Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

*

He thought of Jackson next.

Jackson would almost certainly be home. Jackson was always home. Jackson wasn’t interested in women. Once, when drunk, Jackson had suddenly announced that he was asexual. The laughter he had been expecting never arrived. Everybody simply agreed with him.

Women held no fascination for Jackson. He was far more interested in the weather — its beauty, its caprices. He watched the way the clouds walked across the sky. He listened to what the north wind said. These were his women.

Yes, he would be at home now, in his dark basement flat, his tense wiry frame bent over an antique weather-vane, or staring tenderly, myopically, at the latest reading on a barometer. He would be crouching at his desk, one hand plunged into his coarse, curly hair, calculating the exact position of an isothermal layer, or puzzling over the sudden prevalence of millibars in the air above the city. He would be totally absorbed in making yet another totally erroneous weather forecast.

Moses dialled the number and waited. Sure enough, three rings and there was the quavery tenacious voice he knew so well.

‘Hello?’

‘Jackson?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Moses.’

‘Who?’

‘Moses. You know. Six foot six. Size twelve feet. Likes old ladies — ’

‘I’m sorry, it’s not that Jackson.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got the wrong Jackson. This is Jackson’s brother. The Jackson you want isn’t here.’

There was a pause while Moses assimilated this sudden glut of information: one, Jackson had a brother, two, Jackson and Jackson’s brother sounded identical, three, Jackson’s brother also called himself Jackson, and four, Jackson, the Jackson he knew, was out.

Jackson? Out?

‘Where is he?’ Moses asked.

‘The Amateur Meteorological Society.’

Moses smiled. Few things could persuade Jackson to leave his cluttered basement flat. The AMS was one of them. ‘Could you tell him that Moses called?’ he said.

‘Moses. OK. Any message?’

‘Just tell him that I’ve got some good news.’

‘Good news. Right. Goodbye.’

Very dry brother, Moses thought. Probably a very good meteorologist. Either that or very successful with women. As he pondered the differences between Jackson and Jackson’s brother Jackson, he realised that he still hadn’t actually told anyone.

*

Who else was there?

Vince! What about Vince? Vince would probably tell him to fuck off. Vince was like that. Still.

He dialled Vince’s number.

A sullen voice said, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Moses.’

‘Fuck off, Moses.’

You see?

Moses sighed. ‘What’s wrong with you, Vince?’

‘Why should anything be wrong?’

‘What’s wrong, Vince?’

‘Lots of things. Everything.’

‘Like what?’

‘Alison’s left.’

Oh Christ, not again. People were always leaving Vince. Especially Alison was always leaving Vince. Moses didn’t blame her either. If he was going out with Vince, he would leave him too. There was some great disparity between Vince in your memory and Vince in the flesh. Moses was very fond of Vince when he was somewhere else. The imagined Vince was impish, controversial, photogenic; the real Vince was boorish, truculent, morose.

But, real or imagined, you couldn’t forget him somehow. His blond hair, dark at the roots, stuck up at all angles, unbrushed, unkempt, stiff with gel, lacquer and soap. His mouth turned up at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling, so he gave the impression of being good-humoured when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. And he always wore this black waistcoat, glossy with age and stains, and prolific with insulting badges; it was almost as if these badges had sprouted, like toadstools, from the black soil of his clothes, they were so much a part of him. His trademark, this waistcoat. Vince wouldn’t have been Vince without it.

He was forever being turned away from places — wine-bars, clubs, restaurants, pubs (he had been banned from his King’s Road local twice), cafés, shops, parties, you name it. If asked, he would recite, and not without a certain pride, a list of all the famous places he had never been allowed into. ‘I’m sorry, you’re drunk,’ doormen would tell Vince as he swayed, leering and malevolent, on the pavement — but they would always be looking at his waistcoat. In the end Moses decided there had to be a connection.

One night he tried an experiment. They had taken some angel dust at Vince’s squat, and were on their way to a private party at The Embassy Club. In the back of the cab, he turned to Vince. ‘You don’t need to wear that waistcoat tonight,’ he said in a gently persuasive voice. ‘Why not leave it behind for once?’ He should have known better. Gently persuasive voices didn’t work with Vince. Gently persuasive voices made him puke. He glared at Moses. The lights of Chelsea coloured his face green then red. ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ he snarled. ‘My mother?’ This was not a role that Moses was suited to. He dropped the subject and they went back to being friends. Naturally Vince didn’t get into The Embassy.

That they were friends at all sometimes seemed extraordinary to Moses, not least when he had to scrape the remains of Vince off the floor after a fight or stop Vince jumping out of a tower-block window. Driving Vince to St Stephen’s at four in the morning with a six-inch gash in the back of his head and his blood pumped full of drugs may have made a good story the first time round, but when you had to deal with it on a monthly basis it got pretty fucking tedious. Go and kill yourself somewhere else, you felt like saying. The things he did for Vince. He sometimes hated himself for being so good-natured, and wondered whether in fact he wasn’t Vince’s mother after all.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why’s Alison left you this time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Vince was talking through a mouthful of clenched teeth. ‘She said something about she couldn’t stand it any more.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘She went home. To her fucking parents.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘She was crying.’

‘You want me to ring her?’

Vince didn’t reply. Anger made him autistic.

‘I’ll find out how she is and call you back,’ Moses said.

Vince said something about not caring, then slammed the phone down.

Moses dialled Alison’s number.

‘Hello?’

Only one word but, like the single toll of a bell, the woman’s voice had resonance, hung on in Moses’s head, bright, droll. Not Alison then. Alison’s mother, maybe. But he had delayed too long, making her suspicious. She probably imagined Vince on the other end.

‘Could I speak to Alison, please?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Moses. I’m a friend of Alison’s.’

‘Will you wait a moment? I think she’s upstairs.’

Moses heard footsteps on a tiled floor, the opening and closing of a door, a faint Alison? and, in the distance, the quiet fretting of a string quartet. He had no idea what he was going to say to Alison. He didn’t even know her that well. She had a dry sense of humour and a head of striking, natural red hair. Some total stranger had once come up to her in the self-service restaurant above Habitat and asked her how she got her hair that amazing colour and Alison had said that her parents were responsible for that and the total stranger, gushing now, had said, Wow! Your parents are hairdressers? and Alison had said, No, my parents are my parents, and the total stranger had dried up, backed away, evaporated. The soft Indian-print skirts, the cluster of thin silver bangles on her wrists, the bohemian vagueness acted as elements of Alison’s cover. Underneath, she was pretty tough and sorted-out — almost, at times, Moses felt, predatory. He alternated between liking her a lot and mistrusting her. He couldn’t really understand why she had chosen Vince, but he knew that if one of the two got hurt it wouldn’t be Alison.