Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘So far,’ Moses said.

  He went to buy her another drink. When he returned, Barbara’s face was jutting brutally over the table.

  ‘Where’s Eddie?’ she asked him. She looked ugly for the second time. Uglier than the first time, actually. Violence in the offing.

  Moses glanced round. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s in the toilet or something.’

  ‘The toilet’s right behind you, I would’ve seen him go in,’ Barbara snapped as if he was not only lying, but lying badly.

  Moses crossed the pub to where he had last seen Eddie. Billy was playing now, slamming balls into pockets, dominating the table with a precision and authority he couldn’t seem to bring to anything else he did.

  Even as he asked the question, Moses knew what was coming.

  ‘Seen Eddie?’

  Billy jerked his head in the direction of the side-door without taking his eyes off the table. ‘He left.’

  Moses felt a lot like Billy’s mate as he walked back to where Barbara was waiting. He was beginning to understand why there were so many headless statues in the world.

  She had already guessed the truth, judging by the look on her face: it was stiff and pinched, and suspicion had killed the light in her eyes. She probably thought of him as an accomplice, some kind of decoy, what with all his ridiculous stories. He told her what Billy had said.

  She scratched at a crack in the table-top with a blunt fingernail. ‘Did Eddie say anything about me? You know, earlier on?’

  Yes, he did, Moses thought, remembering a brief exchange with Eddie at the bar. He said, How the fuck’m I going to get rid of Barbara?

  ‘No,’ Moses said. ‘Not that I can remember.’

  Perhaps she believed the lie. She still hadn’t looked up from the table. The silence stretching between them finally came to an end when she snapped her handbag shut. ‘Where can I get a taxi?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  They left the pub and crossed the main road. He flagged down a cab for her. As she climbed in, he said something about seeing her at the party maybe. She didn’t reply. She pulled the door shut, leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes. Her eyelids collected light from the neon fish and chip shop sign across the road, glowed a supernatural white. She looked blind.

  The taxi did a U-turn and headed north.

  Goodbye 1,000, he thought. Or whatever number you are.

  *

  First to see the fourth floor of The Bunker was Jackson.

  ‘I’ll bring something to drink,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ll christen the place.’

  He was full of gestures like that, tense and generous.

  Moses opened all the windows that evening. Lingering indoor smells of bleach and disinfectant blended with exhaust – and curry-fumes and the unlikely scent of blossom from outside. It was May now. Air you could almost wear. A breeze so light that, had it suddenly been made visible, it would, he imagined, have looked like lengths of pale floating muslin. A warm red hem to the buildings. A thin veil of pink beyond, on the horizon.

  Moses sat on the window-ledge and waited for Jackson. He was thinking of nothing, content simply to gaze out over the city as it accelerated towards the hours of darkness. When the bell rang, he didn’t move at first. Then he seemed to unwind, to gather himself. His eyes clicked over into focus like the fruit in a fruit machine. Peering down, he saw Jackson’s tangle of hair four floors below. He kicked off his left shoe, and peeled off his sock. He dropped his door-keys into the sock, rolled it into a tight ball, and threw it out of the window. It bounced off the pavement and into the gutter, missing Jackson by about six feet. Jackson, being Jackson, flinched.

  ‘The keys,’ Moses shouted.

  Jackson cowered below, his face a pale area of nervousness.

  ‘The sock,’ Moses shouted. ‘The keys are in the sock.’

  He sat down again. He had just finished rolling the first christening joint when Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs. Jackson was wearing a beige raincoat with a wide sash belt and floppy lapels. It was an awful raincoat. Not for nothing had Jackson once been known as Columbo.

  ‘You ought to be careful with those keys,’ Jackson said. ‘You could kill somebody with those keys.’

  ‘I need more practice,’ Moses said. ‘You’ll have to come round again.’

  Jackson looked at Moses’s bare left foot, then at the grey sock in his own right hand. He nodded to himself. There was a methodical deductive streak in Jackson. He thought first, asked questions afterwards. Two years back – it must have been during Jackson’s Columbo era – Moses had tried to persuade his friend to become a private detective.

