Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  There were four rooms altogether. He decided to call them bedroom, lounge, kitchen, bathroom, though there were very few clues as to which was which. No cooker in the kitchen, for instance. No bed in the bedroom. The rooms led one into the next through doors that opened unwillingly, dragging on their hinges, as if children had been swinging on the handles. The walls and ceilings had been painted different shades of grey. The plaster had come loose in some places, leaving patches that looked like scabs. In the bedroom, there was a long brown stain where the rain had leaked through.

  Of all the rooms Moses’s favourite was the one he had walked into with Elliot on the morning of the five hundred pigeons. It had a black fireplace surrounded with dark-blue tiles, and a trio of arched windows that reminded Moses of railway stations. They looked out over a clutter of rooftops, treetops, chimney-pots and TV aerials out of which, toffee-coloured in this landscape of red and grey, and surprisingly close, rose the intricate spires and crenellations of the Houses of Parliament. Away to the west a pair of pale-green gasholders stood among the rows of terraced houses like giant cans of paint. Modern offices blocked the view eastwards with their coppery glass façades. Even though it faced north, the room felt bright owing to the size and elevation of these three windows. It had possibilities, this room. Definite possibilities.

  The real find, though, was the bath. (Moses loved baths, even though he had to fold himself double to get into one.) Deep-chested, eight feet long, it stood on four flexed metal claws. A lion of a bath, it was. Its pristine antique enamel seemed unmarked but for the faintest of yellow stains running from the overflow down to the plug-hole. Sometime during his second week of work Moses walked into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. A moment’s silence, as if the machinery was gathering itself. Then a clanking, a subterranean clanking deep in the foundations of the building, like a metal bucket hitting the bottom of a dry well, followed by a gurgling that seemed to be ascending, growing louder, that built to a crescendo as the tap coughed a few brown splashes into the bath. Seconds later a powerful flow of water was crashing on to the enamel. Steam lofted into the chill air. Moses began to take off his clothes.

  Through the small window above the taps he could see the planes easing down into Heathrow. They slid silently from left to right, dropped two hundred feet as they hit a swirl in the glass. He lay in the water until it had turned cold for the third time, pleasure written all over his face in invisible ink. In future, when crisis threatened or exhaustion softened his bones, he would retreat to the bathroom. It would be his sanctuary from the world. It had the power to heal, soothe, replenish him. Sometimes he would climb into the empty bath and lie on the cool enamel, fully dressed, with his eyes closed. Other times he would open those fierce taps and run a bath so deep it swamped the floor. But he would always feel better afterwards – calmer, more objective. A sense of proportion would descend, as silently as planes. If he ever left The Bunker, he would have to take the bath with him – somehow.

  On the day of his first bath, the black cat appeared again. He paused on the window-ledge, one paw raised in the air, disappointed, perhaps, by the absence of pigeons. His glowing yellow eyes raked the room and fixed, eventually, on Moses. Such was the hypnotic power of the cat’s gaze that Moses thought, for one terrifying moment, that he might throw himself from the window as the pigeons had done. He concentrated on one simple thought: I am not a pigeon. The black cat eyed him without blinking. He seemed to be listening, taking the information in. When Moses thought the cat had understood, he relaxed.

  ‘Bird,’ he said affectionately.

  He had decided to give the cat two names, one formal, one familiar. His formal name would be Anton, after Anton Mesmer, who believed that any one person can exercise influence over the will of another by virtue of the emanations proceeding from him. Any one person or cat, Moses had decided, after that exhibition of control over the will of five hundred pigeons a week or two back. His nickname, however, would be Bird. Moses had toyed with the name Seagull, but you couldn’t call a cat Seagull, could you? Bird, he felt, was a nice compromise. Bird the cat.

  Bird responded with a cry worthy of his new name. Bird was hungry, perhaps.

