Darkness, I Read online

  Through the late spring and the summer and the autumn, they ran across France. Black mountains and ruddy fields ruby with French filtered sun. Farm-houses from the 1800s, places where guillotines had rested in 1793, still marked by stone. Provincial squares, dove-cotes, villages rimmed by poplars, and blue-shuttered houses where jasmin grew, and sheep passed through the streets, and l’apres midi vineyards made tunnels of jade.

  Camillo would not speak French, although, in bathrooms, Red could hear him mutter it. In the villages he spoke what seemed to be Polish, waving his arms helplessly, to annoy.

  They returned to England before the seas began to upend, and lived in a rented house in Highgate with twenty-five rooms. Camillo had sex with the two Spanish maids, as he had had sex with more than thirty French women in France.

  ‘He never touched me,’ Red informed them, ‘after that night here, when I told him about Anthony—my tutor. Camillo would say, “I can’t follow that, can I? Perhaps if I get crippled with something.” He seemed to be inviting me to arrange it.’ She did not say very much else that was intimate, only once, ‘He sometimes talked about his mother in his sleep. In France. He used to do that in French, too. But simple childish French. Maman, je t’aime. He said his father killed her through lack of love.’

  And Connor recalled how the woman at the old-young house (the night-eyed Morrigan, sex and death) had said white-haired Malach was Camillo’s father. Malach, who looked like Camillo on his young days, thirty-seven, maybe.

  Camillo had been gone, Red avowed, days and nights in London.

  At the beginning of summer, he got word to Connor, and Red and Camillo came back into Connor’s world of black metal wheeled horses.

  So, the second summer burgeoned, and was like something too tight, constricting them, the ten riders and their women, who had stayed together: Connor, Rose, Pig and Tina, Basher and Josie, Rats, Shiva, Whisper, Owl, Blick and Cathy, Jas and Ray. Triumph Bonnevilles, Norton Jubilees. There were more dogs as well, Meato the Mongrel Fiend, and Jezebel. And even the dogs felt it. Less fine than Viv, they would growl at Camillo, and only Rats’ or Blick’s hands on their collars could dissuade them. Even the bikes acted up.

  Connor had given his allegiance, there was no turning back. If Camillo wanted his battalion, there it must be, ready.

  But Camillo was, or was like, a vicious old man. He looked thirty-seven consistently now. White dreadlocks very long and woven with beads. Rings on firm brown hands. A face to turn a woman on, that was for sure. Black eyes like dead yet fiery seas.

  He had kept the horse head. It was on the prow of the Electraglide and had been all over Provence and Brittany.

  He moved, limber and strong, and one night Camillo seduced innocent silly little Tina, so Pig hit her and left her, and they had to take her to her mother’s, where she stood on the doorstep crying as they rode away.

  Damn Camillo. Old man. Evil rotten old bastard.

  I could cut his bloody throat. But I’ll have to stay true. So Connor said to his angry brain.

  And why stay true? Because once Camillo had seemed breakable and ancient, coming down on to a beach by firelight. Crazy and lost, a valiant eccentric old fellow, like a character from a legend.

  Connor was waiting for Camillo to do some truly awful thing, so that true loyalty might be pissed from the window.

  But Camillo was insidious in the way of the crafty elderly mad. He laughed his high imbecile giggle, and turning in the brightness on some village street, the young girls gazed at him and blushed.

  He did look like that white one, that Malach.

  ‘Do you miss your son, at all,’ Connor said one evening as they rode slow down a bumpy track into some town.

  ‘I have no sons.’

  ‘Oh, your dad then.’

  Camillo did not glance. Camillo said, ‘Mon père est mort.’

  Later on, Connor said to her, to Red, ‘Did he say his daddy had died?’

  ‘He said it. But who knows.’

  She looked thinner, burned away, like the trike they had let Camillo cremate.

  There were thin veils of grey in her hair, Connor had seen that day in the artist’s sunlight. Connor looked at Red with desire, and leaning forward, gently kissed her lips. She did not resist. ‘Thank you, Connor,’ she said, ‘you make me feel human again. But... you’re too young for me.’

  ‘Bugger it,’ said Connor. ‘Couldn’t you wait?’

