Staring At The Light Page 5

  He looked down at his own long hands, saw them still encased in surgical gloves, made a strangled sound of agonized embarrassment, which emerged as a brief yelp. He clawed at the gloves, the wrong, cheaper kind which gave him an allergic reaction even if they did afford protection. They tore at the palm as he ripped them off and threw them away into the corner, where they lay curled on the carpet, looking almost alive. She would pick them up tomorrow, maybe.

  ‘New dress code for travelling the underground, is it?’ she teased him, pressing his hands round the bowl of a glass. There were faint bubbles in the wine. He stared at them, fascinated. ‘You must have looked a little … odd. Over-fastidious, perhaps.’

  The glass was emptied before he spoke. She had an amazing facility for silence: she seemed able to maintain either that or ceaseless chatter exactly as the mood demanded. Suddenly he felt a whole lot better, found himself smiling for no other reason than that image of himself, reading a newspaper on the train with those oh-so-obvious, not quite fleshcoloured rubber gloves, as if the print would contaminate him, and he could not bear the proximity of other kinds of dirt, humanity included, for that matter. He laughed because it might have been true.

  ‘Must’ve thought I was the burglar. Ready to avoid fingerprints. Dressed to kill. Or one of those men who goes round poisoning rats. Something like that. Give me a hug, will you?’

  She did. An almost all-encompassing hug, hands scratching the back of his neck the way he liked. They stayed like that for some time. He could feel the warmth of her enter his bones, struggled against it; failed. He tried to tell himself she was amoral, feckless, promiscuous, insincere on that account, untidy, dishonest, disloyal, insensitive, unkind, calculating, and knew, as he recited to himself this litany of adjectives, that he was really thinking of someone else entirely. Applying to Sarah those angry descriptions that best suited Isabella was hardly fair, although Sarah was amoral in a way he never cared to define and certainly untidy. She was also far more than a fair-weather friend, but still he had to ask.

  ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can mend? Do you like me at all?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, removing herself from his lap and fetching the wine. ‘You are in a bad way.’

  ‘No worse than usual. Better for seeing you,’ he added, in an attempt at grace. She did not come to the surgery for treatment these days. She claimed to enjoy the ambience, which flattered him – although he doubted it was true – even though she had helped to create it. First, there were the additional pictures, which added something to the waiting areas; she inflamed his existing enthusiasms for collecting and made him bolder in his choices. Then there was the increased flow of patients. Sarah recommended him to everyone she knew, and Sarah knew a lot of people. Some of them were strange enough to have crawled out of very peculiar woodwork, but they were still people with teeth. And, one or two of them, people with whom he could empathize without quite understanding the process. Especially Cannon. Cannon was nicely mad; both he and Cannon had gremlins. How Sarah had organized an artist and convict into his surgery was another thing he could never quite fathom. Networking. One day his life had been normal; the next he found himself spirited into a prison to see a patient, then launched into bureaucratic obfuscation to get the patient treatment. A client in need, she had explained: Do this for me, William, please. You’re the only dentist I know who’s treated people like him before. He needs you. She wouldn’t tell him much about Cannon, pleading professional confidence, but he never minded that. Cannon’s treatment had been a triumph, and William was profoundly grateful for the pride it gave him. Oh, for another patient like Cannon. It might be enough to dispel the dreams of inadequacy.

  ‘Still haunted, are we?’ she asked gently, sitting away from him to light the cigarette, despite his disapproval. (They are bad for your teeth, Sarah darling. They inhibit the circulation and retard healing … accelerate periodontal disease … bad for you, wanting to say it, but admiring the precise way she smoked.)

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sighing. ‘I couldn’t bear another night of the same nightmares. But you told me not to mention her name.’

  She settled onto the floor by his feet and shook her head. ‘Nothing is absolutely forbidden, you know it isn’t. Break me in gently. Tell me about the other nightmares first.’

