Dreams of Leaving (59 page)

The bottom shelf: seventy-seven tins of John West sardines in tomato sauce.

The middle shelf: thirty-nine packets of Embassy Number One filter cigarettes.

The top shelf: a screwdriver, a Christmas card, and one half-eaten packet of Butter Osborne biscuits.

Shaking his head, Moses selected four tins of sardines and lifted down the biscuits. He found two bent forks in the drawer under the sink. He couldn't see any plates (except for the ones in the rubbish-bin). That was the lot then. He hurried back upstairs.

The two of them were laughing when he walked in. The old man quickly included him. ‘Did you find everything?'

‘Eventually,' Moses said. He unloaded his supplies on the bed.

Cigarette in mouth, the old man picked up a tin of sardines, tore off the packaging, slipped the key over the metal tab, and deftly unrolled the lid. Then he crushed his cigarette out and reached for a fork. Just by watching him you began to get an idea of how many tins of John West sardines he must have eaten in the past (and how many tins of John West sardines he would probably eat in the future). He ate rapidly but with finesse, spearing whole fish with a single lunge of the fork and inserting them into his already revolving jaws. Drops of tomato sauce splashed on to his beard and lay there glistening like berries. When he had finished he put the two empty tins on the windowsill behind him, wiped his fingers on the sheet, and lit a cigarette. The meal had taken him slightly less than three minutes.

‘Now then,' he began, and the efficiency with which he had disposed of his sardines carried over into his voice, ‘you asked me a question. You asked me what was wrong with the village.' He suppressed a smile. ‘I could answer that question with one simple word. Can either of you guess what that word might be?'

Both Moses and Mary shook their heads.

‘Fear.' The old man pronounced the word with immense relish. ‘Fear.' He paused to pick a sliver of fish from between his teeth. He seemed, at the same time, to be savouring the taste of the word. ‘But that is to begin at the end,' he went on. ‘It has taken me a good forty years to arrive at that simple conclusion. And before you can arrive there, you have to know everything. Or almost everything. If you want to understand completely, that is. So what I'm going to do now, if you're agreed, is to give you a brief history of New Egypt. The history I started once, but never finished. And remember one thing: nobody – and I mean
nobody –
has ever heard this before.'

And so he began to talk.

And they perched on their hard chairs and watched the slow upward trickle of smoke from his constant stream of cigarettes.

The sun strained through the cloudy windows. The afternoon faded.

They listened to his voice.

A voice roughened by years of chainsmoking and loneliness, but an
articulate voice because he had, in his time, delivered lectures in the village hall and sung in the church choir.

A voice issuing from a mass of filthy sheets and crushed cigarette packets and empty sardine tins.

*

He described the people of New Egypt. Their limited horizons. Their inbreeding. Their sterility. He dissected them without pity, without prejudice. He threw their organs around on his bloody marble slab. He showed how apathy was like castration, how it had made them impotent. All his frustrations, all those months of silence (‘You're the first people I've spoken to since August'), came spilling out. His concave hands scooped at the soupy air like ladles. His beard quivered. He had come alive.

His excitement reached a peak when he turned to the subject of the police. The Pharaohs of New Egypt! He exposed their hierarchy, their hypocrisy, their own peculiar brand of fear.

‘It's their job,' he explained, ‘to see that the village behaves in an ordered and harmonious way. But how do you define order? If I had to define it, I would say that order is morale, system, purpose. Order is rising at dawn, regular mealtimes, mowing your lawn. Order is brisk trading and a growing population. Order can be heard, for example, in the crying of a newborn baby or the chimes of an ice-cream van. In New Egypt, though, you won't find any of those things.
There is no order.
So what do the police do? They're forced to include in their definition of the word positive actions
of any kind.
Order is defined as the opposite of apathy. Order is energy, initiative. And it's in this way that drunkenness, fraud, theft, arson, rape, even murder come to be welcomed by the police as being ultimately beneficial to the community. Something has
happened.
Somebody has
done
something. Crime is proof that the village is alive and kicking. Crime is order.'

