Dreams of Leaving (49 page)

Moses appeared in the doorway like a champion, a bottle held aloft. ‘Brandy!' he cried.

Applause from the people gathered round the table. A piercing two-fingered whistle from Mary.

‘Where was it?' Alan asked.

‘In the cistern.'

Rebecca wrinkled her nose in disgust.

‘That would explain the missing label.' Alan turned the bottle in his hands as if he was an expert in the field of bottles found in cisterns.

‘The cistern.' Alison's voice was edged in sarcasm. ‘Of course.'

‘Extraordinary,' Mary said. It was a word she rarely used. She looked very pleased with Moses.

After that incident they all became firm believers in the mysterious powers of alcohol.

*

As summer faded, moths invaded the city. Their sturdy furry bodies cannoned off lampshades and windowpanes. They were constantly flying into Mary's face as if she was the only source of light. When they died their wings crumbled into a fine bronze dust that nobody could remember seeing before.

One Sunday night, after everyone had left, Moses was drinking gin on the terrace with Alan and Mary when Rebecca appeared on the kitchen doorstep. She was holding a sheet of paper very carefully in both hands.

‘I thought you were in bed,' Alan said.

‘I was,' she answered, ‘until I found this.'

In her white nightie, she looked like a tiny priestess as she advanced over the flagstones towards them, her eyes trained on the sheet of paper between her hands, her lips pressed together in concentration. On the paper lay the remains of a giant moth, two inches long, its soft grey fuselage still intact, its wings, almost gold, disintegrating.

‘Look at this dust,' she said. ‘It shines.'

‘So it does,' Mary said. She fetched a mirror from the kitchen, then she
began to smear the gold dust on to one of her eyelids with the tip of her little finger.

‘What are you doing, Mum?' One hand gripping the arm of Mary's chair, standing on tiptoe so she could see, Rebecca was perfectly poised between horror and fascination.

Moses and Alan exchanged a faint smile.

When Mary had completed both eyelids she said, ‘Well? How do I look?'

Rebecca stared at her mother. ‘It looks like real make-up.'

‘Of course it does. That's why the ugly god used it.'

‘What ugly god?'

A very long time ago, Mary began, moths used to live for seventy years, just like human beings. In those days the gods who looked after the world were very decadent. They sat around in the sky, they drank a lot, they dressed up and went to parties. One day they decided to hold a ball. It would be the grandest ball ever.

On the evening of the ball one of the gods was sitting in front of his mirror. He was very miserable. He was in love with the queen of the gods who was the most beautiful and unattainable of women, but he was so ugly that she had never noticed him. ‘I'm
so
ugly,' he moaned. ‘If only I was beautiful too. Then perhaps she would notice me.'

At that moment a moth flew in through the open window. It fluttered and flapped around the room for a while, then it suddenly dropped on to the ugly god's dressing-table. The ugly god was somewhat startled. At first he thought the moth was just tired, but when he turned it over gently with his finger he realised that it was dead. First his ugliness and now this death. He was about to heave a long sigh when he noticed a deposit of fine dust on the end of his finger. A glittery coppery dust. A glamorous dust. Sitting up a little straighter in his chair, he touched the moth again with his finger. Then he touched the skin above his eye with the same finger, once, very delicately. He looked in the mirror and smiled at what he saw.

He caused quite a stir when he arrived at the ball that night. Several of his friends didn't even recognise him. Ladies bought him drinks and paid him compliments. The queen's suitors huddled in a corner, pointing and muttering, their eyes green with envy.

And then the trumpets sounded and the queen of the gods made her entrance. Surrounded by giant male bodyguards, she looked as beautiful and unattainable as ever. When she passed the ugly god, however, she paused.

‘You're beautiful!' she cried. ‘Who are you?'

The ugly god bowed low and told her his name.

‘Come to my chamber tonight,' the queen commanded him, ‘and we
shall be lovers.' And with a rustle of silk and gossamer she was gone.

The ugly god was immediately mobbed by a host of jealous suitors.

