Dispossession (30 page)

o0o

So. Classic password mentality, for young men with no
experience of using passwords: this much at least I knew, I had read about. Men
like me, we tended to use names, as being easier to remember. More than that,
they tended to be names that meant something to us. Parents, siblings, first or
current lovers; heroes from real life or fiction, Kevin Keegan or Judge Dredd;
erotic masturbatory dream-partners, Demi Moore or Michelle Pfeiffer or Antonio
Banderas.

Carol
I typed, and
Carol Carter
, just to get them out of the way,
out of my mind, as I had apparently put Carol herself out of my mind or else
simply out of the way. Then, a little more seriously,
Elspeth
and
Elspeth
Marks
, and
Ellie
of that ilk: it was
my mother’s story, after all, far more than it was mine. All the machine told
me each time was that the password was incorrect, and it could not open the
document.

More seriously still, really buckling down to it now, I
tried
Suzie
and all the variants I could
think of,
Suzie Chu
,
Suzie Marks
,
Suzie
Chu Marks
; and then remembered that I hadn’t called her that, that I’d
refused to for reasons that seemed pretty good to me now, and ran the gamut
again with
Sue
to replace
Suzie
.

Still nothing, only the flat denial; and my fingers were
getting quite fast at this and my mind was sniffing around it like an eager
dog, loving the challenge. I tried faces from the past, early girlfriends, my
closest teenage mates. I tried my birthday, my mother’s, Carol’s. I yelled for
Suzie, asked when was hers, tried that. No soap, but she lingered, so I asked
for the date when we’d met. Sentimental as a kitten, she didn’t need to check
in her diary, even; but it had no result, any way that I could think to write
it. Nor did the date of our first kiss, though Suzie prompted me to try it.

“Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” I murmured, stretching,
giving my fingers a rest. “This is my mind we’re trying to second-guess here,
not yours. Practical, not slushy. Ow! Jesus, mind the machine...!”

I’d only said it to get a rise out of her, and I’d got that
and more. There was a genuine point, though, that I noticed and accepted once I’d
fought her off and sent her flouncing back to Ellie. There really wasn’t any
point tracking the events or moments that she remembered or valued, even if
they’d been shared; what would have resonated with me was all that counted, and
I’d never been much susceptible to dates or anniversaries. Or any form of
numbers, come to that. I was a words man, always had been.

Heroes, who were my heroes? I didn’t have any, not in that
sense. Not whose names I would alight on, looking for an excuse-the-expression
unforgettable mnemonic. Men I admired, sure, and women too; but no idols, no
mascots, no obsessions. Except of course for Luke: but it would have been
lèse-majesté to use his name in such a context, he would have hated it and so I
would never have done that. I tried it anyway, I typed
Luke
just to be sure, and received no reward
beyond the confirmation that I was right, that I hadn’t changed so very much
after all. I still knew what was proper, what was owed to angels.

o0o

I wasn’t always so wise. Once I’d thought of Luke as a
trophy, to be shown off. Sixteen and buzzing with it, first girlfriend and
desperate to impress: of course I’d taken her to meet him, to be overwhelmed by
magic, myth made flesh.

Julia, her name was. A small-town girl who liked discos and
glitter, she was not much impressed by the long bus-ride and the longer slog
uphill to Luke’s hollow, less so by his cool unwelcome and the chipped mug of
hot water that was all he had to offer. I hadn’t warned her, not to spoil the
wonder of him; it was too soon apparent that all she was wondering was how soon
we could head back to civilisation. Recognising my mistake but too shy to admit
it, never any good at leaving Luke even in the face of disaster, I sat as
silent as the pair of them around his smoky fire until he got abruptly to his
feet, said he was off walking.

My cue, my opportunity to rescue something from the day; but
still I didn’t take it. I only scrambled up, puppy-eager to trail him around
the bounds of his territory and ignoring the speaking glare Julia shot at me,
get us out of this...

Stupid with the hungers of youth, I guess I was praying for
a miracle, for him to give us a glimpse of his true nature.

