Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  Moses’s eyes came to rest on the clothes rail in the corner of the room. Alison usually kept half a dozen dresses there. Now it stood empty, naked and angular, like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal. Relationship extinct.

  Vince moved towards the door.

  ‘That’s everything,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  *

  After the coolness of the interior, the roof was like an oven door thrown open in their faces. Rows of chimney-stacks and steep slopes of grey slate trapped the heat in a flat area about twenty feet square. They sat on the low brick wall that acted as a barrier between the rooftop and a sheer drop to the courtyard sixty feet below. They took off their shirts. The smell of creosote rose into their nostrils. Moses opened the bottle. He poured the wine into two glasses that Vince had stolen from the pub across the road.

  Vince produced a small white packet from the pocket of his waistcoat. One corner of his mouth curved upwards. ‘Want some?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Only sulphate.’

  Moses nodded.

  It was so still up there on the roof that Vince cut the stuff on the wall and not a single particle moved. Saturday afternoon clamour drifted up from the street. It sounded like music played backwards. They sat in the hot sun and waited for the bitterness to hit the back of their throats.

  ‘Alison’s left me for good this time,’ Vince said suddenly, in the tone of voice you might use if you were discussing the weather or the price of cigarettes – disenchanted, but routinely so. It was unlike Vince to volunteer information of this kind, and when he did he usually spat it out, like phlegm, but this was a new Vince, a philosophical Vince.

  Moses answered in a similar tone. ‘I thought so.’

  Vince tensed. ‘How come?’

  ‘Her clothes weren’t there.’

  Vince ground his cigarette out with the heel of his boot. ‘Yeah, she came round the other day to pick up the rest of her things. You know what she said? She looked round the room and said, “I don’t know how I could’ve lived here so long.”’

  Moses pushed a bit of air out of his mouth to show Vince that he too would have been pretty pissed off with a comment like that.

  ‘ So long.’ Vince snorted in contempt. ‘She was only here for two months. Two fucking months.’

  ‘Actually,’ Moses said, ‘I’m surprised it lasted that long.’

  ‘What’re you on about?’

  ‘Her living with you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but what d’you mean surprised?’

  ‘You and her,’ Moses said. ‘You didn’t go together.’

  A jet fighter, miles above, released a single trail of vapour. It was so straight that it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. It seemed to underline his words.

  Vince shifted on the wall, looked over the edge. His eyes moved thoughtfully across the jumble of padlocked sheds below.

  ‘You know what I said?’ he said after a while. ‘I said she’d better make bloody sure she’d got everything she wanted because she wouldn’t want to come back again, not if that was the way she felt, not to this fucking hole.’

  Moses couldn’t help grinning. It was a fucking hole.

  ‘Then she told me not to be so sarcastic.’

  Moses poured them both another tumbler of wine. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can almost hear her saying that.’

  ‘Well,’ Vince said, and reached for his rolling-papers. During the silence that followed, he built one of his specials. B-52s, he called them. Three joints in one. Malawi in the fuselage, Lebanese red in the wings. B-52s weren’t lightly named. They wreaked destruction. Large-scale destruction. They wrapped people round toilet-bowls and made them wish they were dead.

  Vince lit the nose and the two wingtips. He inhaled, bared his teeth, leaned back against the wall. When all three ends were burning fiercely, he passed the lethal plane to Moses with a smile. Vince was happy now. One of his greatest joys in life was making people wish they were dead.

  He got up, paced round the rooftop, his badges glinting in the sun, his bandaged arms held parallel to the ground. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’ll be no more windows broken over Alison, that’s for sure.’

  Moses considered this. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘There’ve got to be better reasons than that.’

  ‘Fuck off and die,’ Vince said.

  Moses left about half an hour later, before it became too late to leave at all. Vince said he was going to carry on. He flipped open the lid on a tin of capsules. ‘Painkillers,’ he grinned. ‘For my arms.’

