Divided Kingdom

Chapter Two

Shortly after joining the Ministry, I received an envelope in the internal mail marked Confidential. Inside, I found a document detailing the imminent transfer of a fifteen-year-old girl from the Red Quarter to the Yellow Quarter. Her name was Chloe Allen. I had been included in the transfer team, my role being described as ‘observer’. A covering letter informed me that I would only accompany the relocation officers as far as the border, and I remember feeling relieved about that, the Yellow Quarter being a wild and brutal country by all accounts, where every kind of barbarity was perpetrated in the name of profit or enterprise, or even, sometimes, for no good reason at all. The fact that Bracewell had wanted to escape to such a place still puzzled me.

I met the transfer team in the Ministry car-park one Friday morning, and we drove south in a white minibus. Behind the wheel was Tereak Whittle, strongly built, laconic, in his mid-to-late-twenties. Pat Dunne sat beside him. With her startled eyes, she looked like someone who had become accustomed to witnessing tragedy. I put her age at about fifty. In relocation work it was standard procedure to pair a man with a woman; they brought complementary skills to the job.

We parked outside a two-storey red-brick house. It had a bay window on the ground floor and a small front garden paved in concrete. I stood behind Dunne and Whittle as they rang the bell. The door swung open to reveal a breathless middle-aged man in a green cardigan. He introduced himself as Mr Allen, then showed us into the living-room. While Dunne took out the transfer documents, Mr Allen sat on the edge of his chair and fidgeted. He had the curious habit of rubbing his right thumb against the palm of his left hand, as though trying to remove a stain.

‘Should I call her yet?’ he said at last.

Dunne glanced up. ‘Please do.’

When Mr Allen opened the door, the girl was already on the other side. ‘Oh.’ He took a step backwards, then turned and smiled foolishly. ‘Here she is. Here’s Chloe.’

The girl moved past her father, into the middle of the room. Though she was probably no more than average height, she seemed larger than him. She took up all the space in that little house. She devoured the air.

Her eyes descended on Pat Dunne. ‘Weren’t you due here an hour ago?’

Dunne looked at her, but said nothing.

The girl shrugged. ‘Better late than never, I suppose.’ She went and stood in the bay window with her back to us, her blonde hair cut level with her shoulderblades and gleaming like gold leaf against the darkness of her jacket.

She didn’t seem in the least upset or even disconcerted by the impending transfer. On the contrary, in putting on a black suit for the occasion, she appeared to be mocking the notion that she might be sad to leave. Or she had dressed for the funeral of that part of her life, maybe. Somehow she managed to give the impression that the whole thing had been her idea.

Leaving Dunne and Whittle to fill in the forms with Mr Allen, I went outside to stretch my legs. In the hallway I paused, glancing up the stairs. I could hear someone crying. Chloe’s mother, I thought. Or a sister, perhaps. Backing away, I opened the front door and stood on the pavement. All the sunlight had gone. Clouds blundered across the sky, shapeless and clumsy, the colour of saucepans. I’m an observer, I kept telling myself. I’m only here to observe.

Towards midday we boarded the minibus again. The law required that Chloe travel in the back, separated from the rest of us by wire-mesh. Like a dog, she remarked as she climbed in. Pat Dunne corrected her. There was no shame attached to the transfer process, she said. It was simply a matter of doing what was best — for everyone. Chloe nodded but chose not to respond. She was gazing at the house where she had grown up, its curtains drawn against her, its front door closed. Was it relief she felt, or remorse? Or was it resentment?

As we crossed the river, heading north, I began to feel that I was in a draught. All the windows were shut, though. It didn’t make sense. After a while the sweet smell of chewing-gum came to me, and I looked round. Chloe was sitting right up against the wire-mesh screen, her face just inches from my own.

‘What,’ she said.

I turned away from her. She began to blow on my neck again, but much more gently this time. I leaned forwards, my elbows propped on my knees.

‘Is she bothering you?’ Dunne asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

Halfway through the afternoon we stopped for petrol. While Whittle filled the tank, Pat Dunne took Chloe to the toilet. The clouds had broken up, and I walked out across the forecourt, the warmth of the sun pressing itself evenly against my shoulder-blades. A tractor laboured through the field behind the petrol station, gulls fluttering in the air behind it like a handful of torn paper. Time drifted.

After a few minutes I became aware that Chloe was moving towards me, not directly, but in a series of contrived half-circles and hesitations as she feigned an interest in the scenery. She ended up standing beside me, facing the same way. She had unbuttoned her jacket, I noticed, revealing a tight white T-shirt underneath. Once again, her presence seemed to demand something from me. I felt it as a weight, a burden, as if she had fainted and I had caught her in my arms.

‘Can you imagine what it’s like to be transferred?’ she said.

‘I don’t have to imagine it,’ I told her. ‘I’ve already been through it’.

‘It was a long time ago, though, wasn’t it? You’ve forgotten.’

I gave her a neutral look.

‘You’re just like the others.’ Half-disappointed, half-provocative, she appeared to be trying to tempt me into some disloyalty or misdemeanour.

‘And what are the others like?’ I asked, keeping my voice light.

‘Look at them.’ She glanced across at Dunne and Whittle, who were standing shoulder to shoulder, studying the map. ‘They can’t think for themselves. They just do as they’re told. They’re drones.’

She was appealing to my vanity, of course, but I couldn’t afford to react. Instead, I had to turn her remarks to my own advantage. Yes, my silence said, I’m just like them. Yes, that’s exactly what I am.

Half an hour later, the road brought us up against the border, and once or twice, when the land fell away to the east, I caught my first ever glimpses of choleric territory. I was both horrified and enthralled by what I saw. There was an industrial complex whose cooling towers and pools of effluent covered an area of several square miles. There was a motorway, each of its eight lanes packed with speeding traffic. There were children on a building site, doing something to a cat.

‘You think that’s where I belong?’ Chloe said.

Her mood had altered during the past few minutes. The reality of her destination had hit her for the first time. I could hear a brittleness in her voice, which I took to be the outer edges of a new and unexpected fear.

‘You’re wrong.’ She let out a short bitter laugh. ‘You are so fucking wrong.’

Dunne turned in her seat, speaking to me. ‘This isn’t bad. Sometimes they scream the whole way.’

I asked her how she dealt with that.

She opened the glove compartment and took out a pair of headphones. ‘I got them from a friend of mine who works at the airport.’ She grinned. ‘Put these on, you can’t even hear a plane taking off’.

‘What do you think this is,’ Chloe said, ‘a game?’

The relocation officer spoke past me now, her voice hardening. ‘I could give you an injection if you like. Then you’d sleep like a baby.’

