Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  That would have been the cruellest irony of all.

  *

  The priest sprinkled a handful of token soil on to the coffin lid. The grave gaped. A mouth in the ground not saying anything. Soon the sexton would arrive. Stop it up with spadeloads of earth. Stop it up for ever. Eternal silence.

  George wondered.

  His grandfather and his father were buried here. Now his son. In a way. He had a sudden urge to laugh, to screech with laughter, to guffaw. He coughed instead.

  He glanced round. So few mourners. A dozen, if that. And half of them policemen. Things were definitely back to normal. Even now he was being watched. Perhaps he would always be. He caught Dinwoodie’s eye and felt the tug of the man’s curiosity. He would like to have let Dinwoodie into the secret (imagine his face!) but Dinwoodie had a mouth on him, everyone knew that. If it wasn’t his escape plans, it was his revolutionary party. No, he would never be able to tell Dinwoodie. Or anyone else, for that matter. He turned back in time to see the priest close his prayer-book. The priest’s sacred words were already evaporating in the heat.

  The service over, there was a general adjusting of collars and veils, a general shuffling and clearing of throats. As George steered Alice away from the grave, Peach loomed, a mass of blue curves, vacuum-packed into his dress uniform.

  ‘Please accept my condolences,’ he said, ‘my sincere condolences,’ and rested a heavy hand on George’s shoulder.

  The resonance of this gesture was not lost on George. So devious this Peach. Even now his mind would be on the move, bristling with suspicions as an army bristles with spears.

  ‘Thank you,’ George said. The briefness grief allows you.

  But Peach was unwilling to let go just yet. ‘We did everything we could,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you know.’

  ‘Oh, we know that, Chief Inspector. We know that.’ George considered the sky, its empty unblemished blue, Peach’s face a pale blur in the foreground. And he smiled. ‘If you could’ve found him, you would’ve done. I can only thank you for all you did on our behalf.’ Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, but in a kind of trance. He had climbed, it seemed, into thin exhilarating air.

  Peach shielded his eyes and fell back on convention. ‘Not at all, Mr Highness,’ he said, and pleasantly enough, ‘not at all.’ Tugging at the front of his tunic he turned away to rejoin his colleagues.

  Relief drifted upwards through George’s body, the faintest of breezes, cooling him, refreshing him, but not visibly disturbing his outer surfaces. He couldn’t allow relief to register. He would always be careful.

  He turned to Alice, took her arm.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘shall we?’ Secretly rejoicing that his plan, against all odds, had worked.

  The Building of Many Colours

  The sun falling across the tables of the Delphi Café that afternoon was pure and white, as dazzling as a vision. The proprietor leaned against the back wall, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was leafing through a paper. A fly described an unearned halo in the air above his head. It was a Sunday.

  His only customer was an old woman dressed in a crumpled mackintosh. Her mane of grey hair, so long that it tickled the small of her back when she unpinned it, wound in a chaotic bun beneath her transparent plastic headscarf. A bag, also plastic, nestled against her left foot. Her wrinkled fingers held a cup of tea as settings hold precious stones. Her name was Madame Zola and she had printed cards to prove it. MADAME ZOLA, the cards said. FAMOUS CLAIRVOYANT AND PSYCHIC CONSULTANT. APPOINTMENTS ONLY. Never mind that the cards were twenty years old. She could still touch somebody and feel sadness or ambition or fear, the tremors of a life as it ran along its own unique track towards an unknown destination. Sometimes, too, she got flashes. She would never forget the night when she felt the death of Christos, the man she worshipped, her religion.

  Rain on the windows and she had trickled fingers down his face, his neck, his arm, and she had felt death like a fine powder on his skin, she had felt his life speeding towards some collision, and she had drawn back, biting her wrist, it seemed so strange, this strong Greek, he looked more like a wrestler than a pianist, and he had stared at her across the black curls on his chest, his eyes had reeled her in, fish-hook eyes, and he had said What is it? and she had pretended to be thinking of her sister, the one who had just lost her baby, and he had believed her because she was a woman and women are sentimental, and he had pulled her towards him, one of his piano hands playing in her hair.

