Divided Kingdom

Chapter Four

As we prepared for landing I saw Congreve below me, the city centre glittering in the gloom of the late afternoon like a solar system that had fallen from the heavens, like a grounded constellation, and then I was inside it, moving through it, buildings lifting steeply all around me, their upper storeys lost in the smoky, neon-saturated air. Seen at close range, they were less ethereal, more powerful; they seemed to emit pure energy, a deep turbine hum or murmur that I could feel in my rib-cage.

We were driving along a wide grand avenue, the traffic heavy in both directions, the pavements crowded. In the many-tiered emporia all the lights had been switched on, and I couldn’t help but notice the variety of goods on offer, the sheer lavishness of the displays. At the same time, beggars sat hunched over on every corner, their dogs lounging sloppily beside them. Most of these beggars had hung cardboard squares around their necks on bits of string, and even from a distance I could read their sorry messages: STARVING or HELP ME or, in one case, with bitter sarcasm, SMALL CHANGE ONLY PLEASE.

Braking smoothly, the limousine turned off the main road and eased its way into a maze of narrow streets. Here, suddenly, were strip clubs, peep-shows and sex shops, all jammed together, all different flavours, like a box of candied fruits.

‘A little tour,’ our driver joked over the intercom.

We had entered Firetown, the red-light district. I had listened to relocation officers boast of their exploits on these streets — how young the girls were, what they could do — and as I stared through the window, the air seemed to pulse and glow, a livid blush of scarlet, pink and purple. Once, as we stopped at a set of traffic-lights, a fight broke out on the pavement beside us. A burly ginger-haired man fell heavily against the car’s window, and the glass retained the print of his hand, as a cheek does when it’s been slapped. One of my fellow passengers murmured in alarm.

‘No need to panic,’ came the driver’s voice. ‘It’s reinforced.’

Not long afterwards, we pulled up outside the Plaza Hotel, and it was only then, with a sickening jolt, that I realised what our arrival in this new place actually entailed. I had forfeited my last chance to visit the club. We would be spending the night in Congreve, then returning to the Blue Quarter in the morning. A few hours later, my visa would expire, and I would have to leave the country. There would be no going back to the part of me that had been buried for so many years. There would be no more glimpses of that forgotten life.

A light clicked on in the limousine, and I saw myself reflected in the window. My face looked stiff, morose, vaguely ghoulish. I was in the Yellow Quarter for the first time ever, I had just arrived in one of its great cities, and yet I felt no elation. I didn’t even feel any fear. I was trying to adjust to the sudden, arbitrary loss of all my hopes.

My mind lay soft and cold on the floor of my skull like a carpet of ash.

When I walked into my room, it recognised me. Welcome to the Plaza, Mr Parry, it said. I hope you enjoy your stay. I should have been ready for something like this, perhaps, since choleric people were known to be obsessed with technology, but such was the hectic nature of our schedule that I had no time to dwell on my surroundings. Five o’clock had already struck when I set my case down on the bed, and I was expected for drinks at five-thirty. The venue was a roof garden on the seventeenth floor. While at the party, we would be able to watch the firework display, which was due to start at six. I took a quick shower. As I got dressed, I caught a few minutes of choleric TV. They were showing a documentary about the Prime Minister, Carl Triggs, who was so fiercely patriotic, apparently, that he had taken fire-eating lessons. I watched some rare footage of a bare-chested Triggs demonstrating his prowess in the grounds of one of his palatial mansions, then I went into the bathroom to clean my teeth. When I returned, the commercials were on. At midnight there would be a programme which featured topless female mud-wrestlers competing for a huge cash prize. It was called Rolling in It. I threw on my tuxedo, gave my shoes a polish and by five-thirty-five I was stepping out of the lift and into a space that resembled a conservatory, exotic trees and shrubs massing beneath a high glass ceiling.

The men were dressed in lounge suits or formal evening wear. As for the women, they had chosen much more elaborate confections — one girl was wrapped in jagged swathes of red and orange taffeta, which made her look as if she was being burned at the stake — and their ears, necks, wrists and fingers were all heavily freighted with jewellery. I found Frank Bland in the shade of a palm tree, holding a cocktail. His dinner jacket clung to his midriff as tightly as the skin of an onion.

‘Quite a place,’ he said as I walked over.

‘Does your room talk to you, Frank?’

‘Good evening, Mr Bland.’ He had put on a voice that was both disembodied and obsequious.

I nodded. ‘That’s very good.’ Though everything was reaching me through a veil of quiet desperation, it was a comfort to see Frank Bland. In these altered circumstances, he felt like an ally. A friend.

He took a gulp from his drink. ‘Did you hear me speak this morning?’

‘Of course. I really enjoyed it.’

‘Did I ramble?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose you did a bit.’

He laughed. ‘It was one of the worst hangovers I’ve ever had.’

I wanted to thank him for shedding some light on a subject that intrigued me, but Boorman and Rinaldi wandered over and I lost my chance. Not long afterwards we were ushered out on to the terrace.

I had always loved fireworks — even the most modest sparklers delighted me — but the fireworks we saw that night, unleashed from the roof of a nearby building, were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The colours alone almost defied description. Instead of the usual sprays of red and green and gold, we were treated to the most delicate tinctures, the subtlest of hues — violet, burnt sienna, damask, eau-de-nil. And the fireworks themselves did not explode so much as unfold, like hothouse flowers opening their petals, but in fast-motion, bouquet after bouquet tossed carelessly into the dark. Later, various messages were emblazoned across the sky — 27 GREAT YEARS, THANKS CARL, and so on. The display ended in a riot of sound, the noise rebounding across the city, so deafening and persistent that it seemed the office blocks surrounding us might topple and the ceiling above our heads might shatter in a murderous cascade of glass. For a while I had forgotten how I felt, but then we went back indoors, and people turned to each other and began to talk, and the disappointment I’d been harbouring since the early evening rose inside me once again, swift and remorseless, like floodwater.

Josephine Cox came and stood in front of me, her face flushed. ‘You don’t seem very happy.’

So it was that obvious. Ever since I first set foot in the Bathysphere, I had been feeling scratchy, discontented. My initial experience had been the strangest mixture of the unexpected and the sublime, and it had stopped too soon, of course, and if I nursed a sense of regret about that shortfall the events of the second night had only compounded it, since I had dropped down deep into my past only to have the journey cruelly cut short. Then, a few hours later, Josephine’s surprise announcement had cheated me out of my last chance to go back. But it wasn’t just that. Those two nights had established a kind of precedent, and my life in the Red Quarter, the life I would soon be returning to, now seemed pallid, if not sterile, by comparison. Nothing that happened to me from this point on, I felt, could ever match what had happened to me in that club.

I summoned a feeble smile. ‘I’m just tired, that’s all.’

‘I hope you’re not too tired to enjoy the banquet,’ Josephine said. ‘I’ve put you on a rather special table.’

‘What’s special about it?’

She didn’t answer. Instead, she placed one finger upright against her lips and lifted her shoulders towards her ears, then she moved off into the crowd.

Eleven o’clock was striking as I stepped into my room. I shut the door behind me and leaned back against the cool smooth wood. Goodnight, Mr Parry, the room said. Sleep well. Outside, in the street below, a siren squawked once, abruptly, and then went quiet.

It had been an awkward dinner. I’d been seated at the table of honour, next to the Mayor’s wife. Dressed entirely in black, she had furtive eyes and though she wore expensive rings the skin around her nails was ragged. Between courses her clenched hands rested in her lap like two plucked quails. Trying to be diplomatic, I asked her about herself, but the answers I received were curt and dismissive. The only time she came alive at all was when she mentioned her sixth child, a son, who had been born the year before, and even then she sent a glance in the direction of her husband, seeking his approval, perhaps, or fearing his reaction. Halfway through dessert, she reached under the table, her head turned sideways, one ear only inches from her plate. I assumed she had dropped her napkin, and I shifted in my chair, ready to help her retrieve it. Then I saw that she had drawn her dress up, almost to her hips. Her unexpectedly voluptuous thighs, white as meringue, were darkened in two places by large bruises, both of which bore the imprint of somebody’s knuckles. Look what he does to me, she said in a harsh whisper. She gave me a look of such fury that I thought for one surreal moment that I might be the culprit.

After the banquet, the Mayor himself walked up to me. We shook hands. He was a thick-set, fleshy man with a shaved head. Knowing what I knew, I found it hard to meet his gaze, but I suspected that he might be used to having people look away from him, that he might even see it as proof of his natural authority, his manhood. Thank you, he said, for taking such good care of my wife. His lips parted on a set of strong, widely spaced white teeth. I had never heard gratitude so heavily laden with menace and innuendo. Just then, I thought of something I hadn’t thought of in years. I remembered Pat Dunne in the border hotel the night before she crossed into the Yellow Quarter with Chloe Allen. I saw the heel of her hand slamming into the drinks machine. You have to act like them, she’d told me, or you don’t survive.

I slowly levered myself away from the door and unfastened my bow tie. I was genuinely tired now, my fatigue given a sombre, despairing edge by the knowledge that I could have been in Aquaville, in a water-taxi heading west. I took off my tuxedo and threw it over the back of a chair, then squatted down and unlocked the mini-bar. Inside, I found two miniature bottles of brandy. I emptied one of them into a glass, then closed my eyes and brought it up to my nose. The smell instantly transported me to Charlie Boorman’s room in the Sheraton — the unmade bed, the half-eaten meals, the green crêpe-paper rabbit revolving in the air. My eyes still closed, I drank. The first mouthful sent a thin blade of warmth through me. Brandy. It was the taste of the Blue Quarter to me now. It was the taste of the club with its velvet curtain and its blonde ticket girl. The taste of a gold door opening … To speak to my mother, but not to be allowed to see her. To be so close to her, and then — and then nothing… A low murmur came out of me, and I opened my eyes. Everything was edged in bright pale light. The Yellow Quarter. I finished my first brandy and poured the second.

Taking my drink with me, I walked into the bathroom and switched on the light. I put the glass on the shelf above the sink, next to my travel clock, then I examined myself in the mirror. The areas below my eyes seemed to have been shaded in, and the hollows in my cheeks had deepened. It made me think that the distance between myself and my shadow was narrowing, that I had begun to change places with my darker half. I was about to turn on the tap and drink a few handfuls of cold water when a sudden dull reverberation shook the room. Several things occurred at once. My clock tipped off the shelf and landed in the sink. The shower-curtain rattled on its rail. The mirror leapt in its chrome brackets, and then, almost as an afterthought, cracked down the middle, from top to bottom. My head divided into two sections that no longer quite fitted together. I thought fleetingly of stroke victims, and how one side of the face will often freeze or slip. My right hand lifted to my cheek, as if to check for damage. I picked up my clock and put it back on the shelf. 11:14, it said. And then, more than a minute later, 11:14. I still couldn’t imagine what had happened.

A hush had fallen, and I had the sense that the reverberation had silenced everything that came after it, that it had robbed the world of all its sound. I stepped into the short passageway outside the bathroom. A pale smoke or powder had forced its way beneath my door. I stood quite still and watched as the particles settled on the carpet, a sprinkling of greyish-white, discreet but enigmatic, like a messenger who has been trusted with only part of the news. I moved to the door and pulled it open.

The air outside my room swirled with dust. To my left, about fifty yards away, my corridor met another. At the junction of the two I could see people rushing this way and that, their outlines hazy, their features smudged, as if they were in the process of being erased. Some had towels or handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Others were doubled over, coughing. I heard the word ‘bomb’, and though I had never experienced anything like this before I replayed every detail of the last ninety seconds, and then I thought, Of course. A bomb.

I withdrew, closing the door behind me, and stood looking at my feet for a moment, then I moved on into the middle of the room. Again I stood still, my face lowered. I was seeing images, each of them deliberate, carefully chosen, pressed to my mind’s eye like a licked stamp to an envelope. The hand splayed on the window of the limousine, Frank Bland crammed into his tuxedo. The bruises staining the thighs of the Mayor’s wife, as if wild berries had been piled on to her lap. Look what he does to me. I couldn’t marshal even one coherent thought.

A piece of paper whirred out of the fax machine and spilled languidly on to the carpet. It was blank. I put on my coat and picked up my overnight case, then opened the door again. By now, the vacuum that had followed the explosion had been filled with the constant shrill ringing and almost festive whoops of various alarms and sirens. I turned to the right, making for the emergency stairs.

Beyond the fire doors I came across the spindly, bewildered figure of Marco Rinaldi. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped nightshirt, and his eyelids were swollen with sleep. His black hair lifted above one ear in a single eccentric wing.

‘I think I’m still drunk,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s been a bomb,’ I said.

‘A bomb?’ He looked around, then back at me again, as though he expected me to offer him some proof.

We started down the stairs, Rinaldi leading the way. Our rooms were on the fourteenth floor. It would take a while, I thought, to reach ground-level. Every so often Rinaldi glanced at me over his shoulder, a nervous, enquiring look, and I would smile and nod. We passed the twelfth floor, the eleventh. By the tenth I noticed that my pace had slowed and that a gap had opened up between us. Other guests kept pushing past me. Part of my mind seemed to be examining the current situation from an entirely different viewpoint; it had begun to question my behaviour and was about to suggest alternatives. As we approached the eighth floor, two middle-aged men burst through the fire doors and out on to the stairs. I can’t find Angela, one of them was babbling. I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve looked in her room, I’ve looked — The other man took him by the shoulders. John, he said, calm down. She’s probably downstairs. She’s probably waiting for us down there. I stood stock still. My ambivalence had gone. Resolved itself. You have to use all this confusion and hysteria, I told myself. Use the dust, the hours of darkness, the uncertainty. Use it. No one will know what’s become of you. They might think you’re trapped under the rubble. They might think you’re dead. They won’t know, though. They won’t be sure of anything. This is your chance, I said to myself. This is a gift.

