Dreams of Leaving

Talking to Horses

During the last few days of July the temperature soared. Heat welded the end of one month to the beginning of the next, and hardly anybody noticed the join. A middle-aged man was arrested for jumping naked into the Serpentine. Summer at last.

The first Sunday in August Moses drove north-west across London, an A — Z open on his lap. He had been invited to Alison’s parents’ house for lunch. He was to drive to the Shirleys’ house and back again so many times during the coming weeks that the route quickly stuck in his head, became automatic, second nature. Years later, driving a different car, going in a different direction, he would sometimes slip into one part of it by chance — only two or three streets, perhaps, but he would recognise the sequence — and he would wonder why it seemed so familiar. And sometimes he would remember, with a feeling that was like hunger or butterflies, the way it tightened his stomach, turned it over. With a feeling that was like homesickness.

He left The Bunker at noon. He hadn’t thought to park in the shade (this was England, after all), and the air had massed inside his car, dense and sweltering, essence of leather. He wound all the windows down, rolled up his sleeves, and drove fast. One hand on the gearstick, one on the wheel. Eyes screened by sunglasses. And slowly the stubborn air broke up. The city looked evacuated, streets beaten flat by a high sun, the chill tunnels of tube stations gaping and empty. 82 degrees, the radio said. Unbelievable, this weather.

He arrived at the house to find the front door ajar. A cool hallway smelling of cinnamon and hyacinth and antique furniture. Dark-blue walls hung with charcoal drawings. Distant voices rooms away.

Nobody heard him knock.

He crossed the threshold, the sun pressing on his neck, his shoulderblades. At the end of the hall a second door, also open, framed two girls in leotards practising handstands on a square of sunlit grass. New noises now. Laughter and jazz. The delicate percussion of glasses. The snap of cards.

He waited.

Then a woman with a shock of messy glossy black hair stepped backwards into the hall, talking to somebody he couldn’t see. When she turned and noticed him, he flinched, moved forwards suddenly, as if she had caught him redhanded at something.

‘Are you a burglar?’ she asked him. She cocked an eyebrow, used only half her mouth to smile with.

‘No,’ he said. And, smiling back, he felt the heat issuing from her slightly bloodshot blue eyes. Her satin dress crumpled as she moved, like the air above a fire.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘how about a glass of white wine?’

The woman was Mary Shirley, of course, and though he couldn’t fault Vince’s savage rendering of detail — she wore black, carried a six-inch cigarette-holder between the first and second fingers of her left hand, talked like an old movie — he couldn’t help feeling, at the same time, that there was something about her, a presence, perhaps, that Vince had chosen not to mention. As soon as he walked into that rundown red-brick house, as soon as he saw her in context, smoke curling like a blue creeper up her arm, he knew that Vince’s words had become redundant, that he could leave them behind on the porch. It was strange ground for him, as it must once have been for Vince, but he felt no unease, only the pressure (almost sensual, this) of his own aroused curiosity.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That would be very nice.’

*

He watched Mary arrange herself on an upholstered cane chair in the garden. She folded her legs beneath her and stood a bottle of vodka upright against the backs of her knees. She lit one cigarette after another and dropped her ash on the lawn. In the sunlight her skin looked pale, almost soggy, but her eyes travelled lightly over everything, and she gave the impression, without speaking or moving, that she was orchestrating what went on around her, that she could steal the show at any moment she chose. Into one silence she inserted the following words:

‘I’ve been having terrible dreams.’

She lifted her eyebrows, swirled the vodka in her glass. People began to listen.

‘What dreams?’ This was Rebecca, Mary’s youngest.

‘It was sunset,’ Mary said, ‘and I was standing on a footpath somewhere in the country. The sun was going down behind a ridge and the sky was green and orange, the colour you get when you burn copper. A row of spiky black figures were walking along the ridge. They were carrying sacks on their backs.’

She leaned sideways, tossed her cigarette into the nearest flower-bed.

‘I was terrified, for some reason. I stood there, hoping desperately that they wouldn’t notice me. But I knew how powerful their eyes were. Distance and darkness were nothing to them. And the more I worried about whether or not they were going to notice me, the more real that danger became. It was almost as if they could hear me worrying.’

Moses, who knew that feeling, nodded to himself.

‘Then, suddenly, I was in a small room. The walls of the room were solid with cages, and inside the cages were jackdaws, hundreds of them. The room was full of the sound of their wings thrashing. I remember thinking: This is what panic sounds like. The figures I had seen up on the ridge were in the room too. Silent hooded figures. And that’s when I made the connection. Those sacks on their backs, they had been full of jackdaws.

‘Then one of the figures stepped forward. He opened one of the cages and took hold of a jackdaw. The jackdaw struggled, cried out, but the man’s hands were too strong. He held the jackdaw up to his face, bit off its beak, and spat it on the floor. Then he tore its throat out with his teeth and, raising the jackdaw in the air like a chalice, tilted his head back. Blood poured from the jackdaw’s throat into the man’s open mouth — ’

‘Oh, disgusting,’ Rebecca cried.

‘Mary, please,’ Alison said.

‘Then,’ Mary said, ‘he offered it to me — ’

‘Then what happened?’ Rebecca said.

Mary leaned back. ‘Nothing. That was the end. Now,’ and her eyes scanned the members of her audience, ‘who can tell me what that means?’

Moses saw the mischief in her smile as she spun the top off her private bottle with her thumb and poured herself another vodka. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was, he had already decided, extraordinary.

*

Sometime during the afternoon he walked into the kitchen and found Mary standing by the draining-board.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him. ‘Is that what you’re looking for?’

He said he would. He asked her what she was drinking.

‘Vodka,’ she said. ‘I like vodka. It’s tasteless.’ And then grinned at him as if challenging him to contradict her. When he didn’t, she said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name. Or maybe I never knew it.’

‘Moses.’

‘That’s a peculiar name.’ She handed him a large neat vodka, then looked at him sideways-on. ‘I suppose you’ve had problems with that.’

He ran through a few of the nicknames he had been given over the years. Foreskin made her laugh. He laughed with her.

‘How terrible,’ she said. ‘How very demoralising.’

She kept him guessing as to how seriously she meant that. Up close her gaze was like light. Hard to look straight at.

‘That dream,’ he said. ‘Was it real?’

She swallowed a mouthful of vodka before answering. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, was it a real dream? Did you really dream it?’

‘What a strange question. Yes, of course I did.’

‘I just wondered. You seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’

‘I seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’ In repeating his words she had given them a sardonic edge.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ He tried to explain that, although he didn’t know her, she seemed like someone who was just naturally inventive, someone who could create events out of routine. He explained it badly, but he thought she could probably read the meaning beneath his clumsy words if she chose to. At the same time, he was beginning to realise that if there were two routes, a hard one and an easy one, Mary would always take the hard one.

‘Oh, I am.’ She lifted her shoulders, drew down the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m a wonderful storyteller. I’m famous for it.’

‘So famous,’ Moses said, ‘that even I’d heard of you.’

Mary walked to the window, swung round, and studied him over the rim of her glass as she drank. ‘I don’t know whether I like you,’ she said.

‘I don’t know whether I like you either,’ Moses said.

A rushed moment, as if an hour had passed in a few seconds, and suddenly they were both smiling. Afterwards he couldn’t decide whether they had both started smiling at the same time or not and, if not, then which one of them had started smiling first. He could only say that it had felt like some kind of understanding, the way their smiles seemed to synchronise.

*

As he followed her back into the garden, a university professor broke off what he was saying to her husband Alan and, brushing her elbow lightly with his hand, steered her into their circle.

‘Ah, Mary,’ he exclaimed, ‘perhaps you can tell us. What’s the attraction of life in Muswell Hill?’

‘I like Muswell Hill,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a dustman called Maurice.’

‘Maurice?’ the professor said. ‘How charming.’

She had given the name its French pronunciation so perhaps he was imagining a pale tubercular dustman with manicured hands and a waxed moustache. Just a few words from Mary and the area acquired a new dimension, became exotic, fashionable even, and people began to wonder why they didn’t live there too. She had that ability. She could make something fascinating simply by placing it under her own unique microscope.

‘Oh no,’ she was saying, ‘he’s not like that at all. He’s very — ’ she paused, put a thoughtful finger to her chin — ‘long. He looks a bit like Donald Sutherland.’

Alan snorted. ‘He doesn’t.’

‘He does too. He’s got the same ears. And eyes. And his hands are so big that if you put a cup of tea in them it disappears completely.’

She raised her cigarette-holder to her lips, released it again like a blown kiss. ‘Me and Maurice. Sometimes, on Tuesday mornings when I’m not working, I ask him in for a cup of tea. We sit down at the kitchen table and we talk rubbish.’

A smile ran across her face, the way an urchin runs across a street: dodging cars, hooted at — the same cheek, the same delight.

‘You know what he said to me once? He said, “I’ve never seen rubbish like your rubbish, Mrs Shirley.” When I asked him what was so special about my rubbish, he said, “I’ve never seen so many bottles in one dustbin in my whole life. It was a real bugger to lift. Ted (Ted’s his mate) nearly hernia’d himself.” Really. He said that. Ted nearly hernia’d himself.’ She rocked with laughter in her cane chair. ‘He told me he could tell what people are like from their rubbish.’ She slowed her voice down, made it sombre, fumbling. ‘ “If someone eats a lot of tuna fish I know it. You can’t hide anything from a dustman. And I’m worried about you, Mrs Shirley.” “Worried about me, Maurice?” I said. “I don’t eat tuna fish.” He shook his head, very serious and wise, and said, “There’s too many bottles in that rubbish of yours, Mrs Shirley, and don’t tell me they’re lemonade bottles, because I know different.”’

‘What did you say to that?’ The professor swayed back on his heels. Later he would drink himself into a flower-bed and fall asleep.

‘ “Some of them are probably lemonade bottles, Maurice,” I said, “because that’s what I put in my vodka sometimes.”’

‘Not if you can help it,’ Alison scoffed.

‘Sometimes, I said. And then — this was the best one — a few months ago Maurice was sitting at the kitchen table, blowing on his tea to cool it down, when I saw a thought move across his face. It actually moved across his face. I saw it. “You know, if there was a competition for the loudest rubbish, Mrs Shirley,” he said, “yours’d win hands down.” “Competition for the what, Maurice?” I said. “Competition for the loudest rubbish,” he said.’

Mary loved that story, and Moses often heard her repeat it that summer. ‘OK, so we drink a bit too much,’ she would say with a swagger in her voice, ‘but at least we’ve got the loudest rubbish in the area.’

‘How do you know?’ somebody new to the house would ask.

‘Maurice says so,’ she would say. ‘Maurice is our dustman.’

‘And it was true,’ she went on, pouring herself another vodka, ‘because I went out one day and listened. The noise was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful. So when his birthday came round I bought him a bottle of whisky to make up for it. When I gave it to him, he looked at it and then he looked at me and said, “You’re a crafty one, Mrs Shirley.” “Crafty?” I said. “Why?” I honestly couldn’t see it. “Trying to turn me into an alcoholic too, are you?” he said. “I’m not an alcoholic, Maurice,” I told him. “I just like to drink.” “I’m not a dustman either,” he said. “I just carry dustbins.”’

She let smoke drift out of her mouth and across her face. It veiled her grin.

‘No posing, no games, no voyeurism,’ she said, glancing down at Moses. ‘Just straight up, that’s Maurice. A real breath of fresh air.’

She had already told Maurice that if they ever tried to take him off his route she would fire off letters of complaint, a salvo of letters, she said, to the council, to her local M P — to the Department of the Environment, if need be.

‘I’d raise an enormous stink.’ She nodded to herself, her chin tilted upwards as it always was when she threw down the gauntlet. And then burst out laughing when she realised what she had said.

*

Moments alone with Mary were rare in the beginning. Too many deflections, too much chaos. What she called a full house. A full house on Sundays meant they were winning, she said. Winning the fight against monotony and playing safe and death. Winning the fight against going through life too soberly. When the chips are down, that’s all this is, she would cry, one hand clutching a bottle to her chest, the other sweeping, declamatory, all-embracing, round the garden. A fight, a gamble, a throw of the dice.

The house seemed a part of this. It drew life from her, held the same philosophy, and, like a magician’s hat, conjured endless surprises: a fancy-dress party, a water-fight, a string quartet — even, once, a white rabbit sitting, like a hallucination, but perfectly content, on the bathroom floor (it belonged, Moses discovered later, to a schoolfriend of Rebecca’s). Moses found himself constantly sidetracked, constantly in demand — most of all, curiously enough, by members of the family. Rebecca, skinny, mercurial, eight years old, took him firmly by the hand that afternoon and led him off to Highgate Cemetery. To pick blackberries, she said. (They didn’t find any blackberries — it was too early, perhaps, or too late — so they picked flowers instead and drank chocolate milk in a sweet-shop and met a man with braces made of string and hands that shook even though, as Rebecca pointed out, it wasn’t cold at all; they decided to be frightened of him and ran all the way home.) Sean, quieter, darker, thirteen, came and asked Moses to help him build a cage for his rat. Alan beat him at pool on the table in the attic (a secret bottle of malt whisky in the cue-rack, laughter rising up from the garden), and arranged a bicycle-ride through old Hampstead for the following weekend. (If you had been invited once, and the family took to you, there was no need, it seemed, for a second invitation; you were simply expected.) Even Alison, less precious on her own territory, had him admiring her latest textile designs. ‘There’s no peace in this house,’ he sighed that evening, sinking into the nearest armchair. ‘No peace,’ Rebecca echoed, and jumped into his lap to prove the point.

The week trickled through his fingers like quicksand then it was Sunday again. One Sunday spilled over into the next, they blurred and formed a third, a switchback of events, an irresistible current that swept him along, that made him weightless as a piece of cork or an empty bottle. The moments he spent alone with Mary were islands he fetched up on by chance, explored, but soon left again because in that house there were always ships passing by, there was always smoke on the horizon. Though he didn’t always want rescuing.