  How she wished she hadn’t touched him that night – but how could she not touch him?

  In any case, he had believed her lie and one year later, in the same room, he had died. His head resting in her hands, his hands still for ever. Fifteen years ago now, but she still returned once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes with flowers and nowhere to leave them, because she thought of Kennington as his cemetery and the building where he had died as his mausoleum, and when she stood in front of the building she could still hear the music pouring from his fingers, running up her spine and into her hair, every note a shiver, and when darkness fell she would turn away and travel home, this frost around her heart, an old woman on the bus with flowers.

  Yes, she could predict the future. Her husband’s death was proof of that. She could also make a cup of tea last a very long time. The proprietor had already sent one or two unpleasant glances in her direction. She had ignored him, of course. And even as she sat at her table in the shadows, her various powers combined to produce a vision of the café in ruins. There was no malice in this. Visions came unsolicited; they appeared out of thin air, as poems do. It was unmistakably the Delphi Café, though. She recognised the strawberry formica and the concrete stump where the pillar had been. And there, perched high on the rubble and miraculously intact, stood her cup of tea, filled to the brim with twigs, cobwebs, the bones of small animals, wood-splinters, fragments of plaster and brick, the remnants of a nest, and an unidentifiable grey dust (had bombs fallen?). With fingers that were nimble for their age, she unearthed about 0.02 cl. of petrified tea, scarcely more than a stain really, but proof none the less that she could make a cup of tea last almost indefinitely (whether the proprietor liked it or not), prolonging it into a future which, it had to be admitted, she had herself predicted, but which all the same seemed real enough. For one nasty moment she took this vision as a warning – the destruction of the café might occur this afternoon, her life was in danger – but when she searched the wreckage she could find no trace of her body. She could only assume that she had already left the café and would die (had died?) peacefully somewhere else.

  Some minutes later she passed a hand across her forehead. Another vision intruded. Time had wound back into the present. She saw a man standing beside a phone-box somewhere in the immediate vicinity. A tall dark man. She recognised the phone-box, but she didn’t recognise the man.

  A tall dark stranger?

  Madame Zola frowned. All her basic instincts told her this was nonsense. Worse than that – a cliché. She adjusted her plastic headscarf, a nervous fluttering of her left hand, then peered down into her cup as if to extract some guidance or advice from the few tea-leaves floating on the surface. They told her nothing. She glanced up at the proprietor. His paper closed then opened again with a loud rustle of its intricately marked wings. She shuddered at the vision of a giant butterfly alighting on his face.

  Tall dark stranger indeed.

  When you worked on such a vast scale, when your materials were the past, the present and the future, you often fell victim to vivid but random images, maverick phenomena. Pieces of fantasy, dream, or memory would break loose, float free, generate their own electricity, their own atmosphere, as stars do. Madame Zola had a word for this kind of thing when it happened. She called it interference. This tall dark stranger, she decided, lips twisting as if she had just bitten into a lemon, almost certainly fell into that category. Lifting her cup, she sipped at her cold tea. She was getting old. Her gift was breaking up. She
felt herself crossing the fine line between clairvoyance and hallucination.

  All the same, as the minutes passed, she was unable to dismiss an obscure feeling of excitement, not unlike moths brushing against her stomach walls. Interference or not, she was becoming increasingly convinced of two things: one, that the tall dark stranger was going to walk into the café, and two, that she would be able to make her cup of tea last until he did.

  *

  Madame Zola needn’t have doubted herself. A tall dark stranger was indeed standing beside a phone-box in the immediate vicinity. His name was Moses Highness.

  Moses seemed to be in some kind of dilemma. He opened the phonebox door, closed it, then opened it again. It looked as if he was fighting the pull of a magnetic field. In the end he capitulated. Opened the door, edged in sideways and did what he always did: thumbed through the directory until he reached the letter H.