  Moses lowered himself backwards through the skylight. ‘Any excuse,’ he said.

  *

  Ground level.

  Moses shaded his eyes. There was a big bucket in the sky at the end of the King’s Road. This bucket was overflowing with molten gold light. The light was called sunset, and this is how it worked. The bucket slowly emptied of light. As the bucket emptied, the light slowly darkened – gold to orange, orange to red, red to purple – until, after hours of pouring, only the sediment remained: black light or, in other words, night.

  Moses began to walk east. It was around six. At this point the light was still gold and the supply seemed endless. The people coming towards him had gold faces, gold hands, gold fingers, gold rings. They looked as if they had just stepped off planes from somewhere exotic. He wondered if he looked as if he had just stepped off a plane. He felt as if he was still on one. That old B-52. Where was his car?

  There it was.

  He slid into the front seat, basked for a moment in the aroma of hot leather. Ahhh, Bisto.

  Jesus, he was driving already.

  He plugged a cassette in, top volume. One of Gloria’s. Cuban stuff. What the hell.

  He was heading riverwards. The road seemed calm enough. His Rover floated on a purring cushion of air.

  He watched a supersite poster glide past. It was a picture of a man sitting in a desert. The man had clean-cut features, neat black hair and a firm jaw. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He was smiling. It was nice in the advert.

  Moses smiled back. He knew how the man felt. He was in an advert too.

  *

  Certain items of clothing struck him immediately as being inappropriate for a drinks party in Hampstead. The plus-fours, for example. The kilt. The straitjacket (a twenty-first birthday present from Jackson). He flicked through his wardrobe. He was proud of his wardrobe. As part of a new drive to inject system and discipline into his life, he had spent a whole day alphabetising his clothes. From A for Anorak to Z for Zoot Suit. Shirts were all ranged under S, but they also had a strict internal order of their own: Hawaiian, for instance, came before Psychedelic but after Bowling. Those shirts that had no obvious style or function were classified according to colour: Amber, Beige, Charcoal, Damson, and so on. It was some time before he reached his sharkskin suit, but when he did he realised that he need look no further. That was it. Suit: Sharkskin.

  He had bought it from a charity organisation that operated out of a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate. A woman of about fifty had answered the door. She wore a necklace of wooden beads, a tweed skirt, and a pair of stout brown shoes. She seemed vigorous but absent-minded at the same time.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Oh dear.’ And then, turning back inside, ‘Sorry. Do come in.’

  Moses had fallen in love with the suit at first sight. It had a double-breasted jacket, a pocket that slanted rakishly over the heart, and a grey watered-silk lining with triangular flaps sewn into the armpits to soak up sweat (a task which, thankfully, they had never had to perform). The trousers, high-waisted, roomy, pleated, tapered nicely to a half-inch turnup at the ankle; they were the kind of trousers that Robert Mitchum used to wear in those movies he made in the forties. The colour of the suit? Well, at first glance it looked grey, a sober darkish grey, but when you examined it closely you could see that the cloth was shot through with tiny flecks of blue and orange. In sunlight it would come alive.
Perhaps the best thing about the suit, though, was the label inside. PURE SHARKSKIN, it said, and gave an address in St James’s. Moses didn’t know what sharkskin was, but he certainly liked the sound of it. He tried the suit on behind a purple velvet curtain and it fitted perfectly. It might almost have been tailored to his measurements. A miracle. He marched straight up to the woman at the counter.

  ‘This is a wonderful suit. I’ll take it.’

  ‘How strange that you should choose that one.’ The woman’s eyes settled cautiously on his face. ‘It only came in yesterday.’

  ‘I was lucky then.’

  ‘I shouldn’t really tell you, I suppose, but the man who it belonged to only died last week.’ The beads of her wooden necklace clicked between her fingers. A rosary of sorts.

  He couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t tactless.

  He finally broke the silence with the words, ‘He must have been a big man.’

  ‘Yes. He was. He used to row.’ And the woman stared Moses straight in the eye as if he had accused her of lying.

