Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘You’re making things difficult, Moses Bloody Highness.’ The tall policeman read these last three words off his official form as if Bloody was Moses’s middle name.

‘So are you,’ Moses said.

‘I suggest you shut your mouth and get on with it.’

Both the policemen had voices that grated like machines for grinding the organs, bones and flesh of cattle. They would make mincemeat of him if he wasn’t careful. He thought of Mary’s voice and almost cried. He fumbled with his boots again, managed to undo one of the laces.

‘Look at that. He did it.’

‘Amazing.’

‘Now do it up again.’

‘What is this?’ Moses said. ‘Kindergarten?’

‘You don’t deserve to be treated any other way — ’

‘Bastard.’ The stocky policeman liked to finish off the tall policeman’s sentences for him. They were a real team.

Moses tied the lace. ‘Now what?’

‘Now take your boots off.’

He muttered under his breath. He untied the lace again. Then he stood up. He let go of his trousers, gripped his left boot in both hands and began to hop round the floor. It just wouldn’t come off. His trousers slipped down to his knees, tied his legs together. He fell over again.

‘I’m bored with this game,’ he said.

‘You’re not doing very well, are you — ’

‘Jewboy.’

‘Not quite so fucking smart as you thought.’

‘Oh piss off, will you?’ he said. Anger was beginning to seep through the many layers of his drunkenness.

A shoe pinned his wrist to the floor.

‘We don’t like that kind of language.’

‘Specially not from a stupid cunt like you.’

The tall policeman moved towards him, a sheen of sweat on his high balding forehead.

‘I’m going to report you two,’ Moses said.

‘Did you say report?’

‘Yeah. To Chief Inspector Peach.’ Bravado now, bluff, anything.

‘Peach.’ one of the policemen scoffed.

‘You piece of shit,’ said the other, and landed a shoe just above Moses’s left eye.

‘Haha,’ Moses said. Red and orange planets whirled across the darkness as he closed his eyes. One of them looked like Saturn. ‘If I said Manchester, would you start dribbling?’

The shoe landed again, somewhere on the back of his thighs.

‘Crime is order,’ he shouted as they came at him again. ‘A policeman said that.’

‘I’ll give you crime is order.’

‘Crime is order, my foot.’

Two different shoes landed simultaneously in two different and tender places.

‘All right, that’s enough.’

‘Peach’s important,’ Moses murmured. ‘Peach’s my friend. He’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’

But the policemen had gone and he was alone.

Cold lino floor. Distantly aching body. One grazed hand beside his face, the redness too close to his eyes. Unwillingness to move.

Cold.

*

It was some time before the door opened again.

‘Would you come this way, please?’

Moses had propped himself against a wall. He turned his head and saw a young police officer with a soft face and freckles. His voice polite, almost subservient. Classic interrogation technique, Moses thought. One moment he was bastard, the next he was sir.

‘What’ve you got lined up for me now?’ But the alcohol and the drugs had worn off and he felt drab and slow, utterly incurious. Police procedure — the exhaustion, the monotony, the waiting — had tranquillised him; he would submit to each new development quite passively.

‘Fingerprints,’ the new policeman said.

Wincing, Moses climbed to his feet. He followed the new policeman out of the room, down a corridor that smelt like a hospital (and no wonder, he thought, feeling his injuries), and into a room that was as cluttered as the previous room had been bare.

The policeman produced a packet of Embassy Number One. ‘Like a cigarette, Moses?’

Suspicious, Moses searched into the policeman’s freckled face; it contained nothing but innocence. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You smoke the same brand as my dad.’

The policeman lit the cigarette for him. While Moses smoked, the policeman prepared a flat oblong tin and several printed sheets of paper.

‘Give me your hand,’ the policeman said.

Moses raised an eyebrow and crushed his cigarette out.

‘The fingerprints,’ the policeman explained with a grin. ‘It’s easier if I guide your hand. Unless you’ve done it before, of course.’

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘This is my first time.’

He watched as the policeman took his fingers one by one and carefully but firmly rolled them from left to right, first across the ink-pad in the oblong tin, then across a sheet of paper that had been divided into squares, one for each finger. He realised that he was collecting the kind of information that Vince specialised in. That fucker. This was all his fault.

Afterwards, when he was washing the ink off his fingers, he said over his shoulder, ‘You know, I think you’re OK.’

The policeman grinned.

‘Seriously,’ Moses said. ‘I’ve come across quite a few policemen recently and you’re one of the nicest I’ve come across.’

The policeman’s grin broadened. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Harry.’

‘Not Dirty Harry?’

‘That’s an old joke, Moses.’

‘Sorry, Harry. People always make the same jokes about my name too.’ Moses dried his hands on the towel provided. ‘Hey, Harry. I was thinking of becoming a policeman. What d’you reckon?’

Harry shook his head slowly. ‘I think you’d better forget the idea.’

‘Why’s that, Harry?’

Harry pointed at the fingerprints on the table. ‘I don’t think they’d look too good on your application form.’

Something sank in Moses. A slow lift in the tower-block of his body. Going down. ‘Oh yeah. Shit. I suppose you’re right.’ Then he turned and looked appealingly at Harry. ‘But I would’ve been tall enough, wouldn’t I?’

‘Oh yes.’ Harry squinted up at Moses. ‘You would’ve been tall enough, all right.’

After the fingerprints came the mug-shots. One frontal and two profiles were required. Harry sat Moses down in a metal chair, then crouched behind his camera. He told Moses which way to look and not to smile.

‘So I have to look serious, do I?’ Moses said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Can’t have our criminals smiling, can we?’ Moses composed himself, assuming an expression of great, if slightly wounded, nobility. His chin raised, he thought momentarily of Mary again.

Harry straightened up. ‘You can relax now.’

‘I bet those were pretty good pictures,’ Moses said. ‘Could you get me a few copies?’

Harry laughed. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s against regulations.’

‘Shame, that. Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. Now there’s one last thing, then you can go. You have the right to make a written statement. You don’t have to, you understand. But you can. If you want. It’s entirely up to you.’

Moses considered the proposition for a few moments, then he said, ‘Yes, I’d like to. I feel like writing something.’

Harry sighed. He gave Moses a biro and the appropriate form (with its heavily ruled lines, it looked like the bars on a cell if you turned it sideways), and left the room. When he returned five minutes later with two cups of coffee he peered over Moses’s shoulder. He sighed again.

‘What’s wrong, Harry?’ Moses said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

Harry peered over Moses’s shoulder again, then he frowned and scratched his head. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to, you know.’

Moses read through what he had written so far. At some points he nodded, at others he chuckled. It made a good story. He decided to cross out the bit about the policemen’s breath smelling like sour milk. That probably wouldn’t go down too well in court.