Dreams of Leaving

The Building of Many Colours

The sun falling across the tables of the Delphi Café that afternoon was pure and white, as dazzling as a vision. The proprietor leaned against the back wall, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was leafing through a paper. A fly described an unearned halo in the air above his head. It was a Sunday.

His only customer was an old woman dressed in a crumpled mackintosh. Her mane of grey hair, so long that it tickled the small of her back when she unpinned it, wound in a chaotic bun beneath her transparent plastic headscarf. A bag, also plastic, nestled against her left foot. Her wrinkled fingers held a cup of tea as settings hold precious stones. Her name was Madame Zola and she had printed cards to prove it. MADAME ZOLA, the cards said. FAMOUS CLAIRVOYANT AND PSYCHIC CONSULTANT. APPOINTMENTS ONLY. Never mind that the cards were twenty years old. She could still touch somebody and feel sadness or ambition or fear, the tremors of a life as it ran along its own unique track towards an unknown destination. Sometimes, too, she got flashes. She would never forget the night when she felt the death of Christos, the man she worshipped, her religion.

Rain on the windows and she had trickled fingers down his face, his neck, his arm, and she had felt death like a fine powder on his skin, she had felt his life speeding towards some collision, and she had drawn back, biting her wrist, it seemed so strange, this strong Greek, he looked more like a wrestler than a pianist, and he had stared at her across the black curls on his chest, his eyes had reeled her in, fish-hook eyes, and he had said What is it? and she had pretended to be thinking of her sister, the one who had just lost her baby, and he had believed her because she was a woman and women are sentimental, and he had pulled her towards him, one of his piano hands playing in her hair.

How she wished she hadn’t touched him that night — but how could she not touch him?

In any case, he had believed her lie and one year later, in the same room, he had died. His head resting in her hands, his hands still for ever. Fifteen years ago now, but she still returned once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes with flowers and nowhere to leave them, because she thought of Kennington as his cemetery and the building where he had died as his mausoleum, and when she stood in front of the building she could still hear the music pouring from his fingers, running up her spine and into her hair, every note a shiver, and when darkness fell she would turn away and travel home, this frost around her heart, an old woman on the bus with flowers.

Yes, she could predict the future. Her husband’s death was proof of that. She could also make a cup of tea last a very long time. The proprietor had already sent one or two unpleasant glances in her direction. She had ignored him, of course. And even as she sat at her table in the shadows, her various powers combined to produce a vision of the café in ruins. There was no malice in this. Visions came unsolicited; they appeared out of thin air, as poems do. It was unmistakably the Delphi Café, though. She recognised the strawberry formica and the concrete stump where the pillar had been. And there, perched high on the rubble and miraculously intact, stood her cup of tea, filled to the brim with twigs, cobwebs, the bones of small animals, wood-splinters, fragments of plaster and brick, the remnants of a nest, and an unidentifiable grey dust (had bombs fallen?). With fingers that were nimble for their age, she unearthed about 0.02 cl. of petrified tea, scarcely more than a stain really, but proof none the less that she could make a cup of tea last almost indefinitely (whether the proprietor liked it or not), prolonging it into a future which, it had to be admitted, she had herself predicted, but which all the same seemed real enough. For one nasty moment she took this vision as a warning — the destruction of the café might occur this afternoon, her life was in danger — but when she searched the wreckage she could find no trace of her body. She could only assume that she had already left the café and would die (had died?) peacefully somewhere else.

Some minutes later she passed a hand across her forehead. Another vision intruded. Time had wound back into the present. She saw a man standing beside a phone-box somewhere in the immediate vicinity. A tall dark man. She recognised the phone-box, but she didn’t recognise the man.

A tall dark stranger?

Madame Zola frowned. All her basic instincts told her this was nonsense. Worse than that — a cliché. She adjusted her plastic headscarf, a nervous fluttering of her left hand, then peered down into her cup as if to extract some guidance or advice from the few tea-leaves floating on the surface. They told her nothing. She glanced up at the proprietor. His paper closed then opened again with a loud rustle of its intricately marked wings. She shuddered at the vision of a giant butterfly alighting on his face.

Tall dark stranger indeed.

When you worked on such a vast scale, when your materials were the past, the present and the future, you often fell victim to vivid but random images, maverick phenomena. Pieces of fantasy, dream, or memory would break loose, float free, generate their own electricity, their own atmosphere, as stars do. Madame Zola had a word for this kind of thing when it happened. She called it interference. This tall dark stranger, she decided, lips twisting as if she had just bitten into a lemon, almost certainly fell into that category. Lifting her cup, she sipped at her cold tea. She was getting old. Her gift was breaking up. She felt herself crossing the fine line between clairvoyance and hallucination.

All the same, as the minutes passed, she was unable to dismiss an obscure feeling of excitement, not unlike moths brushing against her stomach walls. Interference or not, she was becoming increasingly convinced of two things: one, that the tall dark stranger was going to walk into the café, and two, that she would be able to make her cup of tea last until he did.

*

Madame Zola needn’t have doubted herself. A tall dark stranger was indeed standing beside a phone-box in the immediate vicinity. His name was Moses Highness.

Moses seemed to be in some kind of dilemma. He opened the phonebox door, closed it, then opened it again. It looked as if he was fighting the pull of a magnetic field. In the end he capitulated. Opened the door, edged in sideways and did what he always did: thumbed through the directory until he reached the letter H.

‘Now then,’ he muttered, his right eye twitching. He began to run his finger down the thin columns of names –

Heart

Heaven

Hemlock

Henna

Henry V

Hercules

Herod

Hey

Hey Gary

Hey Raymond

Hi-Tension Tattooing

Hidalgo

Hien Chul Oh A

Higgins Prof

Highgate Literary Scientific Institution

Highjack Video

Highmore — only to sigh as he witnessed that nimble, almost imperceptible, but oh so familiar leap to –

Higho Belinda

Hikmet

Himmel

Ho

Hogbin –

Hopeless. It was always the same. The same disappointment. The crucial name missing, that gap invisible to eyes other than his own. For that was what he was looking for when he succumbed to the lure of the phone-box: another Highness. Not necessarily his parents, not even a relative. Just another person with the same name. Just one person, that was all he asked. He had checked the London directories a thousand times, and whenever he travelled to other towns he checked theirs too, but so far he had drawn a blank. Literally, a blank.

He must have been about eight the first time. Still living at the orphanage, anyway. They used to go for walks with Mrs Hood every afternoon — outings, she called them — always the same walk, long too, real drudgery, until one day he noticed something different. A phone-box standing near the entrance to a wood. So red against the dusty summer green of the hedgerow. And those directories, fat and pink, lolling like dogs’ tongues in the heat. He had dropped out of the crocodile and slipped inside.

He was always losing things, Moses. That afternoon, it was his sense of time. Those phone-books, the names. They revealed new worlds, they cast spells, they mesmerised. They were open sesame and abracadabra and look into my eyes. And that gap where his own name ought to have been but wasn’t. Not so much a gap, really, as an absence, an invisibility, a having-gone. As if he didn’t belong at all, not in this world. As if he only existed in another dimension, between the names. Everything swam away from him with great gaping strokes. A black wake in his vision. The oily swell of waves. He supposed he must almost have fainted. He surfaced with the smell of hot dust and stale breath and dried urine in his nostrils, and black fingers from the print of those magic pages. When he arrived back at the orphanage, Mrs Hood summoned him to her clinical white office. She examined his hands and asked him what on earth he had been up to. ‘Reading the phone-books,’ he said. Her plump glossy face (which ought to have looked kind, but didn’t) darkened. She told him he was insolent, and sent him to bed without any tea. He had associated looking for his name with hunger ever since.

Sixteen years later he still found phone-boxes irresistible. They stood like sirens on street-corners, their doors inched open for him, their glass panes winked and beckoned. And, after all, phone-books were constantly updated so there was always an outside chance. He had heard that people in America had strange names and one day, when he was rich, he planned to tour the country state by state, directory by directory, until he found another Highness, a Highness he would probably be related to in some fantastic circuitous manner, and he, Moses, sole English bearer of the name, would visit this Highness and they would drink to their common burden and talk late into the night, exchanging tall stories, stories that arose from having a name as unusual as theirs. (God knows, he had enough of those. When he was fifteen he had tried to change his name. The town hall clerk, a man with hands like tarantulas, had actually laughed at him; one of the tarantulas had crawled across the man’s lips, but too late to frighten the laughter away. Moses had called him several names — they weren’t in the phone-book either — and stalked out.) It was a dream, of course, an American dream, but one that Moses cherished and meant to translate into reality. In the meantime the search continued on this side of the Atlantic. He no longer had the slightest desire to change his name. Some things you inherited, even as an orphan.

Besides, he thought as he stood in the phone-box, what would he have called himself instead? He could have called himself Moses Pole, after his foster-parents, but that would only have opened another bag of jokes. It could have been Moses anything. Or anything anything. It was that arbitrary. He closed his eyes, thumbed blind through the directory and jabbed with his finger. He opened his eyes and glanced down at the page. Fluck, Brian. Jesus. He let the directory swing back into place and left the phone-box smiling. He suddenly felt very hungry.

*

Madame Zola’s eyes had blurred from too much staring. The frosted-glass door and the smeared windows of the café swam beyond their contours, mingling lazily like Martini in gin, until a sudden injection of movement and colour, a flurry of blues and blacks, made her jump. She blinked her eyes back into focus just in time to recognise the tall dark stranger she had never seen before. He was bigger than she had been led by her vision to expect — an enormous assembly of legs and arms held together by a torn leather jacket and a pair of oily worn jeans. He positively dwarfed the café interior. She wondered how he had fitted into that picture in her head. He was the one, though. No doubt about that. She took a sip of tea that was, for her, almost profligate.

Moses paid for a cup of coffee and a ham roll and carried them to the back of the café. He placed his camera on the table (exploring London and taking photographs was something he often did on Sundays) and, after a series of improvised contortions, managed to sit down. It was one of those places where they screw everything to the floor. The tables, the chairs, the waste-bins, even, in this case, the hat-stand. Nothing moves. Sometimes you wonder whether the people who work there have been screwed to the floor as well. And they always screw everything just that little bit too close together. Places like the Delphi Café reinforced his feeling that the world had been designed for other people: phone-boxes were too narrow, baths were too short, chandeliers were too low, and tables and chairs were too close together. It was a world of barriers and partitions. It seemed to divide into areas of confinement that caused him discomfort and, on occasion, pain. It pinched like a shoe that didn’t quite fit. How he longed sometimes to sweep the whole cautious miserly clutter aside. To run barefoot, as it were. Being so tall, of course, he felt it more acutely than most. Moving the tip of your finger across his forehead was like reading a braille history of his life. Bumps and swellings everywhere. It wasn’t that he was accident-prone; it was just that he stuck out like a sore thumb which, because it stuck out, became still sorer. It had taken him until now — twenty-four years old and 6’ 6” — to learn the words duck and stoop, to become accustomed to his size in relation to his surroundings, to begin to make the necessary compensations. Hopefully that was it, at least as far as vertical growth was concerned, and from now on, year by year, millionth of an inch by millionth of an inch, he would shrink, as his foster-father (once 6’1”, now 5’11”) had done.

His thoughts were interrupted at this point by the pressure of a hand on his arm. Looking round, he saw an old woman sitting at the next table. Worn face. Sombre eyes. On the breadline, he thought. There were a million like her.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said.

He studied her. ‘I don’t remember you.’

‘No, of course not.’ She looked away from him with a smile that was almost coy. ‘How could you?’ Then, though her head remained in profile, her eyes slid sideways until they rested on him again. ‘My name is Madame Zola.’

‘And mine’s Moses.’

‘An unusual name,’ Madame Zola observed. ‘A name with a destiny. You see this cup of tea?’

Moses nodded, smiling.

‘I made this cup of tea last until you came.’

‘And now,’ she put her cup down, and leaned towards him with the air of a conspirator, ‘there is something I must show you.’

‘Show me? What?’

Madame Zola waved his questions away like flies. They were tiresome questions. He hadn’t understood.

‘I have to show you,’ she said, ‘not speak about it. I cannot speak about it. Come. It’s not far.’

Abandoning her cup of tea with a wistful smile — it was still more than two-thirds full; she could have waited another two days for him — she rose to her feet.

‘Yes,’ Moses was saying, ‘but why me?’

‘Because you,’ and her smile became indulgent, ‘you came through the door.’

He followed her across the café.

‘Who knows,’ she joked, as they stepped out into the September sunlight, ‘maybe it’s your future I’ll show you.’

She was taking him to the building, the building where she had lived with Christos, the building where Christos had died. In those days it had been as white as the keys on a piano and she had told Christos that and he had said That would be strange music, meaning music played on a piano with no black keys. Since then the building had changed colour many times. It had been grey, cream, green and brown. Now it was pink. So many disguises. To forget the past and be young always. Like a soul passing through its different reincarnations. Some buildings had souls, she decided, and she had told Christos that too. He had laughed and she had seen the secret part of his beard that grew, black and soft, on the underside of his chin. Soul, he had scoffed. You have a head full of wool and no knitting needles. But she knew, you see. She knew the building would go on changing colour until it had been through every colour of the rainbow. Only then would it be allowed to die, to rest. She had seen visions of its destruction, but she had never been able to place them in time. It hadn’t surprised her to receive a vision of the building again that afternoon — she often saw it; it contained the ashes of her happiest years — but it was curious how it had merged with the vision of the tall dark stranger, Moses, who now walked beside her. She didn’t understand precisely in what way the two were connected, only that some connection must exist. She felt impelled to bring them together.

‘You see,’ and she stopped Moses with a light touch just below the elbow, ‘I knew you were coming.’ And then, a minute later, with a quizzical tilt of her head, ‘but I never believed you would be tall and dark. That is extraordinary.’

Moses grinned at her without understanding the reference. He had the feeling he was learning something, though he couldn’t have said what exactly. He couldn’t take his eyes off her hands. She clasped them together in front of her as if they contained something precious or fragile which she was in the process of delivering.

‘There.’ She had lifted one finger, and the blood rustled in her veins. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’

*

She was pointing at a pink building on the other side of the main road. It was so pink, this building. Almost fluorescent. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed it before. Perhaps it had only recently been painted. Not only pink, but triangular too, dominating the junction. It reminded him of a ship, the way it ploughed through the drab sea of surrounding shops and houses. Yellow flowering weeds fluttered on the roof like tiny pennants.

