Gloria.
The night before he left for Leicester he had covered that last fatal inch to the telephone. He had dialled her number. He regretted it now. He had been drinking (well, drunk). He had hardly been aware that it was her number that he was calling. That was bad. All his bluster vanished the moment he heard her voice, leaving him exposed, shrunken, pitiful. It was the first time he had spoken to her since Talent Night. That seemed like months ago. Probably was.
‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Hello. It’s me.’ This false gaiety in his voice. Game-show presenter. Just awful.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Moses. You know. Moses.’
Forget it. Hang up now.
‘Oh. Hello, Moses.’
Too late.
It sounded, though, as if she was using a name that she was only pretending to recognise, that, in reality, she couldn’t put a face to, that didn’t mean anything. She sounded like a receptionist. He felt like a stranger (with no appointment). He couldn’t think of what to say next. Or why he had phoned, for that matter.
‘Look, I just rang up to see if you got my message.’
‘What message?’
‘I left a message at The Blue Diamond last weekend. No, the weekend before. I think. Sometime, anyway. You were singing there.’
‘Oh, The Blue Diamond. Yes. No, I didn’t sing there in the end. I cancelled.’
‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ he said.
Thanks for telling me.
‘Did you go?’
‘No. My friend’s car broke down. In the country. I couldn’t get back. That’s why I left the message that you didn’t get.’
‘Oh.’
Why was this so difficult?
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going away for Christmas. To my foster-parents, I think. So I probably won’t see you for a while.’
He thought he heard soft laughter on the other end. Had he said something funny?
‘Well,’ she said, ‘have a wonderful time, won’t you.’
Just like that. She wasn’t interested. She wasn’t remotely fucking interested. He lapsed into silence, bit his lip.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m still here.’
That was the trouble with telephones. No time to think. No time to not say anything. Mary was right about telephones.
‘When are you going?’ Gloria’s impersonal voice again.
He thought. ‘I don’t know exactly. Tomorrow maybe. Or the next day. I don’t know.’
‘So what are you doing tonight?’
He gulped, sensing a trap. ‘Nothing, really. Just staying in.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look,’ he quickened, ‘maybe I’ll see you when I get back, OK?’
‘OK,’ and just a trace of tired intimacy in, ‘if that’s what you want.’
She was like water. You could throw stone after stone and the surface always formed again. Perfectly, unbearably smooth. There was a pressure building inside him and no valve that he knew of.
‘I suppose so,’ he murmured. He saw himself reflected in the uncurtained window, all the hollows in his face filled with shadow.
‘Ring me when you get back,’ she was saying. ‘Have a wonderful time, won’t you.’
She hung up.
He stared at the receiver, a useless furry buzzing in his hand, then flung it against the wall. An explosion of red plastic. One fragment ricocheted, nicked his cheek as it flew past. He touched his face and his fingertips came away bloody. He would have the scar – a miniature triangle, a crocodile tear – for the rest of his life.
Then, only yesterday, at breakfast in Leicester, he had received some mail from Italy. His name and address had been scrawled in black ink, the letters spiky, rushed. He hadn’t recognised the handwriting. He had sniffed the envelope. It hadn’t smelt like anyone he knew. That should have told him something. When he tore the letter open, a postcard fell out. He scanned it rapidly for a signature. Gloria XX.
Now he took the postcard from his coat pocket and examined it again. A picture of a square in Florence, probably a famous square judging by the ancient yellow buildings and the groups of multi-coloured tourists. In the top left-hand corner he noticed an empty pedestal. This couldn’t have been intentional on Gloria’s part; he had never mentioned his statue theory to her. Still, a touch of irony there. It seemed to undermine what she had written, make it laughable. He read it anyway. She said she was sorry about their last phone-call; she’d taken some sleeping-pills because she’d been having trouble sleeping. She told him she missed him. She thought they ought to get together in the New Year.
He wondered.
He glanced out of the window and saw a mass of dark cloud, two strands lifting away into the sky, tousled by a night of restless sleep. There was no mistaking that head of black hair on that pale-blue pillow.
