Dispossession (38 page)

I was at the top now, more or less, one elbow hooked over.
When I looked across I saw Luke dragging Dean towards the nearest tree, still
with that arm around his neck and the other hand still tearing strips of skin.
Dean wasn’t resisting but he was conscious yet, I could see his feet stumbling
in the grass although Luke must have held most of his weight now, his legs
surely wouldn’t do it.

I don’t know trees, but this was something tall and sparse,
more trunk than branches. Spruce or fir, my mind wanted to claim against my
ignorance. Whatever, it was way too high and unladderlike for mortal man to get
up without climbing irons. But Luke just kicked his trainers off, slung Dean
over his shoulder and started up it, clinging with fingers and setting his toes
in the bark as if there were rungs to hold him.

Up and up he went, maybe forty feet up before he found a
branch to hold him; and me, I just clung to the gate and watched him until
Suzie tugged at my trousers, more imperative now,
come
on down, there’s no point even pretending any more...

So I jumped down beside her, and we clung together instead
and only watched—no sound, no movement, in me at least no feeling left at
all—while Luke set Dean in the groin where branch met trunk, and skinned him.

I could see too well despite the distance, despite the
height. I could see with a rare clarity, as if my eyes had a zoom feature
suddenly, and a finer focus. Good country air, perhaps. Or perhaps it was this
also that made Luke stand out in crowds or solo on hillsides, that he walked
all the time in a different kind of light.

I didn’t think of looking away. I wanted to cover Suzie’s
eyes, to stop her seeing as I was seeing, but I had no right to make that
choice for her; and she chose as I did, or was compelled as I was. At any rate,
we watched together as Luke methodically flayed my friend Dean, peeling his
skin from him like wet tissue paper, length by length.

Too late—knowing it was too late, knowing it would always
have been too late but doing it anyway just for the gesture, just to have
something done—I did briefly fight off that sapping paralysis of watching, long
enough to trot over to the security pylon and jab the buzzer, jab and jab until
surely I must have alerted someone on the other end of the intercom. I didn’t
wait to talk to them, though. Their camera would tell them better than I could,
what was happening to their buddy. Me, I went straight back to Suzie. Wrapped
my arms around her with a whispered “Sorry” into her hair—
sorry I left you even for a moment, sorry I abandoned
you to stand and be a witness here alone
—and stood with her again, the
two of us witnesses and very much alone but for each other.

o0o

Dean had saved my life in hospital, but not I saved his, I
had no way to do it. You’d have needed a helicopter, to come at Luke in that
tree. You’d have needed a squad of Marines to tackle Luke anywhere, and I wasn’t
sure a squad could do the job.

Suzie and I, we did what we could, we bore witness. And when
it was over or all but, when Dean was dead or dead enough—looking dead at
least, looking like a side of meat even to my unwantedly-good sight, looking
reduced that far from human—it took only the slightest movement in her, the
first hint of a turn to turn me too. We turned away without discussion, without
thought. I put my arm around her shoulders and felt her shaking, pressed her
close against my side so that she could feel my shaking too.

We walked down into the village and found a phone-box; I
shoved a coin in the slot and phoned Dulcie.

“Come and rescue us,” I said. “We’re at Arlen Bank Side—that’s
the village, not the house. We’ll be in,” I peered through the window, squinted
to read through dirty glass, “in the Lord Hurlington. Come soon.”

“On our way,” Dulcie said, no hesitation. “How many of you?”

“Just two,” I said. “Me and my wife.”

o0o

Dulcie came herself, at that momentous news. Presumably she
wanted to congratulate me personally, and commiserate with Carol. When she
stepped out of the taxi to find me at an outside table negotiating brandy down
the neck of the diminutive and still-shaking Chinese girl perched on my knee,
her face should have been saved for a better occasion. I was in no state myself
to enjoy it.

I gave her the briefest possible introduction, “Dulce, this
is my wife, Suzie Chu Marks,” because Dulcie was a long-time friend and she
deserved that much. Being a long-time friend she didn’t ask for more, she didn’t
ask anything at all. Reading something of the situation in our faces, she just
mothered us gently into the cab and drove off.

This time, halfway back to the city, I remembered to tell
her the address had changed. “Take us to Chinatown, I’ll show you where.”

