Moses shrugged. ‘I was too upset.’
Now Elliot couldn’t find words.
‘Look, I’m really sorry about the other day,’ Moses said. ‘I was in a real state. I didn’t mean to — ’
‘No. No, no, no.’ Elliot dropped his head, lifted his hands to ward off the apologies. ‘Listen. I don’t know what to say, you know? I mean, I know how close you were — ’
Moses gave him a questioning look.
‘You know, the time I saw you both on the street,’ Elliot said, ‘kissing and that.’
Moses considered his feet. ‘Yeah, we were pretty close.’
‘Look,’ and Elliot placed a hand on Moses’s shoulder, ‘if there’s anything I can do just give me a shout, all right?’
Moses nodded. ‘Thanks, Elliot.’
As he unlocked his front door and began to climb the stairs he didn’t feel that he had in any way lied to Elliot.
*
He went and stood by the window. Sunday again. One week since that trip to New Egypt. He could no longer go to Muswell Hill. Not today, maybe not ever. He wondered what to do with himself now that so much of his life had been destroyed.
He crossed the room to his desk and opened the top drawer. He took out a pile of photographs. A record of the days he had spent in Muswell Hill. He sat down at the desk and switched the lamp on. He stacked the photographs face-down. For a moment they reminded him of cards and he remembered Madame Zola and he thought, Maybe I can use the photos as a sort of tarot pack, not to predict the future but to explain the present. The present had been happening so fast recently that it had left him bewildered, punch drunk, breathless as the runner who comes in last. A throwback to his schooldays, that feeling of falling behind. Still looking for his games clothes when the rest of the team had already left for the pitch. If only he could have borrowed somebody else’s, but nobody else’s fitted. He shook his head. Driftwood from childhood.
He began to turn the photos up one by one. He arranged them in neat rows until they covered the surface of his desk. He had dozens of Alan and Alison and Sean and Rebecca. The only photos he had of Mary were photos of her back or the tip of her nose. She had always refused to let him (or anyone else, for that matter) take photographs of her. When threatened with a camera (she called it threatened), she issued statements like, Don’t be a user, or, Why are you trying to steal pieces of me? I will not be stolen. Once, when shown a picture that someone had taken of her without her knowledge, she had thrust it back with the words, That’s not me. She had a whole arsenal of names for people who took photographs: they were thieves, they were voyeurs, they were necrophiliacs. Aim a camera at Mary and you saw her at her most scathing, her most dogmatic.
Ten days before, she had visited him at The Bunker and he had asked her, ‘Why won’t you ever let me take any pictures of you?’
She had been studying his parents’ album with a detached curiosity, one eyebrow permanently raised. She looked up. ‘Why should I?’
‘I don’t know. To be remembered, maybe.’
‘I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be alive, real, flesh and blood, not,’ and she brushed a photograph of Alice with the disdainful backs of her fingers, ‘not this.’
But, with Mary, wherever there was a rule there was an exception, and it only took him a moment to locate it in his memory. Exactly one week later. That Sunday morning in Bagwash. The wind blowing. Clouds like clean washing. After breakfast they had walked out past the graveyard. And she had let him take a photograph of her.
‘All right,’ she had said, leaning back against the wall, ‘this is your big chance. Make the most of it. There won’t be another.’
‘Pose,’ he had laughed. ‘Come on, you ought to be good at that.’
Suddenly he knew how to fill this empty Sunday evening. He reached for his camera and began to wind the film back, even though he had only used half the pictures. He snapped the back open and pulled out the canister. Then he disappeared into the makeshift darkroom that he had built in a cupboard off the bedroom.
Two hours later, in the dim red light, he watched Mary’s image emerge. He bent his head close to the tray of chemicals like a craftsman working with minute and precious materials. I’ll never be able to show this to her was the thought he produced.
He stared at the photograph. Prophecy? Coincidence? Nonsense? He couldn’t decide. She stood just to the left of centre-frame. In that voluptuous black dress of hers — it draped around her body, dropped almost to her ankles — she looked faintly Victorian. A stone wall ran behind her, waist-high, crumbly as shortbread. Her left arm reached down at an angle to her body, her left hand resting on the top of the wall as if to balance her. On one side her dress pressed itself against her, on the other it billowed out into the air. The bodice and the skirt formed two separate black triangles. Her right hand had flown up towards her hair, a spontaneous, almost girlish gesture, charged with grace, entirely natural. It looked as though she was holding on to an invisible hat, or as though some wonderful notion had just occurred to her. He remembered watching her through the camera, waiting for the right moment (she may have hated cameras but at least she understood right moments), and thinking how, for those few seconds, she had seemed to fly in the face of the world. And he had caught that elation of hers. That spontaneous groundless elation.
He tried to remember what else they had said, if anything, but no words came. Only afterwards she had walked towards him, dress swirling, and, smiling, she had said, Photographer, because she still thought of photography as theft, as exploitation, as necrophilia. And had, in a way, been proved right. For here she was, in this silent picture, an unknowing tragic heroine. Ahead of her, two or three hours ahead of her, lay the discovery of her husband’s death. And behind her, behind her all the time, stretched a skyline of white marble, a sinister city with tombstones for buildings, because the wall she was leaning against was the wall of the cemetery. And if he half-closed his eyes her dress became a ship of death, two black sails mounted on the slender mast of her body, and the wind blowing through the picture filled her sails, blew her towards her sombre destination. And she was laughing, looking happier than he could ever remember –
No, he would never be able to show her the picture. He stared and stared at her in her black dress (happiness dressed in sadness) and thought again of the curious exchange which had taken place that weekend. She had given him his past and lost her future. A father traded for a husband. She had always seen what she had with Moses as a kind of bouquet thrown at the feet of her marriage, as a tribute, a celebration. Now it had become a wreath laid at the base of a memorial. The marriage had kept their relationship alive. The death of the one had killed the other.
He pinned the picture to the washing-line above his head so it could dry. If nothing else, he had a memento of Mary.
What was it she called photographs?
That’s right: little deaths. Every photograph a little death.
Memento mori.
How fitting, he thought. And smiled bitterly to himself.
*
Alan dead. Mary inaccessible.
His father also inaccessible.
And Peach at large.
For days on end Moses stayed indoors. At night dreams ran round the inside of his head like men in padded cells until he had to turn the light on, get up, walk about. Times like that, sleep was a foreign country and he didn’t have a passport. He came close to calling Mary, even Gloria, but he always resisted, his hand an inch from the phone. This was his to deal with.
It was as if everything that had been lying dormant for twenty-five years had surfaced at once, reworked into new nightmare formulas. The old man, his father, lying supine on an altar, delivering, between deep inhalations from his cigarette, a lecture on some high-flown subject that Moses couldn’t make head or tail of, and priests approaching from dark corners of the church with knives because the lecture was, so they said, heretical. Or Moses standing at the bottom of a deep pit and his mother, eyes and mouth blacked out, rolling down the slope towards him, rolling over and over as children do, but never reaching him. Or Mary being ambushed and raped in a baroque hotel by a gang of policemen. He woke exhausted every morning. He felt top-heavy, listless, surfeited. He stared out of the window, watched different types of weather affect the view. He let Bird in, fed him, let him out again. Once or twice he took long walks through unknown streets. (He sometimes sensed that he was being followed. That’s called paranoia, Moses. He would turn aggressively, only to realise that it was his past catching up with him.) But mostly he just made quick forays to Dino’s for milk and bread and eggs, or to the Indian off-licence for cans of Special Brew. He got drunk alone. He watched his black and white TV until the screen hissed with a blank grey fury. Then he knew it was time to try and go to sleep again.