Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘You mean dump them?’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I want you to have them.’

  The dustman lowered his eyes.

  She watched his hands wander on the surface of the table. She thought of plants moving on the bottom of the sea.

  ‘I know you never really spoke to Alan,’ she went on, ‘but you would have liked each other. I know you would. I can’t imagine anyone I would rather give his clothes to. Please take them, Maurice. Who knows,’ and she surprised herself by laughing, ‘some of them might even fit.’

  ‘You do me good,’ she told him as she showed him to the door. ‘Come again, won’t you?’

  ‘Next Tuesday suit you?’ He grinned at her. It was one of his jokes.

  ‘Next Tuesday’s fine.’ She watched him shamble down the garden path, his feet flapping on the concrete as if his ankle-joints needed tightening.

  Her smile lasted.

  When his lorry had turned the corner, she walked back indoors, stood by the phone. Facts, she thought. Facts, not emotions. She knew roughly what had happened to Alan. She knew that he had collapsed on Ealing Broadway at about two forty-five on Saturday afternoon. She knew that he had died of a thrombosis, a hardening of the artery walls which, according to the doctor who signed the death certificate, ought to have been detected years before. (‘Ought?’ she had wanted to scream at him, this placid careful man, because he had, for those few minutes, represented the entire profession to her. ‘Why wasn’t it then? Why didn’t you?’) Now she needed to know how it had happened. She needed an eye-witness account. She needed to be able to see every detail.

  She dialled the police in Ealing. After twenty minutes of being transferred from one extension to another, after repeating her story at least half a dozen times, she was given the number of a Mrs Hart (a name that Moses must have run his finger over a thousand times, she thought, while searching for his own). Mrs Hart, she was told, had been present at the scene of her husband’s death and would be able to provide her with the information she required. That same afternoon she drove to Ealing. Mrs Hart lived in a walk-up council block not far from Ealing Broadway. The stairs smelt of urine and then, higher up, of meat-fat. Mrs Hart’s flat was on the fourth floor.

  When Mary knocked on the door of number 72, an old woman with silver hair answered. ‘Mrs Hart?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘I’m Mrs Shirley.’

  ‘They said you was comin’.’ Mrs Hart ushered Mary into her lounge. ‘Wos your name, love?’

  Mary told her.

  ‘Mine’s Ruby. Ought to’ve been born on Valentine’s Day, didn’ I?’ Her narrow eyes gleamed like an animal’s – trust rather than cunning, though.

  They sat down on a brown and yellow sofa. A gas fire bubbled in the corner.

  ‘I’m sorry about your ’usband.’ Ruby laid a hand on Mary’s wrist. ‘It’s a bloody world, isn’ it?’

  Mary nodded. ‘I wanted to ask you what happened that afternoon. What you saw. It’s so hard not having been there.’

  ‘I can imagine, love.’ Ruby shifted to face Mary, her hands folded like gloves in her lap. ‘Well,’ and she took a deep breath, ‘I was on me way to the shops. Fifteen minutes’ walk from ’ere. It’s the steps, see. Murder on me legs.’ She rolled her eyes and Mary smiled. ‘I was walkin’ up the main road when this bus come along, number sixty-free I fink it was. There’s nobody at the stop, but the bus stops anyway, to let somebody off. Then this gentleman goes past me, well, I mean you can tell, can’t you, an’ ’e’s shoutin’ an’ wavin’ an’ all sorts for the bus to wait for ‘im like. The driver sees ‘im runnin’, but you know what some of them drivers’re like, right bloody bastards if you excuse me language. Wos ’e do? ’E puts ‘is foot down, dun ’e. Well,’ another deep breath, ‘the gentleman, ’e carries on runnin’ ‘cos the bus is goin’ pretty slow, then all of a sudden ’e keels over. Jus’ keels over right there on the street. I fought ’e must of tripped or summin’ so I goes over to ’elp ‘im up like. ’E’s lying on ‘is back in ’e, wiv ‘is eyes open but sort of starin’ an’ ’e sees me an’ ’e smiles an’ ’e says, “Stupid,” ’e says an’ I says, “Wos stupid?”, finking ’e means me an’ ’e says, “Fancy slippin’ on a banana like that,” an’ I look round for a banana an’ there in’t no banana is there an’ I look at ‘im an’ I’m about to tell ‘im there in’t no banana an’ what’s ’e talkin’ about banana but then I look a bit closer like an’ I see ’e’s dead. Well, there’s all these people shoutin’ about get a nambulance an’ I says, “Wos the point of a nambulance, ’e’s dead in ’e.” An’ ’e was wan ’e. Frombosis, the doctor said. Nuffin’ to do wiv no banana.’