Half a flight below me, Rinaldi had stopped as well. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I have to go back,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten something.’

‘Go back? Are you mad?’

‘I’ve got to. Look, you keep going. I’ll see you outside.’

He hesitated, one hand on the banister, but I could tell from his snatched glances down the stairwell that he didn’t relish the idea of waiting.

‘You go on,’ I insisted. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Be careful,’ I heard him call out as I turned away.

Everyone apart from me was coming down, some of them bleeding, others white with shock. I met no other delegates, at least none that I recognised. It felt right to be going up again. Easier. As if, for me, the world had been upended.

The fourteenth floor was utterly deserted. Walking along the corridor, I thought the lights seemed dimmer. Dust in the atmosphere — or a partial power failure. I stopped outside my room and felt in my pocket for my keys. A draught edged past, and I could smell night air, the scent of fallen leaves. I entered my room, locking the door behind me. Good… Good… Good, the room said, and then fell silent.

I had lied to Rinaldi, of course. I had forgotten nothing.

I laid my coat on the bed, then reached for the remote. Surprisingly, perhaps, the TV still worked. A reporter was standing in front of the hotel. His voice had a thrilled, brittle quality about it — the voice of someone who was already an authority on something that had only just happened — and the wind ruffled the hair on his forehead in a way that made him seem dashing but vulnerable. He would probably be a celebrity by morning. The bomb had been left in a sports bag on the first floor, he was telling us. Thirty people had been admitted to hospital, some critically injured. As yet there were no fatalities. In a statement released a short time ago, the Black Square had claimed responsibility for the explosion. The notorious terrorist organisation had condemned the Rearrangement Day celebrations — twenty-seven years of shame, it had called them — and reiterated its determination to fight on, to bring about reunification. Carl Triggs had denounced the attack as ‘a despicable and cowardly abomination’. The police suspected the existence of a second device — or, at least, they hadn’t been able to rule it out. The entire area had been cordoned off.

I fetched my toilet bag from the bathroom, then went over to the wardrobe and lifted out the suit I had worn on the flight that afternoon. Laying the suit across the bed, I opened my wallet and took out the largest banknotes I had on me. I folded each note in half, lengthways, and then again, then I slipped my jacket off its hanger and, using a pair of nail-scissors, carefully unpicked two or three stitches from one end of the collar and slid the folded notes inside. I turned the collar down again and smoothed it out. It might have looked a little thicker than before, but I doubted anyone would notice. I put on the suit and reached for my overcoat. The clock next to the bed said ten-past twelve. I glanced at the TV. The reporter was standing sideways-on to the hotel. Half the front wall had dropped away, exposing the internal structure of the building. Rooms gaped out into the night. Wires dangled. How peculiar, I thought, that I was still inside.

Buttoning my coat, I crossed the room and unlocked the door. Out in the corridor nothing had changed. What I was contemplating was unthinkable — it went against all my principles, everything I had ever learned or held dear — but the disappointment I had been dealing with all evening had not diminished, as I had hoped it might. If anything, in fact, it had intensified, gradually distilling into a kind of anguish. I had to return to that club in the Blue Quarter. I had to. Had I been finding out about myself, or just imagining things? I didn’t know. Whatever the truth was, it had felt more real than anything had felt for ages. I had felt more real. Or more alive, perhaps. Yes, I would return, but under my own auspices. If I was caught, I would be charged under Article 58 of the Internal Security Act, an all-purpose clause that covered any action that could be seen to be ‘undermining the state’. I would be throwing away my career, my position — all those years. None of that appeared to bother me. I had always been renowned for my ‘integrity’ and my ‘conscientiousness’. My ‘sense of civic responsibility’. A strange, reckless delight swept through me at the thought that I would now be trampling on that reputation. For the second time that night, I set off towards the fire stairs, my heart like a bomb exploding endlessly inside my body.

As I reached ground-level, the power failed completely. In darkness now, I pushed through a sprung fire door, carpet replacing lino underfoot. A weak silvery light inhabited the corridor in which I stood, a kind of phosphorescence, as if sparks from the detonation had somehow been dispersed into the atmosphere. Though I could just about see, I had no idea which way to go. It was a vast hotel — five hundred rooms, someone had told me — and I had only arrived that afternoon. I hadn’t had the opportunity to orient myself. Sounds came to me — the stammer of a helicopter, a man talking through a megaphone — but they seemed both distant and redundant. I chose a direction, began to walk. Once, I passed through an area of armchairs and plants, rain falling lightly on the plush upholstery, the leaves, and I looked up, expecting a glimpse of the night sky, clouds hovering, but the ceiling was still intact. The sprinkler system had come on, triggered by all the dust and smoke.

A few minutes later, and wholly by chance, I found myself outside the banqueting hall, the padded double-doors opening on air that felt dense, trapped, a fug of filter coffee and stubbed-out cigars. Standing just inside, I heard a peculiar rumbling noise. I moved cautiously out across the room, light catching on the rims of wine-glasses, the blades of knives, the mirror-panelled walls. A man had fallen asleep with his head resting against the back of a chair, his hands folded across his belly, his mouth ajar. When I shook him by the shoulder, his snoring seemed to concertina, one sound colliding with another in a sudden clutter of snorts and grunts. I shook him again. He murmured something, then slumped forwards on to the table. I couldn’t just leave him. What if a second bomb went off? Also, I thought, more calculating now, my delayed departure from the hotel would look far less suspicious if I was seen to be bringing someone out. Putting an arm around the man’s waist, I hauled him to his feet. He didn’t struggle or protest. As we moved towards the FIRE EXIT sign, bumping between tables, he nuzzled affectionately into my neck, his breath warm and meaty as an animal’s. We went up a short flight of steps, along a service corridor, then I pressed down, one-handed, on a horizontal metal bar and we were outside — cold air, voices, blue lights whirling.

Halfway down the alley, two firemen stopped me and I steered the dead weight of the drunk into their arms.

‘I found him in the banqueting hall,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t wake him.’

‘We need to look at timings and schedules,’ the drunk man murmured. ‘Let me give you my card.’ Eyes still closed, he chuckled to himself.

Showing the firemen my room key, I told them I was a guest of the hotel. I spoke calmly. In my suit and overcoat I must have looked affluent, respectable. They asked if I was hurt, and when I shook my head they waved me on.

At the end of the alley I ducked beneath a strip of yellow tape. The people on the other side of the police cordon were gazing past me, their faces brightly lit and utterly transfixed, as if a spaceship had just landed behind my back. I resisted the temptation to look round. I already knew what was there — I’d seen it on TV — and besides, I didn’t want to run the risk of catching anybody’s eye. I had to sink without a sound into the blue-black of the night.

As I moved deeper into the crowd, I wondered whether Rinaldi would be questioned by the authorities and, if so, what he would tell them. Parry? He went back upstairs. He said he’d forgotten something. I don’t know what… Would he embellish his role at all? I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He pushed me away. What could I do? He might even become dramatic. I didn’t see him after that. I never saw him again — In retrospect, I was glad Rinaldi was the last person I’d had contact with. Half-asleep, still drunk, dressed in a lurid nightshirt, Marco Rinaldi would make the most unreliable of witnesses. There would be layer on layer of ambiguity, plenty of room for doubt and speculation. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.

Once I had put a certain distance between myself and the Plaza, I was able to slow down, feeling confident that I would no longer be recognised. The streets were full — I didn’t think I’d ever seen such crowds — but none of the people who surrounded me had any idea who I was. There would be no chance meetings with old acquaintances or colleagues from the office, no voices calling out my name in disbelief. Though midnight had come and gone, the celebrations showed no sign of letting up, people shouting and dancing and fighting everywhere I looked, and the news of the bomb had just begun to filter through, which gave the atmosphere a feverish, chaotic edge.

I pushed my way into a bar, hoping for some respite, but here too I was buffeted, and it took me another quarter of an hour to get a drink. The TV in the top corner of the room had been tuned to a news channel, the volume turned up high. There, once again, was the hotel. I watched the injured being brought out on stretchers and loaded into ambulances. A section of the road that ran past the entrance had been buried under an avalanche of masonry and plaster, and we were shown endless close-ups of the rubble, among which lay an assortment of unlikely objects — an armchair, a vacuum-cleaner, three oranges, a doll (the camera lingered on the doll, of course). My brandy arrived at last. When I reached for the glass I noticed that my hand was trembling. Was it the fact that I had been in great danger, that I was, in some very real sense, lucky to be alive, or was it a response to the action I had subsequently taken? There was no way of telling. I drank half the brandy, which seemed to steady me a little.

Until the bomb went off, the notion of escape had not occurred to me — I hadn’t even entertained it as a possibility — and yet, somehow, I found that I was already in possession of a strategy. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to walk through a gap in the wall, as Victor and Marie had done. This was the Yellow Quarter, and the borders would be fiercely defended. No, I would make for one of the big northern cities — Burnham, Sigri, Ustion — and go to ground. I would become a student of choleric behaviour, learning rashness and belligerence, but all the while I would be working out how to return to the Blue Quarter. Only a moment ago my hand had been shaking, but now a thrill went through me at the sheer unimaginable magnitude of what I was doing. My thoughts had begun to startle me. Or perhaps I was just discovering new aspects of myself, qualities I hadn’t realised I had. Sitting in that bar, not knowing where it was or even what it was called, I felt like a spy — glamorous, resolute, only dimly perceived.

By the time I left, it was after one o’clock in the morning, and slack columns of drizzle were slanting across the road like gauze curtains blown sideways by a breeze. There was almost nobody about. The weather must have driven everyone indoors. Moans and wails came from somewhere, and I paused, unable to decide whether the sounds were human or animal. It would be the tail-end of the revelries, I told myself. Things winding down, people who had gone too far. Turning my collar up against the rain and wrapping myself tightly in the folds of my coat, I set off in what I hoped was a northerly direction.

I passed along the damp dead streets of the business district, some of whose buildings I recognised from the drive in from the airport, then the road sloped upwards and I found myself on an elevated dual carriageway. Huge yards lay below me, filled with lumber and scrap metal.

Looking over my shoulder, all the brashness and glitter of the city centre behind me now, I saw a car come speeding up the fast lane. As I watched, it began to veer towards me. There didn’t seem to be anybody driving. At the last minute, a woman’s face rose into the windscreen, and I heard the tyres shriek as she applied the brakes. The car swerved out into the middle lane again, spun round twice, and then stalled, facing in the wrong direction, one of its elaborately spoked wheels resting on the central reservation. Its headlights angled sideways and upwards, almost quizzically, into the night. Fine rain fell through the beams, silent, sharp-looking, as if a tin of pins and needles had been emptied somewhere high up in the sky.

The door on the driver’s side opened and an elderly woman climbed out. She wore a fur coat, and her pale hair had been pinned up in a tidy and yet complex bun. She appeared calm, if slightly indignant.

‘What are you doing there?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’ As though I had distracted her in some way. As though the accident were all my fault.

‘Nothing,’ I said stupidly. ‘I was just walking.’

A car flashed between us, horn blaring.

She watched it vanish round a curve in the dual carriageway, then turned back to me. She seemed to have no sense that either she or her car might be in danger, or that they might present a threat to others. ‘Yes. I see.’ She passed one hand across her forehead, then lightly touched her hair. Her movements had the slow-motion dreaminess of someone underwater. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ She let out an unexpected husky laugh. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

I asked her where she was going. Home, she told me. She lived in the suburbs. That would be perfect, I said, then glanced towards her car.

She read the look. ‘I’m not drunk,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a few champagne cocktails, that’s all.’ She saw that I wasn’t entirely reassured. ‘I was looking for my cigarette lighter. I dropped it on the floor.’

Perhaps I should hold the lighter, I suggested. When she wanted a cigarette, I would light it for her. She thoroughly approved of this idea.

Once she had turned the car around and we were under way, she asked me how I came to be walking along that stretch of road. She’d never seen anyone out there before. I felt an almost overpowering need to tell her that I’d been staying in the hotel that was bombed, but I knew it would be unwise. I had to try and keep my mouth shut, not give anything away.

‘Cars,’ she said. ‘They always go wrong at the most inconvenient times.’

She had jumped to her own conclusions about me: my car had broken down and I’d had no choice but to abandon it. She glanced across at me. I nodded. It would be a miracle if it was still there when I got back, she said. The vandalism these days. Incredible. She shook her head. The diamonds she was wearing in her ears seemed to fence with the air, each glint of light as fine as the blade of a rapier. With crime so prevalent, I found it surprising she had offered me a lift, but perhaps I was part of a bargain she had made with fate that night. I was a risk she’d been required to take.

After a while she asked if I had the lighter handy. I held the flame up to her cigarette, and she inhaled. Smoke moved across the windscreen like ink in water. My eyes smarted, and I began to cough, but the woman next to me paid no attention. The city seemed endless, spreading out on all sides, in all directions. There was something careless about it. Something profligate. Her expensive car hurtled on into the dark, largely ignoring the white lines that divided one lane from another.