By the time we reached the checkpoint it was five o’clock. Knowing how long it could take to cross into choleric territory — hours usually, what with all the harassment and provocation — and aware of the dangers of travelling in that country once darkness had fallen, Pat Dunne decided we should spend the night in the Red Quarter. We wouldn’t be the only ones. A tourist settlement called the Border Experience had sprung up in the vicinity, with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops. Sanguine people came from far and wide to climb the viewing platforms, each hoping for a brief taste of life on the other side. They all had their photos taken with a guard, and they all bought knick-knacks for family and friends back home. It was as if some of the cholerics’ notorious materialism had seeped over the wall. On the way to our hotel, I stopped and looked in a shop window. There were ashtrays in the shape of watch-towers, and tiny, realistic attack dogs made of china. There were snowstorms with miniature replicas of no man’s land inside. I saw tins of Border Shortbread and Border Fudge, and border guard dolls standing to attention in clear plastic cylinders. I saw mugs with words like ‘Furious’ or ‘Livid’ printed on them. My favourite souvenir was a T-shirt. On the front it said I came I saw I lost my temper. On the back, simply, Welcome to the Yellow Quarter.

At the Frontier Lodge, we took three rooms — one each for Whittle and me, and one for Dunne and Chloe Allen. My room overlooked the car-park — there, below me, was our minibus, dwarfed by tourist coaches — but if I leaned on the window-sill and looked to my left I had a clear view of the border. Two walls ran parallel to one another, about a hundred yards apart. Between them, in no man’s land, I could see life-size versions of the souvenirs I had noticed earlier: watch-towers, searchlights, concrete crosses, rolls of barbed wire and a sandy, mined section known as a death strip (in aerial photographs, the border often had the look of a stitched wound). Despite the fact that nothing was happening, I couldn’t seem to tear myself away. It was in these eerie halfway places that one was able to appreciate the full power and extent of the Rearrangement, and it inspired an inevitable reverence, a kind of awe.

As I stood by the window, I heard a click behind me and turned in time to see Chloe Allen slip into my room. I watched her lean back against the door until it closed. She was wearing the same outfit as before, only she had removed her black jacket and her shoes. She took a few quick steps towards me, stopping when she reached the bed.

‘You’re not supposed to leave your room,’ I said.

‘You don’t mind, though,’ she said, ‘do you.’

Thinking I should fetch one of the relocation officers, I tried to edge past her, but she moved to block my way.

‘Let’s forget about the other two,’ she said. ‘Let’s run away together.’

Her smile was sly but genuine.

Taking the hem of her T-shirt in both hands, she deftly lifted it over her head and tossed it on to the bed. She was wearing nothing underneath.

‘They’re pretty, aren’t they,’ she said.

‘Chloe,’ I said. ‘Put your clothes back on.’

‘You used my name.’

I attempted to edge past her again. This time she grabbed the front of my jacket. When I pulled free, she began to flail at me with loosely clenched fists. I caught hold of both her wrists and held her at arm’s length. I realised I was laughing. I had no idea why I might be doing that. There was nothing remotely funny about the situation. Chloe was insulting me now, not loudly, but in a malignant, strangled whisper, as though her fury was such that she couldn’t find her voice. I pushed her away from me, then turned and hurried out into the corridor.

I tried Pat Dunne’s room first. She wasn’t there. Whittle had disappeared as well. I stopped a couple who were making for the lift and asked if they happened to have seen a woman of about fifty with curly hair. The man thought he’d seen someone like that. She was further down the corridor, he said. By the drinks machine. She seemed to be having trouble with it, he added, grinning.

When I found Dunne, she was standing in front of the machine, banging the stainless steel with the heel of her hand. ‘The fucking thing,’ she said. ‘It ate my money.’

She must have noticed the look I was giving her.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but listen. If you go into choleric territory, you have to act like them, or you don’t survive.’

‘Chloe Allen’s in my room,’ I said.

Something loosened in her face. ‘What? When I left her, she was sleeping.’

‘Well, she’s awake now.’

When we burst into my room, it was empty. We found Chloe where she belonged, in the room she was sharing with Pat Dunne. She was lying on her side in bed and breathing steadily, the covers pulled up over her face, one strand of dark-gold hair forming an innocent question mark on the pillow. What, me?

Dunne looked at me sideways. I held her gaze.

‘I didn’t imagine it,’ I said.

Back in my own room, I locked the door. The air smelled of perfume, its sweetness rendered more intense by the grey walls, the dull blond furniture. I opened the window, then sat down on the edge of the bed.

Let’s run away together.

She had noticed me as soon as she walked into the living-room that morning. I had shown up on her adolescent radar. She’d identified me as the one unstable element, a weak point she could probe, exploit.

They’re pretty, aren’t they.

I decided not to risk another confrontation. I could already picture the sequence of looks that would appear on Chloe’s face at the breakfast table as she tried to turn me into her accomplice, her jilted lover, or even, possibly, her rapist. I stayed upstairs until I saw Dunne and Whittle walk her across the car-park. Halfway to the minibus she looked up, scanning the hotel façade, but I stepped back from the window. I don’t think she saw me. I waited until the minibus joined the queue of vehicles at the checkpoint, then I went down to the restaurant.

Dunne and Whittle didn’t return until mid-afternoon. As we drove back to the capital, they told me about their day. No sooner had they crossed the border than Chloe became totally unmanageable. She had used the foulest language and hurled herself repeatedly against the wire-mesh. In the end they had been forced to sedate her. Whittle thought her behaviour had been triggered by my absence. He found my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know, I think she took a shine to you.’

I laughed softly, then looked out of the window.

Pat Dunne turned to face me. ‘What actually happened in your room last night?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’

Later, I wondered whether the transfer I had witnessed had been an elaborate test of my moral fibre, with Chloe playing the role of temptress, but then I dismissed the idea as overheated, a paranoid fantasy brought on by the pressures of my new working environment. It was also conceivable that the authorities had been reminding me of the commitment I had made. After all, my family might have been treated much as Chloe had been treated, had immunity not been granted. I couldn’t be sure, though, and it wasn’t the kind of question you could ask. And even if I had been able to ask, I knew what the answer would be. The authorities would claim that being sent out on the road as an observer was a crucial part of the induction process. I had been given a look at the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the job, they would tell me, a ‘unique insight’ into what life was like ‘in the field’. I couldn’t really have taken issue with any of that.

I had made a pact with the ruling powers, and they were as good as their word: Victor and Marie were left alone. No visits from state officials, no check-ups, no brown envelopes with scarlet peacocks stamped in the top left-hand corner. They’ve obviously given up on us, Victor would tell me over the phone with undisguised glee. We’re hopeless cases. The way things turned out, though, Victor needed less protection than I had imagined. I had only been at the Ministry for eighteen months when he succumbed to a massive stroke, his death occurring unexpectedly, and in slightly unusual circumstances.

