Staring At The Light Read online

  And yet there he was, crossing Cannon’s line of vision, in front of the painting, which he ignored, confident here as if he had been invited, so oddly at home that the first thing Cannon felt was a spurt of jealousy. This is my place, mine. I found it, and there was a sense of déjà vu in that. How many dens, how many hiding-places had Johnny uncovered when they were kids? How many caches of paint and paper had he ruined before he gave up? Beyond count, and here he was again, doing the same. Johnny was talking to himself, suited and spurred with shiny shoes, as if for an appointment, convincingly debonair, fooling himself. Oh, how the devil did anyone with Cannon’s use of words ever begin to explain the chameleon existence of Johnnyboy, when nobody else in the world had ever known him, ever been close to knowing him? Hirelings, paid and fired. These days, he was like a potentate with a series of speechless eunuchs who never lasted long. He looked so lonely down there that Cannon wanted to leap off the step and touch him, hug him, but he was paralysed. The first touch would never be the last; touch him, and his own soul and his own hope were as dead in the water as floating fish. No-one would ever know. If he killed him now … if he killed him now … if he killed him now. He sat instead, the salt on his tongue, his mouth slack, watching, listening.

  Johnnyboy, in his suit, was trying to read, trying to check from the notes in his hand. There was another presence, out of sight, calling back, a fucking eunuch fatty – they were always like that, big, sexless, brain-dead.

  ‘Look … there’s another one … “C’s friends,” it says. He doesn’t have any friends. She must be with his friends. There’s no-one else. Why couldn’t that little bastard Andrew have got this far? Pay people, they focking let you down. Do it yourself. Only way. Christ, will you look at that rubbish on the wall? Sort of shit he’d want to paint …’

  Cannon smiled. He did not know why he smiled. Once, they had only smiled for each other. Now the very intonation of that hectoring voice made him smile out of sheer recognition, bite back the desire to answer. He bit his knuckle instead. The figure moved out of sight; not far, three steps at most, the voice fading.

  ‘Writes messages to himself, this fella, only in pencil, on his focking notes. Tells you who knows who and where they live …’

  A distant voice, murmuring, indecipherable, discontented. Johnnyboy had filled his small horizon with similarly servile voices, muttering now, ‘Nuns, focking Sisters of Mercy.’

  The door clicked shut. He was not the only one who knew his way out as well as his way in. They were gone and he was here. Shivering.

  Wanting to blow up this place now Johnny had been in it. Make it disappear.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Sarah?’

  ‘Anything. Shhhh, you’re shivering. Here …’ She held his arm across her body, his hand to her breast, her body nestled into him. She had pulled her hair beneath her head, so that his chin could rest on her shoulder in the crook of her neck, and that, to William, was the sweetest piece of generosity. She made room for him; accommodated her small self against his length, made herself fit. Made herself belong, without making any demands. Was this a kind of kindness, he wondered, technique, or the sensitivity engendered by serious affection? Was it simply a question of practice?

  ‘Have you ever posed for Cannon?’ He moved his hand and stroked the curve of her hip. Soft, the bone firm beneath.

  She moved, closer into him, covered his hand with her own. ‘Yes. It was rather uncomfortable.’ She shook slightly with remembered laughter. ‘Cannon doesn’t go in for creature comforts. And it wasn’t me he wanted to paint, it was his wife.’

  ‘Tell me about his wife … his brother.’ The body, relaxed after love, tensed. William regretted that. He adored her like this, as floppy as a soft toy, sleepy, close.

  ‘No, my love, I won’t. Let him tell you himself if he wants. It’s a long story, which he can tell but I can’t tell for him.’

  ‘All right.’ The warmth he had lost padding to and from the bathroom was fully restored. He remembered the curve of her back as he had got back into her bed; the way she moved her hair to make a resting-place for his chin.

  ‘Besides,’ she said sleepily, ‘that wasn’t what you wanted to ask, was it?’

