Moses examined Django for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Is there something wrong with me, do you think?’
Django looked Moses up and down. ‘Not that I can see. Apart from you being out of it, that is.’
‘I mean, I’m the DJ, Django.’
‘So?’
‘Well, I thought girls always fell for the DJ.’
‘Apparently not, Mose.’
Moses sighed again. He tried to forget about the German actress. The lights coloured his face an appropriate blue. ‘All right, Django. I’ll play your records now.
‘Cheers, Mose.’
During the next hour Moses played both the records twice and the drinks kept coming. He saw Django dancing with a girl, and the girl Django was dancing with wasn’t Django’s wife. Moses began to understand. The requests. The whisky-bribes. Crafty bugger. A Scotsman definitely. A Scotsman and a wife-beater. He wished the German actress would go. Her beauty was ruining his evening. His smiles reached out to where she stood. She didn’t notice. His smiles were like love-letters that get lost in the post.
Eddie came over again. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’ Moses said.
‘Staring at that girl in the black dress.’
Suddenly Eddie’s grinning face irritated Moses intensely. ‘If you don’t like it, Eddie, why don’t you fuck off home?’
Eddie fucked off home ten minutes later – with the German actress. Moses felt that something had gone badly wrong somewhere. He needed a drink.
‘Anything else you want to hear?’ he asked a passing Django.
‘“Knock on Wood”. Ami Stewart.’
Moses played that twice too and drank himself into a vast indifference to everything.
The Bunker closed at two that night. While Moses was clearing away, Elliot strolled up and laid three £10 notes in a fan on the mixing-desk.
‘I thought you said twenty,’ Moses said.
‘You did a good job.’ A smile tugged lightly at the corner of Elliot’s mouth. ‘I thought maybe you could take over on Wednesdays. Permanent, like.’
‘Not a chance.’
‘How come?’
‘Too painful.’
Elliot looked puzzled. He scratched his head at the point where his hair was receding. Maybe that was why it was receding, Moses thought. Maybe Elliot got puzzled a lot.
‘I can’t go into it,’ Moses said, ‘not now. I’d just rather be a normal person. You know, one of the crowd. Inconspicuous.’
Inconspicuous made Elliot laugh. ‘You seem a bit down. Fancy a game of pool?’
Moses, slow tonight, said, ‘Where?’
‘In the office. Got my own table.’
Now Moses remembered. ‘Sure,’ he said.
He followed Elliot up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Outside the last few people were stumbling home. Standing by the office window, Moses saw Belsen fold the gaunt scaffolding of his body into a battered white Cortina and drive away.
Elliot selected two glasses with heavy bases and poured them both a large Remy. The green baize, lit from above, lived up to its reputation. So did Elliot. There was something carnal about the way he chalked his cue, the way his eyes feasted on the position of balls on the table. He won two games on stripes. Then he was on spots, and the spots disappeared as if he had some kind of miracle cream on the end of his cue. He crept towards the black on soft predatory feet and killed it in the top right-hand pocket. Moses had lost again. Three games in a row.
Elliot slapped him on the back. ‘You need to sharpen up, Moses.’
Moses stood his cue against the wall. ‘It’s been a long night.’
Elliot went and sprawled in his executive leather chair. Moses took the dralon sofa under the window. He surrendered to the deep soothing reds and charcoal greys of the office. Wall-lamps built nests of warm light in the corners. Two glasses of brandy glowed in the shadows.
The traffic had slackened on the street below. The occasional truck. The still more occasional bus. Moses was sober now – the soberness that comes from hours of drinking. Elliot must think I’m all right, he thought. He only invites people up here if he thinks they’re all right. He reached for his brandy, and smiled as he swallowed.
Elliot propped his feet on the desk and talked about the club. He offered Moses cigarettes. They smoked until the corners of the office disappeared. Then the conversation touched on the break-in last September, and Elliot, without any prompting from Moses, began to tell the story.
There had been two men, apparently. They had climbed in the back way – over the wall and into the yard where the dustbins were kept – and forced a ground-floor window.
