Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  The animal crouched twenty feet away, its striped sides rigid, its breathing invisible. There are no tigers in the desert, he told himself. But it was there all right. He could hear the rage vibrating in its chest. It trembled for a moment – power that could be held no longer – drew back, sprang. He saw the teeth, yellow, filmed over with saliva, curving down like raised knives –

  Something sharp dug into his naked shoulder, and he cried out.

  ‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, tugging at him.

  He jack-knifed upright. A bright blue light revolved in the room. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was just going to find out.’ Gloria put on one of his shirts and padded to the window.

  Moses leaned on one elbow, still half asleep, bewildered. The dream lingered, mingled with the memory of recent sex. He couldn’t work out how much of the sex he remembered was real and how much dreamt. They had pulled each other’s clothes off. She had pressed her body to his.

  The icy air.

  Her nipples in silhouette, tiny minarets, and his hand moving over the smooth drifted dunes of her ribs, moving across the soft desert of her belly, moving down, down to the oasis. And her hand, too, had moved, following a trail of hair, discovering his scrotum, shrivelled like a dried fig with the cold, and she had bitten into it, and he had gasped a little, less out of pain than surprise, then she had lifted her head, her face invisible, and the whole thing linked with his dream because she had said something about Arabia –

  ‘Moses. Come here. Quick.’

  He eased out of the warm bed and slipped into his coat. Gloria stood at the window. On tiptoe, her heels off the ground. His shirt-tails reaching the backs of her knees. He wanted to say something, but the feeling wouldn’t translate. He went and stood beside her.

  Other people had opened their windows too, sensing tragedy as people do, intrigued because it wasn’t theirs. An ambulance had drawn up below. It stood at a curious angle to the pavement; it looked casual, abandoned. As they watched, two men in dark uniforms wheeled a stretcher out of one of the houses opposite. A black nylon shroud hid the body. It had been stretched so taut that the feet made no hill. The two men slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, closed the doors, and exchanged a few words. All this without glancing up once. The revolving blue light accelerated away down the road, turned left at the junction. The night became orange and grey, ordinary again. People closed their windows, went back to bed. Moses and Gloria stared down into the empty street.

  It was Moses who pulled away first. He walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on. He heard Gloria shut the window.

  ‘I don’t feel like sleeping any more,’ she said from the doorway. ‘If I go to sleep, men in black uniforms might come and take me away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let them,’ he said.

  She was looking at the floor, one hand toying with the shirt’s top button.

  ‘I’m making some coffee,’ he told her.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Lucky this didn’t happen last weekend.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Last weekend I didn’t have a kettle.’

  Gloria laughed softly. Reaching up, she ruffled his hair. Then she left the kitchen, and he heard her moving about in the bedroom. When she returned she was dressed. She bounced her earrings up and down in her hand. They clicked like dice. He wondered if she was going to leave.

  He unscrewed the lid on the coffee-jar, spooned the granules into two matching cups (they were new too), poured the boiling water on to the granules, added milk from a carton, and stirred, enjoying doing the small things slowly.

  Gloria had folded her arms. She began to twist one strand of hair around her finger. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He handed her a cup. ‘There are a lot of old people living round here. They live here all their lives. Die here too. They never move. Some of them haven’t even been north of the river. They’ll look at you when you tell them you have and say something like, Nice up there, is it? Like it’s a foreign country or something. Well, I suppose it is for them.’ He paused. ‘We all have our foreign countries, I suppose.’

  Gloria smiled at him, then, as if that movement of her lips had set her body in motion, as if one was the natural extension of the other, walked towards him, met his mouth with hers.

  *

  It was still dark in the living-room, so Moses switched on the lamp. It shed a soft-edged glow. He arranged a few cushions on the floor. Then he knelt down, lit the gas-heater. It sighed like the inside of a seashell.

  Gloria walked over to the window again. She stared out, thinking, perhaps, of her own body wrapped in that taut cloth, of a blue light revolving in the street for her.

  Without turning round, she said, ‘I wonder if that person was dead.’

  ‘Probably,’ Moses said. ‘They covered the face.’

  He stood behind her. Over her shoulder he saw somebody drive past in a white car.

  ‘I still don’t know you, really, do I?’ she said. She turned to look at him, but couldn’t. He was standing too close.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She let herself lean back against him. ‘Too many blue lights this evening,’ she said. ‘Fucks me up, you see.’

  He smiled at the way she’d said evening. It was almost morning now.

  She pulled away from him again. He felt she had trusted him in that brief moment, had entrusted him with some sacred part of herself, and was now detaching herself, confident about what she had done, knowing she had left something behind. He watched her cross the room. She bent down next to his record collection. She flicked through, found Charlie Parker. She put him on. Humming the first few bars of ‘Cherokee’, she began to rummage in her bag. She held up a tiny white envelope.

  ‘Since we’re going to stay awake,’ she said.

  He smiled.

  She chopped the coke on her own mirror, her legs folded beneath her, her body in a loose Z-shape.

  ‘Two for you, two for me, two for later,’ she said.

