Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

The sun, coppery now, was dropping into a bank of grey cloud. Safe deposit for the night. The tide had turned. The sea, ruled into straight lines by the waves, was covered with the hieroglyphics of swimmers — black dots for heads, the pale flash of arms.

Walking back through the fading light, he stopped whenever he thought he saw something interesting. Most stones seemed to be grey (flint) or white (chalk). If he stared hard enough he found his eyes began to invent exceptions. But as soon as he crouched down, touched one with his hand, it turned ordinary again. This process repeated itself, as if it was a lesson he was supposed to be learning. Some stones, he noticed, were the strangest most luminous colours when wet, but if you picked them up and dried them off they lost their allure, looked just like a million other stones. He did find a few treasures, though: a meteorite, no bigger than a ping-pong ball, rust-brown, fissured as a brain; several smooth pieces of glass, white on the outside, blue, yellow or green on the inside, like boiled sweets dusted with sherbet; and a dull green stone the exact shape of a lady’s automatic. He fitted this last stone into his palm and bounced his hand in the air a couple of times, as he had seen people do with guns, testing it for weight and balance. It felt good: small, compact — good. He raised his arm stiffly, aimed at the setting sun, and fired.

A red stain appeared in the sky away to the right. He must’ve missed. Hit a cloud by mistake.

He blew across the barrel of his new stone gun.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

*

Somebody had lit the bonfire. Scraps of paper floated upwards with the smoke, then dived and swooped, jittery as bats, glowed red until the black air blew them out. Sometimes a damp branch whined or popped, spat sparks, tiny flutes of steam, jets of green flame. It was a warm night, but the fire drew people in. Their disembodied faces hung in the darkness. In that leaping athletic light, they looked like caricatures of themselves — their noses pulled, their lips grimacing, their eyes coloured-in black. Moses recognised Alison, though. She looked more Pre-Raphaelite than ever with her wide tranquil forehead and her scorching red abundance of hair. He made his way round the fire towards her.

When she saw him she let out a little cry of surprise. She hadn’t known he was coming, how was he, what had he been doing — her usual flurry of familiarities and exclamations.

‘Have you seen Vince?’ he asked her.

‘Not for weeks,’ came her reply. It was funny, but whenever you mentioned Vince’s name these three lines appeared on her forehead like seagulls flying in formation.

‘What I meant was, have you seen him here?’ He tried to put his hands in his pockets, but he had crammed them too full of treasures. Ballast for his lightheadedness.

‘What?’ Alison cried. ‘Is Vince here?’ Dismay loosened the skin round her mouth.

Since Vince was their only common ground, they usually ended up treading all over him whenever they talked to each other. These days Alison trod warily. She didn’t regret leaving Vince, not for a second, but one nagging fear remained: the fear that she wasn’t free of him, that he was still attached to her, as if by a length of elastic, that he might spring back into her life at any moment. I don’t like emotional blackmail, and I certainly don’t like being hit for failing to respond to it, she had told Moses more than once. I don’t measure love in bruises, she had said on another occasion — rather sententiously, Moses thought. Still, he could hardly disagree with the sentiment, and when he talked to her he often found himself having to reassure her or, more accurately, perhaps, having to listen to her reassure herself. She was tough, he still believed that, but Vince seemed to have touched a nerve in her, a nervousness, and brought it to the surface, put it on display. She felt the threat of his presence so acutely. Now she knew he had come to the party she kept glancing over her shoulder, probing the darkness around her. Vince was out there, she was thinking, plotting something malevolent against her. She was wrong. The only person that Vince was capable of plotting something malevolent against was himself.

‘I wasn’t expecting him to turn up,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d known that, I would’ve thought twice about coming.’ She stabbed at some stones with the toe of her shoe. ‘ Shit ,’ she broke out, bitterly. ‘Everything was going so well.’

Vince might have planned the whole thing out of spite, purely to spoil her evening. A fourth seagull appeared on her forehead.

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making out,’ Moses said. ‘I don’t think he even knows you’re here.’

Alison said nothing.

‘And even if he finds out I don’t think he’ll bother you.’ He tried to put it tactfully. ‘He didn’t come alone, you see. He brought somebody with him.’

All four seagulls banked and vanished. They left only the faintest of after-images. It was so neat a reversal that Alison’s face might have been a coin that somebody had just flipped over.

‘Who’s he with?’

‘A girl called Debra.’

‘Debra?’ Alison looked thoughtful.

‘You probably don’t know her. I only met her today.’

‘What’s she like?’

Moses knew Alison well enough to have anticipated this: the is-she-good-looking bit.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not taking sides.’

‘I didn’t ask you to take sides. I just asked you what she was like.’

Moses sighed. ‘She comes from Liverpool. She’s got a good sense of humour. She doesn’t put up with any bullshit.’

Alison looked up sharply. ‘What’s she doing with Vince then?’

Moses had to laugh because he had just thought exactly the same thing. But he wasn’t going to give Alison the satisfaction of knowing that. ‘That’s her problem,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you forget about Vince? Pretend he isn’t here. I mean, you probably won’t see him anyway. The last time I saw him he was sitting about two miles away. Way over there, under the cliffs. “Fuck the party,” he said. “I’m staying where I am.”’

Alison picked up her drink, smiled into it sadly, almost fondly. ‘Typical Vince,’ she murmured.

Moses looked away from her.

The moon had floated up into the night sky. Someone had cut its string. Cut mine, he thought. That afternoon, after leaving the village behind, Gloria had said, Let’s change the mood. She’d rolled a fat joint and they’d smoked it driving. It’d worked. Suddenly they were out of their heads and laughing, and Moses had spun off into fantasy. He’d imagined making drunk uninterrupted love to Gloria on a bed of sand, he’d imagined swimming afterwards with nothing on, he’d imagined moonlight on the surface of the water.

Well, at least the moon was playing its part. A stack of silver dishes reached from the shoreline to the horizon, swaying with the motion of the waves.

But where was Gloria? He hadn’t seen her for ages.

Alison broke into his silence. ‘I was just thinking, Moses. Why don’t you come round to my parents’ house next Sunday? We often have people round on Sundays. I think you’d enjoy it.’

Moses remembered talking to Alison’s mother on the phone once. He remembered the allure in her voice. ‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘ll call you next week, OK?’

Soon afterwards Alison drifted away to talk to somebody else.

Moses didn’t mind in the least. You could overdose on Alison. Still, he would take her up on that invitation.

*

While he was rooting about among sausage-boxes and sacks of briquettes, Moses looked up and saw Jackson skulking in the shadows of a recent rock-fall. Jackson was clutching a brown paper parcel in both hands and looking apprehensive, as if he was about to walk into an ambush; he kept advancing a few paces then stopping again, bending forwards from the waist and twisting his head this way and that.