Breaking Light (31 page)

‘Yeah, well, maybe you should stop snooping around.'

‘I'm afraid that's what I do, my friend. Although, I wouldn't call it snooping, exactly … I'm gathering intelligence.'

‘What for?'

‘To bring down Dr Buster.'

‘Why?'

‘Isn't it obvious? I can't stand the man. He's a charlatan … and a full-blown psychopath,' he replied, casually, and stretched his legs under the table. ‘Anyway, going back to your love, there's only one thing I have not yet worked out: is it Mary or Anne?'

Gabriel, defeated, looked at his shoes and mumbled, ‘It's Anne.'

‘Anne. Ah, Gabe, Gabe.' Rey tutted and shook his head, his eyes still smiling. ‘Has your heart chosen wisely? Who can tell?'

‘Lay off it, will you?' Gabriel flared, feeling a sudden rush of red fury rising inside him. His face closed on itself in a strange grimace. There was a faint twitch in his upper lip.

Rey studied him for a moment. ‘I'm sorry, Gabe; I didn't mean to annoy you. It's just … Well, I'm not sure it's all that
practical
. But then, I suppose, love never is.'

‘I don't care.'

‘No, I can see that.' Rey sighed and continued. ‘If you really care as much as you claim to do, would you be prepared to do something – anything – for them?'

‘Yes, of course. But how?' He was not sure he wanted to know.

Rey seemed to be lost in thought for the moment. He was drumming his fingertips together in front of his mouth.

‘Rey?'

‘Eh? Ah, yes … Tell me, Gabe, the twins had their twenty-first birthday a few weeks ago, didn't they?'

Gabe nodded, not sure where this was going.

‘Well, in that case,' he said, clapping his hands once, ‘I think it's time for them to free themselves from this show, don't you? It's high time they got away, before Buster's
business
closes in on them.'

‘Yes … Yes, I do, but—'

‘You can drive a car on your own now, can't you, Gabe? You remember what I taught you?'

‘Yes, sort of … But, where?'

‘Where? What kind of a question is that?' For once, Rey looked irritated. ‘Does it matter?'

‘No, I suppose not.'

‘Ah, I forgot – you're the boy who doesn't know where he is and who never knows where he's going …
Where
is important to you, isn't it?' Rey's voice was silken soft now.

‘No, I don't care.' Gabriel shook his head, frowning. Rey had a way of making him feel ridiculous – like a child. He didn't want to be the kind of person who asked ‘Where?' Not that he could see why that question was so laughable.

‘Well, you can decide
where
later on. The first thing is to get them out of here without Dr Buster noticing and picking up your trail.'

‘Okay;
how
, then?'

Rey laughed out loud. ‘Don't worry, Gabe; I intend to put on a show that will keep Dr Buster occupied for quite some time.'

‘Yeah? What about you?'

‘What about me? I'll be gone soon enough.'

‘Gone where?'

‘That question again. I'll tell you where: into the labyrinth of life.'

‘How will I know when to make a run for it?'

‘Don't
worry
; you will know.' Rey shut the book –
Troy of the Iliad: Myth or Legend
 – and stood up. ‘Let's go for a walk.'

‘What? Now? I just got back.'

‘Don't be such a milksop. There's something I want to show you.'

*

It was the end of summer but the evening was warm and pleasant and millions of insects swarmed over the heather as the two
youths set off across the moor. They followed a stream east with the setting sun warming their necks above their collars. The sweet, resinous smell of bog myrtle was everywhere.

‘Where are we going?' Gabriel asked, regretting it at once.

Rey just pointed to a rock in the distance. ‘It's marked on the map as St Michael's Chapel,' he said. ‘I was there yesterday. A brilliant place – a ruin.'

The rock itself tore out of the heath like a canine tooth and, as he got closer, Gabriel began to distinguish the ruins of the chapel, which had been built into the granite, centuries previously, so that now it was almost indistinguishable from the rock. The sun cast long purple shadows, settling into its untidy bed. A single aperture remained in the chapel wall.