Marie called me one Tuesday evening, and I caught a train to the coast the following day, but I didn’t hear the full story until after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. I sat at the kitchen table, the jagged line of the cliff-edge showing halfway up the window. Marie opened a bottle of gin and poured us both a drink. She told me how she had woken early on the morning of Victor’s death, and how the silence had a quality she didn’t recognise. When she drew the curtains, she was almost blinded by the whiteness of the world outside. Snow had fallen in the night, three inches of it. To the east, the cliff rose in a glistening curve, smooth as a sugared almond. She went into Victor’s room to tell him, but he wasn’t there. Though she could just make out the imprint of his body on the counterpane, evidence of a nap the day before, it didn’t look as if the bed had been slept in. She searched the cottage from one end to the other, upstairs and down. She couldn’t find him anywhere. Perhaps he’s gone into the village, she thought. And then she thought, Perhaps he’s gone on a journey. After all, he’d done it before. He was always threatening to up sticks, make tracks. He peppered his conversation with words like ‘vamoose’ and ‘skedaddle’. He was capable of almost anything, she said, in his wild old age.

‘What do you mean, he’d done it before?’ I asked.

But Marie didn’t appear to have heard me.

She found him later that morning, she said, in the back garden. She had come across two shapes lying on the ground, one long and vaguely cylindrical, the other smaller, squarer. She approached the small object first. It seemed safer. She bent down and began to brush the snow away. A piece of pale-green leather showed beneath her fingers. The book of shoes. She knew then what the other shape was. Rising to her feet, she circled him slowly, as though he was asleep and she was trying not to wake him. She couldn’t quite believe he was under there. Then, as she stood uncertainly beside him, she heard a quick, stealthy sound and, looking down, she saw that the snow had slipped, revealing the rim of an ear, already bloodless, and some brittle wisps of hair.

‘Weren’t you frightened?’ I asked.

‘I screamed.’ She grinned at me. ‘Have you ever screamed after it’s snowed? It’s the strangest thing. You feel like you’re in a box. The kind of box a ring comes in, or a trumpet. A box lined with velvet.’ Something lifted in her just then, and she became Marie again, Marie as she had been when I first saw her, framed in the living-room doorway of the house on Hope Street, mischievous, carefree. Then it dropped again, whatever it was, and she turned back into a woman I didn’t really feel I knew. ‘I screamed,’ she said a second time, her voice without inflection now, ‘but there was no one there. A ship on the horizon. A few gulls.’

Later, when we’d finished the bottle, I watched her run her index finger along the table, following the grain in the wood. Outside, the wind swirled against the walls. I was almost sure I could feel the cottage rock on its foundations.

‘What will you do?’ I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘Stay here.’

‘Won’t you be lonely?’

‘I’d be lonely if I moved,’ she said.

At least no one would bother her, I thought as I travelled back to the city the next day. My head ached, and my mouth was strangely perfumed from all the gin I’d drunk. It had been a good funeral, though. People had made an effort to be there. At the graveside I had lifted my eyes from the coffin to see Mr Page standing across from me. His black suit looked immaculate — one would have expected nothing less — but something about him seemed out of character, abnormal, just plain wrong. After a while I realised that although his mouth was still doing its best to turn up at the corners it had crumpled in the middle — or to put it another way, he no longer appeared to be smiling. How I wish I could have caught Bracewell’s eye right then! How I would love to have seen the expression on his face! The miraculous, the almost unimaginable moment had arrived, and sadness had brought it about, not anger, but it was too late to have any real impact on me, it was all too late.

If the authorities fulfilled their side of the bargain, so did I. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my new job. As far as Marie was concerned, I was a quality engineer — I looked at companies and came up with ways of improving their performance — but in fact I was employed by a branch of the civil service that was generally considered to be the government’s right arm. I worked long hours, arriving home at nine or ten at night. Most weekends, too, I could be found in the office. I had almost no social life. I went out with a girl called Alex, who was a violinist, but she ended it after three months, claiming that we hardly saw each other. Somehow I didn’t question the need for such sacrifices — or rather, I always seemed able to justify them to myself. It was up to people like me, I thought, to safeguard the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. Only later did I start to understand why I might have been pushing myself so hard. I had to fight for the system, I had to believe in it, or my removal from my family would all have been for nothing.

Over the years I rose through the ranks, from a glorified filing clerk to one of a handful of people whose responsibility it was to advise on all transfers, both into and out of the country, but the big promotion came just before my thirtieth birthday. During our lunch together in the beer garden, Diana Bilal had mentioned words like psychologist and detective, hoping to capture my imagination, perhaps, and yet the word that seemed to define my new position most accurately was ‘diplomat’. A transfer was, in itself, a highly complex and delicate procedure — no one knew that better than I did — but, viewed in the wider context, it also became a matter of negotiation between two parties who didn’t necessarily see eye to eye. I had to deal, on a regular basis, with people who held equivalent positions in other parts of the divided kingdom, and despite all the obvious differences in temperament and perception it was important to try and maintain good working relations. If I disputed one of their initiatives, it could be regarded as an example of Red Quarter impatience or naivety. If they disputed one of mine, I could just as easily see it as Blue Quarter dithering, Green Quarter cynicism or Yellow Quarter recklessness. The job required flexibility and patience as well as sound judgement, and for that reason, perhaps, it was seen by some as a stepping-stone into the world of politics.

Despite all the lies and the deprivation, despite the fact that my original existence seemed buried beneath layers of artifice — not for the first time the image of Russian dolls occurred to me, my lives concealed neatly, one inside the other — despite all that, my work gave me a real sense of fulfilment. If the Red Quarter was a contented and harmonious place in which to live, it was because we, the public servants, had made it so. What’s more, I had done everything I could to ensure that my new family was taken care of.

Every now and then, though, especially as I left my twenties behind and moved into my thirties, I thought back to the day when the government official arrived at Thorpe Hall in his chauffeur-driven limousine, and I remembered how he had told us that we were special, and that the fate of the kingdom rested in our hands, and unease would flash through me like a blast of heat. Had I simply become what they had wanted me to become? Was I really so malleable?

Was I the man in the chauffeur-driven limousine?

I was sitting in my office one morning, working my way through a pile of recent case histories, when I heard a knock on the door. I glanced up. The door opened, and Mr Vishram’s face appeared in the gap. ‘Am I interrupting, Thomas?’ Before I could reply, he had installed himself on the only other chair in the room, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose with the tip of a forefinger.