  Moses fetched the old green and gold cake-tin he had found under the kitchen sink and covered the bottom with milk. He placed the tin in the middle of the living-room floor. Bird stared at Moses with suspicion as Moses moved back to the kitchen doorway. Then, dropping down to floor-level without a sound as if he weighed nothing, he began to creep towards the tin. Stalking it, as if it might be dangerous. Once there, he squatted over the tin, neck extended, and lapped at the milk, his tongue moving out and back like a tiny pink clockwork toy.

  Halfway through he suddenly stopped. Black chin sprinkled with white drops, he looked at Moses, seemed to be appraising him.

  ‘It’s good milk, Bird,’ Moses whispered. ‘It’s Dino’s milk.’

  Bird dipped his blunt head into the tin again. When he had finished he paused, as if thinking, then turned, sprang back on to the window-ledge and vanished, as before.

  Moses still hadn’t moved. He gazed round the room with its clean floorboards and its grey decaying walls and its open window through which the black cat came and went.

  It was beginning to feel like home.

  *

  As if somebody had splashed petrol around and tossed a lit match, the end of April caught fire. Car tyres crackled on the sticky tarmac of main roads. Clouds rolled along the horizon like smoke. The temperature, unbelievably, touched eighty, HEATWAVE, the papers roared, HEATWAVE.

  Moses hired a transit van and moved out of Eddie’s flat in a single day, sweat tickling his forehead, trickling down his spine. He saw roadworkers with red backs. Girls in bikinis. In April. The world seemed out of kilter – surreal, delirious.

  Elliot watched him unload from the shadow of a wall.

  ‘I would’ve given you a hand,’ he said, ‘but you know how it is.’ He adjusted the lapels of his excuse.

  ‘I know how it is,’ Moses panted, a mattress balanced on his back.

  ‘So what’s it like up there?’

  ‘It’s luxury. It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

  Elliot threw his head back and swallowed hot sky.

  But Moses meant it. Those empty rooms on the fourth floor dwarfed what few belongings he had. He had never had so much space to himself before. The place might have been designed specifically with him in mind, might have been waiting for him to arrive and take possession.

  He drove back to Eddie’s that night to return the keys.

  ‘Finished already?’ Eddie said. ‘I was going to help you.’ He opened the fridge and handed Moses a cold beer.

  ‘Eddie,’ Moses said, ‘the thought never crossed your mind.’

  As he tore the ring-pull off the can, he watched Eddie smiling. The damage Eddie had caused with that smile of his. Moses had long since pushed the statue theory aside, stored it away in the museum section of his mind for re-evaluation at a later date. He had begun to see Eddie’s beauty in wider terms. As a magnetic force. As disruption unleashed on men and women alike. Once, he remembered, Eddie had brought the entire cosmetics department of a famous London store to a standstill simply by smiling as he stepped out of the lift. The air vibrated softly as fifty murmurs of desire coincided. Then fifty tongues emerged to moisten fifty upper lips. One salesgirl let a bottle of perfume slip from her hand. It shattered on the tiles with a crystal sigh and the ground floor of the department store smelt of Opium for several days. In memory of Eddie. Another time Moses and Eddie were walking along a quiet street in Kensington. A red sports saloon, some foreign make, slowed and drew alongside. The woman at the wheel wound the window down. Moses thought she was about to ask for directions. Instead, with her eyes on Eddie, she cried, ‘You’re beautiful.’ The car sped away again, its pert rear-end pointing in the air. ‘What is it about you?’ Moses had asked. Eddie shrugged, smiled. A young man on an old-fashioned bicycle glimpsed the
smile on Eddie’s face and rode straight over a traffic island without even noticing. There ought to be a sign, Moses thought. CAUTION: MAN SMILING.

  *

  That was the really curious thing, Moses thought, as he walked out of The Bunker two days later. Eddie could never be accused of being conceited or narcissistic. He didn’t keep a record of his lovers, as some men did, because he wasn’t trying to prove anything. Girls passed in and out of his life without changing him in the slightest. Their presence was necessary, continuous, and taken for granted – like time itself; Lauren followed Connie as Tuesday followed Monday. Nostalgia had no place in his scheme of things. Nor, it seemed, did expectation. He was like a train with infinite stations on its line but no terminus.