The train slowed, switched tracks, drew into St Pancras.
Still staring at the sky, he knew that it wouldn’t be long before those black clouds (all that now remained of Gloria) were blown away.
*
Walking down Charing Cross Road, he thought he heard somebody call his name. He turned round, saw nobody, felt stupid. He was about to walk on when he caught sight of Alison waving at him from the other side of the road.
She waited for the lights to change, then ran towards him.
‘Alison.’ He stooped to kiss her cool cheek. ‘How are you?’
Four weeks of mourning had done nothing to diminish the glory of her red hair. He could tell from her forehead, though, that she had been through a painful time. Instead of the four seagulls he remembered, one distant albatross flying alone.
‘Where’ve you been, Moses? I’ve been trying to call you,’ she said, all in one breath.
He gestured with his suitcase. ‘I’ve been away – ’
‘Have you got time for a cup of coffee?’ Her eyes moved from one part of his face to another with some urgency.
He said he had.
They ducked into the café opposite Foyle’s. Flustered by this chance meeting, Moses almost hit his head on the lintel. Such a small world. They took a table by the window, faced each other across a silence of yellow formica and red plastic ketchup containers shaped like tomatoes. A shaft of sunlight struck through the plate-glass, set fire to Alison’s hair. She blinked, shifted sideways into the shadow. Her hair went out. Waiting for her to begin, Moses felt for his cigarettes. He lit one.
‘It took me a while to work it out,’ she said finally.
He realised from the candour in her eyes that it was no use pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about. She either knew or had guessed everything. How had she found out, though? He absent-mindedly flicked his cigarette. The ash rolled across the table. Alison scooped it up in a paper napkin and tipped it into the ashtray. She glanced up, noticed him watching her.
‘Sorry,’ she said, with a smile that contrived to be both embarrassed and ironic. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine, clearing up after other people.’
‘It’s all right.’ He was still staring at her. She had just reminded him of an evening in Muswell Hill. Mary sitting crosslegged on the carpet. One elbow resting against the arm of the sofa. A lit cigarette poised between the fingers of that hand. She had waited until everybody was looking then, quite deliberately, she had tapped the end of her cigarette so the ash landed on the sofa. Alison had left her chair and brushed the ash into the nearest ashtray with her hand. Mary had waited until Alison sat down then, smiling, she had done exactly the same thing again. Alison had sighed and left the room. Now, once more, Alison seemed to be taking the parental role – concerned, long-suffering, responsible – and Mary was the daughter who had misbehaved. With me, he thought. ‘How did you find out?’ he said.
Alison rubbed at the surface of the table with her fingertips as if she might see a clear beginning there somewhere. ‘It was about two weeks ago. Vince turned up at my flat. I don’t know how he found out where I was li
ving.’ She frowned. ‘Trust him, though.’
Perhaps it was that red hair of hers, glowing like a beacon in the suburbs, Moses thought. He imagined her hair would cause her a lot of anxiety in the future and that, as the years went by, her forehead would become a sanctuary for birds of all descriptions, some settling at the corners of her mouth and eyes, others flying in formation, their wings etched deep in the pale sky of her skin.
‘He was out of his head, of course,’ she was saying. ‘Said he hadn’t slept for five days. Drunk and God knows what else. I didn’t want to know, you know? He told me some story about a girl called Debra.’ That innocent enquiring glance again. ‘She’d left him or something – ’
‘Is that true?’
Alison shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s beside the point.’
Moses smiled into his cup.
‘Then he started on about me. I should’ve known he was going to do that. I shouldn’t have let him in at all.’
‘He would’ve just broken in.’
But Alison hadn’t heard him. She was hearing Vince’s voice. ‘He said it used to be me and him and what’d happened to the and.’
‘What and?’
‘That’s what I said. “What and?” I kept asking him. “The and between you and me,” he said.’ She was staring straight ahead and smiling as if she could see through the café wall to a peaceful horizon. ‘Sometimes he’s got a way with words.’
