Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Everybody started shaking with uncontrollable laughter. Vince was always complaining about how poor he was. In pubs he could never afford a drink, so people always had to pay for him. In restaurants he never ordered anything; he just waited until people had finished, then devoured their leftovers. He sponged compulsively, especially from Eddie. Skint was his favourite word. Broke came a close second. Onassis was the perfect name for him.

‘You bastards ,’ Vince shrieked. He stood in the middle of the room, teeth clenched, knuckles white, then whirled round and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

For a month or two he got real hell. Talk about taking the piss. The name really took off. Everybody began to call him Onassis, even people who hardly knew him. When he was hungry, they took him to Greek restaurants. When they dropped in to see him they did that ridiculous Zorba dance as they came through the door. They even dragged him off to see The Greek Tycoon (Anthony Quinn played Vince), lashing him to the seat so he couldn’t leave until it was over.

One evening they went out for a meal together — Eddie, Moses, Vince and Alison — and Vince, drunk again, started smashing plates.

‘Vince, this is an Indian restaurant,’ Alison gently reminded him.

Vince didn’t hesitate. ‘When you’re Onassis,’ he declared, ‘all restaurants are Greek.’ He carried on smashing plates until they were all thrown out.

Then, just as Vince was becoming accustomed to his new role, even beginning to enjoy it, they dropped the name completely. Vince went from being Onassis to being anonymous again. All restaurants were no longer Greek. Alison stopped calling herself Jackie. Vince sulked for weeks, but ever since that time he had been very careful to avoid any allusions to money.

A Capri took the curve outside the pub too fast, bumped the kerb, then swerved away, tyres spinning, in the direction of World’s End.

‘Arsehole,’ someone jeered.

Moses turned back to Vince and Eddie.

‘Look,’ Vince was saying, holding out his bandaged arms, his fingers curling up, ‘I really haven’t got any money. I spent it all on drugs.’

‘Tightwad,’ Eddie said. ‘Skinflint.’ He signalled a passing cab and climbed in. He wound the window down and leaned out, grinning. ‘Bloody Greek.’

Moses watched Vince glaring at the taxi as it pulled away; Vince’s fingers trembled with frustration now as well as pain. ‘Don’t worry about it, Vince,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bit of money.’

Vince spat on the pavement. ‘That cunt.’

Strange how Eddie always seemed to get under Vince’s skin, Moses thought. And when Vince tried to retaliate, Eddie simply produced that smile of his, that infuriating smile which, like a joker, always won him the game. Moses could understand why Eddie got hit. What he couldn’t understand was why it didn’t happen more often.

‘All right,’ Vince said. ‘You get the wine, I’ll supply the drugs.’

Moses bought a two-litre bottle of Italian red from the off-licence across the road. That just about cleaned him out. Then they walked back to Vince’s place.

Home for Vince, as he was fond of telling people, was the old Chelsea police station, and for once this wasn’t bullshit. The building had been abandoned by the police three or four years before. Since then the paleyellow brick façade had darkened to grey and the front door had surrendered most of its white paint to the repeated attacks of drunks from over the road. Vince shared the squat with about ten others, but he could never keep track of their names. Turnover’s too high, he would say. Once Moses had walked into one of the rooms on the top floor and found a girl lying on a bed with her legs spread wide and a bloke slumped in the corner smoking a joint through a gas-mask. Nutters, Vince informed him. From Australia. That was all he knew. A few weeks later one of the nutters fell off the roof and died (people didn’t last long in the old Chelsea police station). Typical bloody Australians, was Vince’s only comment. He saw the death as an inconvenience: there had been investigations by the police, and he had received an eviction order as a result. He had ignored it, of course. Still, it made life difficult. He had been living in the building longer than anyone. Perhaps he was a survivor after all, Moses sometimes thought.

Vince selected a long spindly key from the bunch that he wore, like a jailer, on his belt. His fingers seemed to be shaking less, but it still took him a while to open the door. It was gloomy inside, twenty degrees cooler, and it smelt of ancient wood, greasy and dark from years of being touched and brushed against. It had the quietness of a place that wasn’t used to quietness. It felt the way schools feel during the holidays. Traffic-sounds didn’t penetrate. Only the clinking of Vince’s keys as he slouched down the corridor and a radio muttering somewhere above.

The police had done a pretty thorough job of moving out. They had taken everything except an old grey filing-cabinet (no files inside), a few busted chairs and some posters, one of which (it described a wanted terrorist) Vince had taped to the wall over his bed. More recent tenants had left debris of a different kind: whisky-bottles coated with dust; fag-ends stamped flat; a buckled bicycle-wheel; articles of clothing with unknown histories — a pair of khaki shorts, an armless leather jacket, one blue high-heeled shoe. In the biggest room (once a lecture-hall) somebody had painted a series of pictures on the walls: a smiling cow in a lush green meadow, a funeral procession on a tropical beach, a man asleep in a wheelchair. Each picture had its own baroque gold frame, its own circumflex of picture-wire, its own nail to hang on. Not real, but painted. And all with their own individual and realistic shadows, also painted. Moses had never regretted turning down Vince’s offer of a room in the old Chelsea police station. If he had lived there he would probably have ended up painting pictures and frames and wire and nails and shadows too. Either that or he would have fallen off the roof. There were environments and there were environments.

Vince unlocked the door of his room and shoved it open. ‘I’ll get the drugs,’ he said, ‘then we’ll go up on the roof.’

Moses waited in the doorway. Vince had masked the frosted-glass windows with off-cuts of dark-blue cloth, so the light that strained into the room was dingy, subterranean. He had few possessions. A single mattress, a ghetto-blaster, one or two books (The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde sprawled on his pillow), and a 2,000-piece jigsaw of one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Pieces of the jigsaw lay scattered round the room, mingling with ashtrays, crumpled clothes, hard-drug paraphernalia and balls of dust. All the pieces looked identical: black and white with trickling yellow lines. It had been a present from Alison during happier times. Bet you’ll never finish that, Moses remembered her saying. Vince never had — but he had never given up either. He was stubborn like that. One day that jigsaw would probably drive him mad.

Moses’s eyes came to rest on the clothes rail in the corner of the room. Alison usually kept half a dozen dresses there. Now it stood empty, naked and angular, like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal. Relationship extinct.

Vince moved towards the door.

‘That’s everything,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

*

After the coolness of the interior, the roof was like an oven door thrown open in their faces. Rows of chimney-stacks and steep slopes of grey slate trapped the heat in a flat area about twenty feet square. They sat on the low brick wall that acted as a barrier between the rooftop and a sheer drop to the courtyard sixty feet below. They took off their shirts. The smell of creosote rose into their nostrils. Moses opened the bottle. He poured the wine into two glasses that Vince had stolen from the pub across the road.