Moses trembled. Mary lay still. The place where his knee pressed into the back of her thigh had turned sticky and cold. They both seemed to be waiting for Alan to do something.
Alan spoke to Mary. ‘I think you’ve got a bit mixed up.’ His voice held no trace of censure. Only a soothing calm. Perhaps it sounded a little as if he was talking to a wayward child.
Mary didn’t move.
Alan came forwards and stood over them. ‘Come to bed when you’re ready,’ he said. He ruffled Mary’s hair, then Moses’s. Then he left the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Mary left soon after without saying anything.
Gloria would’ve laughed, Moses thought, just before he fell asleep. How Gloria would’ve laughed.
A hangover dulled the panic he might otherwise have felt when he woke the next morning. He needn’t have worried, though. They all ate breakfast as usual, in chaos, three people talking at once.
Nothing had changed.
*
A few days later Gloria rang up.
‘Moses,’ she said, ‘I want to speak to you.’
‘You are speaking to me.’
‘Really speak to you. Not on the phone.’
The receiver felt twice its normal weight in his hand. It must be something serious. They agreed to meet at a pub they both knew in Battersea. A quiet place with a clientele of transvestites, pensioners and UB40S. London in a nutshell. Moses had been a regular there in 1979.
As he pushed through the door that evening, a woman with plasters on two of her fingers stuck her hand out. ‘Fifty pence tonight, love.’
Of course. It was Tuesday night. And Tuesday night was Talent Night. Always had been.
Dolly stood at the bar knocking back the gins. One of the local stars, Dolly. Her copper bouffant hairdo told you that. She had a voice that poured liquid concrete into songs, made them strong and real so they lasted in your head. She was arguing with June, but not so hard that she couldn’t wink at him as he squeezed by.
He winked back. ‘All right, Dolly?’
‘How are you, darling?’
They had an understanding, him and Dolly. They both thought June was a cow. (June thought she was Loretta Lynn.)
‘You want to know what June looks like?’ he had said to Dolly one night.
‘Go on then.’
‘Stand in front of the mirror. That’s right. Now, put your finger in your mouth – ’
Dolly had screamed with laughter. ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?’
‘Come on, Dolly. Put your finger in your mouth. No, it doesn’t matter which one. That’s it. Now, close your lips round your finger. Not too hard. Just so there’s no gaps. Perfect. Now then. Take your finger out again, but don’t move your lips. Carefully. There. Now look in the mirror. June, isn’t it?’
It was true. June really did look like that. Dolly had almost pissed herself that night.
He pushed past a man who was wearing a black bra and a serious, almost scholarly expression, and ordered a Pils. The woman behind the bar remembered him too. They chatted for a moment, then he told her he was meeting someone and edged towards the back of the pub. He sat down in a corner beneath a framed picture of the Matterhorn. The mountain rose against a sky of faultless blue. Four blurred red flowers occupied the foreground. As good a place as any for a serious conversation.
He finished his first drink, started a second.
Then he saw her standing in the doorway, hair teased by the wind, eyebrows of miraculous precision. He couldn’t call out because June was singing. June’s voice had, in its time, cracked everything from glasses to safes. No competition then. He waved, but his wave was lost in the rough sea of couples dancing. Finally he stood up. Then she noticed him and smiled quickly. When she reached him, he bent down, kissed her cheek. He thought he smelt snow on her skin. The first sign of winter.
He bought her an orange juice. She removed her gloves. He said he was sorry, but he had forgotten it was Talent Night, he had thought it was going to be quiet, still, they might as well stay now, mightn’t they?
She sipped at her orange juice, eyes lowered. She turned the glass in her white fingers. Her gloves on the table looked like hands praying. He could sense the words building up behind her closed lips.
When he stopped talking, she hesitated, then she said, ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’
He looked at her carefully. If his eyes had been hands, they would have been holding a wounded bird or a grenade or a piece of priceless china. That’s how carefully he was looking at her.
‘I’ve slept with Eddie.’
He leaned back. So have about two thousand other people, he thought. So what. It was an abstraction, a statistic. It had no real meaning of its own. He waited for her to go on.
‘It started at that beach party. I didn’t see you for hours. I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Describing anxiety, her voice was calm.
He said, ‘I didn’t know where you were either.’
‘He kept appearing next to me and standing there and looking. You know that look he’s got.’
‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I know.’ He heard lift doors slide open and fifty sighs leave fifty pairs of lips in unison. Yes, he knew.
‘I don’t know why he chose me. It could’ve been anyone, probably. He’s strange like that.’ She paused to meditate on what she had just said.
‘He waited until I got drunk,’ she went on. ‘We kissed and things. You didn’t notice.’
‘It was dark.’
‘What?’
‘It was dark. How could I notice?’
‘You just went off somewhere. You weren’t around. You didn’t seem to care.’ She lifted her eyes to his. ‘You should’ve been around.’
‘I remember climbing the steps the next morning,’ he said. ‘Those wooden steps to the top of the cliff. It was cold. You were shivering. You’d just had a dream about somebody stealing your voice. But if they had you wouldn’t have been able to tell me about the dream.’ He smiled. ‘I remember putting my arm around you. It made climbing the steps even harder. But I wanted to. I remember that.’
