Red Shift

Logan drank.

Face came out of the hut. “Feel free,” he said.

“After you, sir,” said Magoo.

“To hell with them,” said Logan, and went into the hut.

“What do you reckon?” said Face.

“I’ll tell you when he comes out,” said Magoo. “If he don’t give – I’ve seen Romans break. If he don’t do it to her he’s only got himself, and he don’t dare look right now.”

“You like Logan?”

“He’s shit gone wrong. I like surviving.”

“Buzzard?”

“Playing Roman. It gets you, if you let it: then you ain’t nothing. Congratulations, sir.”

Logan had come out.

“Yeh.”

“Have a beer.”

“No. The games are over. Stand to till dawn.”

Logan picked Macey up. The sword hung on his palm. Face pulled it away.

“Here, kid,” said Logan. He pushed Macey through the door opening. “Go do yourself some good.”

“You know, sir?” said Magoo. “That chick was half stoned when I found her. That’s why she was missed the first time.”

“Search for others,” said Logan. “We can’t afford mistakes.”

“There won’t be any more,” said Face. “I know these Cats.”

Macey shivered in the hut. His clothes were drying on him and stiffening. His skin flaked, encrusted. He blinked in the dark hut. A girl, about fifteen years old, lay like a doll on the floor. The lamp was reflected in her eyes. There had been paint on her brow, but it was smudged to shapelessness. Macey slumped on his hands and knees. The stink of him was in his own nostrils. He touched the paint on her forehead. “Don’t,” he said, “be afraid,” and she reached out her hand, “of me.” The hand touched the hard weight slung by his shoulder, and her eyes moved to him. He fell beside her, his fingers reached gently for the lobe of her ear and held it. She smoothed his clogged hair.

Jan held Tom’s wrists. He let her. She turned on the crooked tap, shook his hands free of the glass and pushed them into the water. There were no deep cuts, and she directed the jet to sluice fragments away from the skin.

“Bloody Norah!”

Tom’s father had come into the kitchen.

“Let your hands dry, don’t rub them,” said Jan. Tom did so, his body quiet, his face red and swollen.

“Has he hurt himself?”

“He’s done no hurting,” said Jan.

She dabbed his hands with paper tissue. They seemed to be free of glass. His father went to the taps and the window.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said.

“So much was obvious,” said Jan.

“He did this.”

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t the idea.”

“It was the result.”

“Bloody Norah.”

“Bloody Tom,” said Jan.

“What’s it come to?”

“He ran out of words.”

“Him? He’s a walking dictionary. I don’t understand him half the time. The one thing he can do is express himself.”

“He’s still here,” said Tom. “He hasn’t died, or anything convenient like that.”

“I never really thought you two were – you know.”

“Permission to dismiss, please, sergeant-major.”

“But it wouldn’t have been right to have left it to your mother.”

“Left right left right left right left left—”

“She’s my wife.”

Tom laughed quietly.

“It matters.”

“Does it?” said Tom.

“Yes, mush: it does.”

Tom lifted his head. “I usually do see things too late. My father is honest,” he said to Jan. “I’ve never know him not.” He drank some water from the tap. “The powers of recovery of the human organism are remarkable. If you’re admitting error to me, you must, logically, have dissociated yourself from the accusation at source, while I was being constructive with the window. You told my mother that she was wrong.”

“I – did – say—”

“Something.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s my turn to help you.”

“Not me: your mother.”

“You differentiate?”

“It was the swearing—”

“It didn’t wreck the kitchen,” said Jan.

“But it wasn’t nice: from a girl. And we’ve always given you a considerable degree of latitude.”

“About fifty-three degrees fourteen minutes north,” said Tom.

“Swearing’s not nice.”

“Inadequate vocabulary would be a better description,” said Tom. He walked towards the lounge.

“Don’t diminish yourself in there,” said Jan.

Tom nearly smiled. His father moved with him, but Tom stopped. “No, sergeant-major. This is a solo. Go help Jan.”

His father wavered. “Sex,” he said.

“What about it?”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

Tom walked endlessly towards the lounge. His mother was hunched before the gas fire. For the first time he saw that she was old. He put his arms around her shoulders. She was light to raise: he held bones. Her face rested on his shoulder. He could not tell whether her crying was real.

“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “But you were, and are, wrong.” She shook, too, as he had shaken, and through it, within her, he felt his own strength, and was alert.

“I thought – that you – and she.”

“There’s no ‘she’. The name is Jan.”

“I thought you’d been – intimate.”

The obscenity, but he held on. Words. Which to use now to end now?

“You thought we’d had relations.”

His mother nodded.

“Only our parents,” said Tom, “and that should be a joke.”

His mother sobbed again. The strength did not move.

“You have to face up to the existence of Jan, you know.”

“Your father and I would prefer it if you waited till you’d finished your studies before you had anything to do with girls.”

“That could be ten years!” He was laughing now.

“Soon enough.”

“Jan’s a help: and their house.”

“It’s not our fault we can’t do better than this. It’d be worse in Married Quarters. I’ve had some! She should wash her mouth out with carbolic.”

“Stop before you start,” said Tom. “And listen. What you said to Jan tonight was not only untrue, it was humiliating.”

“Humiliating!”

“Will you apologise?”

“To her? To that kind of language? If you tell me you’ve not been—I’ll believe you.” Generosity, thought Tom, is infinite. “But I’m not apologising to someone who uses foul language in my home.”

“Wait there,” said Tom. He lifted his hands from his mother’s shoulders. The cotton dress was tacky and clung to him. The prints of his palms and fingers were clear. He went to the kitchen. Jan and his father had cleaned up the glass and were putting hardboard over the window.

“My mother’s upset by your swearing: so am I. Will you take it back?”

“Go on, love,” said his father. “Sticks and stones—”

“Sorry,” said Jan. “I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.”

“I needed to know,” said Tom.

“How are your hands?” said his father.

“Right as rain,” said Tom. “I’ve remembered: it was Plautus.”

“What was?”

“First said ‘right as rain’. Stay there until I’ve settled my mother.”

He went through to the lounge.

“Jan doesn’t feel very accommodating. And I can see her point.”

“Then she’s not welcome here,” said his mother.

“Suit yourself. I’m going over to ‘The Limes’ with her now, neither to be intimate, nor to have relations, but to work.”

“Your hands are bleeding.”

“I’ll survive,” said Tom. “Hey, turn the sound up on the telly: there’s a commercial for removing biological stains.”

“What we want,” said Tom, “is a communications satellite.” He walked with Jan through the wood. It was a clear moon. The M6 was like a river, and the Milky Way a veil over the birch trees. “I suppose any would do. How’s your astronomy?”

“Non-existent.”

“You must know the basic constellations.”

“They never fitted the pictures in the books. I like that kite, though.”

“Where? Kite? Kite? That’s not a kite, you goof, that’s part of Orion. Those three stars are his belt.”

“Well, I’ve always liked them.”

“OK. We’ll have Delta Orionis: over there on the right. It’ll be with us all winter. We’ll be together at least once every twenty-four hours.”

“How?”

“What’s a good time? Ten o’clock? Every night at ten o’clock we’ll both try to look at that star, and be together because we know the other’s watching, and thinking. At the same moment we’ll be looking at the same thing.”

“If it isn’t cloudy,” said Jan. “I love you: you’re so impossible.”

“It’s impossible.”

“It’s not. It’s a marvellous idea. That star and us. Like now.”

“There’s never ‘now’,” said Tom. “Delta Orionis may not exist. It isn’t even where we think it is. It’s so far away, we’re looking at it as it was when the Romans were here.”

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