Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Vince offered an obscene suggestion as to what it might have been that Eddie had eaten.

‘That’s not pink,’ Eddie said, ‘though, of course, you probably wouldn’t know.’

A pause while Eddie and Vince hit each other. Vince staggered backwards over a dustbin. Eddie danced away, smiling.

‘I still think it was Vince’s fault, though,’ Moses said.

The following day, after only four hours’ sleep, Moses boarded a bus (his car had broken down again) with a two-litre plastic bottle of water, a family-size pack of Paracetamol, and a hangover that was like people moving furniture in his head. He was on his way up north. His foster-parents, Uncle Stan and Auntie B, were expecting him for the weekend.

*

Auntie B opened the door in her French plastic apron. Her hands showered white flour. When she saw Moses, her face seemed to widen; her eyes narrowed and lengthened, her mouth stretched into a smile.

‘Moses,’ she cried. ‘How are you? Happy birthday.’

They embraced. Moses kissed her on both cheeks. Her hands stuck out of his back like tiny wings because she didn’t want to get flour on his clothes. He heard the scrape of Uncle Stan’s chair on the parquet floor of the study. It had been six months.

The Poles would have described themselves as an ordinary couple — middle class, middle aged, middle income-bracket — but Moses had noticed them the first time they visited the orphanage. They seemed different somehow. Their smiles didn’t look glassy or stuck-on. They didn’t bury him in comics and cakes until he couldn’t breathe. They turned the other people who visited into fakes.

Mr Pole wore prickly tweed jackets with leather ovals on the elbows. He carried his pipe bowl uppermost in his breast pocket like a chubby brown periscope, and the rituals of smoking had transformed his fingers into instruments, fidgety and deft. He grumbled a lot. His wife — B, as he called her — was round and peaceful. When you heard her voice you thought of a cat curling up in front of the fire. When you kissed her, your lips seemed to touch marshmallow. So soft and sweet and powdery.

He had always looked forward to their visits, so when Mrs Hood summoned him to her office one day and asked him whether he would like to go and live with Mr and Mrs Pole he didn’t hesitate. Nor did he need Mrs Hood to tell him how lucky he was. He had been dreaming of a moment like this for as long as he could remember without ever having really believed that it would arrive.

The Poles moved north, and Moses moved with them. They had bought a detached Victorian house on the outskirts of Leicester. They gave him a room of his own on the second floor. The view from the window skimmed the tops of several fruit trees, cleared the garden wall, and came to rest in the peaceful green spaces of a municipal park. He inhaled the smell of apples and the silence.

They were consistently straight with him. There was no coyness or pretence about his origins. He was ten years old, after all — no baby. They told him to call them Uncle Stan and Auntie B; that neatly sidestepped the twin potholes of mum and dad and, besides, he had already become accustomed to the names during their many visits to the orphanage. They explained why his name was Highness and not Pole. His name, they said, was all that he had that was truly his (well, not quite all, but they didn’t tell him that — not yet), and he should keep it. Out of the way they closed ranks and stood up for him whenever necessary came a sense of their own uniqueness and strength as a family and, over the years, he grew to love them — not as parents exactly (he couldn’t imagine what that must feel like), but as people who had been kind to him. Saviours, if you like. Apart from anything else they had saved him from an awful nickname (the children had called him names like Jew and Judas and Rabbi for years but then, when they discovered that he couldn’t really be Jewish because he hadn’t been circumcised, they began to call him, of all things, Foreskin ); he simply left it behind, along with the iron beds and the rising-bells, the walls painted two shades of green, and the constant echoey clang and clatter of the place, as if everything was happening inside a metal bucket. It had been such a luxury to move into that house in Leicester, and it was always a luxury to come back. A hushed and cushioned existence — except, that is, for the platoon of grandfather clocks that stood in the hall; a passion of Uncle Stan’s, they ticked and creaked and wheezed and, once in a while, all chimed simultaneously, a chaotic orchestra of gongs and xylophones and bells led, in Moses’s imagination, by a mad cook spanking the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. The carpets were fingernail deep and deliciously soft if, in the middle of the night, half asleep and barefoot, you had to cross the landing to the upstairs lavatory. The air smelt of wood-polish, pot-pourris of rose leaves, and Uncle Stan’s pipe-tobacco, and then, as you moved towards the kitchen, of warm pastry and freshly ground coffee.

Moses sat at the kitchen table as Auntie B put the finishing touches to the evening meal. Outside the lawn had turned blue, and birds clamoured from the webbed branches of the cedar tree. Uncle Stan stalked in and out of the room, ransacking cupboards for things of no importance.

‘How was your journey up?’ The floral print of Auntie B’s dress tightened across her wide back as she stooped to check the oven.

‘Not too bad. The trouble was, I went out with some friends last night, to celebrate, and I think I drank a bit too much.’ Even now, Moses was conscious of having to imitate good humour.

‘Well,’ Auntie B said, ‘it was your birthday, after all. People often get a bit tipsy on their birthdays, don’t they?’

A bit tipsy. Moses smiled to himself. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I feel a bit better now.’

Auntie B twirled round, her eyebrows high on her forehead, her mouth the shape of a lozenge. ‘Would you like a drink? Hair of the dog?’

It was as if she had learned this last phrase from some book without ever having been able to imagine how she could apply it to her own life but here, suddenly, was the chance, and she had taken it, and felt bright, naughty.

‘No thanks, Auntie B. Coffee’s perfect.’ He drained his cup to prove it.

Auntie B hovered with the percolator. ‘Another cup?’

‘Yes, please.’

Uncle Stan bustled into the kitchen, eyebrows bristling. ‘Where’s that magazine?’

Auntie B turned the upper half of her body and, beautifully bland, watched Uncle Stan as he began to pull drawers open. ‘What magazine?’ she said.

‘You know the one I mean,’ said Uncle Stan, in some kind of agony.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Oh, come on , poppet.’ In an excess of irritation, he finally looked at her.

The corners of Auntie B’s mouth tucked neatly under her round cheeks. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Stanley. I don’t know where your silly magazine is.’

Uncle Stan sighed dramatically and hurled himself from the room. Moses grinned at Auntie B.

‘He’s always losing things,’ she said, one eye on the door.

Nothing had changed, Moses thought. Uncle Stan had to worry and pester. Auntie B needed somebody who she could gently scold, hold up to ridicule, and then later, Moses suspected, draw towards her white upholstered bosom.

Two comfortable days went by — birthday presents, meals, TV. Auntie B produced endless cups of tea and coffee, and was constantly inventing excuses to cook or eat. Uncle Stan griped about money, aches and pains, old age.

It wasn’t until Sunday evening that they broached the subject that they had, in their own meandering way, been leading up to.