‘That’ll teach you,’ he hissed, ‘you bloody martyr.’
Moses had forgotten about his fractured cheekbone, but as he felt the pain exploding inwards through his head, as he watched Eddie laughing at the surprise on his face, it seemed to him that Eddie had chosen that side of his face quite deliberately.
‘You fucking shit,’ he shouted.
Eddie’s eyes lit up. ‘Now, now,’ he said. He began to run backwards, dance backwards on his toes, like a boxer, but when he stumbled on an empty bottle Moses jumped at him and landed a punch on the side of his head. They rolled down a slope towards the sea. Moses forced Eddie on to his stomach. He placed both his hands on the back of Eddie’s head and, mustering all his strength, twisted Eddie’s face into the beach. He heard Eddie laughing through a mouthful of stones.
Then he got to his feet and walked back to the fire.
*
The sea was breathing deeply like someone sound asleep, each wave a soft exhalation through its open mouth. In the silence between waves Moses could hear the softer breathing of the people all around him.
He had been trying to get to sleep himself, thinking that if he synchronised his breathing with the rhythm of the waves, if he harnessed himself to all that natural hypnotic power, then maybe he would drift off.
No such luck.
His eyes stung so much they wouldn’t stay closed. The coldness of the stones soaked up into his hip. He looked around for the blanket Gloria had brought down from the car, but it had disappeared.
Jesus, he ached all over. Skinned knuckles on both hands. His left shin caked with blood. A jarring pain in his cheek. He rubbed the back of his neck and his hand came away sticky with tar.
He just hoped Eddie had come off worse.
The sky had diluted – black to grey. Instructions for the creation of dawn: just add water to the colour of the night. Not a hint of sunshine anywhere. It looked as if the weather had broken.
He glanced down at Gloria. She was still asleep, burrowed into the bay-shape he had made with his body when he lay down, her head resting in the hollow between his hip and his rib-cage. She had curled up very tight, like a fist. There was oil on the soles of her shoes, and on her neck, just below her ear, he saw two tiny moles that he had never noticed before. Dracula scars.
‘Gloria?’ He ruffled her hair. Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t wake up.
‘Gloria?’
She jack-knifed into a sitting position, her eyes wide open. ‘I was dreaming,’ she said.
‘What were you dreaming about?’ he asked her as they trudged across the beach.
She frowned. ‘Someone had hidden my voice. Someone had stolen my voice while I was sleeping and hidden it somewhere.’
They walked up the steps, their heads bent, the wood creaking under their feet. The grey air flapped around them like damp canvas. Their clothes were stiff, sticky with salt.
‘Why do I feel so cold?’ Gloria spoke through mauve lips. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold.’
When they reached the top they paused, looked back down. It was high tide. Grey sky. Grey sea. There was no way of telling where the horizon was, nothing to suggest a division of any kind. A foghorn groaned in the distance. An explanation there, perhaps. Grey sea. Grey beach. At the base of the cliffs, a splash of colour, the only splash of colour visible. The reds, greens, blues of sleeping-bags. Sudden and out of place, like something spilt or dropped. An accident. The scattered pieces of a puzzle.
‘Come on,’ Moses said. ‘It’ll be warmer in the car.’
On their way across the car-park they passed Eddie’s car. Moses peered in through the windscreen. He smiled at what he saw.
‘Hey,’ he called out. ‘Come and look at this.’
Gloria stood ten yards away, her hands tucked into her armpits. ‘What is it? I thought you said we could sleep.’
She trailed back to Eddie’s car and looked through the window. Eddie, Vince and Debra were sitting inside. All three sat perfectly upright in their seats with their eyes closed. They were all fast asleep.
‘So?’ Gloria said.
‘What does it remind you of?’
Gloria shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Old Dinwoodie.’
‘Old who?’
Moses stared at her. ‘Old Dinwoodie. You know. It was just before his bike went off the road. He was driving along with his eyes shut. Don’t you remember?’
