Dispossession (35 page)

o0o

Walking with Luke was like walking with a determined dog,
not at all a social activity. So long as the route was obvious he ploughed
ahead, sometimes far ahead, never a thought for companionship or conversation;
as soon as there was a question over which way to go, he would stand and wait
to be told.

I’d known him wait patiently, serenely almost, though Luke
was never truly serene. Today he waited furiously, pale and tense and enraged
apparently by our slowness. I took to pointing the way as soon as I was sure
myself, so as not to face too nearly the glare of his glacier eyes.

Suzie and I weren’t strolling, we weren’t dawdling, this was
a serious march for us as much as for Luke. Even so he left us a distance
behind him, again and again; which left her free to grip my arm and talk to me
as we walked.

Or to ask questions, rather, to demand to know. “Why did he
go to Carol, then, if he wanted you?”

“Didn’t know where to find me,” I said. “Obviously.”

“It’s not obvious.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. The way you talk about him, he knows everything.”

“No. I told you already, he doesn’t know his way about,
places he hasn’t been. He has a different kind of spatial awareness,”
he used to dwell in the heavens,
“he can’t get
around on the ground, and he hates to fly.” She didn’t look persuaded; I tried
a different way. “Take the wings off a bumble-bee, it’ll never get back to the
hive. Luke’s like that. No navigational skills in two dimensions,” and God only
knew how many dimensions Luke had lost. “He doesn’t see the world that way.”

“He found Carol all right.”

“He’s been there before.”

“How come?”

“I took him.” The confession earned me nothing but an
anticipatory silence,
well? Go on, then, I’m
waiting.
Took me a minute, because I didn’t like to think back to that
night, it was a memory I could very happily have lost; but in the end she won.
If you could call it winning, if the prize was something that anyone could
want. She won the story, first time ever I’d told it to anyone but Carol.

“It was years ago,” I said, “we’d just bought the place, me
and Carol, and I think that level of commitment had us both scared shitless. At
any rate we were fighting all the time, over stupid things, the way we never
did; and we had a week’s holiday booked that we’d been going to spend playing
house together. Nesting, you know? But we couldn’t, we’d have killed each
other; so she went to stay with her parents for a few days, and I went to see
Luke.”

Young I’d been, young and grown-up both at once, car keys
and house keys and so much worry in my pockets; what I needed most was a spell
of total dispossession, nothing at all in my pockets or on my mind.

So I camped with Luke, drank water and ate what he picked
from the hedgerows, leaves and fungi and fruits; and after a couple of days
there was an old Beetle came bumping up the track and half a dozen kids
squeezed out of it, younger even than me.

I was too young then, not wise enough to leave. So I stayed
and listened to them talking horror to Luke, talking vivisection. They were
students, it seemed, nice ordinary middle-class kids who smoked dope and took
acid and didn’t eat meat because that was the culture they’d found when they
came to college, that’s what their new friends did and so they did it also.

How they’d come to this, how they were friends of Luke’s I
couldn’t gather and didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. Somewhere, sometime they’d
met, the kids had met whatever criteria Luke used, had been admitted to his
circle; and today they were all abuzz with outrage and conspicuous virtue.

None of them would do such work, they said, but a friend of
a friend of theirs was a technician in the animal labs at the university’s
medical school. Unbearable stories they heard from him, they said, unimaginable
cruelty.

Luke listened, nodded at the stumble-tongued examples they
gave, and I thought how foolish they were, how young, not to realise that Luke
had seen more cruelty than ever man could imagine. But then they came to the
point of all this, they said the labs’ cages were full just now with a new term
starting and they wanted to raid, they said, they wanted to smash and to
rescue.

But it had to be tonight, they said, terrible things were
scheduled for the morning—
because we’re worked up
for it now
, I thought they meant,
and we’ll
lose our nerve by morning
—and they wanted Luke to lead them. Someone
with experience, they said.

