Divided Kingdom

Chapter Eight

She ran ahead of me, her hair and coat-tails flapping. Snow poured into the gap between us. We passed to the left of a church, its roof partly gone, its stone floor open to the sky. There were other buildings, ancient-looking, some with walls still standing, some torn down to their foundations. Through a hedge and into a garden, the grass waist-high. Buildings here too. More recent. Tall chimneys, narrow windows. All in a state of disrepair. I looked round, eyes half-closed against the swirling snow. I thought I could hear men’s voices, but the men themselves weren’t visible.

We had reached the back of a house, the whole wall hidden behind a screen of vines and creepers. The girl heaved on a door and pushed me inside. Brick steps led down to a cellar. The smell of cold ashes and mouse-droppings. The faintest memory of candle wax. She motioned for me to follow, then parted a frayed curtain to reveal a second door, the wood untreated, dark as peat. She bolted it behind us and started up a narrow staircase. I could only tell where she was by listening to her footsteps on the bare boards. Once, a light flared in my head and I saw a hand splayed on the earth, pale as something that had just been disinterred, and I knew that it belonged to Lum, even though I couldn’t see any other part of her.

At last we came out into a room with a low ceiling and a single round window. There was no view, only a tangle of greenery, the snow a constant slanting movement just beyond. Again the girl bolted the door behind us, then she went to the window and put her face close to the criss-crossing bars. I squatted on my haunches, my heart beating so hard that it seemed to shake my whole body. Blood sizzled in my ears. They were still out there, all the rest of them.

The girl turned from the window. ‘Do you know who I am?’

I stared at her. It had gone all blank inside me. All hollow.

‘You don’t remember me, do you.’

What was she saying?

‘Can you talk?’ She moved towards me, knelt in front of me. I felt her eyes searching my face. All hollow. Just a space. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s not important.’

I’m sorry, I said inside my head.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now. You’re going to be all right.’ She placed her hand over mine. I was aware of its weight, its heat. ‘They’ll never find us here. It’s too rundown, too overgrown. There are too many rooms. They’ll lose interest. I know what they’re like.’

That’s not what I’m frightened of, I said inside my head.

She couldn’t hear a thing, of course, and yet she held herself quite still as she looked at me, and her look didn’t waver, not for a moment. She didn’t even seem to blink. She had lines in the thin skin below her eyes, which made me think that she had slept too little in her life, or seen too much. ‘You really don’t recognise me, do you?’ She tucked a strand of her bracken-coloured hair behind her ear. ‘Well, maybe it’s no wonder,’ she added, half to herself.

Faint cries reached me from outside. The window was a mouth belonging to someone in great pain.

‘Listen to me,’ the girl said.

I was receiving images of mud and roots, a clearing in the woods, and all from ground-level, as if my face had been forced sideways into the dirt. Men stood round me, a boy too. Thick fingers held his shoulder. A dog panted in my ear, its breathing coarse and hot. Far above me, out of reach, I saw a tree’s branches shifting against a darkening sky, and it was beautiful up there, and quiet, a kind of paradise. I was seeing through the eyes of one of my companions, a person was calling out to me, and there was nothing I could do.

‘Listen,’ the girl said.

And she began to speak to me. She had been with me all along, she said. She had made her share of mistakes. She had been too slow sometimes, too indecisive, which was only to be expected, perhaps, and once or twice she had lost me altogether. But when I slipped just now. When I fell. That was her. She’d pushed me.

What are you saying? I said inside my head.

There had been someone right behind me, she told me. One of them. I shouldn’t worry, though. Everything would be fine now. She was going to take me home. That was why she had appeared. That was what she did.

I still didn’t understand.

Later, she withdrew into the middle of the room, an elbow cupped in the palm of one hand, the fingers curled against her chin. She needed to go out for supplies, she said. I would have to stay put. I wasn’t to leave the room, not under any circumstances. She moved towards a second door, which I hadn’t noticed until that moment. Still sitting on the ground, I drew my knees up to my chest, then laid my forearms over them and lowered my head.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You rest for a while.’

The door closed behind her. Her footsteps receded.

As soon as she had gone, I began to doubt her existence. She seemed so convenient — too good to be true. Had I invented a saviour for myself? Was the only kindness imaginary?

Dusk crept into the room as though it, too, were seeking refuge.

The last of the light picked out a cobweb, its fragile hammock slung high up in one corner. The smell of earth grew stronger, earth that had never seen the sun.

When I finally heard noises, I flattened myself against the wall, expecting men with weapons. The door opened. The girl backed into the room. She had a rucksack over her shoulder, and she was dragging some lengths of material. Velvet, she said. She thought they might have been curtains. She had found a few hessian sacks as well. If we used the sacks as a kind of mattress, she said, we could pull the curtains over us like blankets and it might just be enough to keep us warm. She was sorry she’d been so long. She hoped I hadn’t worried.

While I arranged the bedding on the floor, she opened her rucksack and unpacked a wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread with a jagged crust. There was also a brown-paper bag filled with apples, some pickled onions in a jar and a flask of wine shaped like a teardrop. We could not risk a candle, she said. Someone might see it from outside. We made do with the dim glow that filtered through the window, starlight reflecting off the snow.

She watched as I washed the food down with gulps of rough red wine.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

After we had eaten, she wrapped up the rest of the food and put it in her rucksack, which she hung on a nail behind the door. Undoing my boots, I climbed into the bed and lay down on my side, one hand beneath my cheek. I was still receiving pictures. They belonged to the operating theatre or the mortuary, the bloodshed casual, plenteous. My whole body flinched each time they came.

She gave me something she called dwale. She kept it in a small glass bottle that she wore on a cord around her neck. The liquid tasted of alcohol and stale herbs. It would help to calm me, she said. I watched her settle beside me, on her back.

Night had filled the room. The darkness of her face against the lesser darkness of the air. Her even breathing. A silence had descended, a silence that didn’t necessarily mean peace. Through the window came the smell of snow. Clean, vaguely metallic. Like stainless steel.

My mouth had dried up. I had no spit.

Though the cries had stopped, I could still hear them.

I was exhausted, and yet I couldn’t seem to sleep — or if I did drift off for a while I was always on the verge of witnessing some terrible atrocity, violence the like of which I had never imagined before, let alone encountered. In my dreams people kept telling me not to look. If I didn’t look, they told me, I would be all right. But I couldn’t help looking. There was a part of me that was inquisitive, perhaps, or weak-willed, or even missing altogether. I was the woman who became a pillar of salt. The warrior who turned to stone.

All night she lay beside me, and I drew comfort from the warmth and nearness of her body. When the cold of the floor rose up through the layers of sacking, I pressed myself against her, the backs of her thighs on my lap, her hair in my mouth. She didn’t seem to mind. As for me, I was used to sleeping next to strangers. I’d been doing it for weeks.