He crossed the road and tested the double-doors. Locked. He tried to peer through the ground-floor windows. The smoked glass, opaque and black, gave nothing away. Like somebody who answers a question with a question, they offered him only a few different reflections of himself. He turned. The old woman was standing beside him. One hand on her throat, she stared up at the pink façade.

‘I’m leaving now,’ she said. ‘You’ll never see me again probably, but maybe I’ll see you.’

‘I’ll keep a look out for you,’ he said.

‘That won’t make any difference.’

Reading between the lines around her eyes, he realised she was smiling, but with difficulty, through tears. He looked at the ground, then at the building again. This time he noticed a flysheet taped to the side-door. He moved closer. The Revelation Sisters, it said. A gay cabaret. The small-print told him more. The building was a nightclub, and its name was The Bunker.

When he looked round again, Madame Zola had vanished. He crossed the street and began to take pictures. He wanted to remember the building and, by remembering the building, remember her too.

He had almost finished the film when the double-doors slammed open. A black guy appeared. He was leaning forwards, hands bunched at thigh-level. Well-dressed. Furious. Without thinking, Moses snapped off another couple of pictures. He watched the black guy through the camera as he locked the double-doors, threw wary glances left and right, noticed Moses, and walked towards him, growing larger, more detailed.

‘What the fuck’re you doing?’ The voice was smooth and venomous, anger planed down.

Moses lowered his camera. ‘Taking a few pictures. Of the building.’

The black guy’s eyes were pools of yellow acid. Moses felt them eat into his face. ‘I don’t like people taking pictures, all right?’

‘All right.’

The black guy spun on his heel, and walked over to a white Mercedes parked in the shadow of the side-street. He drove past Moses in low gear, tyres trickling on the tarmac like something about to explode. Moses wound his film back thoughtfully, his eyes following the car as it turned the corner.

*

He returned to The Bunker twice that week. It was closed both times, lifeless. He wondered whether it had closed for good.

Two weeks later he was driving up to Soho to meet his flatmate, Eddie, for a drink when he happened to pass the club again. This time he noticed a few people clustered round the doorway. It was raining. A slab of violet light glistened on the slick black pavement. The place looked open. He stamped on his brakes and pulled into the side of the road. A horn blared behind him, headlights flashed full beam. Fuck you too, he thought.

Leaving the engine idling, he crossed the pavement. It was open. £2.50 to get in. The blonde girl selling tickets smiled at him. Change of plan, he decided.

He parked his old Rover in the side-street and ran back to the club in case it closed while he wasn’t looking.

‘Is there a phone in here?’ he asked the girl.

‘Down the corridor on the right,’ she said.

But he postponed the call to Eddie (Eddie was always late anyway) and, moving down the corridor, turned left into a room with a small bar and a dance-floor. Black walls. The usual barrage of lights. Iggy Pop’s ‘No Fun’ slammed out of head-high stacks of speakers. A Mohican danced alone, fists clubbing the air. Already damaged sofa-seating seemed to shrink back against the walls. A short flight of stairs led to a second room, also painted black. Lengths of ripped black netting gathered like stormclouds on the ceiling. White neon tubes fizzed above the bar. The facing wall, a solid mass of mirror-tiles, glimmered a dim silver. There were black tables, sticky with spilt drinks. His kind of place.

He walked back through the club to the main entrance. The blonde girl was talking to a man whose name, if Moses had heard it right, was Belsen. Moses waited for her to notice him. His size made that inevitable.

When she turned her head, he said, ‘I’m sorry, where did you say the phone was?’

She laughed. ‘Have you been looking for it all this time?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ And then, to Belsen, ‘Won’t be a second.’

Belsen’s watery eyes followed them down the corridor. His face looked as if it had been made of wax which had melted, run, then hardened again. He was wearing a Crombie and drinking Coke out of a can.

‘Who’s that man?’ Moses asked the girl.

‘That’s Belsen. He’s the bouncer.’

‘I don’t think he likes me.’

The girl smiled. ‘He doesn’t like anyone. That’s his job. There’s the phone.’

Moses thanked her. He dialled the pub where he was supposed to be meeting Eddie and when Eddie came on he said, ‘New venue, place called The Bunker.’ He gave Eddie the address and hung up.

On his way to the bar, he bumped into somebody he recognised from a club in the West End. Moses knew him as The Butcher. The Butcher wore a naval cap and a belted leather apron. A meathook earring swung from his left ear. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, exposing a pair of scarred white forearms. The Butcher sold speed. Moses bought a £5 deal and headed for the Ladies. ‘The Ladies is cool,’ The Butcher had told him.

The Butcher was right. Chinese-red walls. Hairspray and smoke instead of air. Men slumped in wash-basins. Girls with their eyes on the mirror. Moses stood in line for one of the two cubicles.

When his turn came, he squeezed inside and bolted the door.

A couple of minutes later somebody wondered what he was doing.

‘Wanking, probably,’ another voice suggested.

Derisive laughter.

‘I’m not,’ Moses called out.

‘What’s taking you so long then?’

He didn’t answer this time. He had to chop the speed on the sloping top of the cistern and that wasn’t easy. One clumsy movement could send the whole lot cascading into the toilet bowl. He cut the powder into four crude lines with his Cashpoint card, rolled a £5 note and, bending his right nostril to the paper, vacuumed them up one after the other. No sense in running the gauntlet of all those beautiful jeering girls again. He dropped the paper into the toilet and flushed. Cynical applause from the other side of the door.

‘About fucking time.’

Moses emerged, hands raised, warding off abuse. ‘Really sorry about that.’

‘You would’ve been,’ a girl muttered as she pushed past him, ‘if I’d done it on the floor.’

He had forgotten all about Eddie. He had two or three drinks, talked to the blonde girl (whose name was Louise), and once, much to his astonishment, for it was something he rarely attempted, danced. The speed, he thought. OK stuff. He’d have to use that butcher again.

At least an hour had passed when a smile appeared.

‘Oh dear,’ the smile said, ‘you look a bit fucked up, Moses.’

‘Hello, Eddie.’

The smile handed Moses a whisky. ‘Swallow that and we’ll go smoke a joint.’

Moses tipped the whisky into his mouth and handed the glass back. The smile became a grin. They occupied a dark corner, lit the joint. A crush of bodies soaked up the music now. It was hot.

‘Vince and Jackson’ve come along too,’ the grin said, ‘but I lost them.’

Moses didn’t answer. He was beginning to feel strange. A smell had risen in his nostrils, a smell he couldn’t identify or explain. Something like rotten meat, something like shit. But it wasn’t so much the actual smell that affected him as the idea that he had noticed the smell and would now be unable to not notice it. The smell was like the symbol of a stage he had reached in an extremely unpleasant and irreversible process. It told him there was no going back. Not now. Oh dear indeed.

His skull began to revolve of its own accord inside his scalp. His forehead became the target for a volley of tiny ice-cold missiles. He touched his hairline and sweat glistened on his fingertips. He stumbled towards the exit.

Half an hour later Jackson ran into Eddie. ‘Have you seen Moses?’ he asked.

‘Last I saw of him,’ Eddie said, ‘he was going that way.’ He pointed to the corridor. ‘Seemed to be in a hurry.’

They exchanged a knowing look.

Jackson eventually found Moses in a skip on the main road. Moses was lying on a heap of rubble, his head halfway inside a TV set. He had lost a shoe. His arms and legs were flung out, crooked, the shape of a swastika. He looked as if he had fallen out of an aeroplane. Jackson sighed. He went to fetch Eddie, but Eddie had disappeared. With some girl, knowing Eddie. He found Vince instead. Led him outside. They stood on the pavement and stared at Moses.

‘What are we going to do with him?’ Jackson asked.

Vince climbed into the skip. ‘Hey, Moses,’ he said.

Moses didn’t move.

Vince poked him with the toe of his boot. Absolutely no reaction. Vince kicked Moses several times in various parts of his body. Including once in the groin, for good measure. A faint groan came from inside the TV.

Vince climbed down shaking his head. ‘Better call him a cab.’

Jackson nodded wisely. ‘Usual procedure. Leave it to me.’

He ran back to The Bunker and asked the blonde girl where the phone was. She showed him. ‘Is your friend all right?’ she asked him. ‘I saw him leave. He didn’t look very well.’

‘He’ll be all right,’ Jackson said. ‘You know. Tomorrow.’

He called the cab company they always used and explained the situation. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘The skip on Kennington Road.’

Ten seconds.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay you this end.’

Another five seconds.

He grinned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t usually do that.’

When Eddie arrived home at three that morning, he found Moses asleep on the sofa in the lounge with both shoes on his feet and a smile on his face.

Cab-drivers are amazing.

*

Moses had been living with Eddie for almost two years. When he first moved in, somebody had told him that Eddie would be the perfect flatmate. Sociable, loaded, out a lot. Perfect.

Not so.

Eddie was too good-looking to be the perfect flatmate. He had blue eyes and a symmetrical white smile. His skin was so smooth that an American girl had once asked him whether he oiled his body. He walked on the balls of his feet, so he communicated purpose, energy, sexual hunger. He worked in the City, some job whose mystery he preserved by using phrases like interest differential and liquidity ratio. Most people thought him just too good to be true. The phone rang constantly. So did the doorbell. Lying in bed at night, Moses soon learned to recognise the sequence of sounds that meant Eddie had come home: the giggles on the stairs, the gulp of the toilet, the three-syllable squeal of Eddie’s bedroom door. It seemed that, sooner or later, half the world’s population would pass through that ground-floor flat in Battersea. It could have been worse, of course. As Moses said to Eddie after their first exhausting week together: ‘Thank Christ you’re not bisexual.’

The months went by and Moses developed a theory about Eddie. He became secretly convinced that Eddie had once been a statue, that Eddie had been released from his immobility, activated, as it were, but only for a limited period of time, and that, sooner or later, Eddie would have to return to his pedestal (somewhere in the Mediterranean, no doubt) and readopt his classical pose (involving, Moses imagined, a discus or a javelin). This explained Eddie’s smooth skin, his sculptured features and his athletic physique. It explained the hectic dyslexic way he lived. It explained his attitude to women (for which Moses could find no other possible explanation). Above all, it explained why he never got home until three or four in the morning. Life was short for Eddie.

Whenever one of Moses’s friends travelled abroad, he asked them to keep an eye out for empty pedestals. Nothing of any significance had turned up so far. There had been a brief surge of hope, the glimmer of a breakthrough, when he received a postcard from Vince’s girlfriend, Alison, reporting the existence of an unoccupied plinth on one of the remoter islands in the Cyclades. However, the missing statue had been removed to a museum in Athens, and Alison assured Moses, in a second postcard bought at that very museum, that she had seen the statue in question and that it definitely wasn’t Eddie.

During the summer and autumn of 1979 Moses kept Eddie under constant surveillance. When they passed a statue in the street, he watched Eddie’s face, but it never registered even the slightest flicker of recognition or unease. Either Eddie was a natural actor, or he was like Moses and part of his memory had been erased.

Once, Moses — a casual Moses, studying his fingernails — had asked Eddie a trick question.

‘Where were you born, Eddie?’

‘Basingstoke,’ Eddie said.

Basingstoke indeed. What kind of fool did he take Moses for?

Then, a few days before their first visit to The Bunker, Moses forced a confrontation. Uncertainty and frustration had been eating into the fabric of his life like an army of moths. He opened colour supplements and Michelangelo’s David would be standing there, eyes averted, as if he knew. He went for long walks through parks only to see stone Neptunes frozen in the act of climbing out of artificial lakes. He dreamed about football matches attended by capacity crowds of 100,000 statues, scarves wrapped round their cold necks, rattles in their dramatic outstretched hands. He couldn’t take it any longer. He had to know the truth.

It was a weekend. Moses had been sitting at the kitchen table when Eddie ambled in wearing his blue towel dressing-gown. Eddie had a loose-muscled way of moving about, even first thing in the morning. His eyes were heavy, though. He had slept alone and that always took a lot out of him. What you aren’t used to can hit you pretty hard.

Eddie poured some cornflakes into a bowl, added milk and sugar, and sat down opposite Moses. These movements tortured Moses. Their slowness, their relaxed simplicity, crackled through him like electricity. He felt as if he was about to short-circuit. The first spoonful was halfway to Eddie’s mouth when Moses spoke:

‘Eddie, were you ever a statue?’

There. He had said it. After all these months.

‘I mean, you know,’ he went on, ‘have you got to go back sometime and be one again? And, if so, how long have you got exactly? Because if you are going back, I think I should know, really. After all, I am living with you.’

A puzzled expression, remote, barely defined, moved across Eddie’s face, but left it undisturbed. Wind over stone.

‘All right then,’ Moses said, ‘just tell me where it is. The pedestal, I mean. I’m curious, you see.’

‘Moses,’ Eddie said slowly, ‘it’s very early in the morning and I’m trying to eat my breakfast, OK?’ He shook his head. The first spoonful of cornflakes completed its journey to his mouth.

Moses rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Eddie’s cereal made a rhythmic crunching sound in the silence of the kitchen. Moses saw a battalion of statues with stiff arms and stony faces marching through the darkness towards him.

The next few days had proved awkward for them both. Moses hated the tube — it was too small for him — but when he wanted to go to the Trafalgar Square post office to check the directories he had to use it. What else could he do? His Rover had broken down again and there were seventeen statues on the bus-route.

Eddie seemed distracted too. Why did Moses keep going on about his past? What was all this crap about statues? And where had last week’s colour supplement gone? He could often be seen sitting around the flat deep in thought, his forehead resting on his fist, his elbow resting on his knee. That was the last straw for Moses. The idea that Eddie could have been a famous sculpture all along explained the failure of his various Mediterranean investigations. It had never occurred to him to explore the art galleries. He had been too limited. This, coupled with Eddie’s talent for evasion, made the task of arriving at any kind of truth almost totally inconceivable. Moses realised there and then that he would have to resign himself to never knowing the answer.

*

Midnight in the flat at Battersea. Recuperation time. Moses had arranged himself in front of the TV. Three cans of Special Brew beside his left foot. Cigarettes on the arm of his chair. Then the front door slammed. Eddie and Jackson breathed a mixture of whisky fumes and cold air into the room. Jackson leaned his bicycle — a black pre-war Hercules — against the wall. Eddie collapsed in a chair and spread himself as if he had acquired great power.

