Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  Peach hit him hard in the solar plexus. It was a precision punch. It came out of nowhere. It even surprised Peach. He hadn’t hit anybody for five years. The West Indian went down gasping.

  Peach looked round for a taxi. There weren’t any. He swore viciously. He only had a few seconds before the West Indian was up again and pulling a knife on him or something. He hastened off down the road. When he was fifty yards away he turned and saw the West Indian climbing to his feet. Peach began to run. In his youth he had been an exceptional dancer. He and Hilda had won the New Egypt Dancing Trophy six years in a row. The rumba, the polka, the foxtrot – they had mastered them all. And even now, at the age of seventy-two, he could still show a remarkable lightness of foot.

  As he rounded the curve in the road he heard uncanny jangling music. Not one music, but many, all mixed up, mingling. The lights of the fun-fair came into view.

  The fun-fair. Crowds. Safety in numbers.

  He crossed the main road and plunged into the park.

  Saturday night. It was packed. Children brandished candy-floss and balloons. Strings of naked light-bulbs looped from tree to tree. The Big Wheel soared overhead. A girl’s shoe landed with a slap at his feet, the strap still fastened. He looked up. Hair flew. Screams. The glint of teeth. He pushed on into the crowd.

  He stopped outside a yellow tent. A crude picture of a dwarf in a jester’s cap and bells had been painted on to the canvas. Bold red letters bellowed: THE WORLD’S SMALLEST MAN! ONLY THREE FEET TALL! THE MOST AMAZING AND UNIQUE EXPERIENCE! BRING A MAGNIFYING GLASS! Somewhere to hide while he got his breath back, collected his thoughts. He paid his 50p and ducked under the canvas flap.

  The world’s smallest man was watching Star Trek on TV. He was sitting in his own specially constructed lounge. All the furniture and fittings had been built to scale: a miniature sofa, a miniature lamp, a miniature clock – even the TV was miniature. Nothing separated him from his visitors – no bars, no sheets of toughened glass – and yet he didn’t seem to be aware of them. He sat in his miniature armchair with his legs crossed, watched his programme on his miniature TV, and drank from a miniature tea-cup which he replaced, gently and precisely, on its miniature saucer after each mouthful.

  For a moment Peach lost touch with his surroundings. Staring down at this little man (he really was very small), he felt neither shock nor pity, only a kind of recognition. The world’s smallest man must, from time to time, have thought about escape. Perhaps he had even succeeded in escaping. But then, Peach’s fantasy ran on, he found himself in a world in which he had no place. A world that overlooked him, trampled him. A world that couldn’t help mistreating him because it was so big and he was so small. So he returned to his yellow tent and his miniature lounge. It wasn’t exactly private, but if he concentrated he could imagine that he was alone. He could train himself to ignore those prying eyes, those personal remarks. It was a life.

  Peach checked his watch. 8.24. If he wasn’t in a taxi in twenty minutes he’d be done for. He used a buxom middle-aged couple to cover his exit from the tent and darted into the shadows beside the rifle-range. He saw the West Indian standing on the steps of the merry-go-round, white tie loosened, hands on hips, eyes scanning faces. He shrank against the damp green canvas. The whang! of pellets hitting metal ducks resounded in his ears. Sweat registered on his body as a series of cold patches.

  He peered out again, watched the West Indian pass his fingertips almost absent-mindedly across his stomach. He smiled from his hiding-place. It had been a textbook punch. Nine inches. Pure Joe Louis. And fast, so fast the West Indian hadn’t even seen it coming. Not bad for an old man.

  He began to work his way round the back of the rifle-range towards the road. As if on a parallel track, the West Indian also moved north. The next time Peach looked for him, he saw him leaning against a yellow fence, his scowling face switched on and off by sparks from the dodgems. A second man stood next to him. This second man wore a parka adorned with various military insignia. He must have been seven feet tall. His face a wasteland and cold, so cold, despite the light bleeding from a string of red bulbs above his head. Peach shivered.

  8.47.