Was it that first afternoon or another Sunday later in the month that he discovered her, perched on the upturned water-tank at the bottom of the garden, apples crushed to sweep pulp at her feet, wasps droning invisible somewhere as if the air itself was dozing, and told her, drunk now, swaying above her, that she was different?

‘Don’t fool yourself, Moses,’ she said, and some fatigue in her smile made him think for a moment that he was just another actor with the same lines, ‘I’m an ordinary woman, a perfectly ordinary woman.’

But her voice denied it. Her voice had colour, substance, contours. On her lips each phrase became a view of hills, soft rounded hills fringed by woods, green with rain, veiled in mist. He could literally gaze at her speaking.

He remembered the time he’d heard her voice on the phone, months ago now, and how it had hung on in his head, painting pictures. Then that first Sunday in Muswell Hill, he’d watched her prepare the evening meal. A cookery book lay open in her hand. Reduce the volume of the gravy, she declared, only to burst out laughing at the absurdity of the language. At one moment she could turn the recipe into an address to the troops, the next she made it sound like a prayer — to which Mary, iconoclast that she was, would probably have said, That’s exactly what it is. A prayer — but her voice always (and despite itself, perhaps) performed. So he couldn’t help smiling to himself when she told him how ordinary she was, couldn’t help smiling at the way her voice and her words, simultaneous phenomena, took different sides.

‘Why is it so important for you to be ordinary?’ he asked her.

‘Why is it so important for you to prove I’m not?’ she replied.

Most of the time she got the better of him like that.

*

Those Sundays of drinking into the small hours.

It was like a tree, Moses sometimes thought. As the night grew older, so the members of the family would detach themselves, first Rebecca, then Sean, then Alison, then Alan, until, finally, only Mary and Moses were left, clinging, very drunk, to their respective branches.

‘That’s beautiful,’ Mary said, when he told her.

Alan must have thought so too. During the next few weeks he produced a series of drawings, primitive supernatural drawings, which he called The Family Tree. The tree had six leaves and each leaf was a face. On one of the leaves Moses saw his own face, and was touched to find himself so accepted. He liked the last drawing best of all. It showed the tree at five in the morning, its branches stripped and bare, all the fallen leaves lying curled up on the ground with their eyes closed (it must have represented one of the Sundays when Moses, too drunk to drive home, had stayed overnight in the guest-room because his face was there with all the others). Alan built frames for the drawings and hung them on the kitchen wall above the Swiss cheese plant. ‘So we can look at them,’ he said, ‘while it’s actually happening.’

Every now and then there were emergencies, times when the Shirleys, either through some oversight or simply because of their own excesses, ran out of alcohol. Moses loved to watch Mary then. The horror, the panic, the outrage, that flickered almost frame by frame across her face. The glint of resolution as she took charge. ‘Listen,’ she would say, hands on hips, ‘I run a tight ship. This house cannot be dry.’ There would be groans of, ‘But we only looked last week and there was nothing then,’ and Mary would say, ‘Well, at least try.’ And so a kind of alcoholic safari would begin. They would scour the house, all but tear it apart in a desperate search for a bottle of something — anything. In the end they often found bottles in the most obvious places — in Alan’s briefcase, under Mary’s pillow. ‘You see,’ Mary would gloat over those who had doubted her. ‘You just have to believe.’

Once, though, she walked in through the back door brandishing an unopened bottle of Teacher’s. Mud streaked the glass. A snail had camped on the label. ‘Now where,’ she said, ‘do you suppose I found this?’ Nobody sitting at the kitchen table knew. ‘Under a rhubarb leaf at the bottom of the garden,’ she said. The culprit was never found. Moses suspected Rebecca, who had never concealed her scorn for the way her parents drank. ‘Alcohol,’ she would say, supremely disdainful in her glasses with their pale-blue rims, ‘I don’t need that.’

Another time they ran out at five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon. Serious. One and a half hours until the off-licence opened. One football match, two LPs, three mindless game-shows between them and a drink. Mary rose to the challenge as usual. ‘Oh, there’ll be a bottle of something somewhere. The law of probability.’ They searched the house room by room, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer. Many secrets were discovered, many lost things found, but not a single bottle came to light, not unless you counted a flagon of Sean’s homemade beer, dusty and opaque, and at least five years old. Not even Mary would touch that. They returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The clock said five past six. It began to drizzle outside. Despondency set in.

Mary sighed. ‘This never used to happen.’

Alan was trying to balance a spoon across his forefinger. ‘Think of it as a test,’ he said.

‘I’m not in the mood for tests,’ Mary snapped.

Alan smiled.

Alison said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’

‘Tea?’ Mary made it sound like a four-letter word.

Moses had noticed before how Alison and Mary swapped roles. When Mary became impetuous or extreme, Alison humoured her, made sensible suggestions, as a parent would. The look that Mary gave Alison as Alison put the kettle on was one of pure truculence.

‘My children.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Where do they get all this virtue from? All this common sense? It’s beyond me. Utterly beyond me.’

Moses had been doing some lateral thinking. Suddenly he hoisted himself upright. ‘There’s one place we didn’t look.’ He jumped to his feet. His chair crashed over backwards. He threw the kitchen door open and took the stairs in three giant bounds. The house shuddered at his enthusiasm. Alison rolled her eyes and sighed. Several people watched the kitchen ceiling as Moses tramped overhead.

Silence.

Then: ‘Hold the tea.’

Moses appeared in the doorway like a champion, a bottle held aloft. ‘Brandy!’ he cried.

Applause from the people gathered round the table. A piercing two-fingered whistle from Mary.

‘Where was it?’ Alan asked.

‘In the cistern.’

Rebecca wrinkled her nose in disgust.

‘That would explain the missing label.’ Alan turned the bottle in his hands as if he was an expert in the field of bottles found in cisterns.

‘The cistern.’ Alison’s voice was edged in sarcasm. ‘Of course.’

‘Extraordinary,’ Mary said. It was a word she rarely used. She looked very pleased with Moses.

After that incident they all became firm believers in the mysterious powers of alcohol.

*

As summer faded, moths invaded the city. Their sturdy furry bodies cannoned off lampshades and windowpanes. They were constantly flying into Mary’s face as if she was the only source of light. When they died their wings crumbled into a fine bronze dust that nobody could remember seeing before.

One Sunday night, after everyone had left, Moses was drinking gin on the terrace with Alan and Mary when Rebecca appeared on the kitchen doorstep. She was holding a sheet of paper very carefully in both hands.

‘I thought you were in bed,’ Alan said.

‘I was,’ she answered, ‘until I found this.’

In her white nightie, she looked like a tiny priestess as she advanced over the flagstones towards them, her eyes trained on the sheet of paper between her hands, her lips pressed together in concentration. On the paper lay the remains of a giant moth, two inches long, its soft grey fuselage still intact, its wings, almost gold, disintegrating.

‘Look at this dust,’ she said. ‘It shines.’

‘So it does,’ Mary said. She fetched a mirror from the kitchen, then she began to smear the gold dust on to one of her eyelids with the tip of her little finger.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’ One hand gripping the arm of Mary’s chair, standing on tiptoe so she could see, Rebecca was perfectly poised between horror and fascination.

Moses and Alan exchanged a faint smile.

When Mary had completed both eyelids she said, ‘Well? How do I look?’

Rebecca stared at her mother. ‘It looks like real make-up.’

‘Of course it does. That’s why the ugly god used it.’

‘What ugly god?’

A very long time ago, Mary began, moths used to live for seventy years, just like human beings. In those days the gods who looked after the world were very decadent. They sat around in the sky, they drank a lot, they dressed up and went to parties. One day they decided to hold a ball. It would be the grandest ball ever.

On the evening of the ball one of the gods was sitting in front of his mirror. He was very miserable. He was in love with the queen of the gods who was the most beautiful and unattainable of women, but he was so ugly that she had never noticed him. ‘I’m so ugly,’ he moaned. ‘If only I was beautiful too. Then perhaps she would notice me.’

At that moment a moth flew in through the open window. It fluttered and flapped around the room for a while, then it suddenly dropped on to the ugly god’s dressing-table. The ugly god was somewhat startled. At first he thought the moth was just tired, but when he turned it over gently with his finger he realised that it was dead. First his ugliness and now this death. He was about to heave a long sigh when he noticed a deposit of fine dust on the end of his finger. A glittery coppery dust. A glamorous dust. Sitting up a little straighter in his chair, he touched the moth again with his finger. Then he touched the skin above his eye with the same finger, once, very delicately. He looked in the mirror and smiled at what he saw.

He caused quite a stir when he arrived at the ball that night. Several of his friends didn’t even recognise him. Ladies bought him drinks and paid him compliments. The queen’s suitors huddled in a corner, pointing and muttering, their eyes green with envy.

And then the trumpets sounded and the queen of the gods made her entrance. Surrounded by giant male bodyguards, she looked as beautiful and unattainable as ever. When she passed the ugly god, however, she paused.

‘You’re beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’

The ugly god bowed low and told her his name.

‘Come to my chamber tonight,’ the queen commanded him, ‘and we shall be lovers.’ And with a rustle of silk and gossamer she was gone.

The ugly god was immediately mobbed by a host of jealous suitors.

‘What’s your secret?’ one of them hissed. He wore the same lipstick as usual. Made from the juice of crushed rose petals. Very dreary.

The ugly god was still dazed, as much by the queen’s beauty as by her invitation. ‘A special powder,’ he said.

‘What powder?’ hissed another. He had dyed his hair with a solution distilled from the bark of silver birches. Old hat.

The ugly god realised that he had already said too much. ‘I cannot say,’ he said. And smiled in a most infuriating way.

He spent an exquisite night with the queen, but by the next morning the powder of the wings of the moth had rubbed off and he was ugly again.

‘Get out of my sight!’ the queen cried when she awoke. ‘God, I must’ve been drunk last night!’

The ugly god was chased out of the palace in disgrace. On the street he met two of his friends. ‘Hello, ugly,’ they said. They were full of gossip about the mysterious stranger who had attended the ball and spent the night with the queen. ‘Weren’t you there?’ they said. ‘Didn’t you see him?’ But the ugly god was too sad to reply. He had lost the queen’s love and he didn’t know how to win it back.

When he reached home he sat down at his dressing-table. He had no powder left. He had used it all the previous night. That was the trouble. The powder of the wings of moths was a very rare substance.

And then he had a brainwave. He put on his divine robes, stood at the open window and, drawing himself up to his full height, raised his right hand. ‘I hereby decree that from now on,’ he said, ‘moths will only live for one day.’

Back inside his room he could scarcely contain his delight. He jumped up and down and shook his fists in a very ungodlike manner. If moths died often enough then he would never run out of their magical powder. So he would always be beautiful. And the queen would love him for all eternity.

He returned to the palace wearing some of his new make-up. The queen embraced him. ‘Oh, how beautiful you are! How could I have sent you away?’ she cried. ‘What a terrible hangover I must’ve had! You must come and live with me for ever! I command it!’

And so the ugly god moved into the palace and married the queen and lived happily ever after. Moths died more often than they used to, of course, but happiness is more important. And besides, nobody ever made the connection.

Rebecca was smiling. ‘So that’s why moths only live for such a short time.’

Mary nodded. ‘Now off to bed with you or you’ll look like an ugly god in the morning.’

Rebecca kissed everyone goodnight and disappeared upstairs.

The bottle of gin was empty, but another lay chilling in the freezer. They wouldn’t be searching the house tonight. While Alan fetched the new bottle, Mary put some music on. She stood at the end of the terrace where the light from the house was swallowed by the darkness of the garden and sang along with Marlene Dietrich, a glass in her hand, her eyelids glistening a powdery gold.

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn

I know I’m not to blame —

And the moths fluttered out of the night, the words of the song mysteriously come to life.

‘It suits you,’ Moses said.

Mary looked up. ‘The song?’

‘The make-up.’

He settled deeper in his chair. The white roses on the back wall held out the tiny shiny bowls of their petals, collected all the moonlight from the sky. A grey cat tightropewalked along the fence; its tail curled up into the air like smoke. Somebody coughed two gardens away.

‘You know, sometimes, moments like this,’ he said, ‘I feel as if I live here.’

‘Why don’t you?’ came Mary’s voice, light, provocative.

‘I’m serious. I feel as if this is where I really live. Here in Muswell Hill. In this house. There’s something about being here. I can’t explain it — ’

That morning he had been playing with Rebecca in the garden. He had gripped her by the wrists, a sailor’s grip, and swung her round in the air. She had whirled out horizontally, making a sound like the wind or a ghost, her legs as slack as a rag doll’s legs. He could still hear her crying ‘Faster, faster’ he could still feel her never wanting it to end. When he had finally slowed down and set her on her feet again, she couldn’t stand. She had staggered about like a drunkard, and he had copied her. It was part of the game to act dizzier than you really were, to act a bit crazy. They had ended up in the lavender bush, a tangle of legs and arms, helpless with laughter. At that moment he had glanced up at the house and noticed Mary standing in an upstairs window. She had been smiling, but not at him. Her smile seemed to precede his awareness of her. It seemed to relate to what had gone before — the game, the laughter. A strange thought had come to him: she wants another child, my child. Then she had seen him watching her and she had pulled back from the window, back into the shadows, as if frightened he might read her mind. But perhaps he already had.

‘Mary?’

‘Yes?’

‘What were you smiling about this morning? You know, when I saw you in the window.’

Mary turned and walked away down the garden. He watched her go. He could see nothing of her, only the tip of her cigarette glowing as she paced up and down in front of the hedge. Then a red scratch on the darkness as she threw it away. The trees shivered as a breeze passed by.

Alan returned with the second bottle of gin. Shortly afterwards Alison joined Alan and Moses on the terrace. She sat down on the kitchen doorstep, her hair wrapped in a white towel. She smelt of cleanness, dampness, shampoo. She was drinking water.

