Dreams of Leaving (24 page)

Eddie seemed amused. ‘Highness has a vivid imagination,' he told her.

‘Highness?'

‘Some people call him Highness.'

‘Some people are drunk,' Moses said. ‘I'm thinking of leaving. What are you doing?'

Eddie grinned. ‘I'm thinking of leaving.'

‘Alone?'

‘No.' Eddie turned to a shy girl in tight jeans who had, until now, been attached to the back of his shirt. ‘This is Dawn,' he said. Or it could have been Diane. Or Doreen. Moses didn't quite catch the name.

Dawn/Diane/Doreen smiled hello. A red ribbon blushed in her black hair like a moment of embarrassment.

‘Where's Louise?' Gloria asked.

‘I don't know,' Moses said.

‘Police,' somebody announced calmly.

Later Moses wondered how this had carried above the soundtrack of the party. Some words had more punch, perhaps.

‘It's a raid,' came the same calm voice.

There was a general furtive surge in the direction of the door, as if people were pretending that they weren't really leaving. Out on the stairs, the urgency increased and Moses was swept along, Gloria in front of him, Eddie and D/D/D somewhere behind.

Two officers with flat hats and glistening moustaches flanked the front door. One of them tipped his face at Moses.

‘Not driving tonight, are we, sir?'

‘Beep beep,' came a voice from the stairs.

Everybody laughed.

‘I don't – ' Moses began, but the policeman, scowling, waved him through.

At the bottom of the steps Moses put his arm round Gloria. She leaned into him a fraction, just enough to tell him that she had been waiting for that. He felt her ribs tremble under his fingers. She glanced up, lips parted. He bent over her. His tongue brushed her teeth. Bedtime.

Louise's face floated into the corner of his eye. ‘Somebody chucked a brick through the window,' she was saying.

They reached the pavement. Everybody had left the party at the same time, and small groups of people stood about looking out of context. Two panda cars nuzzled the kerb. Their blue disco-lights were flashing, but nobody was dancing. D/D/D shrank against a tree, her coat thrown over her shoulders.

‘Where's Eddie?' Moses asked her.

She shrugged. She looked puzzled, derelict, cold.

Oh Christ, he thought.

‘We've lost Eddie,' he told the other three. ‘I'm just going to go and have a look for him. Wait for me, won't you?'

Gloria sent a queer little smile through the darkness towards him. He hesitated, self-conscious suddenly. ‘I won't be long,' he said.

Inside the house a few people lay against the walls. Too smashed to move, react or care. Moses stepped over bodies, bottles, ashtrays – the rubble of a party. Music was still playing in the evacuated rooms, loud abrasive music, someone's expression of defiance. He asked one girl whether she had seen a man who looked like a statue. She stared right through him. It was a conspiracy, he decided. A conspiracy of statues.

After about five minutes he gave up. He almost broke his ankle on the way downstairs, but it was less out of drunkenness than out of impatience
to be with Gloria again. He cursed Eddie as he rubbed the ankle where it had turned over. What was the point of all these escape-acts anyway? Who did he think he was? The Houdini of love? Fuck him.

He limped out through the door and down the steps. Long splinters of glass from the shattered window made Egyptian shapes on the footpath: pyramids, sabres, crescent moons. The trees creaked overhead, shone black, dripped moisture. Three figures waited by the gate with questions on their faces.

‘No luck, I'm afraid,' he told them.

They stood there for a moment longer, shoulders hunched against the chill, all staring in different directions.

Moses leaned on the railings. He watched the road curve out of sight, dissolve into the mist. Someone had bought hundreds of aerosols of fine rain and sprayed them into the orange air that hung around the street-lamps.

Then Gloria came up, touched his arm. ‘Where did you leave the car?' she asked, her face a mask of black and silver.

*

Moses dropped Louise and D/D/D in Victoria and now he was driving south down Vauxhall Bridge Road, alone with Gloria. They hadn't needed to discuss anything. It was one of those tacit agreements, after a party, three in the morning. Things like this didn't happen to Moses very often and when they did he was usually too drunk to notice. He was drunk now, but he was noticing.