As head of the Department of Transfer and Relocation, Ajit Vishram belonged to the select high-powered group that ran the Ministry. He was also a brilliant scholar, with several works of non-fiction to his name, all of which I had read. People said that he had the ear of the Prime Minister, which wouldn’t have surprised me particularly, though I had never raised the subject with him. He openly admitted to a streak of melancholy — all writers are sanguine melancholics, he would declare with a dismissive gesture, as if something so obvious was hardly worth saying — an admission which, given his immediate working environment, was daring to say the least, but also cunningly preemptive. Though he must have been approaching sixty, he didn’t have a single white hair, and if you chose to overlook the crescents of puckered, purplish skin beneath his eyes, his face was quite unmarked by age. He wore carefully tailored pale-grey suits made from a light, shiny fabric in which silk almost certainly played a part, and he carried himself with a quiet gravity that was often misconstrued as self-importance by those who didn’t know him. He seemed to have no sense of the impression he created, however — or, if he did, then it simply failed to engage his interest. He was consistently both stately and impervious. I saw him as the ruler of a small, influential and untroubled country — which, in his rumoured closeness to Michael Song, he very nearly was, perhaps.

‘Are you free for lunch tomorrow?’ Vishram toyed idly with the power line that led to my computer. ‘There’s something I need to discuss with you.’

‘Yes, I’m free,’ I said. ‘What’s it about?’

He would meet me in the lobby, he said, at half-past twelve, then he rose from the chair and with a humorous glint in his dark eyes and an enigmatic nod he passed out of my office, his progress so smooth that I imagined for a second that he had castors instead of feet. Smiling faintly, I shook my head. The whole episode had been typical of him: he liked nothing better than to tantalise and then withdraw. My concentration broken, I stood up and moved over to the window.

The offices were situated in a part of the city from which the entire kingdom had once been governed. These days, though, everything looked different. The old metropolis had been divided so as to create four new capitals, and my building backed directly on to a section of the border. On the other side of the concrete wall lay the choleric capital, Thermopolis. Sitting at my desk, I could often hear attack dogs barking, and once, when I was working late, I had been startled by the sudden brittle chatter of machine-gun fire. I gazed down into the narrow strip of no man’s land. To the left, the border moved in a northwesterly direction, incorporating a square where people used to get drunk on New Year’s Eve. The famous admiral now stood in a mined wasteland, peering out, one-eyed, over a tangle of barbed wire. To my right, the border ran across an iron bridge and then turned east along the south bank of the river. The bridge itself had been fortified, with watch-towers at either end and a steel dragnet underneath. Sometimes, in fine weather, I would lean on the window-sill and train my binoculars on the gardens that lay just to the east of the bridge, and I would study the inhabitants of Thermopolis as they gesticulated, insulted one another, and, more often than not, came to blows, and because I couldn’t hear anything they said I found it curiously soothing, like watching mime.

As I stared out of the window, my gaze lost its focus and turned inwards. It had been a tricky sort of day from the very beginning. My alarm clock had failed to go off, and I jerked awake at five-past six, which was twenty minutes later than usual. I had been in the middle of a dream, but the dream had faded, leaving nothing except the dimly remembered sensation of a cold wind blowing against my skin, and even then, still half-asleep, I knew that the partial and elusive nature of that memory would frustrate me, and that I would carry that feeling around with me all day. There was something about Vishram’s proposal that reminded me of the dream. They shared a sketchy quality, a seemingly deliberate ambiguity, as though they belonged to the same family of experiences. I swung back into the room, trusting that if I plunged into my paperwork once more, if I buried these ambiguities beneath the weight of familiar problems, then I could forget again. I didn’t hold out too much hope, though. What was it about these hints and glimpses that disturbed me so?

Seen from above, Pneuma looked a little like an hour-glass, the narrowest point of which measured scarcely a mile across, and it was here, right in the city centre in other words, and a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll from my office, that I had been lucky enough to find a flat.

On leaving work that day, I set off through the park, as usual. Most people moved about on foot, or else rode bicycles. Cars were more or less extinct. As for the underground, it had been deemed both antiquated and unsafe, not to mention bad for the health, and the authorities had shut it down years ago. Our city was a clean, quiet place in which snatches of music could often be heard. Taking off my jacket, I folded it over my arm. It was a warm evening, and groups of students sat in casual circles on the grass. Rows of green-and-white-striped deckchairs faced down the slope, awaiting collection by the park-keeper. To the west, and back-lit by the setting sun, I could see the sheer pale concrete of the Hilton, its rooftop bristling with all manner of aerials and lightning conductors. The Blue Quarter’s capital — Aquaville — lay just beyond, with its rheumatic population and its network of canals.

On nearing the north side of the park, I turned down a narrow passageway. It ran between two walled gardens, under a block of flats and out into a cul-de-sac so small and well concealed that hardly anybody knew it existed. Stafford Court stood at the far end, its entrance flanked by two miniature bay trees in square black tubs. As I walked into the lobby, the caretaker’s front door opened. Kenneth Loames was an amiable, if slightly cloying man — the human equivalent of glue, I sometimes felt, or chewing-gum; once he made contact, he was almost impossible to dislodge. Normally I slipped by unnoticed, or tried to, but on this occasion, unfortunately, he had spotted me and, still more ominous, he had a subject, he said, that he would like to raise with me. I waited by the lift as Loames searched for the right phrasing.

‘I’ve got flies,’ he said at last.

I looked at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘In my living-room. There are flies.’ He gestured vaguely towards the half-open door behind him.

‘It has been very mild,’ I said, pushing the call button on the lift.

Loames stood beside me, gazing benignly at the illuminated numbers. ‘You’ve not noticed any flies, though, Mr Parry? In your flat?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

Loames was nodding to himself ‘. So,’ he said. ‘Busy at the moment?’

‘Pretty busy, yes.’

His head angled in my direction, eyes sharpening a little. He asked all the usual questions, but I could often sense others lurking just beneath, like predatory fish. He seemed to suspect that there were things he wasn’t being told, and with some justification — in my case, at least.

The lift doors finally slid open.

‘Well,’ Loames said, ‘if you should see anything —’

‘I’ll let you know.’ I stepped into the lift and pressed the button for my floor. ‘Have a good evening, Mr Loames.’

When I walked into my flat, the phone was ringing. Thinking it might be the caretaker again, I picked up the receiver and rather wearily said, ‘Yes?’

There was a soft pause. ‘Thomas? Are you all right?’

The voice belonged to my girlfriend, Sonya Visvikis. She had called to tell me that the people we were supposed to be seeing the following night had cancelled. We could still have dinner, though, just the two of us — or did I think that was a bit dull? Not at all, I said. Actually, I’d prefer it. I could be with her by eight. I paused, thinking she might say something else, but the line fell quiet. In the silence, I heard a faint whine and I glanced round, first one way, then the other, expecting to see one of Loames’s flies, but there was nothing there. The noise must have come from outside. A distant ambulance, perhaps. A gust of cold wind from my dream.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Sonya said.