That at least I got, an early revelation that men should be
careful what they pray for.

He led us tramping over the hill and into a wooded valley,
while she followed sulking at my back, refusing to take my hand even down the
muddy slides between the trees. Flocks of birds fled us, screaming. At the
bottom the path ran parallel to a fence closing off a great tract of land that
must have had a gamekeeper to patrol it, because the barbs on the wire were
decorated with the desiccating corpses of his hunting.

Weasels and crows I knew, other predators I was less certain
of naming in the mess of ripped fur or feather, exposed bone; but last in the
long line was a raven, today’s kill by the look of it, fresh blood on its
broken chest and its wings splayed out in a grisly crucifixion.

Luke stood a long time, looking at that dead bird. I heard
muttering behind me, and looked round to see Julia making faces,
this is horrid, this is disgusting, I’m bored and fed up
and I want to go home.
All I could give her was a shrug,
I don’t know the way home from here, we’ll have to stick
with him for a while yet.

Then her face changed, no more messages for me; she was
staring past me and the wire was vibrating beside me, and there was the rustle
of long-dead creatures falling apart, falling away. I twisted around and saw
Luke tugging and tearing, yanking the raven savagely from the barbs, doing more
damage and I couldn’t see the point.

Until he lifted the body to his mouth and breathed on it,
spat on it, licked its dusty spattered feathers, the dark-edged holes in its
flesh. Distantly I was aware of Julia retching, and it sounded real, a reaction
not a comment; but all my focus was on Luke, on his hands where they were not
cradling but clutching the bird, almost crushing it, threatening more damage
still.

Its wings hung outside his clenched hands, moving as his
fingers moved. He had its dead head in his mouth now, working it between tongue
and teeth; and its wings moved, scratching at the air, but his fingers were
entirely still.

He held it away from his face and its head was glistening,
running wet, and its eyes were dull with death yet its beak opened and it
shrieked at him.

Julia shrieked too, and clutched at me.

Luke opened his locked hands and the bird, I suppose, flew.
It fumbled into the air, at least, slow and mechanical-seeming, a travesty of
life. Not skill or nature that kept it aloft, not the effort of its muscles or
its feathers’ spread. This was vile, and Luke felt that as we did: his face
said so, shifting from detachment to something too complex for me to read, a
cocktail perhaps of grief and anger and despair. This was the best that he
could do, and it was pathetic, cruel, heart-rivingly sad.

We watched the bird-thing he had made blundering its way
between the trees, catching on twigs and creepers and leaving feathers wherever
it got caught; and I wondered how many more of these there were in the woods,
how many dead creatures that still crawled or slithered or hacked at the wind
with dishevelled, rotting wings.

Luke had turned and run then, off and away; and when he was
gone, when the sounds of his going had faded to nothing, I’d taken Julia’s
unresisting hand and we’d made our way along the path and along the road it led
us to, until we found a village with a bus stop and an eventual journey home.

o0o

I’d taken Luke no visitors since, though apparently I’d
promised to take Suzie. Twice, now. And I’d talked about him as little as I had
to and boasted not at all, not made a hero of him; and if not of him, then of
whom?

Lacking true heroes, I played instead with any names I could
drag easily from my memory, be they good teachers from school or college,
authors and bands whose work I’d loved or hated, athletes or artists or famous
lawgivers from Solon to Judge Jeffries to Lord Denning; but I had to look back
to my adolescence for most of them, and over that distance none seemed to stand
out more than the others, and it was no surprise that none produced what I was
looking for, none was the key to unlock all my so-carefully-guarded secrets.

Fantasy figures, then? Again I was looking back ten years or
more; I pictured my room as it had been then, all the pin-ups and posters on
the walls; the bands I’d tried already, but I named as many of the women as I
could and tried them all, and failed with them all.

And again was not surprised, because this didn’t feel any
more right than using Suzie’s notions of what mattered most. It was me who’d
set this up, a radically-altered me but me none the less; and I wouldn’t have
scouted a long-abandoned past for a brief but crucial phrase, I’d have used something
current. Something relevant, either to my life or to the project...

