Under the Influence

Knowing a thing was wrong has never once stopped me wanting to know what it was like. That, in a sentence, is the whole trouble with me.

I'd been sitting long enough that the chair had stopped being a novelty and gone back to being a chair, when the screen woke in front of me.

I got up. I'll own I was glad of it — there's only so long a man can mind an empty screen before he starts inventing jobs for his hands. The colour came swirling up, and I went over to meet her, set to take whatever weight she'd brought through this time.

It wasn't a table. Beatrix came backwards out of the colour hauling a trolley after her — one of the wire supermarket sort — and the trolley was full of bottles.

"Surprise," she said, and swung it round beside the nearest stack of chairs so the whole load of it caught the light. Glass in every colour the stuff comes in — deep bottle-greens, ambers, a few frosted-white ones already sweating in the warmth. Labels I couldn't read the half of.

"What is it?" I said, though I was most of the way to knowing, and not liking the knowing.

"Drinks." She said it patiently, like I was a bit slow on the day. Then, when I didn't move: "Alcohol, Jerome."

I stopped where I was. "You went back through for drink?"

"What's a welcome without it." She wasn't asking. She'd already lifted a bottle out and was turning it to read the back, which is a thing I've watched people do who aren't reading anything at all — it gives the hands something to be at.

Drink was not a thing we did. Not a habit we'd happened never to fall into, not a taste we'd never got round to — a line, drawn down the Word of Wisdom and held since before I was old enough to know I was holding it. No alcohol; no tea nor coffee either. You learned the shape of the rule young and you did not walk up to the edge of it to see what was on the far side. So I knew exactly what was in those bottles, and exactly what it would make of me to drink from one. I'd reached twenty-one without lifting a glass — not for want of a chance but because I had never once seriously pictured doing it — and here I stood now in front of a whole trolley of the stuff, with a woman watching me work out what my own face was doing about it.

She read it off me anyway. "Let me guess. Never had a drop."

"No."

"Not once?"

"Not once." I heard how it sounded the second it was out — like a thing to apologise for, which nettled me, because I didn't think it was one.

She didn't laugh, which I'd half braced for. She propped herself on the edge of a table instead and looked at me with more considering in it than I'd earned. "No. I don't suppose you would have. Luke's gone on about your lot enough that I should've guessed."

"Luke talks about us?"

"For years. My sister's thick as thieves with his Jamie — Gladys, that is, my sister — so I've had the Smiths secondhand a good long while." She tipped the bottle at me. "Big family. Everything done in a crowd. Church of a Sunday and a job found for every pair of hands, whether the hands went asking for one or not."

It's a strange thing, your own family read back to you by a stranger who's got it mostly right. "That's about the size of it," I said.

"He's proud of you, for what it's worth. Wouldn't say it to your faces in a hundred years — but he goes on about how the lot of you can turn your hand to anything put in front of you." She shrugged. "Resourceful. That was his word. More than the once."

That landed somewhere I wasn't set for it to. Luke had never said the like to me directly, and I'd have wagered the same held for all of us. "He's never said that to us."

"No." She looked almost kind about it. "Some people don't think they have to."

I let that sit, and turned to the trolley to have somewhere to put my eyes. "So what's all this, then."

"A bit of everything." She named them off, tapping the necks as she went. "Wine. Vodka. Rum down the bottom there. Some of the sweet flavoured muck I had a feeling Paul would go for." She came up with a dark green bottle and a flat, plain label and held it out for me to see, like you'd show a child a bird before it goes up. "This one's an easy start. Chardonnay. Wine — light, bit fruity. You sip it."

"Chardonnay," I said, and made a hash of it.

"Close enough." She cracked the cap, took a mouthful, shut her eyes a second over it, and I understood I was being shown the thing done properly before I was let loose on it. "Still cold." She held it out. "Go on."

I took the bottle. Colder and heavier than it had any business being, and the smell came up off the neck of it sharp enough to sting my eyes before I'd got it near my mouth. The whole of me wanted to hand it straight back — there was a clean, level voice in me, the one that had kept this rule my entire life, saying do exactly that. The watcher in me wanted, rather more, to know — what the fuss was, what the stuff actually did, why grown people built whole evenings around a thing we'd been raised to leave well alone. God forgive me, the watcher won, the way he generally does.

"Sip it," she said. "Delicately."

I did not sip it delicately. I took a proper pull — the kind you take at the trough after a morning shifting feed — and the inside of my mouth caught fire.

