Dreams of Leaving (32 page)

His room had a flimsy hardboard door. The number, chipped gilt, dangled on a single screw. He turned the handle and walked in. Green carpet. Faded orange bedspread. Massive dark wardrobe. Chair. Gas-ring. Ashtray. He closed the door, put his case on the bed, and walked into the bathroom. He ran the cold tap and splashed some water on to his face. He dried on a threadbare towel that said, incongruously, GOOD MORNING. Stepping back into the bedroom, he took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and unlocked his case. He was travelling light: a pair of striped pyjamas, a washing-bag, a diary, a bus-map, binoculars, a Thermos of Hilda's homemade minestrone soup and half a dozen ham sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. He crossed to the window and raised the sash. Then he settled on the chair and ate four of the sandwiches one after another. Even though the sandwiches were very good indeed (nobody made ham sandwiches like Hilda), his face registered nothing. He was thinking. The city made a sound like distant applause.

After gulping down a cup of minestrone, he reached for his diary. He thumbed through the pages until he found the number he was looking for. He moved to the bed and picked up the telephone. He dialled with nimble precise rotations of his index-finger. The number began to ring.

Somebody answered. A voice said, ‘Eddie here.'

Peach blinked once, iguana-like. His lidded eyes fixed on the wall opposite. ‘Eddie, this is Mr Pole speaking. Moses's foster-father.'

‘Mr Pole. What can I do for you?'

What indeed, Peach gloated. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. An orange smear: minestrone.

‘I'm sorry to bother you, Eddie, but I seem to have mislaid Moses's new address. I wondered if you could possibly – '

‘No problem, Mr Pole. Hang on a moment.'

Because, until today, the world had always been inaccessible, Peach had always listened to telephone voices very carefully. He found he could often construct a picture of the person he was talking to. Sometimes a face. Sometimes a body too. Sometimes the room they happened to be in. He tried to picture Eddie now, but saw a dog instead. A white toy dog. He gritted his teeth.

‘Mr Pole?'

‘Yes?'

‘You can reach him on 735–8020.'

Peach pulled his pen out of his breast pocket. ‘735 – '

‘8020,' Eddie said.

‘I see. And do you have his address by any chance?'

‘I don't know his proper address, but the name of the club where he lives is The Bunker. He probably told you that, didn't he?'

‘The Bunker. That's right, I remember now,' Peach lied.

‘If you address a letter to The Bunker, Kennington Road, London SEII, I'm sure it'll get there.'

Peach scribbled frantically.

‘OK, Mr Pole?'

‘Thank you very much, Eddie,' Peach oozed, as only Peach could. ‘You've been extremely helpful.'

Good old Eddie, he sneered as he rang off. What a fool. What a
dupe.

He walked to the window. Anticipation started the motor in his lower lip. It began to slide in and out, a smooth action, almost hydraulic. This city was putty in his hands. He could shape it at will.

He was developing a knack for these phone-calls. Only a few weeks before, he had called the Poles in Leicestershire. A woman had answered.

‘Yes?' Her voice had stretched the word out, making it sag comfortably
in the middle like a hammock. He saw a plump woman with fussy hands. A roast in the oven. A couple of spoilt cats.

‘My name's John,' he had said. ‘I'm an old friend of Moses's. I haven't seen him for years, and I've been trying to track him down.' A bit of truth makes a better lie.

‘Well – ' and Mrs Pole had given the word two syllables when one would have sufficed – ‘the last
we
heard he was moving to some sort of
discothèque,
but I'm afraid he hasn't given us the exact address yet. I'm terribly sorry.'

Faced with her vagueness, he had become doubly precise. ‘Could you tell me where Moses was living before? Perhaps they'll know.'

‘That's right,' Mrs Pole had said, as if he was participating in a quiz-game of which she was the mindless compère.

Eventually she had given Peach Eddie's address and telephone number. She explained who Eddie was. A nice boy, she called him, even though she had only spoken to him once. The woman was plainly a nincompoop.

‘I do hope you find Moses,' she had finished up. ‘An old friend, are you?'

‘Mmm.'

