Dreams of Leaving

Crime is Order

Elliot had gone away for a few days. Business, Ridley said. Business? Moses thought. Hiding, more like. But he kept the thought to himself.

It took him until Tuesday night to pin Elliot down.

‘You know that policeman who was looking for me?’ Moses said, lowering himself on to the corner of Elliot’s desk. ‘What was he like?’

‘I told you,’ Elliot said. ‘He was a big bloke.’

‘A big bloke. That really narrows it down, doesn’t it.’

Elliot heaved a sigh. ‘All right, he was old. Sixty, maybe. Maybe older. Tell you one thing, though. He had a punch like a fucking train.’ His hand moved gingerly across his waistcoat.

‘What did his hair look like?’

‘Hair? Grey, I think.’

‘Long? Short? Curly?’

‘It was short. Sort of a crewcut.’

Moses felt his heart stall. ‘What about his eyes?’

‘Oh, fuck off, Moses. How am I supposed to notice his eyes? I wasn’t in love with the geezer, was I?’

Moses walked to the window. He stared out over the rooftops, his hands in his pockets. Car headlights wiped across his face. ‘Ridley was there, wasn’t he?’

‘He turned up after the bloke ran off. I don’t reckon he saw much.’

‘Do us a favour, Elliot. Get him up here for a moment, would you? It’s important.’

Elliot blew some air out of his mouth. ‘The things I do for you, Moses. And what do you do for me, eh?’

‘I get hit on the head, that’s what I do for you.’

Elliot sighed. He reached for the phone and dialled an internal number. ‘Is Ridley around? Yeah? Well, tell him Elliot wants to speak to him. Yeah, now.’

A few minutes later the office door opened and Ridley appeared. He looked from Elliot to Moses and back again. ‘So what’s the problem, chief?’

‘You remember that copper who came round a couple of months ago?’ Elliot said.

Ridley rolled his head back. He remembered.

Moses jumped in. ‘D’you remember what he looked like?’

‘Didn’t see him, did I?’ Ridley scratched his forearm. It sounded like somebody sawing wood. ‘Heard his voice, though.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Deep. Fucking deep.’

‘Thanks, Ridley.’ Moses turned away. Sixty, crewcut, deep voice. That clinched it.

When Ridley had left, Elliot said, ‘What’s this all about, Moses? You know who the copper was?’

Moses was staring out of the window again. At the place where Peach must, impossibly, have stood. ‘Yeah, I know who he was.’

‘So who was he?’

‘It won’t mean anything to you.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Peach. Chief Inspector Peach.’

‘Peach? I never heard of no fucking Peach.’

‘You wouldn’t have.’ On his way out Moses paused by the door. ‘One thing, Elliot. If you see him again, don’t be too gentle, all right?’

Elliot threw his cigarette out of the window to its death. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, Moses.’

Moses walked slowly down the stairs. Peach in London. Peach asking questions. Why? Moses needed to talk to somebody. And the only person who would understand was Mary. He tried to reach her that night, but there was no reply.

*

The next day he tried again. It was three in the afternoon and he was standing in a call-box in Soho. Dead ducks rotated on a stainless steel spit ten feet away. A green neon sign — SPANKERAMA — flashed in a curtained window. Somebody had scratched the words GOD and FUCK into the red paintwork above the phone. With a coin, probably, because the O was a pyramid and the U looked like a V-sign. A copy of the Sun soaked up urine on the floor. BIG FREEZE CHAOS, the front page said. The freak cold snap earlier in the week had thrown the whole of Central London into chaos: rail services cut, traffic snarl-ups, hyperthermia. Moses shivered as he dialled. Somebody picked up on the other end. He pressed his waiting coin into the slot.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘I was wondering when you were going to call.’

‘Mary?’ He hardly recognised her voice. It sounded so emaciated. As if it had been sent to a concentration camp for voices. But that only delayed him a second. ‘Mary, something’s happened. I’ve found out who — ’

‘Wait a moment, Moses,’ her voice cut in, gathering strength. ‘Listen to me. Just slow down and listen to me.’

The next five seconds were like watching a punch in slow motion: soft ripping as the fist split the air, then the sudden jolt as everything speeded up, happened too fast, as the punch connected.

‘Alan’s dead. He died on Saturday — ’ Her voice crumpled as it hit the sixth word.

Moses let his forehead fall against the cold glass of the phone-box. A different kind of shivering now. The pips went. You have to pay to go on thinking, he thought. He pressed another coin into the slot, then looked at the groove on his thumb that the coin had left behind. He was noticing things like that now. Things he usually skimmed over. The word dead did that. It turned you into a camera. Automatic pictures: those red ducks revolving in the window; that slush in the gutter; the words GOD and FUCK. God and fuck. That just about summed it up.

Saturday …

They had driven south to look for his parents. They had broken down on the way back. Mary had tried to phone Alan. She hadn’t got through. And no wonder. Alan had been dead the whole time.

‘Mary — ’

‘It’s all right, Moses. I’m still not used to saying it.’ A wry toughness in her voice. Almost cavalier, she sounded.

‘Shit, I don’t — I don’t know what — ’

‘It’s all right.’

Silence again. Their relationship hadn’t been built to withstand anything like this. One moment they were sailing along, the next they were clinging to the wreckage. He pressed his forehead into the glass. Icepack-cold. Numbing. He wanted to see her, but he could only see the darkness behind his closed eyes. The colour of mourning. The colour of her clothes. Maybe he was seeing her.

Tap, tap.

Somebody was tapping on the glass. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of black shoes. Then a grey pinstripe suit and a furled umbrella. Finally a pinched indignant face. He turned round, faced the other way.

‘Can you hear me?’ Mary said.

‘Yes.’

‘I want you to listen to me and try to understand what I’m going to say.’

He could hear the bravery in her voice. It made his voice catch when he answered her. ‘I’m listening.’

Tap, tap.

‘I don’t want to see you, Moses. Can you understand that?’

‘I think so.’

Tap, tap, tap.

‘Don’t call me and don’t write. I need some time.’

‘OK.’

Tap, tap. TAP, TAP.

He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and pushed the door open.

‘I’m in a hurry,’ the man with the umbrella said. ‘Could you please — ’

‘Wait your fucking turn, all right?’ Moses forced the words out, one syllable at a time, through clenched teeth. He pulled the door shut again.

‘Hello? — Moses? — ’

‘It’s all right. I’m still here.’

‘Do you understand what I’ve been saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you understand why?’

‘I think so. I’m trying to.’

‘That makes me feel a lot better.’

‘Good.’

Tap, tap.

‘I’m going to hang up now, Moses.’

‘OK.’

Tap, tap. TAP.

‘Goodbye then.’

‘Goodbye, Mary — and take care — ’

But she had already hung up.

He listened to the dialling tone until it cut off. Then only void. A distant sputtering, like outer space.

Tap, tap, tap.

TAP, TAP, TAP.

He replaced the receiver and pushed the door open. He snatched the man’s umbrella and, with a kind of weary strength, hurled it towards Cambridge Circus. It cartwheeled through the icy sky, spinning black on grey, and landed in the middle of Charing Cross Road. He thought he heard a discreet snap as it was crushed by the wheels of a passing cab.

‘Hey,’ the man cried. ‘You can’t just — ’

‘I just did,’ Moses said.

And walked away. No smile on his face. Not even a backward glance.

*

South from Soho.

