Divided Kingdom

Chapter Five

Lying in bed with blankets drawn up to my chin, I was looking at a ceiling, delicately vaulted, white as chalk. The smoothness of the surface made it hard for me to focus, so I turned my head to the right. Set deep into the wall was a single window, its tiny panes framing a sky of blended grey and gold. There would be a garden out there, I thought, a place where one could read or dream. I turned my head the other way. The man from the beach was sitting on a chair beside the bed. He was clean-shaven, with high cheekbones, and his shorn black hair showed traces of silver. He was still wearing his blue robes, but his mitre was resting on his lap.

‘How do you feel?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. Weak.’ Actually I felt like a child who had been sick for a long time — or perhaps I was being distantly reminded of my boyhood, the lost years, an illness I had concealed from myself. ‘Are you a bishop?’

The man smiled faintly, lowering his eyes. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

There was a stillness about him, as if he had retreated from the outer edges of his body into a place that was private, inaccessible.

‘When we found you on the beach,’ he said, ‘you needed medical attention. We brought you back here, dressed your injuries —’

‘I was injured?’

‘You must have hit your head. You don’t remember? You were suffering from exhaustion too.’

‘Were there any other survivors?’

‘Not that we know of.’

The man reached behind him for a glass. I should drink, he said; it would help me to sleep. I lifted my head off the pillow, and he held the glass to my lips. I had swallowed half the medicine when a panic began to unfold inside me, heat flooding across my skin.

‘Is this the Blue Quarter?’ I said, looking up into his face.

He nodded.

I sank back with a sigh. Sleep took me.

A bell hauled me to the surface once again. This time a woman was sitting beside the bed. Something about her complexion, some papery quality it had, made me think she must have suffered. She wore her brown hair cut short, like a boy. A book lay open on her lap, the words arranged in blocks. Poetry, I thought. Or hymns.

‘Were you one of the people on the beach?’ I asked.

She looked up at me and smiled. ‘Yes, I was there. We were all there.’ She closed her book. ‘You probably don’t realise this,’ she said, ‘but you have performed a kind of miracle by coming here. You’ve saved the whole community.’

Ever since the vernal equinox, she told me, they had been waiting for a sign, something that would confirm the fact that they were living in the right way, that they had chosen the correct path. All summer they had watched the skies, but they had seen nothing out of the ordinary — no comet, no shower of meteors, no eclipse. In the gardens and the orchard everything grew as it had always grown, the fruit trees bearing fruit, the soil yielding a rich variety of vegetables; eggs were provided by the hens, milk by the goats, honey by the bees. Had times been different, they would have given thanks for this abundance. Instead, it had only caused anxiety, as though the gods of nature were procrastinating, as though they had already made up their minds but couldn’t work out how to break the dreadful news.

Then, early one morning, a young member of the community had been walking along the cliffs when she noticed what appeared to be a wooden figure in the waves below. She ran back to the main house, where she reported the sighting to Owen Quayle, whose community it was. He led his followers down to the coast to witness the sign for which they had all been waiting with such eagerness and trepidation. It was more conclusive than they could ever have expected. The figure the girl had seen was just one of many figures washed up on the beach that day, and the manner in which they had chosen to manifest themselves — dislodged, toppled, overturned — allowed of only one interpretation. They were false gods. They no longer deserved obedience. They should be summarily cast out.

‘And it was you who delivered the sign to us,’ the woman said, ‘in person, as it were, and for that we’re profoundly grateful.’

‘I was shipwrecked,’ I said.

Smiling, she shook her head. I had been too literal. I hadn’t understood that facts were only the servants of some far greater message. ‘So long as you remain here,’ she said, ‘you’ll be treated as an honoured guest, a benefactor.’

I lay back, trying to make sense of this strange information.

‘I’ve talked too much,’ the woman said. ‘You should rest now.’ She rose to her feet and moved across the room. Then, with one hand on the door, she turned to face me again. ‘My name’s Rhiannon, by the way.’

For days, it seemed, I slipped in and out of consciousness. Usually, when I came round, there would be people in the room, and they would ask me how I felt or whether there was anything they could do for me. I didn’t always have the strength to answer. I would close my eyes, surrender to the bed’s embrace, my body without weight or substance.

I couldn’t even be sure, at times, if I was awake or asleep. Once, at night, I became convinced that I was lying on a car seat with a warm rug over me. Through the window I could see black trees rushing past at a steep angle. Above them was the sky, paler, and in much less of a hurry. Stars showed dimly. My parents had been talking in hushed voices, but now they were silent. Soon my mother would look round. I would pretend to be asleep. She would reach down and adjust the rug, then gently brush the hair back from my forehead. It felt like the beginning of a holiday — or it could have been the end, the long drive home … Another time I sat up to get a drink of water, and there on the bedside table were the cigarette-lighter and the silver ring — all that these people had found on me, presumably, when they took me into their care. I picked up the lighter and ran my thumb across the flint. To my amazement it produced a flame.

Occasionally I would hear laughter coming from outside, or footsteps, or snatches of conversation, and I remembered what I had read about phlegmatic people, that they were ‘dulcet’ or sweet-tempered, but not necessarily equipped to deal with life’s many tribulations, and gradually I became curious about this community that I was supposed to have saved. I began to question Rhiannon, who seemed to be in charge of my recovery. She told me I should speak to Owen, the man in the blue robes. As founder of the Church of Heaven on Earth, he would be able to give me the answers I was looking for. When I felt well enough, she would arrange an audience.

‘The Church of what?’ I said.

She smiled, the dry skin creasing at the edges of her eyes.

‘It’s true that we call ourselves the Church of Heaven on Earth,’ Owen Quayle said, ‘but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. We don’t pretend that things are perfect here. The name expresses an aim — or a yearning, perhaps — not a fact.’ He gestured towards a crystal decanter. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I adjusted my shirt collar, which chafed a little. I was dressed in clothes Rhiannon had laid out for me, my own having been ruined by the sea, apparently. On leaving my room that evening — the first time I had ventured beyond the door — I followed her across a cobbled yard, then down an unlit path and out on to a wide two-tiered lawn. To the left of us was a walled garden. To the right lay a swimming-pool, drained for the winter. The lawn swept up to the back of a large country house whose many windows glowed in the dusk. The place had once belonged to an arms dealer, Rhiannon told me, and, before that, to a duke. She took me as far as the door of the library. Go on in, she said. You’re expected. It was a comfortable room, filled with well-worn furniture, oriental carpets, and reading lamps with green glass shades. Three walls were lined with books, and against the fourth, between a pair of heavily curtained windows, stood a leather-topped writing desk and a chair whose cushions were moulded to the shape of Owen Quayle’s body.

When we were settled on adjacent sofas with our wine, he began, in concise and elegant language, to explain the precepts on which his community had been founded. They believed in God, not as a judge or an avenger, but in the abstract sense, as the seed from which the universe had grown, the source or fount of all existence. They were prepared to accept Jesus Christ too, though they saw him as a teacher rather than a divinity; in their opinion, he was simply a man who had encouraged people to treat each other well. They didn’t believe in the resurrection or the life everlasting, and they rejected the notion of an immortal soul. All life was here, on earth. Though they had set themselves apart, on this remote property, they weren’t puritans or ascetics. Far from it. The purpose of their ‘church’ — a word they used in the loosest sense — was not to renounce the world but to savour it, to relish it — to embrace it in all its rich variety. If they had an aim, it was probably happiness, which they tended to define negatively as freedom from distress and pain. In philosophical terms, the system with which they identified most closely was that of Epicurus, whose teachings could be summarised, Owen thought, as follows: to live in tranquillity, to appreciate the gift of life, to have no fear of death. It was an approach that was at once spiritual and rational. Respect remained a fundamental principle, as did a sense of awe and wonder, but faith didn’t really play a part.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘why did you need a sign?’

Owen nodded, as if he had known such a question might be coming. At that moment, however, we were interrupted by a knock on the door. A man with a shaved head announced that everything was ready, then withdrew. Owen turned back to me. He would be more than happy to continue our discussion, he told me, but it seemed that dinner was served.

He rose to his feet and, reaching for his tall scarlet hat, fitted it carefully on to his head. With his mitre and his robes, it was possible that he had gone too far, but I wouldn’t be the one to say so. Where would I have been without him and his followers? If he wore elaborate clothes, it must be because he thought that there was a place for ritual and hierarchy, that they were things that made people feel safe.

