*
Sometime during the afternoon he walked into the kitchen and found Mary standing by the draining-board.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him. ‘Is that what you’re looking for?’
He said he would. He asked her what she was drinking.
‘Vodka,’ she said. ‘I like vodka. It’s tasteless.’ And then grinned at him as if challenging him to contradict her. When he didn’t, she said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name. Or maybe I never knew it.’
‘Moses.’
‘That’s a peculiar name.’ She handed him a large neat vodka, then looked at him sideways-on. ‘I suppose you’ve had problems with that.’
He ran through a few of the nicknames he had been given over the years. Foreskin made her laugh. He laughed with her.
‘How terrible,’ she said. ‘How very demoralising.’
She kept him guessing as to how seriously she meant that. Up close her gaze was like light. Hard to look straight at.
‘That dream,’ he said. ‘Was it real?’
She swallowed a mouthful of vodka before answering. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, was it a real dream? Did you really dream it?’
‘What a strange question. Yes, of course I did.’
‘I just wondered. You seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’
‘I seem like the kind of person who makes things up.’ In repeating his words she had given them a sardonic edge.
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ He tried to explain that, although he didn’t know her, she seemed like someone who was just naturally inventive, someone who could create events out of routine. He explained it badly, but he thought she could probably read the meaning beneath his clumsy words if she chose to. At the same time, he was beginning to realise that if there were two routes, a hard one and an easy one, Mary would always take the hard one.
‘Oh, I am.’ She lifted her shoulders, drew down the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m a wonderful storyteller. I’m famous for it.’
‘So famous,’ Moses said, ‘that even I’d heard of you.’
Mary walked to the window, swung round, and studied him over the rim of her glass as she drank. ‘I don’t know whether I like you,’ she said.
‘I don’t know whether I like you either,’ Moses said.
A rushed moment, as if an hour had passed in a few seconds, and suddenly they were both smiling. Afterwards he couldn’t decide whether they had both started smiling at the same time or not and, if not, then which one of them had started smiling first. He could only say that it had felt like some kind of understanding, the way their smiles seemed to synchronise.
*
As he followed her back into the garden, a university professor broke off what he was saying to her husband Alan and, brushing her elbow lightly with his hand, steered her into their circle.
‘Ah, Mary,’ he exclaimed, ‘perhaps you can tell us. What’s the attraction of life in Muswell Hill?’
‘I like Muswell Hill,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a dustman called Maurice.’
‘Maurice?’ the professor said. ‘How charming.’
She had given the name its French pronunciation so perhaps he was imagining a pale tubercular dustman with manicured hands and a waxed moustache. Just a few words from Mary and the area acquired a new dimension, became exotic, fashionable even, and people began to wonder why they didn’t live there too. She had that ability. She could make something fascinating simply by placing it under her own unique microscope.
‘Oh no,’ she was saying, ‘he’s not like that at all. He’s very — ’ she paused, put a thoughtful finger to her chin — ‘long. He looks a bit like Donald Sutherland.’
Alan snorted. ‘He doesn’t.’
‘He does too. He’s got the same ears. And eyes. And his hands are so big that if you put a cup of tea in them it disappears completely.’
She raised her cigarette-holder to her lips, released it again like a blown kiss. ‘Me and Maurice. Sometimes, on Tuesday mornings when I’m not working, I ask him in for a cup of tea. We sit down at the kitchen table and we talk rubbish.’
A smile ran across her face, the way an urchin runs across a street: dodging cars, hooted at — the same cheek, the same delight.
‘You know what he said to me once? He said, “I’ve never seen rubbish like your rubbish, Mrs Shirley.” When I asked him what was so special about my rubbish, he said, “I’ve never seen so many bottles in one dustbin in my whole life. It was a real bugger to lift. Ted (Ted’s his mate) nearly hernia’d himself.” Really. He said that. Ted nearly hernia’d himself.’ She rocked with laughter in her cane chair. ‘He told me he could tell what people are like from their rubbish.’ She slowed her voice down, made it sombre, fumbling. ‘ “If someone eats a lot of tuna fish I know it. You can’t hide anything from a dustman. And I’m worried about you, Mrs Shirley.” “Worried about me, Maurice?” I said. “I don’t eat tuna fish.” He shook his head, very serious and wise, and said, “There’s too many bottles in that rubbish of yours, Mrs Shirley, and don’t tell me they’re lemonade bottles, because I know different.”’
‘What did you say to that?’ The professor swayed back on his heels. Later he would drink himself into a flower-bed and fall asleep.
‘ “Some of them are probably lemonade bottles, Maurice,” I said, “because that’s what I put in my vodka sometimes.”’
‘Not if you can help it,’ Alison scoffed.
‘Sometimes, I said. And then — this was the best one — a few months ago Maurice was sitting at the kitchen table, blowing on his tea to cool it down, when I saw a thought move across his face. It actually moved across his face. I saw it. “You know, if there was a competition for the loudest rubbish, Mrs Shirley,” he said, “yours’d win hands down.” “Competition for the what, Maurice?” I said. “Competition for the loudest rubbish,” he said.’
Mary loved that story, and Moses often heard her repeat it that summer. ‘OK, so we drink a bit too much,’ she would say with a swagger in her voice, ‘but at least we’ve got the loudest rubbish in the area.’
‘How do you know?’ somebody new to the house would ask.
‘Maurice says so,’ she would say. ‘Maurice is our dustman.’
‘And it was true,’ she went on, pouring herself another vodka, ‘because I went out one day and listened. The noise was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful. So when his birthday came round I bought him a bottle of whisky to make up for it. When I gave it to him, he looked at it and then he looked at me and said, “You’re a crafty one, Mrs Shirley.” “Crafty?” I said. “Why?” I honestly couldn’t see it. “Trying to turn me into an alcoholic too, are you?” he said. “I’m not an alcoholic, Maurice,” I told him. “I just like to drink.” “I’m not a dustman either,” he said. “I just carry dustbins.”’
She let smoke drift out of her mouth and across her face. It veiled her grin.
‘No posing, no games, no voyeurism,’ she said, glancing down at Moses. ‘Just straight up, that’s Maurice. A real breath of fresh air.’
She had already told Maurice that if they ever tried to take him off his route she would fire off letters of complaint, a salvo of letters, she said, to the council, to her local M P — to the Department of the Environment, if need be.
‘I’d raise an enormous stink.’ She nodded to herself, her chin tilted upwards as it always was when she threw down the gauntlet. And then burst out laughing when she realised what she had said.
*
Moments alone with Mary were rare in the beginning. Too many deflections, too much chaos. What she called a full house. A full house on Sundays meant they were winning, she said. Winning the fight against monotony and playing safe and death. Winning the fight against going through life too soberly. When the chips are down, that’s all this is, she would cry, one hand clutching a bottle to her chest, the other sweeping, declamatory, all-embracing, round the garden. A fight, a gamble, a throw of the dice.