At some point she realised I was still awake and started telling me a story.

‘The night you were taken from your family,’ she said, ‘was the night I came into the world.’

I stared at her, wondering how she knew that, but she didn’t notice. She was looking at the ceiling, her profile showing as the finest of silver lines.

She had been born on a houseboat, which was where her parents had lived back then. Her father worked as a lock-keeper. At midnight, when she was five hours old, she had opened her eyes for the first time. It had been snowing all evening.

It was raining where I was, I said inside my head.

Her mother wrapped her in a shawl and held her up to the window. She had watched the snowflakes come showering out of the sky like white flowers, snowflakes landing on the canal and vanishing. She had no memories of that night — her parents had told her about it later, when she was older — but she sometimes wondered whether that was where it all began.

Where what began? I said inside my head.

The first time it happened, she had been standing on the towpath. She remembered the warm air on her bare arms, the drowsy sound of bees humming. It must have been summer. She couldn’t have been more than four or five. A dandelion floated out over the still green water. She had only stared at the delicate, almost transparent ball of seeds for a few moments, but when she returned to herself again she was standing on the other side of the canal. She had a tickle in her nose, as if she might be about to sneeze, and both her feet were wet. She began to cry. Her father appeared on the deck of the houseboat, his face the colour of a peeled apple. How did you get over there, Odell? She had no words for what she’d done.

After that, she kept ending up in strange places. She learned to look forward to the lost seconds, the thrilling, inexplicable journey from where she was to somewhere else. She would feel powerful yet passive. Years later, she had the same sensation on a funfair ride, the way the car whirled her backwards in a tight curve, a motion that was slow at first, oddly hydraulic, then high-speed, blurry, irresistible. She couldn’t always regulate it, though, certainly not in the beginning. Sometimes it took her by surprise, like the afternoon she stepped outside during a gale and her mother found her as the sun was setting, two miles down the towpath and halfway up a tree.

Under the velvet my body jerked, tension leaving my muscles at long last.

One day she went walking with her parents in the fields near the canal. The wind was blowing hard again, and she had lifted her arms away from her sides and leaned against it, as if it were a wall. Then she was gone. Her parents had been looking at her when it happened, waiting for her to catch up with them. In the next moment they heard her calling from the far end of the field. Though it scared them half to death, it also came as something of a relief. In the past they had often been at a loss to explain her movements, but now, perhaps, they had an answer. She should protect her gift, they told her. Keep it to herself. She did the opposite, of course.

I was falling away. Sinking. A light object dropping through thick liquid.

The trouble was, she had never been popular at school. Her looks seemed to unnerve people. They could never tell what she was thinking. To try and win them over, she started doing tricks. Once, while in the company of two girls from her class, she used a gust of wind to transport her from the school playground to the roof of the bicycle shed. Up here, she shouted. I’m up here. The girls wouldn’t have anything to do with her after that. They claimed she’d hypnotised them. All they would talk about was her weird eyes. Green, they said, but black too, somehow, like fir trees planted too close together. Black like a forest. And her face as well, the freckles. It made them think of one of those roadsigns in the country that people have fired guns at –

I woke to see bright fragments lying on the floor. Despite the barred window and its mask of vines and creepers, the sun had managed to penetrate the room. I turned in the bed. The girl’s eyes slid open.

‘You slept,’ she said.

I sat up and yawned, the memory of her story still with me. It seemed to have been addressed to the naive or credulous side of me. It appeared to be testing my ability to suspend my disbelief. But maybe that was the whole point. She had claimed to be capable of extraordinary things. I was supposed to have faith in her.

She had been out, she said, just before dawn. The men had gone. As for my friends …

I rose to my feet and walked into the corner of the room. I found a cobweb that spanned both walls and pushed gently at the sticky threads. They had surprising resilience. Behind me, the girl had fallen silent, aware that I had heard enough. When she spoke again, she approached the subject from a different angle.

We would have to lie low, she said. Let things settle. In the meantime, she had a change of clothes for me. It wouldn’t be wise to be dressed as one of the White People, not at the moment. If I wanted to wash, there was a water-butt outside. I turned to face her. She was sitting on the faded velvet, lacing up her boots.

Yes, I said inside my head. I’d like to wash.

She handed me a bag containing the clothes, then she unbolted the door. I followed her down the staircase and into the cellar. While she looked outside, to make sure there was nobody around, I stared at the walls. I’d just noticed the graffiti. Genitals, both male and female, all highly exaggerated.

‘Originally this would have been a guest-house for the priory,’ the girl said. ‘Later, it became the vicarage. The vicar was moved out during the Rearrangement.’ She was standing just inside the room, shaking water off her hands. ‘After he went, the place was taken over by the military. They trained border guards here. You can see what kind of people they must have been.’ Her eyes drifted across the walls without showing any expression. ‘I don’t know why they left. Maybe the novelty wore off. It’s been empty for a while now.’ She glanced at me. ‘You go and wash if you like. I’ll wait here.’

The hinges let out a croak as I pushed the door open.

It was the most perfect morning. Beneath a blue sky the snow had the restrained glitter of caster sugar, and it lay evenly on everything, the branches of the trees half white, half black. The air had absolute clarity and crispness; simply to stand and breathe felt like a luxury. I thought I could hear the trickle of a stream, but it might have been the river on the far side of the field — or perhaps the snow had already started melting. There was a tension to the stillness, as if the beauty of the day could not be sustained for long.

I moved to the water-butt and stripped off my white garments. Spattered with mud, ashes and dried blood, they stood out quite distinctly against the snow. I kicked off one boot, then the other. They lay there awkwardly like a pair of crows that had been shot in mid-air and then plummeted to earth. Bending over the barrel, I brought handful after handful of water to my face. The cold made me gasp. My skin stung. The ring that hung around my neck knocked against the barrel’s lip as I leaned forwards. My fingers soon went numb. I took care not to lift my eyes towards the ridge. I didn’t want to think about what had happened there.

I dried myself on my undershirt, then dressed in the clothes the girl had given me — jeans, a black sweater, thick wool socks and a cheap brown leather coat. I felt in my cloak pocket. It was empty. The key to the front door of the Cliff was gone. So was the lighter and the book of dreams. I must have lost them when I fell. Still fastened to my wrist, though, was my watch, the one that didn’t tell the time. I pulled my boots back on, then folded up the cloak.

When I walked back into the cellar, the girl glanced round, and a single ray of sun reached through a broken pane high in the wall, lighting up her face. I understood what her classmates had meant about her eyes. They were neither black nor green, and yet both colours were involved, somehow.

