Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘You’re beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’

  The ugly god bowed low and told her his name.

  ‘Come to my chamber tonight,’ the queen commanded him, ‘and we shall be lovers.’ And with a rustle of silk and gossamer she was gone.

  The ugly god was immediately mobbed by a host of jealous suitors.

  ‘What’s your secret?’ one of them hissed. He wore the same lipstick as usual. Made from the juice of crushed rose petals. Very dreary.

  The ugly god was still dazed, as much by the queen’s beauty as by her invitation. ‘A special powder,’ he said.

  ‘What powder?’ hissed another. He had dyed his hair with a solution distilled from the bark of silver birches. Old hat.

  The ugly god realised that he had already said too much. ‘I cannot say,’ he said. And smiled in a most infuriating way.

  He spent an exquisite night with the queen, but by the next morning the powder of the wings of the moth had rubbed off and he was ugly again.

  ‘Get out of my sight!’ the queen cried when she awoke. ‘God, I must’ve been drunk last night!’

  The ugly god was chased out of the palace in disgrace. On the street he met two of his friends. ‘Hello, ugly,’ they said. They were full of gossip about the mysterious stranger who had attended the ball and spent the night with the queen. ‘Weren’t you there?’ they said. ‘Didn’t you see him?’ But the ugly god was too sad to reply. He had lost the queen’s love and he didn’t know how to win it back.

  When he reached home he sat down at his dressing-table. He had no powder left. He had used it all the previous night. That was the trouble. The powder of the wings of moths was a very rare substance.

  And then he had a brainwave. He put on his divine robes, stood at the open window and, drawing himself up to his full height, raised his right hand. ‘I hereby decree that from now on,’ he said, ‘moths will only live for one day.’

  Back inside his room he could scarcely contain his delight. He jumped up and down and shook his fists in a very ungodlike manner. If moths died often enough then he would never run out of their magical powder. So he would always be beautiful. And the queen would love him for all eternity.

  He returned to the palace wearing some of his new make-up. The queen embraced him. ‘Oh, how beautiful you are! How could I have sent you away?’ she cried. ‘What a terrible hangover I must’ve had! You must come and live with me for ever! I command it!’

  And so the ugly god moved into the palace and married the queen and lived happily ever after. Moths died more often than they used to, of course, but happiness is more important. And besides, nobody ever made the connection.

  Rebecca was smiling. ‘So that’s why moths only live for such a short time.’

  Mary nodded. ‘Now off to bed with you or you’ll look like an ugly god in the morning.’

  Rebecca kissed everyone goodnight and disappeared upstairs.

  The bottle of gin was empty, but another lay chilling in the freezer. They wouldn’t be searching the house tonight. While Alan fetched the new bottle, Mary put some music on. She stood at the end of the terrace where the light from the house was swallowed by the darkness of the garden and sang along with Marlene Dietrich, a glass in her hand, her eyelids glistening a powdery gold.

  Men cluster to me

  Like moths around a flame

  And if their wings burn

  I know I’m not to blame –

  And the moths fluttered out of the night, the words of the song mysteriously come to life.

  ‘It suits you,’ Moses said.

  Mary looked up. ‘The song?’

  ‘The make-up.’

  He settled deeper in his chair. The white roses on the back wall held out the tiny shiny bowls of their petals, collected all the moonlight from the sky. A grey cat tightropewalked along the fence; its tail curled up into the air like smoke. Somebody coughed two gardens away.

  ‘You know, sometimes, moments like this,’ he said, ‘I feel as if I live here.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ came Mary’s voice, light, provocative.