‘What's your secret?' one of them hissed. He wore the same lipstick as usual. Made from the juice of crushed rose petals. Very dreary.

The ugly god was still dazed, as much by the queen's beauty as by her invitation. ‘A special powder,' he said.

‘What powder?' hissed another. He had dyed his hair with a solution distilled from the bark of silver birches. Old hat.

The ugly god realised that he had already said too much. ‘I cannot say,' he said. And smiled in a most infuriating way.

He spent an exquisite night with the queen, but by the next morning the powder of the wings of the moth had rubbed off and he was ugly again.

‘Get out of my sight!' the queen cried when she awoke. ‘
God,
I must've been drunk last night!'

The ugly god was chased out of the palace in disgrace. On the street he met two of his friends. ‘Hello, ugly,' they said. They were full of gossip about the mysterious stranger who had attended the ball and spent the night with the queen. ‘Weren't you there?' they said. ‘Didn't you see him?' But the ugly god was too sad to reply. He had lost the queen's love and he didn't know how to win it back.

When he reached home he sat down at his dressing-table. He had no powder left. He had used it all the previous night. That was the trouble. The powder of the wings of moths was a very rare substance.

And then he had a brainwave. He put on his divine robes, stood at the open window and, drawing himself up to his full height, raised his right hand. ‘I hereby decree that from now on,' he said, ‘moths will only live for one day.'

Back inside his room he could scarcely contain his delight. He jumped up and down and shook his fists in a very ungodlike manner. If moths died often enough then he would never run out of their magical powder. So he would always be beautiful. And the queen would love him for all eternity.

He returned to the palace wearing some of his new make-up. The queen embraced him. ‘Oh, how beautiful you are! How could I have sent you away?' she cried. ‘What a
terrible
hangover I must've had! You must come and live with me for ever! I command it!'

And so the ugly god moved into the palace and married the queen and lived happily ever after. Moths died more often than they used to, of course, but happiness is more important. And besides, nobody ever made the connection.

Rebecca was smiling. ‘So that's why moths only live for such a short time.'

Mary nodded. ‘Now off to bed with you or you'll look like an ugly god in the morning.'

Rebecca kissed everyone goodnight and disappeared upstairs.

The bottle of gin was empty, but another lay chilling in the freezer. They wouldn't be searching the house tonight. While Alan fetched the new bottle, Mary put some music on. She stood at the end of the terrace where the light from the house was swallowed by the darkness of the garden and sang along with Marlene Dietrich, a glass in her hand, her eyelids glistening a powdery gold.

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn

I know I'm not to blame –

And the moths fluttered out of the night, the words of the song mysteriously come to life.

‘It suits you,' Moses said.

Mary looked up. ‘The song?'

‘The make-up.'

He settled deeper in his chair. The white roses on the back wall held out the tiny shiny bowls of their petals, collected all the moonlight from the sky. A grey cat tightropewalked along the fence; its tail curled up into the air like smoke. Somebody coughed two gardens away.

‘You know, sometimes, moments like this,' he said, ‘I feel as if I live here.'

‘Why don't you?' came Mary's voice, light, provocative.

‘I'm serious. I feel as if this is where I really live. Here in Muswell Hill. In this house. There's something about being here. I can't explain it – '

That morning he had been playing with Rebecca in the garden. He had gripped her by the wrists, a sailor's grip, and swung her round in the air. She had whirled out horizontally, making a sound like the wind or a ghost, her legs as slack as a rag doll's legs. He could still hear her crying ‘Faster,
faster'
he could still feel her never wanting it to end. When he had finally slowed down and set her on her feet again, she couldn't stand. She had staggered about like a drunkard, and he had copied her. It was part of the game to act dizzier than you really were, to act a bit crazy. They had ended up in the lavender bush, a tangle of legs and arms, helpless with laughter. At that moment he had glanced up at the house and noticed Mary standing in an upstairs window. She had been smiling, but not at him. Her smile seemed to precede his awareness of her. It seemed to relate to what had
gone before – the game, the laughter. A strange thought had come to him: she wants another child,
my
child. Then she had seen him watching her and she had pulled back from the window, back into the shadows, as if frightened he might read her mind. But perhaps he already had.