It had always been a favourite walk of his. It used all the senses. The sultry neon of strip-joints, arguments in Chinese, rack on rack of foreign magazines, the forest-fire crackle of pork frying, a million brands of cigarettes, cauliflowers bowling along the gutters, snatches of crisp disco-funk from curtained doorways, the steamy reek of Dim Sum whisked into the street by ventilator-fans. He usually dawdled. This time, though, he walked fast, automatically. A turbulent mixture of emotions drove him along like high-octane fuel. If he slowed he would explode. He didn’t understand this impetus they gave him. He was no mechanic.

He suspected that he made an impression on the city that afternoon. His size, his haste — both excessive. As he burst into Piccadilly Circus he saw one tourist point and giggle. ‘Look at that English. Crazy, no?’

Yes, crazy. He had this exaggerated sense of his own power — as if, simply by walking across London, he could alter the course of history. On Haymarket he stepped out in front of a chauffeured limousine. The limo swerved, threw its passenger’s bald head against the window. Afterwards Moses thought he had placed that bald head. It belonged to a senior cabinet minister. Would the minister now make an uncharacteristically shaky speech in the House of Commons?

Moses crossed Trafalgar Square on a diagonal, ignoring the traffic lights, the screech of brakes, the horns. He didn’t even stop to swear at the pigeons (something he had got into the habit of doing recently). He stormed straight into Whitehall, oblivious, vacant, irresistible. The horseguards fought to control their mounts as he passed. No doubt several of the tourist snaps taken at the time would come out blurred. Shame. He wondered if he had rattled any of the windows in 10 Downing Street. He hoped so. Oh, for a million like me, he thought. Did the Ministry of Defence report any slight earth tremors? It didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. Not even Elliot, friend and benefactor, could put a stop to the projectile that Moses had become. He advanced to meet Moses, hands outstretched in greeting, only to be unceremoniously brushed aside and left spinning on his heels, like someone in a cartoon.

Moses didn’t slacken his pace until he reached his bathroom. Never had he needed the soothing properties of his bath more urgently. He soaked for an hour and a half, waiting for calmness to descend, hardly daring to think. He lay in the bath until the water turned cold for the third time, until all he could see was a faint orange glimmer on the surface.

Alan dead.

Excluded from Mary’s sorrow, confined to his own. That and the swirl of water as he stirred an arm or a leg. How close he was to that original memory of his.

Alone. The darkness. The sound of water. Dimly he began to understand his fascination with baths.

Later he walked into the bedroom, lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

*

He woke two hours later, sticky and confused. Dreams he couldn’t remember rustled in his head like tissue-paper. His mouth tasted sour. His anger had curdled, turned to defiance. He picked up the phone and weighed it in his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he called Jackson.

A fumbling on the other end, then a stammered, ‘Hello?’

‘Jackson?’

‘Moses!’ Jackson cried. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you?’

‘Not too good at the moment. What’re you doing tonight?’

‘Tonight I’m busy. What about tomorrow?’

Moses hung his head, said nothing.

‘Why?’ Jackson went on. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I just feel like seeing someone.’ Moses allowed himself a wry smile. ‘It’s a pity I can’t see that ghost you’re always going on about. That’d be better than nothing.’

Jackson produced a silence so incredulous that Moses wondered what he had said.

‘What ghost?’ Jackson asked eventually.

‘The ghost you told me about. The ghost that was sitting next to me. You know, on the sofa,’ and Moses pointed at the sofa, as if it proved something.

Another silence from Jackson, equally incredulous.

‘You do remember,’ Moses said, ‘don’t you?’

‘I hate to disappoint you, Moses, but there isn’t any ghost.’

Moses gaped into the phone. ‘What?’

‘There isn’t a ghost. There never was. I made it up.’

‘You what?’

‘I made it up. I thought you might be lonely living up there all by yourself, so I invented a ghost for you — ’

‘But the coat-hook — ’ Moses broke in. ‘The chair — ’

‘They were just props, that’s all. It was a story, you see.’

Moses sank on to the windowsill. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Sorry if I messed you around, Moses.’ It sounded as if Jackson meant it.

‘That’s all right,’ Moses said. ‘It’s my fault. I mean, I was the one who believed it, wasn’t I?’

‘Of course you believed it. You needed to.’

Needed to? Moses was about to mock when he recognised a sort of wisdom in what Jackson was saying. Moses had never thought of himself as lonely before, but didn’t it make sense? Certainly he felt that way now. Typical of Jackson to pick up on something like that. Jackson had sensitivity, insight. He was a fund of delicate perceptions and responses. Back in August Moses had asked Louise whether there was anything going on between her and Jackson. Louise had smiled. ‘Well?’ he had said. ‘Is there?’ ‘Sort of,’ she had replied. ‘What do you mean, sort of?’ Louise had shrugged. ‘I slept with him once.’ ‘And?’ ‘And what?’ ‘And what happened?’ Louise’s smile had deepened, become private. ‘He kissed my feet,’ she said.

Moses could see Jackson now, almost as if they were in the same room. Those narrowed eyes, that enigmatic smile. A buddha, that’s what Jackson was. Nervous and wiry and not gold at all, but a buddha just the same.

‘You still there, Moses?’

‘Yeah, I’m still here. Just thinking, that’s all. You know, it’s funny, but you’re absolutely right. Even though I didn’t think about her much, I kind of got used to the idea of her being there. I wasn’t living alone. I was sharing with this woman who I never saw.’

‘Well, now she’s moved out,’ Jackson said. ‘Think of it like that.’

‘Yeah.’ Moses laughed softly to himself. ‘You know something, Jackson? I didn’t like people using her chair.’

‘Sometimes, Moses,’ and Moses could hear Jackson smiling, ‘just sometimes, you really take the biscuit.’

‘Yes,’ Moses nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

After he had hung up he leaned back against the window and sighed. With every phone-call, another loss. First Mary, now the ghost. Only the past for company.

He decided to risk one last call. He dialled Vince’s number.

‘Yeah?’

Vince was home. Good.

‘Vince? It’s Moses.’

‘So what.’

‘I need a favour.’

‘No.’

‘Just shut up and listen for a moment, will you. I want to get out of it.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Now.’

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘None of your business. Can you organise it or not?’

Vince said nothing for a few seconds. Weighing up possibilities, no doubt. Sometimes Moses thought there must be scales in Vince’s mind. A gram of this, a spoon of that. Everything measured out in little envelopes.

‘Tell you what,’ Moses said. ‘I’ll meet you in that pub opposite you. About eight. You know the one I mean?’

‘’Course I fucking know. It’s my territory.’

‘See you in a bit.’

‘Hang on. How long’re you going to be there?’

‘Till I fall over.’

‘This sounds like fun,’ Vince leered.

‘I doubt it,’ Moses said, and hung up.

*

Moses arrived first, as he had expected to. Vince only did two kinds of waiting. He waited for his dealer, and he waited for girlfriends who had left him to come back. His dealer always showed, the girlfriends rarely did. Mere friends didn’t rate as a priority.

Moses ordered a Pils and settled in a quiet corner. He was drinking to get drunk, drinking fast and with determination, so he would be able to sleep that night. He wanted time to pass, distance to happen. Like when you doze on a train. He sat there pretending the pub was a train.

Several stations later Vince turned up. He grinned at the debris of empty bottles on the table. That was what he liked to see.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Must be my round.’

Unheard-of for Vince, this, but Moses didn’t even crack a smile.

Vince obviously hadn’t heard about Alan’s death and Moses wasn’t going to break the news to him so he felt weighed down at the beginning by stuff he couldn’t offload, but as they moved from drink to drink and pub to pub, ever deeper into a world where objects and people Xeroxed themselves in front of his eyes, he floated free of all that. Time concertina’d, every action danced. He talked to Vince without saying anything, which was how most of his friends talked, which was how Vince, especially, talked, which was why he had called Vince in the first place. Vince didn’t ask questions. Vince wasn’t interested. They went to the Gents together to take Vince’s sulphate and there was sufficient intimacy in that: two pairs of shoes showing under a single cubicle door.

