Dreams of Leaving (41 page)

‘It could've been a mistake. Why would anyone want me?'

Elliot touched his solar plexus. ‘It didn't feel like a mistake.'

‘You didn't tell him anything, though?'

‘No,' and now Elliot turned back to look at Moses, ‘but he knew.'

Fear flickered down through Moses's body. He swallowed the rest of his brandy. ‘I wonder what he wants,' he said.

Elliot lit a Dunhill, tapped it on the edge of the ashtray. ‘Me and Ridley, we went after him, but we lost him in the park. He just vanished.' He leaned his elbows on the table, held his cigarette close to his mouth as he talked. ‘I tried to trace him, asked around, made a few phone-calls, but nobody knows anything. He just vanished, like he was never there. Real thin air job.'

He finished his drink and stood up. ‘All I wanted to say was, watch yourself, all right? I don't know who that bloke was, but he was a tough old sod and he had something on you.' His hand moved across his stomach again like someone exploring a painful memory. ‘If he turns up again I'm going to get Ridley to sort him out.'

Moses nodded. ‘Thanks, Elliot. And thanks for telling me.'

As Elliot slipped away into the crowd, Gloria said, ‘Thank you,' and slotted the microphone back on to its stand. She stepped down off the stage and walked over. She took one of Moses's cigarettes. He lit it for her.

‘Well?' she said. ‘How was I?'

‘Brilliant. You're singing better than ever tonight.'

She eyed him curiously. ‘Are you OK, Moses?'

‘Yeah.' He hoisted himself a little higher in his chair and assembled a smile for her. ‘Yeah, I'm fine. I was just thinking, that's all.'

‘Did you hear Malone? Isn't he great?'

‘I was too busy listening to you.'

Gloria laughed. ‘Moses, you're a terrible liar.'

‘I was,' Moses said. ‘Honestly.'

She touched his shoulder, then his cheek, and slipped away with a rustle of pink silk. She had to talk to the band. Letting his eyes drift beyond her, Moses noticed the clandestine figure of Jackson standing by the bar. Jackson seemed to be talking to Louise. Moses stood up, walked over.

‘Jackson,' he said. ‘I didn't know you were here.'

Jackson looked startled then shifty. He pulled his jacket in towards his body like a bird folding its wings. ‘I was just talking to Louise.'

‘I can see that.' Moses turned to Louise. She was wearing a black T-shirt, black ski-pants with silver ankle-zips and black patent-leather pumps. It might have been The Bunker's uniform. ‘I hear you're going away.'

‘Holiday with my parents.' Louise wrinkled her short nose. ‘Still, free sun, I suppose.'

‘Can't be bad,' said Moses, who had never been abroad in his life.

‘You don't know my parents.' Louise had an infectious chuckle, and Moses caught it. ‘I was just telling Jackson. I'm having a beach party. Two weeks' time. You going to come?'

‘Love to. Where?'

‘Ask Gloria. She's got the details.'

‘Oh Christ,' Jackson said. ‘Look who it is.'

Moses turned to see Eddie steering his magnesium smile through the smoke.

Louise muttered, ‘I ought to be getting back to work.'

Jackson dipped his head into his pint, but his eyes clung to Louise as she disappeared behind a pillar. This startled Moses. He had seen Jackson look at clouds that way before, but never women. But now Eddie had arrived and was slapping Jackson on the back. Jackson's beer slopped over.

‘Thank you, Eddie,' Jackson said.

‘Jackson,' Eddie said, ‘I thought you never drank.'

Jackson twisted his head to one side and smiled craftily, looking more than ever like a bird, the kind that steals jewellery. ‘Sometimes I go wild,' he said.

They sat at Moses's table in the corner. Eddie's new lover had a sleeping eye that made anything she said seem ironic. But were these fringed white cowboy boots of hers ironic? Moses doubted it somehow. He wondered what number she was. 1,000? 1,500? Eddie was just saying that he'd had a pretty hectic week. Maybe 2,000, then. The girl laughed, unaware of the significance of Eddie's remark.

In the meantime Gloria had climbed back on stage.

‘Me again.' She held the mike in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. ‘Thanks for all your help this afternoon, Ridley. This one's for you.'