‘Professional job,’ Elliot said. ‘Very professional.’
One of the men had been carrying a plastic bag of shit. He had scooped it up in handfuls, and plastered it over the walls, the tables, the bar. Afterwards he had wiped his hands on the curtains in the foyer. The second man had brought along one of those plastic tubs you buy paint in. Instead of being full of paint, it had been full of blood. Ten litres of the stuff. That too had been smeared over everything in sight.
‘Right fucking mess,’ Elliot said. ‘You can imagine, right?’
Moses shuddered.
Elliot went on with the story. The next day, a Sunday, he had pulled up outside The Bunker in his motor. Two flicks of his wrist and the double-doors were open. The stench had flung him back into the street, an arm over his nose, gagging. It was as if everything that was bad in his life had caught up with him at once.
He had rushed up the stairs to his office. It had been left untouched. He had grabbed the phone and almost called the police. Almost. Instead he had picked up the Yellow Pages and dialled a firm of industrial cleaners. After hanging up, he had noticed some shit on his shoes. He must have trodden in it on his way upstairs. At that moment, he said, he had wanted to kill.
Later in the day he called a couple of friends of his, forensic experts. The only clues that had been left behind were the plastic bag and the paint-tub. The plastic bag had come from Safeway’s. The tub had once held Crown White Matt. No fingerprints on either of them. According to Elliot’s forensic friends, the shit in the plastic bag had been human, possibly belonging to the man who had done the job, and collected over a period of several days during which time he had eaten, among other things, a McDonald’s, two Indian take-aways and a Chinese. More than that, they couldn’t say. The chances of tracing the man, they told Elliot, were slim. Very slim indeed.
‘You know, it’s funny,’ Moses said, ‘but the first time I came here I smelt shit. I thought I was imagining it.’
‘You weren’t imagining it.’ Elliot smiled grimly. ‘This place was so full of shit I could’ve opened a sewage farm. I had to close for three weeks.’ He sighed, leaned back, massaged his neck. ‘Three weeks is a fuck of a lot of money.’
Moses wanted to ask why it had happened; he chose not to.
‘Yeah,’ Elliot went on, ‘that’s why I laid into you that afternoon. You know, when you were out there taking pictures.’
‘What? You mean that was the same afternoon?’
Elliot nodded.
‘No wonder you were in such a foul mood,’ Moses grinned. ‘I suppose you could say it was shit that brought us together.’
Elliot winced. ‘Hey Moses, I don’t want to think about it, OK?’
Moses apologised, but his grin lingered.
He stayed at The Bunker until four in the morning. Partly because he liked Elliot’s company, and partly because he didn’t want to risk running into the German actress who hadn’t noticed him smiling at her. Especially as she was with Eddie, who had.
*
Then it happened again.
One evening at the end of February Moses turned up outside The Bunker to find Elliot prowling up and down the pavement as if held by an invisible cage. His face twitched with rage. His lips were forced back over his gums.
>
‘What’s wrong, Elliot?’
‘Fuck,’ Elliot snarled. ‘Fuck Jesus fucking fuck.’ He pointed at the pavement just to the left of where Moses was standing. Somebody had painted a big white arrow on the ground. It was aimed at the entrance of the club.
Elliot jerked his head, and disappeared through the double-doors. Moses followed him inside. A trail of similar arrows led across the foyer, up the stairs, along the corridor, leading, inevitably, to Elliot’s office. Elliot pushed the door open, then stepped aside to let Moses in first.
It was a scene of such violence that Moses found the stillness unnerving. As he gazed into the room, he kept expecting something to spring out at him from a hiding-place in the debris. It was the kind of stillness that had recently been havoc and had only just returned to being stillness again. Moses took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly through his mouth. The entire office had been systematically and viciously destroyed. Torn paper, broken glass and long splinters of wood buried the carpet ankle-deep. The red drapes lay on top, cut into sinister neat pieces. The red lamps had been ripped loose and smashed. Wires trailed from the empty sockets like torn ligaments. The two black holes in the wall made the room look blinded somehow. The desk, the sofa and the executive chair, dismembered, hacked almost beyond recognition, reared up from the chaos as if trying to break free. Blood inched down the window-panes. The bitter smell of urine trickled into Moses’s nostrils. But worst of all – and Moses groaned when he noticed it – was what they had done to the pool-table, Elliot’s pride and joy. They had sawn the legs off, all four of them, and slashed the green baize into strips, with a razor-blade by the look of it, and then peeled it back to reveal the slab of grey slate, showing like bone through flesh, beneath.