  Tell me again, she might have said. William’s nightmares were constants, variations on a few themes with different pictures. They were the result of the pursuit of perfection and an underlying guilty conscience that would not shift, and although the recitation of the dreams had lessened considerably in the time she had known him, they saddened and irritated her because William did not deserve such afflictions. No man of such conscientious kindness deserved them, and that was why she listened. He did not deserve to remain half in love with his shallow bitch of an ex-wife either. That was a private opinion.

  ‘Well, take last night. I woke up convinced that the hall was full of brilliant paintings, and I’d painted them all. Although, of course, I hadn’t, when I came to look at them, never could have, never shall.’

  She shrugged. ‘You can’t paint pictures when you’re obsessed with technique.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt,’ he said crossly. ‘I don’t mind about not being able to paint. I haven’t minded for years. But there were three people in the hallway, looking at the paintings. They were sharpening their nails, ready to tear them to pieces and, after them, me.’ He gulped the wine too fast and felt the bubbles go up his nose. ‘There was that child, Adrian. You know the one I mean, the one I told you about?’

  Yes, she knew.

  ‘Pale and ill and coughing, like someone who’s blocked off half a lung. That piece of amalgam I dropped down his throat locked inside his lung somewhere, and no-one knowing why he was so ill. All skin and bone he was, but as for his sister, well …’ He shuddered.

  ‘She was the one where you think you took out the wrong teeth?’

  ‘Yes.’ He patted her shoulder, grateful for her recall, as if she had never heard these nightmare stories before. ‘Overcrowded mouth. Had a lot of them at the time. Got the records muddled up. Didn’t concentrate. Only realized what I’d done after she’d gone.’

  ‘Might have done.’

  ‘Must have done. Otherwise, why does she stand in the hallway in my dreams with two ugly incisors on either side of two huge gaps? Her smile was obscene and, really, she could have been so pretty. So beautiful. And, of course, you can guess who had brought them in to mash up the paintings and haunt me all over again? I couldn’t trace those children, however hard I tried. But her. She could.’

  ‘Your ex-wife. Who else? No doubt she was looking perfectly wonderful.’

  ‘She was, actually. She always does.’

  ‘William, how can you be so helpless? Why do you allow her to tease you? I never heard anything so insane. Both of you. She wrecks your confidence and betrays you and comes back for treatment, and you let her. Why can’t you say, “Go away”?’

  ‘I don’t know. Habit, I suppose. Perhaps I really enjoy the temptation to put the drill through the roof of her mouth. Perhaps I like to think of her nicely sedated while I sew her lips together. Stitch her tongue to her back teeth to stop her talking. Wouldn’t do a great deal of harm.’

  Sarah rose with her usual grace. ‘I think’, she said, ‘that even Isabella might notice something like that. I’m ordering pizza.’

  The nightmares always faded into nonsense as soon as he talked about them – another thing that shamed him. It seemed to mean they might have no significance at all because they were soluble in wine, digestible with food and they never survived time with Sarah. But the night had its own inexorable, bullying pace, taking him straight back into a broken sleep, even after pizza and too little lust. Far too tired for that, hugging instead, grateful for her body smelling of clean cotton, curled against his in a neat fit. Grateful for being accepted without demands or criticism, nothing but affection, which always felt exclusive at the time. That
was what saved him from the trouble of having to think about love and all its strictures.

  Of course he did not love Sarah Fortune; lover and friend was all. For William, love meant a grand passion, a gnawing of fingernails, intensity, anxiety and being connected at the hip; it was not supposed to be tranquil like this. This was a matter of mere liking and glorious convenience. Not the same thing at all.

  And she thought, as she often did, about how the longing to protect other people had become so habitual that it was far more important than love. A mental check: everyone she cared about relatively safe for the moment. Aunt Pauline, Julie, Cannon, William. Falling into sleep, she wondered, briefly, what Cannon might be doing.