  ‘Now then,’ he muttered, his right eye twitching. He began to run his finger down the thin columns of names –

  Heart

  Heaven

  Hemlock

  Henna

  Henry V

  Hercules

  Herod

  Hey

  Hey Gary

  Hey Raymond

  Hi-Tension Tattooing

  Hidalgo

  Hien Chul Oh A

  Higgins Prof

  Highgate Literary Scientific Institution

  Highjack Video

  Highmore – only to sigh as he witnessed that nimble, almost imperceptible, but oh so familiar leap to –

  Higho Belinda

  Hikmet

  Himmel

  Ho

  Hogbin –

  Hopeless. It was always the same. The same disappointment. The crucial name missing, that gap invisible to eyes other than his own. For that was what he was looking for when he succumbed to the lure of the phone-box: another Highness. Not necessarily his parents, not even a relative. Just another person with the same name. Just one person, that was all he asked. He had checked the London directories a thousand times, and whenever he travelled to other towns he checked theirs too, but so far he had drawn a blank. Literally, a blank.

  He must have been about eight the first time. Still living at the orphanage, anyway. They used to go for walks with Mrs Hood every afternoon – outings, she called them – always the same walk, long too, real drudgery, until one day he noticed something different. A phone-box standing near the entrance to a wood. So red against the dusty summer green of the hedgerow. And those directories, fat and pink, lolling like dogs’ tongues in the heat. He had dropped out of the crocodile and slipped inside.

  He was always losing things, Moses. That afternoon, it was his sense of time. Those phone-books, the names. They revealed new worlds, they cast spells, they mesmerised. They were open sesame and abracadabra and look into my eyes. And that gap where his own name ought to have been but wasn’t. Not so much a gap, really, as an absence, an invisibility, a having-gone. As if he didn’t belong at all, not in this world. As if he only existed in another dimension, between the names. Everything swam away from him with great gaping strokes. A black wake in his vision. The oily swell of waves. He supposed he must almost have fainted. He surfaced with the smell of hot dust and stale breath and dried urine in his nostrils, and black fingers from the print of those magic pages. When he arrived back at the orphanage, Mrs Hood summoned him to her clinical white office. She examined his hands and asked him what on earth he had been up to. ‘Reading the phone-books,’ he said. Her plump glossy face (which ought to have looked kind, but didn’t) darkened. She told him he was insolent, and sent him to bed without any tea. He had associated looking for his name with hunger ever since.

  Sixteen years later he still found phone-boxes irresistible. They stood like sirens on street-corners, their doors inched open for him, their glass panes winked and beckoned. And, after all, phone-books were constantly updated so there was always an outside chance. He had heard that people in America had strange names and one day, when he was rich, he planned to tour the country state by state, directory by directory, until he found another Highness, a Highness he would probably be related to in some fantastic circuitous manner, and he, Moses, sole English bearer of the name, would visit this Highness and they would drink to their common burden and talk late into the night, exchanging tall stories, stories that arose from having a name as unusual as theirs. (God knows, he had enough of those. When he was fifteen he had tried to change his name. The town hall clerk, a man with hands like tarantulas, had actually laughed at him; one of the tarantulas had crawled across the man’s lips, but too late to frighten the laughter away. Moses had called him several names – they weren’t in the phone-book either – and stalked out.) It was a dream, of course, an American dream, but one that Moses cherished and meant to translate into reality. In the meantime the search continued on this side of the Atlantic. He no longer had the slightest desire to change his name. Some things you inherited, even as an orphan.

  Besides, he thought as he stood in the phone-box, what would he have called himself instead? He could have called himself Moses Pole, after his foster-parents, but that would only have opened another bag of jokes. It could have been Moses anything. Or anything anything. It was that arbitrary. He closed his eyes, thumbed blind through the directory and jabbed with his finger. He opened his eyes and glanced down at the page. Fluck, Brian. Jesus. He let the directory swing back into place and left the phone-box smiling. He suddenly felt very hungry.

  *

  Madame Zola’s eyes had blurred from too much staring. The frosted-glass door and the smeared windows of the café swam beyond their contours, mingling lazily like Martini in gin, until a sudden injection of movement and colour, a flurry of blues and blacks, made her jump. She blinked her eyes back into focus just in time to recognise the tall dark stranger she had never seen before. He was bigger than she had been led by her vision to expect – an enormous assembly of legs and arms held together by a torn leather jacket and a pair of oily worn jeans. He positively dwarfed the café interior. She wondered how he had fitted into that picture in her head. He was the one, though. No doubt about that. She took a sip of tea that was, for her, almost profligate.