‘Moses,’ she said, ‘you’re still here.’

‘Moses is always here,’ Mary said, appearing out of the darkness in her black dress, making them all jump. ‘Moses is one of the family. Aren’t you, Moses?’

Her smile rested on his face, and her hand touched his shoulder for a moment.

Her eyelids still dusty gold.

Queen of the gods.

*

The following Wednesday Moses’s phone rang. It was Mary.

‘Have you got any plans for lunch?’ she said.

He laughed. ‘What do you think I am? A businessman?’

‘I’ve got a couple of bottles of white wine and a cold chicken,’ she said. ‘I thought we could have a picnic on Parliament Hill. Rebecca wants to fly her kite. Would you like to come?’

‘I’d love to.’

‘We’ll meet by the bench at the top of the hill. Do you know the bench I mean?’

‘I’ll find it.’

‘One o’clock then.’ She hung up.

Moses smiled to himself. Mary always sounded so formal on the phone. It was because she hated them. ‘How can you talk to someone when you can’t see their face?’ he remembered her saying. When he tried to argue the point, she closed him down. ‘Telephones,’ she said, and her voice registered the most profound disdain. ‘They fake closeness. They pervert distance. Distance should be respected. I’d rather drive fifty miles to speak to someone in person than talk to them on the telephone. I only use them when I have to.’ She spoke of telephones as if they had wounded her in the past.

When Moses arrived at the bench, they were waiting for him, Rebecca wearing black jeans and a pink sweater, Mary in a black dress, the usual diamanté brooch at her throat, the usual jet earrings.

‘We would have driven down and picked you up,’ Mary said, some of the formality lingering, ‘but we thought you might be out.’

‘Lying in a skip somewhere,’ Rebecca said, squinting up at him.

‘I don’t lie in skips,’ Moses said. ‘Not on Wednesday mornings.’

‘So we telephoned,’ Mary said, ‘instead.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ Moses said.

‘Moses?’ Rebecca said. ‘Do you know anything about kites? Kites that look like dragons, I mean.’

‘I know a bit about kites because I had one once. It was an aeroplane, though, not a dragon. Do you think that matters?’

‘I don’t know. The thing is, aeroplanes are supposed to fly. I’m not so sure about dragons.’

Moses squatted down and examined the dragon.

‘And look,’ Rebecca said, ‘it’s got holes in it.’

‘Ah,’ Moses said, ‘but this is a Chinese flying dragon, and Chinese flying dragons fly even better than aeroplanes.’

‘You’re making it up,’ Rebecca said. ‘There’s no such thing.’ But she wanted there to be.

‘And this — ’ he glanced around — ‘is perfect Chinese flying dragon weather.’ He pointed at the sky. It bustled with huge white clouds which kept bumping into each other, but very lightly, as if they had been pumped full of air. If you pricked one it would burst, he told her, and later you would find pieces of shrivelled cloud scattered about on the ground. He drew her attention to the trees, which rustled like presents being unwrapped by the breeze. Then one final (and unexpected) piece of evidence: a Chinese man chose that moment to trot by, one hand on his pork-pie hat. ‘You see?’ Moses laughed. ‘What did I tell you?’

Rebecca had to smile. ‘All right, I believe you.’

And, in no time, the dragon was flying magnificently. Mary spread a rug on the grass. Moses sat next to her. They watched Rebecca as she skipped down the hill, the string clenched in her fist, her eyes fixed on the twisting gold tail in the air above.

‘That was mine when I was her age,’ Mary told him. ‘When I was living in North Yorkshire. You didn’t know I was a northerner, did you? You didn’t know I came from a coal-mining family?’

Her revelations, he had often noticed, tended to coincide with moments of contentment, as if she felt she couldn’t allow time to pass too comfortably. A coal-mining family? Perhaps that explained her coal-mine-coloured tights, her kohl-lined eyes, her attachment to black. He smiled to himself.

‘I come from a small mining-town,’ she went on. ‘We moved away when I was nine. That’s why I haven’t got an accent any more.’

‘Was your father a miner then?’

‘No, he was a teacher. My grandfather was a miner, though. My grandfather — I remember him so vividly. Especially the back of his neck. He had these lines, hundreds of lines that criss-crossed, made diamond shapes. The lines were all ingrained with black. The coal-dust, I suppose. It gets into your skin. Becomes a second skin.

‘I used to call them necklaces, those tiny strings of diamond shapes. Grandpa’s necklaces. It used to make him chuckle. My mother tried to put a stop to it. “Men don’t wear necklaces, Mary,” she used to say. As if it was something I didn’t know. She was a very stupid woman. Missed the point completely.

‘Grandpa was special. He was a man and he wore necklaces. I thought that was absolutely wonderful, whatever my mother said. Sometimes he wore a scarf, for his bronchitis, and I would pester him until he took it off. “I want to see your necklaces, Grandpa,” I used to say. “Show me your necklaces.” And he would slowly loosen his scarf, making a game of it, chuckling his deep chuckle and shaking his head as if he had never heard anything like it.

‘But I think it scared him in a way. I think he was always listening out for my mother. Ready to pretend nothing was happening if she came in. Why do parents do that? Why do they try to close you down like that?’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Moses said.

‘Of course not.’ Such vehemence in her voice. She might have been disagreeing with him. Sometimes she seemed to be correcting not what he said but how he said it. As if his emphasis had been all wrong.

Then she added, wistful now, ‘I suppose I learned something.’

‘What about your father?’

‘He was a quiet man. No necklaces. He would do anything to avoid an argument, anything for a bit of peace and quiet. The only time I can remember him raising his voice was when he left the dinner-table once and stood in the doorway and shouted, “I’M NOT GOING TO ARGUE, MAEVE.” Maeve was my mother.’

She was laughing, but Moses thought he detected a new brightness in her eyes: tears.

‘Poor old Dad,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought about him for so long. She killed him, really.’

‘Your mother?’

Mary nodded. ‘She needed drama. She needed scenes. That’s where her momentum came from. But he couldn’t take it. One of them had to give. He used to think that she would run out of steam if he kept quiet, but silence made her hysterical. She would work herself up into a frenzy. It was frightening, like watching someone having a fit. And he would be sitting in his chair, waiting for it all to blow over. Looking so small. Scared. Not even daring to look up. He would just sit there, waiting for it to end so he could light his pipe and switch on the radio and draw rings round the names of horses in the back of the paper.’

She fell silent, one hand in the hair at the back of her neck. After staring at the grass for a while, she said, ‘They never should’ve married.’

‘Then you wouldn’t be here,’ Moses said, ‘sitting on this hill with me and Rebecca. Then you would’ve missed all this.’

Mary smiled. ‘I’d be somewhere. I would’ve forced my way into the world somehow.’

Her airy confidence annoyed him. ‘Yes,’ he persisted, ‘but not here.’

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not here.’ The distinction didn’t seem to be important to her.

Then a familiar but anxious voice called from the bottom of the hill. ‘Moses? What do I do when I want it to come down?’

They both laughed at the look of utter helplessness on Rebecca’s face. Helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds.

That picnic on Parliament Hill set one or two new precedents. It shifted the scene away from the house in Nio and on to more neutral territory. It also disrupted the neat pattern of Sundays only. It meant that, in future, they could meet wherever they liked, with or without the children, and on weekdays too. Mary taught part-time, so she often had free mornings or afternoons. Moses, of course, was always free. They began to go on expeditions, locally at first, in Muswell Hill, then further afield, as if their courage was growing. They discovered some unusual places: a church in Epping Forest, a pub in Rotherhithe, a stretch of canal in Kensal Rise. Slowly they were building up common ground, creating, as it were, their own private frame of reference.

The impetus came mostly from Mary — an abrupt phone-call or a note, sometimes posted, sometimes delivered by hand, never more than a sentence long, and signed simply ‘M’. Once or twice she even arranged trips over Sunday lunch. Everything was done naturally and openly, everything was above board and beyond suspicion. It was strange, but he often had to remind himself that, after all, they had absolutely nothing to hide. The conditions for guilt existed without the grounds for feeling guilty. Just occasionally he felt burdened somehow as if he had become the repository of a trust that he knew he was going to betray. He wondered how that had come about. Would come about. If it came about.

One fact stood out clearly enough. Some kind of bridge was being built. And he was walking over it as easily, as thoughtlessly as in a dream, simply because it was there.

*

One Thursday evening in September Moses arrived home to find a note slipped under his front door. Feel like a drink? M. He turned round to see Mary standing behind him.

‘Well?’ she grinned. ‘Do you?’

They drove north in Mary’s 1968 Volvo. The sky predicted thunder, black stormclouds edged in gold. Mary wore a tight black dress, black gloves to the elbow, red lipstick.

‘Let’s stop at the first pub we see,’ she said, ‘and sink a few Martinis.’

The first pub they saw was somewhere in Highgate: brown curtains, Skol beer-mats, nothing special. Mary walked up to the bar to order their drinks. Moses took a table by the window. He watched the bartender reach for a bottle of dry Martini.

‘No, no, not that,’ he heard Mary call out. ‘Real Martinis. You know. American Martinis.’ She wasn’t being high-handed or condescending; she just seemed amused at the misunderstanding.

The bartender (thin, whiskery, whisky-sour) stared, first at Mary, then at Moses, and Moses suddenly realised what he must be thinking. The age difference. The tight dress. The lipstick. Prostitute, he was thinking. And the word was making an ugly screeching sound in his mind. Nails on a blackboard. Painted nails.

Mary didn’t seem to have noticed. She was giving the bartender instructions. ‘Large gin. Dash of dry Martini. Just a dash, mind. A green olive, if you’ve got one. And no ice, of course.’

‘Of course.’ The bartender stared at her for a moment longer. He seemed to want her to know exactly what he thought of her. Then he began to put the drinks together. In his own sweet time. With infinite distaste.

Eventually he set the glasses down in front of her. One slopped over.

‘Sorry, madam,’ he smirked, ‘but we don’t usually get your type in here.’ And, turning his back on her, he busied himself with a couple of dirty glasses.

Moses felt anger well up inside him, hot and sudden, like blood from a deep cut.

‘I know what he’s thinking,’ Mary said when she sat down, ‘and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t let it get to you, Moses. If I can deal with it so can you.’ She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.’

He knew she was right, but he couldn’t help himself: the bartender had crawled under his skin. He hated people who stood their weakness on a pedestal, who thought their small minds gave them the right to sit in judgment over others. His anger simmering, he ostentatiously lit a cigarette for Mary. The bartender was still polishing glasses. His eyes would swivel in their direction every now and then and slide away again whenever Moses looked up. A few locals sat on stools at the bar. Their eyes swivelled too.

Mary finished her drink. ‘Not bad,’ she said cheerfully, ‘for somebody who’s never made one before.’

Moses tried to smile.

‘Would you like another?’ she asked him.

‘Somewhere else,’ he said.

Instead of following her to the door, he walked up to the bar. The bartender, still polishing, pretended not to notice him.

‘Listen you,’ Moses said in a low voice, ‘if you ever do anything like that again, I’m going to come in here and knock your fucking head off, all right?’

He waited long enough to see the bartender’s face take on a certain rigidity, the rigidity of fear, then he turned away.

‘That’s assault,’ Mary told him when he joined her outside.

‘I didn’t touch him.’

‘You threatened him, though.’

Moses opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind.

She linked her arm through his. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever go there again.’

‘No,’ he said.

A few yards short of the car, he stopped. Shaken, yet strangely ignited. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’

They told the story over lunch the following Sunday. It rapidly became spectacular. Mary hadn’t left the pub at all, she had slouched against the wall, filing her nails, a gangster’s moll, while Moses, mafioso, did terrible things to the whiskery bartender: he had shaken the bartender by the scruff of the neck until his false teeth flew out; he had cleaned Mary’s shoes with the bartender’s face; he had thrown whisky around and reached slowly for his lighter while the bartender gaped, grovelled, dribbled like a fire-hose in a drought. The story changed and grew with every telling; it became more vicious, more surreal, more just. It always went down well at lunches and parties. ‘Oh Mary,’ someone would clamour, ‘tell them the one about Moses. You know, the time he blew up that pub in Highgate.’ Before long the incident had distorted beyond all recognition. Even the memory blurred. Only the names remained the same.

*

Mary and Moses.

This intimacy grew, slowly as a plant or a face, its slowness old-fashioned (something Mary claimed to be herself). It was like the colour of a leaf changing. It used the slipping of summer into autumn as a metaphor to describe itself. One week it was green, the next it was orange, and the week after that it was red. Something had happened in between, some gradual yet tangible chemical development had taken place. She had spoken once of starting something that you can’t control. He had forgotten the context, but remembered the words. They surfaced whenever he thought about her.

He returned again and again to the same point. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. He never stood and looked at her and thought, as he might have done with Gloria: she’s beautiful. It was an attraction of a different nature altogether. It transcended simple good looks. It almost transcended definition. He only knew that when he was with Mary he felt an affinity that was unthought-out, unforced, uncanny. He felt good. And he marvelled at how effortlessly that feeling had come into being. Only the thought of her marriage, her family, brought him back to earth, anchored him. And she talked about them regularly and passionately. Take Alan, for instance. She was still in love with him, she said. He was the only man in her life. He knocked everybody else into a cocked hat. She fought for Alan even though there was no fight going on. Hold on, Moses wanted to say to her sometimes, I agree with you. They were surrounded by natural obstacles: Alan, Alison, Sean, Rebecca — her love for them, his too. It was reassuring, in a way. It meant that nothing bad could happen.

Inevitably, perhaps, he saw less of Gloria. He called her less. And he was surprised to discover that he didn’t miss her at all. Late one Sunday night (one of the nights he actually managed to make it back to The Bunker) she called him.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

She probably hadn’t meant it to sound like that, but that was how it came out. He told her the truth. ‘I went out to lunch. At the Shirleys’.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Alison’s family. The Alison who used to be with Vince. I told you.’