  There was a rustling in the dark, in the back there, over by the wall where the nettles were thickest. Wet and dank, they had covered the sound of his fall, and now they whispered with life. Cannon half sat against a wall, which felt strangely warm against his jacket, watched the nettles with mild curiosity, content to wait until they settled. He was not afraid of the dark: he liked it. It was something he had tried to explain in paint, about how the night was never completely silent and the darkness never entirely impenetrable. Look, he mouthed, wagging a finger at the moon. Look at you, you old bugger, shining on. It was mirrored in the back window of the chapel, which held its own light, visible as he had clambered over the high wall and snagged his trousers on thorns. He was willing to take a bet that the noise in the nettles was some rat. Rat or snake, ferret or tiger, he didn’t care. As long as it was not human. See? You can even read your watch by the light of the moon, my love. Why worry about the dark?

  The clouds were moving across his vision, racing to catch up with the moon and wrap it round, pull it down and rein it in to serve some God his supper; a nice half melon of moon. Not a new moon, or Cannon would have paused, taken off his hat, bowed his head in the cold and made a solemn wish. Now that he was older and wiser, he would not waste the wish by using it to wish for three more wishes. One would do. It was time. He knew it was time without squinting at the watch: it was the slight shivering of his limbs, thin under all his garments, which made him realize. A numbness to go with the shaking; a fever that owed something to anxious delight. He swept softly through more of the undergrowth, feeling a tin can bend beneath his feet while the other boot scrunched on broken glass before he reached the door. Even as he reached it, it opened slightly, revealing a chink of subdued light. The iron latch made a sound like a small animal in pain. Dear Lord, Cannon thought, even a piece of metal resents us.

  ‘Is it you?’ He had meant to speak perfectly normally, but it was impossible. What he produced was a sibilant whisper, a sign of the fear he hardly felt, but which still infected him. It was only the dreadful fear of finding nothing behind that door.

  ‘Of c-c-c-c-course it is. Qu-quick, come in.’ She copied the sibilance of his whisper: he felt it could have been heard a million miles away, as if she was shouting, but she never did shout. She looked too small to produce any great sound, apart from an uncertain stutter, and as he enveloped her in his great big woolly embrace, hugging the life out of her, he felt as if he could have wrapped her up and put her into one of the capacious pockets of his coat. She seemed to sense it, too, getting her small self inside the jacket so she could snuggle closer, struggling to put her arms round his middle, worm her way through all the layers into his heart. He touched her hair, level with his chest, amazed as ever by its softness; then he felt blindly with his stubby fingers for the sockets of her eyes; kissed them first, one by one, and only then her mouth. The skin around her eyes was dry, her mouth against his lips warm, and her hands, beneath the jumper, hotter than burning coal. He was twice her volume and he staggered beneath her impact. Only her nose was cold.

  He knew this was the sacristy to the chapel, although he had never quite established where it was in relation to anything else, or whatever it was that lay beyond. This was the only entrance he knew, always approached at dark as if he was approaching a place of pilgrimage on his hands and knees. Cannon would not have minded the bare-footed progress of a pilgrim.

  They moved from sacristy to chapel, through the rows of seats to the back where a small light illuminated a statue of monumental ugliness. A garishly coloured plaster saint with a chipped red robe, lovingly dusted along with the rubber plant on the table supporting both. Cannon was carrying her: he felt as if he was carrying every single thing that was precious in his own life inside his arms, but still he paused, his face puzzled as he looked at the statue that gave them light. There was a dragon curled at the feet of the saint, a harmless-looking thing in the act of being pierced by a spear through the mouth, wide open to welcome such intrusion. The dragon looked as if it were an invalid being offered soup, while the saint looked smug.

  ‘Not his best side,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘And the dragon has lost its teeth.’

  ‘I’m a dragon,’ he growled, pulling her closer, listening to her gasp. ‘Only I found my teeth. Why did I waste all that time?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, how should I know?’ He could feel her laughter, along with her whisper, vibrate down the length of his arms and jolt his spine.

  Her hands were finding his and he was trying to hide them beneath her skirt. Thick tights and skinny shanks: she could feel him through every centimetre of her skin. She felt the bandage. ‘Oh, Cannon, is it still sore?’

  ‘Nothing, lovely, nothing. I don’t know what came over me. Fireworks madden me. Won’t happen again. Are you all right?’