‘The same people?’ Moses asked.
Elliot shrugged.
It couldn’t be kids, that much was clear. And remembering what Elliot had told him about the previous break-in, Moses thought he recognised the style. The blood, the shit, the piss. The same sadistic premeditated violence. It had the feel of a vendetta, a psychotic vendetta, and, once again, Moses wondered exactly what truth lay beneath the rumours he had heard about Elliot. This kind of thing didn’t happen to just anyone.
‘I suppose it’s no good getting the police in,’ he said.
Elliot didn’t even hear. His face had clenched like a fist. He was, Moses saw, one of those people who feel fury rather than fear.
He took Elliot by the arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go and get a drink somewhere.’
He drove Elliot to a pub in Bermondsey. The jukebox was playing early Sinatra to an interior of dark wood. They drank in near silence. An idea occurred to Moses – or, rather, recurred, because it had first begun to hatch when Elliot told him what had happened in October. The idea now grew, spread wings, though, even as it did so, Moses realised that he would have to save it for a more propitious moment.
*
Winter eased. Spring became a possibility.
When the vital conversation took place, Moses had been waiting almost a month. Insurance had restored the office to its former sleek condition. The windows were wide open. The roar of rush-hour traffic competed with the squeak of the blue chalk cube on the end of Elliot’s cue. The pool-table was playing as beautifully as ever, though Elliot still winced sometimes when he looked down at the green baize and remembered. Moses sat on the arm of the sofa, cue in one hand, a brandy in the other. A typical evening on the second floor of The Bunker.
Elliot was telling Moses about a trip he had made to West Germany. ‘I was in this town, right?’ he was saying.
Elliot in West Germany? ‘What were you doing there?’ Moses asked.
‘Business.’
‘Ah,’ Moses said.
‘Anyway,’ Elliot went on, ‘there was this bloke going on about a dome – ’
‘The cathedral?’ Moses suggested.
‘Yeah, probably, but he called it a dome. Anyway, this bloke, he’s sort of a guide, right? He points at this dome and he says, “You see that?”, and I go, “Yeah”. “You see that?” he says, second time, OK?, and I’m thinking What is this? but I go, “Yeah,” anyway. Then he says, “Ugly,” he says. “Ugly ugly ugly”. And I’m cracking up but he hasn’t finished yet. “In the war,” he says, “boo boo boo, everything falls down, but that,” and he points at the fucking dome again, “that no bombs touch.” I’m thinking Yeah, OK, so? And then he says, “You know why no bombs touch?”, and I go, “No,” and he says, “Why God inside”.’
Elliot shook his head. ‘God inside. Jesus?’
‘You shouldn’t mock,’ Moses said, with the air of somebody who has just thought of something. ‘There’s a moral in that story.’
‘Moral?’ Elliot said. ‘What moral?’ But he wasn’t really listening. He was loping round the table, running his cue back and forwards through his left hand, intent on victory.
Moses smiled. His moment had come. ‘I mean, maybe you need God in here, Elliot.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Well, if you had God in here, maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more.’
Elliot paused in mid-shot and straightened up. There was a shrewdness in his gaze that Moses recognised as confusion in disguise. He stepped forwards out of the shadows. He couldn’t risk obscurity. Not when he was this close.
‘I was thinking,’ Moses said, ‘that maybe I could be God, you see.’
Elliot rushed his shot, and missed for once.
‘You going to talk English or what?’ he snapped.
He hated missing.
The setting sun reached through the window, showed Moses standing in the centre of the room, his cue upright in his hand like a shepherd’s crook. I could be God, he was thinking. Just a couple more sentences, that should clinch it.