‘Oh yes.’ Her voice sounded flat. As if all the lifeblood had been drained out of her.

‘You sound strange,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. Anyway, look, what I wanted to ask you was, do you want to do something on Thursday night?’

Her voice had lifted, seeking brightness in his reply, but he didn’t have to think very hard to remember that he had already arranged to meet Mary on Thursday. He carried the phone over to the window. No cars were waiting at the lights so when the lights changed nothing happened. Sunday night. Almost two o’clock. Dead time.

‘Hello?’ came Gloria’s voice. ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t. I’m doing something on Thursday.’

A moment silence, then: ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s what the phone’s been trying to tell me all day. When I called you this morning, it just rang and rang, and nobody answered. I didn’t call you this afternoon because I thought, all those times I called in the morning and nobody answered, that was a good piece of advice. You’re wasting your time, kind of thing. You might as well forget it, save yourself a lot of trouble. Looks like it was right, doesn’t it? Shame I didn’t listen.’

‘You got through,’ he said. Beginning to wish she hadn’t.

‘Yes. I got through.’

He had never heard her sound so low. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

She hesitated. ‘No, it’s too late. And anyway, you don’t want to, really.’

It was almost a question, it called for a denial. Moses didn’t answer. He felt so tired. He wanted to go to bed alone. Not talk. Drift into sleep.

‘All right. Look. See you around, OK?’ Gloria said, staccato now. ‘Bye.’

She hung up.

He listened to the buzzing for a while, then he put the phone down.

Two minutes later he was sitting on the bed unlacing his boots when the phone rang again. He had thought about ringing her back when she hung up like that, but he had decided against it. He didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation they had now would run round in vicious circles. Telephones solve nothing, he told himself. And he heard Mary’s voice calling him an escapist. Now Gloria was calling him back and he would have to talk to her anyway. He didn’t want to answer, but he had to, really. She knew he was there. He could hardly pretend to be asleep already. He walked back into the next room, his bootlaces trickling on the floor behind him. He picked up the receiver and looked at the ceiling. ‘Hello?’

It wasn’t Gloria.

A voice, high-pitched, sexless, ageless, chanted:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again —

‘Who’s this?’ Moses said.

Silence. Then, very faintly, the sound of breathing. Light and quick. Excitement, he thought. And imagined a child on the other end. But knew this was no child.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ the voice whispered. Then hung up.

Click. Buzz.

It took Moses a while to realise that the call had not been for him but for Elliot. Thinking about it, it had to have been for Elliot; it had the same eerie theatrical vindictiveness as the white arrows and the skinned pool-table. Even so, it chilled him. Suddenly he needed to talk to somebody. If he used the phone again he could erase the memory of that voice.

He picked up the phone and dialled Gloria’s number. He let it ring twenty times before replacing the receiver. He wondered if she was asleep already or just not answering.

He went to bed and tried to read. The words jumped on the page. None of their meaning registered. After ten minutes he switched the light off. The darkness buzzed like a phone left off the hook.

There were no more calls.

The next day he told Elliot. Elliot shrugged. ‘That’s what I said. We’ve been getting phone-calls.’

Something had fastened on to Elliot during the past few days and sucked all the colour out of his face. He looked grey. Even his gold medallion looked grey.

‘Everything all right, Elliot?’ Moses asked.

Elliot jerked forward in his chair and stalled as if the clutch controlling him had slipped. ‘None of your fucking business, all right?’

Moses stared at him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I just thought I’d let you know, anyway,’ and moved towards the door.

Elliot leaned back. He pushed the tip of his tongue between his front teeth, worked it in and out of the gap. ‘Hey, Moses?’ he called out. ‘If there’s any trouble at night, call this number.’

He slipped a piece of paper across the desk. Moses walked back and picked it up. Seven digits. A perfectly normal London number.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘Me,’ Elliot said. ‘Sometimes.’

He smiled craftily. But as far as Moses was concerned Elliot had just let him know that he was worried.

*

Thursday came. The sun was shining. Clouds lay in white clumps on the clean blue surface of the sky. When the doorbell rang at midday, Moses leaned out of his window and saw Mary below. Light showed as silver on the black gloss of her hair (she had dyed it again). A black skirt swirled around her pale calves. He called her name and she looked up. She didn’t answer, though. She didn’t approve of people shouting in the street. For somebody who had often been described as bohemian, eccentric even, she could be surprisingly conventional at times. But she used that. The two qualities ran alongside each other in her like trains running on parallel tracks, and she could switch at will. It was part of her struggle to resist classification. Two or three times he had heard her mention some scene from an old black and white movie. A man’s talking to a woman. The man’s so wrapped up in what he’s saying that he doesn’t notice that he’s boring the woman. In the end the woman becomes so thoroughly bored that she leaves the room. The man carries on talking, utterly oblivious, utterly foolish. It’s quite a while before he swings round to discover that he’s alone, that he’s been talking to an empty room. The moral? In Mary’s words: Nobody should ever take anybody else for granted. The implication being, least of all me.

But Moses couldn’t imagine anyone taking Mary for granted. Even her most mundane remarks seemed provocative somehow. Perhaps because you wouldn’t have expected them to come from her. Sentiments expressed by millions of people every day. Sentiments like, ‘I love my husband,’ or, ‘Nobody could ever take my children away from me’ (yes, sometimes she sounded like a soap-opera). She stamped them as her own only by the blunt unadorned categorical way she spoke. When Mary talked of basic emotions she left no room for doubts or indecision. To Mary, this proved that she was a perfectly ordinary person. To Moses, it set her apart from just about everybody he had ever known.

He wanted to understand her more, especially when he was drunk, but she always turned his questions round. The answers, when they came, told him more about himself. He didn’t want to hear about himself. So he persisted. And learned even less.

Only last Sunday he’d said, ‘I want to know how you work. I want to know what goes on inside your head.’

Frowning, she’d replied, ‘I’m not a machine, you know.’

‘Maybe that’s what it is about you. You’re not set in your ways like — ’

‘Like other people my age?’

‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

‘There’s something you’ve got to understand, Moses. I’m not a bloody stone. I change. I’m changing right now. Right in front of your eyes.’

‘Stones change too.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. Everything changes. Everyone changes. I’m just the same as everyone else. Stop treating me like a freak.’

His patience had come apart then. ‘You never admit anything, do you? You’ve always got to have the last word.’

She’d stared at him thoughtfully. ‘You know, one day you’ll realise I’m right about me and you’re wrong and then you won’t be honest about why you don’t want to see me any more.’

He’d denied this, but she’d given him one of her knowing looks.

‘You’re going to have to have a lift installed,’ Mary said.

He turned and saw her standing in the doorway. She didn’t sound out of breath, not in the slightest. She must have rested halfway up. He smiled to himself at this little insight.

‘A drink?’ he said.

‘Maybe just one,’ she said. ‘For the road.’

He poured two whiskies. It was the first time she had seen where he lived. While he hunted for money and keys, she explored, glass in hand, lips pressed together. She walked into the kitchen and the bathroom, then emerged again, crossed the lounge, and disappeared into the bedroom. He heard her pause inside the door, take two or three quick steps, and pause again.

When she returned she asked him, ‘How often do you wash your sheets?’

‘I don’t know,’ he stammered. ‘Not very often, I suppose.’

‘ How often?’

‘About once every three weeks.’

‘You should leave them longer,’ she said. ‘They smell wonderful.’

He stared at her.

She gave him a radiant, brazen smile. ‘So where are we going today?’

*

As they went through the cemetery gates they passed an old man in blue overalls. He was shovelling dead leaves on to a slow-burning fire. They said good afternoon to him. He scowled, grunted something. They walked on, stopped beneath the memorial to Karl Marx. Somebody had daubed his massive Humpty Dumpty head with red paint. Perhaps that explained the man’s black mood. In the distance, through the trees, Moses could hear the laughter of children.

Mary was smiling. ‘When I brought Rebecca here, two years ago, she stood in front of Marx and looked very puzzled. After a while she turned to me and said, “How come he got a big statue like that just for inventing a boring old shop?” She thought he was the Marks in Marks and Spencer’s. It was one of her first jokes.’

Moses could picture Rebecca squinting up at Marx, he could picture the indignation, the disbelief, on her small face. He too smiled.

They turned down an overgrown path between two rows of uneven leaning gravestones. Grass sprang up, stiff and blond as straw. Brambles clung to Mary’s stockings. They watched a squirrel steal a red carnation from a wreath and eat it in the shadow of a bush. The old man’s fire shook slow blue smoke into the air like incense. Mary sat down at the foot of a tomb and lit a cigarette. Moses sat down next to her. As he read the inscription on the stone — In Memory Of Our Beloved Father — something came free in him. Words took shape.

‘It’s pretty strange,’ he said, ‘not knowing where your parents are.’

Mary glanced round at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If my parents were dead, properly dead, in graves with names on, then at least I’d know where they were, wouldn’t I? As it is, I haven’t really got proof of anything.’

He wrenched a few blades of grass out of the ground and twisted them until they were dark and wet. He had sounded so bitter, surprising even himself.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Moses,’ Mary said. ‘You’ve never told me anything about your parents.’

So he told her. The same story he had told Gloria in that hotel in Leicestershire. He recognised many of the phrases. He added where necessary, especially for Mary, and found himself believing his embellishments. It was his story — one of the things he only entrusted to the people closest to him. It sealed a friendship, a relationship. Sanctified it, almost. Yes, he had the feeling, this time above all others, of handling something priceless and fragile, like the bones of a saint, something that could easily break up, decay, crumble into dust.

When he came to the end, Mary gave him a long careful look.

‘I’m going to say something and you’re probably not going to like it.’

‘What?’ he said, uneasy now.

‘I think that was a nice performance. Almost convincing.’

‘But it’s true.’

‘I know it’s true. That’s not the point. You were performing, Moses. You performed the whole thing. That’s not the first time you’ve told somebody, is it?’

He looked away from her. ‘No,’ he mumbled. His stomach twisted as if he had been caught cheating.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It shows. You’ve told it before. Quite a few times, I imagine. You’re not really even thinking about your parents when you tell it. Not any more. You’re just using them. You’re using your own family, your own history, to pull emotions out of people. You didn’t really feel anything when you told me all that stuff about the dress — except self-pity, maybe. It wasn’t real, Moses. It didn’t feel real. It was like something put on specially for tourists. Some kind of ritual disembowelling. Is that all I am to you? I don’t want smiling natives and air-conditioning and cabaret. I want real stuff. You’ve reached the point where you’ve sanitised everything. You can’t take it any further. You know it and I know it. So why do it?’

He couldn’t answer.

Anger shook her to her feet. She walked away. He noticed the blades of dead grass stuck to the back of her skirt.

In the car, she said, ‘You know something? You don’t need us. It’s not us you need — me and Alan and Rebecca and Sean and Alison. It’s your parents. Your family. Your real family. So find them. Stop using us.’

‘How am I supposed to do that?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. But at least you could start trying.’

He dropped into a painful silence. It took him minutes to struggle out. ‘I do need you.’ He could hear a childish defiance in his voice.

‘Find them, Moses. Then you can decide that.’

She left him outside The Bunker. He thanked her for the afternoon, but the words came out awkward, accusing. After she had driven away, he went through a bewildering variety of responses in a very short space of time — fear, guilt, anxiety, amusement, cynicism. None of them seemed to fit.

That feeling of not knowing what to say.

He had sat in the car, on the gravestone, tongue-tied, panic-stricken, his bowels churning. Part of him hated her for attacking him there, in the area of trust and confidences. Another part of him applauded her, told him she was justified. He liked to appear as the victim of mysterious and tragic circumstances, he liked to manipulate people, he liked the sound of his own voice. He liked being thought of as special. What had she said? Something about disembowelling for tourists. She was right. She had been hard with him in precisely those areas where Gloria, say, had been soft. She had been accurate. That thought startled him. Suddenly it seemed as though she had passed a test which he, unwittingly, had put her through.

*

The next Sunday the weather broke.

Moses woke to the sound of a roof-tile shattering on the street below. Thunder in the distance, constant thunder, as if the world was ill. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood in his bleak kitchen, swallowing coffee and watching the rain come down. After what Mary had said, he had made a few enquiries regarding the whereabouts of his parents, but he had drawn a complete blank.

On Friday evening he had phoned Uncle Stan and Auntie B. Auntie B had answered.

‘You know, I thought that suitcase would upset you, Moses,’ she had said.

She was so straightforward about things, Moses thought. Mary would probably adore her.

‘A bit of a funny idea, really,’ she had gone on, ‘leaving a suitcase like that.’

‘You’re absolutely sure there wasn’t an address anywhere?’ Moses had said. ‘What about on that letter?’

‘Oh no, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Only a “to whom it may concern”. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know who they were.’

Moses had asked her for the address of the orphanage where he had grown up. He phoned the orphanage on Saturday morning. He spoke to a Mr Parks (Mrs Hood had died, apparently).

‘Even if we had that kind of information,’ Mr Parks said, ‘we couldn’t possibly divulge it. Not to anyone.’

Divulge. Really, he said that.

‘I’m not anyone,’ Moses said. ‘I’m the person involved.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not our policy to — ’

‘I don’t think you heard me, Mr Parks. It’s my parents I’m looking for. My own parents.’

‘I’m very sorry.’ Mr Parks appeared to be gloating then. ‘We can’t help you.’

Moses slammed the phone down.

He resorted to directories, though without his usual enthusiasm. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in the Trafalgar Square post office. He thumbed through every directory he could lay his hands on. He came out with black fingers and a headache.

Perhaps his parents were ex-directory. Perhaps they didn’t have a phone. Perhaps they had emigrated. Or died, like Mrs Hood. He was beginning to wonder whether in fact he had ever actually had any parents. Perhaps he was a miracle of science. Or perhaps he had been delivered by a giant stork.

The perhapses seemed to go on for ever.

