Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘You know what I mean, Mary.’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong with you today?’

When he didn’t reply, she wrapped herself more tightly in her shawl and, backing away from him, said, ‘Christ, sometimes you chill me to the bone.’

She almost trod on Alan’s foot. Alan had been standing in the doorway. Moses hadn’t noticed him either.

‘What’s going on out here?’ Alan asked. Light-hearted though, not accusing. He obviously hadn’t seen anything.

Mary pushed past him without answering.

Moses smiled. ‘Just a little difference of opinion.’

‘Ah yes.’ Alan’s eyes glittered behind his glasses. ‘That happens in this house.’

Moses found Mary drinking brandy in the living-room. He told her he was sorry, but said they had to be more careful. Mary shook her head.

‘It was the moment. You destroyed it.’

Moses said nothing.

‘I thought we agreed about that,’ she said. ‘I thought we said no destruction.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘What’s crazy?’

‘Blowing it up into something so big.’

‘You destroyed the moment, Moses,’ she insisted, and that had the power to negate anything he said.

It unnerved him, the way everything was suddenly turning round, coming back on him like a wave. Mary had laid down laws about no destruction and no fucking and then she had handed them over to him to enforce while she, it seemed, was free to modify or challenge them whenever she pleased. It was as if, in suspecting him of wanting the relationship with her simply because there was no responsibility involved, she had created a sense of responsibility herself, given it to him, and claimed the role of devil’s advocate for her own. At last he realised that if the rules were still intact it was purely his own doing. They could be broken any time he chose.

*

Perhaps that was why he got so drunk that night. It anaesthetised the fear. You just blundered about regardless, sorted out the wreckage in the morning.

At midnight he found Mary alone in the kitchen. She had just put on a record of Billie Holiday songs. She was drinking neat vodka. She held out a hand to him.

‘Everybody’s gone to bed,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance.’

They danced.

Once, when he glanced towards the door, she whispered, ‘Don’t be frightened.’

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘You flinched. I felt it.’

‘I don’t remember flinching.’ He pulled away, looked down at her. ‘When did I flinch?’

She smiled and pressed her face into his shirt. ‘Relax,’ she said.

It wasn’t dancing music, but they carried on dancing. In one of their closer moments, he let his hand rest against her right breast. One of her hands instantly flew up and knocked it away.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you want me to do that?’

‘Accident,’ she murmured. ‘It was an accident.’

His hand returned.

Afterwards he couldn’t remember the sequence of events that led from the kitchen to the guest-room. He only remembered that he couldn’t stop touching her. Then he was lying next to her in the bed he always slept in when he stayed overnight. They were both naked. Two of his fingers were sliding the length of her cunt and she was moaning. Don’t moan, he wanted to say, but that would probably be destruction again. Jesus.

He tried, as his fingers moved inside her, to work out who slept where and how thick the walls were and who would be likely to hear, but he was too drunk to arrive at any solutions. He travelled no further than the initial anxieties. Meanwhile Mary moaned. Non-stop.

Why’s she moaning? he wondered. She had never moaned before. She hadn’t moaned in the woods, for example.

Once the sound of a revving car stifled her. He longed for traffic-jams outside the bedroom window. How typical, he thought, that they lived at the end of a cul-de-sac.

Despite his anxiety, despite the rules, despite everything, he was just about to push his cock inside her when the door of the guest-room opened. Alan stood in the doorway wearing his pyjamas. His glasses picked up light from outside. Blank silver discs for eyes. Head cocked at an angle, poised insect. Silence.

Moses trembled. Mary lay still. The place where his knee pressed into the back of her thigh had turned sticky and cold. They both seemed to be waiting for Alan to do something.

Alan spoke to Mary. ‘I think you’ve got a bit mixed up.’ His voice held no trace of censure. Only a soothing calm. Perhaps it sounded a little as if he was talking to a wayward child.

Mary didn’t move.

Alan came forwards and stood over them. ‘Come to bed when you’re ready,’ he said. He ruffled Mary’s hair, then Moses’s. Then he left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Mary left soon after without saying anything.

Gloria would’ve laughed, Moses thought, just before he fell asleep. How Gloria would’ve laughed.

A hangover dulled the panic he might otherwise have felt when he woke the next morning. He needn’t have worried, though. They all ate breakfast as usual, in chaos, three people talking at once.

Nothing had changed.

*

A few days later Gloria rang up.

‘Moses,’ she said, ‘I want to speak to you.’

‘You are speaking to me.’

‘Really speak to you. Not on the phone.’

The receiver felt twice its normal weight in his hand. It must be something serious. They agreed to meet at a pub they both knew in Battersea. A quiet place with a clientele of transvestites, pensioners and UB40S. London in a nutshell. Moses had been a regular there in 1979.

As he pushed through the door that evening, a woman with plasters on two of her fingers stuck her hand out. ‘Fifty pence tonight, love.’

Of course. It was Tuesday night. And Tuesday night was Talent Night. Always had been.

Dolly stood at the bar knocking back the gins. One of the local stars, Dolly. Her copper bouffant hairdo told you that. She had a voice that poured liquid concrete into songs, made them strong and real so they lasted in your head. She was arguing with June, but not so hard that she couldn’t wink at him as he squeezed by.

He winked back. ‘All right, Dolly?’

‘How are you, darling?’

They had an understanding, him and Dolly. They both thought June was a cow. (June thought she was Loretta Lynn.)

‘You want to know what June looks like?’ he had said to Dolly one night.

‘Go on then.’

‘Stand in front of the mirror. That’s right. Now, put your finger in your mouth — ’

Dolly had screamed with laughter. ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?’

‘Come on, Dolly. Put your finger in your mouth. No, it doesn’t matter which one. That’s it. Now, close your lips round your finger. Not too hard. Just so there’s no gaps. Perfect. Now then. Take your finger out again, but don’t move your lips. Carefully. There. Now look in the mirror. June, isn’t it?’

It was true. June really did look like that. Dolly had almost pissed herself that night.

He pushed past a man who was wearing a black bra and a serious, almost scholarly expression, and ordered a Pils. The woman behind the bar remembered him too. They chatted for a moment, then he told her he was meeting someone and edged towards the back of the pub. He sat down in a corner beneath a framed picture of the Matterhorn. The mountain rose against a sky of faultless blue. Four blurred red flowers occupied the foreground. As good a place as any for a serious conversation.

He finished his first drink, started a second.

Then he saw her standing in the doorway, hair teased by the wind, eyebrows of miraculous precision. He couldn’t call out because June was singing. June’s voice had, in its time, cracked everything from glasses to safes. No competition then. He waved, but his wave was lost in the rough sea of couples dancing. Finally he stood up. Then she noticed him and smiled quickly. When she reached him, he bent down, kissed her cheek. He thought he smelt snow on her skin. The first sign of winter.