‘Seven,’ came the chant.
Gloria said something about going up to the car. He moved away with her towards the steps. The night seemed to darken then. He stumbled, almost fell. When he looked across at Gloria he saw that she was disappearing again.
‘No,’ he cried out.
But her body had already vanished, her body vanished first, and when he searched for her face some of her features (fringe, pupils, lips, eyebrows) instantly became invisible. Gloria and the night, they were made of the same stuff; she was turning into one small part of that immeasurably vast darkness. With a shiver he remembered Louise rising out of the sea, he remembered the reluctance of that black water to surrender her. He wanted to kiss Gloria, just lean across and kiss her, but he didn’t know how to find her mouth, or what exactly he would be kissing if he did. They had reached the steps now. A swaying in his head. Panic or nausea, he couldn’t tell which. He grasped a metal stanchion for support.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he said.
‘In the car,’ her voice came back from somewhere above him.
He reached the top just behind her. Only her hands, her cheekbones, the whites of her eyes, remained. She was going fast, dissolving in the night’s black acid. If he let her go he would have to wait until daylight to look for her and she might be miles away by then, a corpse or as good as, lost to him for ever. Where was the nearest light? In the car, she had said. Yes, there was a light in the car. If he could get her there in time. He hardly dared to look at her. When he did, a splinter of white light in the corner of her eye, a fraction of her, returned his glance. Like a dream where you can’t run fast enough, he started over the gravel, pulling her by an arm he couldn’t see. She seemed to be resisting. Didn’t she realise what was happening? Or was that what she wanted?
‘Nineteen,’ came a faint cry.
‘What’s the hurry?’ She tripped, laughed as he caught her.
He half-carried, half-dragged her the last few yards. He unlocked the door, tore it open. The light came on. It was dim, but it was enough. A sickly pallor ran back into her face, rebuilding her features, filling in gaps. Her surprise became visible.
‘What was all that about?’
‘All what?’
‘All that crazy rushing to the car.’
He slid into the driving-seat. His heart was banging like a stone in a tin can. He switched the radio on. Frank Sinatra was singing. ‘Strangers in the Night’, of all things.
‘I thought you were going to disappear,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you to disappear.’
He watched her face in the light from the radio. She was hugging her legs as if cold or alone, her chin resting on her knees. Even though he could now see all of her he felt that some crucial part of her had eluded him. He had failed. She had disappeared.
It turned out so right
For strangers in the night –
Why does music always do that? he wondered.
‘Shall we go?’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Back to London.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
A silence.
‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t really want to either.’
She sat up, possessed of some new efficiency now, and opened the glove compartment. She undid the envelope that contained the coke. She tipped half the contents on to the cover of his logbook. Using her own razor-blade, she cut the stuff into four lines. She rolled a £5 note and, bending quickly, vacuumed up the two lines nearest her. Then she passed him the £5 note. He leaned over, his face almost touching her knee, and did the same.
‘I’m going over to the pub for a brandy,’ he said. ‘Coming?’
She sniffed twice, once with each nostril. ‘No, I think I’ll go back down.’
He got out of the car, locked the doors.
‘Moses?’
He looked up. She had reached the top of the steps. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Thank you for not wanting me to disappear.’
‘That’s all right.’ He had spoken quietly. He doubted whether his voice had carried to where she was standing.
They looked at each other across a distance for a moment, then she turned and started down the steps. He watched her until she disappeared below the level of the cliff-top.
*
‘Nice place, isn’t it?’ Vince said.
Moses stopped short, a yard inside the door. He hadn’t expected anything, but if he had, he wouldn’t have expected anything like this. Vince was sitting in the shade of a life-size cardboard palm tree. Along one wall there were wooden booths with Wild West swing-doors. A chrome and purple jukebox in the corner. Pineapple ice-buckets on the bar. Red plastic diner-stools with silver legs. Green glass fishing-floats dangling from a mass of orange netting overhead. Hanging on the far wall, a Mexican poncho, three hunting-horns, a coolie hat, a sabre, a painting of a bullfight, and a stuffed swordfish. And all this at first glance. The way Vince was grinning, it might have been his doing.