  Only fifty yards now separated him from the metal fence. Beyond the fence, the road. He waited for the two men to turn away, then he lowered his head and ran. The music, the screaming, the gunfire, dwindled. He heard only the rasp of his own breathing as he struggled through the clutter of machinery and cables. Trees added to the confusion. Once he gashed his shin on the jagged head of a tent-peg, but he didn’t falter. He scaled the fence, cleared the pavement, teetered on the kerb. A truck lurched forwards with a vicious hiss as its air-brakes eased. He saw a yellow light and waved frantically. He didn’t dare look round.

  The taxi curved towards him through the traffic. He scrambled in and slammed the door. ‘Victoria,’ he gasped. ‘Quick.’

  The driver accelerated away. ‘In a hurry, are we?’

  8.58.

  The taxi turned north at the traffic lights, and Peach glanced behind him for the first time. No sign of the giant or the West Indian. He leaned back against the seat. His leg hurt. He could feel the blood trickling down into his sock.

  Orange lights splashed over his face. ‘Never again,’ he murmured. ‘Never again.’

  He wound the window down.

  Air.

  Every time the taxi stopped at a set of traffic lights, the driver pulled out a harmonica and began to play tunes that Peach remembered from the thirties and forties. Peach was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of being somewhere strange, somewhere foreign yet magical, somewhere utterly incongruous. In his exhaustion he had become a tourist.

  The driver caught his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t mind, do you, guy?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Peach said. ‘It’s delightful. Very soothing.’

  ‘Soothing?’ The driver squinted over his shoulder. ‘First time anyone’s ever called it that.’

  They both laughed.

  The taxi rattled up on to the dreary skeleton of Vauxhall Bridge. It was only then that Peach realised he had left his case in that café on Kennington Road.

  *

  9.09.

  Too late to turn round and go back. Too late, too dangerous. He took a swift inventory of the contents. Pyjamas, washing-bag, A–Z, a Thermos flask, one stale ham sandwich. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. And, more to the point, nothing that betrayed his identity. After all, it could easily fall into the wrong hands (the West Indian’s, for instance). Thank God he had transferred his diary to his jacket pocket.

  The taxi pulled up in front of Victoria Station at 9.21. Peach handed the driver a handsome tip.

  ‘That’s for getting me here on time,’ he said, ‘and for the music.’ And for saving my life, he added silently.

  ‘Cheers, guv.’ The driver leaned across and looked up at Peach. Light skated off the thick lenses of his glasses. His teeth angled back into his mouth like a shark’s. ‘You ought to slow down a bit, man your age. You’ll kill yourself. Take my word for it.’

  Peach promised to take things easier in the future. It was a promise he intended to keep.

  He caught the train with two minutes to spare.

  He shared the carriage with a soldier, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, smoking. Just the two of them. Saturday night, Peach remembered. Not many people left the city on Saturday night.

  The train shifted tracks on its way out of the station. A sound like knives being ground. Once over the bridge it gathered speed, shedding the lights of the city the way a meteor sheds sparks. The soldier slept, using his kit-bag as a pillow.

  At Haywards Heath Peach climbed out. He had to wait twenty-five minutes on the draughty platform.

  He sat on a bench and gazed at the initials, the messages, the obscenities, that had been carved into the thick green paint.

  He stared into the darkness where the silver rails met. Sometimes the coloured lights of the fun-fair whirled through his mind like bright c
ars in a nightmare.

  The local train stopped at every station on the line. This time he was alone in the carriage.

  At 11.22 he handed his ticket to a yawning guard and walked down a long flight of wooden steps to the car-park. A breeze lifted and dropped the leaves of a tree, and he thought of the girl with the blonde hair. His bicycle lay where he had left it. He hauled it back up the mud bank, a twig twanging in the spokes. He switched on the front and rear lights, swung himself on to the saddle, and rode away.

  Trees built a dark cathedral over the road. The moon slid out from behind a cloud and the gaps between branches turned into windows. Hedges rustled like a priest’s vestments. Birds mumbled in the undergrowth. The air was cool, peaceful, sharp with sap. Peach pedalled slowly, his left leg aching. It was almost as if the day had never happened. He was conscious of moving from a garish dream into calm familiar reality.