  ‘I’m serious. I feel as if this is where I really live. Here in Muswell Hill. In this house. There’s something about being here. I can’t explain it – ’

  That morning he had been playing with Rebecca in the garden. He had gripped her by the wrists, a sailor’s grip, and swung her round in the air. She had whirled out horizontally, making a sound like the wind or a ghost, her legs as slack as a rag doll’s legs. He could still hear her crying ‘Faster, faster’ he could still feel her never wanting it to end. When he had finally slowed down and set her on her feet again, she couldn’t stand. She had staggered about like a drunkard, and he had copied her. It was part of the game to act dizzier than you really were, to act a bit crazy. They had ended up in the lavender bush, a tangle of legs and arms, helpless with laughter. At that moment he had glanced up at the house and noticed Mary standing in an upstairs window. She had been smiling, but not at him. Her smile seemed to precede his awareness of her. It seemed to relate to what had gone before – the game, the laughter. A strange thought had come to him: she wants another child, my child. Then she had seen him watching her and she had pulled back from the window, back into the shadows, as if frightened he might read her mind. But perhaps he already had.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What were you smiling about this morning? You know, when I saw you in the window.’

  Mary turned and walked away down the garden. He watched her go. He could see nothing of her, only the tip of her cigarette glowing as she paced up and down in front of the hedge. Then a red scratch on the darkness as she threw it away. The trees shivered as a breeze passed by.

  Alan returned with the second bottle of gin. Shortly afterwards Alison joined Alan and Moses on the terrace. She sat down on the kitchen doorstep, her hair wrapped in a white towel. She smelt of cleanness, dampness, shampoo. She was drinking water.

  ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘you’re still here.’

  ‘Moses is always here,’ Mary said, appearing out of the darkness in her black dress, making them all jump. ‘Moses is one of the family. Aren’t you, Moses?’

  Her smile rested on his face, and her hand touched his shoulder for a moment.

  Her eyelids still dusty gold.

  Queen of the gods.

  *

  The following Wednesday Moses’s phone rang. It was Mary.

  ‘Have you got any plans for lunch?’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘What do you think I am? A businessman?’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of bottles of white wine and a cold chicken,’ she said. ‘I thought we could have a picnic on Parliament Hill. Rebecca wants to fly her kite. Would you like to come?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘We’ll meet by the bench at the top of the hill. Do you know the bench I mean?’

  ‘I’ll find it.’

  ‘One o’clock then.’ She hung up.

  Moses smiled to himself. Mary always sounded so formal on the phone. It was because she hated them. ‘How can you talk to someone when you can’t see their face?’ he remembered her saying. When he tried to argue the point, she closed him down. ‘Telephones,’ she said, and her voice registered the most profound disdain. ‘They fake closeness. They pervert distance. Distance should be respected. I’d rather drive fifty miles to speak to someone in person than talk to them on the telephone. I only use them when I have to.’ She spoke of telephones as if they had wounded her in the past.

  When Moses arrived at the bench, they were waiting for him, Rebecca wearing black jeans and a pink sweater, Mary in a black dress, the usual diamanté brooch at her throat, the usual jet earrings.

  ‘We would have driven down and picked you up,’ Mary said, some of the formality lingering, ‘but we thought you might be out.’

  ‘Lying in a skip somewhere,’ Rebecca said, squinting up at him.

  ‘I don’t lie in skips,’ Moses said. �
��Not on Wednesday mornings.’

  ‘So we telephoned,’ Mary said, ‘instead.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ Moses said.

  ‘Moses?’ Rebecca said. ‘Do you know anything about kites? Kites that look like dragons, I mean.’

  ‘I know a bit about kites because I had one once. It was an aeroplane, though, not a dragon. Do you think that matters?’

  ‘I don’t know. The thing is, aeroplanes are supposed to fly. I’m not so sure about dragons.’

  Moses squatted down and examined the dragon.

  ‘And look,’ Rebecca said, ‘it’s got holes in it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Moses said, ‘but this is a Chinese flying dragon, and Chinese flying dragons fly even better than aeroplanes.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ Rebecca said. ‘There’s no such thing.’ But she wanted there to be.

  ‘And this – ’ he glanced around – ‘is perfect Chinese flying dragon weather.’ He pointed at the sky. It bustled with huge white clouds which kept bumping into each other, but very lightly, as if they had been pumped full of air. If you pricked one it would burst, he told her, and later you would find pieces of shrivelled cloud scattered about on the ground. He drew her attention to the trees, which rustled like presents being unwrapped by the breeze. Then one final (and unexpected) piece of evidence: a Chinese man chose that moment to trot by, one hand on his pork-pie hat. ‘You see?’ Moses laughed. ‘What did I tell you?’

