Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  At that instant, Gloria appeared in the doorway, clasping her overnight bag in front of her with both hands.

  ‘And this,’ Moses said, unable to restrain himself, ‘is Mrs Highness.’

  ‘One moment.’ The receptionist stepped backwards through a red curtain into some inner sanctum.

  ‘He’s extraordinary,’ Moses whispered to Gloria.

  Gloria clutched his arm.

  Her grip tightened as the red curtain parted again. During his absence the receptionist had managed to regain absolute control of his head. Whether he had some surgical machine or device behind the curtain or whether he had simply applied a soothing lotion they would never know, but, whatever the remedy, his head was as firm as yours or mine as he asked Moses to sign the register.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ Moses said, ‘but have you been working here a long time?’

  ‘Yes,’ the receptionist said, staring at Moses with his lidless eyes. ‘Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘By a long time, I mean thirty years. Have you been here that long?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been here about thirty years.’

  Moses leaned closer. ‘I’m only asking because I think my parents stayed here, probably during the fifties, and I was wondering if, by any chance, you remembered them.’

  The receptionist tilted his head sideways (Careful! Moses thought) and read the name in the register. ‘No, I don’t think so. I would have remembered a name like that.’ And his upper lip lifted, raising the lid on a keyboard of discoloured teeth. It was a ghastly smile.

  Moses drew back, disappointed. ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘I suppose it was worth a try.’

  The receptionist laid the key of room number 5 beside the register. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, sir. How long will you be staying?’

  ‘We’re just here for the weekend.’

  ‘It’s not often we have young people here,’ and the receptionist’s head began to wobble again. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.’

  Moses thanked him.

  ‘Second on the left at the top of the stairs,’ the receptionist said, and disappeared behind his red curtain again.

  *

  Gloria climbed the stairs ahead of Moses and waited for him at the top. There was a surprising delicacy, even tenderness, about the way he handled the older of the two suitcases. It looked like a child in his grasp, she thought. A child clutching its father’s hand.

  ‘That man gives me the creeps,’ she said as Moses reached her.

  He chuckled. ‘What did his head remind you of?’

  Gloria shuddered. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know what I thought?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Taj Mahal.’

  Gloria had to laugh. His face sometimes.

  Moses unlocked the door of their room. It seemed cold inside because everything was green. Counterpane, curtains, carpet, wallpaper, lampshades, telephone. Everything. A few ungainly pieces of furniture stood against the walls. A tallboy. A wardrobe. A sideboard, its marble top veined like Gorgonzola. The bathroom had a chessboard tile floor. A jungle of silver pipes and fittings grew out of the back of the lavatory and up the wall. The taps on the basin said HOT and COLD. The wooden handle on the end of the lavatory chain was the shape of a slim pear. Gloria knocked it with her hand so it swung. Then she leaned over the bath and twisted the hot tap. Scalding water gushed.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she called out, ‘then you can tell me all about these mysterious parents of yours.’

  Moses smiled at her through the gathering steam, then withdrew into the room. He walked to the window. A lawn lay below, spread like a cloth of alternating pale-green and dark-green stripes, and stapled to the ground by croquet-hoops. Beyond the lawn, maybe a hundred yards away, the tarnished metal of a lake, fenced on its far side by a line of poplars that looked mauve, French somehow, as mist stole in behind them to remove the view.

  The first weekend in June. Somewhere north of Leicester. He wondered why he had come all this way. Those questions he had put to Taj Mahal, had he really expected any answers, any joy? It had been too much to hope for. Still, he clung to the fantasy that his parents might once have stayed at the hotel, might have been happy there. Yes, maybe there was sufficient justification in that. Some kind of logic, at least. His homage to that secret world between the names. A message spirited across the years. Standing in their footprints.

  He turned away from the window. He took a book out of his suitcase, tried to read, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He could hear Gloria swirling water around. He walked towards the bathroom door.

  ‘Hey, Gloria,’ he called out. ‘Any room for me in there?’

  She laughed. ‘You must be joking.’

  *

  After their bath they climbed into bed, their bodies warm and damp between the crisp sheets. They made love quietly, as if someone was listening. When they finally looked away from one another, dusk had inked the windows in, like the o’s in school textbooks. They lay there, not talking.

  Gloria felt relaxed, drowsy. Moses had rolled over on his side, his back to her, his breathing soft and regular. She closed her eyes and her mind drifted loose, drawing pictures, spinning riddles. It was one of those dreams you seem to have under control, seem to, but the dream is strong, it strains at the leash, it knows pretty much where it wants to go; you think you’re leading it and it ends up taking you for a walk. It began with a conscious thought or a spoken phrase, she couldn’t tell which. It sounded in her head so clearly that she wasn’t certain whether she had said it out loud or to herself: I know what’s going to happen –

  She was standing by the door facing into the room, her arms behind her back, the palms of her hands against the panelled wood as if she was holding it shut. The tall window in front of her was blue-black, a syringe glutted with blood.

  What a mess it would make, she was thinking, if I opened it.