God knows what they were thinking, or why Luke said yes.
Perhaps they thought that rules of wysiwyg applied, that all they were getting
was a young drop-out who lived apart from unacceptable men and did as little
harm as he could to the world around him. Perhaps Luke even thought he could do
that for them, he could keep his nature caged within the weak containment of
his skin. He learned to do it later, after all, for the tree-protestors and
almost for the cameras, falling with only that slightest hint of flight.
Perhaps this evening was to be a trial run, where Luke would touch the lives of
men again and pray—no,
hope
that all they
felt was the touch of another man.

At any rate, they did ask and he did say yes; and then the
only trouble was how to get Luke from his caravan to the lab, because there
wasn’t time for him to walk or run it.

Luke hates cars with a passion, but even worse than cars he
hates to fly.

No room for him in their ramshackle Beetle, even if he’d
been prepared to squash, if they’d been prepared to squash with him. Everyone
in the caravan was looking at me now, and what the hell else could I do? I’d
taken enough from him over the years in escape and shelter, never had the
chance before to give anything in return.

“I’ll drive you,” I said. Had to go back sometime, after
all. Better to spend a day or two in the house alone, before Carol came home
and we started fighting again.

o0o

So I’d had Luke in my car, a once-and-only experience that
was, and definitely not for sharing. He rode in the back for the extra space,
and spent the entire journey with the window wound full down and his face
pressed into the wind like a travel-sick dog; but it wasn’t the wind, I
thought, that made the car so cold despite the heater on full all the way. It
wasn’t the road, I thought, that made it judder so, that had the steering wheel
wrench against my hands and almost had us flying off at the bumps and the
humpback bridges.

Some kind of hell-drive that was, with me never feeling
quite in control of the car and going faster than I wanted, stopping harder,
however lightly I touched my foot to the pedals. I wanted to tell him to
behave, to sit still and leave the driving to me. But every glance in the
mirror only showed me his face turned out into the air and his eyes tight shut,
not to see the steel box he rode in. He wasn’t doing this, or not consciously.
Things happened around Luke, that was all, and I was learning something new
today, how machinery reacted to his proximity.

Never had the chance before, never seen him get near to so
much as a battery shaver. He had old broken engines rusting in his garden of
trees behind the caravan, but they weren’t there to work.

Still, we survived. We made it to the house, though I made
it swearing privately that never would I drive Luke anywhere again. I’d given
the kids my address as a place to meet, and as well that I had; they were meant
to be following right behind my car, but they arrived fifteen minutes later
than we did, eyeing me askance even as they murmured how brave I was to drive
so hard on such a road, they wouldn’t like to try it.

For
brave
read
stupid
, I understood, and shrugged and said
nothing about it. Settled them in the front room with Luke, insofar as it was
ever possible to settle Luke within walls; made them coffee and left them to
it. They had plans to make and hours to kill, and they were welcome to use my
front room for those purposes, in Carol’s absence. I wanted no closer role than
that. Smashing labs wasn’t my business, I wasn’t even sure how much I
sympathised.

“All I wanted was my house to myself,” I said to Suzie,
stumping along the footpath with Luke ranging ahead of us, not necessarily out
of earshot—I didn’t know how far his ears could reach, I’d never learned his
physical limitations and wasn’t sure that he had—but at least far enough for
this to feel possible if not comfortable, talking about him in his company. “I
couldn’t have coped with Carol or anyone then, I needed to get my head
straight; and I couldn’t do it without privacy. I wanted them gone, but I could
only wait for that, I couldn’t throw them out. I’d invited them, after all.”

“So what happened?”

I just waited, was what happened. I waited a long time. They
went off about midnight; I took a last cup of tea to bed with me, thinking that
was it, no more rads for me, no revolutions. No Luke for a while either, they’d
take him home or he’d find his own way, not my problem.

