‘You’re not kidding,’ she said. ‘That Eddie, he drives like a fucking maniac.’
A madonna with a Liverpool accent.
‘That’s because he is a fucking maniac,’ Moses said.
‘Fucking right.’ The word fucking sounded so much better coming out of her mouth. It might have been invented specially for girls from Liverpool. ‘No way am I going back in that car. I’d rather walk.’ She shook herself. ‘He gives me the creeps, anyway. He a friend of yours?’
Vince looked at Moses.
‘Sort of,’ Moses said. ‘We used to live together.’
The girl closed her eyes, offered her wide pale eyelids to the sun. Vince sifted stones with his dirty fingers.
‘I knew there was something different about you,’ Moses said. ‘Your arms.’
‘Yeah, they didn’t do a bad job, did they?’
The bandages had come off. Thin red scars ran the length of his forearms where the glass had lifted flaps of skin away, but they were main roads on a map not the railway lines you get with stitches.
‘So tape really does work,’ Moses said. ‘Three months and you’ll be able to do it again.’
Vince grinned, leaned back against the rock. No rise out of him at all. No venom. For the first time ever Moses could imagine Vince living beyond thirty. Vince with a wife and kids. Vince with a mortgage, a food-processor, and a sense of responsibility. He put it down to the influence of this girl from Liverpool, whose name, Vince finally told him, was Debra. No o, noh.
‘Don’t think my parents knew how to spell it,’ she said.
Most people called her Zebra, she told him, because she wore a lot of black and white, and at least that was spelt right. She took another long pull on the brandy, lit a Benson and Hedges, and stared out towards the sea.
‘I’ve always been fat,’ she said. ‘Once I screwed up this weighing-machine in Blackpool. I was so heavy it thought I was a fucking man.’ She chuckled. ‘It called me sir. My mum nearly died.’
She tapped the end of her cigarette. The ash fell, invisible, against the grey pebbles. ‘Once I got so depressed I almost did myself in.’ A pause. Then her madonna smile. ‘Didn’t have the guts, did I.
‘I’m pretty used to being fat now. Fuck it is what I think. It’s me, isn’t it. Fucked if I’m going to change. Like I like chips, right?’
‘And alcohol,’ Vince murmured.
‘And alcohol. Fucked if I’m going to give them up just to please some git in a magazine.’
‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘It’s like someone telling me I ought to be shorter or something.’
Debra nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘I’m not supposed to be short and you’re not supposed to be thin and – ’ Moses glanced at Vince’s arms – ‘you’re not supposed to be alive.’
Debra smiled, but Vince ignored the remark. ‘You’re not fat, Zeb,’ he said. ‘You’re more sort of voluptuous, really.’
‘Fuck off, Vincent.’ And before Vince could move, Debra was sitting on his chest.
Vince began to struggle. ‘I’ll beat shit out of you,’ he warned her. ‘I will.’
She just laughed. ‘You couldn’t beat shit out of a nappy.’
Moses watched her pin Vince’s scarred arms to the ground; it was good to see Vince being treated with the respect he deserved. He wondered why she had told them all that stuff about herself. Maybe she had always been teased, he thought. And maybe, over the years, she had learned to get in first herself, to sound at home with her disadvantages, before people could start pointing fingers or cracking jokes. He liked her, he decided. She was someone else who didn’t quite fit. The world would never be off the peg for either of them.
*
Half an hour later Moses said he really ought to be getting back to the party.
Vince and Debra, arm in arm and reconciled, told him they were staying put.
Moses motioned to the bottle of brandy, almost empty now. ‘But aren’t you going to run out pretty soon?’
Vince patted the carrier-bag beside him. A clink of glass answered Moses’s question. He should have known that Vince would provide for his own oblivion.
The sun, coppery now, was dropping into a bank of grey cloud. Safe deposit for the night. The tide had turned. The sea, ruled into straight lines by the waves, was covered with the hieroglyphics of swimmers – black dots for heads, the pale flash of arms.
