Dreams of Leaving

Rockets in July

The Rover touched fifty-five as an art collector touches his own private Rodin. Moses loved his old car. Gloria had wanted to hire a Porsche to drive down to Louise’s party in (these girls with parents in Hampstead!), but a Porsche, they found out, cost about £130 a day and neither of them had that kind of money. Gloria capitulated gracefully. She settled for half a Porsche which, when commuted into powders and liquids, turned out to be a gram of coke and a Thermos of Smirnoff and crushed ice. Much more sensible.

‘So where is the party exactly?’ Moses asked her.

Gloria, navigator for the trip, snuggled down in her seat. ‘A place called Star Gap,’ she said. ‘It’s somewhere on the south coast. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.’

Moses nodded.

They had left the rain behind in Purley (where rain belongs) and as the car swung away from a roundabout and climbed up through the trees towards Godstone the sun broke through, beat like a sudden drum rhythm in his blood. He wound the window down, listened to the cymbal hiss of tyres on the wet road. Gloria put sunglasses on and pretended to be an Italian movie-star. Smiles journeyed between them. So did the Thermos of vodka.

They had been driving for an hour when Gloria sat up.

‘What about a deviation?’ she suggested.

Moses narrowed his eyes. ‘In what sense of the word?’

‘I thought that, on this occasion,’ she said, in a voice that left him in no doubt, ‘the two senses of the word might be combined in a single act.’

Moses smiled.

‘It’ll be the first time, you see. Outdoors, I mean. We can’t really count that greenhouse in Leicestershire, can we?’

Moses agreed that they couldn’t really count the greenhouse in Leicestershire.

Gloria consulted the map. ‘Now, let’s see. We’ll be passing through a big patch of light green soon and, according to this, light green means either forest, woodland, or an area of outstanding natural beauty, so what I— ’

‘That means that if you were on the map,’ Moses interrupted, ‘you’d be light green.’

‘That’s very nice of you, Moses,’ Gloria said, colouring slightly (though not light green). ‘Anyway,’ she went on, after they had kissed dangerously (Moses always closed his eyes when he kissed), ‘what I was going to say was, why don’t we deviate somewhere in this area of forest, woodland or outstanding natural beauty?’

‘Exactly what I was thinking. How far is it?’

‘About seven miles.’

Moses stamped on the accelerator. The needle on the speedometer swung wildly between fifty-eight and sixty-five mph.

Porsche indeed. Who needs a Porsche?

*

They parked on a scenic bank of leaf-mould about half a mile up a lane that led eventually, so Gloria maintained, to a village called Balls Green. Gloria was so taken with the name that she was all for checking it out right away until Moses leaned over and, resting a hand on her wrist, gently reminded her that their departure from the main road (deviation in the first sense) had a specific purpose (deviation in the second sense) and Gloria was so overwhelmed by his logic and his singlemindedness that she instantly put all other thoughts out of her head.

They had a line of coke each in the car. Gloria began to slip out of her shorts.

‘In here?’ Moses looked surprised.

Gloria laughed. ‘No. I’m just changing.’

From surprise to bewilderment. ‘Changing?’

‘You’ll see.’

Outside the clouds parted to reveal a sky of almost transparent blue. Trees shifted their leaves and branches like people exercising. The air had warmed up.

Moses stood a little way from the car and let the sun move over his face.

Then Gloria was walking towards him in a long black skirt that she had fastened at the waist with a studded leather belt. She put an arm round him. ‘You know what I think, Moses? I think this is an area of outstanding natural beauty.’

He looked down at her and said, ‘Well, it is now, anyway.’

Hand in hand, they strolled up a mud track between massed banks of blackberry bushes and old man’s beard. Gloria noticed a stile set back in the hedgerow and a field beyond.

‘What about in there?’ she said.

They surveyed the field together. Lining one side, a row of silver birches, their bark scalloped, edged in black, catching the sun like the scales on fish. Tough springy grass sloped up to a copse at the far end. No sign of any livestock.

‘A perfect field,’ Moses said.

He vaulted over the stile. Gloria handed him the Thermos and followed, pinching her skirt between finger and thumb, as ladies descending staircases in ballgowns do. Moses, waiting below, ran a hand up her thigh. It encountered nothing but warm bare skin. Gloria smiled. Moses began to understand the full significance of the skirt.

They sat side by side on the grass. They drank vodka and breathed the lush agricultural air. Gloria said she could smell magnolia and Moses agreed, even though he couldn’t really think what magnolia smelt like. It was that kind of field.

Soon she was arranging herself on top of him, and it wasn’t long before he was inside her in a way that she had engineered and he was very happy with. Her skirt hid their four legs and far more besides.

‘You’re cunning,’ Moses said. The skirt, he meant.

Gloria smiled. ‘Someone’s got to think ahead.’

They fell silent, moved together. For a while it seemed as if Sussex might prove to be more accommodating than Leicestershire. Gloria could have been a tree doing its exercises. Sometimes her body shuddered as if a gust of wind had caught it, and one arm rose into the air beside her ear, the hand clenching and unclenching. Her eyelids trembled like leaves. Moses grasped her by the waist with both hands, twisted his face sideways into the grass. He closed his eyes. No sky any more. Only this green smell and the arching of his back. It was extraordinary how quickly she could move him from humour to ecstasy.

Then he heard the cough.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he came back to say.

But they had both heard it. A harsh bronchial cough, such as belonged in a doctor’s waiting-room rather than in an area of outstanding natural beauty, if not for its own sake, for theirs. Gloria had the presence of mind to leave her body exactly where it was.

‘Pretend we’re having a fight,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do the talking.’

Moses began to struggle, though not too hard, for fear of displacing the skirt.

A man leaned over the stile. He wore a flat cap and a pair of shabby corduroys. A burlap sack bulged on his back. His tiny eyes circled the field, moving jerkily as flies, then settled on the young couple in the grass below.

‘That’s a private field, that is,’ he observed.

Gloria launched into a complicated story about how they were driving down to visit friends on the south coast and how they had stopped to stretch their legs and how they had then got into an argument and how they were now sorting out their differences and how they would soon be on their way because they were already late for lunch.

The man said, ‘Ah.’

Gloria assured him that it would only be a matter of a few minutes and that they would leave the field exactly as they had found it because they both had a great respect for the countryside, in fact they adored it, and what they were supposed to be doing this weekend, actually, was looking for a house, the house they would live in after they had got married, though, after today, she was having second thoughts about the whole thing.

The man eyed them with suspicion, a look that seemed to reflect, more than anything else, the immense gap between their lives and his, a look that had a gloating lascivious edge to it that made them both uneasy. They were relieved when he hoisted his sack higher on his shoulder and took a step backwards. But there he paused again.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t think I don’t know what you’re really up to.’ He nodded, coughed, spat twice, and, turning away, disappeared up the track.

‘Well, we’ve tried Sussex and we’ve tried Leicestershire,’ Gloria said, as they walked back to the car. ‘How many counties does that leave?’

Moses didn’t know.

‘What a country,’ Gloria sighed. ‘We’ll just have to keep trying, I suppose. One day, somewhere, it’ll happen.’

Moses agreed that this was a desirable goal and one that would prove most satisfying, he thought, when accomplished.

They climbed back into the car. Moses started the engine. They looked at each other and sighed again.

‘Coitus interruptus,’ Moses said.

They drove away.

*

Fifteen minutes later they were passing through a village when Moses said he had to stop for a piss.

‘Can’t you wait until we get out into the country?’ Gloria asked him.

Moses swung the car on to a grass verge. ‘Oh, this’ll do.’

They had stopped outside the last house in the village. A simple redbrick house with a glass porch, white windows, and a blue front door. A framed notice, protected by a sheet of glass and mounted on two wooden posts, grew out of the low privet hedge that separated the front garden from a narrow strip of asphalt pavement. Moses, squinting, could only read the word POLICE. That’s a funny place for a police notice, he thought.

Gloria got out and, leaving her door open, eased up on to the bonnet, wincing as the heat from the engine seeped through the thin fabric of her skirt. Moses crossed the road. He scaled a ditch and stood facing away from the car.

‘Carthorse,’ Gloria jeered.

Moses turned and grinned at her over his shoulder. He was about to say something when a movement behind her distracted him. The blue front door was opening. A policeman emerged.

