Dreams of Leaving

The Wooden Triangle

‘Thank you for driving me to the station like this.’

‘Don’t be silly, Moses.’ Auntie B’s face never lost its china stillness, its placidity, even when she chided him. ‘It’s been lovely to see you. You’ll come and see us again, won’t you?’

Now she was being silly. That hint of uncertainty (the legacy of his having discovered his real father?). He dismissed it with, ‘Of course I will.’

He had spent Christmas in Leicester — he had stayed over two weeks, in fact — grateful for the warmth, the soft ticking of clocks in the hallway, the small-scale dramas (the cat moulting, a blocked drain, a wine-stain on the dining-room table). He had eaten three meals a day and slept ten hours a night. Uncle Stan and Auntie B knew nothing and in their ignorance he found relief. His unease dissolved in their everyday routines. He left London behind, as he had once left the orphanage behind, and felt a great calmness settle. He told them about the contents of the suitcase, the trip down to New Egypt, the meeting with his father. He described his father as a sort of eccentric invalid and the village as one of those dull places in the middle of nowhere that nobody ever leaves, and was surprised at how much truth his carefully censored version of the facts contained (he only hid what might have worried them; about Peach, for instance, he said nothing). They listened and nodded, made all the right noises. They asked very few questions, thinking it no business of theirs, perhaps, or simply content with the parameters he had set. They had never tried to expand their role into areas where it didn’t belong, and they didn’t now. Their occasional references to the subject, though oblique, told him all he needed to know about the way they were thinking. For instance: ‘Well,’ Auntie B had said one night (and her eyes never once wandered from the TV screen), ‘you know you can always come here, Moses. You’ll always have a home here.’ He knew. Or as now: ‘You’ll come and see us again, won’t you.’ Of course he would.

‘Thank you for everything, Auntie B.’ He leaned over, kissed her on the cheek. ‘See you soon.’

He walked through the damp acidic air of the station — its draughty arches and its stained dripping brick had always reminded him of urinals — and boarded the train to London. His eyelids prickled. It was nine in the morning.

He was looking forward to late nights again. He wanted to sit at his fourth-floor window and feel the music ride up from below and gaze at those golden zips of light that ran down the slim dark buildings of the city. He wanted to thrash Elliot at pool, drink Eddie into oblivion, drive Vince to hospital, tease Jackson about the weather. He longed to be back. Where things happened. Among friends. He had even invented one or two strategies for dealing with the Peach threat (he would park his car further away, fit extra locks on the doors, buy a toy periscope for the kitchen window), and if they were a bit frivolous it was only his new confidence asserting itself.

Sensing his impatience, perhaps, the train left several seconds early. The magic rhythm of its wheels on the tracks soon made misty Leicester disappear and a pale-blue sky unveiled itself. A pocket-torch sun clicked on, pointed out neat lawns, a car glazed with dew, the red slant of a rooftop. It was like somebody big looking for somebody small, he thought. Ridley looking for Gloria, for instance.

Gloria.

The night before he left for Leicester he had covered that last fatal inch to the telephone. He had dialled her number. He regretted it now. He had been drinking (well, drunk). He had hardly been aware that it was her number that he was calling. That was bad. All his bluster vanished the moment he heard her voice, leaving him exposed, shrunken, pitiful. It was the first time he had spoken to her since Talent Night. That seemed like months ago. Probably was.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello. It’s me.’ This false gaiety in his voice. Game-show presenter. Just awful.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Moses. You know. Moses.’

Forget it. Hang up now.

‘Oh. Hello, Moses.’

Too late.

It sounded, though, as if she was using a name that she was only pretending to recognise, that, in reality, she couldn’t put a face to, that didn’t mean anything. She sounded like a receptionist. He felt like a stranger (with no appointment). He couldn’t think of what to say next. Or why he had phoned, for that matter.

‘Look, I just rang up to see if you got my message.’

‘What message?’

‘I left a message at The Blue Diamond last weekend. No, the weekend before. I think. Sometime, anyway. You were singing there.’

‘Oh, The Blue Diamond. Yes. No, I didn’t sing there in the end. I cancelled.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ he said.