  Tears were falling from Mary’s eyes. Alan had died alone. Among strangers. Without understanding. She had been so far away. Too far away to comfort, to explain, to reassure. That degree of distance from someone she had been so close to. It dismantled her armour. Her make-up ran, her body crumpled in Ruby’s arms. That one weekend away had opened up a gap for ever. She couldn’t leap over or build a bridge. She could only sit at the edge and pour her tears into it. One day, when she had cried enough, perhaps she would be able to swim across. She would be returning from that weekend for the rest of her life. Even on her deathbed she still wouldn’t quite have reached home.

  ‘You poor darlin’,’ Ruby murmured. ‘It’s a bloody world.’

  As Mary drove back to Muswell Hill, a strange thought occurred to her. A middle-aged man – try, she told herself, to see him objectively, even if only for a moment – collapses on a busy street. A woman bends to help him. The flow of pedestrians is interrupted. A crowd gathers. The traffic jams as cars slow down and drivers peer through windscreens. One of the city’s main arteries is blocked for maybe thirty seconds. The traffic police appear. They gesticulate with their immaculate white gloves. The cars move on. The crowd disperses. The street regains its rhythm.

  But there are no traffic police in the middle-aged man’s veins.

  The blockage is permanent.

  He dies.

  Yes, she thought. Alan had articulated, on a large scale, the drama that had taken place inside his own body. He had externalised his death. She wanted to tell him that, she wanted to see the expression on his face – when she thought of things like that she always told him – but she could only have told him if he was still alive, if the whole thing had never happened, and then there wouldn’t have been anything to tell. Grief’s vicious circle. He was dead, and you could go round and round, but you couldn’t go back. There was no reversing up a one-way street like death. No sir, there was a big ticket for that.

  *

  The day before the funeral a wreath of white flowers and wild ferns was delivered to the house in Muswell Hill. Alison carried it into the kitchen and laid it on the table.

  ‘It’s from Moses.’ She read the note, then looked across at Mary. ‘Isn’t he coming tomorrow?’

  Mary was standing in front of the mirror. She tilted her head sideways, adjusted an earring. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Mary didn’t answer.

  ‘He’s entitled to, isn’t he?’ Alison said, not querulous exactly, but insistent. ‘I thought he was – ’ and she paused – ‘a member of the family.’

  Mary recognised her own words. She chose not to acknowledge them. ‘He doesn’t know about it.’

  ‘What?’ Rebecca was lingering in the doorway. ‘He doesn’t know that Daddy – ’

  ‘He doesn’t know about the funeral,’ Mary cut in.

  ‘Why not?’ Alison persisted.

  Mary turned from the mirror. This was the point at which the truth became too complex, too unwieldy, to manage, at the moment at least, and lies, the lackeys that they were, presented themselves, oily and obsequious. And so she said simply, ‘I didn’t tell him,’ which closed the door in the face of her daughters’ questions and the lies that wanted to serve as answers. The two girls seemed to accept this, despi
te the look they swapped behind (or almost behind) their mother’s back. Alison murmured something about not being able to breathe; she moved away and opened a window. Rebecca did something nervous with her feet. Mary forced herself to leave the room.

