Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

He had a piss. An afterthought, really. So casual it made him laugh. He walked back into the club and turned all the lights on. No blood, no shit, no white arrows. He switched on the PA. Thump, hiss. For the next hour he played music. Bands like Crass, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Pack, Crisis, The Fall. He even found the Anti-Nowhere League single that had been crashing through his head all evening. He played that too.

so what, so what, you boring little cunt

who cares, who cares what you do

who cares, who cares about you

you

you, you, you —

At times he had the feeling that the person who had hit him was listening outside the broken toilet window. In a way he hoped so. Because the music was for him.

He shivered behind the D J’s Perspex shield until it began to get light. Only then did he switch the lights and the power off and climb back up the stairs to bed.

*

He woke at midday. His neck ached. The sky was grey and grit blew in the wind. Pigeons peeled off the windowsill across the street like plump aeroplanes, stumbled through the air in clumsy circles, and landed on the windowsill again. There were machine-guns in his mind.

He tried ringing Elliot on the internal extension. No reply. Great. He went out to buy some breakfast.

Dino took one look at Moses as he pushed through the door and his whole face expanded into a smile. ‘Hello, Moses.’ He pronounced it Maoses, as usual. ‘You look terrible.’

‘I didn’t sleep too well.’

Dino was wearing a badge on his shapeless grey sweatshirt. It’s all Greek to me, it said.

‘That’s a great badge, Dino,’ Moses said.

‘You like it?’ Dino squinted down, his chin doubling. ‘One of my mates gave it to me.’

‘You know, I could use a badge like that.’

‘Yeah, but you’re not Greek, are you?’ Dino cackled and vanished into the back of his shop.

When Moses got back to The Bunker he found a note under the door. Dinner tonight? M. He couldn’t understand how they had missed each other. He had only been out for fifteen minutes at the most. He ran back to the main road and looked for the old blue Volvo. Not a sign. He shrugged his shoulders and, slipping the note into his pocket, walked slowly home.

*

He stayed in all afternoon waiting for Elliot. When he saw the white Mercedes glide into the side-street on the stroke of five he ran downstairs.

‘Elliot — ’

‘Hey, Abraham! What’s up?’

‘Elliot, listen. We got broken into again last night.’

‘Don’t be funny.’

‘It’s true, Elliot.’

Upstairs in the office, he told Elliot the whole story in detail. He only left out the part where he had sat in the club until dawn playing records. He couldn’t make any sense of that himself. When he had finished, Elliot propped his feet on the desk and blew some air out of his mouth.

‘Shit. You all right, Moses?’

Moses nodded.

‘You sure?’

‘It was only a glancing blow,’ Moses explained. ‘I think he was aiming for my head, but it was dark and my head’s much higher up than most people’s, so he got my shoulder instead.’

‘Lucky you’re big, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Moses said. ‘Lucky I’m big.’

Elliot drew his lips into his mouth and stared out of the window. ‘You didn’t get a look at him?’

Moses shook his head. ‘Too dark.’

‘OK, leave this with me. I appreciate what you did, you know, but next time, if you hear something, call me first. All right?’

Moses moved towards the door. ‘I’ll remember that.’

Elliot faced back into the room and, adjusting his gold bracelet, said casually, ‘Just as a matter of interest, Moses, who was that woman coming out of your door the other day?’

‘Woman? What woman?’

‘Nice-looking, but getting on a bit. Had a black dress on.’

‘Careful, Elliot,’ Moses said. ‘That’s my mother you’re talking about.’

‘Your mother? Don’t give me that — ’

But Moses had already left the office.

Elliot, who had seen Moses kissing the woman on the street, looked puzzled. Sons don’t kiss their mothers. Not like that. Not with tongues. Some of the stories Moses came out with. Like that one about a friend of his who had slept with two thousand women. That had to be some kind of record, that did. Elliot grinned, shook his head, whistled through the gap in his teeth. Then the grin faded, his face tightened, and he went back to hoping the phone wasn’t going to ring.

*

‘Christ, Moses,’ Alison said, ‘that’s scary.’

He had just told the Shirleys what had happened the previous night. He glanced across at Mary. She was tilting her knife this way and that, catching light on the blade.

‘Why don’t you leave?’ she said. ‘If it’s that dangerous, why not find somewhere else to live?’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. Elliot’s a friend. I owe him.’

Her knife struck the table. ‘When are you going to stop being other people’s fool?’ she snapped.

He had been smiling, but the smile stiffened on his face. The silence round the table had the tension of held breath.

‘When are you going to stop being grateful, for fuck’s sake? When are you going to stop letting people use you? Stop being grateful, Moses. Start standing up for yourself. You don’t owe anybody anything, don’t you see that? Jesus Christ, it makes me sick the way you sit there like a stuffed prick and say “I owe him”. You don’t owe. Got it?’

She stared at him, her face mottled, tight with anger, and he remembered the time he’d told her about Eddie. He’d tried to explain the way Eddie treated women. ‘It’s not intentional,’ he’d said. ‘He can’t see it. He just does it.’ She’d considered this, then she’d said, ‘He sounds like a shit to me.’ Of course he’d sometimes thought of Eddie as a shit. The time Eddie dumped that topless waitress on him, for instance. Or the night of the beach party. When it affected him personally, perhaps. And suddenly, in that moment, Mary’s judgment had spread to cover everything that Eddie did. She’s right, he’d found himself thinking. Eddie’s just a shit. A shit from Basingstoke. Where shits come from. It all made sense. But later he’d remembered that she often seemed jealous of his friends, his ‘other world’, as she called it, and that she often put them down without giving them a chance, almost as a matter of principle. So he’d swayed back again. Eddie had become a statue once more. Mythical, unaccountable, creating his own laws.

Wasn’t this new outburst of hers similar? Wasn’t she just pulling The Bunker down because it didn’t include her, because it was something she felt she had to compete against? Or was she really concerned about his safety?

When he looked across at her, she said sadly, ‘When are you going to learn, Moses? When are you going to learn?’

‘You’re right,’ he sighed. He wanted to learn from her. He really did.

But, at the same time, he knew that nothing she could say to him would ever make him leave The Bunker.

*

Later, drunker, they stood talking on the terrace. A light wind tugged at the edges of the shawl that she had wrapped around her shoulders. On a sudden impulse she leaned across to kiss him. He stepped back so abruptly that she almost lost her balance.

‘Not now,’ he said.

She glared at him. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘I don’t want to do that now. Not here. It’s too dangerous.’

‘ Dangerous?’ Her lip curled. She seemed to find what he was saying utterly beyond belief, utterly contemptible. ‘What do you mean dangerous?