Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Gloria walked over to the window again. She stared out, thinking, perhaps, of her own body wrapped in that taut cloth, of a blue light revolving in the street for her.

Without turning round, she said, ‘I wonder if that person was dead.’

‘Probably,’ Moses said. ‘They covered the face.’

He stood behind her. Over her shoulder he saw somebody drive past in a white car.

‘I still don’t know you, really, do I?’ she said. She turned to look at him, but couldn’t. He was standing too close.

‘No,’ he said.

She let herself lean back against him. ‘Too many blue lights this evening,’ she said. ‘Fucks me up, you see.’

He smiled at the way she’d said evening. It was almost morning now.

She pulled away from him again. He felt she had trusted him in that brief moment, had entrusted him with some sacred part of herself, and was now detaching herself, confident about what she had done, knowing she had left something behind. He watched her cross the room. She bent down next to his record collection. She flicked through, found Charlie Parker. She put him on. Humming the first few bars of ‘Cherokee’, she began to rummage in her bag. She held up a tiny white envelope.

‘Since we’re going to stay awake,’ she said.

He smiled.

She chopped the coke on her own mirror, her legs folded beneath her, her body in a loose Z-shape.

‘Two for you, two for me, two for later,’ she said.

She took her two and handed him the mirror. When he handed it back, she was brushing the tip of her nose with the back of her finger and he noticed a fine groove running between her nostrils and thought of Blue Rooms on south-coast piers (holidays with Uncle Stan and Auntie B) and penny-in-the-slot machines and smiled.

‘What’s so funny, Moses?’

‘Your nose. It’s like a slot-machine.’

‘No more for you then.’ She ran her finger across the dusty glass and licked it.

The lamplight was diluting fast in the greyness of daybreak. Traffic grew heavier on the main road. The record crackled to a finish.

Gloria sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s go out somewhere.’

She kept changing, landing abruptly in a new mood like a needle jumping on a record and skipping whole tracks. She was a mystery-tour of a girl. Constantly wrongfooting him. She’ll go right here, he would think (an instinct, this), she’ll definitely go right. And she’d go left. Wonderful. He delighted in being unable to predict her.

‘Let’s go and have breakfast,’ she was saying. ‘In a hotel. In Mayfair.’

She inhaled the smoke from her latest cigarette impatiently. Her eyes had the glint of solid silver cutlery. ‘What do you think, Moses?’ Standing over him now.

A smile of collaboration spread across his face like a fresh white tablecloth. He could almost feel the hands of an experienced waitress smoothing it down at the corners.

Gloria swung down on to his lap. ‘Some of those hotels have dress restrictions so we’d better ring first.’

‘OK,’ and Moses was just reaching for the phone when he realised that he didn’t have one. That, in fact, he had never had one. That he ought to have one. (He would have to speak to Elliot.)

More laughter. Another line each. The first side of Charlie Parker again (for the third time).

During the next twenty minutes they ruled out The Ritz, The Savoy, and Claridge’s. Gloria said you couldn’t eat breakfast in any of those places without wearing jackets and ties and shit like that. They decided to take a chance on Brown’s in Dover Street.

Moses switched off the (by now) invisible light, and picked up his car keys. Night was over.

*

Moses swept past reception in his leather jacket, his slipstream turning several pages of the hotel register. He parted the glass doors of the breakfast room and manoeuvred his large unshaven face into the head-waiter’s line of vision.

‘We’d like a table, please.’

‘For two, sir?’

Moses gave this a moment’s thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘For four.’

‘Certainly, sir. If you’ll just follow me.’

The head-waiter, a narrow man with silver hair, threaded his way neatly to the centre of the room. Moses and Gloria followed. Somewhat less neatly.

‘Why four?’ Gloria hissed.

‘Because you get a better table that way,’ Moses hissed back.

It was five to eight. Moses surveyed the room with the superiority of somebody who hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours. There were one or two businessmen dressed like seals in sleek grey suits, their hair slicked back, still damp from the shower. An elderly couple, impeccable in cashmere and tweed, exchanged crisp pieces of information. Their limbs creaked and rustled like newspaper being folded as they shifted in their cane chairs. The light in the room, tinged with pink, felt soothing. The air smelt of coffee and oranges. It could have been summer outside. It almost was.

‘Tell you the truth,’ Moses said, after studying the menu for a while, ‘I’m not all that hungry.’

‘Neither am I.’ Gloria lit a cigarette. Smoke trickled professionally out of her nose. ‘What about some champagne then? Lanot’s only £17.'

Moses began to sweat. ‘Fine,’ he said.

Half a dozen waiters were hovering around their table in maroon and black like clumsy humming-birds. Moses signalled one over. He broke his flight pattern and stooped with a fat white pad. Moses ordered champagne, coffee, orange juice — and two fresh grapefruits.

‘Are you OK for money?’ Gloria whispered when he had left.

Moses smiled. ‘No, not really.’

‘What about the £80 you got for sheets?’

‘That’s not for breakfast. That’s for this special weekend that I want you to come on.’

‘You’re not going to tell me anything about it?’

‘No. You’ll just have to trust me.’

Gloria smiled as she crushed out her cigarette. ‘All right. I’ll pay for breakfast, you pay for the weekend. OK?’

Their waiter arrived with the champagne. As Moses watched him wave his wrists in the air, address himself to the bottle, and, teeth clamped to his bottom lip, ease the cork into his immaculate white cloth, Gloria’s words sank in.

‘You mean you’ll come?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll come.’

‘It may not be for a couple of weeks, you know.’

‘Do you think we’ll last that long?’

Moses’s laughter bounced around the room like a number of thrown balls. Knives and forks paused in mid-air. Eyes peered through eyebrows, over papers. Voices went underground, risking only whispers. Then one of the seals coughed, and the breakfast sounds pieced themselves together again into that familiar jigsaw where the sky is always at the top of the picture and children always look happy.

‘Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘nobody laughs at breakfast-time.’

It had the ring of an old Chinese proverb so they raised their glasses and drank to it, discovering, as they did so, that they were laughing again and that the proverb had, buried within it, the power of proving itself wrong — infinitely.

Something occurred to Moses.

‘Did we get any sleep last night?’

‘About an hour.’

‘What I mean is, did we have sex of any kind?’

Gloria touched her napkin to her mouth and surveyed him, the relic of a smile preserved on her face. ‘Do you know what I thought when I first saw you?’

Moses couldn’t guess.

‘It was the size of you, you see. Relative to me, I mean.’

‘What about it?’

‘I thought, If I go to bed with this man, am I going to get crushed?’

Moses looked shocked. ‘You didn’t.’

‘I did. I was really worried.’

Moses glanced down at himself, as if assessing his potential as an instrument of violence.