*
Why had he come to this foreign country? he wondered, cursing himself over and over again, though it was too late now, of course. The stupidity of it. But words were talismans, there was protection in their syllables, their sounds could stop the bad thing happening. Keep talking, he told himself, because talking can save you. Keep talking. All the time dragging himself across the sand towards the cover of the trees. All the time looking over his shoulder. Looking was important too. Never turn your back.
The animal crouched twenty feet away, its striped sides rigid, its breathing invisible. There are no tigers in the desert, he told himself. But it was there all right. He could hear the rage vibrating in its chest. It trembled for a moment — power that could be held no longer — drew back, sprang. He saw the teeth, yellow, filmed over with saliva, curving down like raised knives –
Something sharp dug into his naked shoulder, and he cried out.
‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, tugging at him.
He jack-knifed upright. A bright blue light revolved in the room. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know. I was just going to find out.’ Gloria put on one of his shirts and padded to the window.
Moses leaned on one elbow, still half asleep, bewildered. The dream lingered, mingled with the memory of recent sex. He couldn’t work out how much of the sex he remembered was real and how much dreamt. They had pulled each other’s clothes off. She had pressed her body to his.
The icy air.
Her nipples in silhouette, tiny minarets, and his hand moving over the smooth drifted dunes of her ribs, moving across the soft desert of her belly, moving down, down to the oasis. And her hand, too, had moved, following a trail of hair, discovering his scrotum, shrivelled like a dried fig with the cold, and she had bitten into it, and he had gasped a little, less out of pain than surprise, then she had lifted her head, her face invisible, and the whole thing linked with his dream because she had said something about Arabia –
‘Moses. Come here. Quick.’
He eased out of the warm bed and slipped into his coat. Gloria stood at the window. On tiptoe, her heels off the ground. His shirt-tails reaching the backs of her knees. He wanted to say something, but the feeling wouldn’t translate. He went and stood beside her.
Other people had opened their windows too, sensing tragedy as people do, intrigued because it wasn’t theirs. An ambulance had drawn up below. It stood at a curious angle to the pavement; it looked casual, abandoned. As they watched, two men in dark uniforms wheeled a stretcher out of one of the houses opposite. A black nylon shroud hid the body. It had been stretched so taut that the feet made no hill. The two men slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, closed the doors, and exchanged a few words. All this without glancing up once. The revolving blue light accelerated away down the road, turned left at the junction. The night became orange and grey, ordinary again. People closed their windows, went back to bed. Moses and Gloria stared down into the empty street.
It was Moses who pulled away first. He walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on. He heard Gloria shut the window.
‘I don’t feel like sleeping any more,’ she said from the doorway. ‘If I go to sleep, men in black uniforms might come and take me away.’
‘I wouldn’t let them,’ he said.
She was looking at the floor, one hand toying with the shirt’s top button.
‘I’m making some coffee,’ he told her.
‘That’s good.’
‘Lucky this didn’t happen last weekend.’
‘Why?’
‘Last weekend I didn’t have a kettle.’
Gloria laughed softly. Reaching up, she ruffled his hair. Then she left the kitchen, and he heard her moving about in the bedroom. When she returned she was dressed. She bounced her earrings up and down in her hand. They clicked like dice. He wondered if she was going to leave.
He unscrewed the lid on the coffee-jar, spooned the granules into two matching cups (they were new too), poured the boiling water on to the granules, added milk from a carton, and stirred, enjoying doing the small things slowly.
Gloria had folded her arms. She began to twist one strand of hair around her finger. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’ He handed her a cup. ‘There are a lot of old people living round here. They live here all their lives. Die here too. They never move. Some of them haven’t even been north of the river. They’ll look at you when you tell them you have and say something like, Nice up there, is it? Like it’s a foreign country or something. Well, I suppose it is for them.’ He paused. ‘We all have our foreign countries, I suppose.’
Gloria smiled at him, then, as if that movement of her lips had set her body in motion, as if one was the natural extension of the other, walked towards him, met his mouth with hers.
*
It was still dark in the living-room, so Moses switched on the lamp. It shed a soft-edged glow. He arranged a few cushions on the floor. Then he knelt down, lit the gas-heater. It sighed like the inside of a seashell.
Gloria walked over to the window again. She stared out, thinking, perhaps, of her own body wrapped in that taut cloth, of a blue light revolving in the street for her.
Without turning round, she said, ‘I wonder if that person was dead.’
‘Probably,’ Moses said. ‘They covered the face.’
He stood behind her. Over her shoulder he saw somebody drive past in a white car.
‘I still don’t know you, really, do I?’ she said. She turned to look at him, but couldn’t. He was standing too close.
‘No,’ he said.
She let herself lean back against him. ‘Too many blue lights this evening,’ she said. ‘Fucks me up, you see.’
He smiled at the way she’d said evening. It was almost morning now.
She pulled away from him again. He felt she had trusted him in that brief moment, had entrusted him with some sacred part of herself, and was now detaching herself, confident about what she had done, knowing she had left something behind. He watched her cross the room. She bent down next to his record collection. She flicked through, found Charlie Parker. She put him on. Humming the first few bars of ‘Cherokee’, she began to rummage in her bag. She held up a tiny white envelope.
‘Since we’re going to stay awake,’ she said.
He smiled.
She chopped the coke on her own mirror, her legs folded beneath her, her body in a loose Z-shape.
‘Two for you, two for me, two for later,’ she said.
She took her two and handed him the mirror. When he handed it back, she was brushing the tip of her nose with the back of her finger and he noticed a fine groove running between her nostrils and thought of Blue Rooms on south-coast piers (holidays with Uncle Stan and Auntie B) and penny-in-the-slot machines and smiled.
‘What’s so funny, Moses?’
‘Your nose. It’s like a slot-machine.’
‘No more for you then.’ She ran her finger across the dusty glass and licked it.
The lamplight was diluting fast in the greyness of daybreak. Traffic grew heavier on the main road. The record crackled to a finish.
Gloria sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s go out somewhere.’
She kept changing, landing abruptly in a new mood like a needle jumping on a record and skipping whole tracks. She was a mystery-tour of a girl. Constantly wrongfooting him. She’ll go right here, he would think (an instinct, this), she’ll definitely go right. And she’d go left. Wonderful. He delighted in being unable to predict her.
‘Let’s go and have breakfast,’ she was saying. ‘In a hotel. In Mayfair.’
She inhaled the smoke from her latest cigarette impatiently. Her eyes had the glint of solid silver cutlery. ‘What do you think, Moses?’ Standing over him now.