‘Mary?'

‘Yes?'

‘What were you smiling about this morning? You know, when I saw you in the window.'

Mary turned and walked away down the garden. He watched her go. He could see nothing of her, only the tip of her cigarette glowing as she paced up and down in front of the hedge. Then a red scratch on the darkness as she threw it away. The trees shivered as a breeze passed by.

Alan returned with the second bottle of gin. Shortly afterwards Alison joined Alan and Moses on the terrace. She sat down on the kitchen doorstep, her hair wrapped in a white towel. She smelt of cleanness, dampness, shampoo. She was drinking water.

‘Moses,' she said, ‘you're still here.'

‘Moses is always here,' Mary said, appearing out of the darkness in her black dress, making them all jump. ‘Moses is one of the family. Aren't you, Moses?'

Her smile rested on his face, and her hand touched his shoulder for a moment.

Her eyelids still dusty gold.

Queen of the gods.

*

The following Wednesday Moses's phone rang. It was Mary.

‘Have you got any plans for lunch?' she said.

He laughed. ‘What do you think I am? A businessman?'

‘I've got a couple of bottles of white wine and a cold chicken,' she said. ‘I thought we could have a picnic on Parliament Hill. Rebecca wants to fly her kite. Would you like to come?'

‘I'd love to.'

‘We'll meet by the bench at the top of the hill. Do you know the bench I mean?'

‘I'll find it.'

‘One o'clock then.' She hung up.

Moses smiled to himself. Mary always sounded so formal on the phone. It was because she hated them. ‘How can you talk to someone when you can't see their face?' he remembered her saying. When he tried to argue
the point, she closed him down. ‘Telephones,' she said, and her voice registered the most profound disdain. ‘They fake closeness. They pervert distance. Distance should be respected. I'd rather drive fifty miles to speak to someone in person than talk to them on the telephone. I only use them when I have to.' She spoke of telephones as if they had wounded her in the past.

When Moses arrived at the bench, they were waiting for him, Rebecca wearing black jeans and a pink sweater, Mary in a black dress, the usual
diamanté
brooch at her throat, the usual jet earrings.

‘We would have driven down and picked you up,' Mary said, some of the formality lingering, ‘but we thought you might be out.'

‘Lying in a skip somewhere,' Rebecca said, squinting up at him.

‘I don't lie in skips,' Moses said. ‘Not on Wednesday mornings.'

‘So we telephoned,' Mary said, ‘instead.'

‘I'm glad you did,' Moses said.

‘Moses?' Rebecca said. ‘Do you know anything about kites? Kites that look like dragons, I mean.'

‘I know a bit about kites because I had one once. It was an aeroplane, though, not a dragon. Do you think that matters?'

‘I don't know. The thing is, aeroplanes are supposed to fly. I'm not so sure about dragons.'

Moses squatted down and examined the dragon.

‘And look,' Rebecca said, ‘it's got holes in it.'

‘Ah,' Moses said, ‘but this is a Chinese flying dragon, and Chinese flying dragons fly
even better
than aeroplanes.'

‘You're making it up,' Rebecca said. ‘There's no such thing.' But she wanted there to be.

‘And this – ' he glanced around – ‘is perfect Chinese flying dragon weather.' He pointed at the sky. It bustled with huge white clouds which kept bumping into each other, but very lightly, as if they had been pumped full of air. If you pricked one it would burst, he told her, and later you would find pieces of shrivelled cloud scattered about on the ground. He drew her attention to the trees, which rustled like presents being unwrapped by the breeze. Then one final (and unexpected) piece of evidence: a Chinese man chose that moment to trot by, one hand on his pork-pie hat. ‘You see?' Moses laughed. ‘What did I tell you?'

Rebecca had to smile. ‘All right, I believe you.'

And, in no time, the dragon was flying magnificently. Mary spread a rug on the grass. Moses sat next to her. They watched Rebecca as she skipped down the hill, the string clenched in her fist, her eyes fixed on the twisting gold tail in the air above.