At midnight they were leaving a basement wine-bar somewhere in Chelsea. Moses had been delayed over a discrepancy in the bill. When he climbed the stairs he found Vince wrestling with part of the décor. Some kind of framed print.

‘What the fuck’re you doing, Vince?’

‘What’s it look like?’

‘You’ve got no idea, have you.’

‘Give us a hand then.’

‘Get out the way.’ He shoved Vince aside. He gave the print one swift tug and it came away from the wall. A screw scuttled down the stairs and round the corner.

He ran up the stairs and turned left on to the street. When he reached the corner he stopped to inspect the print. It was an airbrush drawing of a Coca-Cola bottle. He leaned it against an iron railing and was just turning to ask Vince why he had such fucking awful taste when somebody grabbed his arm and swung him round. There were about three policemen standing there with about another three policemen standing behind them. He almost said Hello, Hello, Hello. He didn’t, but the thought made him grin.

‘Oh, so we think it’s funny, do we?’ one of the policemen said.

Fuck off, Moses thought.

Another picked the print up off the pavement and examined it with great interest as if he was in the market for that kind of thing. He probably was.

‘Is this yours?’ he said.

‘Certainly not,’ Moses said. What an insult.

‘Where did you get it from then?’

‘Over there.’

‘Over where?’

‘That wine-bar over there.’

Where was Vince? Moses wondered. His bloody idea. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Vince being questioned by some other policemen. It was unclear exactly how many.

‘That your mate, is it?’

He didn’t like the way they kept jumping to conclusions so he didn’t say anything this time. He had the impression — a dim impression, submerged in pints and pints of alcohol — that he had said too much already. He silently cursed that honesty of his which always floated to the surface when he was drunk.

‘I think,’ the policeman with the print said, ‘that we’d better return this to where it belongs.’

The policeman who was holding Moses reached for his walkie-talkie and, just for a second or two, his grip on Moses’s arm relaxed. Moses jerked free and made a break for the nearest side-street. Darkness flowed round his body like fur. Lights bounced on either side of him. Like swimming, this running. So effortless and smooth. Ridiculous, actually. He wanted to stop and laugh. His idea (inspired, he thought, by memories of Top Cat) was to hide in a dustbin until the policemen blundered past and then dart off in the opposite direction. But when he turned the corner he couldn’t see a single dustbin. Not one. No dustbins? he thought. Where do they put all their rubbish? He was still running, but the confidence was draining out of him. Dismay filtered into his bloodstream. Escape began to seem less and less feasible. As he looked over his shoulder to see where the policemen were, his foot caught the raised lip of a paving-stone and he went sprawling. The next thing he knew, there were half a dozen policemen kneeling on his back.

‘Got you, you bastard.’

‘Resisting arrest, eh?’

‘You’re in big trouble, you are, mate.’

Their breath stank of triumph and sour milk. He tried to look round to see exactly who the breath belonged to, only to have his face rammed sideways into the pavement.

‘Don’t you bloody move, smartarse.’

‘You’re in big trouble, you are.’

He didn’t move.

‘All right, get on your feet.’

How could he do that? At least five of them were still kneeling on his back.

‘I said get up, cunt.’

He laughed. ‘You told me not to move.’

He shouldn’t have laughed. A fist (or something designed for a similar purpose) crashed into his kidneys. He gasped. These were hard men, he realised. They would smile at you and then knock the teeth out the back of your head if you smiled back.

‘Got a right one here.’

‘He’s in big trouble, he is.’

‘Come on, get up.’

They eased off his back — unwillingly, it seemed to him — and gripped him by the arms. All right, he thought. I’ll get up.

They marched him back towards the wine-bar, two in front, two behind, one on either side. Everything bar handcuffs. Two squad cars waited on the road, engines idling. The crackle of walkie-talkies. Blue whirling lights. A small crowd gathering. This can’t be real, he thought. This can’t all be for me.

They passed Vince skulking in a doorway. He made a face, powerless, apologetic, and shrugged. There weren’t any six policemen kneeling on his back and calling him bastard, Moses noticed.

They escorted him back through the door, down the stairs (past the two ragged holes and the telltale rectangle of clean white wallpaper) and into the bar. One policeman stood guard over him while two others held a conference with a squat middle-aged man who was, presumably, the manager. The few people left in the bar stared at Moses with open curiosity.

He heard the word prosecute. Heav-y. He exchanged a brief glance with the manager. The manager’s eyes were loaded with scorn and disgust. Oh, come on, Moses wanted to say. I wasn’t going to steal that thing. Who’d want to steal anything that corny?

‘He liked the place so much,’ the girl behind the bar was saying, ‘that he had to take a piece of it with him.’

Now that hurt. He remembered smiling at her earlier in the evening and he remembered her almost smiling back. She wouldn’t even look at him now. She went on polishing glasses, her eyes screened by her hair, her lips twisted in contempt.

Some kind of decision was reached. One of the policemen pushed him through the bar, up the stairs and out on to the street. A squad car drew alongside. The policeman spoke into his walkie-talkie.

‘— have successfully apprehended the criminal — ’

Criminal? Criminal? I’m not a criminal, Moses thought.

Oh yes you are, said the policeman’s face.

Moses was bundled into the back of the car. He had to sit between two policemen, his shoulders drawn together, his arms dangling between his legs. The lights of the King’s Road raked through the interior as they moved away. He felt a sudden sense of elation at the novelty of it all.

‘See that shop?’ he cried. ‘That’s where I bought these boots!’

The two policemen in front exchanged a glance.

What was wrong with them? Moses wondered. They’d made their arrest, the tension was over, why couldn’t they loosen up, have a bit of fun? He stared at them one by one, these four policemen who didn’t know how to enjoy themselves. Where was wit? Where was laughter? Where, if nothing else, was job satisfaction? He wanted to entertain them, but all his jokes fell on stony faces.

Then a frightening thought occurred to him. So frightening that he was almost too afraid to ask.

‘You’re not Peach’s men, are you?’

Both the policemen in the back stared straight ahead, expressionless, unblinking.

‘You know. Peach. Chief Inspector Peach.’

Not a flicker of recognition.

‘He runs a police station. Somewhere down south. Pretty small operation by your standards, I suppose.’

Still nothing.

‘You really don’t know him?’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,’ the driver said.

‘Well,’ Moses said, ‘that’s a relief.’

But then he thought, they would say that, wouldn’t they. If they were Peach’s men. He tried another tack.

‘Where are you taking me?’

They wouldn’t say.

He leaned forwards and peered at the fuel gauge. Almost empty. Not enough to get to New Egypt then. Thank God for that.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘careful you don’t run out of petrol.’

‘I think you’d better shut it,’ the policeman on his left said.

‘Oh, life,’ Moses exclaimed. ‘I was beginning to think you were all dead. Bit worrying being driven along by four dead policemen.’

‘Christ,’ the driver muttered.

The car swung left into a narrow backstreet. Now Moses knew he hadn’t been kidnapped by Peach, he began to relax, take in his surroundings. They passed a girl with blonde hair standing by the side of the road. She looked at him as if she knew him. He waved. The girl smiled. Her smile reached through the closed car window, past the taciturn policemen, and into Moses’s heart, where it glowed. There is nothing to beat the smile of a girl you have never seen before, he thought.

