Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  They passed Vince skulking in a doorway. He made a face, powerless, apologetic, and shrugged. There weren’t any six policemen kneeling on his back and calling him bastard, Moses noticed.

  They escorted him back through the door, down the stairs (past the two ragged holes and the telltale rectangle of clean white wallpaper) and into the bar. One policeman stood guard over him while two others held a conference with a squat middle-aged man who was, presumably, the manager. The few people left in the bar stared at Moses with open curiosity.

  He heard the word prosecute. Heav-y. He exchanged a brief glance with the manager. The manager’s eyes were loaded with scorn and disgust. Oh, come on, Moses wanted to say. I wasn’t going to steal that thing. Who’d want to steal anything that corny?

  ‘He liked the place so much,’ the girl behind the bar was saying, ‘that he had to take a piece of it with him.’

  Now that hurt. He remembered smiling at her earlier in the evening and he remembered her almost smiling back. She wouldn’t even look at him now. She went on polishing glasses, her eyes screened by her hair, her lips twisted in contempt.

  Some kind of decision was reached. One of the policemen pushed him through the bar, up the stairs and out on to the street. A squad car drew alongside. The policeman spoke into his walkie-talkie.

  ‘– have successfully apprehended the criminal – ’

  Criminal? Criminal? I’m not a criminal, Moses thought.

  Oh yes you are, said the policeman’s face.

  Moses was bundled into the back of the car. He had to sit between two policemen, his shoulders drawn together, his arms dangling between his legs. The lights of the King’s Road raked through the interior as they moved away. He felt a sudden sense of elation at the novelty of it all.

  ‘See that shop?’ he cried. ‘That’s where I bought these boots!’

  The two policemen in front exchanged a glance.

  What was wrong with them? Moses wondered. They’d made their arrest, the tension was over, why couldn’t they loosen up, have a bit of fun? He stared at them one by one, these four policemen who didn’t know how to enjoy themselves. Where was wit? Where was laughter? Where, if nothing else, was job satisfaction? He wanted to entertain them, but all his jokes fell on stony faces.

  Then a frightening thought occurred to him. So frightening that he was almost too afraid to ask.

  ‘You’re not Peach’s men, are you?’

  Both the policemen in the back stared straight ahead, expressionless, unblinking.

  ‘You know. Peach. Chief Inspector Peach.’

  Not a flicker of recognition.

  ‘He runs a police station. Somewhere down south. Pretty small operation by your standards, I suppose.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘You really don’t know him?’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,’ the driver said.

  ‘Well,’ Moses said, ‘that’s a relief.’

  But then he thought, they would say that, wouldn’t they. If they were Peach’s men. He tried another tack.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  They wouldn’t say.

  He leaned forwards and peered at the fuel gauge. Almost empty. Not enough to get to New Egypt then. Thank God for that.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘careful you don’t run out of petrol.’

  ‘I think you’d better shut it,’ the policeman on his left said.

  ‘Oh, life,’ Moses exclaimed. ‘I was beginning to think you were all dead. Bit worrying being driven along by four dead policemen.’

  ‘Christ,’ the driver muttered.

  The car swung left into a narrow backstreet. Now Moses knew he hadn’t been kidnapped by Peach, he began to relax, take in his surroundings. They passed a girl with blonde hair standing by the side of the road. She looked at him as if she knew him. He waved. The girl smiled. Her smile reached through the closed car window, past the taciturn policemen, and into Moses’s heart, where it glowed. There is nothing to beat the smile of a girl you have never seen before, he thought.

  ‘Peach offered me a job, you know.’ There was something about the silence of these policemen that made him talk. ‘He said I’d make an excellent police officer. No, magnificent, he said. What d’you think of that?’

  Before anyone could reply they had pulled into the kerb and parked. Moses was manhandled out of the car and on to the pavement. Seen in the bleak light of the street-lamps, the policemen had hard closed faces, the kind of faces that believe in duty, violence, Margaret Thatcher, and a good chauvinistic fuck on Friday nights.

  ‘You know, I don’t like Peach very much,’ he laughed, ‘but I like him better than you lot.’

