At first he thought he was in bed because he was lying down and he felt strangely comfortable. But then he realised that the ceiling was the wrong colour and anyway, what would all these people be doing in his bedroom? They were bending over him and their heads looked like tulips, the hard conical shape of the buds before they open, and he wanted to laugh.
Gloria knelt beside him.
‘Why aren’t you singing?’ he asked her.
She gazed down at him sadly, as if he was dying in a film. ‘That’s over,’ she told him.
‘I must’ve missed the last bit,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Yes, you did.’
‘Malone was good.’
She smiled and ran a cool hand through his hair. ‘How do you feel?’
‘What happened?’
‘You got hit.’
Moses smiled faintly.
Now Ridley loomed above him. His one gold earring swung like something a hypnotist might use.
‘Moses,’ and Ridley held a finger up, ‘how many fingers can you see?’
‘One.’
Ridley held up two fingers. ‘How many now?’
‘That’s not nice, Ridley.’
‘He’s all right,’ Ridley told Gloria. ‘Better get him upstairs, though.’
They helped him up to his flat and put him to bed with an ice-pack over his eye. Gloria said she would stay the night.
‘That’s very nice of you,’ Moses mumbled, ‘to look after me.’
‘Don’t be a prick,’ she said.
He woke at midday, and this time he really was in bed. The right side of his face felt fragile and stiff, twice its normal size. He could hear Gloria singing somewhere. One of the songs from last night. She must be in the bathroom. He tried to open his eyes, but only the left one worked. There was a huge gold tiara outside the window. He closed the eye again.
‘Gloria?’ he called out.
He heard the floorboards creak as she walked into the bedroom.
‘Gloria?’
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Tell me what that gold tiara’s doing outside the window.’
Now he heard her laughing.
He opened his left eye again. The empty gasholder gleamed in the afternoon sun. The sun is clever, he thought. It can turn buildings into jewellery.
Gloria went out to the kitchen to make some coffee. When she returned, Moses was sitting up in bed with both eyes open. Gloria screamed and threw his coffee all over the wall.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘Your eye.’
‘What about it?’
‘Look in the mirror.’
He crawled across the bed until his face appeared in the mirror. ‘Jesus,’ he gasped.
The white part of his right eye had flooded with blood. The right side of his face had swollen too; sheets of pain, bright as aluminium, flashed across the inside of his head when he pressed his cheek.
‘How did it happen?’ he asked. ‘I can’t remember a thing.’
‘Well, apparently you bumped into this guy and spilled beer all down him. It doesn’t seem like a very good reason to hit someone but Ridley said he knew the guy from somewhere. He used to be a boxer and he’s always looking for trouble.’
Moses groaned. ‘A boxer? Trust me to get hit by a boxer.’
‘Ridley threw him out. You should’ve seen it. He just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and chucked him in that skip. The guy was furious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so furious. But Ridley just stood there with his arms folded and said, “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”’ Gloria laughed and shook her head.
‘I wish I’d seen it,’ Moses said.
‘You were lying on the floor. You must’ve been out cold for about two minutes.’
Moses touched his cheek. ‘D’you think anything’s broken?’
‘I don’t know. It might be an idea to check.’
‘Have my head examined, you mean.’ Moses grinned. ‘Shit, it even hurts to grin.’
Gloria drove him to St Thomas’s in Waterloo. The doctor, an urbane Pakistani, told him that he had sustained a hairline fracture of the right cheekbone. It would heal naturally, he said. As for the eye, that was just a broken bloodvessel. He wrote Moses a prescription. There didn’t appear to be any concussion, he said, but he advised Moses to take things easy for a few days.
‘If I was you,’ he concluded, stroking his neck with an elegant tapering finger, ‘I should try not to get into any more fights with boxers.’
Moses promised to avoid anyone who looked even remotely like a boxer.
On the way back to The Bunker Gloria turned to him. ‘You know something else that happened last night? After I’d finished singing, Ridley came up to me. Oh shit, I thought, what’ve I done now? But he just put his hand on my shoulder and smiled and said, “That was fucking diamond.”’
Rockets in July
The Rover touched fifty-five as an art collector touches his own private Rodin. Moses loved his old car. Gloria had wanted to hire a Porsche to drive down to Louise’s party in (these girls with parents in Hampstead!), but a Porsche, they found out, cost about £130 a day and neither of them had that kind of money. Gloria capitulated gracefully. She settled for half a Porsche which, when commuted into powders and liquids, turned out to be a gram of coke and a Thermos of Smirnoff and crushed ice. Much more sensible.
‘So where is the party exactly?’ Moses asked her.
Gloria, navigator for the trip, snuggled down in her seat. ‘A place called Star Gap,’ she said. ‘It’s somewhere on the south coast. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.’
Moses nodded.
They had left the rain behind in Purley (where rain belongs) and as the car swung away from a roundabout and climbed up through the trees towards Godstone the sun broke through, beat like a sudden drum rhythm in his blood. He wound the window down, listened to the cymbal hiss of tyres on the wet road. Gloria put sunglasses on and pretended to be an Italian movie-star. Smiles journeyed between them. So did the Thermos of vodka.
