Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  A rush of blackness, but it was only Mary sitting down.

  ‘Any luck?’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  He thought he saw traces of abandonment on her face. Smooth damp places. Sand abandoned by an outgoing tide. Some kind of ebbing.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  She downed her brandy. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

  He stayed at the table for a moment, then moved off jerkily in Mary’s wake, as if attached to her by a long and invisible rope that had only tightened, taken effect, when she was twenty feet away. Umbilical, she would’ve called it. He fetched up at her side in an upright heap. Eyes vacant with alcohol. One arm held away from his body like a wing. For balance. Staring at the carpet, he wondered why anyone in their right mind would take vomit as a design motif. If he was sick, he thought, and he was sick carefully enough, maybe he could fit his sick into one of those obscene recurring patterns and nobody would ever notice.

  ‘You go on,’ he said. ‘Just got to ask something.’

  He found their waitress in the lobby. She stood below him gazing upwards. She was very small. Tiny balls of light (reflections of the electric chandelier above) rolled about on the lenses of her glasses. He wanted to take her head in his two hands and tilt it until the silver balls stopped on the two black centres of her eyes. Instead he asked her for a local telephone directory. She produced one from behind the reception desk.

  ‘And two more brandies, please,’ he said.

  She rolled the silver balls that were her eyes and moved off down the corridor.

  He thumbed through the directory until he reached H. The same old routine, with one crucial difference: this time there had to be a Highness – Highness G, 14 Caution Lane, New Egypt. He read the names out loud to himself – ‘Hardware, Haseldine, Havana, Head – ’ he skipped a couple of pages – ‘Hick, Higgins, Hilton – ’ He must’ve missed it. He began again. Using his finger because the names were jumping. But no. No Highness. He straightened up, wrapped his hand round the lower half of his face. It could only mean one thing. His father didn’t have a phone.

  On a whim, he looked up Peach. There were three Peaches, but none of them were Chief Inspectors. None of them lived in New Egypt either. Curious. Unless Peach was ex-directory, of course. He nodded to himself. Peach was cunning on two legs. Peach would be ex-directory.

  The waitress returned with the brandies. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  He shook his head. He had wanted to ask his father an urgent question. He had wanted to know how Peach could possibly have discovered his identity. But now he had no way of reaching his father, not without returning to the village, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk that. Now he would never know. He began to walk towards the stairs.

  ‘Sir?’ the waitress called out. ‘Your brandies.’

  *

  Wallpaper like warfare. Salvoes of red roses exploding round his ears. Two brandies balanced in one hand, he ran up the corridor and burst into the wrong room. Red Blouse had changed into Pink Slip. Blue Blazer was no longer Blue Blazer; Blue Blazer hung over the back of a chair.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ Moses said, and, backpedalling, hit his head on the door.

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ Pink Slip said, slipping into Beige Robe (though, for Moses, she would always be Red Blouse). ‘Just leave them on the table, would you?’

  Moses gaped at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Just leave them on the table,’ she repeated.

  ‘But they’re mine.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They’re mine,’ Moses said. ‘I bought them.’

  It was Red Blouse’s turn to gape. ‘Aren’t you a waiter?’

  ‘No,’ Moses said. Glancing down at his white shirt and his black trousers, he began to understand the misunderstanding. Red Blouse had obviously been too engrossed in Blue Blazer to notice Moses sitting in the corner of the dining-room. So it’s true, he thought. Love is a bad play and all the actors are blind.

  Meanwhile Red Blouse was staring at him and all the time she was staring at him her mouth was opening wider and wider until it seemed that something must emerge. And finally it did. It was a scream. A scream so powerful that it wiped out the entire world. For some indefinable length of time (two or three seconds, perhaps – or a century, who knows?), there was no world, only scream. The scream of Red Blouse. Then it ceased and there was void, such as there was at the beginning of time before the world existed. Then the world crept back, shell-shocked, wary.