‘Let’s go back up,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

Like peasants from another period of history, we breakfasted on bread, cheese, pickled onions and red wine. While we ate and drank, the girl outlined her plan. We were deep in the Yellow Quarter, so there was no easy option. If we travelled south and luck was on our side, we could reach the Red Quarter in four or five days. It might be dangerous, but it would be better than heading east and crossing into the Green Quarter, where the authorities were probably still looking for me. Also, we would only have to cross one border, not two. We would have to pretend to be a couple, though. A choleric couple. Had I seen how they behaved? No? Well, the beauty of it was I didn’t need to talk. The kind of man she had in mind was more likely to hit a woman than speak to her. The women tended to nag and moan, while the men just grunted or read the papers.

‘That’s all you have to do,’ she said. ‘Ignore me. You can do that, can’t you?’

I nodded slowly. Of course I could ignore her. I didn’t know her. When we first arrived in the room, she’d asked if I remembered her. What was that about? I still had no idea.

After breakfast she suggested a game of draughts to pass the time. I scratched out a board on the floor with a stone while she went to look for objects we could use as pieces. She returned with some chunks of burnt wood and fragments of stained glass, all of which she had collected in the church. We played for most of the morning, and I didn’t win once.

In the middle of the day she had to go out again for provisions. I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. It was a way of protecting myself from the images that were appearing in my head, images that were graphic, almost medical. Also, if I stayed awake, I would only worry. What if something were to happen to her? I didn’t believe I could survive by myself. Not out here. Without her, I would be dead — or worse.

I slept fitfully, but the images still came, disguised as dreams.

She returned with cold sausage, bread, pickled cabbage and more red wine, but she seemed different, more preoccupied, and we ate in silence. The light gradually faded, the room darkening long before the world outside.

When we had finished, she asked me if she should go on with her story. I nodded, and she picked up exactly where she’d left off.

Ignoring her parents’ advice, she carried on performing for other children in the hope that they would become her friends, but her gift just frightened or bewildered them. She was lonelier than ever. And then, one morning, she received an official-looking letter. Her father opened it and read it first. ‘They know,’ he said.

‘Know what?’ she said.

Her father handed her the letter. She was required to appear before a tribunal, not locally, but in the capital, two hundred miles away. She couldn’t tell what the charge was — the summons contrived to be both menacing and utterly inscrutable — but she knew she was guilty.

On the appointed day she caught a train to Aquaville, her parents’ reproach clearly audible in the rhythm of the wheels on the track: If only you’d listened — if only you’d listened … If only I’d listened, she thought as she climbed the steps to the Ministry, her mouth dry, her heart stumbling inside her. She was convinced she was about to be severely punished. Borstal at the very least, maybe even a prison sentence.

A government official escorted her to a grey door high up in the building. He turned the handle, then stepped aside to let her through. On entering the room, she saw a man sitting behind a desk. In front of him was a piece of moulded plastic with the name Adrian Croy printed on it. The man was alone, which disconcerted her. She had been expecting a judge and jury, something that resembled a court of law.

‘Ah, Miss Burfoot,’ the man said.

Adrian Croy was a slight, dapper man with wrists as narrow as school rulers. His hands twirled and fluttered when he spoke in such a way that she imagined he was simultaneously translating what he was saying into sign language. She felt clumsy in his presence, as if surrounded by bone china.

‘You probably think that you’re in trouble.’ He was looking at her in a manner that did not endear him to her. She saw amusement and curiosity. A kind of craving too. ‘You have crossed the border illegally,’ he said. ‘Twice.’

She sighed. It was true. She had done it as a dare to herself, just to see if it was possible. Then she had done it again, to make sure the first time hadn’t been a fluke. She hadn’t meant anything by it. ‘I knew you’d find out,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, Miss Burfoot, we always find out.’ Croy leaned back in his seat and studied her. ‘We would like to offer you a position.’

‘A position?’

‘A job.’

‘I’ve never had a job,’ she said, ‘except for working on the canal.’

Croy allowed himself a small, neat smile. ‘I’d hardly call that making good use of your particular skills.’

They weren’t going to punish her. They were giving her a job instead. She could scarcely believe her luck.

I shifted uneasily on the bed of sacking and old velvet, reminded of a certain sunlit afternoon, Diana smiling at me across the rim of her wine-glass, the word ‘immunity’ suspended seductively in the air between us.

‘I was so innocent,’ Odell murmured, half to herself.

Me too, I said inside my head.

At the age of seventeen she had come to an arrangement with the authorities. She was paid a modest retainer, and reported to Croy twice a month. Sometimes he would brief her on a specific job — surveillance, usually — but more often than not he would attempt to justify their shadowy activities. At some point, though, the talk would always gravitate towards the nature of her gift. When she told him what she could do — somehow, with Croy, she couldn’t seem to help bragging about it — the black parts of his eyes would widen, and his hands would move more dreamily in front of him, like objects in space. He would claim that she was part of a tradition that dated back thousands of years. In her, he would say, one could see the true flowering of the phlegmatic character — adaptability, yes, but taken to extremes. He had theories about her too. In his opinion, she didn’t actually become invisible. She simply appeared to do so. He called what she did ‘escaping notice’. Frankly, it would bore her having to listen to all this, but she tried not to show it. She had to keep reminding herself that this dainty, middle-aged man was dangerous. If he were to turn against her, he could make things difficult for her. And so it paid to keep him sweet. Aware of this, she always played a little vaguer, a little more spiritual, than she really was.

‘Tradition?’ she said once. ‘What tradition?’

He beamed. Her unworldliness never failed to delight him. ‘The shape-shifter, the psychopomp,’ he said. ‘The seer.’

‘What’s a psychopomp?’ This time she was genuinely curious.

‘They’re spirit guides,’ Croy told her. ‘They pilot dead people to their place of rest. They oversee the process whereby souls are purified, transformed.’ He paused. ‘I suppose you could say they teach the craft of dying.’

On another occasion he startled her by proposing that they should become a magic act. ‘Burfoot & Croy,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see it?’ His right hand slid sideways across the air in front of him, palm facing outwards, fingers uppermost and slightly curled, as if to enclose an exotic painted sign. She smiled but said nothing. He had such peculiar fantasies. Was he really suggesting that they should run away together, or was it just another test? She could never quite be certain. If she hadn’t been so strange-looking, she would have said that Adrian Croy was in love with her.