‘Peach offered me a job, you know.’ There was something about the silence of these policemen that made him talk. ‘He said I’d make an excellent police officer. No, magnificent, he said. What d’you think of that?’

Before anyone could reply they had pulled into the kerb and parked. Moses was manhandled out of the car and on to the pavement. Seen in the bleak light of the street-lamps, the policemen had hard closed faces, the kind of faces that believe in duty, violence, Margaret Thatcher, and a good chauvinistic fuck on Friday nights.

‘You know, I don’t like Peach very much,’ he laughed, ‘but I like him better than you lot.’

The grip on his upper arm tightened. He would have a bruise there in the morning — and it wouldn’t be the only one either.

*

He was escorted into a grey room with bare walls and no windows. Two policemen in regulation shirtsleeves stood on either side of a solid wooden desk. One was tall and sallow; a few strands of black hair had made the lonely journey across the top of his bald head. The other, stockier, had a bull neck, sloping shoulders, and a blur of ginger hair on his forearms. They had already taken his name and address (they had taken his belt too, and they had dropped it into a transparent plastic bag which made the belt look important and rather dangerous, and meant he had to hold his trousers up by hand). Now they were telling him to take off his boots. Try it sometime when you’re drunk. Hold on to your trousers with one hand and reach down for your laces with the other. Impossible. Either your trousers fall down or you do.

After two or three attempts he said, ‘I can’t.’

The tall policeman walked round the desk and stood over him. ‘Take your bloody boots off, Moses.’ The Moses was a sneer.

The stocky policeman laughed. ‘Are you a bit Jewish by any chance, Moses? Are you a bit of a fucking yid?’ He draped his forefinger across his nose as he spoke.

‘None of your business,’ Moses said. For which he was shoved in the back by the tall policeman. He keeled over, landed face down on the floor.

‘Take your boots off, Moses.’

‘I thought it was only blacks you beat up,’ Moses said, and instantly regretted it. A highly polished shoe smashed into his ribs.

‘Didn’t hurt you, did I, Moses?’

‘You’re making things difficult, Moses Bloody Highness.’ The tall policeman read these last three words off his official form as if Bloody was Moses’s middle name.

‘So are you,’ Moses said.

‘I suggest you shut your mouth and get on with it.’

Both the policemen had voices that grated like machines for grinding the organs, bones and flesh of cattle. They would make mincemeat of him if he wasn’t careful. He thought of Mary’s voice and almost cried. He fumbled with his boots again, managed to undo one of the laces.

‘Look at that. He did it.’

‘Amazing.’

‘Now do it up again.’

‘What is this?’ Moses said. ‘Kindergarten?’

‘You don’t deserve to be treated any other way — ’

‘Bastard.’ The stocky policeman liked to finish off the tall policeman’s sentences for him. They were a real team.

Moses tied the lace. ‘Now what?’

‘Now take your boots off.’

He muttered under his breath. He untied the lace again. Then he stood up. He let go of his trousers, gripped his left boot in both hands and began to hop round the floor. It just wouldn’t come off. His trousers slipped down to his knees, tied his legs together. He fell over again.

‘I’m bored with this game,’ he said.

‘You’re not doing very well, are you — ’

‘Jewboy.’

‘Not quite so fucking smart as you thought.’

‘Oh piss off, will you?’ he said. Anger was beginning to seep through the many layers of his drunkenness.

A shoe pinned his wrist to the floor.

‘We don’t like that kind of language.’

‘Specially not from a stupid cunt like you.’

The tall policeman moved towards him, a sheen of sweat on his high balding forehead.

‘I’m going to report you two,’ Moses said.

‘Did you say report?’

‘Yeah. To Chief Inspector Peach.’ Bravado now, bluff, anything.

‘Peach.’ one of the policemen scoffed.

‘You piece of shit,’ said the other, and landed a shoe just above Moses’s left eye.

‘Haha,’ Moses said. Red and orange planets whirled across the darkness as he closed his eyes. One of them looked like Saturn. ‘If I said Manchester, would you start dribbling?’

The shoe landed again, somewhere on the back of his thighs.

‘Crime is order,’ he shouted as they came at him again. ‘A policeman said that.’

‘I’ll give you crime is order.’

‘Crime is order, my foot.’

Two different shoes landed simultaneously in two different and tender places.

‘All right, that’s enough.’

‘Peach’s important,’ Moses murmured. ‘Peach’s my friend. He’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’

But the policemen had gone and he was alone.

Cold lino floor. Distantly aching body. One grazed hand beside his face, the redness too close to his eyes. Unwillingness to move.

Cold.

*

It was some time before the door opened again.

‘Would you come this way, please?’

Moses had propped himself against a wall. He turned his head and saw a young police officer with a soft face and freckles. His voice polite, almost subservient. Classic interrogation technique, Moses thought. One moment he was bastard, the next he was sir.

‘What’ve you got lined up for me now?’ But the alcohol and the drugs had worn off and he felt drab and slow, utterly incurious. Police procedure — the exhaustion, the monotony, the waiting — had tranquillised him; he would submit to each new development quite passively.

‘Fingerprints,’ the new policeman said.

Wincing, Moses climbed to his feet. He followed the new policeman out of the room, down a corridor that smelt like a hospital (and no wonder, he thought, feeling his injuries), and into a room that was as cluttered as the previous room had been bare.

The policeman produced a packet of Embassy Number One. ‘Like a cigarette, Moses?’

Suspicious, Moses searched into the policeman’s freckled face; it contained nothing but innocence. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You smoke the same brand as my dad.’

The policeman lit the cigarette for him. While Moses smoked, the policeman prepared a flat oblong tin and several printed sheets of paper.

‘Give me your hand,’ the policeman said.

Moses raised an eyebrow and crushed his cigarette out.

‘The fingerprints,’ the policeman explained with a grin. ‘It’s easier if I guide your hand. Unless you’ve done it before, of course.’

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘This is my first time.’

He watched as the policeman took his fingers one by one and carefully but firmly rolled them from left to right, first across the ink-pad in the oblong tin, then across a sheet of paper that had been divided into squares, one for each finger. He realised that he was collecting the kind of information that Vince specialised in. That fucker. This was all his fault.

Afterwards, when he was washing the ink off his fingers, he said over his shoulder, ‘You know, I think you’re OK.’

The policeman grinned.

‘Seriously,’ Moses said. ‘I’ve come across quite a few policemen recently and you’re one of the nicest I’ve come across.’

The policeman’s grin broadened. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Harry.’

‘Not Dirty Harry?’

‘That’s an old joke, Moses.’

‘Sorry, Harry. People always make the same jokes about my name too.’ Moses dried his hands on the towel provided. ‘Hey, Harry. I was thinking of becoming a policeman. What d’you reckon?’

Harry shook his head slowly. ‘I think you’d better forget the idea.’

‘Why’s that, Harry?’

Harry pointed at the fingerprints on the table. ‘I don’t think they’d look too good on your application form.’

Something sank in Moses. A slow lift in the tower-block of his body. Going down. ‘Oh yeah. Shit. I suppose you’re right.’ Then he turned and looked appealingly at Harry. ‘But I would’ve been tall enough, wouldn’t I?’

‘Oh yes.’ Harry squinted up at Moses. ‘You would’ve been tall enough, all right.’

After the fingerprints came the mug-shots. One frontal and two profiles were required. Harry sat Moses down in a metal chair, then crouched behind his camera. He told Moses which way to look and not to smile.

‘So I have to look serious, do I?’ Moses said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Can’t have our criminals smiling, can we?’ Moses composed himself, assuming an expression of great, if slightly wounded, nobility. His chin raised, he thought momentarily of Mary again.

