Dreams of Leaving by Rupert Thomson Page B

but she didn’t recognise the man.
    A tall dark stranger?
    Madame Zola frowned. All her basic instincts told her this was nonsense. Worse than that – a cliché. She adjusted her plastic headscarf, a nervous fluttering of her left hand, then peered down into her cup as if to extract some guidance or advice from the few tea-leaves floating on the surface. They told her nothing. She glanced up at the proprietor. His paper closed then opened again with a loud rustle of its intricately marked wings. She shuddered at the vision of a giant butterfly alighting on his face.
    Tall dark stranger indeed.
    When you worked on such a vast scale, when your materials were the past, the present and the future, you often fell victim to vivid but randomimages, maverick phenomena. Pieces of fantasy, dream, or memory would break loose, float free, generate their own electricity, their own atmosphere, as stars do. Madame Zola had a word for this kind of thing when it happened. She called it
interference.
This tall dark stranger, she decided, lips twisting as if she had just bitten into a lemon, almost certainly fell into that category. Lifting her cup, she sipped at her cold tea. She was getting old. Her gift was breaking up. She felt herself crossing the fine line between clairvoyance and hallucination.
    All the same, as the minutes passed, she was unable to dismiss an obscure feeling of excitement, not unlike moths brushing against her stomach walls. Interference or not, she was becoming increasingly convinced of two things: one, that the tall dark stranger was going to walk into the café, and two, that she would be able to make her cup of tea last until he did.
    *
    Madame Zola needn’t have doubted herself. A tall dark stranger was indeed standing beside a phone-box in the immediate vicinity. His name was Moses Highness.
    Moses seemed to be in some kind of dilemma. He opened the phonebox door, closed it, then opened it again. It looked as if he was fighting the pull of a magnetic field. In the end he capitulated. Opened the door, edged in sideways and did what he always did: thumbed through the directory until he reached the letter H.
    â€˜Now then,’ he muttered, his right eye twitching. He began to run his finger down the thin columns of names –
    Heart
    Heaven
    Hemlock
    Henna
    Henry V
    Hercules
    Herod
    Hey
    Hey Gary
    Hey Raymond
    Hi-Tension Tattooing
    Hidalgo
    Hien Chul Oh A
    Higgins Prof
    Highgate Literary Scientific Institution
    Highjack Video
    Highmore – only to sigh as he witnessed that nimble, almost imperceptible, but oh so familiar leap to –
    Higho Belinda
    Hikmet
    Himmel
    Ho
    Hogbin –
    Hopeless. It was always the same. The same disappointment. The crucial name missing, that gap invisible to eyes other than his own. For that was what he was looking for when he succumbed to the lure of the phone-box: another Highness. Not necessarily his parents, not even a relative. Just another person with the same name. Just
one person,
that was all he asked. He had checked the London directories a thousand times, and whenever he travelled to other towns he checked theirs too, but so far he had drawn a blank. Literally, a blank.
    He must have been about eight the first time. Still living at the orphanage, anyway. They used to go for walks with Mrs Hood every afternoon – outings, she called them – always the same walk, long too, real drudgery, until one day he noticed something different. A phone-box standing near the entrance to a wood. So red against the dusty summer green of the hedgerow. And those directories, fat and pink, lolling like dogs’ tongues in the heat. He had dropped out of the crocodile and slipped inside.
    He was always losing things, Moses. That afternoon, it was his sense of time. Those phone-books, the names. They revealed new worlds, they cast spells, they mesmerised. They were open sesame and abracadabra and look into my eyes. And that gap where his own name ought to have