Thanks for telling me.

‘Did you go?’

‘No. My friend’s car broke down. In the country. I couldn’t get back. That’s why I left the message that you didn’t get.’

‘Oh.’

Why was this so difficult?

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going away for Christmas. To my foster-parents, I think. So I probably won’t see you for a while.’

He thought he heard soft laughter on the other end. Had he said something funny?

‘Well,’ she said, ‘have a wonderful time, won’t you.’

Just like that. She wasn’t interested. She wasn’t remotely fucking interested. He lapsed into silence, bit his lip.

‘Hello?’

‘I’m still here.’

That was the trouble with telephones. No time to think. No time to not say anything. Mary was right about telephones.

‘When are you going?’ Gloria’s impersonal voice again.

He thought. ‘I don’t know exactly. Tomorrow maybe. Or the next day. I don’t know.’

‘So what are you doing tonight?’

He gulped, sensing a trap. ‘Nothing, really. Just staying in.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look,’ he quickened, ‘maybe I’ll see you when I get back, OK?’

‘OK,’ and just a trace of tired intimacy in, ‘if that’s what you want.’

She was like water. You could throw stone after stone and the surface always formed again. Perfectly, unbearably smooth. There was a pressure building inside him and no valve that he knew of.

‘I suppose so,’ he murmured. He saw himself reflected in the uncurtained window, all the hollows in his face filled with shadow.

‘Ring me when you get back,’ she was saying. ‘Have a wonderful time, won’t you.’

She hung up.

He stared at the receiver, a useless furry buzzing in his hand, then flung it against the wall. An explosion of red plastic. One fragment ricocheted, nicked his cheek as it flew past. He touched his face and his fingertips came away bloody. He would have the scar — a miniature triangle, a crocodile tear — for the rest of his life.

Then, only yesterday, at breakfast in Leicester, he had received some mail from Italy. His name and address had been scrawled in black ink, the letters spiky, rushed. He hadn’t recognised the handwriting. He had sniffed the envelope. It hadn’t smelt like anyone he knew. That should have told him something. When he tore the letter open, a postcard fell out. He scanned it rapidly for a signature. Gloria XX.

Now he took the postcard from his coat pocket and examined it again. A picture of a square in Florence, probably a famous square judging by the ancient yellow buildings and the groups of multi-coloured tourists. In the top left-hand corner he noticed an empty pedestal. This couldn’t have been intentional on Gloria’s part; he had never mentioned his statue theory to her. Still, a touch of irony there. It seemed to undermine what she had written, make it laughable. He read it anyway. She said she was sorry about their last phone-call; she’d taken some sleeping-pills because she’d been having trouble sleeping. She told him she missed him. She thought they ought to get together in the New Year.

He wondered.

He glanced out of the window and saw a mass of dark cloud, two strands lifting away into the sky, tousled by a night of restless sleep. There was no mistaking that head of black hair on that pale-blue pillow.

The train slowed, switched tracks, drew into St Pancras.

Still staring at the sky, he knew that it wouldn’t be long before those black clouds (all that now remained of Gloria) were blown away.

*

Walking down Charing Cross Road, he thought he heard somebody call his name. He turned round, saw nobody, felt stupid. He was about to walk on when he caught sight of Alison waving at him from the other side of the road.

She waited for the lights to change, then ran towards him.

‘Alison.’ He stooped to kiss her cool cheek. ‘How are you?’

Four weeks of mourning had done nothing to diminish the glory of her red hair. He could tell from her forehead, though, that she had been through a painful time. Instead of the four seagulls he remembered, one distant albatross flying alone.

‘Where’ve you been, Moses? I’ve been trying to call you,’ she said, all in one breath.

He gestured with his suitcase. ‘I’ve been away — ’

‘Have you got time for a cup of coffee?’ Her eyes moved from one part of his face to another with some urgency.

He said he had.

They ducked into the café opposite Foyle’s. Flustered by this chance meeting, Moses almost hit his head on the lintel. Such a small world. They took a table by the window, faced each other across a silence of yellow formica and red plastic ketchup containers shaped like tomatoes. A shaft of sunlight struck through the plate-glass, set fire to Alison’s hair. She blinked, shifted sideways into the shadow. Her hair went out. Waiting for her to begin, Moses felt for his cigarettes. He lit one.

