Moses couldn’t help grinning. It was a fucking hole.
‘Then she told me not to be so sarcastic.’
Moses poured them both another tumbler of wine. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can almost hear her saying that.’
‘Well,’ Vince said, and reached for his rolling-papers. During the silence that followed, he built one of his specials. B-52s, he called them. Three joints in one. Malawi in the fuselage, Lebanese red in the wings. B-52s weren’t lightly named. They wreaked destruction. Large-scale destruction. They wrapped people round toilet-bowls and made them wish they were dead.
Vince lit the nose and the two wingtips. He inhaled, bared his teeth, leaned back against the wall. When all three ends were burning fiercely, he passed the lethal plane to Moses with a smile. Vince was happy now. One of his greatest joys in life was making people wish they were dead.
He got up, paced round the rooftop, his badges glinting in the sun, his bandaged arms held parallel to the ground. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’ll be no more windows broken over Alison, that’s for sure.’
Moses considered this. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘There’ve got to be better reasons than that.’
‘Fuck off and die,’ Vince said.
Moses left about half an hour later, before it became too late to leave at all. Vince said he was going to carry on. He flipped open the lid on a tin of capsules. ‘Painkillers,’ he grinned. ‘For my arms.’
Moses lowered himself backwards through the skylight. ‘Any excuse,’ he said.
*
Ground level.
Moses shaded his eyes. There was a big bucket in the sky at the end of the King’s Road. This bucket was overflowing with molten gold light. The light was called sunset, and this is how it worked. The bucket slowly emptied of light. As the bucket emptied, the light slowly darkened — gold to orange, orange to red, red to purple — until, after hours of pouring, only the sediment remained: black light or, in other words, night.
Moses began to walk east. It was around six. At this point the light was still gold and the supply seemed endless. The people coming towards him had gold faces, gold hands, gold fingers, gold rings. They looked as if they had just stepped off planes from somewhere exotic. He wondered if he looked as if he had just stepped off a plane. He felt as if he was still on one. That old B-52. Where was his car?
There it was.
He slid into the front seat, basked for a moment in the aroma of hot leather. Ahhh, Bisto.
Jesus, he was driving already.
He plugged a cassette in, top volume. One of Gloria’s. Cuban stuff. What the hell.
He was heading riverwards. The road seemed calm enough. His Rover floated on a purring cushion of air.
He watched a supersite poster glide past. It was a picture of a man sitting in a desert. The man had clean-cut features, neat black hair and a firm jaw. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He was smiling. It was nice in the advert.
Moses smiled back. He knew how the man felt. He was in an advert too.
*
Certain items of clothing struck him immediately as being inappropriate for a drinks party in Hampstead. The plus-fours, for example. The kilt. The straitjacket (a twenty-first birthday present from Jackson). He flicked through his wardrobe. He was proud of his wardrobe. As part of a new drive to inject system and discipline into his life, he had spent a whole day alphabetising his clothes. From A for Anorak to Z for Zoot Suit. Shirts were all ranged under S, but they also had a strict internal order of their own: Hawaiian, for instance, came before Psychedelic but after Bowling. Those shirts that had no obvious style or function were classified according to colour: Amber, Beige, Charcoal, Damson, and so on. It was some time before he reached his sharkskin suit, but when he did he realised that he need look no further. That was it. Suit: Sharkskin.
He had bought it from a charity organisation that operated out of a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate. A woman of about fifty had answered the door. She wore a necklace of wooden beads, a tweed skirt, and a pair of stout brown shoes. She seemed vigorous but absent-minded at the same time.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Oh dear.’ And then, turning back inside, ‘Sorry. Do come in.’
Moses had fallen in love with the suit at first sight. It had a double-breasted jacket, a pocket that slanted rakishly over the heart, and a grey watered-silk lining with triangular flaps sewn into the armpits to soak up sweat (a task which, thankfully, they had never had to perform). The trousers, high-waisted, roomy, pleated, tapered nicely to a half-inch turnup at the ankle; they were the kind of trousers that Robert Mitchum used to wear in those movies he made in the forties. The colour of the suit? Well, at first glance it looked grey, a sober darkish grey, but when you examined it closely you could see that the cloth was shot through with tiny flecks of blue and orange. In sunlight it would come alive. Perhaps the best thing about the suit, though, was the label inside. PURE SHARKSKIN, it said, and gave an address in St James’s. Moses didn’t know what sharkskin was, but he certainly liked the sound of it. He tried the suit on behind a purple velvet curtain and it fitted perfectly. It might almost have been tailored to his measurements. A miracle. He marched straight up to the woman at the counter.
‘This is a wonderful suit. I’ll take it.’
‘How strange that you should choose that one.’ The woman’s eyes settled cautiously on his face. ‘It only came in yesterday.’
‘I was lucky then.’
‘I shouldn’t really tell you, I suppose, but the man who it belonged to only died last week.’ The beads of her wooden necklace clicked between her fingers. A rosary of sorts.
He couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t tactless.
He finally broke the silence with the words, ‘He must have been a big man.’
‘Yes. He was. He used to row.’ And the woman stared Moses straight in the eye as if he had accused her of lying.
‘You knew him then?’
‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sighed. ‘I knew him.’
‘Oh,’ Moses said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘That’ll be four pounds.’ She had already folded the suit and tucked it out of sight in a brown paper bag.
Afterwards he couldn’t help wondering why she had said Oh dear when she saw him standing in the doorway. Did he resemble the man who had died the week before? Had she loved that man, perhaps? Had she thought of Moses as some kind of ghost? And, if so, had he then upset her further by selecting, as it were, his own sharkskin suit?
He would never know, of course, but the incident gave him a peculiar feeling: the feeling that all happiness was rooted in grief, the one evolving naturally, organically, from the other, like flowers from earth.
*
Shit, seven-thirty already. He should have been in Hampstead by now. Drinking. And he was still in Lambeth. Naked. It was the speed, the dope. They had reversed him into his memory.
He dressed, checked his face in the mirror, ran some gel through his hair, snatched up keys and cigarettes, and took the stairs, three at a time.
‘Hey, Abraham! What’s up?’
It was Elliot. He was standing on the corner, hands in his pockets. Only his shoulderblades touched the wall. That cool. He was wearing his maroon suit. A white tie glowed softly against the backcloth of a black shirt. He looked beautiful.
Moses walked over. He forgot the rush he was in. It was good knowing people who smiled when they saw you. It could make you forget anything.
‘What’s with the tie, Elliot?’
Elliot looked down at his tie as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘You like it?’