‘I didn’t see that.’ Gloria turned away.
Moses’s smile had narrowed, but a trace of it still lingered as he followed her to the car. Some part of him was immensely pleased that she had seen Eddie sitting there with his mouth open like that.
*
He ached into consciousness again, his forehead pressed against cold glass. He had lost all feeling in his right leg. He opened his mouth in the shape of a scream as he shifted and felt the life begin to crawl back through his skin. Christ, what a night.
He wiped the window with the less painful of his two hands. The mobile toilet door had swung open: it banged repeatedly on the tinny grey drum of its own side wall. Mist clung to the summit of the field beyond. Two or three dismal sheep grazed beside the wire fence. In front of the café, a few people in sweaters clutched white china mugs. They looked like the victims of some minor natural disaster. Nobody seemed to be talking. At least the café had opened. That was something.
He heard Gloria yawn from beneath her blanket on the back seat. He turned to look at her. Ouch: his neck. First her hair emerged, then an ear, and finally the rest of her face, exhausted, but still beautiful.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she muttered.
He watched her in the mirror instead. Smeared mascara. Blue crescents under her eyes. She looked bruised.
‘Moses,’ came her small voice, ‘d’you think there’s any chance of a cup of coffee?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, I think there’s a chance.’
He got out of the car and stretched.
During the forties and fifties the café must have been quite safe. A place to take the family at weekends. A beauty spot of sorts. And even now, on a calm day, you could sit at one of those unsteady metal tables on the terrace and listen to the sea rustling over the pebbles below and believe that everything was all right. But what about the raw winter nights when storms blew in, and the waves hacked and munched at the base of the cliffs, and the black gap gaped and beckoned? There was fear in that old place as it watched the worn grass diminish year by year, as the sixty-foot drop edged nearer and nearer. He could almost hear the death-rattle of those loose sheets of glass, the teeth of the café chattering.
A few tables and chairs had taken up positions outdoors. They had been painted strange garish colours: mustard-yellow, hot-pink, lime-green. It was like an exhibition of freaks, a zoo of four-legged creatures with no heads. One of the tables was psychedelic mauve. It stood apart from the rest of the furniture as if embarrassed or shunned. Angled away from the sun-terrace and halfway to the cliff-edge, it gave the impression that, any moment now, it might break into an ungainly blundering run and hurl itself into the void.
Table kills itself.
On his way into the café, Moses passed Eddie. Eddie looked up, but nothing registered on his face. He had a split lip and a smear of oil on his forehead. His grazed hands dangled in his lap. He obviously wasn’t going to explain what last night had been about.
Moses carried two cups of coffee out on to the grass and handed one to Gloria. She was sitting on the mauve table, elbows on her knees. He suddenly remembered the man with the dyed black hair and the vermilion shirt, the man who laughed like a train, and smiled to himself.
‘I bet I know who painted this table,’ he said.
Gloria held her cup close to her lips and stared at the horizon, her face in profile against the dull sky. Her mood had altered in the last five minutes. It was as if she had woken up without thinking and had now remembered something depressing.
He asked her if sh
e was all right.
She nodded.
She found her cigarettes and lit one. She let the smoke drift out of her mouth without seeming to notice.
He asked her if she wanted to go.
She shrugged. It must have meant yes, though, because she threw her cigarette away and picked up her bag.
They searched half-heartedly for Louise. They couldn’t find her anywhere so Moses wrote a note. Louise, it said, we were very tired and had to go. Thank you for the wonderful party. Lots of love, Moses and Gloria. He left it with the woman who ran the café.
Vince had been watching Moses from his table on the sun-terrace. Now he came over and asked if he and Debra could have a lift back. Moses told him yes.
Eddie was sitting on a bench outside the café. He looked more than ever like a statue, not because of his classic features or his athlete’s physique, but simply because he watched them leaving with blank eyes. He didn’t even wave goodbye.
