Dreams of Leaving

Injury Time

The shot orange of the street-lamps bled through the fog, stained the rain on the pavement, died in the white neon arms that reached out from the nightclub as Moses walked up, but the size of the man blocking the open doorway was no trick of the light. The man had rolled the sleeves of his white shirt back to his elbows, and skulls and anacondas tangled on his forearms. Moses had never seen such big tattoos, mainly because he had never seen such big arms. And the face. Its swollen pallor stopped him cold. The man had drinker’s eyelids, puffy and hard, as if pumped full of silicon; they reduced the eyes beneath to mean glittery slits. His hair, scraped back from his forehead, slithered down over his collar in dark greasy coils. His sideburns bristled like wire wool. A giant gold hoop earring about three inches in diameter swung from his left ear. It was his one visible affectation. Moses thought it very unlikely that anyone had ever teased him about his earring. He knew from his own experience that big people sometimes get picked on by smaller people who want to prove something, but big was too small a word for this man, and nobody in their right mind would have picked on him. He was so big that there wasn’t a word big enough to describe how big he was. So when he told Moses to hold it, Moses held it.

‘I’m,’ he gulped, ‘I’m looking for Elliot. I’m a friend of his. I live up there.’

He pointed to his kitchen window on the fourth floor, but the man just stared at his hand.

Disconcerting.

After a long moment, the man’s stare shifted from his hand to his face. So heavy, this stare, that it almost had to be winched. Then the massive head tipped sideways and he bellowed, ‘Mr Frazer?’

So that was Elliot’s surname. Probably an alias, though, knowing (not knowing) Elliot. Elliot appeared in the doorway. His head barely reached the man’s shoulder.

‘Can I see you about something?’ Moses asked.

‘It’s all right, Ridley,’ Elliot said. Then, to Moses, ‘I’ve fired Belsen. This is his replacement, Ridley. Ridley, meet Moses.’

Ridley nodded.

Moses did likewise, glad to get out of shaking hands. He had already taken a look at Ridley’s hands. They were chipped and grazed and scarred, and every scar told the story of someone else’s pain.

‘What’s he doing here?’ he whispered, as he climbed the stairs behind Elliot.

Elliot looked cryptic. ‘We’ve been getting phone-calls. That’s what he’s doing here.’

‘A kind of receptionist?’ Moses ventured.

Elliot didn’t laugh. ‘You could say that.’

He sat down in his red chair, propped his feet on the desk, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t usually come in on Mondays, but Moses had seen the white Mercedes float into the mist below his window. Signs of stress littered the office: screwed-up paper on the floor, an almost empty bottle of brandy by the phone, a crowd of Dunhill butts wedged upright in the ashtray like people in a Hong Kong swimming-pool.

‘What are these phone-calls then?’ Moses asked.

Elliot flicked ash, ran his tongue along his teeth; for a moment, Moses thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘Bad phone-calls,’ he said eventually. ‘Old ghosts from the past, you know?’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Yeah, well,’ and Elliot allowed himself a wry grin, ‘these ones I believe in.’

Moses crossed the room and fitted his cigarette into the ashtray. On his way back to the sofa his foot caught a pool-cue that had been resting against the wall. The cue clattered to the floor.

A door opened somewhere downstairs.

‘Everything all right up there, Mr Frazer?’ The voice was huge and violent and had tattoos all over it.

Moses stooped, clipped the cue into its wooden wall-rack, and stood back.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Elliot called out. He looked across at Moses and almost grinned for the first time that evening. ‘That’s what he’s doing here,’ he said.

He stood up, stretched, strolled over to the pool-table. ‘James Ridley. He was a wrestler for a while. Had to stop. Killed someone, apparently.’

‘I believe that,’ Moses said.

‘They used to call him The Human Mangle.’ Elliot bounced the white ball on his palm, then sent it rolling up the table. ‘He used to sort of tear people apart and scatter the pieces around. That’s what I heard. Fancy a game?’

Moses began to set the balls up. ‘Could be you’ve got the right man for the job, Elliot.’

‘Yeah, could be.’ Elliot emptied the remains of the brandy into two tumblers. ‘You were going to ask me something.’

Moses broke first and put a stripe down. As he played he told Elliot about Gloria: who she’d worked with, where she’d sung, and so on.

Elliot interrupted him. ‘I know what’s coming.’

‘Well?’ Moses said. ‘Could it be arranged, do you think?’

‘Leave it with me.’

When Moses walked downstairs an hour later he heard whistling. Clear repeating notes that seemed to reach from the past and expect no reply. Like a prehistoric bird, perhaps. Something exotic, no longer alive. He passed Ridley on the way out.

‘That whistling,’ he said. ‘Did you hear it?’

Ridley tilted the great rock of his face at Moses. ‘Yeah. It was me.’

His words weighed more than other people’s. Boulders crashing down a mountain-side. Moses in their path.

Moses framed a silent oh and hurried away. Ridley could whistle like the ghost of a bird long since extinct and tear people into pieces as if they were paper. Ridley was dangerous. Very dangerous.

Definitely the right man for the job.

*

Moses woke to the sound of cheerful men delivering beer. He loved the clanking the metal barrels made as they rolled across the cobbled yard below. Sometimes the men whistled (tuneless whistling, nothing like Ridley’s), sometimes they cracked jokes. This morning he could hear them swearing at each other. Short pungent phrases rose into the air like the smell of fresh bread.

From his bed he could see his new red telephone, installed by Elliot ‘for security reasons’, and the previous night he had received his first incoming call. From Gloria, appropriately enough. She had invited him to a drinks party at her parents’ place in Hampstead. Seven o’clock, she said. It was a long time since he had been to a drinks party (and he had never been to a drinks party in Hampstead), so he was looking forward to the evening.

He eased out of bed and leaned on the windowsill. The north side of the building stood in cool shadow. In the distance the Houses of Parliament lay wrapped in a blue haze like presents that were no fun because you could guess what was inside. It was going to be a hot day. One of those days when the city smells of dusty vegetation, when the roads glitter with the chrome and glass of passing cars, when businessmen sling their jackets casually over their shoulders and secretaries lie on the grass in public parks. He moved towards the kitchen. He lit the gas and put the kettle on. Then he walked into the bathroom. A warm breeze drifted through the open window, tickled the hair under his arms, dropped a cellophane wrapper on the floor. He smeared his face with shaving-foam and reached for a razor.

And it was then that the pigeon landed on the window-ledge.

It immediately began to strut up and down as if it owned the place. Maybe it had once. Maybe it was one of the pigeons he had thrown out in April. Or maybe it was some kind of tourist pigeon who had got wind of that event and flown down from Trafalgar Square to do a bit of sightseeing. A snarl twisted his foam-bearded face. He put down the razor and picked up a bar of soap. He flung it at the pigeon. The soap grew wings and flew out of the window. The pigeon seemed to smile. Conspiracy of pigeon and soap.

‘Bird,’ he shouted. ‘Bird, I need you.’

But Bird was probably far away. Sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time. He was a free agent, no strings attached. He knew the city from rooftop to sewer, he knew its ins and outs, its ups and downs, he knew its fire-escapes, its skylights, its manholes. He stalked flocks of scavengers on the mud banks of the river, he raided the plush dustbins of Kensington and Chelsea, he slept in the warm air-vents of the West End. He would return with his ear torn and bleeding or a seagull’s wing wedged between his blunt jaws, and Moses loved him for his nonchalance, his self-sufficiency. Yes, Bird was probably far, far away. Moses would have to deal with this alone.

He reached for the scrubbing-brush. Took careful aim. Let fly.

An explosion, a splash. The pigeon nodded, chuckled, casually took wing. A triangle of glass lay on the floor, reflecting the window it had once belonged to. The scrubbing-brush floated serenely in the toilet-bowl.

Moses examined the window. Only one pane broken. Well, he muttered to himself, at least it’s summer, and began to sweep up the glass. He wondered whether he could get Jackson to invent some kind of pigeon deterrent, something that would blast the fuck out of them once and for all. He smiled as he finished shaving, dreaming of pigeon carnage.

The kettle boiled and he poured the water into his cracked brown pot. While he waited for the tea to brew, he went over to the phone. It was around ten. If he phoned Vince now, he might just catch him before he got out of his head. Vince didn’t waste much time. Especially at weekends. He dialled the number. Somebody groaned at the other end.

‘Vince,’ Moses cried. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’

‘You bastard.’

Moses smiled. Even Vince’s language seemed benign this morning.

‘Vince, part those filthy bits of cloth you call curtains and feel the sun beating on your face.’

‘I’ll give you beating on your face, you cunt. You woke me up.’

Oh, sacrilege.

‘But Vince, you have to smell the morning air.’

‘Fuck the morning air.’

‘Well, all right. I just thought we could go out for a drink, that’s all.’

‘Where?’

Give Vince credit. He could sort the wood out from the trees.

‘That pub next to you,’ Moses said.

‘About twelve, OK?’

‘Yeah, but Vince, why don’t — ’

‘If you say another word about the weather, I’m going to bloody kill you.’