For all his ambiguities, though, and despite the power he wielded over her, they were, at some fundamental level, of one mind. Yes, she had crossed borders illegally, but that didn’t mean she wanted them removed. Far from it. Without borders they would return to the chaos of a quarter of a century ago. Without borders they would find themselves living in what used to be called, laughably in her opinion, the ‘united kingdom’ — a kingdom united in name only, a kingdom otherwise characterised by boorishness, thuggery and greed. She had no desire to live in a place like that. The Blue Quarter might be deficient in some respects, she said, but at least those who lived there were socially aware and ecologically responsible, prizing gentleness above aggression and spiritual development above material success, and on the whole she wanted to preserve things pretty much the way they were. She just liked to bend the rules once in a while, that was all.

‘I still cross the border illegally from time to time,’ she said. ‘You know what I tell them now, if they find out?’

I lay still, waiting for the answer.

‘I tell them I’m practising my craft. That’s the kind of language they understand.’ She fell silent. ‘I’m not breaking the law,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m doing my duty.’ And she laughed softly, delighted by her own capricious logic.

Odell shook me out of a deep sleep, letting me know that it was dawn. I had a feeling I hadn’t had since I was a boy — a panic that uncoiled slowly as a snake, a powerful dread of what the day might bring. I wished I could have stayed in bed or hidden somewhere. I wanted it all to be over. She shook me again. I sat up, blinking. A weak light leaked through the window, grubby as the skin on boiled milk. Birds fumbled in their nests. I pushed my feet into my boots and pulled on the stiff leather coat. We ate the few scraps left over from the previous night’s meal, sharing the inch of red wine in the bottom of the bottle, then it was time to go.

I followed Odell through the second of the two doors and into a small high-ceilinged room. The only piece of furniture in there was a wardrobe, its mirror-panelled door ajar. Our figures crept across the glass, furtive as thieves. On we went, through other, larger rooms, most of which showed evidence of looting. Paintings had been removed, leaving ghostly after-images. Wallpaper had been defaced or gouged. In one room a fire had been lit in the middle of the floor, and I imagined I could smell it, the air inlaid with a thin blue seam of smoke. We stepped out on to a landing, its uneven boards sloping away from us, slippery with light. Pinned to a door at the far end was a life-size black-and-white picture of a soldier with a gun, concentric circles radiating outwards from his heart. There were holes in the paper, and the wood. At the head of the stairs I stooped and peered through a diamond-paned window. Pines lifted before me, their red-brown trunks showing dimly through the mist. To my surprise, the snow had melted. The land looked waterlogged and drab.

Downstairs, in the hall, wooden chairs were arranged against opposing walls, making me think a party had been held here once. Trainee border guards would have cavorted with girls from nearby villages, the guards resplendent in their dress uniforms, all pressed serge and polished brass, the girls in short skirts and white stilettos, their bare legs marbled with the cold. I could almost hear the live band with its thrashing drums, its raunchy lead guitar. Odell led me across the hall and down a passage. Then, as we passed through yet another door, the space seemed to explode above my head. We were in a church. The roof must have been sixty feet high, and the nave could have held a congregation of many hundreds. Here too, though, the vandals had been at work. Pews had been upended and set on fire. Windows had been smashed. The stone flags underfoot were crunchy with stained glass — the blue of saints’ robes, the yellow of their haloes, the green of a green hill far away. I noticed some incongruous additions to the church’s interior — relics of the military occupation, no doubt. Leaning nonchalantly against the font was a motorbike, its back tyre flat. Further up the aisle, empty bullet casings and beer bottles lay scattered about. And there were even more recent intrusions: a pigeon chuckled in the organ loft, and on the altar steps some sheep had deposited their neat but convoluted droppings, each of which looked exactly like a small black brain.

We left through the sacristy. Once outdoors, I paused and looked around. Some fifty yards ahead of me was a drystone wall, and on the hillside beyond were the evergreens I had seen from the landing. Behind me rose the great hunched back of the church. A few traces of snow lingered under trees and bushes, and against the base of north-facing walls.

As I stood there, Odell stepped in front of me. ‘Your face is all wrong.’

I stared at her, perplexed.

‘You look as if you’ve never been here before,’ she said, ‘as if you come from somewhere else. They’ll notice that immediately. You can’t show any surprise or curiosity. I want you to look fed up, long-suffering. We’re a couple, remember, and we don’t get on.’

I nodded. All right.

‘Show me,’ she said, ‘before we go any further.’

I pushed my hands deep into my trouser pockets, then I scowled. I could feel the skin buckling on the bridge of my nose.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said.

We passed through a wicket gate and set off along a footpath. On my shoulder was a bag that held my cloak and undergarments. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to cross back into the Red Quarter. If we were stopped and searched, Odell was going to claim that they were trophies from the recent hunt, as was the watch I was wearing, the one that had no hands. She would tell the story with relish, how we had chased the White People through the woods, how we had terrorised and raped and butchered. I had become so carried away, she would say, that I had completely lost my voice. When she first suggested this strategy, I felt something contract inside me. She noticed the look on my face and said simply, ‘Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?’

We climbed over a stile and down into a country lane, then walked on, side by side, in silence. Stone walls hemmed us in. We passed barns of corrugated-iron, some faded red, some green. Once, the sun broke through, alighting on a piece of rough pasture to the north-east of us, the land all round still deep in shadow. Like a memory of happiness, I thought, that single illuminated field. Like the bits of my life that had been given back to me … We were quiet for so long that I almost forgot the role I was supposed to be playing, but then I saw a man come hobbling towards us. Chained to his wrist was a hawk, its head sheathed in a leather hood.

As the man approached, Odell began to grumble. ‘How much further? My feet ache.’

I chose not to answer. Instead, I gathered a ball of phlegm into my mouth, rolled it on my tongue, then fired it past the end of her nose and into the ditch.

She grasped me by the sleeve. ‘I said, how much further?’

I shook her off and lengthened my stride, giving the man a curt nod as he passed by. The man grunted in reply. I watched him move on down the road, a stocky figure dressed in brown, the bird of prey so motionless that it could have been stuffed. Knowing it was alive beneath that hood sent a shiver through me.

‘Good,’ Odell said. ‘Just right.’

To the south the landscape brooded. The sky had lowered, and the air above the hills was smeared with rain.

By the time we reached our first village, something unexpected had occurred. My mood had soured. I was in a bad temper after all, a genuine bad temper, which meant I no longer had to worry about standing out.

As soon as we entered the village, Odell said, ‘I thought you told me we were there,’ and she stopped in the middle of the street and put her hands on her hips. ‘You fool,’ she said, ‘you stupid fool. Hey!’ And she grabbed me by the upper arm.

I’d always hated being touched like that. Swinging round, I raised my fist as if to strike her. At the last minute, though, I turned aside and slammed my hand into the front wall of a house. I watched the grazed skin ooze blood, then whirled away from her and stormed up the street, scattering the chickens that darted, cackling, across my path. I might even have trodden on one of them. I felt something squirm out from under my boot, but I didn’t bother looking down.

