Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Webster let them drop and hugged Nancy while they thrashed at his feet.

“Well done, poppet. Three! We’ll have these for tea.”

The breeze was now a wind, and the swell beneath them choppy. They would have to go in soon. He took the first mackerel off its hook, held it firmly by the tail and raising his arm high beat its head sharply against the bench seat. The fish gave a final quiver and went still. As he bent to free the second his phone rang, an absurdly urban noise, and Elsa gave him a steady look. Distracted for a moment he let it ring out and set about his work again, killing the last two fish while Nancy and Daniel looked on with a childish lack of squeamishness.

The three mackerel lay beside him now, neatly in parallel and waiting to be gutted. As he reached into his jacket pocket for his penknife his phone rang again, its old-fashioned trill insistent.

“Just turn it off,” said Elsa.

“It’s a Friday,” he said.

It was a U.S. cell phone number that he didn’t recognize.

“Hello.”

“Ben?”

“Yes.”

“Lester. What’s up?”

“Lester? Jesus. How are you?”

“I’m good, buddy, I’m good. We miss you. How’s life with Ike?”

“It’s all right. It’s good, thanks. Listen, Lester, I’m on a boat, sitting next to three dead mackerel. Can I call you back in an hour?”

He turned to keep the phone out of the wind.

“Sure. Listen, all it was, I got a call from some guy, said he was a headhunter, his client’s thinking about giving you a job.”

“Is he real?”

“He left his name and a number, his cell. No company. Jonathan Whitehouse. A Brit. I couldn’t find any headhunter of that name. Not on this planet anyway.”

Webster knew what that meant. “You’d think they’d bother to do it properly.”

“I know. Don’t they know who we are?” Lester chuckled.

“What did he want to know?”

“What kind of a guy you are. And why you left. He tried to squeeze that in. I told him I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know. So who’s checking you out, Ben? You fighting someone you shouldn’t be?”

“God, I don’t know. Some Russian. Lester, I should go. But thanks. I appreciate it.”

“No problem, man. Any time.”

Webster switched his phone to silent and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

Elsa nodded, clearly annoyed. There had been enough Ikertu on this trip already.

“Right,” he said with false cheerfulness. “Daniel. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we?”

Daniel had nothing, and when Webster told him that was fine, that he never caught anything either, he protested. He didn’t want to go home now. That wasn’t fair. He wanted to stay until he’d caught as many fish as Nancy. Webster tried to exchange a glance with Elsa but she was looking out to sea, more irritated by the call than he had realized, or by something unsaid. Her mood had changed.

In the last fifteen minutes the wind, squalling now and forceful, had blown them halfway across the estuary so that they were only two hundred yards from the northern shore, and over the headland to the south rainclouds the color of wet rock were massing. The little boat danced erratically on the chop.

“Did you check the forecast?” said Elsa.

“There was nothing about this,” said Webster, sitting in the stern and dropping the engine back into the water. Daniel started to cry and Elsa comforted him as Webster started it up, turning the boat back toward the village, suddenly feeling exposed and more vulnerable than he had thought possible here. Substantial waves crossed the estuary now and Webster took them on the perpendicular, the bow rising up and crashing down, sending thick arcs of spray over the boat. Everyone was quiet, the only sounds the blustering wind and the slap of the bow on the water, and Webster, adjusting their direction and concentrating hard, watched his family huddled together and found himself praying for their safe return.

“HE MAY NOT LOOK IT,but he’s a daunting figure, my father.” Webster had stood to speak, but there was no need. They were twelve in all, squeezed around a makeshift dining table that was really two tables artfully dressed, and in the candlelight each face was bright with expectation. He could have simply raised his glass and bid them all do the same, and they would have been happy—his father, perhaps, would have preferred it—but there were things he had never said before that needed to be said.

“When we were little, Friday night was discussion night. I think it started when I was ten or eleven.” He glanced at his sister. “You must have been all of nine. After we’d eaten, Dad would ask us if there was anything we wanted to talk about that week. There never was. So he’d suggest something. Something from the papers, or something that was on his mind, or something he knew was on ours. The first one I can remember, there was a huge CND march in London, and you wanted to know,” he turned to his father, “whether we thought it was right that these weapons existed. Or what we made of the miners’ strike. Or hostages in Beirut. Or heart transplants. Or Chernobyl.” He took a breath.

“Some of this scared me, to be honest. These were things I half heard on the radio or caught scraps of on the news when we were ushered off to bed, and I wanted to block them out. But you didn’t let us do that. We had to know what the world was like, so that we wouldn’t be scared.

“And it worked, more or less. I used to have the odd nightmare about nuclear winters, but that had more to do with my friend Peter Lennon gleefully showing me films about the likely aftermath. But generally the world was a less frightening place. It was still scary, but we didn’t have to be scared by it.”

Webster paused. “He did this for us. But more importantly he did it for countless others who were much more vulnerable than we ever were. We knew what he did at work, a little, because he’d explain it to us, like everything else. Not the details, of course, and in a sense I still don’t know. But I can see the thousands of people he treated and begin to imagine how they were helped and changed and sometimes cured by his work. In thirty years of practicing, that’s thousands and thousands of lives made better, sometimes in small ways, sometimes beyond all expectation. Thousands of people who because of him were less fearful. Became less scared.”

He looked at his sister again. “It’s quite an inheritance, not being scared of the dark. And Rachel, at least, uses her powers for good.” He smiled. “But I don’t think either of us can look at a thing we don’t understand and not want to understand it. Dad showed us how to explore the world.”

Webster stopped, took a sip of wine from one of the glasses in front of him, and looked down at his father, who was gazing at the tablecloth with a peaceful half-smile on his face. The little room was utterly quiet, and shadows thrown by the candles flickered on the walls.

“I’m going to stop, before this turns into a eulogy. I’m not going to go on about what a wonderful father he’s been, or what a wonderful husband I think he’s been—unless I’ve missed something. Or how he now has a new career as a local campaigner for truth and justice.” His father laughed. “I’m very aware that this is not a funeral and that, like Mr. Jarndyce, the man on my right doesn’t much like being praised. With any luck this little speech will have to last for a long, long time. But sixty-five isn’t a bad time to take stock, and, well, there’s a lot of stock to take. An awful lot. He couldn’t have set a better example. That’s why he’s daunting. Just a little.”

Webster took his champagne glass, specially filled, and raised it.