  ‘No. Not quite. Am I a good lover, Sarah?’

  She could have laughed at such a question at this stage in their knowledge of one another. How long was it? Two years, on his reckoning, since his first sight of her in that small office of hers, less than that since they had become lovers, almost imperceptibly. A drink at her place, several; a casual invitation, why don’t you stay? A scene repeated more times than he could count. Understated passion, remarkably satisfying, marked by a gratitude on his part that denied the asking of any upsetting questions. What a fool he was to ask such a question now, but it was suddenly important to know that he did, actually, please her. He rewarded her; he paid any debt he might have by fixing things; he took on her acquaintances as patients; he tried to keep things equal; but did he delight her, as she delighted him?

  She stirred in his arms, raised his hand to her lips, brushed his fingers against them. His right hand, the one John Smith had bitten. Suddenly he wanted to pull it away, retreat to his native state where all questions were superfluous except those justifying purely factual answers without opinions attached. Back to his own world, where the biggest mystery of the day was why, without scientific explanation, a solution of hydrogen peroxide could stop bleeding. It took an effort to repeat his question.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you are. Do you think I pretend?’

  ‘Well, no. Perhaps I just needed to know in words.’

  She was wider awake now, turning with a phumph in the bed so that she faced him and held him by the hair. He thought for a minute she was going to grab him by the ears and beat his head against the pillow. The curtains were never closed in Sarah’s room; she said she was afraid of the dark. Ambient London light through the window showed only the hollows of her face. She kissed his nose, then his mouth. He wanted her to say something more.

  ‘William, I’d like to kill that wife of yours for what she did to you. You’re a marvellous lover. You’ve got the heart for it. Makes you good at whatever you do … let it take you over. Makes you a good dentist and, yes, a good and generous lover. Will that do?’

  Not entirely, but he nodded. There was something else he wanted to know and wanted to hear, but for the moment, in a state of contentment, he could not remember what it was.

  Do you love me? Do I love you?

  11

  No. He had not seen Johnny, or heard his voice. There was nothing to indicate the presence of anyone else. The two men he had heard, the one he had seen, were figments of his imagination. They were nothing of substance; Sarah was right to suspect the soundness of his mind. Cannon blinked. He was stiff, as if he had sat still for a long time, fallen asleep without knowing and woken cramped and uncomfortable. He was not entirely sure of where he was, leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

  There was no way Johnnyboy would ever come to a dentist. No way. Nothing in their subliminal understanding of one another would make him cross that barrier. The sheer smell of the place would make him sick, the way he had been sick the first time they put him in the chair and held him in it. Projectile vomit as soon as the probe hit his teeth. A grunt of disgust; the lady dentist wanting to hit him, except she didn’t want to get so close. The twin, Cannon, watching from a corner. Johnnyboy refused to cross the portals without him. Johnny would never, ever go to a dentist, not if the pain killed him first. He’d had two of his teeth pulled by a barber later, and that was all. So it was a dream, then.

  Cannon could still feel the taste of salt in his mouth; looked through his hands into the waiting room, comforting himself. Better to be losing his mind.

  Then he noticed how the light was on down there. He had not put on the light. He could see what he wanted to see without that; he had merely pulled up the blind. And then he heard the vo
ice, echoing through his head with its resonance of disgust. That’s the kind of shit my brother would paint.

  If only he could paint with Bonnard’s joy. If only … How fucking ironic that Johnnyboy, who could not recognize talent, could not recognize what his brother had done with his stolen money. The desire to scream with outrage roused Cannon into the present. Of course it was Johnny, standing there, defacing the painting by the mere looking at it; there was something unique and corrosive about Johnny’s capacity for disgust. The repercussions of what he had seen and heard intruded like a bad headache. This was what he, Cannon, had done, in return for William’s great contribution to his life and William’s tentative friendship. He had brought Johnny inside the door in his wake, like a wave of disease. A confident Johnny, too, who did not give a damn about who saw him.