Though Owen wasn’t looking at me, he appeared to feel my gaze on him and to have a rough idea of what I was thinking. ‘I don’t always dress so formally,’ he said, ‘but tonight’s a special occasion, as you’re about to find out.’

The following morning, after breakfast, I went for a walk. In the daylight I could see that they had put me in a stable-block which, like the main house, had been built from limestone, austere and grey. Though it was only a few weeks until Christmas, the sun was shining, and a haze that felt autumnal clung to everything I saw. Tranquil pathways led between high hedges. Lawns were silvery with dew. I passed a lake with an island in the middle, then climbed unsteady steps into a wild meadow. In the distance a black cat picked its way through the tall grasses, setting each paw down with the utmost care, as though the ground were mined. From where I stood, I saw how a ridge encircled the house on three sides, hiding it from the world. The tension and anxiety I had felt while staying with Fernandez had lifted away, and I was filled with a new optimism. Against all the odds I had made it to the Blue Quarter. The crossing had been unorthodox, to say the least — perhaps they all were — but the border was behind me now, and I could start thinking once again about what it was that I wanted to attain. I couldn’t help but believe that there would be less resistance from now on, less danger, that things would, in general, be easier. The essential nature of the people in this country dictated it.

At the top of the meadow, I looked back towards the house, remembering what had happened the previous night. Once we had left the library, Owen escorted me down a corridor and into a room that was entirely dark. Before I could voice my bewilderment, I was blinded by a sustained flash of electric light. When my eyes had adjusted, I saw that I was standing on a dais at the far end of a dining-hall. In front of me were dozens of faces, all lifted in my direction, all applauding me. Owen put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. These would be the people I had seen on the beach, I realised. These would be the members of the Church of Heaven on Earth.

‘We have gathered here tonight, as you know,’ Owen began, ‘to honour an unexpected guest —’

A ripple of amusement washed around the room.

‘Unexpected, but certainly not unwelcome. In fact’ — and here he couldn’t resist a smile — ‘it might have been nice if he had come a little sooner.’

Loud laughter greeted this.

‘It has been a troubled year for all of us, but now, thanks to the man standing beside me, I think I can honestly say that we feel better in ourselves. Now, thanks to him, our life can go on.’

The hall erupted in cheers and whistles.

Owen lifted his hands in an appeal for quiet. ‘Let’s raise our glasses to this long-awaited messenger — our saviour, you might even say — Thomas Parry!’

I smiled as I started up the hill. Although I had felt humbled by the reception, fraudulent too, in some respects, I had thought it only polite to respond to Owen’s speech with a few words of my own.

‘Thank you.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know very much about your community. I’m not even sure I share your beliefs. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know where I am at the moment —’ My opening remarks had created a slightly awkward silence, but now I heard laughter swooping through the room, the exaggerated laughter that often accompanies a release of tension. ‘But I do want to say one thing,’ I went on. ‘You took me in and showed me kindness, and, in my situation, that was more than I could ever have expected, and I simply want to thank you for that.’ My voice had begun to shake, which surprised me, and I found myself adding, ‘Really I’m just happy to be alive.’

A standing ovation followed. Embarrassed, I looked away.

Owen approached me again, and I thought I saw both fondness and compassion in the smile he gave me. I had surprised him too, perhaps. In a gesture I scarcely recognised, I took his right hand in mine and placed my left hand over it. It wasn’t a handshake so much as a way of demonstrating the sincerity of what I’d said.

I came out on to the brow of the ridge and set off along a path that led to the sea. In half an hour I had reached the cliffs. Far below, the waves threw themselves languidly against a strip of mud-coloured sand. There was an eerie quiet down there, a sense of lassitude, and even though the sun still shone I had the impression that something had leaked out of the day. Whatever had been easy-going and benign was gone.

I found I was thinking about John Fernandez — the speed with which he had arranged a passage for me, his apparent familiarity with procedures which, to many, would have seemed baffling, not to say perilous. And he had mentioned bribing customs officers as well. He worked for the transport union, of course, but still … I had read enough relocation files to know that smugglers operated up and down the coast, trafficking in human beings. There were always people who wanted to cross illegally from one country to another. They just had to pay the going rate. Did Fernandez run a business like that? Had I turned, unwittingly, to one of the few who could actually get me out? He hadn’t asked for any money, though. When I arrived outside his house, he’d been standing in the darkened hall, behind the door. Was I something Fernandez had been waiting for, or even dreading? Was I his day of reckoning? In which case he’d got off lightly, maybe.

Then I remembered the voices I thought I’d heard, and it occurred to me that there might have been stowaways in some of the other containers. Unable to unbolt their doors, they had been calling out for help, their cries muffled by the metal walls and by the rush of water through the hold. No, no. Surely someone would have mentioned it. That docker in the overalls — or Fernandez himself…

I stepped back from the cliff-edge, took the dank air into my lungs. It seemed difficult in this place even to breathe. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come down to the sea. I would head east along the coastal path, then circle back towards the house. It was almost midday now, and Owen had asked me to join him for lunch.

When I knocked on the library door, I was greeted by the shaven-headed man from the night before. He was Owen’s personal assistant, he told me. Unfortunately, Owen had been called away unexpectedly. He was very sorry. I was shown to a table by the window. There was a plate of freshly cut sandwiches for me and a jug of lemon barley water. If I needed anything else, the man said, he would be in the next room.

After I had eaten, I wandered into the conservatory where I found Rhiannon sitting in a wicker chair, doing needlepoint. She was working on an image of a woman and a small boy. Dressed in sandals and brightly coloured robes, they were walking hand in hand along an unpaved road. There were olive trees behind them, and stark white hills.

‘I don’t know if I’d have the patience for that kind of thing,’ I said.

She looked up and smiled. ‘It’s Epicurus and his mother. She was a fortune-teller. He used to travel from house to house with her when he was young.’ She reached into her bag for a new ball of wool. ‘It’s for Owen’s birthday.’

She had reminded me of something that had been bothering me. ‘You know, I still don’t understand why you were looking for a sign,’ I said.

She laid her needlepoint aside and ran a hand slowly through her hair.

‘In January,’ she said, ‘one of our members committed suicide. He had only been with us for a month. We thought we could help him, but he was too unstable. He would have been better cared for somewhere else — a hospital …’ She sighed, then leaned forwards in her chair. ‘Well, anyway, after Kieran’s death — that was his name — a shadow fell over the community. It was as if something had been lost. An innocence, perhaps. Nothing bad had ever happened here before …

‘The sign was Owen’s idea. If we were going to change the atmosphere, he told us, we would have to look outside ourselves. Something special was needed — some symbolic event or ruling. We were quite prepared to abide by it too. If the sign had gone against us, we would all have had to leave.’ She stared out across the garden. ‘I don’t know where we would’ve gone, though.’

I followed her gaze. Two girls were playing badminton on the lawn, laughing whenever they swung at the shuttlecock and missed.

‘How did all this begin?’ I said.

She had never heard the whole story, she said, but she would tell me what she knew. When Owen was in his twenties, he had owned several factories that made pre-cast concrete. He had been wealthy even then, apparently. But the Rearrangement had turned him into a multimillionaire. He won a contract to act as sole supplier to the governments of all four countries. Uniformity of product was vital. Every wall that was erected had to look the same.

‘A concrete millionaire?’ I said. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

Rhiannon shook her head, as though she too found it hard to believe.

The authorities were always telling Owen that he was helping to create a better world, she said, that his name would go down in history, and so on, but he soon began to feel uncomfortable. He must have noticed how much misery was being caused, and he must also have realised that, for large sections of the population, the most powerful symbol of that misery was the concrete that he had himself supplied. He stopped going in to work, hoping the business would collapse, but it had become so established that it more or less ran itself. There was only one course of action left. He sold everything — the factories, his town house, the lot — and moved to the coast. He went from being a dynamic, glamorous industrialist to a man who grew tomatoes and read books about comparative religion. He still enjoyed company, though. Friends came to stay. Then friends of those friends came. One day he looked around and saw that he was living in a community. It hadn’t been planned, or even thought about. It had happened organically. And, purely by chance, their way of life was perfectly in tune with the phlegmatic temperament. They understood the need for sanctuary, they rejected materialism without being puritanical, and with their emphasis on gratitude and celebration they were able to channel or harness all manner of emotion. People heard about the community, and it spoke to them, and they began to arrive on the doorstep.