  Rebecca had to smile. ‘All right, I believe you.’

  And, in no time, the dragon was flying magnificently. Mary spread a rug on the grass. Moses sat next to her. They watched Rebecca as she skipped down the hill, the string clenched in her fist, her eyes fixed on the twisting gold tail in the air above.

  ‘That was mine when I was her age,’ Mary told him. ‘When I was living in North Yorkshire. You didn’t know I was a northerner, did you? You didn’t know I came from a coal-mining family?’

  Her revelations, he had often noticed, tended to coincide with moments of contentment, as if she felt she couldn’t allow time to pass too comfortably. A coal-mining family? Perhaps that explained her coal-mine-coloured tights, her kohl-lined eyes, her attachment to black. He smiled to himself.

  ‘I come from a small mining-town,’ she went on. ‘We moved away when I was nine. That’s why I haven’t got an accent any more.’

  ‘Was your father a miner then?’

  ‘No, he was a teacher. My grandfather was a miner, though. My grandfather – I remember him so vividly. Especially the back of his neck. He had these lines, hundreds of lines that criss-crossed, made diamond shapes. The lines were all ingrained with black. The coal-dust, I suppose. It gets into your skin. Becomes a second skin.

  ‘I used to call them necklaces, those tiny strings of diamond shapes. Grandpa’s necklaces. It used to make him chuckle. My mother tried to put a stop to it. “Men don’t wear necklaces, Mary,” she used to say. As if it was something I didn’t know. She was a very stupid woman. Missed the point completely.

  ‘Grandpa was special. He was a man and he wore necklaces. I thought that was absolutely wonderful, whatever my mother said. Sometimes he wore a scarf, for his bronchitis, and I would pester him until he took it off. “I want to see your necklaces, Grandpa,” I used to say. “Show me your necklaces.” And he would slowly loosen his scarf, making a game of it, chuckling his deep chuckle and shaking his head as if he had never heard anything like it.

  ‘But I think it scared him in a way. I think he was always listening out for my mother. Ready to pretend nothing was happening if she came in. Why do parents do that? Why do they try to close you down like that?’

  ‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Moses said.

  ‘Of course not.’ Such vehemence in her voice. She might have been disagreeing with him. Sometimes she seemed to be correcting not what he said but how he said it. As if his emphasis had been all wrong.

  Then she added, wistful now, ‘I suppose I learned something.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘He was a quiet man. No necklaces. He would do anything to avoid an argument, anything for a bit of peace and quiet. The only time I can remember him raising his voice was when he left the dinner-table once and stood in the doorway and shouted, “I’M NOT GOING TO ARGUE, MAEVE.” Maeve was my mother.’

  She was laughing, but Moses thought he detected a new brightness in her eyes: tears.

  ‘Poor old Dad,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought about him for so long. She killed him, really.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  Mary nodded. ‘She needed drama. She needed scenes. That’s where her momentum came from. But he couldn’t take it. One of them had to give. He used to think that she would run out of steam if he kept quiet, but silence made her hysterical. She would work herself up into a frenzy. It was frightening, like watching someone having a fit. And he would be sitting in his chair, waiting for it all to blow over. Looking so small. Scared. Not even daring to look up. He would just sit there, waiting for it to end so he could light his pipe and switch on the radio and draw rings round the names of horses in the back of the paper.’

  She fell silent, one hand in the hair at the back of her neck. After staring at the grass for a while, she said, ‘They never should’ve married.’

  ‘Then you wouldn’t be here,’ Moses said, ‘sitting on this hill with me and Rebecca. Then you would’ve missed all this.’

  Mary smiled. ‘I’d be somewhere. I would’ve forced my way into the world somehow.’

  Her airy confidence annoyed him. ‘Yes,’ he persisted, ‘but not here.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not here.’ The distinction didn’t seem to be important to her.