Moses smiled again. Vince’s threats were always idle. Now if that had come from James ‘The Human Mangle’ Ridley –

*

Vince was already standing outside the pub when Moses turned up a few minutes after midday. Both Vince’s arms were bandaged from the base of his fingers to the crook of his elbow. He was struggling to light a cigarette. Eddie lounged against a nearby wall. He was wearing a three-piece suit and a pair of sunglasses. He was doing nothing to help. When he saw Moses he pointed to a bottle of Pils on the table.

‘I got you a drink.’

‘Cheers, Eddie.’ Moses’s throat was dry and he swallowed half the bottle before he put it down. He looked round for the inevitable girl. ‘Not alone, surely?’

Eddie nodded, lit a Rothman’s. Moses raised an eyebrow. They both drank.

‘Nice suit,’ Moses said.

‘I’m working today,’ Eddie explained. ‘Got to be back by three.’

‘That’s rough.’ Moses jerked his head in Vince’s direction. ‘What happened to him?’

‘Usual story.’ Eddie flicked ash. ‘He got into a fight with a couple of windows.’

Moses sighed.

Vince moved closer, held his arms out for inspection. His fingers shook. They were stained bright yellow from the iodine. Blood had dried under his nails and embedded itself in the criss-cross creases on his knuckles.

‘Did it hurt?’ Moses asked.

‘No,’ Vince said. ‘Glass doesn’t hurt.’

Moses hadn’t realised that.

‘Not until afterwards,’ Vince added, on reflection.

They laughed at that. Acts of self-destruction seemed to mellow Vince out. Afterwards he became tolerable, almost human. For a few days, anyway.

‘I had to take him to the hospital,’ Eddie said. ‘It was two nights ago. I got back from Soho about half three. Cab dropped me off. When I walked up to the front door I saw it was open. Thought I’d been broken into. I went in and turned the light on. Everything looked normal. TV was still there. Nothing missing at all. Then I went into the bedroom. Vince was lying on my bed. Blood everywhere.’

Vince grinned at the ground. He was nodding as if to say, Yeah, it’s all true.

‘He was a right fucking mess. Out of his head completely. Skin hanging off his arms in flaps. I had to phone a cab, take him to St Stephen’s. Didn’t want him bleeding to death in my flat.’

‘How did he get in?’ Moses asked.

‘I bust the door down,’ Vince said.

‘I’m going to get one of those metal doors,’ Eddie said. ‘You know, like they have in New York. Next time he’s going to have to find somewhere else to bleed.’

‘I’ll smash the window,’ Vince said.

Eddie gave him a steady look. ‘I’ll move.’

‘I’ll find you.’

‘I’ll move so far away you’ll bleed to death before you get there.’ Eddie smiled and went inside to buy another round. The drinks were on expenses, he had already told them.

Moses looked Vince over, sighed again.

‘All this is mine,’ Vince said. He pointed at the ground. The pavement around his feet was spattered with drops of blood, all the same shape but all different sizes, like money or rain. Some of them still looked fresh, a rich red; others had dried in the sun, turned black.

‘You must’ve been here a while,’ Moses said, bending down. ‘Some of this blood’s dry already.’

Vince grinned. ‘Sherlock fucking Moses. I was here last night.’

Moses straightened up again. ‘How many stitches did they give you?’

‘That’s nineteenth-century stuff. They don’t use stitches any more. They use tape.’

‘Tape?’

‘They tape the flaps of skin together. It’s better than stitches. Doesn’t leave a scar.’

Vince liked to be thought of as an authority. He took a pride in knowing things that most people weren’t fucked up enough to know. He was like a veteran returning from a war that nobody had ever heard of. He told stories of action he had seen, he showed off his wounds, but if you asked the wrong questions he retreated into sullen silence. With Vince there was always some kind of war going on. Whenever he got angry or depressed, bored even, he would hit himself with some lethal mix of drugs and alcohol, and then he would go out and try and beat shit out of a brick wall or a truck or a football crowd, anything so long as the odds were impossible. He always came off worst, he always suffered. His wars were all lost wars. But he never surrendered. That was where the pride came in.

Eddie returned with the drinks. He had taken his sunglasses off, and Moses now saw the swelling around Eddie’s left eye. The skin had a singed look: yellow shading into brown.

‘Christ,’ Moses said. ‘Not you as well.’

Eddie put his sunglasses back on. ‘Somebody hit me.’

‘Why?’

‘He thought I was stealing his wife.’

‘And you weren’t?’

‘I was just talking to her.’

‘Just talking to her,’ Moses scoffed. Eddie never just talked to women.

‘All right, she read my palm.’

‘The love-line,’ Vince leered from the shadows.

‘So you were holding hands,’ Moses said. ‘What else?’

‘She asked me to dance.’

‘How could you refuse?’ Vince said.

‘So we danced. I tried to, you know, maintain the proper distance, but— ’

Moses snorted.

‘— but she held me close.’

‘And her husband didn’t like it,’ Moses said.

Eddie sighed. ‘Her husband was a rugby player.’

Smiles all round. The conversation drifted, becalmed in the heat, the stillness outside the pub. At quarter to three Eddie said he had to go. ‘What are you two going to do?’

‘Drink,’ Vince said. ‘You got any money, Moses?’

Moses swapped a look with Eddie.

‘Just asking,’ Vince added quickly, but not quickly enough.

He had just taken Moses and Eddie back to an afternoon about a year before. In Moses’s memory it felt like a Sunday. They had been at a party all night. They had slept late, got up wasted. Bleak windows, grey faces. A pall hanging over everything. Intermission, Moses called it. One thing’s over and the next thing hasn’t started yet. So you wait, smoke, don’t talk much. Greyness invading, the tap of rain.

Shifting Vince’s coat, Moses noticed a name-tag sewn on to the collar. Vincent O. Brown, the red cotton handwriting said.

‘Vincent O. Brown.’ Moses’s voice broke a silence of several minutes. ‘Any guesses as to what the O might stand for?’

No response.

‘What about Organ?’ he said.

‘Offal,’ Eddie suggested from his armchair.

‘You two can fuck right off,’ Vince said.

‘Oedipus.’ Alison joined in, drawing on her personal experience of Vince, it seemed.

Vince slung a cushion at her. ‘That goes for you too.’

She ducked and said, ‘Ovary.’

The room suddenly came alive.

‘Orifice.’

‘Oswald.’

‘Olive.’

‘Orgasm.’

‘Oaf.’

‘Object.’

‘That’s enough,’ Vince screamed.

‘Hey,’ Moses said. ‘What about Onassis?’

Everybody started shaking with uncontrollable laughter. Vince was always complaining about how poor he was. In pubs he could never afford a drink, so people always had to pay for him. In restaurants he never ordered anything; he just waited until people had finished, then devoured their leftovers. He sponged compulsively, especially from Eddie. Skint was his favourite word. Broke came a close second. Onassis was the perfect name for him.

‘You bastards,’ Vince shrieked. He stood in the middle of the room, teeth clenched, knuckles white, then whirled round and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

For a month or two he got real hell. Talk about taking the piss. The name really took off. Everybody began to call him Onassis, even people who hardly knew him. When he was hungry, they took him to Greek restaurants. When they dropped in to see him they did that ridiculous Zorba dance as they came through the door. They even dragged him off to see The Greek Tycoon (Anthony Quinn played Vince), lashing him to the seat so he couldn’t leave until it was over.

One evening they went out for a meal together — Eddie, Moses, Vince and Alison — and Vince, drunk again, started smashing plates.

‘Vince, this is an Indian restaurant,’ Alison gently reminded him.

Vince didn’t hesitate. ‘When you’re Onassis,’ he declared, ‘all restaurants are Greek.’ He carried on smashing plates until they were all thrown out.

Then, just as Vince was becoming accustomed to his new role, even beginning to enjoy it, they dropped the name completely. Vince went from being Onassis to being anonymous again. All restaurants were no longer Greek. Alison stopped calling herself Jackie. Vince sulked for weeks, but ever since that time he had been very careful to avoid any allusions to money.

A Capri took the curve outside the pub too fast, bumped the kerb, then swerved away, tyres spinning, in the direction of World’s End.

‘Arsehole,’ someone jeered.

Moses turned back to Vince and Eddie.

‘Look,’ Vince was saying, holding out his bandaged arms, his fingers curling up, ‘I really haven’t got any money. I spent it all on drugs.’

‘Tightwad,’ Eddie said. ‘Skinflint.’ He signalled a passing cab and climbed in. He wound the window down and leaned out, grinning. ‘Bloody Greek.’

Moses watched Vince glaring at the taxi as it pulled away; Vince’s fingers trembled with frustration now as well as pain. ‘Don’t worry about it, Vince,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bit of money.’

Vince spat on the pavement. ‘That cunt.’

Strange how Eddie always seemed to get under Vince’s skin, Moses thought. And when Vince tried to retaliate, Eddie simply produced that smile of his, that infuriating smile which, like a joker, always won him the game. Moses could understand why Eddie got hit. What he couldn’t understand was why it didn’t happen more often.

‘All right,’ Vince said. ‘You get the wine, I’ll supply the drugs.’