Moses’s heart plummeted down through his body like a lift with the cables cut. He clutched, one-handed, at the place where it had once been. He had just remembered the Thermos of vodka on the floor of the car. And the coke in the glove compartment. And Gloria had mentioned something about having some grass on her. He tried to warn her by making a serious face but all she did was make faces back. He watched helplessly as the policeman came up behind her.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ the policeman said.

Gloria leapt off the bonnet.

‘I’m sorry,’ the policeman said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Gloria said.

The policeman smiled remotely. ‘People in the village say I have a very soft tread.’

By now Moses was standing next to Gloria. Tiny wet spots spattering the front of his trousers testified to the haste with which he had finished his business on the other side of the road.

‘Good afternoon, officer,’ he said. He hoped it sounded brisk enough. But co-operative at the same time.

‘You know, for a moment,’ the policeman said, transferring his gaze from Gloria’s face to Moses’s, ‘I thought you were going to piss all over my hedge.’

Moses and Gloria both laughed — rather too abruptly, perhaps. The policeman waited until they had stopped and then smiled unnervingly as if he knew something which they were only pretending to know.

As he turned his attention to the car, however, a change came over him. He became more enervated, less sinister. He seemed to find the number-plates particularly interesting.

‘This your car, is it?’ he asked, managing to translate his mounting excitement into an official question.

Moses said that it was.

‘May I ask where you’re coming from?’

‘London.’

‘London,’ the policeman repeated in a voice that had thickened like soup. He rolled the word sensually on his tongue. He seemed to regret that there were only two syllables; Aberystwyth, for instance, would have been better. None the less, saliva was beginning to flood into the narrow troughs between his cheeks and his gums.

‘But that,’ he continued, indicating the number-plate with his boot, ‘unless I’m much mistaken, is a Midlands number-plate, is it not? In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a Leicester number-plate. Am I right?’

As he pronounced the word ‘Leicester’, a bright jet of saliva spurted from the side of his mouth. Moses watched it trickle down the car-door. What the fuck is going on here? he wondered.

He began to explain that, yes, they were Leicester number-plates because the car had originally come from Leicester. A friend of his, who had moved away from Leicester, up to Edinburgh, in fact, had sold it to him. But that was four years ago and he himself now lived in London.

This casual dropping of the names Leicester, Edinburgh and London in such rapid succession was proving too much for the policeman. He had unfurled an enormous white handkerchief, almost the size of a sailcloth, and was pressing it to his mouth. The handkerchief was drenched in seconds. Unwilling to risk speech again for hydrological reasons, his excitement now unquenchable, he seemed to be about to wave them on their way. And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the matter. But Gloria chose that moment to glance back down the road.

‘What’s that?’ she cried.

The two men swung round. One of those old-fashioned motorised wheelchairs with a khaki canvas surround and plastic windows whined round the bend towards them. But there was something about this wheelchair, Moses was thinking, that wasn’t quite right. As it drew level, he realised what had been troubling him. The wheelchair wasn’t a real wheelchair; it was a motorbike disguised as a wheelchair.

‘Good Christ,’ the policeman exclaimed, allowing the handkerchief to drop away from his mouth (and hosing down one side of Moses’s car as a result), ‘that’s old Dinwoodie!’

He raised his whistle to his lips and tried to blow a piercing blast, but all he succeeded in producing was a spray of furious white froth. As he looked on, foaming, impotent, the wheelchair accelerated with an unexpected surge of power and simultaneously jettisoned its entire outer shell to reveal a pre-war olive-green BSA. It was a quite extraordinary moment — like watching a rocket leaving the earth’s atmosphere or a chrysalis releasing a butterfly. Old Dinwoodie vanished round a curve in the road with one arm raised in triumph, his grey hair flapping on his shoulders, blue smoke belching from his exhaust.

The policeman cried out, half in anguish, half in exhilaration. He turned and raced back into the house, spraying a cluster of rose-bushes as he went which, as it happened, were in dire need of water because it had been an unusually dry summer in the south-east.

‘Emergency, poppet,’ he slobbered.

Through the open door Moses saw the policeman brush his wife aside and begin to ransack a cupboard under the stairs. Moments later the policeman emerged again, brandishing a megaphone and a red-and-white-striped police-beacon, one of those plastic ones with a magnetic bottom. Ignoring his wife, he burst from the house, sprinted across the lawn, and hurdled the privet hedge, helmet askew, uniform marinating in the juices now flowing freely from his mouth.

‘Quick!’ he spluttered as he reached up and attached his beacon to the roof of Moses’s car. ‘Quick! Before he gets away!’

Moses gazed at the policeman in utter stupefaction. He was beginning to think that the man was dangerously mad. He looked across at Gloria for guidance or advice. Gloria was giggling. He looked at the policeman again.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘What are you waiting for?’ the policeman shrieked. ‘Follow that wheelchair!’

It dawned on Moses that his car was about to be appropriated for police purposes. The policeman had already bundled Gloria into the back seat. Now he was in the process of clambering into the front himself. The Thermos of vodka rolled against his boots but he kicked it away without seeming to notice.

Moses walked round to the driver’s side and climbed in. The policeman was sitting in the passenger seat, hunched over, rigid, mopping at his mouth. He was staring at the windscreen like somebody watching their favourite programme on TV. Moses started the engine. He didn’t understand what was happening, he didn’t know what kind of policeman this policeman was, but he had decided that it would be wisest to play along, for the time being at least. And besides, he thought, relaxing a fraction now it seemed that the car wasn’t going to be searched after all, it isn’t every day that a policeman tells you to follow a wheelchair, especially a wheelchair that isn’t a wheelchair but a motorbike disguised as a wheelchair.

They had only been driving for two or three minutes when the motorbike came into view about half a mile ahead on the open road. Moses was disappointed. He had been looking forward to breaking the speed limit. Legally, for once.

‘He isn’t really trying,’ he complained.

‘Oh yes he is,’ the policeman said. ‘He’s trying like absolute hell.’

He could imagine exactly what was going through old Dinwoodie’s head, he told them. He had done his homework and he recognised the symptoms. That initial rush of adrenalin would even out into a feeling of euphoria, one hundred per cent euphoria, which, in turn, would give way to a sense of disconnection, creeping up gradually, stealthily, making everything seem unreal, paranormal, only distantly experienced.

Moses absorbed this curious information in silence.

When Gloria asked the policeman whether he had brought any handcuffs along, the policeman replied with a confidence that was almost patronising. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We shan’t be needing anything like that.’ He had his saliva under control at last which made it possible to pick up the tremor of exultation in his voice.

Meanwhile they were still gaining rapidly on old Dinwoodie. The policeman removed his helmet. Then he wound the window down and leaned out with his megaphone.

‘Dinwoodie? This is Police Constable Marlpit. Please pull over to the side of the road immediately. I repeat, please pull over immediately.’

He shook his head and turned to Moses. There was a very good reason, he explained, why his words were having so little effect. Old Dinwoodie had just caught a glimpse of the South Downs for the first time in his life. They stretched away above the trees, they stretched into a distance he had dreamed about. Their modest green undulations, the copses nestling in their hollows like soft green explosions, like miniature puffs of smoke, brought tears to his eyes. They were more beautiful than he had ever imagined. And he was floating towards them, untouchable, part of everything. He was dissolving. He could no longer feel where his body ended and the air began. It flowed round him as the grain in a length of wood flows round a knot. Everything was warm and slow, and there were no sharp edges any more, no needs, no pain. His goggles were misting over. His grip on the throttle was relaxing.

During this monologue Moses couldn’t, at certain points, be sure if Marlpit was talking about himself or about Dinwoodie. There seemed to be a temporary blurring of identities. As if Marlpit had inhabited, and could read, Dinwoodie’s mind.

By the time Moses drew alongside the motorbike, his speed had dropped to fifteen miles an hour. ‘This has got to be the slowest car-chase in history,’ he muttered to himself.

PC Marlpit was bellowing through his megaphone again. Old Dinwoodie just didn’t seem to hear.

‘Jesus,’ Moses said. ‘He’s driving with his eyes shut.’

Even as he spoke the motorbike slowly wandered off the road, slid sideways down a muddy bank, and folded in a ditch. Dinwoodie sat up in the long grass, dazed but unhurt, his goggles dangling from one ear. His eyes were open now. Tears were streaming down his face.

Moses pulled into the side of the road.