‘Does he always do that?' Gloria asked. ‘Disappear like that?'

She huddled down in the passenger seat, her feet tucked into the glove compartment.

Moses chuckled. ‘Yes, he does. I don't know what it is. Maybe he gets bored. Maybe it's all too easy for him. I don't know.'

Gloria wound the window down an inch or two and lit a joint. The slipstream took the smoke from her lips and bent it out into the night air –a silk scarf from a magician's sleeve. She seemed to be thinking over what he had just said.

‘Bastard,' she said eventually. It was the last carriage in a long train of thought.

Moses glanced across at her and smiled. They kept turning towards each other at the same time as if there were magnetic forces attracting his face to hers and hers to his.

‘Are you going to stay?' Moses asked, as he accelerated over the bridge. ‘Tonight, I mean.'

Gloria snuggled deeper in her seat. ‘Why? Have I still got time to change my mind?'

‘You've got about three minutes.'

Three minutes isn't a long time and nothing had changed at the end of it except the name of the road. Suddenly they were home and in the silence as the engine died they kissed for the first time.

Moses locked the car door and stood, motionless but swaying, looking beyond the unlit windows of his flat. The world whirled. That last joint on the drive back. He could see no stars, only the racing-colours of the city sky, orange and grey. The street, high-sided, gorgelike, channelled the power of the wind. He felt as though he was being tested for aerodynamic styling, a test he would almost certainly have failed. A fine rain performed subtle acupuncture on his upturned face. He shivered. It was cold. He was out of his head. He could no longer remember how they had got there.

‘Over here,' came a cry, blown in his direction by the wind.

Gloria was waving to him from the street-corner.

‘See this?' she said, when he reached her. She was pointing at a poster on the door of The Bunker. It advertised an evening of jazz-funk with somebody called Jet Washington.

‘That was yesterday,' Moses said.

‘I know that. What I mean is – '

‘He was terrible.'

‘That's not what I – '

‘People threw glasses at him.' Moses shook his head at the memory. The look of outrage on Jet's face when a plastic glass bounced off his shoulder. The impotence. The tearful slope-shouldered way he left the stage halfway through his set.

‘Moses, will you – '

‘
Jet Washington?
Moses said. The side of his mouth twisted to signify disdain.

He looked down in surprise as Gloria began to pummel him in the stomach with her tiny gloved fists. ‘Why are you doing that?' he asked her.

‘I'm trying to get you to listen to me.'

‘I am listening.'

‘What I was trying to say was, do you think it would be possible for me to sing here?'

‘Are you a singer?'

‘You
know
that, Moses.'

‘You're really a singer?'

‘Yes.' Gloria leaned against the wall, the black plastic of her raincoat catching hundreds of slivers of silver light that twitched and shivered as she moved like broken-off pieces of Moses's amazement. She now seemed a lot less drunk than he was.

‘What time is it?' he asked her. (Her eyebrows said about ten to four.)

Gloria held her watch up to the light. The action was beautiful because it was so serious.

‘Five past three,' she said.

Moses shook with laughter and almost buried her entirely in his arms.

*

Why had he come to this foreign country? he wondered, cursing himself over and over again, though it was too late now, of course. The stupidity of it. But words were talismans, there was protection in their syllables, their sounds could stop the bad thing happening. Keep talking, he told himself, because talking can save you. Keep talking. All the time dragging himself across the sand towards the cover of the trees. All the time looking over his shoulder. Looking was important too. Never turn your back.

The animal crouched twenty feet away, its striped sides rigid, its breathing invisible. There are no tigers in the desert, he told himself. But it was there all right. He could hear the rage vibrating in its chest. It trembled for a moment – power that could be held no longer – drew back, sprang. He saw the teeth, yellow, filmed over with saliva, curving down like raised knives –

Something sharp dug into his naked shoulder, and he cried out.

‘Moses,' Gloria whispered, tugging at him.

He jack-knifed upright. A bright blue light revolved in the room. ‘What's happening?'