  ‘I’ll be old then, too,’ she said. ‘Not like him.’

  Then they went into a pub.

  There were fat stuffed fish in cases, beams, and no juke. But in a corner, the inglenook, probably, by the unlit summer hearth, an old man sat with an open book before him and a bottle of Bristol Cream. He would pour a glass and drink it slowly, steadily. Then fill the glass again.

  He had white hair from old age, and his face was a panoply of wrinkles, fluted over fine hard bones.

  ‘Look,’ said Connor. ‘He’s old enough.’

  Red looked.

  She moved quietly across the pub, and stood over the old man, who raised his head and saw her. He smiled, for Red was a pleasing sight; then he glanced uneasily at the bikers. Connor went over, too, bowed and said, ‘She was wondering what your book was.’

  ‘Kipling short stories,’ said the old man. He had a musical, resonant voice. He was strong.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink,’ said Connor.

  ‘No,’ said Red, ‘let me.’

  Connor retreated. He watched, surreptitiously, the real old man looking amused, musing, kind.

  He left them to it, and so did Camillo. Camillo made no comment. It was Basher who did that.’

  ‘Ere, you’re losing your bint, mate.’

  And Cathy and Ray tittered. And Meato mounted Jezebel, to the consternation of some lady drinkers nearby.

  Camillo said, ‘Her father was fifty-seven when he conceived her. He died when he was seventy-two. She was fourteen. She’s always looking for the wise old prat. I am not he.’

  Connor realized Camillo did not speak as he had when Connor first knew him. There were glimpses of that sometimes. That was all. Camillo was now someone else. Connor said, ‘Owl, I’ll have some scrumpy.’

  Meato left Jezebel in order to surprise Owl at the bar.

  Chapter Ten

  Sometime before the pub closed, Red’s new old man went home. Red sat on the grass of the slope, where they had camped. ‘I might stay. I’d have to go slowly. His wife died and he’s still in love with her. Then again, she was twenty years younger than he is. Like my mother, leukaemia. A wicked shame.’

  Connor thought it was like Red to be regretful of the old man’s wife, even if her death offered a chance.

  Or had the old man not gained Red’s full attention?

  However, presently she said, ‘His name’s Mark.’

  She looked shy.

  There might be a way out for her.

  In the morning, about ten, a cheery woman came up to the camp from the pub and told them they could have breakfast in the pub garden. It was an ample fry-up, not greasy but appetizing, local sausages and bacon, market mushrooms, tomatoes from the house garden, eggs (free range), and fried home-made bread.

  After the feast came the reckoning. Very mildly and pleadingly, the pub owner asked Connor if they would move their camp. It might otherwise scare off the regular customers.

  For Red’s sake, they did not go too far.

  Above a cloud of pine woods, some forestry planting, they emerged on a round and tufted hill. A few miles off were the frills of the town they had come through earlier. Below, in a valley smudged by the mist of a hazy day, an old gabled house, a mansion, lay above a drained pond with broken statues.

  Connor and Viv, Rose, Blick and Shiva, went down with Cathy and Ray, to look. The others did not want to come, and Red was busy washing her hair with ten bottles of Evian and some Boots shampoo. (An optimistic sign.) Camillo lay asleep, like most of the others, and the dogs, in the sun. Camillo had told th
em they would get skin cancer. It had made him gleeful.

  The mansion was only a shell in any case, partly roofless, with a huge inner area, its walls mysteriously whitewashed. The wooden floor still held. A carved wooden stairway, strangely not yet pilfered, led up to nowhere.

  Viv barked theatrically at daylight ghosts.

  They returned to the camp. Red was drying her hair and reading a novel by Muriel Spark. Viv ran over to help.

  ‘If you want to go back to that pub tonight, Rose and I can go with you. That won’t frighten anybody.’

  ‘I can go alone,’ said Red.

  ‘Well, Rose or Whisper will ride you over. I’ll come and see if you want bringing back. It’s open country.’

  ‘I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Connor.

  ‘Except in the matter of Camillo.’

  When the afternoon was deepening, three or four vans and a couple of cars drove into the valley below, and pulled up on the gravel before the house.

  The bikers’ camp, concealed on their woody hill, watched with lazy interest.