  ‘Well, the rain seems to be holding off,’ Jackson observed, in silhouette against the perfect sunset. He cast around for somewhere to put his tightly furled umbrella.

  ‘Rain? You forecast rain this evening?’

  Jackson nodded, winced. ‘A severe depression moving south-east across the country. Scattered showers followed by outbreaks of heavier rain during the night.’

  Moses suppressed a grin.

  Jackson handed Moses a plastic bag containing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When Moses looked at him, not only with gratitude, but with a degree of curiosity, he explained, ‘I thought it was going to be cold, you see.’

  Moses couldn’t help smiling now. He was glad that Jackson hadn’t taken his advice about becoming a private detective. He now knew that Jackson, after a great deal of intense and detailed investigation, would always come up with the wrong murderer.

  He also suspected that Jackson’s constant reference to the weather was some kind of front. As if Jackson had inside him a device that took what he wanted to say and scrambled it. Moses doubted he would ever crack the code.

  ‘Well,’ and Jackson clapped his hands together in an attempt to convey the enthusiasm he quite genuinely felt, ‘what about a tour?’

  There was nothing much to see beyond the rooms themselves, but the rooms, bare and uncluttered, still seemed miraculous to Moses.

  ‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘that the whole place was three inches deep in pigeon shit.’

  Rapid pecking movements of Jackson’s head as he darted from one room to the next. He said little, but missed nothing. He noticed the skylight in the kitchen and the view of the Houses of Parliament. And when he saw the bath, he emitted a curious whooshing noise that sounded like red-hot metal being dipped in water. Moses took this for approval.

  ‘So,’ Moses said, when they reached the living-room again, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘I think it was time for you to move out of Eddie’s.’ A wily grin from Jackson, who never answered a question directly.

  They cracked open the bottle of bourbon. Moses apologised for the absence of glasses. They drank out of jamjars instead.

  ‘We’re lucky,’ he told Jackson. ‘Bird has to drink out of a cake-tin.’

  He sat down on the sofa and lit one of the joints. Jackson leaned against the windowsill. He was still wearing his galoshes. Things like that made him endearing.

  Later, drunker, Jackson kept staring at Moses as if he suddenly found him quite fascinating. Moses shifted on the sofa. He tried passing the joint to Jackson. Perhaps that was what he wanted. Jackson accepted the joint, but the staring continued.

  Eventually he had to ask, ‘What is it, Jackson?’

  Jackson’s eyes slid sideways towards the door, then back to Moses again. ‘Who was that?’

  Moses looked confused. ‘What?’

  ‘Who was that woman?’

  ‘Woman? What woman?’

  ‘The woman you were talking to.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Jackson? I wasn’t talking to a woman.’

  ‘Yes, you were. I saw you.’

  Moses placed his right cheek in the palm of his hand and went back over the past few minutes with some thoroughness. ‘I don’t remember a woman,’ he said finally.

  ‘Didn’t you see her?’

  Moses shook hi
s head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘How can you talk to somebody you can’t see?’ Jackson asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know I was talking to anybody.’

  ‘She was sitting right next to you.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yes. There.’ And Jackson pointed at the sofa.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There. On the sofa. Next to you.’

  Moses turned and studied the place where the woman he was supposed to have been talking to was supposed to have been sitting.

  ‘What did she look like?’ he asked.

  ‘She was wearing a raincoat. A black raincoat. With a belt.’

  Moses narrowed his eyes at Jackson. Whisky. A few joints. A devious intelligence. He wasn’t convinced.

  ‘It’s true.’ Jackson held his hands out in front of him as if he had an orange in each one. ‘It’s absolutely true.’

  Moses examined his friend closely. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘what were we talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. I was going to ask you when she left.’

  ‘We must,’ Moses said, ‘have been talking very softly.’

  ‘You were. You were sort of – whispering to each other.’ Jackson gave the word a salacious twist.

  ‘And she’s left now, you say?’ Moses asked, glancing again at the empty space beside him.