Marlpit climbed out. ‘I shan’t be needing you any more,’ he said. He leaned his elbows on the window. ‘However, I would like to thank you, on behalf of the village constabulary, for your patience and your co-operation.’

He fitted his helmet back on to his head and detached the beacon from the roof of the car.

‘Excuse me, officer,’ Moses said, ‘but what did old Dinwoodie do exactly?’

‘Oh,’ Marlpit blustered, genial now, almost offhand, shaking his head at the improbability of events, ‘he was just trying to escape, that’s all.’

And before Moses could question him further, he about-faced and marched back up the road to where old Dinwoodie was sitting, hands draped over his knees.

‘Escape?’ Moses said, half to himself. ‘Where from?’

A prison? An asylum? Certainly old Dinwoodie looked a bit mad, with his antique leather flying-helmet and his spaced-out teeth and his tears all caught up in the bristles on his cheeks — but what about Marlpit? That wasn’t exactly normal behaviour for a policeman, was it?

Gloria made a face as she climbed back into the front seat. Marlpit’s saliva had left a long dark stain on the tan leather. It bore a curious resemblance to a truncheon. She stared into the distance for a while, as if hypnotised. Then she turned to Moses.

‘Did you see?’ she said. ‘He was crying.’

Moses nodded. He glanced in his rear-view mirror. He watched Marlpit bend down and begin to brush the mud and twigs off old Dinwoodie’s trouser-legs. Dinwoodie stood in the ditch, as helpless as a child, wiping his face with the backs of his hands.

Moses shifted into gear and pulled away.

‘Nobody’s going to believe this,’ he said.

*

Barely wide enough for two cars, the road bumped down towards the sea between fields of green wheat and treeless hillsides cropped by flocks of sheep. Look for a white hotel, Louise had said.

Gloria saw the building first. It sat on a sharp bend where the road veered away from the cliffs and ran inland again, as if frightened for its own safety. A gravel car-park lay to the right, bounded on one side by a pub and a café and on the other by a row of fishermen’s cottages. The cliffs dropped downwards here, then sloped up again, forming a kind of shallow bowl against the sky. The sea filled the bottom of the bowl.

Moses stopped the car in front of the pub.

Star Gap.

The cliffs eroded as much as seven feet a year in some places, Louise had told them. One of the cottages had toppled on to the beach a while back. Now only one inside wall remained, flush with the cliff-edge. You could still see the patterned wallpaper, the outline of fireplaces, the empty squares where the ghosts of pictures hung.

Women in sheepskin coats walked their dogs along the beach at dawn and dusk. Pensioners ate ham sandwiches in their warm cars, tartan blankets draped over their knees. Fishermen still fished; their boats, drawn up in neat formation on the pebbles, foamed with orange netting. Foreign students turned up on bicycles, played guitars or radios, sunbathed topless. But none of this could dispel the forlorn doomed atmosphere of the place. You didn’t have to be Madame Zola to see that it had no future to look forward to. The air, though bracing, harboured a curious smell of decay (seaweed? rotting fish? the mobile toilets?), and all the colours — the pastel blues, the pearly greys of the cottages, the lemon-yellow and peppermint-green of the café — had bleached over the years, were slowly becoming different shades of white. You could imagine a corpse being found there, months after the investigation, when everyone had given up hope, when it no longer meant anything. Then Moses remembered Louise telling him a story about how, in the early seventies, the police thought they had discovered Lord Lucan’s body in the gorse bushes behind the pub. It had turned out to be someone far less important.

‘Strange place for a party,’ he said.

‘Louise used to come down here a lot when she was a kid,’ Gloria told him. ‘Her parents’ve got a house a few miles inland.’

They took another couple of lines of coke each and walked to the cliff-edge. A makeshift staircase built out of scaffolding, splintery planks, and wire mesh led down to a wide pebble beach. The coastline curved away to the west, the chalk of the cliffs pocked like cheese and topped with a layer of grass as thin as rind. They leaned on the safety-rail. All the metal had turned brown and orange, and the colour rubbed off on their hands and sleeves.

It didn’t matter.

The sun pressed their faces gently into the book of the day like flowers.

A rustling as Gloria’s hands dived into her bag, did a miniature breaststroke through its contents, and surfaced again with a pair of sunglasses.

She could bring something to the most simple action — something that no one else could bring. It didn’t have a name, this something that she brought. It just ran through her movements like a current and carried him away.

Her eyes invisible now behind the sunglasses, she smiled at him with her mouth as if she had guessed what he was thinking.

Then her mouth altered and she lifted an arm.

‘That must be them. Over there.’

He turned.

About a hundred people clustered at the base of the cliffs. Some danced, others sunbathed.

Music blared, faded, blared on the shifting air.

‘Yes, I can see Louise.’

Gloria pointed to a tiny figure in a blue bikini. They waved and shouted and the tiny figure in the blue bikini waved back. They ran down the steps and across the pebbles, their shoes crunching like a lot of people eating apples at the same time.

Louise looked great. The Spanish sun had bleached her hair white-blonde. Her deep tan turned them into ghosts.

‘Look at you.’ Gloria hugged her. ‘How was it?’

‘Costa del phoney,’ Louise laughed. ‘The beach wasn’t even a real beach. Just a lot of stones and grit all ground up to look like sand, but it didn’t look like sand, it looked more like grey dust. And it was packed. People lying about four deep like a mass grave or something. So we went up the mountain to this private swimming-club every day and lay around and drank and did absolutely fuck all.’

‘I hate you,’ Gloria said.

‘You look wonderful,’ Moses said. ‘Elliot’ll be all over you.’

Louise laughed. ‘Same old Moses. How’s the eye?’

Moses turned his head sideways and leaned towards her.

‘Shame,’ Louise said. ‘I thought it had a bit of class, that eye. Like you were possessed or something.’

‘I think maybe I was that night,’ Moses said, remembering.

‘Hey, Louise, you old tart.’ Gloria flung her arms around her friend again. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘Twenty-one,’ Louise groaned.

‘Oh shut up,’ Moses said.

‘Well,’ Louise said, ‘the drink’s over there, the sea’s over there, and later on — ’ she pointed to a mountain of boxes, crates and driftwood — ‘there’s going to be a bonfire.’

‘I’m going to go off and explore,’ Moses said. ‘You know, look for treasures. It’s ages since I’ve been to the beach.’

The two girls grinned at each other.

He scrambled down a steep bank. The stones had been shored up in a smooth frozen copy of a wave. They rattled like metal chains as he dislodged them. When he reached the sand he took his shoes and socks off.

It was low tide. The sea had rolled back, exposing its seedy underworld: rocks, shells, rusty metal spars, clots of oil, rotting netting, seaweed, driftwood, jagged cans, plastic detergent bottles, bits of junk from Holland and France. There was something magical about these battered travelled objects, though. You never knew what might turn up at your feet. A piece of blue glass, for instance, polished to a jewel by the sea, as if the sea was a craftsman and each of its waves a skilful, practised movement of a hand. Real treasures. He stepped from one rock to the next, keeping his eyes fixed on his feet so as not to slip. When he looked up again, the party had shrunk to nothing. He was alone.

The sea lay flat — sluggish, almost greasy. Waves creased and uncreased lazily, folds in blue leather. An oil tanker sat on the horizon. He squatted on his haunches, skimmed a few stones. His thinking slowed, moved at a leisurely pace like a procession, each thought a carriage drawn by two patient horses. Some of the thoughts were linked, some seemed random and didn’t belong, some repeated themselves over and over. He had put distance between himself and the party, and he now became aware that, in some mysterious deep-rooted way, he had been thinking about the same thing all along: old Dinwoodie. Suddenly the patient horses acquired plumes, the carriages turned black, the whole procession mourned what had happened to him. In that rare blue seaside air the incident began to crystallise. Two portraits. In the first the old man sat in tearful confusion, twigs and grass stuck to his jacket, badges of despair, his eyes containing nothing but the fragments of some broken dream. In the second the policeman gloated at the motorbike as it grew in the windscreen, his hands braced on his knees, drool on his uniform, in the grip, it seemed, of an exquisite tension or excitement. The old man’s tears, the policeman’s saliva. Misery and greed.

‘Hey!’

He recognised the old man’s feelings, knew them inside out. Nights in the orphanage. Awake in the darkness. Nineteen others sleeping. The rise and fall of their breathing. An empire of lost children. Sometimes imagining himself alone. Then it would seem as if the very air had come alive. Frightened then. Turning the damp pillow. Pulling the coarse blankets over his head.

