Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘I’m not being weird. This is weird.’ He waved a hand in the air to indicate the room, the house, the party. ‘You’re from a different world, Gloria. I don’t know where I’m from, but I don’t think it’s somewhere like this. In fact, I know it isn’t.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Moses pressed his fingers into his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

Things had begun to drift away from him again. He was travelling backwards on a slow roller-coaster. Voices sounded distant and cramped, like voices on the telephone, and even his dislike for Paul Newman was being sucked back into a past that was vague, gelatinous, irrelevant.

He looked down at Gloria. Her eyebrows told him that it was time to go home.

‘I ought to be going,’ he murmured.

She nodded.

They found Mrs Wood adjusting her hair in the full-length mirror by the door.

‘Thank you for the wonderful party,’ Moses said. He took her hand in his, bent over it, and touched it with his lips. For one awful moment he thought he was going to be sick on it, but the spasm passed and he straightened up again, pale but undisgraced.

‘Lovely to meet you,’ she said. ‘I hope we’ll see you again.’

‘I like you,’ Moses said.

She smiled. ‘I like you too, Moses.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Gloria said.

In the night air Moses felt better. ‘Did I really kiss your mother’s hand?’ he asked Gloria.

‘Only just,’ she said. ‘I mean, you nearly missed.’

They both began to laugh. Softly, privately, for different reasons.

Moses leaned back against the voluptuous white curve of the staircase. ‘You see, you never told me your parents lived in a spaceship.’

‘Moses, you’re very drunk.’

‘And you, Gloria, are very beautiful.’

‘Are you sure you can drive?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Maybe I should call you a cab.’ She was trying very hard to be stern with him. ‘Do you want a cab?’

‘No, I’m all right. Really. My motor skills are unimpaired. Look.’ And very carefully, like someone mounting a butterfly, he leaned over and placed a kiss on Gloria’s lips.

It was nice, so he did it again. Doing it for longer didn’t seem to make it any less nice. Though this time it was a little less like someone mounting a butterfly, perhaps.

He ran down the stairs and his voice hovered in the air behind him.

‘Remember, you’re singing. Thursday.’

*

The posters had been up since the beginning of the week — bold black letters on a dayglo orange background: HOLLY WOOD. THE BUNKER. THURSDAY JUNE 26 10 PM — and by nine-thirty on Thursday night many of the tables had been taken. Moses sat in a dark corner and glanced across at Gloria. She was discussing something with her pianist. It was extraordinary how interesting she made the dance-floor seem just by standing on it. He had wanted to wish her luck again, but by the time he had ordered another brandy and returned to his table she was already up on stage. She had her usual band. Only the saxophonist, Malone, was new; he stood to one side, facing away from the audience, wearing a brown coat that buttoned all the way from his ankles to his throat. Gloria had chosen a shimmery pink dress this evening — to go with the building, she had told Moses earlier. She had backcombed her hair into a mass of spun black candy-floss. A fringe hid the time her eyebrows were telling. One hand on the microphone, she turned, said something to the guitarist. Moses’s heart did a swift drumroll. He still couldn’t adjust to the sight of her performing. This public Gloria was always an apparition out of nowhere for him, some exotic derivation of the girl he knew, smiled at, slept with. It made him dizzy to feel himself slipping into the objectivity he saw in other people’s eyes when they watched her sing.

But there she was, spotlit now, one hand shading her eyes.

‘I’m going blind up here,’ came her voice, husky, echoing above the hiss of the PA. ‘Could someone do something?’

The lights dimmed. The buzz of the audience cut out as if a plug had been pulled.

‘Thanks.’ A quick smile, and then simply, ‘My name’s Holly and this one’s for Moses — ’

It was one of those songs where the voice sets out alone and the instruments creep in after a verse or two, discreetly, one by one, like people arriving late at a theatre. A brave way to open, Moses thought, still feeling the glow that her surprise dedication had given him. He had only heard her sing twice before, but it seemed to him that she was singing better than ever tonight. There was an edge to her voice, even when she softened it, that cut into the silence of the audience, left marks to prove it had been there. People would walk out talking about her.

As the first song faded into brushwork and random piano, applause flew towards the stage on great clattering wings. Moses suddenly imagined Gloria ducking, her hands thrown up around her ears. He was too preoccupied with this vision of his to clap. Or to notice that Elliot had slipped into the vacant seat beside him.

*

‘What’s up, Judas?’

Moses jumped. ‘Elliot. How long’ve you been there?’

‘Not long.’

‘Want a drink.’

‘I’ve got one.’

‘So what’s new?’ Moses had meant nothing by the question, but he watched it hook something big in Elliot.

Elliot’s head lifted. ‘Are you in any kind of trouble?’

Moses looked blank. ‘Not so far as I know.’

‘What I mean is, are you in any kind of trouble with the police?’

Moses grinned.

‘I’m serious.’ Elliot moved his shoulders inside his jacket. He tipped some brandy into his mouth, swallowed, and bared his teeth. ‘Last Saturday I had a visitor. It was right after you drove off in your car. He wanted to know if you lived here. He knew your name.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know. He was a big bastard. Wore one of those old check jackets that look like a dog’s thrown up on it. I reckon he was a copper. Plainclothes.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Elliot leaned back, pushed his empty glass around on the table. ‘You get to recognise the smell. Something about them. And that bloke, I smelt it on him right away.’

‘So what did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t tell him nothing. I told him to fuck off. Then he hit me.’

Moses’s eyes opened wide. ‘What d’you mean he hit you?’

‘He fucking hit me. Right in the guts. Took me by surprise, didn’t he.’

Elliot drained his glass.

Moses was up to the bar and back again with two brandies like a man on elastic.

‘That was the other thing,’ Elliot said. ‘The way he hit me, right? One, blokes like that, they don’t go around hitting people, not unless something’s really getting on their tits. Two, he knew how to hit. I mean, he had a punch. There was muscle under that jacket. Technique too. He was a copper all right. No question.’

Elliot turned towards the stage. He registered no emotion or feeling of any kind. His mind had travelled somewhere else. It had left his face vacant, the bolts drawn, the power switched off at the mains. He was looking at Gloria, but he wasn’t seeing her at all.

After a minute or two Moses said, ‘So you don’t know what this bloke wanted?’

‘He wanted you,’ Elliot said, without taking his eyes off the stage.

‘It could’ve been a mistake. Why would anyone want me?’

Elliot touched his solar plexus. ‘It didn’t feel like a mistake.’

‘You didn’t tell him anything, though?’

‘No,’ and now Elliot turned back to look at Moses, ‘but he knew.’

Fear flickered down through Moses’s body. He swallowed the rest of his brandy. ‘I wonder what he wants,’ he said.