‘Crime is order?' Moses laughed. ‘I like that.'

The old man lifted one stained finger. ‘Except when it becomes part of an escape-attempt, of course. You see, the establishment of order here in New Egypt presupposes one simple fact: the continuing existence of the village itself. Let one person leave and in no time at all you'd have everybody leaving. Hey presto, no New Egypt. It would become a gap on the map, a ghost village, a sociological monument. A community of twenty-nine policemen with no one to protect and nothing to enforce. That's why they do everything in their power to keep us here. You remember I told you that we grow up with our own nursery rhymes? Well, I'm going to
give you an example of what I mean. This is one of the most well known. If you were to walk past the village school during lessons, chances are you'd hear it floating out of one of the classrooms. Every child in the village knows the words. Your mother,' and he turned solemn eyes on Moses, ‘used to sing it all the time.'

He pulled himself up in bed, cleared his throat and began to sing. The tune reminded Moses of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter'. Equally mournful, equally forlorn. The song would normally be sung by the high clear voices of children. The old man's voice, ravaged and gravelly, gave it new bitterness, added poignancy.

The world is a dream
,

It will always be so
.

Our life is a stream

With nowhere to go
.

The sky's always crying
,

The willow tree weeps
.

We're living, we're dying
,

We're here for keeps
.

The wind comes to stay
,

The rain and the snow
;

They're here for a day

Or a week, then they go.

But we're here for life
,

From our very first breath
;

Come trouble, come strife
,

We're here until death.

The world is a dream

That we never had
.

Our life is a stream

Of tears so sad.

We do nothing but dream
,

It will always be so
.

Things are just as they seem
.

We have nowhere to go –

No sooner had he finished singing the last line of the song than he broke down and began to cough again. His head jerked forward repeatedly as if somebody was shoving him in the back.

‘I shouldn't sing,' he gasped.

Mary left the room to fetch some water. Moses could only look on helplessly as the old man struggled for breath. The old man described the village so objectively that it was easy to forget that he
actually lived
there. When he told stories and sang songs he was describing himself. A life of soiled sheets and furniture in boxes. A life of squalor, withdrawal and gloom.
We're here for life. We're here until death.

Mary returned with a glass of water.

‘Thank you,' the old man whispered. He drank, then he collapsed against his pillows. He let his eyes close. A few drops of water trembled in his beard.

When he opened his eyes again he said, ‘That was the first time I've sung anything in seven years.'

‘Well, you sang beautifully.' Mary said. ‘Really quite beautifully.'

‘You know, people used to think that song was anonymous,' he told them, ‘but I did a bit of research and I discovered that it was written by a man called Birdforth.' He paused and glanced at them significantly. ‘Birdforth was chief of police from 1902 to 1916.'

Moses's eyes widened at the sinister implications.

‘That's right,' the old man said. ‘Brainwashing. Propaganda. All quite deliberate. And very, very insidious.'

He gulped at his water. ‘You see, most people don't even realise. They can't be bothered to realise. It's easier not to. But every so often,' and his eyes flickered like dark agile fish in the deep lenses of his glasses, ‘every generation, perhaps, somebody a little bit different comes along. Somebody with their own private vision. Somebody with a dream. Fanatics, you might call them. And they're the people the police have to watch out for. Because they're the people who will, at some point in their lives, throw caution to the winds, fly in the face of everything they've ever learned, and try to do the one thing that nobody has ever done before: escape.'

He gave them examples: ‘Tarzan' Collingwood, Mustoe the greengrocer, Tommy Dane. Something that had been cloudy in Moses's mind now began to sharpen, resolve itself, assume a shape. Until he could restrain himself no longer.

‘Old Dinwoodie,' he cried.

The old man's voice cut out in mid-sentence. ‘How do you know about that?'

Moses began to tell him the story of the drive through New Egypt in
July. Mary had heard it already; she excused herself and left the room.

