Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘One.’

Ridley held up two fingers. ‘How many now?’

‘That’s not nice, Ridley.’

‘He’s all right,’ Ridley told Gloria. ‘Better get him upstairs, though.’

They helped him up to his flat and put him to bed with an ice-pack over his eye. Gloria said she would stay the night.

‘That’s very nice of you,’ Moses mumbled, ‘to look after me.’

‘Don’t be a prick,’ she said.

He woke at midday, and this time he really was in bed. The right side of his face felt fragile and stiff, twice its normal size. He could hear Gloria singing somewhere. One of the songs from last night. She must be in the bathroom. He tried to open his eyes, but only the left one worked. There was a huge gold tiara outside the window. He closed the eye again.

‘Gloria?’ he called out.

He heard the floorboards creak as she walked into the bedroom.

‘Gloria?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Tell me what that gold tiara’s doing outside the window.’

Now he heard her laughing.

He opened his left eye again. The empty gasholder gleamed in the afternoon sun. The sun is clever, he thought. It can turn buildings into jewellery.

Gloria went out to the kitchen to make some coffee. When she returned, Moses was sitting up in bed with both eyes open. Gloria screamed and threw his coffee all over the wall.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Your eye.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look in the mirror.’

He crawled across the bed until his face appeared in the mirror. ‘Jesus,’ he gasped.

The white part of his right eye had flooded with blood. The right side of his face had swollen too; sheets of pain, bright as aluminium, flashed across the inside of his head when he pressed his cheek.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked. ‘I can’t remember a thing.’

‘Well, apparently you bumped into this guy and spilled beer all down him. It doesn’t seem like a very good reason to hit someone but Ridley said he knew the guy from somewhere. He used to be a boxer and he’s always looking for trouble.’

Moses groaned. ‘A boxer? Trust me to get hit by a boxer.’

‘Ridley threw him out. You should’ve seen it. He just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and chucked him in that skip. The guy was furious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so furious. But Ridley just stood there with his arms folded and said, “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”’ Gloria laughed and shook her head.

‘I wish I’d seen it,’ Moses said.

‘You were lying on the floor. You must’ve been out cold for about two minutes.’

Moses touched his cheek. ‘D’you think anything’s broken?’

‘I don’t know. It might be an idea to check.’

‘Have my head examined, you mean.’ Moses grinned. ‘Shit, it even hurts to grin.’

Gloria drove him to St Thomas’s in Waterloo. The doctor, an urbane Pakistani, told him that he had sustained a hairline fracture of the right cheekbone. It would heal naturally, he said. As for the eye, that was just a broken bloodvessel. He wrote Moses a prescription. There didn’t appear to be any concussion, he said, but he advised Moses to take things easy for a few days.

‘If I was you,’ he concluded, stroking his neck with an elegant tapering finger, ‘I should try not to get into any more fights with boxers.’

Moses promised to avoid anyone who looked even remotely like a boxer.

On the way back to The Bunker Gloria turned to him. ‘You know something else that happened last night? After I’d finished singing, Ridley came up to me. Oh shit, I thought, what’ve I done now? But he just put his hand on my shoulder and smiled and said, “That was fucking diamond.”’

The Rover touched fifty-five as an art collector touches his own private Rodin. Moses loved his old car. Gloria had wanted to hire a Porsche to drive down to Louise’s party in (these girls with parents in Hampstead!), but a Porsche, they found out, cost about £130 a day and neither of them had that kind of money. Gloria capitulated gracefully. She settled for half a Porsche which, when commuted into powders and liquids, turned out to be a gram of coke and a Thermos of Smirnoff and crushed ice. Much more sensible.

‘So where is the party exactly?’ Moses asked her.

Gloria, navigator for the trip, snuggled down in her seat. ‘A place called Star Gap,’ she said. ‘It’s somewhere on the south coast. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.’

Moses nodded.

They had left the rain behind in Purley (where rain belongs) and as the car swung away from a roundabout and climbed up through the trees towards Godstone the sun broke through, beat like a sudden drum rhythm in his blood. He wound the window down, listened to the cymbal hiss of tyres on the wet road. Gloria put sunglasses on and pretended to be an Italian movie-star. Smiles journeyed between them. So did the Thermos of vodka.

They had been driving for an hour when Gloria sat up.

‘What about a deviation?’ she suggested.

Moses narrowed his eyes. ‘In what sense of the word?’

‘I thought that, on this occasion,’ she said, in a voice that left him in no doubt, ‘the two senses of the word might be combined in a single act.’

Moses smiled.

‘It’ll be the first time, you see. Outdoors, I mean. We can’t really count that greenhouse in Leicestershire, can we?’

Moses agreed that they couldn’t really count the greenhouse in Leicestershire.

Gloria consulted the map. ‘Now, let’s see. We’ll be passing through a big patch of light green soon and, according to this, light green means either forest, woodland, or an area of outstanding natural beauty, so what I— ’

‘That means that if you were on the map,’ Moses interrupted, ‘you’d be light green.’

‘That’s very nice of you, Moses,’ Gloria said, colouring slightly (though not light green). ‘Anyway,’ she went on, after they had kissed dangerously (Moses always closed his eyes when he kissed), ‘what I was going to say was, why don’t we deviate somewhere in this area of forest, woodland or outstanding natural beauty?’

‘Exactly what I was thinking. How far is it?’

‘About seven miles.’

Moses stamped on the accelerator. The needle on the speedometer swung wildly between fifty-eight and sixty-five mph.

Porsche indeed. Who needs a Porsche?

*

They parked on a scenic bank of leaf-mould about half a mile up a lane that led eventually, so Gloria maintained, to a village called Balls Green. Gloria was so taken with the name that she was all for checking it out right away until Moses leaned over and, resting a hand on her wrist, gently reminded her that their departure from the main road (deviation in the first sense) had a specific purpose (deviation in the second sense) and Gloria was so overwhelmed by his logic and his singlemindedness that she instantly put all other thoughts out of her head.

They had a line of coke each in the car. Gloria began to slip out of her shorts.

‘In here?’ Moses looked surprised.

Gloria laughed. ‘No. I’m just changing.’

From surprise to bewilderment. ‘ Changing?’

‘You’ll see.’

Outside the clouds parted to reveal a sky of almost transparent blue. Trees shifted their leaves and branches like people exercising. The air had warmed up.

Moses stood a little way from the car and let the sun move over his face.

Then Gloria was walking towards him in a long black skirt that she had fastened at the waist with a studded leather belt. She put an arm round him. ‘You know what I think, Moses? I think this is an area of outstanding natural beauty.’