‘Yes, I’m fine. Why?’

‘I don’t know. You sound different.’

‘I just ran into Mr Loames,’ I said. ‘He’s got flies, apparently.’

Sonya laughed.

‘He wanted to know if I’d got any,’ I said.

By now Sonya was laughing so hard that she could barely speak.

We had only been seeing each other for about four months, but I had loved her laughter the moment I heard it. It was voluptuous, somehow, and resonant, so much so that I often imagined she had a musical instrument inside her, something exquisitely crafted, one of a kind.

After the phone-call was over, I cooked myself a light supper, then I moved to the sofa by the window and tried to read. I couldn’t concentrate, though. My head buzzed, as if with interference. I had a feeling of incompleteness, of things being just out of reach. Towards nine o’clock I put on my jacket, picked up my keys and left the flat, thinking a walk might help me to relax.

The air that closed around me as I stepped through the glass doors had a dense, humid quality I would never have associated with October. An Indian summer, people were calling it. The first in years. I walked down the street, then along the passageway, and came out into the park, the deckchairs all stacked away now, the students gone. I hesitated for a moment, looking down the path. In the distance, I could see a man standing quite still, his face turned towards me. Afraid it might be Loames again, I struck out across the grass. Loames … I suddenly realised that the name had a melancholic aspect to it. The way it referred to the earth, even the lugubrious vowels. Extraordinary I hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe one day his name would appear on my desk, on a list of people being recommended for a transfer, and Stafford Court would have to find a new caretaker.

A few minutes later, I emerged in front of a building that used to be the palace, its austere façade reminding me, as always, of cold ash, then I walked slowly westwards, through a square of cream-coloured houses with black balconies, before turning south towards the river. By the time I reached the embankment I was sweating lightly under my clothes. I leaned on the stone parapet and looked out over the water. Had I been able to swim across, I would have found myself in the Blue Quarter. There had been a bridge here once, but it had been dismantled during the Rearrangement. Only bridges that complemented the partitioning of the city had survived. In the Red Quarter, for instance, we had several of our own, since we had been granted territory on both sides of the river, but in stretches where the river itself had become the border all the bridges had been destroyed. The roads that had once led to them stopped at the water’s edge, and stopped abruptly. They seemed to stare into space, no longer knowing what they were doing there or why they had come. During my early twenties I was gripped by the sense of history that emanated from such places; they were like abandoned gateways, entrances to forgotten worlds. Also, of course, I felt that I had stumbled on a physical embodiment of my own experience. There were bridges down inside me too. There was the same sense of brutal interruption.

I walked on, passing through the muted pools of light that lay beneath each of the street lamps. Like many people of my age, I’d had two names, two lives. Once, I had been someone called Matthew Micklewright, but that person no longer existed, and I wasn’t even curious about him now. It was just too long ago, too remote — too unlikely. What’s the point of clinging to something that has gone? What good does it do? That old name had become as hollow and empty as a husk. A name deprived of breath, of meaning. A name without a face. And then the night when my life began again … A strange beginning. Soldiers, bright lights. The cold. And me being lifted, as if by surgeons, into a new world — and crying probably, though I couldn’t remember that. But every birth is merciless, perhaps. Then the lorry, the train, and all the hardships and uncertainties of the holding station –

I put a hand on the parapet, my heart seeming to bounce against the inside of my ribs. The dream I had woken with that morning had come back in its entirety. I had been walking in a sunlit garden. A strong wind pushed at the trees and bushes, and the grass rippled on the ground. It was cold in the garden — though like someone who had drunk too much I couldn’t feel it. Or if I could, then only as a delicious extra layer to my skin. For a long time that was all I knew — the sunlight on the grass, the wind, the ceaseless rushing sound of leaves … And then I saw a boy with light-brown hair standing motionless beneath a tree. He didn’t seem to have noticed me, despite the fact that I was walking towards him. He didn’t see me. Not even when I stood in front of him. He was naked, I realised. Somehow this hadn’t registered until that moment. I looked all around, but couldn’t find his clothes. The tree shuddered in the wind. The trunk wasn’t visible, nor were the branches. Only a huge murmuring cloud of leaves, which seemed held together by some supernatural force.

Staring out across the water, I trembled, as if the cold wind of the dream had jumped dimensions and was in the world with me. The boy was Jones. Even though he had light-brown hair. Even though he wasn’t standing on one leg.

Jones.

Like me, he would be in his thirties by now. Was it true that he’d been sent to an asylum? What had become of him? Had he survived?

The following day I met Vishram in the lobby, as arranged, and we took a tram across town. In fifteen minutes we were standing in a grand but decaying square only a few hundred yards from the border. Though Vishram had stepped out on to the pavement with an air of sublime equanimity, he had brought me, at lunchtime, to the very heart of Fremantle, the red-light district. Here you could find establishments that catered to every taste, no matter how esoteric or degenerate, venery being the one vice to which those of a sanguine disposition were known to be susceptible.

Vishram paused outside a house that looked residential, then climbed the steps and pressed an unmarked bell. The door clicked open. A cool, tiled hallway stretched before us. The staircase curved up towards another door which stood ajar and through which came, in muffled form, the familiar hum and clatter of a crowded restaurant. Once upstairs, we were escorted into a space that skilfully contrived to be both generous and intimate. Lamps with scarlet shades stood on each table, deflecting attention from the height of the ceiling, while curtains of the same colour framed the three tall windows that overlooked the square. The waitresses wore white blouses and black skirts. They were all young and good-looking, and at least two of them knew Vishram by name.

‘I see you’re a regular,’ I observed once our food had arrived.

He didn’t look up from the wood pigeon that he was preparing to dissect. ‘They make an exceptional crème brûlée,’ he said. ‘It’s a weakness of mine.’

‘I didn’t know you had any weaknesses.’

He laid down his knife and fork, then pressed his napkin to his mouth. Above the folds of crisp white linen, his eyes were amused, benevolent, and ever so slightly long-suffering.

‘There’s a conference in three weeks’ time,’ he said. ‘We’re thinking of sending you along.’

‘It’s been a while since I attended a conference. I always seem to be too busy.’

‘It’s in the Blue Quarter,’ Vishram added casually.

I reached for the mineral water and poured myself another glass. I was aware of having to concentrate on every movement I made, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem. My lungs felt oddly shallow.

‘The Blue Quarter,’ I said.