‘It took me a while to work it out,’ she said finally.

He realised from the candour in her eyes that it was no use pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about. She either knew or had guessed everything. How had she found out, though? He absent-mindedly flicked his cigarette. The ash rolled across the table. Alison scooped it up in a paper napkin and tipped it into the ashtray. She glanced up, noticed him watching her.

‘Sorry,’ she said, with a smile that contrived to be both embarrassed and ironic. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine, clearing up after other people.’

‘It’s all right.’ He was still staring at her. She had just reminded him of an evening in Muswell Hill. Mary sitting crosslegged on the carpet. One elbow resting against the arm of the sofa. A lit cigarette poised between the fingers of that hand. She had waited until everybody was looking then, quite deliberately, she had tapped the end of her cigarette so the ash landed on the sofa. Alison had left her chair and brushed the ash into the nearest ashtray with her hand. Mary had waited until Alison sat down then, smiling, she had done exactly the same thing again. Alison had sighed and left the room. Now, once more, Alison seemed to be taking the parental role — concerned, long-suffering, responsible — and Mary was the daughter who had misbehaved. With me, he thought. ‘How did you find out?’ he said.

Alison rubbed at the surface of the table with her fingertips as if she might see a clear beginning there somewhere. ‘It was about two weeks ago. Vince turned up at my flat. I don’t know how he found out where I was living.’ She frowned. ‘Trust him, though.’

Perhaps it was that red hair of hers, glowing like a beacon in the suburbs, Moses thought. He imagined her hair would cause her a lot of anxiety in the future and that, as the years went by, her forehead would become a sanctuary for birds of all descriptions, some settling at the corners of her mouth and eyes, others flying in formation, their wings etched deep in the pale sky of her skin.

‘He was out of his head, of course,’ she was saying. ‘Said he hadn’t slept for five days. Drunk and God knows what else. I didn’t want to know, you know? He told me some story about a girl called Debra.’ That innocent enquiring glance again. ‘She’d left him or something — ’

‘Is that true?’

Alison shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s beside the point.’

Moses smiled into his cup.

‘Then he started on about me. I should’ve known he was going to do that. I shouldn’t have let him in at all.’

‘He would’ve just broken in.’

But Alison hadn’t heard him. She was hearing Vince’s voice. ‘He said it used to be me and him and what’d happened to the and.’

‘What and?’

‘That’s what I said. “What and?” I kept asking him. “The and between you and me,” he said.’ She was staring straight ahead and smiling as if she could see through the café wall to a peaceful horizon. ‘Sometimes he’s got a way with words.’

Moses waited for her to come back.

‘Anyway,’ and her voice drew nearer again, ‘I said there wasn’t an and any more, I said he might as well forget it, and he got really shitty, he really worked himself up, you know, the way he does, and started calling Mary all kinds of names — ’

‘Mary?’

‘Oh yes, he always blames Mary. I don’t know why. He says she turned me against him, told me he wasn’t good enough, that kind of thing. All a pile of crap, really.’ Though she would never get Vince to believe that. ‘He really hates her, you know.’

‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘He’s told me.’

‘The names he called her. Incredible.’ She shook her head. ‘He said she was spoilt, pretentious, immature — ’ she was ticking the words off on her fingers — ‘jealous, vindictive, and then he said, “I don’t know what Moses sees in her —”’

Moses looked up sharply from his cup.

‘I know,’ Alison said. ‘It had exactly the same effect on me. Vince didn’t actually know anything, you see, but it was the way he said it that made me think. He went on and on about what a bitch she was, but I wasn’t listening any more. All I could think about was you and Mary, all those times you came round to our house as if you were a friend of the family when really — ’

‘I was a friend of the family, Alison. I liked you all. I still do. It wasn’t just — ’

‘I’m not attacking you,’ she cut in. ‘I’m just working it out for myself, that’s all.’

She stared down at her hands. Moses glanced out of the window. The sky had darkened. Lights in the shop windows now, lights in the offices.