‘So who’s this old lady?’ he said.

Moses glanced up from an Open University programme about logarithms. ‘I’m watching TV,’ he said.

‘Jackson’s been telling me,’ Eddie said. ‘You met some old lady.’

‘She was a clairvoyant,’ Jackson said, ‘apparently.’

‘Of course she was,’ Eddie scoffed, ‘and she could make a cup of tea last for a week.’

‘Three days,’ Moses said.

‘I thought you were watching TV,’ Eddie said.

Moses turned back to the screen. He swallowed some beer from his can. Jackson placed himself carefully at one end of the sofa and crossed his legs.

‘So who is she?’ Eddie asked.

Moses was watching a professor scrawl a series of hieroglyphics on a blackboard. The professor wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a violent green shirt. His hair was about to take off. Moses didn’t understand a word he was saying. Great television.

‘What?’ he said.

‘This old lady who took you to The Bunker,’ Eddie persisted. ‘Who was she?’

‘I don’t know. Just an old lady. Look at this professor.’

Jackson threw a quizzical glance at Eddie. ‘He’s changing the subject.’

‘Avoiding the issue,’ Eddie said. ‘Pretending not to know.’

‘Something to hide, I expect.’

‘He’s embarrassed. Look at him.’

‘Old ladies, you see.’

‘Well, we all know what Highness is like.’ Eddie always called Moses ‘Highness’ when he was drunk.

‘No taste.’ Jackson adjusted the cushions on the sofa with a dispassionate hand. ‘No taste at all.’

‘Anything in a skirt,’ Eddie leered. ‘Absolutely anything.’

‘Incredible, really.’

‘Too drunk to notice, you see. Too fucking wasted.’

‘Yes,’ and Jackson became solemn, ‘a drunk.’

‘An animal. A real animal.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Taking too much speed.’

‘Lying in skips.’

‘Picking up old ladies.’

Moses sighed.

‘Picking up old ladies,’ Eddie repeated. He leaned forwards, his pupils floating in a pink surround. ‘And watching programmes about logarithms.’

Jackson chuckled.

‘If you must know,’ Moses said, ‘she picked me up.’

More mockery, more laughter. In the end, of course, he had to tell the story, a story that concluded with the words, ‘And then she vanished into thin air.’

Eddie and Jackson exchanged looks.

‘Strange,’ Moses said, ‘don’t you think?’

Eddie stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I don’t believe it. Clairvoyants and black gangsters and cups of tea that last for ever. It’s too much. You made it up, didn’t you, Highness?’

‘I didn’t.’

Eddie grinned. ‘Come on, Highness.’

‘Every word I told you is true. I promise you,’ but Moses couldn’t help smiling at the expression on Eddie’s face.

‘Do you believe him?’ Eddie asked Jackson.

Jackson made an n-shape with his mouth.

‘Neither do I,’ Eddie said. ‘Look. He’s smiling. You can’t trust him, you know. He’s always making things up.’

Almost two weeks, Moses thought, since their little conversation about statues. Had he touched a nerve in Eddie?

‘He probably just drove past the place,’ Eddie was saying, ‘you know, completely by chance, and stopped because he thought it looked interesting.’

Jackson was staring at the ceiling. ‘It wasn’t that interesting.’

‘Exactly. So he had to make up a few stories, didn’t he. Make it sound interesting.’

‘Pretty sad, really.’

‘Very sad.’

Moses switched the TV off and stood up. ‘Jesus, you two talk a lot of shit. I’m going out.’

Eddie looked up, all drunken innocence. ‘Where are you going, Highness?’

‘Anywhere. To the pub.’

Eddie turned to Jackson. ‘What do you think, Jackson? Do you think he’s telling the truth?’

Jackson glanced at his watch. ‘The pubs are closed,’ he said, ‘aren’t they?’

Eddie gloated up at Moses. Moses shrugged and went out.

To The Bunker.

*

During the next two months, the November and December of 1979, Moses saw very little of his friends. Jackson had started working at an occult bookshop, and spent his evenings and weekends pursuing his interest in meteorology. Vince was taking a lot of heroin in his squat at the bottom of the King’s Road. Eddie flew to New York on business. Moses received a postcard. Met any more old ladies? He needed air. New air. He began to go to The Bunker once, often twice, a week. As he drove east through the city, past the power-station and the huge refrigerated warehouses, along those stark grey four-lane roads, he thought of Madame Zola sometimes, the way you might think of a key that has unlocked a door.

He quickly became a regular, a face, a name. He leaned against walls. He talked to anyone. He heard things. The nightclub hadn’t always been a nightclub. It had been a wine-bar called Florian’s, a fishing-tackle shop and a printer’s studio in its time. Nothing lasted. Very high turnover of owners. Some said it was an unlucky building. ‘Sliker fuckin’ kermelion, init,’ a drunk told him one night, brandishing an empty bottle in his face, and Moses chose not to point out that a ‘kermelion’ blended rather than clashed with its surroundings; he didn’t want any trouble.

Between frequent drinks and awkward dances he began to find out about the present set-up. Belsen had done time for armed robbery. One of the barmen, Django, beat his wife. Elliot, the guy who ran the club, was a pimp. Louise had slept with him. How much truth these rumours contained Moses couldn’t have said, but he listened all the same. When he asked why the club had closed in September, people told him there had been some kind of break-in. Nobody could give him the details. Elliot would know, they said, but Elliot, they added in the same breath, didn’t like to talk about it, know what I mean? He suddenly realised that Elliot was the guy who had told him not to take the pictures.

He began to narrow his focus, and found there was more gossip about Elliot than about everybody else put together. Take the gap between his front teeth. ‘Yer know what that means, dontcher,’ Gladys said (Gladys owned the petshop three doors down). ‘What does it mean, Gladys?’ Moses asked. Gladys showed him her own diminishing collection. ‘Wimmin,’ she leered. ‘That’s what.’ (One woman it didn’t mean, Moses soon discovered, was Louise. He had mentioned the rumour to her one evening, and she had laughed and said, ‘Nobody gets that close to Elliot.’)

No one seemed to know where Elliot had come from originally — though there were a few predictable theories about the jungle. He had a South London accent — Bermondsey, somebody said. People often mistook him for a famous West Indian cricketer, and once, so rumour had it, Elliot had signed the great man’s autograph for a group of young fans outside the Oval (Moses made a mental note: sense of humour?). Many accused Elliot of arrogance. The evidence? Flash suits, flash car, flash attitude. Elliot didn’t seem to care whether he made enemies or not. ‘The way I see it, right,’ he had been heard to say, ‘you make deals, you make enemies. That’s the way it goes.’ His pleasures? He drank brandy, preferably Remy Martin. He smoked Dunhill King Size. He listened to Manhattan Transfer in his office late at night (‘He likes that soft music,’ said Dino, a spry and ageless Greek who ran the delicatessen opposite the club, ‘but he plays it so loud”). He had his own private pool-table too, and he saw himself as a bit of a hustler. If he thought you were all right he invited you up to the office for a game. When asked what they thought of him, most people used colourful language. Wanker cropped up more than once. So did bastard. Moses realised that if he wanted to know Elliot better he would have to meet him again. In the flesh. People were beginning to repeat themselves and contradict themselves. People were beginning to ask, ‘Why all these questions?’

He had been voyeur for long enough.

*

Elliot shaking Belsen’s hand. Elliot at the wheel of his white Mercedes. Elliot dyed red by a dance-floor spotlight. Elliot in an upstairs window, a cigarette bouncing on his lower lip.

But no contact. No real opening.

Once, as Moses paid to get in, Elliot seemed to be staring straight at him, but when Moses tried a smile, Elliot gave no sign that he had recognised him. It wasn’t that Elliot stared at you as if you weren’t there. No, he stared at you as if you were there — but not for much longer. He stared at you as if you were about to be removed. Permanently. It made you feel nervous and disposable. Moses had the feeling it was meant to. In that moment the roles reversed, and Moses began to feel watched.

Then, one Friday just after New Year, Elliot wanted a light and Moses happened to be nearest. As Elliot dipped his head towards the match, he glanced up sideways through the flame.

‘So how did they come out?’ he said.

Moses was thrown for a moment. In the ultraviolet light of the corridor Elliot looked supernatural. Only the whites of his eyes and the gold of his medallion showed.

‘The pictures. How did they come out?’

‘Oh, the pictures.’ Moses relaxed. ‘Fine. Yeah. They came out fine.’

‘I’d like to see them sometime.’

‘Sure. There are a couple of good ones.’

Elliot fired smoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘This is your place, isn’t it?’ Moses risked.

Elliot nodded.

‘It’s good. I come here a lot.’

‘I know.’ Like the hand that conceals a razor-blade, Elliot’s face gave nothing away. His wide unflinching eyes seemed to be sizing Moses up. Moses began to understand why people talked about him the way they did.

They saw each other again five days later. Moses was standing in the foyer when Elliot appeared at his elbow, Belsen in attendance.

‘Well, fuck me,’ Elliot said, ‘if it isn’t the photographer.’ He was wearing a maroon suit and a silver tie. He eyed Moses with a kind of teasing hostility.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ Moses said. He handed Elliot an A4 envelope.

Belsen’s cold face glimmered in the corner like the light from an open fridge. He lit a Craven A and sucked on it so hard that his cheeks hollowed out and all the bones rose to the surface.

Elliot frowned. ‘What’s this then?’

‘Open it,’ Moses said.

Elliot glanced at Belsen, then tore the envelope open. The first two pictures were views of The Bunker shot from the front and the side. The third showed Elliot in close-up, chin lifted, snarling. Elliot nodded, and his top lip peeled back to reveal the gap between his teeth that meant wimmin to Gladys and nothing to Moses.

‘Nice,’ he said. And made as if to hand the pictures back.

‘No,’ Moses said, ‘they’re yours.’

Elliot blinked. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. They’re for you. Hang them in your office or something.’

‘How much?’

Moses smiled. ‘Nothing. I developed them myself.’

‘How about a drink then?’

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘What do you want?’

Moses knew the answer to that one. ‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘Remy, if you’ve got it.’

Of course he’d got it.

Moses bumped into Louise again on his way out. ‘I didn’t know Elliot was a friend of yours,’ she said.

‘He isn’t.’ Moses paused, smiling, by the door. ‘But I’ve got the feeling he will be.’

*

One night in January Moses was standing outside The Bunker. He couldn’t find his money. The air prickled with a fine drizzle. A chill wind rumpled the surfaces of puddles. There was nobody in the fish and chip shop across the road. London in winter.

Jackson waited while Moses ran through his pockets once again. Jackson was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The wind seemed to be trying to untie the knots in his hair.

‘Moses? Hey! Moses!’

It was Elliot. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit of soft grey cloth. He looked warm and expensive, and his forehead shone like bronze. He had a problem, he said. His regular DJ for Wednesday night had called off sick. He needed a replacement. Strictly a one-off. There was twenty quid in it. Did Moses know anyone?

Moses poked a crushed Coke can with the toe of his shoe. ‘Funny you should say that. I worked as a DJ one summer. Up in Leicester. I’d be glad to help you out. And I could use the money.’ He kicked the can into the gutter.

‘You sure about that?’

Moses nodded. They shook on it.

Elliot turned to go into the club. ‘You coming in or what?’

‘In a minute. Got to find my money.’

‘It’s on me,’ Elliot said.

Jackson tugged on Moses’s shirt as they walked in. Teeth chattering, he whispered, ‘You never worked in a disco.’

‘What do you know standing there in a short-sleeved shirt on a night like this?’

‘It’s going to warm up later on,’ Jackson said. ‘A ridge of high pressure moving in from the west.’ But his lips had already turned blue, and his conviction was beginning to fade.

‘Later on?’ Moses said. ‘July or August, maybe.’

‘Anyway, what’s that got to do with whether you’ve worked in a disco before or not?’

‘You’re always wrong,’ Moses said. ‘That’s what.’

*

When Moses arrived at The Bunker on Wednesday night, Django pulled him to one side. Django had bushy orange sideburns and a boxer’s nose that turned left halfway down. He looked Scottish but claimed to be Italian, hundred per cent. But then he also claimed he didn’t beat his wife.

‘Listen, Mose,’ Django said, ‘how about doing us a favour?’

‘What favour?’

Django shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Just a couple of requests, that’s all.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, and if you play them for me, maybe I’ll send a few double whiskies your way, you follow me?’

Moses studied the barman with new interest. ‘What requests?’

Django mentioned two Beatles songs.

‘What d’you want to hear them for?’

Django grinned. He looked very sly when he grinned. ‘Like I said, Mose. Double whiskies.’

‘How many?’

‘One for each request.’

Moses nodded. ‘See what I can do, Django.’

He walked over to the DJ’s booth and installed himself in front of the two turntables. He put on the headphones. Jackson had been wrong the other night, but not that wrong. Moses had only been a DJ once in his life, five years ago now, and he had already drunk a bottle of red wine that evening because he had only been a DJ once in his life. Nerves.

The buckles on Elliot’s shoes glinted gold as he moved across the dance-floor and into the corner of Moses’s eye.

‘How’s it going?’

Moses was casual, even though Elliot had surprised him. ‘It’s coming back to me,’ he said.

Elliot lifted and dropped his shoulders as if to adjust the fit of his jacket. ‘If you need me, I’ll be upstairs. All right, Isaac?’ He grinned and walked away.

‘Isaac,’ Moses muttered, ‘I’ll give him Isaac.’

Once he had mastered all the knobs and dials he began to enjoy himself. He played all his favourite music — The Sex Pistols, T. Rex, The Temptations, Iggy Pop, Françoise Hardy, Killing Joke, The Anti-Nowhere League, Aretha Franklin. He didn’t talk between tracks except for once when he said, ‘And here’s something you might remember from when you were very young,’ and put on ‘Practising for Childbirth’, an educational EP on the CBF label. One girl, who reminded Moses of a famous German actress — she wore a simple black dress and no shoes — actually danced to the syncopated gasps and sighs, her eyes closed, her hair a dark blonde waterfall, and yes, Moses had to agree, the record did have a certain obscure rhythm of its own. After that hypnotic solitary dance, Moses couldn’t stop looking at her. He tried to steer a smile towards her, but her eyes slid away and his smile sailed on into a sea of faces that weren’t hers. There was a man with her, of course. There always is.