Harry straightened up. ‘You can relax now.’

‘I bet those were pretty good pictures,’ Moses said. ‘Could you get me a few copies?’

Harry laughed. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s against regulations.’

‘Shame, that. Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. Now there’s one last thing, then you can go. You have the right to make a written statement. You don’t have to, you understand. But you can. If you want. It’s entirely up to you.’

Moses considered the proposition for a few moments, then he said, ‘Yes, I’d like to. I feel like writing something.’

Harry sighed. He gave Moses a biro and the appropriate form (with its heavily ruled lines, it looked like the bars on a cell if you turned it sideways), and left the room. When he returned five minutes later with two cups of coffee he peered over Moses’s shoulder. He sighed again.

‘What’s wrong, Harry?’ Moses said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

Harry peered over Moses’s shoulder again, then he frowned and scratched his head. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to, you know.’

Moses read through what he had written so far. At some points he nodded, at others he chuckled. It made a good story. He decided to cross out the bit about the policemen’s breath smelling like sour milk. That probably wouldn’t go down too well in court.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I want to do it. One thing, though. What do I say about being beaten up by those two policemen in the other room?’

Harry took a deep breath. ‘That’s a very serious allegation, Moses.’

‘It’s not an allegation, Harry. It’s the truth. Have you seen my eyebrow?’

‘I understood,’ Harry said slowly, ‘that you sustained that injury while resisting arrest.’

Moses subjected Harry to long and careful scrutiny. Then he drew a line, very deliberately, under what he had written. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I’ve finished.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Harry said as he signed the statement, ‘it’ll be all right.’ (It wasn’t all right. Two weeks later Moses appeared at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court. The judge told him he was childish and irresponsible, and fined him £50. He almost charged him with contempt of court too. For leaning on the dock. The judge had white hair and a bright pink face. Moses had never seen anyone who looked so consistently furious.)

‘You can collect your things now,’ Harry said. ‘There are some friends of yours waiting for you.’

Moses tossed his polystyrene cup into the waste-paper basket. ‘Thanks, Harry.’ He paused by the door. ‘Just think. We could’ve been working together.’

Harry grinned and scratched his head.

‘Not any more, though. Eh, Harry?’

‘Goodbye, Moses.’

‘See you, Harry.’

Moses walked back to the duty-room where he was handed his personal effects. Through a window of reinforced glass he could see Vince, Eddie and some new girl of Eddie’s. She was wearing skin-tight red and white striped trousers. The officer on duty seemed to think that she was something to do with Moses.

‘Blimey, look at that,’ he drooled. ‘You’re a lucky bastard.’

‘Arrested, beaten up, my Wednesday night ruined,’ Moses murmured. ‘Oh yes, I’m a lucky bastard all right.’

But the officer didn’t seem to hear him. Still mesmerised by those stripes.

Moses buckled his belt with great relief. How nice to have two hands again. Amazing invention, belts. He had always taken them for granted in the past. Not any more.

He met his friends on the steps of the police station like a hero returning.

It was just after two in the morning.

They all went dancing.

*

Everybody who came into contact with Mary during the six days between Alan’s death and the funeral seemed, either openly or covertly, to be congratulating her on the way she was coping. Coping. The word nauseated her. The way she saw it, that kind of sympathy came from the same family as condescension, a distant relation, perhaps, but still family, and if there was one thing she couldn’t stomach it was being condescended to, however obscurely. She thought she knew what they were picking up on, though. They were picking up on surface stuff: her dry eyes, her efficient manner — her armour, in other words. She wore a lot of lipstick and kohl. She wore stiff fabrics too, nothing that swirled or floated, nothing vague. Her airiness had evaporated completely. She displayed instead a kind of ironic practicality that verged, at times, on callousness. ‘No, the funeral’s happening very quickly,’ she heard herself inform a neighbour on the phone. ‘Apparently not many people died in Muswell Hill last week.’ Inside, though, she was still trying to get used to the idea that she had been cheated. Her. Cheated. Her anger at that. She wanted to whirl round and, levelling a finger, cry, ‘Don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes.’ But you can’t talk to death like that. Death doesn’t have to listen to anyone.

She saw only the necessary people — the priest, the funeral directors, Alan’s father. She made an exception for Maurice. He came round on the Tuesday. He didn’t treat her as if she was ill, or wounded, or mad. He simply looked at her across the table without pity or embarrassment, the slow bones of his hands cradling a cup of tea, the right shoulder of his grey jacket worn shiny by long familiarity with dustbins. That stare of his spread a safety-net that she could fall into. Those hands made her feel strangely comfortable. She even smiled as she said, ‘I want you to take all Alan’s clothes away with you.’

‘You mean dump them?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No. I want you to have them.’

The dustman lowered his eyes.

She watched his hands wander on the surface of the table. She thought of plants moving on the bottom of the sea.

‘I know you never really spoke to Alan,’ she went on, ‘but you would have liked each other. I know you would. I can’t imagine anyone I would rather give his clothes to. Please take them, Maurice. Who knows,’ and she surprised herself by laughing, ‘some of them might even fit.’

‘You do me good,’ she told him as she showed him to the door. ‘Come again, won’t you?’

‘Next Tuesday suit you?’ He grinned at her. It was one of his jokes.

‘Next Tuesday’s fine.’ She watched him shamble down the garden path, his feet flapping on the concrete as if his ankle-joints needed tightening.

Her smile lasted.

When his lorry had turned the corner, she walked back indoors, stood by the phone. Facts, she thought. Facts, not emotions. She knew roughly what had happened to Alan. She knew that he had collapsed on Ealing Broadway at about two forty-five on Saturday afternoon. She knew that he had died of a thrombosis, a hardening of the artery walls which, according to the doctor who signed the death certificate, ought to have been detected years before. (‘Ought?’ she had wanted to scream at him, this placid careful man, because he had, for those few minutes, represented the entire profession to her. ‘Why wasn’t it then? Why didn’t you?’) Now she needed to know how it had happened. She needed an eye-witness account. She needed to be able to see every detail.

She dialled the police in Ealing. After twenty minutes of being transferred from one extension to another, after repeating her story at least half a dozen times, she was given the number of a Mrs Hart (a name that Moses must have run his finger over a thousand times, she thought, while searching for his own). Mrs Hart, she was told, had been present at the scene of her husband’s death and would be able to provide her with the information she required. That same afternoon she drove to Ealing. Mrs Hart lived in a walk-up council block not far from Ealing Broadway. The stairs smelt of urine and then, higher up, of meat-fat. Mrs Hart’s flat was on the fourth floor.

When Mary knocked on the door of number 72, an old woman with silver hair answered. ‘Mrs Hart?’

The old woman nodded.

‘I’m Mrs Shirley.’

‘They said you was comin’.’ Mrs Hart ushered Mary into her lounge. ‘Wos your name, love?’

Mary told her.

‘Mine’s Ruby. Ought to’ve been born on Valentine’s Day, didn’ I?’ Her narrow eyes gleamed like an animal’s — trust rather than cunning, though.

They sat down on a brown and yellow sofa. A gas fire bubbled in the corner.

‘I’m sorry about your ’usband.’ Ruby laid a hand on Mary’s wrist. ‘It’s a bloody world, isn’ it?’

Mary nodded. ‘I wanted to ask you what happened that afternoon. What you saw. It’s so hard not having been there.’

