And I helped the policeman, he thought.
What had the policeman said? Something like, Oh, he’s just trying to escape, that’s all.
That’s all.
And I helped the policeman.
‘Hey! Moses!’
That wasn’t one of his thoughts. That had come from somewhere behind him.
*
Looking round blinded him at first. The intense whiteness of those soaring walls of chalk. Then the shout came again, abrasive, familiar, redirecting him. Now he could see two figures sitting at the foot of the cliffs. Was that Vince? What was he doing here?
Moses started up the beach. It sloped sharply, and the pebbles ran out from beneath his feet. He felt like someone trying to go up an escalator that’s going down. In the end he had to drop on to all fours.
Vince — for it was Vince — jeered from his vantage-point. He was leaning against a rock, his arm around a girl. Moses had to smile. Typical Vince to come to a party and then sit as far away from it as possible. He looked totally out of place in these natural surroundings. The sun lit every crease and crevice in his haggard face, and showed up all the stains on that infamous black waistcoat.
He handed Moses a bottle of brandy. ‘You weren’t expecting to see me, were you,’ he said, as if that alone justified the trip down.
Moses swallowed a mouthful of brandy and handed it back. ‘Thanks. No. So why are you here?’
‘Eddie told me about it.’ Vince passed the bottle to the girl. She held it to her lips and tipped her head back. Three gulps. It wasn’t the first time she had drunk brandy out of a bottle.
‘So Eddie’s here too?’ Moses said.
‘Yeah. He gave us a lift down.’
‘Christ, you’re lucky to be alive.’ Moses addressed this remark to the girl.
She twisted the bottle into the stones so it stood upright. She had fat arms and a big awkward body, but when she smiled she looked like a madonna. It was a really beautiful face.
‘You’re not kidding,’ she said. ‘That Eddie, he drives like a fucking maniac.’
A madonna with a Liverpool accent.
‘That’s because he is a fucking maniac,’ Moses said.
‘Fucking right.’ The word fucking sounded so much better coming out of her mouth. It might have been invented specially for girls from Liverpool. ‘No way am I going back in that car. I’d rather walk.’ She shook herself. ‘He gives me the creeps, anyway. He a friend of yours?’
Vince looked at Moses.
‘Sort of,’ Moses said. ‘We used to live together.’
The girl closed her eyes, offered her wide pale eyelids to the sun. Vince sifted stones with his dirty fingers.
‘I knew there was something different about you,’ Moses said. ‘Your arms.’
‘Yeah, they didn’t do a bad job, did they?’
The bandages had come off. Thin red scars ran the length of his forearms where the glass had lifted flaps of skin away, but they were main roads on a map not the railway lines you get with stitches.
‘So tape really does work,’ Moses said. ‘Three months and you’ll be able to do it again.’
Vince grinned, leaned back against the rock. No rise out of him at all. No venom. For the first time ever Moses could imagine Vince living beyond thirty. Vince with a wife and kids. Vince with a mortgage, a food-processor, and a sense of responsibility. He put it down to the influence of this girl from Liverpool, whose name, Vince finally told him, was Debra. No o, noh.
‘Don’t think my parents knew how to spell it,’ she said.
Most people called her Zebra, she told him, because she wore a lot of black and white, and at least that was spelt right. She took another long pull on the brandy, lit a Benson and Hedges, and stared out towards the sea.
‘I’ve always been fat,’ she said. ‘Once I screwed up this weighing-machine in Blackpool. I was so heavy it thought I was a fucking man.’ She chuckled. ‘It called me sir. My mum nearly died.’
She tapped the end of her cigarette. The ash fell, invisible, against the grey pebbles. ‘Once I got so depressed I almost did myself in.’ A pause. Then her madonna smile. ‘Didn’t have the guts, did I.
‘I’m pretty used to being fat now. Fuck it is what I think. It’s me, isn’t it. Fucked if I’m going to change. Like I like chips, right?’
‘And alcohol,’ Vince murmured.
‘And alcohol. Fucked if I’m going to give them up just to please some git in a magazine.’
‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘It’s like someone telling me I ought to be shorter or something.’
Debra nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘I’m not supposed to be short and you’re not supposed to be thin and — ’ Moses glanced at Vince’s arms — ‘you’re not supposed to be alive.’
Debra smiled, but Vince ignored the remark. ‘You’re not fat, Zeb,’ he said. ‘You’re more sort of voluptuous, really.’
‘Fuck off, Vincent.’ And before Vince could move, Debra was sitting on his chest.
Vince began to struggle. ‘I’ll beat shit out of you,’ he warned her. ‘I will.’
She just laughed. ‘You couldn’t beat shit out of a nappy.’
Moses watched her pin Vince’s scarred arms to the ground; it was good to see Vince being treated with the respect he deserved. He wondered why she had told them all that stuff about herself. Maybe she had always been teased, he thought. And maybe, over the years, she had learned to get in first herself, to sound at home with her disadvantages, before people could start pointing fingers or cracking jokes. He liked her, he decided. She was someone else who didn’t quite fit. The world would never be off the peg for either of them.
*
Half an hour later Moses said he really ought to be getting back to the party.
Vince and Debra, arm in arm and reconciled, told him they were staying put.
Moses motioned to the bottle of brandy, almost empty now. ‘But aren’t you going to run out pretty soon?’
Vince patted the carrier-bag beside him. A clink of glass answered Moses’s question. He should have known that Vince would provide for his own oblivion.
The sun, coppery now, was dropping into a bank of grey cloud. Safe deposit for the night. The tide had turned. The sea, ruled into straight lines by the waves, was covered with the hieroglyphics of swimmers — black dots for heads, the pale flash of arms.
Walking back through the fading light, he stopped whenever he thought he saw something interesting. Most stones seemed to be grey (flint) or white (chalk). If he stared hard enough he found his eyes began to invent exceptions. But as soon as he crouched down, touched one with his hand, it turned ordinary again. This process repeated itself, as if it was a lesson he was supposed to be learning. Some stones, he noticed, were the strangest most luminous colours when wet, but if you picked them up and dried them off they lost their allure, looked just like a million other stones. He did find a few treasures, though: a meteorite, no bigger than a ping-pong ball, rust-brown, fissured as a brain; several smooth pieces of glass, white on the outside, blue, yellow or green on the inside, like boiled sweets dusted with sherbet; and a dull green stone the exact shape of a lady’s automatic. He fitted this last stone into his palm and bounced his hand in the air a couple of times, as he had seen people do with guns, testing it for weight and balance. It felt good: small, compact — good. He raised his arm stiffly, aimed at the setting sun, and fired.
A red stain appeared in the sky away to the right. He must’ve missed. Hit a cloud by mistake.
He blew across the barrel of his new stone gun.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
*
Somebody had lit the bonfire. Scraps of paper floated upwards with the smoke, then dived and swooped, jittery as bats, glowed red until the black air blew them out. Sometimes a damp branch whined or popped, spat sparks, tiny flutes of steam, jets of green flame. It was a warm night, but the fire drew people in. Their disembodied faces hung in the darkness. In that leaping athletic light, they looked like caricatures of themselves — their noses pulled, their lips grimacing, their eyes coloured-in black. Moses recognised Alison, though. She looked more Pre-Raphaelite than ever with her wide tranquil forehead and her scorching red abundance of hair. He made his way round the fire towards her.