Dreams of Leaving (33 page)

He recovered. ‘Where can you see that? On the palm of my hand?' But his sarcasm drifted past her. She seemed not to have noticed it. Beneath notice, perhaps. ‘I am an old man,' he began again. ‘One thing I'm not particularly curious about is the future.'

‘You're also human.'

He didn't follow.

‘You may be old,' Madame Zola said, ‘but I'm older and I have to tell you one thing that maybe you don't know. People are always curious about the future. It's human character. They can be on the death bed. Still they have to know. Will I die? Will I live? How long will I live? What will happen when I die? All these questions. Always questions. Don't tell me you're not curious about the future.' She waggled a hand, almost in admonition, under Peach's nose. ‘And that – ' one of her fingers stabbed the air triumphantly before curling up and rejoining the others – ‘is why I'll never,
never
go out of business.'

Peach was thinking about Lord Batley. Batley had tried to escape at the age of seventy-nine. He had obviously believed in some kind of future. And wasn't he, Peach, desperately curious as to what the outcome of today's investigations would be?

Sighing, he admitted, ‘You're right.'

‘I know I'm right.' Her mouth curved downwards. ‘Do you want to know what I see in your hand?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah, you become simple now, you see? That's my effect. I see it happen. Everywhere I see it.' She waved a hand to include not just the café, but
the city, the country too, the earth even, and the planets in attendance. ‘That's
my
power.'

Her eyes drifted away from his, drifted beyond the yellow café walls and the steamy plate-glass, into a world that he couldn't imagine. A smile spread like water through all the cracks and crevices in her face until it was irrigated with a look of pure contentment.

‘You're going on a journey,' she told him. ‘An important journey. A difficult journey. It will happen very soon, this journey.'

‘I know.'

‘I'm right?'

‘Yes.'

Her eyes misted over again. ‘You're looking for something.'

He stared at her. She spoke in cliches, but the clichés were true. Her simple, almost facile, statements lodged under the mind's skin.

‘But you feel lost,' she was saying. ‘Among strangers. Alone.'

Her eyes refocused, seeking confirmation. He gave it to her.

‘There's some danger – '

He remained calm. ‘What danger?'

‘That I cannot see.'

He glanced down at his untouched plate.

‘You must forgive me, I didn't wish to stop you eating,' Madame Zola said (she had a foot in both worlds, it seemed, and could move from one to the other like someone playing two games of chess at the same time), ‘but sometimes I feel something and when I feel something I cannot keep it inside. It has to come out. If I keep it inside I burst. Pif. Like a balloon.'

Peach suddenly found that he was hungry. He slid a forkload of cold scrambled egg into his mouth, then reached for a slice of toast. The butter had melted clean through. The toast sagged in his hand. He shrugged, ate it anyway.

‘Anything else?' His briskness had returned with his appetite. They might both have been restored to him by Madame Zola.

She examined his left hand again. With his right, he gulped cold milky tea.

‘I see only your strength, your power. You remember I said that you have power?'

‘I thought you meant a different kind of power.'

‘You have both,' and her smile, like a fishing-net, caught all possible meanings.

He withdrew his hand and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He began to gather his possessions together.

‘You have to go now,' Madame Zola said. As if it was her idea, as if she was dismissing him.

‘If you'll forgive me. I have an extremely testing day ahead of me.'

‘I think I'll stay here a little longer.' She indicated the unfinished cup of tea in front of her. ‘I wish you luck with your – ' and she paused, dark eyes glittering – ‘
business
.'

‘Thank you, Madame Zola.' Peach even bowed slightly.

He paid the waitress and left the café. It was 8.45. The sun pressed against the inside of a thin layer of cloud. He unbuttoned his jacket as he hurried down Queensway. His mind, unleashed, sprang forwards.

That woman had slowed him down with her mumbo-jumbo.
You're looking for something,
she had said. But they all said things like that, didn't they, fortune-tellers? She couldn't have told him
what
he was looking for or whether he was going to
find
it, could she? Of course she couldn't.

Free of the Blue Sky Café, out in the open air, he welcomed his scepticism back like a friend whom he hadn't seen for a long time.

