Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  Peach eased himself on to a stool and leaned his forearms on the bar. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘has not exactly been the easiest of days.’

  The landlord tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes, nodded.

  Peach didn’t usually drink at lunch-time, but usually was a word that didn’t apply. Not today. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter,’ he said. ‘Anything’for yourself?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, sir. I’ll have a lager.’ The landlord pulled Peach’s bitter first, then the lager. ‘Your good health, sir.’

  Peach raised his glass to his lips. ‘Cheers.’

  When he spoke again he had almost drained it dry. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you could help me.’

  ‘Do my best, sir,’ the landlord said.

  ‘I’m looking for a place called The Bunker. It’s a nightclub. Somebody told me that it’s on this road.’

  The landlord shook a cigarette out of a squashed packet of Benson’s. He ran the tip of his tongue along his sparse moustache, pressed his lips together, and nodded (Peach’s intuition told him this happened a lot). ‘I know the place,’ he said. ‘It’s been open less than a year. Run by a coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.’ He sniffed. ‘No pun intended.’ He struck a match and lit his cigarette. He put the match out by shaking it, the way a nurse shakes a thermometer.

  Peach swallowed some more beer. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Just down the road.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘About a hundred yards down. Right-hand side. You can’t miss it.’ The landlord smiled. ‘It’s pink.’

  ‘Pink?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  They looked at each other and shook their heads in the manner of men who have seen all kinds of things come and go. There was a certain intimacy about the moment.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Peach ventured, ‘you know whether a young man by the name of Moses is living there, do you?’

  The landlord arranged his features in a position of deep thought. ‘Moses? No. I don’t know anyone called Moses.’

  Ah well, Peach thought. Worth a try.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ the landlord enquired.

  ‘Not exactly a friend,’ Peach said, ‘though we do go back a long way,’ and, turning aside, he strolled through the arcade of his own amusement.

  The landlord nodded once or twice. Smoke from his cigarette rose up through blades of sunlight. Traffic sighed beyond the frosted glass. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a pleasant pub.

  Peach drained his glass.

  ‘Another?’ the landlord said.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s on me.’

  Peach hesitated. ‘I really ought to be getting on, but,’ and he consulted his watch, ‘well, all right. Just a half, mind. Thank you very much.’

  When he emerged from the pub some twenty minutes later, his head seemed to be floating on his neck as a ball floats on water. It was an unfamiliar though not unpleasing sensation. He paused outside a launderette and took out his notebook. In the pool of the village, he wrote, you know where the water ends and the land begins. In the ocean of the world, you drift beyond the sight of any shore. He read it through to himself and nodded several times. He was quite pleased with it. Really quite pleased. It had an oriental, no, a universal ring to it. Perhaps he would try it out in one of his pep-talks. He moved off down the road again. His lower lip slid in and out as he walked. He passed an Indian restaurant, a delicatessen, a vet’s. Then suddenly, on the other side of the road, he saw the building that Terence, the landlord, had described. It was pink all right. It was very pink. And Peach was grateful for its pinkness. If it hadn’t been so pink, he would probably have walked right past it.

  He crossed the road. At last, he thought. The Bunker! He tried to peer in through one of the ground-floor windows, but he could see nothing. Effective stuff, smoked-glass. He tested the double-doors. Locked. He wished he knew more about nightclubs: how they operated, when they opened, what the routine was. The smoked-glass windows confronted him with his own ignorance.

  He stepped back to the kerb so as to get a better view of the rest of the building. On the second floor, he could see a pair of red curtains, a red lampshade hanging from the ceiling. The next floor up looked derelict: grimy windows, one pane missing. He would have assumed that the fourth floor was unoccupied too, had he not noticed a piece of black cloth covering one of the windows. He instinctively felt that this was where Moses lived. He walked round to the side of the building. Another door, also locked. Further along he found a metal gate about the width of a truck. Sharp green spikes lined the top to stop people climbing over. The padlock securing the gate was as big as his fist. He put his eye to the crack between the upper and the lower hinges. He saw a cobbled yard, a few dustbins, a stack of yellow beer-crates. Nobody had bothered to paint the back of The Bunker pink. Only the façade mattered, it seemed.