‘Oi,’ said a woman in an apron. They were probably her chickens.

I glared at her, and she sprang back into her doorway as though pulled from behind by an immensely powerful hand.

Rage surged through me. Such a rage.

The air filled with the jangle of fairground music, and I turned to see a white high-sided van grinding its way up the street, a loudspeaker bolted precariously to its roof. Every so often, the driver interrupted his music to proclaim the delights of his hams and sausages, his tongue. Odell stopped the van and bought a few items, then it passed me and dipped down an incline to the village green. A crowd had gathered there, beneath a large, gnarled oak, and once the racket the van was making had died away I could hear the shrieks and squeals of children. There must be an attraction of some kind, I thought. A juggler, perhaps. A puppet show.

As I drew nearer, Odell caught up with me and took my arm. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘Keep going.’

This time I didn’t shake her off. Something in her voice told me she wasn’t acting. She led me down the road, past grim, grey houses, their windows either too low or too high, and oddly asymmetrical, as if only dwarves and giants lived inside. Before long, the village was behind us, and the children’s cries had faded into the distance.

‘It was nothing you need know about,’ she said.

The smell of melted snow on the grass verges, the sky above the fields grey and pale-yellow.

After a while two men in work clothes appeared on the road ahead of us. I pushed my hands into my pockets, feeling the rips in the lining. Each new encounter was a test of our authenticity, our nerve, and I couldn’t help but believe that, sooner or later, we would be found out.

The men slowed as they reached us.

‘Seen the heads?’ said the shorter of the two.

‘We just came from there.’ Odell pointed back along the road. ‘There’s three of them. All bitches.’

The short man laughed lasciviously. He looked at his companion, eyes like bits of wet glass, then the two of them moved on, quickening their pace.

I waited until they were hidden by a bend in the road, then I went and leaned on a farm gate. I had received an image of a woman. Ears and nose cut off. An apple wedged into her mouth as if she were a suckling pig. Seen the heads? I retched once or twice, but nothing came up. Cold sweat all over me.

Odell laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear that. It was the only way.’

I know, I said inside my head. I understand.

Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?

It was dark by the time we entered the next village, but Odell made no attempt to find a room. It might have been the gingerhaired twins sitting on a bench outside the post office, one gnawing avidly at his thumbnail, the other aiming a kick at a dog as it loped by, or perhaps it was the fat woman in her front garden who took one look at us, spat sideways and withdrew into her house. This was a sour embittered place, a place that had turned its fury against itself, and it would have no patience with the likes of us.

We had reached the edge of the village and were beginning to prepare ourselves for a night in the open when we saw a caravan parked in the corner of an orchard, a white shape seemingly afloat among dock leaves and thistles. Odell forced the door — a sharp dry snap, like the cracking of a nut — and we climbed inside. The curtains were already drawn, but a faint glow eased through the frosted-plastic sky-light, just enough to see by. There were cushioned bench-seats, ideal for sleeping on. There was even a sink, with running water. We fastened the door, using a metal catch. If anyone came, Odell said, we would escape through the window at the back.

Though she had promised me nothing but tantrums that day, she had broken her own rules within the first few hours. She had been aware of my fragile state, I think, and whenever we found ourselves alone she would link her arm through mine and tell me how well I was doing. Once, as we stood beneath a tree, sheltering from the downpour that had been threatening all morning, I turned to look at her. I had no memory of ever meeting her before, or even seeing her, but that now seemed irrelevant. In the tarnished half-light of the storm her eyes had taken on the strangest colour, a new commingling of green and black, ambiguous but vivid, and the breath stalled in my throat. All of a sudden I wanted to touch her. Did she guess what I was thinking? Possibly. Because she chose that moment to announce that the rain was letting up and it was time to push on.

By late afternoon we had left the Wanings behind. In a sense, though, we had merely swapped one set of dangers for another. The Wanings may have lapsed into anarchy, but we had just as much to fear from the so-called forces of law and order, whose reputation for corruption and brutality was common knowledge. As the sun was setting, we saw our first roadblock. Fortunately the two officers were facing the other way, questioning a man on a bicycle, and we were able to slip behind a hedgerow and flatten ourselves against the ground. As their jeep finally roared past, a cigarette butt landed in the grass no more than a hand’s width from my right elbow. Though it had been discarded, it continued to smoulder, all the virulence of the Yellow Quarter concentrated into that stubborn quarter-inch of ash.

Following a meagre supper in the caravan, Odell began to talk. Before too long, she said, we would be passing through built-up areas. Things would move faster, and I would have to be ready to act decisively. If we got into any kind of confrontation, for instance, I should leave immediately. Just leave. If we already had a place to stay, I should go back there. Lock myself in. If not, I should wait near by. She would extricate herself. That was her speciality. If for some reason she failed to reappear, I was to carry on towards the border. I would have to cross it on my own. In the darkness I reached out and squeezed her hand to let her know that I had understood.

At dawn I was woken by a vicious scratching, and I sat up quickly, thinking someone was trying to get in. Then I realised it was coming from above me. Through the skylight’s blurry plastic I saw arrowheads, delicate as pencil drawings. It was just birds’ feet. Birds walking on the roof.

We left the caravan soon after, fells rising in blue-black curves above the mist. Later, the sun burned through. We drank from a stream that tasted metallic, as if we were sipping the water from a spoon. We walked south and then west, clouds tumbling in the sky, huge sweeps of land on every side. We saw no people, not even one. There was only the sound of our boots in the grass and, sometimes, the clatter of a pheasant’s wings as, startled by our approach, it heaved itself into the air.

That night we curled up in a hut that smelled of sheep, the ground outside littered with shotgun cartridges and brittle clumps of fleece. The wind kept me awake, levering its way into every crack and crevice in the walls. In the morning we climbed down to flat land. Houses now, and villages, with youths standing around. They would be smoking or kicking a football about or trying to put each other in headlocks. Their eyes would flick in our direction as we passed, and I sensed the shape of their thoughts, dark and splintery. I had to work hard not to show any fear. The memory of those strangers stretched across the road still lingered. I noticed a boy leaning against a wall next to a newsagent’s. He watched us go by, then slid a few words out of one side of his mouth, and the boys who were with him laughed, the noise so abrupt and harsh that two crows lifted from a nearby tree. No one actually confronted us, but that wasn’t the point. It was the constant, unremitting threat of violence that I found wearing. It was the sense of apprehension, the dread.

In the early afternoon we stopped to rest. The road shadowed a railway cut, and we climbed over the wall and installed ourselves on the embankment, so as to be hidden from any passers-by. Odell unwrapped the cold meat and bread, leftovers from the day before. A passenger train rushed past below us as we ate. Odell eyed it thoughtfully. The sky had clouded over. A chill wind bent the blades of grass beside me, and I huddled deeper into my creaky leather coat.