By seven in the morning I was standing outside a transport café on a country road. I had been lucky: I had covered a lot of ground and I hadn’t got into any trouble. The aristocratic woman — Annette — had dropped me at a suburban petrol station. From there, I had hitched a ride in a lorry going north. The driver swore constantly at other motorists, and sometimes I thought I could see the violence rising off him like steam off a horse at the end of a long race, but he only spoke to me once, after about an hour, and that was to announce that he was stopping in a lay-by for a nap. I continued on foot. Cars and trucks slammed by, not even slowing down, and I had almost given up hope of another lift when a transit van came to a halt ahead of me, WE OF THE NIGHT painted on the back in silver and framed by a sprinkling of stars. The words unnerved me at first, but the man behind the wheel, Tony Spillman, turned out to be the sales director of a firm that manufactured beds. ‘And I don’t mind telling you,’ he said before I’d even finished fastening my seat-belt, ‘in a business like mine, I get into some pretty interesting situations.’ With no encouragement from me at all, he embarked on a detailed account of his sexual exploits. I must have dozed off at some point, though, because the next time I looked at the clock on the dashboard it said a quarter to six and Spillman was telling me he’d have to let me out. ‘Got a little detour to make — a breakfast meeting, so to speak …’ and his head moved backwards on his neck, which gave him a temporary double chin, and his lower lip curved into a small plump shape, like a segment of tangerine.

I watched him drive away, the stars on the back of his van fading in the grainy light of dawn, then I turned and walked into the café. There were only two people in the place, both men. One huddled over a plate of bacon and sausage, the other was studying the sports pages of a tabloid newspaper. Not knowing when I’d have another chance to eat, I ordered a full breakfast. Neither of the men so much as looked at me. It was too early in the day for suspicion, or even curiosity.

Later, when I was paying my bill, I noticed a map of the region on the wall behind the cash-till and asked the waitress to show me where we were. She gave me a sharp look — maybe she thought I was trying to make a fool of her — then she put her finger on an area of pale-yellow. I murmured in disbelief. Despite the hours I had spent on the road, I was still no more than a hundred miles from Congreve. The lorry-driver had taken me north, I knew that much, but Spillman must have turned east while I was sleeping, and I’d ended up in a rural backwater, close to the border with the Green Quarter, which was no use to me whatsoever — though as I stood there staring at the map I began to see how it might work as a decoy. After all, who would suspect me of making for the Green Quarter? In short, my erratic route might actually throw people off the scent. From here, I could either continue north or double back. First, though, I would have to find a place to stay.

I asked the waitress if she knew of anywhere. There was a pub, she said. They might have rooms. She pointed to a small black box on a road that was even narrower than the one we were on. The junction looked about a mile away. I thanked her, then I buttoned my coat and left.

Outside, the sun had risen, but its rays were as colourless as panes of glass and I had to walk fast just to keep warm. I’d forgotten to give Annette her lighter back. I could feel its smooth shape at the bottom of my pocket.

As I approached the turning I saw a phone-box, and I had the sudden urge to call someone, so I could set a seal on what I’d done, so I didn’t feel quite so alone. I stepped inside and put the receiver to my ear. The line was dead. I stared out across the road, the tops of the trees in sunlight, their trunks still plunged in shade. Who would I have talked to anyway? Marie? It was early. She would be asleep. When she heard the ringing she would pick up the phone that sat on her bedside table, next to the photo taken on a yacht when she was twenty-three — Marie in a pink bikini, laughing. That’s me, happy, she had told me during my last visit.

Hello?

Marie? It’s Tom. Did I wake you?

It doesn’t matter. The sound of her turning in the bed, like surf. Where are you?

I can’t say exactly. It’s like you and Victor, though — what you did. It’s like that. A pause. I love you, Marie.

She would be facing the ceiling, one forearm draped over her eyes. A smile at the corner of her mouth.

I always loved you, right from the beginning. Another pause, my mind drifting back. I hated those people for making you feel bad.

That was a long time ago.

I know. But you were so much better than they were.

A car rushed past, steel-blue, into the future.

I’ll probably think I dreamt all this. I often have dreams about you, Tom.

I dream about you too.

Do you?

I couldn’t have spoken to Marie, of course, not even if the phone had been working. Communication between the four countries wasn’t possible unless you went through official channels. But then I remembered the time I found Victor weeping over the death of his wife, and I wondered if there was a chance Marie had felt something while I was talking to her in my head. She might have woken suddenly and sat upright in her bed. Thinking of me, not knowing why.

I followed the narrow road for what seemed like hours as it climbed between rough pastures and drystone walls. Behind me, I could just make out the red roof of the café where I had eaten breakfast, the main road running through the middle of the valley like the spine in a leaf. Since I had started my ascent, there hadn’t been a hint of any traffic, not unless you counted the wreck I’d seen, burned-out, windowless, abandoned in a ditch. The only signs of life were the fragile spires of smoke rising from chimneys in the valley’s western reaches and, once or twice, from somewhere high above, the drowsy humming of a plane.

It was after midday when I came out at the top of the pass. A wide, shallow basin lay in front of me, a kind of plateau ringed by hills. In the foreground were a number of grey-and-white houses, one larger than the rest. Could that be the pub the waitress had spoken of? I hoped so. Cloud was moving across the sky from the north, a solid shelf or ledge of it. Whatever meagre heat the sun had brought would soon be gone. My limbs were heavy, my eyelids too. I could almost have slept standing up.

I forced myself onwards, each footstep sending a jolt through my whole body. Though I longed to reach the pub, the distance between us seemed to remain the same. Then, when I had almost despaired of arriving, I rounded a bend and there it was, only yards away. The chipped gold letters above the entrance said THE AXE EDGE INN.

I mounted the steps and pushed the door open. I’d walked into the public bar — a floor of stained wood, with chairs and tables to match. The air smelled of beer and green logs, and the horse-brasses pinned to the walls in vertical rows gave off a sullen gleam. A woman stood behind the bar, reading a note. Her hair was drawn back in a tight bun, which only served to accentuate the strong bones in her cheeks and jaw. When I asked if she had a room, she folded the note and put it in her pocket, then she came out from behind the bar and stood staring at me, hands on hips. She wore a white ribbed sweater, brown jodhpurs and a pair of tall, scuffed riding boots. Her face, which was lightly tanned, looked hard as a mask.

‘I didn’t hear a car,’ she said.

‘I don’t have a car,’ I said. ‘I walked.’

Her gaze dropped from my face to my coat, then further, to my shoes. ‘You don’t look like much of a walker to me.’

I let out a sigh. ‘Do you have a room or don’t you?’

‘All right, all right,’ the woman said. ‘Jesus.’

She led me through an archway and on into a second bar. On the wall hung a stag’s head, a dented hunting horn and several framed black-and-white photos of men squinting on the tops of mountains.

‘I don’t usually have people staying,’ she said, ‘not this time of year.’

Winter, I thought. Business would be slow.

The woman reached over the counter and plucked a key from a metal hook. As I took the key from her, I had the distinct feeling that it was accompanied by a warning, unspoken, but quite palpable.

My room was small, with a low ceiling. The walls were stained with the bodies of insects that had been swatted during the summer months, their blood no longer red but dark-brown or dull-pink. I put my bag down at the foot of the bed and moved to the window. The land fell away in front of me, the coarse grass studded with boulders. Rain smudged the horizon to the east. I faced back into the room. There was a washbasin in one corner, and opposite the bed was a fireplace that had been boarded up. A tall wardrobe stood behind the door, as if intent on ambushing the next person who walked in. I placed my watch on the bedside table, then took off all my clothes and climbed between the sheets. The pillowcase smelled of mildew, but I laid my head against it anyway, and I remembered nothing after that.

I woke to raucous applause, people clapping and whistling. I couldn’t see anything, though, nor, for a few moments, did I have any idea where I was. I reached out for my watch, which lay coiled on the table. The luminous green hands said ten to seven. Clutching the watch, I sank back among the blankets, my mind still stunned with sleep. Darkness had fallen outside. I let my eyes close, then forced them open again and swung my legs out of the bed. The cold air took hold of me, stippling my bare skin with goose-bumps.

As I rose to my feet, trying to remember where the light-switch was, a movement in the window caught my eye. Still naked, I went and looked through the glass. In the distance, perhaps a mile away, a monstrous creature glowed and flickered. A dappled brownish-golden colour, it had a long thick body and a tapering tail, and it was staggering, almost drunkenly, in the direction of the pub.

I found a light-switch by the door and turned it on, then walked over to the washbasin. I ran the hot tap. It coughed once, then shuddered, but nothing came out. I washed under the cold tap instead, bringing handful after handful of icy water to my face until I felt properly awake. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My eyelids were swollen, puffy, my forehead creased. How long had I been asleep? Five hours? Six? A towel in my hands, I returned to the window. The creature had edged closer. Its stubby head ended in a forked tongue which seemed to be licking at the night. I quickly threw on my clothes and went downstairs.

Both bars had filled with people, some dressed in army surplus, some in anoraks and wellingtons. Others wore fur hats with flaps over the ears. Several of the men had beards. Through the window I caught a glimpse of the woman I’d spoken to earlier. She was standing on the asphalt at the front of the pub, her legs astride, smoking a cigarette. I went outside and joined her. She continued to smoke, without acknowledging my presence.

‘I saw something from my room,’ I said. ‘I thought I should tell you.’

‘Did you?’ Holding her cigarette at thigh-level, she stared out into the dark.

‘It looked like a salamander.’

She said nothing. A thin spiral of smoke coiled upwards, past her sleeve.

‘Is something going to happen?’ I said.

‘You tell me.’

‘How could I tell you? I’ve never been here before.’

She looked at me sideways, steadily. She seemed to be debating something inside herself. Then she said, ‘It’s the burning of the animals.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Every year, around this time,’ she said, ‘we burn the animals. We always do it in a different place, or the authorities would interfere. It’s our little gesture of rebellion against the way things are.’

‘I know about rebellion,’ I said.

‘You do?’ Still watching me, the woman drew on her cigarette, then blew the smoke out of one corner of her mouth.

I found myself telling the woman who I was and what I had done. Perhaps I wanted to repay her for having been straightforward with me, but there was also something about the harsh planes of her face and the toughness around her mouth that invited confidences. I was sure that her initial hostility was only caution blown up large. And so I told her everything.

Towards the end she nodded slowly. ‘I heard about that bomb,’ she said. ‘Four people died.’

‘I didn’t know.’ I looked up into the night sky. The dull pewter of the clouds had brightened to silver where the moon was trying to push through. ‘There wasn’t anything about me, was there?’

‘You? No.’

‘Good.’

She looked at me head-on for the first time, her eyes narrowing at the corners, and I suddenly felt delicate, almost breakable. ‘So you’re on the run?’ she said.

I tried to smile. My mouth crumpled, though, which was something I hadn’t expected, and I had to look away. ‘Yes,’ I murmured, ‘I suppose I am.’

‘You’ve chosen an interesting time to do it.’ She threw her cigarette into the road. ‘Let’s go back inside. I’ll buy you a drink.’

I had seen people drink heavily during the conference, Fernandez, Boorman, and the rest of them, but their drinking paled in comparison with the drinking I saw at the Axe Edge Inn that night, and I drank too, more than ever before, more than I thought possible. After I had been handed a double brandy by Fay Mackenzie — for that was the landlady’s name — a friend of hers, Hugo, bought me another, then it was my round and I found myself embarking on a third. I always asked for brandy now. It had become my drink. I used it as a sort of touchstone, a way of throwing out a line from the immediate past to an uncertain future. Hugo had discovered I was a defector, as he called it, and he kept slapping me on the shoulder and offering me a top-up, even though my glass seemed constantly to be on the point of brimming over. He was also desperate to learn of my reasons for leaving the Red Quarter. ‘I know,’ he exclaimed, his big straw-coloured teeth showing, ‘you just couldn’t take all that contentment any more, could you?’ Clutching the side of his belly with one hand, like somebody with a stitch, he bent double, hugely entertained by his own joke.

Just then a fight broke out. The crowd parted, as though drawn to the edges of the room by some magnetic force, and two men staggered about in the makeshift arena, their arms wrapped around each other. They heaved and grunted, but neither could seem to gain the upper hand. I imagined for a moment that they were engaged in a form of primitive dance. At last one of them tore himself free and swung a blow. His fist circled the air like a wrecking ball, but demolished nothing, and as he tottered sideways, off balance, the other man clubbed him above the ear.

‘This is what you came for,’ Hugo bellowed. ‘A bit of real life.’

About to disagree with him, I opened my mouth, but then I closed it again. I had always associated the Red Quarter with brightness, simplicity, a sense of hope. Oddly, though, I now felt as if these properties amounted to a superfluity of some kind, even a weakness. According to Galenic thought, blood was the only humour that had no particular quality when present in excess. Blood had to be looked upon as eucrasic or well tempered, and yet the world I remembered, the world in which I had lived for a quarter of a century, the world I’d turned my back on, didn’t seem well tempered so much as over-sanitised, devoid of warmth and feeling, bland.

By now the two men were fighting on the tarmac in front of the pub, their struggle rendered more dramatic by the car headlights trained on them. I saw a third man with banknotes folded lengthways between his fingers like pieces of a dismantled fan. Bets were being placed on the outcome. Meanwhile, in the bar, a fair-haired man had stood up on a table and begun to sing. The tune was that of a traditional ballad, but the words belonged to a protest song. All people were different, he sang, but if one looked beneath those differences, all people were the same. We had to be allowed to live together, to complement one another. That was where true freedom lay. A subversive idea, of course, if not a kind of treason, and it was then that I realised exactly how far I had travelled in the last eighteen hours or so. The room almost burst apart as everybody joined in with the chorus, which demanded that we overthrow the current leadership. Even before the song had ended, though, there was a surge towards the door. When I asked Hugo what was happening, he looked at me over his shoulder, and his eyes had opened wide.