‘I can imagine, love.’ Ruby shifted to face Mary, her hands folded like gloves in her lap. ‘Well,’ and she took a deep breath, ‘I was on me way to the shops. Fifteen minutes’ walk from ’ere. It’s the steps, see. Murder on me legs.’ She rolled her eyes and Mary smiled. ‘I was walkin’ up the main road when this bus come along, number sixty-free I fink it was. There’s nobody at the stop, but the bus stops anyway, to let somebody off. Then this gentleman goes past me, well, I mean you can tell, can’t you, an’ ’e’s shoutin’ an’ wavin’ an’ all sorts for the bus to wait for ‘im like. The driver sees ‘im runnin’, but you know what some of them drivers’re like, right bloody bastards if you excuse me language. Wos ’e do? ’E puts ‘is foot down, dun ’e. Well,’ another deep breath, ‘the gentleman, ’e carries on runnin’ ‘cos the bus is goin’ pretty slow, then all of a sudden ’e keels over. Jus’ keels over right there on the street. I fought ’e must of tripped or summin’ so I goes over to ’elp ‘im up like. ’E’s lying on ‘is back in ’e, wiv ‘is eyes open but sort of starin’ an’ ’e sees me an’ ’e smiles an’ ’e says, “Stupid,” ’e says an’ I says, “Wos stupid?”, finking ’e means me an’ ’e says, “Fancy slippin’ on a banana like that,” an’ I look round for a banana an’ there in’t no banana is there an’ I look at ‘im an’ I’m about to tell ‘im there in’t no banana an’ what’s ’e talkin’ about banana but then I look a bit closer like an’ I see ’e’s dead. Well, there’s all these people shoutin’ about get a nambulance an’ I says, “Wos the point of a nambulance, ’e’s dead in ’e.” An’ ’e was wan ’e. Frombosis, the doctor said. Nuffin’ to do wiv no banana.’

Tears were falling from Mary’s eyes. Alan had died alone. Among strangers. Without understanding. She had been so far away. Too far away to comfort, to explain, to reassure. That degree of distance from someone she had been so close to. It dismantled her armour. Her make-up ran, her body crumpled in Ruby’s arms. That one weekend away had opened up a gap for ever. She couldn’t leap over or build a bridge. She could only sit at the edge and pour her tears into it. One day, when she had cried enough, perhaps she would be able to swim across. She would be returning from that weekend for the rest of her life. Even on her deathbed she still wouldn’t quite have reached home.

‘You poor darlin’,’ Ruby murmured. ‘It’s a bloody world.’

As Mary drove back to Muswell Hill, a strange thought occurred to her. A middle-aged man — try, she told herself, to see him objectively, even if only for a moment — collapses on a busy street. A woman bends to help him. The flow of pedestrians is interrupted. A crowd gathers. The traffic jams as cars slow down and drivers peer through windscreens. One of the city’s main arteries is blocked for maybe thirty seconds. The traffic police appear. They gesticulate with their immaculate white gloves. The cars move on. The crowd disperses. The street regains its rhythm.

But there are no traffic police in the middle-aged man’s veins.

The blockage is permanent.

He dies.

Yes, she thought. Alan had articulated, on a large scale, the drama that had taken place inside his own body. He had externalised his death. She wanted to tell him that, she wanted to see the expression on his face — when she thought of things like that she always told him — but she could only have told him if he was still alive, if the whole thing had never happened, and then there wouldn’t have been anything to tell. Grief’s vicious circle. He was dead, and you could go round and round, but you couldn’t go back. There was no reversing up a one-way street like death. No sir, there was a big ticket for that.

*

The day before the funeral a wreath of white flowers and wild ferns was delivered to the house in Muswell Hill. Alison carried it into the kitchen and laid it on the table.

‘It’s from Moses.’ She read the note, then looked across at Mary. ‘Isn’t he coming tomorrow?’

Mary was standing in front of the mirror. She tilted her head sideways, adjusted an earring. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

Mary didn’t answer.

‘He’s entitled to, isn’t he?’ Alison said, not querulous exactly, but insistent. ‘I thought he was — ’ and she paused — ‘a member of the family.’

Mary recognised her own words. She chose not to acknowledge them. ‘He doesn’t know about it.’

‘What?’ Rebecca was lingering in the doorway. ‘He doesn’t know that Daddy — ’

‘He doesn’t know about the funeral,’ Mary cut in.

‘Why not?’ Alison persisted.

Mary turned from the mirror. This was the point at which the truth became too complex, too unwieldy, to manage, at the moment at least, and lies, the lackeys that they were, presented themselves, oily and obsequious. And so she said simply, ‘I didn’t tell him,’ which closed the door in the face of her daughters’ questions and the lies that wanted to serve as answers. The two girls seemed to accept this, despite the look they swapped behind (or almost behind) their mother’s back. Alison murmured something about not being able to breathe; she moved away and opened a window. Rebecca did something nervous with her feet. Mary forced herself to leave the room.

The tension stayed with her. At four in the morning she threw on a silk dressing-gown and walked out on to the terrace. Such a wind. She filled her lungs with fierce air. Clouds, great jagged sheets of steel, clashed overhead. The moon showed briefly, dented and blackened, the bottom of an old saucepan. They told her no stories, nothing she could use to explain her withholding, her dishonesty, not even to herself. She stood on the terrace and listened to the crash and jangle of the night until she, too, seemed turned to metal by the cold, until the wind had blown all thoughts from her head. Towards dawn she slept.

In the morning she opened the doors of her wardrobe, and the rows and rows of black clothes that she saw there immobilised her. It’s almost as if I’ve been preparing for this moment, she thought. It’s almost as if I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this death, this grief, this widowhood. With every black dress bought, with every black accessory received. Preparing, preparing. She dropped on to the bed, remembered her mother on a rare visit to London saying, in that deliberately puzzled voice she could put on (as if grappling with a problem to which she could imagine no possible solution), ‘I simply do not understand this love-affair you seem to have with black.’ She couldn’t think what her reply had been. Something withering, no doubt. But now the sight of all that black crushed and sickened her. When Alison walked in twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t moved.

‘You’ve got to get dressed, Mary,’ Alison said. ‘The car will be here soon.’

Mary didn’t look round. ‘I’m going to wear white.’

‘You can’t. It’s just not the right time for something like that.’

Perhaps she responded to the panic in her daughter’s voice. ‘Not the right time,’ she repeated. But with no irony, no venom. Without another word, she submitted to Alison’s choice of dress.

*

When a funeral happens, people don’t usually say, ‘It’s a nice day for it,’ but if it had been a wedding or a picnic or a flower-show, Mary thought, that’s what they would have said. Last night’s wind had cleared the sky of clouds. As they drove from the church to the graveyard in their hired grey limousine, they passed old men on benches, hatless, sucking on their teeth, women in gardens pinning wet clothes to the wide thin smiles of their washing-lines, shopkeepers in their doorways, slit-eyed against this unexpected sunlight. So many people out. The world and his wife, she thought. And then, moments later: the world and his widow. Not self-pity, this. Accuracy.

The car turned in through black wrought-iron gates.

‘Excuse me,’ she said suddenly, ‘but I’d like to walk the rest of the way, if you don’t mind.’

Their chauffeur, a man whose face was as rigid as the profile on a coin, stopped the car. She stepped out. Her children followed. She looked about her, recognised the cat that was dozing on a headstone. She breathed, almost with relief, the familiar air of the cemetery. She had walked its paths so many times. With Alan, with the children, and, most recently, with Moses. If Moses had come to the funeral he might have been surprised, even disappointed, she thought. He would have expected some less formal, less conventional event, unaware of how the process is designed to carry you, like a raft, away from the wreckage of someone’s death, away from that whirlpool it creates, to carry you as effortlessly as possible into calmer waters where you can begin to think again. It was a funeral like a million others before it. The usual words, the usual music, the usual moments of solemnity. For once, too, she fitted in because everyone was wearing black. It almost seemed to her as if they were imitating her. Which, in their grief, perhaps, they were.