The climb from the foot of the rock was steep; at times, they had to use their hands. Dusk had settled as he pushed through a hole in the chapel wall. It took a while for Gabriel's eyes to get used to the gloom.

‘Wow, this is great.' His voice was brittle against the compressed shadows. He held his breath and listened. The last warm rays of the setting sun moved a breeze across the moor, which sighed in the broken battlements above. For a moment, there was no other sound.

‘Rey?'

‘I'm here.' Rey stepped out from behind a pile of fallen rubble. Part of his face was still in shadow. ‘Isn't it marvellous?'

‘Yeah …'

‘Just imagine all the hopes and aspirations that went into building the chapel into the rock. It can't have been easy, dragging these blocks of stone here … and for what purpose?' He
shook his head. ‘This is what humanity is about: we create things against all the odds.'

‘Yes, but we also destroy for no reason. This place –' Gabriel looked at the ancient stones around him; he listened to the moor wind – ‘it reminds me of … a place up on the moors, near where I grew up. Not far from here. And of what happened there.' He hesitated, not quite knowing how to advance across such difficult terrain. ‘I did something bad there. Something very bad.'

The confession hung darkly between them and would not settle. Rey remained silent, so he pushed on. ‘I betrayed my only friend. My – brother.'

‘Gabe, we have all done bad things at some time in our lives …'

‘Yeah, but not like this.'

‘Ah –' Rey whistled – ‘you're talking of
real
shame …'

He was. Oh, he was – the grey sludge of it and how it threatened to swallow him up, like the mire had swallowed that cow they – he and Michael – had watched as her eyes turned in the grip of death. But, if you couldn't run away from it, you had to hide from it – always hide from it, as he did now, answering in a steady voice, ‘What are you talking about?'

He could feel Rey's eyes on him and stepped back into the shadows.

‘There's a certain vanity in living with shame, you know. You can wrap yourself in its filthy robes and still be quite snug.' Rey's voice was soft but it hurt.

Gabriel was awkwardly aware of his heart, which seemed to have grown too large for its cavity. He found it hard to breathe as he was back again at those other rocks, looking into those eyes. And Michael's young voice: ‘Don't let them do this!' He swallowed and breathed again through the old betrayal.

‘What is it that you don't get, Rey?' His jaw was stiff with frustration. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Of course you don't,' Rey tutted, shaking his head from side to side, humouring him.

‘Leave me alone, will you!' What did Rey know about anything?

Rey ignored him. ‘It's possible to get away, you know. To shake off the filth.'

Gabriel laughed abruptly.

‘Gabriel, listen to me. You're not a bad person, all right?'

Gabriel had withdrawn further into the shadows. He could smell the familiar rancid stench of self-loathing. Stay away from me. He took a deep breath.

‘Gabe?'

‘Yeah, yeah …' Gabriel felt his face twitch; in the twilight, it must have looked like a grimace. He made sure his eyes were hidden in shadows.

‘No, listen to me: whatever you did, you've got to leave it behind – here, amongst these ruins.' Rey held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture which was more. It seemed to epitomise all that exasperating, blunt human striving – all the loathsome hopes of his existence. And all the possibilities, the supplications of life.

‘No,' he persisted, sternly.

‘No?'

‘Leave it. The damage is done. Who do you think you are anyway? I don't need your bloody absolution.'

‘But that's what I'm trying to tell you – it can be reversed. Doesn't this place, these ancient man-made walls, instil you with some hope, some sense of wonder and, well, just
sense
?'

At this, Gabriel felt a thickening in his throat and had to look
away. He stared hard at one of the carved blocks of granite in the chapel wall. He stared, and suddenly he saw in the stone the long, steady marks of the mason's chisel. And, as he let himself be momentarily distracted by the softness of those furrows ploughed into the stone, there was a loosening inside him, a kind of falling away, and that which had been encrusted there for so long started to disintegrate, slowly turning to silt and being carried away in his blood flow.