He turned round to see smoke rising from the grill. His toast was on fire. The last of the bread too. He switched the grill off and blew the flames out. He waited for the toast to cool, then he scraped the burnt bits off. He tried to spread it with butter, but the butter had been in the fridge for too long. Suddenly there were fragments of toast shrapnel all over the kitchen floor.

After sweeping up his breakfast with a dustpan and brush, Moses went and stood by the window. Rain. Grey skies. Misery. He watched a woman walk towards the bus-stop, hunched under a green umbrella. She was probably just tucking her chin into her collar to keep from getting soaked, but to Moses it looked as if she was carrying the heaviest umbrella in the world.

*

He dressed slowly and drove north through the drenched empty streets. It was no longer a decision whether or not to go to Muswell Hill on Sundays. It had become imperative, automatic, like breathing.

Mary opened the front door. She was wearing a faded black dress fastened at the waist with one of Sean’s studded leather belts. She had a scarf round her neck, wispy, cloud-grey, made of something diaphanous like chiffon. Her fairy-tale look. She eyed him suspiciously.

‘I didn’t think we’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not for a while, anyway.’

He wiped the rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Why not?’

‘After last Thursday I thought you’d probably stay away. Lick your wounds. I wouldn’t have blamed you, actually.’ She smiled faintly, and he smiled back, then looked away.

‘You’re not quite over it yet,’ she said, ‘are you?’

He breathed in deeply. ‘No.’

She seemed to approve of this. She took a step backwards and looked at him again, afresh almost. ‘Christ, you’re soaked,’ she laughed. ‘Come on in and get some dry things. We’re getting drunk as usual.’

He followed her straight upstairs. ‘Who knows,’ she joked over her shoulder, ‘maybe I’ll attack you again later on.’

‘There’s nothing left to attack.’

She stopped on the top step, smiled down at him. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

Lunch was spaghetti bolognese, a tossed salad, and bottles of Chianti on the oak table in the kitchen. Moses drank quickly, with exhilaration. The glasses of wine were a series of weights. Suddenly the scales tipped and he was drunk again.

After the meal he washed up unsteadily. Broke a plate. Outside the rain sluiced off the roof, flooded the terrace.

Rebecca, drying, groaned. ‘I wanted to go out.’

They left the saucepans to soak and played the rain game with Alan. The rain game is easy. All you have to do is say what the rain is coming down in.

Alan said, ‘Buckets.’

Moses said, ‘Ten-gallon hats.’

Rebecca said, ‘Swimming-trunks.’

In theory the rain always stopped before you ran out of containers. Not on this particular afternoon. It went on raining using containers they had never even heard of.

It was still raining two hours later when, after a series of twists and turns, the conversation arrived at marriage.

‘You’re lucky,’ Moses was telling Alan. ‘Your marriage is the kind of marriage I’d want if I was married.’ He was entering the third stage of drunkenness now: the earnest stage (the fourth was loss of memory and balance, the fifth was coma). He poured himself another glass of wine. Like the rain, it didn’t look as if it would be running out in the near future.

‘It’s your sense of priorities,’ he went on. ‘I mean, you’re each other’s priority and because you know you’re each other’s priority you can act like you’re not. You can go anywhere, do anything. Maybe sometimes it looks like you’re putting other things first, but that doesn’t matter because deep down you know, you see. If you’re Alan you know that Mary’s always there, and if you’re Mary you know that Alan’s always there — ’

‘And if you’re Moses,’ Mary interrupted from her green chair in the corner, ‘you know that Alan and Mary are always there.’

‘Yes,’ he had to admit, ‘that’s probably true.’

‘And if you’re Alison,’ came Sean’s voice from the scullery, ‘you know that Vince’s always there.’

‘ That is not true,’ Alison cried, though she knew it was.

Mary smiled down into her drink. ‘Vince,’ she murmured.

Moses set that smile against the things that Vince had said about her. And couldn’t help himself. ‘You know what he said about you, Mary?’

‘Who? Vince?’ Mary said. ‘No. Tell me.’

‘He said you act like time’s stood still for twenty years.’

Mary’s face lifted, lit up. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘My God, that’s absolutely right. All this — ’ and Moses took it that she meant this heady Muswell Hill air she breathed, the spirit of the house, her happiness — ‘it hasn’t changed in twenty years. How wonderful!’

He had to laugh because she looked so victorious, so fulfilled, as if she had just won a prize. He knew how much Vince would have hated him for telling Mary what he had said about her. But how much more Vince would have hated the fact that she had taken the insult as a compliment, that she had discovered a new truth in those bitter words. Outmanoeuvred again. Bitch.

And suddenly Moses saw her as some brilliant species of fish. She exploited to the full the privacy and depth and space of the element she moved in. One moment she tilted her scales to catch the light and masqueraded as a piece of reflected sky, or travelled incognito through the darkness of the ocean bed. The next she lay on the surface, all gall and nonchalance and dazzle. And when those crude hooks ploughed or wheedled their way through the water towards her, she slipped past them with infinite grace, infinite delight.

Fishwoman, he thought.

Some day he would tell her that and make her laugh.

In the meantime the rain was still falling, collecting in deep pools on the terrace, the perfect background to his thoughts.

*

Evening had fallen. Moses had fallen too, snapping the back off a kitchen chair (Alan had laughed and said, ‘It’s all right, I like stools’). Now he stretched out on the living-room floor, a tumbler of brandy in his hand. Alison sat crosslegged in front of the TV; there was a crackling as she drew a brush through the forest-fire of her hair. Sean was beating Alan at pool upstairs. Rebecca was in the bath. He wondered where Mary had disappeared to, and the thought lifted him effortlessly to his feet.

Outside the rain had stopped because everybody had forgotten about it. The eaves and drainpipes of the house creaked with the last of the downpour. A few pale clouds overlapped at a great height.

He found her sitting on the low brick wall separating the Shirleys’ front garden from their next-door neighbours’. She wasn’t wearing any shoes.

‘Haven’t you got cold feet?’ he said.

She didn’t react.

He tilted his head back until it was parallel with the sky. It was so dark up there. Giddy and unending. Stars staggered. One tripped and fell a million miles.

‘What did you mean,’ she said finally, ‘by that little monologue about my marriage?’

‘I meant what I said.’

‘It sounded like a challenge.’

‘To do what?’

‘I think you know the answer to that. I also think you’re playing games.’ When he didn’t respond, her eyes turned on him and her voice hardened. ‘Playing games,’ she said, ‘with me.’

‘What about you? Aren’t you playing games?’

‘That’s not my style.’

‘What do you call what you’re doing then?’

‘Fear. Risk. Confusion. Take your pick.’

‘I don’t see what the difference is.’

She reached out, placed a hand on the back of his head and drew his mouth towards hers. She kissed him with closed lips. As the first kiss merged into a second then into a third, her lips gave, parted under his. He tasted wine and through the wine he tasted her.

She leaned back against the wall, stared uphill into the sky. ‘That’s the difference, Moses. I really do it. You don’t.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘You know, sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can hear the motorway from here.’ It might have been a private joke, the way she smiled.

He couldn’t hear the motorway. That breathy silence could have been anything. He was drunk, he was thinking, but not drunk enough. Panic.

Mary’s head, resting on her knees, moved from side to side as if she was denying something. ‘What am I doing?’ she murmured. ‘What am I doing? What are you doing?’

‘Sitting on the wall,’ he said.

‘Sitting on the fence,’ she came back instantly. And smiled at him sideways, through her hair, her lips shining like dark glass.

In that moment he felt her quickness could get them out of anything. He didn’t believe what she said about confusion and fear and risk. This was Mary. She was extraordinary. They would be all right.

*

He woke early as he always did in strange beds. He had a headache and creases on his cheeks from sleeping face down. When he tiptoed downstairs through the quiet house he found Mary in the kitchen. She was making toast and coffee. The open window let birdsong and a suggestion of sunlight into the room.

‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps we could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath.’

‘Don’t you have to work?’

Smiling, she handed him a piece of toast. ‘I’m ill,’ she said.

They left the house just after seven and drove to the Vale of Health. Mary parked the car next to a deserted fairground. She pointed at the dodgems rimmed with orange rust and standing at curious angles to one another. ‘People at a party,’ she said, and once again he saw that nothing was wasted on her. She could make the world more interesting just by looking at it.

They scaled a steep bank of bleached grass. At the top the woods began. Beech trees stood on the hard-packed mud, their trunks dusted with green, their leaves sapped of life, shot through with holes, ready to drop, their roots rising through the surface of the ground.

Moses bent down. ‘They look like ribs,’ he said, ‘the ribs on starving horses.’ He glanced up to see Mary watching him with a curious smile on her face. It made him feel as if he had been doing something slightly eccentric. He began to get a glimmer of the reason why she liked to be with him.

‘Yes. Yes, they do,’ she said.

He rejoined her on the path. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘I used to talk to horses.’

On Saturday afternoons, he told her, he sometimes had to play football. Matches were specially organised for the boys who were no good at games. For the spastics, as they were known. In his first year Highness MG was thirteen years old and just over six foot tall. Highness MG was a spastic.

On the one afternoon that stood for all the others in his memory a Welshman by the name of Davies took the game. Davies was an officious little bastard. He wore royal-blue track-suits and ran on the spot all the time. He was only 5′8″. Highness MG had been put down to play right-back. A real spastic’s position, right-back. So far as he could work out it meant staying at one end of the pitch, more or less out of the way, for forty-five minutes. Then, at half-time, he had to walk down to the other end of the pitch, to the area diagonally opposite, in fact, and stay there for another forty-five minutes. Unless there was injury time (what a terrible phrase; it sounded like everybody was officially supposed to hurt each other), in which case he would have to stand around for even longer. He arrived at the pitch that afternoon wearing his brand-new games jersey. The collar chafed his neck. The wind blew around his bare knees. It really was a very tedious and unpleasant business altogether.

Time went slowly. Sometimes the ball passed through his section of the pitch accompanied by rapid breathing, shouts, and the thudding of energetic boots (some spastics tried harder than others). He watched it go by like a rather dull carnival. Once the ball ran loose and rolled towards him. He lunged at it half-heartedly. The weight of his boot (size 9, suspiciously clean) carried his leg higher into the air than he had bargained for, causing a temporary, though not total, loss of balance. For those few moments he must have looked like a clumsy can-can dancer. The ball trickled under his raised leg and into touch.

‘Oh, Midget,’ everybody yelled. ‘Come on, Midget.’

Mary interrupted him. ‘Why Midget?’

‘Because my initials are MG.’ He winced. ‘You know, in some ways, I think I hated that name even more than Foreskin.’

‘That’s because it’s true,’ Mary said. ‘In some ways you are very small.’ And when she saw the look on his face she added, ‘I’m sorry, but I mean it.’

Moses went on with the story.

Because these matches featured spastics they always took place in the most remote corners of the school grounds. On this particular afternoon they were playing right up against the boundary fence. Beyond the fence lay an ordinary field. A field with no white lines on it. A field where footballs were meaningless and the Welshman’s whistle had no power. A sensible field, in other words. At some point during the second half Midget got fed up with searching for insects in the long grass. He ached with cold and the inside of his thigh stung where the ball had struck it while he wasn’t looking (he was convinced that Puddle had done it on purpose). He wandered casually to the edge of the pitch and crossed the touchline. Sacrilege. Heresy. Taboo. He half-expected alarms to sound, dogs to start barking, search-lights to track him down in the gloom of that November afternoon, but, strangely enough, nobody seemed to notice.

He leaned on the metal fence. There was a tree in the middle of the field. Two or three horses stood in the shadow of its branches.

‘Hello, horses,’ he said affectionately.

It seemed like the first time he had spoken in ages.

They were old and tired, these horses. They had obviously had hard lives and had been put out to grass. One of them, a roan with shaggy hooves and a bulging sack of a stomach, lifted its head and shambled over.

He moved his hand out slowly, stroked the soft puffing nose.

‘What’s it like in there then?’ he said.

Then he heard the whistle screech and saw a blur of royal-blue in the corner of his eye. The horse’s eyes rolled back. It shied away from the sudden rush of colour, thudded off into the sanity of its field.

‘Goodbye, horses,’ he said.

‘What the blazes are you doing, Highness?’ Davies shouted, jogging on the spot. His voice was going up and down too.

‘Talking to the horses.’

‘Talking to the horses, sir.’

‘Talking to the horses, sir.’ Feeling like a parrot, sir.

‘And why, when you’re supposed to be playing football, are you talking to horses, Highness?’

‘They’re more interesting. Sir.’

His reply was greeted by a burst of applause. Davies froze in stupefaction, one knee in the air, until he realised that it was the crowd three pitches away (who had just seen Darling SGB of the First XV go over for a try to put the school ahead of its local rivals).

‘Davies never forgave me for that,’ Moses said. ‘You know what he wrote on my report? He wrote: Highness seems totally uninterested in any form of physical exertion whatsoever.’

‘Nicely put,’ Mary said, ‘but no longer entirely true, I suspect.’

Moses laughed.

He had never been to Kenwood House before, but it seemed appropriate to be seeing it at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, as if that specific time and place had been reserved long in advance. He had the feeling that, although everything was unusual, everything was as it should be.

Mist dressed the trees in grey uniforms, confined the world to little more than the footpath they were walking along. They reached a ditch. He jumped over. Mary stooped to examine a dam of twigs and leaves. She almost lost her footing on the bank. She was no athlete either, he saw. She would probably have talked to horses too. He held a hand out to her and helped her across.

They sat down on the grass beside the lake, the house a suggestion of white in the mist behind them. Mary leaned back against him, her head resting on his stomach. It was strange, her lying against him like that. In a flashback he saw Gloria in the same position, that Sunday morning on the beach. That kind of duplication worried him; it was as if, sooner or later, all human contact fell into the same tired easy patterns. He wanted to establish a difference between the two. He bent over and kissed Mary’s mouth. It was cool, closed; it didn’t move under his.