  The tension stayed with her. At four in the morning she threw on a silk dressing-gown and walked out on to the terrace. Such a wind. She filled her lungs with fierce air. Clouds, great jagged sheets of steel, clashed overhead. The moon showed briefly, dented and blackened, the bottom of an old saucepan. They told her no stories, nothing she could use to explain her withholding, her dishonesty, not even to herself. She stood on the terrace and listened to the crash and jangle of the night until she, too, seemed turned to metal by the cold, until the wind had blown all thoughts from her head. Towards dawn she slept.

  In the morning she opened the doors of her wardrobe, and the rows and rows of black clothes that she saw there immobilised her. It’s almost as if I’ve been preparing for this moment, she thought. It’s almost as if I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this death, this grief, this widowhood. With every black dress bought, with every black accessory received. Preparing, preparing. She dropped on to the bed, remembered her mother on a rare visit to London saying, in that deliberately puzzled voice she could put on (as if grappling with a problem to which she could imagine no possible solution), ‘I simply do not understand this love-affair you seem to have with black.’ She couldn’t think what her reply had been. Something withering, no doubt. But now the sight of all that black crushed and sickened her. When Alison walked in twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t moved.

  ‘You’ve got to get dressed, Mary,’ Alison said. ‘The car will be here soon.’

  Mary didn’t look round. ‘I’m going to wear white.’

  ‘You can’t. It’s just not the right time for something like that.’

  Perhaps she responded to the panic in her daughter’s voice. ‘Not the right time,’ she repeated. But with no irony, no venom. Without another word, she submitted to Alison’s choice of dress.

  *

  When a funeral happens, people don’t usually say, ‘It’s a nice day for it,’ but if it had been a wedding or a picnic or a flower-show, Mary thought, that’s what they would have said. Last night’s wind had cleared the sky of clouds. As they drove from the church to the graveyard in their hired grey limousine, they passed old men on benches, hatless, sucking on their teeth, women in gardens pinning wet clothes to the wide thin smiles of their washing-lines, shopkeepers in their doorways, slit-eyed against this unexpected sunlight. So many people out. The world and his wife, she thought. And then, moments later: the world and his widow. Not self-pity, this. Accuracy.

  The car turned in through black wrought-iron gates.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said suddenly, ‘but I’d like to walk the rest of the way, if you don’t mind.’

  Their chauffeur, a man whose face was as rigid as the profile on a coin, stopped the car. She stepped out. Her children followed. She looked about her, recognised the cat that was dozing on a headstone. She breathed, almost with relief, the familiar air of the cemetery. She had walked its paths so many times. With Alan, with the children, and, most recently, with Moses. If Moses had come to the funeral he might have been surprised, even disappointed, she thought. He would have expected some less formal, less conventional event, unaware of how the process is designed to carry you, like a raft, away from the wreckage of someone’s death, away from that whirlpool it creates, to carry you as effortlessly as possible into calmer waters where you can begin to think again. It was a funeral like a million others before it. The usual words, the usual music, the usual moments of solemnity. For once, too, she fitted in because everyone was wearing black. It almost seemed to her as if they were imitating her. Which, in their grief, perhaps, they were.

  They reached the graveside. Now the priest began to recite the traditional phrases. They have beauty, she thought, staring away into the sky. A used beauty, a worn beauty, like stone steps worn smooth and slightly concave by five, ten, twenty centuries of feet. They were phrases everybody passed through. There were no exceptions. At least they contained that truth. We’re all pretty ordinary, she thought. All pretty ordinary when it comes down to it. That’s what the phrases said.

  Her eyes drew closer, moved over the faces of her children.

  Sean stood at the head of the grave. Hands clasped, hair combed, pale. Awkward in a black jacket, and trousers that itched. He would be waiting for something dramatic to happen, something to fix the day in his memory: a partial eclipse of the sun, a riderless horse galloping between the stones, an explosion in that house beyond the cemetery wall. His eyes would be aching with the constant fruitless quest for symbols. Her gaze passed to Alison. Alison’s hair glowed under a black headscarf, mere embers of the fire it usually was. She seemed to be examining the brass handles on the coffin. Then her eyes lifted, moved across the polished wood, paused on that discreet metal plaque. She would be thinking how new everything looked, how horribly new and clean. And how Alan had always hated anything that looked new. How he had loved old things, things with stories in their surfaces, things with histories. Death had turned him into someone she didn’t recognise. Rebecca was standing next to Mary, so Mary couldn’t see her face. She could only feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, a grip that tightened as a cluster of gulls suddenly rose screeching against a screen of evergreens.