‘And they’re still arriving,’ Rhiannon said, ‘even now.’

‘By sea as well as land,’ I said lightly.

‘Actually’ — and she gave me a smile I couldn’t fathom — ‘I think you’d fit in rather well.’

My eyes drifted beyond her. The girls had disappeared, leaving their rackets lying on the grass. The lake beyond was motionless.

‘In the end, there’s something about this place,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I don’t know what it is. An absence of pressure, I suppose. A sense of acceptance.’ She smiled again, more openly this time. ‘A kind of peace.’

The unearthly stillness that had troubled me during my walk turned out to have been the prelude to a change in the weather. That night a storm blew in, gale-force winds rushing through the courtyards and passageways of the house. Sheet lightning lit up the sky every few seconds, making the clouds look like stage scenery, artificial and melodramatic. After dinner I retired to my room with a book I had borrowed from the library, an essay on gardens by someone called Sir William Temple. As I lay on my bed reading, a lamp on beside me and the rest of the room in darkness, the door came open. At first I thought the wind must have forced the latch, but then I saw a figure silhouetted against the steel-grey light in the yard outside.

‘Rhiannon?’

‘It’s not Rhiannon.’

A girl crossed the room with a tray. She had brought me a herbal infusion that smelled a little like warm grass. I didn’t think I’d seen her before — unless, perhaps, she was one of the girls who’d been playing badminton. The silk dress she was wearing came down to her ankles, but it showed off her forearms, which looked slender, almost golden, as she reached into the fall of lamplight to pour the tea. Her dark-brown hair was so long that it hid her shoulderblades. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.

‘I was the one who saw you first,’ she said.

‘I’d been wondering who it was,’ I said — though, in truth, I had done my best to put the events of that particular day behind me.

She looked away into the room. ‘I’m often out there early. It’s a beautiful time. That morning, though, I saw something on the water, a figure that had arms, a face. Then I saw you crouching on top of it, all huddled up. I ran back to the house. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast.’

‘I heard a bell tolling as I was drifting in towards the beach,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a funeral. There was a part of me that thought I must have died.’

She glanced at me sideways. What I had just said seemed to disturb her. Outside, the wind swelled, surging against the walls.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘About a year.’

‘And will you stay?’

‘I don’t know. I’m happy at the moment.’ She moved her shoulders, as if to rid herself of the burden of having to decide too soon. ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’

She saw me hesitate.

‘It’s not raining,’ she said. ‘It’s not even cold.’

I closed my book and put it down.

She led me through the stable-yard, then along the side of the conservatory whose sheets of glass creaked under the gale’s weight. We crossed the lawn at the back of the house. In Owen’s library, the curtains had been drawn against the storm. After circling the lake, we entered a wood on the edge of the property. Lightning flared. High wrought-iron gates stood on the path ahead of us, forbidding as a row of spears. Any sound they might have made as we hauled them open was drowned by the trees hissing and thrashing all around us. We began to climb upwards, over rugged ground, and soon the house had shrunk to a collection of frail yellow lights afloat in a swirling blackness.

Before long we found ourselves on a headland, its cropped grass the colour of slate when the sky lit up. Only now did the wind reveal its true power, gathering the girl’s long hair and lifting it away from her neck until it flew at right angles to her body. Her exhilarated laughter was snatched from her mouth and carried off into the night. I watched the silk of her dress ripple against her belly and her thighs, and I imagined that, if I kissed her, her breath would taste fresh and slightly bitter, like the petals of chrysanthemums. I remembered the tea that she had served with such care, then carelessly abandoned, tea which would be cold by now, and I thought how young she was, how little lay behind her, how far she had to go.

She had brought me to a part of the cliffs I hadn’t visited before, and I could hear the sea below, boiling and roaring on a steep bank of shingle. The waves didn’t break so much as shatter. We leaned into a wind that seemed to want to fling us to the earth. Once or twice, miles out, sheet lightning flashed, and I could just make out the clouds massed on the horizon, their furious shapes, their ripped and jagged edges, like molten metal left to cool.

The girl linked her arm through mine and pointed to the east.

‘Look that way,’ she shouted.

For a moment, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, which was so eager, so elated. It was one of the purest things I’d ever seen.

She tightened her grip on my arm and pointed again. ‘Keep looking.’

And then it happened. White water came leaping from the ground in front of us, rising high into the air, only for the wind to reach out and bend it sideways. Now I could see the blow-hole in the cliff-top, just a few feet from where we stood.

The girl leaned close to me again. ‘There’s a cave down there. We swim there in the summer. When it’s calm.’

‘I’ll be gone by then,’ I said.

But she had already turned away, and didn’t hear.

My door was open, and a triangle of early morning sunlight stretched out on the floor, as white and pristine as a sail. Since my suit was beyond repair, I was wearing the clothes Rhiannon had found for me, which would in any case be more appropriate for the kind of travelling I had in mind. Before throwing the suit away, I’d checked the jacket collar, but the banknotes had been reduced to a pulp. I was broke. If I was to reach Aquaville, I would either have to walk or hitch.

The room darkened. Rhiannon stood in the doorway, holding a knapsack. ‘You’re leaving,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I think it’s time.’

‘So you know about our visitors?’

‘What visitors?’

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The day before, Owen had been interviewed by two officials from Customs and Excise, she told me. They suspected there had been at least one survivor from the boat that had recently gone down just off the coast. If the person or persons in question were illegal immigrants, as appeared to be the case, they would have to be apprehended and taken to a detention centre where their true status could be established.

‘He didn’t mention me,’ I said, ‘did he?’

‘He said he’d seen some statues on the beach, but that was all.’

‘Did they believe him?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’m sorry. I should have told you.’

‘There was no need. As far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. You’re the reason we can go on living here. We’re hardly going to hand you over to the authorities.’

‘All the same, it’s best I leave as soon as possible.’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Rhiannon reached into the knapsack and handed me a wallet. ‘Owen had a collection for you.’

The wallet was stuffed with notes of all denominations, and plenty of loose change. ‘This is a lot of money,’ I said.

‘He didn’t want you to leave empty-handed, not after what you’ve done for us.’ She passed me the knapsack. ‘A few things to keep you going.’

I shook my head. ‘You didn’t need to do all this.’ Then I remembered the principles on which the community had been founded. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For everything.’

She smiled. ‘Are you ready?’

Aware that the house might be under observation, she took me along a series of overgrown paths that would see me safely off the property. As we came through a wooded hollow, I heard the stuttering of rotor blades.

‘That’s probably them now,’ she said.

She held quite still and listened, then she moved on up the slope. I followed her. The chatter of the helicopter faded.

We scaled a fence, then struck out along one edge of a field. When we arrived at the stile in the corner, the land unfolded in front of me, sleepy and unspoiled. This was as far as she could go, Rhiannon said. In the knapsack I would find a detailed map of the area. For the first few miles, I should keep to footpaths and bridleways. She doubted the Customs and Excise people would be looking for me there.

I thanked her again. We embraced quickly. Stepping back, I saw that her face had altered, as if the bones had shifted a fraction.

‘Think of us sometimes,’ she said.

With those words, I felt she had given something away — something she’d wanted me to see all along, perhaps, but hadn’t wanted to spell out. I had thought of the Church of Heaven on Earth as a kind of cult, though it was actually more like a charity. Owen had created a place in which he could try and redress the damage wreaked by the division of the kingdom. Losses could be overcome there. Injuries could heal. Maybe that was what Rhiannon had meant when she said I would fit in. Maybe that explained the unfathomable smile. She had identified me as a casualty, not of the shipwreck, but of an earlier catastrophe — the Rearrangement — and if times had been different, who knows, I might even have stayed on. How had she been wounded, though? What was the origin of the pain I thought I’d seen in her? I turned to speak to her, but it was too late. She was already halfway across the field.

Though it was almost December, the air had a sweet burnt smell, and the sky was tall and blue and empty. The recent storm had blown the clouds into a different part of the world altogether; all that bad weather had piled up somewhere else. I had the feeling that my life, too, had been swept clean, put in order. I walked northwards through open, undulating country. To the east I had a view of a ruined castle. Beyond it, a finger of water pointed inland. An estuary, I thought, or possibly the sea.