‘The animals are coming,’ he cried.

It was a sight I would never forget. On arriving at the pub that afternoon, the road outside had been deserted, even desolate, but people were now overflowing on to the verges and into the ditches, and judging by the lights that jumped and flickered in the distance, a good number were making their way across the fields. Fay Mackenzie came and stood at my shoulder. Four local communities took part in the festival every year, she told me. Each community was held responsible not only for the building of an animal, which had to be carried out in secret, but also for its delivery to the site that had been set aside for the burning. Her next words were drowned by the shrill cacophony of whistling and hissing that greeted the procession as it rounded a bend in the road just below us. All four creatures were made of papier mâché and lit from within, and the size of them astounded me. A rabbit took the lead. Despite squatting on its haunches, the rabbit must have stood at least fifteen feet tall, its head and body ghost-white with black patches, its ears laid flat against its back as if it had already learned of its impending fate. Its beady eyes looked frightened, blind. After the rabbit came a sea horse, which was even taller, its neat sculptured head on a level with the eaves of houses. Though it had been painted a delicate shade of lilac, the sea horse also seemed filled with a sense of foreboding. It was there in the recalcitrant curve of its body, and in the pouting of its coral lips. A peacock appeared next, its breast a deep enamelled blue. Its tail was on full display, dozens of eyes afloat on a glinting mass of turquoise, green and gold. To my surprise, I felt not even the slightest twinge of loyalty or pride. Taking up the rear — and here the whistles and hisses almost deafened me — was the salamander I had seen earlier. Up close, it was a terrifying vision, its long tongue lolling between toothless jaws, its short scaly legs grasping at the air. As it lurched past, people from the pub joined the procession, some carrying bottles, others holding torches. I followed, yet another glass of brandy in my hand.

Not far from the top of the pass, the crowd streamed left on to a narrow track that led down into a sort of rift or depression in the land. With steep grass slopes on three sides and a sheer dark wall of rock at the back, the site had all the qualities of a natural amphitheatre. Wooden platforms had been erected at the bottom, each with stacks of kindling underneath. The people gathered down there were singing the song I’d just heard in the bar. When they reached the end of it, they simply returned to the beginning again, the volume seeming to build with each rendition. By the time I completed my descent, I, too, knew all the words.

I pushed into the middle of the arena. The animals had already been hoisted up on to their respective platforms. Seen from below, they resembled the hideous creatures that appear in cautionary tales. I suspected that the children who attended the burning would have dreams about them afterwards. Or nightmares. If you didn’t do as you were told, the salamander would come after you, its blunt jaws snapping at your heels. Or the ghostly rabbit with its blind pink eyes. These were the ogres in this part of the world. These were the bogeymen.

Sensing a shift in the crowd, I turned in time to see it parting. A dark-haired man strode towards the clearing, flanked by armed civilians in balaclavas. He was dressed in black tatters, as though he had just been pulled from a burning house; wisps of smoke rose from his clothes, and a trail of ashes glowed in the grass behind him. He began to mount a flight of wooden steps. On the ground below, his escorts formed a line, facing outwards, their semi-automatic weapons held diagonally across their chests. A hush had fallen. Just murmurs now. The man kept his back turned as he climbed. Only when he was standing beneath the salamander’s fearsome jaws did he swing round. A loud gasp escaped from the crowd. A child began to cry. The man’s face and hands were black, so black that I couldn’t distinguish them at first. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but flames and smoke came out instead. Everything about him was black. The whites of his eyes, his teeth. Even his tongue. A wind sprang up. His charred rags stirred.

‘I am the Master of the Conflagration,’ he said slowly, his voice so deep and guttural that I imagined that his larynx too had been fire-damaged.

‘Welcome,’ the crowd said, sounding, by contrast, almost shy.

The Master paused for a moment, then he spoke again. ‘If people tell us what to believe, do we believe?’

‘No,’ the crowd said, louder this time.

‘If people tell us what we are, do we listen?’

The crowd shouted, ‘No!’

I glanced over my shoulder. The field was full, right up to the top of the path. I could see heads silhouetted against the sky, and every face was turned in the direction of the Master.

‘We know what we are,’ he was saying, ‘and we know what we are not.’

The crowd murmured in agreement.

‘And what we are not,’ he went on, ‘we shall now, ceremonially, destroy.’

His right arm swept out sideways, then his left, and lighted coals flew in quick, bright arcs from both his sleeves. The crowd cried out with one voice, a voice in which I heard both rapture and alarm, then it burst into spontaneous applause. The coals had landed among the kindling, and the stacked wood beneath the animals had started to burn. But the Master of the Conflagration was gone. Though he didn’t appear to have climbed down off the platform, he could no longer be seen. His bodyguards were leaving by a rough track that led up to the neck of the pass. Their dark clothes soon merged with the darkness of the field. Above me, the salamander began to creak and fidget as flames reached for its belly.

I turned to the man standing beside me. In the light of the blaze his face seemed to glisten. ‘Where did he go?’ I asked.

The man didn’t take his eyes off the burning animals. ‘This must be your first time.’

‘Yes.’

The peacock’s tail flared with a vicious crackle.

‘Some say he’s the leader of the Black Square,’ the man said. ‘Others say he’s just a travelling magician.’ The man turned to me, and the shadow of his nose lengthened across his cheek so suddenly, so markedly, that I flinched. The man grinned. ‘You’ll just have to make up your own mind.’

‘It’s you,’ I said.

The man’s grin widened. ‘Is it?’

People scattered, screaming, as the salamander’s head parted with its body and floated into the air, swept upwards by a blast of heat and held there for a moment, as if tethered. It swayed in the dark sky, leering at our upturned faces, then it was consumed by flames, its long tongue curling, shrivelling, blackening, and with one final lurch, in which it appeared to cast a poignant glance over its shoulder, recalling, perhaps, the journey it had undertaken earlier that evening, it crashed to the ground in a shower of sparks, leaving nothing but a heap of burnt paper and a scorched wire frame. I watched as several children ran over and poked at the corpse with sticks. Then, like many others, I turned and started back towards the road.

Afterwards I couldn’t remember how we met, only that I was standing at the bar and that they were there as well, the three of them. Leon did most of the talking. He wore a leather jacket, and he had lined the lower rims of his eyelids with black kohl. The other man, Mike, had a spider’s web tattooed on the side of his neck. The girl was called April. In her crimson headscarf, her frayed denim jacket and her knee-length boots, she looked faintly piratical. They lived in Ustion, Leon told me, which was sixty miles north, but they always drove down for the burning of the animals. You couldn’t miss the burning.

Somehow it came out in conversation that I was thinking of heading that way.

‘You want a lift?’ Leon said. ‘We’re going there ourselves. Right now.’

Mike and April swallowed their drinks and placed the empty glasses on the bar. It all seemed to have been decided very quickly.

‘Really,’ April said. ‘It’s no trouble.’ Gazing up at me, she linked her arm through mine.

‘Well, if you’re sure.’ I drained my brandy.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Leon said.

‘Come on, Tom.’ April pulled gently on my arm, and we walked out of the bar together.

Leon had a dented pickup truck with roll-bars at the front and an extra set of headlights mounted on the roof. For hunting, he explained. Before he could go into any detail, though, I realised I had left my bag behind. Saying I would only be a moment, I turned and hurried back into the pub.

Upstairs, when I switched the light on, my room appeared to slip a little, like a picture dropping in its frame. Now that I had accepted Leon’s offer of a lift, I was worried he might become impatient and go without me. And there was April too, of course — that tantalising look she’d given me, the way she’d called me ‘Tom’ … I packed as fast as I could and zipped my bag shut, then I hoisted it on to my shoulder and ran back down the stairs. I found Fay Mackenzie in the bar. I couldn’t thank her enough, I told her, for taking me in, for treating me so well and, above all, for trusting me. Probably I said too much, my words tumbling over one another, but she only smiled at me and wished me luck. She wouldn’t take any money for the room.

Outside, the air had thickened. The smoke from the burning seemed to have been driven down the hill, flakes of charred paper drifting past at head-height. My new friends were standing at the edge of the car-park, deep in conversation. Then one of them noticed me, and they separated, their faces turning towards me.

‘All set?’ Leon said.

I nodded.

He held the door open on the passenger’s side. I climbed in first, hoping April would follow, but Mike got in next, leaving April to sit against the door. Leon went round to the driver’s side. Once behind the wheel, he revved the engine, then let the clutch out fast. The truck leapt down the road that led away from the pub.

April leaned forwards and spoke to him. ‘You drunk?’

‘No drunker than usual,’ he said.

I held my bag on my lap, aware of the men’s shoulders on either side of me. It was cold in the truck, and the cramped interior smelled of oil and cigarettes. I watched as the headlights picked out one bend after another.

I turned to Leon. ‘How far did you say it was?’

‘Where to?’ he said.

‘Ustion.’

‘I don’t know. It’s a way.’

He seemed to consider the question irrelevant, beside the point. My stomach tightened. I stole a glance at his profile, hoping for some reassurance, but all I saw was a low, brooding brow, and teeth that slanted back into his mouth like a shark’s — features I had failed to notice while we were talking in the bar.

After driving for five or ten minutes, Leon took a sharp right-hand turn on to a much narrower road. Mike and I were thrown to the left, and April cried out, then swore, as she was crushed against the door. Leon just laughed. The truck lurched and bounced over potholes, unseen branches scraping at the windows and the roof. As I peered through the windscreen, trying to determine where we were going, the road opened out into a wide apron of gravel and weeds. Our headlights swept over part of a building, and I caught glimpses of a turret and an ivy-covered wall.

‘Where’s this?’ I asked.

Nobody answered.

Leon switched the lights and engine off, then opened his door and stepped out. April and Mike climbed out the other side. I hesitated, then I followed. We had parked next to a circular pond with a raised edge, the water hidden beneath a quilt of lily pads. I lifted my eyes to the building that lay beyond. The wings that extended sideways from the gate-house were topped by battlements, and the windows resembled those in medieval castles. I turned back to Leon, who seemed to have fallen into a kind of trance. His friends were standing near by, but facing in different directions, as though keeping watch. I wasn’t sure why they had brought me to this place. I suspected I was becoming embroiled in some reckless agenda of theirs, as a result of which I might lose sight of my own.

‘It used to be an asylum,’ Leon said, ‘but it was shut down years ago.’

The night was quiet and still. Moonlight coated everything.

I walked over to Leon. ‘I need to get moving,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could tell me which way to go.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the building. ‘First you have to give us something. For our trouble.’

I stared at him blankly. ‘Give you something?’

‘Some kind of payment.’

Mike seized me from behind, pinning my arms, then Leon reached into my pockets and felt around.

‘If it’s money you want,’ I said, ‘it’s in my wallet.’

Leon stood back. Behind him, April cut my bag open with a knife and started tossing pieces of my clothing on to the ground.

‘There’s nothing valuable in there,’ I said.

Leon leaned in towards me again, blocking my view of the girl. ‘You know it all, don’t you?’ A grey gleam on his sloping teeth. ‘Actually, no, that can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Because if you knew it all you wouldn’t have got yourself into this situation in the first place.’ I watched as he opened my wallet and went through the contents. He shone a torch on my visa, then on my identity papers, and let out a low whistle.

Still stooping over my bag, April looked round. ‘What?’

‘I heard he was from somewhere else,’ Leon said. ‘I just didn’t know where.’

‘Where’s he from?’ April asked.

Leon told her.

‘What do you think he’s doing here?’ she said.

Still examining my papers, Leon didn’t say anything.

April walked towards me. ‘He could be a spy.’

I had applied the same word to myself only the night before, but in a purely romantic sense. Now, though, it was being used seriously, as an accusation.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

Almost instantly there was an explosion in my head, and I dropped to the gravel, lights hanging in the left side of my field of vision like a curtain of garish elongated beads. Mike must have hit me.

As I lay there, April reached down and pulled off my coat. I made no attempt to resist. She put the coat on over her denim jacket, then paraded up and down in front of the pond as if she were on a catwalk. She was much shorter than me, and the coat’s hem trailed along the ground behind her.

‘You’re spoiling it,’ I murmured.

Mike’s boot caught me just below the ribs. ‘It’s hers now,’ he said. ‘She can do what she likes with it.’

Lying on my side, doubled up, I felt the bile rush into my mouth. At the same time, I had the feeling that the episode was already over and that it could have been much worse. They had what they wanted — my money, my documents, my coat. Clearly, though, there was a kind of protocol involved. They couldn’t leave until their superiority had been properly established. It was important therefore that I didn’t draw any more attention to myself. Better to grovel, play dead.

It appeared to work. The next time I looked, they had their backs turned.

‘I almost forgot,’ Leon said over his shoulder. ‘You go that way.’ He pointed off into the trees.

April made a remark I didn’t catch. The two men laughed.

Doors slammed. My head still resting on the ground, I felt the surge of the engine in my teeth, a vibration conducted by the earth, a kind of bass note. The pickup truck turned in a slow, tight half-circle and I was blinded for a second as its bank of lights swept over me. I saw myself as they must have seen me, a crumpled man, eyes shut to slits. The roar faded. For some time afterwards I thought I could detect the reverberation, but then I decided it was just one of the many layers that made up the silence — or even, perhaps, some residue from the bomb that had gone off, a memory that was physical, a tremor stored below the surface of my skin.