  Then a familiar but anxious voice called from the bottom of the hill. ‘Moses? What do I do when I want it to come down?’

  They both laughed at the look of utter helplessness on Rebecca’s face. Helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds.

  That picnic on Parliament Hill set one or two new precedents. It shifted the scene away from the house in Nio and on to more neutral territory. It also disrupted the neat pattern of Sundays only. It meant that, in future, they could meet wherever they liked, with or without the children, and on weekdays too. Mary taught part-time, so she often had free mornings or afternoons. Moses, of course, was always free. They began to go on expeditions, locally at first, in Muswell Hill, then further afield, as if their courage was growing. They discovered some unusual places: a church in Epping Forest, a pub in Rotherhithe, a stretch of canal in Kensal Rise. Slowly they were building up common ground, creating, as it were, their own private frame of reference.

  The impetus came mostly from Mary – an abrupt phone-call or a note, sometimes posted, sometimes delivered by hand, never more than a sentence long, and signed simply ‘M’. Once or twice she even arranged trips over Sunday lunch. Everything was done naturally and openly, everything was above board and beyond suspicion. It was strange, but he often had to remind himself that, after all, they had absolutely nothing to hide. The conditions for guilt existed without the grounds for feeling guilty. Just occasionally he felt burdened somehow as if he had become the repository of a trust that he knew he was going to betray. He wondered how that had come about. Would come about. If it came about.

  One fact stood out clearly enough. Some kind of bridge was being built. And he was walking over it as easily, as thoughtlessly as in a dream, simply because it was there.

  *

  One Thursday evening in September Moses arrived home to find a note slipped under his front door. Feel like a drink? M. He turned round to see Mary standing behind him.

  ‘Well?’ she grinned. ‘Do you?’

  They drove north in Mary’s 1968 Volvo. The sky predicted thunder, black stormclouds edged in gold. Mary wore a tight black dress, black gloves to the elbow, red lipstick.

  ‘Let’s stop at the first pub we see,’ she said, ‘and sink a few Martinis.’

  The first pub they saw w
as somewhere in Highgate: brown curtains, Skol beer-mats, nothing special. Mary walked up to the bar to order their drinks. Moses took a table by the window. He watched the bartender reach for a bottle of dry Martini.

  ‘No, no, not that,’ he heard Mary call out. ‘Real Martinis. You know. American Martinis.’ She wasn’t being high-handed or condescending; she just seemed amused at the misunderstanding.

  The bartender (thin, whiskery, whisky-sour) stared, first at Mary, then at Moses, and Moses suddenly realised what he must be thinking. The age difference. The tight dress. The lipstick. Prostitute, he was thinking. And the word was making an ugly screeching sound in his mind. Nails on a blackboard. Painted nails.

  Mary didn’t seem to have noticed. She was giving the bartender instructions. ‘Large gin. Dash of dry Martini. Just a dash, mind. A green olive, if you’ve got one. And no ice, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ The bartender stared at her for a moment longer. He seemed to want her to know exactly what he thought of her. Then he began to put the drinks together. In his own sweet time. With infinite distaste.

  Eventually he set the glasses down in front of her. One slopped over.

  ‘Sorry, madam,’ he smirked, ‘but we don’t usually get your type in here.’ And, turning his back on her, he busied himself with a couple of dirty glasses.

  Moses felt anger well up inside him, hot and sudden, like blood from a deep cut.

  ‘I know what he’s thinking,’ Mary said when she sat down, ‘and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t let it get to you, Moses. If I can deal with it so can you.’ She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.’

  He knew she was right, but he couldn’t help himself: the bartender had crawled under his skin. He hated people who stood their weakness on a pedestal, who thought their small minds gave them the right to sit in judgment over others. His anger simmering, he ostentatiously lit a cigarette for Mary. The bartender was still polishing glasses. His eyes would swivel in their direction every now and then and slide away again whenever Moses looked up. A few locals sat on stools at the bar. Their eyes swivelled too.