They had been driving for an hour when Gloria sat up.
‘What about a deviation?’ she suggested.
Moses narrowed his eyes. ‘In what sense of the word?’
‘I thought that, on this occasion,’ she said, in a voice that left him in no doubt, ‘the two senses of the word might be combined in a single act.’
Moses smiled.
‘It’ll be the first time, you see. Outdoors, I mean. We can’t really count that greenhouse in Leicestershire, can we?’
Moses agreed that they couldn’t really count the greenhouse in Leicestershire.
Gloria consulted the map. ‘Now, let’s see. We’ll be passing through a big patch of light green soon and, according to this, light green means either forest, woodland, or an area of outstanding natural beauty, so what I– ’
‘That means that if you were on the map,’ Moses interrupted, ‘you’d be light green.’
‘That’s very nice of you, Moses,’ Gloria said, colouring slightly (though not light green). ‘Anyway,’ she went on, after they had kissed dangerously (Moses always closed his eyes when he kissed), ‘what I was going to say was, why don’t we deviate somewhere in this area of forest, woodland or outstanding natural beauty?’
‘Exactly what I was thinking. How far is it?’
‘About seven miles.’
Moses stamped on the accelerator. The needle on the speedometer swung wildly between fifty-eight and sixty-five mph.
Porsche indeed. Who needs a Porsche?
*
They parked on a scenic bank of leaf-mould about half a mile up a lane that led eventually, so Gloria maintained, to a village called Balls Green. Gloria was so taken with the name that she was all for checking it out right away until Moses leaned over and, resting a hand on her wrist, gently reminded her that their departure from the main road (deviation in the first sense) had a specific purpose (deviation in the sec
ond sense) and Gloria was so overwhelmed by his logic and his singlemindedness that she instantly put all other thoughts out of her head.
They had a line of coke each in the car. Gloria began to slip out of her shorts.
‘In here?’ Moses looked surprised.
Gloria laughed. ‘No. I’m just changing.’
From surprise to bewilderment. ‘Changing?’
‘You’ll see.’
Outside the clouds parted to reveal a sky of almost transparent blue. Trees shifted their leaves and branches like people exercising. The air had warmed up.
Moses stood a little way from the car and let the sun move over his face.
Then Gloria was walking towards him in a long black skirt that she had fastened at the waist with a studded leather belt. She put an arm round him. ‘You know what I think, Moses? I think this is an area of outstanding natural beauty.’
He looked down at her and said, ‘Well, it is now, anyway.’
Hand in hand, they strolled up a mud track between massed banks of blackberry bushes and old man’s beard. Gloria noticed a stile set back in the hedgerow and a field beyond.
‘What about in there?’ she said.
They surveyed the field together. Lining one side, a row of silver birches, their bark scalloped, edged in black, catching the sun like the scales on fish. Tough springy grass sloped up to a copse at the far end. No sign of any livestock.
‘A perfect field,’ Moses said.
He vaulted over the stile. Gloria handed him the Thermos and followed, pinching her skirt between finger and thumb, as ladies descending staircases in ballgowns do. Moses, waiting below, ran a hand up her thigh. It encountered nothing but warm bare skin. Gloria smiled. Moses began to understand the full significance of the skirt.
They sat side by side on the grass. They drank vodka and breathed the lush agricultural air. Gloria said she could smell magnolia and Moses agreed, even though he couldn’t really think what magnolia smelt like. It was that kind of field.
Soon she was arranging herself on top of him, and it wasn’t long before he was inside her in a way that she had engineered and he was very happy with. Her skirt hid their four legs and far more besides.
‘You’re cunning,’ Moses said. The skirt, he meant.
Gloria smiled. ‘Someone’s got to think ahead.’
They fell silent, moved together. For a while it seemed as if Sussex might prove to be more accommodating than Leicestershire. Gloria could have been a tree doing its exercises. Sometimes her body shuddered as if a gust of wind had caught it, and one arm rose into the air beside her ear, the hand clenching and unclenching. Her eyelids trembled like leaves. Moses grasped her by the waist with both hands, twisted his face sideways into the grass. He closed his eyes. No sky any more. Only this green smell and the arching of his back. It was extraordinary how quickly she could move him from humour to ecstasy.
Then he heard the cough.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he came back to say.
But they had both heard it. A harsh bronchial cough, such as belonged in a doctor’s waiting-room rather than in an area of outstanding natural beauty, if not for its own sake, for theirs. Gloria had the presence of mind to leave her body exactly where it was.
‘Pretend we’re having a fight,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do the talking.’
Moses began to struggle, though not too hard, for fear of displacing the skirt.
A man leaned over the stile. He wore a flat cap and a pair of shabby corduroys. A burlap sack bulged on his back. His tiny eyes circled the field, moving jerkily as flies, then settled on the young couple in the grass below.
‘That’s a private field, that is,’ he observed.