Nothing more than a nod of the head to that, but the back of
her neck was eloquent:
I want the full story
,
it was saying,
when you’re ready to tell me.

Our eyes met briefly in the driving-mirror, and I guess mine
were making promises, but they were probably lying. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get
to learn or remember the whole story myself, and parts of it I was sure I’d
never want to tell. Even to long-time friends.

Suzie spent the whole journey huddled tight against me and I
thought I understood, I thought the numbing shock of what we’d seen was all.
God knew, it was enough. But she lifted her face from my shirt just once, as we
came in sight of the flat; and she whispered, “He looked, he looked just like
Jacky did, when they took me to see him in the morgue.”

Nothing I could say to that, I only held her closer and
touched my lips to her forehead, tasting cold salt bitter sweat; but inside I
was cursing. Cursing myself, for forgetting that. I should have covered her
eyes after all, or turned her away from the sight of it. Would have done, if I’d
only thought.

Out of the car, and I paid Dulcie with another mute meeting
of eyes if not minds. Then my arm around Suzie’s frail-seeming shoulders and we
went up those stairs like Siamese twins, joined at the heart in horror.

At the last landing before our private stairs, we found the
wrong door closed, the wrong door open. The club was locked up, when it should
have been open for business; the fire door stood ajar.

“Didn’t we lock this?” I thought we had, but I was ready to
blame my slipshod memory again if she said no.

“Yes,” she said. “Look.”

And her hand was trembling again as she showed me where the
wood was split and torn in the frame, where the door had been smashed open.

“Jonty...”

I licked my lips, where they were suddenly too dry to bear.
When I could find my voice at all, I whispered, “You stay here.”

“No.”

“Suzie, whoever did this, if they’re still up there...”

“If they’re still up there, two of us is better than one. I
said, no more adventures without me,” though she looked a long way, a very long
way from adventurous. “And anyway, Lee should be here, he should be in the club
and he’s not. And he’s my friend, nearest thing to a brother I’ve got now. I’m
coming up.”

“He’s probably gone for the police,” I said.

“Don’t be stupid. He’d have phoned them, wouldn’t he? I’m
coming
up
.”

And she was too, she did. It was as much as I could do to
make her walk behind me. Or tiptoe, rather, as I soft-shoed it as quietly as I
knew how.

The flat door also had been broken open, though it was
pushed to now. I hesitated, almost lifted a hand to knock; but then I laid that
hand flat against the wood, and shoved gently. It swung in, and there was the
room as I was expecting now, as I was dreading to see it: chaos and disaster,
papers strewn everywhere.

Blood on the papers, blood on the carpet too, and I hadn’t
been expecting that.

The door a little wider, and I could see one of the sofas;
and
fuck!
yes, there was someone in the
flat, and I had a moment of frozen panic before Suzie made some kind of hard,
anxious noise in her throat and pushed past me.

Then I could see through the runnels of dried blood that had
matted his hair and masked his face, I could see what Suzie had seen faster,
something of Lee beneath. I ran across in her wake, my feet skidding
unheedingly on letters and magazines, bank statements and God knew what
important documents.

His eyes were closed, his breathing irregular and rasping.
He had the phone in his hand, and the butt end of a broken snooker cue at his
feet. Suzie’s quick fingers were at his throat, feeling for a pulse. I picked
up the phone, ready to call an ambulance and then the police; but she said,
“No. Run down to Uncle Han’s, get him.
Hurry
,
Jonty...!”

My reaction, her reaction: not the time to argue which was
wiser. Lee was her friend more than mine, and of her culture; that made it her
call. I dropped the phone on the sofa and hurried, taking each flight of stairs
in three or four reckless bounds till I came down onto the first-floor landing,
to the door that hid Mr Han the herbalist. Suzie had been threatening me with
this man’s doctoring ever since she brought me here from hospital, our little
trip out; so far I’d dodged or avoided or postponed, one way or another. My
body, my call. I thought. She obviously didn’t.

Whatever.
Please ring buzzer
and wait
, the sign said, but that day I just crashed through the door.
Small reception-room, a few chairs, all of them occupied; the clientèle was
mixed, from elderly Chinese to young Western.

