Dreams of Leaving (57 page)

‘You heard me. We're going to see your parents.'

‘Today?'

‘Now.'

‘But,' Moses panicked, ‘but they don't know we're coming.'

‘So what are you going to do? Call them up and say, “Hello, can I come and see you for the first time in twenty-five years?”'

‘Twenty-four and a half, actually.'

‘Or maybe you'd like to send them a quick telegram? Hi stop. My name's Moses stop. Remember me? stop.'

Moses grinned despite himself, then immediately looked worried again. ‘But listen, Mary,' he said, ‘how do we know they still live there?'

‘How do we know they don't until we try?'

He paced up and down in front of the window, his right eye blinking as it always did when he was nervous. Mary watched him from the sofa, one leg tucked underneath her body, elegant, mischievous – determined.

Then he swung round, hands spread. ‘There's no point just turning up. I mean, what if they're out?'

‘What if they're having a garden party? What if they're having sex? What if they're horribly deformed?' Mary threw her hands up in exasperation and caught them again.

He frowned. ‘I suppose so.' He was thinking hard now. ‘But hold on,' he quickened, sensing a loophole he might wriggle through, ‘we don't even know where this New Egypt is.'

‘Don't we?'

‘No, we don't. And I don't have a map either. Sorry about that.' He spread his hands again, grinning this time.

Mary grinned back, slid a hand into her bag. The hand emerged with a
Shell Road Atlas. ‘I've
got a map,' she said,
‘and
I know where New Egypt is.'

‘Shit.' There was no way out of this. ‘Where is it then?'

But Mary wasn't telling. She handed him his coat instead, led him downstairs to the car and opened the door. ‘Get in,' she said.

He obeyed. Reluctantly.

Soon they were leaving the southern suburbs of the city. Frost glazed the rooftops of the last few houses; net curtains, like another kind of frost, hid the windows. Then open country, a dual carriageway through brittle woods. A new roundabout, fat yellow bulldozers, mud the colour of rust. The sky cleared. The grey turned blue. Sun struck through the windscreen, bounced off Mary's
diamanté
brooch.

He turned to her with a puzzled look. ‘You know, I think I recognise this road. Should I recognise it?'

Mary shrugged. ‘I don't know.'

He studied the road in greater detail. Yes. There, for example. He remembered laughing at that signpost (PICNIC AREA I HARTFIELD 4) because it sounded like a football result.

‘Are you sure we haven't driven down this road before?' he asked.

‘I have, lots of times, but never with you. Oh,' and she smiled across at him, ‘I almost forgot. Look behind your seat.'

He reached round and pulled out something he had no trouble recognising: a bottle of twelve-year-old malt whisky.

‘It's for you,' she said. ‘You can open it if you like.'

‘For me? Why?'

‘It's not every day you go and meet parents you've never seen before, is it?' she said.

*

It had been all right to begin with. The drive south. The sunshine. The whisky. But now he had the map on his knee and the village was less than an inch away and he was trembling. It was a feeling he hadn't known for years, this trepidation, and it made a child of him. He wanted a hand to cling to, a bed to hide under. He wanted to turn round and run off in the opposite direction.

What was he going to say to them, these parents?

He tried out a couple of approaches in his head.

Polite: ‘Good afternoon. Mr and Mrs Highness?' No, they'd probably take him for a Mormon and slam the door in his face.

Tantalising: ‘Mr and Mrs Highness? I've got some rather good news for you.' Then they'd think that they'd won the pools or something. What a let-down when they discovered the truth.

Direct, but awkward: ‘Um, hello. My name's Moses. I'm your son, I think.' What would they do? Faint? Burst into tears? Pretend they didn't understand (‘Moses?' A blank look – affable, but blank. ‘Sorry, son. You must be confusing us with someone else.')

He just couldn't imagine it.

And now they were turning off the main road. A country lane took them up a steep hill in a series of tight curves. New Egypt appeared on a signpost for the first time (NEW EGYPT
) but it didn't sound like a football result and he wasn't laughing. They began to descend. A sign loomed on the right-hand side. Two grey metal stanchions buried in tall grass and ragged ferns.

He reached for the bottle again, now almost empty. He smiled fleetingly. Mary thought of everything. She was an expert in a crisis. She ought to be. She had caused enough of them herself. Look at her now. So serene. Whisky always did that to her. He hoped they didn't get stopped by the police. Unlikely, though. There wouldn't be many –

Police.

Suddenly everything connected.

‘I
have,'
he cried out. ‘I
knew
it.'

Mary stamped on the brakes. The car slewed into the hedge that lined the road. ‘Moses,' she said, ‘I wish you wouldn't shout like that.'

‘I
have
been here before,' he said.

She switched the engine off and leaned back against her door. She lit a cigarette. ‘So tell me about it.'

He told her the whole story of the drive down to the south coast in July. The bizarre slobbering policeman. The motorbike disguised as a wheelchair. Old Dinwoodie in his flying-helmet.

‘How extraordinary,' she said when he had finished. ‘Just think. That Dinwoodie might be a friend of your father's.'

Moses looked dubious. ‘I don't know. He looked like he'd just escaped from a mental home or something.'

Mary threw her cigarette out of the window. She started the engine, shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.

‘I'm rather looking forward to this,' she said.

*

They approached the village along a street of identical red-brick houses. They saw nobody. No movement in the windows, no smoke rising from the chimneys.

They reached a crossroads and turned left up the high street. They circled the village green. One peeling sightscreen. A duck-pond brimming with sky. No ducks, though. The clock on the church tower had stopped at ten past seven. Moses wondered how long ago.

‘I feel like the last person alive,' Mary said.

Moses nodded. She was speaking for both of them.