  Moses began to slide backwards round the edge of the door, but he delayed long enough to see Blue Blazer (White Birthday Suit) catapult from the bathroom, skin trailing steam, trip on a pair of shoes (‘Are you all right, daaaaargh – ’) and nosedive into the carpet (Pink Buttocks, Brown Mole).

  ‘Sorry,’ Moses said, melting into the corridor. ‘Terribly sorry.’

  Mary lay diagonally across the bed in the next room. ‘Did you hear somebody scream?’ she said, her voice sleepy with alcohol.

  ‘Scream?’ Moses closed the door softly behind him. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘That’s funny. I could’ve sworn I heard somebody scream.’

  He knelt down beside her. ‘Brandy,’ he said.

  ‘How nice.’

  ‘Undress me,’ he whispered.

  Removal of evidence.

  He reached over and switched off the light.

  ‘No light?’ she said. ‘But I always – ’

  ‘It’ll make a change,’ he said, ‘won’t it?’

  Sex. The perfect alibi.

  *

  Mary woke early the next morning. She dressed with a series of deft silent movements and left the room. In the lobby she made enquiries as to the whereabouts of a Mr Fowler, then she set off down the hill on foot. Mr Fowler, the village mechanic, proved most obliging. He told her he would tow the Volvo himself. He could have a new clutch cable fitted by midday, he assured her, twirling his spanner as a philanderer might twirl his moustache. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

  When she returned to the hotel, Moses was awake. She gave him the good news.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you try Alan again?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She came and sat on the bed. She was ninety per cent air this morning. Her fingers skimmed across his skin like a breeze. ‘Let’s go and have some breakfast, shall we?’

  Ten minutes later they sauntered into the dining-room. Blue Blazer and Red Blouse were sitting at the same table by the window. No trifle fantasies today. No clasping of hands, no glances moist with furtive lust, no sweet nothings not disturbing candle-flames. No nothing. Only eyes lowered as if in shame. Blue Blazer spreading brittle toast, Red Blouse fingering the pleats in her skirt. Had Moses broken the spell by bursting in on them like that? Perhaps. But what a feeble spell then.

  As Moses poured himself a cup of coffee he remembered having woken in the night. He had been lying on the counterpane, a chill on the surface of his skin. Naked. Dehydrated. No idea where he was. He could hear the radio going, low volume, something about the death of a famous comedian. He remembered feeling his way out of his dreams and across the room. Running the cold tap. Gulping two glasses of water straight down. Then, moving back towards the bed, he had paused, curious suddenly about the view from the window. He had imagined a vast dark sky, vaulted as the inside of an umbrella, and stars like punctures in the fabric, leaking weak light from behind, and the night air hissing, the night air seeming to escape, and then, below, the land falling away, hills and valleys rolling away in waves, unseen dogs barking, sleeping farms, a dim ribboning of lanes, wave on wave of invisible black hills and valleys, breaking against a distant silent horizon. When he parted the curtains he jumped back. A graveyard pressed its face to the glass. Cold gnarled stones up close. A thin tree beckoning. The stealthy bulk of a church. He hadn’t liked seeing this. He hadn’t liked seeing it alone in the dead centre of the night. He had hurried back to
bed, huddled against Mary. He had buried himself in her untroubled warmth, in her oblivion.

  He watched her now as she smoked and ate toast at the same time, as she swallowed the remnants of her coffee. He knew that he could admit fear to her. Admit weakness. Smallness. Anything. And that was what it was about, wasn’t it?

  ‘I still need you, you know.’

  She looked up. ‘Why do you suddenly say that?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ he said. ‘I remember you saying, a few weeks ago, in that graveyard it was, I remember you saying that it wasn’t you I needed but my parents, my real parents, and that I’d only be able to decide whether I needed you or not after I’d found them. Well, now I’ve found them, one of them, anyway, and I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided – I still need you.’

  Mary smiled and came round the table and gave him a cool lingering kiss on the mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Blue Blazer and Red Blouse pretending not to notice.

