‘She was really your mother? Come on.’
‘She was. She really was.’
‘She was really your mother? And she’s died?’ The news had pulled Elliot’s features wide across his face.
Moses just nodded.
Elliot spread his palms in the air as if testing for rain. ‘Why didn’t you say nothing, Moses?’
Moses shrugged. ‘I was too upset.’
Now Elliot couldn’t find words.
‘Look, I’m really sorry about the other day,’ Moses said. ‘I was in a real state. I didn’t mean to – ’
‘No. No, no, no.’ Elliot dropped his head, lifted his hands to ward off the apologies. ‘Listen. I don’t know what to say, you know? I mean, I know how close you were – ’
Moses gave him a questioning look.
‘You know, the time I saw you both on the street,’ Elliot said, ‘kissing and that.’
Moses considered his feet. ‘Yeah, we were pretty close.’
‘Look,’ and Elliot placed a hand on Moses’s shoulder, ‘if there’s anything I can do just give me a shout, all right?’
Moses nodded. ‘Thanks, Elliot.’
As he unlocked his front door and began to climb the stairs he didn’t feel that he had in any way lied to Elliot.
*
He went and stood by the window. Sunday again. One week since that trip to New Egypt. He could no longer go to Muswell Hill. Not today, maybe not ever. He wondered what to do with himself now that so much of his life had been destroyed.
He crossed the room to his desk and opened the top drawer. He took out a pile of photographs. A record of the days he had spent in Muswell Hill. He sat down at the desk and switched the lamp on. He stacked the photographs face-down. For a moment they reminded him of cards and he remembered Madame Zola and he thought, Maybe I can use the photos as a sort of tarot pack, not to predict the future but to explain the present. The present had been happening so fast recently that it had left him bewildered, punch drunk, breathless as the runner who comes in last. A throwback to his schooldays, that feeling of falling behind. Still looking for his games clothes when the rest of the team had already left for the pitch. If only he could have borrowed somebody else’s, but nobody else’s fitted. He shook his head. Driftwood from childhood.
He began to turn the photos up one by one. He arranged them in neat rows until they covered the surface of his desk. He had dozens of Alan and Alison and Sean and Rebecca. The only photos he had of Mary were photos of her back or the tip of her nose. She had always refused to let him (or anyone else, for that matter) take photographs of her. When threatened with a camera (she called it threatened), she issued statements like, Don’t be a user, or, Why are you trying to steal pieces of me? I will not be stolen. Once, when shown a picture that someone had taken of her without her knowledge, she had thrust it back with the words, That’s not me. She had a whole arsenal of names for people who took photographs: they were thieves, they were voyeurs, they were necrophiliacs. Aim a camera at Mary and you saw her at her most scathing, her most dogmatic.
Ten days before, she had visited him at The Bunker and he had asked her, ‘Why won’t you ever let me take any pictures of you?’
She had been studying his parents’ album with a detached curiosity, one eyebrow permanently raised. She looked up. ‘Why should I?’
‘I don’t know. To be remembered, maybe.’
‘I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be alive, real, flesh and blood, not,’ and she brushed a photograph of Alice with the disdainful backs of her fingers, ‘not this.’
But, with Mary, wherever there was a rule there was an exception, and it only took him a moment to locate it in his memory. Exactly one week later. That Sunday morning in Bagwash. The wind blowing. Clouds like clean washing. After breakfast they had walked out past the graveyard. And she had let him take a photograph of her.
‘All right,’ she had said, leaning back against the wall, ‘this is your big chance. Make the most of it. There won’t be another.’
‘Pose,’ he had laughed. ‘Come on, you ought to be good at that.’
Suddenly he knew how to fill this empty Sunday evening. He reached for his camera and began to wind the film back, even though he had only used half the pictures. He snapped the back open and pulled out the canister. Then he disappeared into the makeshift darkroom that he had built in a cupboard off the bedroom.