I lay there in the dirt like someone paralysed. There was even a part of me that wanted to go to sleep. They had taken everything — and yet, no, that wasn’t quite true. At least I had those banknotes hidden in my collar. I would need them now. So why this sense of abandonment, this loss of all initiative? I could only think it was because I’d been attacked. Where I came from, things like that didn’t happen.

The brandy was beginning to wear off, and my mouth tasted of cinders. I forced myself to sit up. The bead curtain still hung in my head, undulating slightly, as if somebody had just passed through it, and each time I took a breath a sharp blade seemed to pierce the left side of my chest. I had been hoping to continue on foot, but it was after midnight and I didn’t know the exact nature of my injuries. It would make more sense to shelter in the asylum. Then, when morning came, I would reassess the situation.

I climbed to my feet and walked over to my bag. The sides had been slashed open, and my clothes lay scattered all around. I would only take what I could carry in my pockets — socks, a toothbrush, underwear. A sweater would be useful too, I thought. I removed my jacket, then pulled on the only sweater I had brought along, wincing as I lifted my arms above my head. I left everything else where it was. From a distance my bag looked cryptic, even faintly chilling, the sort of thing that leads people to believe in alien abduction.

Some gut feeling prevented me from trying the main entrance. Instead, I circled one of the towers and started down the left side of the building. There had been a path here once, but thistles and brambles had sprung up, and I had to inch forwards with my arms at shoulder-level and my elbows pointing outwards, like someone wading into cold water for a swim. The moonlight made space and distance hard to judge. A low branch almost took my eye out, and the backs of my fingers stung where they had brushed against blue-grey beds of nettles.

At last, towards the rear of the building, the undergrowth cleared, and I was able to approach a window. I began to hunt for a stone, kneeling down and running my hands over the ground, but I couldn’t find anything, so I unlaced one of my shoes and, gripping it by the toe, swung the heel sharply against the glass. The splintering noise was so loud that I was sure a caretaker or night-watchman would appear. I held still and listened. Nothing except an owl deep in the woods behind me. Knocking the rest of the window into the room, I put my shoe back on and clambered through.

There was a smell of yeast. Methylated spirits too. I moved towards a doorway, glass snapping underfoot. Then on into a corridor. Much darker here. Gloss paint on the walls, the dim outline of a stainless-steel trolley. When I came to a staircase, I began to climb. Again, I didn’t attempt to rationalise my decision. I simply assumed it was instinct, something primitive or vestigial kicking in.

In a small room on the third floor I found a bed, just a bare mattress resting on coiled metal springs, but a bed nonetheless, and for all my injuries, for all the exhausting twists and turns of the past day or two, I heard myself laugh out loud. The sound didn’t last. The huge empty building dispensed with it, as though it were unsuitable, improper, a habit that had been discredited or lost.

On the far side of the bed was a wooden chair. Beyond that, the room’s only window. The moon had lodged itself in the top right-hand pane, its bright face half-hidden by a strip of cloud. Lowering myself on to the bed, I reached out and touched the headboard. There were dark patches where the paint had been chipped away by inmates or intruders, the letters carved so crudely that they often overshot each other. I thought I detected a ‘J’, though, and I wondered whether it was to a place like this that Jones had been sent, and whether he had ever curled up on a mattress and tried to scratch his initials into part of a bed, or into a wall, and once again, despite all the time that had gone by, I felt for him. Then I remembered my first night at the club — Jones walking towards me, Jones unharmed. It was always possible that he’d survived, and even, maybe, prospered. And what of me? Would I prosper? Would I survive? I saw my bedroom, high up in the house, the copper beech outside, the road beyond. I’d had such a vivid sense of myself — just then, for those few moments. I had felt so present, so alive. And if I was here now, risking everything, it was because I was determined not to let that feeling go. I lay down on my side and, as I pulled my jacket over me and drew my knees in towards my chest, I found I had left the asylum, the Yellow Quarter too, and I was moving across the lobby of the club, one hand lifting to part the velvet curtain …

I woke several times that night. Once, the moon still hung in the window, though it had sunk into one of the lower panes. When I opened my eyes again, only seconds later seemingly, the moon had gone.

In all my dreams I was cold.

Towards dawn I heard a ticking somewhere outside. I rose to my feet and crept across the room. The door creaked as I turned the handle. All I could see when I peered to the left was a long corridor, like a tunnel, filled with milky light. I turned to the right. A dog stood twenty feet away, looking at me over its shoulder. It had small eyes and a blunt boot of a head. Some kind of bull terrier, I supposed. So pale, though. Unnaturally pale. I shut the door and leaned against it, my heart beating high up in my throat. I waited a few minutes, then I fetched the chair and wedged it beneath the door-handle. For the rest of the night I slept in snatches.

I woke and lay quite motionless, my breath showing against the wall like smoke. I pulled myself upright. My ribs had stiffened, but I didn’t think anything was broken. On my temple a lump had formed, the same shape as the back of a teaspoon, and my left eyebrow had split open. The crusting of blood crumbled like earth beneath my fingers. I slipped my jacket on over my sweater, then let my eyes travel slowly round the room. Pale-green walls, floorboards painted grey. A window showing treetops and a cloudy sky. A cupboard. Bookshelves, but no books. Then I saw the chair tilted at an angle against the door. There had been a dog, I remembered. It had stared at me over its shoulder, its jaws set in a mirthless grin.

I began to look for something that might double as a weapon. In the cupboard I found some medical magazines, a plastic measuring jug and an empty pot of white emulsion. On the shelves, only a jam-jar filled with brownish liquid. There was nothing under the bed. In the end, I snapped one of the legs off the chair. It would serve as a cudgel. If I used the paint pot as a kind of gauntlet, I would be able to fend the dog off with one hand while I attacked it with the other. The whole thing seemed laughable — a charade, really — but how else was I going to protect myself?

I put an ear to the door. Silence. Hardly daring to breathe, I eased the chair out from beneath the handle and stood it behind me, then I opened the door. A lino floor stretching away. A scattering of leaves, fragile and ginger. Staying close to the wall, I set off along the corridor, the leaves exploding beneath my shoes. I hadn’t noticed them the night before, but then I hadn’t realised that if I made a noise I might put myself in danger. I reached the stairwell. Cool air slid up from below.

On the first floor I stopped again, imagining I’d heard a bark, though it was hard to tell above the fierce hiss of blood inside my head. I wondered how many dogs there were. It seemed unlikely there would be just one.

I didn’t try and make it back to the broken window. Instead, I moved through the kitchens and on into the laundry. At last I found a door I could unbolt. Ducking under tangled washing-lines, I mounted a flight of steps and came out on to a terrace that ran the entire length of the back of the building. Fragments of shattered roof-tile lay about, and dandelions had sprung up in the cracks between the wide uneven flags. From the balustrade I could survey the grounds. A lawn and then a hedge, both overgrown. In the distance, a jagged, tree-lined horizon. The sky was still and grey, and pressed down like the soft pedal on a piano, deadening all sound.

I hurried away across the grass. Hunger gripped me, keen as loneliness. Beyond a high brick wall was a kitchen garden, and my spirits lifted, but everything in there had been neglected for too long. The leaves of cabbages had turned to ragged dark-green lace, while the rhubarb stalks were thick as builders’ wrists. As for the apples, wasps had drilled them through and through. I managed to dig up two potatoes, which I wiped clean on my shirt-tail and ate raw. Later, on a spindly tree by the far wall, I found a single pear. I plucked the fruit from its branch and studied the speckled skin, as if for instructions, then I bit into it, and the flesh, though hard and bitter, had a curiously refreshing quality. All the same, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I might have eaten something that was supposed to be ornamental.

I emerged from the garden and climbed a grass slope, making for the cover of the trees. Once there, I stopped and took a final look at the place where I had spent the night. It struck me as odd that the asylum hadn’t been put to better use — choleric people were meant to be so dynamic, so resourceful — but perhaps, in the end, the four countries didn’t vary as much as was commonly believed. Perhaps our famous differences were no more than convenient fictions. I was aware that my thoughts were taking a new turn, and wondered if I had been influenced — contaminated, some might say — by Fay Mackenzie and her friends. Before I could reach any conclusions, I saw a white dog come lumbering round the edge of the building, its blunt muzzle close to the flagstones, as though following a scent. I could delay no longer. Keeping a firm grasp on the chair-leg, I set off into the woods.

After walking for some time, I stepped out on to a ridge, and there below me, to my astonishment, lay the border. From my vantage point I could see over the wall into the countryside beyond — its fields, its hawthorn hedges, its narrow twisting lanes. For a moment I thought I was looking at the Blue Quarter, but then I remembered it hadn’t featured on the map in the café at all. The border with the Blue Quarter would have to be at least an hour away by car, and we hadn’t been on the road for more than five or ten minutes. Leon and his friends had told me we were driving north, to the city where they lived, but actually we must have driven east. It was the Green Quarter that I could see. Those people had not only robbed me, they had lied to me as well. Maybe that was why they’d been laughing just before they left.

Tired and disconsolate, I sat down at the foot of a tree, laying my eccentric weapons on the ground beside me. It was a typical rural border, with a single concrete wall reaching away in both directions. There were no watch-towers, no death strips. No men with guns. A set of tyre-tracks ran parallel to the wall, worn in the grass by regular patrols. It made me think of the section of border that Marie had talked about. We thought we must be seeing things. We just climbed through. I couldn’t see any gaps or holes in this wall, though — and, even if there had been, it wouldn’t have done me any good. I hadn’t the slightest desire to enter the Green Quarter. There was nothing for me there.

Still, after a while, curiosity got the better of me, and I started down the hill. A few minutes later, I was standing in the shadow of the wall, and I saw at once that it was both immaculate and unassailable. No flaws or blemishes. Not even any cracks. The wall had been built to the standard height, with a smooth rounded lip at the top, a kind of overhang. It offered no handholds or footholds — no purchase of any kind. I placed my palm against the surface. It was cold as a gravestone. It promised death. Even here, under an innocuous November sky. Even here, in the middle of nowhere. I stood back. What now?

At that moment I heard a faint buzzing noise, not unlike a power drill or an electric razor. I looked northwards along the track. A motorbike came slithering and sliding over a rise in the ground, and as it drew nearer I saw that its rider was wearing the uniform of a choleric border guard, the black rainproof jacket trimmed with yellow piping, the gun strapped into a yellow holster.

The motorbike stopped beside me. I hadn’t moved. The guard switched off the engine, then he removed his helmet and placed it on the petrol tank in front of him.

‘Hard to talk with one of those things on,’ he said.

‘I imagine,’ I said.

The guard had cut himself shaving, and the small circle of dried blood on his chin gave him an air of vulnerability. His black hair had been flattened by the helmet. I was reminded, incongruously, of the places in fields where people have had picnics or made love. Now that I was facing the danger I had hardly dared to picture, I felt curiously calm, and on the edge of a powerful and unforeseen hilarity.

‘What are you doing here?’ the guard said.

‘Just out for a walk,’ I said.

‘You’re not thinking of —’ His eyes darted towards the top of the wall.

I smiled. ‘Climbing over? How could I?’ I held my arms away from my sides, to demonstrate my innocence, the fact that I had nothing to hide.

‘You’d be surprised,’ the guard said.

Removing his leather gauntlets, he took out a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers, and then embarked on a story about a man called Jake Tilney who had been transferred to the Yellow Quarter when he was in his forties. Though he seemed, outwardly, to be settling into his new life, Jake never stopped trying to find a way of returning to the Green Quarter, which had been his home before. At last he came up with something so obvious, so straightforward, as to merit the word genius. He designed and built his very own pocket ladder. It had an extension capacity of eleven and a half feet, which was the exact height of the wall, but it folded into a metal rectangle that measured no more than twelve inches by eighteen and weighed less than a bag of sugar. One day Jake travelled to a remote section of the border. Alone and unobserved, he assembled his ladder and climbed to the top of the wall, then he simply pulled the ladder up after him, placed it on the other side and climbed down again — and all in less than sixty seconds, or so he maintained in his statement.

‘He was caught,’ I said.

The guard nodded.

When Jake Tilney appeared in front of the tribunal, claiming that he belonged in the Green Quarter, the judges laughed at him. In the very manner of his escape attempt, they said, he had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was unqualified to live there.

Perhaps if you had done something less practical, they said, less daring —

But then it wouldn’t have worked, Jake cried.

The judges exchanged a knowing glance.

Jake was transferred back to the Yellow Quarter. Two years later he died of a heart attack, a common cause of death for those of a choleric disposition. His ladder, now known as the Tilney, won him a posthumous award for significant achievement in the field of industrial design.

‘A cruel irony,’ I said.

The guard nodded again and looked at the ground, his roll-up dead between his fingers. He was not at all the kind of brute or bully I would have expected to encounter at the border. Though he seemed a little indiscreet — should he be telling me about escape attempts? weren’t all those details confidential? — I felt he was a man I could get along with. I offered him a light, which he accepted.

‘There is another possibility, of course,’ he said, removing a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘You could have something hidden in the grass. Or up there’ — and his eyes lifted to the ridge behind me — ‘among the trees.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like maybe a pole,’ he said. ‘As in pole-vault.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘I would never have thought of that.’ And it was true. I wouldn’t.

‘We had one of those last month. Ex pole-vault champion. Fellow by the name of Alvis Deane.’

‘Can’t say I’ve heard of him.’