‘I thought I might find you in here,’ Moses said.
‘No, you didn’t. It’s a horrible surprise.’ Vince’s grin widened. ‘Because now you’re going to have to talk to me and buy me drinks.’
Moses stood by the door, one hand massaging his forehead. Not only Disneyland in here, but Vince. He could feel the stones in his pockets beginning to weigh him down, to drag him floorwards.
‘Mine’s a brandy,’ Vince said.
Moses pushed towards the bar.
‘Yes sir?’ The landlord had dyed black hair and wore a vermilion shirt with silver metal collar-tips. There was nowhere to look.
‘Two brandies,’ Moses said. ‘No ice.’
He watched the landlord press the glasses to a Hennessey optic. ‘Quite a place you’ve got here.’
‘You like it?’ The landlord flashed him a smile. All crow’s-feet and dentures.
Moses was fucked if he was going to say it again. Someone might think he was taking the piss and knock him out. That was all he needed. He paid quickly, smiled, and squeezed back to the safety of the palm tree.
Vince grabbed his drink and swallowed it whole.
‘If you’re going to drink them like that,’ Moses said, ‘it’s hardly worth me sitting down.’
‘Should’ve brought me a double then, shouldn’t you.’
Moses shook his head. ‘You would’ve drunk that twice as fast.’ He leaned back against the fake teak panelling. ‘What’s wrong with everyone today? Everyone’s acting so strange. Jackson turns up with a box of fireworks. Louise is all brown and goes swimming in the middle of the night. Gloria keeps disappearing. Eddie’s pretending he isn’t even here. And you.’ He turned to face Vince. ‘You sit there quietly, not breaking anything. What’s going on, Vince?’
Vince shrugged.
Moses reached for his glass. ‘And the seagulls. Did you notice the seagulls?’
Vince hadn’t.
‘What they do is, they sort of spread their wings and float upwards on the air-currents till they’re level with the top of the cliff, then they slide sideways —’ Moses demonstrated with his hand – ‘float all the way down again till they reach the bottom. Then they start all over again. Do exactly the same thing. Millions and millions of times. Why do they do that? Does it feel good?’
Vince didn’t know.
‘Everybody’s up to something.’ Moses stubbed his cigarette out in the tail of a pink china mermaid. ‘Even the birds.’
‘Have you got any of that left?’
Moses looked blank. ‘Any of what?’
‘Any of whatever you’re on.’
‘No.’
Vince knocked back the rest of Moses’s drink and banged the empty glass down on the table.
‘All right,’ Moses said, ‘but this is your last one.’
He returned to the bar.
The landlord winked. ‘Two brandies. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘No rocks. Right?’
‘
Right.’
‘Plenty of rocks on the beach. Right?’ The landlord’s mouth opened. A round dark hole. The shape of a railway tunnel. A long train of laughter came squeaking out. How about a drink yourself? Moses thought. Oil, for instance.
‘You know,’ the landlord rattled on, ‘I’ve been here fifteen years now and I don’t reckon I’ve been down to the beach more than half a dozen times.’
Oh, so it was the life-history now, was it?
‘Too busy up here, I suppose,’ Moses said. Collecting all this junk.
‘I keep myself pretty busy.’ The landlord picked up a white cloth, began to caress a glass. ‘Going to invite me down there later on?’
‘Sorry,’ Moses said. ‘Not my party.’
When he returned to the palm tree he decided it was time to start pestering Vince. Vince was acting too cocktail-party for his liking. He wanted the old blood-and-vomit Vincent back. The Suicide Kid. Onassis on acid. The dregs at the bottom of the King’s Road.
He began with, ‘Seen anything of Alison recently?’
Vince scowled. ‘No. Why? Have you?’
‘Oh, a little bit, you know.’ Moses was airy. ‘I’m seeing her next Sunday. She’s asked me round for lunch.’
‘Muswell Hill?’