They reached the graveside. Now the priest began to recite the traditional phrases. They have beauty, she thought, staring away into the sky. A used beauty, a worn beauty, like stone steps worn smooth and slightly concave by five, ten, twenty centuries of feet. They were phrases everybody passed through. There were no exceptions. At least they contained that truth. We’re all pretty ordinary, she thought. All pretty ordinary when it comes down to it. That’s what the phrases said.

Her eyes drew closer, moved over the faces of her children.

Sean stood at the head of the grave. Hands clasped, hair combed, pale. Awkward in a black jacket, and trousers that itched. He would be waiting for something dramatic to happen, something to fix the day in his memory: a partial eclipse of the sun, a riderless horse galloping between the stones, an explosion in that house beyond the cemetery wall. His eyes would be aching with the constant fruitless quest for symbols. Her gaze passed to Alison. Alison’s hair glowed under a black headscarf, mere embers of the fire it usually was. She seemed to be examining the brass handles on the coffin. Then her eyes lifted, moved across the polished wood, paused on that discreet metal plaque. She would be thinking how new everything looked, how horribly new and clean. And how Alan had always hated anything that looked new. How he had loved old things, things with stories in their surfaces, things with histories. Death had turned him into someone she didn’t recognise. Rebecca was standing next to Mary, so Mary couldn’t see her face. She could only feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, a grip that tightened as a cluster of gulls suddenly rose screeching against a screen of evergreens.

Lumps of mud thudded on to the coffin lid, dirt on the cleanness that Alison abhorred. Like somebody knocking on a door. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Dad. Dad who? No, not Dad. Dead. Mary thought she saw Sean’s leg begin to tremble. She could imagine him running, running over this grass that was bumpy with other people’s dead, running to escape the trembling. She felt Rebecca’s grip tighten again and watched her as she leaned forwards, peered down into that fascinating oblong hole in the ground. It was so deep it made Rebecca shiver, feel dizzy; she almost lost her balance.

Then they were walking towards the limousine and the expressionless chauffeur who was waiting to drive them back to the house where there was to be, as Rebecca had whispered disbelievingly to Alison the night before, a party because Dad’s dead.

*

Two days later Mary stood in front of her wardrobe again. She had decided that everything black had to go. Dresses, underwear, accessories — the lot. She removed her black clothes from their hangers, their shelves, their drawers, and dropped them, one by one, on to the bed behind her. The heap grew and grew until she caught herself staring, exactly as her mother would have done, with incredulous uncomprehending eyes. Oh how it all turns round, she thought.

She counted sixty-one separate black items in all (not including shoes) and was astonished at the power they gave off, the history they contained. Some dated back over twenty years to the summer when she had first met Alan (a silk blouse she bought on Bond Street in 1959), others were as recent as her affair with Moses (a pair of elbow-length gloves with pearl buttons that he had found for her at Camden Lock). She gave them the time they deserved. She let the memories flow out of them, through her, and back again, then she packed them into plastic dustbin-liners (also black).

Her first instinct had been to take her clothes along to a charity shop, but she had quickly changed her mind. She wanted them destroyed, not passed on (it horrified her to think that she might see somebody walking down the street in a dress that Alan had given her), and she wanted to supervise the destruction herself. She wanted to see them disappear with her own eyes. She wanted to know exactly where they had gone.

As dusk fell that Sunday afternoon she hauled the bags down to the end of the garden. She built a fire out of newspaper, a drawerload of Alan’s memorabilia, and the remains of the old garden fence. She sat on the upturned water-tank and fed the clothes into the flames, one item at a time, with a pair of tongs. The wools crackled like dry foliage, the synthetics shrivelled and dripped. The smell was awful, something like singed hair, and the smoke that unravelled past the knitting-needle branches of the sycamore was as black as the clothes themselves. Exorcism, she thought.

Sean, who loved fires, must have noticed the orange glow from his bedroom window. He stood in the shadows by the hedge and watched as Mary lifted a fifties’ stiletto into the air and placed it carefully in the centre of the blaze. The crocodile skin flared.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

She didn’t take her eyes off the fire. ‘I’m burning a few of my old clothes.’

He moved closer, stood at her shoulder. ‘The black ones?’

She nodded.

‘Why the black ones?’

Her voice dropped a register. ‘Because that phase is over.’

*

‘What’s got into you?’

Elliot stopped Moses on the end of his finger. It was Sunday night. Draughts in the doorway of The Bunker. The cold neon glow that Moses called morgue light.

Moses stared at the finger (he had learned a trick or two from Ridley), but the finger didn’t waver.

Nor did Elliot’s eyes. ‘I don’t see you for weeks, then you walk straight past me, nearly fucking knock me over. What’s the idea?’

Moses didn’t know what to tell him. He lowered his eyes. ‘My mother died,’ he said eventually.

‘You what?’

‘My mother. She died.’

Elliot stepped back, hands on hips. He looked round, looked back at Moses. ‘Your mother?’

‘You know,’ Moses said, ‘that woman you saw. Wearing a black dress. Getting on a bit — ’ His voice tied up.

‘She was really your mother? Come on.’

‘She was. She really was.’

‘She was really your mother? And she’s died?’ The news had pulled Elliot’s features wide across his face.

Moses just nodded.

Elliot spread his palms in the air as if testing for rain. ‘Why didn’t you say nothing, Moses?’

Moses shrugged. ‘I was too upset.’

Now Elliot couldn’t find words.

‘Look, I’m really sorry about the other day,’ Moses said. ‘I was in a real state. I didn’t mean to — ’

‘No. No, no, no.’ Elliot dropped his head, lifted his hands to ward off the apologies. ‘Listen. I don’t know what to say, you know? I mean, I know how close you were — ’

Moses gave him a questioning look.

‘You know, the time I saw you both on the street,’ Elliot said, ‘kissing and that.’

Moses considered his feet. ‘Yeah, we were pretty close.’

‘Look,’ and Elliot placed a hand on Moses’s shoulder, ‘if there’s anything I can do just give me a shout, all right?’

Moses nodded. ‘Thanks, Elliot.’

As he unlocked his front door and began to climb the stairs he didn’t feel that he had in any way lied to Elliot.

*

He went and stood by the window. Sunday again. One week since that trip to New Egypt. He could no longer go to Muswell Hill. Not today, maybe not ever. He wondered what to do with himself now that so much of his life had been destroyed.

He crossed the room to his desk and opened the top drawer. He took out a pile of photographs. A record of the days he had spent in Muswell Hill. He sat down at the desk and switched the lamp on. He stacked the photographs face-down. For a moment they reminded him of cards and he remembered Madame Zola and he thought, Maybe I can use the photos as a sort of tarot pack, not to predict the future but to explain the present. The present had been happening so fast recently that it had left him bewildered, punch drunk, breathless as the runner who comes in last. A throwback to his schooldays, that feeling of falling behind. Still looking for his games clothes when the rest of the team had already left for the pitch. If only he could have borrowed somebody else’s, but nobody else’s fitted. He shook his head. Driftwood from childhood.

He began to turn the photos up one by one. He arranged them in neat rows until they covered the surface of his desk. He had dozens of Alan and Alison and Sean and Rebecca. The only photos he had of Mary were photos of her back or the tip of her nose. She had always refused to let him (or anyone else, for that matter) take photographs of her. When threatened with a camera (she called it threatened), she issued statements like, Don’t be a user, or, Why are you trying to steal pieces of me? I will not be stolen. Once, when shown a picture that someone had taken of her without her knowledge, she had thrust it back with the words, That’s not me. She had a whole arsenal of names for people who took photographs: they were thieves, they were voyeurs, they were necrophiliacs. Aim a camera at Mary and you saw her at her most scathing, her most dogmatic.