After a couple of hours I paused for a rest. In the knapsack Rhiannon had given me, I found some mineral water. I drank half of it, then consulted the map. Now that I had money, of course, I could afford a train. I decided to make for a town to the north-west, whose station was on the main line to the capital. Even if I kept to the footpaths and bridleways, as Rhiannon had advised, I should be able to get there in two days. I would be thirty miles from the coast by then, and breaking cover ought not to be a problem. Pleased with my strategy, I tucked the map and water-bottle back into the knapsack and hurried on.

Once, as I climbed down into a gully, I heard the helicopter again, though it was only a subdued grinding in the distance, little more than a vibration. I saw it too, above the treetops, heading busily in the wrong direction.

By the time I stopped for lunch I must have walked ten miles. A kind of heath spread out all round me, pine trees relishing the sandy soil. Gorse clung to the ground in strands like natural barbed wire, and every now and then my trouser-legs would snag on its sharp spines. Unpacking the knapsack, I discovered hard-boiled eggs, crusty rolls filled with slabs of cheese, several apples, a bar of chocolate, and a second bottle of water. As I ate and drank, I checked my position on the map. I was in a white space, between two rivers. Ahead of me lay an area of downland, the hills topped with ancient forts and barrows, the valleys housing villages with quaint, humorous-sounding names. The going would be more arduous, but at least I ought to be able to find a place to stay. I finished the bread and cheese, then ate an apple. I kept the rest of the food and water for later on. My energy renewed, I set off again, determined to make full use of the daylight.

That afternoon I passed through several farms, every one of them abandoned. The houses had been boarded up, and the cattle sheds were empty, ghostly places, doors hanging off their hinges, hay strewn haphazardly about. Not long before the Rearrangement, disease had swept the countryside, and huge numbers of livestock had been slaughtered and then burned. The farmers had never recovered. A substantial percentage of the Blue Quarter’s population had been vegetarian for years.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a large flock of sheep about a mile to the west. As I watched them move across the wide green flank of a hillside, though, I realised they weren’t sheep at all but people — White People. It was astute of them to favour the Blue Quarter. They would be treated kindly here; in some areas, in fact, they would be revered, or even worshipped. I had always felt a good deal of sympathy for them, a feeling that had only been enhanced by my encounter on the front steps of the Sheraton, but I had never really believed in their so-called powers, preferring to find rational explanations for their sometimes mystifying, almost supernatural behaviour, and I remembered a story Marie had told me, one from which we had drawn quite different conclusions.

The incident occurred during Victor and Marie’s walking tour of the Red Quarter. They had been in the far north at the time. Instead of slavishly following the border, they decided to scale a ridge that ran parallel to it. The ground had been marshy at first. After a while, though, it turned into high pasture, punctuated by pale-grey boulders. The ridge was further away than it had looked, but they had started now, and both father and daughter agreed that nothing tried the patience more than the process of having to retrace your steps. They would reach the ridge, they said, even if it killed them. And it almost had.

They toiled onwards, upwards. The grass became a steeply sloping field of stones. No sooner had they arrived at what they had imagined to be the summit than another summit would appear, one which, until that point, had been concealed by the angle of their ascent. To make matters worse, a mist had drifted in behind them, obscuring the route they had taken. They peered at the ridge. It had transformed itself into a crest of ominous black rock. They glanced at each other. On they went.

In another hour they had reached the top. They couldn’t see for more than a few feet in any direction, and their clothes were soaking wet. Still, they celebrated by sharing a cup of coffee from their flask.

What happened next was something Marie hadn’t been able to explain. The mist seemed to give in front of her, and in this opening she saw a footpath curve off through a kind of meadow. She took a few steps towards the opening, so as to have a clearer view of the path, some clue as to where it went. When she glanced over her shoulder, Victor had disappeared. She couldn’t believe it. Assuming he must be behind her, she whirled one way, then the other. There was no one there. The mist closed in around her. She called his name softly, almost experimentally, but there was no reply. She shouted as loud as she could. Her voice refused to carry. Her sense of isolation was so acute that, paradoxically, she felt haunted.

She returned to the patch of ground where she’d been standing when she last saw him. The rocks looked different. She thought about crying, but managed to resist it. She had no idea what to do. The mist thinned. A bronze light fell. Looking up, she saw a group of figures dressed in white. One of them detached himself from the others and approached. His face was blurred with a growth of beard, and his black hair hung down to his shoulders, its knotted strands festooned with burrs and leaves and bits of bark. He stood sideways on to her and gestured with one hand. He wanted her to follow him. She realised she wasn’t frightened, and this surprised her.

The figures moved effortlessly across the rough terrain. She tried to draw level with them, hoping to get a look at their faces, hoping to talk to them, but no matter how quickly she walked they contrived to keep the same distance ahead of her. And then she forgot all about them because she saw Victor sitting on the ground beneath a stony ledge. She hurried over, knelt beside him. He had fallen, he said, but he didn’t think he’d hurt himself. His eyes were bright and pale. Did you see them?

She nodded.

White People. He had been about to launch into a discourse on their behaviour when he noticed one of them standing near by. Come on. He wants to take us down.

They followed the white figure until the border appeared below them. When they looked round to offer thanks, they found that they were, once again, alone.

To Marie, the story was a confirmation of the White People’s uncanny psychic skills, but my scepticism remained intact. They had been able to lead Victor and Marie down from the ridge because they were acquainted with out-of-the-way places. It was in places like these that they had been forced to live their lives. Also, they didn’t want other people intruding, perhaps. Victor and Marie had strayed on to their territory, and the two of them had been gently but firmly escorted away from it.

I watched the cloaked figures vanish into the shelter of a wood. Though I didn’t think I would need rescuing that day, the knowledge that I had set eyes on them gave me the feeling that nothing bad could happen, or if it did, then it wouldn’t be anything that couldn’t be remedied, and maybe, in the end, that was all people meant when they talked about unusual powers.

I stayed in a village pub that night. My only anxiety was that the authorities would have alerted rural communities for miles around, and that people would be on the look-out for strangers, but nobody even gave me a second glance. The next day I set out early and made good progress, arriving at the station towards four in the afternoon, just as the rain came down. I bought a one-way ticket to the capital.

When the train pulled in fifteen minutes later, I chose a seat by the window, facing forwards. My carriage was nearly empty. It was a Friday, I realised, and most people would be travelling in the opposite direction, going to the country for the weekend. Opening my wallet to check on the state of my finances, I noticed a piece of plain paper hidden in among the banknotes. Come and see us in the summer, it said. I’ll take you swimming. Under the two lines of looping handwriting was the imprint of a girl’s lips, the colour of crushed raspberries. She hadn’t signed her name. She hadn’t needed to. As we walked back to the house, her hair had flown into my face, half blinding me. She had laughed and then apologised, plucking the long, sweet-smelling strands out of the dark and twisting them into a knot. We had parted in the stable-yard, outside my door. The summer … Words like that had no significance for me. I couldn’t imagine where I’d be in six days, let alone six months.

I looked at her mouth again, the pattern of white lines as distinctive as a fingerprint. So intimate, that mouth — and the waxy fragrance of her lipstick lifting off the paper … Although she had brought me tea less than forty-eight hours ago, I felt I was thinking back to an event that had taken place in the long-distant past; it seemed exaggerated, almost apocryphal, even though nothing had happened. I imagined trying to tell the story to somebody — Vishram, for instance. There was a storm that night. A gale. I was in my room, reading a book. At first I thought the wind had blown the door open, but it was a girl… And Vishram would smile in that patient, knowing way of his, and he would say, You slept with her. And I would say, No, I didn’t. That’s the whole point. Vishram would shake his head at what he would undoubtedly see as slowness on my part, a wasted opportunity.

I settled back in my seat. The rain was still falling, each drop wriggling diagonally across the outside of the window. The telegraph poles slid by, their wires sinking, rising, sinking. When I thought of Vishram, he seemed too vivid a concoction, somehow. His suits shimmered. His nails were as dark as dried rose petals. He didn’t walk, he floated. He was extravagant, improbable, a character enlisted from a dream. It occurred to me that I had forgotten to let Sonya know about his offer of a job — and he’d been so insistent. Ah well. Tired after the day’s exertions, I leaned my head against the head-rest and surrendered to the rhythm of the train.

On waking, I saw that I was no longer alone. A girl was sitting on the other side of the carriage, reading a newspaper. She must have boarded the train while I was sleeping. She was smartly dressed, in a tailored black jacket and wide black trousers, and on her feet she wore a pair of men’s brogues, also black. She had hair the colour of copper wire, or bracken, and curious heavy-lidded eyes, and her face was covered with freckles to such a degree that she gave the impression of having been camouflaged. I was still studying her when she looked up from her paper and met my gaze.