  Moses had reached the door of his new local. A jaded murky place. Crawling with small-time ruffians and drunks. He ordered a pint of draught Guinness, and retired to a deserted corner.

  Yes, it was astonishing how little Eddie held on to, how much he left behind. Sometimes, when Moses couldn’t sleep, he ran through the list of Eddie’s lovers – the ones he knew of, anyway. They were more interesting than sheep, though not so very different, perhaps, not if you saw them from Eddie’s point of view. Did he distinguish between the different girls at all? Did he remember Beryl, the mud wrestler, for instance? Did he. remember Sister Theresa? Did he remember anything?

  The door swung open. Eddie walked in, accompanied by a girl Moses had never seen before. Surprise, surprise. He wondered what number she was. 500? 1,000? He had told Elliot that he had a friend who had slept with two thousand women, but he really didn’t know. This one’s name was Barbara.

  Moses asked her what she did.

  ‘Hostess,’ she said.

  He thought of the aeroplanes gliding past his bathroom window, then of jet-set parties next to swimming-pools, but he couldn’t fit Barbara’s bomber jacket and her disgruntled mouth into either category.

  He must have looked puzzled because Barbara added, ‘In a club.’

  In a club. Moses’s face acquired a look that was both interested and knowledgeable. He had just placed her. She was almost certainly the girl Eddie had referred to in a recent (and uncharacteristically anxious) phone-call. He remembered the conversation.

  ‘Moses?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Eddie here.’

  Moses had waited.

  ‘I was just wondering,’ Eddie had said, ‘whether you felt like coming round tonight?’

  This isn’t like Eddie, Moses had thought. Eddie never asked people round. How could he? He was never round to ask people round. Something must be up.

  ‘You see, there’s this girl I thought you’d like to meet.’

  ‘Who is this girl,’ Moses had sneered, ‘that I’d like to meet?’

  Eddie chuckled. ‘She’s a topless waitress. She’s got tattoos.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Soho.’

  ‘No, the tattoos. Where are the tattoos?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you could find out.’

  So that was it. Another of Eddie’s games.

  As he glanced across at Barbara, he remembered something else that Eddie had said.

  ‘She’s angry about something. I think she’s going to attack me.’

  No sympathy from Moses. And certainly, with that sour twisted mouth, Barbara looked capable of violence.

  ‘So.’ Eddie smiled. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘There’s a party coming up,’ Moses said. ‘Louise told me about it. If you want to bring Barbara along, I’m sure it’d be OK.’

  Eddie made a face behind her back.

  Moses grinned. ‘That’s settled then.’

  Eddie bought Barbara a Bacardi and Coke, then he sloped off to play pool at the back of the pub. She watched him go. There was reproach in the fractional hardening of her face.

  ‘Where do you work?’ Moses asked her.

  ‘A place called Bosom Buddies,’ she said.

  Jesus, Moses thought. If that’s anywhere near as bad as it sounds. (Actually, knowing Eddie, it was probably worse.)

  ‘What do you have to do?’

  Barbara scowled. ‘Talk to strangers. Mostly people I can’t stand.’

  Cheapskate businessmen from out of town, apparently. Sweaty little creeps in crumpled suits. And the bag who ran the place. Lashings of mascara, hands like chicken-feet, tongue like a blunt ladies’ razor. She gloated jealously from a red sofa in the corner. Barbara had seen her twist a girl’s nipple once for upsetting a client. ‘Really nice piece of work, she is.’

  Moses had been trying to imagine Barbara topless and sociable. He’d failed. There was a long silence while they both looked elsewhere. Eddie, it seemed, was having a good run on the table.

  Later she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to talk to people socially any more. It’s too much like work.’

  Moses said he understood that. Her surly mouth and her hands stuck deep in her jacket pockets – she looked cold, but she had already told him that she wasn’t – now made sense to him. He wondered what she was expecting from Eddie, if anything. He knew there was nothing she could do to make her fate any different from Eddie’s last girl – number 999, or whatever number she had been. Especially after that phone-call. Soon she would be just another five words in Moses’s mind as he tried to get to sleep. She would be even less to Eddie. He would be on to number 1,001 by then.