  Jackson nodded. ‘A couple of minutes ago.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Moses sat quietly on the sofa absorbing this strange information.

  Then he thought of something.

  He reached down with his right hand and touched the cushion next to him. And the funny thing was, it felt warm.

  *

  The following morning Moses went to see Elliot. Elliot was on the phone, so Moses waited in the doorway. He noticed how brooding, how oppressive, the office looked in the daytime. All those sombre reds and greys. They soaked up light, gave nothing back. At night Elliot’s desk withdrew into the shadows, but now it showed – a drab industrial plastic construction, its sterility broken only by a pair of soiled telephones and an overflowing Senior Service ashtray. Only the pool-table exploited the natural light, turning a green that was almost fluorescent as the sun played on its surface. The office had been designed with the small hours in mind: drawn curtains, low lighting, smoke.

  Five minutes had gone by. Moses crossed the room and sat down on the radiator. He could see Elliot in profile now. It was a very one-sided phone-call. Elliot was staring out of the window almost as if he was just staring out of the window. The telephone seemed incidental. He had hardly said a word.

  Finally he said OK twice and slammed down the receiver. His sigh carried his chest forward a few inches and back again. A well-built man, Elliot, under all those playboy suits and ties.

  ‘Christ,’ Elliot muttered. He pushed the phone to the far edge of the desk. As far away as possible.

  ‘Hello,’ Moses said.

  ‘As if I haven’t got enough trouble already. Now you. What’s up, Moses?’

  Moses hesitated. ‘I’ve got a ghost.’

  ‘A ghost?’

  ‘Yeah, a ghost. It’s upstairs. In my living-room. Do you know anything about it?’

  Elliot looked at Moses to see if he was being serious. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about a ghost. You going to tell me about it?’ He lit a cigarette, then tossed the packet across the room to Moses. He leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. Christ, the entertainment business.

  Moses took a cigarette, lit it, and threw the packet back. ‘It’s a she, actually,’ he began carefully. ‘Apparently she wears a black raincoat.’

  ‘Apparently? What do you mean, apparently?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t actually see her. This friend of mine, he – ’

  ‘You didn’t actually see her?’

  ‘No, you see I was – ’

  ‘Hold on. Let me get this straight, right? You’re worried about a ghost you can’t see?’

  ‘Yes, but you – ’

  ‘What, you mean if you could see it, it wouldn’t worry you?’

  ‘It’s not that, Elliot. It’s just – ’

  But Elliot wasn’t listening any more. He was bent double in his executive chair, clutching his stomach. He was killing himself.

  ‘Well,’ Moses said, easing off the radiator and starting for the door, ‘I just thought I’d tell you – ’

  ‘Hey, Moses.’

  Moses turned.

  Elliot was prancing up and down the office with his jacket draped over his head. ‘Woooooo,’ he was going. ‘Woooooooooooooo.’

  Oh well, Moses thought. At least I cheer the bastard up.

  *

  One further development regarding the invisible ghost.

  The next weekend, at around four in the afternoon, the bell rang on the fourth floor of The Bunker. Moses peered out of the window. It was Jackson. Moses was surprised to see him again so soon. Visits from Jackson were usually few and far between.

  He leaned out of the window. ‘Keys,’ he shouted.

  This time he aimed at least twenty feet to the left of Jackson’s anxious upturned face. The sock bounced off a car roof and into the road. Jackson scuttled after it. Moses went out to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He returned in time to see Jackson walk in, close the door behind him, and produce a bradawl from his raincoat pocket (the weather was still fine). He watched as Jackson began to bore a hole in the door about two-thirds of the way up. Jackson made small grunting sounds as his elbow gouged the air. It was a hard wood.

  Once he had bored the hole according to his own internal specifications, he plunged a hand into his raincoat pocket and pulled out a hook shaped like a gold question-mark. He screwed it into the hole with a series of deft energetic twists of his wrist, the tip of his tongue appearing from time to time in the corner of his mouth – a sign of intense concentration. Then he stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  Moses handed Jackson a cup of tea, as you would any workman.