  She nodded against his chest. ‘Why did you d-d-do that, Cannon, why? Clumsy man. You need your hands. You don’t need d-d-dying, not yet. Not a long while yet. And if you go alone, I swear to God I’ll kill you. Honest I shall.’

  ‘It was a bad day,’ he whispered lamely. ‘And it was never our house. I wanted him to know what I thought of him. I wasn’t living there. He left me a note. Telling me he’d get the house back for me if I’d come home. Don’t let’s talk about him.’ Then he stood with her still in his arms, that little strong scrap of her bound to him like a limpet as he bowed towards the altar and then sat down again. There was a smell of polish, which he rather liked.

  Oh, to make love in a big, light room to the sound of the sea through a window. He had never envied anyone, but he did now. Never believed in a God either, but he did here, temporarily, in the hope of the fulfilment of his single wish. Listen to me, God, please. I shall obey every letter of the law, and if you let us free, I shall sacrifice whatever else I hold dear. Paint, canvas, fine wine, notoriety, curiosity and my few friends. You can have them all. Vanity and ambition are long since gone, so you can see I’ve made a start. Free me from my brother; free Johnnyboy from me. And free me from the urge to destroy things.

  ‘How do they pray in here?’ he asked into her ear. ‘Isn’t it too cold to pray?’

  She shook her head. Soft hair touched his face and made him want to moan with longing.

  ‘They wear a lot of clothes. And it’s only cold at night.’

  Cold, but not lonely; not with the statues and the altar light and the moon through the windows.

  ‘Are they still kind to you?’ he whispered urgently.

  ‘Of c-c-course. And I’m busy.’

  That was a relief. Idleness had never suited her. She felt guilty if her hands were free of work. Born to it, took to it like a duck to water, proud of it. His wife, who should have been breeding babies by now – three already if she had not had to wait for him to grow up and free himself and watch him make a mess of it, a process begun as soon as he clapped eyes on her. Waited for his self-discovery, and then his discovery by the rest of the world, and now, still waiting for this long process of revenge to work its way out. Never, ever blaming him. There’s no such thing as a future you haven’t built with your own hands, she had told him with her sweet stutter, which was worse when she was cross. And I don’t see how you can build one on destruction. You may have grown up with bombs and evil. You don
’t have to continue.

  ‘We shouldn’t have stolen from him, should we?’

  It was kind of her to say ‘we’, when all the decisions had been his, wrong decisions of course, however justifiable at the time. Stealing from Johnny because Johnny had never paid him and had told him to get rid of her. Knowing that even if Johnny had put one of the houses in his name, it didn’t mean it was his. Futile to try to take something from Johnnyboy. Oh, yes, he’d stolen quite a bit and let Johnny frame him for more. He thought of the explosives made at Johnny’s behest; shuddered; never, ever again. Thought of the picture he had bought to launder the money, and the fact that it was now all that was left, with his dwindling reserves of cash. Thought of Johnny’s revenge, played out in this game.

  ‘What’s happening out there?’ she asked.

  They were warming each other: she pressed his hands between her thick-clad thighs. Her own palms were callused with work; he fancied he could feel them rubbing his back. Cannon coughed quietly, loud in the silence. ‘Not so much yet. I got rid of the house. We just have to wait and see. Until Christmas. He promised. He keeps to the rules as long as it’s him who makes them.’

  ‘Why don’t you just give him everything? Give him what he wants? Everything. Even the picture.’ It was a sad question, not really expecting an answer.

  ‘You know why. Because it leaves nothing. He’d burn the picture. I couldn’t bear it. And because it would never be enough. It’s me he wants. Me, coming home.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. D-darling, I know.’

  Just as she knew why she was here. She was both his strength and the weak link in his fence against the enemy. His hidden weapon, his vulnerability. Because she knew, as well as Johnny knew, that Cannon would lose his mind if Johnny ever attacked her again. She was small, brown-haired, otherwise insignificant, except to him. And she knew there was no worse enemy than one related by blood; no worse adversary than a lover betrayed; and Johnnyboy Smith was both.