Walking back through the fading light, he stopped whenever he thought he saw something interesting. Most stones seemed to be grey (flint) or white (chalk). If he stared hard enough he found his eyes began to invent exceptions. But as soon as he crouched down, touched one with his hand, it turned ordinary again. This process repeated itself, as if it was a lesson he was supposed to be learning. Some stones, he noticed, were the strangest most luminous colours when wet, but if you picked them up and dried them off they lost their allure, looked just like a million other stones. He did find a few treasures, though: a meteorite, no bigger than a ping-pong ball, rust-brown, fissured as a brain; several smooth pieces of glass, white on the outside, blue, yellow or green on the inside, like boiled sweets dusted with sherbet; and a dull green stone the exact shape of a lady’s automatic. He fitted this last stone into his palm and bounced his hand in the air a couple of times, as he had seen people do with guns, testing it for weight and balance. It felt good: small, compact – good. He raised his arm stiffly, aimed at the setting sun, and fired.
A red stain appeared in the sky away to the right. He must’ve missed. Hit a cloud by mistake.
He blew across the barrel of his new stone gun.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
*
Somebody had lit the bonfire. Scraps of paper floated upwards with the smoke, then dived and swooped, jittery as bats, glowed red until the black air blew them out. Sometimes a damp branch whined or popped, spat sparks, tiny flutes of steam, jets of green flame. It was a warm night, but the fire drew people in. Their disembodied faces hung in the darkness. In that leaping athletic light, they looked like caricatures of themselves – their noses pulled, their lips grimacing, their eyes coloured-in black. Moses recognised Alison, though. She looked more Pre-Raphaelite than ever with her wide tranquil forehead and her scorching red abundance of hair. He made his way round the fire towards her.
When she saw him she let out a little cry of surprise. She hadn’t known he was coming, how was he, what had he been doing – her usual flurry of familiarities and exclamations.
‘Have you seen Vince?’ he asked her.
‘Not for weeks,’ came her reply. It was funny, but whenever you mentioned Vince’s name these three lines appeared on her forehead like seagulls flying in formation.
‘What I meant was, have you seen him here?’ He tried to put his hands in his pockets, but he had crammed them too full of treasures. Ballast for his lightheadedness.
‘What?’ Alison cried. ‘Is Vince here?’ Dismay loosened the skin round her mouth.
Since Vince was their only common ground, they usually ended up treading all over him whenever they talked to each other. These days Alison trod warily. She didn’t regret leaving Vince, not for a second, but one nagging fear remained: the fear that she wasn’t free of him, that he was still attached to her, as if by a length of elastic, that he might spring back into her life at any moment. I don’t like emotional blackmail, and I certainly don’t like being hit for failing to respond to it, she had told Moses more than once. I don’t measure love in bruises, she had said on another occasion – rather sententiously, Moses thought. Still, he could hardly disagree with the sentiment, and when he talked to her he often found himself having to reassure her or, more accurately, perhaps, having to listen to her reassure herself. She was tough, he still believed that, but Vince seemed to have touched a nerve in her, a nervousness, and brought it to the surface, put it on display. She felt the threat of his presence so acutely. Now she knew he had come to the party she kept glancing over her shoulder, pro
bing the darkness around her. Vince was out there, she was thinking, plotting something malevolent against her. She was wrong. The only person that Vince was capable of plotting something malevolent against was himself.
‘I wasn’t expecting him to turn up,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d known that, I would’ve thought twice about coming.’ She stabbed at some stones with the toe of her shoe. ‘Shit,’ she broke out, bitterly. ‘Everything was going so well.’
Vince might have planned the whole thing out of spite, purely to spoil her evening. A fourth seagull appeared on her forehead.
‘I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making out,’ Moses said. ‘I don’t think he even knows you’re here.’
Alison said nothing.
‘And even if he finds out I don’t think he’ll bother you.’ He tried to put it tactfully. ‘He didn’t come alone, you see. He brought somebody with him.’
All four seagulls banked and vanished. They left only the faintest of after-images. It was so neat a reversal that Alison’s face might have been a coin that somebody had just flipped over.
