He stepped back to the kerb so as to get a better view of the rest of the building. On the second floor, he could see a pair of red curtains, a red lampshade hanging from the ceiling. The next floor up looked derelict: grimy windows, one pane missing. He would have assumed that the fourth floor was unoccupied too, had he not noticed a piece of black cloth covering one of the windows. He instinctively felt that this was where Moses lived. He walked round to the side of the building. Another door, also locked. Further along he found a metal gate about the width of a truck. Sharp green spikes lined the top to stop people climbing over. The padlock securing the gate was as big as his fist. He put his eye to the crack between the upper and the lower hinges. He saw a cobbled yard, a few dustbins, a stack of yellow beer-crates. Nobody had bothered to paint the back of The Bunker pink. Only the façade mattered, it seemed.
He stood back. He dismissed any thought of trying to break in. He would be running too many risks. Besides, the place looked impregnable. Especially to a man who couldn’t even cut his own toenails any more. He would have to wait.
He looked round, noticed a café on the other side of the main road. Positioned directly opposite The Bunker, it commanded views of both entrances. He crossed the road and pushed the glass door open. No foreigners, he was relieved to see. Nobody at all, in fact. He took the table by the window and ordered a coffee.
The nightclub stood on the junction, flamboyant, still.
It was 12.52.
*
By 3.15 he had severe indigestion. He had eaten a sausage sandwich, a ham roll, two cheese rolls with pickle, a bowl of oxtail soup, and a slice of cheesecake, and he had drunk three cups of coffee and two cups of tea. And nothing had happened. He decided to go for a walk.
He paid the bill and left the café. The door jangled shut behind him. He set off down the road. He resisted the urge to glance back over his shoulder at the pink building. A truck slammed past him, flinging his shirt against his back. He followed the curve of a high brick wall and Kennington Park came into view. A nylon banner slung between two oak trees announced the opening of a fun-fair that evening. He crossed the road to investigate.
A green generator hummed in the north-east corner of the park. Long red trucks huddled under the dusty foliage. He picked his way through fierce pieces of machinery. They lay about in the grass, dismembered, sticky with grease. Parts of something called an Octopus, apparently. He couldn’t imagine how they would look when assembled. Men with hands like wrenches were tightening nuts and bolts, shouting to each other in accents he could hardly understand. He moved through smells of beer and oil and sweat. Disco music crashed out of a gaudy wooden cabin at the foot of the Big Wheel. He winced. A man in fraying denims, hair tied back in a ponytail, gave him a hard still look as he passed — a look that seemed to freeze time and silence the music. Peach avoided the man’s eyes. He didn’t want any trouble. Leaving the clutter, the noise, the knots of fascinated boys behind, he wandered off across the grass.
The next half-hour passed uneventfully. He watched a woman push a crying child on a swing. The higher the child went, the more it cried. The woman looked away, smoking. Two black youths loped past in track-suits. They shouted something at him, but again he didn’t understand. It would take a lifetime, and he only had twenty-four hours. He saw a man asleep on a bench, a pair of training-shoes for a pillow, a scar on his bald head like the lace on a football. Mostly there was nothing to look at. It was a drab park, and that beer he had drunk at lunch-time had taken the edge off things.
Then the nightclub slid into his mind — pink, triangular, a vessel carrying a cargo of mysteries — and he imagined the black cloth parting and a face appearing at the window. While he walked aimlessly in the park, the young man whose face he didn’t know left by the side-door. Slipped the net. Escaped again. Time to get back, he thought. And almost ran back up the main road.
But nothing had changed. The black cloth hanging in the fourth-floor window as before. The same cars parked on the street outside. He walked into the café and sat down at his table.
The owner shuffled over in carpet-slippers. ‘Twice in one day,’ he said. ‘You must really like it here.’ He let out a dry sarcastic chuckle.
Peach ignored him. He ordered lasagne, a side salad, vanilla ice-cream, and a cup of black coffee. ‘And make it slow,’ he said.
‘And what?’
‘And make it slow.’
The man backed away, scratching his head.
He returned half an hour later. ‘Slow enough for you?’
Peach nodded.
His lasagne stood on its plate like the model of a block of flats. The salad? A few dog-eared leaves of lettuce and a pile of carrot-shavings. He ate with no appetite, one eye on the window. He sometimes paused for minutes between mouthfuls. He was beginning to hate the pink building. He knew it off by heart, in minute detail, from the fringe of yellow weeds on the roof to the Y-shaped crack beneath one of the ground-floor windows. The pink façade had burned itself into his subconscious and would recur on sleepless nights. His eyes itched with the pinkness of it. He never wanted to look at anything pink again. Never.
Then it was 6.56. A black Rover — a Rover 90, registration PYX 520 — turned into the street that ran down the left-hand side of The Bunker. It parked. The door on the driver’s side opened. A man got out. Early to middle twenties. Leather jacket. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Tall. 6’5”, 6’6”. Big too. 220 Ibs, perhaps. Maybe more. The man was alone.
Peach had long since stopped eating. His two scoops of vanilla ice-cream subsided in their clear glass bowl. He watched the young man cross the pavement, unlock the black side-door, and vanish into the building. A minute or two later a hand parted the black cloth in the fourth-floor window. Peach’s lower lip slid out and back. Once.
While his eyes were scouring the top of the building for further developments, a white Mercedes drew up on the street below. A West Indian climbed out. Coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts. Could this be the owner?
The West Indian looked right and left as he locked the car door. A routine scan. Then he turned and walked towards The Bunker, lifting his shoulders a couple times, dropping his chin, the moves a boxer makes as he approaches the ring. He opened the double-doors and disappeared inside. Lights came on in a second-floor window. The owner, then.
Peach stirred the thick puddle his ice-cream had become. Part of him wanted to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Moses Highness had drowned in the river, that nobody had ever escaped from the village, that the hundred per cent record was still intact. But now he had proof of his suspicions — the proof that he had, in a way, been dreading. The young man in the leather jacket was no carbon-copy of George Highness — they shared certain basic characteristics: above-average height, similar hair-colour — and yet Peach knew he had seen Moses. It shook him. To know, after twenty-four years, that the baby had survived, escaped, grown up. In the outside world. Anathema to Peach. Anathema and nightmare. He stirred and stirred at his ice-cream. The man in the carpet-slippers asked him if he had finished. ‘No,’ he said.
He had seen what he had come to see and yet he couldn’t leave. Some part of him still needed convincing. He had made inroads. He felt he understood the territory now. He might almost have been on home ground. And he had time to spare. So he waited.
After about fifteen minutes the double-doors swung open again. The West Indian appeared. He wore a dark suit (black? navy? maroon? from this distance it was difficult to tell) and a white tie. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and leaned against the wall. He smoked. His head moved, following cars, but he didn’t seem to be waiting for anybody, just passing the time of day. He flicked his cigarette into the road. A shower of sparks.