Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  Mary finished her drink. ‘Not bad,’ she said cheerfully, ‘for somebody who’s never made one before.’

  Moses tried to smile.

  ‘Would you like another?’ she asked him.

  ‘Somewhere else,’ he said.

  Instead of following her to the door, he walked up to the bar. The bartender, still polishing, pretended not to notice him.

  ‘Listen you,’ Moses said in a low voice, ‘if you ever do anything like that again, I’m going to come in here and knock your fucking head off, all right?’

  He waited long enough to see the bartender’s face take on a certain rigidity, the rigidity of fear, then he turned away.

  ‘That’s assault,’ Mary told him when he joined her outside.

  ‘I didn’t touch him.’

  ‘You threatened him, though.’

  Moses opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind.

  She linked her arm through his. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever go there again.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  A few yards short of the car, he stopped. Shaken, yet strangely ignited. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’

  They told the story over lunch the following Sunday. It rapidly became spectacular. Mary hadn’t left the pub at all, she had slouched against the wall, filing her nails, a gangster’s moll, while Moses, mafioso, did terrible things to the whiskery bartender: he had shaken the bartender by the scruff of the neck until his false teeth flew out; he had cleaned Mary’s shoes with the bartender’s face; he had thrown whisky around and reached slowly for his lighter while the bartender gaped, grovelled, dribbled like a fire-hose in a drought. The story changed and grew with every telling; it became more vicious, more surreal, more just. It always went down well at lunches and parties. ‘Oh Mary,’ someone would clamour, ‘tell them the one about Moses. You know, the time he blew up that pub in Highgate.’ Before long the incident had distorted beyond all recognition. Even the memory blurred. Only the names remained the same.

  *

  Mary and Moses.

  This intimacy grew, slowly as a plant or a face, its slowness old-fashioned (something Mary claimed to be herself). It was like the colour of a leaf changing. It used the slipping of summer into autumn as a metaphor to describe itself. One week it was green, the next it was orange, and the week after that it was red. Something had happened in between, some gradual yet tangible chemical development had taken place. She had spoken once of starting something that you can’t control. He had forgotten the context, but remembered the words. They surfaced whenever he thought about her.

  He returned again and again to the same point. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. He never stood and looked at her and thought, as he might have done with Gloria: she’s beautiful. It was an attraction of a different nature altogether. It transcended simple good looks. It almost transcended definition. He only knew that when he was with Mary he felt an affinity that was unthought-out, unforced, uncanny. He felt good. And he marvelled at how effortlessly that feeling had come into being. Only the thought of her marriage, her family, brought him back to earth, anchored him. And she talked about them regularly and passionately. Take Alan, for instance. She was still in love with him, she said. He was the only man in her life. He knocked everybody else into a cocked hat. She fought for Alan even though there was no fight going on. Hold on, Moses wanted to say to her sometimes, I agree with you. They were surrounded by natural obstacles: Alan, Alison, Sean, Rebecca – her love for them, his too. It was reassuring, in a way. It meant that nothing bad could happen.

  Inevitably, perhaps, he saw less of Gloria. He called her less. And he was surprised to discover that he didn’t miss her at all. Late one Sunday night (one of the nights he actually managed to make it back to The Bunker) she called him.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  She probably hadn’t meant it to sound like that, but that was how it came out. He told her the truth. ‘I went out to lunch. At the Shirleys’.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Alison’s family. The Alison who used to be with Vince. I told you.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Her voice sounded flat. As if all the lifeblood had been drained out of her.

  ‘You sound strange,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. Anyway, look, what I wanted to ask you was, do you want to do something on Thursday night?’

  Her voice had lifted, seeking brightness in his reply, but he didn’t have to think very hard to remember that he had already arranged to meet Mary on Thursday. He carried the phone over to the window. No cars were waiting at the lights so when the lights changed nothing happened. Sunday night. Almost two o’clock. Dead time.

  ‘Hello?’ came Gloria’s voice. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t. I’m doing something on Thursday.’

  A moment silence, then: ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s what the phone’s been trying to tell me all day. When I called you this morning, it just rang and rang, and nobody answered. I didn’t call you this afternoon because I thought, all those times I called in the morning and nobody answered, that was a good piece of advice. You’re wasting your time, kind of thing. You might as well forget it, save yourself a lot of trouble. Looks like it was right, doesn’t it? Shame I didn’t listen.’

  ‘You got through,’ he said. Beginning to wish she hadn’t.

  ‘Yes. I got through.’

  He had never heard her sound so low. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  She hesitated. ‘No, it’s too late. And anyway, you don’t want to, really.’

  It was almost a question, it called for a denial. Moses didn’t answer. He felt so tired. He wanted to go to bed alone. Not talk. Drift into sleep.

  ‘All right. Look. See you around, OK?’ Gloria said, staccato now. ‘Bye.’

  She hung up.

  He listened to the buzzing for a while, then he put the phone down.

