Dreams of Leaving (11 page)

‘The same people?' Moses asked.

Elliot shrugged.

It couldn't be kids, that much was clear. And remembering what Elliot had told him about the previous break-in, Moses thought he recognised the style. The blood, the shit, the piss. The same sadistic premeditated violence. It had the feel of a vendetta, a psychotic vendetta, and, once again, Moses wondered exactly what truth lay beneath the rumours he had heard about Elliot. This kind of thing didn't happen to just anyone.

‘I suppose it's no good getting the police in,' he said.

Elliot didn't even hear. His face had clenched like a fist. He was, Moses saw, one of those people who feel fury rather than fear.

He took Elliot by the arm. ‘Come on. Let's go and get a drink somewhere.'

He drove Elliot to a pub in Bermondsey. The jukebox was playing early Sinatra to an interior of dark wood. They drank in near silence. An idea occurred to Moses – or, rather, recurred, because it had first begun to hatch when Elliot told him what had happened in October. The idea now grew, spread wings, though, even as it did so, Moses realised that he would have to save it for a more propitious moment.

*

Winter eased. Spring became a possibility.

When the vital conversation took place, Moses had been waiting almost a month. Insurance had restored the office to its former sleek condition. The windows were wide open. The roar of rush-hour traffic competed with the squeak of the blue chalk cube on the end of Elliot's cue. The pool-table was playing as beautifully as ever, though Elliot still winced sometimes when he looked down at the green baize and remembered. Moses sat on the arm of the sofa, cue in one hand, a brandy in the other. A typical evening on the second floor of The Bunker.

Elliot was telling Moses about a trip he had made to West Germany. ‘I was in this town, right?' he was saying.

Elliot in West Germany? ‘What were you doing there?' Moses asked.

‘Business.'

‘Ah,' Moses said.

‘Anyway,' Elliot went on, ‘there was this bloke going on about a dome – '

‘The cathedral?' Moses suggested.

‘Yeah, probably, but he called it a dome. Anyway, this bloke, he's sort of a guide, right? He points at this dome and he says, “You see that?”, and I go, “Yeah”. “You see that?” he says, second time, OK?, and I'm thinking
What is this?
but I go, “Yeah,” anyway. Then he says, “Ugly,” he says. “Ugly ugly ugly”. And I'm cracking up but he hasn't finished yet. “In the war,” he says, “boo boo boo, everything falls down, but that,” and he points at the fucking dome again, “that no bombs touch.” I'm thinking
Yeah, OK, so?
And then he says, “You know why no bombs touch?”, and I go, “No,” and he says, “Why God inside”.'

Elliot shook his head. ‘God inside.
Jesus?
'

‘You shouldn't mock,' Moses said, with the air of somebody who has just thought of something. ‘There's a moral in that story.'

‘Moral?' Elliot said. ‘What moral?' But he wasn't really listening. He was loping round the table, running his cue back and forwards through his left hand, intent on victory.

Moses smiled. His moment had come. ‘I mean, maybe you need God in here, Elliot.'

‘What the
fuck
are you talking about?'

‘Well, if you had God in here, maybe you wouldn't get broken into any more.'

Elliot paused in mid-shot and straightened up. There was a shrewdness in his gaze that Moses recognised as confusion in disguise. He stepped forwards out of the shadows. He couldn't risk obscurity. Not when he was this close.

‘I was thinking,' Moses said, ‘that maybe I could be God, you see.'

Elliot rushed his shot, and missed for once.

‘You going to talk English or what?' he snapped.

He hated missing.

The setting sun reached through the window, showed Moses standing in the centre of the room, his cue upright in his hand like a shepherd's crook. I could be God, he was thinking. Just a couple more sentences, that should clinch it.

He took a deep breath, became precise, factual. ‘Listen, the top floor's empty, right? You're not using it for anything, so what I thought is, suppose I live up there. Sort of keep an eye on the place when you're not here. I mean, you can't be here all the time, can you? Not a man with your interests. And if somebody was actually
living
here all the time, then maybe you wouldn't get broken into any more – '

Moses bent over the table. He lined up a spot and knocked it into the left-hand side pocket. Like a sort of full stop.