There was a middle-aged Chinese woman sitting behind a desk.
She looked up, started to smile, said, “Jonty. We’ve been expecting you.” Then,
registering my urgency, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Lee. He’s in our flat, he’s been attacked. Suzie said
to fetch Mr Han...” Doctor Han? Uncle Han? I didn’t know. I was back to that
again, strangers knowing me too well while I was totally at sea with them.

“Yes. Of course. One moment.” Unflustered but very focused
now, every movement precise and necessary, she stood up and rapped firmly on a
door behind her, then pushed it immediately open and went through. I heard
conversation, tonal, guttural, incomprehensible; and thought,
Doctor, will I ever speak Cantonese again?
Because that was my tutor lying hurt upstairs and very likely for my sake,
injured because of me. My tutor and friend, apparently. And my wife’s
near-brother, and in a hell of a mess: and all because I couldn’t remember what
was important, and I was too stupid to figure it out in retrospect.

o0o

Suzie’s Uncle Han was probably no blood relation—I hoped!
Bad genes in the family pool somewhere if I were wrong, because God, he was
ugly—but he came running like a father, sprinting bow-legged up the stairs
faster than I could keep up with. By the time I reached the doorway in his wake
he was already kneeling on the sofa beside Lee, his battered leather
medicine-bag was open on the floor and he was dabbing something onto Lee’s
scalp with one hand and peeling back eyelids with the other, muttering through
buck teeth as he dabbed and peeled.

“Suzie,” I said, “he needs a hospital.”

She just glanced at me, one brief glare,
shut the hell up, what do you know?
and turned
back to Han again.

“I do know,” I said mildly, as if she’d spoken that aloud.
“I’ve had my own experience, remember? Head wounds can be dangerous. He needs
X-rays, maybe a scan.”

She grunted, glared again, but this time did at least
condescend to put it to Han, in a rapid singsong. The language sounded less
harsh somehow, when she spoke it.

He replied in half a dozen hard, chopped syllables. She
blushed, and reached for the phone. Didn’t offer me a translation, but I could
provide my own:
What, you mean you haven’t called
an ambulance yet? For God’s sake, girl, I can give him first aid, but he needs
a proper check-up, you of all people shouldn’t need telling that.

Before she could dial, though, even three easy digits, Lee
stirred and groaned and opened his eyes. I saw her hand freeze on the
number-pad; I saw her choose not to use it, not just yet.

“Lee?” she said, and a few words of Cantonese; and when he
didn’t respond to that, beyond moving his eyes slowly to find her, she put the
phone down and tried him again in English. “How are you feeling, Lee?”

A little pause, as if he were feeling himself out from the
inside, checking; and then, “Fuck,” he said, and tried a smile. Didn’t look
good, but it worked well. I saw the tension leave Suzie’s shoulders in a rush.

“All right. Just sit still. Uncle Han’s here, he’ll sort you
out.”

Then they switched to Cantonese again, Han asking questions,
I guess, and Lee responding weakly. Han reached into his bag and came up with a
handful of dried leaves which he sorted into Suzie’s cupped palms, a little of
this and a little of that. She took them into the kitchen; me, I wanted to
seize this hiatus, to seize the phone and make the call myself. But I felt
displaced, no part of this, isolated by language and culture both; so I only stood
there in the doorway, neither in nor out, hoping that Lee could tolerate a
little delay.

My thumb played with the little brass plate below the bell,
tracing the engraved lettering.
Jack Chu.
Perhaps we should get it replaced,
Suzie and Jonty
Marks
it should read instead, there was something morbid about keeping
it this way; but again that had to come from her, when she was ready.

Jack Chu.
Jacky, she
always called him. I wondered if he’d actually been Jack, even, or if his birth
certificate said John...

And my thumb was still then on the plaque, as my mind kicked
off on a tangent; and I took one pace into the room and looked around, and in
all the chaos I couldn’t see my computer anywhere.

This wasn’t the time to say so, obviously, though it was
burning suddenly on my tongue. Suzie came back from the kitchen with one of her
fine porcelain cups, something in it steaming and aromatic. She held it to Lee’s
lips, ignoring his unfocused efforts to take it for himself. As he sipped, she
spoke to me without looking round: “Jonty, be useful. Bring a flannel from the
bathroom. Wet and warm, not hot.”