At first, and out of longing, he had played Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’. Then, with savage irony, he thought, he put on ‘Stand By Your Man’ by Tammy Wynette. He swayed miserably behind his Perspex shield.

Eddie came over. ‘What’s this shit you’re playing?’

‘Go away, Eddie.’

‘Jesus, you look strange, Moses.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘You look like a dinosaur in a museum.’

‘Fuck off, Eddie. I’m working.’

‘Been a while, hasn’t it?’

‘Eddie,’ Moses said patiently, ‘fuck off before I kill you, all right?’

Eddie sauntered away, grinning. Django appeared.

‘You haven’t played any of my records yet,’ he complained.

Moses sighed. ‘Hey, Django,’ he said, ‘you see that girl over there in the black dress?’

Django had already noticed her.

‘She’s a German actress,’ Moses said. ‘Famous German actress.’

‘Yeah?’ Django looked impressed. Then suspicious. And, finally, sceptical. ‘You’re rat-arsed, you are.’

‘She’s beautiful, Django. I’m in love.’

‘I can understand that, Mose. So what’s the problem?’

‘She’s ignoring me.’

‘Want me to have a word with her?’

Moses examined Django for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Is there something wrong with me, do you think?’

Django looked Moses up and down. ‘Not that I can see. Apart from you being out of it, that is.’

‘I mean, I’m the DJ, Django.’

‘So?’

‘Well, I thought girls always fell for the DJ.’

‘Apparently not, Mose.’

Moses sighed again. He tried to forget about the German actress. The lights coloured his face an appropriate blue. ‘All right, Django. I’ll play your records now.

‘Cheers, Mose.’

During the next hour Moses played both the records twice and the drinks kept coming. He saw Django dancing with a girl, and the girl Django was dancing with wasn’t Django’s wife. Moses began to understand. The requests. The whisky-bribes. Crafty bugger. A Scotsman definitely. A Scotsman and a wife-beater. He wished the German actress would go. Her beauty was ruining his evening. His smiles reached out to where she stood. She didn’t notice. His smiles were like love-letters that get lost in the post.

Eddie came over again. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’ Moses said.

‘Staring at that girl in the black dress.’

Suddenly Eddie’s grinning face irritated Moses intensely. ‘If you don’t like it, Eddie, why don’t you fuck off home?’

Eddie fucked off home ten minutes later — with the German actress. Moses felt that something had gone badly wrong somewhere. He needed a drink.

‘Anything else you want to hear?’ he asked a passing Django.

‘“Knock on Wood”. Ami Stewart.’

Moses played that twice too and drank himself into a vast indifference to everything.

The Bunker closed at two that night. While Moses was clearing away, Elliot strolled up and laid three £10 notes in a fan on the mixing-desk.

‘I thought you said twenty,’ Moses said.

‘You did a good job.’ A smile tugged lightly at the corner of Elliot’s mouth. ‘I thought maybe you could take over on Wednesdays. Permanent, like.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘How come?’

‘Too painful.’

Elliot looked puzzled. He scratched his head at the point where his hair was receding. Maybe that was why it was receding, Moses thought. Maybe Elliot got puzzled a lot.

‘I can’t go into it,’ Moses said, ‘not now. I’d just rather be a normal person. You know, one of the crowd. Inconspicuous.’

Inconspicuous made Elliot laugh. ‘You seem a bit down. Fancy a game of pool?’

Moses, slow tonight, said, ‘Where?’

‘In the office. Got my own table.’

Now Moses remembered. ‘Sure,’ he said.

He followed Elliot up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Outside the last few people were stumbling home. Standing by the office window, Moses saw Belsen fold the gaunt scaffolding of his body into a battered white Cortina and drive away.

Elliot selected two glasses with heavy bases and poured them both a large Remy. The green baize, lit from above, lived up to its reputation. So did Elliot. There was something carnal about the way he chalked his cue, the way his eyes feasted on the position of balls on the table. He won two games on stripes. Then he was on spots, and the spots disappeared as if he had some kind of miracle cream on the end of his cue. He crept towards the black on soft predatory feet and killed it in the top right-hand pocket. Moses had lost again. Three games in a row.

Elliot slapped him on the back. ‘You need to sharpen up, Moses.’

Moses stood his cue against the wall. ‘It’s been a long night.’

Elliot went and sprawled in his executive leather chair. Moses took the dralon sofa under the window. He surrendered to the deep soothing reds and charcoal greys of the office. Wall-lamps built nests of warm light in the corners. Two glasses of brandy glowed in the shadows.

The traffic had slackened on the street below. The occasional truck. The still more occasional bus. Moses was sober now — the soberness that comes from hours of drinking. Elliot must think I’m all right, he thought. He only invites people up here if he thinks they’re all right. He reached for his brandy, and smiled as he swallowed.

Elliot propped his feet on the desk and talked about the club. He offered Moses cigarettes. They smoked until the corners of the office disappeared. Then the conversation touched on the break-in last September, and Elliot, without any prompting from Moses, began to tell the story.

There had been two men, apparently. They had climbed in the back way — over the wall and into the yard where the dustbins were kept — and forced a ground-floor window.

‘Professional job,’ Elliot said. ‘Very professional.’

One of the men had been carrying a plastic bag of shit. He had scooped it up in handfuls, and plastered it over the walls, the tables, the bar. Afterwards he had wiped his hands on the curtains in the foyer. The second man had brought along one of those plastic tubs you buy paint in. Instead of being full of paint, it had been full of blood. Ten litres of the stuff. That too had been smeared over everything in sight.

‘Right fucking mess,’ Elliot said. ‘You can imagine, right?’

Moses shuddered.

Elliot went on with the story. The next day, a Sunday, he had pulled up outside The Bunker in his motor. Two flicks of his wrist and the double-doors were open. The stench had flung him back into the street, an arm over his nose, gagging. It was as if everything that was bad in his life had caught up with him at once.

He had rushed up the stairs to his office. It had been left untouched. He had grabbed the phone and almost called the police. Almost. Instead he had picked up the Yellow Pages and dialled a firm of industrial cleaners. After hanging up, he had noticed some shit on his shoes. He must have trodden in it on his way upstairs. At that moment, he said, he had wanted to kill.

Later in the day he called a couple of friends of his, forensic experts. The only clues that had been left behind were the plastic bag and the paint-tub. The plastic bag had come from Safeway’s. The tub had once held Crown White Matt. No fingerprints on either of them. According to Elliot’s forensic friends, the shit in the plastic bag had been human, possibly belonging to the man who had done the job, and collected over a period of several days during which time he had eaten, among other things, a McDonald’s, two Indian take-aways and a Chinese. More than that, they couldn’t say. The chances of tracing the man, they told Elliot, were slim. Very slim indeed.

‘You know, it’s funny,’ Moses said, ‘but the first time I came here I smelt shit. I thought I was imagining it.’

‘You weren’t imagining it.’ Elliot smiled grimly. ‘This place was so full of shit I could’ve opened a sewage farm. I had to close for three weeks.’ He sighed, leaned back, massaged his neck. ‘Three weeks is a fuck of a lot of money.’

Moses wanted to ask why it had happened; he chose not to.

‘Yeah,’ Elliot went on, ‘that’s why I laid into you that afternoon. You know, when you were out there taking pictures.’

‘What? You mean that was the same afternoon?’

Elliot nodded.

‘No wonder you were in such a foul mood,’ Moses grinned. ‘I suppose you could say it was shit that brought us together.’

Elliot winced. ‘Hey Moses, I don’t want to think about it, OK?’

Moses apologised, but his grin lingered.

He stayed at The Bunker until four in the morning. Partly because he liked Elliot’s company, and partly because he didn’t want to risk running into the German actress who hadn’t noticed him smiling at her. Especially as she was with Eddie, who had.

*

Then it happened again.

One evening at the end of February Moses turned up outside The Bunker to find Elliot prowling up and down the pavement as if held by an invisible cage. His face twitched with rage. His lips were forced back over his gums.

‘What’s wrong, Elliot?’

‘Fuck,’ Elliot snarled. ‘Fuck Jesus fucking fuck.’ He pointed at the pavement just to the left of where Moses was standing. Somebody had painted a big white arrow on the ground. It was aimed at the entrance of the club.

Elliot jerked his head, and disappeared through the double-doors. Moses followed him inside. A trail of similar arrows led across the foyer, up the stairs, along the corridor, leading, inevitably, to Elliot’s office. Elliot pushed the door open, then stepped aside to let Moses in first.

It was a scene of such violence that Moses found the stillness unnerving. As he gazed into the room, he kept expecting something to spring out at him from a hiding-place in the debris. It was the kind of stillness that had recently been havoc and had only just returned to being stillness again. Moses took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly through his mouth. The entire office had been systematically and viciously destroyed. Torn paper, broken glass and long splinters of wood buried the carpet ankle-deep. The red drapes lay on top, cut into sinister neat pieces. The red lamps had been ripped loose and smashed. Wires trailed from the empty sockets like torn ligaments. The two black holes in the wall made the room look blinded somehow. The desk, the sofa and the executive chair, dismembered, hacked almost beyond recognition, reared up from the chaos as if trying to break free. Blood inched down the window-panes. The bitter smell of urine trickled into Moses’s nostrils. But worst of all — and Moses groaned when he noticed it — was what they had done to the pool-table, Elliot’s pride and joy. They had sawn the legs off, all four of them, and slashed the green baize into strips, with a razor-blade by the look of it, and then peeled it back to reveal the slab of grey slate, showing like bone through flesh, beneath.

‘The same people?’ Moses asked.

Elliot shrugged.

It couldn’t be kids, that much was clear. And remembering what Elliot had told him about the previous break-in, Moses thought he recognised the style. The blood, the shit, the piss. The same sadistic premeditated violence. It had the feel of a vendetta, a psychotic vendetta, and, once again, Moses wondered exactly what truth lay beneath the rumours he had heard about Elliot. This kind of thing didn’t happen to just anyone.

‘I suppose it’s no good getting the police in,’ he said.

Elliot didn’t even hear. His face had clenched like a fist. He was, Moses saw, one of those people who feel fury rather than fear.

He took Elliot by the arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go and get a drink somewhere.’

He drove Elliot to a pub in Bermondsey. The jukebox was playing early Sinatra to an interior of dark wood. They drank in near silence. An idea occurred to Moses — or, rather, recurred, because it had first begun to hatch when Elliot told him what had happened in October. The idea now grew, spread wings, though, even as it did so, Moses realised that he would have to save it for a more propitious moment.

*

Winter eased. Spring became a possibility.

When the vital conversation took place, Moses had been waiting almost a month. Insurance had restored the office to its former sleek condition. The windows were wide open. The roar of rush-hour traffic competed with the squeak of the blue chalk cube on the end of Elliot’s cue. The pool-table was playing as beautifully as ever, though Elliot still winced sometimes when he looked down at the green baize and remembered. Moses sat on the arm of the sofa, cue in one hand, a brandy in the other. A typical evening on the second floor of The Bunker.

Elliot was telling Moses about a trip he had made to West Germany. ‘I was in this town, right?’ he was saying.

Elliot in West Germany? ‘What were you doing there?’ Moses asked.

‘Business.’

‘Ah,’ Moses said.

‘Anyway,’ Elliot went on, ‘there was this bloke going on about a dome — ’

‘The cathedral?’ Moses suggested.

‘Yeah, probably, but he called it a dome. Anyway, this bloke, he’s sort of a guide, right? He points at this dome and he says, “You see that?”, and I go, “Yeah”. “You see that?” he says, second time, OK? and I’m thinking What is this? but I go, “Yeah,” anyway. Then he says, “Ugly,” he says. “Ugly ugly ugly”. And I’m cracking up but he hasn’t finished yet. “In the war,” he says, “boo boo boo, everything falls down, but that,” and he points at the fucking dome again, “that no bombs touch.” I’m thinking Yeah, OK, so? And then he says, “You know why no bombs touch?”, and I go, “No,” and he says, “Why God inside”.’

Elliot shook his head. ‘God inside. Jesus?’

‘You shouldn’t mock,’ Moses said, with the air of somebody who has just thought of something. ‘There’s a moral in that story.’

‘Moral?’ Elliot said. ‘What moral?’ But he wasn’t really listening. He was loping round the table, running his cue back and forwards through his left hand, intent on victory.

Moses smiled. His moment had come. ‘I mean, maybe you need God in here, Elliot.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Well, if you had God in here, maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more.’

Elliot paused in mid-shot and straightened up. There was a shrewdness in his gaze that Moses recognised as confusion in disguise. He stepped forwards out of the shadows. He couldn’t risk obscurity. Not when he was this close.

‘I was thinking,’ Moses said, ‘that maybe I could be God, you see.’

Elliot rushed his shot, and missed for once.

‘You going to talk English or what?’ he snapped.

He hated missing.

The setting sun reached through the window, showed Moses standing in the centre of the room, his cue upright in his hand like a shepherd’s crook. I could be God, he was thinking. Just a couple more sentences, that should clinch it.

He took a deep breath, became precise, factual. ‘Listen, the top floor’s empty, right? You’re not using it for anything, so what I thought is, suppose I live up there. Sort of keep an eye on the place when you’re not here. I mean, you can’t be here all the time, can you? Not a man with your interests. And if somebody was actually living here all the time, then maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more — ’

Moses bent over the table. He lined up a spot and knocked it into the left-hand side pocket. Like a sort of full stop.

Elliot stared at the place where the spot had disappeared. ‘Maybe you have something there,’ he said.

They carried on playing in silence. A siren cut through the quiet of the street below like a reminder of violence. It was more than five minutes before Elliot spoke.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘If you were normal size, like me, for instance, I’d say no way.’ He paused. ‘But since you’re so fucking big — ’

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. They shook hands, and slapped each other on the back. Moses leapt into the air, his legs revolving as if he was riding a bicycle. When he landed, the floor trembled. He was big all right. Out came the brandy. Elliot poured two. Trebles.

‘’Course,’ Elliot said, ‘you could be one of them, couldn’t you?’

‘That’s right,’ Moses said.

They held each other’s glances for a few long seconds, their heads very still as if the slightest movement could cause something terrible to happen, then they began to laugh, both at the same time.