She took a fast, shallow breath. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘Do you mean me?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled quickly. ‘Sorry. It’s just that I thought I’d seen you somewhere before.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’d remember my face, I suppose,’ she said lightly.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s striking.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘People often say that about me.’ Her voice was still light, objective. ‘I’m “striking”, apparently. I always have the feeling it’s just another word for odd.’

I laughed. ‘Where do you think you might have seen me?’

She turned in her seat and looked directly at me. Seen straight on, her face had even more power to unnerve. The way her eyelids lowered over her eyes, the distance between her cheekbones, the strong line of her jaw. Above all, her mouth, which was incongruously voluptuous, the top lip carved with delicate precision, the bottom lip succulent and drowsy. And then the freckles — as if she’d hidden herself behind a kind of veil or screen and was watching me through it. Taken all at once, these features gave her a look that was poised somewhere between the sensual and the menacing. I had never seen a face quite like it.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said after a while. ‘In Aquaville, I think.’

‘I’ve only been there once, and that was for a conference.’

‘Was it about two weeks ago?’

‘Yes. The Cross-Border Conference. It was held at the Sheraton.’

Now she was laughing. ‘I was there.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Really?’

‘Every night they put a chocolate on my pillow,’ she said. ‘It looked just like a smile.’

‘That’s right.’ I had forgotten about the chocolates.

‘And then there was that trip to the Yellow Quarter. I had such a bad feeling about it. I didn’t want to go.’

‘You weren’t hurt?’ I said. ‘In the bomb, I mean?’

She shook her head. ‘I was dancing at the time. There was a disco in the basement. Flaming something. We were all evacuated on the spot. What about you?’

‘I was in my room when it went off. I got out down the fire stairs.’

She folded her newspaper and put it on the table in front of her. ‘I must have seen you at one of the parties,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps I heard you speak. I don’t think we actually met.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Oh, nothing very important. I was just an observer.’ Looking down, she pinched the crease in one of her trouser-legs between finger and thumb and let it go again. Then she glanced at me quickly, so quickly that her hair still hung in her eyes. She used both hands to tuck it back behind her ears. ‘So what are you doing now?’

I had been wondering whether we would get to this point and what I would say if we did. After all, I had no idea who she was, this girl with the unique face and the disarming manner. She could have been anyone. In the event, the long hesitation worked in my favour.

‘Listen, if it’s confidential,’ she said, ‘I completely understand. It’s just that you don’t often see people from the Red Quarter all the way out here.’

So she did remember me. Before I could say anything, though, she spoke again.

‘You seem very much at home, if you don’t mind me saying so. I mean, I would never have guessed, not if I hadn’t seen you at the conference.’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s strange, but that’s exactly how I feel. Almost as if —’ I cut myself off, wary of giving too much away. ‘Of course there are things I could never get used to.’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Of course.’ She reached for her purse. ‘I’m just going to the buffet. Can I get you anything?’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

At the buffet I asked if I could buy her a drink. A brandy would be good, she said. Rather than returning to our seats, we took our brandies to a table in the dining-car. The girl’s name was Odell Burfoot, and she seemed eager to talk.

‘It must be extraordinary,’ she said, ‘crossing borders like you do.’

‘I haven’t really done very much of it …’

‘No, but still. How does it feel?’

‘It’s such a big thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s something you’re not even supposed to think about.’ I paused. ‘When it actually happens, it’s almost impossible to separate all the things you’ve been told you’re going to feel, or imagined you might feel, from the actual feeling itself. Does that make any sense?’

The look on her face, though neutral, appeared to intensify, as if her heart rate had accelerated or her temperature had just gone up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think it does.’

‘In the end, you’re doing something you never thought you’d do. So there’s excitement, but there’s fear too. I don’t think that would ever go away.’

She smiled at me with her eyes, but said nothing.

We flashed through a country station and on into the dark. As I sipped my brandy, I thought back to the conference. I tried to place Odell at one of the events or functions, but her face refused to float up into my memory. Another face came floating up instead.

‘Do you remember somebody called Walter Ming?’ I said. ‘He was at the conference too. His hair looked like a wig, and he wore the most peculiar suits.’

She laughed. ‘Poor Walter.’

‘You met him? What did you make of him?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m not sure. I suppose I thought there was something suspicious about him.’

‘I think he was just lonely. He asked me out to dinner, but I said I was busy. He was rude to me after that.’

Lonely? It had never occurred to me that Ming might be lonely.

‘I saw the two of you together,’ Odell said. ‘You talked to him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. A couple of times.’

‘He seemed really taken with you. Maybe he’d never met anyone like you before.’

‘You think so?’ All I could remember was how offhand and aloof he had seemed, and how slippery. ‘How odd that you were there — that you saw it all …’

She finished her drink, then glanced out of the window.

‘Aquaville,’ she said.

I climbed down from the train. There, once again, was the station concourse, with its sluggish crowds and its posters advertising remedies for colds and flu. To think of how nervously I’d surveyed the scene when I arrived back in November! Imagine how I must have stood out! This time, though, I was dressed in phlegmatic clothes, phlegmatic shoes. This time, against all the odds, I looked the part. What had that girl said? You seem very much at home, if you don’t mind me saying so. I hadn’t minded at all. In fact, it had bolstered my confidence. And yet, as I hesitated on the platform, I half expected to feel a hand plucking at my sleeve, and when I swung round, there he would be, the man I’d seen before, with his slicked-back hair and his damp greenish complexion, something of the gambler or the ticket tout about him. He would be facing away from me, of course, pretending to consult the departures board, its litany of cancellations, and I would hear the words — something that might interest you — then he would slip a card into my pocket. Instead, it was the girl with the freckles who circled round in front of me. She had put on a black cloche hat and a long dark coat whose hem brushed the tops of her carefully polished brogues. She had the severe, otherworldly look of a lay preacher. For the first time I felt a flicker of recognition, as though, at some point in the past, I had smelled her perfume as she stood beside me in a lift, or caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror as she walked behind me, but the flicker stubbornly refused to resolve itself into anything more definite.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose this is goodbye.’

‘Yes.’ I shook hands with her.

‘Are you going to forget me again?’

‘Probably,’ I said.

We both laughed.

She thanked me for the drink, then turned away.

As soon as she had vanished into the crowd I felt desolate. Foolish too. Why had I let her go so easily? I should have arranged another meeting — a walk, maybe, or dinner. This was my new life, after all, and I had enjoyed her company. But then, almost immediately, I had the disturbing sensation that the encounter hadn’t taken place at all, that I had invented the whole thing, right down to her freckles and her bracken-coloured hair, right down to her name — Odell Burfoot — so awkward, like somebody talking with a mouthful of stones … Or, if it had happened, it was already fading. Even the one moment of physical contact — the handshake — was beginning to seem ephemeral, as if I had shaken hands with a figment of my own imagination.

A dense fog had descended on the city. The passers-by looked shadowy and incomplete, mere sketches. The weather couldn’t have been more appropriate. I would be able to make my way through the streets without the slightest fear of being recognised. I only wished I had something warmer to wear. Perhaps, in the morning, I would find a charity shop or a fleamarket and buy myself a second-hand coat. How easy to allow that thought to form, how natural it seemed, and yet, at some point between now and tomorrow, I would be turning the handle on that pale-gold door, and then — and then what? I didn’t know. I had hopes, of course, but that was all. I couldn’t possibly have predicted what I’d be feeling in twelve hours’ time.

Opposite the station were three high-class hotels — the Aral, the Tethys and the Varuna. I remembered their ornate, decaying façades from my previous visit, but with my limited finances and little or no idea of what the next few days might bring, I decided it might be prudent to economise. I turned right, then right again, away from the city centre, opting for the maze of obscure canals that lay to the west of the station. Within minutes, I found myself in a different world — rubbish bags dumped everywhere, the scuttle of rats, and a smell that was almost sweet, like rotting celery. Wooden boards had been nailed over the ground-floor windows of all the houses. Once, I was able to peer between two slats that had come loose. The dark glint of floodwater, a framed photo of three children floating on the surface … Further on, a crudely painted arrow pointed to a basement. A palm-reader known as Undine plied her trade down there. I pictured Undine as a fat woman in a rowing-boat, which she would steer from one room to another using a frying pan or a spatula or the lid from an old biscuit tin. I hurried on, passing beneath the tattered awning of a fish restaurant. Sooner or later I was bound to find a cheap hotel, the kind of place where they wouldn’t care about documents or think it untoward if someone had no luggage.