Elliot stared at the place where the spot had disappeared. ‘Maybe you have something there,' he said.

They carried on playing in silence. A siren cut through the quiet of the street below like a reminder of violence. It was more than five minutes before Elliot spoke.

‘I've been thinking,' he said. ‘If you were normal size, like me, for instance, I'd say no way.' He paused. ‘But since you're so fucking big – '

He didn't have to finish the sentence. They shook hands, and slapped each other on the back. Moses leapt into the air, his legs revolving as if he was riding a bicycle. When he landed, the floor trembled. He was big all right. Out came the brandy. Elliot poured two. Trebles.

‘'Course,' Elliot said, ‘you could be one of them, couldn't you?'

‘That's right,' Moses said.

They held each other's glances for a few long seconds, their heads very still as if the slightest movement could cause something terrible to happen, then they began to laugh, both at the same time.

‘You really think you can handle it?' Elliot asked.

‘Let's put it this way,' Moses said. ‘You're not going to be any worse off, are you?'

Ten minutes later Elliot had to go downstairs to attend to something. He left Moses sprawling in his executive chair. The look on Moses's face was one of pure fruition. He forgave everyone for their cruel jokes about his size. He even forgave his unknown parents for having created the problem in the first place.

It was all worth it.

*

Who to tell, though?

First would have to be Eddie. His life in Eddie's flat in Battersea would now be coming to an end. Well, that had been part of the plan, really. No more voices at night. No more statues in the kitchen. No more Jackson Browne (like most beautiful people, Eddie had absolutely no taste in music).

Not that they hadn't had some good times, of course. How could he forget the night Eddie had come in and thrown up all over the TV?

‘Eddie,' Moses had said the next morning, ‘what's
that?
'

‘What?' Eddie said. ‘Oh,
that.
That's breakfast television.'

Moses smiled as he dialled the number that had been his for the last two years. They had been avoiding each other recently. Putting a bit of physical distance between them might bring them closer together. Something like that, anyway.

He glanced at his watch. Nine twenty-five. Hang on. If it was nine twenty-five, Eddie probably wouldn't be in. Unless he was having sex. At nine twenty-five, though? Yes, what about the time Moses had come home, it must have been around seven in the evening, to find a pair of pearl earrings placed, all neatness and innocence, on the arm of the sofa – the first in a trail of female clues that led with unerring logic, with unfaltering resolve, across the carpet, along the hall and up the stairs, only to disappear with a wriggle of black elastic under Eddie's bedroom door. Yes, he might well be in.

Moses let the number ring just in case Eddie was struggling, irritable, half-dressed, but still unbelievably good-looking, towards the phone. After two minutes he gave up. Either Eddie was out, or the sex was uninterruptible. He replaced the receiver.

*

He thought of Jackson next.

Jackson would almost certainly be home. Jackson was
always
home. Jackson wasn't interested in women. Once, when drunk, Jackson had suddenly announced that he was asexual. The laughter he had been expecting never arrived. Everybody simply agreed with him.

Women held no fascination for Jackson. He was far more interested in the weather – its beauty, its caprices. He watched the way the clouds walked across the sky. He listened to what the north wind said. These were his women.

Yes, he would be at home now, in his dark basement flat, his tense wiry frame bent over an antique weather-vane, or staring tenderly, myopically, at the latest reading on a barometer. He would be crouching at his desk, one hand plunged into his coarse, curly hair, calculating the exact position of an isothermal layer, or puzzling over the sudden prevalence of millibars in the air above the city. He would be totally absorbed in making yet another totally erroneous weather forecast.

Moses dialled the number and waited. Sure enough, three rings and there was the quavery tenacious voice he knew so well.

‘Hello?'

‘Jackson?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's Moses.'

‘Who?'

‘Moses. You know. Six foot six. Size twelve feet. Likes old ladies – '

‘I'm sorry, it's not that Jackson.'

‘What?'

‘You've got the wrong Jackson. This is Jackson's brother. The Jackson you want isn't here.'

