Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  That the old man chainsmoked was obvious from a glance at the dented saucepan which served as his ashtray. It was piled high with cigarettebutts. The cigarette-butts had outgrown the saucepan, overflowed on to the bedside table, outgrown that too, and overflowed on to the floor. From there, of course, they could fall no further, so they had begun to pile up again. They behaved in exactly the same way as snow does. They might have fallen from the sky. Even as Moses stared, entranced, the old man squeezed the end of his latest cigarette between finger and thumb and tossed the new butt on to the mountainous heap of old ones. It tumbled from the saucepan on to the table, from the table on to the floor. It might have been a demonstration of how the system worked. The old man folded his hands on the blanket. He seemed to be waiting for Moses to speak.

  ‘Mr Highness?’

  The name sounded so strange in his mouth, felt as awkward as a stone. This was the confrontation he had dreamed of. All those hours in phone-boxes. Fingers black from thumbing through directories. The reek of urine in his nostrils, in his soul. Another Highness! How could he ever have imagined that it would happen not in America but in Sussex, not with a stranger but with his father?

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ the old man said.

  Moses didn’t hesitate now. ‘I’m your son. Moses.’

  A new stillness seemed suspended in the room.

  ‘I thought you were a policeman,’ the old man said. ‘Or the bloody priest.’ He almost smiled.

  ‘No.’

  The old man shifted in bed, using an elbow to raise himself higher on his soiled stack of pillows. He lit a cigarette, dragged hard. When he spoke again, no smoke came out. He must have absorbed it all.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you had better sit down.’ He indicated two simple wooden chairs by the far wall. ‘Bring them over.’

  Moses crossed the room and returned with the chairs. He placed them side by side next to the bed. He offered one to Mary. They both sat down. He couldn’t help noticing the sheet that the old man was lying on. It started out white at the edge of the bed and, after moving through various shades of grey, turned almost black, a glossy black, as it slid beneath his body.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not used to entertaining.’ The old man’s smile of apology closely resembled pain. He lifted his cigarette to his lips and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. His eyes drifted from Moses to Mary for a moment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Moses said. ‘This is Mary. She’s a very close friend of mine.’

  ‘George Highness,’ the old man said.

  They both leaned forwards and shook hands.

  It was all so improbable. Moses became daring. ‘You didn’t expect me then?’

  The old man took this seriously. He lowered his eyes. ‘No, I never expected to see you again. Of course, I imagined you. Many times. I even imagined you sitting where you’re sitting now. But they were all ghosts, different ghosts of you. The real you had gone.’ He lifted his head. ‘I could never imagine how you’d look. It’s curious, but I think you look more like your mother, actually.’

  ‘My mother?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ the old man said quickly. ‘She died eight years ago.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’ The old man seemed alarmed. ‘How?’

  ‘Somebody in the pub told me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know his name. He was wearing a green anorak. He was drunk.’

  ‘Ah yes, the greengrocer.’ The old man drifted on his bed for a while as if on a raft. ‘But did I ever think that you’d come back?’ He shook his head and his beard rustled against his shirt. ‘No. Never. I never hoped for that.’

  Half an inch of ash toppled off the end of his cigarette and landed in the lower extremities of his beard. He brushed it away with deft practised movements of his fingertips. It seemed to distract him from something he had been about to say. A silence fell.

  Eventually he said, ‘You must have a lot of questions.’

  ‘My mother,’ Moses said. ‘She died in a mental home, didn’t she?’

  ‘He told you that too?’

  Moses nodded.

  ‘That bloody gossip, I could kill him.’ The old man’s head jerked fiercely towards the wall. ‘Yes, she died in the mental home just outside the village. She had been in there for twelve years.’

  ‘What was wrong with her?’