‘You really think you can handle it?’ Elliot asked.

‘Let’s put it this way,’ Moses said. ‘You’re not going to be any worse off, are you?’

Ten minutes later Elliot had to go downstairs to attend to something. He left Moses sprawling in his executive chair. The look on Moses’s face was one of pure fruition. He forgave everyone for their cruel jokes about his size. He even forgave his unknown parents for having created the problem in the first place.

It was all worth it.

*

Who to tell, though?

First would have to be Eddie. His life in Eddie’s flat in Battersea would now be coming to an end. Well, that had been part of the plan, really. No more voices at night. No more statues in the kitchen. No more Jackson Browne (like most beautiful people, Eddie had absolutely no taste in music).

Not that they hadn’t had some good times, of course. How could he forget the night Eddie had come in and thrown up all over the TV?

‘Eddie,’ Moses had said the next morning, ‘what’s that?’

‘What?’ Eddie said. ‘Oh, that. That’s breakfast television.’

Moses smiled as he dialled the number that had been his for the last two years. They had been avoiding each other recently. Putting a bit of physical distance between them might bring them closer together. Something like that, anyway.

He glanced at his watch. Nine twenty-five. Hang on. If it was nine twenty-five, Eddie probably wouldn’t be in. Unless he was having sex. At nine twenty-five, though? Yes, what about the time Moses had come home, it must have been around seven in the evening, to find a pair of pearl earrings placed, all neatness and innocence, on the arm of the sofa — the first in a trail of female clues that led with unerring logic, with unfaltering resolve, across the carpet, along the hall and up the stairs, only to disappear with a wriggle of black elastic under Eddie’s bedroom door. Yes, he might well be in.

Moses let the number ring just in case Eddie was struggling, irritable, half-dressed, but still unbelievably good-looking, towards the phone. After two minutes he gave up. Either Eddie was out, or the sex was uninterruptible. He replaced the receiver.

*

He thought of Jackson next.

Jackson would almost certainly be home. Jackson was always home. Jackson wasn’t interested in women. Once, when drunk, Jackson had suddenly announced that he was asexual. The laughter he had been expecting never arrived. Everybody simply agreed with him.

Women held no fascination for Jackson. He was far more interested in the weather — its beauty, its caprices. He watched the way the clouds walked across the sky. He listened to what the north wind said. These were his women.

Yes, he would be at home now, in his dark basement flat, his tense wiry frame bent over an antique weather-vane, or staring tenderly, myopically, at the latest reading on a barometer. He would be crouching at his desk, one hand plunged into his coarse, curly hair, calculating the exact position of an isothermal layer, or puzzling over the sudden prevalence of millibars in the air above the city. He would be totally absorbed in making yet another totally erroneous weather forecast.

Moses dialled the number and waited. Sure enough, three rings and there was the quavery tenacious voice he knew so well.

‘Hello?’

‘Jackson?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Moses.’

‘Who?’

‘Moses. You know. Six foot six. Size twelve feet. Likes old ladies — ’

‘I’m sorry, it’s not that Jackson.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got the wrong Jackson. This is Jackson’s brother. The Jackson you want isn’t here.’

There was a pause while Moses assimilated this sudden glut of information: one, Jackson had a brother, two, Jackson and Jackson’s brother sounded identical, three, Jackson’s brother also called himself Jackson, and four, Jackson, the Jackson he knew, was out.

Jackson? Out?

‘Where is he?’ Moses asked.

‘The Amateur Meteorological Society.’

Moses smiled. Few things could persuade Jackson to leave his cluttered basement flat. The AMS was one of them. ‘Could you tell him that Moses called?’ he said.

‘Moses. OK. Any message?’

‘Just tell him that I’ve got some good news.’

‘Good news. Right. Goodbye.’

Very dry brother, Moses thought. Probably a very good meteorologist. Either that or very successful with women. As he pondered the differences between Jackson and Jackson’s brother Jackson, he realised that he still hadn’t actually told anyone.

*

Who else was there?

Vince! What about Vince? Vince would probably tell him to fuck off. Vince was like that. Still.

He dialled Vince’s number.

A sullen voice said, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Moses.’

‘Fuck off, Moses.’

You see?

Moses sighed. ‘What’s wrong with you, Vince?’

‘Why should anything be wrong?’

‘What’s wrong, Vince?’

‘Lots of things. Everything.’

‘Like what?’

‘Alison’s left.’

Oh Christ, not again. People were always leaving Vince. Especially Alison was always leaving Vince. Moses didn’t blame her either. If he was going out with Vince, he would leave him too. There was some great disparity between Vince in your memory and Vince in the flesh. Moses was very fond of Vince when he was somewhere else. The imagined Vince was impish, controversial, photogenic; the real Vince was boorish, truculent, morose.

But, real or imagined, you couldn’t forget him somehow. His blond hair, dark at the roots, stuck up at all angles, unbrushed, unkempt, stiff with gel, lacquer and soap. His mouth turned up at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling, so he gave the impression of being good-humoured when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. And he always wore this black waistcoat, glossy with age and stains, and prolific with insulting badges; it was almost as if these badges had sprouted, like toadstools, from the black soil of his clothes, they were so much a part of him. His trademark, this waistcoat. Vince wouldn’t have been Vince without it.

He was forever being turned away from places — wine-bars, clubs, restaurants, pubs (he had been banned from his King’s Road local twice), cafés, shops, parties, you name it. If asked, he would recite, and not without a certain pride, a list of all the famous places he had never been allowed into. ‘I’m sorry, you’re drunk,’ doormen would tell Vince as he swayed, leering and malevolent, on the pavement — but they would always be looking at his waistcoat. In the end Moses decided there had to be a connection.

One night he tried an experiment. They had taken some angel dust at Vince’s squat, and were on their way to a private party at The Embassy Club. In the back of the cab, he turned to Vince. ‘You don’t need to wear that waistcoat tonight,’ he said in a gently persuasive voice. ‘Why not leave it behind for once?’ He should have known better. Gently persuasive voices didn’t work with Vince. Gently persuasive voices made him puke. He glared at Moses. The lights of Chelsea coloured his face green then red. ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ he snarled. ‘My mother?’ This was not a role that Moses was suited to. He dropped the subject and they went back to being friends. Naturally Vince didn’t get into The Embassy.

That they were friends at all sometimes seemed extraordinary to Moses, not least when he had to scrape the remains of Vince off the floor after a fight or stop Vince jumping out of a tower-block window. Driving Vince to St Stephen’s at four in the morning with a six-inch gash in the back of his head and his blood pumped full of drugs may have made a good story the first time round, but when you had to deal with it on a monthly basis it got pretty fucking tedious. Go and kill yourself somewhere else, you felt like saying. The things he did for Vince. He sometimes hated himself for being so good-natured, and wondered whether in fact he wasn’t Vince’s mother after all.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why’s Alison left you this time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Vince was talking through a mouthful of clenched teeth. ‘She said something about she couldn’t stand it any more.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘She went home. To her fucking parents.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘She was crying.’

‘You want me to ring her?’

Vince didn’t reply. Anger made him autistic.

‘I’ll find out how she is and call you back,’ Moses said.

Vince said something about not caring, then slammed the phone down.

Moses dialled Alison’s number.

‘Hello?’

Only one word but, like the single toll of a bell, the woman’s voice had resonance, hung on in Moses’s head, bright, droll. Not Alison then. Alison’s mother, maybe. But he had delayed too long, making her suspicious. She probably imagined Vince on the other end.

‘Could I speak to Alison, please?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Moses. I’m a friend of Alison’s.’

‘Will you wait a moment? I think she’s upstairs.’

Moses heard footsteps on a tiled floor, the opening and closing of a door, a faint Alison? and, in the distance, the quiet fretting of a string quartet. He had no idea what he was going to say to Alison. He didn’t even know her that well. She had a dry sense of humour and a head of striking, natural red hair. Some total stranger had once come up to her in the self-service restaurant above Habitat and asked her how she got her hair that amazing colour and Alison had said that her parents were responsible for that and the total stranger, gushing now, had said, Wow! Your parents are hairdressers? and Alison had said, No, my parents are my parents, and the total stranger had dried up, backed away, evaporated. The soft Indian-print skirts, the cluster of thin silver bangles on her wrists, the bohemian vagueness acted as elements of Alison’s cover. Underneath, she was pretty tough and sorted-out — almost, at times, Moses felt, predatory. He alternated between liking her a lot and mistrusting her. He couldn’t really understand why she had chosen Vince, but he knew that if one of the two got hurt it wouldn’t be Alison.

A fumbling sound at the other end and Alison picked up the phone.

‘Hello?’ She sounded wary, bruised.

‘Alison, it’s me. Moses. I just thought I’d ring you, see how you were.’

‘You’ve spoken to Vince, then?’

Moses said he had.

‘How did he sound?’

‘Pretty pissed off. What happened?’

‘Oh, you know, another argument. He wants me to live with him and I don’t think I’m ready for that. Not at the moment, anyway. I told him that and he went mad and hit me.’

‘Oh shit,’ Moses muttered.

‘Not hard or anything. He was too drunk for that.’ She laughed — a half-laugh; the other half was bitterness. ‘Well, I’m pretty fed up with all that shit. So I left.’

Moses sighed. ‘Are you all right now?’

‘Yes, I’m all right. Bit shaky.’ She paused, sniffed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Just because I tell him I don’t want to live with him, he starts thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy going on — ’

‘That’s typical Vince,’ Moses said. ‘He likes it better when he’s fighting the whole world.’

‘I’m not the world, I’m me,’ Alison said tearfully. ‘Why’s he have to make everything so complicated?’

Moses didn’t know the answer to that.

After Alison rang off, thanking him, he tried Vince again. No reply. It was as he had feared. Vince had gone out to wreak terrible vengeance on an innocent city. He would probably end up in hospital again. Moses didn’t want to think about it.

He sat in Elliot’s chair for a while longer. Too many phone-calls had taken his elation apart piece by piece until nothing recognisable was left. He felt tired as he unlocked the door of his old Rover, slid into the seat and drove home.

So much for telling everyone the news, he thought.

*

‘Do you like pigeons?’

Elliot asked the question casually as he walked Moses round to The Bunker’s side entrance.

Moses scratched his head. What was all this about pigeons? Elliot had called Moses at nine that morning and offered to show him the rooms on the top floor of The Bunker. ‘I’ll be here until twelve,’ Elliot had told him.

Moses had driven over at eleven, his lungs still misty with smoke from the previous night. Too much whisky with Vince had laced the suspense he might otherwise have felt with irritation.

They had reached the black door. Wind blew dust and grit into the back of his neck. He folded his arms and drew his shoulders together.

‘What do you mean, do I like pigeons?’ he said.

Elliot didn’t appear to have heard. It was an annoying habit of his.

Seconds later he said, ‘You’ll see.’ His grin was half grimace as he grappled with a muscular rusty padlock.

The padlock had resisted his first efforts, but now the key slid in and gripped. It snapped open, almost jumped out of his hands. He pushed at the door. It swung inwards to reveal a pile of crumpled newspapers, a few circulars, and a steep flight of wooden stairs.

‘Nobody’s been in here for bloody years,’ he said.

There was a light-switch on the wall. One of those round protruding light-switches with an inbuilt timing-device. He jabbed it with his thumb. It began to tick quietly like a shy bomb. He set off up the stairs, two at a time. Moses followed.

Halfway to the top, the light clicked off. Moses heard Elliot mutter Fuck somewhere up ahead. They reached a door.

‘You really don’t like pigeons?’ Elliot asked Moses again.

‘I hate pigeons,’ Moses said. And said it with feeling, because it was true.

Elliot’s laugh was soft, so soft that it was hardly louder than a smile. Moses didn’t like the sound of it.

Elliot put his shoulder to the door. A groaning splintering sound. The wood gave. Light poured into the stairwell.

At first, Moses thought he was seeing some kind of optical illusion — the result of being in the darkness for too long. But then he realised that what he was seeing was real. He blinked his eyes several times. Yes, it was definitely real. They had walked into a room full of about five hundred pigeons. The pigeons were moving about with extraordinary speed and abandon. It seemed to Moses as if fifty per cent of the air had been siphoned off and replaced with moulting grey feathers. He took a deep breath. It was like breathing pigeon.

‘Oh,’ he said.

He backed away towards the stairs.

‘Do you like it?’ Elliot shouted. He thought the whole thing was a big joke.

Moses didn’t answer. He was gazing at the floor — or the place where the floor would have been if it hadn’t been inches deep in pigeon shit.

‘Oh,’ he said.

He had had a dream and his dream, after all these months, had finally come true. But there hadn’t been any pigeons in his dream. No pigeons at all. They had come as something of a shock to him.

‘Oh,’ he said, for the third time.

When he returned three days later, the party was still in full swing. He winced in the darkness of the stairwell as he heard the whirring and clattering of five hundred pairs of grey wings, as he thought of the task that lay ahead of him, but at least he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that he was prepared.

*

This was how Moses had spent his dole cheque that week:

1 broom

1 dustpan and brush

1 mop

1 plastic bucket

1 pair of Torpedo swimming-goggles

3 scrubbing-brushes

1 wicker carpet-beater

20 giant black plastic bin-liners

1 bottle of non-scratch cream cleanser with ammonia

1 bottle of scratch cream cleanser with ammonia

1 bottle of new thicker Domestos

1 bottle of new stronger Vim

1 aerosol of new improved instant double-action double-strength easy-to-use 30 % more free Blast insect-killer with new perfume in new giant family-size can as seen on TV

1 aerosol of Supafresh air-freshener with new alpine fragrance

2 grams of speed

5 packets of Increda Bubble — the popping bubble-gum (Feel the pop! Chew the soft juicy bubble-gum! Blow the fantastic bubble!)

1 case of Merrydown Vintage Cider (dry)

1 cassette of Liszt’s The Dance of Death

1 Second World War hand-held air-raid siren

1 shovel

That, he thought, should just about cover it.

*

The pigeons seemed to have some collective premonition of their impending fate. They began to whirl round the room twice as fast, colliding with each other, slamming blindly into walls and windows. Even the more casual of the pigeons left their mantelpieces and sills and mingled in mid-air, exchanging theories about the new situation and discussing possible courses of action.

