Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Not exactly a friend,’ Peach said, ‘though we do go back a long way,’ and, turning aside, he strolled through the arcade of his own amusement.

The landlord nodded once or twice. Smoke from his cigarette rose up through blades of sunlight. Traffic sighed beyond the frosted glass. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a pleasant pub.

Peach drained his glass.

‘Another?’ the landlord said.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘It’s on me.’

Peach hesitated. ‘I really ought to be getting on, but,’ and he consulted his watch, ‘well, all right. Just a half, mind. Thank you very much.’

When he emerged from the pub some twenty minutes later, his head seemed to be floating on his neck as a ball floats on water. It was an unfamiliar though not unpleasing sensation. He paused outside a launderette and took out his notebook. In the pool of the village, he wrote, you know where the water ends and the land begins. In the ocean of the world, you drift beyond the sight of any shore. He read it through to himself and nodded several times. He was quite pleased with it. Really quite pleased. It had an oriental, no, a universal ring to it. Perhaps he would try it out in one of his pep-talks. He moved off down the road again. His lower lip slid in and out as he walked. He passed an Indian restaurant, a delicatessen, a vet’s. Then suddenly, on the other side of the road, he saw the building that Terence, the landlord, had described. It was pink all right. It was very pink. And Peach was grateful for its pinkness. If it hadn’t been so pink, he would probably have walked right past it.

He crossed the road. At last, he thought. The Bunker! He tried to peer in through one of the ground-floor windows, but he could see nothing. Effective stuff, smoked-glass. He tested the double-doors. Locked. He wished he knew more about nightclubs: how they operated, when they opened, what the routine was. The smoked-glass windows confronted him with his own ignorance.

He stepped back to the kerb so as to get a better view of the rest of the building. On the second floor, he could see a pair of red curtains, a red lampshade hanging from the ceiling. The next floor up looked derelict: grimy windows, one pane missing. He would have assumed that the fourth floor was unoccupied too, had he not noticed a piece of black cloth covering one of the windows. He instinctively felt that this was where Moses lived. He walked round to the side of the building. Another door, also locked. Further along he found a metal gate about the width of a truck. Sharp green spikes lined the top to stop people climbing over. The padlock securing the gate was as big as his fist. He put his eye to the crack between the upper and the lower hinges. He saw a cobbled yard, a few dustbins, a stack of yellow beer-crates. Nobody had bothered to paint the back of The Bunker pink. Only the façade mattered, it seemed.

He stood back. He dismissed any thought of trying to break in. He would be running too many risks. Besides, the place looked impregnable. Especially to a man who couldn’t even cut his own toenails any more. He would have to wait.

He looked round, noticed a café on the other side of the main road. Positioned directly opposite The Bunker, it commanded views of both entrances. He crossed the road and pushed the glass door open. No foreigners, he was relieved to see. Nobody at all, in fact. He took the table by the window and ordered a coffee.

The nightclub stood on the junction, flamboyant, still.

It was 12.52.

*

By 3.15 he had severe indigestion. He had eaten a sausage sandwich, a ham roll, two cheese rolls with pickle, a bowl of oxtail soup, and a slice of cheesecake, and he had drunk three cups of coffee and two cups of tea. And nothing had happened. He decided to go for a walk.

He paid the bill and left the café. The door jangled shut behind him. He set off down the road. He resisted the urge to glance back over his shoulder at the pink building. A truck slammed past him, flinging his shirt against his back. He followed the curve of a high brick wall and Kennington Park came into view. A nylon banner slung between two oak trees announced the opening of a fun-fair that evening. He crossed the road to investigate.

A green generator hummed in the north-east corner of the park. Long red trucks huddled under the dusty foliage. He picked his way through fierce pieces of machinery. They lay about in the grass, dismembered, sticky with grease. Parts of something called an Octopus, apparently. He couldn’t imagine how they would look when assembled. Men with hands like wrenches were tightening nuts and bolts, shouting to each other in accents he could hardly understand. He moved through smells of beer and oil and sweat. Disco music crashed out of a gaudy wooden cabin at the foot of the Big Wheel. He winced. A man in fraying denims, hair tied back in a ponytail, gave him a hard still look as he passed — a look that seemed to freeze time and silence the music. Peach avoided the man’s eyes. He didn’t want any trouble. Leaving the clutter, the noise, the knots of fascinated boys behind, he wandered off across the grass.

The next half-hour passed uneventfully. He watched a woman push a crying child on a swing. The higher the child went, the more it cried. The woman looked away, smoking. Two black youths loped past in track-suits. They shouted something at him, but again he didn’t understand. It would take a lifetime, and he only had twenty-four hours. He saw a man asleep on a bench, a pair of training-shoes for a pillow, a scar on his bald head like the lace on a football. Mostly there was nothing to look at. It was a drab park, and that beer he had drunk at lunch-time had taken the edge off things.

Then the nightclub slid into his mind — pink, triangular, a vessel carrying a cargo of mysteries — and he imagined the black cloth parting and a face appearing at the window. While he walked aimlessly in the park, the young man whose face he didn’t know left by the side-door. Slipped the net. Escaped again. Time to get back, he thought. And almost ran back up the main road.

But nothing had changed. The black cloth hanging in the fourth-floor window as before. The same cars parked on the street outside. He walked into the café and sat down at his table.

The owner shuffled over in carpet-slippers. ‘Twice in one day,’ he said. ‘You must really like it here.’ He let out a dry sarcastic chuckle.

Peach ignored him. He ordered lasagne, a side salad, vanilla ice-cream, and a cup of black coffee. ‘And make it slow,’ he said.

‘And what?’

‘And make it slow.’

The man backed away, scratching his head.

He returned half an hour later. ‘Slow enough for you?’

Peach nodded.

His lasagne stood on its plate like the model of a block of flats. The salad? A few dog-eared leaves of lettuce and a pile of carrot-shavings. He ate with no appetite, one eye on the window. He sometimes paused for minutes between mouthfuls. He was beginning to hate the pink building. He knew it off by heart, in minute detail, from the fringe of yellow weeds on the roof to the Y-shaped crack beneath one of the ground-floor windows. The pink façade had burned itself into his subconscious and would recur on sleepless nights. His eyes itched with the pinkness of it. He never wanted to look at anything pink again. Never.

Then it was 6.56. A black Rover — a Rover 90, registration PYX 520 — turned into the street that ran down the left-hand side of The Bunker. It parked. The door on the driver’s side opened. A man got out. Early to middle twenties. Leather jacket. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Tall. 6’5”, 6’6”. Big too. 220 Ibs, perhaps. Maybe more. The man was alone.

Peach had long since stopped eating. His two scoops of vanilla ice-cream subsided in their clear glass bowl. He watched the young man cross the pavement, unlock the black side-door, and vanish into the building. A minute or two later a hand parted the black cloth in the fourth-floor window. Peach’s lower lip slid out and back. Once.