It was sour and it was sharp and it scalded the whole way down, and it tasted, near as I could place it, the way the back shed smelled the summer something died under the floor of it and we never did find what. I coughed. I coughed in earnest, folded over the trolley with my eyes streaming, while Beatrix's laugh went up and carried off over the dunes.

"You're meant to sip," she got out, "not put it away like you're at the trough yourself."

"That's vile." My voice had gone to gravel. I dragged the back of my hand over my mouth. "People drink that on purpose?"

"You'll learn the difference." She took the bottle off me, enjoying herself far too much. "You're your brother all over."

"Luke?"

"Paul."

That stopped me. "Paul doesn't drink."

"Doesn't he." She let it hang, and there was a wickedness in it, the pleasure of somebody about to pull a prop out from under you. "He's not the article he was, your Paul. When he's down at Luke's he's not above a glass or three. Not wine, mind — he likes the sweet stuff. The kind that's more pudding than drink."

I turned that over and couldn't get it to sit flat. Paul. Our Paul, who taught the Sunday lesson with his scriptures gone soft at the spine, who'd not take a cup of tea if you knelt and begged him. "Paul," I said again, to no use at all.

"Paul." She was already down in the trolley after something. "Here. This'll suit you and him both."

What she came up with was a squat bottle with a label the colour of a child's cordial — Raspberry Vodka, it read. I had it in my hands before the sense of it caught me up. "How does it come open?"

"Sleeve." She reached across — she'd no sleeves of her own, only brown arms — and took a fold of my shirt cuff and broke the cap loose through the cloth with one turn of her hand. Her fingers were quick and cool against my wrist the half-second it took, and there was a thing I felt at that, brief and to do with nobody but myself, that I set down without looking too hard at it. "There. All yours."

This time I sipped. The sweetness met my tongue ahead of anything else, and under the sweetness a low warmth that opened out as it went down and kept opening, and settled in behind my breastbone like a coal banked for the night. Against everything I'd just decided about the entire business, it was lovely.

"That's —" I looked at the bottle, faintly betrayed by it. "That's actually good."

"See." Whatever she'd braced me to turn out to be — a chore, a disappointment, the dull one of the family — I'd come in under it, and she looked pleased in a way she didn't trouble to hide. "Not all of it's penance."

"Jerome!"

The voice came over the rise ahead of the rest of him, and I came within a hair of wearing the mouthful. I had the bottle back in Beatrix's hands before I'd decided to — caught red-handed and shoving the evidence at the nearest grown-up, twenty-one years old and gone straight back to nine. She took it, and a faint colour came up in her own face as she did, the two of us all at once a pair of conspirators caught at the fence.

Charles came down the slope at a trot, hair every which way and a sheen on him from the run; he'd plainly not walked a step of it. He'd done what I sent him for, then — Dad knew about the furniture now, and a load off my mind that should have been, except that Charles's eye had already found the bottle in Beatrix's hand and lit up.

"Any good?" he said.

Beatrix handed it to him. Just like that — no more thought to it than passing the salt down a table.

"Beatrix —" It came out of me high and scandalised. "Charles! You can't, you're sixteen —"

He had the cap off and a long swig down him before I'd finished. He came up off it with a sigh got up entirely for my benefit, every inch of it theatre. "Mm. Lovely." Then, to me, with a tilt of the bottle that was nothing but dare: "I don't reckon Earth law travels, somehow. Have a look about you."

I opened my mouth and got nothing out of it.

"Nor the Word of Wisdom, come to that," he added, and drank again, watching me over the bottle to see it land — and there was the real dare, not the bottle in his hand but the easy way he'd set down a thing the whole of our raising was built on, like shrugging off a coat in a warm room.

And it landed — not the law, not the rules, but the ease of him. You don't take up a bottle like that the first time. You don't put on the sigh, the timing, the whole little performance of the man who knows his way round it, without having had the practice somewhere I'd not been standing. The cold of that went through me ahead of the words. "You've done this before."

He shrugged, grinning, not minding in the least that I'd got there. "What if I have."

"When?" They came up faster than I could put them in order. "Where? Do Mum and Dad —"

"Don't be thick." He rolled his eyes as though I were the one being absurd. "Course they don't."

Beatrix, watching the two of us go at it like it was the best turn she'd had all week, fished out another of the little sweet bottles and held it my way. "You may as well," she said, and there was no push in it — only permission, set down where I could pick it up or leave it.

I looked at Charles, settled onto a chair now like the whole afternoon had been laid on for his comfort, at home in it in a way I couldn't find the door to. Sixteen, and easier in his own skin breaking every commandment we owned than I had ever been keeping them. That, more than any of the drink, was the thing I couldn't get past.