Crouching low, with his arms wrapped round his head, Moses crossed the room and opened all three windows. Then, returning to the door, he switched his cassette-recorder on. The first bars of The Dance of Death thundered out at top volume. Moses began to shake the can of insect-killer. He glanced ominously at the pigeons. Some of them seemed to have taken the hint and headed for the open air. The others didn’t seem to understand the significance of the music they were listening to. Moses leaned back against the door and sprayed clouds of new improved Blast into the room. No effect whatsoever. We are not insects, the grey wings seemed to say. We are birds.

Eyes streaming, Moses tossed the can to one side. He reached for the carpet-beater. It was a sturdy article, a relic from Victorian times when carpets took some beating. It didn’t look as if it was going to stand for any nonsense, especially from a handful of twentieth-century pigeons. Things turned out differently. For ten minutes Moses thrashed and flailed. But the pigeons had never seen a carpet-beater before. They didn’t know what it was. They circled the room, wondering why this large man was attacking the air with an old wooden implement. It was strange behaviour, certainly, but not necessarily threatening. Some of the pigeons who had left even flew back into the room again to find out what was happening.

Moses was beginning to feel tired and foolish, he was beginning to feel as if he was playing a game of surrealist tennis that would last for ever, he was just reaching for the Second World War air-raid siren when help came from an unexpected quarter in the shape of a cat, a street-cat by the look of it, jet-black, with a blunt nose and fierce yellow eyes. It slid into the room from one of the window-ledges and crouched by the wall, eyes scouring the busy air, its rangy haunches tense and trembling. Moses stopped beating pigeons and stared at the cat. Where had it come from? And what did it have in mind?

Everything seemed to go quiet as Moses watched the cat begin to move slowly round the edge of the room, its eyes never leaving the pigeons, not for a moment; it seemed to know exactly where the walls were without looking. Halfway round, it paused, spread itself flat on the floor, hindlegs shuffling, and unleashed a haunting guttural cry that cut through the silence its entrance had created. It made Moses think of a seagull. Yes, now he thought about it, the cat sounded exactly like a seagull. How extraordinary.

The pigeons, meanwhile, had reacted with consternation and frenzy. They were clambering over one another in a desperate effort to reach the windows. In a matter of seconds they were gone. The cat sat up, lifted its left leg, scratched its ear, then licked its flank. In the light of its recent eerie display of control, this was reassuringly catlike. The washing over, it shrugged its shoulders, turned tail, and left the way it had come, without so much as a backward glance. Moses was impressed.

During the days that followed, the black cat patrolled the edges of his mind with a casual power, uttering its uncanny seagull cry from time to time as if it could still see the ghost of a pigeon there. The thought of this cat sustained him as he shovelled shit, chiselled and scraped at it, tipped it into buckets and bags, and hauled it down eight flights of stairs and out to the dustbins in the cobbled yard at the back of the club. Sometimes Elliot would be there, lounging against a wall, the spring light picking out the bracelet on his wrist, the mockery in his grin.

‘How’s it going up there, Abraham?’ Elliot asked once as Moses passed. He lit a Dunhill. His gold lighter flashed like a piece snapped off the sun.

Moses looked at him. ‘Was that suit expensive, Elliot?’

‘Two hundred.’ Elliot glanced down, brushed at a lapel.

‘Well, in that case, it’d be a shame to get shit all over it, wouldn’t it?’ Moses said, gesturing with his bucket.

After that Elliot often backed away in genuine alarm whenever Moses trudged past.

*

That April Moses worked harder than he had ever worked for money. Every day for three weeks he undid the padlock on the black door and climbed the eight flights of stairs and, gradually, the shit cleared. Areas of clean floorboards opened up before him like a whole new life. The sight of all this unfurnished space ignited him all over again, and his face would glow through a spattering of dust and filth. Hands blistered, dirt embedded in every crevice of his skin, he returned to Eddie’s flat each night with a larger vision of his future.

There were four rooms altogether. He decided to call them bedroom, lounge, kitchen, bathroom, though there were very few clues as to which was which. No cooker in the kitchen, for instance. No bed in the bedroom. The rooms led one into the next through doors that opened unwillingly, dragging on their hinges, as if children had been swinging on the handles. The walls and ceilings had been painted different shades of grey. The plaster had come loose in some places, leaving patches that looked like scabs. In the bedroom, there was a long brown stain where the rain had leaked through.

Of all the rooms Moses’s favourite was the one he had walked into with Elliot on the morning of the five hundred pigeons. It had a black fireplace surrounded with dark-blue tiles, and a trio of arched windows that reminded Moses of railway stations. They looked out over a clutter of rooftops, treetops, chimney-pots and TV aerials out of which, toffee-coloured in this landscape of red and grey, and surprisingly close, rose the intricate spires and crenellations of the Houses of Parliament. Away to the west a pair of pale-green gasholders stood among the rows of terraced houses like giant cans of paint. Modern offices blocked the view eastwards with their coppery glass façades. Even though it faced north, the room felt bright owing to the size and elevation of these three windows. It had possibilities, this room. Definite possibilities.

The real find, though, was the bath. (Moses loved baths, even though he had to fold himself double to get into one.) Deep-chested, eight feet long, it stood on four flexed metal claws. A lion of a bath, it was. Its pristine antique enamel seemed unmarked but for the faintest of yellow stains running from the overflow down to the plug-hole. Sometime during his second week of work Moses walked into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. A moment’s silence, as if the machinery was gathering itself. Then a clanking, a subterranean clanking deep in the foundations of the building, like a metal bucket hitting the bottom of a dry well, followed by a gurgling that seemed to be ascending, growing louder, that built to a crescendo as the tap coughed a few brown splashes into the bath. Seconds later a powerful flow of water was crashing on to the enamel. Steam lofted into the chill air. Moses began to take off his clothes.

Through the small window above the taps he could see the planes easing down into Heathrow. They slid silently from left to right, dropped two hundred feet as they hit a swirl in the glass. He lay in the water until it had turned cold for the third time, pleasure written all over his face in invisible ink. In future, when crisis threatened or exhaustion softened his bones, he would retreat to the bathroom. It would be his sanctuary from the world. It had the power to heal, soothe, replenish him. Sometimes he would climb into the empty bath and lie on the cool enamel, fully dressed, with his eyes closed. Other times he would open those fierce taps and run a bath so deep it swamped the floor. But he would always feel better afterwards — calmer, more objective. A sense of proportion would descend, as silently as planes. If he ever left The Bunker, he would have to take the bath with him — somehow.

On the day of his first bath, the black cat appeared again. He paused on the window-ledge, one paw raised in the air, disappointed, perhaps, by the absence of pigeons. His glowing yellow eyes raked the room and fixed, eventually, on Moses. Such was the hypnotic power of the cat’s gaze that Moses thought, for one terrifying moment, that he might throw himself from the window as the pigeons had done. He concentrated on one simple thought: I am not a pigeon. The black cat eyed him without blinking. He seemed to be listening, taking the information in. When Moses thought the cat had understood, he relaxed.

‘Bird,’ he said affectionately.

He had decided to give the cat two names, one formal, one familiar. His formal name would be Anton, after Anton Mesmer, who believed that any one person can exercise influence over the will of another by virtue of the emanations proceeding from him. Any one person or cat, Moses had decided, after that exhibition of control over the will of five hundred pigeons a week or two back. His nickname, however, would be Bird. Moses had toyed with the name Seagull, but you couldn’t call a cat Seagull, could you? Bird, he felt, was a nice compromise. Bird the cat.

Bird responded with a cry worthy of his new name. Bird was hungry, perhaps.

Moses fetched the old green and gold cake-tin he had found under the kitchen sink and covered the bottom with milk. He placed the tin in the middle of the living-room floor. Bird stared at Moses with suspicion as Moses moved back to the kitchen doorway. Then, dropping down to floor-level without a sound as if he weighed nothing, he began to creep towards the tin. Stalking it, as if it might be dangerous. Once there, he squatted over the tin, neck extended, and lapped at the milk, his tongue moving out and back like a tiny pink clockwork toy.

Halfway through he suddenly stopped. Black chin sprinkled with white drops, he looked at Moses, seemed to be appraising him.

‘It’s good milk, Bird,’ Moses whispered. ‘It’s Dino’s milk.’

Bird dipped his blunt head into the tin again. When he had finished he paused, as if thinking, then turned, sprang back on to the window-ledge and vanished, as before.

Moses still hadn’t moved. He gazed round the room with its clean floorboards and its grey decaying walls and its open window through which the black cat came and went.

It was beginning to feel like home.

*

As if somebody had splashed petrol around and tossed a lit match, the end of April caught fire. Car tyres crackled on the sticky tarmac of main roads. Clouds rolled along the horizon like smoke. The temperature, unbelievably, touched eighty, HEATWAVE, the papers roared, HEATWAVE.

Moses hired a transit van and moved out of Eddie’s flat in a single day, sweat tickling his forehead, trickling down his spine. He saw roadworkers with red backs. Girls in bikinis. In April. The world seemed out of kilter — surreal, delirious.

Elliot watched him unload from the shadow of a wall.

‘I would’ve given you a hand,’ he said, ‘but you know how it is.’ He adjusted the lapels of his excuse.

‘I know how it is,’ Moses panted, a mattress balanced on his back.

‘So what’s it like up there?’

‘It’s luxury. It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

Elliot threw his head back and swallowed hot sky.

But Moses meant it. Those empty rooms on the fourth floor dwarfed what few belongings he had. He had never had so much space to himself before. The place might have been designed specifically with him in mind, might have been waiting for him to arrive and take possession.

He drove back to Eddie’s that night to return the keys.

‘Finished already?’ Eddie said. ‘I was going to help you.’ He opened the fridge and handed Moses a cold beer.

‘Eddie,’ Moses said, ‘the thought never crossed your mind.’

As he tore the ring-pull off the can, he watched Eddie smiling. The damage Eddie had caused with that smile of his. Moses had long since pushed the statue theory aside, stored it away in the museum section of his mind for re-evaluation at a later date. He had begun to see Eddie’s beauty in wider terms. As a magnetic force. As disruption unleashed on men and women alike. Once, he remembered, Eddie had brought the entire cosmetics department of a famous London store to a standstill simply by smiling as he stepped out of the lift. The air vibrated softly as fifty murmurs of desire coincided. Then fifty tongues emerged to moisten fifty upper lips. One salesgirl let a bottle of perfume slip from her hand. It shattered on the tiles with a crystal sigh and the ground floor of the department store smelt of Opium for several days. In memory of Eddie. Another time Moses and Eddie were walking along a quiet street in Kensington. A red sports saloon, some foreign make, slowed and drew alongside. The woman at the wheel wound the window down. Moses thought she was about to ask for directions. Instead, with her eyes on Eddie, she cried, ‘You’re beautiful.’ The car sped away again, its pert rear-end pointing in the air. ‘What is it about you?’ Moses had asked. Eddie shrugged, smiled. A young man on an old-fashioned bicycle glimpsed the smile on Eddie’s face and rode straight over a traffic island without even noticing. There ought to be a sign, Moses thought. CAUTION: MAN SMILING.

*

That was the really curious thing, Moses thought, as he walked out of The Bunker two days later. Eddie could never be accused of being conceited or narcissistic. He didn’t keep a record of his lovers, as some men did, because he wasn’t trying to prove anything. Girls passed in and out of his life without changing him in the slightest. Their presence was necessary, continuous, and taken for granted — like time itself; Lauren followed Connie as Tuesday followed Monday. Nostalgia had no place in his scheme of things. Nor, it seemed, did expectation. He was like a train with infinite stations on its line but no terminus.

Moses had reached the door of his new local. A jaded murky place. Crawling with small-time ruffians and drunks. He ordered a pint of draught Guinness, and retired to a deserted corner.

Yes, it was astonishing how little Eddie held on to, how much he left behind. Sometimes, when Moses couldn’t sleep, he ran through the list of Eddie’s lovers — the ones he knew of, anyway. They were more interesting than sheep, though not so very different, perhaps, not if you saw them from Eddie’s point of view. Did he distinguish between the different girls at all? Did he remember Beryl, the mud wrestler, for instance? Did he. remember Sister Theresa? Did he remember anything?

The door swung open. Eddie walked in, accompanied by a girl Moses had never seen before. Surprise, surprise. He wondered what number she was. 500? 1,000? He had told Elliot that he had a friend who had slept with two thousand women, but he really didn’t know. This one’s name was Barbara.

Moses asked her what she did.

‘Hostess,’ she said.

He thought of the aeroplanes gliding past his bathroom window, then of jet-set parties next to swimming-pools, but he couldn’t fit Barbara’s bomber jacket and her disgruntled mouth into either category.

He must have looked puzzled because Barbara added, ‘In a club.’

In a club. Moses’s face acquired a look that was both interested and knowledgeable. He had just placed her. She was almost certainly the girl Eddie had referred to in a recent (and uncharacteristically anxious) phone-call. He remembered the conversation.

‘Moses?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Eddie here.’

Moses had waited.

‘I was just wondering,’ Eddie had said, ‘whether you felt like coming round tonight?’

This isn’t like Eddie, Moses had thought. Eddie never asked people round. How could he? He was never round to ask people round. Something must be up.

‘You see, there’s this girl I thought you’d like to meet.’

‘Who is this girl,’ Moses had sneered, ‘that I’d like to meet?’

Eddie chuckled. ‘She’s a topless waitress. She’s got tattoos.’

‘Where?’

‘Soho.’

‘No, the tattoos. Where are the tattoos?’

‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you could find out.’

So that was it. Another of Eddie’s games.

As he glanced across at Barbara, he remembered something else that Eddie had said.

‘She’s angry about something. I think she’s going to attack me.’

No sympathy from Moses. And certainly, with that sour twisted mouth, Barbara looked capable of violence.

‘So.’ Eddie smiled. ‘What’s happening?’

‘There’s a party coming up,’ Moses said. ‘Louise told me about it. If you want to bring Barbara along, I’m sure it’d be OK.’

Eddie made a face behind her back.

Moses grinned. ‘That’s settled then.’

Eddie bought Barbara a Bacardi and Coke, then he sloped off to play pool at the back of the pub. She watched him go. There was reproach in the fractional hardening of her face.

‘Where do you work?’ Moses asked her.

‘A place called Bosom Buddies,’ she said.

