‘When did you last see him?’ Moses asked.
Ridley scowled. ‘Saturday before Christmas. Tarted up to the eyeballs he was. Looked like a fucking pimp.’
Moses had to grin.
‘Fucking pimp.’ Ridley scraped his hair back from his forehead. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me, come to think of it.’
They took one final look round the office. Elliot had taken nothing with him. He had even left his beloved pool-table behind. The balls had scattered to all four corners of that flawless baize. Moses picked up the wooden triangle and turned it absent-mindedly in his hands. While the balls sat inside the triangle they looked neat, tight, safe. Lift the triangle and they suddenly seemed to huddle there, unprotected, vulnerable. Then the white ball struck and broke them up. And so the game began. He wondered which pocket of the country Elliot had darted into. A wanted man, obviously. Businessman, patron, dandy, cheat, absconder. Whereabouts unknown. Last seen looking like a pimp. Moses secretly wished him luck. Or perhaps he made his own, like Mary.
Moses moved over to the window, leaned against the sash. The snow, denser than before, was being driven diagonally across the glass, so it felt as if the whole nightclub was hurtling sideways and upwards at breathtaking speed into the last night of the year. As he gazed down into the street, the present slackened its grip, his mind drifted, and he saw himself returning by chance at some unspecified time in the future.
It was many years later and he was travelling south across London. He was a good deal larger now than he had been in his youth — so large, in fact, that the taxi-driver had made some crack about charging him an excess baggage tariff on his body. Moses had taken no offence at this. He had smiled and settled back, almost filling the three-man seat entirely. One short-cut through the back streets of Lambeth, however, brought him lurching forwards in a commotion of flesh, all his complacency gone.
‘Could you stop, please?’ he cried, rapping on the glass partition. ‘Could you just stop here for a moment?’
The driver pulled into the kerb and watched in his wing-mirror, engine snickering, as Moses climbed out, quite agile considering, and stood transfixed on the pavement, his size now obvious as the wind pressed his lightweight raincoat to the left-hand side of his body. He was gazing up at a building that had once been pink. It was orange now, but the paint had peeled and faded, stained by exhaust-fumes, rain, the feculence of birds. The entrances had been barred with padlocked metal grilles, and most of the ground-floor windows had been punched out; white star-shaped gaps showed in the black smoked-glass. A litter of newspaper, leaves and mangled beer-cans had fetched up in the main doorway.
And the pigeons had returned. He could hear their muffled chuckling and mumbling coming from an open window on the fourth floor. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered, fists tightening. Time, it seemed, hadn’t diminished his loathing of pigeons.
He shook his head gently. Memories collided like soft toys in a packing-case, a few eyes missing, a few limbs coming unstitched at the joints, a few holes where the stuffing showed through, but otherwise intact and safely stored away. It must have been — what? — 1980. Around then, anyway. How quaint the 19 sounded now.
The wind lunged savagely, whipping his coat away from his legs, banging a loose sheet of corrugated-iron somewhere, whirling rubbish into a hectic spiral in the doorway. An empty beer-can clattered across the pavement towards him. It began to drizzle.
He became aware of the meter ticking away loudly behind him, ticking like a direct personal threat, as if, at any moment, it might blow his fragile memories to smithereens. Nostalgia was a luxury, it told him, and had to be paid for.
He scrambled back into the taxi, slammed the door behind him and, after one last glance at the abandoned orange building, continued on his journey.
*
The wind howled as it caught the edge of the building. The place smelt old already, stale, almost sweet, like a dying man’s breath. Moses turned back into the room. His time there, he now knew, was over and that saddened him, but he said nothing; Ridley would have little use for anything so sentimental, preoccupied, as he seemed to be, by thoughts of money and revenge.
They left the office and walked back down the stairs.
‘If I was you,’ Ridley shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’d get the fuck out of here before the pigs show up again.’
Moses murmured agreement.
‘Specially with your record,’ Ridley added.
‘Oh, you know about that?’
A remote smile crossed the mountainous landscape of Ridley’s face. ‘I reckon you’ve got a couple of days,’ he said when they reached the street. ‘Maximum.’
It was his world, this world of violence and debts, and he spoke with careless authority. He zipped his sleeveless quilted ski-jacket, shoved his hands in the pockets, and tipped his head skywards. The snow avoided it, frightened.
Moses shuffled his numb feet.
‘Hey, Ridley,’ he said suddenly, ‘there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Where’d you learn to whistle like that?’
Deep lines appeared at the corners of the bouncer’s eyes. It was like watching ice crack on a frozen lake. ‘My old man,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘He was a brickie, a boxer, did a bit of everything. He was a magic whistler, always was. He could do about over a hundred different birds. Most of them I never even heard of. I used to copy him when I was a kid. One day he said to me he said, “It’s a good thing you’re learning to whistle.” “What you on about?” I said. “Well, you never know,” he said. “Might come in handy one day.” And he looked at me, real crafty, like. Couple of days later I asked my mum what he meant and she said he beat some ex-middleweight champion in a fight once by whistling at him.’
‘Seriously,’ he added, when he saw the smile forming on Moses’s face. ‘Apparently he beat him by whistling at him, very soft, between punches. Confused him, like.’
‘I don’t reckon you need much help when it comes to a fight, Ridley.’
‘No, well. Like my dad said. You never know, do you.’
Fifty yards away, on the other side of the road, Dino paused outside his shop to marvel at the sight of these two abnormally large men laughing. If laughter was 58p a pound like tomatoes, Dino was thinking, I could make a real killing there. And it would be nice selling laughter. A lot nicer than selling yoghurt or fish-fingers.
‘Well,’ Ridley said, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’
Moses nodded.
‘Good luck, Moses.’
‘You too, Ridley.’
Ridley lowered his arm across the road and stopped a cab.
After Ridley had left, Moses felt more alone than he had felt all day. But then he saw Dino waving at him from the other side of the road, two leeks in his chubby Greek fist.
‘Happy New Year, Moses,’ Dino pronounced it Maoses, as always.
Moses grinned and waved back. ‘Happy New Year, Dino.’
Footnotes
a Artificial Police Representative
A Note on the Author
RUPERT THOMSON is the author of eight highly acclaimed novels, of which Air and Fire and The Insult were shortlisted for the Writer’s Guild Fiction Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize respectively. His most recent novel, Death of a Murderer, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award. His memoir