Moses bought a two-litre bottle of Italian red from the off-licence across the road. That just about cleaned him out. Then they walked back to Vince’s place.

Home for Vince, as he was fond of telling people, was the old Chelsea police station, and for once this wasn’t bullshit. The building had been abandoned by the police three or four years before. Since then the paleyellow brick façade had darkened to grey and the front door had surrendered most of its white paint to the repeated attacks of drunks from over the road. Vince shared the squat with about ten others, but he could never keep track of their names. Turnover’s too high, he would say. Once Moses had walked into one of the rooms on the top floor and found a girl lying on a bed with her legs spread wide and a bloke slumped in the corner smoking a joint through a gas-mask. Nutters, Vince informed him. From Australia. That was all he knew. A few weeks later one of the nutters fell off the roof and died (people didn’t last long in the old Chelsea police station). Typical bloody Australians, was Vince’s only comment. He saw the death as an inconvenience: there had been investigations by the police, and he had received an eviction order as a result. He had ignored it, of course. Still, it made life difficult. He had been living in the building longer than anyone. Perhaps he was a survivor after all, Moses sometimes thought.

Vince selected a long spindly key from the bunch that he wore, like a jailer, on his belt. His fingers seemed to be shaking less, but it still took him a while to open the door. It was gloomy inside, twenty degrees cooler, and it smelt of ancient wood, greasy and dark from years of being touched and brushed against. It had the quietness of a place that wasn’t used to quietness. It felt the way schools feel during the holidays. Traffic-sounds didn’t penetrate. Only the clinking of Vince’s keys as he slouched down the corridor and a radio muttering somewhere above.

The police had done a pretty thorough job of moving out. They had taken everything except an old grey filing-cabinet (no files inside), a few busted chairs and some posters, one of which (it described a wanted terrorist) Vince had taped to the wall over his bed. More recent tenants had left debris of a different kind: whisky-bottles coated with dust; fag-ends stamped flat; a buckled bicycle-wheel; articles of clothing with unknown histories — a pair of khaki shorts, an armless leather jacket, one blue high-heeled shoe. In the biggest room (once a lecture-hall) somebody had painted a series of pictures on the walls: a smiling cow in a lush green meadow, a funeral procession on a tropical beach, a man asleep in a wheelchair. Each picture had its own baroque gold frame, its own circumflex of picture-wire, its own nail to hang on. Not real, but painted. And all with their own individual and realistic shadows, also painted. Moses had never regretted turning down Vince’s offer of a room in the old Chelsea police station. If he had lived there he would probably have ended up painting pictures and frames and wire and nails and shadows too. Either that or he would have fallen off the roof. There were environments and there were environments.

Vince unlocked the door of his room and shoved it open. ‘I’ll get the drugs,’ he said, ‘then we’ll go up on the roof.’

Moses waited in the doorway. Vince had masked the frosted-glass windows with off-cuts of dark-blue cloth, so the light that strained into the room was dingy, subterranean. He had few possessions. A single mattress, a ghetto-blaster, one or two books (The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde sprawled on his pillow), and a 2,000-piece jigsaw of one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Pieces of the jigsaw lay scattered round the room, mingling with ashtrays, crumpled clothes, hard-drug paraphernalia and balls of dust. All the pieces looked identical: black and white with trickling yellow lines. It had been a present from Alison during happier times. Bet you’ll never finish that, Moses remembered her saying. Vince never had — but he had never given up either. He was stubborn like that. One day that jigsaw would probably drive him mad.

Moses’s eyes came to rest on the clothes rail in the corner of the room. Alison usually kept half a dozen dresses there. Now it stood empty, naked and angular, like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal. Relationship extinct.

Vince moved towards the door.

‘That’s everything,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

*

After the coolness of the interior, the roof was like an oven door thrown open in their faces. Rows of chimney-stacks and steep slopes of grey slate trapped the heat in a flat area about twenty feet square. They sat on the low brick wall that acted as a barrier between the rooftop and a sheer drop to the courtyard sixty feet below. They took off their shirts. The smell of creosote rose into their nostrils. Moses opened the bottle. He poured the wine into two glasses that Vince had stolen from the pub across the road.

Vince produced a small white packet from the pocket of his waistcoat. One corner of his mouth curved upwards. ‘Want some?’

‘What is it?’

‘Only sulphate.’

Moses nodded.

It was so still up there on the roof that Vince cut the stuff on the wall and not a single particle moved. Saturday afternoon clamour drifted up from the street. It sounded like music played backwards. They sat in the hot sun and waited for the bitterness to hit the back of their throats.

‘Alison’s left me for good this time,’ Vince said suddenly, in the tone of voice you might use if you were discussing the weather or the price of cigarettes — disenchanted, but routinely so. It was unlike Vince to volunteer information of this kind, and when he did he usually spat it out, like phlegm, but this was a new Vince, a philosophical Vince.

Moses answered in a similar tone. ‘I thought so.’

Vince tensed. ‘How come?’

‘Her clothes weren’t there.’

Vince ground his cigarette out with the heel of his boot. ‘Yeah, she came round the other day to pick up the rest of her things. You know what she said? She looked round the room and said, “I don’t know how I could’ve lived here so long.”’

Moses pushed a bit of air out of his mouth to show Vince that he too would have been pretty pissed off with a comment like that.

‘ So long.’ Vince snorted in contempt. ‘She was only here for two months. Two fucking months.’

‘Actually,’ Moses said, ‘I’m surprised it lasted that long.’

‘What’re you on about?’

‘Her living with you.’

‘Yeah, I know, but what d’you mean surprised?’

‘You and her,’ Moses said. ‘You didn’t go together.’

A jet fighter, miles above, released a single trail of vapour. It was so straight that it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. It seemed to underline his words.

Vince shifted on the wall, looked over the edge. His eyes moved thoughtfully across the jumble of padlocked sheds below.

‘You know what I said?’ he said after a while. ‘I said she’d better make bloody sure she’d got everything she wanted because she wouldn’t want to come back again, not if that was the way she felt, not to this fucking hole.’

Moses couldn’t help grinning. It was a fucking hole.

‘Then she told me not to be so sarcastic.’

Moses poured them both another tumbler of wine. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can almost hear her saying that.’

‘Well,’ Vince said, and reached for his rolling-papers. During the silence that followed, he built one of his specials. B-52s, he called them. Three joints in one. Malawi in the fuselage, Lebanese red in the wings. B-52s weren’t lightly named. They wreaked destruction. Large-scale destruction. They wrapped people round toilet-bowls and made them wish they were dead.

Vince lit the nose and the two wingtips. He inhaled, bared his teeth, leaned back against the wall. When all three ends were burning fiercely, he passed the lethal plane to Moses with a smile. Vince was happy now. One of his greatest joys in life was making people wish they were dead.

He got up, paced round the rooftop, his badges glinting in the sun, his bandaged arms held parallel to the ground. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’ll be no more windows broken over Alison, that’s for sure.’

Moses considered this. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘There’ve got to be better reasons than that.’

‘Fuck off and die,’ Vince said.

Moses left about half an hour later, before it became too late to leave at all. Vince said he was going to carry on. He flipped open the lid on a tin of capsules. ‘Painkillers,’ he grinned. ‘For my arms.’

Moses lowered himself backwards through the skylight. ‘Any excuse,’ he said.

*

Ground level.

Moses shaded his eyes. There was a big bucket in the sky at the end of the King’s Road. This bucket was overflowing with molten gold light. The light was called sunset, and this is how it worked. The bucket slowly emptied of light. As the bucket emptied, the light slowly darkened — gold to orange, orange to red, red to purple — until, after hours of pouring, only the sediment remained: black light or, in other words, night.

Moses began to walk east. It was around six. At this point the light was still gold and the supply seemed endless. The people coming towards him had gold faces, gold hands, gold fingers, gold rings. They looked as if they had just stepped off planes from somewhere exotic. He wondered if he looked as if he had just stepped off a plane. He felt as if he was still on one. That old B-52. Where was his car?

There it was.

He slid into the front seat, basked for a moment in the aroma of hot leather. Ahhh, Bisto.

Jesus, he was driving already.

He plugged a cassette in, top volume. One of Gloria’s. Cuban stuff. What the hell.

He was heading riverwards. The road seemed calm enough. His Rover floated on a purring cushion of air.

He watched a supersite poster glide past. It was a picture of a man sitting in a desert. The man had clean-cut features, neat black hair and a firm jaw. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He was smiling. It was nice in the advert.

Moses smiled back. He knew how the man felt. He was in an advert too.

*

Certain items of clothing struck him immediately as being inappropriate for a drinks party in Hampstead. The plus-fours, for example. The kilt. The straitjacket (a twenty-first birthday present from Jackson). He flicked through his wardrobe. He was proud of his wardrobe. As part of a new drive to inject system and discipline into his life, he had spent a whole day alphabetising his clothes. From A for Anorak to Z for Zoot Suit. Shirts were all ranged under S, but they also had a strict internal order of their own: Hawaiian, for instance, came before Psychedelic but after Bowling. Those shirts that had no obvious style or function were classified according to colour: Amber, Beige, Charcoal, Damson, and so on. It was some time before he reached his sharkskin suit, but when he did he realised that he need look no further. That was it. Suit: Sharkskin.