  The grip on his upper arm tightened. He would have a bruise there in the morning – and it wouldn’t be the only one either.

  *

  He was escorted into a grey room with bare walls and no windows. Two policemen in regulation shirtsleeves stood on either side of a solid wooden desk. One was tall and sallow; a few strands of black hair had made the lonely journey across the top of his bald head. The other, stockier, had a bull neck, sloping shoulders, and a blur of ginger hair on his forearms. They had already taken his name and address (they had taken his belt too, and they had dropped it into a transparent plastic bag which made the belt look important and rather dangerous, and meant he had to hold his trousers up by hand). Now they were telling him to take off his boots. Try it sometime when you’re drunk. Hold on to your trousers with one hand and reach down for your laces with the other. Impossible. Either your trousers fall down or you do.

  After two or three attempts he said, ‘I can’t.’

  The tall policeman walked round the desk and stood over him. ‘Take your bloody boots off, Moses.’ The Moses was a sneer.

  The stocky policeman laughed. ‘Are you a bit Jewish by any chance, Moses? Are you a bit of a fucking yid?’ He draped his forefinger across his nose as he spoke.

  ‘None of your business,’ Moses said. For which he was shoved in the back by the tall policeman. He keeled over, landed face down on the floor.

  ‘Take your boots off, Moses.’

  ‘I thought it was only blacks you beat up,’ Moses said, and instantly regretted it. A highly polished shoe smashed into his ribs.

  ‘Didn’t hurt you, did I, Moses?’

  ‘You’re making things difficult, Moses Bloody Highness.’ The tall policeman read these last three words off his official form as if Bloody was Moses’s middle name.

  ‘So are you,’ Moses said.

  ‘I suggest you shut your mouth and get on with it.’

  Both the policemen had voices that grated like machines for grinding the organs, bones and flesh of cattle. They would make mincemeat of him if he wasn’t careful. He thought of Mary’s voice and almost cried. He fumbled with his boots again, managed to undo one of the laces.

  ‘Look at that. He did it.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Now do it up again.’

  ‘What is this?’ Moses said. ‘Kindergarten?’

  ‘You don’t deserve to be treated any other way – ’

  ‘Bastard.’ The stocky policeman liked to finish off the tall policeman’s sentences for him. They were a real team.

  Moses tied the lace. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now take your boots off.’

  He muttered under his breath. He untied the lace again. Then he stood up. He let go of his trousers, gripped his left boot in both hands and began to hop round the floor. It just wouldn’t come off. His trousers slipped down to his knees, tied his legs together. He fell over again.

  ‘I’m bored with this game,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not doing very well, are you – ’

  ‘Jewboy.’

  ‘Not quite so fucking smart as you thought.’

  ‘Oh piss off, will you?’ he said. Anger was beginning to seep through the many layers of his drunkenness.

  A shoe pinned his wrist to the floor.

  ‘We
don’t like that kind of language.’

  ‘Specially not from a stupid cunt like you.’

  The tall policeman moved towards him, a sheen of sweat on his high balding forehead.

  ‘I’m going to report you two,’ Moses said.

  ‘Did you say report?’

  ‘Yeah. To Chief Inspector Peach.’ Bravado now, bluff, anything.

  ‘Peach.’ one of the policemen scoffed.

  ‘You piece of shit,’ said the other, and landed a shoe just above Moses’s left eye.

  ‘Haha,’ Moses said. Red and orange planets whirled across the darkness as he closed his eyes. One of them looked like Saturn. ‘If I said Manchester, would you start dribbling?’

  The shoe landed again, somewhere on the back of his thighs.

  ‘Crime is order,’ he shouted as they came at him again. ‘A policeman said that.’

  ‘I’ll give you crime is order.’

  ‘Crime is order, my foot.’

  Two different shoes landed simultaneously in two different and tender places.

  ‘All right, that’s enough.’

  ‘Peach’s important,’ Moses murmured. ‘Peach’s my friend. He’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’

  But the policemen had gone and he was alone.