  He stood back. He dismissed any thought of trying to break in. He would be running too many risks. Besides, the place looked impregnable. Especially to a man who couldn’t even cut his own toenails any more. He would have to wait.

  He looked round, noticed a café on the other side of the main road. Positioned directly opposite The Bunker, it commanded views of both entrances. He crossed the road and pushed the glass door open. No foreigners, he was relieved to see. Nobody at all, in fact. He took the table by the window and ordered a coffee.

  The nightclub stood on the junction, flamboyant, still.

  It was 12.52.

  *

  By 3.15 he had severe indigestion. He had eaten a sausage sandwich, a ham roll, two cheese rolls with pickle, a bowl of oxtail soup, and a slice of cheesecake, and he had drunk three cups of coffee and two cups of tea. And nothing had happened. He decided to go for a walk.

  He paid the bill and left the café. The door jangled shut behind him. He set off down the road. He resisted the urge to glance back over his shoulder at the pink building. A truck slammed past him, flinging his shirt against his back. He followed the curve of a high brick wall and Kennington Park came into view. A nylon banner slung between two oak trees announced the opening of a fun-fair that evening. He crossed the road to investigate.

  A green generator hummed in the north-east corner of the park. Long red trucks huddled under the dusty foliage. He picked his way through fierce pieces of machinery. They lay about in the grass, dismembered, sticky with grease. Parts of something called an Octopus, apparently. He couldn’t imagine how they would look when assembled. Men with hands like wrenches were tightening nuts and bolts, shouting to each other in accents he could hardly understand. He moved through smells of beer and oil and sweat. Disco music crashed out of a gaudy wooden cabin at the foot of the Big Wheel. He winced. A man in fraying denims, hair tied back in a ponytail, gave him a hard still look as he passed – a look that seemed to freeze time and silence the music. Peach avoided the man’s eyes. He didn’t want any trouble. Leaving the clutter, the noise, the knots of fascinated boys behind, he wandered off across the grass.

  The next half-hour passed uneventfully. He watched a woman push a crying child on a swing. The higher the child went, the more it cried. The woman looked away, smoking. Two black youths loped past in track-suits. They shouted something at him, but again he didn’t understand. It would take a lifetime, and he only had twenty-four hours. He saw a man asleep on a bench, a pair of training-shoes for a pillow, a scar on his bald head like the lace on a football. Mostly there was nothing to look at. It was a drab park, and that beer he had drunk at lunch-time had taken the edge off things.

  Then the nightclub slid into his mind – pink, triangular, a vessel carrying a cargo of mysteries – and he imagined the black cloth parting and a face appearing at the window. While he walked aimlessly in the park, the young man whose face he didn’t know left by the side-door. Slipped the net. Escaped again. Time to get back, he thought. And almost ran back up the main road.

  But not
hing had changed. The black cloth hanging in the fourth-floor window as before. The same cars parked on the street outside. He walked into the café and sat down at his table.

  The owner shuffled over in carpet-slippers. ‘Twice in one day,’ he said. ‘You must really like it here.’ He let out a dry sarcastic chuckle.

  Peach ignored him. He ordered lasagne, a side salad, vanilla ice-cream, and a cup of black coffee. ‘And make it slow,’ he said.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And make it slow.’

  The man backed away, scratching his head.

  He returned half an hour later. ‘Slow enough for you?’

  Peach nodded.

  His lasagne stood on its plate like the model of a block of flats. The salad? A few dog-eared leaves of lettuce and a pile of carrot-shavings. He ate with no appetite, one eye on the window. He sometimes paused for minutes between mouthfuls. He was beginning to hate the pink building. He knew it off by heart, in minute detail, from the fringe of yellow weeds on the roof to the Y-shaped crack beneath one of the ground-floor windows. The pink façade had burned itself into his subconscious and would recur on sleepless nights. His eyes itched with the pinkness of it. He never wanted to look at anything pink again. Never.

