‘That’s not pink,’ Eddie said, ‘though, of course, you probably wouldn’t know.’
A pause while Eddie and Vince hit each other. Vince staggered backwards over a dustbin. Eddie danced away, smiling.
‘I still think it was Vince’s fault, though,’ Moses said.
The following day, after only four hours’ sleep, Moses boarded a bus (his car had broken down again) with a two-litre plastic bottle of water, a family-size pack of Paracetamol, and a hangover that was like people moving furniture in his head. He was on his way up north. His foster-parents, Uncle Stan and Auntie B, were expecting him for the weekend.
*
Auntie B opened the door in her French plastic apron. Her hands showered white flour. When she saw Moses, her face seemed to widen; her eyes narrowed and lengthened, her mouth stretched into a smile.
‘Moses,’ she cried. ‘How are you? Happy birthday.’
They embraced. Moses kissed her on both cheeks. Her hands stuck out of his back like tiny wings because she didn’t want to get flour on his clothes. He heard the scrape of Uncle Stan’s chair on the parquet floor of the study. It had been six months.
The Poles would have described themselves as an ordinary couple – middle class, middle aged, middle income-bracket – but Moses had noticed them the first time they visited the orphanage. They seemed different somehow. Their smiles didn’t look glassy or stuck-on. They didn’t bury him in comics and cakes until he couldn’t breathe. They turned the other people who visited into fakes.
Mr Pole wore prickly tweed jackets with leather ovals on the elbows. He carried his pipe bowl uppermost in his breast pocket like a chubby brown periscope, and the rituals of smoking had transformed his fingers into instruments, fidgety and deft. He grumbled a lot. His wife – B, as he called her – was round and peaceful. When you heard her voice you thought of a cat curling up in front of the fire. When you kissed her, your lips seemed to touch marshmallow. So soft and sweet and powdery.
He had always looked forward to their visits, so when Mrs Hood summoned him to her office one day and asked him whether he would like to go and live with Mr and Mrs Pole he didn’t hesitate. Nor did he need Mrs Hood to tell him how lucky he was. He had been dreaming of a moment like this for as long as he could remember without ever having really believed that it would arrive.
The Poles moved north, and Moses moved with them. They had bought a detached Victorian house on the outskirts of Leicester. They gave him a room of his own on the second floor. The view from the window skimmed the tops of several fruit trees, cleared the garden wall, and came to rest in the peaceful green spaces of a municipal park. He inhaled the smell of apples and the silence.
They were consistently straight with him. There was no coyness or pretence about his origins. He was ten years old, after all – no baby. They told him to call them Uncle Stan and Auntie B; that neatly sidestepped the twin potholes of mum and dad and, besides, he had already become accustomed to the names during their many visits to the orphanage. They explained why his name was Highness and not Pole. His name, they said, was all that he had that was truly his (well, not quite all, but they didn’t tell him that – not yet), and he should keep it. Out of the way they closed ranks and stood up for him whenever necessary came a sense of their own uniqueness and strength as a family and, over the years, he grew to love them – not as parents exactly (he couldn’t imagine what that must feel like), but as people who had been kind to him. Saviours, if you like. Apart from anything else they had saved him from an awful nickname (the children had called him names like Jew and Judas and Rabbi for years but then, when they discovered that he couldn’t really be Jewish because he hadn’t been circumcised, they began to call him, of all things, Foreskin); he simply left it behind, along with the iron beds and the rising-bells, the walls painted two shades of green, and the constant echoey clang and clatter of the place, as if everything was happening inside a metal bucket. It had been such a luxury to move into that house in Leicester, and it was always a luxury to come back. A hushed and cushioned existence – except, that is, for the platoon of grandfather clocks that stood in the hall; a passion of Uncle Stan’s, they ticked and creaked and wheezed and, once in a while, all chimed simultaneously, a chaotic orchestra of gongs and xylophones and bells led, in Moses’s imagination, by a mad cook spanking the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. The carpets were fingernail deep and deliciously soft if, in the middle of the night, half asleep and barefoot, you had to cross the landing to the upstairs lavatory. The air smelt of wood-polish, pot-pourris of rose leaves, and Uncle Stan’s pipe-tobacco, and then, as you moved towards the kitchen, of warm pastry and freshly ground coffee.
