Dreams of Leaving (48 page)

*

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.'