  Then it was 6.56. A black Rover – a Rover 90, registration PYX 520 – turned into the street that ran down the left-hand side of The Bunker. It parked. The door on the driver’s side opened. A man got out. Early to middle twenties. Leather jacket. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Tall. 6’5”, 6’6”. Big too. 220 Ibs, perhaps. Maybe more. The man was alone.

  Peach had long since stopped eating. His two scoops of vanilla ice-cream subsided in their clear glass bowl. He watched the young man cross the pavement, unlock the black side-door, and vanish into the building. A minute or two later a hand parted the black cloth in the fourth-floor window. Peach’s lower lip slid out and back. Once.

  While his eyes were scouring the top of the building for further developments, a white Mercedes drew up on the street below. A West Indian climbed out. Coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts. Could this be the owner?

  The West Indian looked right and left as he locked the car door. A routine scan. Then he turned and walked towards The Bunker, lifting his shoulders a couple times, dropping his chin, the moves a boxer makes as he approaches the ring. He opened the double-doors and disappeared inside. Lights came on in a second-floor window. The owner, then.

  Peach stirred the thick puddle his ice-cream had become. Part of him wanted to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Moses Highness had drowned in the river, that nobody had ever escaped from the village, that the hundred per cent record was still intact. But now he had proof of his suspicions – the proof that he had, in a way, been dreading. The young man in the leather jacket was no carbon-copy of George Highness – they shared certain basic characteristics: above-average height, similar hair-colour – and yet Peach knew he had seen Moses. It shook him. To know, after twenty-four years, that the baby had survived, escaped, grown up. In the outside world. Anathema to Peach. Anathema and nightmare. He stirred and stirred at his ice-cream. The man in the carpet-slippers asked him if he had finished. ‘No,’ he said.

  He had seen what he had come to see and yet he couldn’t leave. Some part of him still needed convincing. He had made inroads. He felt he understood the territory now. He might almost have been on home ground. And he had time to spare. So he waited.

  After about fifteen minutes the double-doors swung open again. The West Indian appeared. He wore a dark suit (black? navy? maroon? from this distance it was difficult to tell) and a white tie. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and leaned against the wall. He smoked. His head moved, following cars, but he didn’t seem to be waiting for anybody, just passing the time of day. He flicked his cigarette into the road. A shower of sparks.

  The black curtain still open on the fourth floor. The light still on.

  Dusk came down. Lights in the café now.

  Peach suddenly realised how visible he was. A fat man in a lit window. His watching had become conspicuous. He should leave. Move closer. Adopt a more strategic position.

  As he paid the bill he noticed the weight of the case in his hand. An inconvenience. Removing his diary and his binoculars, he asked the owner of the café if he would mind looking after the case, just for half an hour or so. The owner said he closed at nine. ‘Fine,’ Peach said.

  Outside the café he paused just to one side of the window and hung his binoculars round his neck. When the West Indian was looking the other way, he walked off down the road. He crossed about two hundred yards below the nightclub and began to work his way back. Facing the nightclub, on the same side of the road, stood a fish and chip shop. Wood-veneer tables, red plastic chairs with spindly black legs, white neon lighting that showed every crease and vein in your face. No cover there. But just this side of the fish and chip shop window, Peach found a garage doorway. A low brick wall reaching out across the pavement hid him from the waist down. Shadow did the rest.

  He now stood less than forty feet from the West Indian. Even without his binoculars, he could see the built-up heels of the man’s boots. He could also see the side-door of the nightclub – Moses’s front door, in effect. It was ideal.

  He checked his watch. Exactly 7.30.