Moses nodded.
‘What d’you want to do that for?’
‘I want to, that’s all. Anyway, what d’you care?’
‘I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.’
It looked as if Vince still hadn’t got Alison out of his system. He didn’t know it, of course. There was too much other shit blocking his system for him to be able to find out.
The bell rang for last orders.
‘Anyway,’ Moses began again, ‘I want to meet this woman you’re always going on about. Alison’s mother.’
Vince flared. ‘What d’you mean always going on about her? I’m not always going on about her.’
‘All right, you’ve only mentioned her once or twice,’ and Moses leaned into Vince’s face, ‘but I want to meet her, I want to see what she’s like.’
Vince pushed Moses away. ‘She’s a phoney.’
‘You told me that. What else?’
Vince twisted away. His bloodshot eyes tracked a girl in black tights. She almost took the whole conversation with her as she walked out of the door.
Moses nudged Vince. ‘What else?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. She must be at least forty but she acts like time’s stood still for twenty years. Fucking hippie’s what she is.’ Vince wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘She floats round the house in an old velvet dress like some kind of fucking museum-piece. Chainsmokes through a cigarette-holder, shit like that. She can’t do anything normally, you know? She sits in this green chair of hers and looks at you like she’s sorry for you or something, like she understands you. She makes me fucking puke.’
Moses smiled to himself. This was more like it. And he rather liked the idea of somebody chainsmoking through a cigarette-holder. That kind of perversity appealed to him.
‘She drinks a lot too,’ Vince was saying. ‘A fuck of a lot. There’s always a bottle of vodka down the side of her chair. They all drink in that house. Alison’s the only one who doesn’t. She’s probably seen her mother make a fool of herself too many times. No wonder she’s thinking of moving out. If I had a mother like that, I would’ve moved out when I was fucking born.’
He stole one of Moses’s cigarettes. He lit it, sucked the smoke deep down. Half the cigarette was gone before he spoke again.
‘Yeah, she’s always out of her head,’ he sneered. ‘You’ll probably like her.’
*
Closing-time.
Somebody had wedged the door open, and Moses could see a triangle of lit gravel and a strip of dark-blue sky above the darker outline of the cliff. The landlord was shouting something about glasses. His vermilion shirt was shouting too. Moses couldn’t understand either of them. He suddenly felt drunker than he had for ages. Movements kept breaking up into staggered versions of themselves. If he closed his eyes, his whole body began to lift and turn in one long slow backwards somersault. Like being inside a wave. What a terrible, terrible place to get this wrecked in. No rocks, right?
He got up and the world sat down. He couldn’t look at Vince. He knew the upward curve of Vince’s lips would make his stomach churn. He aimed for the rectangle of darkness where the breeze was coming from.
Then he was zig-zagging over stones. A single headlamp blinded him. Tyres spun viciously, kicked up dirt and gravel. He heard a girl’s laughter submerge in the rough snarling of motorbike engines, submerge, surface, then submerge again, like someone drowning, like someone going down for the third time.
He had long since lost Vince.
He stumbled into something (lobster-pots?), cracked his shin, then found himself climbing, falling, scrambling down the steps, slamming into the scaffolding at the end of each flight, winding himself on the metal rails.
Once he looked for the fire. It had shrunk. It threw out orange starfish arms into the darkness.
When he reached the beach he thought he saw Gloria. An impish figure on a white rock. That way of sitting – arms hugging her legs, chin resting on her knees – seemed to belong to her. The next time he looked – lifting his head was so hard, like fighting the pull of a magnet – she had gone.
Halfway between the steps and the fire everything began to whirl about. This was the worst so far. It felt as if someone was stirring the night with a giant spoon, as if he was one grain of sugar in the bottom of a cup. He spun away to the base of the cliffs and collapsed on the pebbles. He retched and retched, but only bile and bitter froth came up.