Gloria launched into a complicated story about how they were driving down to visit friends on the south coast and how they had stopped to stretch their legs and how they had then got into an argument and how they were now sorting out their differences and how they would soon be on their way because they were already late for lunch.
The man said, ‘Ah.’
Gloria assured him that it would only be a matter of a few minutes and that they would leave the field exactly as they had found it because they both had a great respect for the countryside, in fact they adored it, and what they were supposed to be doing this weekend, actually, was looking for a house, the house they would live in after they had got married, though, after today, she was having second thoughts about the whole thing.
The man eyed them with suspicion, a look that seemed to reflect, more than anything else, the immense gap between their lives and his, a look that had a gloating lascivious edge to it that made them both uneasy. They were relieved when he hoisted his sack higher on his shoulder and took a step backwards. But there he paused again.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t think I don’t know what you’re really up to.’ He nodded, coughed, spat twice, and, turning away, disappeared up the track.
‘Well, we’ve tried Sussex and we’ve tried Leicestershire,’ Gloria said, as they walked back to the car. ‘How many counties does that leave?’
Moses didn’t know.
‘What a country,’ Gloria sighed. ‘We’ll just have to keep trying, I suppose. One day, somewhere, it’ll happen.’
Moses agreed that this was a desirable goal and one that would prove most satisfying, he thought, when accomplished.
They climbed back into the car. Moses started the engine. They looked at each other and sighed again.
‘Coitus interruptus,’ Moses said.
They drove away.
*
Fifteen minutes later they were passing through a village when Moses said he had to stop for a piss.
‘Can’t you wait until we get out into the country?’ Gloria asked him.
Moses swung the car on to a grass verge. ‘Oh, this’ll do.’
They had stopped outside the last house in the village. A simple redbrick house with a glass porch, white windows, and a blue front door. A framed notice, protected by a sheet of glass and mounted on two wooden posts, grew out of the low privet hedge that separated the front garden from a narrow strip of asphalt pavement. Moses, squinting, could only read the word POLICE. That’s a funny place for a police notice, he thought.
Gloria got out and, leaving her door open, eased up on to the bonnet, wincing as the heat from the engine seeped through the thin fabric of her skirt. Moses crossed the road. He scaled a ditch and stood facing away from the car.
‘Carthorse,’ Gloria jeered.
Moses turned and grinned at her over his shoulder. He was about to say something when a movement behind her distracted him. The blue front door was opening. A policeman emerged.
Moses’s heart plummeted down through his body like a lift with the cables cut. He clutched, one-handed, at the place where it had once been. He had just remembered the Thermos of vodka on the floor of the car. And the coke in the glove compartment. And Gloria had mentioned something about having some grass on her. He tried to warn her by making a serious face but all she did was make faces back. He watched helplessly as the policeman came up behind her.
‘Good afternoon, miss,’ the policeman said.
Gloria leapt off the bonnet.
‘I’m sorry,’ the policeman said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘I didn’t hear you,’ Gloria said.
The policeman smiled remotely. ‘People in the village say I have a very soft tread.’
By now Moses was standing next to Gloria. Tiny wet spots spattering the front of his trousers testified to the haste with which he had finished his business on the other side of the road.
‘Good afternoon, officer,’ he said. He hoped it sounded brisk enough. But co-operative at the same time.
‘You know, for a moment,’ the policeman said, transferring his gaze from Gloria’s face to Moses’s, ‘I thought you were going to piss all over my hedge.’
Moses and Gloria both laughed – rather too abruptly, perhaps. The policeman w
aited until they had stopped and then smiled unnervingly as if he knew something which they were only pretending to know.
As he turned his attention to the car, however, a change came over him. He became more enervated, less sinister. He seemed to find the number-plates particularly interesting.
‘This your car, is it?’ he asked, managing to translate his mounting excitement into an official question.
Moses said that it was.
‘May I ask where you’re coming from?’
‘London.’
‘London,’ the policeman repeated in a voice that had thickened like soup. He rolled the word sensually on his tongue. He seemed to regret that there were only two syllables; Aberystwyth, for instance, would have been better. None the less, saliva was beginning to flood into the narrow troughs between his cheeks and his gums.
‘But that,’ he continued, indicating the number-plate with his boot, ‘unless I’m much mistaken, is a Midlands number-plate, is it not? In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a Leicester number-plate. Am I right?’
As he pronounced the word ‘Leicester’, a bright jet of saliva spurted from the side of his mouth. Moses watched it trickle down the car-door. What the fuck is going on here? he wondered.
He began to explain that, yes, they were Leicester number-plates because the car had originally come from Leicester. A friend of his, who had moved away from Leicester, up to Edinburgh, in fact, had sold it to him. But that was four years ago and he himself now lived in London.
This casual dropping of the names Leicester, Edinburgh and London in such rapid succession was proving too much for the policeman. He had unfurled an enormous white handkerchief, almost the size of a sailcloth, and was pressing it to his mouth. The handkerchief was drenched in seconds. Unwilling to risk speech again for hydrological reasons, his excitement now unquenchable, he seemed to be about to wave them on their way. And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the matter. But Gloria chose that moment to glance back down the road.
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