36. How They Talk About Their Town

The humming of the tune.

Weeks ago.

Moses, in just his boxers and a t-shirt, hair mussed and sticking cutely at the crown like a cartoon toddler, comes back to bed with two coffees in his one grip and an unfolded letter and torn envelope in his other hand. Med has picked up the orange Penguin paperback of Malone Dies that is half-read on the bedside table and is leafing through it trying to make as much sense of it as she can of a book not fit for extracting snippets. She notices a strange look on Moses’s face.

“What is it?” she says. She closes the book and places it carefully back where she got it. “What is that?”

Moses puts the coffees down and sits on the edge of the bed.

“News,” he says.

Med lifts herself onto her elbow.

“News of what?”

Moses is looking it over and over.

“News of news,” he says.

Med snatches it. Moses scowls. They’re not quite in the place yet for this to be adorable. It’s just an invasion of privacy and Med gets that immediately but before she hands it back and apologises she sees what it is as there’s not much to see. A letter from the University of Sussex.

Moses has hold of it once again and he’s looking down at it just as he was before as if Med hadn’t grabbed it.

“You’re applying to Uni?” Med says.

Moses feels something cool within him. Relief? He can talk to someone now about this. It’s out there. At least halfway. Just a little nudge and he has a confidant.

“I’ve been accepted,” he says.

“Sussex?”

“Yeah. To do English. As a mature student.”

“They’ll be in for a shock when they meet you.” Not quite the right time for a joke? She’s never really seen him like this before. He’s quiet, humble, perhaps even a little dazed. “I didn’t know you were thinking of it.”

“I haven’t told anyone.”

“No one?”

“Not even my parents know.”

That seems a big deal. He lives under their roof. In fact he lives under their house, not just their roof, in this half-damp basement room with a duff tumble drier in the corner piled high with books and CDs.

Med pulls herself up further so she’s sitting up and slides a t-shirt over her head. This might be a serious conversation, and she probably should have her wits about her. Moses is going. All the way to Brighton. She’s misread where the two of them might be headed with each other.

“This is exciting news,” she says, sipping her coffee, letting the steam rise up over her face.

“Yeah,” says Moses, sounding less than convincing.

“You must want this, otherwise why apply?”

“Of course I want it. It’s just now it’s here, written in black and white, there’s a lot to do, a lot to think over and sort out. I’m not great at all that stuff.”

“All that life?”

He smiles, still holding the letter.

“I am shit at life,” he says.

“Your parents will be happy.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“They will be.” Thoughtful pause. “It’s just that I’ve been before. It didn’t work out.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I went straight from school. Lampeter out in the wild west. To study theology.”

“Wow. I was not expecting that.”

“I know, right? I don’t bring it up very often.”

“You were going to become a priest?” Med pulls her knees up to her chest as if she’s just realised she’s half naked in front of a stranger.

“No no no. It’s not like that. It’s an academic study of text and scripture and doctrine. I have no religious calling.”

“What happened?”

“I found out I haven’t much of an academic calling either.”

“But you’re going back?”

“Not there. I wasn’t ready. I drank too much. Most days it was all day.”

“You do that now.”

“There it was different. Doing it in the midst of all those hills and sheep felt nihilistic. And not in a good way. I missed most classes because of drinking. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night listening to Talk Radio and drinking wine on my own, arguing with the phone-in. Shot of wine before breakfast. I started smoking John Players Special because they were the cheapest strongest fags in the shop and when I came back I was at the Pips and one of the boys told me they were banned from the market in the UK because they were found to have fibre glass in the filters. That felt a bit like a punctuation mark in my steady decline.”

Med watches him. He’s charming as he tells the story, as if it’s a bedtime story and his own role in it is figurative rather than biographical.

“There was a kebab shop on the hight street, and I used to teach English phrases to the Turkish owner – write them down in his little notebook – and in exchange for a new phrase he would give me a kebab. That was how I ate. One kebab every night.”

“You had no friends?”

“Plenty. You get as fucked up as I did in a place that small and you can be mistaken for gregarious. I even had a girlfriend for a short while.”

Moses and Med, for a second, lock eyes. He’s aware this next bit won’t paint him in a good light.

“I invited her back here one weekend. Her name was Ruth. She’d come to Lampeter to read Classics in an attempt to get away from a heroin habit in Kildare. She met everyone, and I got right fucked up and disappeared for the whole weekend. Completely forgot she was with me. She was stuck here dependent on the charity of people I had just introduced her to.”

