Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  Moses dialled the number and waited. Sure enough, three rings and there was the quavery tenacious voice he knew so well.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Moses.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Moses. You know. Six foot six. Size twelve feet. Likes old ladies – ’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not that Jackson.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong Jackson. This is Jackson’s brother. The Jackson you want isn’t here.’

  There was a pause while Moses assimilated this sudden glut of information: one, Jackson had a brother, two, Jackson and Jackson’s brother sounded identical, three, Jackson’s brother also called himself Jackson, and four, Jackson, the Jackson he knew, was out.

  Jackson? Out?

  ‘Where is he?’ Moses asked.

  ‘The Amateur Meteorological Society.’

  Moses smiled. Few things could persuade Jackson to leave his cluttered basement flat. The AMS was one of them. ‘Could you tell him that Moses called?’ he said.

  ‘Moses. OK. Any message?’

  ‘Just tell him that I’ve got some good news.’

  ‘Good news. Right. Goodbye.’

  Very dry brother, Moses thought. Probably a very good meteorologist. Either that or very successful with women. As he pondered the differences between Jackson and Jackson’s brother Jackson, he realised that he still hadn’t actually told anyone.

  *

  Who else was there?

  Vince! What about Vince? Vince would probably tell him to fuck off. Vince was like that. Still.

  He dialled Vince’s number.

  A sullen voice said, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Moses.’

  ‘Fuck off, Moses.’

  You see?

  Moses sighed. ‘What’s wrong with you, Vince?’

  ‘Why should anything be wrong?’

  ‘What’s wrong, Vince?’

  ‘Lots of things. Everything.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Alison’s left.’

  Oh Christ, not again. People were always leaving Vince. Especially Alison was always leaving Vince. Moses didn’t blame her either. If he was going out with Vince, he would leave him too. There was some great disparity between Vince in your memory and Vince in the flesh. Moses was very fond of Vince when he was somewhere else. The imagined Vince was impish, controversial, photogenic; the real Vince was boorish, truculent, morose.

  But, real or imagined, you couldn’t forget him somehow. His blond hair, dark at the roots, stuck up at all angles, unbrushed, unkempt, stiff with gel, lacquer and soap. His mouth turned up at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling, so he gave the impression of being good-humoured when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. And he always wore this black waistcoat, glossy with age and stains, and prolific with insulting badges; it was almost as if these badges had sprouted, like toadstools, from the black soil of his clothes, they were so much a part of him. His trademark, this waistcoat. Vince wouldn’t have been Vince without it.

  He was forever being turned away from places – wine-bars, clubs, restaurants, pubs (he had been banned from his King’s Road local twice), cafés, shops, parties, you name it. If asked, he would recite, and not without a certain pride, a list of all the famous places he had never been allowed into. ‘I’m sorry, you’re drunk,’ doormen would tell Vince as he swayed, leering and malevolent, on the pavement – but they would always be looking at his waistcoat. In the end Moses decided there had to be a connection.

  One night he tried an experiment. They had taken some angel dust at Vince’s squat, and were on their way to a private party at The Embassy Club. In the back of the cab, he turned to Vince. ‘You don’t need to wear that waistcoat tonight,’ he said in a gently persuasive voice. ‘Why not leave it behind for once?’ He should have known better. Gently persuasive voices didn’t work with Vince. Gently persuasive voices made him puke. He glared at Moses. The lights of Chelsea coloured his face green then red. ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ he snarled. ‘My mother?’ This was not a role that Moses was suited to. He dropped the subject and they went back to being friends. Naturally Vince didn’t get into The Embassy.

  That they were friends at all sometimes seemed extraordinary to Moses, not least when he had to scrape the remains of Vince off the floor after a fight or stop Vince jumping out of a tower-block window. Driving Vince to St Stephen’s at four in the morning with a six-inch gash in the back of his head and his blood pumped full of drugs may have made a good story the first time round, but when you had to deal with it on a monthly basis it got pretty fucking tedious. Go and kill yourself somewhere else, you felt like saying. The things he did for Vince. He sometimes hated himself for being so good-natured, and wondered whether in fact he wasn’t Vince’s mother after all.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why’s Alison left you this time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Vince was talking through a mouthful of clenched teeth. ‘She said something about she couldn’t stand it any more.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘She went home. To her fucking parents.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She was crying.’

