Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Jackson,’ Moses called out.

Jackson started, turned round. He brought one hand up to shield his eyes against the glare of the fire.

‘Oh, it’s you, Moses.’

Jackson had travelled down alone by train. The parcel was a box of rockets, he explained. A birthday present for Louise.

He perched on a crate, the parcel on his lap. ‘You’ve no idea how difficult it is,’ he said, ‘to find rockets in July.’

Moses suppressed a smile. Only Jackson would’ve thought of such a thing.

‘In one of the shops the woman got really angry with me,’ Jackson said. ‘She told me I was four months early. “Four months early?” I said. “Why?” “November the fifth,” she said.’ He shook his head as he remembered.

He had been looking for Louise for hours. ‘It’s so dark,’ he complained. ‘I keep treading on people.’

Moses laughed. ‘We’ll find her together.’

Jackson hadn’t thought of looking in the sea. They were walking along the shoreline when Moses saw her ten yards out.

‘Louise,’ he shouted. ‘Here a moment.’

Clouds had hidden the moon. When Louise stood up, the water wrapped itself around her thighs, looked as if it didn’t want to let her go. She stumbled as the undertow sucked pebbles past her feet, but struggled free and ran towards them smiling.

‘Jackson,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it.’ She snatched up a white towel and began to rub her hair, tilting her head first to one side then to the other.

‘Here,’ and Jackson held out the parcel, ‘this is for you.’

Draping the towel round her shoulders, Louise accepted the parcel, examined it, all four sides of it, with her wet hands, left dark fingerprints on the brown paper. She held it to her ear and shook it gently, two dents of puzzlement between her eyebrows, but waves kept breaking behind her with a dull thump and foam came sliding round her ankles, drowning any other sound she might have heard. Jackson said nothing, content, it seemed, simply to watch her. She tore the brown paper off and pulled out an oblong box secured with Sellotape. She broke the Sellotape with her teeth and opened the lid. The rockets lay inside, tightly packed, two rows deep. Bright red and yellow. Twisted blue-black touchpapers. Long blond launching-sticks.

‘There’s twenty-one of them,’ Jackson explained, ‘because that’s how old you are.’

And then, when she still didn’t say anything, he shifted from one foot to the other and added, ‘You know, like the candles on a cake.’

When Louise lifted her eyes from the box of rockets to Jackson’s anxious face, her deep tan and the slick blackness of the sea behind her gave her smile a new and unexpected dimension: for a moment she was an actress — famous, glamorous, spotlit for the cameras.

‘They’re beautiful.’ She rested a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Thank you, Jackson.’

Jackson looked pleased, serious and uncomfortable. It was a speciality of his: he did it with equal measures of each.

Louise turned to Moses. ‘Aren’t they great?’

‘Well,’ and Moses thought of the coat-hook and the chair, ‘Jackson’s always had a way with presents.’

‘You know what I’m going to do?’ Louise said. ‘I’m going to get some empty bottles and I’m going to line them up in one long line and I’m going to put rockets in them and then I’m going to let them off, one by one, like they do on royal birthdays or whenever it is.’

She ran off up the beach.

Moses and Jackson sat down on the stones to wait for her.

‘Does she like them, do you think?’ Jackson asked.

‘ Jackson,’ Moses said. ‘Didn’t you see her face?’

Jackson chuckled to himself. ‘You know, I thought it was going to rain tonight. I mean, really rain. A real downpour. And look what happens. This is probably one of the warmest nights of the year so far.’

The moon slid out from behind a cloud. Its movement was so smooth that it might have been running on greased tracks. Moses glanced down at his latest bottle of wine. Soon Louise would be able to stick a rocket in the end of it. He wondered where Gloria was, but only vaguely, and was surprised by the vagueness of the thought. He watched Jackson fold his raincoat and place it beside him on the beach.

‘If you thought it was going to rain,’ Moses said suddenly, ‘how come you brought fireworks?’

Jackson grinned as if Moses had just fallen into a carefully-laid trap. ‘Maybe I wanted her to feel sorry for me,’ he said.

Moses smiled.

Louise returned, wearing a knee-length pink T-shirt. She was dragging a crate of empty bottles. Moses and Jackson helped her to wedge the bottles into the pebbles at intervals of ten feet so they formed a long line parallel with the sea. Then she borrowed Moses’s lighter.

‘Here goes,’ she said.

She lit the first touchpaper and jumped back. The rocket seemed to hold its breath for a moment, to gather itself, then it fizzed out over the sea, a fierce arc of sparks, and fizzled out, dropping a cluster of silver stars into the darkness.

‘One,’ chanted the crowd of people now assembled at the water’s edge.

Louise was lighting the second rocket when Moses felt a slight tugging on his sleeve.

‘There you are,’ Gloria said. She looked excited, dishevelled. He could see all the parties she had ever been to in her eyes. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Looking for you,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

She laughed. ‘I must’ve been in all the places you didn’t look.’

He stared at the sea beyond her. He saw the stack of silver dishes crash. It struck him that neither of them were telling the truth. He hadn’t been looking for her, not for at least two hours. Not at all, really. It had just been something to say. But her lie, he felt, had nothing to do with what she had said. Her lie had something to do with what she hadn’t said, though he didn’t even have a glimmer of what that might be.

A rocket screamed out over the sea. It scored a ragged orange line in the night sky and self-destructed. The explosion rebounded off the cliffs behind them. He felt Gloria jump.

‘Seven,’ came the chant.

Gloria said something about going up to the car. He moved away with her towards the steps. The night seemed to darken then. He stumbled, almost fell. When he looked across at Gloria he saw that she was disappearing again.

‘No,’ he cried out.

But her body had already vanished, her body vanished first, and when he searched for her face some of her features (fringe, pupils, lips, eyebrows) instantly became invisible. Gloria and the night, they were made of the same stuff; she was turning into one small part of that immeasurably vast darkness. With a shiver he remembered Louise rising out of the sea, he remembered the reluctance of that black water to surrender her. He wanted to kiss Gloria, just lean across and kiss her, but he didn’t know how to find her mouth, or what exactly he would be kissing if he did. They had reached the steps now. A swaying in his head. Panic or nausea, he couldn’t tell which. He grasped a metal stanchion for support.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he said.

‘In the car,’ her voice came back from somewhere above him.

He reached the top just behind her. Only her hands, her cheekbones, the whites of her eyes, remained. She was going fast, dissolving in the night’s black acid. If he let her go he would have to wait until daylight to look for her and she might be miles away by then, a corpse or as good as, lost to him for ever. Where was the nearest light? In the car, she had said. Yes, there was a light in the car. If he could get her there in time. He hardly dared to look at her. When he did, a splinter of white light in the corner of her eye, a fraction of her, returned his glance. Like a dream where you can’t run fast enough, he started over the gravel, pulling her by an arm he couldn’t see. She seemed to be resisting. Didn’t she realise what was happening? Or was that what she wanted?