I took the bottle. She had the cap off it through my cuff again before I could fumble the job myself. "What if we're caught," I said, and heard the whisper come into my own voice and hated it a little.

"We won't be." Charles was certain as scripture. "Dad's wedded to that barbecue and Mum's got Karen pinned by the ear. Nobody's coming out this far."

It didn't settle me, not really. But the worst of it, I told myself, was already spent: you only cross a line the once for the first time, and I'd spent mine on a mouthful of wine I hadn't even liked. The warmth off that first lot had got down into my arms now, and the fizz of the wanting was louder in me than the fret, and I lifted the bottle and drank. Cool, sweet, easy — easier than the wine by a country mile, and easier than it had any right to be. I felt it the whole length of me.

"This one's better," I said. "You want some?" — out of my mouth before I'd resolved to offer it, which ought to have told me plenty about where the afternoon was already headed.

Beatrix raised her wine and declined with it. "I'll keep to the Chardonnay."

"Nasty stuff," said Charles, who an hour since couldn't have told Chardonnay from creek water.

I couldn't tell you, after, how long we stood out there. That's the first lesson the stuff teaches, and it teaches it for nothing: it lifts the clock clean off the wall. We talked. Beatrix had a stock of stories about her Portal runs that grew taller as the bottles grew emptier, and Charles supplied the running commentary he supplies whether the world has asked for it or not, and I — by my own account, which I would not trust under oath — was funnier that afternoon than I have been before or since. The bottles went round. The laughing came easier each time, and then it stopped being laughing and turned into a thing with no floor under it, the sort of giggling that feeds on itself, that you cannot think your way back out of because thinking is the very thing that's gone.

There's a particular indignity in that for a man who prides himself on noticing. I can stand in a paddock and tell you which bird made a call I only caught the back half of. I could not, that afternoon, have told you what Charles and I had been laughing at four seconds after we'd begun — and we kept at it regardless, the two of us folded over like boys at the back of a class, past all help.

"You're both three sheets to the wind," Beatrix said, propped against the table and watching us like a kettle she'd not yet decided to take off the heat. Charles and I caught each other's eye and went off into it again, helpless, and she turned her own eyes up to the heavens. "Right. Lightweights. Let's get this lot to camp before one of you starts to sing."

The threat of the singing didn't land — it made us worse — but we got ourselves more or less upright and did as we were bid. Charles and I went weaving off after the empty trolleys by the Portal and brought them back with the wheels arguing every yard, and under Beatrix's eye we split the load. Two trolleys went to the bottles, packed standing and wadded so they'd not chime against one another the length of the dunes. She did that part herself, quick and sure, sliding each one home into its place; she'd plainly done it before, and more than once.

"Steady," she said, when Charles near had a trolley over. "It's not a race."

"Could've fooled me," said Charles, unrepentant.

The third trolley took everything else we'd turned up down there worth the carting — a string of little solar lamps, a portable speaker, a stack of mismatched tablecloths, a box of paper decorations gone soft at the folds from sitting somewhere damp a long while. By the time it was all distributed the loads sat square and the trolleys would push, which out of that chaos felt like an achievement worth a good deal more than it was.

I kept catching myself watching Charles as we worked. Calm as you like. Not a flicker in him of the thing sitting in my own chest — the plain certainty that we'd done a thing that counted, that had been written down somewhere it couldn't be unwritten. Mum and Dad were the least of it. There was an account kept higher than them, and I'd been raised dead sure it was kept on me whether a soul was watching or not. Charles carried none of that. Half of me wanted to know how a person set it down. The other half was afraid the answer was simpler than I'd like — that out here, a world away from the chapel and the family table and everyone who'd ever expected better of us, you just quietly stopped believing the account was being kept at all.

"Mum'll have us," I said, mostly to myself, getting a shoulder in behind the first trolley.

"Only if she finds out." Charles got a giggle out on the end of it that rather undid the swagger.

"The pair of you," Beatrix said, shaking her head, and put her own trolley moving.

So I leaned into the weight and pushed, and the wheels bit and rolled, and I went up over the dunes behind the two of them with a trolley of contraband and a head come loose from its moorings and a grin I couldn't have got off my face with a chisel — on towards the smoke of Dad's barbecue, and Mum, and a commandment I'd kept clean for twenty-one years and broken in an afternoon without ever quite deciding to. I'd worry about the whole of it later. That, it turns out, is the other thing the stuff does.