  She took her two and handed him the mirror. When he handed it back, she was brushing the tip of her nose with the back of her finger and he noticed a fine groove running between her nostrils and thought of Blue Rooms on south-coast piers (holidays with Uncle Stan and Auntie B) and penny-in-the-slot machines and smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny, Moses?’

  ‘Your nose. It’s like a slot-machine.’

  ‘No more for you then.’ She ran her finger across the dusty glass and licked it.

  The lamplight was diluting fast in the greyness of daybreak. Traffic grew heavier on the main road. The record crackled to a finish.

  Gloria sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s go out somewhere.’

  She kept changing, landing abruptly in a new mood like a needle jumping on a record and skipping whole tracks. She was a mystery-tour of a girl. Constantly wrongfooting him. She’ll go right here, he would think (an instinct, this), she’ll definitely go right. And she’d go left. Wonderful. He delighted in being unable to predict her.

  ‘Let’s go and have breakfast,’ she was saying. ‘In a hotel. In Mayfair.’

  She inhaled the smoke from her latest cigarette impatiently. Her eyes had the glint of solid silver cutlery. ‘What do you think, Moses?’ Standing over him now.

  A smile of collaboration spread across his face like a fresh white tablecloth. He could almost feel the hands of an experienced waitress smoothing it down at the corners.

  Gloria swung down on to his lap. ‘Some of those hotels have dress restrictions so we’d better ring first.’

  ‘OK,’ and Moses was just reaching for the phone when he realised that he didn’t have one. That, in fact, he had never had one. That he ought to have one. (He would have to speak to Elliot.)

  More laughter. Another line each. The first side of Charlie Parker again (for the third time).

  During the next twenty minutes they ruled out The Ritz, The Savoy, and Cla
ridge’s. Gloria said you couldn’t eat breakfast in any of those places without wearing jackets and ties and shit like that. They decided to take a chance on Brown’s in Dover Street.

  Moses switched off the (by now) invisible light, and picked up his car keys. Night was over.

  *

  Moses swept past reception in his leather jacket, his slipstream turning several pages of the hotel register. He parted the glass doors of the breakfast room and manoeuvred his large unshaven face into the head-waiter’s line of vision.

  ‘We’d like a table, please.’

  ‘For two, sir?’

  Moses gave this a moment’s thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘For four.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. If you’ll just follow me.’

  The head-waiter, a narrow man with silver hair, threaded his way neatly to the centre of the room. Moses and Gloria followed. Somewhat less neatly.

  ‘Why four?’ Gloria hissed.

  ‘Because you get a better table that way,’ Moses hissed back.

  It was five to eight. Moses surveyed the room with the superiority of somebody who hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours. There were one or two businessmen dressed like seals in sleek grey suits, their hair slicked back, still damp from the shower. An elderly couple, impeccable in cashmere and tweed, exchanged crisp pieces of information. Their limbs creaked and rustled like newspaper being folded as they shifted in their cane chairs. The light in the room, tinged with pink, felt soothing. The air smelt of coffee and oranges. It could have been summer outside. It almost was.

  ‘Tell you the truth,’ Moses said, after studying the menu for a while, ‘I’m not all that hungry.’

  ‘Neither am I.’ Gloria lit a cigarette. Smoke trickled professionally out of her nose. ‘What about some champagne then? Lanot’s only £17.'

  Moses began to sweat. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  Half a dozen waiters were hovering around their table in maroon and black like clumsy humming-birds. Moses signalled one over. He broke his flight pattern and stooped with a fat white pad. Moses ordered champagne, coffee, orange juice – and two fresh grapefruits.

  ‘Are you OK for money?’ Gloria whispered when he had left.

  Moses smiled. ‘No, not really.’

  ‘What about the £80 you got for sheets?’

  ‘That’s not for breakfast. That’s for this special weekend that I want you to come on.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me anything about it?’

  ‘No. You’ll just have to trust me.’

  Gloria smiled as she crushed out her cigarette. ‘All right. I’ll pay for breakfast, you pay for the weekend. OK?’

  Their waiter arrived with the champagne. As Moses watched him wave his wrists in the air, address himself to the bottle, and, teeth clamped to his bottom lip, ease the cork into his immaculate white cloth, Gloria’s words sank in.

  ‘You mean you’ll come?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘It may not be for a couple of weeks, you know.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll last that long?’

  Moses’s laughter bounced around the room like a number of thrown balls. Knives and forks paused in mid-air. Eyes peered through eyebrows, over papers. Voices went underground, risking only whispers. Then one of the seals coughed, and the breakfast sounds pieced themselves together again into that familiar jigsaw where the sky is always at the top of the picture and children always look happy.

  ‘Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘nobody laughs at breakfast-time.’

  It had the ring of an old Chinese proverb so they raised their glasses and drank to it, discovering, as they did so, that they were laughing again and that the proverb had, buried within it, the power of proving itself wrong – infinitely.

  Something occurred to Moses.

  ‘Did we get any sleep last night?’

  ‘About an hour.’

  ‘What I mean is, did we have sex of any kind?’

  Gloria touched her napkin to her mouth and surveyed him, the relic of a smile preserved on her face. ‘Do you know what I thought when I first saw you?’

  Moses couldn’t guess.

