Dreams of Leaving by Rupert Thomson Page A

wound in a chaotic bun beneath her transparent plastic headscarf. A bag, also plastic, nestled against her left foot. Her wrinkled fingers held a cup of tea as settings hold precious stones. Her name was Madame Zola and she had printed cards to prove it. MADAME ZOLA, the cards said. FAMOUS CLAIRVOYANT AND PSYCHIC CONSULTANT. APPOINTMENTS ONLY. Never mind that the cards were twenty years old. She could still touch somebody and feel sadness or ambition or fear, the tremors of a life as it ran along its own unique track towards an unknown destination. Sometimes, too, she got flashes. She would never forget the night when she felt the death of Christos, the man she worshipped, her religion.
    Rain on the windows and she had trickled fingers down his face, his neck, his arm, and she had felt death like a fine powder on his skin, she had felt his life speeding towards some collision, and she had drawn back, biting her wrist, it seemed so strange, this strong Greek, he looked more like a wrestler than a pianist, and he had stared at her across the black curls on his chest, his eyes had reeled her in, fish-hook eyes, and he had said
What is it?
and she had pretended to be thinking of her sister, the one who had just lost her baby, and he had believed her because she was a woman and women are sentimental, and he had pulled her towards him, one of his piano hands playing in her hair.
    How she wished she hadn’t touched him that night – but how could she not touch him?
    In any case, he had believed her lie and one year later, in the same room, he had died. His head resting in her hands, his hands still for ever. Fifteen years ago now, but she still returned once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes with flowers and nowhere to leave them, because she thought of Kennington as his cemetery and the building where he had died as his mausoleum, and when she stood in front of the building she could still hear the music pouring from his fingers, running up her spine and intoher hair, every note a shiver, and when darkness fell she would turn away and travel home, this frost around her heart, an old woman on the bus with flowers.
    Yes, she could predict the future. Her husband’s death was proof of that. She could also make a cup of tea last a very long time. The proprietor had already sent one or two unpleasant glances in her direction. She had ignored him, of course. And even as she sat at her table in the shadows, her various powers combined to produce a vision of the café in ruins. There was no malice in this. Visions came unsolicited; they appeared out of thin air, as poems do. It was unmistakably the Delphi Café, though. She recognised the strawberry formica and the concrete stump where the pillar had been. And there, perched high on the rubble and miraculously intact, stood her cup of tea, filled to the brim with twigs, cobwebs, the bones of small animals, wood-splinters, fragments of plaster and brick, the remnants of a nest, and an unidentifiable grey dust (had bombs fallen?). With fingers that were nimble for their age, she unearthed about 0.02 cl. of petrified tea, scarcely more than a stain really, but proof none the less that she could make a cup of tea last almost indefinitely (whether the proprietor liked it or not), prolonging it into a future which, it had to be admitted, she had herself predicted, but which all the same seemed real enough. For one nasty moment she took this vision as a warning – the destruction of the café might occur this afternoon, her life was in danger – but when she searched the wreckage she could find no trace of her body. She could only assume that she had already left the café and would die (had died?) peacefully somewhere else.
    Some minutes later she passed a hand across her forehead. Another vision intruded. Time had wound back into the present. She saw a man standing beside a phone-box somewhere in the immediate vicinity. A tall dark man. She recognised the phone-box,