The sun pressed through the mist, brought out a fluorescence in the grass, a pallor in her skin, then it withdrew again, turned back into an area of brightness in the sky. The pressure of her head on his body spread, ran through his blood until he was alive to every part of her: the veins on her hand, the gleam in her hair, the curve of her nearest breast whose shape he still didn’t know. It was like being injected with some kind of slow drug that convinced him once again just how extraordinary she was — an injection she could quite reasonably deny all knowledge of, and would, knowing her.

It was a game, whatever she said. And, as in any game, there were rules. She laid down two rules that morning on the heath. The first after several minutes of silence. She levelled her chin at him suddenly, reminding him of a general, her profile in relief against a battalion of trees. ‘Nothing is to be destroyed,’ she said.

He said nothing.

You, me, him, us, them, he thought. A tall order, that. Like a tray stacked high with crockery. A cup slides towards one edge. You tilt the tray to try and save it. A plate falls off the other end. Crash. Nothing is to be destroyed, he repeated to himself. He looked at her and saw what they had together as a circus-act.

And the second?

‘You must never let me fuck you,’ she said. ‘Never.’ And when she saw him smiling, ‘No, I’m perfectly serious, Moses. Even if I ask you to, you must never let me. Promise me that.’

Even then he had a presentiment of how erotic a rule like that could be. Was that the reason for it, though? He never knew with Mary. She experimented with herself. ‘I put myself through things,’ she had told him once, and he remembered thinking of lions and hoops of fire. Still smiling, he nodded. He promised.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I’ve never done this before,’ and her eyes dilated, somewhere between triumph and fear.

‘I don’t understand. Never done what before?’

‘I’ve only been with Alan. That’s it. That’s all I know.’

He found this almost impossible to believe. She had led him, he felt, to believe the opposite. And he had never kissed anyone who kissed so well. But then there was a certain innocence about her kiss that made him think: Well, perhaps she is telling the truth. An innocence that her experience, such as it was, had done nothing to corrupt or transform.

So they were agreed: their relationship was to continue as it had started — orally.

One question wouldn’t go away, however. Mary had made the rules — but was she going to stick to them? After all, everybody knows what rules are for. And Mary was perverse enough to do exactly that.

*

‘That looks forbidden,’ Mary said. ‘Let’s try it.’

She backed the Volvo on to the grass verge and switched off the engine.

It was October now. Leaves the colour of tobacco. Air you could smoke like a cigarette. One of those days you remember years later. You don’t always remember the date or the place, sometimes you don’t even remember who you were with, but you remember the way your mind emptied out like a sigh, you remember the ease of your body’s moving, the feel of the air on your skin, the shape of a cloud, you remember a casual phrase, something somebody said without thinking, something that takes on significance purely through being remembered: That looks forbidden. Let’s try it.

A path curved away ahead of them. On the left, beyond the metal cattle-fence, a meadow sloped up to a ridge whose cutting edge had been blunted by a row of trees. To the right a high brick wall allowed them teasing glimpses of a mansion set in the middle of a private park. Once Moses saw a deer glide through the smoky distance. They followed the path for about twenty minutes until it narrowed, ducked into a wood.

Mary stood still, inhaled. ‘That’s so erotic.’

All that mulch and mould, she meant. All that humus, bark and fungus. Matured, ripened, sweetened in the dark container of that wood. He remembered her smiling up at him, her face between his thighs. ‘My God, how good that smells.’ And so crestfallen when he told her that he had just washed his sheets for the first time in almost four weeks. ‘Four weeks,’ she had groaned. ‘What a terrible waste. How could you do something like that, Moses? How could you throw it all away?’ In mourning, almost. He had looked puzzled and amused. He had never thought of dirt like that before.

Now she was standing next to him, her eyes flecked with silver, saying, ‘Jesus, you know what this is like? This is like having my face in your pants.’

They lay down on the noisy leaves, each sensing the other’s body stirring under all the layers of clothing. One hand eventually discovering the warm pale flesh of her stomach made her gasp. She curled round, took him in her mouth so softly, so gradually, that he didn’t have to will his orgasm; it rushed him from a distance, threw him backwards, shook him like a fit. She drank him, spilling nothing.

Afterwards she moved towards his mouth.

‘Taste yourself,’ she said.

The air lay cold against their faces, everywhere except their lips which it couldn’t reach. The leaves crumbled into dust under their bodies.

He drew back so he could look at her.

‘You don’t seem so tall when we’re lying down,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll have to lie down more often in the future.’

He smiled.

‘And that taste,’ she said. ‘That taste in the daytime. That too.’

He leaned above her watching the light, the white October light, run like acid into all the lines on her face, making them deeper, more pronounced. He traced one that curved through the thin mauve skin beneath her eye.

‘You look older outdoors,’ he said, meaning he liked the way she looked.

She lay back, looked up at him. It was her look. It came at you horizontally (vertically, in this case). Shrewd eyes, head cocked, mouth pushed forwards, almost pouting. It was amused, sceptical, challenging, but most of all it was enigmatic since she used it as shorthand and he could never gauge its meaning.

‘I’m forty,’ she said. ‘Next year I’ll be forty-one.’

He lay back, his head next to hers in the leaves. ‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘Does Alan know anything about this? I mean, if he knew, what would he think?’

Mary sighed. ‘How should,’ I know? I told you. I’ve never done this before. I have no idea.’

‘You don’t think he suspects?’

‘Why should he? He trusts me. He hasn’t got any suspicion.’

She saw Moses frown. ‘I’ll spell it out for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been married for nineteen years. I know Alan and he knows me. It’s close, you know? Even after all this time. And I would never leave him. Not for you. Not for anyone. And you know that too, if you’re honest with yourself. That’s why you’re in this thing. It’s safe.’

He realised that she was angry because she thought he was trying to put her marriage in a box, and nobody could do that to her marriage. He wasn’t, though. He only wanted to know what it felt like to be in the middle.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you don’t understand what I’m trying to say.’

‘If you can’t be clear, that’s your problem. I’m not an interpreter.’

Moses sat up, looked away from her.

‘I’m a wife and a mother,’ Mary said. ‘Whatever else I am comes third.’

He knew that. At the same time he found that degree of clarity a bit suspect. ‘How can you be so sure?’ he asked her. ‘How can it be so neat?’

‘It’s nineteen years of my life, Moses. If I wasn’t sure about that, I wouldn’t be sure about anything.’

‘Maybe you just described me.’

‘Maybe I did. But there’s a big difference. I’m forty. I can’t afford to be wrong.’

‘Old woman,’ he said. He knelt in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders.

‘Yes,’ she said, defiant now, leaves in her hair, ‘I am old.’

‘Kiss me,’ he said.

She stared at him steadily for a moment, then her face relaxed. She kissed him.

*

The wall seemed to go on for ever. Everything was happening on the left and Mary, brighter now as if they had, between them, cleared the air, pointed, scrutinised, cried out:

‘Look. A weir.’

The water, shaped like a comb, fell sheer into a still pool. She told him a story about a girl she had known when she was at college. The girl had drowned herself just below a weir. When they found her, she was floating, bound in weeds, like Ophelia. She had left a note behind in her room. I would have done this months ago, but I had to wait for my hair to grow.

Moses shivered.

‘And I remember everybody telling her how much nicer she looked with her hair long,’ Mary said.

Later they passed a bonfire.

‘You know what Rebecca used to call those?’ she said. ‘Cloud factories.’

Then they saw a sofa overgrown with brambles, a jay (no more than a scribble of blue on the grey paper of the afternoon), and a moon rising above the trees, as see-through as a piece of dead skin. It was one of those days when everything you see has a story attached to it, when everything you see reminds you of something else.

But nothing happened on the right. They glimpsed the house at intervals, from a number of different angles, through gaps where the wall had tumbled down, through cracks in padlocked doors and, once, through the bars of an ornate wrought-iron gateway. There was something pornographic about the way the house revealed itself. It turned them into voyeurs.

After walking for almost two hours they reached the car again.

‘How peculiar,’ Mary said, ‘to go all the way round the house like that, to go so far, without ever getting any nearer.’

It struck Moses that, on another day, they would probably have ignored the PRIVATE PROPERTY signs and scaled the wall and explored the grounds. But he said, ‘Some things are better from a distance.’

‘I hope that doesn’t include me.’

He smiled. ‘You know it doesn’t.’

But she had come perilously close, it seemed, and knew it. For that walk round the wall, he thought, had summed up their entire relationship.

Never getting any nearer.

The rules still intact.

*

Gloria phoned again.

He didn’t want to talk to her at all. He had nothing to say. He found himself feeling delayed by her call, as if he had something important to do, which he hadn’t. She sounded cheerful which made him sound depressed. His mind drifted as she talked. He said yes, no — anything, really. He didn’t care whether he gave himself away or not.

When she had finished answering the questions he hadn’t asked her she began to ask him questions.

‘Are you still seeing the Shirleys?’

‘Yes. Weekends, mostly. Sometimes I stay there a couple of days.’

‘Oh. That’s nice.’ She was trying to be big-hearted. Taking an interest in something that either upset or annoyed her. It made him want to rub her face in it. Would it be ‘nice’ then?

‘What do you do there?’

‘We get drunk, talk, go for walks— ’

‘Is she an alcoholic?’

‘Who?’

‘The mother. Mrs Shirley.’

‘No. She just drinks a lot.’

A short laugh from Gloria, but he hadn’t meant it as a joke. Then a pause. ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You sound a bit morose.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, sounding morose.

‘What is it then? Don’t you want to talk to me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. But really she was right. He didn’t want to talk to her. He couldn’t explain it to himself so there seemed little point in trying to explain it to her.

‘Can I come round?’ she was asking him now.

‘When?’ he said. Thinking tomorrow, the next day, something like that.

‘Now.’

Jesus, he thought. Then he went blank. Looked at the clock even though he already knew what time it was.

‘If you like,’ he said finally.

‘See you in about half an hour.’

He put the phone down and began to wait for her to arrive. He resented her presumption. Inviting herself round like that. But why, in that case, hadn’t he simply said no? How was it she had acquired the power to rob him of initiative?

*

She hung her coat on the ghost’s coat-hook even though he had told her a thousand times.

‘I’m worried about you,’ she said, moving across the room towards him.

He kissed her, then he turned away. ‘Why?’

‘I think you’re getting in over your head.’

‘Over my head?’ He laughed, but there was no humour in his laugh. What right did she have to say that? ‘How do you know?’

She sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. He could hear it crackle in the silence as she inhaled. ‘Call it a hunch,’ she said.

He looked over his shoulder at her. It was something Mary might have said. She phrased things that way.

‘I mean, I don’t care what you do with her.’ Gloria was examining her shoes.

‘And what if I told you we don’t do anything?’

‘I don’t care. The thing is, you’re not being straight with me. You keep everything to yourself. I don’t know where I stand any more.’ She paused, looked up from her shoes. ‘That means something, don’t you think?’

Moses turned back to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold glass. He felt sick, uncertain, found out. His mind was going blank with the division of things. Down in the street he could see three children sitting on a wall. They were laughing and swinging their legs. He wanted to sit on a wall. He wanted to laugh and swing his legs.

‘Moses,’ and Gloria’s voice had softened now, ‘just tell me where I stand.’

‘It’s a friendship,’ he heard himself insisting.

She looked down at her hands. For the first time, he saw her as a nun, her smile limited and prim — superior. She was making him ridiculous. A friendship. How pompous. But what could he tell her? He tried again.

‘I like them all. The whole family. That’s why I go there. It’s as simple as that. I can’t see why you’re making it into such a great drama.’

She came and stood next to him, her shoulder touching his upper arm. It was a forgiveness routine (for what?). He turned to look at her. She turned a moment later. They kissed. But the deeper their kiss became, the less he could see. It was all too close. He couldn’t focus. Everything blurred and swam away.

*

Sleeping together didn’t change anything. His body went through the motions — and not without a certain practised tenderness — but his mind floated free. His orgasm, when it came, seemed to happen somewhere else. It was like hearing an explosion in the distance as you walk down a quiet street: you pause for a second, listen, then walk on unaffected.

He lay on his back afterwards, one arm over his face, the other across his stomach. He wished the afternoon would accelerate into dusk so their faces became invisible. Gloria asked him what he was thinking about.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

When, actually, he was.

He was thinking about a picture he had seen while he was fucking her. Night-time. A street of ordinary houses. No lights in any of the houses, though. It had been raining in the picture. Even now the sound of a light drizzle came to his ears, scarcely audible, like the movements of insects. The street looked dark, empty, shiny. Halfway down on the left a pink sign flashed on and off … on and off … the only colour, the only life in the surrounding darkness. In neon script it said Goodbye. Just that one word. Staining the wet black tarmac pink. Nice picture. He could have watched it for a long time. It was so monotonous, so precise, so comforting. Very nice picture.

‘Nothing,’ he repeated.

*

The mood lingered.

That night, after Gloria left, he thought about Mary. He stared at the kitchen floor as he thought about her. A colour appeared: yellow. Texture followed and the yellow turned into sand. A silent wind blew and the sand drifted. Something showed through. A fragment of mosaic. He bent down, blew on it. The mosaic grew.

There could be an entire floor here, he thought. He began to remove the grains of sand with a fine toothbrush so as not to damage anything that might be there.

This is ridiculous, he thought some time later, having cleared about forty square feet of mosaic with a toothbrush. There’s probably a whole villa here. First he used a broom, then impatience gave him a shovel. His mind raced on ahead. It came back with the word city. He called in cranes, trucks, bulldozers. He supervised the excavations.

He stood back. So. A city. Well, he’d known it all along, really. Just hadn’t dared believe in it. In case it disappointed him. In case it let him down. He was superstitious that way.

Now he walked through what he had unearthed without reaching its limits. He paused in courtyards, he followed streets, he crossed squares. He stood at crossroads. He felt like a tourist. Overawed. Bewildered. No mastery of history.

Inadequate.

He faltered at the word.

