Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

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.