  Cold lino floor. Distantly aching body. One grazed hand beside his face, the redness too close to his eyes. Unwillingness to move.

  Cold.

  *

  It was some time before the door opened again.

  ‘Would you come this way, please?’

  Moses had propped himself against a wall. He turned his head and saw a young police officer with a soft face and freckles. His voice polite, almost subservient. Classic interrogation technique, Moses thought. One moment he was bastard, the next he was sir.

  ‘What’ve you got lined up for me now?’ But the alcohol and the drugs had worn off and he felt drab and slow, utterly incurious. Police procedure – the exhaustion, the monotony, the waiting – had tranquillised him; he would submit to each new development quite passively.

  ‘Fingerprints,’ the new policeman said.

  Wincing, Moses climbed to his feet. He followed the new policeman out of the room, down a corridor that smelt like a hospital (and no wonder, he thought, feeling his injuries), and into a room that was as cluttered as the previous room had been bare.

  The policeman produced a packet of Embassy Number One. ‘Like a cigarette, Moses?’

  Suspicious, Moses searched into the policeman’s freckled face; it contained nothing but innocence. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You smoke the same brand as my dad.’

  The policeman lit the cigarette for him. While Moses smoked, the policeman prepared a flat oblong tin and several printed sheets of paper.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ the policeman said.

  Moses raised an eyebrow and crushed his cigarette out.

  ‘The fingerprints,’ the policeman explained with a grin. ‘It’s easier if I guide your hand. Unless you’ve done it before, of course.’

  ‘No,’ Moses said. ‘This is my first time.’

  He watched as the policeman took his fingers one by one and carefully but firmly rolled them from left to right, first across the ink-pad in the oblong tin, then across a sheet of paper that had been divided into squares, one for each finger. He realised that he was collecting the kind of information that Vince specialised in. That fucker. This was all his fault.

  Afterwards, when he was washing the ink off his fingers, he said over his shoulder, ‘You know, I think you’re OK.’

  The policeman grinned.

  ‘Seriously,’ Moses said. ‘I’ve come across quite a few policemen recently and you’re one of the nicest I’ve come across.’

  The policeman’s grin broadened. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Not Dirty Harry?’

  ‘That’s an old joke, Moses.’

  ‘Sorry, Harry. People always make the same jokes about my name too.’ Moses dried his hands on the towel provided. ‘Hey, Harry. I was thinking of becoming a policeman. What d’you reckon?’

  Harry shook his head slowly. ‘I think you’d better forget the idea.’

  ‘Why’s that, Harry?’

  Harry pointed at the fingerprints on the table. ‘I don’t think they’d look too good on your application form.’

  Something sank in Moses. A slow lift in the tower-block of his body. Going down. ‘Oh yeah. Shit. I suppose you’re right.’ Then he turned and looked appealingly at Harry. ‘But I would’ve been tall enough, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Harry squinted up at Moses. ‘You would’ve been tall enough, all right.’

  After the fingerprints came the mug-shots. One frontal and two profiles were required. Harry sat Moses down in a metal chair, then crouched behind his camera. He told Moses which way to look and not to smile.

  ‘So I have to look serious, do I?’ Moses said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can’t have our criminals smiling, can we?’ Moses composed himself, assuming an expression of great, if slightly wounded, nobility. His chin raised, he thought momentarily of Mary again.

  Harry straightened up. ‘You can relax now.’

  ‘I bet those were pretty good pictures,’ Moses said. ‘Could you get me a few copies?’

  Harry laughed. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s against regulations.’

  ‘Shame, that. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. Now there’s one last thing, then you can go. You have the right to make a written statement. You don’t have to, you understand. But you can. If you want. It’s entirely up to you.’

  Moses considered the proposition for a few moments, then he said, ‘Yes, I’d like to. I feel like writing something.’

  Harry sighed. He gave Moses a biro and the appropriate form (with its heavily ruled lines, it looked like the bars on a cell if you turned it sideways), and left the room. When he returned five minutes later with two cups of coffee he peered over Moses’s shoulder. He sighed again.