A sudden blur of colour took him by surprise. It sprinted along the very edge of his vision. The flicker of a lizard? The sun glancing off a stone? These were possibilities, but not convincing ones. He ran to the corner just in time to catch a glimpse of someone on a bicycle. The someone wore an orange anorak.

He would’ve known that orange anorak anywhere.

Alan.

Well, he supposed he should’ve been expecting that. Yes, he should’ve expected to run into Alan. He sank down on to one of the massive hewn blocks of stone that made up the kerb. No point chasing him, though. No point even calling out. What could he say?

After that it seemed to go dark in a second. Night descending. The weekend again. Traffic lights turned green on the main road below and strange people’s feet pressed accelerators. Voices bumped against the kitchen window like balloons. Outside there was another city.

Three phone-calls happened in quick succession.

First Eddie wanted Moses to come to a party in Barons Court.

‘No,’ Moses said.

Then Jackson called from his aunt’s in Cheltenham to ask Moses whether he had seen any sign of the cold front which ought to be moving towards London at that very moment.

‘No,’ Moses said.

And finally Louise rang, jaunty as ever (she called him honey), and asked him if he minded filling in for her at The Bunker because she had promised to take an old Spanish friend of hers to see Gloria sing.

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘I don’t mind.’

*

He sat in Louise’s Perspex box that evening and sold tickets. People paying to get in were impressed by his expressionless face and his sullen monosyllables. All the best clubs hired people like that.

But nothing could lighten Moses’s mood, not even Ridley’s imitation of a bird of paradise. An Anti-Nowhere League single was running through his head:

I’ve been here and I’ve been there

and I’ve been every-fucking-where

so what, so what, you boring little cunt —

The night dragged, joyless.

When the club closed at two, he left Ridley to lock up. He climbed the stairs, put some music on and stretched out on his sofa. He had a sense of the building falling silent under him.

He went to bed just before three.

He woke almost immediately, it seemed, but a glance at his clock told him it was four-fifteen. Bird stood on the windowsill, one paw raised. When he saw Moses he opened his blunt jaws and released one of his famous seagull cries. It rose from the bottom of the night, desolate but urgent, chilling — a warning.

‘What is it, Bird?’

Then he heard a sound. It followed so closely on his words that it might have been surreal punctuation. Something like glass shattering, he thought. He lay still, propped up on one elbow, every muscle rigid.

Hearing nothing more, he eased out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, and stepped into an old pair of desert-boots. His movements unusually light, he crossed the room and listened at the door. A truck shifted gears on the main road; a window vibrated somewhere, then the building quietened down again.

He crept downstairs until he reached the door that connected his stairs with the short corridor leading to Elliot’s office. Here again he paused, heard nothing. He flung Elliot’s door open with a crash and flicked the light on. The walls, the desk, the sofa, leapt out at him and froze. It occurred to him that if there was anyone in the building they would now know that they were not alone.

He moved back along the corridor towards the stairs that led down into the nightclub. His footsteps made no sound on the carpet. He began to take the stairs. One by one, one hand on the wall. He stopped at the bottom of each flight. Listened. Before turning blind into the next flight. It was a gamble every time, a private dare. Sooner or later something would be there. It was like Russian roulette. There had to be a bullet in one of the chambers.

Then he had reached the bottom of the stairs and the dim expanse of the foyer lay ahead. To his left a glimmer of pale light showed him where the Perspex ticket-box was. To his right a wide corridor led to the bar.

He edged into the corridor. The darkness thickened, began to pulse. Then he remembered the policeman. And wanted to run or scream. Wanted to hurl himself to the floor and thrash about like an epileptic. Fear had him. Still he inched along the corridor. When the carpet turned to wood beneath his feet, he knew he was standing on the dance-floor. The darkness sang like an electric fence now. He could feel the hairs lifting on his bare forearms. A sudden draught of cool air brushed past him. Where had that come from? He sensed a movement to his left and turned. Something struck him where his neck joined his shoulder. The darkness was a night sky showering big flakes of snow. He hit out sideways and made contact with something that felt smooth and hard. A person’s face, perhaps. He heard a noise like air escaping from a valve. Then he was lying on his back.

He couldn’t have lost consciousness though, because he saw a shape slip away across the dance-floor. Or thought he did, anyway. He hauled himself to his feet. He had the feeling that he was coming last in some kind of bizarre race.

He found a broken window in the Ladies. The same toilet he had taken speed in all those months ago. He stood on the seat and put his face to the gap. Cold air touched his hair. He heard a car pull away in the side-street. He doubted that it was the person who had broken in. It seemed too convenient somehow. Besides it had taken him ages to cover the distance from the dance-floor to the toilet window. Whoever it was would probably be far away by now. Whoever it was.

He had a piss. An afterthought, really. So casual it made him laugh. He walked back into the club and turned all the lights on. No blood, no shit, no white arrows. He switched on the PA. Thump, hiss. For the next hour he played music. Bands like Crass, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Pack, Crisis, The Fall. He even found the Anti-Nowhere League single that had been crashing through his head all evening. He played that too.

so what, so what, you boring little cunt

who cares, who cares what you do

who cares, who cares about you

you

you, you, you —

At times he had the feeling that the person who had hit him was listening outside the broken toilet window. In a way he hoped so. Because the music was for him.

He shivered behind the D J’s Perspex shield until it began to get light. Only then did he switch the lights and the power off and climb back up the stairs to bed.

*

He woke at midday. His neck ached. The sky was grey and grit blew in the wind. Pigeons peeled off the windowsill across the street like plump aeroplanes, stumbled through the air in clumsy circles, and landed on the windowsill again. There were machine-guns in his mind.

He tried ringing Elliot on the internal extension. No reply. Great. He went out to buy some breakfast.

Dino took one look at Moses as he pushed through the door and his whole face expanded into a smile. ‘Hello, Moses.’ He pronounced it Maoses, as usual. ‘You look terrible.’

‘I didn’t sleep too well.’

Dino was wearing a badge on his shapeless grey sweatshirt. It’s all Greek to me, it said.

‘That’s a great badge, Dino,’ Moses said.

‘You like it?’ Dino squinted down, his chin doubling. ‘One of my mates gave it to me.’

‘You know, I could use a badge like that.’

‘Yeah, but you’re not Greek, are you?’ Dino cackled and vanished into the back of his shop.

When Moses got back to The Bunker he found a note under the door. Dinner tonight? M. He couldn’t understand how they had missed each other. He had only been out for fifteen minutes at the most. He ran back to the main road and looked for the old blue Volvo. Not a sign. He shrugged his shoulders and, slipping the note into his pocket, walked slowly home.

*

He stayed in all afternoon waiting for Elliot. When he saw the white Mercedes glide into the side-street on the stroke of five he ran downstairs.

‘Elliot — ’

‘Hey, Abraham! What’s up?’

‘Elliot, listen. We got broken into again last night.’

‘Don’t be funny.’

‘It’s true, Elliot.’

Upstairs in the office, he told Elliot the whole story in detail. He only left out the part where he had sat in the club until dawn playing records. He couldn’t make any sense of that himself. When he had finished, Elliot propped his feet on the desk and blew some air out of his mouth.

‘Shit. You all right, Moses?’

Moses nodded.

‘You sure?’

‘It was only a glancing blow,’ Moses explained. ‘I think he was aiming for my head, but it was dark and my head’s much higher up than most people’s, so he got my shoulder instead.’

‘Lucky you’re big, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Moses said. ‘Lucky I’m big.’

Elliot drew his lips into his mouth and stared out of the window. ‘You didn’t get a look at him?’

Moses shook his head. ‘Too dark.’

‘OK, leave this with me. I appreciate what you did, you know, but next time, if you hear something, call me first. All right?’

Moses moved towards the door. ‘I’ll remember that.’

Elliot faced back into the room and, adjusting his gold bracelet, said casually, ‘Just as a matter of interest, Moses, who was that woman coming out of your door the other day?’

‘Woman? What woman?’

‘Nice-looking, but getting on a bit. Had a black dress on.’

‘Careful, Elliot,’ Moses said. ‘That’s my mother you’re talking about.’

‘Your mother? Don’t give me that — ’

But Moses had already left the office.

Elliot, who had seen Moses kissing the woman on the street, looked puzzled. Sons don’t kiss their mothers. Not like that. Not with tongues. Some of the stories Moses came out with. Like that one about a friend of his who had slept with two thousand women. That had to be some kind of record, that did. Elliot grinned, shook his head, whistled through the gap in his teeth. Then the grin faded, his face tightened, and he went back to hoping the phone wasn’t going to ring.

*

‘Christ, Moses,’ Alison said, ‘that’s scary.’

He had just told the Shirleys what had happened the previous night. He glanced across at Mary. She was tilting her knife this way and that, catching light on the blade.

‘Why don’t you leave?’ she said. ‘If it’s that dangerous, why not find somewhere else to live?’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. Elliot’s a friend. I owe him.’

Her knife struck the table. ‘When are you going to stop being other people’s fool?’ she snapped.

He had been smiling, but the smile stiffened on his face. The silence round the table had the tension of held breath.

‘When are you going to stop being grateful, for fuck’s sake? When are you going to stop letting people use you? Stop being grateful, Moses. Start standing up for yourself. You don’t owe anybody anything, don’t you see that? Jesus Christ, it makes me sick the way you sit there like a stuffed prick and say “I owe him”. You don’t owe. Got it?’

She stared at him, her face mottled, tight with anger, and he remembered the time he’d told her about Eddie. He’d tried to explain the way Eddie treated women. ‘It’s not intentional,’ he’d said. ‘He can’t see it. He just does it.’ She’d considered this, then she’d said, ‘He sounds like a shit to me.’ Of course he’d sometimes thought of Eddie as a shit. The time Eddie dumped that topless waitress on him, for instance. Or the night of the beach party. When it affected him personally, perhaps. And suddenly, in that moment, Mary’s judgment had spread to cover everything that Eddie did. She’s right, he’d found himself thinking. Eddie’s just a shit. A shit from Basingstoke. Where shits come from. It all made sense. But later he’d remembered that she often seemed jealous of his friends, his ‘other world’, as she called it, and that she often put them down without giving them a chance, almost as a matter of principle. So he’d swayed back again. Eddie had become a statue once more. Mythical, unaccountable, creating his own laws.

Wasn’t this new outburst of hers similar? Wasn’t she just pulling The Bunker down because it didn’t include her, because it was something she felt she had to compete against? Or was she really concerned about his safety?

When he looked across at her, she said sadly, ‘When are you going to learn, Moses? When are you going to learn?’

‘You’re right,’ he sighed. He wanted to learn from her. He really did.

But, at the same time, he knew that nothing she could say to him would ever make him leave The Bunker.

*

Later, drunker, they stood talking on the terrace. A light wind tugged at the edges of the shawl that she had wrapped around her shoulders. On a sudden impulse she leaned across to kiss him. He stepped back so abruptly that she almost lost her balance.

‘Not now,’ he said.

She glared at him. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘I don’t want to do that now. Not here. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Dangerous?’ Her lip curled. She seemed to find what he was saying utterly beyond belief, utterly contemptible. ‘What do you mean dangerous?

‘You know what I mean, Mary.’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong with you today?’

When he didn’t reply, she wrapped herself more tightly in her shawl and, backing away from him, said, ‘Christ, sometimes you chill me to the bone.’

She almost trod on Alan’s foot. Alan had been standing in the doorway. Moses hadn’t noticed him either.

‘What’s going on out here?’ Alan asked. Light-hearted though, not accusing. He obviously hadn’t seen anything.

Mary pushed past him without answering.

Moses smiled. ‘Just a little difference of opinion.’

‘Ah yes.’ Alan’s eyes glittered behind his glasses. ‘That happens in this house.’

Moses found Mary drinking brandy in the living-room. He told her he was sorry, but said they had to be more careful. Mary shook her head.

‘It was the moment. You destroyed it.’

Moses said nothing.

‘I thought we agreed about that,’ she said. ‘I thought we said no destruction.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘What’s crazy?’

‘Blowing it up into something so big.’

‘You destroyed the moment, Moses,’ she insisted, and that had the power to negate anything he said.

It unnerved him, the way everything was suddenly turning round, coming back on him like a wave. Mary had laid down laws about no destruction and no fucking and then she had handed them over to him to enforce while she, it seemed, was free to modify or challenge them whenever she pleased. It was as if, in suspecting him of wanting the relationship with her simply because there was no responsibility involved, she had created a sense of responsibility herself, given it to him, and claimed the role of devil’s advocate for her own. At last he realised that if the rules were still intact it was purely his own doing. They could be broken any time he chose.

*

Perhaps that was why he got so drunk that night. It anaesthetised the fear. You just blundered about regardless, sorted out the wreckage in the morning.

At midnight he found Mary alone in the kitchen. She had just put on a record of Billie Holiday songs. She was drinking neat vodka. She held out a hand to him.

‘Everybody’s gone to bed,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance.’

They danced.

Once, when he glanced towards the door, she whispered, ‘Don’t be frightened.’

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘You flinched. I felt it.’

‘I don’t remember flinching.’ He pulled away, looked down at her. ‘When did I flinch?’

She smiled and pressed her face into his shirt. ‘Relax,’ she said.

It wasn’t dancing music, but they carried on dancing. In one of their closer moments, he let his hand rest against her right breast. One of her hands instantly flew up and knocked it away.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you want me to do that?’

‘Accident,’ she murmured. ‘It was an accident.’

His hand returned.

Afterwards he couldn’t remember the sequence of events that led from the kitchen to the guest-room. He only remembered that he couldn’t stop touching her. Then he was lying next to her in the bed he always slept in when he stayed overnight. They were both naked. Two of his fingers were sliding the length of her cunt and she was moaning. Don’t moan, he wanted to say, but that would probably be destruction again. Jesus.

He tried, as his fingers moved inside her, to work out who slept where and how thick the walls were and who would be likely to hear, but he was too drunk to arrive at any solutions. He travelled no further than the initial anxieties. Meanwhile Mary moaned. Non-stop.