‘Well, nor had I, to be honest.’

‘Did he make it?’

‘Yes and no.’ The guard fell silent. The art of suspense appeared to come naturally to him. ‘There was something on the other side,’ he said, tossing the soggy stub of his roll-up into the grass. ‘A greenhouse.’

I imagined the scene. ‘Noisy.’

‘And painful,’ the guard said. ‘He broke his pelvis and both his legs. An elbow too, if I remember rightly. And there were severe lacerations, of course.’ He shook his head.

It had all been going so easily. We were like two men talking in a pub, so much so that I had been lulled into believing that the guard could be disarmed by the mere fact of conversation, that any suspicion he might normally have felt in a situation like this could be overridden, and that, in no time at all, I would be allowed to continue on my way without further ado. During his most recent silence, however, his eyes had been roving across my suit, which was creased and stained, and he gradually assumed a resigned, almost forlorn expression.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to search you,’ he said.

‘In case I’ve got a ladder on me?’

Smiling bleakly, the guard stepped off his motorbike and heaved it up on to its stand. ‘Could you empty your pockets?’

I did as he asked, producing the lighter, my toothbrush, some loose change, a pair of underpants and some socks.

‘Nothing else?’ he said.

‘That’s it.’

The guard pushed his hands into all my pockets, much as Leon had done a few hours earlier. Then, like a customs officer, he ran his hands over the outside of my clothes, along both my arms, down both my legs. Up close, he smelled of wintergreen, as if he might be carrying a sporting injury. I looked beyond him, at the wall, its smooth blank concrete unable either to help or to remember.

At last the guard stood back. ‘You don’t appear to have any papers.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, I was attacked, you see.’

‘Attacked?’

‘Three people in a pickup truck. They attacked me. They took my papers and all my money. They took my coat as well.’

‘You’re aware, of course,’ the guard said slowly, ‘that it’s a criminal offence to travel anywhere without your papers?’

‘I just told you. They were stolen.’

We weren’t like two men in a pub any more. The mood had altered, the sense of common ground had dropped away. A hierarchy had been established in its place. The guard was beginning to work himself up into a state of necessary indignation. He might even achieve outrage. And if that happened, I would be in trouble.

You have to act like them.

I snatched up the guard’s helmet and hit him full in the face with it. He cried out. Hands covering his face, he sank to his knees and toppled sideways, bright blood dripping through his fingers. I took the gun out of its holster and used the butt to smash the radio, then I hurled the gun over the wall. It landed on the other side with a dull thud like ripe fruit dropping from a tree. No greenhouse there, then. I grabbed my possessions and stuffed them back into my pockets. As I turned away, the motorbike fell over, crushing one of the guard’s legs. He cried out again, even louder this time. I hesitated for a moment, then I started running.

I leaned against a tree at the top of the hill. My mouth tasted of tin, and I felt sick. I had never hit anyone before. Maybe that was why. Down below, the guard was on the ground, the motorbike still lying across his leg. My mind began to spin, hurling out thoughts the way a lawn-sprinkler hurls out water. A motorbike like that might weigh as much as three hundred pounds. It would be hard to shift. There was even a possibility that his leg was broken. Without a radio he wouldn’t be able to raise the alarm, in which case he’d have to wait until a colleague came along, and that might not be for hours. Still, it was only a matter of time before word got out. There’s a man on the loose. He’s wearing a dark suit. He’s not carrying any documents. A pause. He could be dangerous. With a hollow, frightened laugh, I turned and plunged into the woods. I couldn’t form a coherent strategy as yet. I was simply trying to put some distance between myself and what had happened.

Half an hour later I waded out of waist-high bracken and on to a farm track. On the far side, behind metal railings, was a field of green wheat. A light wind blew. The wheat ears swayed. It was peaceful, but suspiciously so, as though the crops hid an entire battalion of soldiers. When the signal was given, they would all rise up, the barrels of their rifles trained on my head and heart. As I started along the track, I tried to put myself in the guard’s position. There he was, trapped under his motorbike, and with a bloody nose into the bargain. It was an absurd predicament. Humiliating too. Would he be prepared to admit that someone had hit him in the face with his own helmet? Imagine the teasing that would go on at his local barracks! Imagine the nicknames he’d be given! Helmethead, Nosebleed. Arse. Rounding a bend, I saw a five-bar gate ahead of me. A country lane beyond. My mind was still whirling with theories, hypotheses. What if the guard claimed that his bike had skidded in the mud? What if he pretended that he’d never even set eyes on me? I began to see how his discomfiture might work in my favour. It seemed conceivable that I might not be reported after all — in which case I could return to the Axe Edge Inn, where Fay would help me.

I looked up into the sky. The clouds had thinned, unveiling a strip of the purest pale-blue. I could be in the bar by lunchtime, and think of the tale I would be able to tell! I vaulted over the gate and, buttoning my jacket against the wind, set off along the lane with rapid, determined strides.

It looked exactly like a crime scene. The pub had been sealed off with bright-yellow plastic tape, the words POLICE — DO NOT CROSS repeated every few feet in black. Two of the downstairs windows had been smashed, and the car-park glittered with broken glass. A plank had been nailed at an angle across the front entrance. There were dark stains at the edge of the road. I couldn’t tell whether it was oil or blood. As I stood there, I noticed something glinting in the ditch. At first I took it for a coin, but then I bent closer and saw it was a ring. Though made from silver, it was uneven, almost crude, and it had blackened here and there, either with neglect or age. On the inside an intriguing inscription had been carved into the metal, with an anchor to separate the first word from the last. So you don’t drift too far, it said.

I had just slipped the ring into my pocket when I heard a whirring sound, and I looked round to see a bicycle come freewheeling down the hill towards me. I recognised the rider as the fair-haired singer from the night before. When he saw me, he braked and sat astride his bicycle, one foot resting on the pedals, the other on the ground. He had a gash on his cheek, and three of his fingers had been bound with tape. I asked him if he had seen Fay Mackenzie.

He looked past me, at the view. ‘She’s been arrested.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was a raid.’ He looked at me again. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

I told him roughly what I had told Fay, adding that I had been attacked and robbed shortly after leaving the pub. Fay was the only person I could trust, I said, and I needed her help.

‘She’s the one who needs help,’ the man said. ‘I hate to think what they’ll do to her.’

Midnight was striking, he told me, when they heard engines snarling on the hill below the pub. The lorries were enough to scare you in themselves — enormous military vehicles with searchlights mounted on the top, their wheels the size of tractor wheels, thick shapes carved into the tyres for grip. The police were members of a special riot squad, armed with rubber bullets, tear-gas and electric cattle-prods. At least thirty people had been arrested, and many more were injured. The Axe Edge Inn had been officially closed down until further notice.

‘But why?’ I said. ‘What’s the reason?’

‘They don’t need a reason. They can call it anything they want.’ He glanced at his taped fingers. Then in a bitterly ironic voice, he said, ‘I expect we were jeopardising national security.’

‘You got away, though.’

‘I was lucky.’

The world seemed to flatten, to spread out sideways. With Fay gone, I had no one to turn to — unless … Into my head floated the image of a large bearded man dancing with a bright-green rabbit.

John Fernandez.

I remembered that he lived in Athanor, the Yellow Quarter’s biggest port. As good a place to disappear as any. Ports were heterogeneous, chaotic, filled with strangers. If I went to Fernandez, though, would he hand me over to the authorities? Somehow I couldn’t imagine it. I hardly knew the man, and yet I had spent enough time in his company to realise that he was something of a maverick. Despite his bulky, shambling presence, he had a quicksilver quality. A conventional reaction could not be relied upon, which in my current predicament could only augur well, I felt. In the end, it had to be a risk worth taking.

I asked the fair-haired man where the nearest railway station was. He pointed back the way I had just come. It was fifteen miles, he said. Maybe more.

‘I’d like to buy your bicycle,’ I said.

The man laughed.

‘I’ll give you a good price.’ I took off my jacket and, reaching into one end of the collar, eased out a banknote and held it up.

‘That would buy you three of these,’ he told me.

‘Yes or no?’

The man shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’

Handing him the money, I took the bicycle and swung my leg over the crossbar. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose I should be going.’

Hands on hips, the man was shaking his head. Clearly, he couldn’t quite believe the direction that events had taken.

‘Safe journey,’ he called out as I rode away.

The wind roared in my ears, and the air was so cold that tears slid sideways into my hair, but I felt liberated, almost giddy. I began to sing. I had no words, only a melody, and though the piece sounded familiar I couldn’t place it. That didn’t stop me. I sang until my throat hurt. At first I assumed it was something to do with Victor, a favourite tape of his, but two hours later, when I drew up in front of the station, my mind seemed to open, revealing a door standing ajar and a landing beyond, not L-shaped like the house on Hope Street, but wide and spacious, with a hallway below, and light showing through the dark bars of the banisters … Could I be remembering music my parents used to play after I’d been sent upstairs to bed?

Athanor shocked me with its brazen air of dereliction. I suppose the name had led me to expect a wondrous place, a place of magical transformation, and yet, as I emerged from the gritty gloom of the railway station and started walking down one of the port’s main thoroughfares, I saw stretches of barren land sealed off by wire-mesh and wooden hoardings, whole sections of the city laid to waste, whole streets demolished, gone. At one point I passed a pub that stood entirely on its own, defiant yet piteous, like the last remaining tooth in a punch-drunk boxer’s mouth. In the years prior to the Rearrangement the city would have gone under completely were it not for all the money made from drugs, and traces of that warped energy were still visible in the developments along the docks, the casino complexes and the flyovers that swooped dizzily through the centre. Still, the city seemed defined by omissions, by absences. Athanor: an oven used by alchemists. I couldn’t imagine all this grime and decay turning to gold, at least not in the near future.

Not long after arriving, I saw a group of ten-year-olds with voices like crows and no eyebrows, soft drinks in their hands, and bags of crisps, and mobile phones. Over the choppy paving-stones they came, with predatory speed, only fanning out and flowing round me at the very last minute. One of them lifted the flap on my jacket pocket, his fingers deft as a gust of wind, but it was just habit, a kind of reflex. He had already scanned me as a prospect and rejected me. With hindsight, I was glad I had left my bicycle at the station. I was glad too that my overcoat had been stolen. As it was, the gang never guessed that I had a small fortune sewn into my collar, nor that a silver ring hung on a piece of string around my neck. I touched one hand to my bruised forehead. Oddly enough, the fact that I’d been attacked now stood me in good stead. It made me more authentic, less visible. I could imagine tourists flying in to Athanor with stick-on stitches and fake scars in their luggage, as one took sun-cream to the beach, for protection. Want to enjoy your stay in the Yellow Quarter? Want to blend in? Make sure you look badly beaten up! Choose from our unique range of cosmetic wounds and injuries!

In a street not far from the cathedral I found a pub called the Duke’s Head. The walls were the colour of raw liver, and the wood floor was strewn with cigarette butts. It was Friday night, and people stood three or four deep at the bar. A mosaic of faces, everybody talking. The air mostly smoke. When I got close enough, I sat on a stool and ordered a double brandy. It was a cheap make, and the first taste sent a shudder through me. I held still and stared between my knees, hoping I wouldn’t bring the drink back up, but then I felt the warmth hit my stomach and begin to spread.

The journey to Athanor had gone smoothly — that is, until a woman got into my carriage. She had a boy of about four with her, and he had noticed me immediately. Children are like the police, I thought. No one can make you feel guilty the way a child can. Standing on his mother’s lap, the boy had levelled a finger at me. What’s that? The woman glanced in my direction. That’s a man. The boy hadn’t seemed at all convinced. In an attempt to deflect any awkwardness, I asked the woman what his name was. Thomas, she said. That’s my name, I told her. Did you hear that? the woman said to the child. The man’s called Thomas, just like you. The child shook his head. No, he said. I smiled at the woman and shrugged good-naturedly, then I stared out of the window, pretending to take an interest in the scenery. What’s that? Strange how appropriate those words seemed. With his innocent yet merciless gaze, his almost feral intuition, the boy had seen me for what I was — at large without papers, stateless, no longer properly a person.

Putting my drink down, I asked the landlord whether it was possible to make a call. He directed me to a pay-phone in the corridor that led to the toilets. The phone-book had been torn in two, but luckily the front half had survived. I ran through the ‘F’s. There he was, the only FERNANDEZ J. in the book. I memorised his address — 176 Harbour Drive — then returned to the bar and ordered another brandy. When the landlord brought me my drink, I asked if he knew where Harbour Drive was. He couldn’t think, but an old woman with a black eye-patch overheard and answered for him. Take a left out of the pub, she said, and then keep walking for about a mile. I’d see the road on my right. There was a chippie on the corner. I thanked her, and she promptly banged her glass down on the bar in front of me. She wanted a large vodka, with no ice. I bought her one. When she had swallowed it, which only took a moment, the glass hit the bar in front of me again. I smiled at her and shook my head, then I finished my brandy and eased down off my stool. As I turned to go, the woman put her face close to mine and lifted her eye-patch to reveal the scarred and hollow socket underneath. I pushed through the crowd to the door, then I was outside.

From the fish-and-chip shop Harbour Drive sloped upwards, becoming steadily more prosperous. After half a mile the road levelled out, and it was here that I found number 176, a detached house with a garage. I walked in through the front gate, climbed the steps to the porch and pressed the bell. The house looked closed up for the night. Even the stained-glass fanlight above the door showed only a faint glimmer from inside, as if a single lamp had been left on at the far end of the hall. I hoped John Fernandez hadn’t gone to bed. I pressed the bell again.