Moses sat at the kitchen table as Auntie B put the finishing touches to the evening meal. Outside the lawn had turned blue, and birds clamoured from the webbed branches of the cedar tree. Uncle Stan stalked in and out of the room, ransacking cupboards for things of no importance.
‘How was your journey up?’ The floral print of Auntie B’s dress tightened across her wide back as she stooped to check the oven.
‘Not too bad. The trouble was, I went out with some friends last night, to celebrate, and I think I drank a bit too much.’ Even now, Moses was conscious of having to imitate good humour.
‘Well,’ Auntie B said, ‘it was your birthday, after all. People often get a bit tipsy on their birthdays, don’t they?’
A bit tipsy. Moses smiled to himself. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I feel a bit better now.’
Auntie B twirled round, her eyebrows high on her forehead, her mouth the shape of a lozenge. ‘Would you like a drink? Hair of the dog?’
It was as if she had learned this last phrase from some book without ever having been able to imagine how she could apply it to her own life but here, suddenly, was the chance, and she had taken it, and felt bright, naughty.
‘No thanks, Auntie B. Coffee’s perfect.’ He drained his cup to prove it.
Auntie B hovered with the percolator. ‘Another cup?’
‘Yes, please.’
Uncle Stan bustled into the kitchen, eyebrows bristling. ‘Where’s that magazine?’
Auntie B turned the upper half of her body and, beautifully bland, watched Uncle Stan as he began to pull drawers open. ‘What magazine?’ she said.
‘You know the one I mean,’ said Uncle Stan, in some kind of agony.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Oh, come on, poppet.’ In an excess of irritation, he finally looked at her.
The corners of Auntie B’s mouth tucked neatly under her round cheeks. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Stanley. I don’t know where your silly magazine is.’
Uncle Stan sighed dramatically and hurled himself from the room. Moses grinned at Auntie B.
‘He’s always losing things,’ she said, one eye on the door.
Nothing had changed, Moses thought. Uncle Stan had to worry and pester. Auntie B needed somebody who she could gently scold, hold up to ridicule, and then later, Moses suspected, draw towards her white upholstered bosom.
Two comfortable days went by – birthday presents, meals, TV. Auntie B produced endless cups of tea and coffee, and was constantly inventing excuses to cook or eat. Uncle Stan griped about money, aches and pains, old age.
It wasn’t until Sunday evening that they broached the subject that they had, in their own meandering way, been leading up to.
‘Well, shall I go and get it then?’ Joints cracking, Uncle Stan rose out of his armchair.
Auntie B scarcely glanced up from the news. ‘Why are you asking me, Stanley?’
Uncle Stan let out a rasp of exasperation. Life could be such a bugger. He left the room and returned five minutes later with a suitcase. He placed the suitcase on the coffee-table.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘this suitcase was left to you by your real parents, Moses. Don’t know what’s inside it. Haven’t got an earthly. None of my business, really. All these years it’s been up there in the attic, getting dustier and dustier, wa
iting for you to be twenty-five. Well, now you are, so you’d better have it.’
Moses listened carefully as Uncle Stan told him what little he knew about the suitcase. Strange how familiar it seemed to him, though he had probably never seen it before. He picked it up and turned it round in his hands. It was as if it had once occupied a space in his memory, only to fade with time until it became so dim as to be invisible. The blank space had remained, meaningless until solved, like a riddle. A space that the suitcase, reappearing again like this, fleshed out, filled in, fitted.
One foot six by two foot six. Old leather, black where scarred. Battered brass catches. No tags or stickers, though. No marks of identification. And dusty enough to write your name on. So he did. Moses, he wrote.
He didn’t open it that night. He waited until he got back to The Bunker the next day. On the journey down he noticed how light it was, almost as though there was nothing inside. That would be funny, he thought.