Moses and Gloria didn’t talk on the way back – but then they never seemed to talk much on the way back from places. And this time, maybe because of the other two, Gloria didn’t sing either. The only sound, apart from the hum of the engine, was a very soft sound, softer than a hundred tons of cotton wool, almost unidentifiably soft, and heard by Moses alone: it was the sound of Alison’s mother chainsmoking cigarettes through a six-inch cigarette-holder. The only time anyone spoke was at the beginning of the journey when Debra asked Moses whether he could possibly drop her in Lewes.
‘No problem,’ he said.
It was only later that he realised, with a stab of disappointment, that this meant taking a different route and that they would not now be driving back through that strange village.
Talking to Horses
During the last few days of July the temperature soared. Heat welded the end of one month to the beginning of the next, and hardly anybody noticed the join. A middle-aged man was arrested for jumping naked into the Serpentine. Summer at last.
The first Sunday in August Moses drove north-west across London, an A–Z open on his lap. He had been invited to Alison’s parents’ house for lunch. He was to drive to the Shirleys’ house and back again so many times during the coming weeks that the route quickly stuck in his head, became automatic, second nature. Years later, driving a different car, going in a different direction, he would sometimes slip into one part of it by chance – only two or three streets, perhaps, but he would recognise the sequence – and he would wonder why it seemed so familiar. And sometimes he would remember, with a feeling that was like hunger or butterflies, the way it tightened his stomach, turned it over. With a feeling that was like homesickness.
He left The Bunker at noon. He hadn’t thought to park in the shade (this was England, after all), and the air had massed inside his car, dense and sweltering, essence of leather. He wound all the windows down, rolled up his sleeves, and drove fast. One hand on the gearstick, one on the wheel. Eyes screened by sunglasses. And slowly the stubborn air broke up. The city looked evacuated, streets beaten flat by a high sun, the chill tunnels of tube stations gaping and empty. 82 degrees, the radio said. Unbelievable, this weather.
He arrived at the house to find the front door ajar. A cool hallway smelling of cinnamon and hyacinth and antique furniture. Dark-blue walls hung with charcoal drawings. Distant voices rooms away.
Nobody heard him knock.
He crossed the threshold, the sun pressing on his neck, his shoulderblades. At the end of the hall a second door, also open, framed two girls in leotards practising handstands on a square of sunlit grass. New noises now. Laughter and jazz. The delicate percussion of glasses. The snap of cards.
He waited.
Then a woman with a shock of messy glossy black hair stepped backwards into the hall, talking to somebody he couldn’t see. When she turned and noticed him, he flinched, moved forwards suddenly, as if she had caught him redhanded at something.
‘Are you a burglar?’ she asked him. She cocked an eyebrow, used only half her mouth to smile with.
‘No,’ he said. And, smiling back, he felt the heat issuing from her slightly bloodshot blue eyes. Her satin dress crumpled as she moved, like the air above a fire.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘how about a glass of white wine?’
The woman was Mary Shirley, of course, and though he couldn’t fault Vince’s savage rendering of detail – she wore black, carried a six-inch cigarette-holder between the first and second fingers of her left hand, talked like an old movie – he couldn’t help feeling, at the same time, that there was something about her, a presence, perhaps, that Vince had chosen not to mention. As soon as he walked into that rundown red-brick house, as soon as he saw her in context, smoke curling like a blue creeper up her arm, he knew that Vince’s words had become redundant, that he could leave them behind on the porch. It was strange ground for him, as it must once have been for Vince, but he felt no unease, only the pressure (almost sensual, this) of his own aroused curiosity.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That would be very nice.’
*
He watched Mary arrange herself on an upholstered cane chair in the garden. She folded her legs beneath her and stood a bottle of vodka upright against the backs of her knees. She lit one cigarette after another and dropped her ash on the lawn. In the sunlight her skin looked pale, almost soggy, but her eyes travelled lightly over everything, and she gave the impression, without speaking or moving, that she was orchestrating what went on around her, that she could steal the show at any moment she chose. Into one silence she inserted the following words:
‘I’ve been having terrible dreams.’