‘Who’s there?’

I jumped. It was Fernandez, and yet I had heard no footsteps, nor had I noticed any lights go on. Was it possible that he’d been watching out for me? Had he somehow known that I would come?

I put my mouth to the letter box. ‘It’s Thomas Parry. We met at the conference.’

A moment of absolute stillness, then two locks turned and the door swung inwards. We stood facing each other, in near darkness. Fernandez was wearing the same black-rimmed glasses he had worn on the night of the card game.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

‘Could you let me in?’ I said. ‘I’ll explain everything.’

He looked over my shoulder, scanning the street, then looked at me again. For a few tense seconds I thought he might turn me away — he would have been quite capable of such a reaction, I was sure — but finally he stood aside, and I stepped past him, into the hall. He closed the door and fastened both the locks.

‘I was just going to bed,’ he said with his back to me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

I followed him through a door on the right side of the hall. He told me to watch my head on the way down. At the bottom of the stairs we turned left into a long low-ceilinged room with a mustard-coloured sofa at one end and a desk with a swivel chair at the other. In the middle of the room two armchairs faced each other across a shag-pile rug. Dark-brown curtains hid the windows. On the desk, in an ornate silver frame, was a black-and-white photograph of a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had thick dark eyebrows, creamy skin, and black hair that curled in beneath her chin.

‘My sister used to have hair like that,’ I said.

Even as I spoke, I was overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion. Sinking into the nearest chair, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I gripped the arms of the chair like someone bracing himself for take-off. Like someone afraid of flying.

‘I should tell you,’ I said. ‘I’m here illegally.’

I opened my eyes again. Fernandez seemed to stand out against the furnishings, almost as though he had been superimposed.

He moved over to the desk and opened the deepest of the drawers. He took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. ‘The night the bomb went off,’ he said. ‘You disappeared.’

‘What happened to the conference?’

‘It was suspended. We were all sent home.’

I gave him an abbreviated version of what I had done during the hours immediately following the explosion.

‘And you’ve been missing ever since?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

I watched him carefully. This was the moment I hadn’t been able to predict, or even imagine. Either he would think of an excuse to leave the room, and then he would go upstairs and call the authorities, or he would — he would what?

‘Drink?’ Fernandez held the bottle out towards me.

I shook my head. ‘Thanks. I’ve had enough.’

He poured himself a single measure, then placed the bottle and the unused glass on the desk and stood facing the curtains. ‘How did you know?’

‘Know what?’

‘About me.’

‘I didn’t.’ I paused. ‘I don’t.’

‘No one told you anything?’

‘No.’

‘Strange,’ he murmured. ‘I had the feeling you’d seen through me. Something you said, I don’t remember what. Or it might’ve been a look you gave me.’

‘I had the feeling there was something unpredictable about you,’ I said. ‘When I thought of you this morning, when you came into my head, somehow I couldn’t imagine you turning me in. So here I am.’

‘You took a pretty big risk.’

‘I know. I seem to have been doing that lately.’

Fernandez flashed me a look over his shoulder. I ought not to be glib or flippant, I realised. I had almost certainly endangered him by coming to his house. Him and whoever he lived with. That woman in the photograph, perhaps.

‘I had no choice,’ I said. ‘You were the only person I could think of.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

‘I need to get back to the Blue Quarter.’

‘The Blue Quarter? Why?’

I had known that he would ask that question — or that someone would — and yet I hadn’t been at all sure how I was going to answer. I leaned forwards in the chair. ‘Remember the club I asked you about?’

‘What club?’

I started to describe the Bathysphere and what had happened there. I told him how I seemed to have crossed a kind of border in myself, and how, for the first time, I’d had a real sense of the person I used to be, the person I was first, before everything changed, and as I was talking I realised something extraordinary. I had always seen the moment when I was lifted out of bed as a birth, but actually the opposite was true. The cold hands, the bright lights — my parents grieving … I had died that night, and I’d been dead ever since. And now I was trying to do something about that. What was this whole journey in the end but an attempt to bring myself back to life?

‘I’ve been dead all this time,’ I said, laughing, ‘and I didn’t even know it.’

Fernandez studied me for a few moments, then he finished his drink and set the glass down on the desk. ‘You’re tired.’

‘Yes. Very.’

‘You’d better stay here tonight. You can sleep on the sofa.’

I was about to thank him when I heard a creak on the stairs outside the room. We watched in silence as the door-handle tilted towards the floor. A small face appeared round the edge of the door and gazed at me.

‘My daughter,’ Fernandez said.

I let my breath out slowly. ‘I didn’t know you had children.’

‘Two.’ He walked over to the little girl and lifted her into his arms. ‘Come on, Rosie. I’ll take you back to bed.’ Her solemn dark-brown eyes still trained on me, she rested her head against her father’s shoulder.

Before he left the room, he told me to stay where I was and not make any noise. There should be some bedding in the cupboard, he said. The toilet was outside the door. He’d come and get me in the morning.

Later, as I lay beneath a couple of rough wool blankets, I heard a ticking and though I knew there must be a clock in the room it was the pale dog that I could see, patrolling the corridors of the asylum, blunt head lowered, jaws ajar …

Somebody let out a cry, and I sat up quickly, blinking. The centre-light had been switched on.

A man with a black beard and glasses stood by the door with a tray. ‘You shouted so loud,’ he said, ‘I almost dropped the whole thing.’

‘I’m sorry. I was asleep.’ I pushed the blankets to one side and put my feet on the floor.

He set the tray down beside me. He had brought me a cup of coffee, a plate of scrambled eggs and some toast.

‘Is it late?’ I asked.

He told me it was after ten. He had waited until his wife and children had left the house, not wanting them to know that I was staying.

‘What about your daughter?’ I said.

‘Luckily she’s always making things up. When she said there was a strange man in the basement, my wife just told her to get on with her cereal.’

‘I’m sorry to have caused you all this trouble.’

He glanced at me over the top of his glasses, as if he suspected me of sarcasm, but I pretended not to have noticed, and he looked away again. He had made a few calls, he told me. While I ate, he outlined what he’d been able to arrange. A boat was leaving the north docks at four o’clock that afternoon, bound for the Blue Quarter with a cargo of religious artefacts. Once it reached its destination, however, I would be on my own. Usually, customs officers were paid to turn a blind eye, but there hadn’t been enough time to set up anything like that. He couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t be arrested as soon as I stepped out of my container.

‘Container?’ I murmured, still dazed by what he had just told me. All I had expected from him was a temporary refuge, the chance to catch my breath. Now, suddenly, I was on my way to the Blue Quarter.

‘Keep eating,’ Fernandez said. ‘We have to leave soon.’

When I had finished my breakfast, he took me up to a bathroom on the first floor, where I had a shower and a shave. He left some clean underwear and socks outside the door. Though I had questions for him, somehow I didn’t feel I could ask. He was doing so much for me. Curiosity would seem like a form of ingratitude.

Dressed again, I went downstairs and waited in the kitchen. The air still vibrated with the presence of his wife and children, the silence so recent that it had yet to settle properly. I glanced at the remains of breakfast — a slice of toast with a bite taken out of it, small pools of milk in the bottom of bowls, the rim of a white cup smudged with lipstick. A home, a family, routine — all things that people took for granted, and yet they had never seemed more inaccessible to me, or more unlikely. I felt a stab of nostalgia as I stood there, then a loneliness. Was it because I was looking at the kind of life I had been denied, or did I wish I could simply abandon the difficult course I had taken and somehow attach myself to all this security, this warmth? Maybe both were true. But perhaps it was also true that nothing of any value could be achieved without a measure of apprehension and regret.

Given that the authorities might already have issued a warrant for my arrest, Fernandez thought it best if I remained out of sight for the duration of the car journey, so I wedged myself behind the two front seats and let him cover me with some newspapers and an old blanket. I didn’t speak until we had been driving for several minutes, but then I couldn’t hold back any longer.

‘You said last night that you thought I’d seen through you,’ I said. ‘What did you think I’d seen?’

A snort of disbelief came from the driving seat. ‘You really expect me to tell you that?’

‘Why not? You’ve got nothing to lose.’

He stayed quiet for a while. I assumed he had decided not to answer.

‘What was so clever about the way they divided us,’ he said at last, ‘was that it more or less guaranteed that we would hate each other. I can’t help feeling a kind of contempt for you, for instance. It might be because of what you’re doing, and the effect it has on others, but it might simply be because of who you are. I’m from the Yellow Quarter, and you’re from somewhere else. That’s probably enough. And yet, to answer your question, I’m one of the few people who believe in that great pipe dream, that we should be able to live in the same country. All of us. You, me — even Rinaldi.’ He allowed himself a brief wry laugh. ‘Then I see myself succumb to prejudice, and I realise how insidious it is, how easy …’

It was silent except for the ticking of the indicator. I chose not to say anything. The honesty and bluntness of what I’d heard had caught me unawares. I hadn’t expected Fernandez to be so open, but perhaps, with me hidden, he felt alone in the car. In a sense, then, he was talking to himself.

‘It’s like racism, really, if you think about it,’ he went on. ‘I don’t mean the old racism. That’s dead and gone. I’m not interested in the colour of someone’s skin. It’s their thoughts that bother me. The new racism is psychological. What’s strange is, we seem to need it — to thrive on it. If we don’t have someone to despise, we feel uncomfortable, we feel we haven’t properly defined ourselves. Hate gives us hard edges. And the authorities knew that, of course. In fact, they were banking on it. They force-fed us our own weakness — our intolerance, our bigotry. They rammed it down our throats.’ He paused. ‘They took the worst part of us and built a system out of it. And it worked —’ He blasted his horn, then swore at another driver, but it was the authorities that he was angry with, and clearly he was also angry with himself.

‘You asked me what I thought you saw,’ Fernandez said. ‘I’ll tell you. I thought you realised I was bluffing, or even double-bluffing — my talk on terrorism, and so on. I thought you knew I was against the system. I even suspected you might pity me because I was so obviously fighting a losing battle, and I hated you for that. And I thought you could feel me hating you.’

‘I felt something,’ I said. ‘Not that, though.’

‘I was classified as choleric,’ Fernandez said, ‘which is something I dispute, of course, something I resent as well, and yet I seem to be getting more and more choleric with every year that passes. It’s ironic, don’t you think?’

I didn’t answer.

‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Where do you stand?’

‘I’m not sure. What I’m doing, it’s not really political. It’s more —’

‘Everything’s political.’ The car lurched as Fernandez braked. ‘Keep quiet for a moment.’

I heard him wind his window down and speak to somebody outside, then he shifted into gear and drove on.

‘I’m not sure you made the right decision,’ he said eventually.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Maybe, when the bomb went off, you should have gone home like the rest of us. Maybe you should have thought things through.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ I paused. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

As a result of what had happened in the club, something entirely unexpected had risen up inside me. On returning to my hotel room after leaving Rinaldi on the stairs, there had been a moment when I wanted to fling my head back and give vent to a strange wild laughter. I hadn’t known what lay behind that sudden exhilaration, only that it felt like the dismissal of everything that didn’t matter and the embracing of all that was vital and true. I had been sure of myself in a way that was both abstract and unprecedented and, in spite of all the difficulties I had run into since then, that sense of certainty had grown stronger.

‘No,’ I said again, more firmly. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Fernandez said, ‘it’s too late now.’

When I got out of the car, I saw that we were parked in the corner of a large warehouse. I paced up and down to try and work some feeling back into my legs. After a while, a man in blue overalls came over, wiping his grease-stained hands on a rag. ‘That’s the one, Mr Fernandez,’ he said, pointing to a pale-orange container. Then he slid his eyes across to me. ‘They lift that container, you’d better be holding on to something. They’re not exactly gentle.’ He flicked his lank, thinning hair back from his forehead. ‘Maybe try and wedge yourself among the statues.’

‘What statues?’ I said.

The man just sniggered. I watched as Fernandez went round to the back of his car and opened the boot, then I looked at the container again, its exterior scarred and battered. ‘Are you going to lock me in?’ I asked.

‘The door’s got a bolt on it,’ the man said, ‘so it can be opened from inside as well as out. I’d stay inside if I was you. Stuff shifts about. You start walking around the hold, you could get crushed. Also, the guys that run the boat don’t know you’re there. They’re not going to like the idea of a stowaway.’

So I was a stowaway now. I was becoming more illegal by the minute.

‘How long’s the voyage?’ I asked.

‘Eighteen hours. Maybe more. Old tramp steamers, it’s hard to say.’

Fernandez returned with two blankets and a plastic carrier bag. ‘Some food for the journey,’ he said. ‘And you’ll need the blankets. It’ll probably get cold in there.’

The man in the overalls stood some distance from us and began to gnaw at his fingers. Every so often he would lift them away from his mouth, nails curling in towards the palm, as if to admire his handiwork.

I looked at Fernandez. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for all this.’

‘I’ll be glad to get rid of you,’ he said. ‘You people who don’t know what you’re doing, you’re dangerous. You destabilise things.’

‘I thought that’s what you wanted.’

‘You people.’ Fernandez shook his head. ‘You always have to have the last word, don’t you?’