‘I don't know. I was just going to find out.' Gloria put on one of his shirts and padded to the window.

Moses leaned on one elbow, still half asleep, bewildered. The dream lingered, mingled with the memory of recent sex. He couldn't work out how much of the sex he remembered was real and how much dreamt. They had pulled each other's clothes off. She had pressed her body to his.

The icy air.

Her nipples in silhouette, tiny minarets, and his hand moving over the smooth drifted dunes of her ribs, moving across the soft desert of her belly, moving down, down to the oasis. And her hand, too, had moved, following a trail of hair, discovering his scrotum, shrivelled like a dried fig with the cold, and she had bitten into it, and he had gasped a little, less out of pain
than surprise, then she had lifted her head, her face invisible, and the whole thing linked with his dream because she had said something about Arabia –

‘Moses. Come here. Quick.'

He eased out of the warm bed and slipped into his coat. Gloria stood at the window. On tiptoe, her heels off the ground. His shirt-tails reaching the backs of her knees. He wanted to say something, but the feeling wouldn't translate. He went and stood beside her.

Other people had opened their windows too, sensing tragedy as people do, intrigued because it wasn't theirs. An ambulance had drawn up below. It stood at a curious angle to the pavement; it looked casual, abandoned. As they watched, two men in dark uniforms wheeled a stretcher out of one of the houses opposite. A black nylon shroud hid the body. It had been stretched so taut that the feet made no hill. The two men slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, closed the doors, and exchanged a few words. All this without glancing up once. The revolving blue light accelerated away down the road, turned left at the junction. The night became orange and grey, ordinary again. People closed their windows, went back to bed. Moses and Gloria stared down into the empty street.

It was Moses who pulled away first. He walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on. He heard Gloria shut the window.

‘I don't feel like sleeping any more,' she said from the doorway. ‘If I go to sleep, men in black uniforms might come and take me away.'

‘I wouldn't let them,' he said.

She was looking at the floor, one hand toying with the shirt's top button.

‘I'm making some coffee,' he told her.

‘That's good.'

‘Lucky this didn't happen last weekend.'

‘Why?'

‘Last weekend I didn't have a kettle.'

Gloria laughed softly. Reaching up, she ruffled his hair. Then she left the kitchen, and he heard her moving about in the bedroom. When she returned she was dressed. She bounced her earrings up and down in her hand. They clicked like dice. He wondered if she was going to leave.

He unscrewed the lid on the coffee-jar, spooned the granules into two matching cups (they were new too), poured the boiling water on to the granules, added milk from a carton, and stirred, enjoying doing the small things slowly.

Gloria had folded her arms. She began to twist one strand of hair around her finger. ‘I wonder what happened,' she said.

‘I don't know.' He handed her a cup. ‘There are a lot of old people
living round here. They live here all their lives. Die here too. They never move. Some of them haven't even been north of the river. They'll look at you when you tell them you have and say something like, Nice up there, is it? Like it's a foreign country or something. Well, I suppose it is for them.' He paused. ‘We all have our foreign countries, I suppose.'

Gloria smiled at him, then, as if that movement of her lips had set her body in motion, as if one was the natural extension of the other, walked towards him, met his mouth with hers.

*

It was still dark in the living-room, so Moses switched on the lamp. It shed a soft-edged glow. He arranged a few cushions on the floor. Then he knelt down, lit the gas-heater. It sighed like the inside of a seashell.

Gloria walked over to the window again. She stared out, thinking, perhaps, of her own body wrapped in that taut cloth, of a blue light revolving in the street for her.

Without turning round, she said, ‘I wonder if that person was dead.'

‘Probably,' Moses said. ‘They covered the face.'

He stood behind her. Over her shoulder he saw somebody drive past in a white car.

‘I still don't know you, really, do I?' she said. She turned to look at him, but couldn't. He was standing too close.

‘No,' he said.

She let herself lean back against him. ‘Too many blue lights this evening,' she said. ‘Fucks me up, you see.'

He smiled at the way she'd said evening. It was almost morning now.