Dreams of Leaving Read Online Free PDF Page A

propelled by curiosity. They scrutinised his armfuls of rushes. They asked innocent loaded questions.
    â€˜Rushes, Mr Highness?’
    â€˜Yes, officer.’ And then, ‘My wife, you know. She loves having greenery around the place.’ Absolute crap, of course. In her present state, she couldn’t have cared less. And how he longed to sound defiant. To say, for example, ‘That’s right, officer. They’re rushes.’ Or even, ‘Yes. So what?’ He resisted. These would have been cheap victories. He forced himself to think in campaign terms.
    But it wasn’t only the police he had to contend with. Once he came back from the river to find Alice waiting, hands on hips, in the kitchen. It was Valentine’s Day.
    â€˜Hello, Alice,’ he said, kicking off his Wellington boots. ‘God, it’s beautiful out there.’ He felt good after his walk, his mind honed by the wind and cutting cleanly.
    â€˜Don’t tell me,’ she snapped. ‘More bloody rushes.’
    He looked up at her in surprise. She so rarely swore. And the air in the kitchen suddenly seemed compressed, squeezed into a space too small for it.
    â€˜I need them,’ he explained. ‘I need them to practise with. I’m still learning, you see.’
    â€˜You can say that again.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜Learning,’ she mocked, and waved a hand in the air, palm up, as if scattering seed. ‘Learning, he says. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ask me.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, Alice. I just don’t follow you.’ His mind not cutting quite as cleanly as he had thought.
    Her sudden fury released a blast of heat in the cold room. ‘Spending all your time with these,’ she screamed and grabbing a handful of rushes froma vase on the dresser hurled them, stiff and dripping, at his face. They landed on the floor with a slap. ‘And none of it with me,’ she went on. ‘Now do you
follow
?’
    George wiped his face with the back of his hand.
    â€˜If you want to
learn
something,’ Alice sneered, ‘why don’t you try learning something about marriage?’
    Still George said nothing. He was staring at the rushes. They lay on the floor like a prophecy or an omen.
    Then her voice sank back into listlessness as she told him, ‘They’re beginning to drive me mad.’
    He decided that, from then on, he would only pick what he needed. He would hide the rushes out of sight at the top of the house. If the police came round and asked where all the ‘greenery’ was, he would have to dream up a new story.
    As he watched Alice fly from the room, her arms angled back like wings, it struck him that this plan of his could be seen as nothing more than an attempt to set some vivid daring achievement against a marriage that had become lack-lustre, irredeemable. But he loved Alice. He still loved her. And her unhappiness hurt him all the more because he lacked the power to alter it. He had tried. God knows he had tried. He now knew that her only happiness lay in sleep, in unconsciousness, and finally, he supposed, in death. Moses, though. He could do something there. However risky, however far-fetched, however painful it might prove to be.
    He locked himself in the attic at night and worked for hours at a stretch. He had never been practical so he took a certain pride in the acquisition of this new and utterly manual skill. He suffered untold setbacks and began to understand why he had heard so little about basket-weaving. Awkward, monotonous, maddening work.
    Then, one night, he found himself watching in fascination as the rushes began to flow from between his clumsy hands, braiding, interlacing, reproducing in their twisting plaits, in their infinite and subtle shades of green, the currents of the river they had grown in. His confidence rose, bobbed on the surface of his darker thoughts. He knew he could build a basket that would