Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

By 7.15 he had paid the bill (exorbitant! that was the last time he would ever leave the village!) and was making for Queensway on foot. He decided to breakfast at the Blue Sky Café, blue being a colour of which he was particularly fond. He found a table by the window, took in his surroundings. Teak veneer panelling to shoulder height. Matt yellow paint beyond. Sticky-looking ventilation-grilles. Cacti on the mantelpiece. He watched the door opening and closing on a succession of workmen who wanted cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. When he ordered, the waitress called him love.

Smiling, he arranged his A — Z, his bus-map and his diary on the table in front of him. He began to outline a strategy for his assault on The Bunker. The military side — reconnaissance, briefing, manoeuvres — appealed to him. In his mind, he wore a uniform.

‘Excuse me.’

He looked up and saw an old woman sitting at the next table. He could tell from her accent that she wasn’t English. Something about her face, too, didn’t belong. Not another bloody foreigner. He sighed visibly.

‘Were you addressing me, madam?’

The old woman reached across and touched him on the shoulder. Her hand descended so lightly that it might have reflected either awe on her part or fragility on his. The former seemed more likely.

‘You’re a man of great power,’ she said. ‘I can feel it.’

He glanced round. Nobody had noticed. The last thing he wanted, even this far from The Bunker, was to start attracting attention. He faced the old woman again. Her smile, almost coquettish, somehow avoided being grotesque. But he was brisk this morning, not easily charmed. He was too conscious of the ground he had to cover, of the red second-hand on the clock above the glass display-case of rolls and buns. His first thought translated rapidly into speech.

‘What do you want?’

The woman placed the same light yet curiously restraining hand on his arm. ‘What do you want, sir?’

Really, this was an impossible conversation. Quite impossible. He began to gather up his maps and notebooks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some rather important business to — ’

The woman’s face broke up into a network of creases and lines in whose intricate web he suddenly, and unaccountably, felt himself to be a fly.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said.

Frightened? Him? Outrageous. And yet –

This world. So very different. The cloth of the night dyed orange, embroidered with voices, torn by screams and the screech of brakes — had it frightened him?

The woman’s words pricked his skin like needles. Doubts began to run in his bloodstream.

‘You’re not comfortable,’ she was telling him. ‘You’re a long way from home, maybe that’s the reason. Yes, I think that’s the reason.’

Her voice scraped like dry leaves blowing over the surface of a road. Her dark eyes turned up stones. His scrambled eggs arrived, but he watched them congeal on the plate.

‘Give me your hand,’ she said.

He held out his hand, and she wrapped it in her cool papery fingers. She began to murmur to herself. This seemed to be taking place in a vacuum. Or not taking place at all. He was thankful nobody in the village could see him now. He observed his own submissiveness as if it was happening to somebody else.

‘Who are you exactly?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, you can speak!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought maybe you lost your voice. My name is Madame Zola. I’m a clairvoyant. Famous clairvoyant.’

He stared at his hand lying in hers.

‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that you are, how shall I say, curious.’

He recovered. ‘Where can you see that? On the palm of my hand?’ But his sarcasm drifted past her. She seemed not to have noticed it. Beneath notice, perhaps. ‘I am an old man,’ he began again. ‘One thing I’m not particularly curious about is the future.’

‘You’re also human.’

He didn’t follow.

‘You may be old,’ Madame Zola said, ‘but I’m older and I have to tell you one thing that maybe you don’t know. People are always curious about the future. It’s human character. They can be on the death bed. Still they have to know. Will I die? Will I live? How long will I live? What will happen when I die? All these questions. Always questions. Don’t tell me you’re not curious about the future.’ She waggled a hand, almost in admonition, under Peach’s nose. ‘And that — ’ one of her fingers stabbed the air triumphantly before curling up and rejoining the others — ‘is why I’ll never, never go out of business.’

Peach was thinking about Lord Batley. Batley had tried to escape at the age of seventy-nine. He had obviously believed in some kind of future. And wasn’t he, Peach, desperately curious as to what the outcome of today’s investigations would be?

Sighing, he admitted, ‘You’re right.’

‘I know I’m right.’ Her mouth curved downwards. ‘Do you want to know what I see in your hand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, you become simple now, you see? That’s my effect. I see it happen. Everywhere I see it.’ She waved a hand to include not just the café, but the city, the country too, the earth even, and the planets in attendance. ‘That’s my power.’

Her eyes drifted away from his, drifted beyond the yellow café walls and the steamy plate-glass, into a world that he couldn’t imagine. A smile spread like water through all the cracks and crevices in her face until it was irrigated with a look of pure contentment.

‘You’re going on a journey,’ she told him. ‘An important journey. A difficult journey. It will happen very soon, this journey.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m right?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes misted over again. ‘You’re looking for something.’

He stared at her. She spoke in cliches, but the clichés were true. Her simple, almost facile, statements lodged under the mind’s skin.

‘But you feel lost,’ she was saying. ‘Among strangers. Alone.’

Her eyes refocused, seeking confirmation. He gave it to her.

‘There’s some danger — ’

He remained calm. ‘What danger?’

‘That I cannot see.’

He glanced down at his untouched plate.

‘You must forgive me, I didn’t wish to stop you eating,’ Madame Zola said (she had a foot in both worlds, it seemed, and could move from one to the other like someone playing two games of chess at the same time), ‘but sometimes I feel something and when I feel something I cannot keep it inside. It has to come out. If I keep it inside I burst. Pif. Like a balloon.’

Peach suddenly found that he was hungry. He slid a forkload of cold scrambled egg into his mouth, then reached for a slice of toast. The butter had melted clean through. The toast sagged in his hand. He shrugged, ate it anyway.

‘Anything else?’ His briskness had returned with his appetite. They might both have been restored to him by Madame Zola.

She examined his left hand again. With his right, he gulped cold milky tea.

‘I see only your strength, your power. You remember I said that you have power?’

‘I thought you meant a different kind of power.’

‘You have both,’ and her smile, like a fishing-net, caught all possible meanings.

He withdrew his hand and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He began to gather his possessions together.

‘You have to go now,’ Madame Zola said. As if it was her idea, as if she was dismissing him.

‘If you’ll forgive me. I have an extremely testing day ahead of me.’

‘I think I’ll stay here a little longer.’ She indicated the unfinished cup of tea in front of her. ‘I wish you luck with your — ’ and she paused, dark eyes glittering — ‘ business .’