*
The week of the ghost was also the week of Moses’s twenty-fifth birthday. On the Thursday night Moses booked a table for four in a restaurant in Soho. He wanted to celebrate the occasion quietly, he said, with a few close friends.
Poor Chinese restaurant.
The celebration reached its climax shortly before midnight with the waiters’ hands fluttering in delicate protest, like birds attempting flight, only to weaken, fall back, return to the relative safety of their white tunics, as Moses, who weighed more than three of them put together and had woken that morning to a bottle of champagne, a Thai-stick and two lines of coke (his birthday presents), began to spin the revolving table like some kind of giant roulette wheel.
‘Place your bets,’ he cried.
‘What are we betting on?’ asked Jackson, very dry. ‘How long we can survive before they throw us out?’
Bowls of rice and seaweed, plates of mauled prawn toast, bottles of soy sauce and dishes loaded with the stripped skeletons of Peking ducks took to the air, swift and confident, as if they were trying to teach the waiters’ hands how to fly. This demonstration was not appreciated. The manager came weaving through the barrage to insist, politely but firmly, that Mr Highness and his party leave the restaurant.
Out on the street the recriminations began.
‘And on my birthday, too,’ Moses said.
‘It was because it was your birthday that it happened,’ Jackson pointed out.
‘It was your fault, Vince,’ Moses said.
‘My fault?’ Vince seemed genuinely taken aback.
‘We would never’ve been thrown out of that place,’ Moses said, ‘if you hadn’t worn that waistcoat of yours.’
‘It is a very unpleasant waistcoat,’ Eddie agreed.
‘Look, fuck off you two. If you,’ and Vince shoved Moses into a lamp-post, ‘hadn’t covered me in rice — ’
Moses couldn’t help giggling as he remembered how Vince had lurched to his feet halfway through the meal only to lose his balance and topple across a neighbouring table, his waistcoat luridly stuffed with Special Fried Rice and soup that must have been either Chicken with Sweetcorn or Hot and Sour.
‘Mind you,’ he went on, ignoring Vince, ‘Jackson didn’t exactly set a very good example, did he?’
Drunk for the first time since the night he confessed his asexuality, Jackson had suddenly, and without warning, plummeted headfirst into a dish of Squid in Black Bean Sauce.
‘I was embarrassed by your behaviour,’ Jackson explained. ‘I wanted to hide.’ Like a monkey with fleas, he was still picking the black beans out of his hair.
‘Maybe you’ll actually have to wash it now,’ Vince sneered.
‘I don’t see how you can talk, Vincent.’ Jackson was primness itself. ‘That waistcoat of yours must’ve put down roots by now.’
‘All your fault, Vincent.’ Moses was returning to his theme.
Vince hated being called Vincent. His mother called him Vincent. He told them all to get fucked, and stalked ahead.
‘Anyway,’ Jackson smiled, ‘what about Eddie?’
‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘That was really disgusting.’
During one of the lulls in the meal Eddie had turned away from the table as if to sneeze. A jet of pink vomit had flown out of his perfectly sculptured mouth and crashlanded in the grove of yucca plants behind him. Afterwards, Moses seemed to remember, Eddie had gone on eating, as if nothing had happened. A bit of a Roman, Eddie.
‘Why was it pink?’ Eddie wondered.
Moses couldn’t think.
Vince, curious, rejoined them. ‘Why was what pink?’
‘My sick,’ Eddie said. ‘Why was it pink? Did I eat anything pink?’
Vince offered an obscene suggestion as to what it might have been that Eddie had eaten.
‘That’s not pink,’ Eddie said, ‘though, of course, you probably wouldn’t know.’
A pause while Eddie and Vince hit each other. Vince staggered backwards over a dustbin. Eddie danced away, smiling.
‘I still think it was Vince’s fault, though,’ Moses said.
