Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Vince produced a small white packet from the pocket of his waistcoat. One corner of his mouth curved upwards. ‘Want some?’

‘What is it?’

‘Only sulphate.’

Moses nodded.

It was so still up there on the roof that Vince cut the stuff on the wall and not a single particle moved. Saturday afternoon clamour drifted up from the street. It sounded like music played backwards. They sat in the hot sun and waited for the bitterness to hit the back of their throats.

‘Alison’s left me for good this time,’ Vince said suddenly, in the tone of voice you might use if you were discussing the weather or the price of cigarettes — disenchanted, but routinely so. It was unlike Vince to volunteer information of this kind, and when he did he usually spat it out, like phlegm, but this was a new Vince, a philosophical Vince.

Moses answered in a similar tone. ‘I thought so.’

Vince tensed. ‘How come?’

‘Her clothes weren’t there.’

Vince ground his cigarette out with the heel of his boot. ‘Yeah, she came round the other day to pick up the rest of her things. You know what she said? She looked round the room and said, “I don’t know how I could’ve lived here so long.”’

Moses pushed a bit of air out of his mouth to show Vince that he too would have been pretty pissed off with a comment like that.

‘ So long.’ Vince snorted in contempt. ‘She was only here for two months. Two fucking months.’

‘Actually,’ Moses said, ‘I’m surprised it lasted that long.’

‘What’re you on about?’

‘Her living with you.’

‘Yeah, I know, but what d’you mean surprised?’

‘You and her,’ Moses said. ‘You didn’t go together.’

A jet fighter, miles above, released a single trail of vapour. It was so straight that it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. It seemed to underline his words.

Vince shifted on the wall, looked over the edge. His eyes moved thoughtfully across the jumble of padlocked sheds below.

‘You know what I said?’ he said after a while. ‘I said she’d better make bloody sure she’d got everything she wanted because she wouldn’t want to come back again, not if that was the way she felt, not to this fucking hole.’

Moses couldn’t help grinning. It was a fucking hole.

‘Then she told me not to be so sarcastic.’

Moses poured them both another tumbler of wine. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can almost hear her saying that.’

‘Well,’ Vince said, and reached for his rolling-papers. During the silence that followed, he built one of his specials. B-52s, he called them. Three joints in one. Malawi in the fuselage, Lebanese red in the wings. B-52s weren’t lightly named. They wreaked destruction. Large-scale destruction. They wrapped people round toilet-bowls and made them wish they were dead.

Vince lit the nose and the two wingtips. He inhaled, bared his teeth, leaned back against the wall. When all three ends were burning fiercely, he passed the lethal plane to Moses with a smile. Vince was happy now. One of his greatest joys in life was making people wish they were dead.

He got up, paced round the rooftop, his badges glinting in the sun, his bandaged arms held parallel to the ground. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’ll be no more windows broken over Alison, that’s for sure.’

Moses considered this. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘There’ve got to be better reasons than that.’

‘Fuck off and die,’ Vince said.

Moses left about half an hour later, before it became too late to leave at all. Vince said he was going to carry on. He flipped open the lid on a tin of capsules. ‘Painkillers,’ he grinned. ‘For my arms.’

Moses lowered himself backwards through the skylight. ‘Any excuse,’ he said.

*

Ground level.

Moses shaded his eyes. There was a big bucket in the sky at the end of the King’s Road. This bucket was overflowing with molten gold light. The light was called sunset, and this is how it worked. The bucket slowly emptied of light. As the bucket emptied, the light slowly darkened — gold to orange, orange to red, red to purple — until, after hours of pouring, only the sediment remained: black light or, in other words, night.

Moses began to walk east. It was around six. At this point the light was still gold and the supply seemed endless. The people coming towards him had gold faces, gold hands, gold fingers, gold rings. They looked as if they had just stepped off planes from somewhere exotic. He wondered if he looked as if he had just stepped off a plane. He felt as if he was still on one. That old B-52. Where was his car?

There it was.

He slid into the front seat, basked for a moment in the aroma of hot leather. Ahhh, Bisto.

Jesus, he was driving already.

He plugged a cassette in, top volume. One of Gloria’s. Cuban stuff. What the hell.

He was heading riverwards. The road seemed calm enough. His Rover floated on a purring cushion of air.

He watched a supersite poster glide past. It was a picture of a man sitting in a desert. The man had clean-cut features, neat black hair and a firm jaw. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He was smiling. It was nice in the advert.

Moses smiled back. He knew how the man felt. He was in an advert too.

*

Certain items of clothing struck him immediately as being inappropriate for a drinks party in Hampstead. The plus-fours, for example. The kilt. The straitjacket (a twenty-first birthday present from Jackson). He flicked through his wardrobe. He was proud of his wardrobe. As part of a new drive to inject system and discipline into his life, he had spent a whole day alphabetising his clothes. From A for Anorak to Z for Zoot Suit. Shirts were all ranged under S, but they also had a strict internal order of their own: Hawaiian, for instance, came before Psychedelic but after Bowling. Those shirts that had no obvious style or function were classified according to colour: Amber, Beige, Charcoal, Damson, and so on. It was some time before he reached his sharkskin suit, but when he did he realised that he need look no further. That was it. Suit: Sharkskin.

He had bought it from a charity organisation that operated out of a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate. A woman of about fifty had answered the door. She wore a necklace of wooden beads, a tweed skirt, and a pair of stout brown shoes. She seemed vigorous but absent-minded at the same time.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Oh dear.’ And then, turning back inside, ‘Sorry. Do come in.’

Moses had fallen in love with the suit at first sight. It had a double-breasted jacket, a pocket that slanted rakishly over the heart, and a grey watered-silk lining with triangular flaps sewn into the armpits to soak up sweat (a task which, thankfully, they had never had to perform). The trousers, high-waisted, roomy, pleated, tapered nicely to a half-inch turnup at the ankle; they were the kind of trousers that Robert Mitchum used to wear in those movies he made in the forties. The colour of the suit? Well, at first glance it looked grey, a sober darkish grey, but when you examined it closely you could see that the cloth was shot through with tiny flecks of blue and orange. In sunlight it would come alive. Perhaps the best thing about the suit, though, was the label inside. PURE SHARKSKIN, it said, and gave an address in St James’s. Moses didn’t know what sharkskin was, but he certainly liked the sound of it. He tried the suit on behind a purple velvet curtain and it fitted perfectly. It might almost have been tailored to his measurements. A miracle. He marched straight up to the woman at the counter.

‘This is a wonderful suit. I’ll take it.’

‘How strange that you should choose that one.’ The woman’s eyes settled cautiously on his face. ‘It only came in yesterday.’