And I lay there in bed with my cup of tea and the radio on,
wondering what they were doing, how it was all going; and an hour later I was
still wide awake, not even trying to sleep, and the tea was cold and I hadn’t
heard a word of what I thought I was listening to, and I was still trying to
picture things a mile away like a movie in my head, trying to give myself
psychic dreams wide awake. God knows why, they were all strangers to me bar
Luke, and I didn’t need to worry about him; but I was worried.

And then there was a great knocking on the door downstairs,
a pounding that went on and on like whoever it was didn’t know about stopping,
they’d never got that far. I rolled out of bed and fumbled into my bathrobe,
and half the street must have been awake by then and all of them hating me
because you do that, you always blame the neighbour for his visitors.

And I’d just got out onto the landing when the knocking did
stop, finally; but I’d only taken two steps towards the stairs when there was a
different kind of knocking, right behind me.

I twisted round, and I was sweating cold suddenly, stinking
with it; and worse when I saw who was knocking, where he was. I think I
screamed a little, maybe.

It was Luke, and he was outside the landing window, knocking
on the glass; and all I could see was his face against the night, and he looked
like he’d been lifted entire from some cheap back-to-basics horror movie.

“His hair, his face, he was all running with blood,” I said
to Suzie, and shivered again in the sunlight as I remembered, as I had shivered
that night when I opened the door to him.

The decision to let him in, I don’t remember. It must have
been made in the face of simple logic, in the face of blood.
If I don’t open the door
, I must have thought,
he’ll only come in through the window.

Don’t remember the decision, don’t remember taking the
stairs in a sprint in the dark, though I daresay that I did, I must have done.
What I do remember is standing cold in the doorway, shivering for better
reasons than my bathrobe being all I had against the night. I remember looking
out, then stepping into the street and looking up. I remember seeing Luke
standing on the little slate pentroof we had like a canopy above the door;
being there, to be sure, he was right outside the landing window and not flying
at all, not hanging like some bloody movie monster in the too-supportive air.

He stepped off the roof and came down, you couldn’t say that
he jumped. And when his bare feet were on the pavement beside mine—too long a
time they took, too slow they were—he said, “Come with me, Jonty.”

I could see now how the blood ran off him, how it soaked his
clothes and pooled between his feet. Not his blood, I was certain, though it
looked black and terrible in the sodium lights.

Why?
was the question,
why should I when I don’t want to, when I don’t know
what the hell you’ve done and all I can see are the consequences, all I can see
is the blood?
But
why?
was too much
to manage, with my body racked with shudders and my mind spindizzy with the
stink of blood and Luke and danger. I knew what he’d say, anyway.
Because I want you
, he’d say, and nothing more.
He’d never say
need
.

So all I asked was, “Where?”

“The laboratory.”

Of course, the laboratory. Where else?

“Let me get some clothes,” I said, stalling, hoping he’d see
it as some faint gesture of defiance.

“Hurry,” he said; and I did that, I hurried. Defiance only
runs so far. Me, I ran into the house, dressed fumblingly with fingers that
were deathly cold and stumbled back down dark stairs into a street that seemed
darker, as if Luke had barred all the lamps from working now. There were still
shadows, so there must I suppose have been light; but I couldn’t see it or use
it.

Luke didn’t speak again, he only turned and started running
himself, not looking back, trusting me to follow. Assuming I could keep up. I
did that, though barely; but I thought this hurry in him was almost as
frightening as the blood that had drenched him, that he was leaving behind as
black bare footprints on the paving-slabs. Those I could see, and him, and
nothing else.

He led and I followed, though I knew a quicker way than the
one he took; and at last I couldn’t run any more, I blundered into a massive
wrought-iron gate and just clung, watching him. When he was far enough away my
sight came back, and I realised we were there anyway. This was the gate to the
old university campus, and there was the medical school just ahead. The labs, I’d
gathered from the kids’ conversation, were in the modern block jutting out on
the right; and to be sure, the foyer of that block blazed with light. Too much
light there seemed to be, a beacon against the night,
hey, look at me!
I couldn’t understand why it
hadn’t attracted attention already, burning alone like that, drawing the eye,
surely asking questions.