Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Whenever one of Moses’s friends travelled abroad, he asked them to keep an eye out for empty pedestals. Nothing of any significance had turned up so far. There had been a brief surge of hope, the glimmer of a breakthrough, when he received a postcard from Vince’s girlfriend, Alison, reporting the existence of an unoccupied plinth on one of the remoter islands in the Cyclades. However, the missing statue had been removed to a museum in Athens, and Alison assured Moses, in a second postcard bought at that very museum, that she had seen the statue in question and that it definitely wasn’t Eddie.

During the summer and autumn of 1979 Moses kept Eddie under constant surveillance. When they passed a statue in the street, he watched Eddie’s face, but it never registered even the slightest flicker of recognition or unease. Either Eddie was a natural actor, or he was like Moses and part of his memory had been erased.

Once, Moses — a casual Moses, studying his fingernails — had asked Eddie a trick question.

‘Where were you born, Eddie?’

‘Basingstoke,’ Eddie said.

Basingstoke indeed. What kind of fool did he take Moses for?

Then, a few days before their first visit to The Bunker, Moses forced a confrontation. Uncertainty and frustration had been eating into the fabric of his life like an army of moths. He opened colour supplements and Michelangelo’s David would be standing there, eyes averted, as if he knew. He went for long walks through parks only to see stone Neptunes frozen in the act of climbing out of artificial lakes. He dreamed about football matches attended by capacity crowds of 100,000 statues, scarves wrapped round their cold necks, rattles in their dramatic outstretched hands. He couldn’t take it any longer. He had to know the truth.

It was a weekend. Moses had been sitting at the kitchen table when Eddie ambled in wearing his blue towel dressing-gown. Eddie had a loose-muscled way of moving about, even first thing in the morning. His eyes were heavy, though. He had slept alone and that always took a lot out of him. What you aren’t used to can hit you pretty hard.

Eddie poured some cornflakes into a bowl, added milk and sugar, and sat down opposite Moses. These movements tortured Moses. Their slowness, their relaxed simplicity, crackled through him like electricity. He felt as if he was about to short-circuit. The first spoonful was halfway to Eddie’s mouth when Moses spoke:

‘Eddie, were you ever a statue?’

There. He had said it. After all these months.

‘I mean, you know,’ he went on, ‘have you got to go back sometime and be one again? And, if so, how long have you got exactly? Because if you are going back, I think I should know, really. After all, I am living with you.’

A puzzled expression, remote, barely defined, moved across Eddie’s face, but left it undisturbed. Wind over stone.

‘All right then,’ Moses said, ‘just tell me where it is. The pedestal, I mean. I’m curious, you see.’

‘Moses,’ Eddie said slowly, ‘it’s very early in the morning and I’m trying to eat my breakfast, OK?’ He shook his head. The first spoonful of cornflakes completed its journey to his mouth.

Moses rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Eddie’s cereal made a rhythmic crunching sound in the silence of the kitchen. Moses saw a battalion of statues with stiff arms and stony faces marching through the darkness towards him.

The next few days had proved awkward for them both. Moses hated the tube — it was too small for him — but when he wanted to go to the Trafalgar Square post office to check the directories he had to use it. What else could he do? His Rover had broken down again and there were seventeen statues on the bus-route.

Eddie seemed distracted too. Why did Moses keep going on about his past? What was all this crap about statues? And where had last week’s colour supplement gone? He could often be seen sitting around the flat deep in thought, his forehead resting on his fist, his elbow resting on his knee. That was the last straw for Moses. The idea that Eddie could have been a famous sculpture all along explained the failure of his various Mediterranean investigations. It had never occurred to him to explore the art galleries. He had been too limited. This, coupled with Eddie’s talent for evasion, made the task of arriving at any kind of truth almost totally inconceivable. Moses realised there and then that he would have to resign himself to never knowing the answer.

*

Midnight in the flat at Battersea. Recuperation time. Moses had arranged himself in front of the TV. Three cans of Special Brew beside his left foot. Cigarettes on the arm of his chair. Then the front door slammed. Eddie and Jackson breathed a mixture of whisky fumes and cold air into the room. Jackson leaned his bicycle — a black pre-war Hercules — against the wall. Eddie collapsed in a chair and spread himself as if he had acquired great power.

‘So who’s this old lady?’ he said.

Moses glanced up from an Open University programme about logarithms. ‘I’m watching TV,’ he said.

‘Jackson’s been telling me,’ Eddie said. ‘You met some old lady.’

‘She was a clairvoyant,’ Jackson said, ‘apparently.’

‘Of course she was,’ Eddie scoffed, ‘and she could make a cup of tea last for a week.’

‘Three days,’ Moses said.

‘I thought you were watching TV,’ Eddie said.

Moses turned back to the screen. He swallowed some beer from his can. Jackson placed himself carefully at one end of the sofa and crossed his legs.

‘So who is she?’ Eddie asked.

Moses was watching a professor scrawl a series of hieroglyphics on a blackboard. The professor wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a violent green shirt. His hair was about to take off. Moses didn’t understand a word he was saying. Great television.

‘What?’ he said.

‘This old lady who took you to The Bunker,’ Eddie persisted. ‘Who was she?’

‘I don’t know. Just an old lady. Look at this professor.’

Jackson threw a quizzical glance at Eddie. ‘He’s changing the subject.’

‘Avoiding the issue,’ Eddie said. ‘Pretending not to know.’

‘Something to hide, I expect.’

‘He’s embarrassed. Look at him.’

‘Old ladies, you see.’

‘Well, we all know what Highness is like.’ Eddie always called Moses ‘Highness’ when he was drunk.

‘No taste.’ Jackson adjusted the cushions on the sofa with a dispassionate hand. ‘No taste at all.’

‘Anything in a skirt,’ Eddie leered. ‘Absolutely anything.’

‘Incredible, really.’

‘Too drunk to notice, you see. Too fucking wasted.’

‘Yes,’ and Jackson became solemn, ‘a drunk.’

‘An animal. A real animal.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Taking too much speed.’

‘Lying in skips.’

‘Picking up old ladies.’

Moses sighed.

‘Picking up old ladies,’ Eddie repeated. He leaned forwards, his pupils floating in a pink surround. ‘And watching programmes about logarithms.’

Jackson chuckled.

‘If you must know,’ Moses said, ‘ she picked me up.’

More mockery, more laughter. In the end, of course, he had to tell the story, a story that concluded with the words, ‘And then she vanished into thin air.’

Eddie and Jackson exchanged looks.

‘Strange,’ Moses said, ‘don’t you think?’

Eddie stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I don’t believe it. Clairvoyants and black gangsters and cups of tea that last for ever. It’s too much. You made it up, didn’t you, Highness?’

‘I didn’t.’

Eddie grinned. ‘Come on, Highness.’

‘Every word I told you is true. I promise you,’ but Moses couldn’t help smiling at the expression on Eddie’s face.