Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Was I?’ Moses was genuinely shocked. ‘I wasn’t.’

But Gloria just smiled at him. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered where we might find Marvin Gaye’s brother.’

She led him back downstairs to a room by the front door. ‘In there,’ she said.

The door stood ajar, and they could hear somebody playing the piano inside, soft disconnected notes. Moses pushed the door open. They paused on the threshold.

The man sitting at the piano was black. He wore a blue suit and a mustard roll-neck sweater. Did he look like Marvin Gaye? What did Marvin Gaye look like? Moses couldn’t remember. Anyway, the man was alone. There was nobody else in the room. Moses felt awkward, guilty somehow, as if they had stumbled into someone’s private grief. He examined the room carefully. Yes, the man was alone all right. Nobody was listening to Marvin Gaye’s brother playing the piano. Moses tugged nervously on Gloria’s arm. He was fucked if he was going to hang around in a room full of nobody listening to a famous person’s brother play the piano. Too embarrassing.

‘Let’s go,’ he whispered. ‘Quick, before he sees us.’

As they backed away, on tiptoe, the pianist turned round. He didn’t look surprised or hurt or angry. Not a bit. In fact, he seemed very relaxed. He was even smiling.

‘Can I help you people?’

‘Well, OK,’ Moses said. ‘Are you by any chance Marvin Gaye’s brother?’

‘No,’ the pianist said. ‘Are you?’

Moses laughed. ‘Somebody told us that Marvin Gaye’s brother was going to play the piano tonight.’

The pianist scratched his head with one long humorous finger. ‘I didn’t know he had a brother.’

‘I bet he hasn’t got a brother,’ Moses said.

Gloria summed up. ‘Amy’s always been full of shit.’

*

They found an unopened bottle of Chianti in the kitchen — the way the wine was lasting, anyone would think Jesus was going to play the piano — and wandered back upstairs to look for Louise. They came across Eddie in the Chinese room.

‘Look who it is,’ Eddie said.

‘What’ve you been up to?’ Moses asked him.

Eddie eyed Gloria. ‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘ Oh, you re Eddie,’ Gloria said. ‘The one with the special powers. How exciting. To have special powers.’

Eddie seemed amused. ‘Highness has a vivid imagination,’ he told her.

‘Highness?’

‘Some people call him Highness.’

‘Some people are drunk,’ Moses said. ‘I’m thinking of leaving. What are you doing?’

Eddie grinned. ‘I’m thinking of leaving.’

‘Alone?’

‘No.’ Eddie turned to a shy girl in tight jeans who had, until now, been attached to the back of his shirt. ‘This is Dawn,’ he said. Or it could have been Diane. Or Doreen. Moses didn’t quite catch the name.

Dawn/Diane/Doreen smiled hello. A red ribbon blushed in her black hair like a moment of embarrassment.

‘Where’s Louise?’ Gloria asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Moses said.

‘Police,’ somebody announced calmly.

Later Moses wondered how this had carried above the soundtrack of the party. Some words had more punch, perhaps.

‘It’s a raid,’ came the same calm voice.

There was a general furtive surge in the direction of the door, as if people were pretending that they weren’t really leaving. Out on the stairs, the urgency increased and Moses was swept along, Gloria in front of him, Eddie and D/D/D somewhere behind.

Two officers with flat hats and glistening moustaches flanked the front door. One of them tipped his face at Moses.

‘Not driving tonight, are we, sir?’

‘Beep beep,’ came a voice from the stairs.

Everybody laughed.

‘I don’t — ’ Moses began, but the policeman, scowling, waved him through.

At the bottom of the steps Moses put his arm round Gloria. She leaned into him a fraction, just enough to tell him that she had been waiting for that. He felt her ribs tremble under his fingers. She glanced up, lips parted. He bent over her. His tongue brushed her teeth. Bedtime.

Louise’s face floated into the corner of his eye. ‘Somebody chucked a brick through the window,’ she was saying.

They reached the pavement. Everybody had left the party at the same time, and small groups of people stood about looking out of context. Two panda cars nuzzled the kerb. Their blue disco-lights were flashing, but nobody was dancing. D/D/D shrank against a tree, her coat thrown over her shoulders.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ Moses asked her.

She shrugged. She looked puzzled, derelict, cold.

Oh Christ, he thought.

‘We’ve lost Eddie,’ he told the other three. ‘I’m just going to go and have a look for him. Wait for me, won’t you?’

Gloria sent a queer little smile through the darkness towards him. He hesitated, self-conscious suddenly. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

Inside the house a few people lay against the walls. Too smashed to move, react or care. Moses stepped over bodies, bottles, ashtrays — the rubble of a party. Music was still playing in the evacuated rooms, loud abrasive music, someone’s expression of defiance. He asked one girl whether she had seen a man who looked like a statue. She stared right through him. It was a conspiracy, he decided. A conspiracy of statues.

After about five minutes he gave up. He almost broke his ankle on the way downstairs, but it was less out of drunkenness than out of impatience to be with Gloria again. He cursed Eddie as he rubbed the ankle where it had turned over. What was the point of all these escape-acts anyway? Who did he think he was? The Houdini of love? Fuck him.

He limped out through the door and down the steps. Long splinters of glass from the shattered window made Egyptian shapes on the footpath: pyramids, sabres, crescent moons. The trees creaked overhead, shone black, dripped moisture. Three figures waited by the gate with questions on their faces.

‘No luck, I’m afraid,’ he told them.

They stood there for a moment longer, shoulders hunched against the chill, all staring in different directions.

Moses leaned on the railings. He watched the road curve out of sight, dissolve into the mist. Someone had bought hundreds of aerosols of fine rain and sprayed them into the orange air that hung around the street-lamps.

Then Gloria came up, touched his arm. ‘Where did you leave the car?’ she asked, her face a mask of black and silver.

*

Moses dropped Louise and D/D/D in Victoria and now he was driving south down Vauxhall Bridge Road, alone with Gloria. They hadn’t needed to discuss anything. It was one of those tacit agreements, after a party, three in the morning. Things like this didn’t happen to Moses very often and when they did he was usually too drunk to notice. He was drunk now, but he was noticing.

‘Does he always do that?’ Gloria asked. ‘Disappear like that?’

She huddled down in the passenger seat, her feet tucked into the glove compartment.

Moses chuckled. ‘Yes, he does. I don’t know what it is. Maybe he gets bored. Maybe it’s all too easy for him. I don’t know.’

Gloria wound the window down an inch or two and lit a joint. The slipstream took the smoke from her lips and bent it out into the night air — a silk scarf from a magician’s sleeve. She seemed to be thinking over what he had just said.

‘Bastard,’ she said eventually. It was the last carriage in a long train of thought.

Moses glanced across at her and smiled. They kept turning towards each other at the same time as if there were magnetic forces attracting his face to hers and hers to his.

‘Are you going to stay?’ Moses asked, as he accelerated over the bridge. ‘Tonight, I mean.’