  Moses paid for a cup of coffee and a ham roll and carried them to the back of the café. He placed his camera on the table (exploring London and taking photographs was something he often did on Sundays) and, after a series of improvised contortions, managed to sit down. It was one of those places where they screw everything to the floor. The tables, the chairs, the waste-bins, even, in this case, the hat-stand. Nothing moves. Sometimes you wonder whether the people who work there have been screwed to the floor as well. And they always screw everything just that little bit too close together. Places like the Delphi Café reinforced his feeling that the world had been designed for other people: phone-boxes were too narrow, baths were too short, chandeliers were too low, and tables and chairs were too close together. It was a world of barriers and partitions. It seemed to divide into areas of confinement that caused him discomfort and, on occasion, pain. It pinched like a shoe that didn’t quite fit. How he longed sometimes to sweep the whole cautious miserly clutter aside. To run barefoot, as it were. Being so tall, of course, he felt it more acutely than most. Moving the tip of your finger across his forehead was like reading a braille history of his life. Bumps and swellings everywhere. It wasn’t that he was accident-prone; it was just that he stuck out like a sore thumb which, because it stuck out, became still sorer. It had taken him until now – twenty-four years old and 6’ 6” – to learn the words duck and stoop, to become accustomed to his size in relation to his surroundings, to begin to make the necessary compensations. Hopefully that was it, at least as far as vertical growth was concerned, and from now on, year by year, millionth of an inch by millionth of an inch, he would shrink, as his foster-father (once 6’1”, now 5’11”) had done.

  His thoughts were interrupted at this point by the pressur
e of a hand on his arm. Looking round, he saw an old woman sitting at the next table. Worn face. Sombre eyes. On the breadline, he thought. There were a million like her.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said.

  He studied her. ‘I don’t remember you.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ She looked away from him with a smile that was almost coy. ‘How could you?’ Then, though her head remained in profile, her eyes slid sideways until they rested on him again. ‘My name is Madame Zola.’

  ‘And mine’s Moses.’

  ‘An unusual name,’ Madame Zola observed. ‘A name with a destiny. You see this cup of tea?’

  Moses nodded, smiling.

  ‘I made this cup of tea last until you came.’

  ‘And now,’ she put her cup down, and leaned towards him with the air of a conspirator, ‘there is something I must show you.’

  ‘Show me? What?’

  Madame Zola waved his questions away like flies. They were tiresome questions. He hadn’t understood.

  ‘I have to show you,’ she said, ‘not speak about it. I cannot speak about it. Come. It’s not far.’

  Abandoning her cup of tea with a wistful smile – it was still more than two-thirds full; she could have waited another two days for him – she rose to her feet.

  ‘Yes,’ Moses was saying, ‘but why me?’

  ‘Because you,’ and her smile became indulgent, ‘you came through the door.’

  He followed her across the café.

  ‘Who knows,’ she joked, as they stepped out into the September sunlight, ‘maybe it’s your future I’ll show you.’

  She was taking him to the building, the building where she had lived with Christos, the building where Christos had died. In those days it had been as white as the keys on a piano and she had told Christos that and he had said That would be strange music, meaning music played on a piano with no black keys. Since then the building had changed colour many times. It had been grey, cream, green and brown. Now it was pink. So many disguises. To forget the past and be young always. Like a soul passing through its different reincarnations. Some buildings had souls, she decided, and she had told Christos that too. He had laughed and she had seen the secret part of his beard that grew, black and soft, on the underside of his chin. Soul, he had scoffed. You have a head full of wool and no knitting needles. But she knew, you see. She knew the building would go on changing colour until it had been through every colour of the rainbow. Only then would it be allowed to die, to rest. She had seen visions of its destruction, but she had never been able to place them in time. It hadn’t surprised her to receive a vision of the building again that afternoon – she often saw it; it contained the ashes of her happiest years – but it was curious how it had merged with the vision of the tall dark stranger, Moses, who now walked beside her. She didn’t understand precisely in what way the two were connected, only that some connection must exist. She felt impelled to bring them together.