Jesus, Moses thought. If that’s anywhere near as bad as it sounds. (Actually, knowing Eddie, it was probably worse.)

‘What do you have to do?’

Barbara scowled. ‘Talk to strangers. Mostly people I can’t stand.’

Cheapskate businessmen from out of town, apparently. Sweaty little creeps in crumpled suits. And the bag who ran the place. Lashings of mascara, hands like chicken-feet, tongue like a blunt ladies’ razor. She gloated jealously from a red sofa in the corner. Barbara had seen her twist a girl’s nipple once for upsetting a client. ‘Really nice piece of work, she is.’

Moses had been trying to imagine Barbara topless and sociable. He’d failed. There was a long silence while they both looked elsewhere. Eddie, it seemed, was having a good run on the table.

Later she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to talk to people socially any more. It’s too much like work.’

Moses said he understood that. Her surly mouth and her hands stuck deep in her jacket pockets — she looked cold, but she had already told him that she wasn’t — now made sense to him. He wondered what she was expecting from Eddie, if anything. He knew there was nothing she could do to make her fate any different from Eddie’s last girl — number 999, or whatever number she had been. Especially after that phone-call. Soon she would be just another five words in Moses’s mind as he tried to get to sleep. She would be even less to Eddie. He would be on to number 1,001 by then.

It was this feeling, the feeling that she was owed something, something she would never get from Eddie, not in a million years, and certainly not in the three days the relationship would last, that made him start talking again when silence would have suited him just as well. He wanted to cut the ropes on her heart so it could float free of Eddie. He wanted to see her face light up. Just once.

‘See him over there?’ Moses said to her. ‘The one in the denim jacket?’

Barbara squinted along his outstretched arm. She might have been aiming a gun. At close range, Moses realised she was ugly. She pulled away and nodded.

‘That’s Billy,’ Moses said. ‘He’s a thief.’

A week ago, he told her, he had dropped into the pub for a quick drink. He noticed Billy standing at the bar with an A — Z, his index-finger tracing a route through the intricate grey tangle of streets, like a kid learning to read. His air of intense concentration roused Moses’s curiosity. He positioned himself at Billy’s elbow.

‘What are you up to, Billy?’

Billy jumped, swung round, flipped the A — Z over, all in a single movement. Wired-up wasn’t the word. He threw a few suspicious glances, left, right, and over his shoulder, then he leaned towards Moses, narrowing the gap between them to about six inches.

‘I got a job tonight.’ He stared at the bottles on the back of the bar as he spoke. His voice was so quiet you could have heard the clicking of a combination.

‘A job?’ Moses said jovially. ‘That’s really good news, Billy. It’s about time you got a job.’ He slapped Billy on the back, and sent him staggering.

Billy adjusted his denim jacket and gave Moses a withering look. ‘A job,’ he hissed. ‘You know. A job.’

‘All right, Billy, all right. No need to tell the world.’

Billy was fuming, the air rushing noisily out of his nostrils. He stared into his drink as if he was furious with it.

‘And you’re just checking up,’ Moses lowered his voice, ‘to see exactly where this job is. Right?’

He studied Billy innocently, and with great interest. He had never met a real thief before. He could smell whisky, crumbling garden walls at midnight, cold feet. He wanted to know more.

But Billy clammed up. He knocked his whisky back and ordered another as if Moses wasn’t there, knocked that back too, and checked his watch. Moses wondered who he had synchronised it with.

Billy left the pub at ten on the dot. He made so sure nobody saw him leave that everyone saw him leave. Only seconds later Maureen sidled up to Moses with her red furry slippers and her lopsided grin. She nudged him in the ribs with her skinny elbow.

‘Billy’s got a job tonight then.’

‘Has he?’

‘I’m telling you.’

‘How do you know, Maureen?’

‘He had his book with him, didn’t he?’ Her eyes wrinkled up with a natural cunning that she had inherited from her uncle who had a legal business in Waterford. ‘His A — Z. It’s the only book he’s ever read.’

She dived into her pint of cider and surfaced gasping.

‘’Course, he doesn’t understand it, does he? That’s why he always screws up. Never make a criminal, that Billy.’

Maureen had been right.

The next night Billy had slunk into the pub at around eight, his face pasty and dishevelled, his arms dangling, out of order. He asked for his usual, but without his usual enthusiasm.

Moses walked up to him and leaned on the bar. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I was rat-arsed.’

Billy looked at him, then looked back at his drink. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘How did it go?’ Moses was trying to be friendly.

‘I’m going to get bloody killed,’ Billy said.

He’d got lost, he said, and turned up at the wrong house, and his mate’d waited two hours, and in the rain as well, and now his mate was down with pneumonia or something, and he’d rung his mate up to see how he was, and his mate’d said, as soon as he was on his feet again, he was going to tear Billy’s head off.

‘How long does pneumonia last?’ Billy had asked Moses.

‘Pneumonia?’ Moses had sucked in air. ‘You can die of pneumonia, Billy.’

Billy had grinned. ‘Fingers crossed, eh Moses?’

Barbara crushed her cigarette out. She nodded in Billy’s direction. ‘Looks like he got away with it.’ He still had his head on was what she meant.

‘So far,’ Moses said.

He went to buy her another drink. When he returned, Barbara’s face was jutting brutally over the table.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ she asked him. She looked ugly for the second time. Uglier than the first time, actually. Violence in the offing.

Moses glanced round. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s in the toilet or something.’

‘The toilet’s right behind you, I would’ve seen him go in,’ Barbara snapped as if he was not only lying, but lying badly.

Moses crossed the pub to where he had last seen Eddie. Billy was playing now, slamming balls into pockets, dominating the table with a precision and authority he couldn’t seem to bring to anything else he did.

Even as he asked the question, Moses knew what was coming.

‘Seen Eddie?’

Billy jerked his head in the direction of the side-door without taking his eyes off the table. ‘He left.’

Moses felt a lot like Billy’s mate as he walked back to where Barbara was waiting. He was beginning to understand why there were so many headless statues in the world.

She had already guessed the truth, judging by the look on her face: it was stiff and pinched, and suspicion had killed the light in her eyes. She probably thought of him as an accomplice, some kind of decoy, what with all his ridiculous stories. He told her what Billy had said.

She scratched at a crack in the table-top with a blunt fingernail. ‘Did Eddie say anything about me? You know, earlier on?’

Yes, he did, Moses thought, remembering a brief exchange with Eddie at the bar. He said, How the fuck’m I going to get rid of Barbara?

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘Not that I can remember.’

Perhaps she believed the lie. She still hadn’t looked up from the table. The silence stretching between them finally came to an end when she snapped her handbag shut. ‘Where can I get a taxi?’

‘I’ll show you.’

They left the pub and crossed the main road. He flagged down a cab for her. As she climbed in, he said something about seeing her at the party maybe. She didn’t reply. She pulled the door shut, leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes. Her eyelids collected light from the neon fish and chip shop sign across the road, glowed a supernatural white. She looked blind.

The taxi did a U-turn and headed north.

Goodbye 1,000, he thought. Or whatever number you are.

*

First to see the fourth floor of The Bunker was Jackson.

‘I’ll bring something to drink,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ll christen the place.’

He was full of gestures like that, tense and generous.

Moses opened all the windows that evening. Lingering indoor smells of bleach and disinfectant blended with exhaust — and curry-fumes and the unlikely scent of blossom from outside. It was May now. Air you could almost wear. A breeze so light that, had it suddenly been made visible, it would, he imagined, have looked like lengths of pale floating muslin. A warm red hem to the buildings. A thin veil of pink beyond, on the horizon.

Moses sat on the window-ledge and waited for Jackson. He was thinking of nothing, content simply to gaze out over the city as it accelerated towards the hours of darkness. When the bell rang, he didn’t move at first. Then he seemed to unwind, to gather himself. His eyes clicked over into focus like the fruit in a fruit machine. Peering down, he saw Jackson’s tangle of hair four floors below. He kicked off his left shoe, and peeled off his sock. He dropped his door-keys into the sock, rolled it into a tight ball, and threw it out of the window. It bounced off the pavement and into the gutter, missing Jackson by about six feet. Jackson, being Jackson, flinched.

‘The keys,’ Moses shouted.

Jackson cowered below, his face a pale area of nervousness.

‘The sock,’ Moses shouted. ‘The keys are in the sock.’

He sat down again. He had just finished rolling the first christening joint when Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs. Jackson was wearing a beige raincoat with a wide sash belt and floppy lapels. It was an awful raincoat. Not for nothing had Jackson once been known as Columbo.

‘You ought to be careful with those keys,’ Jackson said. ‘You could kill somebody with those keys.’

‘I need more practice,’ Moses said. ‘You’ll have to come round again.’

Jackson looked at Moses’s bare left foot, then at the grey sock in his own right hand. He nodded to himself. There was a methodical deductive streak in Jackson. He thought first, asked questions afterwards. Two years back — it must have been during Jackson’s Columbo era — Moses had tried to persuade his friend to become a private detective.

‘Well, the rain seems to be holding off,’ Jackson observed, in silhouette against the perfect sunset. He cast around for somewhere to put his tightly furled umbrella.

‘Rain? You forecast rain this evening?’

Jackson nodded, winced. ‘A severe depression moving south-east across the country. Scattered showers followed by outbreaks of heavier rain during the night.’

Moses suppressed a grin.

Jackson handed Moses a plastic bag containing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When Moses looked at him, not only with gratitude, but with a degree of curiosity, he explained, ‘I thought it was going to be cold, you see.’

Moses couldn’t help smiling now. He was glad that Jackson hadn’t taken his advice about becoming a private detective. He now knew that Jackson, after a great deal of intense and detailed investigation, would always come up with the wrong murderer.

He also suspected that Jackson’s constant reference to the weather was some kind of front. As if Jackson had inside him a device that took what he wanted to say and scrambled it. Moses doubted he would ever crack the code.

‘Well,’ and Jackson clapped his hands together in an attempt to convey the enthusiasm he quite genuinely felt, ‘what about a tour?’

There was nothing much to see beyond the rooms themselves, but the rooms, bare and uncluttered, still seemed miraculous to Moses.

‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘that the whole place was three inches deep in pigeon shit.’

Rapid pecking movements of Jackson’s head as he darted from one room to the next. He said little, but missed nothing. He noticed the skylight in the kitchen and the view of the Houses of Parliament. And when he saw the bath, he emitted a curious whooshing noise that sounded like red-hot metal being dipped in water. Moses took this for approval.

‘So,’ Moses said, when they reached the living-room again, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think it was time for you to move out of Eddie’s.’ A wily grin from Jackson, who never answered a question directly.

They cracked open the bottle of bourbon. Moses apologised for the absence of glasses. They drank out of jamjars instead.

‘We’re lucky,’ he told Jackson. ‘Bird has to drink out of a cake-tin.’

He sat down on the sofa and lit one of the joints. Jackson leaned against the windowsill. He was still wearing his galoshes. Things like that made him endearing.

Later, drunker, Jackson kept staring at Moses as if he suddenly found him quite fascinating. Moses shifted on the sofa. He tried passing the joint to Jackson. Perhaps that was what he wanted. Jackson accepted the joint, but the staring continued.

Eventually he had to ask, ‘What is it, Jackson?’

Jackson’s eyes slid sideways towards the door, then back to Moses again. ‘Who was that?’

Moses looked confused. ‘What?’

‘Who was that woman?’

‘Woman? What woman?’

‘The woman you were talking to.’

‘What are you talking about, Jackson? I wasn’t talking to a woman.’

‘Yes, you were. I saw you.’

Moses placed his right cheek in the palm of his hand and went back over the past few minutes with some thoroughness. ‘I don’t remember a woman,’ he said finally.

‘Didn’t you see her?’

Moses shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘How can you talk to somebody you can’t see?’ Jackson asked him.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know I was talking to anybody.’

‘She was sitting right next to you.’

‘Was she?’

‘Yes. There.’ And Jackson pointed at the sofa.

‘Where?’

‘There. On the sofa. Next to you.’

Moses turned and studied the place where the woman he was supposed to have been talking to was supposed to have been sitting.

‘What did she look like?’ he asked.

‘She was wearing a raincoat. A black raincoat. With a belt.’

Moses narrowed his eyes at Jackson. Whisky. A few joints. A devious intelligence. He wasn’t convinced.

‘It’s true.’ Jackson held his hands out in front of him as if he had an orange in each one. ‘It’s absolutely true.’

Moses examined his friend closely. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘what were we talking about?’

‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. I was going to ask you when she left.’

‘We must,’ Moses said, ‘have been talking very softly.’

‘You were. You were sort of — whispering to each other.’ Jackson gave the word a salacious twist.

‘And she’s left now, you say?’ Moses asked, glancing again at the empty space beside him.

Jackson nodded. ‘A couple of minutes ago.’

‘Hmm.’

Moses sat quietly on the sofa absorbing this strange information.

Then he thought of something.

He reached down with his right hand and touched the cushion next to him. And the funny thing was, it felt warm.

*

The following morning Moses went to see Elliot. Elliot was on the phone, so Moses waited in the doorway. He noticed how brooding, how oppressive, the office looked in the daytime. All those sombre reds and greys. They soaked up light, gave nothing back. At night Elliot’s desk withdrew into the shadows, but now it showed — a drab industrial plastic construction, its sterility broken only by a pair of soiled telephones and an overflowing Senior Service ashtray. Only the pool-table exploited the natural light, turning a green that was almost fluorescent as the sun played on its surface. The office had been designed with the small hours in mind: drawn curtains, low lighting, smoke.

Five minutes had gone by. Moses crossed the room and sat down on the radiator. He could see Elliot in profile now. It was a very one-sided phone-call. Elliot was staring out of the window almost as if he was just staring out of the window. The telephone seemed incidental. He had hardly said a word.

Finally he said OK twice and slammed down the receiver. His sigh carried his chest forward a few inches and back again. A well-built man, Elliot, under all those playboy suits and ties.

‘Christ,’ Elliot muttered. He pushed the phone to the far edge of the desk. As far away as possible.

‘Hello,’ Moses said.

‘As if I haven’t got enough trouble already. Now you. What’s up, Moses?’

Moses hesitated. ‘I’ve got a ghost.’

‘A ghost?’

‘Yeah, a ghost. It’s upstairs. In my living-room. Do you know anything about it?’