We were about to move on when a goods train rattled down the line towards us. Instead of the usual trucks, it was hauling several transporters, each of which had a tarpaulin lashed over its main frame. Odell began to slither down the embankment, signalling for me to follow her. When she reached the track she ran alongside one of the transporters. Catching hold of a stanchion, she swung herself up on to a metal footplate. I tossed her my bag, then hoisted myself on to the same section of the train. She was already loosening the ties on one corner of a tarpaulin. We ducked under the heavy plastic and found ourselves pressed up against a yellow sports car, one of three, all identical in make and colour. I tried the door on the driver’s side, fully expecting it to be locked, but it opened with an expensive click. I hesitated for a second, then climbed inside. The smell of leather upholstery enfolded me — the smell of newness itself. Odell climbed in after me. Settling behind the steering-wheel, she pulled the door shut. The smooth swaying motion of the car, the darkness beyond the windows, the presence of a girl beside me — for a moment I was able to fool myself into thinking that it was my first night at the Bathysphere and nothing else had happened yet.

‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said.

I turned to face her.

‘Not so long ago,’ she said, ‘I was in love with someone …’

I smiled. It was a good beginning.

His name was Luke, and they had met when she was twenty. One Sunday evening she was waiting on the platform of a provincial railway station. She wanted to get back to the city, but there had been all kinds of delays and cancellations, and people were standing three or four deep by the time the train pulled in. Then she saw him, through one of the carriage windows. He was reading a book, his face lowered, his black hair falling on to his forehead. In that same moment she noticed that a window in his carriage had been left open. She tended not to use her gift for her own personal gain, not any more, but that evening she decided to flout the rules for once. A damp flurry of wind took her over the heads of the other passengers, through the window and down into the seat directly opposite the dark-haired boy. When he looked up and saw her, his eyes widened and he breathed in sharply.

‘What are you staring at?’ she said. ‘Do I remind you of someone?’

‘No.’ He seemed momentarily dazed by the speed and boldness of her questions. ‘I didn’t hear the door open.’

‘Perhaps you were asleep.’

‘Asleep? I don’t think so.’ He glanced at his book. ‘I was reading.’

‘Then perhaps you were in another world,’ she said.

The train shook itself and then began to move. She stared out of the window, pretending to take an interest in the lights of unknown houses, distant towns.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

What she had loved most of all about Luke was lying next to him while he was sleeping. He always looked so untroubled. She thought that if they slept in the same bed for long enough she would acquire that look of his. At the beginning she would stay awake for hours and try to draw the calmness out of him. She used to see it as a grey-blue vapour drifting eerily from his body into hers.

She had wanted to be with him for ever — in fact she’d been quite unable to imagine not being with him — but she had made a mistake: she told him what she could do. In bed one night, with all the lights out, she turned to him and said, ‘You know when we first met, on that train …’

‘I knew it,’ Luke cried when she had finished. ‘I knew there was something.’

Initially, he was seduced by the glamour of it. He saw a kind of peculiar, inverted celebrity, and that excited him. But he soon started to feel that their relationship had its roots in deception — her deception — and the subject would come up whenever they argued. The fact that she had fooled him. Made him look stupid.

‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ she would cry. ‘It was because I loved you. And anyway, you almost guessed. Even then, at the beginning.’

She should never have told him. She should’ve been content simply to have profited from her gift. But she had been unsure of herself, perhaps. She had hoped to bind him to her still more closely. Once, many years ago, a great-aunt had given her some advice. An air of mystery is just as valuable as wit or beauty. It keeps people interested — especially men. And certainly, for the first few months, Luke had suspected there was a side to her that he hadn’t understood, and he would worry at it almost pleasurably, as you might push your tongue against a loose tooth. When she told him the truth, however, it allowed him to think that the riddle had been solved. He had reached the end of her, and there was nothing more to discover. Far from binding him, the knowledge set him free. He could move on.

And another thing. Although she had sworn him to secrecy, he was always nearly giving the game away. He couldn’t bear it that people didn’t know about her. To start with, she thought it was because he was proud of her, but then she began to realise it was something far less healthy. He had sensed that people found the relationship odd, and that reflected badly on him. If they knew who she was, though, they’d get it. In other words, it wasn’t that he wanted people to know she was different, or special, or extraordinary. No, in the end he was only concerned with his own image.

Odell sighed. ‘I wasn’t as beautiful as he was. People were always admiring him, and he’d pretend he hadn’t noticed. I didn’t mind that, really. I just wanted him to see the beauty in me. A beauty others didn’t see. Maybe he couldn’t, though. Or maybe it wasn’t enough.’

I see it, I said inside my head.

The train had slowed, and I could feel every joint in its body as it picked its way cautiously through what felt like a maze of points. Odell sighed again. Opening her door, she said she was going to take a look outside.

When she returned, she told me we had reached a city. She thought it might be Ustion, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, it would probably be wise to leave now, before the transporters were either checked or unloaded.

Although the train was still moving, we had no trouble jumping down on to the tracks. The station loomed about half a mile ahead of us, a harsh recorded voice echoing from the cavernous interior. Any luggage found unattended will be destroyed. A mist had descended, and all the lights were ringed with gauzy haloes. Crouching low, I followed Odell across the rails, then we scaled a wall of dark bricks and dropped down into a side-street.

We weren’t prepared for the sight that greeted us when we turned the corner. Men rampaged along the main road, red shirts worn outside their trousers, open cans of beer in their hands. Cars raced past, honking their horns. Some had pennants tied to their aerials, others had scarves trapped and flapping in their wound-up windows. Odell bought a paper from a news-stand. The Ustion Gazette. She had guessed right. As she took her change, she asked the vendor what was happening.

‘Important game tonight,’ he said.

We ducked into a doorway as a second group of men swayed towards us. They were singing strange savage songs that I’d never heard before. With their cropped hair and their hard, exultant faces, they seemed to have sealed themselves off from the rest of us. It was like the divided kingdom in miniature — the same tribalism, the same deep need to belong. If you supported a football team, you saw all other teams as forces to be challenged, ridiculed, defeated. You stuck together, no matter what. You dealt with everything life threw at you. The triumphs, the disasters. The thick and thin of it. People have to have something they can identify with, Miss Groves had told us once. They have to feel they’re part of something. I watched as a man with a shaved head heaved a rubbish bin through a plate-glass window. His companions whooped and roared. They began to chant his name, breaking it into two raucous syllables. Then on they went towards the ground, which rose out of the terraced streets like some great cauldron, bubbling furiously with noise and light.