He couldn’t have guessed how long he spent there, his forehead pressed to a boulder, cooled by the damp chalk. An hour, maybe. Even two. His hair, wet through with sweat, gradually dried into stiff strands. He was shivering, but being cold made him feel better. He scooped up handfuls of shiny wet pebbles and rubbed them into his face.
Once he saw Gloria run past, light steps, light years away. He didn’t call out, and she didn’t see him.
He was glad about that.
*
Afterwards he couldn’t remember exactly how the fight had started.
When he stood up, shaky but clear, he walked down to the sea to rinse his face. By the time he reached the fire it must have been late. Only a few people were still awake, talking in low voices. The evening had divided them into couples. He sat down next to Gloria.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Vince asked from the other side of the fire.
Moses smiled. ‘Throwing up.’
Gloria murmured, ‘Oh, Highness,’ and rested her head against his shoulder.
Highness? he thought.
‘I’m all right now,’ he said.
He stared into the mass of collapsing red embers. Sometimes a flame leapt up, like something growing, only to wither, fall back, die out. Jackson said he was going to gather some more wood so the fire would last the night. Louise went with him. Then Moses felt hands on his shoulders and suddenly he was somersaulting backwards down a steep bank of stones. He lay still, not understanding what had happened. Then he looked up and saw Eddie standing over him. Eddie grinned.
Moses propped himself up on one arm. ‘Hello, Eddie.’
Eddie kicked the arm out from under him. ‘Come on, shithead. This is a fight.’
Moses laughed good-naturedly. A fight. What next. But as he tried to clamber to his feet Eddie pushed him over again and something competitive took hold. He shoved Eddie in the chest. Eddie staggered backwards down the beach.
Moses stood up. He was a head taller than Eddie and he had a seventy-pound weight advantage, but Eddie was muscular and his muscles were hard and supple from sleeping with at least fifteen hundred women and he was using his muscles with a frenzy Moses hadn’t seen before.
Their struggle took them some distance from the fire and now they faced each other, panting, watching each othe
r’s eyes for the next move. Eddie was grinding his teeth together, his face contorted by a kind of predatory glee. He looks as if he wants to kill me, Moses thought. Why? he wondered.
He glanced sideways, brushed some chalk off his sleeve. ‘Isn’t that enough now, Eddie?’
‘Isn’t that enough now? So we’ve had enough, have we? Poor little Highness has had enough.’ And, lowering his head, Eddie charged.
Moses stepped to one side and, using Eddie’s momentum, sent him diving headfirst into the pebbles. It was too easy. Eddie picked himself up, slowly but automatically. He shook himself. He leered over his shoulder at Moses, his features stretched wide across his face. He was breathing through his open mouth like an animal.
He charged again. The same thing happened. Moses the matador. For once, though, Moses didn’t see the funny side. He was tired. Bored too. But Eddie wouldn’t let up. He charged a third time, arms extended like horns, fingers curved and spread. This time he caught Moses, clawed at his collar, clung on. They both crashed to the ground. Moses heard something rip. He rolled over, twisted free of Eddie’s grip. He scrambled to his feet. Eddie lunged for his ankle, but Moses stepped out of reach. He noticed that one of his pockets was torn. All his treasures had fallen out.
‘You bastard. Now I’ve lost all my stones.’
‘Ahhh. Now he’s lost all his stones.’
Moses looked at Eddie and saw fury running in his veins instead of blood. When Eddie rushed him again, he seized Eddie by the wrists.
‘What do you want, Eddie?’
‘Nice Highness.’
‘Look, can we stop this now? I’m bored, OK?’
‘You’re so nice, aren’t you, Highness? Everybody likes Highness. Don’t they, Highness?’
Eddie was spitting the words out from a distance of six inches. Moses could feel the saliva hitting him in the face.
‘What d’you want?’ He shook Eddie by the wrists. ‘D’you want to hit me? Is that what you want? All right. Hit me.’ He flung Eddie’s hands away from him. And waited.
Eddie swayed from the waist, almost lost balance. His laughter sounded like heavy breathing. Then his arm uncoiled through the air and the palm of his hand landed hard and flat on Moses’s face.
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