He opened a bottle of wine and put some music on. He placed the suitcase on the sofa. He turned the tiny key in the locks, first the left, then the right, and snapped the catches open. He lifted the lid.
A smell drifted up – something like dusty roses. A scent, perhaps. But a scent that had been preserved, that had aged. He parted the tissue-paper.
The contents of the suitcase were as follows:
1 dress
1 pair of red shoes (child’s size 2)
1 photograph album.
That was it.
Unfinished Histories (1972)
It was after ten o’clock at night. Arms pinned behind his back, almost as if handcuffed, Chief Inspector Peach stood at his office window. The storm was building. Staggered flashes of lightning took pictures of his massive silhouette. The trees over the road heaved, strained, testing the strength of their roots. Rain hissed down through the light of a single street-lamp, fine as silver wire. In the intervals between thunderclaps a typewriter could be heard, scratching and clicking beyond the door like an insect.
Storms made Peach think. Their explosions loosened the order in his mind. Thoughts long buried came tumbling down. He turned away from the window and crossed the room to his desk, his boots deliberate on the wooden floor. The angle of his head, lowered in thought, blurred the line of his jaw; his double chin had, with the years, almost doubled again. He sank heavily into his chair.
There were times when he saw himself as a premier surrounded by dissidents, when he saw his office as the object of endless plots and conspiracies. Deep down, he knew this was nonsense, morbid nonsense, and an injustice both to himself and his colleagues, but then the sound of thunder came to him, unfurling miles away, rolling across the countryside, breaking against the glass of his window –
He still remembered – how could he forget? – the weeks in 1959 when that feeling had washed over him, sucked him down, when no amount of struggling could bring him back to the surface. Though he had trusted nobody, he had been forced to turn the running of the village over to three of his sergeants while he retired to bed – to rest, recuperate, re-think. And there had been moments when he doubted whether he would ever return.
The breakdown –
Sheets of glass, infinite and tough, between himself and everything else. Sheets of glass thickening, thickening. Until he couldn’t hear anything any more, until he couldn’t make himself heard. He didn’t want to think about it. He had worked through it, that was the main thing. When the feeling came now, he took it for what it was – the accumulating weight of responsibility, a sign of fatigue, his mind telling him to ease off. He obeyed. At sixty-four, he couldn’t afford to go through all that again. He might really never come back this time.
A knock on the door dropped into his thoughts. Gratefully, he watched them scatter and disperse. When he spoke, his voice had its usual authority, its usual depth of tone. So much so that it blended with the retreating thunder.
‘Come in.’
Dolphin – now Sergeant Dolphin (Peach had promoted him in 1969) – steered his large face round the door. ‘I was wondering, sir, what you wanted me to do with this.’ And he shuffled backwards into the office dragging a curious structure that appeared to be made out of strips of corrugated cardboard. It was about six feet tall, four feet wide and two inches thick. It had been painted brown. Leather straps dangled from the underside.
Ah, Peach thought. Ah yes.
‘Lean it up against the wall, Dolphin,’ he said, ‘then take a seat. I want to have a word with you.’
Dolphin manoeuvred the structure into the gap between the bookshelf and a large-scale wall-map of the village. Then he closed the door and sat down. Too eagerly, perhaps, for a spring twanged somewhere beneath him. He cringed, muttered an apology.
With his moments of embarrassment, his nail-bitten fingers and his rosy outdoor face, he sometimes reminded Peach of a giant schoolboy. Peach approved of his eagerness, though. It was one of the qualities he looked for in a police officer. That, physical presence, and a shrewd mind. And Dolphin, surprisingly, had all three. That blundering physique of his concealed a wealth of deftness and tact. But Dolphin was fidgeting, tugging at his collar and rearranging his legs, and Peach finally took pity.
‘An extraordinary case, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Most unusual,’ the sergeant said. ‘Ingenious, really.’
Peach frowned. He didn’t want obsequiousness. He wanted fresh opinions, new angles: feedback. He prompted Dolphin once again. ‘Had you suspected him at all, the greengrocer?’