Moses glanced round, but he couldn't see the big man anywhere. Still, it was a nice gesture. Word would get back, and somewhere in that gigantic construction of muscle and bone, somewhere in that mobile pain-dispenser, there had to be a heart, a tattooed heart, no doubt, but a heart none the less.

He had been trying not to think about what Elliot had said, but the anonymous policeman kept bursting into his head regardless, as if his head was a house that was staging a party and all his usual thoughts were guests and the policeman was a policeman. ‘It's a raid,' came a calm voice. ‘Great party,' his thoughts said, ‘really great, but I'm afraid we've got to be going now.' And, reaching for their coats, they all filed out at the same time, left him alone in the house. Alone with the policeman …

‘ –and Malone on tenor sax – '

Gloria was introducing the band. If he didn't listen to the saxophone this time, she'd murder him.

He only had to wait until halfway through the next song, then Malone unleashed a sixty-second solo, and played with such raw soaring power, assembled such an intricate structure of notes, that listening to him was like being led through some extraordinary abandoned mansion. It was as if Malone somehow knew of Moses's anxiety and was building a house specially for him, a different kind of house, a house where policemen would never appear at the door. The saxophone scaled the façade, dropped into an upstairs room, tiptoed across the landing, opened a door with rusty hinges, tripped, stumbled to the edge of a parapet, peered over, stepped sharply back, ran down flight after flight of stairs, through ballrooms peopled by the ghosts of dancers, through echoing cloisters and claustrophobic passageways, past windows with vistas and hushed rooms no longer used, tore through curtained doorways and out, finally, into the open air, paused to breathe the air, ran on through gardens with peacocks and fountains, along spacious landscaped avenues, past sudden explosions of plants from South America, and back down a sweeping gravel drive to the road where Gloria was waiting with the rest of the song.

‘Malone,' she said, over the applause. ‘We just borrowed him for the night. I wish he didn't have to go back – '

‘Renew him,' Moses shouted. ‘Renew him.'

Malone bowed majestically in his cylindrical brown coat.

Five minutes later Moses pushed his way through the crowd to buy another round of drinks. He swayed from side to side, collided with some people, rebounded off others, but he always did that when he was drunk, he meant nothing by it, so he was surprised when he heard somebody swear at him, surprised enough to turn and catch a glimpse of an unidentifiable object flying towards him at great speed.

At first he thought he was in bed because he was lying down and he felt strangely comfortable. But then he realised that the ceiling was the wrong colour and anyway, what would all these people be doing in his bedroom? They were bending over him and their heads looked like tulips, the hard conical shape of the buds before they open, and he wanted to laugh.

Gloria knelt beside him.

‘Why aren't you singing?' he asked her.

She gazed down at him sadly, as if he was dying in a film. ‘That's over,' she told him.

‘I must've missed the last bit,' he said.

She nodded. ‘Yes, you did.'

‘Malone was good.'

She smiled and ran a cool hand through his hair. ‘How do you feel?'

‘What happened?'

‘You got hit.'

Moses smiled faintly.

Now Ridley loomed above him. His one gold earring swung like something a hypnotist might use.

‘Moses,' and Ridley held a finger up, ‘how many fingers can you see?'

‘One.'

Ridley held up two fingers. ‘How many now?'

‘That's not nice, Ridley.'

‘He's all right,' Ridley told Gloria. ‘Better get him upstairs, though.'

They helped him up to his flat and put him to bed with an ice-pack over his eye. Gloria said she would stay the night.

‘That's very nice of you,' Moses mumbled, ‘to look after me.'

‘Don't be a prick,' she said.

He woke at midday, and this time he really was in bed. The right side of his face felt fragile and stiff, twice its normal size. He could hear Gloria singing somewhere. One of the songs from last night. She must be in the bathroom. He tried to open his eyes, but only the left one worked. There was a huge gold tiara outside the window. He closed the eye again.

‘Gloria?' he called out.

He heard the floorboards creak as she walked into the bedroom.

‘Gloria?'

‘Yes?'

‘Tell me something,' he said. ‘Tell me what that gold tiara's doing outside the window.'

Now he heard her laughing.