  ‘What’s wrong, Harry?’ Moses said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  Harry peered over Moses’s shoulder again, then he frowned and scratched his head. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to, you know.’

  Moses read through what he had written so far. At some points he nodded, at others he chuckled. It made a good story. He decided to cross out the bit about the policemen’s breath smelling like sour milk. That probably wouldn’t go down too well in court.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I want to do it. One thing, though. What do I say about being beaten up by those two policemen in the other room?’

  Harry took a deep breath. ‘That’s a very serious allegation, Moses.’

  ‘It’s not an allegation, Harry. It’s the truth. Have you seen my eyebrow?’

  ‘I understood,’ Harry said slowly, ‘that you sustained that injury while resisting arrest.’

  Moses subjected Harry to long and careful scrutiny. Then he drew a line, very deliberately, under what he had written. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I’ve finished.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Harry said as he signed the statement, ‘it’ll be all right.’ (It wasn’t all right. Two weeks later Moses appeared at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court. The judge told him he was childish and irresponsible, and fined him £50. He almost charged him with contempt of court too. For leaning on the dock. The judge had white hair and a bright pink face. Moses had never seen anyone who looked so consistently furious.)

  ‘You can collect your things now,’ Harry said. ‘There are some friends of yours waiting for you.’

  Moses tossed his polystyrene cup into the waste-paper basket. ‘Thanks, Harry.’ He paused by the door. ‘Just think. We could’ve been working together.’

  Harry grinned and scratched his head.

  ‘Not any more, though. Eh, Harry?’

  ‘Goodbye, Moses.’

  ‘See y
ou, Harry.’

  Moses walked back to the duty-room where he was handed his personal effects. Through a window of reinforced glass he could see Vince, Eddie and some new girl of Eddie’s. She was wearing skin-tight red and white striped trousers. The officer on duty seemed to think that she was something to do with Moses.

  ‘Blimey, look at that,’ he drooled. ‘You’re a lucky bastard.’

  ‘Arrested, beaten up, my Wednesday night ruined,’ Moses murmured. ‘Oh yes, I’m a lucky bastard all right.’

  But the officer didn’t seem to hear him. Still mesmerised by those stripes.

  Moses buckled his belt with great relief. How nice to have two hands again. Amazing invention, belts. He had always taken them for granted in the past. Not any more.

  He met his friends on the steps of the police station like a hero returning.

  It was just after two in the morning.

  They all went dancing.

  *

  Everybody who came into contact with Mary during the six days between Alan’s death and the funeral seemed, either openly or covertly, to be congratulating her on the way she was coping. Coping. The word nauseated her. The way she saw it, that kind of sympathy came from the same family as condescension, a distant relation, perhaps, but still family, and if there was one thing she couldn’t stomach it was being condescended to, however obscurely. She thought she knew what they were picking up on, though. They were picking up on surface stuff: her dry eyes, her efficient manner – her armour, in other words. She wore a lot of lipstick and kohl. She wore stiff fabrics too, nothing that swirled or floated, nothing vague. Her airiness had evaporated completely. She displayed instead a kind of ironic practicality that verged, at times, on callousness. ‘No, the funeral’s happening very quickly,’ she heard herself inform a neighbour on the phone. ‘Apparently not many people died in Muswell Hill last week.’ Inside, though, she was still trying to get used to the idea that she had been cheated. Her. Cheated. Her anger at that. She wanted to whirl round and, levelling a finger, cry, ‘Don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes.’ But you can’t talk to death like that. Death doesn’t have to listen to anyone.

  She saw only the necessary people – the priest, the funeral directors, Alan’s father. She made an exception for Maurice. He came round on the Tuesday. He didn’t treat her as if she was ill, or wounded, or mad. He simply looked at her across the table without pity or embarrassment, the slow bones of his hands cradling a cup of tea, the right shoulder of his grey jacket worn shiny by long familiarity with dustbins. That stare of his spread a safety-net that she could fall into. Those hands made her feel strangely comfortable. She even smiled as she said, ‘I want you to take all Alan’s clothes away with you.’