He took a deep breath, became precise, factual. ‘Listen, the top floor’s empty, right? You’re not using it for anything, so what I thought is, suppose I live up there. Sort of keep an eye on the place when you’re not here. I mean, you can’t be here all the time, can you? Not a man with your interests. And if somebody was actually living here all the time, then maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more – ’
Moses bent over the table. He lined up a spot and knocked it into the left-hand side pocket. Like a sort of full stop.
Elliot stared at the place where the spot had disappeared. ‘Maybe you have something there,’ he said.
They carried on playing in silence. A siren cut through the quiet of the street below like a reminder of violence. It was more than five minutes before Elliot spoke.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘If you were normal size, like me, for instance, I’d say no way.’ He paused. ‘But since you’re so fucking big – ’
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. They shook hands, and slapped each other on the back. Moses leapt into the air, his legs revolving as if he was riding a bicycle. When he landed, the floor trembled. He was big all right. Out came the brandy. Elliot poured two. Trebles.
‘’Course,’ Elliot said, ‘you could be one of them, couldn’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ Moses said.
They held each other’s glances for a few long seconds, their heads very still as if the slightest movement could cause something terrible to happen, then they began to laugh, both at the same time.
‘You really think you can handle it?’ Elliot asked.
‘Let’s put it this way,’ Moses said. ‘You’re not going to be any worse off, are you?’
Ten minutes later Elliot had to go downstairs to attend to something. He left Moses sprawling in his executive chair. The look on Moses’s face was one of pure fruition. He forgave everyone for their cruel jokes about his size. He even forgave his unknown parents for having created the problem in the first place.
It was all worth it.
*
Who to tell, though?
First would have to be Eddie. His life in Eddie’s flat in Batter
sea would now be coming to an end. Well, that had been part of the plan, really. No more voices at night. No more statues in the kitchen. No more Jackson Browne (like most beautiful people, Eddie had absolutely no taste in music).
Not that they hadn’t had some good times, of course. How could he forget the night Eddie had come in and thrown up all over the TV?
‘Eddie,’ Moses had said the next morning, ‘what’s that?’
‘What?’ Eddie said. ‘Oh, that. That’s breakfast television.’
Moses smiled as he dialled the number that had been his for the last two years. They had been avoiding each other recently. Putting a bit of physical distance between them might bring them closer together. Something like that, anyway.
He glanced at his watch. Nine twenty-five. Hang on. If it was nine twenty-five, Eddie probably wouldn’t be in. Unless he was having sex. At nine twenty-five, though? Yes, what about the time Moses had come home, it must have been around seven in the evening, to find a pair of pearl earrings placed, all neatness and innocence, on the arm of the sofa – the first in a trail of female clues that led with unerring logic, with unfaltering resolve, across the carpet, along the hall and up the stairs, only to disappear with a wriggle of black elastic under Eddie’s bedroom door. Yes, he might well be in.
Moses let the number ring just in case Eddie was struggling, irritable, half-dressed, but still unbelievably good-looking, towards the phone. After two minutes he gave up. Either Eddie was out, or the sex was uninterruptible. He replaced the receiver.
*
He thought of Jackson next.
Jackson would almost certainly be home. Jackson was always home. Jackson wasn’t interested in women. Once, when drunk, Jackson had suddenly announced that he was asexual. The laughter he had been expecting never arrived. Everybody simply agreed with him.
Women held no fascination for Jackson. He was far more interested in the weather – its beauty, its caprices. He watched the way the clouds walked across the sky. He listened to what the north wind said. These were his women.
Yes, he would be at home now, in his dark basement flat, his tense wiry frame bent over an antique weather-vane, or staring tenderly, myopically, at the latest reading on a barometer. He would be crouching at his desk, one hand plunged into his coarse, curly hair, calculating the exact position of an isothermal layer, or puzzling over the sudden prevalence of millibars in the air above the city. He would be totally absorbed in making yet another totally erroneous weather forecast.
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