  ‘Oh,’ and he twirled his left hand in the air beside his ear, ‘they had names for it. They called it manic depression. They said she had an avoidant personality. They had all kinds of fancy names. But the truth was far more simple, really. She was born in New Egypt. She was a New Egyptian. The world, even this tiny world, hurt her physically. It hurt her the way sun hurts people with fair skin. She wanted shade. She stayed in bed all the time. She drew the curtains on her life. She wanted to die. Nothing I could say to her made any impact whatsoever. I told her I loved her. I told her I needed her. She listened, but she didn’t really hear. Her pain was so great, I suppose, that she couldn’t even begin to imagine mine. There was nothing I could say to her, nothing that would make the slightest difference. I couldn’t tell her life was wonderful. It wasn’t and she knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t paint a glowing picture of the future. We didn’t have a future. She knew that too. She may have been disturbed or mentally ill or whatever you choose to call it, but she understood what life in this village meant. Means. It means boredom, loneliness and despair. And this, I suspect, touches on the question you must be longing to ask. Why did we get rid of you? That’s the big question, isn’t it? Am I right?’

  Moses nodded.

  ‘We got rid of you,’ the old man said, ‘because we didn’t want you to turn out like us. We didn’t want you to turn out like everybody else in this bloody village. We wanted you to have a better chance in life – ’

  ‘But what’s so terrible about life in this village?’ Moses interrupted.

  The old man let out a high-pitched yelp and doubled up. His cigarette flew from between his fingers. His glasses clattered to the floor. Convulsions racked his entire body. Several seconds passed before Moses realised this was laughter, laughter that had developed into a coughing fit.

  ‘Christ,’ the old man wheezed. He leaned back against his soiled pillows, flushed and breathless. ‘Christ, that was a good one. A bloody good one. Are you hungry?’

  Mary wasn’t.

  ‘I could eat something,’ Moses said.

  ‘Go downstairs,’ the old man said to Moses. ‘You’ll find some tins in the kitchen cupboard. Biscuits too, if I remember rightly. Bring them up here. And a couple of forks. This is going to take some time so I think we should eat first.’

  Moses ran down the stairs. He edged round the gas-cooker and into the kitchen. The wallpaper (orange and yellow discs) hung limply from the corners of the room. Sheets of newspapers dated 1970 covered most of the brown lino floor. Grease had clogged the transparent plastic air-vent in the window above the sink. Somebody had hurled a stack of dirty washing-up into the rubbish-bin – and none too recently, by the look of it.

  The kitchen cupboard had lost both its handles so he had to prise the twin doors open with a carving-knife. The contents of the cupboard were as follows:

  The bottom shelf: seventy-seven tins of John West sardines in tomato sauce.

  The middle shelf: thirty-nine packets of Embassy Number One filter cigarettes.

  The top shelf: a screwdriver, a Christmas card, and one half-eaten packet of Butter Osborne biscuits.

  Shaking his head, Moses selected four tins of sardines and lifted down the biscuits. He found two bent forks in the drawer under the sink. He couldn’t see any plates (except for the ones in the rubbish-bin). That was the lot then. He hurried back upstairs.

  The two of them were laughing when he walked in. The old man quickly included him. ‘Did you find everything?’

  ‘Eventually,’ Moses said. He unloaded his supplies on the bed.

  Cigarette in mou
th, the old man picked up a tin of sardines, tore off the packaging, slipped the key over the metal tab, and deftly unrolled the lid. Then he crushed his cigarette out and reached for a fork. Just by watching him you began to get an idea of how many tins of John West sardines he must have eaten in the past (and how many tins of John West sardines he would probably eat in the future). He ate rapidly but with finesse, spearing whole fish with a single lunge of the fork and inserting them into his already revolving jaws. Drops of tomato sauce splashed on to his beard and lay there glistening like berries. When he had finished he put the two empty tins on the windowsill behind him, wiped his fingers on the sheet, and lit a cigarette. The meal had taken him slightly less than three minutes.

