Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

A woman with a dead pigeon.

That wasn’t a mystery.

That was an omen.

*

The black double-doors of The Bunker exploded outwards, snowflakes and waste-paper flying, and Ridley appeared, head flung back, fists bunched. His movements were so violent that they threw the air around him into a state of chaos. Moses thought he felt the shock-waves as he crossed the road.

When Ridley caught sight of Moses he glared and, for a moment, Moses was included in the bouncer’s terrible rage.

‘Where the fuck’ve you been?’

Moses swallowed. He began to explain, but Ridley cut him off with a horizontal slash of his hand. The question, it seemed, had been a rhetorical one.

‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ were Ridley’s next words. He looked up and down the street as if he expected the object of his anger to manifest itself. It would have to be a very foolish object, Moses thought, to do that.

He turned his attention to the club. A sorry sight. Smoked-glass windows shattered. Fire-blackened frames. Glimpses of a burnt-out interior. The fourth floor seemed to have escaped, though. His own side-door looked untouched.

‘What happened exactly?’ he asked.

Ridley swung round, jaw muscles rippling. His giant gold earring spat light. Snow melted on his face, ran down it like sweat. ‘How much do you know about this?’

‘I wasn’t here. I heard there was a fire. And somebody died.’

‘Yeah, it was a copper.’

Moses nodded. ‘I heard that too.’

‘You heard a lot. Did you hear what his name was?’

Moses shook his head.

‘Peach. His name was Peach.’ Ridley stepped back to judge the effect of his words. ‘Yeah, I thought that might interest you. And you know something else? They think he started it.’ He stared at Moses as if he expected some kind of explanation, but Moses could only stare back.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Moses asked finally.

Ridley liked that. His laughter struck the walls of the houses opposite. Moses thought of thrown rocks.

‘He’s dead all right,’ the bouncer said. ‘Heart attack or something. I had to go down the station. Answer questions and that. They get a bit upset when a copper snuffs it.’

Then his anger returned, tightened the skin across his face. The bones seemed to shift beneath like continental plates. An immensely slow, immensely powerful grinding.

‘There’s something else,’ he said between his teeth. ‘Looks like Frazer’s done a runner.’ And, whirling round, he charged back indoors.

The avalanche of footsteps on the stairs told Moses that Ridley was heading for the office. He paused inside the door and looked round. He scarcely recognised the foyer. Scorched, gutted, flooded with water. A stench of damp ashes, charred wood, singed cloth. He squelched across the carpet, began to mount the stairs.

When he walked into the office, Ridley was brandishing a sheaf of brown envelopes. ‘I found these,’ he said.

They were letters from creditors and banks, unpaid bills, and summonses, some dating back to the summer. One letter from somebody called Mr Andrew Private and dated December 7th threatened Elliot with ‘legal action in the near future’, should he fail to repay his ‘substantial debt’ immediately. The tone of voice was tired, indignant — a reasonable man at the end of his tether; clearly not the first letter that Mr Private had written to Mr Frazer.

‘I never realised,’ Moses said, though, even as he spoke, he remembered the one-sided phone-calls, the talk of old ghosts from the past, and then the string of anonymous threats — the white arrows, the nursery rhymes, the blood and the shit. Yes, it all added up. ‘He’s gone for good, hasn’t he?’

‘He owed me too, the bastard,’ Ridley growled. ‘Four hundred quid. If I ever get hold of him — ’

He flexed his right fist, and his bones creaked in the abandoned room like the snap of dry twigs in a wood; the anaconda tattooed along the muscle of his forearm swelled grotesquely as if it had just swallowed a goat.

Elliot must’ve been desperate, Moses thought, to have risked incurring Ridley’s anger. Either desperate, or very, very foolish. Maybe even both. Ridley would crush Elliot like so much garlic and use him to season his next meal.

‘When did you last see him?’ Moses asked.

Ridley scowled. ‘Saturday before Christmas. Tarted up to the eyeballs he was. Looked like a fucking pimp.’

Moses had to grin.

‘Fucking pimp.’ Ridley scraped his hair back from his forehead. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me, come to think of it.’

They took one final look round the office. Elliot had taken nothing with him. He had even left his beloved pool-table behind. The balls had scattered to all four corners of that flawless baize. Moses picked up the wooden triangle and turned it absent-mindedly in his hands. While the balls sat inside the triangle they looked neat, tight, safe. Lift the triangle and they suddenly seemed to huddle there, unprotected, vulnerable. Then the white ball struck and broke them up. And so the game began. He wondered which pocket of the country Elliot had darted into. A wanted man, obviously. Businessman, patron, dandy, cheat, absconder. Whereabouts unknown. Last seen looking like a pimp. Moses secretly wished him luck. Or perhaps he made his own, like Mary.

Moses moved over to the window, leaned against the sash. The snow, denser than before, was being driven diagonally across the glass, so it felt as if the whole nightclub was hurtling sideways and upwards at breathtaking speed into the last night of the year. As he gazed down into the street, the present slackened its grip, his mind drifted, and he saw himself returning by chance at some unspecified time in the future.

It was many years later and he was travelling south across London. He was a good deal larger now than he had been in his youth — so large, in fact, that the taxi-driver had made some crack about charging him an excess baggage tariff on his body. Moses had taken no offence at this. He had smiled and settled back, almost filling the three-man seat entirely. One short-cut through the back streets of Lambeth, however, brought him lurching forwards in a commotion of flesh, all his complacency gone.

‘Could you stop, please?’ he cried, rapping on the glass partition. ‘Could you just stop here for a moment?’

The driver pulled into the kerb and watched in his wing-mirror, engine snickering, as Moses climbed out, quite agile considering, and stood transfixed on the pavement, his size now obvious as the wind pressed his lightweight raincoat to the left-hand side of his body. He was gazing up at a building that had once been pink. It was orange now, but the paint had peeled and faded, stained by exhaust-fumes, rain, the feculence of birds. The entrances had been barred with padlocked metal grilles, and most of the ground-floor windows had been punched out; white star-shaped gaps showed in the black smoked-glass. A litter of newspaper, leaves and mangled beer-cans had fetched up in the main doorway.

And the pigeons had returned. He could hear their muffled chuckling and mumbling coming from an open window on the fourth floor. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered, fists tightening. Time, it seemed, hadn’t diminished his loathing of pigeons.

He shook his head gently. Memories collided like soft toys in a packing-case, a few eyes missing, a few limbs coming unstitched at the joints, a few holes where the stuffing showed through, but otherwise intact and safely stored away. It must have been — what? — 1980. Around then, anyway. How quaint the 19 sounded now.

The wind lunged savagely, whipping his coat away from his legs, banging a loose sheet of corrugated-iron somewhere, whirling rubbish into a hectic spiral in the doorway. An empty beer-can clattered across the pavement towards him. It began to drizzle.