  ‘You want me to ring her?’

  Vince didn’t reply. Anger made him autistic.

  ‘I’ll find out how she is and call you back,’ Moses said.

  Vince said something about not caring, then slammed the phone down.

  Moses dialled Alison’s number.

  ‘Hello?’

  Only one word but, like the single toll of a bell, the woman’s voice had resonance, hung on in Moses’s head, bright, droll. Not Alison then. Alison’s mother, maybe. But he had delayed too long, making her suspicious. She probably imagined Vince on the other end.

  ‘Could I speak to Alison, please?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Moses. I’m a friend of Alison’s.’

  ‘Will you wait a moment? I think she’s upstairs.’

  Moses heard footsteps on a tiled floor, the opening and closing of a door, a faint Alison? and, in the distance, the quiet fretting of a string quartet. He had no idea what he was going to say to Alison. He didn’t even know her that well. She had a dry sense of humour and a head of striking, natural red hair. Some total stranger had once come up to her in the self-service restaurant above Habitat and asked her how she got her hair that amazing colour and Alison had said that her parents were responsible for that and the total stranger, gushing now, had said, Wow! Your parents are hairdressers? and Alison had said, No, my parents are my parents, and the total stranger had dried up, backed away, evaporated. The soft Indian-print skirts, the cluster of thin silver bangles on her wrists, the bohemian vagueness acted as elements of Alison’s cover. Underneath, she was pretty tough and sorted-out – almost, at times, Moses felt, predatory. He alternated between liking her a lot and mistrusting her. He couldn’t really understand why she had chosen Vince, but he knew that if one of the two got hurt it wouldn’t be Alison.

  A fumbling sound at the other end and Alison picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ She sounded wary, bruised.

  ‘Alison, it’s me. Moses. I just thought I’d ring you, see how you were.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to Vince, then?’

  Moses said he had.

  ‘How did he sound?’

  ‘Pretty pissed off. What happened?’

  ‘Oh, you know, another argument. He wants me to live with him and I don’t think I’m ready for that. Not at the moment, anyway. I told him that and he went mad and hit me.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Moses muttered.

  ‘Not hard or anything. He was too drunk for that.’ She laughed – a half-laugh; the other half was bitterness. ‘Well, I’m pretty fed up with all that shit. So I left.’

  Moses sighed. ‘Are you all right now?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right. Bit shaky.’ She paused, sniffed. ‘I
don’t know what’s wrong with him. Just because I tell him I don’t want to live with him, he starts thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy going on – ’

  ‘That’s typical Vince,’ Moses said. ‘He likes it better when he’s fighting the whole world.’

  ‘I’m not the world, I’m me,’ Alison said tearfully. ‘Why’s he have to make everything so complicated?’

  Moses didn’t know the answer to that.

  After Alison rang off, thanking him, he tried Vince again. No reply. It was as he had feared. Vince had gone out to wreak terrible vengeance on an innocent city. He would probably end up in hospital again. Moses didn’t want to think about it.

  He sat in Elliot’s chair for a while longer. Too many phone-calls had taken his elation apart piece by piece until nothing recognisable was left. He felt tired as he unlocked the door of his old Rover, slid into the seat and drove home.

  So much for telling everyone the news, he thought.

  *

  ‘Do you like pigeons?’

  Elliot asked the question casually as he walked Moses round to The Bunker’s side entrance.

  Moses scratched his head. What was all this about pigeons? Elliot had called Moses at nine that morning and offered to show him the rooms on the top floor of The Bunker. ‘I’ll be here until twelve,’ Elliot had told him.

