Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Moses had been trying to imagine Barbara topless and sociable. He’d failed. There was a long silence while they both looked elsewhere. Eddie, it seemed, was having a good run on the table.

Later she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to talk to people socially any more. It’s too much like work.’

Moses said he understood that. Her surly mouth and her hands stuck deep in her jacket pockets — she looked cold, but she had already told him that she wasn’t — now made sense to him. He wondered what she was expecting from Eddie, if anything. He knew there was nothing she could do to make her fate any different from Eddie’s last girl — number 999, or whatever number she had been. Especially after that phone-call. Soon she would be just another five words in Moses’s mind as he tried to get to sleep. She would be even less to Eddie. He would be on to number 1,001 by then.

It was this feeling, the feeling that she was owed something, something she would never get from Eddie, not in a million years, and certainly not in the three days the relationship would last, that made him start talking again when silence would have suited him just as well. He wanted to cut the ropes on her heart so it could float free of Eddie. He wanted to see her face light up. Just once.

‘See him over there?’ Moses said to her. ‘The one in the denim jacket?’

Barbara squinted along his outstretched arm. She might have been aiming a gun. At close range, Moses realised she was ugly. She pulled away and nodded.

‘That’s Billy,’ Moses said. ‘He’s a thief.’

A week ago, he told her, he had dropped into the pub for a quick drink. He noticed Billy standing at the bar with an A — Z, his index-finger tracing a route through the intricate grey tangle of streets, like a kid learning to read. His air of intense concentration roused Moses’s curiosity. He positioned himself at Billy’s elbow.

‘What are you up to, Billy?’

Billy jumped, swung round, flipped the A — Z over, all in a single movement. Wired-up wasn’t the word. He threw a few suspicious glances, left, right, and over his shoulder, then he leaned towards Moses, narrowing the gap between them to about six inches.

‘I got a job tonight.’ He stared at the bottles on the back of the bar as he spoke. His voice was so quiet you could have heard the clicking of a combination.

‘A job?’ Moses said jovially. ‘That’s really good news, Billy. It’s about time you got a job.’ He slapped Billy on the back, and sent him staggering.

Billy adjusted his denim jacket and gave Moses a withering look. ‘A job,’ he hissed. ‘You know. A job .’

‘All right, Billy, all right. No need to tell the world.’

Billy was fuming, the air rushing noisily out of his nostrils. He stared into his drink as if he was furious with it.

‘And you’re just checking up,’ Moses lowered his voice, ‘to see exactly where this job is. Right?’

He studied Billy innocently, and with great interest. He had never met a real thief before. He could smell whisky, crumbling garden walls at midnight, cold feet. He wanted to know more.

But Billy clammed up. He knocked his whisky back and ordered another as if Moses wasn’t there, knocked that back too, and checked his watch. Moses wondered who he had synchronised it with.

Billy left the pub at ten on the dot. He made so sure nobody saw him leave that everyone saw him leave. Only seconds later Maureen sidled up to Moses with her red furry slippers and her lopsided grin. She nudged him in the ribs with her skinny elbow.

‘Billy’s got a job tonight then.’

‘Has he?’

‘I’m telling you.’

‘How do you know, Maureen?’

‘He had his book with him, didn’t he?’ Her eyes wrinkled up with a natural cunning that she had inherited from her uncle who had a legal business in Waterford. ‘His A — Z. It’s the only book he’s ever read.’

She dived into her pint of cider and surfaced gasping.

‘’Course, he doesn’t understand it, does he? That’s why he always screws up. Never make a criminal, that Billy.’

Maureen had been right.

The next night Billy had slunk into the pub at around eight, his face pasty and dishevelled, his arms dangling, out of order. He asked for his usual, but without his usual enthusiasm.

Moses walked up to him and leaned on the bar. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I was rat-arsed.’

Billy looked at him, then looked back at his drink. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘How did it go?’ Moses was trying to be friendly.

‘I’m going to get bloody killed,’ Billy said.

He’d got lost, he said, and turned up at the wrong house, and his mate’d waited two hours, and in the rain as well, and now his mate was down with pneumonia or something, and he’d rung his mate up to see how he was, and his mate’d said, as soon as he was on his feet again, he was going to tear Billy’s head off.

‘How long does pneumonia last?’ Billy had asked Moses.

‘Pneumonia?’ Moses had sucked in air. ‘You can die of pneumonia, Billy.’

Billy had grinned. ‘Fingers crossed, eh Moses?’

Barbara crushed her cigarette out. She nodded in Billy’s direction. ‘Looks like he got away with it.’ He still had his head on was what she meant.

‘So far,’ Moses said.

He went to buy her another drink. When he returned, Barbara’s face was jutting brutally over the table.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ she asked him. She looked ugly for the second time. Uglier than the first time, actually. Violence in the offing.

Moses glanced round. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s in the toilet or something.’

‘The toilet’s right behind you, I would’ve seen him go in,’ Barbara snapped as if he was not only lying, but lying badly.

Moses crossed the pub to where he had last seen Eddie. Billy was playing now, slamming balls into pockets, dominating the table with a precision and authority he couldn’t seem to bring to anything else he did.

Even as he asked the question, Moses knew what was coming.

‘Seen Eddie?’

Billy jerked his head in the direction of the side-door without taking his eyes off the table. ‘He left.’

Moses felt a lot like Billy’s mate as he walked back to where Barbara was waiting. He was beginning to understand why there were so many headless statues in the world.

She had already guessed the truth, judging by the look on her face: it was stiff and pinched, and suspicion had killed the light in her eyes. She probably thought of him as an accomplice, some kind of decoy, what with all his ridiculous stories. He told her what Billy had said.

She scratched at a crack in the table-top with a blunt fingernail. ‘Did Eddie say anything about me? You know, earlier on?’

Yes, he did, Moses thought, remembering a brief exchange with Eddie at the bar. He said, How the fuck’m I going to get rid of Barbara?

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘Not that I can remember.’

Perhaps she believed the lie. She still hadn’t looked up from the table. The silence stretching between them finally came to an end when she snapped her handbag shut. ‘Where can I get a taxi?’

‘I’ll show you.’

They left the pub and crossed the main road. He flagged down a cab for her. As she climbed in, he said something about seeing her at the party maybe. She didn’t reply. She pulled the door shut, leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes. Her eyelids collected light from the neon fish and chip shop sign across the road, glowed a supernatural white. She looked blind.

The taxi did a U-turn and headed north.

Goodbye 1,000, he thought. Or whatever number you are.

*

First to see the fourth floor of The Bunker was Jackson.