Vishram smiled faintly. ‘You would miss Rearrangement Day,’ he went on, ‘but they’ll probably organise some kind of celebration over there.’ Lowering his eyes, he brushed a few breadcrumbs from the tablecloth with the backs of his fingers. ‘Though with phlegmatics, of course, one can never be too sure.’

I watched the bubbles rising in my glass. What was being proposed was both a privilege and an affirmation of the Department’s faith in me — not many were trusted with a visit to another part of the divided kingdom — and, though I had thought the opportunity might present itself at some point, I certainly hadn’t expected it so soon.

The Blue Quarter.

The words glowed inside my head, buzzing sleepily like neon. I was breathing a little easier now. Was I supposed to feel like this? What was I supposed to feel like? I glanced at Vishram, but his deceptively blank gaze was fixed on one of the more sinuous waitresses as she threaded her way among the tables.

From a political standpoint, the Blue Quarter had always been a laughing-stock. The past fifteen years had seen thirteen different administrations, each one a coalition, the result being that even decisions taken at the highest levels were constantly reversed and nothing ever got done. As for the citizens themselves, they were reputed to be gentle and unflappable, if a little slow. They had a mystical side as well, by all accounts. In ancient times, the Druid would have been phlegmatic. So would the witch. But in the end I preferred not to generalise, and despite the fact that my job required me to group people together I somehow knew the reality of the Blue Quarter would be more subtle and complex than I’d been led to believe.

‘I would need a thorough briefing,’ I said at last.

Vishram’s eyes reverted to my face, and I thought I saw the shadow of something perverse swimming in their dark-brown depths, but then it was gone and there was only receptivity — the composed, indulgent look of someone who spends his life listening to problems and dispensing advice.

‘Of course. But you’d be willing to go?’

I looked at him. Was this a trick question?

‘Some people don’t trust themselves,’ Vishram said. ‘They think they’d be tempted in some way — or altered. What’s more, there’s the old superstition about the border-crossing itself, that one might be mysteriously depleted by the experience, that one might lose a part of oneself — that one might suffer injury or harm.’

Vishram directed his gaze towards the windows. Compared to the room in which we sat, with its intimate lighting and its clandestine atmosphere, the trees in the middle of the square seemed wan, over-exposed.

‘It always reminds me of how primitive people were said to feel about being photographed,’ he went on. ‘They thought their souls were being stolen.’

I leaned back in my chair.

‘But you’re not worried about any of that,’ Vishram said.

It was more of an assertion than an enquiry, and I just held his gaze and smiled.

He nodded. ‘Aquaville,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be a magical city. The canals, the Turkish baths, the water-taxis … Apparently they have an indoor ocean too. You can go surfing half a mile below the surface of the earth.’

I examined Vishram closely for a moment — his manicured fingernails, his elegant yet portly physique. ‘You’ve never been surfing, have you?’

He appeared to place a cough inside his fist.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought not.’

That night I cycled over to Sonya’s place on the south side of the river. I had met her in a park in June, at the evening performance of an opera. She had walked up to me at the interval, her beauty as classic and unforced as the single string of pearls she was wearing and the slingbacks that she carried carelessly in her left hand. We knew someone in common, she said. A professor at the university. When she put her glass of wine down, the shape of her fingers showed in the condensation. That, oddly, was the decisive moment. Looking at that glass, I could imagine exactly how we might touch each other. I asked if I could see her again, and she wrote her phone number on the back of my programme. Within a few days, we had met twice, and on our third date, after dinner at a jazz club, she took me back to her flat and we made love. Like everybody else I had been close to, she believed I was a quality engineer — whatever that is, as she would always add with a crooked smile. I thought at first that she might be a journalist, or even an actress — with her olive skin and dark-brown hair she resembled a famous film star of the previous century — but she worked at the Public Library, in the rare books department. She didn’t make much money. I was happy to help her with her everyday expenses, though — buying clothes, paying bills, and so on. Since we both valued our independence, we had kept our own flats, but we tried to see each other at least two or three times a week. She had been married once, when she was in her early-twenties, but she’d had no children. Since she was older than I was, almost thirty-seven, I sometimes wondered what kind of future she imagined for herself, but she had given me no indication that she was dissatisfied with the way things were going. I didn’t find it difficult to picture the children we might have together — skinny, dark-eyed, with a laughter as rich and rare as hers.

I waited until we were settled in her living-room with a bottle of chilled white wine, then I told her my news. ‘Sonya, they want me to go to a conference next month. It’s in the Blue Quarter.’

She reached for her wine and drank. It was another humid night, and all the windows were open. The murmur of voices floated up from the other flats that gave on to the light-well.

‘Is that why you sounded so strange when I spoke to you last night?’ she said.

‘No. I didn’t know about it then.’

A shriek of laughter came from somewhere below.

Sonya was staring down into her glass. I had wanted her to be excited for me — after all, to be chosen for such a trip was an honour, whatever your profession — and her muted reaction caught me off guard.

‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said. ‘About what it’s like, I mean.’

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘It’s damp. Everyone’s ill all the time. I’ll probably get flu.’

She didn’t even smile.

I reached across the table. Her gaze shifted to my hand, which now covered hers. ‘It’s a conference,’ I said gently. ‘It’s just work.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and her chin lifted and she looked away from me, into the room.

‘Sonya …’ I rose to my feet and walked round the table. Standing behind her, I wrapped her in my arms and then just held her. Cool air from the window moved across my back.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘I’m being stupid.’

‘No.’

I had heard stories about the Blue Quarter too — tales of enchantment and possession, of pagan ritual, of bizarre religious cults — but I had heard them from relocation officers, and they had always been notorious for their lurid imaginations. It was partly due to the privilege of their position. They travelled to other quarters on a regular basis. They saw places no one else saw. They could invariably command an audience willing to hang on their every word. But it was also a result of their constant exposure to other people’s trauma. The stories they told were defence mechanisms, safety valves, ways of deflecting or releasing pressure. Their humour was gallows humour. The old joke about relocation officers was that they themselves often had to be relocated. They crossed too many borders. They burned out. It was an occupational hazard. I remembered what Vishram had said at lunch. One might lose a part of oneself. One might suffer injury or harm.

Sonya carefully detached herself from me and, tilting her head sideways, touched the back of her wrist to her right eye. Then she looked up at me and smiled.

‘It’ll be amazing,’ she said.

