Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

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 ever 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.’

Mary poured the extraordinary tea. The old man cradled his mug in both hands. He sipped noisily, his moustache extending over the rim.

‘Christ, this is damn good,’ he said. ‘Uncommonly good. I’d almost forgotten what tea tasted like. Bloody good.’

‘Something I’ve noticed,’ Mary said. ‘All your escape stories are about men. Haven’t any women ever tried to get away?’

‘Women?’ The old man wedged his mug into a fold in the blanket. ‘There was one woman.’

He lit a cigarette and leaned back. Smoke filtered out of his nostrils. He was taking his time. He knew he had an audience.

‘Her real name was Miss Neville,’ he said, ‘but we all called her the mad lady. She lived behind the church. Strange house. Dark-red bricks and all the window-frames painted green. She had a withered leg so she couldn’t get about very much. She walked very slowly with two sticks, or sometimes she used crutches. You hardly ever saw her. She loved animals, especially birds. Storks used to land in her garden and, once, a flock of swallows hibernated in her kitchen instead of flying south for the winter. She had a special way with birds. She could talk to them and they understood her. Most people in the village thought she was some kind of witch. The children were frightened of her.

‘I was frightened of her too, but I was curious. One day — I suppose I must have been nine or ten — I went to visit her. I just walked up the drive and knocked on her front door. There was no answer, so I went round to the back and peeped in through her French windows. And there was old Miss Neville sitting in a high-backed chair. She was clapping her hands. Not rhythmically, the way you might clap to music, but a sort of double clap, as if she was summoning a servant. Her hair kept falling in her eyes, I remember, and her eyes were glowing yellow in the dark room, and her mouth was hanging open. She looked very strange, transported almost. For a moment I couldn’t work out what on earth she was doing. Then I saw the birds –

‘There were about eight of them, all the same size, dark grey, and when Miss Neville clapped her hands they rose into the air, all at the same time, straight up into the air like helicopters. And every time she clapped her hands they performed a new trick, a new manoeuvre. They flew round and round the room in perfect formation. They hovered in mid-air. They did all kinds of symmetrical things. I couldn’t believe my eyes, of course. I just stood at the window and stared. I completely forgot that I had no business to be there. And I suppose she must have seen me because the next thing I knew the door opened and she was standing in front of me.

‘“What do you want, young man?” she said. “I came to visit you,” I said. “Did you?” she said. “Did you indeed? Well, I suppose you’d better come in then, hadn’t you?” She had this queer way of stretching her neck out and looking down at you sideways. She was wearing a huge shapeless dress. As big as a tent, it was. And dark green, with little bits of velvet stuck all over it.

‘She hobbled back into the room on her crutches and I followed her. I have never been to a zoo, but her house smelt the way I imagine a zoo to smell. Sweet somehow. A curious mixture of musk and chicken-feed and manure. You know, I’ve never forgotten the smell of old Miss Neville’s house. And the mess. Feathers, balls of fur, bird-lime, mouse-droppings, cat-hair, frogspawn — you name it. I’d never seen anything like it. I suppose it was a zoo, really.