  And, glancing down at her cotton summer frock, her bare legs, her little girl’s white socks, she shuddered; the feeling was like opening the fridge on a hot day and standing in front of it with nothing on.

  Moses was in the room too, she noticed. Over by the bed. There was a suitcase on the floor beside him, and he hunched over it, fumbling with the locks. He turned and looked in her direction several times, but didn’t seem to see her. He acted as if she wasn’t there at all. This was such a strong impression that she thought, Maybe I’m not.

  At last he got it open. The inside, she saw, was lined with blue velvet and moulded into holes and slots of differing shapes and sizes, each one snugly filled by a piece of polished black metal.

  Moses sat down on the bed facing her and slowly but professionally assembled the gun. This took time. It was a complicated thing. The only sounds in the room for a while were the clicks and squeaks of its interlocking sections and appendages.

  She was going to ask Moses a question, but thought better of it. He seemed so removed. An automaton.

  Finally he stood up and walked to the window. He opened it. All the blood, she noticed, stayed outside. She looked over his shoulder as he squatted down and, resting the gun on the windowsill, squinted along its gleaming barrel.

  She saw herself walking across the tennis court in the garden below, trailing a black headscarf along the grass. (She recognised the scarf; it was the silk one, her favourite.) She was wearing a white summery dress fastened at the waist by a wide mauve ribbon. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking.

  The barrel of the gun tracked across until her head appeared in the centre of that tiny stylised spider’s web. She chose that moment to glance up at the window, her eyes and mouth no more than dark smudges in the flat paleness of her face. Moses’s finger tightened, squeezed the trigger. A thin jet of water spurted from the barrel.

  She was standing by the door as before.

  ‘Look at me,’ she was saying. ‘I’m soaked.’

  She glanced down at
herself. Her summer dress, her legs, her socks, were drenched. With blood, she noticed, quite casually.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Moses said, sitting by the window, cradling the gun in his elbow. ‘It was only a joke.’

  He smiled. It was such a distant smile. It was like watching someone smiling on Mars.

  Gloria woke convinced that she had been awake the whole time, that it had been a daydream. It was only when she looked at her watch that she realised that she had been asleep for over an hour. Moses was still fast asleep, facing her now, one arm reaching out towards her from under his cheek. She wondered if he realised he was asleep. She thought it was funny that she hadn’t been lying in bed with him in the dream because the room she had dreamt about was the room they were in now. The dream had used such recent, present things. She shivered, remembering the innocent way she had looked at the blood on her dress and her legs; she hadn’t really known what it was. She hadn’t been frightened, though, she remembered, and was surprised by that. And that smile on his face at the end, a slight variation on his usual smile, but not so different, really, now she thought about it. She looked down at him. The smile was on his face now, she saw. She shook her head. He was the only man she had ever known who actually slept with a smile on his face.

  Without waking him, she got out of bed, walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. She looked at the mirror rather than at herself. Tiny brown marks round the edge like liver spots. Old mirror. She picked up a glass from the shelf, filled it with cold water, and gulped it down. Then she ran another bath, colder this time. Another bath? she thought. What’s got into me?

  She had already decided not to tell Moses about her dream, but one of the first things he said when he shuffled into the bathroom with one red cheek from where it had pressed against his arm was, ‘Do you want to know what I’ve got in my suitcase?’

  Gloria studied her feet. They didn’t reach the end of the bath. Nowhere near.

  ‘Have you been reading my thoughts?’ she said.

  ‘I never read people’s thoughts. They’re private.’ He grinned, sat down on the toilet seat. ‘You know, I’ve got the feeling you’re going to like what I’ve got in that suitcase.’

  So, Gloria thought. Probably not a shotgun kit then.

  Moses tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. ‘Is that your second bath in two hours or did I dream we went to bed together?’

  ‘It wasn’t a dream,’ Gloria said.

  *

  Still drying herself, Gloria watched from the bathroom as Moses knelt down on the carpet and snapped the locks open. He lifted the real cowhide lid to reveal a mass of noisy tissue-paper. As he removed the layers, Gloria padded into the room on her bare feet, one towel twisted into a turban for her hair, another wrapped round her slender body almost twice. She stood behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s a dress,’ was all she could, rather obviously, say.

  ‘Yes, it’s a dress,’ Moses said. ‘I think it must’ve belonged to my mother.’

  Gloria was uncertain how to react. Standing behind him, she could only guess at his face. He had told her nothing about his parents, not a single word, but the act of opening the suitcase seemed to have dimmed the lights in the room, lit candles, started something. The dress rustled like a chasuble as he unfolded it, releasing an incense that was fragile with age and storage. He held it up for her to see.

  The style was early fifties, she guessed. A tight, shaped bodice, a narrow waist with a white plastic belt, and a layered, frothy skirt, just below knee-length, which, if danced in, would whirl out horizontally, spinning and billowing. The colour was a soft damask pink with white polka-dots. A real dancing dress.

  ‘I’m not sure, though,’ Moses said, ‘not really.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Gloria said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s difficult.’

  Gloria moved on to the bed. She undid the turban and began to dry her hair. She watched Moses at the same time.