I rose out of sleep just after three o’clock, my head cluttered with disturbing images. Not wanting to wake Sonya, I eased out of bed and crept through the darkness to her bathroom. I drank some cold water from the tap, then turned to the window. A full moon hung in an almost cloudless sky. The street below was quiet. I saw three girls stop outside the building opposite. They talked for a while, then I heard the word ‘goodnight’, and two of them walked away. Alone now, the third girl leaned close to the building’s entrance with her head bent, her neck white in the moonlight. She must be having trouble with her keys, I thought. Eventually the door gave, and she disappeared inside. I had been watching with a feeling of nostalgia, even though I had never seen the girl before, and I realised I was thinking of Marie, and how she would have stood outside the house on Hope Street in much the same way, tired certainly, perhaps a little drunk as well, trying to fit her key into the lock. Once through the front door, she would climb the creaky staircase in the dark. As she crossed the landing, she would knock against the linen chest that jutted from the wall, and I would hear her swear under her breath. Fuck, I would whisper, imitating her. I’d be grinning. In the morning she would pull her skirt and pants down on one side and show me the mauve-and-yellow rose that had bloomed on her hip like a tattoo. Was it really eighteen months since I had seen her last?

I had been due to attend a seminar on the south coast, and on the spur of the moment I had phoned Marie and asked if I could stay with her. I remembered a cliff-top path, a bright November day. Skylarks were chattering high above, black splinters in the sky’s blue skin. The sea sprawled to my left, hundreds of feet down, its waves fluttering like gills. My blood felt fresher for the walk. Then I came over a rise and saw the cottage below, a roof of dark slates, smoke coiling upwards from the chimney and merging with the air. Even at a distance I could see Marie in the front garden, the only figure in a vast panoramic landscape. How solitary her life had become, I thought, now Victor was no longer there.

I drew closer, then stood still and watched her. Bending from the waist, her hair hanging loose on both sides of her face, she was weeding a bed of irises. At last she seemed to sense my presence. She looked round, then straightened slowly, squinting into the light. I raised a hand and waved.

‘Oh Tom. It’s you.’ She walked over in her clumsy wellingtons, touching her right sleeve to her nose. When she embraced me, she laid her head against my shoulder, and I could feel her voice vibrating in my collar-bone. ‘I forgot you were coming. I mean, I forgot it was today.’

I stood back. ‘You look good, Marie. You look really well.’

‘Do I?’ She glanced down at her cardigan, which was darned in several places and missing a button, then her eyes lifted again. ‘Look at you, though. How much did that coat cost?’

Later that day I sat at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea. She told me she had got a job at the local railway station, in the ticket office. Victor would have approved, I said. She nodded absently, and wrapped both hands around her mug, as if to extract warmth from it. Her bottom lip had split down the middle, and the shine had gone from her hair. She would be forty now. It was hard to believe.

‘You can’t imagine how anyone can live like this,’ she said.

I smiled faintly.

‘Things happen here. You’d be surprised.’ She had become defiant, as though my presence had ignited some aspect of her that had been lying dormant, just barely smouldering. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this — he made me promise not to — but I don’t suppose it matters now.’

He. Our father.

At breakfast one morning, she told me, Victor had come up with an idea. He had decided to walk round the border. All the way round. He wanted to see exactly where he had been living for the past twenty years. He was curious about ‘the dimensions of the cage’. And they had done it, the two of them. They had walked nearly seven hundred miles. It had taken them most of the summer.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

‘We crossed the border too,’ Marie said. ‘Illegally.’

She seemed to relish the look that appeared on my face. She had startled me out of my complacency. At the same time, I had a sense of how comprehensively I had deceived her over the years. It had never occurred to her that I might work for the Ministry. She just saw me as someone who obeyed the rules.

‘We crossed it in broad daylight,’ she said. ‘We walked right through. There was no one there.’

‘Where was it?’

She named the place. I knew it as a marshy stretch of country, bleak and windswept — the only border we shared with the Green Quarter.

‘There must have been some kind of wall,’ I said.

‘There was. But it had a hole in it’.

‘A hole?’

‘A gap,’ Marie said. ‘I don’t know what had happened. Maybe the wall had collapsed. Or maybe it was being repaired. I don’t know. But there was definitely a gap. We couldn’t believe it at first. After everything we’d heard about national security and the integrity of the state. We thought we must be seeing things.’ Her eyes slanted towards the window — a thin stripe of grey-green sea, the grey sky above. She smiled. ‘We walked towards it, and we walked really slowly, as if it was alive and we might startle it. Then we just climbed through.’

‘Both of you?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I remember standing on the other side. It looked the same, of course — but it felt different. Completely different. Like the moon or something. There was this moment when we looked all round and then our eyes met and we started laughing.’ She shook her head, as if what had been stored there still astonished her. ‘We jumped up and down and shouted things and danced, even though there wasn’t any music. We behaved like mad people. You should have seen us.’

You should have seen us.

‘Thomas?’

I jumped, the breath rushing out of me. Sonya stood in the doorway. She was naked, her face in shadow, one foot turned slightly inwards. I had gone so deep into my memory that I had forgotten where I was.

‘I woke up and you weren’t there,’ she said. ‘I thought for a moment you’d gone home.’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t do that’.

She moved into my arms. ‘You’re cold.’

‘I couldn’t sleep, that’s all’.

‘You’ve been working too hard. When you come back, maybe we should go away — a long weekend …’

I held her tightly, kissed her hair.

‘Come on, my darling,’ she said. ‘Come back to bed.’

On the Wednesday before I left for the Blue Quarter, I went for a walk, thinking I might sit somewhere quiet and read for an hour. I crossed the main road, making for the park that lay to the west of the office. Though it was overcast, the sky seemed to have retreated a great distance from the earth, and I had a feeling of lightness, almost of vertigo, as if there was too much space above my head, as if I might fall upwards. I passed through the park gates and took a path that curved around the south side of the lake. A blackbird spilled rapid, trembling drops of sound into the air. Something about the way a willow hung its branches over the water, leaving its trunk exposed, reminded me of a woman washing her hair in a sink. Odd thoughts. I stood still and stared up at the clouds, my eyes pushing into the greyness. I was trying to detect a surface, gauge a depth. Impossible, of course.

Following our lunch in Fremantle, Vishram had invited me back to his office, where he loaded me down with reading material. He always insisted on thorough preparation, no matter what the assignment, but I had never seen him quite so openly enthusiastic. As I turned to leave, my forearms already aching with the burden of articles, essays and treatises, he murmured, Wait, Thomas, I forgot something and consulting his shelves again, he selected yet another volume, Nightmare in Pneuma by D.W.B. Forbes-Mallet, a high-ranking Green Quarter diplomat who had attended the inaugural cross-border conference. During the past fortnight I had got through a number of books — among them, an introduction to phlegmatic cooking called The Cautious Kitchen, with recipes for bread-and-butter pudding and fish pie, and a monograph on the mating habits of the sea horse — but now I had Nightmare in Pneuma tucked under my arm. Given the title, it was no surprise to discover that the first conference had gone badly wrong, with gangs of drunken Yellow Quarter delegates running amok in the streets, and a Green Quarter delegate jumping to his death from the roof of his hotel. He had been a colleague of the author’s, and a good friend. It was almost as if the authorities had brought everyone together in order to illustrate the wisdom of their grand design, as Forbes-Mallet rather sourly observed.