And then the day the Poles had come to take him away in their old Ford Anglia. The smell of those blue plastic seats as they drove north. The smell of freedom.

And I helped the policeman, he thought.

What had the policeman said? Something like, Oh, he’s just trying to escape, that’s all.

That’s all.

And I helped the policeman.

‘Hey! Moses!’

That wasn’t one of his thoughts. That had come from somewhere behind him.

*

Looking round blinded him at first. The intense whiteness of those soaring walls of chalk. Then the shout came again, abrasive, familiar, redirecting him. Now he could see two figures sitting at the foot of the cliffs. Was that Vince? What was he doing here?

Moses started up the beach. It sloped sharply, and the pebbles ran out from beneath his feet. He felt like someone trying to go up an escalator that’s going down. In the end he had to drop on to all fours.

Vince — for it was Vince — jeered from his vantage-point. He was leaning against a rock, his arm around a girl. Moses had to smile. Typical Vince to come to a party and then sit as far away from it as possible. He looked totally out of place in these natural surroundings. The sun lit every crease and crevice in his haggard face, and showed up all the stains on that infamous black waistcoat.

He handed Moses a bottle of brandy. ‘You weren’t expecting to see me, were you,’ he said, as if that alone justified the trip down.

Moses swallowed a mouthful of brandy and handed it back. ‘Thanks. No. So why are you here?’

‘Eddie told me about it.’ Vince passed the bottle to the girl. She held it to her lips and tipped her head back. Three gulps. It wasn’t the first time she had drunk brandy out of a bottle.

‘So Eddie’s here too?’ Moses said.

‘Yeah. He gave us a lift down.’

‘Christ, you’re lucky to be alive.’ Moses addressed this remark to the girl.

She twisted the bottle into the stones so it stood upright. She had fat arms and a big awkward body, but when she smiled she looked like a madonna. It was a really beautiful face.

‘You’re not kidding,’ she said. ‘That Eddie, he drives like a fucking maniac.’

A madonna with a Liverpool accent.

‘That’s because he is a fucking maniac,’ Moses said.

‘Fucking right.’ The word fucking sounded so much better coming out of her mouth. It might have been invented specially for girls from Liverpool. ‘No way am I going back in that car. I’d rather walk.’ She shook herself. ‘He gives me the creeps, anyway. He a friend of yours?’

Vince looked at Moses.

‘Sort of,’ Moses said. ‘We used to live together.’

The girl closed her eyes, offered her wide pale eyelids to the sun. Vince sifted stones with his dirty fingers.

‘I knew there was something different about you,’ Moses said. ‘Your arms.’

‘Yeah, they didn’t do a bad job, did they?’

The bandages had come off. Thin red scars ran the length of his forearms where the glass had lifted flaps of skin away, but they were main roads on a map not the railway lines you get with stitches.

‘So tape really does work,’ Moses said. ‘Three months and you’ll be able to do it again.’

Vince grinned, leaned back against the rock. No rise out of him at all. No venom. For the first time ever Moses could imagine Vince living beyond thirty. Vince with a wife and kids. Vince with a mortgage, a food-processor, and a sense of responsibility. He put it down to the influence of this girl from Liverpool, whose name, Vince finally told him, was Debra. No o, noh.

‘Don’t think my parents knew how to spell it,’ she said.

Most people called her Zebra, she told him, because she wore a lot of black and white, and at least that was spelt right. She took another long pull on the brandy, lit a Benson and Hedges, and stared out towards the sea.

‘I’ve always been fat,’ she said. ‘Once I screwed up this weighing-machine in Blackpool. I was so heavy it thought I was a fucking man.’ She chuckled. ‘It called me sir. My mum nearly died.’

She tapped the end of her cigarette. The ash fell, invisible, against the grey pebbles. ‘Once I got so depressed I almost did myself in.’ A pause. Then her madonna smile. ‘Didn’t have the guts, did I.

‘I’m pretty used to being fat now. Fuck it is what I think. It’s me, isn’t it. Fucked if I’m going to change. Like I like chips, right?’

‘And alcohol,’ Vince murmured.

‘And alcohol. Fucked if I’m going to give them up just to please some git in a magazine.’

‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘It’s like someone telling me I ought to be shorter or something.’

Debra nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘I’m not supposed to be short and you’re not supposed to be thin and — ’ Moses glanced at Vince’s arms — ‘you’re not supposed to be alive.’

Debra smiled, but Vince ignored the remark. ‘You’re not fat, Zeb,’ he said. ‘You’re more sort of voluptuous, really.’

‘Fuck off, Vincent.’ And before Vince could move, Debra was sitting on his chest.

Vince began to struggle. ‘I’ll beat shit out of you,’ he warned her. ‘I will.’

She just laughed. ‘You couldn’t beat shit out of a nappy.’

Moses watched her pin Vince’s scarred arms to the ground; it was good to see Vince being treated with the respect he deserved. He wondered why she had told them all that stuff about herself. Maybe she had always been teased, he thought. And maybe, over the years, she had learned to get in first herself, to sound at home with her disadvantages, before people could start pointing fingers or cracking jokes. He liked her, he decided. She was someone else who didn’t quite fit. The world would never be off the peg for either of them.

*

Half an hour later Moses said he really ought to be getting back to the party.

Vince and Debra, arm in arm and reconciled, told him they were staying put.

Moses motioned to the bottle of brandy, almost empty now. ‘But aren’t you going to run out pretty soon?’

Vince patted the carrier-bag beside him. A clink of glass answered Moses’s question. He should have known that Vince would provide for his own oblivion.

The sun, coppery now, was dropping into a bank of grey cloud. Safe deposit for the night. The tide had turned. The sea, ruled into straight lines by the waves, was covered with the hieroglyphics of swimmers — black dots for heads, the pale flash of arms.

Walking back through the fading light, he stopped whenever he thought he saw something interesting. Most stones seemed to be grey (flint) or white (chalk). If he stared hard enough he found his eyes began to invent exceptions. But as soon as he crouched down, touched one with his hand, it turned ordinary again. This process repeated itself, as if it was a lesson he was supposed to be learning. Some stones, he noticed, were the strangest most luminous colours when wet, but if you picked them up and dried them off they lost their allure, looked just like a million other stones. He did find a few treasures, though: a meteorite, no bigger than a ping-pong ball, rust-brown, fissured as a brain; several smooth pieces of glass, white on the outside, blue, yellow or green on the inside, like boiled sweets dusted with sherbet; and a dull green stone the exact shape of a lady’s automatic. He fitted this last stone into his palm and bounced his hand in the air a couple of times, as he had seen people do with guns, testing it for weight and balance. It felt good: small, compact — good. He raised his arm stiffly, aimed at the setting sun, and fired.

A red stain appeared in the sky away to the right. He must’ve missed. Hit a cloud by mistake.

He blew across the barrel of his new stone gun.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

*

Somebody had lit the bonfire. Scraps of paper floated upwards with the smoke, then dived and swooped, jittery as bats, glowed red until the black air blew them out. Sometimes a damp branch whined or popped, spat sparks, tiny flutes of steam, jets of green flame. It was a warm night, but the fire drew people in. Their disembodied faces hung in the darkness. In that leaping athletic light, they looked like caricatures of themselves — their noses pulled, their lips grimacing, their eyes coloured-in black. Moses recognised Alison, though. She looked more Pre-Raphaelite than ever with her wide tranquil forehead and her scorching red abundance of hair. He made his way round the fire towards her.

When she saw him she let out a little cry of surprise. She hadn’t known he was coming, how was he, what had he been doing — her usual flurry of familiarities and exclamations.

‘Have you seen Vince?’ he asked her.

‘Not for weeks,’ came her reply. It was funny, but whenever you mentioned Vince’s name these three lines appeared on her forehead like seagulls flying in formation.

‘What I meant was, have you seen him here?’ He tried to put his hands in his pockets, but he had crammed them too full of treasures. Ballast for his lightheadedness.

‘What?’ Alison cried. ‘Is Vince here?’ Dismay loosened the skin round her mouth.