‘I thought about you not coming to the funeral,’ Alison began again, ‘about you suddenly not coming to the house any more. And the way Mary won’t talk about you now, like you never existed or something. It puzzled me for ages, until Vince said what he did. Then it all just suddenly fell into place.’

Moses thought of Vince’s jigsaw and smiled.

‘It was obvious, really. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. Too close to it, I suppose. The way she kept going round to visit you. Because she never lied about that, you know. She never pretended she was going shopping or visiting a friend — ’

‘She was visiting a friend.’

‘— and I admire her for that, though I don’t know what Dad — ’ For the first time, her eyes lost their coolness, their clarity. Her lower lip began to tremble.

‘I think he knew,’ Moses said.

‘And then there was that awful weekend. Sorry, but I can’t seem to help talking about it. And you were so close to us — ’ Three tears rolled down her cheek, one after the other, and dropped on to the yellow formica. ‘We were looking for you everywhere. And even then I didn’t realise.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, sniffed twice.

‘The car really did break down, you know.’

Alison nodded. ‘Anyway, I haven’t said anything to Mary,’ she said, her grey eyes clear again (she was one of those people, he realised, who cried invisibly, whose eyes didn’t swell or redden, whose make-up never ran). ‘I don’t think it’s the right time, do you?’

He shook his head, though, quite honestly, he doubted whether it would make any difference to Mary. Alison’s ‘right times’ would never be hers.

As they paid at the counter, he noticed an old woman sitting at the table behind the coat-rack. A plastic mac, hair in a bun, a cup of tea.

Alison heard his startled exclamation. ‘What is it, Moses?’

‘Nothing.’ He turned away. ‘I just thought I saw someone I knew.’

Outside on the pavement they hesitated, drawing out this chance meeting of theirs. Suddenly there seemed to be something final about what would otherwise have been a perfectly casual goodbye. Now he was no longer seeing Mary, now Alison was no longer seeing Vince, they had nothing in common. He couldn’t imagine what would bring them together. Only chance again, perhaps. He watched her staring first at the traffic then at her shoes. As he watched, a single snowflake (predicted by Jackson?) settled on the concrete beside her foot and melted. That sprawl of black cloud he had seen from the train loomed overhead. Everyone was walking faster now. Snow.

Finally she lifted her head. ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘was it serious?’

The albatross beat its great wings on the pale wastes of her forehead and he seemed to hear its cry, very faintly, in the darkening air above. It was the cry of someone waking to a cold and muddled world and not wanting to be awake, wanting to pull the sky over their head like a blanket, wanting to close their eyes, go back to sleep again. He thought of Mary and saw no pictures, only the vaguest of silhouettes, a shadow in the distance, the blackness of her clothes. But he could still remember times when they had laughed until they ached.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

*

He waited for Alison to disappear up the street, then he turned and ran back to the café. He stood in front of Madame Zola. Her black eyes slowly lifted to meet his. He had forgotten how they drew you in until you were all vision and no body.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You.’

‘You remember?’

‘The past is clear. It’s only the future that isn’t clear.’

Moses smiled. Same old Madame Zola. ‘I’m having trouble with them both at the moment.’ He peered into her cup of tea. Three-quarters full. ‘You must’ve been here a long time.’

She nodded. ‘You remember also.’

‘How could I forget? You started all this.’

She waved a hand in front of her face as if brushing cobwebs aside. ‘I started nothing, but,’ and she gave him a curious look, ‘I have something to tell you. You aren’t leaving now.’

She had this way of pitching a sentence halfway between a question and a command. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time.’

‘Come, sit down,’ and she motioned him to the chair opposite. Her gesture reminded him of a papal benediction. He sat down.

She leaned over the table, clutching her cup in both hands. It might have been the only solid object in the room. ‘I saw a fire,’ she whispered, ‘and a dead man.’

‘No! Where?’

‘Ah yes, that’s so strange.’ Her eyes slid away from his. ‘You know the pink building? It happened there.’

Moses stared at her. ‘The pink building? You mean — ’

She shook herself out of her dreaming skin and hissed, ‘A dead man, I said. He died in front of my eyes.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know his name. But he was a policeman — ’

‘A policeman?’