He had bought it from a charity organisation that operated out of a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate. A woman of about fifty had answered the door. She wore a necklace of wooden beads, a tweed skirt, and a pair of stout brown shoes. She seemed vigorous but absent-minded at the same time.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Oh dear.’ And then, turning back inside, ‘Sorry. Do come in.’

Moses had fallen in love with the suit at first sight. It had a double-breasted jacket, a pocket that slanted rakishly over the heart, and a grey watered-silk lining with triangular flaps sewn into the armpits to soak up sweat (a task which, thankfully, they had never had to perform). The trousers, high-waisted, roomy, pleated, tapered nicely to a half-inch turnup at the ankle; they were the kind of trousers that Robert Mitchum used to wear in those movies he made in the forties. The colour of the suit? Well, at first glance it looked grey, a sober darkish grey, but when you examined it closely you could see that the cloth was shot through with tiny flecks of blue and orange. In sunlight it would come alive. Perhaps the best thing about the suit, though, was the label inside. PURE SHARKSKIN, it said, and gave an address in St James’s. Moses didn’t know what sharkskin was, but he certainly liked the sound of it. He tried the suit on behind a purple velvet curtain and it fitted perfectly. It might almost have been tailored to his measurements. A miracle. He marched straight up to the woman at the counter.

‘This is a wonderful suit. I’ll take it.’

‘How strange that you should choose that one.’ The woman’s eyes settled cautiously on his face. ‘It only came in yesterday.’

‘I was lucky then.’

‘I shouldn’t really tell you, I suppose, but the man who it belonged to only died last week.’ The beads of her wooden necklace clicked between her fingers. A rosary of sorts.

He couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t tactless.

He finally broke the silence with the words, ‘He must have been a big man.’

‘Yes. He was. He used to row.’ And the woman stared Moses straight in the eye as if he had accused her of lying.

‘You knew him then?’

‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sighed. ‘I knew him.’

‘Oh,’ Moses said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’ll be four pounds.’ She had already folded the suit and tucked it out of sight in a brown paper bag.

Afterwards he couldn’t help wondering why she had said Oh dear when she saw him standing in the doorway. Did he resemble the man who had died the week before? Had she loved that man, perhaps? Had she thought of Moses as some kind of ghost? And, if so, had he then upset her further by selecting, as it were, his own sharkskin suit?

He would never know, of course, but the incident gave him a peculiar feeling: the feeling that all happiness was rooted in grief, the one evolving naturally, organically, from the other, like flowers from earth.

*

Shit, seven-thirty already. He should have been in Hampstead by now. Drinking. And he was still in Lambeth. Naked. It was the speed, the dope. They had reversed him into his memory.

He dressed, checked his face in the mirror, ran some gel through his hair, snatched up keys and cigarettes, and took the stairs, three at a time.

‘Hey, Abraham! What’s up?’

It was Elliot. He was standing on the corner, hands in his pockets. Only his shoulderblades touched the wall. That cool. He was wearing his maroon suit. A white tie glowed softly against the backcloth of a black shirt. He looked beautiful.

Moses walked over. He forgot the rush he was in. It was good knowing people who smiled when they saw you. It could make you forget anything.

‘What’s with the tie, Elliot?’

Elliot looked down at his tie as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘You like it?’

‘Not bad. What’s it made of?’

‘Silk, man. Hundred per cent.’

‘Really?’

Elliot held the tie out on the palm of his hand. ‘Feel it.’

Moses bent over the tie, studied it closely, tested it between two fingers. Silk. You could feel that. He turned it over and held the label up to the light. SILK. 100 %. He nodded, looked impressed. ‘That’s a great tie.’

Elliot tucked the tie back inside his jacket.

‘Mine’s terylene,’ Moses said. ‘Hundred per cent.’ He waved his tie in Elliot’s face.

Elliot looked pained. ‘Terylene’s shit, Moses. If you’re going to live here, you better smarten up.’

‘What about this then?’ Moses opened his jacket and tapped the label. ‘Pure sharkskin, this is.’

‘Don’t give me no fish talk, Moses.’

‘All right,’ and laughing, Moses lunged at Elliot’s jacket. ‘What’s yours? Polyester?’

‘If you touch me,’ Elliot said, ‘I might have to call Ridley.’

Moses backed away with his hands in the air. ‘OK, Elliot. You win.’ He felt for his keys and walked towards his car.

‘Hey, Moses, about your friend, the singer,’ Elliot called out. ‘She’s on. Thursday. Happy now?’

Moses turned round, rushed over to Elliot, and hugged him. Smothered him in grateful sharkskin and terylene. ‘That’s great, Elliot. That’s really great. I’ll tell her tonight.’

‘Jesus, Moses,’ Elliot gasped when Moses finally released him, ‘you nearly fucking killed me there.’ He straightened his jacket and tie, hitched his trousers up, patted his hair. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.

But Moses was already turning the key in his ignition. Two blasts on the horn and he vanished round the corner in a cloud of blue exhaust.

Nothing special happened on the way to Hampstead. He drove fast and learned quite a lot about Aztec rituals from some programme on Radio 4.

*

He turned into a street that ran along the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. Narrow, fastidious, a clutter of expensive parked cars. He noticed blue plaques on the walls of houses, the slanting roof of a conservatory, a cello in an upstairs window. Then the street widened, wound north. Double electric garages now. Serious children with golden hair. The burglar alarms alone looked worth stealing. When he reached the number that Gloria had given him he had to stop the car and double-check the address. It was the right house.

He didn’t honestly think he’d ever seen anything like it. Sweeping expanses of white façade that looked as cold and slippery as ice-rinks. Sheer stretches of glass (sometimes reflecting his shadowy figure, for he had parked the car and was now walking round the outside). The building seemed to absorb colour from its immediate surroundings — deep blue from the shadows, silver from the moon — and yet a grey day, he imagined, would only serve to heighten its intrinsic whiteness. No garden to speak of. No plants or flower-beds. Only a functional patio and a two-tier lawn. Trees and shrubbery shielded the house on three sides. On the fourth, a view of the heath. The effect was one of spartan luxury, a sort of inverted flamboyance. Gloria’s roots, he thought. And smiled, thinking of his own.

He circled the house for the second time. The lawn looked so modelled, so planed, that it seemed as if the house had just landed and would shortly be taking off again, leaving no memory or proof of its existence except, perhaps, for a few indentations in the grass that would be gone by morning; it didn’t seem to grow, or even belong there. When he returned to the staircase again — this was semi-circular, and broke up the relentless linear mood of the building — the door opened and a slice of white light fell across the lawn. A woman in a white knee-length dress appeared, her backlit hair a platinum-blonde, her figure youthful. From a distance she looked perfect, alien. This did nothing to rid Moses of his initial impression that the house had just fallen out of the sky. He approached the steps.

‘Good evening,’ he called up.

She must have noticed him already because there was no trace of surprise in her voice. ‘You must be Moses,’ she said.

‘And you,’ he said, reaching her and extending a hand, ‘must be Mrs Wood.’

‘Heather.’

Her name was like her voice — springy, fragrant, open-air somehow — and he told her so.

And Heather laughed, so he laughed too, and they stood there in the doorway still shaking, or rather, by now, merely holding hands.

‘Am I late?’ he asked her.

‘Late? No. We’ve only just opened the first bottle of champagne. I call that perfect timing.’

She ushered him into the house ahead of her, but he paused just inside the door, needing a moment or two to take things in. The living-area that spread out below him was thirty or forty feet long and furnished in a style that could, perhaps, have been called cubic chic. Blocks of white fibreglass or plastic, upholstered in white leather, acted as armchairs and sofas. An original Picasso drawing hung in a spotlit alcove. The floor was a stretch of pale natural wood, lacquered like a dance-floor and lavished with a profusion of white scatter-rugs. Six-foot Yucca palms and other, taller exotic plants led his eye towards the ceiling high above, a slanting amalgamation of mirrors, pipes and glass through which he could see, at certain points, a few rectilinear sections of starless night sky. Almost giddy, he dropped his gaze to the centre of the room. A long low coffee-table (also white, also cubic) dominated; arranged on its perfect surface, two bottles of champagne in a silver ice-bucket, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses (to see people on the other side of the room?), a vase of wild grasses and an Indian conch.

Moses took a deep breath. ‘Nice,’ he said.

Heather smiled. ‘Introductions,’ she said and, taking him gently by the arm, guided him down the steps. Her hand was elegant, tanned, and uncluttered by rings, except for the one that bound her, presumably, to Mr Wood.

Thirty or forty people stood about in different parts of the room. Heather steered Moses from one clique to another, supplying him with names and, where appropriate, pieces of information, gossip or scandal to fix the names in his mind. She was an accomplished hostess, but Moses’s mind, bombarded by an afternoon of Vince, took in less than it might have done.