He opened his left eye again. The empty gasholder gleamed in the afternoon sun. The sun is clever, he thought. It can turn buildings into jewellery.

Gloria went out to the kitchen to make some coffee. When she returned, Moses was sitting up in bed with both eyes open. Gloria screamed and threw his coffee all over the wall.

‘What's wrong?' he asked.

‘Your eye.'

‘What about it?'

‘Look in the mirror.'

He crawled across the bed until his face appeared in the mirror. ‘Jesus,' he gasped.

The white part of his right eye had flooded with blood. The right side
of his face had swollen too; sheets of pain, bright as aluminium, flashed across the inside of his head when he pressed his cheek.

‘How did it happen?' he asked. ‘I can't remember a thing.'

‘Well, apparently you bumped into this guy and spilled beer all down him. It doesn't seem like a very good reason to hit someone but Ridley said he knew the guy from somewhere. He used to be a boxer and he's always looking for trouble.'

Moses groaned. ‘A boxer? Trust me to get hit by a boxer.'

‘Ridley threw him out. You should've seen it. He just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and chucked him in that skip. The guy was furious. I don't think I've ever seen anyone look so furious. But Ridley just stood there with his arms folded and said, “I don't want to see you again. Ever.”' Gloria laughed and shook her head.

‘I wish I'd seen it,' Moses said.

‘You were lying on the floor. You must've been out cold for about two minutes.'

Moses touched his cheek. ‘D'you think anything's broken?'

‘I don't know. It might be an idea to check.'

‘Have my head examined, you mean.' Moses grinned. ‘Shit, it even hurts to grin.'

Gloria drove him to St Thomas's in Waterloo. The doctor, an urbane Pakistani, told him that he had sustained a hairline fracture of the right cheekbone. It would heal naturally, he said. As for the eye, that was just a broken bloodvessel. He wrote Moses a prescription. There didn't appear to be any concussion, he said, but he advised Moses to take things easy for a few days.

‘If I was you,' he concluded, stroking his neck with an elegant tapering finger, ‘I should try not to get into any more fights with boxers.'

Moses promised to avoid anyone who looked even remotely like a boxer.

On the way back to The Bunker Gloria turned to him. ‘You know something else that happened last night? After I'd finished singing, Ridley came up to me. Oh shit, I thought, what've I done now? But he just put his hand on my shoulder and smiled and said, “That was fucking diamond.”'

The Rover touched fifty-five as an art collector touches his own private Rodin. Moses loved his old car. Gloria had wanted to hire a Porsche to drive down to Louise's party in (these girls with parents in Hampstead!), but a Porsche, they found out, cost about £130 a day and neither of them had that kind of money. Gloria capitulated gracefully. She settled for half a Porsche which, when commuted into powders and liquids, turned out to be a gram of coke and a Thermos of Smirnoff and crushed ice. Much more sensible.

‘So where is the party exactly?' Moses asked her.

Gloria, navigator for the trip, snuggled down in her seat. ‘A place called Star Gap,' she said. ‘It's somewhere on the south coast. Don't worry. We'll find it.'

Moses nodded.

They had left the rain behind in Purley (where rain belongs) and as the car swung away from a roundabout and climbed up through the trees towards Godstone the sun broke through, beat like a sudden drum rhythm in his blood. He wound the window down, listened to the cymbal hiss of tyres on the wet road. Gloria put sunglasses on and pretended to be an Italian movie-star. Smiles journeyed between them. So did the Thermos of vodka.

They had been driving for an hour when Gloria sat up.

‘What about a deviation?' she suggested.

Moses narrowed his eyes. ‘In what sense of the word?'

‘I thought that, on this occasion,' she said, in a voice that left him in no doubt, ‘the two senses of the word might be combined in a single act.'

Moses smiled.

‘It'll be the first time, you see. Outdoors, I mean. We can't really count that greenhouse in Leicestershire, can we?'

Moses agreed that they couldn't really count the greenhouse in Leicestershire.

Gloria consulted the map. ‘Now, let's see. We'll be passing through a big patch of light green soon and, according to this, light green means either forest, woodland, or an area of outstanding natural beauty, so what I– '

‘That means that if you were on the map,' Moses interrupted, ‘you'd be light green.'