‘I held his head so,’ and, lifting her shoulders, she tucked her elbows into her rib-cage and spread her palms, the tips of her little fingers touching, ‘and he died in my hands. In these same hands you see now. And for some moments I thought time, he was running away, and it was fifteen years before, and my Christos — ’ Her voice cracked like a dam and the dark valleys of her eyes flooded. Moses put out a hand, but she shook her head, staunched the flow with a soiled tissue. ‘I had troubles with the police,’ she went on. ‘So much troubles, you don’t know, and all because this man, he died in my hands — ’

‘You said something about a fire, Madame Zola. What about the fire?’

She seemed to rouse herself. ‘Yes, yes. The fire-engines, they came. Clang, clang, clang. Two fire-engines.’

‘And the building? Is it burned down?’

‘No, it’s not destroyed. It cannot be destroyed. Not yet. There are many colours it must be before it can rest. It was never orange, I think. No. I’m certain it was never orange — ’

She had lost him. He pushed his chair back. ‘Madame Zola, I’m sorry, but I really have to go.’

‘You know,’ she sighed, ‘sometimes you think you have all the time in the world,’ and with her gnarled hands she fashioned a globe out of the dingy air, ‘and then suddenly you have no time at all. Ah,’ and, shaking her head, she lifted her cup and wet her top lip.

*

Falling softly as feathers, the snow tickled the serious faces of businessmen. Bare-headed office-girls wore white flowers in their hair; winter could seem tropical. Moses ran towards Trafalgar Square. Thoughts raced through his head; they kept cornering too fast and spinning off. He jumped a bus at the lights outside South Africa House.

‘Come on,’ he whispered to himself, as it ground and floundered down Whitehall. ‘Come on.’

He wiped a hole in the condensation and peered out. He saw a woman stumbling along the pavement in a fur coat. Rich, she looked, but deranged. Eyes of glass. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, palms upwards. Resting on them, as on an altar, lay a pigeon, its neck slack, its head lolling — dead, presumably. There was a dignity, a mystical dignity, about the way she bore this dead pigeon along the street, past the Houses of Parliament, through a group of tourists gathered by the railings; he imagined a silence must have fallen as the red sea of anoraks parted to let her through. On other days he might have asked questions — What was the history of the woman and the pigeon? Where was she taking it now that it was dead? Could there be some kind of special pigeon cemetery in the area? — but as the bus lurched towards Lambeth Bridge, wheels slipping on the curve, gears clashing, he realised that no questions applied.

A woman with a dead pigeon.

That wasn’t a mystery.

That was an omen.

*

The black double-doors of The Bunker exploded outwards, snowflakes and waste-paper flying, and Ridley appeared, head flung back, fists bunched. His movements were so violent that they threw the air around him into a state of chaos. Moses thought he felt the shock-waves as he crossed the road.

When Ridley caught sight of Moses he glared and, for a moment, Moses was included in the bouncer’s terrible rage.

‘Where the fuck’ve you been?’

Moses swallowed. He began to explain, but Ridley cut him off with a horizontal slash of his hand. The question, it seemed, had been a rhetorical one.

‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ were Ridley’s next words. He looked up and down the street as if he expected the object of his anger to manifest itself. It would have to be a very foolish object, Moses thought, to do that.

He turned his attention to the club. A sorry sight. Smoked-glass windows shattered. Fire-blackened frames. Glimpses of a burnt-out interior. The fourth floor seemed to have escaped, though. His own side-door looked untouched.

‘What happened exactly?’ he asked.

Ridley swung round, jaw muscles rippling. His giant gold earring spat light. Snow melted on his face, ran down it like sweat. ‘How much do you know about this?’

‘I wasn’t here. I heard there was a fire. And somebody died.’

‘Yeah, it was a copper.’

Moses nodded. ‘I heard that too.’

‘You heard a lot. Did you hear what his name was?’

Moses shook his head.

‘Peach. His name was Peach.’ Ridley stepped back to judge the effect of his words. ‘Yeah, I thought that might interest you. And you know something else? They think he started it.’ He stared at Moses as if he expected some kind of explanation, but Moses could only stare back.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Moses asked finally.