  Jesus, God, do something.

  He ran down the last of the stairs, snapped off the light, stumbled further down into the safety of the basement, pulled the door, as if it was a shield. It was stiff and warped; it would not shut. It seemed so typical of William that the door would not shut – there was no need to close it because William had nothing to hide. And not a single clue how to protect himself either. Such a calm, skilled man; professional in his own field, devoid of any of the black arts he would need against Johnny if Johnny had singled him out for attention. Why? William didn’t have so much as a stick, let alone a knife or a gun, in the same way that he had nothing to bar his doors. William could not hurt a fly, and now here he was, caught by a spider. Why, and what did he have to keep Johnny out?

  You could only threaten Johnnyboy, not persuade him. What did William possess for that? A useless, gentle temperament was what. Cannon prowled in an agony of self-recrimination so intense it burned. He was disastrous to the people who liked him; he should not be alive; he was a walking piece of damage.

  His eye lit on the detritus in the room. Bottles, jars, old packets spilling out of shelves with an air of abandonment. Cannon stopped and stared. Ah, Christ. Save me from my promises. Jesus save me, even though I don’t believe. Hydrogen peroxide, somewhere; he’d seen it. What did William say it was used for? William and his lectures. Stopped bleeding; no-one quite knew why. And over there, that old-fashioned disinfectant, in packets. Mix crystals with water, clean the lav. And over there, more of this redundant stuff. And, over here, potassium permanganate in disguised form, crystals again, the sort of thing he had found in his gran’s cupboard before she, too, died; he remembered her creating out of it a dark purply-greenish mouthgargle – This’ll set you right.

  He groaned, and he wept a little and brushed away the tears. There was the makings of destruction in here and the same old urge to use them. Some of the things he had played with as a child, bless him. Making big bangs out of household stuff, the way they made them now out of fertilizer and shit and subversive handbooks, and he had made them out of nothing without even knowing the names; just knowing what worked. High explosive, bigger, faster bangs and greater risk to health; low explosive, less dramatic and in the end more fun for a kid. He allowed himself a moment of moral superiority: it was so easy to make a bomb now – all you had to do was steal the stuff, no art to it, no art at all; no guesswork. Probably no fear either of the kind that now drove him mad even at the sound of fireworks. Never, ever again would he do such a thing. Johnny had made him go on doing it: it was him who had the knack, not Johnny; him who had the knack with everything except the orders.

  Never again. I shall never again destroy anything, or make anything that can destroy, he had promised his wife, who had made him repeat it – as a Catholic repeats Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy – until the promise was etched into his brain, made him forget that it had been fun. Wicked fun, she said, and all the more wicked because you never saw the result. You ran away before you saw the cost of it or you sold it to someone else and didn’t see. We didn’t kill anyone, he’d protested. How did you know? How many lives did you ruin? All promises were made to be amended, because Johnnyboy was on the threshold; Johnnyboy knew nothing of reason or art or anything, any more than dear William knew how to stop him coming back.

  Listen, William. You’ve got to be on the right side of the door yelling to him that if he comes any further forward you’ll blow the door into his head; he understands that. Tell him you’ve got a nice piece of high explosive.

  He began to assemble things, like a cook in readiness for a feast. He poured the disinfectant crystals onto a cleanish part of the stone floor, ground them beneath the heel of his boot. He took the torch out of his pocket, flicked it on and off. There were batteries around here somewhere, bound to be, or he’d bring one. Johnny won’t be back tonight; doesn’t need to be; something planned. OK. Squeeze the juice from the lemon left in the fridge; improvise; put the mix of the crystal powder and the peroxide solution and the lemon juice into this bowl, cool to near freezing, maybe outside the window – God, it was cold out there. Leave it a few hours. Use the torch: break the glass on the bulb, give it that little bit of intense heat from the naked filament – better still, cross the wires from the flex of that old Hoover … Take it away, Joe. Tell him what you’ve got in here … Tell him to take his gorilla home, or else.

