Dreams of Leaving (34 page)

He stood back. He dismissed any thought of trying to break in. He would be running too many risks. Besides, the place looked impregnable. Especially to a man who couldn't even cut his own toenails any more. He would have to wait.

He looked round, noticed a café on the other side of the main road. Positioned directly opposite The Bunker, it commanded views of both entrances. He crossed the road and pushed the glass door open. No foreigners, he was relieved to see. Nobody at all, in fact. He took the table by the window and ordered a coffee.

The nightclub stood on the junction, flamboyant, still.

It was 12.52.

*

By 3.15 he had severe indigestion. He had eaten a sausage sandwich, a ham roll, two cheese rolls with pickle, a bowl of oxtail soup, and a slice of cheesecake, and he had drunk three cups of coffee and two cups of tea. And nothing had happened. He decided to go for a walk.

He paid the bill and left the café. The door jangled shut behind him. He set off down the road. He resisted the urge to glance back over his shoulder at the pink building. A truck slammed past him, flinging his shirt against his back. He followed the curve of a high brick wall and Kennington Park came into view. A nylon banner slung between two oak trees
announced the opening of a fun-fair that evening. He crossed the road to investigate.

A green generator hummed in the north-east corner of the park. Long red trucks huddled under the dusty foliage. He picked his way through fierce pieces of machinery. They lay about in the grass, dismembered, sticky with grease. Parts of something called an Octopus, apparently. He couldn't imagine how they would look when assembled. Men with hands like wrenches were tightening nuts and bolts, shouting to each other in accents he could hardly understand. He moved through smells of beer and oil and sweat. Disco music crashed out of a gaudy wooden cabin at the foot of the Big Wheel. He winced. A man in fraying denims, hair tied back in a ponytail, gave him a hard still look as he passed – a look that seemed to freeze time and silence the music. Peach avoided the man's eyes. He didn't want any trouble. Leaving the clutter, the noise, the knots of fascinated boys behind, he wandered off across the grass.

The next half-hour passed uneventfully. He watched a woman push a crying child on a swing. The higher the child went, the more it cried. The woman looked away, smoking. Two black youths loped past in track-suits. They shouted something at him, but again he didn't understand. It would take a lifetime, and he only had twenty-four hours. He saw a man asleep on a bench, a pair of training-shoes for a pillow, a scar on his bald head like the lace on a football. Mostly there was nothing to look at. It was a drab park, and that beer he had drunk at lunch-time had taken the edge off things.

Then the nightclub slid into his mind – pink, triangular, a vessel carrying a cargo of mysteries – and he imagined the black cloth parting and a face appearing at the window. While he walked aimlessly in the park, the young man whose face he didn't know left by the side-door. Slipped the net. Escaped again. Time to get back, he thought. And almost ran back up the main road.

But nothing had changed. The black cloth hanging in the fourth-floor window as before. The same cars parked on the street outside. He walked into the café and sat down at his table.

The owner shuffled over in carpet-slippers. ‘Twice in one day,' he said. ‘You must really like it here.' He let out a dry sarcastic chuckle.

Peach ignored him. He ordered lasagne, a side salad, vanilla ice-cream, and a cup of black coffee. ‘And make it slow,' he said.

‘And what?'

‘And make it slow.'

The man backed away, scratching his head.

He returned half an hour later. ‘Slow enough for you?'

Peach nodded.

His lasagne stood on its plate like the model of a block of flats. The salad? A few dog-eared leaves of lettuce and a pile of carrot-shavings. He ate with no appetite, one eye on the window. He sometimes paused for minutes between mouthfuls. He was beginning to hate the pink building. He knew it off by heart, in minute detail, from the fringe of yellow weeds on the roof to the Y-shaped crack beneath one of the ground-floor windows. The pink façade had burned itself into his subconscious and would recur on sleepless nights. His eyes itched with the pinkness of it. He never wanted to look at anything pink again. Never.

Then it was 6.56. A black Rover – a Rover 90, registration PYX 520 – turned into the street that ran down the left-hand side of The Bunker. It parked. The door on the driver's side opened. A man got out. Early to middle twenties. Leather jacket. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Tall. 6'5”, 6'6”. Big too. 220 Ibs, perhaps. Maybe more. The man was alone.