  After breakfast they linked arms and walked outside. They followed the road that ran alongside the graveyard wall. A fresh wind blowing, laundered clouds.

  ‘What a lot there is to tell Alan,’ Moses said.

  Mary pulled the hair away from her mouth. ‘I shall tell him everything,’ she declared, her chin in the air. ‘Everything.’

  The general, he thought. His general.

  ‘I know you will,’ he said. He had expected her to respond like that. He knew she couldn’t tolerate restrictions of any kind. Restrictions were death to her, the stones over the wall.

  Everything went so smoothly that morning, as if those few hours belonged to a different weekend altogether – Mary even allowed him to take a photograph of her (usually she shielded her face with a hand and cried, ‘No pictures,’ or asked him why he was threatening her) – and the sight of Mr Fowler standing in front of the hotel with the car when they returned from their walk seemed like a part of this.

  He greeted them with a lopsided grin. ‘Good as new,’ he called out, patting the bonnet.

  Mary thanked him for his trouble and wrote him a cheque.

  Later they passed him on the road, his arms flexing at the elbows, the morning light hitching a lift into the village on his brilliantined black hair. They waved at him and he waved back.

  *

  ‘I want some normal life,’ Moses said, as they eased into the heavy traffic on Camden High Street. ‘Could you drop me here?’

  His gaze had fallen on the green wooden stalls of the vegetable market, the pyramids of tomatoes and oranges, the rows of aubergines, the spiky clusters of pineapples, and their colours seemed to plane the uneven surfaces in his mind, the parts that hadn’t slept enough. The sun divided a heap of newspapers into equal halves of light and shadow. A bare arm reached up and opened a third-floor window. Was that a tin whistle in the distance? He wanted to drift, mingle, breathe. It would be breaking precedent, of course – it would be the first Sunday in almost four months that he hadn’t been to Muswell Hill – but hadn’t they already broken precedent by spending the night together and besides, as Mary herself might have argued, what was precedent for?

  She stopped the car opposite the tube station and, stretching across, hands resting on the wheel, kissed him once on the lips. It was a strange kiss – formal, barren, unlike her. A kiss with no history and no future. A kiss that said goodbye and nothing else. Her mouth had shut in his face like a door and she had withdrawn deep into the house to tend to something more pressing. He thought he understood as he got out. Now she was nearing home he had taken second place to her family. He leaned on the window. Stared at her.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll call you in the week.’ He never usually said things like this to her. It was that kiss. It had unnerved him somehow. He felt the car move fractionally against his body.

  ‘See you soon, Mary.’

  He lifted his hands, stood back. She drove away. Hunched over the wheel. Like somebody driving in thick fog. He watched the car shrink, a metaphor for her withdrawal. He shrugged. Turned away. Leaving her to drive into a tragedy that he could never have foreseen because all the important things are shocks that take place on either side of your imagination.

  It was Sunday afternoon.

  He didn’t call her until the following Wednesday.

  *

  ‘I’m home,’ Mary announced.

  Her voice hung on in the air, a slowly dying thing.

  She stood perfectly still, her hand on the edge of the front door, and listened to the empty house. The creak of a stair under no footstep. The automatic click of the kitchen thermostat. The wind testing a window in the living-room. She recognised the sounds, but she had never heard them on a Sunday before. How peculiar.

  ‘How peculiar,’ she said out loud. And felt a rope begin to tighten round her throat.

  She took a few steps forward, down the hall, and stood in the kitchen doorway. They had the presence of inhabitants, those sounds. They had grown out of all proportion in her absence. In this silence.

  She walked across the room and opened a window. Cold air flowed in over the back of her hand. Raised the hairs on her forearms.

  There ought to be a note, she was thinking. But there was only a pot of cold tea. A jar of marmalade. A dirty plate.

  Then a sound that didn’t belong. A guest sound.

  No, not guest.

  Intruder.

  She turned round.

  ‘Mrs Shirley?’