There seemed to be no centre to the village. After passing the post office for the second time, she stopped the car outside a pub.

‘You might as well ask in there,' she said.

‘Ask?'

‘Yes, ask. Where your parents live. That's why we're here, Moses. Remember?'

He leaned out of the window. The pub, he saw, was called The Legs and Arms. On the sign hanging above the doorway a pair of legs and arms, both disembodied, engaged one another in a sort of clumsy pink swastika.

‘Take a look at this place, Mary.'

‘Are you going in or not?'

‘The name, Mary. Did you see the name?'

She sighed. ‘I suppose I'm going to have to do this myself.'

‘No, it's all right. I'm going.' He opened his door and clambered out.

When he first pushed through the double-doors he thought the pub was empty. The silence. The gloom. The stale smells of peanuts, spilt beer, cheap cigars. Then he began to notice people. Half dozen or so. All sitting on their own in different corners. Not a word from any of them. Only, now and then, the rustle of a coat, the clink of a glass, a sigh. He walked up to the bar. A man slumped on a stool with a pint of bitter and a whisky chaser. He wore a green anorak and a pork-pie hat. He had a boxer's face: dented in some places, swollen in others. Then Moses noticed the broken bloodvessels showing like red threads in the surface of the man's skin. Not a boxer's face. A drunk's.

‘Excuse me,' he said.

The drunk's head rotated slowly, sideways and upwards. ‘Hundred yards,' he said. A sluggish voice, blurred words. His eyes kept sliding away.

‘Excuse me,' Moses said. ‘I need some directions.'

‘After all those years. Hundred yards then bam.' The drunk's elbow jerked. Beer slopped on to the bar, frothy as bile.

Moses nodded. He looked round casually for someone else.

‘Tell us about your stomach muscles, they said. Tell us what you do with your missus.' The drunk's face twisted with sudden frenzy. ‘Those filthy bastards.' He aimed a soiled and trembling finger at Moses's chest. ‘I could've done it, though. I could've bloody done it.'

Loop-tape in his head, Moses thought. That's what happens in pubs. You get these weirdos. You come in halfway through and it sounds like gibberish. You wait an hour or two till they get round to the point where you first came in and you listen to the whole thing again. And sometimes it begins to make sense. Sometimes. But he didn't have an hour or two today.

He noticed an old lady over by the window. Sun poured through the glass. She sat in its cold transparent glow, spotlit, brittle, both hands clasped on the head of her cane. Her chin moved rhythmically, as if she was chewing something. He approached.

‘Excuse me,' he said. ‘I'm looking for Mr and Mrs Highness. I wondered if you – '

The old lady raised eyes of the palest blue. They seemed to look beyond him to a scene of utter horror.

‘You had better ask my husband,' she said.

‘Your husband?' Moses glanced round.

‘Oh no. He isn't
here.
He's at home. On the manor, you see. Lord Batley never leaves the manor.' She shuddered. ‘Never.'

‘You're Lady Batley?'

The old lady lifted her chin an inch. Not pride exactly, but the memory of pride. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I am.'

‘Lady Batley – ' Moses was squatting beside her now – ‘I'm trying to find Mr and Mrs – '

‘I sometimes come here for a glass of white wine. I don't think there's any harm in that.' She smiled at him. Looking into her eyes was like looking down through fathoms of clear water to something lying on the ocean-bed. It gave him a kind of vertigo.

‘Of course, I don't know what Oscar would say,' she quavered. ‘Oscar doesn't like to see women drinking alone. He
disapproves.'
She lifted one dappled hand to her breastbone. ‘He tried to die once, you know. I told
him, I
told
him it was no good. He promised me that he would never do it again.'

‘Never do what?' Moses asked.

Lady Batley stared at him. ‘Die,' she said.

She sat there chewing in the cold light. He could see straight through her skin to the tangle of veins beneath. One coiled on her left temple as if squeezed from a tube of pale-blue oil-paint.

He stood up.

Walking back across the pub, he stopped to look at a picture on the wall. It was a drawing of a policeman. Cut from a magazine, by the look of it. Two darts pinned it to the flock wallpaper. One through each eye.

Moses frowned, looked around. A woman had just appeared behind the bar. She was washing glasses. A little routine, she had. Into the water, on to the brush, into the water and out. Nice rhythm. All right, he thought. One last attempt.

‘Do you know where I could find Mr and Mrs Highness?' he asked her.

It was the drunk, surprisingly, who reacted. ‘What about Highness?'

Moses held up a picture of his parents standing outside their house. ‘Do Mr and Mrs Highness still live here?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘You mean they've moved?'

The drunk seemed to find this extremely funny. ‘Moved? Did you hear that, Brenda? “Have they moved?” he says.'

The woman behind the bar allowed herself a sour smile.

‘Where are they then?' Moses asked.

‘Only one of them's moved.' The drunk released this information with a sly glance.

‘Which one?'

‘Mrs Highness.'

‘So she's left her husband?'

The drunk cackled. ‘In a way, yes.'

Suddenly Moses understood. ‘She's dead?'

‘Yeeaahh. Wa-hay.' The drunk banged the bar with his red hand.
‘What
a clever boy. Yeah, died in the home, she did.'

‘In the home?'

‘The loony-bin, the nuthouse, the funny-farm. Where anyone with any sense round here ends up.' He sucked down the last of his beer. ‘Are you a detective?'

Moses smiled. ‘Not a detective, no.'

‘Not a policeman, are you? Not a bloody copper?'

‘No.'

‘Thank Christ for that.' The drunk slung his glass across the bar. ‘Give us another, Brenda.'

‘You've had enough,' Brenda said. ‘Time you went home, Joel.'

‘Ah, come off it, Brenda. Give us a pint.'