Peach had long since stopped eating. His two scoops of vanilla ice-cream subsided in their clear glass bowl. He watched the young man cross the pavement, unlock the black side-door, and vanish into the building. A minute or two later a hand parted the black cloth in the fourth-floor window. Peach's lower lip slid out and back. Once.

While his eyes were scouring the top of the building for further developments, a white Mercedes drew up on the street below. A West Indian climbed out.
Coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.
Could this be the owner?

The West Indian looked right and left as he locked the car door. A routine scan. Then he turned and walked towards The Bunker, lifting his shoulders a couple times, dropping his chin, the moves a boxer makes as he approaches the ring. He opened the double-doors and disappeared inside. Lights came on in a second-floor window. The owner, then.

Peach stirred the thick puddle his ice-cream had become. Part of him wanted to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Moses Highness had drowned in the river, that nobody had ever escaped from the village, that the hundred per cent record was still intact. But now he had proof of his suspicions – the proof that he had, in a way, been dreading. The young man in the leather jacket was no carbon-copy of George Highness – they shared certain basic characteristics: above-average height, similar hair-colour – and yet Peach knew he had seen Moses. It shook him. To know, after twenty-four years, that the baby had survived, escaped, grown up.
In the outside world.
Anathema to Peach. Anathema and nightmare. He stirred and stirred at his ice-cream. The man in the carpet-slippers asked him if he had finished. ‘No,' he said.

He had seen what he had come to see and yet he couldn't leave. Some part of him still needed convincing. He had made inroads. He felt he understood the territory now. He might almost have been on home ground. And he had time to spare. So he waited.

After about fifteen minutes the double-doors swung open again. The West Indian appeared. He wore a dark suit (black? navy? maroon? from this distance it was difficult to tell) and a white tie. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and leaned against the wall. He smoked. His head moved, following cars, but he didn't seem to be waiting for anybody, just passing the time of day. He flicked his cigarette into the road. A shower of sparks.

The black curtain still open on the fourth floor. The light still on.

Dusk came down. Lights in the café now.

Peach suddenly realised how visible he was. A fat man in a lit window. His watching had become conspicuous. He should leave. Move closer. Adopt a more strategic position.

As he paid the bill he noticed the weight of the case in his hand. An inconvenience. Removing his diary and his binoculars, he asked the owner of the café if he would mind looking after the case, just for half an hour or so. The owner said he closed at nine. ‘Fine,' Peach said.

Outside the café he paused just to one side of the window and hung his binoculars round his neck. When the West Indian was looking the other way, he walked off down the road. He crossed about two hundred yards below the nightclub and began to work his way back. Facing the nightclub, on the same side of the road, stood a fish and chip shop. Wood-veneer tables, red plastic chairs with spindly black legs, white neon lighting that showed every crease and vein in your face. No cover there. But just this side of the fish and chip shop window, Peach found a garage doorway. A low brick wall reaching out across the pavement hid him from the waist down. Shadow did the rest.

He now stood less than forty feet from the West Indian. Even without his binoculars, he could see the built-up heels of the man's boots. He could also see the side-door of the nightclub – Moses's front door, in effect. It was ideal.

He checked his watch. Exactly 7.30.

He took his diary out and turned to the page where he had jotted down the times of trains. Trains left Victoria for Haywards Heath at twenty-three minutes past the hour. He had to connect with the local train which would take him to within eight miles of New Egypt. The last local train left Haywards Heath at 10.35. If he caught the 9.23 from Victoria, he would get into Haywards Heath at 10.16. The 9.23, then, was the last train he could catch. A taxi to Victoria would take half an hour, perhaps less.
That left him with just under an hour and a half. It ought to be enough. It would have to be.

Twenty minutes passed.

Then the black door opened and Moses appeared. He had changed into a dark suit. Light slid off his wet hair. As he started towards his car, the West Indian called out. Moses paused, turned, walked over. The two men seemed to know each other well. They compared jackets and ties, pushed each other around. They both tilted their heads back when they laughed. They lit cigarettes, and smoke poured from their fingers like slow water. The damaged neon sign above their heads – FLOR AN's – lit them both in the sharpest detail.