Elliot looked at Moses to see if he was being serious. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about a ghost. You going to tell me about it?’ He lit a cigarette, then tossed the packet across the room to Moses. He leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. Christ, the entertainment business.

Moses took a cigarette, lit it, and threw the packet back. ‘It’s a she, actually,’ he began carefully. ‘Apparently she wears a black raincoat.’

‘Apparently? What do you mean, apparently?’

‘Well, I didn’t actually see her. This friend of mine, he — ’

‘You didn’t actually see her?’

‘No, you see I was — ’

‘Hold on. Let me get this straight, right? You’re worried about a ghost you can’t see?’

‘Yes, but you — ’

‘What, you mean if you could see it, it wouldn’t worry you?’

‘It’s not that, Elliot. It’s just — ’

But Elliot wasn’t listening any more. He was bent double in his executive chair, clutching his stomach. He was killing himself.

‘Well,’ Moses said, easing off the radiator and starting for the door, ‘I just thought I’d tell you — ’

‘Hey, Moses.’

Moses turned.

Elliot was prancing up and down the office with his jacket draped over his head. ‘Woooooo,’ he was going. ‘Woooooooooooooo.’

Oh well, Moses thought. At least I cheer the bastard up.

*

One further development regarding the invisible ghost.

The next weekend, at around four in the afternoon, the bell rang on the fourth floor of The Bunker. Moses peered out of the window. It was Jackson. Moses was surprised to see him again so soon. Visits from Jackson were usually few and far between.

He leaned out of the window. ‘Keys,’ he shouted.

This time he aimed at least twenty feet to the left of Jackson’s anxious upturned face. The sock bounced off a car roof and into the road. Jackson scuttled after it. Moses went out to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He returned in time to see Jackson walk in, close the door behind him, and produce a bradawl from his raincoat pocket (the weather was still fine). He watched as Jackson began to bore a hole in the door about two-thirds of the way up. Jackson made small grunting sounds as his elbow gouged the air. It was a hard wood.

Once he had bored the hole according to his own internal specifications, he plunged a hand into his raincoat pocket and pulled out a hook shaped like a gold question-mark. He screwed it into the hole with a series of deft energetic twists of his wrist, the tip of his tongue appearing from time to time in the corner of his mouth — a sign of intense concentration. Then he stepped back to admire his handiwork.

Moses handed Jackson a cup of tea, as you would any workman.

‘That’s very nice,’ he said. ‘But what’s it for?’

‘That,’ Jackson explained, ‘is for her to hang her coat on.’

Another time, perhaps a month later, Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs with an antique upholstered chair. He placed it carefully just inside the door.

‘In case she’s tired after all those stairs,’ he said.

A very thoughtful person, Jackson.

*

The week of the ghost was also the week of Moses’s twenty-fifth birthday. On the Thursday night Moses booked a table for four in a restaurant in Soho. He wanted to celebrate the occasion quietly, he said, with a few close friends.

Poor Chinese restaurant.

The celebration reached its climax shortly before midnight with the waiters’ hands fluttering in delicate protest, like birds attempting flight, only to weaken, fall back, return to the relative safety of their white tunics, as Moses, who weighed more than three of them put together and had woken that morning to a bottle of champagne, a Thai-stick and two lines of coke (his birthday presents), began to spin the revolving table like some kind of giant roulette wheel.

‘Place your bets,’ he cried.

‘What are we betting on?’ asked Jackson, very dry. ‘How long we can survive before they throw us out?’

Bowls of rice and seaweed, plates of mauled prawn toast, bottles of soy sauce and dishes loaded with the stripped skeletons of Peking ducks took to the air, swift and confident, as if they were trying to teach the waiters’ hands how to fly. This demonstration was not appreciated. The manager came weaving through the barrage to insist, politely but firmly, that Mr Highness and his party leave the restaurant.

Out on the street the recriminations began.

‘And on my birthday, too,’ Moses said.

‘It was because it was your birthday that it happened,’ Jackson pointed out.

‘It was your fault, Vince,’ Moses said.

‘My fault?’ Vince seemed genuinely taken aback.

‘We would never’ve been thrown out of that place,’ Moses said, ‘if you hadn’t worn that waistcoat of yours.’

‘It is a very unpleasant waistcoat,’ Eddie agreed.

‘Look, fuck off you two. If you,’ and Vince shoved Moses into a lamp-post, ‘hadn’t covered me in rice — ’

Moses couldn’t help giggling as he remembered how Vince had lurched to his feet halfway through the meal only to lose his balance and topple across a neighbouring table, his waistcoat luridly stuffed with Special Fried Rice and soup that must have been either Chicken with Sweetcorn or Hot and Sour.

‘Mind you,’ he went on, ignoring Vince, ‘Jackson didn’t exactly set a very good example, did he?’

Drunk for the first time since the night he confessed his asexuality, Jackson had suddenly, and without warning, plummeted headfirst into a dish of Squid in Black Bean Sauce.

‘I was embarrassed by your behaviour,’ Jackson explained. ‘I wanted to hide.’ Like a monkey with fleas, he was still picking the black beans out of his hair.

‘Maybe you’ll actually have to wash it now,’ Vince sneered.

‘I don’t see how you can talk, Vincent.’ Jackson was primness itself. ‘That waistcoat of yours must’ve put down roots by now.’

‘All your fault, Vincent.’ Moses was returning to his theme.

Vince hated being called Vincent. His mother called him Vincent. He told them all to get fucked, and stalked ahead.

‘Anyway,’ Jackson smiled, ‘what about Eddie?’

‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘That was really disgusting.’

During one of the lulls in the meal Eddie had turned away from the table as if to sneeze. A jet of pink vomit had flown out of his perfectly sculptured mouth and crashlanded in the grove of yucca plants behind him. Afterwards, Moses seemed to remember, Eddie had gone on eating, as if nothing had happened. A bit of a Roman, Eddie.

‘Why was it pink?’ Eddie wondered.

Moses couldn’t think.

Vince, curious, rejoined them. ‘Why was what pink?’

‘My sick,’ Eddie said. ‘Why was it pink? Did I eat anything pink?’

Vince offered an obscene suggestion as to what it might have been that Eddie had eaten.

‘That’s not pink,’ Eddie said, ‘though, of course, you probably wouldn’t know.’

A pause while Eddie and Vince hit each other. Vince staggered backwards over a dustbin. Eddie danced away, smiling.

‘I still think it was Vince’s fault, though,’ Moses said.

The following day, after only four hours’ sleep, Moses boarded a bus (his car had broken down again) with a two-litre plastic bottle of water, a family-size pack of Paracetamol, and a hangover that was like people moving furniture in his head. He was on his way up north. His foster-parents, Uncle Stan and Auntie B, were expecting him for the weekend.

*

Auntie B opened the door in her French plastic apron. Her hands showered white flour. When she saw Moses, her face seemed to widen; her eyes narrowed and lengthened, her mouth stretched into a smile.

‘Moses,’ she cried. ‘How are you? Happy birthday.’

They embraced. Moses kissed her on both cheeks. Her hands stuck out of his back like tiny wings because she didn’t want to get flour on his clothes. He heard the scrape of Uncle Stan’s chair on the parquet floor of the study. It had been six months.

The Poles would have described themselves as an ordinary couple — middle class, middle aged, middle income-bracket — but Moses had noticed them the first time they visited the orphanage. They seemed different somehow. Their smiles didn’t look glassy or stuck-on. They didn’t bury him in comics and cakes until he couldn’t breathe. They turned the other people who visited into fakes.

Mr Pole wore prickly tweed jackets with leather ovals on the elbows. He carried his pipe bowl uppermost in his breast pocket like a chubby brown periscope, and the rituals of smoking had transformed his fingers into instruments, fidgety and deft. He grumbled a lot. His wife — B, as he called her — was round and peaceful. When you heard her voice you thought of a cat curling up in front of the fire. When you kissed her, your lips seemed to touch marshmallow. So soft and sweet and powdery.

He had always looked forward to their visits, so when Mrs Hood summoned him to her office one day and asked him whether he would like to go and live with Mr and Mrs Pole he didn’t hesitate. Nor did he need Mrs Hood to tell him how lucky he was. He had been dreaming of a moment like this for as long as he could remember without ever having really believed that it would arrive.

The Poles moved north, and Moses moved with them. They had bought a detached Victorian house on the outskirts of Leicester. They gave him a room of his own on the second floor. The view from the window skimmed the tops of several fruit trees, cleared the garden wall, and came to rest in the peaceful green spaces of a municipal park. He inhaled the smell of apples and the silence.

They were consistently straight with him. There was no coyness or pretence about his origins. He was ten years old, after all — no baby. They told him to call them Uncle Stan and Auntie B; that neatly sidestepped the twin potholes of mum and dad and, besides, he had already become accustomed to the names during their many visits to the orphanage. They explained why his name was Highness and not Pole. His name, they said, was all that he had that was truly his (well, not quite all, but they didn’t tell him that — not yet), and he should keep it. Out of the way they closed ranks and stood up for him whenever necessary came a sense of their own uniqueness and strength as a family and, over the years, he grew to love them — not as parents exactly (he couldn’t imagine what that must feel like), but as people who had been kind to him. Saviours, if you like. Apart from anything else they had saved him from an awful nickname (the children had called him names like Jew and Judas and Rabbi for years but then, when they discovered that he couldn’t really be Jewish because he hadn’t been circumcised, they began to call him, of all things, Foreskin); he simply left it behind, along with the iron beds and the rising-bells, the walls painted two shades of green, and the constant echoey clang and clatter of the place, as if everything was happening inside a metal bucket. It had been such a luxury to move into that house in Leicester, and it was always a luxury to come back. A hushed and cushioned existence — except, that is, for the platoon of grandfather clocks that stood in the hall; a passion of Uncle Stan’s, they ticked and creaked and wheezed and, once in a while, all chimed simultaneously, a chaotic orchestra of gongs and xylophones and bells led, in Moses’s imagination, by a mad cook spanking the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. The carpets were fingernail deep and deliciously soft if, in the middle of the night, half asleep and barefoot, you had to cross the landing to the upstairs lavatory. The air smelt of wood-polish, pot-pourris of rose leaves, and Uncle Stan’s pipe-tobacco, and then, as you moved towards the kitchen, of warm pastry and freshly ground coffee.

Moses sat at the kitchen table as Auntie B put the finishing touches to the evening meal. Outside the lawn had turned blue, and birds clamoured from the webbed branches of the cedar tree. Uncle Stan stalked in and out of the room, ransacking cupboards for things of no importance.

‘How was your journey up?’ The floral print of Auntie B’s dress tightened across her wide back as she stooped to check the oven.

‘Not too bad. The trouble was, I went out with some friends last night, to celebrate, and I think I drank a bit too much.’ Even now, Moses was conscious of having to imitate good humour.

‘Well,’ Auntie B said, ‘it was your birthday, after all. People often get a bit tipsy on their birthdays, don’t they?’

A bit tipsy. Moses smiled to himself. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I feel a bit better now.’

Auntie B twirled round, her eyebrows high on her forehead, her mouth the shape of a lozenge. ‘Would you like a drink? Hair of the dog?’

It was as if she had learned this last phrase from some book without ever having been able to imagine how she could apply it to her own life but here, suddenly, was the chance, and she had taken it, and felt bright, naughty.

‘No thanks, Auntie B. Coffee’s perfect.’ He drained his cup to prove it.

Auntie B hovered with the percolator. ‘Another cup?’

‘Yes, please.’

Uncle Stan bustled into the kitchen, eyebrows bristling. ‘Where’s that magazine?’

Auntie B turned the upper half of her body and, beautifully bland, watched Uncle Stan as he began to pull drawers open. ‘What magazine?’ she said.

‘You know the one I mean,’ said Uncle Stan, in some kind of agony.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Oh, come on, poppet.’ In an excess of irritation, he finally looked at her.

The corners of Auntie B’s mouth tucked neatly under her round cheeks. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Stanley. I don’t know where your silly magazine is.’

Uncle Stan sighed dramatically and hurled himself from the room. Moses grinned at Auntie B.

‘He’s always losing things,’ she said, one eye on the door.

Nothing had changed, Moses thought. Uncle Stan had to worry and pester. Auntie B needed somebody who she could gently scold, hold up to ridicule, and then later, Moses suspected, draw towards her white upholstered bosom.

Two comfortable days went by — birthday presents, meals, TV. Auntie B produced endless cups of tea and coffee, and was constantly inventing excuses to cook or eat. Uncle Stan griped about money, aches and pains, old age.

It wasn’t until Sunday evening that they broached the subject that they had, in their own meandering way, been leading up to.

‘Well, shall I go and get it then?’ Joints cracking, Uncle Stan rose out of his armchair.

Auntie B scarcely glanced up from the news. ‘Why are you asking me, Stanley?’

Uncle Stan let out a rasp of exasperation. Life could be such a bugger. He left the room and returned five minutes later with a suitcase. He placed the suitcase on the coffee-table.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘this suitcase was left to you by your real parents, Moses. Don’t know what’s inside it. Haven’t got an earthly. None of my business, really. All these years it’s been up there in the attic, getting dustier and dustier, waiting for you to be twenty-five. Well, now you are, so you’d better have it.’

Moses listened carefully as Uncle Stan told him what little he knew about the suitcase. Strange how familiar it seemed to him, though he had probably never seen it before. He picked it up and turned it round in his hands. It was as if it had once occupied a space in his memory, only to fade with time until it became so dim as to be invisible. The blank space had remained, meaningless until solved, like a riddle. A space that the suitcase, reappearing again like this, fleshed out, filled in, fitted.

One foot six by two foot six. Old leather, black where scarred. Battered brass catches. No tags or stickers, though. No marks of identification. And dusty enough to write your name on. So he did. Moses, he wrote.

He didn’t open it that night. He waited until he got back to The Bunker the next day. On the journey down he noticed how light it was, almost as though there was nothing inside. That would be funny, he thought.

He opened a bottle of wine and put some music on. He placed the suitcase on the sofa. He turned the tiny key in the locks, first the left, then the right, and snapped the catches open. He lifted the lid.

A smell drifted up — something like dusty roses. A scent, perhaps. But a scent that had been preserved, that had aged. He parted the tissue-paper.

The contents of the suitcase were as follows:

1 dress

1 pair of red shoes (child’s size 2)

1 photograph album.

That was it.