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.’
The Return of the Native
On the last Saturday in November Mary did something she had never done before. She arrived at The Bunker without telling Moses first. No note, no phone-call, no prior arrangement. She appeared at the top of the stairs in a black dress fastened at the throat with a diamanté brooch. She wore a black wool coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape. She brought cool air into the room with her.
He noticed the driving-gloves in her left hand. ‘Are we going somewhere?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’ She seemed to weigh the silence before adding, lightly, ‘We’re going to see your parents.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. We’re going to see your parents.’
‘Today?’
‘Now.’
‘But,’ Moses panicked, ‘but they don’t know we’re coming.’
‘So what are you going to do? Call them up and say, “Hello, can I come and see you for the first time in twenty-five years?”’
‘Twenty-four and a half, actually.’
‘Or maybe you’d like to send them a quick telegram? Hi stop. My name’s Moses stop. Remember me? stop.’
Moses grinned despite himself, then immediately looked worried again. ‘But listen, Mary,’ he said, ‘how do we know they still live there?’
‘How do we know they don’t until we try?’
He paced up and down in front of the window, his right eye blinking as it always did when he was nervous. Mary watched him from the sofa, one leg tucked underneath her body, elegant, mischievous — determined.
Then he swung round, hands spread. ‘There’s no point just turning up. I mean, what if they’re out?’
‘What if they’re having a garden party? What if they’re having sex? What if they’re horribly deformed?’ Mary threw her hands up in exasperation and caught them again.
He frowned. ‘I suppose so.’ He was thinking hard now. ‘But hold on,’ he quickened, sensing a loophole he might wriggle through, ‘we don’t even know where this New Egypt is.’
‘Don’t we?’
‘No, we don’t. And I don’t have a map either. Sorry about that.’ He spread his hands again, grinning this time.
Mary grinned back, slid a hand into her bag. The hand emerged with a Shell Road Atlas. ‘I’ve got a map,’ she said, ‘and I know where New Egypt is.’
‘Shit.’ There was no way out of this. ‘Where is it then?’
But Mary wasn’t telling. She handed him his coat instead, led him downstairs to the car and opened the door. ‘Get in,’ she said.
He obeyed. Reluctantly.
Soon they were leaving the southern suburbs of the city. Frost glazed the rooftops of the last few houses; net curtains, like another kind of frost, hid the windows. Then open country, a dual carriageway through brittle woods. A new roundabout, fat yellow bulldozers, mud the colour of rust. The sky cleared. The grey turned blue. Sun struck through the windscreen, bounced off Mary’s diamanté brooch.
He turned to her with a puzzled look. ‘You know, I think I recognise this road. Should I recognise it?’
Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
He studied the road in greater detail. Yes. There, for example. He remembered laughing at that signpost (PICNIC AREA I HARTFIELD 4) because it sounded like a football result.
‘Are you sure we haven’t driven down this road before?’ he asked.