*

By the time he reached Bayswater Road the sun had broken through. It landed in a million places at once: a car windscreen, the catches of a briefcase, a man's gold tooth. He watched the city organise itself around him. He had his bearings now. Marble Arch stood to his left, half a mile away, solid as muscle. Hyde Park lay in front of him, a stretch of green beyond severe black railings. And somewhere to the south, approximately seven miles away, The Bunker waited. He leaned against the bus-shelter, his jacket draped over his arm.

After ten minutes the bus came. It dropped him at Oxford Circus. He caught another going south on Regent Street. The route he had selected took him past many of the famous sights of the city – the statue of Eros, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament – but he only absorbed them subliminally. It was the action that interested him, not the scenery. His mind moved in another dimension, juggling possibilities, shaping initiatives. He wasn't a tourist. He was a policeman.

The bus swung left over a bridge and he knew, without looking at the map, which bridge it was. A barge loaded with machinery forged downriver, shouldering the water aside. Gulls fluttered above. They reminded him of the greengrocer's story. The gulls in the air above the ploughed field: symbols of freedom. How far he seemed from that closed world. How far he was.

When the bus turned into Kennington Road, he stepped out. His head swivelled. He used the gleaming dome of the Imperial War Museum (how appropriate, he thought) to orientate himself. One problem. Kennington Road ran north and south from the crossroads where he was standing. Which way should he go?

A police car pulled up at the lights. Peach approached the window on the passenger's side.

‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but I wonder if you could tell me where The Bunker is?'

The policeman he was talking to had an unusually pale face. It was so pale that it was almost transparent. Even the policeman's eyelashes were pale. Peach's first albino.

‘Never heard of it.' Not only an albino, but arrogant with it.

‘It's a nightclub,' Peach explained.

The policeman pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a strand of colourless hair. ‘Don't know it.'

His colleague, the driver, was muttering something.

‘Try down there.' The policeman pointed south with his chin. ‘Can't help you otherwise, mate.'

‘Much obliged,' Peach said. ‘Thanks very much.'

Mate,
he thought. Bloody albino. Take his uniform away and he'd probably disappear altogether.

He set off down the road. The traffic lights had already changed, but several seconds passed before he heard the police car move away. He understood. If he had been approached by an old man in a sports jacket who was looking for a nightclub, he would have been suspicious too. Especially if he happened to be an albino. Axe to grind. Revenge on the world. He didn't look back, though. He kept walking. Basic psychology. Only the guilty look back. The guilty and the stupid.

He walked for five or ten minutes and saw nothing that even remotely resembled a nightclub (not that he was any too sure what nightclubs looked like in the daylight). Kennington Road ran south into a glitter of bicycle-shops and pub-signs. Council-blocks the colour of dog-meat. A green and white striped bingo-hall. Trees so dusty that their leaves looked plastic. He began to have doubts. What if Eddie had lied? Could Moses have covered his tracks?

He sat down on a bench and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief. He opened his suitcase and examined his notes. He took those anxious questions of his and crumpled them like so much waste-paper. He began again, with a fresh blank sheet, as it were. Outlined his mission to himself. Stated the priorities.

1) Establish the exact whereabouts of the nightclub.

2) Establish whether or not Moses Highness is living at said nightclub.

3) If so, establish visual contact.

4) If not, start again – with Eddie.

Incisive now, Peach walked across the pavement and into a newsagent's. He asked the Indian behind the counter whether he knew of a place called The Bunker. The Indian didn't.

He asked a teenager at a bus-stop. The teenager didn't know either.

Peach walked on, undeterred, a pear-shaped man with a jutting lower lip. Sooner or later, he thought. Sooner or later.

Reaching another set of traffic lights, he noticed a pub on the corner. They would know. Surely. He consulted his watch. Half an hour to opening-time. He sat down on a low brick wall. And waited.

As soon as the bolts were drawn (11.32), he was through the double-doors.

‘You must be desperate,' the landlord said. ‘You nearly knocked the place over.' His eyes creased at the corners; he was making a joke, but the joke included as one of its ingredients a sense of wariness.

Peach eased himself on to a stool and leaned his forearms on the bar. ‘Today,' he said, ‘has not exactly been the easiest of days.'