  ‘Now then,’ he began, and the efficiency with which he had disposed of his sardines carried over into his voice, ‘you asked me a question. You asked me what was wrong with the village.’ He suppressed a smile. ‘I could answer that question with one simple word. Can either of you guess what that word might be?’

  Both Moses and Mary shook their heads.

  ‘Fear.’ The old man pronounced the word with immense relish. ‘Fear.’ He paused to pick a sliver of fish from between his teeth. He seemed, at the same time, to be savouring the taste of the word. ‘But that is to begin at the end,’ he went on. ‘It has taken me a good forty years to arrive at that simple conclusion. And before you can arrive there, you have to know everything. Or almost everything. If you want to understand completely, that is. So what I’m going to do now, if you’re agreed, is to give you a brief history of New Egypt. The history I started once, but never finished. And remember one thing: nobody – and I mean nobody – has ever heard this before.’

  And so he began to talk.

  And they perched on their hard chairs and watched the slow upward trickle of smoke from his constant stream of cigarettes.

  The sun strained through the cloudy windows. The afternoon faded.

  They listened to his voice.

  A voice roughened by years of chainsmoking and loneliness, but an articulate voice because he had, in his time, delivered lectures in the village hall and sung in the church choir.

  A voice issuing from a mass of filthy sheets and crushed cigarette packets and empty sardine tins.

  *

  He described the people of New Egypt. Their limited horizons. Their inbreeding. Their sterility. He dissected them without pity, without prejudice. He threw their organs around on his bloody marble slab. He showed how apathy was like castration, how it had made them impotent. All his frustrations, all those months of silence (‘You’re the first people I’ve spoken to since August’), came spilling out. His concave hands scooped at the soupy air like ladles. His beard quivered. He had come alive.

  His excitement reached a peak when he turned to the subject of the police. The Pharaohs of New Egypt! He exposed their hierarchy, their hypocrisy, their own peculiar brand of fear.

  ‘It’s their job,’ he explained, ‘to see that the village behaves in an ordered and harmonious way. But how do you define order? If I had to define it, I would say that order is morale, system, purpose. Order is rising at dawn, regular mealtimes, mowing your lawn. Order is brisk trading and a growing population. Order can be heard, for example, in the crying of a newborn baby or the chimes of an ice-cream van. In New Egypt, though, you won’t find any of those things. There is no order. So what do the police do? They’re forced to include in their definition of the word positive actions of any kind. Order is defined as the opposite of apathy. Order is energy, initiative. And it’s in this way that drunkenness, fraud, theft, arson, rape, even murder come to be welcomed by the police as being ultimately beneficial to the community. Something has happened. Somebody has done something. Crime is proof that the village is alive and kicking. Crime is order.’

  ‘Crime is order?’ Moses laughed. ‘I like that.’

  The old man lifted one stained finger. ‘Except when it becomes part of an escape-attempt, of course. You see, the establishment of order here in New Egypt presupposes one simple fact: the continuing existence of the village itself. Let one person leave and in no time at all you’d have everybody leaving. Hey presto, no New Egypt. It would become a gap on the map, a ghost village, a sociological monument. A community of twenty-nine policemen with no one to protect and nothing to enforce. That’s why they do everything in their power to keep us here. You remember I told you that we grow up with our own nursery rhymes? Well, I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. This is one of the most well known. If you were to walk past the village school during lessons, chances are you’d hear it floating out of one of the classrooms. Every child in the village knows the words. Your mother,’ and he turned solemn eyes on Moses, ‘used to sing it all the time.’

  He pulled himself up in bed, cleared his throat and began to sing. The tune reminded Moses of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Equally mournful, equally forlorn. The song would normally be sung by the high clear voices of children. The old man’s voice, ravaged and gravelly, gave it new bitterness, added poignancy.

  The world is a dream,

  It will always be so.

  Our life is a stream

  With nowhere to go.

  The sky’s always crying,

  The willow tree weeps.

  We’re living, we’re dying,

  We’re here for keeps.