Moses waited for her to come back.
‘Anyway,’ and her voice drew nearer again, ‘I said there wasn’t an and any more, I said he might as well forget it, and he got really shitty, he really worked himself up, you know, the way he does, and started calling Mary all kinds of names – ’
‘Mary?’
‘Oh yes, he always blames Mary. I don’t know why. He says she turned me against him, told me he wasn’t good enough, that kind of thing. All a pile of crap, really.’ Though she would never get Vince to believe that. ‘He really hates her, you know.’
‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘He’s told me.’
‘The names he called her. Incredible.’ She shook her head. ‘He said she was spoilt, pretentious, immature – ’ she was ticking the words off on her fingers – ‘jealous, vindictive, and then he said, “I don’t know what Moses sees in her –”’
Moses looked up sharply from his cup.
‘I know,’ Alison said. ‘It had exactly the same effect on me. Vince didn’t actually know anything, you see, but it was the way he said it that made me think. He went on and on about what a bitch she was, but I wasn’t listening any more. All I could think about was you and Mary, all those times you came round to our house as if you were a friend of the family when really – ’
‘I was a friend of the family, Alison. I liked you all. I still do. It wasn’t just – ’
‘I’m not attacking you,’ she cut in. ‘I’m just working it out for myself, that’s all.’
She stared down at her hands. Moses glanced out of the window. The sky had darkened. Lights in the shop windows now, lights in the offices.
‘I thought about you not coming to the funeral,’ Alison began again, ‘about you suddenly not coming to the house any more. And the way Mary won’t talk about you now, like you never existed or something. It puzzled me for ages, until Vince said what he did. Then it all just suddenly fell into place.’
Moses thought of Vince’s jigsaw and smiled.
‘It was obvious, really. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. Too close to it, I suppose. The way she kept going round to visit you. Because she never lied about that, you know. She never pretended she was going shopping or visiting a friend – ’
‘She was visiting a friend.’
‘– and I admire her for that, though I don’t know what Dad – ’ For the first time, her eyes lost their coolness, their clarity. Her lower lip began to tremble.
‘I think he knew,’ Moses said.
‘And then there was that awful weekend. Sorry, but I can’t seem to help talking about it. And you were so close to us – ’ Three tears rolled down her cheek, one after the other, and dropped on to the yellow formica. ‘We were looking for you everywhere. And even then I didn’t realise.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, sniffed twice.
‘The car really did break down, you know.’
Alison nodded. ‘Anyway, I haven’t said anything to Mary,’ she said, her grey eyes clear again (she was one of those people, he realised, who cried invisibly, whose eyes didn’t swell or redden, whose make-up never ran). ‘I don’t think it’s the right time, do you?’
He shook his head, though, quite honestly, he doubted whether it would make any difference to Mary. Alison’s ‘right times’ would never be hers.
As they paid at the counter, he noticed an old woman sitting at the table behind the coat-rack. A plastic mac, hair in a bun, a cup of tea.
Alison heard his startled exclamation. ‘What is it, Moses?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away. ‘I just thought I saw someone I knew.’
Outside on the pavement they hesitated, drawing out this chance meeting of theirs. Suddenly there seemed to be something final about what would otherwise have been a perfectly casual goodbye. Now he was no longer seeing Mary, now Alison was no longer seeing Vince, they had nothing in common. He couldn’t imagine what would bring them together. Only chance again, perhaps. He watched her staring first at the traffic then at her shoes. As he watched, a single snowflake (predicted by Jackson?) settled on the concrete beside her foot and melted. That sprawl of black cloud he had seen from the train loomed overhead. Everyone was walking faster now. Snow.
Finally she lifted her head. ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘was it serious?’