  ‘That’s very nice,’ he said. ‘But what’s it for?’

  ‘That,’ Jackson explained, ‘is for her to hang her coat on.’

  Another time, perhaps a month later, Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs with an antique upholstered chair. He placed it carefully just inside the door.

  ‘In case she’s tired after all those stairs,’ he said.

  A very thoughtful person, Jackson.

  *

  The week of the ghost was also the week of Moses’s twenty-fifth birthday. On the Thursday night Moses booked a table for four in a restaurant in Soho. He wanted to celebrate the occasion quietly, he said, with a few close friends.

  Poor Chinese restaurant.

  The celebration reached its climax shortly before midnight with the waiters’ hands fluttering in delicate protest, like birds attempting flight, only to weaken, fall back, return to the relative safety of their white tunics, as Moses, who weighed more than three of them put together and had woken that morning to a bottle of champagne, a Thai-stick and two lines of coke (his birthday presents), began to spin the revolving table like some kind of giant roulette wheel.

  ‘Place your bets,’ he cried.

  ‘What are we betting on?’ asked Jackson, very dry. ‘How long we can survive before they throw us out?’

  Bowls of rice and seaweed, plates of mauled prawn toast, bottles of soy sauce and dishes loaded with the stripped skeletons of Peking ducks took to the air, swift and confident, as if they were trying to teach the waiters’ hands how to fly. This demonstration was not appreciated. The manager came weaving through the barrage to insist, politely but firmly, that Mr Highness and his party leave the restaurant.

  Out on the street the recriminations began.

  ‘And on my birthday, too,’ Moses said.

  ‘It was because it was your birthday that it happened,’ Jackson pointed out.

  �
�It was your fault, Vince,’ Moses said.

  ‘My fault?’ Vince seemed genuinely taken aback.

  ‘We would never’ve been thrown out of that place,’ Moses said, ‘if you hadn’t worn that waistcoat of yours.’

  ‘It is a very unpleasant waistcoat,’ Eddie agreed.

  ‘Look, fuck off you two. If you,’ and Vince shoved Moses into a lamp-post, ‘hadn’t covered me in rice – ’

  Moses couldn’t help giggling as he remembered how Vince had lurched to his feet halfway through the meal only to lose his balance and topple across a neighbouring table, his waistcoat luridly stuffed with Special Fried Rice and soup that must have been either Chicken with Sweetcorn or Hot and Sour.

  ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ignoring Vince, ‘Jackson didn’t exactly set a very good example, did he?’

  Drunk for the first time since the night he confessed his asexuality, Jackson had suddenly, and without warning, plummeted headfirst into a dish of Squid in Black Bean Sauce.

  ‘I was embarrassed by your behaviour,’ Jackson explained. ‘I wanted to hide.’ Like a monkey with fleas, he was still picking the black beans out of his hair.

  ‘Maybe you’ll actually have to wash it now,’ Vince sneered.

  ‘I don’t see how you can talk, Vincent.’ Jackson was primness itself. ‘That waistcoat of yours must’ve put down roots by now.’

  ‘All your fault, Vincent.’ Moses was returning to his theme.

  Vince hated being called Vincent. His mother called him Vincent. He told them all to get fucked, and stalked ahead.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jackson smiled, ‘what about Eddie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘That was really disgusting.’

  During one of the lulls in the meal Eddie had turned away from the table as if to sneeze. A jet of pink vomit had flown out of his perfectly sculptured mouth and crashlanded in the grove of yucca plants behind him. Afterwards, Moses seemed to remember, Eddie had gone on eating, as if nothing had happened. A bit of a Roman, Eddie.

  ‘Why was it pink?’ Eddie wondered.

  Moses couldn’t think.

  Vince, curious, rejoined them. ‘Why was what pink?’

  ‘My sick,’ Eddie said. ‘Why was it pink? Did I eat anything pink?’

  Vince offered an obscene suggestion as to what it might have been that Eddie had eaten.