Since Vince was their only common ground, they usually ended up treading all over him whenever they talked to each other. These days Alison trod warily. She didn’t regret leaving Vince, not for a second, but one nagging fear remained: the fear that she wasn’t free of him, that he was still attached to her, as if by a length of elastic, that he might spring back into her life at any moment. I don’t like emotional blackmail, and I certainly don’t like being hit for failing to respond to it, she had told Moses more than once. I don’t measure love in bruises, she had said on another occasion — rather sententiously, Moses thought. Still, he could hardly disagree with the sentiment, and when he talked to her he often found himself having to reassure her or, more accurately, perhaps, having to listen to her reassure herself. She was tough, he still believed that, but Vince seemed to have touched a nerve in her, a nervousness, and brought it to the surface, put it on display. She felt the threat of his presence so acutely. Now she knew he had come to the party she kept glancing over her shoulder, probing the darkness around her. Vince was out there, she was thinking, plotting something malevolent against her. She was wrong. The only person that Vince was capable of plotting something malevolent against was himself.

‘I wasn’t expecting him to turn up,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d known that, I would’ve thought twice about coming.’ She stabbed at some stones with the toe of her shoe. ‘Shit,’ she broke out, bitterly. ‘Everything was going so well.’

Vince might have planned the whole thing out of spite, purely to spoil her evening. A fourth seagull appeared on her forehead.

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making out,’ Moses said. ‘I don’t think he even knows you’re here.’

Alison said nothing.

‘And even if he finds out I don’t think he’ll bother you.’ He tried to put it tactfully. ‘He didn’t come alone, you see. He brought somebody with him.’

All four seagulls banked and vanished. They left only the faintest of after-images. It was so neat a reversal that Alison’s face might have been a coin that somebody had just flipped over.

‘Who’s he with?’

‘A girl called Debra.’

‘Debra?’ Alison looked thoughtful.

‘You probably don’t know her. I only met her today.’

‘What’s she like?’

Moses knew Alison well enough to have anticipated this: the is-she-good-looking bit.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not taking sides.’

‘I didn’t ask you to take sides. I just asked you what she was like.’

Moses sighed. ‘She comes from Liverpool. She’s got a good sense of humour. She doesn’t put up with any bullshit.’

Alison looked up sharply. ‘What’s she doing with Vince then?’

Moses had to laugh because he had just thought exactly the same thing. But he wasn’t going to give Alison the satisfaction of knowing that. ‘That’s her problem,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you forget about Vince? Pretend he isn’t here. I mean, you probably won’t see him anyway. The last time I saw him he was sitting about two miles away. Way over there, under the cliffs. “Fuck the party,” he said. “I’m staying where I am.”’

Alison picked up her drink, smiled into it sadly, almost fondly. ‘Typical Vince,’ she murmured.

Moses looked away from her.

The moon had floated up into the night sky. Someone had cut its string. Cut mine, he thought. That afternoon, after leaving the village behind, Gloria had said, Let’s change the mood. She’d rolled a fat joint and they’d smoked it driving. It’d worked. Suddenly they were out of their heads and laughing, and Moses had spun off into fantasy. He’d imagined making drunk uninterrupted love to Gloria on a bed of sand, he’d imagined swimming afterwards with nothing on, he’d imagined moonlight on the surface of the water.

Well, at least the moon was playing its part. A stack of silver dishes reached from the shoreline to the horizon, swaying with the motion of the waves.

But where was Gloria? He hadn’t seen her for ages.

Alison broke into his silence. ‘I was just thinking, Moses. Why don’t you come round to my parents’ house next Sunday? We often have people round on Sundays. I think you’d enjoy it.’

Moses remembered talking to Alison’s mother on the phone once. He remembered the allure in her voice. ‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘ll call you next week, OK?’

Soon afterwards Alison drifted away to talk to somebody else.

Moses didn’t mind in the least. You could overdose on Alison. Still, he would take her up on that invitation.

*

While he was rooting about among sausage-boxes and sacks of briquettes, Moses looked up and saw Jackson skulking in the shadows of a recent rock-fall. Jackson was clutching a brown paper parcel in both hands and looking apprehensive, as if he was about to walk into an ambush; he kept advancing a few paces then stopping again, bending forwards from the waist and twisting his head this way and that.

‘Jackson,’ Moses called out.

Jackson started, turned round. He brought one hand up to shield his eyes against the glare of the fire.

‘Oh, it’s you, Moses.’

Jackson had travelled down alone by train. The parcel was a box of rockets, he explained. A birthday present for Louise.

He perched on a crate, the parcel on his lap. ‘You’ve no idea how difficult it is,’ he said, ‘to find rockets in July.’

Moses suppressed a smile. Only Jackson would’ve thought of such a thing.

‘In one of the shops the woman got really angry with me,’ Jackson said. ‘She told me I was four months early. “Four months early?” I said. “Why?” “November the fifth,” she said.’ He shook his head as he remembered.

He had been looking for Louise for hours. ‘It’s so dark,’ he complained. ‘I keep treading on people.’

Moses laughed. ‘We’ll find her together.’

Jackson hadn’t thought of looking in the sea. They were walking along the shoreline when Moses saw her ten yards out.

‘Louise,’ he shouted. ‘Here a moment.’

Clouds had hidden the moon. When Louise stood up, the water wrapped itself around her thighs, looked as if it didn’t want to let her go. She stumbled as the undertow sucked pebbles past her feet, but struggled free and ran towards them smiling.

‘Jackson,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it.’ She snatched up a white towel and began to rub her hair, tilting her head first to one side then to the other.

‘Here,’ and Jackson held out the parcel, ‘this is for you.’

Draping the towel round her shoulders, Louise accepted the parcel, examined it, all four sides of it, with her wet hands, left dark fingerprints on the brown paper. She held it to her ear and shook it gently, two dents of puzzlement between her eyebrows, but waves kept breaking behind her with a dull thump and foam came sliding round her ankles, drowning any other sound she might have heard. Jackson said nothing, content, it seemed, simply to watch her. She tore the brown paper off and pulled out an oblong box secured with Sellotape. She broke the Sellotape with her teeth and opened the lid. The rockets lay inside, tightly packed, two rows deep. Bright red and yellow. Twisted blue-black touchpapers. Long blond launching-sticks.

‘There’s twenty-one of them,’ Jackson explained, ‘because that’s how old you are.’

And then, when she still didn’t say anything, he shifted from one foot to the other and added, ‘You know, like the candles on a cake.’

When Louise lifted her eyes from the box of rockets to Jackson’s anxious face, her deep tan and the slick blackness of the sea behind her gave her smile a new and unexpected dimension: for a moment she was an actress — famous, glamorous, spotlit for the cameras.

‘They’re beautiful.’ She rested a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Thank you, Jackson.’

Jackson looked pleased, serious and uncomfortable. It was a speciality of his: he did it with equal measures of each.

Louise turned to Moses. ‘Aren’t they great?’

‘Well,’ and Moses thought of the coat-hook and the chair, ‘Jackson’s always had a way with presents.’

‘You know what I’m going to do?’ Louise said. ‘I’m going to get some empty bottles and I’m going to line them up in one long line and I’m going to put rockets in them and then I’m going to let them off, one by one, like they do on royal birthdays or whenever it is.’

She ran off up the beach.

Moses and Jackson sat down on the stones to wait for her.

‘Does she like them, do you think?’ Jackson asked.

‘ Jackson,’ Moses said. ‘Didn’t you see her face?’

Jackson chuckled to himself. ‘You know, I thought it was going to rain tonight. I mean, really rain. A real downpour. And look what happens. This is probably one of the warmest nights of the year so far.’

The moon slid out from behind a cloud. Its movement was so smooth that it might have been running on greased tracks. Moses glanced down at his latest bottle of wine. Soon Louise would be able to stick a rocket in the end of it. He wondered where Gloria was, but only vaguely, and was surprised by the vagueness of the thought. He watched Jackson fold his raincoat and place it beside him on the beach.

‘If you thought it was going to rain,’ Moses said suddenly, ‘how come you brought fireworks?’

Jackson grinned as if Moses had just fallen into a carefully-laid trap. ‘Maybe I wanted her to feel sorry for me,’ he said.

Moses smiled.

Louise returned, wearing a knee-length pink T-shirt. She was dragging a crate of empty bottles. Moses and Jackson helped her to wedge the bottles into the pebbles at intervals of ten feet so they formed a long line parallel with the sea. Then she borrowed Moses’s lighter.

‘Here goes,’ she said.