Two hours later, in the dim red light, he watched Mary’s image emerge. He bent his head close to the tray of chemicals like a craftsman working with minute and precious materials. I’ll never be able to show this to her was the thought he produced.
He stared at the photograph. Prophecy? Coincidence? Nonsense? He couldn’t decide. She stood just to the left of centre-frame. In that voluptuous black dress of hers – it draped around her body, dropped almost to her ankles – she looked faintly Victorian. A stone wall ran behind her, waist-high, crumbly as shortbread. Her left arm reached down at an angle to her body, her left hand resting on the top of the wall as if to balance her. On one side her dress pressed itself against her, on the other it billowed out into the air. The bodice and the skirt formed two separate black triangles. Her right hand had flown up towards her hair, a spontaneous, almost girlish gesture, charged with grace, entirely natural. It looked as though she was holding on to an invisible hat, or as though some wonderful notion had just occurred to her. He remembered watching her through the camera, waiting for the right moment (she may have hated cameras but at least she understood right moments), and thinking how, for those few seconds, she had seemed to fly in the face of the world. And he had caught that elation of hers. That spontaneous groundless elation.
He tried to remember what else they had said, if anything, but no words came. Only afterwards she had walked towards him, dress swirling, and, smiling, she had said, Photographer, because she still thought of photography as theft, as exploitation, as necrophilia. And had, in a way, been proved right. For here she was, in this silent picture, an unknowing tragic heroine. Ahead of her, two or three hours ahead of her, lay the discovery of her husband’s death. And behind her, behind her all the time, stretched a skyline of white marble, a sinister city with tombstones for buildings, because the wall she was leaning against was the wall of the cemetery. And if he half-closed his eyes her dress became a ship of death, two black sails mounted on the slender mast of her body, and the wind blowing through the picture filled her sails, blew her towards her sombre destination. And she was laughing, looking happier than he could ever remember –
No, he would never be able to show her the picture. He stared and stared at her in her black dress (happiness dressed in sadness) and thought again of the curious exchange which had taken place that weekend. She had given him his past and lost her future. A father traded for a husband. She had always seen what she had with Moses as a kind of bouquet thrown at the feet of her marriage, as a tribute, a celebration. Now it had become a wreath laid at the base of a memorial. The marriage had kept their relationship alive. The death of the one had killed the other.
He pinned the picture to the washing-line above his head so it could dry. If nothing else, he had a memento of Mary.
What was it she called photographs?
That’s right: little deaths. Every photograph a little death.
Memento mori.
How fitting, he thought. And smiled bitterly to himself.
*
Alan dead. Mary inaccessible.
His father also inaccessible.
And Peach at large.
For days on end Moses stayed indoors. At night dreams ran round the inside of his head like men in padded cells until he had to turn the light on, get up, walk about. Times like that, sleep was a foreign country and he didn’t have a passport. He came close to calling Mary, even Gloria, but he always resisted, his hand an inch from the phone. This was his to deal with.
It was as if everything that had been lying dormant for twenty-five years had surfac
ed at once, reworked into new nightmare formulas. The old man, his father, lying supine on an altar, delivering, between deep inhalations from his cigarette, a lecture on some high-flown subject that Moses couldn’t make head or tail of, and priests approaching from dark corners of the church with knives because the lecture was, so they said, heretical. Or Moses standing at the bottom of a deep pit and his mother, eyes and mouth blacked out, rolling down the slope towards him, rolling over and over as children do, but never reaching him. Or Mary being ambushed and raped in a baroque hotel by a gang of policemen. He woke exhausted every morning. He felt top-heavy, listless, surfeited. He stared out of the window, watched different types of weather affect the view. He let Bird in, fed him, let him out again. Once or twice he took long walks through unknown streets. (He sometimes sensed that he was being followed. That’s called paranoia, Moses. He would turn aggressively, only to realise that it was his past catching up with him.) But mostly he just made quick forays to Dino’s for milk and bread and eggs, or to the Indian off-licence for cans of Special Brew. He got drunk alone. He watched his black and white TV until the screen hissed with a blank grey fury. Then he knew it was time to try and go to sleep again.