There was a pause while Moses assimilated this sudden glut of information: one, Jackson had a brother, two, Jackson and Jackson's brother sounded identical, three, Jackson's brother also called himself Jackson, and four, Jackson, the Jackson he knew, was out.

Jackson? Out?

‘Where is he?' Moses asked.

‘The Amateur Meteorological Society.'

Moses smiled. Few things could persuade Jackson to leave his cluttered basement flat. The AMS was one of them. ‘Could you tell him that Moses called?' he said.

‘Moses. OK. Any message?'

‘Just tell him that I've got some good news.'

‘Good news. Right. Goodbye.'

Very dry brother, Moses thought. Probably a very good meteorologist. Either that or very successful with women. As he pondered the differences between Jackson and Jackson's brother Jackson, he realised that he still hadn't actually
told
anyone.

*

Who else was there?

Vince! What about Vince? Vince would probably tell him to fuck off. Vince was like that. Still.

He dialled Vince's number.

A sullen voice said, ‘Who's that?'

‘Moses.'

‘Fuck off, Moses.'

You see?

Moses sighed. ‘What's wrong with you, Vince?'

‘Why should anything be wrong?'

‘What's wrong, Vince?'

‘Lots of things. Everything.'

‘Like what?'

‘Alison's left.'

Oh Christ, not again. People were always leaving Vince. Especially Alison was always leaving Vince. Moses didn't blame her either. If he was going out with Vince, he would leave him too. There was some great disparity between Vince in your memory and Vince in the flesh. Moses
was very fond of Vince when he was somewhere else. The imagined Vince was impish, controversial, photogenic; the real Vince was boorish, truculent, morose.

But, real or imagined, you couldn't forget him somehow. His blond hair, dark at the roots, stuck up at all angles, unbrushed, unkempt, stiff with gel, lacquer and soap. His mouth turned up at the corners even when he wasn't smiling, so he gave the impression of being good-humoured when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. And he always wore this black waistcoat, glossy with age and stains, and prolific with insulting badges; it was almost as if these badges had sprouted, like toadstools, from the black soil of his clothes, they were so much a part of him. His trademark, this waistcoat. Vince wouldn't have been Vince without it.

He was forever being turned away from places – wine-bars, clubs, restaurants, pubs (he had been banned from his King's Road local twice), cafés, shops, parties, you name it. If asked, he would recite, and not without a certain pride, a list of all the famous places he had never been allowed into. ‘I'm sorry, you're drunk,' doormen would tell Vince as he swayed, leering and malevolent, on the pavement – but they would always be looking at his waistcoat. In the end Moses decided there had to be a connection.

One night he tried an experiment. They had taken some angel dust at Vince's squat, and were on their way to a private party at The Embassy Club. In the back of the cab, he turned to Vince. ‘You don't need to wear that waistcoat tonight,' he said in a gently persuasive voice. ‘Why not leave it behind for once?' He should have known better. Gently persuasive voices didn't work with Vince. Gently persuasive voices made him puke. He glared at Moses. The lights of Chelsea coloured his face green then red. ‘Who the fuck're you?' he snarled. ‘My mother?' This was not a role that Moses was suited to. He dropped the subject and they went back to being friends. Naturally Vince didn't get into The Embassy.

That they were friends at all sometimes seemed extraordinary to Moses, not least when he had to scrape the remains of Vince off the floor after a fight or stop Vince jumping out of a tower-block window. Driving Vince to St Stephen's at four in the morning with a six-inch gash in the back of his head and his blood pumped full of drugs may have made a good story the first time round, but when you had to deal with it on a monthly basis it got pretty fucking tedious. Go and kill yourself somewhere else, you felt like saying. The things he did for Vince. He sometimes hated himself for being so good-natured, and wondered whether in fact he wasn't Vince's mother after all.

‘Why?' he asked. ‘Why's Alison left you this time?'

‘I don't know.' Vince was talking through a mouthful of clenched teeth. ‘She said something about she couldn't stand it any more.'

‘Where is she now?'