Charles. Allan was the intellectual, the sophisticate, the man who had known how to erase Marty’s first primitive tattoo that time. He’d sniff out whatever had been done last night, he’d understand. Whether he’d point the finger after, whether how would give us who—that was another question, and nothing we could do but hope.

And I did find myself hoping, unexpectedly. Standing over Marty’s body, I felt a part of this family as I hadn’t for years. Beside me, Jamie seemed to have burned his anger out; now his hand was slack on his brother’s head and I could hear his breathing catch and harden, carrying too much memory in a room where memory could only equal pain.

“Come on,” I said quietly, “let’s get him tidy again, yeah? Before someone comes?”

Jamie nodded mutely, and between us we turned Marty over and straightened him out. It was impossible not to touch those repugnant scabs, though I avoided them as much as I could, and I could see Jamie doing the same, trying to fit his fingers around them. They felt hard and dry, colder somehow than Marty’s body was. That had to be illusion or imagination, surely, but I thought Jamie was sharing it. Evil always feels cold. Christ, I should know. I’d shivered enough under my uncle’s eyes, some of my cousins’, my father’s sometimes.

We pulled the sheet up from either side of the bed and folded it tidily, well above his groin to hide the black scar where the dragon’s tail had pointed into his pubic hair, treasure lies here. I didn’t know how many girls had gone looking, but he’d had more than his fair share, had Marty. Taken the best part of my share too, I thought sometimes; but only statistically, and not at all by his intent. It had been my choice earlier, another way to defy family traditions, to frustrate their expectations and mark myself out as different, even more than I was marked already.

And then there was Laura and nothing else applied, no other girl need bother. Sorry, no vacancies.

o0o

We did that last duty for Marty, we laid him out nicely, and I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so brotherly to both of them, so close. Then we left him, pulling the door to behind us but not quite closing it, leaving a little gap for him to hear the party downstairs if he was listening. He wouldn’t have wanted to miss a party.

And then we walked down together, side by side; and for the length of that corridor and the staircase I lost my perspective again, lost it utterly. Jamie was only my close relative and my oldest friend, his brother my cousin had died and he was grieving, we were both grieving and that was all.

But Uncle James waited at the foot of the stairs, vengeful and malign, and there it went again. Not possible to keep good hold on such a view, too much evidence stacked against it.

“In the big room,” he said. “Now,” he said, “we won’t wait for Allan.”

“Where is Uncle Allan, anyway?” I murmured, following Jamie down the corridor. It felt right, it felt essential to keep my voice low; the house was too tense for normal conversation, it had to be whispers or screams. And I wasn’t sure how people would react, if they thought I was asking too many questions.

Jamie showed me then how right I was, giving me a glance that was all family, our brief alliance already broken; but he did at least answer. “Shetland,” he said. “He’s been sent for, he’s coming.”

That made sense, to find Uncle Allan so far north. The only one of us who ranged far outside the town, he’d always trumpeted our Celtic lineage, louder than necessary and too often to be interesting. I’d never felt it applied, in any case. There were other Macallans, to be sure, and they were profoundly Scottish; but they weren’t us. We were border people, in any sense you cared for.

o0o

The big room must presumably have been called something else at some time, something more formal. But the big room we kids had christened it when Uncle James bought the house fifteen years back, give or take; and the big room it had remained.

There would never have been an easy label, in any case. Too broad for a gallery, too much to one side to be a hall, far too grand for any more domestic title, it would always have demanded a name to itself: the long room, perhaps, or the sun room after all its south-facing windows. But it rained just as often as the sun shone, and for some obscure childhood reason even our illicit games of indoor cricket had been played width-wise, we’d never used the length of it. All we ever called it was the big room, and the adults caught the habit from us as adults will.

And now we were adults also, and one of us was dead, and the big room was barely big enough to hold all us men in comfort. I’d not seen a family gathering, a clan moot on such a scale: not since my grandfather died, at any rate. My family tended not to assemble in such numbers, it wasn’t entirely safe. Not even for us.

Shivers slicked my tingling skin as soon as I walked into that room; every hair on my body was suddenly alert, and the air crackled dangerously in my lungs. I eased my way past relatives on sofas and relatives in chairs, all of them male; I set my feet carefully in the spaces between younger relatives sitting on the floor, lads all except my sister; I hurried quietly all the way across to an open window, where I could breathe something other than concentrated Macallan.

And yes, I might be blood and my blood might allow me to survive in here where surely a stranger would be sick and maybe dying already; and yes, I might have shared memories with these people, shared affections grievously bruised today; but no, I was no part of this. I didn’t belong and I didn’t want to belong.

So I leant against the wall breathing what breeze there was that would venture into this house, with my head turned to the grass and the hills and the river. Couldn’t turn my ears away, though, couldn’t turn them off. I heard my uncle make his way to the far front of the room, and then I heard his speech.

“My son,” he said, my eldest son, my pretty son, my pride, “my son is dead, you have all seen him now. What was done to him, you have seen. If any of you understands it, I would be glad to hear from you now.”

Not a murmur, not the hiss of a pensive breath. My family does silence very well.

My family does everything well.

“Well, then. Allan will find it out, when he arrives.”

To be sure, Allan would find it out. And there would be no other autopsy for Marty: no police, no cold knives and his body opened under a harsh light and the harsher eyes of strangers, no inquest beyond our own.

“But how the thing was done is secondary now. That it was done, that my son was killed, by whatever agency—that is a matter not for Allan, but for us all.”

And I felt the agreement swell around me, I felt the tight-leashed anger build and build, my skin burned with it and there was a stabbing pain in my head; and how could it be otherwise, at a gathering of such a family at such a time?

But even so, my uncle was too certain, too confident of blood. Not for the first time, he was discounting me; or counting me in, rather, counting me an insignificant addition to the pack when in truth I was far outside it.

I had loved Marty and he was dead, strangely and horribly dead; but if that was a matter for my family, then by definition it was no matter for me.