I sat down on a vacant bench and stared out over the lake — the ducks with their black velvet necks and their enquiring heads, the colour of the grass enhanced by the cloud cover, the air shifting at my back … A young couple walked past, arm in arm, and I overheard a fragment of their conversation. It’ll be great, the girl was saying. You’ll see. The future tense, I thought. The tense that comes naturally to sanguine people. Though everything was normal, it seemed at the same time to be heightened in some way, not unlike the feeling one might have during an eclipse.

‘How’s the reading going?’

I looked up to see Vishram standing on the path, then I glanced down at the Forbes-Mallet, which lay unopened on my lap. ‘It’s going well,’ I said, ‘though I’ve only read about half of what you gave me, I’m afraid.’

‘I did get rather carried away.’ Vishram turned his eyes towards the sky. Were the atmospheric conditions affecting him as well? ‘I was just going back to the office,’ he said. ‘Would you care to join me? Or perhaps you’re not ready?’

‘No, I’d be happy to join you.’

As we set off round the lake, I thought of our recent visit to Fremantle. It was now my conviction that Vishram had had affairs with several of the waitresses and, intending to draw him on the subject, I told him how much I had enjoyed the restaurant. We should go again, I said, on my return. Maybe next time I would try the famous crème brûlée, I added, remembering the white china pot that had been placed in front of him, the lid of melted caramel like a small round pane of amber glass. Vishram nodded, his usually opaque eyes lighting up at the prospect, but he seemed disinclined to speak.

Or perhaps not affairs exactly, I thought. Because, in the end, what the restaurant had reminded me of more than anything was a brothel — refined, discreet, infinitely sophisticated, but a brothel nonetheless — and I suddenly wondered if the whole establishment might not be a front, and all the talk of ambience and cuisine — of crème brûlée! — an elaborate euphemism, a code.

‘And how’s Miss Visvikis?’

Vishram’s question dropped into my thoughts with a studied innocence, a certain delicious incongruity, and he smiled at me across his shoulder as though perfectly aware of the effect he had just created. As far as I knew, though, his many gifts did not include mind-reading. I had introduced him to Sonya at a party fund-raiser in August, and he had spent the best part of an hour discussing book-binding with her — or so he’d told me afterwards.

‘She’s very well,’ I said. ‘She’s worried about me going away, of course. I think she’s a bit jealous too, in a way.’

‘That’s only natural’. Vishram paused. ‘Is she still working at the library?’

‘Yes, she is. Though she’d like a change, I think.’

‘Really?’ Vishram lowered his eyes almost coyly. ‘It just so happens that I’m looking for a research assistant’.

One of his impeccable eyebrows arched, as if he had just made a joke, but at his own expense. He was starting work on a new book, he told me. He had been commissioned to write the official biography of Michael Song.

‘I can’t think of a better person for the job,’ I said.

Vishram thanked me for the kind words.

With so much of his time taken up by the Ministry, he went on, and by other related obligations, he doubted he would be able to carry out all the research himself. Perhaps I could mention it to Sonya, when I saw her next. He felt sure that she’d be equal to the task. Of course he wouldn’t be able to pay very handsomely –

‘I’ll ask her,’ I said. ‘You never know.’

On Friday afternoon I reported to Jasmine Williams in Personnel for a briefing on my forthcoming trip. When I walked into her office she looked up and smiled. She had altered her hairstyle since I had last seen her, the neat cornrows drawing attention to the natural elegance of her head. Jasmine and I had gone out together for a while, when we were both trainees. She’d had a lovely unruffled quality about her, the ability to view any mishap with a kind of amused tolerance. She’d also had the most beautiful body I had ever seen, with breasts that tilted upwards, as if in eagerness, and skin that smelled like butter and sugar melting slowly in a pan. She had been posted to a branch of the Ministry up north, though, which meant we could only see each other at weekends, and after several months we had gradually drifted apart.

‘So,’ she said. ‘This time it’s you.’

‘Yes.’ I moved across the room towards her. ‘I like your hair.’

‘Thanks.’

As I lowered myself into a chair, there was a knock at the door and Vishram appeared. ‘I hope neither of you mind if I sit in on the meeting?’

Jasmine smiled at me again, a little more inscrutably this time. ‘We don’t mind, do we?’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

Vishram seated himself at the back of the room, against the wall. Crossing one leg over the other, he took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses. I would be issued with a standard business visa, Jasmine told me, valid for up to seventy-two hours. The visa permitted travel between the Red Quarter and the Blue Quarter, one journey in each direction. It was a stipulation of this type of visa that contact with local people be kept to an absolute minimum. Obviously the system worked on a trust basis — but then presumably I had earned that trust, she added with a glance in Vishram’s direction, or I wouldn’t have been selected in the first place. I should remember that the laws of both countries were equally specific about the dangers of psychological contamination. She need hardly say that the kingdom had been divided for its own good, and that it was in no one’s interest to jeopardise twenty-seven years of comparative equilibrium.

‘What about contact with other delegates?’ I said.

‘No restrictions.’ Jasmine consulted her computer. ‘We haven’t mentioned medication.’

‘Medication?’

‘As you might imagine, things are a bit different over there. The pace of life is slower, but it’s also more unpredictable. There’s more indecision, more ambiguity. If you like, we can issue you with medication that will help you to adapt’.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said.

Jasmine watched me carefully.

‘I want to experience the Blue Quarter for myself,’ I went on. ‘I want to see it as it is. Not diminished in any way — or enhanced, for that matter.’

‘All right’. Jasmine looked beyond me. ‘Mr Vishram? Anything to add?’

Vishram held his glasses at arm’s length to check the lenses for smears, but it seemed that he had done a good job. ‘No,’ he said, putting the glasses back on. ‘I think you’ve covered everything.’

‘Don’t let the rules and regulations suffocate you, Tom,’ Jasmine said. ‘They’re just there to provide you with a framework within which you can operate quite freely.’

‘Hopefully,’ Vishram said, rising to his feet, ‘it will be an experience that you never forget.’

‘You make it sound rather daunting,’ I said.

Vishram merely smiled and turned away. On reaching the door, though, he paused, and I assumed he was going to offer me one last piece of advice or reassurance. Instead, he returned to an earlier and unrelated topic of conversation.

‘Don’t forget to have a word with Sonya, will you,’ he said, ‘or this wretched book of mine will never get written.’