As I crossed a metal footbridge, I looked to my left and saw a pale-blue neon sign fixed vertically to the front of a building and glowing weakly through the fog. HYDRO HOTEL, it said. Then, in smaller horizontal letters, vacancies. The canal was so narrow that there was only room for a path along one side, the houses opposite sliding straight into the water like teeth into a jaw. I retraced my steps and turned along the path, pausing when I reached the hotel entrance. The lobby had a beige tile floor with a strip of orange carpet running up the middle. Reception was a hatch cut in a chipboard partition. I pressed the buzzer on the counter. Behind me, on a drop-leaf table, stood an aquarium. I put my face close to the glass. A single goldfish was swimming upside-down among the weeds.

‘You know anything about fish?’

I straightened up. The hatch framed a woman, middle-aged, with dyed blonde hair and fleshy arms. Aquaville was printed on the front of her white T-shirt in silver script, as if a snail had crawled across it in the night.

‘When they swim upside-down like that,’ I said, ‘it means they’re dying.’

The woman nodded gloomily. ‘Oh well.’

‘Have you got a room?’

I told her I would be staying for two nights and paid in advance. This would establish my respectability, I thought, and stop her asking any awkward questions. She handed me a key. It was on the second floor, she said. At the front. Thanking her, I set off up the stairs. When I had rounded the first corner, I allowed myself a brief smile. Documents hadn’t even been mentioned.

My room smelled of cologne, something lemony, as though it had only recently been vacated. Either that, or nobody had cleaned. I walked into the bathroom. At first I thought the washbasin was cracked, but then I realised it was a black hair, six inches long. I flushed it down the toilet. Back in the room, I stood at the window, staring out into the fog. For days, if not for weeks, I’d hardly dared to think about the city in case all my attempts to return to it were thwarted. But I had managed it. Everything I wanted was no more than a few light steps away. Her hand resting on my forehead, her skirt a blur of brightly coloured flowers. There you are… A motor launch passed by below, its engine beating like a bird’s heart, soft and rapid.

That evening I ate dinner at the restaurant I had seen earlier. Called, rather touchingly, My Plaice — a fish which, as it happened, did not feature on the menu — it was a small, chaotic establishment where each new arrival was treated as an almost insurmountable catastrophe. My waiter, a bony, long-fingered man in his late twenties, seemed threatened by every word that was addressed to him. When I ordered fish of the day, for example, and a carafe of dry white wine, he just stared at me, his forehead pearled with sweat. Surprisingly, the food was quite good, and I lingered over it, exchanging a few words with Mr Festuccia, whose ‘plaice’ it was, and accepting a liqueur on the house. By the time I paid my bill it was almost eleven o’clock.

I asked my waiter to call me a taxi, but he gave me a look of such consternation that I instantly revised my request. Did he know where I could find transport at this time of night? Yes, he knew. I’d just have to let him think for a moment. Fingers in his mouth, he squinted at the ceiling. Yes, he’d seen a taxi-rank, he said finally. In the direction of the railway station. Five minutes’ walk. Well, maybe seven.

Once outside, I walked as fast as I could. I saw no point in delaying any longer. I seemed to have been waiting an eternity for this moment without ever knowing whether it would actually arrive. Now, at last, it was just a matter of a taxi ride. The city was still wrapped in fog, the light of the street lamps blurred as candy-floss. As I turned into a narrow passage that linked two canals, a door slammed open and a man whirled out on to the pavement with such velocity that I assumed he’d just been forcibly ejected from the house. We collided. He almost fell. As we muttered our apologies, I caught a glimpse of him. Something vulpine about the face, something canny. A quarter of a century collapsed in a split-second.

‘Cody!’ I said.

‘What? Who are you?’ He pushed his face close to mine, and I smelled his breath, sugary and yet corrupt, like over-ripe fruit. He must have been drinking for hours. Days even.

‘We were at Thorpe Hall together. I sat next to —’

Gripping my sleeve, he led me down a cul-de-sac that was still more narrow and obscure, then pushed me into a doorway. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Then or now?’

‘Now,’ he hissed. ‘Now, of course.’

‘Thomas Parry.’

‘And before?’

‘Micklewright. Matthew Micklewright.’

‘You really expect me to believe this is a coincidence?’

I laughed. ‘What else?’

His head swivelled towards the alley, as if he had heard something. He kept one hand on my chest, though, pinning me against the door. We remained in that position for at least a minute. I could probably have freed myself, but I chose not to. He turned to me again. ‘We could go somewhere,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got time.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right.’

He stepped away from me, sliding both hands into his trouser pockets. Though he was still staring at me, his face seemed to have been decanted of all expression, like someone daydreaming. For the first time he was thinking back, perhaps, trying to place me. I straightened my jacket, brushed myself down.

‘Are you still called De Vere?’ I asked.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Bracewell told me.’

‘Bracewell…’ He looked off down the cul-de-sac to where a cat crouched by a dustbin, its eyes lustrous and flat.

We didn’t say much after that — at least, not for a while. De Vere jerked his head and started walking. Over bridges we went, through a housing estate, across a park. Every now and then he would give me a rapid sideways glance. He still appeared to suspect me of some kind of trickery or subterfuge.

At last we reached a building whose double-doors were paned with frosted glass. De Vere knocked twice. A stooping grey-haired man let us in. The interior was poorly lit, the floor bare concrete, the walls pale-blue to waist-height and then cream beyond. The man locked the doors behind us, grumbling about the weather. As we set off down a corridor, I thought I could smell chlorine.

‘A swimming-pool,’ I said.

‘Used to be,’ De Vere said. ‘It’s a bar now.’

We passed through another set of double-doors and into a vast dark hall that was lit only by candles, the air filled with the murmur of people talking in lowered voices. Glass-topped tables had been arranged on the floor of the pool. More tables stood around the edge. The fact that it had been drained was supposed to be a political statement, De Vere told me, a slight sneer on his face. Clearly he thought such gestures either immature or futile.

There were no free tables in the pool itself, so we sat above it, near the diving-board. I studied De Vere as he ordered drinks, large ones — gin for him, brandy for me. He looked pretty much as I remembered him. He had the same unusually red lips and cocky features, and he gave off the same subtle aura of debauchery — or perhaps it wasn’t quite so subtle any more, I thought, as I noted the faint but uneven growth of beard, the stained teeth, the eyes that looked bloodshot, almost infected. He had acquired a curiously indefinite quality. I could see the boy he used to be, but I could also see the old man he was going to become. He was like somebody trapped between different versions of himself, unwilling — or unable — to decide between them.

Our drinks arrived. De Vere snatched up his gin and drank half of it straight down, then he apologised for his behaviour in the alley.

‘You did seem a bit nervous,’ I said.

He let out an explosive sound that was only distantly related to laughter. ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on round here?’ He watched me across the candle flame, the shadows shifting on his face. ‘No. Probably not.’ He drank from his glass again, icecubes jostling against his teeth.

The authorities pretended to be initiating transfers, he told me, but what they were actually doing was throwing people into prisons or detention centres, or even, and here his voice trembled, into unmarked graves.

‘It’s true,’ he said when he saw my reaction. ‘At least one person I know has disappeared. Because he spoke out. Because he said it was wrong, the way our country’s organised, and that no government should have the right to —’ He shook his head, as if it was useless to go on about such things, then he finished his drink and stared fiercely into the empty glass.

‘It doesn’t sound very phlegmatic,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to be strong to abuse power. You can abuse it out of weakness or insecurity. Out of fear. We’ve had so many governments during the last decade that every new one spends most of the time looking over its shoulder, trying to consolidate its position — using whatever means it can.’ Once again, he saw the expression on my face. ‘You think I’m exaggerating.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Do you still live in the Red Quarter?’ he said.

‘It’s where I’ve been living,’ I said, ‘yes.’

‘Well, let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘It’s happening there too.’

I started to remonstrate, but he talked over me.

‘Maybe not the killings, but the arrests, the imprisonment without trial, the interrogations. That’s why we all have an Internal Security Act. That’s what it’s for. He looked at me and shook his head again, as though he couldn’t believe my naivety. ‘Why do you think you have the same leader year after year?’