Given the conditions, Odell thought it best if we got off the streets. We found a hotel not far from the station and registered as Mr and Mrs Burfoot, a new name for me, and one that gave me an unexpected thrill. Later, we had dinner in a bar on the ground floor. We chose a table that had a view of the TV. The football was on. As we took our seats, the two teams walked out of the tunnel, flanked by police with riot shields and visors. Fights had already broken out on the terraces. The camera homed in as the crowd surged in two different directions at once, and I thought of how the sea looks when a wave rebounds from a breakwater and meets another wave head-on. We ordered steak pie and chips from the blackboard behind the bar, and I drank a pint of dark, flat beer, which was what the other men were drinking. Once the game began, I turned my back on Odell — a perfect example of choleric behaviour, I thought — and when we left more than an hour later I still hadn’t so much as glanced at her. At the door a shrill whistling from the crowd had me looking over my shoulder. One of the home side’s star players was being stretchered off the pitch with his hands covering his face. They showed a slow-motion replay of the foul. A defender from the opposing team hacked him to the ground and then stood back, arms raised in the air, palms outwards, as if innocent of any wrongdoing. They were like children, these footballers, with their transparent lying and their endless tantrums. Nothing was ever their fault. They wanted to get away with everything.

Once we were back in our room, Odell locked the door, then leaned against the wall with her hands behind her. I was reminded of Sonya for a moment — she often used to stand like that — but, at the same time, the comparison seemed obscure, even meaningless. I had loved Sonya, I really had, but she had become intangible to me, not quite real, as had almost every other aspect of the way I had lived before. When I considered my return to the Red Quarter, when I tried to imagine what that might entail, my mind closed down. The question Odell had asked me — Do you want to get out of here or don’t you? — expressed it perfectly. Yes, I wanted to get out of the Yellow Quarter, of course I did, and yet, once that had been achieved, I couldn’t actually visualise a life. If I thought about the people I used to see on a regular basis — Vishram, Sonya, Kenneth Loames — they appeared as ephemeral and irrelevant as ghosts, whereas the ghosts themselves — Ob, Neg, Lum — had true substance and even — strange, this — a kind of nobility. If I survived, who would I be exactly? Which version of myself would I be left with? How would I fit in? Turning away from Odell, I walked to the window. A helicopter hovered in the middle distance, its searchlight aimed at the ground directly below it.

She came and stood beside me. ‘It’s only crowd control.’

Of course. The football would be over any minute. Even so, when the helicopter veered towards us, with its head lowered and its searchlight sweeping the streets and buildings, we both instinctively stepped back from the window. All of a sudden the angry stutter of its rotor blades was on top of us, the air itself vibrating. I shaded my eyes as blinding light flashed through the room. It was as though some supernatural force had just flown in one wall and out the other, as though we had been visited by a creature to whom concrete and plaster meant nothing. The helicopter moved on, heading westwards, restless, inquisitive.

‘I didn’t finish my story about Luke,’ Odell said.

I drew the curtains, shutting out the night.

‘You’re not too tired?’ she said.

I shook my head. We settled on the bed, Odell leaning against the pillows with her knees drawn up while I lay on my side, my cheek propped on one hand.

Luke had left her eighteen months ago, she said, and in all that time she had heard nothing from him. Then, in late November, the day after she saw me being arrested by the Blue Quarter police, she had gone home for a few hours. She lived in an old petrol station on the outskirts of Aquaville. The ground floor had been a working garage — it still smelled of diesel oil and spray-paint — but the upstairs was like a loft, with windows running along one side and a view over the fields.

She was just sorting through her mail when there was a knock on the door. It was Luke. His dark hair stuck up at all angles, and the whites of his eyes looked dingy, almost stained. He was in trouble, he said.

It took another hour and most of a bottle of wine for him to get to the point. His girlfriend was about to be transferred. He didn’t want to lose her, though, so he had hidden her. When Odell reminded him of the penalties he would face if he was caught, he snapped at her. Yes, he knew about the penalties. He knew. Then he lowered his voice again. He was sorry. He was tired. He hadn’t slept.

‘You have to help me,’ he said.

She couldn’t, she told him. Didn’t he have any idea who she worked for? It turned out that he didn’t — so she’d kept something from him after all! — but once he got over the shock he tried to persuade her that it was perfect. They’d never suspect a person in her position. She shook her head. She couldn’t risk it. When he made a half-hearted attempt to blackmail her, she lost her temper. He backed down.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said after a while. ‘I feel so hopeless.’

Outside, a bitter wind scoured the cracked concrete where the petrol pumps stood. Ice had formed on the puddles, as fragile and transparent as a layer of skin. She bled the radiators with a small grey key. They groaned and clanked a little, but the room didn’t seem to get much warmer.

Later that night Luke asked if he could stay. When she hesitated, he told her not to worry. He’d be gone in the morning. It was strange how he could still wound her, how words like that made her heart hurt.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’

‘Do you want me to sleep in the chair?’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep in the chair, if you like.’

‘You’ll freeze,’ she said.

He climbed beneath the blankets. His body smelled of nutmeg, the way it always used to. She knew she shouldn’t have slept with him, but she did it anyway. She hadn’t been doing it for him. She’d done it for herself.

No one ever bothers to imagine how alone other people are.

It was almost dawn before she noticed that the grey-blue vapour she’d once coveted had disappeared. Turning in the bed, she looked straight at him. She saw how the surface of his skin fluttered, and how he brushed constantly at phantoms with his hands. From his lips came whimpered protests and entreaties. He had become as phlegmatics were supposed to be — tremulous, inert — but unlike most of them he had nothing to fall back on.

In the early morning they stood near the car-wash, the big blue brushes foolish, incongruous, like someone’s idea of a joke, and she knew this was the last time she would ever see him. The tears ran from her eyes. She had lost him, but that wasn’t really why she was crying. She was grieving for all the things that don’t come again. She was grieving because things end, and she wished they didn’t have to.

He put a hand on her shoulder, then turned and walked across the buckled forecourt, his whole body hunched against the cold. Though her tears had given him a kind of strength, he looked unequal to his surroundings; he had the air of a man who was about to be crushed by the weight of his own existence. At that moment, miraculously, a bus appeared on the road. Luke broke into the semblance of a run, waving an arm, but the bus passed smoothly by, and it was then, as his arm dropped back, that she climbed the steps to her front door and went inside.

Odell was picking at the edge of the hotel blanket. In the distance a siren swooped, then hiccuped. ‘What do you think?’ she said.