When Moses had finished, the old man lay back, his fingers plaited on his beard, his eyes trained on some far corner of the room. ‘Well, well,' he murmured. ‘If that isn't a curious twist of fate.'

‘Where's old Dinwoodie now?' Moses asked.

The old man hesitated. ‘He's dead.'

‘Oh no.' Moses stared at the floor.

‘Don't blame yourself. If you hadn't helped to stop him escaping, somebody else would have. He would never have got away. Not old Dinwoodie. He was doomed from the start. I told him so myself and he never spoke to me again after that. There's no point feeling guilty about it. You didn't even know what was happening.'

Moses nodded. He tried to believe what he was hearing. But what damage you could do, he thought. What damage you could do when life blindfolded you.

‘Was he a friend of yours?' he asked.

‘No, not really.' A bleak smile passed across the old man's face. ‘In a place like this you don't have any friends.'

Mary returned with a tray. On the tray stood three mugs, a tin of powdered milk and a green china vase.

‘I couldn't find a teapot,' she explained, ‘so I improvised.'

The old man shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Is that tea?'

‘It is.'

‘Where on earth did you find tea? Last time I looked – March, I think it was – I couldn't find any. Not a single leaf. Where was it?'

‘Under the sink.'

‘Good lord. Was it? Good lord. How extraordinary.'

Mary poured the extraordinary tea. The old man cradled his mug in both hands. He sipped noisily, his moustache extending over the rim.

‘Christ, this is damn good,' he said. ‘Uncommonly good. I'd almost forgotten what tea tasted like.
Bloody
good.'

‘Something I've noticed,' Mary said. ‘All your escape stories are about men. Haven't any women ever tried to get away?'

‘Women?' The old man wedged his mug into a fold in the blanket. ‘There was one woman.'

He lit a cigarette and leaned back. Smoke filtered out of his nostrils. He was taking his time. He knew he had an audience.

‘Her real name was Miss Neville,' he said, ‘but we all called her the mad lady. She lived behind the church. Strange house. Dark-red bricks and all the window-frames painted green. She had a withered leg so she couldn't get about very much. She walked very slowly with two sticks, or sometimes
she used crutches. You hardly ever saw her. She loved animals, especially birds. Storks used to land in her garden and, once, a flock of swallows hibernated in her kitchen instead of flying south for the winter. She had a special way with birds. She could talk to them and they understood her. Most people in the village thought she was some kind of witch. The children were frightened of her.

‘I was frightened of her too, but I was curious. One day – I suppose I must have been nine or ten – I went to visit her. I just walked up the drive and knocked on her front door. There was no answer, so I went round to the back and peeped in through her French windows. And there was old Miss Neville sitting in a high-backed chair. She was clapping her hands. Not rhythmically, the way you might clap to music, but a sort of double clap, as if she was summoning a servant. Her hair kept falling in her eyes, I remember, and her eyes were glowing yellow in the dark room, and her mouth was hanging open. She looked very strange, transported almost. For a moment I couldn't work out what on earth she was doing. Then I saw the birds –

‘There were about eight of them, all the same size, dark grey, and when Miss Neville clapped her hands they rose into the air, all at the same time, straight up into the air like helicopters. And every time she clapped her hands they performed a new trick, a new manoeuvre. They flew round and round the room in perfect formation. They hovered in mid-air. They did all kinds of symmetrical things. I couldn't believe my eyes, of course. I just stood at the window and stared. I completely forgot that I had no business to be there. And I suppose she must have seen me because the next thing I knew the door opened and she was standing in front of me.

‘“What do
you
want, young man?” she said. “I came to visit you,” I said. “Did you?” she said.
“Did
you indeed? Well, I suppose you'd better come in then, hadn't you?” She had this queer way of stretching her neck out and looking down at you sideways. She was wearing a huge shapeless dress. As big as a tent, it was. And dark green, with little bits of velvet stuck all over it.