  Two minutes later he was sitting on the bed unlacing his boots when the phone rang again. He had thought about ringing her back when she hung up like that, but he had decided against it. He didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation they had now would run round in vicious circles. Telephones solve nothing, he told himself. And he heard Mary’s voice calling him an escapist. Now Gloria was calling him back and he would have to talk to her anyway. He didn’t want to answer, but he had to, really. She knew he was there. He could hardly pretend to be asleep already. He walked back into the next room, his bootlaces trickling on the floor behind him. He picked up the receiver and looked at the ceiling. ‘Hello?’

  It wasn’t Gloria.

  A voice, high-pitched, sexless, ageless, chanted:

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again –

  ‘Who’s this?’ Moses said.

  Silence. Then, very faintly, the sound of breathing. Light and quick. Excitement, he thought. And imagined a child on the other end. But knew this was no child.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ the voice whispered. Then hung up.

  Click. Buzz.

  It took Moses a while to realise that the call had not been for him but for Elliot. Thinking about it, it had to have been for Elliot; it had the same eerie theatrical vindictiveness as the white arrows and the skinned pool-table. Even so, it chilled him. Suddenly he needed to talk to somebody. If he used the phone again he could erase the memory of that voice.

  He picked up the phone and dialled Gloria’s number. He let it ring twenty times before replacing the receiver. He wondered if she was asleep already or just not answering.

  He went to bed and
tried to read. The words jumped on the page. None of their meaning registered. After ten minutes he switched the light off. The darkness buzzed like a phone left off the hook.

  There were no more calls.

  The next day he told Elliot. Elliot shrugged. ‘That’s what I said. We’ve been getting phone-calls.’

  Something had fastened on to Elliot during the past few days and sucked all the colour out of his face. He looked grey. Even his gold medallion looked grey.

  ‘Everything all right, Elliot?’ Moses asked.

  Elliot jerked forward in his chair and stalled as if the clutch controlling him had slipped. ‘None of your fucking business, all right?’

  Moses stared at him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I just thought I’d let you know, anyway,’ and moved towards the door.

  Elliot leaned back. He pushed the tip of his tongue between his front teeth, worked it in and out of the gap. ‘Hey, Moses?’ he called out. ‘If there’s any trouble at night, call this number.’

  He slipped a piece of paper across the desk. Moses walked back and picked it up. Seven digits. A perfectly normal London number.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Me,’ Elliot said. ‘Sometimes.’

  He smiled craftily. But as far as Moses was concerned Elliot had just let him know that he was worried.

  *

  Thursday came. The sun was shining. Clouds lay in white clumps on the clean blue surface of the sky. When the doorbell rang at midday, Moses leaned out of his window and saw Mary below. Light showed as silver on the black gloss of her hair (she had dyed it again). A black skirt swirled around her pale calves. He called her name and she looked up. She didn’t answer, though. She didn’t approve of people shouting in the street. For somebody who had often been described as bohemian, eccentric even, she could be surprisingly conventional at times. But she used that. The two qualities ran alongside each other in her like trains running on parallel tracks, and she could switch at will. It was part of her struggle to resist classification. Two or three times he had heard her mention some scene from an old black and white movie. A man’s talking to a woman. The man’s so wrapped up in what he’s saying that he doesn’t notice that he’s boring the woman. In the end the woman becomes so thoroughly bored that she leaves the room. The man carries on talking, utterly oblivious, utterly foolish. It’s quite a while before he swings round to discover that he’s alone, that he’s been talking to an empty room. The moral? In Mary’s words: Nobody should ever take anybody else for granted. The implication being, least of all me.

  But Moses couldn’t imagine anyone taking Mary for granted. Even her most mundane remarks seemed provocative somehow. Perhaps because you wouldn’t have expected them to come from her. Sentiments expressed by millions of people every day. Sentiments like, ‘I love my husband,’ or, ‘Nobody could ever take my children away from me’ (yes, sometimes she sounded like a soap-opera). She stamped them as her own only by the blunt unadorned categorical way she spoke. When Mary talked of basic emotions she left no room for doubts or indecision. To Mary, this proved that she was a perfectly ordinary person. To Moses, it set her apart from just about everybody he had ever known.

  He wanted to understand her more, especially when he was drunk, but she always turned his questions round. The answers, when they came, told him more about himself. He didn’t want to hear about himself. So he persisted. And learned even less.

  Only last Sunday he’d said, ‘I want to know how you work. I want to know what goes on inside your head.’

  Frowning, she’d replied, ‘I’m not a machine, you know.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what it is about you. You’re not set in your ways like – ’

  ‘Like other people my age?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

  ‘There’s something you’ve got to understand, Moses. I’m not a bloody stone. I change. I’m changing right now. Right in front of your eyes.’

  ‘Stones change too.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Everything changes. Everyone changes. I’m just the same as everyone else. Stop treating me like a freak.’

  His patience had come apart then. ‘You never admit anything, do you? You’ve always got to have the last word.’

  She’d stared at him thoughtfully. ‘You know, one day you’ll realise I’m right about me and you’re wrong and then you won’t be honest about why you don’t want to see me any more.’