  The sun set in a daze of gold.

  From the mansion’s openwork roof supernatural rays began to wheel and spin, like trapped lightning.

  ‘ ‘Ere,’ said Basher, ‘they’re going to have a do.’

  A thudding beat started up, and fell back instantly. Meato the Mongrel Fiend howled in horror.

  ‘It’s a festival,’ said Cathy, pleased.

  ‘No, a rave,’ said Connor. ‘We’d better clear out.’

  Connor stood staring down at the valley. He felt uneasy. Music was one thing, but a rave was not about music. He remembered the night he and some girl had biked out to the standing stones at Calversham, and found a black box hidden in the bushes, swords and robes and chalices and a phial of amyl nitrate. They had taken off, he and the girl, pretty fast. Not that raves had anything to do with witchcraft. They just made him feel the same.

  ‘Let’s get the bikes,’ Connor said.

  Yet there was a lurid fascination in the view that held them there, the threatening gouts of bass and drum, over which no melody was audible, the flares of imprisoned lightning, now pink, now sick orange, now viper green.

  As the dusk came out of the ground and the sky turned to a beautiful backdrop of blue and stars, like the fake sky of a planetarium, hordes of vehicles began to surge into the darkened valley.

  Their white lights cut across, flamed, and died.

  Connor thought, incongruously, of the ghost scene in Olivier’s Richard III.

  Viv quivered, and Connor picked her up.

  ‘We’ll be off. Whisper, you can circle round with Red later, to the pub.’

  Then Camillo spoke.

  ‘I want to go down there.’

  Connor turned.

  Camillo was standing in his I-am-a-poor-little-old-man pose, infantile and grotesque on a handsome man in his late thirties.

  ‘Not good, Camillo.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Basher, ‘bloody dick-heads.’

  ‘A rave,’ said Camillo. ‘I want to see.’

  Then he straightened. Became a man of thirty-seven.

  Below, the swarm of Colt GTIs and Fiat Unos kept on gathering.

  The beat was continuous now. The hill shook.

  Viv whined.

  ‘It’ll be thirty quid at least, on the door,’ said Blick. ‘No booze. They don’t drink or smoke, those fucking kids. It ain’t healthy for them.’

  Camillo said, ‘I’m all a-tremble with excitement. Red, are you going with me?’

  She was there in the shadow behind him. Her hair smelled of peaches. Ray put her hand on Red’s arm. Red said to Camillo, ‘It’s a very bad set-up, Camillo.’

  ‘Goody. Pack up my troubles. Do you think I’m too old?’

  And Camillo started to walk down the hill, towards the beating house of lightnings.

  ‘You can’t let him get into that,’ Red exclaimed. She sounded angry and alarmed, as if her baby meant to run out on the road.

  Connor said, ‘No. We can’t stop him either. Shiva, what money have you got?’

  ‘Enough, Connor.’

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘I can manage.’

  ‘All right,’ said Connor. ‘We go in with him.’

  There was a noise from the others, and Meato barked, appalled he could not surmount the deadly barking from below.

  ‘Basher, take charge. Keep an eye out. If there’s shit, I may need the lot of you.’

  ‘Connor, you’re fucking mad.’

  Connor did not argue. He put Viv into Cathy’s arms, and Viv snarled at him. ‘No, baby,’ said Connor, ‘be nice to Cathy. You’re my one and only.’ Viv put down her upstanding ear to join the other ear that never went up. Cathy kissed Viv. Cathy looked nervous, the way she did when Blick got seriously pissed.

  Into the valley of the rave...

  Camillo was ahead of them.

  His guard, Rose, Shiva and Red, with their captain, Connor, moved about ten paces behind.

  The hill was dodgy, in the dark, outcrops, tussocks.

  Ahead the light.

  It hit the sky. Sheered, fragmented, spiked and burst.

  Thudrr. Thudrr.

  ‘It’s like a migraine attack,’ said Red. ‘The kind that knocks out your vision. How do they stand it?’ She took sunglasses from her pocket and put them on.

  Connor thought, She could have been sipping sherry with her Mark. He thought maybe her Mark was there, in the pub, waiting for her. Feeling jilted and old. And Connor was sad, and enraged.