Elliot steered clear of him, perhaps out of respect for his grief, perhaps because he had more pressing problems of his own. Whichever it was, Moses was grateful. Some kind of natural understanding existed between them. Their interiors, he felt, had been constructed along similar lines, by the same architect, you might almost have said, and when certain doors closed they didn’t open again, not for anyone, not until the right time came. Visitors would be greeted by a DO NOT DISTURB sign and three or four bottles of rotten milk. Some days Ridley’s whistling floated up past his window. Haunting, authentic, so he could imagine himself in Africa or Norfolk – somewhere else, at any rate. He listened and he travelled. Comforting, he found it. That illusion of distance from things. When his friends rang he used one of Eddie’s old lines: ‘I’m having a couple of weeks off.’ It meant you’d been overdoing it. They accepted that. It was language they understood.
How he ached, though. Nothing like the way he had ached when Gloria told him about sleeping with Eddie or when those two policemen beat him up. No, he ached as if he had been emptied out, emptied of everything. A real disembowelling, this time. Nothing theatrical about it. No tourists. The loss of Mary, the loss of those Sundays. Bargains had been struck behind his back, he found himself thinking, and wondered if Mary was thinking the same way. He had had no say. He wanted say. In future, anyway.
And always in the attic of his head this long silence. Then a scurrying, a gnawing, a scurrying. Then long silence again.
Peach.
Peach with some sinister idea in mind.
Peach who would stop at nothing.
He remembered something Mary had said to him that night in Bagwash. ‘You,’ she had said, levelling a finger, ‘you floated out of the village and you floated back again. That’s what you do, Moses. You float. You know what I call you?’ She had laughed. Her silver fillings flashing in the candlelight. ‘I call you the lilo man. You’d better be careful someone doesn’t come along and puncture you.’
And he had said, ‘Mary, that’s what I’m afraid of.’
She was right. He could see the dangers of sitting tight and waiting. Only the bad things came. He had to take action. Evasive action. Now.
Ten days before Christmas he called Leicester.
‘Auntie B,’ he said, ‘can I come and stay for a while?’
Sudden Death
As soon as Peach saw Moses standing in his office he knew that he would have to kill him. There was no agonising involved. He wasn’t even conscious of arriving at a decision. The thought came to him so complete, so ineluctable, that it almost seemed premeditated. It was as if it had been there all along, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.
It was winter now, and winter was a good time to think about killing. Peach’s favourite season, winter. The merciless cold. The crisp precise air. The trees stripped of all that dressy foliage, reduced to their essentials. No vagueness, no hesitation there.
Moses had to be killed. Fact. The question was, how?
Problems of accessibility. On the one hand Peach could wait until Moses returned to the village as he was bound to do now that he had, presumably, found his father. Do the job on home ground, so to speak. Delegate even. Hazard would take care of it. On the other hand a second visit from Moses might have dangerous repercussions. Say he talked. Say the truth of his identity leaked out. There was no telling what might happen then. And what if Moses brought that rather vulgar woman with him again? What would Peach do then? Kill her too?
No. He would have to act before Moses returned. And that meant another trip to the city. He didn’t relish the prospect, but he had no choice. And even then it wouldn’t be easy. People knew his face now. That black fellow. Moses too. For obvious reasons he couldn’t afford to be seen by either of them. This thought struck him: he wouldn’t be able to get close enough to Moses to kill him in any one of the usual ways.
Problems.
If only he had reacted more efficiently when Moses appeared in his office. What an opportunity that had been. What a gift. But he had been caught napping. Ah, the slow brains of an old man. Alertness draining out of him like blood. There had even been a moment when he had doubted the reality of what he was seeing. Some kind of optical illusion, he had thought. A mirage, a ghost, the spirit of the pink file. Some such nonsense. But Moses hadn’t vanished. No shimmer in the air, no puff of smoke. Moses had been real. And Peach had made a quick recovery.
But still.