  He took his diary out and turned to the page where he had jotted down the times of trains. Trains left Victoria for Haywards Heath at twenty-three minutes past the hour. He had to connect with the local train which would take him to within eight miles of New Egypt. The last local train left Haywards Heath at 10.35. If he caught the 9.23 from Victoria, he would get into Haywards Heath at 10.16. The 9.23, then, was the last train he could catch. A taxi to Victoria would take half an hour, perhaps less. That left him with just under an hour and a half. It ought to be enough. It would have to be.

  Twenty minutes passed.

  Then the black door opened and Moses appeared. He had changed into a dark suit. Light slid off his wet hair. As he started towards his car, the West Indian called out. Moses paused, turned, walked over. The two men seemed to know each other well. They compared jackets and ties, pushed each other around. They both tilted their heads back when they laughed. They lit cigarettes, and smoke poured from their fingers like slow water. The damaged neon sign above their heads – FLOR AN’s – lit them both in the sharpest detail.

  Peach raised his binoculars and focused on Moses. Neither the eyes (hooded, grey) nor the nose (long, slightly crooked) seemed familiar. The mouth, though. The smile that kept forming there. A smile he had seen too often in the past. It belonged to George Highness. The son had inherited his father’s smile.

  Now the two men were separating. But when Moses had almost reached his car, he turned, ran back, embraced, smothered, all but crushed the West Indian. Peach lowered his binoculars. Curious behaviour.

  Moses returned to his car. He got in, slammed the door. He turned the ignition and the Rover fired first time, engine shuddering. He roared away in a cloud of blue exhaust. Two blasts on the horn. The West Indian shook his head. He straightened his clothes, retouched his hair. Then he settled back against the wall and lit another cigarette. He seemed to be smiling to himself.

  And there Peach should have left it, he realised afterwards. That smile had clinched it. No question as to the young man’s identity now. And yet he couldn’t tear himself away. He still had an hour or so and he wanted to exploit this opportunity to the full. After all, he wouldn’t have another. He left the shadows and crossed the side-street. He walked up to the West Indian.

  ‘Nice evening,’ he said.

  The West Indian flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He dusted his jacket with a casual right hand. When he said, ‘Yeah,’ he was looking not at Peach but at his own lapel.

  Peach slid his hands into his pockets, leaned back on his heels. ‘I thought you might be able to help me.’

  The West Indian looked along his cheekbones at Peach. ‘Don’t know
about that.’

  Peach studied the tight black curls on the man’s head, sparkling and dense, he looked into the slightly yellow whites of his eyes, he noted the hint of red in the pigmentation of his skin, he saw his lips, ridged like shells, peel back to reveal gums that were pink and grey. Perhaps he stared just a fraction too long, or just a fraction too closely.

  ‘What’re you looking at?’ The gap between the West Indian’s two front teeth looked dangerous. Like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Peach began. ‘His name is Moses. Do you know him?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Me?’ jocular now, ‘I’m an old friend of the family.’

  The West Indian’s top lip rolled back over his teeth. He glanced down at his hand. It curled, uncurled, against his thigh.

  ‘You know what I smell?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pig.’ The West Indian smiled into Peach’s eyes. ‘I smell pig.’

  Peach didn’t understand. Not right away.

  ‘And that’s not a smell I particularly like, you know?’

  Peach could feel the evidence, his badge, cold and heavy in his shirt pocket. Still he insisted: ‘I’m a friend of the family, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the West Indian, pointing at the binoculars, ‘and those are for birdwatching.’

  ‘Moses lives here,’ Peach said, ‘doesn’t he?’

  The West Indian lit another cigarette. Dunhill King Size. New York Paris London. The gold lighter snapped shut. ‘Does he?’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘I should clear off if I was you.’

  ‘Listen,’ Peach said, ‘I’m not being unreasonable. All I want to know is if Moses lives here or not.’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘Just tell me,’ Peach said. He was sounding, he realised, less and less like an old friend of the family and more and more like a policeman. Only a policeman would persist like this. And the West Indian knew it.

  ‘If you don’t fuck off right now,’ the West Indian said, ‘I’m going to have to mess up that nice fat face of yours – ’