Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘I’ll bring something to drink,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ll christen the place.’

He was full of gestures like that, tense and generous.

Moses opened all the windows that evening. Lingering indoor smells of bleach and disinfectant blended with exhaust — and curry-fumes and the unlikely scent of blossom from outside. It was May now. Air you could almost wear. A breeze so light that, had it suddenly been made visible, it would, he imagined, have looked like lengths of pale floating muslin. A warm red hem to the buildings. A thin veil of pink beyond, on the horizon.

Moses sat on the window-ledge and waited for Jackson. He was thinking of nothing, content simply to gaze out over the city as it accelerated towards the hours of darkness. When the bell rang, he didn’t move at first. Then he seemed to unwind, to gather himself. His eyes clicked over into focus like the fruit in a fruit machine. Peering down, he saw Jackson’s tangle of hair four floors below. He kicked off his left shoe, and peeled off his sock. He dropped his door-keys into the sock, rolled it into a tight ball, and threw it out of the window. It bounced off the pavement and into the gutter, missing Jackson by about six feet. Jackson, being Jackson, flinched.

‘The keys,’ Moses shouted.

Jackson cowered below, his face a pale area of nervousness.

‘The sock,’ Moses shouted. ‘The keys are in the sock.’

He sat down again. He had just finished rolling the first christening joint when Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs. Jackson was wearing a beige raincoat with a wide sash belt and floppy lapels. It was an awful raincoat. Not for nothing had Jackson once been known as Columbo.

‘You ought to be careful with those keys,’ Jackson said. ‘You could kill somebody with those keys.’

‘I need more practice,’ Moses said. ‘You’ll have to come round again.’

Jackson looked at Moses’s bare left foot, then at the grey sock in his own right hand. He nodded to himself. There was a methodical deductive streak in Jackson. He thought first, asked questions afterwards. Two years back — it must have been during Jackson’s Columbo era — Moses had tried to persuade his friend to become a private detective.

‘Well, the rain seems to be holding off,’ Jackson observed, in silhouette against the perfect sunset. He cast around for somewhere to put his tightly furled umbrella.

‘ Rain? You forecast rain this evening?’

Jackson nodded, winced. ‘A severe depression moving south-east across the country. Scattered showers followed by outbreaks of heavier rain during the night.’

Moses suppressed a grin.

Jackson handed Moses a plastic bag containing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When Moses looked at him, not only with gratitude, but with a degree of curiosity, he explained, ‘I thought it was going to be cold, you see.’

Moses couldn’t help smiling now. He was glad that Jackson hadn’t taken his advice about becoming a private detective. He now knew that Jackson, after a great deal of intense and detailed investigation, would always come up with the wrong murderer.

He also suspected that Jackson’s constant reference to the weather was some kind of front. As if Jackson had inside him a device that took what he wanted to say and scrambled it. Moses doubted he would ever crack the code.

‘Well,’ and Jackson clapped his hands together in an attempt to convey the enthusiasm he quite genuinely felt, ‘what about a tour?’

There was nothing much to see beyond the rooms themselves, but the rooms, bare and uncluttered, still seemed miraculous to Moses.

‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘that the whole place was three inches deep in pigeon shit.’

Rapid pecking movements of Jackson’s head as he darted from one room to the next. He said little, but missed nothing. He noticed the skylight in the kitchen and the view of the Houses of Parliament. And when he saw the bath, he emitted a curious whooshing noise that sounded like red-hot metal being dipped in water. Moses took this for approval.

‘So,’ Moses said, when they reached the living-room again, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think it was time for you to move out of Eddie’s.’ A wily grin from Jackson, who never answered a question directly.

They cracked open the bottle of bourbon. Moses apologised for the absence of glasses. They drank out of jamjars instead.

‘We’re lucky,’ he told Jackson. ‘Bird has to drink out of a cake-tin.’

He sat down on the sofa and lit one of the joints. Jackson leaned against the windowsill. He was still wearing his galoshes. Things like that made him endearing.

Later, drunker, Jackson kept staring at Moses as if he suddenly found him quite fascinating. Moses shifted on the sofa. He tried passing the joint to Jackson. Perhaps that was what he wanted. Jackson accepted the joint, but the staring continued.

Eventually he had to ask, ‘What is it, Jackson?’

Jackson’s eyes slid sideways towards the door, then back to Moses again. ‘Who was that?’

Moses looked confused. ‘What?’

‘Who was that woman?’

‘Woman? What woman?’

‘The woman you were talking to.’

‘What are you talking about, Jackson? I wasn’t talking to a woman.’

‘Yes, you were. I saw you.’

Moses placed his right cheek in the palm of his hand and went back over the past few minutes with some thoroughness. ‘I don’t remember a woman,’ he said finally.

‘Didn’t you see her?’

Moses shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘How can you talk to somebody you can’t see?’ Jackson asked him.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know I was talking to anybody.’

‘She was sitting right next to you.’

‘Was she?’

‘Yes. There.’ And Jackson pointed at the sofa.

‘Where?’

‘There. On the sofa. Next to you.’

Moses turned and studied the place where the woman he was supposed to have been talking to was supposed to have been sitting.

‘What did she look like?’ he asked.

‘She was wearing a raincoat. A black raincoat. With a belt.’

Moses narrowed his eyes at Jackson. Whisky. A few joints. A devious intelligence. He wasn’t convinced.

‘It’s true.’ Jackson held his hands out in front of him as if he had an orange in each one. ‘It’s absolutely true.’

Moses examined his friend closely. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘what were we talking about?’

‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. I was going to ask you when she left.’

‘We must,’ Moses said, ‘have been talking very softly.’

‘You were. You were sort of — whispering to each other.’ Jackson gave the word a salacious twist.

‘And she’s left now, you say?’ Moses asked, glancing again at the empty space beside him.

Jackson nodded. ‘A couple of minutes ago.’

‘Hmm.’

Moses sat quietly on the sofa absorbing this strange information.

Then he thought of something.

He reached down with his right hand and touched the cushion next to him. And the funny thing was, it felt warm.

*

The following morning Moses went to see Elliot. Elliot was on the phone, so Moses waited in the doorway. He noticed how brooding, how oppressive, the office looked in the daytime. All those sombre reds and greys. They soaked up light, gave nothing back. At night Elliot’s desk withdrew into the shadows, but now it showed — a drab industrial plastic construction, its sterility broken only by a pair of soiled telephones and an overflowing Senior Service ashtray. Only the pool-table exploited the natural light, turning a green that was almost fluorescent as the sun played on its surface. The office had been designed with the small hours in mind: drawn curtains, low lighting, smoke.