He remembered meeting a barrister called John Dream, though, because John Dream looked exactly like Bernard Levin. Heather, laughingly, agreed.

He remembered ‘Prince’ Hudson Oleander too. ‘Prince’ Hudson Oleander was a tennis pro from Famoso, California. He had a lecherous sunburnt face with cracks in it, like wood. Apparently he had won the title ‘Prince’ at a tournament in Forest Hills on account of his extraordinary graciousness on court. ‘Apparently,’ Heather whispered behind her hand, ‘it’s the only title he’s ever won.’

Then there was Hermann von Weltraum and his wife, Lottie. (‘Astrologers,’ Heather explained, ‘from Munich.’ Moses thought momentarily, almost wistfully, of Madame Zola, Famous Clairvoyant. He wondered if the Germans were Famous Astrologers. Looking at Hermann’s prissy pink face he doubted it somehow.) And Romeo Pelz, a clothes designer, and his male assistant, Derek. (‘Romeo,’ Heather lowered her eyes, ‘lives up to his name.’) And Christian Persson, a member of the Swedish delegation for human rights and a man, Moses saw, with absolutely no sense of humour. Christian Persson introduced Moses to the Very Reverend William Cloth, vicar of the parish. Heather moved away to fetch Moses a drink. He would need one, the glimmer in her eyes seemed to say.

The religious atmosphere of the group was quickly dispelled by the apparition of a short muscular woman with glazed brown eyes. She had dark curly hair and wore a caftan. If she had had a beard as well as a moustache, she could have passed for Demis Roussos. She was, in fact, Margaux Kampf, an actress.

‘I’m Margaux,’ she purred. ‘With an x.’

Moses looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t hear an x. Did you hear an x, Mr Persson?’

The Swede’s pale-blue eyes opened wide. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

‘It’s on the end, lovey,’ Margaux growled. ‘It’s a silent one.’

Jesus, Moses thought. He looked across at the Reverend. The Reverend was also thinking Jesus, by the look of it.

‘I’m Moses,’ Moses said. ‘No x.’

‘That’s cute,’ said Margaux. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m an escape-artist,’ Moses said. ‘Watch.’ And he turned round and walked away.

Heather moved towards him with a glass of champagne. ‘Is this all right, Moses? Or would you prefer something stronger?’

Moses assured her that champagne was quite strong enough for him.

Heather smiled past him. ‘Here’s someone I don’t need to introduce you to.’

‘Champagne’s quite strong enough for me.’ Gloria was mimicking him. ‘What’re you up to, Moses?’

She was all lit up tonight with the thrill of being on her own ground. She wore a bottle-green turtleneck, a black moiré skirt, black tights. Jet earrings swung against her pale neck. Her dark eyes trained on his face like search-lights, scanning him for signs of misbehaviour.

He smiled. ‘I’m trying to make a good impression.’

‘You’re full of shit, Moses,’ she said.

He held up a finger. ‘Not completely. I’ve got some news for you. You’re singing at The Bunker. I’ve fixed it up with Elliot.’

‘I take back everything I said.’ She took his face between her hands and kissed the tip of his nose. Then pulled away laughing. ‘I know what you’ve been doing. You’ve been taking speed.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I just tasted it. On the end of your nose.’

They were still laughing when a man in a pale grey suit appeared at Gloria’s elbow. ‘May I be introduced?’

‘Dad,’ Gloria said, ‘I’d like you to meet Moses. Moses, this is my father.’

The two men shook hands.

Mr Wood had a way of looking at you from under his eyelids that made you feel as if you were testing his patience. He doesn’t like me, Moses thought. He watched Gloria move away, and it seemed as if she was taking his joy and spontaneity with her. He didn’t want to be left alone with Mr Wood. There was only one way to talk to this manicured man, he sensed, and that was politely. The prospect of having to be polite depressed him.

‘This house is amazing,’ he blurted out and instantly regretted it; Mr Wood looked like the kind of man who expected precision not superlatives.

‘I suppose a lot of people say that,’ he added, trying to salvage something from the wreckage of his opening remark.

The ice squeaked in Mr Wood’s glass, but didn’t quite break. Moses felt like the Titanic. Sinking fast.

‘Yes,’ Mr Wood said. ‘Most people say that.’

Perhaps he felt, during the brief silence that followed, that he had been a little too abrupt or uncharitable because he then offered to show Moses the plans of the house, if he was interested, that is.

Moses said he was. I suppose most people say that, he thought.

Mr Wood took him over to the far side of the room. He unrolled a giant scroll of paper, spread it flat on the table, and pinned the corners down with glass weights. Then he began to talk quietly about the juxtaposition of planes, the distribution of space, and so on. Moses now remembered Gloria mentioning her father and architecture in the same breath, and suddenly all the pieces fell into place.

‘So you designed this house yourself?’

‘That’s right,’ Mr Wood said, as if Moses had finally found the answer to an extremely simple riddle, as if Moses’s surprise was, in itself, surprising.

Mr Wood was an attractive man. Very attractive. He was one of those people who look ten years younger than their age, even though you don’t know how old they are. But Moses had one problem with him. He behaved like one of his own technical drawings. He was what he did. He was too designed. The neatness of his features and his suit. The efficiency of his gestures. The measured way he used words — the way you might use bricks. And his smile, a ruled line across his face that, even now, seemed to be disclaiming any beauty the building might have achieved over and above its functional perfection. That’s all very well, Moses thought, but where does Mrs Wood fit in? He had instantly picked up on the playful streak in her, yet the only thing he had noticed in the house so far that in any way resembled her or might be seen as her doing was the vase of wild grasses on the coffee-table. And there couldn’t be much room in a technical drawing, he imagined, for a vase of wild grasses. He suddenly felt the urge to rescue her from all this. To ride into the white house on a black horse. To snatch her up from under her husband’s perfect nose. To save her from sterility, these expensive chains, this rich death. A rustling distracted him. Mr Wood was rolling up his plans with brisk dry movements of his hands.

*

Moses subsided on to a settee with a fresh glass of champagne. He had wanted to speak to Gloria, but she was tied up with friends of her mother’s. Disconsolate, he faced into the room, watched the guests manoeuvring.

Romeo Pelz, for instance, whose eyes were black except for one tiny silver point at the centre of each pupil, had his arm round Derek’s narrow shoulders and was extracting, by the look of it, some kind of promise or assurance. Derek listened, eyes half-closed, mouth widened like a cat’s, and revolved his head, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise.

Mrs Violet de Light, a shivery woman of forty-fivish with a bell of grey hair and darting eyes (her husband was a publisher, Moses remembered Heather telling him, and she worked on several committees), leaned against the wall in the space between two paintings, her scrawny body twisting sideways and upwards towards Christian Persson like a lightning-struck tree, her ear no more than an inch from his blond Don Quixote beard and his mauve lips as he told her that, no, it wasn’t so much religion that mattered in his work as morality. Mrs de Light quivered with fascination at the word.

Ronald, a journalist, stood by the bookcase. He was gulping neat vodka and casting long shadowy glances in the direction of a girl called Phoebe (whose professional name, Moses had heard someone bitch earlier on, was Dolores). Phoebe was being clutched from behind by the tanned Prince Oleander. His rugged face nuzzled her neck. One of his hands steadied her hip; the other gripped her wrist and guided it smoothly this way and that. Some kind of impromptu tennis-lesson, presumably. A backhand pass. Prince Oleander was having trouble keeping his eye on the imaginary ball. He seemed more interested in the way Phoebe’s breasts were plunging against the two flimsy strips of pink material that made up the top half of her dress. Moses saw Ronald’s grey face sag. This was one game the journalist would never win.

John Dream, meanwhile, was leafing through a book in the comfort of an armchair. He occasionally lifted a hand to pat the crinkly greying waves of his hair. He patted them very carefully as if they were priceless or easily frightened.

The Very Reverend Cloth stood in the middle of the room, transferring his vacant pulpit gaze from one passing guest to the next. Nobody stopped to talk to him, with the exception of Heather who might have been a puppeteer the way she brought sudden jittery life to those rather wooden limbs.

Now and then Moses caught a glimpse of Gloria threading her way through the gathering, as sharp and bright as a needle. He saw her walk up to a young American who looked like Paul Newman. He watched Gloria listen to Paul Newman talking. She seemed to be listening with her whole body. She radiated interest like light. Paul Newman slipped an arm round her shoulders and slid a few droll words out of the corner of his mouth. They both laughed. Those few moments hauled him back to the first time he ever saw her, talking to those two men at the party in Holland Park, and suddenly it was as if the gap between them — there then, there now — had never closed, as if that first impression had stained the way he looked at her, stained it with some bitter resin that nothing they ever did together, no amount of closeness, could remove, and suddenly he wanted to be John Dream, buried in the pages of a book, oblivious, content, or home alone, pouring milk into a dish for Bird — anything but this. And Gloria chose that moment to notice him. She detached herself from the American — rather too abruptly, Moses thought — and moved towards him through the crowd. The smile she was carrying looked forced somehow, artificial. It was like watching an air stewardess moving from first class to economy, her pleasantness no longer natural but obligatory. It was like being back at the orphanage. He felt condescended to.

