Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Moses was beginning to feel tired and foolish, he was beginning to feel as if he was playing a game of surrealist tennis that would last for ever, he was just reaching for the Second World War air-raid siren when help came from an unexpected quarter in the shape of a cat, a street-cat by the look of it, jet-black, with a blunt nose and fierce yellow eyes. It slid into the room from one of the window-ledges and crouched by the wall, eyes scouring the busy air, its rangy haunches tense and trembling. Moses stopped beating pigeons and stared at the cat. Where had it come from? And what did it have in mind?

Everything seemed to go quiet as Moses watched the cat begin to move slowly round the edge of the room, its eyes never leaving the pigeons, not for a moment; it seemed to know exactly where the walls were without looking. Halfway round, it paused, spread itself flat on the floor, hindlegs shuffling, and unleashed a haunting guttural cry that cut through the silence its entrance had created. It made Moses think of a seagull. Yes, now he thought about it, the cat sounded exactly like a seagull. How extraordinary.

The pigeons, meanwhile, had reacted with consternation and frenzy. They were clambering over one another in a desperate effort to reach the windows. In a matter of seconds they were gone. The cat sat up, lifted its left leg, scratched its ear, then licked its flank. In the light of its recent eerie display of control, this was reassuringly catlike. The washing over, it shrugged its shoulders, turned tail, and left the way it had come, without so much as a backward glance. Moses was impressed.

During the days that followed, the black cat patrolled the edges of his mind with a casual power, uttering its uncanny seagull cry from time to time as if it could still see the ghost of a pigeon there. The thought of this cat sustained him as he shovelled shit, chiselled and scraped at it, tipped it into buckets and bags, and hauled it down eight flights of stairs and out to the dustbins in the cobbled yard at the back of the club. Sometimes Elliot would be there, lounging against a wall, the spring light picking out the bracelet on his wrist, the mockery in his grin.

‘How’s it going up there, Abraham?’ Elliot asked once as Moses passed. He lit a Dunhill. His gold lighter flashed like a piece snapped off the sun.

Moses looked at him. ‘Was that suit expensive, Elliot?’

‘Two hundred.’ Elliot glanced down, brushed at a lapel.

‘Well, in that case, it’d be a shame to get shit all over it, wouldn’t it?’ Moses said, gesturing with his bucket.

After that Elliot often backed away in genuine alarm whenever Moses trudged past.

*

That April Moses worked harder than he had ever worked for money. Every day for three weeks he undid the padlock on the black door and climbed the eight flights of stairs and, gradually, the shit cleared. Areas of clean floorboards opened up before him like a whole new life. The sight of all this unfurnished space ignited him all over again, and his face would glow through a spattering of dust and filth. Hands blistered, dirt embedded in every crevice of his skin, he returned to Eddie’s flat each night with a larger vision of his future.

There were four rooms altogether. He decided to call them bedroom, lounge, kitchen, bathroom, though there were very few clues as to which was which. No cooker in the kitchen, for instance. No bed in the bedroom. The rooms led one into the next through doors that opened unwillingly, dragging on their hinges, as if children had been swinging on the handles. The walls and ceilings had been painted different shades of grey. The plaster had come loose in some places, leaving patches that looked like scabs. In the bedroom, there was a long brown stain where the rain had leaked through.

Of all the rooms Moses’s favourite was the one he had walked into with Elliot on the morning of the five hundred pigeons. It had a black fireplace surrounded with dark-blue tiles, and a trio of arched windows that reminded Moses of railway stations. They looked out over a clutter of rooftops, treetops, chimney-pots and TV aerials out of which, toffee-coloured in this landscape of red and grey, and surprisingly close, rose the intricate spires and crenellations of the Houses of Parliament. Away to the west a pair of pale-green gasholders stood among the rows of terraced houses like giant cans of paint. Modern offices blocked the view eastwards with their coppery glass façades. Even though it faced north, the room felt bright owing to the size and elevation of these three windows. It had possibilities, this room. Definite possibilities.

The real find, though, was the bath. (Moses loved baths, even though he had to fold himself double to get into one.) Deep-chested, eight feet long, it stood on four flexed metal claws. A lion of a bath, it was. Its pristine antique enamel seemed unmarked but for the faintest of yellow stains running from the overflow down to the plug-hole. Sometime during his second week of work Moses walked into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. A moment’s silence, as if the machinery was gathering itself. Then a clanking, a subterranean clanking deep in the foundations of the building, like a metal bucket hitting the bottom of a dry well, followed by a gurgling that seemed to be ascending, growing louder, that built to a crescendo as the tap coughed a few brown splashes into the bath. Seconds later a powerful flow of water was crashing on to the enamel. Steam lofted into the chill air. Moses began to take off his clothes.

Through the small window above the taps he could see the planes easing down into Heathrow. They slid silently from left to right, dropped two hundred feet as they hit a swirl in the glass. He lay in the water until it had turned cold for the third time, pleasure written all over his face in invisible ink. In future, when crisis threatened or exhaustion softened his bones, he would retreat to the bathroom. It would be his sanctuary from the world. It had the power to heal, soothe, replenish him. Sometimes he would climb into the empty bath and lie on the cool enamel, fully dressed, with his eyes closed. Other times he would open those fierce taps and run a bath so deep it swamped the floor. But he would always feel better afterwards — calmer, more objective. A sense of proportion would descend, as silently as planes. If he ever left The Bunker, he would have to take the bath with him — somehow.

On the day of his first bath, the black cat appeared again. He paused on the window-ledge, one paw raised in the air, disappointed, perhaps, by the absence of pigeons. His glowing yellow eyes raked the room and fixed, eventually, on Moses. Such was the hypnotic power of the cat’s gaze that Moses thought, for one terrifying moment, that he might throw himself from the window as the pigeons had done. He concentrated on one simple thought: I am not a pigeon. The black cat eyed him without blinking. He seemed to be listening, taking the information in. When Moses thought the cat had understood, he relaxed.

‘Bird,’ he said affectionately.

He had decided to give the cat two names, one formal, one familiar. His formal name would be Anton, after Anton Mesmer, who believed that any one person can exercise influence over the will of another by virtue of the emanations proceeding from him. Any one person or cat, Moses had decided, after that exhibition of control over the will of five hundred pigeons a week or two back. His nickname, however, would be Bird. Moses had toyed with the name Seagull, but you couldn’t call a cat Seagull, could you? Bird, he felt, was a nice compromise. Bird the cat.

Bird responded with a cry worthy of his new name. Bird was hungry, perhaps.

Moses fetched the old green and gold cake-tin he had found under the kitchen sink and covered the bottom with milk. He placed the tin in the middle of the living-room floor. Bird stared at Moses with suspicion as Moses moved back to the kitchen doorway. Then, dropping down to floor-level without a sound as if he weighed nothing, he began to creep towards the tin. Stalking it, as if it might be dangerous. Once there, he squatted over the tin, neck extended, and lapped at the milk, his tongue moving out and back like a tiny pink clockwork toy.