Something swished overhead – a swift returning to its home in the walls, perhaps, or a bat waking up to hunt.

‘It's time to get back, I think. Let's go,' Rey said, with unusual tenderness.

It surprised Gabriel that night had fallen so suddenly. They must have been in the chapel for longer than he imagined. A full moon had risen over the rocks and they had no trouble finding their way down and back on to the heath. They walked in silence, the dark warm between them. When Gabriel looked back after a while, the moon had moved on and the chapel was fading into the shadows, and he suddenly knew that Rey had been saying goodbye, that their friendship would remain here, while they both moved on. It saddened him, and yet how free he felt. How
light
.

*

Sense
. The concept puzzled Mr Askew as he tried to sleep at night. Yes, he had found it in those battered ashlars in the chapel on the moor. But then, afterwards? All those years in London, had he managed to hold on to it or had he stopped striving?

You're sometimes given a nudge – like a toy boat pushed into water – and you let the push take its course. You hope that the
original energy will never run out but you know that, by the laws of physics, it might already have happened and that you will be the last one to know. You go on thinking that things are generally fine. And so, for years, you restrain your emotions, relying instead on the momentum of the push. You travel the same route to work, you look down at the pavement, recognising the patterns of slabs and casually accepting the irregularities of manhole covers. Habit is your friend and it closes its doors softly, gently behind you. Then, brutally, something begins to stir and come awake.

It had been happening for some time now, he knew. The feeling was in his heart, but it was also being pumped around his whole body.
Her
face was the first thing that surfaced in his mind in the morning, and in the night … well.

This was such a night. He woke early out of a dream where his eyes had been wide open. Pulling on his dressing gown, he walked downstairs, crossing the hall where the pattern of white and black guided his way, and opened the front door. He stepped outside on to the front lawn and stood still, feeling the dew settling on him like the ghost of rain. He was afraid that waking up would force him to close his eyes, that, once again, he would have to walk with his eyes closed – or blindfolded. But it did not happen. On this morning, he stayed acutely aware of the significance of things around him. It's a long time since I have been conscious of these things, he thought. The world is making demands of me again. It is threatening to make sense.

*

Then there was a terrible accident. No one could claim that it was anything but an accident, but what followed seemed far
from fortuitous. At least to Gabriel, who would later remember the unfolding events with eerie clarity.

It was the end of that long summer and the winds were gathering in the west, bringing gusts of penetrating chill and rainstorms that had gathered force on their passage across the Atlantic.

When the show finished that night, the site was a field of mud. The tear-down crew was struggling with the big top in the strong wind and the engines of the trucks revved as the wheels failed to grip in the slippery mire. Every now and again, bolts of lightning veined through the dense skin of the night, spotting men in frozen motion like searchlights over a battlefield. In the commotion, Stan was run over by one of the loading trucks. No one heard him scream, but one of the men happened to see his upper body sticking out of the mud and hurried to pull him out. But it was too late. The wheels of the truck had crushed his ribcage and, whilst this had not killed him, he had been pushed, face down, into the mud and rising water, so that he had slowly drowned in silt and his own diluted blood. Who had been driving the truck? In all the commotion, no one seemed to notice the open door of the driver's cab stuttering in the wind. The engine was still running, the headlights sieving through the static rain, eventually dipping on to another body – a body caught in flight and felled, as if by trip wire, only there was no sign of struggle or interference. When they turned him over, out of the mud, Charlie's suffocated face wore a ghastly expression. Afterwards, some would say that it was fear – others would describe it as surprise.

Dr Buster, a wild, yellow glimmer in his eyes, summoned the entire troupe and crew to the food shack for a headcount. Only one other person was missing: Rey.

‘Where is that shifty villain, Rey? Get me the bastard, now!' Dr Buster roared into the wild night.

‘His caravan is gone, sir,' one of the men reported.

‘Gone? What do you mean, “gone”? He's under contract. Where would he go?'

There was no reply but Dr Buster bellowed on: ‘Do you hear me? Has anyone seen him tonight?'