She lit the first touchpaper and jumped back. The rocket seemed to hold its breath for a moment, to gather itself, then it fizzed out over the sea, a fierce arc of sparks, and fizzled out, dropping a cluster of silver stars into the darkness.

‘One,’ chanted the crowd of people now assembled at the water’s edge.

Louise was lighting the second rocket when Moses felt a slight tugging on his sleeve.

‘There you are,’ Gloria said. She looked excited, dishevelled. He could see all the parties she had ever been to in her eyes. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Looking for you,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

She laughed. ‘I must’ve been in all the places you didn’t look.’

He stared at the sea beyond her. He saw the stack of silver dishes crash. It struck him that neither of them were telling the truth. He hadn’t been looking for her, not for at least two hours. Not at all, really. It had just been something to say. But her lie, he felt, had nothing to do with what she had said. Her lie had something to do with what she hadn’t said, though he didn’t even have a glimmer of what that might be.

A rocket screamed out over the sea. It scored a ragged orange line in the night sky and self-destructed. The explosion rebounded off the cliffs behind them. He felt Gloria jump.

‘Seven,’ came the chant.

Gloria said something about going up to the car. He moved away with her towards the steps. The night seemed to darken then. He stumbled, almost fell. When he looked across at Gloria he saw that she was disappearing again.

‘No,’ he cried out.

But her body had already vanished, her body vanished first, and when he searched for her face some of her features (fringe, pupils, lips, eyebrows) instantly became invisible. Gloria and the night, they were made of the same stuff; she was turning into one small part of that immeasurably vast darkness. With a shiver he remembered Louise rising out of the sea, he remembered the reluctance of that black water to surrender her. He wanted to kiss Gloria, just lean across and kiss her, but he didn’t know how to find her mouth, or what exactly he would be kissing if he did. They had reached the steps now. A swaying in his head. Panic or nausea, he couldn’t tell which. He grasped a metal stanchion for support.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he said.

‘In the car,’ her voice came back from somewhere above him.

He reached the top just behind her. Only her hands, her cheekbones, the whites of her eyes, remained. She was going fast, dissolving in the night’s black acid. If he let her go he would have to wait until daylight to look for her and she might be miles away by then, a corpse or as good as, lost to him for ever. Where was the nearest light? In the car, she had said. Yes, there was a light in the car. If he could get her there in time. He hardly dared to look at her. When he did, a splinter of white light in the corner of her eye, a fraction of her, returned his glance. Like a dream where you can’t run fast enough, he started over the gravel, pulling her by an arm he couldn’t see. She seemed to be resisting. Didn’t she realise what was happening? Or was that what she wanted?

‘Nineteen,’ came a faint cry.

‘What’s the hurry?’ She tripped, laughed as he caught her.

He half-carried, half-dragged her the last few yards. He unlocked the door, tore it open. The light came on. It was dim, but it was enough. A sickly pallor ran back into her face, rebuilding her features, filling in gaps. Her surprise became visible.

‘What was all that about?’

‘All what?’

‘All that crazy rushing to the car.’

He slid into the driving-seat. His heart was banging like a stone in a tin can. He switched the radio on. Frank Sinatra was singing. ‘Strangers in the Night’, of all things.

‘I thought you were going to disappear,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you to disappear.’

He watched her face in the light from the radio. She was hugging her legs as if cold or alone, her chin resting on her knees. Even though he could now see all of her he felt that some crucial part of her had eluded him. He had failed. She had disappeared.

It turned out so right

For strangers in the night —

Why does music always do that? he wondered.

‘Shall we go?’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Back to London.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

A silence.

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t really want to either.’

She sat up, possessed of some new efficiency now, and opened the glove compartment. She undid the envelope that contained the coke. She tipped half the contents on to the cover of his logbook. Using her own razor-blade, she cut the stuff into four lines. She rolled a £5 note and, bending quickly, vacuumed up the two lines nearest her. Then she passed him the £5 note. He leaned over, his face almost touching her knee, and did the same.

‘I’m going over to the pub for a brandy,’ he said. ‘Coming?’

She sniffed twice, once with each nostril. ‘No, I think I’ll go back down.’

He got out of the car, locked the doors.

‘Moses?’

He looked up. She had reached the top of the steps. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Thank you for not wanting me to disappear.’

‘That’s all right.’ He had spoken quietly. He doubted whether his voice had carried to where she was standing.

They looked at each other across a distance for a moment, then she turned and started down the steps. He watched her until she disappeared below the level of the cliff-top.

*

‘Nice place, isn’t it?’ Vince said.

Moses stopped short, a yard inside the door. He hadn’t expected anything, but if he had, he wouldn’t have expected anything like this. Vince was sitting in the shade of a life-size cardboard palm tree. Along one wall there were wooden booths with Wild West swing-doors. A chrome and purple jukebox in the corner. Pineapple ice-buckets on the bar. Red plastic diner-stools with silver legs. Green glass fishing-floats dangling from a mass of orange netting overhead. Hanging on the far wall, a Mexican poncho, three hunting-horns, a coolie hat, a sabre, a painting of a bullfight, and a stuffed swordfish. And all this at first glance. The way Vince was grinning, it might have been his doing.

‘I thought I might find you in here,’ Moses said.

‘No, you didn’t. It’s a horrible surprise.’ Vince’s grin widened. ‘Because now you’re going to have to talk to me and buy me drinks.’

Moses stood by the door, one hand massaging his forehead. Not only Disneyland in here, but Vince. He could feel the stones in his pockets beginning to weigh him down, to drag him floorwards.

‘Mine’s a brandy,’ Vince said.

Moses pushed towards the bar.

‘Yes sir?’ The landlord had dyed black hair and wore a vermilion shirt with silver metal collar-tips. There was nowhere to look.

‘Two brandies,’ Moses said. ‘No ice.’

He watched the landlord press the glasses to a Hennessey optic. ‘Quite a place you’ve got here.’

‘You like it?’ The landlord flashed him a smile. All crow’s-feet and dentures.

Moses was fucked if he was going to say it again. Someone might think he was taking the piss and knock him out. That was all he needed. He paid quickly, smiled, and squeezed back to the safety of the palm tree.

Vince grabbed his drink and swallowed it whole.

‘If you’re going to drink them like that,’ Moses said, ‘it’s hardly worth me sitting down.’

‘Should’ve brought me a double then, shouldn’t you.’

Moses shook his head. ‘You would’ve drunk that twice as fast.’ He leaned back against the fake teak panelling. ‘What’s wrong with everyone today? Everyone’s acting so strange. Jackson turns up with a box of fireworks. Louise is all brown and goes swimming in the middle of the night. Gloria keeps disappearing. Eddie’s pretending he isn’t even here. And you.’ He turned to face Vince. ‘You sit there quietly, not breaking anything. What’s going on, Vince?’

Vince shrugged.

Moses reached for his glass. ‘And the seagulls. Did you notice the seagulls?’

Vince hadn’t.

‘What they do is, they sort of spread their wings and float upwards on the air-currents till they’re level with the top of the cliff, then they slide sideways —’ Moses demonstrated with his hand — ‘float all the way down again till they reach the bottom. Then they start all over again. Do exactly the same thing. Millions and millions of times. Why do they do that? Does it feel good?’

Vince didn’t know.

‘Everybody’s up to something.’ Moses stubbed his cigarette out in the tail of a pink china mermaid. ‘Even the birds.’

‘Have you got any of that left?’

Moses looked blank. ‘Any of what?’

‘Any of whatever you’re on.’

‘No.’

Vince knocked back the rest of Moses’s drink and banged the empty glass down on the table.

‘All right,’ Moses said, ‘but this is your last one.’

He returned to the bar.

The landlord winked. ‘Two brandies. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘No rocks. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Plenty of rocks on the beach. Right?’ The landlord’s mouth opened. A round dark hole. The shape of a railway tunnel. A long train of laughter came squeaking out. How about a drink yourself? Moses thought. Oil, for instance.

‘You know,’ the landlord rattled on, ‘I’ve been here fifteen years now and I don’t reckon I’ve been down to the beach more than half a dozen times.’

Oh, so it was the life-history now, was it?

‘Too busy up here, I suppose,’ Moses said. Collecting all this junk.

‘I keep myself pretty busy.’ The landlord picked up a white cloth, began to caress a glass. ‘Going to invite me down there later on?’

‘Sorry,’ Moses said. ‘Not my party.’

