Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Thank you, Madame Zola.’ Peach even bowed slightly.

He paid the waitress and left the café. It was 8.45. The sun pressed against the inside of a thin layer of cloud. He unbuttoned his jacket as he hurried down Queensway. His mind, unleashed, sprang forwards.

That woman had slowed him down with her mumbo-jumbo. You’re looking for something, she had said. But they all said things like that, didn’t they, fortune-tellers? She couldn’t have told him what he was looking for or whether he was going to find it, could she? Of course she couldn’t.

Free of the Blue Sky Café, out in the open air, he welcomed his scepticism back like a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a long time.

*

By the time he reached Bayswater Road the sun had broken through. It landed in a million places at once: a car windscreen, the catches of a briefcase, a man’s gold tooth. He watched the city organise itself around him. He had his bearings now. Marble Arch stood to his left, half a mile away, solid as muscle. Hyde Park lay in front of him, a stretch of green beyond severe black railings. And somewhere to the south, approximately seven miles away, The Bunker waited. He leaned against the bus-shelter, his jacket draped over his arm.

After ten minutes the bus came. It dropped him at Oxford Circus. He caught another going south on Regent Street. The route he had selected took him past many of the famous sights of the city — the statue of Eros, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament — but he only absorbed them subliminally. It was the action that interested him, not the scenery. His mind moved in another dimension, juggling possibilities, shaping initiatives. He wasn’t a tourist. He was a policeman.

The bus swung left over a bridge and he knew, without looking at the map, which bridge it was. A barge loaded with machinery forged downriver, shouldering the water aside. Gulls fluttered above. They reminded him of the greengrocer’s story. The gulls in the air above the ploughed field: symbols of freedom. How far he seemed from that closed world. How far he was.

When the bus turned into Kennington Road, he stepped out. His head swivelled. He used the gleaming dome of the Imperial War Museum (how appropriate, he thought) to orientate himself. One problem. Kennington Road ran north and south from the crossroads where he was standing. Which way should he go?

A police car pulled up at the lights. Peach approached the window on the passenger’s side.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I wonder if you could tell me where The Bunker is?’

The policeman he was talking to had an unusually pale face. It was so pale that it was almost transparent. Even the policeman’s eyelashes were pale. Peach’s first albino.

‘Never heard of it.’ Not only an albino, but arrogant with it.

‘It’s a nightclub,’ Peach explained.

The policeman pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a strand of colourless hair. ‘Don’t know it.’

His colleague, the driver, was muttering something.

‘Try down there.’ The policeman pointed south with his chin. ‘Can’t help you otherwise, mate.’

‘Much obliged,’ Peach said. ‘Thanks very much.’

Mate, he thought. Bloody albino. Take his uniform away and he’d probably disappear altogether.

He set off down the road. The traffic lights had already changed, but several seconds passed before he heard the police car move away. He understood. If he had been approached by an old man in a sports jacket who was looking for a nightclub, he would have been suspicious too. Especially if he happened to be an albino. Axe to grind. Revenge on the world. He didn’t look back, though. He kept walking. Basic psychology. Only the guilty look back. The guilty and the stupid.

He walked for five or ten minutes and saw nothing that even remotely resembled a nightclub (not that he was any too sure what nightclubs looked like in the daylight). Kennington Road ran south into a glitter of bicycle-shops and pub-signs. Council-blocks the colour of dog-meat. A green and white striped bingo-hall. Trees so dusty that their leaves looked plastic. He began to have doubts. What if Eddie had lied? Could Moses have covered his tracks?

He sat down on a bench and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief. He opened his suitcase and examined his notes. He took those anxious questions of his and crumpled them like so much waste-paper. He began again, with a fresh blank sheet, as it were. Outlined his mission to himself. Stated the priorities.

1) Establish the exact whereabouts of the nightclub.

2) Establish whether or not Moses Highness is living at said nightclub.

3) If so, establish visual contact.

4) If not, start again — with Eddie.

Incisive now, Peach walked across the pavement and into a newsagent’s. He asked the Indian behind the counter whether he knew of a place called The Bunker. The Indian didn’t.

He asked a teenager at a bus-stop. The teenager didn’t know either.

Peach walked on, undeterred, a pear-shaped man with a jutting lower lip. Sooner or later, he thought. Sooner or later.

Reaching another set of traffic lights, he noticed a pub on the corner. They would know. Surely. He consulted his watch. Half an hour to opening-time. He sat down on a low brick wall. And waited.

As soon as the bolts were drawn (11.32), he was through the double-doors.

‘You must be desperate,’ the landlord said. ‘You nearly knocked the place over.’ His eyes creased at the corners; he was making a joke, but the joke included as one of its ingredients a sense of wariness.

Peach eased himself on to a stool and leaned his forearms on the bar. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘has not exactly been the easiest of days.’

The landlord tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes, nodded.

Peach didn’t usually drink at lunch-time, but usually was a word that didn’t apply. Not today. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter,’ he said. ‘Anything’for yourself?’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir. I’ll have a lager.’ The landlord pulled Peach’s bitter first, then the lager. ‘Your good health, sir.’

Peach raised his glass to his lips. ‘Cheers.’

When he spoke again he had almost drained it dry. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you could help me.’

‘Do my best, sir,’ the landlord said.

‘I’m looking for a place called The Bunker. It’s a nightclub. Somebody told me that it’s on this road.’

The landlord shook a cigarette out of a squashed packet of Benson’s. He ran the tip of his tongue along his sparse moustache, pressed his lips together, and nodded (Peach’s intuition told him this happened a lot). ‘I know the place,’ he said. ‘It’s been open less than a year. Run by a coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.’ He sniffed. ‘No pun intended.’ He struck a match and lit his cigarette. He put the match out by shaking it, the way a nurse shakes a thermometer.

Peach swallowed some more beer. ‘Where is it?’

‘Just down the road.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘About a hundred yards down. Right-hand side. You can’t miss it.’ The landlord smiled. ‘It’s pink.’

‘Pink?’

‘That’s right.’

They looked at each other and shook their heads in the manner of men who have seen all kinds of things come and go. There was a certain intimacy about the moment.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Peach ventured, ‘you know whether a young man by the name of Moses is living there, do you?’

The landlord arranged his features in a position of deep thought. ‘Moses? No. I don’t know anyone called Moses.’

Ah well, Peach thought. Worth a try.

‘Friend of yours?’ the landlord enquired.