She lifted her eyebrows, swirled the vodka in her glass. People began to listen.
‘What dreams?’ This was Rebecca, Mary’s youngest.
‘It was sunset,’ Mary said, ‘and I was standing on a footpath somewhere in the country. The sun was going down behind a ridge and the sky was green and orange, the colour you get when you burn copper. A row of spiky black figures were walking along the ridge. They were carrying sacks on their backs.’
She leaned sideways, tossed her cigarette into the nearest flower-bed.
‘I was terrified, for some reason. I stood there, hoping desperately that they wouldn’t notice me. But I knew how powerful their eyes were. Distance and darkness were nothing to them. And the more I worried about whether or not they were going to notice me, the more real that danger became. It was almost as if they could hear me worrying.’
Moses, who knew that feeling, nodded to himself.
‘Then, suddenly, I was in a small room. The walls of the room were solid with cages, and inside the cages were jackdaws, hundreds of them. The room was full of the sound of their wings thrashing. I remember thinking: This is what panic sounds like. The figures I had seen up on the ridge were in the room too. Silent hooded figures. And that’s when I made the connection. Those sacks on their backs, they had been full of jackdaws.
‘Then one of the figures stepped forward. He opened one of the cages and took hold of a jackdaw. The jackdaw struggled, cried out, but the man’s hands were too strong. He held the jackdaw up to his face, bit off its beak, and spat it on the floor. Then he tore its throat out with his teeth and, raising the jackdaw in the air like a chalice, tilted his head back. Blood poured from the jackdaw’s throat into the man’s open mouth – ’
‘Oh, disgusting,’ Rebecca cried.
‘Mary, please,’ Alison said.
‘Then,’ Mary said, ‘he offered it to me – ’
‘Then what happened?’ Rebecca said.
Mary leaned back. ‘Nothing. That was the end. Now,’ and her eyes scanned the members of her audience, ‘who can tell me what that means?’
Moses saw the mischief in her smile as she spun the top off her private bottle with her thumb and poured herself another vodka. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was, he had already decided, extraordinary.
*
Sometime during the afternoon he wa
lked into the kitchen and found Mary standing by the draining-board.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him. ‘Is that what you’re looking for?’
He said he would. He asked her what she was drinking.
‘Vodka,’ she said. ‘I like vodka. It’s tasteless.’ And then grinned at him as if challenging him to contradict her. When he didn’t, she said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name. Or maybe I never knew it.’
‘Moses.’
‘That’s a peculiar name.’ She handed him a large neat vodka, then looked at him sideways-on. ‘I suppose you’ve had problems with that.’
He ran through a few of the nicknames he had been given over the years. Foreskin made her laugh. He laughed with her.
‘How terrible,’ she said. ‘How very demoralising.’
She kept him guessing as to how seriously she meant that. Up close her gaze was like light. Hard to look straight at.
‘That dream,’ he said. ‘Was it real?’
She swallowed a mouthful of vodka before answering. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, was it a real dream? Did you really dream it?’
‘What a strange question. Yes, of course I did.’
‘I just wondered. You seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’
‘I seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’ In repeating his words she had given them a sardonic edge.
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ He tried to explain that, although he didn’t know her, she seemed like someone who was just naturally inventive, someone who could create events out of routine. He explained it badly, but he thought she could probably read the meaning beneath his clumsy words if she chose to. At the same time, he was beginning to realise that if there were two routes, a hard one and an easy one, Mary would always take the hard one.
‘Oh, I am.’ She lifted her shoulders, drew down the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m a wonderful storyteller. I’m famous for it.’
‘So famous,’ Moses said, ‘that even I’d heard of you.’
Mary walked to the window, swung round, and studied him over the rim of her glass as she drank. ‘I don’t know whether I like you,’ she said.
Dreams of Leaving Page 36