  Fucking Camillo—

  The pines crowded to the gravel and then there was the wodge of cars all around the basin with the statues.

  A group of kids sprang out of a Mini and raced towards the doors of the mansion, now white, now blue, the gate of electric hell.

  Camillo strode after them.

  Then Connor and his lieutenants.

  Connor said to Red, ‘Do you want to stay outside?’

  ‘I can’t hear... No.’ And Red went by him, up to Camillo.

  ‘Ah, there she is. My chestnut mare.’

  Camillo put his palm on her breast.

  Red said, ‘Do you want to go in? Do you?’

  ‘Yum,’ said Camillo. ‘Let’s see what the real young do.’

  Inside, where the remains of an entrance was, loomed two big men, bouncers. They wore white shorts and Day-Glo tops. The lights wheeled, and changed them.

  ‘All of you?’ said one. ‘You ain’t dressed right. Yer gonner get all hot.’

  ‘How much?’ said Connor.

  ‘How’d ya hear?’

  ‘Flyer,’ said Connor. ‘Radio.’

  ‘No bother,’ said the other man, ‘y’understand?’

  Shiva stalked forward. He plonked down a wad of notes on the rickety wooden table.

  The first bouncer counted them.

  ‘Okay. Cheek or hand?’

  ‘Hand.’ Connor stuck his forward, and the second man sprayed him through a stencil with a black flower.

  Camillo said, ‘I want two.’ He held out both hands. The bouncer only laughed. He did what Camillo asked.

  Shiva had put one hundred and fifty pounds on the table.

  They passed on, through the thick waves of bleeding sound, and the shot blood-sprays of the migrainous light.

  There came a sharp menthol smell.

  Cliv was sitting up on the bonnet of the Land Rover, just under the carved staircase that went nowhere.

  He was comfortable, in charge. He had thought at first they could not get the Land Rover through, but they had done some work on a doorway, and managed it. Cliv liked heights.

  Beside him was the silver ice-bucket packed with melting ice, and in it the bottle of white, full-cream milk. He would take a swig every so often, toast the dancers.

  He had their sweets for them, too, in the vehicle. The white seeds of E, cheap tonight, only twelve pounds a tab.

  Cliv had brown hair tied bac
k in a short ponytail. He was growing his hair, but it took a long time. It might be worth getting extensions. He wore shorts, and his chest was bare. Something rather clever there. A zit had come up, dead centre between his large nipples. But Zephie had plastered the zit with skin-tinted Clearasil, and sprayed glitter over. It looked like a medallion.

  About every forty-five minutes, Cliv would phone Zephie, on the car phone.

  He would tell her what they would do, after the rave.

  The dancers would be off to chill out. But Cliv and Zephie did not go for E.

  Cliv found it arousing to tell Zephie what they would do. More arousing, possibly, than actually doing it—

  He had had a pipe of crack before they opened the doors. And he would have another in an hour or so.

  Crack gave you perspective. You could see where you could get to. No limits.

  He gazed down into the hall of the mansion. It was a great sight.

  The guy on the music knew how to keep it going, and the strobe lights whirled through every colour and shape, striking the whitewashed walls and veering off into the sky above. (Give God a thrill.) On the walls too were fractals, fantastic visions black and red, computer forms, twisted, tangled, splintered. Like a spiral staircase undone by an explosion. Like the Crown of Thorns.

  Over behind the Land Rover was the bar. Bottles of cold Lucozade, juice, and French mineral water—that had been a laugh, the boys filling them up all afternoon, from the taps. They had watered the juice too.

  But the kids needed a drink.

  They danced like crazy.

  They loved it. They loved each other. It was good for them.

  Someone was pushing over through the dancers.

  Cliv focused in the roil of lights.

  ‘Hey, Hyreesh. Look.’

  Cliv’s bodyguard leant forward from the side of the vehicle. He was Indian, dark coffee in a suit, with naked feet. Zephie had said Hyreesh had brilliant feet, but Cliv could not see it. Hyreesh’s fists were better.

  Hyreesh said, ‘Bikers.’

  ‘Yes. What are they after?’

  ‘Must’ve paid.’

  Cliv stretched, and the Clearasil cracked on his pustule. He could be expansive, providing they were prepared to be friendly.