  ‘I don’t know who my mother is,’ Moses said. ‘Until I saw the photographs, I didn’t even know what she looked like.’

  ‘What photographs, Moses?’

  ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ He laughed to himself. ‘Well, neither do I, really.’

  He laid the dress across the foot of the bed. Then he rummaged in among the tissue-paper and pulled out a photograph album.

  ‘These are the photos,’ he said. Head bowed, the album unopened on his knee, he was wondering where to begin.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone before,’ he said.

  ‘Just start,’ Gloria said. She rearranged the pillows on the bed and leaned back.

  ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I’m an orphan, you see. Parents unknown. I can’t remember them.’

  Gloria nodded.

  ‘The first thing I can remember,’ he went on, ‘is the sound of water. I’m lying on my back and it’s like there’s a roof over my head but there are holes in the roof and the light’s coming through. I remember that so clearly. That darkness with pinpricks of light in it. That and the sound of running water. After that the next thing I remember is the orphanage – ’

  He gave her a picture of his life at Mrs Hood’s establishment. The noise. The smells. The nicknames. He told her how a rumour had spread among the children, a rumour about him having been found by a river. Moses. Found by a river. Very funny. He had been convinced that the whole thing was just another joke about his name – the result, no doubt, of too many hours of Religious Knowledge. He had denied it fiercely. (He had had the only fight of his life about it, with a boy called David. After that, they called him Goliath. He couldn’t win.) Later, though, he felt uneasy. Especially when he put the rumour alongside that primal memory of his. They had the sound of running water in common. Was that merely a coincidence?

  Nobody enlightened him – perhaps nobody could – and he had learned to accept the darkness of not knowing. The mystery surrounding his origins had remained and endured.

  ‘Then, a couple of months ago,’ he said, ‘just before I met you, in fact, it was my twenty-fifth birthday. Uncle Stan and Auntie B – they’re my foster-parents – asked me if I’d like to come up for the weekend. Nothing much was happening in London, so I went. On the Sunday night they brought this suitcase down from their attic. “We’ve been looking after this for years,” they said, “ever since we adopted you, but now you’re twenty-five, it’s legally yours. It’s from your parents – ”’

  ‘God,’ was all Gloria could say.

  ‘You see, apparently, when I was abandoned by my parents, this suitcase was left with me. Mrs Hood stored it away until I was adopted. Then my foster-parents looked after it –

  ‘Anyway, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, imagine. I’d forgotten all about my real parents. I hardly ever thought of them because I’d never known them. I’d learned to live with that. Then suddenly, after all those years, they go and remind me of their existence again.’

  Moses shook his head. He picked up the album of photographs, then put it down again. ‘It’s very strange. I’ve looked at these photos, and I’ve tried to remember being there, I’ve tried to recognise the faces, but it’s like trying to remember places you’ve never been, it’s like trying to recognise complete strangers. It’s ridiculous. There are a few pictures of a baby in there, and I suppose it’s meant to be me, but I don’t recognise that either. Christ, I don’t even recognise myself. But I’m staring so hard, you see, I’m trying so hard to remember that sometimes, just sometimes, I fool myself into thinking that I do remember. It’s crazy, but I can’t tell the difference. I don’t know whether the memories are real or not ‘And what about this dress?’ He reached out and touched the hem. ‘When I first opened the suitcase, I thought I remembered it. It was like a flash. A gut-reaction. Very sudden. I remembered my mother, my real mother, bending over me, wearing that dress. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that all I could really see in my memory was the dress. J
ust the dress bending over me. Nobody inside it.’

  He paused.

  ‘Nobody inside it,’ he repeated softly, almost to himself. ‘So you see, I can’t really remember anything – ’

  Silence had filled the green room with water, slowing every sentence, every movement down. When he turned and looked at Gloria he saw that she had been crying. He moved on to the bed and dried her face with his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to go into all that.’

  She wiped her eyes with her wrists. ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘It’s me who should be crying really.’

  ‘I know.’

  *

  They suddenly noticed that it was getting late and that if they were going to get drunk that evening (something they had promised themselves on the drive up) they would have to hurry. They opened their suitcases, pulled out clothes, began to dress each other. It was like a sex-scene in reverse and Moses kept wondering, as Gloria buttoned his trousers and his shirt, whether the film would start winding forwards again, towards nakedness. It didn’t, though. Passively, he watched his body disappearing. Then Gloria stood in front of the mirror and aimed a hairdryer at her head while Moses dusted every inch of her slight body with special talcum powder, from the pale shell-like gaps between her toes to the Turkish Delight of her nipples. She passed the hairdryer from one hand to the other so he could slip her arms into the sleeves of her white silk blouse. He fastened buttons with huge fumbling fingers. He held a pair of black knickers at floor-level for her to step into, one foot at a time, then drew them past her knees, up her thighs and over her soft and unusually straight pubic hair (which had been aged dramatically by the powder). He zipped up her skirt, chose shoes, clipped on earrings. In ten minutes they appeared in the doorway, scented, presentable, and separating from a kiss (the film still running backwards, it seemed).