  A policeman and a policewoman stood in the kitchen doorway. Their eyes blinked like the wings of butterflies. She stared at them and saw such nervousness.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said, ‘isn’t he?’

  Crime is Order

  Elliot had gone away for a few days. Business, Ridley said. Business? Moses thought. Hiding, more like. But he kept the thought to himself.

  It took him until Tuesday night to pin Elliot down.

  ‘You know that policeman who was looking for me?’ Moses said, lowering himself on to the corner of Elliot’s desk. ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I told you,’ Elliot said. ‘He was a big bloke.’

  ‘A big bloke. That really narrows it down, doesn’t it.’

  Elliot heaved a sigh. ‘All right, he was old. Sixty, maybe. Maybe older. Tell you one thing, though. He had a punch like a fucking train.’ His hand moved gingerly across his waistcoat.

  ‘What did his hair look like?’

  ‘Hair? Grey, I think.’

  ‘Long? Short? Curly?’

  ‘It was short. Sort of a crewcut.’

  Moses felt his heart stall. ‘What about his eyes?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Moses. How am I supposed to notice his eyes? I wasn’t in love with the geezer, was I?’

  Moses walked to the window. He stared out over the rooftops, his hands in his pockets. Car headlights wiped across his face. ‘Ridley was there, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He turned up after the bloke ran off. I don’t reckon he saw much.’

  ‘Do us a favour, Elliot. Get him up here for a moment, would you? It’s important.’

  Elliot blew some air out of his mouth. ‘The things I do for you, Moses. And what do you do for me, eh?’

  ‘I get hit on the head, that’s what I do for you.’

  Elliot sighed. He reached for the phone and dialled an internal number. ‘Is Ridley around? Yeah? Well, tell him Elliot wants to speak to him. Yeah, now.’

  A few minutes later the office door opened and Ridley appeared. He looked from Elliot to Moses and back again. ‘So what’s the problem, chief?’

  ‘You remember that copper who came round a couple of months ago?’ Elliot said.

  Ridley rolled his head back. He remembered.

  Moses jumped in. ‘D’you remember what he looked like?’

  ‘Didn’t see him, did I?’ Ridley scratched his forearm. It sounded like somebody sawing wood. ‘Heard his voice, though.’

  ‘What was it like?�
��

  ‘Deep. Fucking deep.’

  ‘Thanks, Ridley.’ Moses turned away. Sixty, crewcut, deep voice. That clinched it.

  When Ridley had left, Elliot said, ‘What’s this all about, Moses? You know who the copper was?’

  Moses was staring out of the window again. At the place where Peach must, impossibly, have stood. ‘Yeah, I know who he was.’

  ‘So who was he?’

  ‘It won’t mean anything to you.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Peach. Chief Inspector Peach.’

  ‘Peach? I never heard of no fucking Peach.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have.’ On his way out Moses paused by the door. ‘One thing, Elliot. If you see him again, don’t be too gentle, all right?’

  Elliot threw his cigarette out of the window to its death. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, Moses.’

  Moses walked slowly down the stairs. Peach in London. Peach asking questions. Why? Moses needed to talk to somebody. And the only person who would understand was Mary. He tried to reach her that night, but there was no reply.

  *

  The next day he tried again. It was three in the afternoon and he was standing in a call-box in Soho. Dead ducks rotated on a stainless steel spit ten feet away. A green neon sign – SPANKERAMA – flashed in a curtained window. Somebody had scratched the words GOD and FUCK into the red paintwork above the phone. With a coin, probably, because the O was a pyramid and the U looked like a V-sign. A copy of the Sun soaked up urine on the floor. BIG FREEZE CHAOS, the front page said. The freak cold snap earlier in the week had thrown the whole of Central London into chaos: rail services cut, traffic snarl-ups, hyperthermia. Moses shivered as he dialled. Somebody picked up on the other end. He pressed his waiting coin into the slot.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘I was wondering when you were going to call.’