Chinatown
? No.
MR2
? No. Nor
Deverill
nor
Vernon
nor
Vern
,
Dean
nor
Leavenhall
nor—of course—
Scimitar
nor
SUSI
.
Nolan
I tried, and
Lindsey Nolan
and
Spain
and
Spanish Jail
and
Spanish Gaol
, and had no joy of them.

Passwords, books I’d loved; suddenly two paths of memory
crossed, and threw me a new idea. In
The Lord of
the Rings
, even the wiser-than-wise Gandalf had been stymied by this
exact same problem, though the solution had been staring him in the face; he’d
been caught by a pun, or else a bad translation. What he’d read as an
invitation, ‘Speak, friend, and enter’ had really been an instruction, ‘Say
“Friend” and enter’. And I loved cleverness, I loved puns, and I loved that moment
as much as any in literature...

So I tried
Friend
, and I
tried
Mellon
which was Elvish for ‘friend’
and actually the word that Gandalf used to get them in; and neither one worked
and I was furious with myself, my former self for not having thought of that,
it would have been such a neat solution.

o0o

I was still stabbing that keyboard with sweaty fingertips,
wearing my prints away, when Suzie came back; and no, she didn’t knock this
time either, nor would I have expected her to. It was the door’s banging open
that dragged my eyes up from the screen. She stood framed, akimbo, imperative.

“Come and eat,” she said.

“In a minute.” I was hopelessly pursuing some desperate
strand of thought, the names of my regular, favourite or most recent clients:
expecting nothing, getting nothing, unable to stop.

“No, not in a minute. Right now.” And she swiftly bent and
unplugged the computer’s lead; which made no difference at all, it switched
automatically to battery power. I thought probably she knew that, because she
didn’t so much as grunt her disappointment, let alone try to wrest the machine
from my grasp, which would most likely have been her next move if she were
serious. She was only making a point, not genuinely trying to cut me off
mid-word.

Point made, she nevertheless hammered it hard home. “I’ve
been entertaining Ellie all afternoon,” she said. “Your turn now, she’s your
mother.”

“Thought you liked her?”

“I do; but there are limits. These are they,” in a phrase
stolen indirectly from Ellie, directly from me.

My mouth twitched into a reluctant smile; she beckoned me
with a flick of her head, and I put the computer down on the futon, switched it
off and stood up with an effort, went to join this awkward, unexpected family
at dinner.

o0o

Suzie had cooked Chinese, and the table was laid only with
chopsticks and soupspoons and bowls.

“Can I have a knife and fork?” I pleaded, sitting where she
told me.

“No.”

“I can’t use these,” picking up the chopsticks to prove it.

“Yes, you can. I taught you.”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“So I’ll teach you again.”

“It’s an impossible task. Dozens have failed before you. I’m
cack-handed.”

“I know. But I did it before. You got pretty good, in the
end. For a cack-handed white boy, I mean. Do it once, I can do it again.”

o0o

So she did it again, and it was too easy. Just a minute of
uncertain fumbling, a single crack of her knuckles on my unprotected skull when
I dropped a stick and offered that as proof, “See? Told you I couldn’t do it,
you’re wasting your time,” and then suddenly I understood, or my fingers did. I
reached for a prawn and the sticks found it, gripped it, lifted it; almost
dropped it deliberately, at the smug told-you-so expression on her face; but
carried it to my mouth in generosity, chewed and swallowed. Hot and juicy and
sharp with flavour, it stirred an appetite I didn’t know I had. Soon I was
snatching food into my bowl without thinking about it, scooping rice urgently
into my mouth, altogether too much at home with these alien instruments.

“You must be a good teacher,” said my mother, expertly
clicking her own chopsticks like a crab its claws. “Heaven knows I tried, but I
never got anywhere with him.”

That, I thought, could be the reason I’d never managed to
learn before: that my mother had been the first to try to teach me, that my
body had rebelled as much as my mind. As my body seemed now to be remembering
lessons that my mind could not, demonstrating an acquired skill though the
acquisition was lost to me.