When he returned to the palm tree he decided it was time to start pestering Vince. Vince was acting too cocktail-party for his liking. He wanted the old blood-and-vomit Vincent back. The Suicide Kid. Onassis on acid. The dregs at the bottom of the King’s Road.

He began with, ‘Seen anything of Alison recently?’

Vince scowled. ‘No. Why? Have you?’

‘Oh, a little bit, you know.’ Moses was airy. ‘I’m seeing her next Sunday. She’s asked me round for lunch.’

‘Muswell Hill?’

Moses nodded.

‘What d’you want to do that for?’

‘I want to, that’s all. Anyway, what d’you care?’

‘I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.’

It looked as if Vince still hadn’t got Alison out of his system. He didn’t know it, of course. There was too much other shit blocking his system for him to be able to find out.

The bell rang for last orders.

‘Anyway,’ Moses began again, ‘I want to meet this woman you’re always going on about. Alison’s mother.’

Vince flared. ‘What d’you mean always going on about her? I’m not always going on about her.’

‘All right, you’ve only mentioned her once or twice,’ and Moses leaned into Vince’s face, ‘but I want to meet her, I want to see what she’s like.’

Vince pushed Moses away. ‘She’s a phoney.’

‘You told me that. What else?’

Vince twisted away. His bloodshot eyes tracked a girl in black tights. She almost took the whole conversation with her as she walked out of the door.

Moses nudged Vince. ‘What else?’

‘Christ, I don’t know. She must be at least forty but she acts like time’s stood still for twenty years. Fucking hippie’s what she is.’ Vince wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘She floats round the house in an old velvet dress like some kind of fucking museum-piece. Chainsmokes through a cigarette-holder, shit like that. She can’t do anything normally, you know? She sits in this green chair of hers and looks at you like she’s sorry for you or something, like she understands you. She makes me fucking puke.’

Moses smiled to himself. This was more like it. And he rather liked the idea of somebody chainsmoking through a cigarette-holder. That kind of perversity appealed to him.

‘She drinks a lot too,’ Vince was saying. ‘A fuck of a lot. There’s always a bottle of vodka down the side of her chair. They all drink in that house. Alison’s the only one who doesn’t. She’s probably seen her mother make a fool of herself too many times. No wonder she’s thinking of moving out. If I had a mother like that, I would’ve moved out when I was fucking born.’

He stole one of Moses’s cigarettes. He lit it, sucked the smoke deep down. Half the cigarette was gone before he spoke again.

‘Yeah, she’s always out of her head,’ he sneered. ‘You’ll probably like her.’

*

Closing-time.

Somebody had wedged the door open, and Moses could see a triangle of lit gravel and a strip of dark-blue sky above the darker outline of the cliff. The landlord was shouting something about glasses. His vermilion shirt was shouting too. Moses couldn’t understand either of them. He suddenly felt drunker than he had for ages. Movements kept breaking up into staggered versions of themselves. If he closed his eyes, his whole body began to lift and turn in one long slow backwards somersault. Like being inside a wave. What a terrible, terrible place to get this wrecked in. No rocks, right?

He got up and the world sat down. He couldn’t look at Vince. He knew the upward curve of Vince’s lips would make his stomach churn. He aimed for the rectangle of darkness where the breeze was coming from.

Then he was zig-zagging over stones. A single headlamp blinded him. Tyres spun viciously, kicked up dirt and gravel. He heard a girl’s laughter submerge in the rough snarling of motorbike engines, submerge, surface, then submerge again, like someone drowning, like someone going down for the third time.

He had long since lost Vince.

He stumbled into something (lobster-pots?), cracked his shin, then found himself climbing, falling, scrambling down the steps, slamming into the scaffolding at the end of each flight, winding himself on the metal rails.

Once he looked for the fire. It had shrunk. It threw out orange starfish arms into the darkness.

When he reached the beach he thought he saw Gloria. An impish figure on a white rock. That way of sitting — arms hugging her legs, chin resting on her knees — seemed to belong to her. The next time he looked — lifting his head was so hard, like fighting the pull of a magnet — she had gone.

Halfway between the steps and the fire everything began to whirl about. This was the worst so far. It felt as if someone was stirring the night with a giant spoon, as if he was one grain of sugar in the bottom of a cup. He spun away to the base of the cliffs and collapsed on the pebbles. He retched and retched, but only bile and bitter froth came up.

He couldn’t have guessed how long he spent there, his forehead pressed to a boulder, cooled by the damp chalk. An hour, maybe. Even two. His hair, wet through with sweat, gradually dried into stiff strands. He was shivering, but being cold made him feel better. He scooped up handfuls of shiny wet pebbles and rubbed them into his face.

Once he saw Gloria run past, light steps, light years away. He didn’t call out, and she didn’t see him.

He was glad about that.

*

Afterwards he couldn’t remember exactly how the fight had started.

When he stood up, shaky but clear, he walked down to the sea to rinse his face. By the time he reached the fire it must have been late. Only a few people were still awake, talking in low voices. The evening had divided them into couples. He sat down next to Gloria.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Vince asked from the other side of the fire.

Moses smiled. ‘Throwing up.’

Gloria murmured, ‘Oh, Highness,’ and rested her head against his shoulder.

Highness? he thought.

‘I’m all right now,’ he said.

He stared into the mass of collapsing red embers. Sometimes a flame leapt up, like something growing, only to wither, fall back, die out. Jackson said he was going to gather some more wood so the fire would last the night. Louise went with him. Then Moses felt hands on his shoulders and suddenly he was somersaulting backwards down a steep bank of stones. He lay still, not understanding what had happened. Then he looked up and saw Eddie standing over him. Eddie grinned.

Moses propped himself up on one arm. ‘Hello, Eddie.’

Eddie kicked the arm out from under him. ‘Come on, shithead. This is a fight.’

Moses laughed good-naturedly. A fight. What next. But as he tried to clamber to his feet Eddie pushed him over again and something competitive took hold. He shoved Eddie in the chest. Eddie staggered backwards down the beach.

Moses stood up. He was a head taller than Eddie and he had a seventy-pound weight advantage, but Eddie was muscular and his muscles were hard and supple from sleeping with at least fifteen hundred women and he was using his muscles with a frenzy Moses hadn’t seen before.

Their struggle took them some distance from the fire and now they faced each other, panting, watching each other’s eyes for the next move. Eddie was grinding his teeth together, his face contorted by a kind of predatory glee. He looks as if he wants to kill me, Moses thought. Why? he wondered.

He glanced sideways, brushed some chalk off his sleeve. ‘Isn’t that enough now, Eddie?’

‘Isn’t that enough now? So we’ve had enough, have we? Poor little Highness has had enough.’ And, lowering his head, Eddie charged.

Moses stepped to one side and, using Eddie’s momentum, sent him diving headfirst into the pebbles. It was too easy. Eddie picked himself up, slowly but automatically. He shook himself. He leered over his shoulder at Moses, his features stretched wide across his face. He was breathing through his open mouth like an animal.

He charged again. The same thing happened. Moses the matador. For once, though, Moses didn’t see the funny side. He was tired. Bored too. But Eddie wouldn’t let up. He charged a third time, arms extended like horns, fingers curved and spread. This time he caught Moses, clawed at his collar, clung on. They both crashed to the ground. Moses heard something rip. He rolled over, twisted free of Eddie’s grip. He scrambled to his feet. Eddie lunged for his ankle, but Moses stepped out of reach. He noticed that one of his pockets was torn. All his treasures had fallen out.

‘You bastard. Now I’ve lost all my stones.’

‘Ahhh. Now he’s lost all his stones.’

Moses looked at Eddie and saw fury running in his veins instead of blood. When Eddie rushed him again, he seized Eddie by the wrists.

‘What do you want, Eddie?’

‘Nice Highness.’

‘Look, can we stop this now? I’m bored, OK?’

‘You’re so nice, aren’t you, Highness? Everybody likes Highness. Don’t they, Highness?’

Eddie was spitting the words out from a distance of six inches. Moses could feel the saliva hitting him in the face.

‘What d’you want?’ He shook Eddie by the wrists. ‘D’you want to hit me? Is that what you want? All right. Hit me.’ He flung Eddie’s hands away from him. And waited.

Eddie swayed from the waist, almost lost balance. His laughter sounded like heavy breathing. Then his arm uncoiled through the air and the palm of his hand landed hard and flat on Moses’s face.