‘Who’s he with?’
‘A girl called Debra.’
‘Debra?’ Alison looked thoughtful.
‘You probably don’t know her. I only met her today.’
‘What’s she like?’
Moses knew Alison well enough to have anticipated this: the is-she-good-looking bit.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not taking sides.’
‘I didn’t ask you to take sides. I just asked you what she was like.’
Moses sighed. ‘She comes from Liverpool. She’s got a good sense of humour. She doesn’t put up with any bullshit.’
Alison looked up sharply. ‘What’s she doing with Vince then?’
Moses had to laugh because he had just thought exactly the same thing. But he wasn’t going to give Alison the satisfaction of knowing that. ‘That’s her problem,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you forget about Vince? Pretend he isn’t here. I mean, you probably won’t see him anyway. The last time I saw him he was sitting about two miles away. Way over there, under the cliffs. “Fuck the party,” he said. “I’m staying where I am.”’
Alison picked up her drink, smiled into it sadly, almost fondly. ‘Typical Vince,’ she murmured.
Moses looked away from her.
The moon had floated up into the night sky. Someone had cut its string. Cut mine, he thought. That afternoon, after leaving the village behind, Gloria had said, Let’s change the mood. She’d rolled a fat joint and they’d smoked it driving. It’d worked. Suddenly they were out of their heads and laughing, and Moses had spun off into fantasy. He’d imagined making drunk uninterrupted love to Gloria on a bed of sand, he’d imagined swimming afterwards with nothing on, he’d imagined moonlight on the surface of the water.
Well, at least the moon was playing its part. A stack of silver dishes reached from the shoreline to the horizon, swaying with the motion of the waves.
But where was Gloria? He hadn’t seen her for ages.
Alison broke into his silence. ‘I was just thinking, Moses. Why don’t you come round to my parents’ house next Sunday? We often have people round on Sundays. I think you’d enjoy it.’
Moses remembered talking to Alison’s mother on the phone once. He remembered the allure in her voice. ‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘ll call you next week, OK?’
Soon afterwards Alison drifted away to talk to somebody else.
Moses didn’t mind in the least. You could overdose on Alison. Still, he would take her up on that invitation.
*
While he was rooting about among sausage-boxes and sacks of briquettes, Moses looked up and saw Jackson skulking in the shadows of a recent rock-fall. Jackson was clutching a brown paper parcel in both hands and looking apprehensive, as if he was about to walk into an ambush; he kept advancing a few paces then stopping again, bending forwards from the waist and twisting his head this way and that.
‘Jackson,’ Moses called out.
Jackson started, turned round. He brought one hand up to shield his eyes against the glare of the fire.
‘Oh, it’s you, Moses.’
Jackson had travelled down alone by train. The parcel was a box of rockets, he explained. A birthday present for Louise.
He perched on a crate, the parcel on his lap. ‘You’ve no idea how difficult it is,’ he said, ‘to find rockets in July.’
Moses suppressed a smile. Only Jackson would’ve thought of such a thing.
‘In one of the shops the woman got really angry with me,’ Jackson said. ‘She told me I was four months early. “Four months early?” I said. “Why?” “November the fifth,” she said.’ He shook his head as he remembered.
He had been looking for Louise for hours. ‘It’s so dark,’ he complained. ‘I keep treading on people.’
Moses laughed. ‘We’ll find her together.’
Jackson hadn’t thought of looking in the sea. They were walking along the shoreline when Moses saw her ten yards out.
‘Louise,’ he shouted. ‘Here a moment.’
Clouds had hidden the moon. When Louise stood up, the water wrapped itself around her thighs, looked as if it didn’t want to let her go. She stumbled as the undertow sucked pebbles past her feet, but struggled free and ran towards them smiling.
‘Jackson,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it.’ She snatched up a white towel and began to rub her hair, tilting her head first to one side then to the other.
‘Here,’ and Jackson held out the parcel, ‘this is for you.’