The landlord tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes, nodded.

Peach didn't usually drink at lunch-time, but usually was a word that didn't apply. Not today. ‘I'll have a pint of bitter,' he said. ‘Anything'for yourself?'

‘That's very kind of you, sir. I'll have a lager.' The landlord pulled Peach's bitter first, then the lager. ‘Your good health, sir.'

Peach raised his glass to his lips. ‘Cheers.'

When he spoke again he had almost drained it dry. ‘I was wondering,' he said, ‘whether you could help me.'

‘Do my best, sir,' the landlord said.

‘I'm looking for a place called The Bunker. It's a nightclub. Somebody told me that it's on this road.'

The landlord shook a cigarette out of a squashed packet of Benson's. He ran the tip of his tongue along his sparse moustache, pressed his lips together, and nodded (Peach's intuition told him this happened a lot). ‘I know the place,' he said. ‘It's been open less than a year. Run by a coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.' He sniffed. ‘No pun intended.' He struck a match and lit his cigarette. He put the match out by shaking it, the way a nurse shakes a thermometer.

Peach swallowed some more beer. ‘Where is it?'

‘Just down the road.'

‘Where exactly?'

‘About a hundred yards down. Right-hand side. You can't miss it.' The landlord smiled. ‘It's pink.'

‘Pink?'

‘That's right.'

They looked at each other and shook their heads in the manner of men who have seen all kinds of things come and go. There was a certain intimacy about the moment.

‘I don't suppose,' Peach ventured, ‘you know whether a young man by the name of Moses is living there, do you?'

The landlord arranged his features in a position of deep thought. ‘Moses? No. I don't know anyone called Moses.'

Ah well, Peach thought. Worth a try.

‘Friend of yours?' the landlord enquired.

‘Not exactly a friend,' Peach said, ‘though we do go back a long way,' and, turning aside, he strolled through the arcade of his own amusement.

The landlord nodded once or twice. Smoke from his cigarette rose up through blades of sunlight. Traffic sighed beyond the frosted glass. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a pleasant pub.

Peach drained his glass.

‘Another?' the landlord said.

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘It's on me.'

Peach hesitated. ‘I really ought to be getting on, but,' and he consulted his watch, ‘well, all right. Just a half, mind. Thank you very much.'

When he emerged from the pub some twenty minutes later, his head seemed to be floating on his neck as a ball floats on water. It was an unfamiliar though not unpleasing sensation. He paused outside a launderette and took out his notebook.
In the pool of the village,
he wrote,
you know where the water ends and the land begins. In the ocean of the world, you drift beyond the sight of any shore.
He read it through to himself and nodded several times. He was quite pleased with it. Really quite pleased. It had an oriental, no, a
universal
ring to it. Perhaps he would try it out in one of his pep-talks. He moved off down the road again. His lower lip slid in and out as he walked. He passed an Indian restaurant, a delicatessen, a vet's. Then suddenly, on the other side of the road, he saw the building that Terence, the landlord, had described. It was pink all right. It was very pink. And Peach was grateful for its pinkness. If it hadn't been so pink, he would probably have walked right past it.

He crossed the road. At last, he thought. The Bunker! He tried to peer in through one of the ground-floor windows, but he could see nothing.
Effective stuff, smoked-glass. He tested the double-doors. Locked. He wished he knew more about nightclubs: how they operated, when they opened, what the routine was. The smoked-glass windows confronted him with his own ignorance.

He stepped back to the kerb so as to get a better view of the rest of the building. On the second floor, he could see a pair of red curtains, a red lampshade hanging from the ceiling. The next floor up looked derelict: grimy windows, one pane missing. He would have assumed that the fourth floor was unoccupied too, had he not noticed a piece of black cloth covering one of the windows. He instinctively felt that this was where Moses lived. He walked round to the side of the building. Another door, also locked. Further along he found a metal gate about the width of a truck. Sharp green spikes lined the top to stop people climbing over. The padlock securing the gate was as big as his fist. He put his eye to the crack between the upper and the lower hinges. He saw a cobbled yard, a few dustbins, a stack of yellow beer-crates. Nobody had bothered to paint the back of The Bunker pink. Only the façade mattered, it seemed.