  Moses had driven over at eleven, his lungs still misty with smoke from the previous night. Too much whisky with Vince had laced the suspense he might otherwise have felt with irritation.

  They had reached the black door. Wind blew dust and grit into the back of his neck. He folded his arms and drew his shoulders together.

  ‘What do you mean, do I like pigeons?’ he said.

  Elliot didn’t appear to have heard. It was an annoying habit of his.

  Seconds later he said, ‘You’ll see.’ His grin was half grimace as he grappled with a muscular rusty padlock.

  The padlock had resisted his first efforts, but now the key slid in and gripped. It snapped open, almost jumped out of his hands. He pushed at the door. It swung inwards to reveal a pile of crumpled newspapers, a few circulars, and a steep flight of wooden stairs.

  ‘Nobody’s been in here for bloody years,’ he said.

  There was a light-switch on the wall. One of those round protruding light-switches with an inbuilt timing-device. He jabbed it with his thumb. It began to tick quietly like a shy bomb. He set off up the stairs, two at a time. Moses followed.

  Halfway to the top, the light clicked off. Moses heard Elliot mutter Fuck somewhere up ahead. They reached a door.

  ‘You really don’t like pigeons?’ Elliot asked Moses again.

  ‘I hate pigeons,’ Moses said. And said it with feeling, because it was true.

  Elliot’s laugh was soft, so soft that it was hardly louder than a smile. Moses didn’t like the sound of it.

  Elliot put his shoulder to the door. A groaning splintering sound. The wood gave. Light poured into the stairwell.

  At first, Moses thought he was seeing some kind of optical illusion – the result of being in the darkness for too long. But then he realised that what he was seeing was real. He blinked his eyes several times. Yes, it was definitely real. They had walked into a room full of about five hundred pigeons. The pigeons were moving about with extraordinary speed and abandon. It seemed to Moses as if fifty per cent of the air had been siphoned off and replaced with moulting grey feathers. He took a deep breath. It was like breathing pigeon.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  He backed away towards the stairs.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Elliot shouted. He thought the whole thing was a big joke.

  Moses didn’t answer. He was gazing at the floor – or the place where the floor would have been if it hadn’t been inches deep in pigeon shit.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  He had had a dream and his dream, after all these months, had finally come true. But there hadn’t been any pigeons in his dream. No pigeons at all. They had come as something of a shock to him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, for the third time.

  When he returned three days later, the party was still in full swing. He winced in the darkness of the stairwell as he heard the whirring and clattering of five hundred pairs of grey wings, as he thought of the task that lay ahead of him, but at least he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that he was prepared.

  *

  This was how Moses had spent his dole cheque that week:

  1 broom

  1 dustpan and brush

  1 mop

  1 plastic bucket

  1 pair of Torpedo swimming-goggles

  3 scrubbing-brushes

  1 wicker carpet-beater

  20 giant black plastic bin-liners

  1 bottle of non-scratch cream cleanser with ammonia

  1 bottle of scratch cream cleanser with ammonia

  1 bottle of new thicker Domestos

  1 bottle of new stronger Vim

  1 aerosol of new improved instant double-action double-strength easy-to-use 30% more free Blast insect-killer with new perfume in new giant family-size can as seen on TV

  1 aerosol of Supafresh air-freshener with new alpine fragrance

  2 grams of speed

  5 packets of Increda Bubble – the popping bubble-gum (Feel the pop! Chew the soft juicy bubble-gum! Blow the fantastic bubble!)

  1 case of Merrydown Vintage Cider (dry)

  1 cassette of Liszt’s The Dance of Death

  1 Second World War hand-held air-raid siren

  1 shovel

  That, he thought, should just about cover it.

  *

  The pigeons seemed to have some collective premonition of their impending fate. They began to whirl round the room twice as fast, colliding with each other, slamming blindly into walls and windows. Even the more casual of the pigeons left their mantelpieces and sills and mingled in mid-air, exchanging theories about the new situation and discussing possible courses of action.