  He’d denied this, but she’d given him one of her knowing looks.

  ‘You’re going to have to have a lift installed,’ Mary said.

  He turned and saw her standing in the doorway. She didn’t sound out of breath, not in the slightest. She must have rested halfway up. He smiled to himself at this little insight.

  ‘A drink?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe just one,’ she said. ‘For the road.’

  He poured two whiskies. It was the first time she had seen where he lived. While he hunted for money and keys, she explored, glass in hand, lips pressed together. She walked into the kitchen and the bathroom, then emerged again, crossed the lounge, and disappeared into the bedroom. He heard her pause inside the door, take two or three quick steps, and pause again.

  When she returned she asked him, ‘How often do you wash your sheets?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he stammered. ‘Not very often, I suppose.’

  ‘ How often?’

  ‘About once every three weeks.’

  ‘You should leave them longer,’ she said. ‘They smell wonderful.’

  He stared at her.

  She gave him a radiant, brazen smile. ‘So where are we going today?’

  *

  As they went through the cemetery gates they passed an old man in blue overalls. He was shovelling dead leaves on to a slow-burning fire. They said good afternoon to him. He scowled, grunted something. They walked on, stopped beneath the memorial to Karl Marx. Somebody had daubed his massive Humpty Dumpty head with red paint. Perhaps that explained the man’s black mood. In the distance, through the trees, Moses could hear the laughter of children.

  Mary was smiling. ‘When I brought Rebecca here, two years ago, she stood in front of Marx and looked very puzzled. After a while she turned to me and said, “How come he got a big statue like that just for inventing a boring old shop?” She thought he was the Marks in Marks and Spencer’s. It was one of her first jokes.’

  Moses could picture Rebecca squinting up at Marx, he could picture the indignation, the disbelief, on her small face. He too smiled.

  They turned down an overgrown path between two rows of uneven leaning gravestones. Grass sprang up, stiff and blond as straw. Brambles clung to Mary’s stockings. They watched a squirrel steal a red carnation from a wreath and eat it in the shadow of a bush. The old man’s fire shook slow blue smoke into the air like incense. Mary sat down at the foot of a tomb and lit a cigarette. Moses sat down next to her. As he read the inscription on the stone – In Memory Of Our Beloved Father – something came free in him. Words took shape.

  ‘It’s pretty strange,’ he said, ‘not knowing where your parents are.’

  Mary glanced round at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If my parents were dead, properly dead, in graves with names on, then at least I’d know where they were, wouldn’t I? As it is, I haven’t really got proof of anything.’

  He wrenched a few blades of grass out of the ground and twisted them until they were dark and wet. He had sounded so bitter, surprising even himself.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Moses,’ Mary said. ‘You’ve never told me anything about your parents.’

  So he told her. The same story he had told Gloria in that hotel in Leicestershire. He recognised many of the phrases. He added where necessary, especially for Mary, and found himself believing his embellishments. It was his story – one of the things he only entrusted to the people closest to him. It sealed a friendship, a relationship. Sanctified it, almost. Yes, he had the feeling,
this time above all others, of handling something priceless and fragile, like the bones of a saint, something that could easily break up, decay, crumble into dust.

  When he came to the end, Mary gave him a long careful look.

  ‘I’m going to say something and you’re probably not going to like it.’

  ‘What?’ he said, uneasy now.

  ‘I think that was a nice performance. Almost convincing.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘I know it’s true. That’s not the point. You were performing, Moses. You performed the whole thing. That’s not the first time you’ve told somebody, is it?’

  He looked away from her. ‘No,’ he mumbled. His stomach twisted as if he had been caught cheating.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It shows. You’ve told it before. Quite a few times, I imagine. You’re not really even thinking about your parents when you tell it. Not any more. You’re just using them. You’re using your own family, your own history, to pull emotions out of people. You didn’t really feel anything when you told me all that stuff about the dress – except self-pity, maybe. It wasn’t real, Moses. It didn’t feel real. It was like something put on specially for tourists. Some kind of ritual disembowelling. Is that all I am to you? I don’t want smiling natives and air-conditioning and cabaret. I want real stuff. You’ve reached the point where you’ve sanitised everything. You can’t take it any further. You know it and I know it. So why do it?’

  He couldn’t answer.

  Anger shook her to her feet. She walked away. He noticed the blades of dead grass stuck to the back of her skirt.

  In the car, she said, ‘You know something? You don’t need us. It’s not us you need – me and Alan and Rebecca and Sean and Alison. It’s your parents. Your family. Your real family. So find them. Stop using us.’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. But at least you could start trying.’

  He dropped into a painful silence. It took him minutes to struggle out. ‘I do need you.’ He could hear a childish defiance in his voice.

  ‘Find them, Moses. Then you can decide that.’

  She left him outside The Bunker. He thanked her for the afternoon, but the words came out awkward, accusing. After she had driven away, he went through a bewildering variety of responses in a very short space of time – fear, guilt, anxiety, amusement, cynicism. None of them seemed to fit.