Ten days before, she had visited him at The Bunker and he had asked her, ‘Why won’t you ever let me take any pictures of you?’

She had been studying his parents’ album with a detached curiosity, one eyebrow permanently raised. She looked up. ‘Why should I?’

‘I don’t know. To be remembered, maybe.’

‘I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be alive, real, flesh and blood, not,’ and she brushed a photograph of Alice with the disdainful backs of her fingers, ‘not this.’

But, with Mary, wherever there was a rule there was an exception, and it only took him a moment to locate it in his memory. Exactly one week later. That Sunday morning in Bagwash. The wind blowing. Clouds like clean washing. After breakfast they had walked out past the graveyard. And she had let him take a photograph of her.

‘All right,’ she had said, leaning back against the wall, ‘this is your big chance. Make the most of it. There won’t be another.’

‘Pose,’ he had laughed. ‘Come on, you ought to be good at that.’

Suddenly he knew how to fill this empty Sunday evening. He reached for his camera and began to wind the film back, even though he had only used half the pictures. He snapped the back open and pulled out the canister. Then he disappeared into the makeshift darkroom that he had built in a cupboard off the bedroom.

Two hours later, in the dim red light, he watched Mary’s image emerge. He bent his head close to the tray of chemicals like a craftsman working with minute and precious materials. I’ll never be able to show this to her was the thought he produced.

He stared at the photograph. Prophecy? Coincidence? Nonsense? He couldn’t decide. She stood just to the left of centre-frame. In that voluptuous black dress of hers — it draped around her body, dropped almost to her ankles — she looked faintly Victorian. A stone wall ran behind her, waist-high, crumbly as shortbread. Her left arm reached down at an angle to her body, her left hand resting on the top of the wall as if to balance her. On one side her dress pressed itself against her, on the other it billowed out into the air. The bodice and the skirt formed two separate black triangles. Her right hand had flown up towards her hair, a spontaneous, almost girlish gesture, charged with grace, entirely natural. It looked as though she was holding on to an invisible hat, or as though some wonderful notion had just occurred to her. He remembered watching her through the camera, waiting for the right moment (she may have hated cameras but at least she understood right moments), and thinking how, for those few seconds, she had seemed to fly in the face of the world. And he had caught that elation of hers. That spontaneous groundless elation.

He tried to remember what else they had said, if anything, but no words came. Only afterwards she had walked towards him, dress swirling, and, smiling, she had said, Photographer, because she still thought of photography as theft, as exploitation, as necrophilia. And had, in a way, been proved right. For here she was, in this silent picture, an unknowing tragic heroine. Ahead of her, two or three hours ahead of her, lay the discovery of her husband’s death. And behind her, behind her all the time, stretched a skyline of white marble, a sinister city with tombstones for buildings, because the wall she was leaning against was the wall of the cemetery. And if he half-closed his eyes her dress became a ship of death, two black sails mounted on the slender mast of her body, and the wind blowing through the picture filled her sails, blew her towards her sombre destination. And she was laughing, looking happier than he could ever remember –

No, he would never be able to show her the picture. He stared and stared at her in her black dress (happiness dressed in sadness) and thought again of the curious exchange which had taken place that weekend. She had given him his past and lost her future. A father traded for a husband. She had always seen what she had with Moses as a kind of bouquet thrown at the feet of her marriage, as a tribute, a celebration. Now it had become a wreath laid at the base of a memorial. The marriage had kept their relationship alive. The death of the one had killed the other.

He pinned the picture to the washing-line above his head so it could dry. If nothing else, he had a memento of Mary.

What was it she called photographs?

That’s right: little deaths. Every photograph a little death.

Memento mori.

How fitting, he thought. And smiled bitterly to himself.

*

Alan dead. Mary inaccessible.

His father also inaccessible.

And Peach at large.

For days on end Moses stayed indoors. At night dreams ran round the inside of his head like men in padded cells until he had to turn the light on, get up, walk about. Times like that, sleep was a foreign country and he didn’t have a passport. He came close to calling Mary, even Gloria, but he always resisted, his hand an inch from the phone. This was his to deal with.

It was as if everything that had been lying dormant for twenty-five years had surfaced at once, reworked into new nightmare formulas. The old man, his father, lying supine on an altar, delivering, between deep inhalations from his cigarette, a lecture on some high-flown subject that Moses couldn’t make head or tail of, and priests approaching from dark corners of the church with knives because the lecture was, so they said, heretical. Or Moses standing at the bottom of a deep pit and his mother, eyes and mouth blacked out, rolling down the slope towards him, rolling over and over as children do, but never reaching him. Or Mary being ambushed and raped in a baroque hotel by a gang of policemen. He woke exhausted every morning. He felt top-heavy, listless, surfeited. He stared out of the window, watched different types of weather affect the view. He let Bird in, fed him, let him out again. Once or twice he took long walks through unknown streets. (He sometimes sensed that he was being followed. That’s called paranoia, Moses. He would turn aggressively, only to realise that it was his past catching up with him.) But mostly he just made quick forays to Dino’s for milk and bread and eggs, or to the Indian off-licence for cans of Special Brew. He got drunk alone. He watched his black and white TV until the screen hissed with a blank grey fury. Then he knew it was time to try and go to sleep again.

Elliot steered clear of him, perhaps out of respect for his grief, perhaps because he had more pressing problems of his own. Whichever it was, Moses was grateful. Some kind of natural understanding existed between them. Their interiors, he felt, had been constructed along similar lines, by the same architect, you might almost have said, and when certain doors closed they didn’t open again, not for anyone, not until the right time came. Visitors would be greeted by a DO NOT DISTURB sign and three or four bottles of rotten milk. Some days Ridley’s whistling floated up past his window. Haunting, authentic, so he could imagine himself in Africa or Norfolk — somewhere else, at any rate. He listened and he travelled. Comforting, he found it. That illusion of distance from things. When his friends rang he used one of Eddie’s old lines: ‘I’m having a couple of weeks off.’ It meant you’d been overdoing it. They accepted that. It was language they understood.

How he ached, though. Nothing like the way he had ached when Gloria told him about sleeping with Eddie or when those two policemen beat him up. No, he ached as if he had been emptied out, emptied of everything. A real disembowelling, this time. Nothing theatrical about it. No tourists. The loss of Mary, the loss of those Sundays. Bargains had been struck behind his back, he found himself thinking, and wondered if Mary was thinking the same way. He had had no say. He wanted say. In future, anyway.

And always in the attic of his head this long silence. Then a scurrying, a gnawing, a scurrying. Then long silence again.

Peach.

Peach with some sinister idea in mind.

Peach who would stop at nothing.

He remembered something Mary had said to him that night in Bagwash. ‘You,’ she had said, levelling a finger, ‘you floated out of the village and you floated back again. That’s what you do, Moses. You float. You know what I call you?’ She had laughed. Her silver fillings flashing in the candlelight. ‘I call you the lilo man. You’d better be careful someone doesn’t come along and puncture you.’

And he had said, ‘Mary, that’s what I’m afraid of.’

She was right. He could see the dangers of sitting tight and waiting. Only the bad things came. He had to take action. Evasive action. Now.

Ten days before Christmas he called Leicester.

‘Auntie B,’ he said, ‘can I come and stay for a while?’