She sat down next to him.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

She touched his arm. An afterthought.

He didn’t look at her.

She tightened her grip on his arm. ‘What’s wrong, Moses?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

His arm felt pressurised. He moved it away from her.

‘You were having a better time over there,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d better go back.’

He wanted her to understand this simple unreasonable jealousy of his, but when he lifted his eyes to meet hers, he saw that she had taken a different turning somewhere. Suddenly they were miles apart and travelling in opposite directions.

‘Is that what you want?’ she said.

He shrugged.

She got up and walked away.

He didn’t watch her go.

Herr and Frau von Weltraum, the German astrologers, took her place on the settee.

‘Do you, by any chance, speak German?’ Hermann asked, pushing his spectacles a little higher on his inquisitive pink nose.

‘Nein,’ Moses said.

Hermann found this tremendously funny, and turned to relate it to his wife. His wife leaned forwards so as to smile at the humorous Englishman.

But the humorous Englishman had left.

*

Out on the patio Moses almost tripped over Ronald the journalist. Ronald lay against the wall, legs splayed, hair plastered over his forehead.

‘What are you doing down there?’ Moses asked.

‘Drinking.’

‘What are you drinking?’

A bottle rose into the air. Moonlight silvered the transparent glass. ‘Vodka. Have some.’

‘Thank you.’ Moses swallowed a mouthful and handed the bottle back.

‘I’m Ronald,’ Ronald said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Moses.’

‘Christ.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Moses studied the journalist with some curiosity. ‘So what are you really doing out here?’

Ronald mauled his face with his free hand. ‘I’m pissed off. Bloody pissed off.’

He had been looking for Phoebe, he explained. You know, Phoebe. The girl with the incredible tits. He had looked all over the house. No dice. So he tried the garden, didn’t he. He was just crossing the lawn when he heard this moan. Coming from the shrubbery, it was. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled the last few yards. And there she was, kneeling in the bushes, her dress pushed down to her waist, her fat breasts erotically tattooed in light and shade. Bloody marvellous sight. Except she wasn’t alone, of course. How did he know? He saw this pair of hands appear on her shoulders, didn’t he. He watched them sort of slide downwards until they were — oh Christ –

‘Prince Oleander,’ Moses said. ‘Giving her another tennis lesson.’

The journalist’s head slumped on to his chest. Then he lifted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed twice, fiercely. He had watched, he told Moses. He hadn’t wanted to. He just had to. He had watched them fucking in the shrubbery. Shuddering rubbery fucking in the shrubbery. He had watched them for ever. Well, until Phoebe started coming, anyway. That he couldn’t take. So he had dragged himself back to the patio and hit the bottle. He wanted to get shit-faced. Best way to be.

‘Are they still out there?’ Moses asked, cocking an ear.

‘I don’t know. Don’t fucking care. Thought I was in with a chance, you see. But I don’t come from Calibloodyfornia, do I.’

The vodka bottle lunged at Moses again. He shook his head this time.

‘Californication,’ Ronald said. He laughed bitterly.

Moses climbed to his feet. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘You going?’

Moses nodded. ‘Got to find someone.’

‘Fucking women,’ Ronald said.

*

The day was catching up on Moses. Moving back indoors, shaky now, a little brittle too, he suddenly understood that the setting for the party, though extravagant and dreamlike, was at the same time perfectly stable. Cushioned on the surface, rock-solid underneath. Everything running along preordained and well-oiled lines. Crossing the living area, he saw the discreet glances of shared amusement that passed between Mr and Mrs Wood, he saw their confidence in each other, the strength of their attachment. They could invite strangers, frauds, drunks, vicars, tarts — all potential spanners in the works — to their parties, they could mix them together like some giant human cocktail, they could flirt with other people’s chaos because they knew it would never happen to them. The spanners in the works might make a pleasant tinkling sound, but they would never damage the machinery. How could he, Moses, match a performance like theirs?

As was happening more and more these days (ever since the arrival of the suitcase, in fact), Moses’s thoughts turned to his own background, setting against this brilliant suburban machinery, against this concentration of dazzle, a darkness illuminated only by a few photos in an old album and a dress that he had given to Gloria (who probably had hundreds more upstairs), and a sudden panic washed over him, the feeling that he had been squandering valuable time, that he should have been buying torches, lighting fires, calling electricians, anything to lift the darkness a little, to reveal his machinery.

Where was his machinery? Perhaps he had been the spanner in those particular works. Too big a spanner. Perhaps that explained everything.

Perhaps.

But he wanted to know.

*

Somebody had turned up the volume of the conversation. Fred Astaire was trying to make himself heard with his own version of the Cole Porter classic ‘Anything Goes’. How apt, Moses thought. Unable to find Gloria, he ended up in a lamplit corner next to Paul Newman. Next to Paul Newman stood the awful Margaux.

‘Moses!’ she cried. ‘Moses with no x! Come and talk to us!’

Moses groaned inside.

‘Have you two met?’ Margaux asked.

‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ Paul Newman said.

I don’t believe you ever will, you bastard, Moses thought. The American had a pleasant transatlantic drawl and, for a moment, Moses wished he had brought Vince along. He would have enjoyed watching Vince toss a glass of champagne in that pleasant American face.

‘This is Moses,’ Margaux was saying. ‘Moses, this is Tarquin.’

Tarquin? Jesus.

‘Have you seen Gloria?’ Moses asked.

Neither of them had. Not recently, anyway.

‘It’s very important.’ He looked round, as much to avoid further conversation as anything else.

Ronald stumbled past, ash on his tie, flies undone. He had stuck the vodka bottle in his trouser pocket. It swung against his hip like a six-gun with no bullets in the chamber. Phoebe and Prince Oleander still hadn’t reappeared. They were probably still fucking in the shrubbery (one day my prince will come). Violet de Light, who had seen her husband stroking Margaux’s hand on the patio, had captured Romeo and was pawing him in a desperate last-ditch attempt to arouse her husband’s jealousy. Raphael de Light, the publisher, knew Romeo was gay. He wriggled with amusement in the kitchen doorway. John Dream was quietly taking his leave of Heather who, turning back into the room, caught Moses’s roving eye and came towards him.

‘Moses, are you enjoying yourself?’

‘It’s a wonderful party. Tell me. Have you seen Gloria anywhere?’

‘The poor boy’s desperate,’ Margaux said.

You cunt, Moses thought, and smiled pleasantly. He began to look round the room again. For a blunt instrument this time. Margaux drifted serenely out of range.

‘— I don’t know where she is,’ Heather was saying. She pushed her hair back from her forehead with spread fingers. An expensive smell circled her left wrist like a bracelet.

Moses felt a wave of nausea well up inside him. His body started moving up and down, up and down, a smooth well-oiled movement, almost pistonlike. The sweep of Heather’s hair became a part of this. The smell of her perfume too. He didn’t dare look at her.

‘— she could be anywhere — ’

He heard her voice through a buzz of interference. The air between them had broken up into patches of black and white. He hoped to Christ he wasn’t going to pass out. Not in Hampstead. He hoped with a desperation which, if anything, made it seem more likely to happen.

‘Got to go to the bathroom.’ Hardly able to move his lips. Mouth heavy, hydraulic. And he could see the sound waves his voice made looping out towards her. Loch Ness monsters made of words, of frequencies. There was a look of concern on her face, he thought, but it was like a bad television picture. All snow. No, bigger than snow. Black gaps between the flakes.

‘ — first on the right at the top of the stairs — ’

He thanked her.

All the way to the bathroom he seemed to be falling. He locked the door and dropped to the floor.

*

Time passed.

Slowly — reluctantly, it seemed to Moses — the nausea withdrew, the pistons ceased. He lifted his head. Marble surfaces. Gold fittings. Plants. In the centre of the room, a sunken bath. Roman-style. He reached over, turned on the taps. There was great wealth in their smooth tooled action, in the instant power they released. He listened to the crash of water on enamel as Chinese philosophers once listened to crickets. He drifted into calm stretches of contemplation. Mr and Mrs Wood must have extraordinary problems, he thought, to own a bathroom as magnificent as this. He would write a book one day. He would call it The Bath — A Definitive Study. Something serious like that. There would be glossy colour plates shot by you-know-who and an introduction written by somebody distinguished. He could already see the press reviews:

— It is not easy to find words to describe the joy, the delight, the passion which Mr Highness evokes — Publisher’s Weekly

— I was held spellbound. Mr Highness is clever, very clever, and immensely entertaining — Sunday Telegraph

— Memories came flooding back. Enthralling — Woman

— Exhibits a wonderfully dry sense of humour throughout — Times Literary Supplement.

Fame beckoned. Fan-mail. Royalties. He would have enough money to fly to America and look for another Highness. He might even appear on the Michael Parkinson show.

As he left the bathroom he heard a sigh of ecstasy and, turning round, saw Margaux and Mr de Light (his future publisher maybe!) breaking from a surreptitious drunken clinch.

‘My Raphael,’ Margaux murmured. ‘My priceless Raphael.’