  Lumps of mud thudded on to the coffin lid, dirt on the cleanness that Alison abhorred. Like somebody knocking on a door. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Dad. Dad who? No, not Dad. Dead. Mary thought she saw Sean’s leg begin to tremble. She could imagine him running, running over this grass that was bumpy with other people’s dead, running to escape the trembling. She felt Rebecca’s grip tighten again and watched her as she leaned forwards, peered down into that fascinating oblong hole in the ground. It was so deep it made Rebecca shiver, feel dizzy; she almost lost her balance.

  Then they were walking towards the limousine and the expressionless chauffeur who was waiting to drive them back to the house where there was to be, as Rebecca had whispered disbelievingly to Alison the night before, a party because Dad’s dead.

  *

  Two days later Mary stood in front of her wardrobe again. She had decided that everything black had to go. Dresses, underwear, accessories – the lot. She removed her black clothes from their hangers, their shelves, their drawers, and dropped them, one by one, on to the bed behind her. The heap grew and grew until she caught herself staring, exactly as her mother would have done, with incredulous uncomprehending eyes. Oh how it all turns round, she thought.

  She counted sixty-one separate black items in all (not including shoes) and was astonished at the power they gave off, the history they contained. Some dated back over twenty years to the summer when she had first met Alan (a silk blouse she bought on Bond Street in 1959), others were as recent as her affair with Moses (a pair of elbow-length gloves with pearl buttons that he had found for her at Camden Lock). She gave them the time they deserved. She let the memories flow out of them, through her, and back again, then she packed them into plastic dustbin-liners (also black).

  Her first instinct had been to take her clothes along to a charity shop, but she had quickly changed her mind. She wanted them destroyed, not passed on (it horrified her to think that she might see somebody walking down the street in a dress that Alan had given her), and she wanted to supervise the destruction herself. She wanted to see them disappear with her own eyes. She wanted to know exactly where they had gone.

  As dusk fell that Sunday afternoon she hauled the bags down to the end of the garden. She built a fire out of newspaper, a drawerload of Alan’s memorabilia, and the remains of the old garden fence. She sat on the upturned water-tank and fed the clothes into the flames, one item at a time, with a pair of tongs. The wools crackled like dry foliage, the synthetics shrivelled and dripped. The smell was awful, something like singed hair, and the smoke that unra
velled past the knitting-needle branches of the sycamore was as black as the clothes themselves. Exorcism, she thought.

  Sean, who loved fires, must have noticed the orange glow from his bedroom window. He stood in the shadows by the hedge and watched as Mary lifted a fifties’ stiletto into the air and placed it carefully in the centre of the blaze. The crocodile skin flared.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the fire. ‘I’m burning a few of my old clothes.’

  He moved closer, stood at her shoulder. ‘The black ones?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why the black ones?’

  Her voice dropped a register. ‘Because that phase is over.’

  *

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  Elliot stopped Moses on the end of his finger. It was Sunday night. Draughts in the doorway of The Bunker. The cold neon glow that Moses called morgue light.

  Moses stared at the finger (he had learned a trick or two from Ridley), but the finger didn’t waver.

  Nor did Elliot’s eyes. ‘I don’t see you for weeks, then you walk straight past me, nearly fucking knock me over. What’s the idea?’

  Moses didn’t know what to tell him. He lowered his eyes. ‘My mother died,’ he said eventually.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘My mother. She died.’

  Elliot stepped back, hands on hips. He looked round, looked back at Moses. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘You know,’ Moses said, ‘that woman you saw. Wearing a black dress. Getting on a bit – ’ His voice tied up.