Mary glanced round at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If my parents were dead, properly dead, in graves with names on, then at least I’d know where they were, wouldn’t I? As it is, I haven’t really got proof of anything.’
He wrenched a few blades of grass out of the ground and twisted them until they were dark and wet. He had sounded so bitter, surprising even himself.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Moses,’ Mary said. ‘You’ve never told me anything about your parents.’
So he told her. The same story he had told Gloria in that hotel in Leicestershire. He recognised many of the phrases. He added where necessary, especially for Mary, and found himself believing his embellishments. It was his story — one of the things he only entrusted to the people closest to him. It sealed a friendship, a relationship. Sanctified it, almost. Yes, he had the feeling, this time above all others, of handling something priceless and fragile, like the bones of a saint, something that could easily break up, decay, crumble into dust.
When he came to the end, Mary gave him a long careful look.
‘I’m going to say something and you’re probably not going to like it.’
‘What?’ he said, uneasy now.
‘I think that was a nice performance. Almost convincing.’
‘But it’s true.’
‘I know it’s true. That’s not the point. You were performing, Moses. You performed the whole thing. That’s not the first time you’ve told somebody, is it?’
He looked away from her. ‘No,’ he mumbled. His stomach twisted as if he had been caught cheating.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It shows. You’ve told it before. Quite a few times, I imagine. You’re not really even thinking about your parents when you tell it. Not any more. You’re just using them. You’re using your own family, your own history, to pull emotions out of people. You didn’t really feel anything when you told me all that stuff about the dress — except self-pity, maybe. It wasn’t real, Moses. It didn’t feel real. It was like something put on specially for tourists. Some kind of ritual disembowelling. Is that all I am to you? I don’t want smiling natives and air-conditioning and cabaret. I want real stuff. You’ve reached the point where you’ve sanitised everything. You can’t take it any further. You know it and I know it. So why do it?’
He couldn’t answer.
Anger shook her to her feet. She walked away. He noticed the blades of dead grass stuck to the back of her skirt.
In the car, she said, ‘You know something? You don’t need us. It’s not us you need — me and Alan and Rebecca and Sean and Alison. It’s your parents. Your family. Your real family. So find them. Stop using us.’
‘How am I supposed to do that?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. But at least you could start trying.’
He dropped into a painful silence. It took him minutes to struggle out. ‘I do need you.’ He could hear a childish defiance in his voice.
‘Find them, Moses. Then you can decide that.’
She left him outside The Bunker. He thanked her for the afternoon, but the words came out awkward, accusing. After she had driven away, he went through a bewildering variety of responses in a very short space of time — fear, guilt, anxiety, amusement, cynicism. None of them seemed to fit.
That feeling of not knowing what to say.
He had sat in the car, on the gravestone, tongue-tied, panic-stricken, his bowels churning. Part of him hated her for attacking him there, in the area of trust and confidences. Another part of him applauded her, told him she was justified. He liked to appear as the victim of mysterious and tragic circumstances, he liked to manipulate people, he liked the sound of his own voice. He liked being thought of as special. What had she said? Something about disembowelling for tourists. She was right. She had been hard with him in precisely those areas where Gloria, say, had been soft. She had been accurate. That thought startled him. Suddenly it seemed as though she had passed a test which he, unwittingly, had put her through.
*
The next Sunday the weather broke.
Moses woke to the sound of a roof-tile shattering on the street below. Thunder in the distance, constant thunder, as if the world was ill. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood in his bleak kitchen, swallowing coffee and watching the rain come down. After what Mary had said, he had made a few enquiries regarding the whereabouts of his parents, but he had drawn a complete blank.
On Friday evening he had phoned Uncle Stan and Auntie B. Auntie B had answered.
‘You know, I thought that suitcase would upset you, Moses,’ she had said.
She was so straightforward about things, Moses thought. Mary would probably adore her.
‘A bit of a funny idea, really,’ she had gone on, ‘leaving a suitcase like that.’
‘You’re absolutely sure there wasn’t an address anywhere?’ Moses had said. ‘What about on that letter?’
‘Oh no, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Only a “to whom it may concern”. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know who they were.’
Moses had asked her for the address of the orphanage where he had grown up. He phoned the orphanage on Saturday morning. He spoke to a Mr Parks (Mrs Hood had died, apparently).
‘Even if we had that kind of information,’ Mr Parks said, ‘we couldn’t possibly divulge it. Not to anyone.’
Divulge. Really, he said that.
‘I’m not anyone,’ Moses said. ‘I’m the person involved.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s not our policy to — ’
‘I don’t think you heard me, Mr Parks. It’s my parents I’m looking for. My own parents.’
‘I’m very sorry.’ Mr Parks appeared to be gloating then. ‘We can’t help you.’
Moses slammed the phone down.
He resorted to directories, though without his usual enthusiasm. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in the Trafalgar Square post office. He thumbed through every directory he could lay his hands on. He came out with black fingers and a headache.
Perhaps his parents were ex-directory. Perhaps they didn’t have a phone. Perhaps they had emigrated. Or died, like Mrs Hood. He was beginning to wonder whether in fact he had ever actually had any parents. Perhaps he was a miracle of science. Or perhaps he had been delivered by a giant stork.
The perhapses seemed to go on for ever.
He turned round to see smoke rising from the grill. His toast was on fire. The last of the bread too. He switched the grill off and blew the flames out. He waited for the toast to cool, then he scraped the burnt bits off. He tried to spread it with butter, but the butter had been in the fridge for too long. Suddenly there were fragments of toast shrapnel all over the kitchen floor.
After sweeping up his breakfast with a dustpan and brush, Moses went and stood by the window. Rain. Grey skies. Misery. He watched a woman walk towards the bus-stop, hunched under a green umbrella. She was probably just tucking her chin into her collar to keep from getting soaked, but to Moses it looked as if she was carrying the heaviest umbrella in the world.
*
He dressed slowly and drove north through the drenched empty streets. It was no longer a decision whether or not to go to Muswell Hill on Sundays. It had become imperative, automatic, like breathing.
Mary opened the front door. She was wearing a faded black dress fastened at the waist with one of Sean’s studded leather belts. She had a scarf round her neck, wispy, cloud-grey, made of something diaphanous like chiffon. Her fairy-tale look. She eyed him suspiciously.
‘I didn’t think we’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not for a while, anyway.’