‘Maybe people are happy with the way things are,’ I said quietly.

‘Happy?’ He almost choked on the word. Then he beckoned to the waiter and ordered two more drinks.

‘I don’t know how you know all this,’ I said.

‘Because I talk to people,’ he said. ‘Because I listen. Because I don’t go round with my head buried in the sand.’

We sat in silence until the waiter brought our drinks. This time I paid.

I glanced down into the pool where a young couple were sitting at a table, kissing. ‘So you knew about Bracewell.’

De Vere looked up slowly. ‘That’s not his name.’

‘Maclean,’ I said. ‘How did you find out?’

‘A policeman I was having sex with told me.’ He stared at me, chin lifted, and I caught a glimpse of Cody, the boy I used to know — his combative spirit, his iconoclasm — then he looked down and began to fidget with his plastic swizzle-stick. ‘I used to have a thing about policemen in those days. Border guards as well. Maybe it was the uniforms — or maybe it was as close as I could get to being somewhere else.’

The policeman in question was one of the people who had found Maclean. Haunted by the case, he had given De Vere a graphic description of the mutilated body, as if by recording every detail he might exorcise himself.

‘He even told me about —’ De Vere broke off. He wiped at his nose savagely with the palm of his hand. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck it.’ He wiped at his nose again, then his eyes, and then sniffed loudly. ‘What did you have to turn up for? What are you doing here, anyway?’

I was silent for a moment.

Then I spoke again. ‘So you were sent to the Yellow Quarter?’

‘I spent eight years in the Yellow Quarter. Now I’m here. They don’t seem to know what to do with me. Can’t make up their minds.’

‘And he knew you were there?’

‘Maclean? Yes, he knew.’ De Vere’s face twisted, and he looked away. ‘He wanted to join me. He wanted to be with me. That’s why he tried to escape.’ De Vere laid his hand flat on the table, the palm facing down. The way he was staring at it, it could have belonged to someone else. ‘He never stopped loving me — did he?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He talked about you all the time.’

With a single violent gesture, De Vere reached into his pocket and tossed something on to the table. The object behaved much as a dice would have done, only it seemed heavier, clumsier. When it came to rest, I saw it was his wedding ring. I remembered Bracewell telling me that they had both thrown their rings into the moat. Was that a lie, or had De Vere gone back later and fished his out again?

‘Crazy, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘It’s just the wheel-nut from some old bastard’s car.’

‘It’s more than that,’ I said.

He eyed me sceptically. I was presuming to speak for him, and I didn’t have the right. With an impatient sound, half sigh, half snarl, he snatched up the ring and thrust it back into his pocket, as if he hated himself for keeping it but couldn’t help himself, then he reached for his glass and swirled the contents. ‘Another drink?’

Wondering how late it was, I risked a look at De Vere’s watch. He noticed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘There’s somewhere I’ve got to be. I mean, I don’t —’

‘Yes. Of course.’ He jumped to his feet, rocking the table. His drink toppled over. ‘Sorry to have kept you.’

‘No, wait. I didn’t mean —’

But he was already brushing past me. By the time I twisted round in my chair, he had disappeared through the double-doors at the far end of the pool. Somehow, I felt I could still see him, though — his tousled red-brown hair, his tight, hoisted shoulders, the worn-down heels on his shoes.

When I left the bar moments later I half expected to find him on the towpath, pacing up and down, or scowling into the canal. He would still be smarting from what he would have perceived as an insult, but I was ready to apologise. I had been insensitive, unthinking. Also, I wanted to have the chance to explain myself. If I told him what I was doing, I was sure that he would understand. But he had gone. I listened for his footsteps, called his name. Out in the fog somewhere was De Vere, who I hadn’t seen for twenty-seven years.

I waited ten or fifteen minutes, but he didn’t return. I had lost him, probably for ever. Even an unexpected stroke of luck — a water-taxi gliding out of the fog with its ‘for hire’ light on — couldn’t lift my spirits. I flagged the taxi down. It cut its speed and drifted towards me. In a listless voice, I gave the driver the address.

‘That’s quite a way,’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve got money.’

I stepped down into the cabin. Everything I touched was damp and slightly sticky. If anything, the fog had thickened since the early evening, and the taxi’s engine had a flat, dead sound as we pulled out into the canal. There wasn’t a single second during that long ride out to the club when I didn’t regret my tactlessness.

I suppose I should’ve known that something would go wrong. There had been any number of warning signs, not least De Vere with his sinister disclosures. I was dreaming of a reunion, though, a kind of homecoming, and when the club’s white stucco rose out of the murk, lights burning in the ground-floor windows, my excitement was so great that I didn’t doubt that it was all about to happen. I didn’t really notice the figures standing on the towpath, let alone grant them any particular significance. I paid the taxi-driver. My hands shook so much that I almost dropped my wallet in the canal. There were no thoughts of a journey back to the centre, no thoughts of anything beyond this moment… Only when I approached the club did I realise that the figures were all dressed identically, in dark-blue tunics, and dark-blue hats with black plastic brims, and that their eyes were trained exclusively on me. They were police, of course. One of them stepped forwards, flipping open a small notebook. ‘Thomas Parry?’

I didn’t answer. Clearly they had been patrolling the quayside for some time. They had an excitement that was all their own — the thrill of a tip-off, a stake-out, a possible arrest. Their bodies trembled with stored tension.

‘You’re to come with us,’ the man with the notebook told me.

To have travelled so far, to have got so close — and now this … I hadn’t even considered such an outcome, and my reaction was suitably incongruous. I laughed out loud.

‘We’re taking you to the Ministry,’ the same man said, ‘for questioning.’ His voice had tightened. He nodded to one of his colleagues, who grasped me by the upper arm and tried to steer me towards a waiting motor launch. I immediately shook him off. I had never been able to bear the feeling of being held like that.

‘First I have to go into the club,’ I said.

The man with the notebook shook his head. ‘We’ve got our orders.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘it won’t take —’

‘It’s orders,’ one of the others said. ‘It’s not up to us.’

The inside of my head buzzed and flashed, as if something in my brain had blown. They were about to deny me the very thing that I’d been looking forward to, the thing I wanted most in all the world. I pushed past them, making for the entrance, and was aware, for a few moments, of people shocked into unnatural shapes.

Before I could reach the door, though, two of them grabbed hold of me. Then the third joined in, his notebook fluttering clumsily to the ground. As we struggled on the steps, one of the glass doors opened and the blonde-haired girl looked out. She was wearing her kimono with its pattern of exotic birds and trees, and her eyebrows, lifted a little in surprise, were plucked into two fine arcs, as usual. In order to recreate the experience of my other visits to the club — or to reproduce the same level of intensity, at least — I had always felt that conditions had to be similar, if not identical, and the blonde girl’s presence there that night, the fact that she would have been sitting in the ticket booth when I walked in, only added to the fury with which I resisted all attempts to restrain me. I was told later that I seemed to possess an almost superhuman strength, and that, if there hadn’t been three policemen at the scene, and if one of them hadn’t been a famous wrestler when he was young, I might actually have got away.

We passed beneath a bridge and swung sharply to the left, the canal splitting wide open in our wake, waves slapping against the sheer dark walls of town houses and then rebounding. The massive bulk of the Ministry towered above us now, its eaves all but shutting out the sky. Though it was after two in the morning, lights still showed in several of the windows. It could be a twenty-four-hour job, working for the government. Nobody knew that better than I did.

I was escorted to a room on the first floor where two men were waiting for me. One wore glasses with no frames, his brown eyes floating beneath the lenses like a pair of sea anemones. The other man had the fleshy but solid build of a field athlete. Running along the far wall of the office was a soundproofed window that overlooked an indoor marina. The water was lit from below, an eerie jewelled green, and various small craft were going silently about their business.

The man with the glasses installed himself behind a desk. I took a seat in front of him. The other man lowered himself, grunting, into a swivel chair some distance to my left. We spent the first half-hour establishing the facts — name, address, occupation, and so on. As for the date of my arrival, I had entered the Blue Quarter on Monday the 7th of November, in the morning, and my visa had expired three days later, on the 10th. I had been at large, illegally, for about two weeks.

At one point the man to my left leaned forwards. ‘Thomas Parry,’ he said in a thin, high-pitched voice that sat awkwardly with his muscular physique. ‘You know, I’m not sure I didn’t speak to you once, on the phone.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ the man with the glasses said. ‘Why did you return to the Blue Quarter?’