  The wind comes to stay,

  The rain and the snow;

  They’re here for a day

  Or a week, then they go.

  But we’re here for life,

  From our very first breath;

  Come trouble, come strife,

  We’re here until death.

  The world is a dream

  That we never had.

  Our life is a stream

  Of tears so sad.

  We do nothing but dream,

  It will always be so.

  Things are just as they seem.

  We have nowhere to go –

  No sooner had he finished singing the last line of the song than he broke down and began to cough again. His head jerked forward repeatedly as if somebody was shoving him in the back.

  ‘I shouldn’t sing,’ he gasped.

  Mary left the room to fetch some water. Moses could only look on helplessly as the old man struggled for breath. The old man described the village so objectively that it was easy to forget that he actually lived there. When he told stories and sang songs he was describing himself. A life of soiled sheets and furniture in boxes. A life of squalor, withdrawal and gloom. We’re here for life. We’re here until death.

  Mary returned with a glass of water.

  ‘Thank you,’ the old man whispered. He drank, then he collapsed against his pillows. He let his eyes close. A few drops of water trembled in his beard.

  When he opened his eyes again he said, ‘That was the first time I’ve sung anything in seven years.’

  ‘Well, you sang beautifully.’ Mary said. ‘Really quite beautifully.’

  ‘You know, people used to think that song was anonymous,’ he told them, ‘but I did a bit of research and I discovered that it was written by a man called Birdforth.’ He paused and glanced at them significantly. ‘Birdforth was chief of police from 1902 to 1916.’

  Moses’s eyes widened at the sinister implications.

  ‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘Brainwashing. Propaganda. All quite deliberate. And very, very insidious.’

  He gulped at his water. ‘You see, most people don’t even realise. They can’t be bothered to realise. It’s easier not to. But every so often,’ and his eyes flickered like dark agile fish in the deep lenses of his glasses, ‘every generation, perhaps, somebody a little bit different comes along. Somebody with their own private vision. Somebody with a dream. Fanatics, you might call them. And they’re the people the police have to watch out for. Because they’re the people who will, at some point in their lives, throw caution to the winds, fly in the face of everything they’ve eve
r learned, and try to do the one thing that nobody has ever done before: escape.’

  He gave them examples: ‘Tarzan’ Collingwood, Mustoe the greengrocer, Tommy Dane. Something that had been cloudy in Moses’s mind now began to sharpen, resolve itself, assume a shape. Until he could restrain himself no longer.

  ‘Old Dinwoodie,’ he cried.

  The old man’s voice cut out in mid-sentence. ‘How do you know about that?’

  Moses began to tell him the story of the drive through New Egypt in July. Mary had heard it already; she excused herself and left the room.

  When Moses had finished, the old man lay back, his fingers plaited on his beard, his eyes trained on some far corner of the room. ‘Well, well,’ he murmured. ‘If that isn’t a curious twist of fate.’

  ‘Where’s old Dinwoodie now?’ Moses asked.

  The old man hesitated. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Moses stared at the floor.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. If you hadn’t helped to stop him escaping, somebody else would have. He would never have got away. Not old Dinwoodie. He was doomed from the start. I told him so myself and he never spoke to me again after that. There’s no point feeling guilty about it. You didn’t even know what was happening.’

  Moses nodded. He tried to believe what he was hearing. But what damage you could do, he thought. What damage you could do when life blindfolded you.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’ he asked.

  ‘No, not really.’ A bleak smile passed across the old man’s face. ‘In a place like this you don’t have any friends.’

  Mary returned with a tray. On the tray stood three mugs, a tin of powdered milk and a green china vase.

  ‘I couldn’t find a teapot,’ she explained, ‘so I improvised.’

  The old man shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Is that tea?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Where on earth did you find tea? Last time I looked – March, I think it was – I couldn’t find any. Not a single leaf. Where was it?’

  ‘Under the sink.’

  ‘Good lord. Was it? Good lord. How extraordinary.’