  He approached the village from the south-west. He caught a glimpse of the lights of Bunt across the fields to the right. He passed the phone-box the brigadier had used in 1945 after Tommy Dane’s bomb blew up. Shortly after crossing the boundary into New Egypt he was blinded by the beam of a torch.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Chief Inspector,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I didn’t realise it was you.’

  When his eyes readjusted Peach recognised PC Wilmott and, behind her, helmet askew, the excitable Marlpit.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, dismounting, ‘not at all. Very glad to see you operating with such efficiency at this time of night.’

  Wilmott, a modest woman, ducked her head. Marlpit sucked in a string of saliva.

  Peach smiled down. ‘Anything to report?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ Wilmott tilted the shallow dish of her face so that it filled with moonlight. ‘A very quiet night.’

  Peach inhaled a deep lungful of village air. ‘A glorious night too, if I may say so.’

  The two constables murmured their agreement.

  ‘Well,’ and Peach climbed astride his bicycle, ‘I should be off home. Mrs Peach will be getting worried, no doubt.’ He smiled again. ‘Good night to you both.’

  ‘Good night,’ the constables chorused.

  Peach had hoped to slip back into the village unseen, but now he thought about it he realised it really didn’t matter. As Chief Inspector he was above the law, beyond suspicion. He explained his movements to no one. Like God he moved in mysterious ways. There were any number of reasons why he might have been riding a bicycle along the boundary at midnight. He might have been putting in a surprise appearance, as generals do, to boost morale. He might have been testing the alertness of his night patrols. He might simply have been taking the air. Rather pleased with his improvisations, he rode on into New Egypt. He forked right at the village green and in less than five minutes he was opening the front door of the old vicarage.

  ‘Hilda, I’m home.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Hilda?’

  He walked into the lounge and found his wife asleep in front of a flickering television. He rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m back.’

  Hilda’s eyelids slid upwards as if she had only pretended to be dozing. ‘I was worried about you,’ she said.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But your trousers – ’

  He glanced down. His trouser-leg had torn just below the knee. Blood had soaked through. ‘Oh, yes. I fell off my bicycle. Stupid of me.’ He looked appropriately sheepish.

  ‘Oh, John. But how did everything go?’

  ‘Very well. Very well indeed, actually. I’m feeling rather tired, though.’

  ‘Poor dear. I don’t know why you take it into your head to do these things. It’s quite unnecessary, I’m sure. And you know it only exhausts you.’ In humouring her husband without ever quite understanding him, in her light-hearted approach to his incomprehensibility, in her ignorance, Hilda sometimes touched on the truth.

  He smiled down at her. He wished he could describe his adventures to her – the cafés and hotels, the trains, the famous buildings. He wished he could tell her about Madame Zola, the world’s smallest man, the Asian boy, the blonde girl (on second thoughts, no, not the blonde girl), Terence the landlord, the black nightclub-owner and his seven-foot sidekick. But these were stories he could share with no one. Not even his wife.

  ‘You’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’m going to have a hot bath and go straight to bed.’

  He kissed the top of her head where the grey curls were beginning to wear thin, then limped across the room, pausing by the door to say, ‘It’s nice to be home, dear.’

  Injury Time

  The shot orange of the street-lamps bled through the fog, stained the rain on the pavement, died in the white neon arms that reached out from the nightclub as Moses walked up, but the size of the man blocking the open doorway was no trick of the light. The man had rolled the sleeves of his white shirt back to his elbows, and skulls and anacondas tangled on his forearms. Moses had never seen such big tattoos, mainly because he had never seen such big arms. And the face. Its swollen pallor stopped him cold. The man had drinker’s eyelids, puffy and hard, as if pumped full of silicon; they reduced the eyes beneath to mean glittery slits. His hair, scraped back from his forehead, slithered down over his collar in dark greasy coils. His sideburns bristled like wire wool. A giant gold hoop earring about three inches in diameter swung from his left ear. It was his one visible affectation. Moses thought it very unlikely that anyone had ever teased him about his earring. He knew from his own experience that big people sometimes get picked on by smaller people who want to prove something, but big was too small a word for this man, and nobody in their right mind would have picked on him. He was so big that there wasn’t a word big enough to describe how big he was. So when he told Moses to hold it, Moses held it.

