He didn’t have to finish the sentence. They shook hands, and slapped each other on the back. Moses leapt into the air, his legs revolving as if he was riding a bicycle. When he landed, the floor trembled. He was big all right. Out came the brandy. Elliot poured two. Trebles.
‘’Course,’ Elliot said, ‘you could be one of them, couldn’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ Moses said.
They held each other’s glances for a few long seconds, their heads very still as if the slightest movement could cause something terrible to happen, then they began to laugh, both at the same time.
‘You really think you can handle it?’ Elliot asked.
‘Let’s put it this way,’ Moses said. ‘You’re not going to be any worse off, are you?’
Ten minutes later Elliot had to go downstairs to attend to something. He left Moses sprawling in his executive chair. The look on Moses’s face was one of pure fruition. He forgave everyone for their cruel jokes about his size. He even forgave his unknown parents for having created the problem in the first place.
It was all worth it.
*
Who to tell, though?
First would have to be Eddie. His life in Eddie’s flat in Battersea would now be coming to an end. Well, that had been part of the plan, really. No more voices at night. No more statues in the kitchen. No more Jackson Browne (like most beautiful people, Eddie had absolutely no taste in music).
Not that they hadn’t had some good times, of course. How could he forget the night Eddie had come in and thrown up all over the TV?
‘Eddie,’ Moses had said the next morning, ‘what’s that?’
‘What?’ Eddie said. ‘Oh, that. That’s breakfast television.’
Moses smiled as he dialled the number that had been his for the last two years. They had been avoiding each other recently. Putting a bit of physical distance between them might bring them closer together. Something like that, anyway.
He glanced at his watch. Nine twenty-five. Hang on. If it was nine twenty-five, Eddie probably wouldn’t be in. Unless he was having sex. At nine twenty-five, though? Yes, what about the time Moses had come home, it must have been around seven in the evening, to find a pair of pearl earrings placed, all neatness and innocence, on the arm of the sofa — the first in a trail of female clues that led with unerring logic, with unfaltering resolve, across the carpet, along the hall and up the stairs, only to disappear with a wriggle of black elastic under Eddie’s bedroom door. Yes, he might well be in.
Moses let the number ring just in case Eddie was struggling, irritable, half-dressed, but still unbelievably good-looking, towards the phone. After two minutes he gave up. Either Eddie was out, or the sex was uninterruptible. He replaced the receiver.
*
He thought of Jackson next.
Jackson would almost certainly be home. Jackson was always home. Jackson wasn’t interested in women. Once, when drunk, Jackson had suddenly announced that he was asexual. The laughter he had been expecting never arrived. Everybody simply agreed with him.
Women held no fascination for Jackson. He was far more interested in the weather — its beauty, its caprices. He watched the way the clouds walked across the sky. He listened to what the north wind said. These were his women.
Yes, he would be at home now, in his dark basement flat, his tense wiry frame bent over an antique weather-vane, or staring tenderly, myopically, at the latest reading on a barometer. He would be crouching at his desk, one hand plunged into his coarse, curly hair, calculating the exact position of an isothermal layer, or puzzling over the sudden prevalence of millibars in the air above the city. He would be totally absorbed in making yet another totally erroneous weather forecast.
Moses dialled the number and waited. Sure enough, three rings and there was the quavery tenacious voice he knew so well.
‘Hello?’
‘Jackson?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Moses.’
‘Who?’
‘Moses. You know. Six foot six. Size twelve feet. Likes old ladies — ’
‘I’m sorry, it’s not that Jackson.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got the wrong Jackson. This is Jackson’s brother. The Jackson you want isn’t here.’
There was a pause while Moses assimilated this sudden glut of information: one, Jackson had a brother, two, Jackson and Jackson’s brother sounded identical, three, Jackson’s brother also called himself Jackson, and four, Jackson, the Jackson he knew, was out.
Jackson? Out?
‘Where is he?’ Moses asked.
‘The Amateur Meteorological Society.’
Moses smiled. Few things could persuade Jackson to leave his cluttered basement flat. The AMS was one of them. ‘Could you tell him that Moses called?’ he said.
‘Moses. OK. Any message?’
‘Just tell him that I’ve got some good news.’
‘Good news. Right. Goodbye.’
Very dry brother, Moses thought. Probably a very good meteorologist. Either that or very successful with women. As he pondered the differences between Jackson and Jackson’s brother Jackson, he realised that he still hadn’t actually told anyone.
*
Who else was there?
Vince! What about Vince? Vince would probably tell him to fuck off. Vince was like that. Still.
He dialled Vince’s number.
A sullen voice said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Moses.’
‘Fuck off, Moses.’
You see?
Moses sighed. ‘What’s wrong with you, Vince?’
‘Why should anything be wrong?’
‘What’s wrong, Vince?’
‘Lots of things. Everything.’
‘Like what?’
‘Alison’s left.’
Oh Christ, not again. People were always leaving Vince. Especially Alison was always leaving Vince. Moses didn’t blame her either. If he was going out with Vince, he would leave him too. There was some great disparity between Vince in your memory and Vince in the flesh. Moses was very fond of Vince when he was somewhere else. The imagined Vince was impish, controversial, photogenic; the real Vince was boorish, truculent, morose.
But, real or imagined, you couldn’t forget him somehow. His blond hair, dark at the roots, stuck up at all angles, unbrushed, unkempt, stiff with gel, lacquer and soap. His mouth turned up at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling, so he gave the impression of being good-humoured when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. And he always wore this black waistcoat, glossy with age and stains, and prolific with insulting badges; it was almost as if these badges had sprouted, like toadstools, from the black soil of his clothes, they were so much a part of him. His trademark, this waistcoat. Vince wouldn’t have been Vince without it.
He was forever being turned away from places — wine-bars, clubs, restaurants, pubs (he had been banned from his King’s Road local twice), cafés, shops, parties, you name it. If asked, he would recite, and not without a certain pride, a list of all the famous places he had never been allowed into. ‘I’m sorry, you’re drunk,’ doormen would tell Vince as he swayed, leering and malevolent, on the pavement — but they would always be looking at his waistcoat. In the end Moses decided there had to be a connection.
One night he tried an experiment. They had taken some angel dust at Vince’s squat, and were on their way to a private party at The Embassy Club. In the back of the cab, he turned to Vince. ‘You don’t need to wear that waistcoat tonight,’ he said in a gently persuasive voice. ‘Why not leave it behind for once?’ He should have known better. Gently persuasive voices didn’t work with Vince. Gently persuasive voices made him puke. He glared at Moses. The lights of Chelsea coloured his face green then red. ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ he snarled. ‘My mother?’ This was not a role that Moses was suited to. He dropped the subject and they went back to being friends. Naturally Vince didn’t get into The Embassy.