The albatross beat its great wings on the pale wastes of her forehead and he seemed to hear its cry, very faintly, in the darkening air above. It was the cry of someone waking to a cold and muddled world and not wanting to be awake, wanting to pull the sky over their head like a blanket, wanting to close their eyes, go back to sleep again. He thought of Mary and saw no pictures, only the vaguest of silhouettes, a shadow in the distance, the blackness of her clothes. But he could still remember times when they had laughed until they ached.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
*
He waited for Alison to disappear up the street, then he turned and ran back to the café. He stood in front of Madame Zola. Her black eyes slowly lifted to meet his. He had forgotten how they drew you in until you were all vision and no body.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You.’
‘You remember?’
‘The past is clear. It’s only the future that isn’t clear.’
Moses smiled. Same old Madame Zola. ‘I’m having trouble with them both at the moment.’ He peered into her cup of tea. Three-quarters full. ‘You must’ve been here a long time.’
She nodded. ‘You remember also.’
‘How could I forget? You started all this.’
She waved a hand in front of her face as if brushing cobwebs aside. ‘I started nothing, but,’ and she gave him a curious look, ‘I have something to tell you. You aren’t leaving now.’
She had this way of pitching a sentence halfway between a question and a command. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Come, sit down,’ and she motioned him to the chair opposite. Her gesture reminded him of a papal benediction. He sat down.
She leaned over the table, clutching her cup in both hands. It might have been the only solid object in the room. ‘I saw a fire,’ she whispered, ‘and a dead man.’
‘No! Where?’
‘Ah yes, that’s so strange.’ Her eyes slid away from his. ‘You know the pink building? It happened there.’
Moses stared at her. ‘The pink building? You mean – ’
She shook herself out of her dreaming skin and hissed, ‘A dead man, I said. He died in front of my eyes.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know his name. But he was a policeman – ’
‘A policeman?’
‘I held his head so,’ and, lifting her shoulders, she tucked her elbows into her rib-cage and spread her palms, the tips of her little fingers touching, ‘and he died in my hands. In these same hands you see now. And for some moments I thought time, he was running away, and it was fifteen years before, and my Christos – ’ Her voice cracked like a dam and the dark valleys of her eyes flooded. Moses put out a hand, but she shook her head, staunched the flow with a soiled tissue. ‘I had troubles with the police,’ she went on. ‘So much troubles, you don’t know, and all because this man, he died in my hands – ’
‘You said something about a fire, Madame Zola. What about the fire?’
She seemed to rouse herself. ‘Yes, yes. The fire-engines, they came. Clang, clang, clang. Two fire-engines.’
‘And the building? Is it burned down?’
‘No, it’s not destroyed. It cannot be destroyed. Not yet. There are many colours it must be before it can rest. It was never orange, I think. No. I’m certain it was never orange – ’
She had lost him. He pushed his chair back. ‘Madame Zola, I’m sorry, but I really have to go.’
‘You know,’ she sighed, ‘sometimes you think you have all the time in the world,’ and with her gnarled hands she fashioned a globe out of the dingy air, ‘and then suddenly you have no time at all. Ah,’ and, shaking her head, she lifted her cup and wet her top lip.
*
Falling softly as feathers, the snow tickled the serious faces of businessmen. Bare-headed office-girls wore white flowers in their hair; winter could seem tropical. Moses ran towards Trafalgar Square. Thoughts raced through his head; they kept cornering too fast and spinning off. He jumped a bus at the lights outside South Africa House.
‘Come on,’ he whispered to himself, as it ground and floundered down Whitehall. ‘Come on.’
He wiped a hole in the condensation and peered out. He saw a woman stumbling along the pavement in a fur coat. Rich, she looked, but deranged. Eyes of glass. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, palms upwards. Resting on them, as on an altar, lay a pigeon, its neck slack, its head lolling – dead, presumably. There was a dignity, a mystical dignity, about the way she bore this dead pigeon along the street, past the Houses of Parliament, through a group of tourists gathered by the railings; he imagined a silence must have fallen as the red sea of anoraks parted to let her through. On other days he might have asked questions – What was the history of the woman and the pigeon? Where was she taking it now that it was dead? Could there be some kind of special pigeon cemetery in the area? – but as the bus lurched towards Lambeth Bridge, wheels slipping on the curve, gears clashing, he realised that no questions applied.
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