Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Her eyes drew closer, moved over the faces of her children.

Sean stood at the head of the grave. Hands clasped, hair combed, pale. Awkward in a black jacket, and trousers that itched. He would be waiting for something dramatic to happen, something to fix the day in his memory: a partial eclipse of the sun, a riderless horse galloping between the stones, an explosion in that house beyond the cemetery wall. His eyes would be aching with the constant fruitless quest for symbols. Her gaze passed to Alison. Alison’s hair glowed under a black headscarf, mere embers of the fire it usually was. She seemed to be examining the brass handles on the coffin. Then her eyes lifted, moved across the polished wood, paused on that discreet metal plaque. She would be thinking how new everything looked, how horribly new and clean. And how Alan had always hated anything that looked new. How he had loved old things, things with stories in their surfaces, things with histories. Death had turned him into someone she didn’t recognise. Rebecca was standing next to Mary, so Mary couldn’t see her face. She could only feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, a grip that tightened as a cluster of gulls suddenly rose screeching against a screen of evergreens.

Lumps of mud thudded on to the coffin lid, dirt on the cleanness that Alison abhorred. Like somebody knocking on a door. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Dad. Dad who? No, not Dad. Dead. Mary thought she saw Sean’s leg begin to tremble. She could imagine him running, running over this grass that was bumpy with other people’s dead, running to escape the trembling. She felt Rebecca’s grip tighten again and watched her as she leaned forwards, peered down into that fascinating oblong hole in the ground. It was so deep it made Rebecca shiver, feel dizzy; she almost lost her balance.

Then they were walking towards the limousine and the expressionless chauffeur who was waiting to drive them back to the house where there was to be, as Rebecca had whispered disbelievingly to Alison the night before, a party because Dad’s dead.

*

Two days later Mary stood in front of her wardrobe again. She had decided that everything black had to go. Dresses, underwear, accessories — the lot. She removed her black clothes from their hangers, their shelves, their drawers, and dropped them, one by one, on to the bed behind her. The heap grew and grew until she caught herself staring, exactly as her mother would have done, with incredulous uncomprehending eyes. Oh how it all turns round, she thought.

She counted sixty-one separate black items in all (not including shoes) and was astonished at the power they gave off, the history they contained. Some dated back over twenty years to the summer when she had first met Alan (a silk blouse she bought on Bond Street in 1959), others were as recent as her affair with Moses (a pair of elbow-length gloves with pearl buttons that he had found for her at Camden Lock). She gave them the time they deserved. She let the memories flow out of them, through her, and back again, then she packed them into plastic dustbin-liners (also black).

Her first instinct had been to take her clothes along to a charity shop, but she had quickly changed her mind. She wanted them destroyed, not passed on (it horrified her to think that she might see somebody walking down the street in a dress that Alan had given her), and she wanted to supervise the destruction herself. She wanted to see them disappear with her own eyes. She wanted to know exactly where they had gone.

As dusk fell that Sunday afternoon she hauled the bags down to the end of the garden. She built a fire out of newspaper, a drawerload of Alan’s memorabilia, and the remains of the old garden fence. She sat on the upturned water-tank and fed the clothes into the flames, one item at a time, with a pair of tongs. The wools crackled like dry foliage, the synthetics shrivelled and dripped. The smell was awful, something like singed hair, and the smoke that unravelled past the knitting-needle branches of the sycamore was as black as the clothes themselves. Exorcism, she thought.

Sean, who loved fires, must have noticed the orange glow from his bedroom window. He stood in the shadows by the hedge and watched as Mary lifted a fifties’ stiletto into the air and placed it carefully in the centre of the blaze. The crocodile skin flared.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

She didn’t take her eyes off the fire. ‘I’m burning a few of my old clothes.’

He moved closer, stood at her shoulder. ‘The black ones?’

She nodded.

‘Why the black ones?’

Her voice dropped a register. ‘Because that phase is over.’

*

‘What’s got into you?’

Elliot stopped Moses on the end of his finger. It was Sunday night. Draughts in the doorway of The Bunker. The cold neon glow that Moses called morgue light.

Moses stared at the finger (he had learned a trick or two from Ridley), but the finger didn’t waver.

Nor did Elliot’s eyes. ‘I don’t see you for weeks, then you walk straight past me, nearly fucking knock me over. What’s the idea?’

Moses didn’t know what to tell him. He lowered his eyes. ‘My mother died,’ he said eventually.

‘You what?’

‘My mother. She died.’

Elliot stepped back, hands on hips. He looked round, looked back at Moses. ‘Your mother?’

‘You know,’ Moses said, ‘that woman you saw. Wearing a black dress. Getting on a bit — ’ His voice tied up.

‘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.