‘Well, no. Not exactly.’ Dolphin shifted in his chair, as if by finding a comfortable position he would also find the right words. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I know he’s thought of escape before. It’s just that I never thought he’d have the – ’ he faltered for a moment then, trampling his inhibitions, came out daringly with – ‘balls.’
Peach’s lower lip curved, became succulent. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘that it surprised me too, Dolphin.’
‘Though, God knows, he spent enough time with Dinwoodie.’ Dolphin plunged into the stream of his thoughts. ‘I suppose I should’ve suspected something, really. I just thought he was all bark, that’s all. You know, like Dinwoodie. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, but nothing ever comes of it. And all the time he was building that – ’ but he couldn’t find the word to describe the structure that was leaning against the wall, so he pointed instead – ‘that’
A sudden flicker of lightning and the structure jumped out into the room. Peach waited for thunder, but none came.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘I think there’s an important lesson to be learned there, Dolphin. We tend to overestimate ourselves sometimes. Get cocky. Complacent. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. Vigilance at all times, Dolphin. I can’t stress that strongly enough. Security must be watertight. Watertight. Not a drop of it must ever escape. Do you follow me?’
Dolphin bit down on his bottom lip. ‘Yes, sir.’
The lecture over, Peach eased back. His voice became conversational again. ‘An intriguing case, though. Quite intriguing.’
Only two nights before, the greengrocer had confessed everything. In the harsh light of the interrogation room, his robust pink features had seemed bulbous, coarse. His methodical demeanour had looked plain clumsy. A failed escape attempt – and, let’s face it, what other kind was there? – rearranged both a person’s appearance and their character. Made them ugly. Broke them. Peach had seen it happen half a dozen times during his long career, and the sight of the greengrocer slumped on that hard chair, mouth slack and hanging open, mud drying on his dishevelled clothes, had reminded him of those other triumphs.
He remembered asking the greengrocer how the idea had come to him.
On a glorious spring morning, the greengrocer replied. Through his shop window, he could see part of a field which at that particular time of year was in the process of being ploughed. He knew that, owing to its unusual shape (a long wedge tapering to a sharp poin
t), this field stretched all the way to the village boundary, just visible as a line of trees in the distance. He saw the field every day and had become attached to it. In the spring it looked especially beautiful – the grain of the earth chiselled into furrows, the white gulls flapping in the air above the farmer’s tractor, like washing hanging out to dry –
Though he was himself a staunch advocate of the beauty of New Egypt, Peach became impatient.
‘That’s enough poetry,’ he said. ‘What about a few facts?’
After a brief wounded silence, the greengrocer continued.
On one of those spring mornings he had been unpacking a fresh delivery of apples. Granny Smiths, they were – a lovely fruit, crisp and green. (A warning glance from Peach.) He was transferring them from their crates to the window display when he noticed something extraordinary. Slowly, very slowly, so as to see everything as it really was and no other way, he stared first at the corrugated cardboard that lined the bottom of the apple-crates, then at the ploughed field beyond the window. He did this several times. Then, even though it was only eleven in the morning, he closed his shop and went upstairs.
He had spent the next two years gathering and assembling his materials. He had to work sporadically, so as not to attract attention. And, in any case, it wasn’t every day that a delivery of apples arrived, was it?
‘Do you remember how I dropped the price of my apples, Chief Inspector?’ For a moment the greengrocer had been his old self again, his head wobbling on his shoulders, a smug light in his eye. ‘I had to get rid of them, you see. So I could order some more.’
Peach nodded. ‘The cardboard.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Very clever.’ Peach’s voice was as crisp as any Granny Smiths, though sourer perhaps. ‘Go on.’
The greengrocer had worked night after night in the dusty gloom of the cellar underneath his shop, hunched over strips of cardboard, pots of brown paint and tubes of industrial glue. It had taken ages. Ages. And even when he had finished he had to wait another nine months to put his plan into action. The time of year was important, of course – but so was the weather. A moon would have been dangerous. Rain too. Snow would have been fatal.
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