Why’s she moaning? he wondered. She had never moaned before. She hadn’t moaned in the woods, for example.

Once the sound of a revving car stifled her. He longed for traffic-jams outside the bedroom window. How typical, he thought, that they lived at the end of a cul-de-sac.

Despite his anxiety, despite the rules, despite everything, he was just about to push his cock inside her when the door of the guest-room opened. Alan stood in the doorway wearing his pyjamas. His glasses picked up light from outside. Blank silver discs for eyes. Head cocked at an angle, poised insect. Silence.

Moses trembled. Mary lay still. The place where his knee pressed into the back of her thigh had turned sticky and cold. They both seemed to be waiting for Alan to do something.

Alan spoke to Mary. ‘I think you’ve got a bit mixed up.’ His voice held no trace of censure. Only a soothing calm. Perhaps it sounded a little as if he was talking to a wayward child.

Mary didn’t move.

Alan came forwards and stood over them. ‘Come to bed when you’re ready,’ he said. He ruffled Mary’s hair, then Moses’s. Then he left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Mary left soon after without saying anything.

Gloria would’ve laughed, Moses thought, just before he fell asleep. How Gloria would’ve laughed.

A hangover dulled the panic he might otherwise have felt when he woke the next morning. He needn’t have worried, though. They all ate breakfast as usual, in chaos, three people talking at once.

Nothing had changed.

*

A few days later Gloria rang up.

‘Moses,’ she said, ‘I want to speak to you.’

‘You are speaking to me.’

‘Really speak to you. Not on the phone.’

The receiver felt twice its normal weight in his hand. It must be something serious. They agreed to meet at a pub they both knew in Battersea. A quiet place with a clientele of transvestites, pensioners and UB40S. London in a nutshell. Moses had been a regular there in 1979.

As he pushed through the door that evening, a woman with plasters on two of her fingers stuck her hand out. ‘Fifty pence tonight, love.’

Of course. It was Tuesday night. And Tuesday night was Talent Night. Always had been.

Dolly stood at the bar knocking back the gins. One of the local stars, Dolly. Her copper bouffant hairdo told you that. She had a voice that poured liquid concrete into songs, made them strong and real so they lasted in your head. She was arguing with June, but not so hard that she couldn’t wink at him as he squeezed by.

He winked back. ‘All right, Dolly?’

‘How are you, darling?’

They had an understanding, him and Dolly. They both thought June was a cow. (June thought she was Loretta Lynn.)

‘You want to know what June looks like?’ he had said to Dolly one night.

‘Go on then.’

‘Stand in front of the mirror. That’s right. Now, put your finger in your mouth — ’

Dolly had screamed with laughter. ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?’

‘Come on, Dolly. Put your finger in your mouth. No, it doesn’t matter which one. That’s it. Now, close your lips round your finger. Not too hard. Just so there’s no gaps. Perfect. Now then. Take your finger out again, but don’t move your lips. Carefully. There. Now look in the mirror. June, isn’t it?’

It was true. June really did look like that. Dolly had almost pissed herself that night.

He pushed past a man who was wearing a black bra and a serious, almost scholarly expression, and ordered a Pils. The woman behind the bar remembered him too. They chatted for a moment, then he told her he was meeting someone and edged towards the back of the pub. He sat down in a corner beneath a framed picture of the Matterhorn. The mountain rose against a sky of faultless blue. Four blurred red flowers occupied the foreground. As good a place as any for a serious conversation.

He finished his first drink, started a second.

Then he saw her standing in the doorway, hair teased by the wind, eyebrows of miraculous precision. He couldn’t call out because June was singing. June’s voice had, in its time, cracked everything from glasses to safes. No competition then. He waved, but his wave was lost in the rough sea of couples dancing. Finally he stood up. Then she noticed him and smiled quickly. When she reached him, he bent down, kissed her cheek. He thought he smelt snow on her skin. The first sign of winter.

He bought her an orange juice. She removed her gloves. He said he was sorry, but he had forgotten it was Talent Night, he had thought it was going to be quiet, still, they might as well stay now, mightn’t they?

She sipped at her orange juice, eyes lowered. She turned the glass in her white fingers. Her gloves on the table looked like hands praying. He could sense the words building up behind her closed lips.

When he stopped talking, she hesitated, then she said, ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’

He looked at her carefully. If his eyes had been hands, they would have been holding a wounded bird or a grenade or a piece of priceless china. That’s how carefully he was looking at her.

‘I’ve slept with Eddie.’

He leaned back. So have about two thousand other people, he thought. So what. It was an abstraction, a statistic. It had no real meaning of its own. He waited for her to go on.

‘It started at that beach party. I didn’t see you for hours. I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Describing anxiety, her voice was calm.

He said, ‘I didn’t know where you were either.’

‘He kept appearing next to me and standing there and looking. You know that look he’s got.’

‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I know.’ He heard lift doors slide open and fifty sighs leave fifty pairs of lips in unison. Yes, he knew.

‘I don’t know why he chose me. It could’ve been anyone, probably. He’s strange like that.’ She paused to meditate on what she had just said.

‘He waited until I got drunk,’ she went on. ‘We kissed and things. You didn’t notice.’

‘It was dark.’

‘What?’

‘It was dark. How could I notice?’

‘You just went off somewhere. You weren’t around. You didn’t seem to care.’ She lifted her eyes to his. ‘You should’ve been around.’

‘I remember climbing the steps the next morning,’ he said. ‘Those wooden steps to the top of the cliff. It was cold. You were shivering. You’d just had a dream about somebody stealing your voice. But if they had you wouldn’t have been able to tell me about the dream.’ He smiled. ‘I remember putting my arm around you. It made climbing the steps even harder. But I wanted to. I remember that.’

She shook her head. ‘You live in a world of your own.’

A drumroll rumbled over the end of her sentence. A cymbal crashed as her eyes drifted away from his, sideways and downwards. Two men in sequined evening gowns minced on to the stage, bulbous silver microphones in their fists.

‘We’re The Revelation Sisters,’ hissed the one in red.

The name rang a bell with Moses. He stared absently over Gloria’s shoulder at the two glittering gyrating men. Their dresses split to the tops of their muscular shaved thighs. He could see the tendons flexing in the backs of their knees.

‘When I first knew you,’ she was saying, ‘you were so — oh, I don’t know — thoughtful, I suppose. You thought of everything. You really tried. But these days — I don’t think you ever think of me at all. You look at me and smile, but you’re miles away. Thousands of miles away.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It’s like you’re on another planet or something.’

The man in the blue dress (his name was Sheila, apparently) was licking the tip of his microphone. He had a long athletic tongue. Like an animal, it was. A blind pink animal.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, when Moses didn’t reply, ‘it wasn’t until about two weeks later that we slept together. Sorry. I mean fucked.’

‘You don’t have to tell me all this, you know,’ he said, but he knew the whole thing was going to come out anyway, all over the tawdry stained table-top, all over the red plastic ashtray, the two dirty glasses and the crumpled peanut packet. People had to talk Eddie out of their systems. The number of times he had been forced to sit through that. He sighed.

‘He just came round — one Sunday, I think it was.’ She aimed a glance at him, a glance that was tipped, he thought, with spite. ‘He didn’t ring beforehand or anything. He just turned up. A knock on the door and there he was. Grinning. “Hello, Gloria,” he said. “Can I come in?”’

She let out a mocking laugh. The way she was telling it, she was rubbing salt in her own wound. And wasn’t this supposed to be hurting him?

‘Cheeky bugger,’ the man in the red dress growled. He leaned down and playfully slapped one of the audience. It was the man in the bra. His scholarly expression played truant for a few seconds.

‘You know, I never really noticed how beautiful he was before. He came in and we talked for a while, I can’t remember what about. It wasn’t important, really. After that we went to bed. He knew it was going to happen all along. He said he knew the moment I opened the door.’ She traced a pattern in the spilt beer with her fingernail. ‘I suppose I knew it too, really.’

A loud cheer turned her head. The man in the red dress had toppled off his high heels. He sprawled on the stage, legs wide apart. He had lost one of his false eyelashes.

Sheila covered his eyes with the back of his hand in a theatrical gesture of horror and despair. ‘First chance she gets,’ he said, ‘she’s on her back with her legs open.’

Gloria spoke through catcalls and raucous laughter. ‘You haven’t said anything, Moses.’

He stared at her. Something seemed different. Suddenly she had the distance of an acquaintance, suddenly he couldn’t imagine ever having been close to her, and he didn’t know why. He stared at her until her features began to come loose and revolve slowly, like twigs or leaves, on the pond of her face. What was it?

At last he realised. It was her eyebrows. They weren’t telling the time any more. They were just eyebrows. Ordinary eyebrows. Even slightly curved! He couldn’t remember this happening before. Not ever.

‘Why are you staring at me?’

His eyes drifted away from her face to the stage behind her where a drummer with a crew-cut was juggling sticks. He was remembering how once, in the middle of ‘God Bless the Child’, her eyebrows had said, miraculously, and only for a split-second, four minutes to three.

‘Say something, Moses. Please.’

He shrugged, smiled. ‘I suppose it was bound to happen, really. But it’s funny it never occurred to me. That’s the strange thing.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Everyone falls for Eddie. But it’s all right. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. To him.’

‘How do you know?’

He didn’t answer her this time. It was useless. He didn’t want to have to start explaining how Eddie was some kind of statue, how he didn’t have any time, how he had to live faster than other people, how nobody could mean anything to him, how he wouldn’t want them to, how that would hold him back, make his eventual return to that pedestal (wherever it was) too difficult. And how could he tell her that he, Moses, had fallen in love with her eyebrows, but that now he didn’t feel anything for them any more, and that, from now on, as far as he was concerned, they were eyebrows just like anybody else’s?

He glanced up, as if for guidance, and saw the picture of the Matterhorn above her head. He nodded to himself. Yes, the way he felt, he might as well have been in Switzerland. Blank as those wastes of snow. Blurred as those red roses. Emotions frozen solid. He imagined Gloria walking towards him across thin ice. It cracked and squeaked under her feet. She wasn’t going to make it. And he wasn’t going to help her.

‘Let’s leave,’ he said.

In the car she turned to him. ‘So what happens now?’

‘I don’t know.’ He concentrated on the road, noticed how smoothly he was driving. All the lights changed to green when he approached as if the gods were riding shotgun. That was funny.

She lit a cigarette. The match rasped, tore the darkness open. In those few seconds he quickly searched her face once more for some faint indication of the time. It told him nothing. The idea that her eyebrows had once been the hands of a clock, that her face had once been a clock-face, recording their time together, an eternity, perhaps, now seemed fanciful, absurd. Was this the end then?

‘I don’t know,’ he repeated.

Nine Elms Lane: windswept, empty, no one at the bus-stop. Scaffolding imprisoning the fronts of buildings. Advertising hoardings hiding the truth of the river. Once he glimpsed a mud bank, pimply as a slug’s back. He beat the lights, streamed left on to Vauxhall Bridge.

Gloria used her cigarette to fill the few minutes it took to reach her flat. She inhaled. She exhaled. She studied the filter. She flicked ash out of the window. Finally she threw the cigarette away, a handful of red sparks in the rear-view mirror.

‘Are you coming in?’

‘I ought to be getting back,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

She began to walk away.

‘Hold on,’ he called out. ‘What about Saturday?’

She looked over her shoulder, frowned. She had obviously forgotten.

‘You’re singing at The Blue Diamond. I was going to come along.’ He smiled. Her memory was like a sieve. Only his unusual size had so far saved him from falling through.

She shrugged. ‘If you want.’

It’s strange, he thought, how sometimes you can watch somebody walk away from you and they can look ugly, even if you know they’re beautiful.

*

Sitting next to Gloria he had been calm. Objective. Almost tranquillised. Alone again, he felt the irritation mount. Dig its spurs in. Draw prickly blood. Things chafed now: the damp air in his flat, the music shuddering up from below, his own clothes against his skin.

He walked over to the suitcase of memories. As he went to lift it from the windowsill, it slipped from his grasp and crashed to the floor. He lost his temper then, and kicked it away from him.

Moments later, regretting the outburst, he squatted on his haunches and snapped the catches open. Many of the photographs had come loose, fallen from the album. They lay jumbled in the bottom of the case. One had flipped over, showing the white of its reverse side. He looked closer. Something written there. The ink, once blue, had faded to a pale grey. He held it up to the light and made out the words: 14 Caution Lane, New Egypt.

New Egypt? He turned the photograph over with nervous fingers. It was a picture of the house. His mother and father standing by the narrow wooden gate. Their hooded eyes, their awkwardness. It was a picture he had studied many times because it was the only one that showed them together. But he had never noticed those words on the back. So faded. Almost invisible.

New Egypt.

He jumped to his feet, snatched up the phone. He dialled Mary’s number. Mary answered.

‘Mary,’ he rushed in, ‘you’ll never guess what.’

‘Who is this, please?’

‘It’s me. Moses. Guess what’s happened, Mary.’

‘How am I supposed to do that, Moses?’ she drawled, her voice at its drollest.

He laughed. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I think I’ve got a lead. On where my real parents live.’

He told her how he had come home depressed, how he had knocked the suitcase over, how the whole thing had been a product of his own clumsiness and frustration.

‘I mean, what a coincidence,’ he said, ‘that that one particular picture landed on top. I might never have seen it otherwise. And all the others are blank. I’ve checked them.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidence.’

‘All right, luck then.’

‘I don’t believe in luck either.’

‘I know, I know, you make your own. Like bread. Mary, listen. I’m scared. I mean, New Egypt. That must be the name of the village where they live, don’t you think? And don’t tell me you don’t believe in fear.’

Mary laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’re scared. Now you might have to get off your arse and do something.’

‘Find them, you mean?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘What if I’m not ready?’

‘Oh, you’re ready, Moses. You’ve been ready for a long time.’