‘There’s no point trying to explain,’ I said.

‘No point?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

The ferocity of what had flashed through me on the towpath seemed to have burned out entire circuits in my head. Only a kind of numb, childish truculence remained — but that seemed justifiable. I was once again the boy who had been abducted in the middle of the night, the boy who had been removed from his home against his will, only this time my feelings were right there on the surface.

‘If you hadn’t been arrested,’ the man with the glasses was saying, ‘what would you have done? What would you have done tomorrow, for example?’

I shook my head. For some reason I remembered Chloe Allen in that moment — her mockery of all authority, her cheek, the sweet smell of her breath through the van’s wire-mesh …

‘You know what you are?’ I said with a smile. ‘You’re drones.’

During the silence that followed, I happened to glance upwards. Slabs of reflected light from the marina were undulating on the ceiling. Distracting, hypnotic, oddly sensual, it was almost as if a belly dancer was performing in the room.

‘Drones,’ I said again.

The man with the glasses wanted to know who I had come into contact with since arriving in the Blue Quarter for the second time. He would be needing a list of names and places, he said — an inventory, in other words, of every one of my encounters. I brought my eyes back down from the ceiling. I didn’t have the slightest intention of betraying Owen or Rhiannon — or any other member of the community for that matter. No one was getting any names and places out of me.

‘Well?’ said the man with the glasses.

I had been in a shipwreck, I told him. I had nearly drowned. On reaching land, I had been exhausted and bewildered. I’d had no idea where I was. Though I had almost certainly met people, I didn’t know who they were or where they lived.

But he would not give up. ‘What about the route you took?’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shouted. ‘Are you deaf?’

Taking a deep breath, then letting the air out through his nose, the man shut down his computer. He glanced briefly at his colleague. The fleshy man’s face showed no discernible expression.

Even though I couldn’t recall any of the people to whom I had been exposed, the man with the glasses said, it was likely that I had been contaminated as a result. He would therefore be recommending a series of tests to determine the exact nature and degree of that contamination. He consulted his watch. Testing would begin at midday.

I slept poorly that night. Each time I woke up, my pillow would be hot, and when I lifted my head all I could see was a pale oblong hanging in the darkness. Guards had shown me to a small windowless room — a ‘secure unit’, as they called it — in the basement of the Ministry. There was a narrow bed, with sheets that smelled sharply of bleach, as though certain of my predecessors had soiled themselves. There was also a sink and a toilet, both made of metal. In the top half of the door was a single pane of reinforced glass. Once I had established where I was, I would turn my pillow over, cool side facing up, and then lie back. So the authorities had finally caught up with me … I couldn’t work out who the informer was. The woman who ran the hotel, perhaps. Or that sweaty waiter at the restaurant. Or perhaps De Vere had had good reason to be paranoid: if the police were keeping him under surveillance, as he suspected, then they couldn’t have failed to notice me. I remembered De Vere’s missing friend and wondered if I should be frightened.

Thoughts came to me one at a time, with no great urgency.

At midday I was taken to a room that resembled a laboratory. There were no windows here either, just pale-green walls and the steady rush of air through ventilation grilles. A technician asked me to remove my shirt, then she proceeded to wire me up to a number of machines. I was being put through various psychological tests, she said, but they would be monitoring my physiological responses at the same time, everything from heart rate and blood pressure to galvanic skin response, muscle tension and brain activity. Data of this kind added to the clarity of the picture that emerged.

I nodded.

‘We do pretty much the same where I come from.’

Though she gave me a smile, she didn’t seem remotely interested in the fact that I’d been involved in work that was similar to hers.

I spent most of the day in that room. To start with, I took a test designed to map out the basic structure of my personality. This was followed by a written paper, comprising several hundred true/false statements, which would allow the authorities to make predictions about my future behaviour. Later came the visual tests. In responding to a series of pictures, I would unconsciously reveal the kinds of ways in which I interacted with the world around me. In the middle of the afternoon I was allowed an hour’s break, during which I ate lunch in the Ministry canteen.

After the break, my levels of fear, anxiety and depression were assessed. Finally, towards seven o’clock, I was moved to a different room. I noted the seascapes on the walls, the scatter cushions, the stacks of monthly magazines. The atmosphere had been carefully constructed so as to prevent subjects feeling nervous or threatened. In the subsequent ‘diagnostic’ interview I was required to react to a sequence of questions and statements which were intended to tap into my emotions. My responses were so full of anger that I felt transparent. I couldn’t pretend the anger wasn’t there, though, and I couldn’t seem to disguise it either.

By the time I had completed everything that was asked of me, it was late in the evening and I could hardly keep my eyes open. They took me back to my room. I didn’t have much of an appetite, but they brought me supper anyway. Not long afterwards I went to bed. My tests would be processed overnight, they had told me, then I would see a psychological assessment officer who would inform me not only of the findings but of any action that might be taken as a result.

Since they had such a dramatic effect on people’s lives, and since they dealt with these people face to face, psychological assessment officers were routinely subjected to considerable levels of pressure and stress, and it was no wonder, perhaps, if they were prone to delusions of grandeur, and no wonder if, from time to time, they became brittle and over-sensitive. Like plants growing in rarefied conditions, they tended to assume unusual or even distorted forms, and Dr Maurice Gilbert, whom I saw at five o’clock the following afternoon, was no exception. He had the doughy, etiolated look of someone who seldom ventured outdoors. Only his hair had flourished: glossy, thick, oxblood in colour, he wore it swept back and a little too long, a sure sign that it was a feature of which he was inordinately proud.

‘It’s not often,’ he mused from behind his desk, ‘that somebody leaves the Red Quarter for the Blue Quarter. I mean, why would anyone do that? Life’s supposed to be so harmonious over there, so full of purpose and good cheer — so perfect …’

I let my eyes drift past him to the window. The blinds had been lowered, though, and the slats were tilted shut. There was no view.

‘But perhaps it’s too perfect,’ Gilbert continued. ‘Perhaps one craves a little discord, a little mess. Perhaps, in the end, we tire of harmony.’ He adjusted one of his gold cufflinks, then leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, I’ve often thought that I belonged in the Red Quarter, but the results never came out quite right. It’s almost as if the tests we use aren’t capable of picking up the nuances that make us what we are, as if our methods of assessment simply aren’t fine enough. Have you ever had that feeling, Mr Parry, that our procedures, our techniques, are failing us?’

I thought at first that he might be trying to trick me into admitting something, but then I realised that the question had been rhetorical. Wholly preoccupied with himself, Gilbert was in love with the sound of his own voice, and he would need nothing from me except an occasional prompting.

‘It sounds strange to say it,’ he went on, ‘possibly even a touch arrogant’ — and his eyes veered towards me, and he let out an abrupt, abbreviated sound, not unlike a dog’s bark — ‘but we know ourselves, don’t we? Surely we know ourselves better than all this’ — and he looked around the room — ‘all this cumbersome machinery with which we surround ourselves?’

I smothered a yawn, but once again I chose not to reply. My patience was running out. I didn’t know how much more of Gilbert I could stand.

‘However,’ he said, and he rose to his feet with a finger raised, as if warning me not to jump to any conclusions, and then began to pace up and down in front of the drawn blinds, ‘the machines, the tests, the inventories — they’re all we have at the moment, poor creatures that we are. At times, you know, I can’t help feeling that we live in an impossibly primitive age, and that future generations will look back at us and laugh.’ Staring at the carpet, he shook his head and smiled ruefully. ‘Still, that’s the way the system works — at this point in history, anyway — and if I find it primitive, well, who am I? Who’s going to listen to me?’

‘Nobody,’ I said.

Gilbert’s head came up sharply, and his eyes narrowed a fraction as he peered across the room at me. Until that moment, for reasons I didn’t completely understand, he had been treating me as an accomplice, a kind of ally, but now he saw that I was actually the enemy. I watched him return to his desk and flip through my case notes. I could restrain myself no longer.

‘Look, it’s obvious you’re going to send me to the Yellow Quarter,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you stop playing games and just get on with it?’

Gilbert had paused with the corner of a page between finger and thumb, and he was looking up at me. The lower half of his face appeared to have swollen slightly, as though he was concealing an entire plum inside his mouth.

‘The Yellow Quarter?’ he said. ‘Oh no. We’re not sending you there.’