‘Well – goodbye, John.'

‘Goodbye, Mrs Pole.' And good riddance.

He unscrewed the Thermos and poured himself a second cup of minestrone. Then he reached for another ham sandwich. He checked his watch. 10.15. Too late to make any further progress tonight. By 10.30 he was lying in bed, his
A–Z
propped on the mound of his stomach, half-moon spectacles resting on his fleshy belligerent nose. Shortly afterwards he leaned over and switched off the light.

One thought creeping up on him in the darkness threatened to sabotage his hopes of sleep. Suppose Highness had sent his son into the outside world with precisely this aim in mind: to tempt Peach to leave the village, to tempt him into a betrayal of everything he stood for. Suppose Highness now planned to exploit his absence. To expose him. To start an insurrection. This thought was so unpleasant that sweat began to accumulate behind Peach's knees.

But surely it was too fantastic, too far-fetched. Highness could never plan anything so complex, so ingenious. Not that moocher, that drone, that bonehead. Only he, Peach, could produce ideas of that calibre. He could run rings round that bloody layabout. He had covered every angle. He was the Chief Inspector.

He slept.

*

You can never be certain what it is that wakes you in the middle of the night.

When Peach woke, he heard shouting in the corridor outside his room. He tried to pick out words, but the language meant nothing to him.

He had been dreaming.

The dream hung eerily in his head like the hush after a bomb's dropped. He had been enveloped in darkness, a darkness that stretched infinitely in all directions. A sort of outer space. He had been surrounded on all four sides by bright orange ropes. He could see nothing but the darkness and the ropes. It was as if he was standing in a boxing-ring. A boxing-ring in outer space.

Not so much standing, perhaps, as floundering. He couldn't see a floor beneath his feet. At times whatever was supporting him seemed firm. At other times it tilted sharply, slid out from under him, gave way. And he would lunge for the ropes, wanting something solid, something tangible, to cling to. But his hands kept passing straight through the ropes as if the ropes weren't there. And he would try again and watch in astonishment, despairing, as the same thing happened.

There had been voices in the dream. Murmurings. Invisible spectators. They hadn't taken sides. They were neither for nor against him. They were simply there. Watching.

Then he had woken in the badly-sprung bed, his pyjamas damp, the darkness tinted orange by the street-lights, and he had heard voices in the corridor. Real voices.

Now somebody was running past his room. A door slammed. That foreign language again. What the
devil
was going on? He switched on the light and peered at his watch. 3.28. He got out of bed. As he pulled his beige jacket on over his pyjamas, some instinct persuaded him to slip his police badge into the pocket. He opened the door of his room just in time to see the door of the room opposite slam shut. He crossed the corridor and knocked.

He knocked again.

The door opened a few inches. A face appeared in the gap. Jet-black hair, olive skin, the pencil-shading of a moustache. An adolescent. Indian or Pakistani. Stale cigarette smoke in the room. The rustling of bedclothes.

‘You're making an incredible amount of noise,' Peach said.

The boy offered him a blank face. Peach read a single word there. Stupidity.

‘It is very late – ' he pronounced each word distinctly and gestured with his watch – ‘and I want to sleep.'

The boy shrugged. Perhaps he really didn't understand. But Peach
thought he detected a sly mockery in that blank face. He felt like seizing the boy by his stringy chicken neck and –

He checked himself. He wasn't in New Egypt now. All right, he thought.

‘I am a policeman,' he said. And, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulled out his badge. Held it up next to his face like a third eye. ‘Po-lice-man. Understand?'

The boy's eyes scattered. He poured some anxious language over his shoulder into the room. A girl's voice answered. She seemed to be giving the boy advice.

The boy turned back. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Very sorry.'

‘Just shut up and go to sleep,' Peach snapped.

He stamped back into his room and closed the door. Instead of going to bed, he sat by the window. There was no darkness to speak of in this city. All night long a gaseous orange glow hung over the buildings. An ominous light. Like an emergency, a war, the end of something. No wonder people ran up and down corridors. How could you sleep with that fire burning in the sky?