‘Mein Kampf,’ whispered Mr de Light, erudite even in desire.

Moses didn’t know how long he had spent on the bathroom floor, but the party, he was glad to see, was obviously still in full swing.

Moses slipped across the landing and down the stairs. There had been a few departures, he learned. Violet de Light had stalked off in a huff. Christian Persson had gone to Heaven (he wanted to check out London nightlife). Phoebe and her tanned tennis-player had taken leave of the Woods (and the bushes) and sped off in a white Golf GTI convertible. Ronald had departed too, but only into unconsciousness. He lay in the garden, his face a mask of masochistic agony, the casualty of too much jealousy and vodka. Alcohol had also transformed the Very Reverend Cloth. He towered over Lottie von Weltraum, two fingers raised, the other two tucked into the palm of his hand, like the pope. He was telling her that he would like to talk to Derek about unnatural acts. But Derek was in the bathroom with Romeo, performing one. Moses knew. He had watched them go in together. Then, finally, he saw Gloria. She was standing in the Picasso alcove. Talking to Paul Newman. Moses walked over.

‘Hello, Gloria.’

‘Hello.’ Without actually moving at all, she seemed to shrink from him. Perhaps to fill the silence, she said, ‘Have you met Tarquin?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘Is that what you were doing in the bathroom for an hour? Looking for me?’

Moses stared at her.

‘Are you all right now, Moses?’ Tarquin asked.

Moses swung round. ‘None of your business, Paul.’

The American smiled. ‘My name’s Tarquin.’

‘Well, you look like a Paul to me.’

Gloria pushed Moses away into the corner. ‘Why are you being so weird tonight?’

‘I’m not being weird. This is weird.’ He waved a hand in the air to indicate the room, the house, the party. ‘You’re from a different world, Gloria. I don’t know where I’m from, but I don’t think it’s somewhere like this. In fact, I know it isn’t.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Moses pressed his fingers into his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

Things had begun to drift away from him again. He was travelling backwards on a slow roller-coaster. Voices sounded distant and cramped, like voices on the telephone, and even his dislike for Paul Newman was being sucked back into a past that was vague, gelatinous, irrelevant.

He looked down at Gloria. Her eyebrows told him that it was time to go home.

‘I ought to be going,’ he murmured.

She nodded.

They found Mrs Wood adjusting her hair in the full-length mirror by the door.

‘Thank you for the wonderful party,’ Moses said. He took her hand in his, bent over it, and touched it with his lips. For one awful moment he thought he was going to be sick on it, but the spasm passed and he straightened up again, pale but undisgraced.

‘Lovely to meet you,’ she said. ‘I hope we’ll see you again.’

‘I like you,’ Moses said.

She smiled. ‘I like you too, Moses.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Gloria said.

In the night air Moses felt better. ‘Did I really kiss your mother’s hand?’ he asked Gloria.

‘Only just,’ she said. ‘I mean, you nearly missed.’

They both began to laugh. Softly, privately, for different reasons.

Moses leaned back against the voluptuous white curve of the staircase. ‘You see, you never told me your parents lived in a spaceship.’

‘Moses, you’re very drunk.’

‘And you, Gloria, are very beautiful.’

‘Are you sure you can drive?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Maybe I should call you a cab.’ She was trying very hard to be stern with him. ‘Do you want a cab?’

‘No, I’m all right. Really. My motor skills are unimpaired. Look.’ And very carefully, like someone mounting a butterfly, he leaned over and placed a kiss on Gloria’s lips.

It was nice, so he did it again. Doing it for longer didn’t seem to make it any less nice. Though this time it was a little less like someone mounting a butterfly, perhaps.

He ran down the stairs and his voice hovered in the air behind him.

‘Remember, you’re singing. Thursday.’

*

The posters had been up since the beginning of the week — bold black letters on a dayglo orange background: HOLLY WOOD. THE BUNKER. THURSDAY JUNE 26 10 PM — and by nine-thirty on Thursday night many of the tables had been taken. Moses sat in a dark corner and glanced across at Gloria. She was discussing something with her pianist. It was extraordinary how interesting she made the dance-floor seem just by standing on it. He had wanted to wish her luck again, but by the time he had ordered another brandy and returned to his table she was already up on stage. She had her usual band. Only the saxophonist, Malone, was new; he stood to one side, facing away from the audience, wearing a brown coat that buttoned all the way from his ankles to his throat. Gloria had chosen a shimmery pink dress this evening — to go with the building, she had told Moses earlier. She had backcombed her hair into a mass of spun black candy-floss. A fringe hid the time her eyebrows were telling. One hand on the microphone, she turned, said something to the guitarist. Moses’s heart did a swift drumroll. He still couldn’t adjust to the sight of her performing. This public Gloria was always an apparition out of nowhere for him, some exotic derivation of the girl he knew, smiled at, slept with. It made him dizzy to feel himself slipping into the objectivity he saw in other people’s eyes when they watched her sing.

But there she was, spotlit now, one hand shading her eyes.

‘I’m going blind up here,’ came her voice, husky, echoing above the hiss of the PA. ‘Could someone do something?’

The lights dimmed. The buzz of the audience cut out as if a plug had been pulled.

‘Thanks.’ A quick smile, and then simply, ‘My name’s Holly and this one’s for Moses — ’

It was one of those songs where the voice sets out alone and the instruments creep in after a verse or two, discreetly, one by one, like people arriving late at a theatre. A brave way to open, Moses thought, still feeling the glow that her surprise dedication had given him. He had only heard her sing twice before, but it seemed to him that she was singing better than ever tonight. There was an edge to her voice, even when she softened it, that cut into the silence of the audience, left marks to prove it had been there. People would walk out talking about her.

As the first song faded into brushwork and random piano, applause flew towards the stage on great clattering wings. Moses suddenly imagined Gloria ducking, her hands thrown up around her ears. He was too preoccupied with this vision of his to clap. Or to notice that Elliot had slipped into the vacant seat beside him.

*

‘What’s up, Judas?’

Moses jumped. ‘Elliot. How long’ve you been there?’

‘Not long.’

‘Want a drink.’

‘I’ve got one.’

‘So what’s new?’ Moses had meant nothing by the question, but he watched it hook something big in Elliot.

Elliot’s head lifted. ‘Are you in any kind of trouble?’

Moses looked blank. ‘Not so far as I know.’

‘What I mean is, are you in any kind of trouble with the police?’

Moses grinned.

‘I’m serious.’ Elliot moved his shoulders inside his jacket. He tipped some brandy into his mouth, swallowed, and bared his teeth. ‘Last Saturday I had a visitor. It was right after you drove off in your car. He wanted to know if you lived here. He knew your name.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know. He was a big bastard. Wore one of those old check jackets that look like a dog’s thrown up on it. I reckon he was a copper. Plainclothes.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Elliot leaned back, pushed his empty glass around on the table. ‘You get to recognise the smell. Something about them. And that bloke, I smelt it on him right away.’

‘So what did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t tell him nothing. I told him to fuck off. Then he hit me.’

Moses’s eyes opened wide. ‘What d’you mean he hit you?’

‘He fucking hit me. Right in the guts. Took me by surprise, didn’t he.’

Elliot drained his glass.

Moses was up to the bar and back again with two brandies like a man on elastic.

‘That was the other thing,’ Elliot said. ‘The way he hit me, right? One, blokes like that, they don’t go around hitting people, not unless something’s really getting on their tits. Two, he knew how to hit. I mean, he had a punch. There was muscle under that jacket. Technique too. He was a copper all right. No question.’

Elliot turned towards the stage. He registered no emotion or feeling of any kind. His mind had travelled somewhere else. It had left his face vacant, the bolts drawn, the power switched off at the mains. He was looking at Gloria, but he wasn’t seeing her at all.

After a minute or two Moses said, ‘So you don’t know what this bloke wanted?’

‘He wanted you,’ Elliot said, without taking his eyes off the stage.

‘It could’ve been a mistake. Why would anyone want me?’

Elliot touched his solar plexus. ‘It didn’t feel like a mistake.’

‘You didn’t tell him anything, though?’

‘No,’ and now Elliot turned back to look at Moses, ‘but he knew.’

Fear flickered down through Moses’s body. He swallowed the rest of his brandy. ‘I wonder what he wants,’ he said.

Elliot lit a Dunhill, tapped it on the edge of the ashtray. ‘Me and Ridley, we went after him, but we lost him in the park. He just vanished.’ He leaned his elbows on the table, held his cigarette close to his mouth as he talked. ‘I tried to trace him, asked around, made a few phone-calls, but nobody knows anything. He just vanished, like he was never there. Real thin air job.’

He finished his drink and stood up. ‘All I wanted to say was, watch yourself, all right? I don’t know who that bloke was, but he was a tough old sod and he had something on you.’ His hand moved across his stomach again like someone exploring a painful memory. ‘If he turns up again I’m going to get Ridley to sort him out.’

Moses nodded. ‘Thanks, Elliot. And thanks for telling me.’

As Elliot slipped away into the crowd, Gloria said, ‘Thank you,’ and slotted the microphone back on to its stand. She stepped down off the stage and walked over. She took one of Moses’s cigarettes. He lit it for her.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘How was I?’