She shook her head. ‘You live in a world of your own.’
A drumroll rumbled over the end of her sentence. A cymbal crashed as her eyes drifted away from his, sideways and downwards. Two men in sequined evening gowns minced on to the stage, bulbous silver microphones in their fists.
‘We’re The Revelation Sisters,’ hissed the one in red.
The name rang a bell with Moses. He stared absently over Gloria’s shoulder at the two glittering gyrating men. Their dresses split to the tops of their muscular shaved thighs. He could see the tendons flexing in the backs of their knees.
‘When I first knew you,’ she was saying, ‘you were so – oh, I don’t know – thoughtful, I suppose. You thought of everything. You really tried. But these days – I don’t think you ever think of me at all. You look at me and smile, but you’re miles away. Thousands of miles away.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It’s like you’re on another planet or something.’
The man in the blue dress (his name was Sheila, apparently) was licking the tip of his microphone. He had a long athletic tongue. Like an animal, it was. A blind pink animal.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, when Moses didn’t reply, ‘it wasn’t until about two weeks later that we slept together. Sorry. I mean fucked.’
‘You don’t have to tell me all this, you know,’ he said, but he knew the whole thing was going to come out anyway, all over the tawdry stained table-top, all over the red plastic ashtray, the two dirty glasses and the crumpled peanut packet. People had to talk Eddie out of their systems. The number of times he had been forced to sit through that. He sighed.
‘He just came round – one Sunday, I think it was.’ She aimed a glance at him, a glance that was tipped, he thought, with spite. ‘He didn’t ring beforehand or anything. He just turned up. A knock on the door and there he was. Grinning. “Hello, Glo
ria,” he said. “Can I come in?”’
She let out a mocking laugh. The way she was telling it, she was rubbing salt in her own wound. And wasn’t this supposed to be hurting him?
‘Cheeky bugger,’ the man in the red dress growled. He leaned down and playfully slapped one of the audience. It was the man in the bra. His scholarly expression played truant for a few seconds.
‘You know, I never really noticed how beautiful he was before. He came in and we talked for a while, I can’t remember what about. It wasn’t important, really. After that we went to bed. He knew it was going to happen all along. He said he knew the moment I opened the door.’ She traced a pattern in the spilt beer with her fingernail. ‘I suppose I knew it too, really.’
A loud cheer turned her head. The man in the red dress had toppled off his high heels. He sprawled on the stage, legs wide apart. He had lost one of his false eyelashes.
Sheila covered his eyes with the back of his hand in a theatrical gesture of horror and despair. ‘First chance she gets,’ he said, ‘she’s on her back with her legs open.’
Gloria spoke through catcalls and raucous laughter. ‘You haven’t said anything, Moses.’
He stared at her. Something seemed different. Suddenly she had the distance of an acquaintance, suddenly he couldn’t imagine ever having been close to her, and he didn’t know why. He stared at her until her features began to come loose and revolve slowly, like twigs or leaves, on the pond of her face. What was it?
At last he realised. It was her eyebrows. They weren’t telling the time any more. They were just eyebrows. Ordinary eyebrows. Even slightly curved! He couldn’t remember this happening before. Not ever.
‘Why are you staring at me?’
His eyes drifted away from her face to the stage behind her where a drummer with a crew-cut was juggling sticks. He was remembering how once, in the middle of ‘God Bless the Child’, her eyebrows had said, miraculously, and only for a split-second, four minutes to three.
‘Say something, Moses. Please.’
He shrugged, smiled. ‘I suppose it was bound to happen, really. But it’s funny it never occurred to me. That’s the strange thing.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Everyone falls for Eddie. But it’s all right. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. To him.’
‘How do you know?’
He didn’t answer her this time. It was useless. He didn’t want to have to start explaining how Eddie was some kind of statue, how he didn’t have any time, how he had to live faster than other people, how nobody could mean anything to him, how he wouldn’t want them to, how that would hold him back, make his eventual return to that pedestal (wherever it was) too difficult. And how could he tell her that he, Moses, had fallen in love with her eyebrows, but that now he didn’t feel anything for them any more, and that, from now on, as far as he was concerned, they were eyebrows just like anybody else’s?
He glanced up, as if for guidance, and saw the picture of the Matterhorn above her head. He nodded to himself. Yes, the way he felt, he might as well have been in Switzerland. Blank as those wastes of snow. Blurred as those red roses. Emotions frozen solid. He imagined Gloria walking towards him across thin ice. It cracked and squeaked under her feet. She wasn’t going to make it. And he wasn’t going to help her.
‘Let’s leave,’ he said.
In the car she turned to him. ‘So what happens now?’
‘I don’t know.’ He concentrated on the road, noticed how smoothly he was driving. All the lights changed to green when he approached as if the gods were riding shotgun. That was funny.
She lit a cigarette. The match rasped, tore the darkness open. In those few seconds he quickly searched her face once more for some faint indication of the time. It told him nothing. The idea that her eyebrows had once been the hands of a clock, that her face had once been a clock-face, recording their time together, an eternity, perhaps, now seemed fanciful, absurd. Was this the end then?