There were smells first of all — salt water, rust and then, surprisingly, fried food. I waited for the darkness to ease a little, to reveal something of the interior, but nothing changed. I heard Fernandez drive away — at least, I assumed it was him. My ears still rang with the dull clang of the door slamming. Minutes went by. The darkness was no less dense. I didn’t panic, though. Instead, a certain unanticipated relief came over me. It’s strange how our reactions can startle us. But perhaps relief made sense. I had been living a life sustained almost entirely by adrenalin, and obviously there was a part of me that viewed the next eighteen hours as a respite, a kind of breathing space. Also, I was bound for the Blue Quarter — and far sooner than I could ever have hoped or imagined. I still couldn’t quite believe what Fernandez had done for me.

The man in the overalls had shut the door on me so quickly that I had had no chance to inspect my surroundings. To allay any fears or uncertainties that might beset me later on, I decided to do some exploring. I took one step at a time, fumbling at the air with hands I couldn’t see. Having located the wall of the container to my left, I began to follow it, but I hadn’t gone far when I came up against an obstacle. Taller than I was, wider too, this would be one of the statues the man in the overalls had mentioned, but since it had been wrapped in protective sheeting I wasn’t able to guess who it was. To its right stood another statue, equally well protected and equally anonymous. I stepped to the right once more and found a statue whose arms stretched out in what I took to be a gesture of supplication. A saint, presumably. Which one, though, I couldn’t possibly have said. To the right of this third statue there was only air, and I walked forwards again. In nine steps I had reached the far wall of the container. I turned to my right. As I groped my way towards the next corner, my foot caught on something and, bending down, I found a coil of slightly oily rope and several small cylinders or tubes, all roughly the same length. When I realised what they were, I laughed softly to myself. I’d had a lighter on me the whole time — the one that belonged to Annette. Feeling stupid, I brought it out of my coat pocket, then flipped the lid open and thumbed the flint. The flame only lit the area immediately around me, but I could see the rope now and the cigarette butts. There were some white cartons on the floor as well. A couple of dockers must have eaten a takeaway in here, then had a smoke. Holding the lighter at head-height, I saw how the rope had been used to lash the statues together. Solid and yet ghostly, oddly menacing, the wrapped shapes occupied at least two-thirds of the container, which left me a narrow right-angled space, a sort of corridor, in which to move about..

After a while I heard a man shouting instructions close by, his voice accompanied by a high-pitched electric whine, then a loud grinding sound came from below me and the entire container shifted to the left. I pocketed the lighter and sat down, wedging my back against the wall and bracing my heels against one of the ridges in the floor. The container instantly lifted off the ground. I assumed it was being transported from the warehouse to the quay. We stopped again, and I heard more shouting. There were various knocks and bangs on the roof, then the container was hoisted into the air where it swung from side to side, tilting a little. I gripped the legs of the statue nearest to me and kept my feet braced against the metal ridge.

Though I did my best to prepare myself for the container’s arrival in the hold, the sudden impact jarred my spine. I was aware too of the disparate pieces of bone that made up my skull; somehow I could feel all the joins. And the loading hadn’t finished yet. Shortly afterwards, another container was lowered on to the roof above me with a brutal resounding clang. Now I knew that the containers were being stacked on top of each other, and that mine could well be on the bottom, I felt a flicker of claustrophobia. Once the ship was moving, it might be wise, I thought, to unbolt the door, if only to have an idea of how the cargo had been arranged.

In the meantime my thoughts turned to John Fernandez. Despite his contempt for me, which he had done nothing to conceal, and despite his habitual gruffness, I realised I was missing him. He was the person I felt closest to in all the world. I had tried to explain myself to him, and even though he hadn’t really understood, let alone approved, he still knew more about me than anybody else I could think of. It was pathetic, perhaps — he would surely have thought so — but true nonetheless.

A loud rumbling began, and the wall behind me started to vibrate. The ship’s engines. Soon we would be heading out to sea. I sat on the floor with one blanket folded under me, the other draped over my shoulders. Night wouldn’t have fallen yet, but it was already cold. I opened the bag Fernandez had given me. Inside, I found a slice of pizza. I took a bite. Chorizo or pepperoni. I ate half of it and saved the rest. There was a banana too, a packet of biscuits and a Thermos flask. I unscrewed the flask and brought it to my nose. He had made me coffee. I poured myself a cup, then drank it straight down. I didn’t care if Fernandez despised me. My gratitude still stood. He had chosen not to turn me away, though it would have been well within his rights to do so. Instead, he had offered me food and shelter, and we had talked without evasion, without pretence. It was hard to believe that I would never see him again. I only hoped I hadn’t compromised him in any way, him and his family.

The floor of the container was plunging and tilting now, and the statues were straining at their ropes. We must have sailed beyond the harbour wall. Using my lighter to locate the door, I began to work the bolt up and down to loosen it. As the door opened, the noise level rose. Clanking, hissing, drumming. In front of me was a container identical to mine. No more than eighteen inches separated the two. The man in the overalls had advised me to stay hidden, but I couldn’t have got out, not even if I’d wanted to. I put my head into the narrow gap. Though the containers had been set down in rows, the distances between them varied, making a network of irregular corridors or aisles. A naked bulb in a wire cage protruded from the side-wall of the hull, but the light in the hold was dingy, thick and yellowish. It seemed to ooze from the bulb like some sort of discharge. I looked the other way. Another corridor, but crooked, cramped. The reek of diesel oil and rust and brine. It was a grim place, brutal as a dungeon. Needing to urinate, I aimed into the space between the two containers. When I had finished, I bolted the door and lay down on the folded blanket, then I covered myself with the second blanket and tried to doze.

The unrelenting din of the engines, the see-saw motion of the floor beneath me, the pitch-black and the cold … I would lie on my side until it froze, then I would turn over. I did this again and again. In the end I must have slept, though, or else I had one of those visions that sometimes grace the edge of sleep. I was crouching in the shade at the side of an old house, and the garden beyond was so drenched in sunlight that it looked ethereal, almost transparent. Then I was on my feet and running. Round the crumbling, rose-hung corner of the house I went, and out on to a lawn where grown-ups were sitting on the ground, legs folded under them, or standing about with glasses of wine. I ran headlong into my mother’s skirt, which had huge flowers all over it, and reaching up — she must have been kneeling now, or bending down — I put one of my hands to her face, and we looked into each other’s eyes, and she was nodding and smiling as if to say, There you are, I was just wondering, and then I heard the groan of metal being wrenched apart, and I turned quickly to see what it could be, only to lose my balance, fall, roll over … I woke in darkness, one elbow in a puddle. The container, I thought. I was in the container. But what was that awful sound I’d heard, and how had I come to be thrown across the floor? Had I been walking in my sleep? From somewhere high above came the sound of men shouting. Though I knew next to nothing about ships, the urgency and desperation in their voices didn’t exactly reassure me. The engines had stopped too, and I could hear a noise I couldn’t remember hearing earlier, a kind of rushing. I began to struggle with the rusty bolt. At last it slid sideways in its bracket, and the door banged open. Things had changed position since the last time I looked. The boat must have run aground, or hit something. Luckily, the container opposite me had shifted backwards a little, and I was able to drop down into a small, wedge-shaped gap. From there, I edged along one of the aisles, aware that if anything moved again I would be trapped or crushed. I had to walk uphill to reach the side of the hold. Glancing behind me, I saw water flooding greedily into the spaces between containers. I imagined for a moment that I heard voices pleading, but I could only think it was the sigh of machinery that had been shut down, the gasp and murmur of pistons cooling, and I turned and hurried towards the nearest flight of stairs.

I climbed through a metal doorway, almost as though I were emerging from a picture frame. The two men standing on the deck were grappling with each other, but when they sensed my presence they stopped and gaped at me, their heads twisted in my direction, their hands still clutching at each other’s throats. I glanced over the guard-rail at where the sea should have been. A dense white fog pressed in all around me.

One of the men broke free and took a step towards me. He was wearing a red baseball cap with the brim flipped back. ‘Who the fuck —’

‘Did we hit something?’ My voice sounded muffled, as if I were still inside the container.

The man in the baseball cap hurled himself at me with such power that he appeared to have been propelled. Taking fistfuls of my jacket in his raw hands, he began to shake me. ‘Who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?’

His lower lip had deep vertical cracks in it, and his breath smelled sour — a mix of fish and beer. Though he didn’t seem to be any taller than I was, he loomed above me, forcing me backwards and downwards, and for a moment I didn’t understand what had happened to my sense of perspective.

Then I realised that the deck itself was sloping.

‘Are we sinking?’ I said.

The man threw me away from him so fiercely that I staggered against the bulkhead. ‘Get a dinghy,’ he yelled at his colleague. ‘There’s got to be some kind of dinghy.’

The other man, freckled and ginger, with a pale mouth, stared at him for a few long seconds, and then yelled back. ‘I already — fucking — told you —’

I moved sideways to the rail. The sea had appeared just a few feet below, opaque and colourless, ominously still. As I stood with my hands on the rail, the boat creaked, and then a shudder passed through it, and I thought of the moment when a slaughtered animal drops to its knees, that sudden fatal heaviness, that somnolence …

Water swirled across my shoes.

Then I was beneath the surface, with no idea which way I was facing. I couldn’t see or breathe. There was a sound in my ears like someone turning over in a bed. I reached up with both hands, tugging at the water. I kicked and kicked. My foot struck something that seemed to give, and one of my shoes detached itself. I imagined it dropping away into the dark, the laces still tied in a neat bow. It looked unhurried, leisurely, almost weightless. A feather would have fallen faster. My shoulder knocked against a solid object, but I fought to get past it, upwards, always upwards. At last, when I no longer believed it possible, I burst out into a small round space. Whiteness enclosed me on all sides. Air wrapped itself around my skull like a cold rag.

‘Hello?’

I had shouted, but my voice was swallowed by the fog. There was no point calling out. I tried to think instead. It was already light. A new day. Even if it was only dawn, the ship would have been under way for fifteen hours. We should be somewhere off the coast of the Blue Quarter — but where exactly? Which direction was the land? And how long before I succumbed to fatigue or hypothermia?

Just as panic was rising through me, I was struck a firm blow on the side of my head, behind the ear. Crying out in shock as well as pain, I swung round in the water. Jesus was floating on his back beside me. His mournful eyes, his crown of thorns. His arms lifting vertically into the air, the tips of his fingers lost in fog. I began to laugh, then stifled it, not out of respect, but simply because it sounded inappropriate, even sinister, in the small dead patch of water we were sharing. I reached out for the statue and held on. It was larger than life, at least eight or nine feet long, and carved from solid wood. It would take my weight quite easily.

The first time I attempted to clamber on, the statue rolled in the water, and I fell back. This kept happening. The white paint they had used for the raiment was slippery as ice. In the end, sapped of nearly all my strength, I heaved myself across the legs and hung there, like a pannier slung over a mule. I was cold now, and my head ached, but at least most of me was out of the water. I waited a few minutes, then I clawed my way up on to the statue’s chest and sat facing the feet, the bearded chin behind me, the outstretched arms on either side.

Once, I thought I heard someone call out. I answered with a cry of my own, but there was no reply. The silence descended again, padded, claustrophobic.

Maybe I dozed off, my head resting on my knees, or maybe I blacked out, I couldn’t have said. The next time I glanced up, though, the fog had cleared. I had expected bits of wreckage to be drifting about close by, but there was only the whiteness of the sky and the greyness of the sea, heaving and empty, drab. I felt exposed. Defenceless. I swallowed once or twice, then gripped the statue’s arms. What had become of those two men? Had they drowned? My narrative had blurred patches, jump-cuts, pieces missing. I rubbed at my eyes, then looked over my shoulder and saw a slab of muddy green on the horizon.

Land.

I began to try and steer the statue in that direction. I had to lie face-down and use my hands as paddles. I paddled hard, but when I lifted my head and squinted beyond the statue’s toes it didn’t seem as if I’d made much progress. Still, the exercise had stirred my blood, warming me a little.

Time passed. The sun burned with more conviction, showing through the cloud cover as a sharp-edged silver disc. Though I had stopped paddling, the wedge of land appeared to have grown in size. Either currents were ferrying me shorewards, or else I had latched on to an incoming tide. Staring at the land, where low cliffs were now visible, their brows fringed by wiry scrub, I coughed twice and nearly vomited. I was hungry — ravenous, in fact — but the remains of my provisions were in the container. I didn’t even bother to go through my pockets, I knew they would yield nothing. I fell to paddling again, if only to distract myself.

As I floated a few yards out, I heard a bell tolling, the sombre notes resonating across the lazy, almost oily waters. Perhaps, after all, I had drowned, just like the other two. Perhaps I was arriving at my own funeral. I slid down off the statue and waded through the shallows to the beach. Using my last reserves of strength, I hauled the statue on to a steep bank of grey and orange pebbles, where it lay on its back, appealing to an utterly indifferent sky. The land felt unsteady beneath my feet. I sat down, forearms on my knees, and gazed at the waves from which I had been delivered. Something was rocking on the swell out there, something that gleamed in the dull light. The minutes passed, and it drew closer. At last I recognised the swollen golden belly. Jesus wasn’t the only one to have escaped from the hold of that tramp steamer. Buddha had freed himself as well, and he was making his own way, patient and unruffled, to the shore.

A crunching sound came from further up the beach, and I glanced over my shoulder. A man in dark-blue robes was striding towards me. His tall scarlet hat had the look of a bishop’s mitre, and in his right hand he held a long stick or staff that curled at the top like a fern. A crowd of people followed in his wake — maybe as many as a hundred, maybe more.

I tried to stand, but all the power drained out of me. The sky lurched sideways. Darkness poured into the corners of my eyes. The man bent over me, bright colours flashing from his ring finger like shafts of sunlight glimpsed through trees.