  ‘You knew him then?’

  ‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sighed. ‘I knew him.’

  ‘Oh,’ Moses said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’ll be four pounds.’ She had already folded the suit and tucked it out of sight in a brown paper bag.

  Afterwards he couldn’t help wondering why she had said Oh dear when she saw him standing in the doorway. Did he resemble the man who had died the week before? Had she loved that man, perhaps? Had she thought of Moses as some kind of ghost? And, if so, had he then upset her further by selecting, as it were, his own sharkskin suit?

  He would never know, of course, but the incident gave him a peculiar feeling: the feeling that all happiness was rooted in grief, the one evolving naturally, organically, from the other, like flowers from earth.

  *

  Shit, seven-thirty already. He should have been in Hampstead by now. Drinking. And he was still in Lambeth. Naked. It was the speed, the dope. They had reversed him into his memory.

  He dressed, checked his face in the mirror, ran some gel through his hair, snatched up keys and cigarettes, and took the stairs, three at a time.

  ‘Hey, Abraham! What’s up?’

  It was Elliot. He was standing on the corner, hands in his pockets. Only his shoulderblades touched the wall. That cool. He was wearing his maroon suit. A white tie glowed softly against the backcloth of a black shirt. He looked beautiful.

  Moses walked over. He forgot the rush he was in. It was good knowing people who smiled when they saw you. It could make you forget anything.

  ‘What’s with the tie, Elliot?’

  Elliot looked down at his tie as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘You like it?’

  ‘Not bad. What’s it made of?’

  ‘Silk, man. Hundred per cent.’

  ‘Really?’

  Elliot held the tie out on the palm of his hand. ‘Feel it.’

  Moses bent over the tie, studied it closely, tested it between two fingers. Silk. You could feel that. He turned it over and held the label up to the light. SILK. 100%. He nodded, looked impressed. ‘That’s a great tie.’

  Elliot tucked the tie back inside his jacket.

  ‘Mine’s terylene,’ Moses said. ‘Hundred per cent.’ He waved his tie in Elliot’s face.

  Elliot looked pained. ‘Terylene’s shit, Moses. If you’re going to live here, you better smarten up.’

  ‘What about this then?’ Moses opened his jacket and tapped the label. ‘Pure sharkskin, this is.’

  ‘Don’t give me no fish talk, Moses.’

  ‘All right,’ and laughing, Moses lunged at Elliot’s jacket. ‘What’s yours? Polyester?’

  ‘If you touch me,’ Elliot said, ‘I might have to call Ridley.’

  Moses backed away with his hands in the air. ‘OK, Elliot. You win.’ He felt for his keys and walked towards his car.

  ‘Hey, Moses, about your friend, the singer,’ Elliot called out. ‘She’s on. Thursday. Happy now?’

  Moses turned round, rushed over to Elliot, and hugged him. Smothered him in grateful sharkskin and terylene. ‘That’s great, Elliot. That’s really great. I’ll tell her tonight.’

  ‘Jesus, Moses,’ Elliot gasped when Moses finally released him, ‘you nearly fucking killed me there.’ He straightened his jacket and tie, hitched his trousers up, patted his hair. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.

  But Moses was already turning the key in his ignition. Two blasts on the horn and he vanished round the corner in a cloud of blue exhaust.

  Nothing special happened on the way to Hampstead. He drove fast and learned quite a lot about Aztec rituals from some programme on Radio 4.

  *

  He turned into a street that ran along the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. Narrow, fastidious, a clutter of expensive parked cars. He noticed blue plaques on the walls of houses, the slanting roof of a conservatory, a cello in an upstairs window. Then the street widened, wound north. Double electric garages now. Serious children with golden hair. The burglar alarms alone looked worth stealing. When he reached the number that Gloria had given him he had to stop the car and double-check the address. It was the right house.