  Crouching low, with his arms wrapped round his head, Moses crossed the room and opened all three windows. Then, returning to the door, he switched his cassette-recorder on. The first bars of The Dance of Death thundered out at top volume. Moses began to shake the can of insect-killer. He glanced ominously at the pigeons. Some of them seemed to have taken the hint and headed for the open air. The others didn’t seem to understand the significance of the music they were listening to. Moses leaned back against the door and sprayed clouds of new improved Blast into the room. No effect whatsoever. We are not insects, the grey wings seemed to say. We are birds.

  Eyes streaming, Moses tossed the can to one side. He reached for the carpet-beater. It was a sturdy article, a relic from Victorian times when carpets took some beating. It didn’t look as if it was going to stand for any nonsense, especially from a handful of twentieth-century pigeons. Things turned out differently. For ten minutes Moses thrashed and flailed. But the pigeons had never seen a carpet-beater before. They didn’t know what it was. They circled the room, wondering why this large man was attacking the air with an old wooden implement. It was strange behaviour, certainly, but not necessarily threatening. Some of the pigeons who had left even flew back into the room again to find out what was happening.

  Moses was beginning to feel tired and foolish, he was beginning to feel as if he was playing a game of surrealist tennis that would last for ever, he was just reaching for the Second World War air-raid siren when help came from an unexpected quarter in the shape of a cat, a street-cat by the look of it, jet-black, with a blunt nose and fierce yellow eyes. It slid into the room from one of the window-ledges and crouched by the wall, eyes scouring the busy air, its rangy haunches tense and trembling. Moses stopped beating pigeons and stared at the cat. Where had it come from? And what did it have in mind?

  Everything seemed to go quiet as Moses watched the cat begin to move slowly round the edge of the room, its eyes never leaving the pigeons, not for a moment; it seemed to know exactly where the walls
were without looking. Halfway round, it paused, spread itself flat on the floor, hindlegs shuffling, and unleashed a haunting guttural cry that cut through the silence its entrance had created. It made Moses think of a seagull. Yes, now he thought about it, the cat sounded exactly like a seagull. How extraordinary.

  The pigeons, meanwhile, had reacted with consternation and frenzy. They were clambering over one another in a desperate effort to reach the windows. In a matter of seconds they were gone. The cat sat up, lifted its left leg, scratched its ear, then licked its flank. In the light of its recent eerie display of control, this was reassuringly catlike. The washing over, it shrugged its shoulders, turned tail, and left the way it had come, without so much as a backward glance. Moses was impressed.

  During the days that followed, the black cat patrolled the edges of his mind with a casual power, uttering its uncanny seagull cry from time to time as if it could still see the ghost of a pigeon there. The thought of this cat sustained him as he shovelled shit, chiselled and scraped at it, tipped it into buckets and bags, and hauled it down eight flights of stairs and out to the dustbins in the cobbled yard at the back of the club. Sometimes Elliot would be there, lounging against a wall, the spring light picking out the bracelet on his wrist, the mockery in his grin.

  ‘How’s it going up there, Abraham?’ Elliot asked once as Moses passed. He lit a Dunhill. His gold lighter flashed like a piece snapped off the sun.

  Moses looked at him. ‘Was that suit expensive, Elliot?’

  ‘Two hundred.’ Elliot glanced down, brushed at a lapel.

  ‘Well, in that case, it’d be a shame to get shit all over it, wouldn’t it?’ Moses said, gesturing with his bucket.

  After that Elliot often backed away in genuine alarm whenever Moses trudged past.

  *

  That April Moses worked harder than he had ever worked for money. Every day for three weeks he undid the padlock on the black door and climbed the eight flights of stairs and, gradually, the shit cleared. Areas of clean floorboards opened up before him like a whole new life. The sight of all this unfurnished space ignited him all over again, and his face would glow through a spattering of dust and filth. Hands blistered, dirt embedded in every crevice of his skin, he returned to Eddie’s flat each night with a larger vision of his future.