  It was this feeling, the feeling that she was owed something, something she would never get from Eddie, not in a million years, and certainly not in the three days the relationship would last, that made him start talking again when silence would have suited him just as well. He wanted to cut the ropes on her heart so it could float free of Eddie. He wanted to see her face light up. Just once.

  ‘See him over there?’ Moses said to her. ‘The one in the denim jacket?’

  Barbara squinted along his outstretched arm. She might have been aiming a gun. At close range, Moses realised she was ugly. She pulled away and nodded.

  ‘That’s Billy,’ Moses said. ‘He’s a thief.’

  A week ago, he told her, he had dropped into the pub for a quick drink. He noticed Billy standing at the bar with an A–Z, his index-finger tracing a route through the intricate grey tangle of streets, like a kid learning to read. His air of intense concentration roused Moses’s curiosity. He positioned himself at Billy’s elbow.

  ‘What are you up to, Billy?’

  Billy jumped, swung round, flipped the A–Z over, all in a single movement. Wired-up wasn’t the word. He threw a few suspicious glances, left, right, and over his shoulder, then he leaned towards Moses, narrowing the gap between them to about six inches.

  ‘I got a job tonight.’ He stared at the bottles on the back of the bar as he spoke. His voice was so quiet you could have heard the clicking of a combination.

  ‘A job?’ Moses said jovially. ‘That’s really good news, Billy. It’s about time you got a job.’ He slapped Billy on the back, and sent him staggering.

  Billy adjusted his denim jacket and gave Moses a withering look. ‘A job,’ he hissed. ‘You know. A job.’

  ‘All right, Billy, all right. No need to tell the world.’

  Billy was fuming, the air rushing noisily out of his nostrils. He stared into his drink as if he was furious with it.

  ‘And you’re just checking up,’ Moses lowered his voice, ‘to see exactly where this job is. Right?’

  He studied Billy innocently, and with great interest. He had never met a real thief before. He could smell whisky, crumbling garden walls at midnight, cold feet. He wanted to know more.

  But Billy clammed up. He knocked his whisky back and ordered another as if Moses wasn’t there, knocked that back too, and checked his watch. Moses wondered who he had synchronised it with.

  Billy left the pub at ten on the dot. He made so sure nobody saw him leave that everyone saw him leave. Only seconds later Maureen sidled up to Moses with her red furry slippers
and her lopsided grin. She nudged him in the ribs with her skinny elbow.

  ‘Billy’s got a job tonight then.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  ‘How do you know, Maureen?’

  ‘He had his book with him, didn’t he?’ Her eyes wrinkled up with a natural cunning that she had inherited from her uncle who had a legal business in Waterford. ‘His A–Z. It’s the only book he’s ever read.’

  She dived into her pint of cider and surfaced gasping.

  ‘’Course, he doesn’t understand it, does he? That’s why he always screws up. Never make a criminal, that Billy.’

  Maureen had been right.

  The next night Billy had slunk into the pub at around eight, his face pasty and dishevelled, his arms dangling, out of order. He asked for his usual, but without his usual enthusiasm.

  Moses walked up to him and leaned on the bar. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I was rat-arsed.’

  Billy looked at him, then looked back at his drink. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘How did it go?’ Moses was trying to be friendly.

  ‘I’m going to get bloody killed,’ Billy said.

  He’d got lost, he said, and turned up at the wrong house, and his mate’d waited two hours, and in the rain as well, and now his mate was down with pneumonia or something, and he’d rung his mate up to see how he was, and his mate’d said, as soon as he was on his feet again, he was going to tear Billy’s head off.

  ‘How long does pneumonia last?’ Billy had asked Moses.

  ‘Pneumonia?’ Moses had sucked in air. ‘You can die of pneumonia, Billy.’

  Billy had grinned. ‘Fingers crossed, eh Moses?’

  Barbara crushed her cigarette out. She nodded in Billy’s direction. ‘Looks like he got away with it.’ He still had his head on was what she meant.