  ‘It was the size of you, you see. Relative to me, I mean.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I thought, If I go to bed with this man, am I going to get crushed?’

  Moses looked shocked. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I did. I was really worried.’

  Moses glanced down at himself, as if assessing his potential as an instrument of violence.

  ‘And?’ he said.

  Gloria smiled. ‘You were very gentle.’

  *

  They had parted at Green Park. Moses’s heart pumping fast. The coke lasting. Or emotion, perhaps. Or some amalgamation of the two.

  ‘I’ve got to get some sleep,’ Gloria said. ‘I’m supposed to be singing tonight.’ She scribbled a few words on the back of a Marlboro packet. ‘That’s in case you want to come.’

  ‘Of course I want to come,’ he shouted after her as she ran away from their last kiss and down the steps into the tube station.

  ‘Why?’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Do you like jazz?’

  ‘No,’ he shouted. Which made her laugh. And her laughter hung on in the musty tunnel long after she had gone.

  ‘Jazz,’ he said to himself as he walked to his car. He thought of people with names like Rubberlegs and Dizzy – funny names, made-up names, names like his. He saw trumpet-players’ cheeks blown up like bubble-gum. He saw sweat scattering like hot rain and the fingers of singers twisting round dented silver microphones and false ceilings built of smoke. He tried to fit Gloria into that.

  Then it was evening and he was driving over Vauxhall Bridge. A dense fierce rain slammed into the left side of the car. On the north bank of the river the lights ran. Flood warnings on the radio. His life had been derailed by the night with Gloria. The whole thing already seemed unreal, as unreal as the tiger dream. He was thankful they had arranged to meet again so soon otherwise he might have begun to doubt whether any of it had actually happened.

  ‘Gloria,’ Moses said out loud.

  He stamped on the accelerator and flicked into overdrive. In less than fifteen minutes he was there. The rain drenched him as he ran across the pavement. Downstairs he had to wait in a queue. Scarlet light discoloured one side of the doorman’s face the way a birthmark does. From inside came the erratic fluttering heartbeat of a double-bass. He was close to her now.

  But the first person he saw in the crowded bar was Eddie.

  ‘You’re late,’ Eddie told him.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see your girlfriend sing.’

  ‘How did you know she was singing?’

  ‘She told me. At the party.’

  Moses shook off his coat. He pulled up a chair and helped himself to some of Eddie’s wine.

  Eddie leaned across the table. ‘Did you have a good night?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Well, anyway, you’re late. She’s been on once already.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you speeding or something?’

  Eddie chuckled.

  ‘So where were you?’ Moses asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Where were you hiding?’

  Eddie leaned back. ‘In the broom cupboard,’ he said. ‘I think it was a broom cupboard. There was a broom in it.’

  Moses had to smile. ‘The broom cupboard. Of course. Next time I’ll look in the broom cupboard. Anyway, listen. I dropped Doreen off for you.’

  ‘Dawn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dawn. Her name was Dawn.’

  ‘I’m surprised you remember.’

  ‘I found a bit of paper in my pocket this morning. It had Dawn written on it and a number. I rang the number to find out who she was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She said she never wanted to see me again.’

  ‘Incredible.’


  Eddie shrugged.

  A hand reached down in front of Moses, snatched up his glass, and replaced it seconds later, empty. Before he had time to say ‘Hello Gloria’ or ‘That’s my wine’ or ‘What did you invite him for?’ she was up on stage introducing herself.

  ‘Good evening, folks,’ she said, hands behind her back. ‘This is Holly again – ’

  Whistles. Applause.

  ‘Second set,’ Eddie said. ‘You see? I told you.’

  But Moses was thinking, Who?

  ‘That’s her stage name,’ Eddie whispered.

  How come he knows so much? Moses wondered.

  ‘ – and this is the band who haven’t got a name yet – ’

  More whistles. More applause.

  Holly? Why Holly?

  ‘Her surname’s Wood,’ Eddie told him. ‘Her real surname, I mean.’

  ‘ – and we’re going to do a few songs for you – not too loud, though, because they’re trying to sleep upstairs – ’

  Jeering.

  ‘ – it’s an old people’s home or something – ’

  Laughter.

  ‘ – anyway, this is the first one – it’s called “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”-’

  Gloria swung away from the microphone and the band launched into the intro. Remote smiles played on their faces. The drummer was using brushes. He looked a bit like Teddy Kennedy. It was a slowed-down slurry version of the song.

  ‘ – oh and thanks for coming – ’ Gloria was looking directly at Moses – ‘don’t think I hadn’t noticed – ’

  Moses settled deeper in his chair, almost blushing. Eddie nudged him in the ribs, half-rose out of his chair, and, looking round as if Moses was somebody famous, clapped loudly.

  For Christ’s sake, Moses thought.

  They had just finished their second bottle of wine, some French stuff, nineteen seventy-something. Now Eddie was ordering champagne. It wasn’t that he was ostentatious. It was just that if money began to pile up in his bank accounts (and he had at least three) he felt as if he had slipped up somewhere, as if he wasn’t really living. So he spent money like water and the water turned into wine and Moses drank it.