‘Do you want to hear this or not? I said something about the chairs, and when you didn’t make your usual bullshit reply I turned to follow you. You weren’t there so I went back to the corridor. I kept wandering around, but I couldn’t find you. I thought I saw you once, but when I shouted, you disappeared into a side room, and I dunno. It was just weird.’
‘You heard me tell you to turn your hideous music on?’
‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’
Aleksey smiled, having an immediate image of Ben sometimes singing to himself and dancing as he cooked, the kitchen full of noise and good smells.
‘My phone was going flat, so I wanted to preserve the battery for the light. I kept shouting though.’
Aleksey’s hand stilled. ‘Not your music?’
Ben turned his head away from the flames he was watching and regarded him. ‘Music? No. Wasn’t me.’
‘Okay. Go on.’
‘That was about it. That place was awful. It stank, ugh. Drains maybe?’
‘Maybe.’ He resumed his slow twisting of the locks around his finger. ‘I have been thinking.’ He ignored the tiny groan. ‘Have you heard of dogs who can sense when people are about to suffer a fit?’
‘Yeah. Course.’
‘Well, what do you think that is? I mean, Radulf can smell things we cannot, that is obvious. Perhaps a cat can see better in the dark than we can. I do not doubt that birds have some awareness of magnetism. But a fit? Something wrong in someone’s brainbeforeit happens? How?’
‘I don’t know. Isn’t that like the tsunami though? People told us afterwards how their animals ran away from the bay hours before the wave hit—that they’d only survived because they’d just followed their lead? Do you think that’s something like what Radulf sensed? It’s more likely the smell, surely?’
‘I didn’t smell anything. But I wasn’t thinking of the dogs, no. I was wondering whether…’ He took a breath. ‘When you said I see ghosts and I said it was a derangement in the brain; you were joking and I was being facetious. We were both perhaps more right and wrong than we knew. That’s what I’ve been thinking—that maybe when I feel stress, something in my brain takes me back to memories of things, an awareness of things that are usually buried too deep to affect me.’
Ben took his hand and held it, playing with his fingers while he considered this idea. ‘You saw something in there?’
‘No, not really. But I got more mixed up than you appear to have, and I was thinking that in remembering another such place that I have not thought about for well over forty years, I confused those memories with what was actually happening. There is a word for it, but I do not know it in English.’
‘Hmm. I think I do.’ He looked away. ‘But I don’t want a fight.’
‘Trust me, Benjamin, the last thing we’re going to do tonight is fight. What do you mean?’
‘Well didn’t you hear Tim in the car—what he was saying about the ghosts?’
‘No, I stopped listening.’
‘He took up your idea of the brain thing but said for many people it could be flashbacks caused by, well, drugs.Acid, he said.Psychedelics.Even if taken many years before. They’ve done studies.’
Aleksey mulled this over. He preferred his theory.
Ben swung his legs down then stood up and held out his hand.
‘It’s all in the past now. This is Light Island, remember?’
Aleksey stretched, smiled, and took the offered hand and allowed Ben to pull him to his feet. They were kissing before they took a step away from the sofa, the feel of rough stubble and tangled hair under his hands banishing the painful memories, the uncertainty. Ben seemed to be inhaling him, hands cupped upon his face, a wildness to the passion that seemed almost dangerous. On his toes, leaning into his lips and mouthing savagely, Ben’s physicality was overwhelming and Aleksey let himself be overpowered. Ben had been more turned around, he reckoned, than he’d let on, and needed safe harbour too. For fifteen years, Aleksey had relished taking that role in Ben’s life, and he led him into that security now, and in this bonding let Ben experience the difference between delusion and the solid reassurance of reality.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sometimes Aleksey woke from dreams that made no sense.
Not that night.
He jerked suddenly awake as if he’d fallen. He’d been trapped in the lighthouse and had not been able to escape. Maybe he’d jumped, which is why the dream fall had woken him.