‘I don’t know,’ he repeated.
Nine Elms Lane: windswept, empty, no one at the bus-stop. Scaffolding imprisoning the fronts of buildings. Advertising hoardings hiding the truth of the river. Once he glimpsed a mud bank, pimply as a slug’s back. He beat the lights, streamed left on to Vauxhall Bridge.
Gloria used her cigarette to fill the few minutes it took to reach her flat. She inhaled. She exhaled. She studied the filter. She flicked ash out of the window. Finally she threw the cigarette away, a handful of red sparks in the rear-view mirror.
‘Are you coming in?’
‘I ought to be getting back,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
She began to walk away.
‘Hold on,’ he called out. ‘What about Saturday?’
She looked over her shoulder, frowned. She had obviously forgotten.
‘You’re singing at The Blue Diamond. I was going to come along.’ He smiled. Her memory was like a sieve. Only his unusual size had so far saved him from falling through.
She shrugged. ‘If you want.’
It’s strange, he thought, how sometimes you can watch somebody walk away from you and they can look ugly, even if you know they’re beautiful.
*
Sitting next to Gloria he had been calm. Objective. Almost tranquillised. Alone again, he felt the irritation mount. Dig its spurs in. Draw prickly blood. Things chafed now: the damp air in his flat, the music shuddering up from below, his own clothes against his skin.
He walked over to the suitcase of memories. As he went to lift it from the windowsill, it slipped from his grasp and crashed to the floor. He lost his temper then, and kicked it away from him.
Moments later, regretting the outburst, he squatted on his haunches and snapped the catches open. Many of the photographs had come loose, fallen from the album. They lay jumbled in the bottom of the case. One had flipped over, showing the white of its reverse side. He looked closer. Something written there. The ink, once blue, had faded to a pale grey. He held it up to the light and made out the words: 14 Caution Lane, New Egypt.
New Egypt? He turned the photograph over with nervous fingers. It was a picture of the house. His mother and father standing by the narrow wooden gate. Their hooded eyes, their awkwardness. It was a picture he had studied many times because it was the only one that showed them together. But he had never noticed those words on the back. So faded. Almost invisible.
New Egypt.
He jumped to his feet, snatched up the phone. He dialled Mary’s number. Mary answered.
‘Mary,’ he rushed in, ‘you’ll never guess what.’
‘Who is this, please?’
‘It’s me. Moses. Guess what’s happened, Mary.’
‘How am I supposed to do that, Moses?’ she drawled, her voice at its drollest.
He laughed. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I think I’ve got a lead. On where my real parents live.’
He told her how he had come home depressed, how he had knocked the suitcase over, how the whole thing had been a product of his own clumsiness and frustration.
‘I mean, what a coincidence,’ he said, ‘that that one particular picture landed on top. I might never have seen it otherwise. And all the others are blank. I’ve checked them.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidence.’
‘All right, luck then.’
‘I don’t believe in luck either.’
‘I know, I know, you make your own. Like bread. Mary, listen. I’m scared. I mean, New Egypt. That must be the name of the village where they live, don’t you think? And don’t tell me you don’t believe in fear.’
Mary laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’re scared. Now you might have to get off your arse and do something.’
‘Find them, you mean?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
‘What if I’m not ready?’
‘O
h, you’re ready, Moses. You’ve been ready for a long time.’
The Return of the Native
On the last Saturday in November Mary did something she had never done before. She arrived at The Bunker without telling Moses first. No note, no phone-call, no prior arrangement. She appeared at the top of the stairs in a black dress fastened at the throat with a diamanté brooch. She wore a black wool coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape. She brought cool air into the room with her.
He noticed the driving-gloves in her left hand. ‘Are we going somewhere?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’ She seemed to weigh the silence before adding, lightly, ‘We’re going to see your parents.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. We’re going to see your parents.’
‘Today?’
‘Now.’
‘But,’ Moses panicked, ‘but they don’t know we’re coming.’
‘So what are you going to do? Call them up and say, “Hello, can I come and see you for the first time in twenty-five years?”’
‘Twenty-four and a half, actually.’
‘Or maybe you’d like to send them a quick telegram? Hi stop. My name’s Moses stop. Remember me? stop.’
Moses grinned despite himself, then immediately looked worried again. ‘But listen, Mary,’ he said, ‘how do we know they still live there?’
‘How do we know they don’t until we try?’
He paced up and down in front of the window, his right eye blinking as it always did when he was nervous. Mary watched him from the sofa, one leg tucked underneath her body, elegant, mischievous – determined.
Then he swung round, hands spread. ‘There’s no point just turning up. I mean, what if they’re out?’
‘What if they’re having a garden party? What if they’re having sex? What if they’re horribly deformed?’ Mary threw her hands up in exasperation and caught them again.
He frowned. ‘I suppose so.’ He was thinking hard now. ‘But hold on,’ he quickened, sensing a loophole he might wriggle through, ‘we don’t even know where this New Egypt is.’
‘Don’t we?’
‘No, we don’t. And I don’t have a map either. Sorry about that.’ He spread his hands again, grinning this time.
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