  He didn’t honestly think he’d ever seen anything like it. Sweeping expanses of white façade that looked as cold and slippery as ice-rinks. Sheer stretches of glass (sometimes reflecting his shadowy figure, for he had parked the car and was now walking round the outside). The building seemed to absorb colour from its immediate surroundings – deep blue from the shadows, silver from the moon – and yet a grey day, he imagined, would only serve to heighten its intrinsic whiteness. No garden to speak of. No plants or flower-beds. Only a functional patio and a two-tier lawn. Trees and shrubbery shielded the house on three sides. On the fourth, a view of the heath. The effect was one of spartan luxury, a sort of inverted flamboyance. Gloria’s roots, he thought. And smiled, thinking of his own.

  He circled the house for the second time. The lawn looked so modelled, so planed, that it seemed as if the house had just landed and would shortly be taking off again, leaving no memory or proof of its existence except, perhaps, for a few indentations in the grass that would be gone by morning; it didn’t seem to grow, or even belong there. When he returned to the staircase again – this was semi-circular, and broke up the relentless linear mood of the building – the door opened and a slice of white light fell across the lawn. A woman in a white knee-length dress appeared, her backlit hair a platinum-blonde, her figure youthful. From a distance she looked perfect, alien. This did nothing to rid Moses of his initial impression that the house had just fallen out of the sky. He approached the steps.

  ‘Good evening,’ he called up.

  She must have noticed him already because there was no trace of surprise in her voice. ‘You must be Moses,’ she said.

  ‘And you,’ he said, reaching her and extending a hand, ‘must be Mrs Wood.’

  ‘Heather.’

  Her name was like her voice – springy, fragrant, open-air somehow – and he told her so.

  And Heather laughed, so he laughed too, and they stood there in the doorway still shaking, or rather, by now, merely holding hands.

  ‘Am I late?’ he asked her.

  ‘Late? No. We’ve only just opened the first bottle of champagne. I call that perfect timing.’

  She ushered him into the house ahead of her, but he paused just inside the door, needing a moment or two to take things in. The living-area that spread out below him was thirty or forty feet long and furnished in a style that could, perhaps, have been called cubic chic. Blocks of white fibreglass or plastic, upholstered in white leather, acted as armchairs and sofas. An original Picasso drawing hung in a spotlit alcove. The floor was a stretch of pale natural wood, lacquered like a dance-floor and lavished with a profusion of white scatter-rugs. Six-foot Yucca palms and other, taller exotic plants led his eye towards the ceiling high above, a slanting amalgamation of mirrors, pipes and glass
through which he could see, at certain points, a few rectilinear sections of starless night sky. Almost giddy, he dropped his gaze to the centre of the room. A long low coffee-table (also white, also cubic) dominated; arranged on its perfect surface, two bottles of champagne in a silver ice-bucket, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses (to see people on the other side of the room?), a vase of wild grasses and an Indian conch.

  Moses took a deep breath. ‘Nice,’ he said.

  Heather smiled. ‘Introductions,’ she said and, taking him gently by the arm, guided him down the steps. Her hand was elegant, tanned, and uncluttered by rings, except for the one that bound her, presumably, to Mr Wood.

  Thirty or forty people stood about in different parts of the room. Heather steered Moses from one clique to another, supplying him with names and, where appropriate, pieces of information, gossip or scandal to fix the names in his mind. She was an accomplished hostess, but Moses’s mind, bombarded by an afternoon of Vince, took in less than it might have done.

  He remembered meeting a barrister called John Dream, though, because John Dream looked exactly like Bernard Levin. Heather, laughingly, agreed.

  He remembered ‘Prince’ Hudson Oleander too. ‘Prince’ Hudson Oleander was a tennis pro from Famoso, California. He had a lecherous sunburnt face with cracks in it, like wood. Apparently he had won the title ‘Prince’ at a tournament in Forest Hills on account of his extraordinary graciousness on court. ‘Apparently,’ Heather whispered behind her hand, ‘it’s the only title he’s ever won.’