He’s staring at his feet, reliving whatever there is of that weekend seven years ago that there is to remember.

“What happened to her?”

“She dropped out. About the same time as I did, I think. I came back here. I hear she went back to her heroin addiction in Ireland. It’s so fucking sad that she met me.” He looks at Med. “I was a kid then. Completely out of my mind. Head full of Kerouac and Biblical texts and booze and speed. And, she was pretty cool, I have to say. Beautiful and smart and all fucked up. I was scared of her. I never saw myself as being actually really good enough to be with someone as interesting as Ruth. Not in the real world. If I was a character in a book, maybe. But not really.”

“But you said you forgot she was there, with you.”

Moses looks down at his feet again.

“Not good,” he says. “I blame this town, of course.”

“It has broad enough shoulders.”

“I’d be nothing without this town. And I hate it.”

“I don’t think either of those statements is true.”

“You’ve been here long enough. You see it, don’t you? The devil in it.”

“I see the devil in people, sometimes.”

“In me?”

“Not the devil,” Med says. “Something though.”

Is Moses blushing?

“It’s a long way away, if you’re looking for an escape,” Med says.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting sucked down into a black hole, and I look up and the black hole is this town.”

“I get it, I do. I don’t know what I’m still doing here.”

“You like it here.”

“It wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“After uni? Go to London. Get a job in advertising or something. Publishing. Making posters. Book covers. Writing about art, maybe.”

“Working the Pips isn’t so far away.”

“Yeah. Talking to Raul about Picasso on a wet Thursday afternoon is exactly the same thing. What about you? Why Brighton?”

“I have some friends down there. I wouldn’t just be airlifted in. I know the city a little bit. I have a place to crash while I look for something a bit more permanent.”

“Yeah, but what are your ambitions?”

Moses looks at the wall, glances around the room, looks down into his coffee cup. They’ve never really talked like this before. They’ve talked, they’ve gone long into the night, but it’s been abstract or about grand notions, or about writers or artists or bands, not about each other. It was all implicit, wasn’t it? They were, as people, embedded within the wider context, their loves and personalities were encased in the artists and writers and bands, in them and in the way they talked about them. They expressed themselves through their appreciation and understanding of the greatness and shitness of others.

“I want to be a writer,” Moses says eventually. But Med knows this. Even if he hadn’t said it before to her, which he definitely has, the way he talks about these things places him there. He has sat opposite her and talked about the craft in a way nobody ever did in Uni when analysing texts or visuals. Moses goes at it from the inside out. She recognised that from the off.

“But what are your ambitions, dude?” she says and pushes his upper arm gently.

“Books,” he says. “I want to be a novelist.”

Med hunkers up closer.

“Novels about what?”

Moses swallows. “Different things. Loneliness.”

Med’s eyes glance to Malone Dies. He’s taking the piss.

“A man stuck in a windowless room?” Med says.

Moses laughs, catches the Beckett too, and looks around the room once again that they are in. “How will I ever escape?” he says.

“Okay, don’t tell me, then,” Med says and lets her head fall back onto the pillow.

“Hey, don’t be like that. It’s not easy to just say what the novels I’m going to write will be about. I have ideas but that’s a long way from being able to turn them into the real things.”

“You writing anything now?”

“Always.”

“So, what’s it about?”

Moses thinks. “I could read you a bit,” he says.

Med excitedly props herself back up on her elbows, and her hair falls over her face, and her make-up is smudged and her shoulders are smooth and round and brown and for the briefest of moments Moses wonders if this is happiness and being here now with a girl like Med listening to his writing to the smell of coffee is the greatest morning of his life. He gets his notebook from a pile of books in the corner and gets comfy at the end of the bed.

“You write longhand?” Med says.

Moses nods. “I type it up on my dad’s computer when I think I’m getting somewhere.” He shuffles, flicks through the pages looking for something he’s halfway proud of. “Here,” he says.

“Do I need context or anything?”

“No. Let’s just go for it as it is.”

“Okay. I’m ready.”

Moses clears his throat of the grizzle of last night’s fags.