The following day, after only four hours’ sleep, Moses boarded a bus (his car had broken down again) with a two-litre plastic bottle of water, a family-size pack of Paracetamol, and a hangover that was like people moving furniture in his head. He was on his way up north. His foster-parents, Uncle Stan and Auntie B, were expecting him for the weekend.
*
Auntie B opened the door in her French plastic apron. Her hands showered white flour. When she saw Moses, her face seemed to widen; her eyes narrowed and lengthened, her mouth stretched into a smile.
‘Moses,’ she cried. ‘How are you? Happy birthday.’
They embraced. Moses kissed her on both cheeks. Her hands stuck out of his back like tiny wings because she didn’t want to get flour on his clothes. He heard the scrape of Uncle Stan’s chair on the parquet floor of the study. It had been six months.
The Poles would have described themselves as an ordinary couple — middle class, middle aged, middle income-bracket — but Moses had noticed them the first time they visited the orphanage. They seemed different somehow. Their smiles didn’t look glassy or stuck-on. They didn’t bury him in comics and cakes until he couldn’t breathe. They turned the other people who visited into fakes.
Mr Pole wore prickly tweed jackets with leather ovals on the elbows. He carried his pipe bowl uppermost in his breast pocket like a chubby brown periscope, and the rituals of smoking had transformed his fingers into instruments, fidgety and deft. He grumbled a lot. His wife — B, as he called her — was round and peaceful. When you heard her voice you thought of a cat curling up in front of the fire. When you kissed her, your lips seemed to touch marshmallow. So soft and sweet and powdery.
He had always looked forward to their visits, so when Mrs Hood summoned him to her office one day and asked him whether he would like to go and live with Mr and Mrs Pole he didn’t hesitate. Nor did he need Mrs Hood to tell him how lucky he was. He had been dreaming of a moment like this for as long as he could remember without ever having really believed that it would arrive.
The Poles moved north, and Moses moved with them. They had bought a detached Victorian house on the outskirts of Leicester. They gave him a room of his own on the second floor. The view from the window skimmed the tops of several fruit trees, cleared the garden wall, and came to rest in the peaceful green spaces of a municipal park. He inhaled the smell of apples and the silence.
They were consistently straight with him. There was no coyness or pretence about his origins. He was ten years old, after all — no baby. They told him to call them Uncle Stan and Auntie B; that neatly sidestepped the twin potholes of mum and dad and, besides, he had already become accustomed to the names during their many visits to the orphanage. They explained why his name was Highness and not Pole. His name, they said, was all that he had that was truly his (well, not quite all, but they didn’t tell him that — not yet), and he should keep it. Out of the way they closed ranks and stood up for him whenever necessary came a sense of their own uniqueness and strength as a family and, over the years, he grew to love them — not as parents exactly (he couldn’t imagine what that must feel like), but as people who had been kind to him. Saviours, if you like. Apart from anything else they had saved him from an awful nickname (the children had called him names like Jew and Judas and Rabbi for years but then, when they discovered that he couldn’t really be Jewish because he hadn’t been circumcised, they began to call him, of all things, Foreskin); he simply left it behind, along with the iron beds and the rising-bells, the walls painted two shades of green, and the constant echoey clang and clatter of the place, as if everything was happening inside a metal bucket. It had been such a luxury to move into that house in Leicester, and it was always a luxury to come back. A hushed and cushioned existence — except, that is, for the platoon of grandfather clocks that stood in the hall; a passion of Uncle Stan’s, they ticked and creaked and wheezed and, once in a while, all chimed simultaneously, a chaotic orchestra of gongs and xylophones and bells led, in Moses’s imagination, by a mad cook spanking the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. The carpets were fingernail deep and deliciously soft if, in the middle of the night, half asleep and barefoot, you had to cross the landing to the upstairs lavatory. The air smelt of wood-polish, pot-pourris of rose leaves, and Uncle Stan’s pipe-tobacco, and then, as you moved towards the kitchen, of warm pastry and freshly ground coffee.