‘That’ll teach you,’ he hissed, ‘you bloody martyr.’

Moses had forgotten about his fractured cheekbone, but as he felt the pain exploding inwards through his head, as he watched Eddie laughing at the surprise on his face, it seemed to him that Eddie had chosen that side of his face quite deliberately.

‘You fucking shit,’ he shouted.

Eddie’s eyes lit up. ‘Now, now,’ he said. He began to run backwards, dance backwards on his toes, like a boxer, but when he stumbled on an empty bottle Moses jumped at him and landed a punch on the side of his head. They rolled down a slope towards the sea. Moses forced Eddie on to his stomach. He placed both his hands on the back of Eddie’s head and, mustering all his strength, twisted Eddie’s face into the beach. He heard Eddie laughing through a mouthful of stones.

Then he got to his feet and walked back to the fire.

*

The sea was breathing deeply like someone sound asleep, each wave a soft exhalation through its open mouth. In the silence between waves Moses could hear the softer breathing of the people all around him.

He had been trying to get to sleep himself, thinking that if he synchronised his breathing with the rhythm of the waves, if he harnessed himself to all that natural hypnotic power, then maybe he would drift off.

No such luck.

His eyes stung so much they wouldn’t stay closed. The coldness of the stones soaked up into his hip. He looked around for the blanket Gloria had brought down from the car, but it had disappeared.

Jesus, he ached all over. Skinned knuckles on both hands. His left shin caked with blood. A jarring pain in his cheek. He rubbed the back of his neck and his hand came away sticky with tar.

He just hoped Eddie had come off worse.

The sky had diluted — black to grey. Instructions for the creation of dawn: just add water to the colour of the night. Not a hint of sunshine anywhere. It looked as if the weather had broken.

He glanced down at Gloria. She was still asleep, burrowed into the bay-shape he had made with his body when he lay down, her head resting in the hollow between his hip and his rib-cage. She had curled up very tight, like a fist. There was oil on the soles of her shoes, and on her neck, just below her ear, he saw two tiny moles that he had never noticed before. Dracula scars.

‘Gloria?’ He ruffled her hair. Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t wake up.

‘Gloria?’

She jack-knifed into a sitting position, her eyes wide open. ‘I was dreaming,’ she said.

‘What were you dreaming about?’ he asked her as they trudged across the beach.

She frowned. ‘Someone had hidden my voice. Someone had stolen my voice while I was sleeping and hidden it somewhere.’

They walked up the steps, their heads bent, the wood creaking under their feet. The grey air flapped around them like damp canvas. Their clothes were stiff, sticky with salt.

‘Why do I feel so cold?’ Gloria spoke through mauve lips. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold.’

When they reached the top they paused, looked back down. It was high tide. Grey sky. Grey sea. There was no way of telling where the horizon was, nothing to suggest a division of any kind. A foghorn groaned in the distance. An explanation there, perhaps. Grey sea. Grey beach. At the base of the cliffs, a splash of colour, the only splash of colour visible. The reds, greens, blues of sleeping-bags. Sudden and out of place, like something spilt or dropped. An accident. The scattered pieces of a puzzle.

‘Come on,’ Moses said. ‘It’ll be warmer in the car.’

On their way across the car-park they passed Eddie’s car. Moses peered in through the windscreen. He smiled at what he saw.

‘Hey,’ he called out. ‘Come and look at this.’

Gloria stood ten yards away, her hands tucked into her armpits. ‘What is it? I thought you said we could sleep.’

She trailed back to Eddie’s car and looked through the window. Eddie, Vince and Debra were sitting inside. All three sat perfectly upright in their seats with their eyes closed. They were all fast asleep.

‘So?’ Gloria said.

‘What does it remind you of?’

Gloria shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Old Dinwoodie.’

‘Old who?’

Moses stared at her. ‘Old Dinwoodie. You know. It was just before his bike went off the road. He was driving along with his eyes shut. Don’t you remember?’

‘I didn’t see that.’ Gloria turned away.

Moses’s smile had narrowed, but a trace of it still lingered as he followed her to the car. Some part of him was immensely pleased that she had seen Eddie sitting there with his mouth open like that.

*

He ached into consciousness again, his forehead pressed against cold glass. He had lost all feeling in his right leg. He opened his mouth in the shape of a scream as he shifted and felt the life begin to crawl back through his skin. Christ, what a night.

He wiped the window with the less painful of his two hands. The mobile toilet door had swung open: it banged repeatedly on the tinny grey drum of its own side wall. Mist clung to the summit of the field beyond. Two or three dismal sheep grazed beside the wire fence. In front of the café, a few people in sweaters clutched white china mugs. They looked like the victims of some minor natural disaster. Nobody seemed to be talking. At least the café had opened. That was something.

He heard Gloria yawn from beneath her blanket on the back seat. He turned to look at her. Ouch: his neck. First her hair emerged, then an ear, and finally the rest of her face, exhausted, but still beautiful.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she muttered.

He watched her in the mirror instead. Smeared mascara. Blue crescents under her eyes. She looked bruised.

‘Moses,’ came her small voice, ‘d’you think there’s any chance of a cup of coffee?’

He smiled. ‘Yes, I think there’s a chance.’

He got out of the car and stretched.

During the forties and fifties the café must have been quite safe. A place to take the family at weekends. A beauty spot of sorts. And even now, on a calm day, you could sit at one of those unsteady metal tables on the terrace and listen to the sea rustling over the pebbles below and believe that everything was all right. But what about the raw winter nights when storms blew in, and the waves hacked and munched at the base of the cliffs, and the black gap gaped and beckoned? There was fear in that old place as it watched the worn grass diminish year by year, as the sixty-foot drop edged nearer and nearer. He could almost hear the death-rattle of those loose sheets of glass, the teeth of the café chattering.

A few tables and chairs had taken up positions outdoors. They had been painted strange garish colours: mustard-yellow, hot-pink, lime-green. It was like an exhibition of freaks, a zoo of four-legged creatures with no heads. One of the tables was psychedelic mauve. It stood apart from the rest of the furniture as if embarrassed or shunned. Angled away from the sun-terrace and halfway to the cliff-edge, it gave the impression that, any moment now, it might break into an ungainly blundering run and hurl itself into the void.

Table kills itself.

On his way into the café, Moses passed Eddie. Eddie looked up, but nothing registered on his face. He had a split lip and a smear of oil on his forehead. His grazed hands dangled in his lap. He obviously wasn’t going to explain what last night had been about.

Moses carried two cups of coffee out on to the grass and handed one to Gloria. She was sitting on the mauve table, elbows on her knees. He suddenly remembered the man with the dyed black hair and the vermilion shirt, the man who laughed like a train, and smiled to himself.

‘I bet I know who painted this table,’ he said.

Gloria held her cup close to her lips and stared at the horizon, her face in profile against the dull sky. Her mood had altered in the last five minutes. It was as if she had woken up without thinking and had now remembered something depressing.

He asked her if she was all right.

She nodded.

She found her cigarettes and lit one. She let the smoke drift out of her mouth without seeming to notice.

He asked her if she wanted to go.

She shrugged. It must have meant yes, though, because she threw her cigarette away and picked up her bag.

They searched half-heartedly for Louise. They couldn’t find her anywhere so Moses wrote a note. Louise, it said, we were very tired and had to go. Thank you for the wonderful party. Lots of love, Moses and Gloria. He left it with the woman who ran the café.

Vince had been watching Moses from his table on the sun-terrace. Now he came over and asked if he and Debra could have a lift back. Moses told him yes.

Eddie was sitting on a bench outside the café. He looked more than ever like a statue, not because of his classic features or his athlete’s physique, but simply because he watched them leaving with blank eyes. He didn’t even wave goodbye.

Moses and Gloria didn’t talk on the way back — but then they never seemed to talk much on the way back from places. And this time, maybe because of the other two, Gloria didn’t sing either. The only sound, apart from the hum of the engine, was a very soft sound, softer than a hundred tons of cotton wool, almost unidentifiably soft, and heard by Moses alone: it was the sound of Alison’s mother chainsmoking cigarettes through a six-inch cigarette-holder. The only time anyone spoke was at the beginning of the journey when Debra asked Moses whether he could possibly drop her in Lewes.

‘No problem,’ he said.

It was only later that he realised, with a stab of disappointment, that this meant taking a different route and that they would not now be driving back through that strange village.