  ‘I’m,’ he gulped, ‘I’m looking for Elliot. I’m a friend of his. I live up there.’

  He pointed to his kitchen window on the fourth floor, but the man just stared at his hand.

  Disconcerting.

  After a long moment, the man’s stare shifted from his hand to his face. So heavy, this stare, that it almost had to be winched. Then the massive head tipped sideways and he bellowed, ‘Mr Frazer?’

  So that was Elliot’s surname. Probably an alias, though, knowing (not knowing) Elliot. Elliot appeared in the doorway. His head barely reached the man’s shoulder.

  ‘Can I see you about something?’ Moses asked.

  ‘It’s all right, Ridley,’ Elliot said. Then, to Moses, ‘I’ve fired Belsen. This is his replacement, Ridley. Ridley, meet Moses.’

  Ridley nodded.

  Moses did likewise, glad to get out of shaking hands. He had already taken a look at Ridley’s hands. They were chipped and grazed and scarred, and every scar told the story of someone else’s pain.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ he whispered, as he climbed the stairs behind Elliot.

  Elliot looked cryptic. ‘We’ve been getting phone-calls. That’s what he’s doing here.’

  ‘A kind of receptionist?’ Moses ventured.

  Elliot didn’t laugh. ‘You could say that.’

  He sat down in his red chair, propped his feet on the desk, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t usually come in on Mondays, but Moses had seen the white Mercedes float into the mist below his window. Signs of stress littered the office: screwed-up paper on the floor, an almost empty bottle of brandy by the phone, a crowd of Dunhill butts wedged upright in the ashtray like people in a Hong Kong swimming-pool.

  ‘What are these phone-calls then?’ Moses asked.

  Elliot flicked ash, ran his tongue along his teeth; for a moment, Moses thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘Bad phone-calls,’ he said eventually. ‘Old ghosts from the past, you know?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ and Elliot allowed himself a wry grin, ‘these ones I believe in.’

  Moses crossed the room and fitted his cig
arette into the ashtray. On his way back to the sofa his foot caught a pool-cue that had been resting against the wall. The cue clattered to the floor.

  A door opened somewhere downstairs.

  ‘Everything all right up there, Mr Frazer?’ The voice was huge and violent and had tattoos all over it.

  Moses stooped, clipped the cue into its wooden wall-rack, and stood back.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Elliot called out. He looked across at Moses and almost grinned for the first time that evening. ‘That’s what he’s doing here,’ he said.

  He stood up, stretched, strolled over to the pool-table. ‘James Ridley. He was a wrestler for a while. Had to stop. Killed someone, apparently.’

  ‘I believe that,’ Moses said.

  ‘They used to call him The Human Mangle.’ Elliot bounced the white ball on his palm, then sent it rolling up the table. ‘He used to sort of tear people apart and scatter the pieces around. That’s what I heard. Fancy a game?’

  Moses began to set the balls up. ‘Could be you’ve got the right man for the job, Elliot.’

  ‘Yeah, could be.’ Elliot emptied the remains of the brandy into two tumblers. ‘You were going to ask me something.’

  Moses broke first and put a stripe down. As he played he told Elliot about Gloria: who she’d worked with, where she’d sung, and so on.

  Elliot interrupted him. ‘I know what’s coming.’

  ‘Well?’ Moses said. ‘Could it be arranged, do you think?’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  When Moses walked downstairs an hour later he heard whistling. Clear repeating notes that seemed to reach from the past and expect no reply. Like a prehistoric bird, perhaps. Something exotic, no longer alive. He passed Ridley on the way out.

  ‘That whistling,’ he said. ‘Did you hear it?’

  Ridley tilted the great rock of his face at Moses. ‘Yeah. It was me.’

  His words weighed more than other people’s. Boulders crashing down a mountain-side. Moses in their path.

  Moses framed a silent oh and hurried away. Ridley could whistle like the ghost of a bird long since extinct and tear people into pieces as if they were paper. Ridley was dangerous. Very dangerous.