‘I hate to disappoint you, Moses, but there isn’t any ghost.’
Moses gaped into the phone. ‘What?’
‘There isn’t a ghost. There never was. I made it up.’
‘You what?’
‘I made it up. I thought you might be lonely living up there all by yourself, so I invented a ghost for you — ’
‘But the coat-hook — ’ Moses broke in. ‘The chair — ’
‘They were just props, that’s all. It was a story, you see.’
Moses sank on to the windowsill. He didn’t know what to say.
‘Sorry if I messed you around, Moses.’ It sounded as if Jackson meant it.
‘That’s all right,’ Moses said. ‘It’s my fault. I mean, I was the one who believed it, wasn’t I?’
‘Of course you believed it. You needed to.’
Needed to? Moses was about to mock when he recognised a sort of wisdom in what Jackson was saying. Moses had never thought of himself as lonely before, but didn’t it make sense? Certainly he felt that way now. Typical of Jackson to pick up on something like that. Jackson had sensitivity, insight. He was a fund of delicate perceptions and responses. Back in August Moses had asked Louise whether there was anything going on between her and Jackson. Louise had smiled. ‘Well?’ he had said. ‘Is there?’ ‘Sort of,’ she had replied. ‘What do you mean, sort of?’ Louise had shrugged. ‘I slept with him once.’ ‘And?’ ‘And what?’ ‘And what happened?’ Louise’s smile had deepened, become private. ‘He kissed my feet,’ she said.
Moses could see Jackson now, almost as if they were in the same room. Those narrowed eyes, that enigmatic smile. A buddha, that’s what Jackson was. Nervous and wiry and not gold at all, but a buddha just the same.
‘You still there, Moses?’
‘Yeah, I’m still here. Just thinking, that’s all. You know, it’s funny, but you’re absolutely right. Even though I didn’t think about her much, I kind of got used to the idea of her being there. I wasn’t living alone. I was sharing with this woman who I never saw.’
‘Well, now she’s moved out,’ Jackson said. ‘Think of it like that.’
‘Yeah.’ Moses laughed softly to himself. ‘You know something, Jackson? I didn’t like people using her chair.’
‘Sometimes, Moses,’ and Moses could hear Jackson smiling, ‘just sometimes, you really take the biscuit.’
‘Yes,’ Moses nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
After he had hung up he leaned back against the window and sighed. With every phone-call, another loss. First Mary, now the ghost. Only the past for company.
He decided to risk one last call. He dialled Vince’s number.
‘Yeah?’
Vince was home. Good.
‘Vince? It’s Moses.’
‘So what.’
‘I need a favour.’
‘No.’
‘Just shut up and listen for a moment, will you. I want to get out of it.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Now.’
‘What the fuck’s going on?’
‘None of your business. Can you organise it or not?’
Vince said nothing for a few seconds. Weighing up possibilities, no doubt. Sometimes Moses thought there must be scales in Vince’s mind. A gram of this, a spoon of that. Everything measured out in little envelopes.
‘Tell you what,’ Moses said. ‘I’ll meet you in that pub opposite you. About eight. You know the one I mean?’
‘’Course I fucking know. It’s my territory.’
‘See you in a bit.’
‘Hang on. How long’re you going to be there?’
‘Till I fall over.’
‘This sounds like fun,’ Vince leered.
‘I doubt it,’ Moses said, and hung up.
*
Moses arrived first, as he had expected to. Vince only did two kinds of waiting. He waited for his dealer, and he waited for girlfriends who had left him to come back. His dealer always showed, the girlfriends rarely did. Mere friends didn’t rate as a priority.
Moses ordered a Pils and settled in a quiet corner. He was drinking to get drunk, drinking fast and with determination, so he would be able to sleep that night. He wanted time to pass, distance to happen. Like when you doze on a train. He sat there pretending the pub was a train.
Several stations later Vince turned up. He grinned at the debris of empty bottles on the table. That was what he liked to see.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Must be my round.’
Unheard-of for Vince, this, but Moses didn’t even crack a smile.
Vince obviously hadn’t heard about Alan’s death and Moses wasn’t going to break the news to him so he felt weighed down at the beginning by stuff he couldn’t offload, but as they moved from drink to drink and pub to pub, ever deeper into a world where objects and people Xeroxed themselves in front of his eyes, he floated free of all that. Time concertina’d, every action danced. He talked to Vince without saying anything, which was how most of his friends talked, which was how Vince, especially, talked, which was why he had called Vince in the first place. Vince didn’t ask questions. Vince wasn’t interested. They went to the Gents together to take Vince’s sulphate and there was sufficient intimacy in that: two pairs of shoes showing under a single cubicle door.
At midnight they were leaving a basement wine-bar somewhere in Chelsea. Moses had been delayed over a discrepancy in the bill. When he climbed the stairs he found Vince wrestling with part of the décor. Some kind of framed print.
‘What the fuck’re you doing, Vince?’
‘What’s it look like?’
‘You’ve got no idea, have you.’
‘Give us a hand then.’
‘Get out the way.’ He shoved Vince aside. He gave the print one swift tug and it came away from the wall. A screw scuttled down the stairs and round the corner.
He ran up the stairs and turned left on to the street. When he reached the corner he stopped to inspect the print. It was an airbrush drawing of a Coca-Cola bottle. He leaned it against an iron railing and was just turning to ask Vince why he had such fucking awful taste when somebody grabbed his arm and swung him round. There were about three policemen standing there with about another three policemen standing behind them. He almost said Hello, Hello, Hello. He didn’t, but the thought made him grin.
‘Oh, so we think it’s funny, do we?’ one of the policemen said.
Fuck off, Moses thought.
Another picked the print up off the pavement and examined it with great interest as if he was in the market for that kind of thing. He probably was.
‘Is this yours?’ he said.
‘Certainly not,’ Moses said. What an insult.
‘Where did you get it from then?’
‘Over there.’
‘Over where?’
‘That wine-bar over there.’
Where was Vince? Moses wondered. His bloody idea. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Vince being questioned by some other policemen. It was unclear exactly how many.
‘That your mate, is it?’
He didn’t like the way they kept jumping to conclusions so he didn’t say anything this time. He had the impression — a dim impression, submerged in pints and pints of alcohol — that he had said too much already. He silently cursed that honesty of his which always floated to the surface when he was drunk.
‘I think,’ the policeman with the print said, ‘that we’d better return this to where it belongs.’
The policeman who was holding Moses reached for his walkie-talkie and, just for a second or two, his grip on Moses’s arm relaxed. Moses jerked free and made a break for the nearest side-street. Darkness flowed round his body like fur. Lights bounced on either side of him. Like swimming, this running. So effortless and smooth. Ridiculous, actually. He wanted to stop and laugh. His idea (inspired, he thought, by memories of Top Cat) was to hide in a dustbin until the policemen blundered past and then dart off in the opposite direction. But when he turned the corner he couldn’t see a single dustbin. Not one. No dustbins? he thought. Where do they put all their rubbish? He was still running, but the confidence was draining out of him. Dismay filtered into his bloodstream. Escape began to seem less and less feasible. As he looked over his shoulder to see where the policemen were, his foot caught the raised lip of a paving-stone and he went sprawling. The next thing he knew, there were half a dozen policemen kneeling on his back.