Peach raised his binoculars and focused on Moses. Neither the eyes (hooded, grey) nor the nose (long, slightly crooked) seemed familiar. The mouth, though. The smile that kept forming there. A smile he had seen too often in the past. It belonged to George Highness. The son had inherited his father's smile.

Now the two men were separating. But when Moses had almost reached his car, he turned, ran back, embraced, smothered, all but crushed the West Indian. Peach lowered his binoculars. Curious behaviour.

Moses returned to his car. He got in, slammed the door. He turned the ignition and the Rover fired first time, engine shuddering. He roared away in a cloud of blue exhaust. Two blasts on the horn. The West Indian shook his head. He straightened his clothes, retouched his hair. Then he settled back against the wall and lit another cigarette. He seemed to be smiling to himself.

And there Peach should have left it, he realised afterwards. That smile had clinched it. No question as to the young man's identity now. And yet he couldn't tear himself away. He still had an hour or so and he wanted to exploit this opportunity to the full. After all, he wouldn't have another. He left the shadows and crossed the side-street. He walked up to the West Indian.

‘Nice evening,' he said.

The West Indian flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He dusted his jacket with a casual right hand. When he said, ‘Yeah,' he was looking not at Peach but at his own lapel.

Peach slid his hands into his pockets, leaned back on his heels. ‘I thought you might be able to help me.'

The West Indian looked along his cheekbones at Peach. ‘Don't know about that.'

Peach studied the tight black curls on the man's head, sparkling and dense, he looked into the slightly yellow whites of his eyes, he noted the
hint of red in the pigmentation of his skin, he saw his lips, ridged like shells, peel back to reveal gums that were pink and grey. Perhaps he stared just a fraction too long, or just a fraction too closely.

‘What're
you
looking at?' The gap between the West Indian's two front teeth looked dangerous. Like the barrel of a gun.

‘I'm looking for a friend of mine,' Peach began. ‘His name is Moses. Do you know him?'

‘Who are you?'

‘Me?' jocular now, ‘I'm an old friend of the family.'

The West Indian's top lip rolled back over his teeth. He glanced down at his hand. It curled, uncurled, against his thigh.

‘You know what I smell?' he said.

‘No.'

‘Pig.' The West Indian smiled into Peach's eyes. ‘I smell pig.'

Peach didn't understand. Not right away.

‘And that's not a smell I particularly like, you know?'

Peach could feel the evidence, his badge, cold and heavy in his shirt pocket. Still he insisted: ‘I'm a friend of the family, that's all.'

‘Yeah,' said the West Indian, pointing at the binoculars, ‘and those are for birdwatching.'

‘Moses lives here,' Peach said, ‘doesn't he?'

The West Indian lit another cigarette. Dunhill King Size. New York Paris London. The gold lighter snapped shut. ‘Does he?'

‘I'm asking you.'

‘I should clear off if I was you.'

‘Listen,' Peach said, ‘I'm not being unreasonable. All I want to know is if Moses lives here or not.'

‘You heard what I said.'

‘Just tell me,' Peach said. He was sounding, he realised, less and less like an old friend of the family and more and more like a policeman. Only a policeman would persist like this. And the West Indian knew it.

‘If you don't fuck off right now,' the West Indian said, ‘I'm going to have to mess up that nice fat face of yours – '

Peach hit him hard in the solar plexus. It was a precision punch. It came out of nowhere. It even surprised Peach. He hadn't hit anybody for five years. The West Indian went down gasping.

Peach looked round for a taxi. There weren't any. He swore viciously. He only had a few seconds before the West Indian was up again and pulling a knife on him or something. He hastened off down the road. When he was fifty yards away he turned and saw the West Indian climbing to his feet. Peach began to run. In his youth he had been an exceptional dancer.
He and Hilda had won the New Egypt Dancing Trophy six years in a row. The rumba, the polka, the foxtrot – they had mastered them all. And even now, at the age of seventy-two, he could still show a remarkable lightness of foot.