Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Vince, part those filthy bits of cloth you call curtains and feel the sun beating on your face.’

‘I’ll give you beating on your face, you cunt. You woke me up.’

Oh, sacrilege.

‘But Vince, you have to smell the morning air.’

‘Fuck the morning air.’

‘Well, all right. I just thought we could go out for a drink, that’s all.’

‘Where?’

Give Vince credit. He could sort the wood out from the trees.

‘That pub next to you,’ Moses said.

‘About twelve, OK?’

‘Yeah, but Vince, why don’t — ’

‘If you say another word about the weather, I’m going to bloody kill you.’

Moses smiled again. Vince’s threats were always idle. Now if that had come from James ‘The Human Mangle’ Ridley –

*

Vince was already standing outside the pub when Moses turned up a few minutes after midday. Both Vince’s arms were bandaged from the base of his fingers to the crook of his elbow. He was struggling to light a cigarette. Eddie lounged against a nearby wall. He was wearing a three-piece suit and a pair of sunglasses. He was doing nothing to help. When he saw Moses he pointed to a bottle of Pils on the table.

‘I got you a drink.’

‘Cheers, Eddie.’ Moses’s throat was dry and he swallowed half the bottle before he put it down. He looked round for the inevitable girl. ‘Not alone, surely?’

Eddie nodded, lit a Rothman’s. Moses raised an eyebrow. They both drank.

‘Nice suit,’ Moses said.

‘I’m working today,’ Eddie explained. ‘Got to be back by three.’

‘That’s rough.’ Moses jerked his head in Vince’s direction. ‘What happened to him?’

‘Usual story.’ Eddie flicked ash. ‘He got into a fight with a couple of windows.’

Moses sighed.

Vince moved closer, held his arms out for inspection. His fingers shook. They were stained bright yellow from the iodine. Blood had dried under his nails and embedded itself in the criss-cross creases on his knuckles.

‘Did it hurt?’ Moses asked.

‘No,’ Vince said. ‘Glass doesn’t hurt.’

Moses hadn’t realised that.

‘Not until afterwards,’ Vince added, on reflection.

They laughed at that. Acts of self-destruction seemed to mellow Vince out. Afterwards he became tolerable, almost human. For a few days, anyway.

‘I had to take him to the hospital,’ Eddie said. ‘It was two nights ago. I got back from Soho about half three. Cab dropped me off. When I walked up to the front door I saw it was open. Thought I’d been broken into. I went in and turned the light on. Everything looked normal. TV was still there. Nothing missing at all. Then I went into the bedroom. Vince was lying on my bed. Blood everywhere.’

Vince grinned at the ground. He was nodding as if to say, Yeah, it’s all true.

‘He was a right fucking mess. Out of his head completely. Skin hanging off his arms in flaps. I had to phone a cab, take him to St Stephen’s. Didn’t want him bleeding to death in my flat.’

‘How did he get in?’ Moses asked.

‘I bust the door down,’ Vince said.

‘I’m going to get one of those metal doors,’ Eddie said. ‘You know, like they have in New York. Next time he’s going to have to find somewhere else to bleed.’

‘I’ll smash the window,’ Vince said.

Eddie gave him a steady look. ‘I’ll move.’

‘I’ll find you.’

‘I’ll move so far away you’ll bleed to death before you get there.’ Eddie smiled and went inside to buy another round. The drinks were on expenses, he had already told them.

Moses looked Vince over, sighed again.

‘All this is mine,’ Vince said. He pointed at the ground. The pavement around his feet was spattered with drops of blood, all the same shape but all different sizes, like money or rain. Some of them still looked fresh, a rich red; others had dried in the sun, turned black.

‘You must’ve been here a while,’ Moses said, bending down. ‘Some of this blood’s dry already.’

Vince grinned. ‘Sherlock fucking Moses. I was here last night.’

Moses straightened up again. ‘How many stitches did they give you?’

‘That’s nineteenth-century stuff. They don’t use stitches any more. They use tape.’

‘Tape?’

‘They tape the flaps of skin together. It’s better than stitches. Doesn’t leave a scar.’

Vince liked to be thought of as an authority. He took a pride in knowing things that most people weren’t fucked up enough to know. He was like a veteran returning from a war that nobody had ever heard of. He told stories of action he had seen, he showed off his wounds, but if you asked the wrong questions he retreated into sullen silence. With Vince there was always some kind of war going on. Whenever he got angry or depressed, bored even, he would hit himself with some lethal mix of drugs and alcohol, and then he would go out and try and beat shit out of a brick wall or a truck or a football crowd, anything so long as the odds were impossible. He always came off worst, he always suffered. His wars were all lost wars. But he never surrendered. That was where the pride came in.

Eddie returned with the drinks. He had taken his sunglasses off, and Moses now saw the swelling around Eddie’s left eye. The skin had a singed look: yellow shading into brown.

‘Christ,’ Moses said. ‘Not you as well.’

Eddie put his sunglasses back on. ‘Somebody hit me.’

‘Why?’

‘He thought I was stealing his wife.’

‘And you weren’t?’

‘I was just talking to her.’

‘Just talking to her,’ Moses scoffed. Eddie never just talked to women.

‘All right, she read my palm.’

‘The love-line,’ Vince leered from the shadows.

‘So you were holding hands,’ Moses said. ‘What else?’

‘She asked me to dance.’

‘How could you refuse?’ Vince said.

‘So we danced. I tried to, you know, maintain the proper distance, but— ’

Moses snorted.

‘— but she held me close.’

‘And her husband didn’t like it,’ Moses said.

Eddie sighed. ‘Her husband was a rugby player.’

Smiles all round. The conversation drifted, becalmed in the heat, the stillness outside the pub. At quarter to three Eddie said he had to go. ‘What are you two going to do?’

‘Drink,’ Vince said. ‘You got any money, Moses?’

Moses swapped a look with Eddie.

‘Just asking,’ Vince added quickly, but not quickly enough.

He had just taken Moses and Eddie back to an afternoon about a year before. In Moses’s memory it felt like a Sunday. They had been at a party all night. They had slept late, got up wasted. Bleak windows, grey faces. A pall hanging over everything. Intermission, Moses called it. One thing’s over and the next thing hasn’t started yet. So you wait, smoke, don’t talk much. Greyness invading, the tap of rain.

Shifting Vince’s coat, Moses noticed a name-tag sewn on to the collar. Vincent O. Brown, the red cotton handwriting said.

‘Vincent O. Brown.’ Moses’s voice broke a silence of several minutes. ‘Any guesses as to what the O might stand for?’

No response.

‘What about Organ?’ he said.

‘Offal,’ Eddie suggested from his armchair.

‘You two can fuck right off,’ Vince said.

‘Oedipus.’ Alison joined in, drawing on her personal experience of Vince, it seemed.

Vince slung a cushion at her. ‘That goes for you too.’

She ducked and said, ‘Ovary.’

The room suddenly came alive.

‘Orifice.’

‘Oswald.’

‘Olive.’

‘Orgasm.’

‘Oaf.’

‘Object.’

‘That’s enough ,’ Vince screamed.

‘Hey,’ Moses said. ‘What about Onassis?’