He had let him go.
He wished he could talk to Dolphin. He needed a younger mind, a sounding-board. He wanted to share the burden. Unthinkable, though. How could he tell Dolphin that he had broken the very rules that they were supposed to be enforcing? It would shake Dolphin’s faith in him. It would undermine the infrastructure that he had spent so much time and energy building. He couldn’t do it. He would have to work in isolation. Well, perhaps that was nothing new.
But as the days went by he made little progress.
The idea of a letter-bomb excited him briefly. It failed to stand up to close examination, however. Firstly, it could be detected by the post office and traced back to him. Secondly, it was unreliable. Moses might only lose his eyesight or a hand. And Peach wasn’t interested in anything less than death. One hundred per cent guaranteed death.
November became December. His deadline (Christmas Day) was less than a month away. He found his attention wandering and couldn’t call it back.
‘You look tired,’ Hilda gently observed.
As if he didn’t know! He had looked in the mirror. The pressure showed in the marshy grey terrain of his face, the soft yellow pits under his eyes.
Another time she asked him, ‘Is everything all right?’
Stupid bloody question.
‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
*
And then, as if he didn’t have enough on his mind already, Pelting Day loomed.
Pelting Day – a village custom, supposedly dating back to the Middle Ages. Every year, at the beginning of December, the police of New Egypt held a lottery to determine which of them were to be subjected to the rigours of pelting. Only the Chief Inspector could claim exemption. Three days before Christmas the three officers who had drawn the unlucky numbers were marched down the hill to the village green. Tradition demanded that they looked impeccable: full dress uniform, combed hair, boots polished to a high gloss. A jeering crowd assembled at the foot of the hill to greet them. Children capered around in masks, chanting rhymes. Then the serious business of the day began. A fourth policeman secured his three colleagues in the stocks. And there they remained for at least an hour while they were pelted with ripe tomatoes, raw eggs, rotten fruit, anything that came to hand, provided, of course, that it was soft and unpleasant.
During his li
fetime Peach had seen various people abuse the spirit of Pelting Day. Tommy Dane, for one. Teeth vengefully pinned to his bottom lip, arm springy as a whip, Tommy had pelted PC Bonefield with hard-boiled eggs, light-bulbs and lumps of coal. ‘You little devil,’ Peach could still hear Bonefield screaming, ‘I’ll get you.’ ‘Come on then,’ Tommy had said, cool as you please. And let fly with a handful of manure. Poor Bonefield had trailed home that evening with two black eyes and a chipped incisor (for which he was reimbursed from the New Egypt Police Fund). As always, Tommy Dane had taken things a little too far. In recent years, however, things had gone to the other extreme. Pelting Day had lost its appeal, its popularity. Hardly anyone bothered to come any more. 1979 had been a fiasco. When the three chosen policemen had arrived at the bottom of the hill they found the place deserted. No jeering crowd. Nobody at all, in fact. They were placed in the stocks as usual. And then they waited. After a while two small boys appeared. One of them had an orange in his hand but, instead of hurling it at a policeman, he peeled it and ate it. ‘I don’t like that game,’ the boy had told the inquisitive Peach. ‘It’s boring.’ Shortly afterwards they left.
1980 could well be just as laughable. With Dinwoodie dead (he had always pelted with extraordinary vigour), Highness still confined to his bed and Mustoe an alcoholic, the village had shrunk further into itself. The members of the younger generation, from whom a little spunk might have been expected, seemed even more listless than their parents. They watched TV. They slept a lot. They behaved like old people. The eighties promised nothing but bleakness.
Now Peach disliked Pelting Day intensely – the whole idea of an organised and legitimate assault on police dignity was offensive to him – and he longed to abolish it but, at the same time, he understood its value. It allowed the villagers to let off steam in a relatively harmless way. It helped to create order in the community. And it was good PR. He couldn’t afford to let the tradition die out. So, this year, he found himself in the curious and uncomfortable position of having to breathe life into something that he would much rather have seen dead.
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