Draping the towel round her shoulders, Louise accepted the parcel, examined it, all four sides of it, with her wet hands, left dark fingerprints on the brown paper. She held it to her ear and shook it gently, two dents of puzzlement between her eyebrows, but waves kept breaking behind her with a dull thump and foam came sliding round her ankles, drowning any other sound she might have heard. Jackson said nothing, content, it seemed, simply to watch her. She tore the brown paper off and pulled out an oblong box secured with Sellotape. She broke the Sellotape with her teeth and opened the lid. The rockets lay inside, tightly packed, two rows deep. Bright red and yellow. Twisted blue-black touchpapers. Long blond launching-sticks.
‘There’s twenty-one of them,’ Jackson explained, ‘because that’s how old you are.’
And then, when she still didn’t say anything, he shifted from one foot to the other and added, ‘You know, like the candles on a cake.’
When Louise lifted her eyes from the box of rockets to Jackson’s anxious face, her deep tan and the slick blackness of the sea behind her gave her smile a new and unexpected dimension: for a moment she was an actress – famous, glamorous, spotlit for the cameras.
‘They’re beautiful.’ She rested a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Thank you, Jackson.’
Jackson looked pleased, serious and uncomfortable. It was a speciality of his: he did it with equal measures of each.
Louise turned to Moses. ‘Aren’t they great?’
‘Well,’ and Moses thought of the coat-hook and the chair, ‘Jackson’s always had a way with presents.’
‘You know what I’m going to do?’ Louise said. ‘I’m going to get some empty bottles and I’m going to line them up in one long line and I’m going to put rockets in them and then I’m going to let them off, one by one, like they do on royal birthdays or whenever it is.’
She ran off up the beach.
Moses and Jackson sat down on the stones to wait for her.
‘Does she like them, do you think?’ Jackson asked.
‘ Jackson,’ Moses said. ‘Didn’t you see her face?’
Jackson chuckled to himself. ‘You know, I thought it was going to rain tonight. I mean, really rain. A real downpour. And look what happens. This is probably one of the warmest nights of the year so far.’
The moon slid out from behind a cloud. Its movement was so smooth that it might have been running on gre
ased tracks. Moses glanced down at his latest bottle of wine. Soon Louise would be able to stick a rocket in the end of it. He wondered where Gloria was, but only vaguely, and was surprised by the vagueness of the thought. He watched Jackson fold his raincoat and place it beside him on the beach.
‘If you thought it was going to rain,’ Moses said suddenly, ‘how come you brought fireworks?’
Jackson grinned as if Moses had just fallen into a carefully-laid trap. ‘Maybe I wanted her to feel sorry for me,’ he said.
Moses smiled.
Louise returned, wearing a knee-length pink T-shirt. She was dragging a crate of empty bottles. Moses and Jackson helped her to wedge the bottles into the pebbles at intervals of ten feet so they formed a long line parallel with the sea. Then she borrowed Moses’s lighter.
‘Here goes,’ she said.
She lit the first touchpaper and jumped back. The rocket seemed to hold its breath for a moment, to gather itself, then it fizzed out over the sea, a fierce arc of sparks, and fizzled out, dropping a cluster of silver stars into the darkness.
‘One,’ chanted the crowd of people now assembled at the water’s edge.
Louise was lighting the second rocket when Moses felt a slight tugging on his sleeve.
‘There you are,’ Gloria said. She looked excited, dishevelled. He could see all the parties she had ever been to in her eyes. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Looking for you,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
She laughed. ‘I must’ve been in all the places you didn’t look.’
He stared at the sea beyond her. He saw the stack of silver dishes crash. It struck him that neither of them were telling the truth. He hadn’t been looking for her, not for at least two hours. Not at all, really. It had just been something to say. But her lie, he felt, had nothing to do with what she had said. Her lie had something to do with what she hadn’t said, though he didn’t even have a glimmer of what that might be.
A rocket screamed out over the sea. It scored a ragged orange line in the night sky and self-destructed. The explosion rebounded off the cliffs behind them. He felt Gloria jump.
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