He had only been gone a few hours, but he already longed for the muffled black night of the village, the air of secrecy, the cover of darkness. He didn't sleep for almost an hour and his sleep, when it took him, proved fitful and thin, disrupted by sirens, cat-fights, and the dreadful silence of orange ropes.

*

He was awake again at 6.30. The orange night had withdrawn. Through a window fogged with dust and fumes and breath, the sky glittered silver-grey. Sheer, streamlined, a colossal machine.

He threw the covers aside and with them all his paralysing thoughts of the night before. Wearing only his twill trousers, he shaped up in front of the mirror like a boxer. He lowered his head and shuffled his feet. He threw a few right jabs. Fff, fff. It felt good.

Even his face – heavy, collapsing, punished by time – couldn't dismay him this morning. He surveyed the folds and creases, the bulging, the sagging, almost with satisfaction. How perfectly they disguised those agile wits of his! He was conscious that he was approaching the day the way he approached a day in the village: optimistic, determined, supremely confident.

By 7.15 he had paid the bill (exorbitant! that was the last time
he
would ever leave the village!) and was making for Queensway on foot. He decided to breakfast at the Blue Sky Café, blue being a colour of which he was
particularly fond. He found a table by the window, took in his surroundings. Teak veneer panelling to shoulder height. Matt yellow paint beyond. Sticky-looking ventilation-grilles. Cacti on the mantelpiece. He watched the door opening and closing on a succession of workmen who wanted cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. When he ordered, the waitress called him love.

Smiling, he arranged his
A–Z,
his bus-map and his diary on the table in front of him. He began to outline a strategy for his assault on The Bunker. The military side – reconnaissance, briefing, manoeuvres – appealed to him. In his mind, he wore a uniform.

‘Excuse me.'

He looked up and saw an old woman sitting at the next table. He could tell from her accent that she wasn't English. Something about her face, too, didn't belong. Not another bloody foreigner. He sighed visibly.

‘Were you addressing me, madam?'

The old woman reached across and touched him on the shoulder. Her hand descended so lightly that it might have reflected either awe on her part or fragility on his. The former seemed more likely.

‘You're a man of great power,' she said. ‘I can feel it.'

He glanced round. Nobody had noticed. The last thing he wanted, even this far from The Bunker, was to start attracting attention. He faced the old woman again. Her smile, almost coquettish, somehow avoided being grotesque. But he was brisk this morning, not easily charmed. He was too conscious of the ground he had to cover, of the red second-hand on the clock above the glass display-case of rolls and buns. His first thought translated rapidly into speech.

‘What do you want?'

The woman placed the same light yet curiously restraining hand on his arm. ‘What do
you
want, sir?'

Really, this was an impossible conversation. Quite impossible. He began to gather up his maps and notebooks. ‘If you'll excuse me, I have some rather important business to – '

The woman's face broke up into a network of creases and lines in whose intricate web he suddenly, and unaccountably, felt himself to be a fly.

‘Don't be frightened,' she said.

Frightened? Him?
Outrageous. And yet –

This world. So very different. The cloth of the night dyed orange, embroidered with voices, torn by screams and the screech of brakes – had it frightened him?

The woman's words pricked his skin like needles. Doubts began to run in his bloodstream.

‘You're not comfortable,' she was telling him. ‘You're a long way from home, maybe that's the reason. Yes, I think that's the reason.'

Her voice scraped like dry leaves blowing over the surface of a road. Her dark eyes turned up stones. His scrambled eggs arrived, but he watched them congeal on the plate.

‘Give me your hand,' she said.

He held out his hand, and she wrapped it in her cool papery fingers. She began to murmur to herself. This seemed to be taking place in a vacuum. Or not taking place at all. He was thankful nobody in the village could see him now. He observed his own submissiveness as if it was happening to somebody else.

‘Who are you exactly?' he asked her.

‘Oh, you can speak!' she exclaimed. ‘I thought maybe you lost your voice. My name is Madame Zola. I'm a clairvoyant. Famous clairvoyant.'

He stared at his hand lying in hers.

‘I can see,' she said, ‘that you are, how shall I say, curious.'