Ridley liked that. His laughter struck the walls of the houses opposite. Moses thought of thrown rocks.

‘He’s dead all right,’ the bouncer said. ‘Heart attack or something. I had to go down the station. Answer questions and that. They get a bit upset when a copper snuffs it.’

Then his anger returned, tightened the skin across his face. The bones seemed to shift beneath like continental plates. An immensely slow, immensely powerful grinding.

‘There’s something else,’ he said between his teeth. ‘Looks like Frazer’s done a runner.’ And, whirling round, he charged back indoors.

The avalanche of footsteps on the stairs told Moses that Ridley was heading for the office. He paused inside the door and looked round. He scarcely recognised the foyer. Scorched, gutted, flooded with water. A stench of damp ashes, charred wood, singed cloth. He squelched across the carpet, began to mount the stairs.

When he walked into the office, Ridley was brandishing a sheaf of brown envelopes. ‘I found these,’ he said.

They were letters from creditors and banks, unpaid bills, and summonses, some dating back to the summer. One letter from somebody called Mr Andrew Private and dated December 7th threatened Elliot with ‘legal action in the near future’, should he fail to repay his ‘substantial debt’ immediately. The tone of voice was tired, indignant — a reasonable man at the end of his tether; clearly not the first letter that Mr Private had written to Mr Frazer.

‘I never realised,’ Moses said, though, even as he spoke, he remembered the one-sided phone-calls, the talk of old ghosts from the past, and then the string of anonymous threats — the white arrows, the nursery rhymes, the blood and the shit. Yes, it all added up. ‘He’s gone for good, hasn’t he?’

‘He owed me too, the bastard,’ Ridley growled. ‘Four hundred quid. If I ever get hold of him — ’

He flexed his right fist, and his bones creaked in the abandoned room like the snap of dry twigs in a wood; the anaconda tattooed along the muscle of his forearm swelled grotesquely as if it had just swallowed a goat.

Elliot must’ve been desperate, Moses thought, to have risked incurring Ridley’s anger. Either desperate, or very, very foolish. Maybe even both. Ridley would crush Elliot like so much garlic and use him to season his next meal.

‘When did you last see him?’ Moses asked.

Ridley scowled. ‘Saturday before Christmas. Tarted up to the eyeballs he was. Looked like a fucking pimp.’

Moses had to grin.

‘Fucking pimp.’ Ridley scraped his hair back from his forehead. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me, come to think of it.’

They took one final look round the office. Elliot had taken nothing with him. He had even left his beloved pool-table behind. The balls had scattered to all four corners of that flawless baize. Moses picked up the wooden triangle and turned it absent-mindedly in his hands. While the balls sat inside the triangle they looked neat, tight, safe. Lift the triangle and they suddenly seemed to huddle there, unprotected, vulnerable. Then the white ball struck and broke them up. And so the game began. He wondered which pocket of the country Elliot had darted into. A wanted man, obviously. Businessman, patron, dandy, cheat, absconder. Whereabouts unknown. Last seen looking like a pimp. Moses secretly wished him luck. Or perhaps he made his own, like Mary.

Moses moved over to the window, leaned against the sash. The snow, denser than before, was being driven diagonally across the glass, so it felt as if the whole nightclub was hurtling sideways and upwards at breathtaking speed into the last night of the year. As he gazed down into the street, the present slackened its grip, his mind drifted, and he saw himself returning by chance at some unspecified time in the future.

It was many years later and he was travelling south across London. He was a good deal larger now than he had been in his youth — so large, in fact, that the taxi-driver had made some crack about charging him an excess baggage tariff on his body. Moses had taken no offence at this. He had smiled and settled back, almost filling the three-man seat entirely. One short-cut through the back streets of Lambeth, however, brought him lurching forwards in a commotion of flesh, all his complacency gone.

‘Could you stop, please?’ he cried, rapping on the glass partition. ‘Could you just stop here for a moment?’

