That they were friends at all sometimes seemed extraordinary to Moses, not least when he had to scrape the remains of Vince off the floor after a fight or stop Vince jumping out of a tower-block window. Driving Vince to St Stephen’s at four in the morning with a six-inch gash in the back of his head and his blood pumped full of drugs may have made a good story the first time round, but when you had to deal with it on a monthly basis it got pretty fucking tedious. Go and kill yourself somewhere else, you felt like saying. The things he did for Vince. He sometimes hated himself for being so good-natured, and wondered whether in fact he wasn’t Vince’s mother after all.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why’s Alison left you this time?’
‘I don’t know.’ Vince was talking through a mouthful of clenched teeth. ‘She said something about she couldn’t stand it any more.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She went home. To her fucking parents.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘She was crying.’
‘You want me to ring her?’
Vince didn’t reply. Anger made him autistic.
‘I’ll find out how she is and call you back,’ Moses said.
Vince said something about not caring, then slammed the phone down.
Moses dialled Alison’s number.
‘Hello?’
Only one word but, like the single toll of a bell, the woman’s voice had resonance, hung on in Moses’s head, bright, droll. Not Alison then. Alison’s mother, maybe. But he had delayed too long, making her suspicious. She probably imagined Vince on the other end.
‘Could I speak to Alison, please?’
‘Who is this?’
‘Moses. I’m a friend of Alison’s.’
‘Will you wait a moment? I think she’s upstairs.’
Moses heard footsteps on a tiled floor, the opening and closing of a door, a faint Alison? and, in the distance, the quiet fretting of a string quartet. He had no idea what he was going to say to Alison. He didn’t even know her that well. She had a dry sense of humour and a head of striking, natural red hair. Some total stranger had once come up to her in the self-service restaurant above Habitat and asked her how she got her hair that amazing colour and Alison had said that her parents were responsible for that and the total stranger, gushing now, had said, Wow! Your parents are hairdressers? and Alison had said, No, my parents are my parents, and the total stranger had dried up, backed away, evaporated. The soft Indian-print skirts, the cluster of thin silver bangles on her wrists, the bohemian vagueness acted as elements of Alison’s cover. Underneath, she was pretty tough and sorted-out — almost, at times, Moses felt, predatory. He alternated between liking her a lot and mistrusting her. He couldn’t really understand why she had chosen Vince, but he knew that if one of the two got hurt it wouldn’t be Alison.
A fumbling sound at the other end and Alison picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’ She sounded wary, bruised.
‘Alison, it’s me. Moses. I just thought I’d ring you, see how you were.’
‘You’ve spoken to Vince, then?’
Moses said he had.
‘How did he sound?’
‘Pretty pissed off. What happened?’
‘Oh, you know, another argument. He wants me to live with him and I don’t think I’m ready for that. Not at the moment, anyway. I told him that and he went mad and hit me.’
‘Oh shit,’ Moses muttered.
‘Not hard or anything. He was too drunk for that.’ She laughed — a half-laugh; the other half was bitterness. ‘Well, I’m pretty fed up with all that shit. So I left.’
Moses sighed. ‘Are you all right now?’
‘Yes, I’m all right. Bit shaky.’ She paused, sniffed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Just because I tell him I don’t want to live with him, he starts thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy going on — ’
‘That’s typical Vince,’ Moses said. ‘He likes it better when he’s fighting the whole world.’
‘I’m not the world, I’m me,’ Alison said tearfully. ‘Why’s he have to make everything so complicated?’
Moses didn’t know the answer to that.
After Alison rang off, thanking him, he tried Vince again. No reply. It was as he had feared. Vince had gone out to wreak terrible vengeance on an innocent city. He would probably end up in hospital again. Moses didn’t want to think about it.
He sat in Elliot’s chair for a while longer. Too many phone-calls had taken his elation apart piece by piece until nothing recognisable was left. He felt tired as he unlocked the door of his old Rover, slid into the seat and drove home.
So much for telling everyone the news, he thought.
*
‘Do you like pigeons?’
Elliot asked the question casually as he walked Moses round to The Bunker’s side entrance.
Moses scratched his head. What was all this about pigeons? Elliot had called Moses at nine that morning and offered to show him the rooms on the top floor of The Bunker. ‘I’ll be here until twelve,’ Elliot had told him.
Moses had driven over at eleven, his lungs still misty with smoke from the previous night. Too much whisky with Vince had laced the suspense he might otherwise have felt with irritation.
They had reached the black door. Wind blew dust and grit into the back of his neck. He folded his arms and drew his shoulders together.
‘What do you mean, do I like pigeons?’ he said.
Elliot didn’t appear to have heard. It was an annoying habit of his.
Seconds later he said, ‘You’ll see.’ His grin was half grimace as he grappled with a muscular rusty padlock.
The padlock had resisted his first efforts, but now the key slid in and gripped. It snapped open, almost jumped out of his hands. He pushed at the door. It swung inwards to reveal a pile of crumpled newspapers, a few circulars, and a steep flight of wooden stairs.
‘Nobody’s been in here for bloody years,’ he said.
There was a light-switch on the wall. One of those round protruding light-switches with an inbuilt timing-device. He jabbed it with his thumb. It began to tick quietly like a shy bomb. He set off up the stairs, two at a time. Moses followed.
Halfway to the top, the light clicked off. Moses heard Elliot mutter Fuck somewhere up ahead. They reached a door.
‘You really don’t like pigeons?’ Elliot asked Moses again.
‘I hate pigeons,’ Moses said. And said it with feeling, because it was true.
Elliot’s laugh was soft, so soft that it was hardly louder than a smile. Moses didn’t like the sound of it.
Elliot put his shoulder to the door. A groaning splintering sound. The wood gave. Light poured into the stairwell.
At first, Moses thought he was seeing some kind of optical illusion — the result of being in the darkness for too long. But then he realised that what he was seeing was real. He blinked his eyes several times. Yes, it was definitely real. They had walked into a room full of about five hundred pigeons. The pigeons were moving about with extraordinary speed and abandon. It seemed to Moses as if fifty per cent of the air had been siphoned off and replaced with moulting grey feathers. He took a deep breath. It was like breathing pigeon.
‘Oh,’ he said.
He backed away towards the stairs.
‘Do you like it?’ Elliot shouted. He thought the whole thing was a big joke.
Moses didn’t answer. He was gazing at the floor — or the place where the floor would have been if it hadn’t been inches deep in pigeon shit.