  Cannon stopped and looked at the muddy mix in the shallow plastic bowl. Yes, Sarah was right. He had lost command of his brain. Next task, tell the darling fool how to detonate the thing, point it, keep his distance. Poke it towards the door like some fucking lion-tamer in a fucking circus. Oh, yeah. Easy-peasy.

  The light that filtered through into the basement was changing slowly but perceptibly. Winter dawn, heralding itself two hours before the real event; a witching hour, and if he were Dracula he would begin to think of going home. Oh, yeah. Dear William would blow himself into smithereens before he could detonate or control a homemade bomb, although he might be fascinated by what was in it. He might be able to do amazing things to teeth with all his knowhow, but he would be just as likely to drink this mix as use it. He’d be the same if you gave him a gun: he’d only want to take it apart. Give the bugger a knife, he’d cut bread with it and give you a slice. Cannon was monstrously tired and appallingly sad. He stared at the contents of the bowl as if it were urine in a potty. What a waste of effort, born of a fevered mind. What was he to do? Surreptitiously explain to William, say, Here’s a bit of useful knowledge for you, just in case of – what?

  He moved towards the ancient fridge with the tread of the defeated on a long march to nowhere, holding the bowl, not sure what to do. It was all absolutely useless. After all, he was not good at anything, directionless without Johnny.

  Finally, he flushed it down the sink. He picked up the lemon he had squeezed, bit into it and chewed. There was still salt in his mouth.

  Then he tidied all trace of his presence from the basement room. Stuffed his possessions into his pockets and squeezed himself out of the window. The cold of the railings bit into his hands. The daylight held no promise. There was nothing to do but wait. As the light reached the room outside the surgery, the answer-machine clicked and whirred. Please speak after the tone. A quiet, apologetic voice hesitated before speech.

  Julie preferred the convent chapel when it was lit by the moon and a couple of candles, or when it was illuminated by electric light in the evening, not the way it was now, merely dim, the windows aching to admit the purer light that the heavy coloured glass denied. None of the sisters could bring themselves to use electricity for a task, when daylight would suffice, even if the light was scarcely as adequate as it was in here. Their sense of economy often outweighed convenience, but it was invariable. A room so dim mid-morning oppressed her. After dark, it mattered less. She was grateful for the winter and the dearth of daylight glimpsed through windows, because it was the light that reminded her she was in prison.

  ‘Help me,’ she murmured.

  A place of enlightenment, in one sense, but still a prison for over three months now, although she had hardly noticed the first weeks. An existence
so artificial it was ludicrous. She was trying, before God, to continue to see the sense of it, not that she believed in God. Life was far too random a matter and people far too various to have either one Creator or one Controller, surely, but she did believe in saints, and that was a kind of concession. If Cannon had opened her eyes to visual beauty in his critical fashion, making her notice and admire, then this place made her at least acknowledge the existence of the kind of soul that needed no such stimulus.

  They needed symbols, these women, ritual and statues to give form to belief and turn the ephemeral into the real. My, she was learning such long words from Pauline and her books. Three hours’ reading a day and it had become curiously addictive. You’ll go back into the world a heathen, Pauline had said cheerfully, but a bit more literate than many. She would certainly not go back the same, but then she had not been quite the person they thought when she first came in. She was already altered.

  Julie had brought the kitten into the chapel with her for the daily cleaning, not an invitation of which Imelda would approve but a venial sin rather than a mortal one. The kitten was company; it skidded on the high polish of the floor and attempted to suffocate itself inside a duster, but she could scold it in her normal voice. ‘You stupid little beast, you! Behave or I’ll strangle you with a sodding rosary and then which direction would you go? Heaven or hell?’ The kitten was also something to hold; light, warm, soft and resentful, a poor substitute for human skin. ‘You gorgeous little sod,’ she said admiringly.