“He stepped slowly from the train and his first step felt like his last one in that place, the one that took him onto the train and away to war. The smell was the same too, the diesel and blue skies and the cherry blossom that lowered itself incongruously over the mouth of the tunnel that led to the wider world. He took it in in lungfuls. Ten years it had been. He had changed but the town had not. First stop, before anything else, would be a pint in the Murenger, the old mock Tudor pub just one street over from the station. If that had changed, there was nothing to be had further on for him, deeper into the town. He slung his bag over his shoulder and made his way up the flyover steps…”

Meds listens. It’s something she’s good at, and she’s been listening intently to Moses since the first time they met. She recognises his faults, and she doesn’t ignore them but she factors them in. And this writing of his, pedestrian and derivative as it may be, isn’t without an eye for the good stuff, isn’t without an ear for it. But what she’s noticing is that the tension of this extract doesn’t lie in the protagonist coming home from war and finding things have changed in his hometown, but that it lies in Moses’s own attachment to this town. Moses reads well, he injects some erudition into the languid prose, but when he reads a passage about the town he seems to be battling with the words on the page, as if they’re moving around like kittens, unruly and beloved and clawed. He’s finished, although he wants to read more, but there’s nothing else comprehensible. He might just read out some random scribbled phrases, but in his head they feel loose and misguided here, now.

“I think it’s excellent,” Med says.

No blushing, no thank you; just, “I want to write a modern version of Henry James’s The Bostonians. Set it here. The New Portonians. A guy comes home from the war and finds he doesn’t fit any more but finds a place in a radical political group. Falls in love.”

“Sounds like us,” Med laughs but Moses doesn’t laugh and she’s said too much attaching them both to the word Love and how does it even sound like them anyway? Moses has locked eyes on her for this, but Med has quickly looked away, back to her coffee which she put on the bedside table some time ago. Maybe she was on a roll, flipping out these statements after complimenting Moses on his terrible writing. Yes, terrible. She can already admit that, just a few seconds further down the line form him finishing reading it, but it doesn’t need to be good to be worthy of some recognition, she thinks; worthy of some praise.

She’s turned her mind to this as she waits for the grey cloud that is the word to which she just connected them to glide over their sunny morning. Moses doesn’t want to get soaked by it any more than Med does, but he’s the one with the lingering gaze. Maybe he craves this most of all. Someone to say something like that to him. He’s had it, of course. School girlfriends. They’d told each other they loved each other. And there was that girl whose name must not be mentioned, but when it all comes down to it that relationship was just a little over six months and as intense and eternal as it may have seemed at the time it was nothing but a bruising experience where you have to learn to ignore the bruises before they’ll agree to go away. He’s still working on the metaphor for that one.

Love. What do they talk about when they talk about love?

The only thing Moses loves is getting smashed on a weekend.

But that’s not true either is it? He loves his parents who have him at his age living in the old basement room that used to be full of car parts and detergent boxes, and who never ask anything of him. He’ll find his way eventually, they say with their eyes. That is love. And he has friends he loves. Vardaman is like a brother. They have cried in each other’s arms, different times, both times over girls. That is a secret never to be told. There for each other. He loves other friends too. Raul. That mystery. When the girl whose name shall not be mentioned broke up with him it was Raul who took Moses out for food and he was the only person he knew who didn’t prescribe vast seas of alcohol as the way to get over it. Moses loved him for that. Alden had been like a big brother, if not a second father, to him over the years. He’d let him drink in the Pips long before he was old enough and he once told him this was because he could see there was no threat in doing that; Moses had an old head and he was good to have around at the bar, even at sixteen and seventeen. Moses loved Alden for that. Moses hasn’t stopped looking at Med but she’s stubborn when it comes to returning it.

“I think maybe getting away from here for a bit will be good for you,” she says, choosing a weighty contentious subject in order to nudge love off the table.

Moses doesn’t disagree – shit, the moment he realised this it was like a cold shower washing over him, so how could he disagree with her. But he still says, “Why do you say that?”

“Because this town will never let you go if you don’t make an effort.”

“Isn’t that like all towns, though?”

Med shakes her head. “It’s not the same thing. This place holds on to you. It traps you and makes you think you wanted it. It’s coercive, cruel, and fucking great all at the same time.”

“We’re all weak.”

“Only because we choose to be.”

“Is that from something?” Moses says screwing up his left eye as he tries to pinpoint where the dialogue originated.

“It’s not from anything,” Med says somehow energised by the subject and she sits up and twists her waist to prop herself up on her knees. “You have made the effort, Mo. You should be excited. Shit, you should be elated. You’re getting out. A new start. This is so important. A new life. Say goodbye to everything here because it’s quicksand. Run. Run. Don’t look back. Don’t wear the t-shirt. Don’t hum the tune. Run.”

Agh, shit, she’s right, and it sucks because he was going to ask her to go with him.