The driver pulled into the kerb and watched in his wing-mirror, engine snickering, as Moses climbed out, quite agile considering, and stood transfixed on the pavement, his size now obvious as the wind pressed his lightweight raincoat to the left-hand side of his body. He was gazing up at a building that had once been pink. It was orange now, but the paint had peeled and faded, stained by exhaust-fumes, rain, the feculence of birds. The entrances had been barred with padlocked metal grilles, and most of the ground-floor windows had been punched out; white star-shaped gaps showed in the black smoked-glass. A litter of newspaper, leaves and mangled beer-cans had fetched up in the main doorway.

And the pigeons had returned. He could hear their muffled chuckling and mumbling coming from an open window on the fourth floor. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered, fists tightening. Time, it seemed, hadn’t diminished his loathing of pigeons.

He shook his head gently. Memories collided like soft toys in a packing-case, a few eyes missing, a few limbs coming unstitched at the joints, a few holes where the stuffing showed through, but otherwise intact and safely stored away. It must have been — what? — 1980. Around then, anyway. How quaint the 19 sounded now.

The wind lunged savagely, whipping his coat away from his legs, banging a loose sheet of corrugated-iron somewhere, whirling rubbish into a hectic spiral in the doorway. An empty beer-can clattered across the pavement towards him. It began to drizzle.

He became aware of the meter ticking away loudly behind him, ticking like a direct personal threat, as if, at any moment, it might blow his fragile memories to smithereens. Nostalgia was a luxury, it told him, and had to be paid for.

He scrambled back into the taxi, slammed the door behind him and, after one last glance at the abandoned orange building, continued on his journey.

*

The wind howled as it caught the edge of the building. The place smelt old already, stale, almost sweet, like a dying man’s breath. Moses turned back into the room. His time there, he now knew, was over and that saddened him, but he said nothing; Ridley would have little use for anything so sentimental, preoccupied, as he seemed to be, by thoughts of money and revenge.

They left the office and walked back down the stairs.

‘If I was you,’ Ridley shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’d get the fuck out of here before the pigs show up again.’

Moses murmured agreement.

‘Specially with your record,’ Ridley added.

‘Oh, you know about that?’

A remote smile crossed the mountainous landscape of Ridley’s face. ‘I reckon you’ve got a couple of days,’ he said when they reached the street. ‘Maximum.’

It was his world, this world of violence and debts, and he spoke with careless authority. He zipped his sleeveless quilted ski-jacket, shoved his hands in the pockets, and tipped his head skywards. The snow avoided it, frightened.

Moses shuffled his numb feet.

‘Hey, Ridley,’ he said suddenly, ‘there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Where’d you learn to whistle like that?’

Deep lines appeared at the corners of the bouncer’s eyes. It was like watching ice crack on a frozen lake. ‘My old man,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘He was a brickie, a boxer, did a bit of everything. He was a magic whistler, always was. He could do about over a hundred different birds. Most of them I never even heard of. I used to copy him when I was a kid. One day he said to me he said, “It’s a good thing you’re learning to whistle.” “What you on about?” I said. “Well, you never know,” he said. “Might come in handy one day.” And he looked at me, real crafty, like. Couple of days later I asked my mum what he meant and she said he beat some ex-middleweight champion in a fight once by whistling at him.’

‘Seriously,’ he added, when he saw the smile forming on Moses’s face. ‘Apparently he beat him by whistling at him, very soft, between punches. Confused him, like.’

‘I don’t reckon you need much help when it comes to a fight, Ridley.’

‘No, well. Like my dad said. You never know, do you.’

Fifty yards away, on the other side of the road, Dino paused outside his shop to marvel at the sight of these two abnormally large men laughing. If laughter was 58p a pound like tomatoes, Dino was thinking, I could make a real killing there. And it would be nice selling laughter. A lot nicer than selling yoghurt or fish-fingers.

‘Well,’ Ridley said, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’

Moses nodded.

‘Good luck, Moses.’

‘You too, Ridley.’

Ridley lowered his arm across the road and stopped a cab.

After Ridley had left, Moses felt more alone than he had felt all day. But then he saw Dino waving at him from the other side of the road, two leeks in his chubby Greek fist.

‘Happy New Year, Moses,’ Dino pronounced it Maoses, as always.

Moses grinned and waved back. ‘Happy New Year, Dino.’