‘Brilliant. You’re singing better than ever tonight.’

She eyed him curiously. ‘Are you OK, Moses?’

‘Yeah.’ He hoisted himself a little higher in his chair and assembled a smile for her. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking, that’s all.’

‘Did you hear Malone? Isn’t he great?’

‘I was too busy listening to you.’

Gloria laughed. ‘Moses, you’re a terrible liar.’

‘I was,’ Moses said. ‘Honestly.’

She touched his shoulder, then his cheek, and slipped away with a rustle of pink silk. She had to talk to the band. Letting his eyes drift beyond her, Moses noticed the clandestine figure of Jackson standing by the bar. Jackson seemed to be talking to Louise. Moses stood up, walked over.

‘Jackson,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

Jackson looked startled then shifty. He pulled his jacket in towards his body like a bird folding its wings. ‘I was just talking to Louise.’

‘I can see that.’ Moses turned to Louise. She was wearing a black T-shirt, black ski-pants with silver ankle-zips and black patent-leather pumps. It might have been The Bunker’s uniform. ‘I hear you’re going away.’

‘Holiday with my parents.’ Louise wrinkled her short nose. ‘Still, free sun, I suppose.’

‘Can’t be bad,’ said Moses, who had never been abroad in his life.

‘You don’t know my parents.’ Louise had an infectious chuckle, and Moses caught it. ‘I was just telling Jackson. I’m having a beach party. Two weeks’ time. You going to come?’

‘Love to. Where?’

‘Ask Gloria. She’s got the details.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Jackson said. ‘Look who it is.’

Moses turned to see Eddie steering his magnesium smile through the smoke.

Louise muttered, ‘I ought to be getting back to work.’

Jackson dipped his head into his pint, but his eyes clung to Louise as she disappeared behind a pillar. This startled Moses. He had seen Jackson look at clouds that way before, but never women. But now Eddie had arrived and was slapping Jackson on the back. Jackson’s beer slopped over.

‘Thank you, Eddie,’ Jackson said.

‘Jackson,’ Eddie said, ‘I thought you never drank.’

Jackson twisted his head to one side and smiled craftily, looking more than ever like a bird, the kind that steals jewellery. ‘Sometimes I go wild,’ he said.

They sat at Moses’s table in the corner. Eddie’s new lover had a sleeping eye that made anything she said seem ironic. But were these fringed white cowboy boots of hers ironic? Moses doubted it somehow. He wondered what number she was. 1,000? 1,500? Eddie was just saying that he’d had a pretty hectic week. Maybe 2,000, then. The girl laughed, unaware of the significance of Eddie’s remark.

In the meantime Gloria had climbed back on stage.

‘Me again.’ She held the mike in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. ‘Thanks for all your help this afternoon, Ridley. This one’s for you.’

Moses glanced round, but he couldn’t see the big man anywhere. Still, it was a nice gesture. Word would get back, and somewhere in that gigantic construction of muscle and bone, somewhere in that mobile pain-dispenser, there had to be a heart, a tattooed heart, no doubt, but a heart none the less.

He had been trying not to think about what Elliot had said, but the anonymous policeman kept bursting into his head regardless, as if his head was a house that was staging a party and all his usual thoughts were guests and the policeman was a policeman. ‘It’s a raid,’ came a calm voice. ‘Great party,’ his thoughts said, ‘really great, but I’m afraid we’ve got to be going now.’ And, reaching for their coats, they all filed out at the same time, left him alone in the house. Alone with the policeman …

‘ —and Malone on tenor sax — ’

Gloria was introducing the band. If he didn’t listen to the saxophone this time, she’d murder him.

He only had to wait until halfway through the next song, then Malone unleashed a sixty-second solo, and played with such raw soaring power, assembled such an intricate structure of notes, that listening to him was like being led through some extraordinary abandoned mansion. It was as if Malone somehow knew of Moses’s anxiety and was building a house specially for him, a different kind of house, a house where policemen would never appear at the door. The saxophone scaled the façade, dropped into an upstairs room, tiptoed across the landing, opened a door with rusty hinges, tripped, stumbled to the edge of a parapet, peered over, stepped sharply back, ran down flight after flight of stairs, through ballrooms peopled by the ghosts of dancers, through echoing cloisters and claustrophobic passageways, past windows with vistas and hushed rooms no longer used, tore through curtained doorways and out, finally, into the open air, paused to breathe the air, ran on through gardens with peacocks and fountains, along spacious landscaped avenues, past sudden explosions of plants from South America, and back down a sweeping gravel drive to the road where Gloria was waiting with the rest of the song.

‘Malone,’ she said, over the applause. ‘We just borrowed him for the night. I wish he didn’t have to go back — ’

‘Renew him,’ Moses shouted. ‘Renew him.’

Malone bowed majestically in his cylindrical brown coat.

Five minutes later Moses pushed his way through the crowd to buy another round of drinks. He swayed from side to side, collided with some people, rebounded off others, but he always did that when he was drunk, he meant nothing by it, so he was surprised when he heard somebody swear at him, surprised enough to turn and catch a glimpse of an unidentifiable object flying towards him at great speed.

At first he thought he was in bed because he was lying down and he felt strangely comfortable. But then he realised that the ceiling was the wrong colour and anyway, what would all these people be doing in his bedroom? They were bending over him and their heads looked like tulips, the hard conical shape of the buds before they open, and he wanted to laugh.

Gloria knelt beside him.

‘Why aren’t you singing?’ he asked her.

She gazed down at him sadly, as if he was dying in a film. ‘That’s over,’ she told him.

‘I must’ve missed the last bit,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Yes, you did.’

‘Malone was good.’

She smiled and ran a cool hand through his hair. ‘How do you feel?’

‘What happened?’

‘You got hit.’

Moses smiled faintly.

Now Ridley loomed above him. His one gold earring swung like something a hypnotist might use.

‘Moses,’ and Ridley held a finger up, ‘how many fingers can you see?’

‘One.’

Ridley held up two fingers. ‘How many now?’

‘That’s not nice, Ridley.’

‘He’s all right,’ Ridley told Gloria. ‘Better get him upstairs, though.’

They helped him up to his flat and put him to bed with an ice-pack over his eye. Gloria said she would stay the night.

‘That’s very nice of you,’ Moses mumbled, ‘to look after me.’

‘Don’t be a prick,’ she said.

He woke at midday, and this time he really was in bed. The right side of his face felt fragile and stiff, twice its normal size. He could hear Gloria singing somewhere. One of the songs from last night. She must be in the bathroom. He tried to open his eyes, but only the left one worked. There was a huge gold tiara outside the window. He closed the eye again.

‘Gloria?’ he called out.

He heard the floorboards creak as she walked into the bedroom.

‘Gloria?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Tell me what that gold tiara’s doing outside the window.’

Now he heard her laughing.

He opened his left eye again. The empty gasholder gleamed in the afternoon sun. The sun is clever, he thought. It can turn buildings into jewellery.

Gloria went out to the kitchen to make some coffee. When she returned, Moses was sitting up in bed with both eyes open. Gloria screamed and threw his coffee all over the wall.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Your eye.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look in the mirror.’

He crawled across the bed until his face appeared in the mirror. ‘Jesus,’ he gasped.

The white part of his right eye had flooded with blood. The right side of his face had swollen too; sheets of pain, bright as aluminium, flashed across the inside of his head when he pressed his cheek.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked. ‘I can’t remember a thing.’

‘Well, apparently you bumped into this guy and spilled beer all down him. It doesn’t seem like a very good reason to hit someone but Ridley said he knew the guy from somewhere. He used to be a boxer and he’s always looking for trouble.’

Moses groaned. ‘A boxer? Trust me to get hit by a boxer.’

‘Ridley threw him out. You should’ve seen it. He just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and chucked him in that skip. The guy was furious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so furious. But Ridley just stood there with his arms folded and said, “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”’ Gloria laughed and shook her head.

‘I wish I’d seen it,’ Moses said.

‘You were lying on the floor. You must’ve been out cold for about two minutes.’

Moses touched his cheek. ‘D’you think anything’s broken?’

‘I don’t know. It might be an idea to check.’

‘Have my head examined, you mean.’ Moses grinned. ‘Shit, it even hurts to grin.’

Gloria drove him to St Thomas’s in Waterloo. The doctor, an urbane Pakistani, told him that he had sustained a hairline fracture of the right cheekbone. It would heal naturally, he said. As for the eye, that was just a broken bloodvessel. He wrote Moses a prescription. There didn’t appear to be any concussion, he said, but he advised Moses to take things easy for a few days.

‘If I was you,’ he concluded, stroking his neck with an elegant tapering finger, ‘I should try not to get into any more fights with boxers.’

Moses promised to avoid anyone who looked even remotely like a boxer.

On the way back to The Bunker Gloria turned to him. ‘You know something else that happened last night? After I’d finished singing, Ridley came up to me. Oh shit, I thought, what’ve I done now? But he just put his hand on my shoulder and smiled and said, “That was fucking diamond.”’