I looked up at her. I didn’t see it as a love story, despite the way it had begun. No, I saw it as more of a cautionary tale. The special substance that makes each one of us unique is finite, ethereal. It can be whittled away, almost without us knowing. It can be used up altogether. I had been so many different people during the past few weeks, and, in the end, I had been nobody at all. Odell knew that, and she was using stories from her life to try and bring me back. She wanted to return me to myself, but slowly, gently. In my own time.

‘You think it’s sad,’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Who for? For me?’

For him, I said inside my head.

‘That’s right,’ she said quietly, looking out across the room.

Later, as I drifted on the edge of sleep, I heard her speak again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think too.’

The sky was ash smeared on silver where the sun was coming up. The pavements and gutters glittered with crushed beer cans and broken glass. Sunday. The city had a stunned feel to it — the temporary numbness of a dead leg. I wondered idly who had won the game. I never did find out.

We left the hotel early, just after seven, the girl on reception smothering a yawn as she handed us a copy of the bill. Most people would stay in bed until mid-morning, Odell told me, sleeping off their hangovers. It was a good day to be travelling. We bought bacon sandwiches and cups of tea from a café near the station, then set off along a main road that led south. I kept my face twisted into a permanent scowl and chewed sullenly on a wad of gum. I was thinking of my brief stay in Athanor, and how my cuts and bruises had protected me. If I looked dangerous enough, I’d be safe. That was the theory, anyway.

The bars were still open. Every once in a while, a drunk would stagger towards us, hands aloft and twitching in some mad semaphore, but we automatically crossed the road before any of them got close. Their curses reached us like the light from distant stars — faint messages from a world already superseded, left behind. We no longer needed to look at each other, Odell and I. We had a kind of understanding now. I swept my eyes from side to side, constantly aware of my environment. At the same time I walked through it all as though none of it could touch me.

By dusk my lungs felt tight with the exhaust fumes I had been forced to breathe, and my feet ached from walking on nothing but paving-stones and tarmac for hour after hour, and I let out a sigh when Odell, who seemed tireless, finally announced that we’d be stopping for the night.

She had chosen a place called the Hot Hotel, the word Hot glowing on and off like brake lights in a traffic-jam. To reach reception, which was located one floor up, we had to walk down an alley that ran along one side of the building. We were given a room on the third floor, with a circular bed and an orange shag-pile carpet. It had the atmosphere of somewhere that was rented by the hour, and if I turned my head fast enough I seemed to glimpse the shady outlines of those who had preceded us. Access to the room was from an open-air walkway or corridor. I leaned on the parapet, looking out over an all-night service station and a supermarket car-park. Opposite the service station I could see a strip club called the Tinder Box. Sometimes I wanted to question the wisdom of Odell’s decisions, but I wasn’t sure I had the right. Maybe she had been drawn by the number of people around, which would lend us a certain anonymity. She had already saved me once, I thought. Probably I should have more faith in her.

In fact, she had saved me a second time that afternoon. We had been walking along a main road, its four lanes packed with cars. To our left, some fifty feet below us, lay a river, its waters viscous, thick as soup. At one point, Odell had spotted a public toilet. It was in a shopping centre on the other side of the road. She told me to wait. She’d only be a moment. No sooner had she disappeared than I sensed something close by, a kind of force or pressure. Half turning, I saw a boy’s face on a level with my elbow, his eyes dark-brown and startled-looking, his teeth bared. Then my arm jerked backwards and the bag with my white clothes in it was gone. At the same time I felt hands reaching into all my pockets. I swung round. A dozen children swarmed on the pavement behind me, some as young as five or six. The boy who had snatched my bag was making off down a steep slope to the river. The others followed.

For a few seconds I saw the world as if through soundproof glass.

A concrete landscape. Sky creamy with pollution.

Then the sounds flowed back — the rush of traffic, the roar of yet another unknown city — and I was running towards the river. At the water’s edge the boys had already spread the contents of my bag out on the ground. Without thinking, I swooped down and took hold of the bag, together with my cloak, my long johns and my undershirt, then started up the slope again. The boys came after me, their voices shrill and jagged. Somehow I was aware of the smallness of the hands that pushed and pulled at me. Since I was clutching my possessions, though, I was powerless to defend myself. As I regained the pavement I saw Odell threading her way through the traffic towards me. She produced an aerosol and sprayed something into the faces of the two boys who were nearest. They doubled over, howling, hands pressed against their eyes. The other boys fell back. They watched us for a while from a distance, as though contemplating a second assault, and then turned reluctantly away. They would find richer pickings elsewhere, perhaps. Or less resistance. I began to tremble uncontrollably. ‘You were lucky not to get hurt,’ Odell told me. ‘Those gangs of kids, they often carry knives — or guns.’ She gave me a hard, steady look. ‘Next time, let it go.’ Later, she relaxed and smiled. ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to take you with me.’

Yes, I thought as I stood on the walkway, looking out over the car-park, I should probably have more faith in her.

We both had showers. Then, once we were dressed, Odell took me to the bar on the ground floor. It was still fairly early, and there was almost no one there, just an older couple on the dance floor at the back, shuffling beneath maroon and purple disco lights. While Odell ordered our drinks, I sat in a booth and let my eyes drift through the interior, trying to convey a sulky indifference to everything I saw. I stared at the couple, who seemed glued together. The woman had her eyes closed, and her head rolled on the man’s shoulder as though attached to her body by a piece of string. Their dancing bore no relation to the music, which was upbeat, corny, before my time.

Odell came back with two double brandies. When I seemed surprised that she knew what I drank, she told me we’d had brandy on a train, in late November. Again I thought back, but no matter how often or how hard I tried, I could never match what she said with anything that I’d experienced.

She smiled. ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’

It was part of her gift, she told me. She knew how to make herself unmemorable. A skill she had developed over the years was to shake hands without leaving the slightest impression. As she offered her hand, she simultaneously withdrew from it, retreating into the most distant part of herself, both physically and mentally. She had done it to me on the train to Aquaville, she said, and at the conference as well, a couple of weeks before.

‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ She shook her head and reached for her drink. ‘I must be better than I thought.’

And she started telling me her story, which was also my story, of course. She had first met me, very briefly, at the cocktail party in the Concord Room — though she had used her gift to ‘absent herself’, as she put it. She’d been officially assigned to keep me under observation until I returned to the Red Quarter. Little did she know, at that point, how long the assignment was going to last! She had flown to Congreve, just as I had, her seat two rows in front of mine. She had watched the fireworks, and attended the banquet afterwards. When the bomb went off, she was in a club in the basement of the hotel, socialising with some other delegates. ‘As I told you once before,’ she said with a crafty grin. Anyway, they were all evacuated on the spot. Later, she slipped through a police cordon and found me on the fourteenth floor, walking back towards my room — walking in the wrong direction, in other words. It was enough to prompt her to call Adrian Croy, who immediately switched her role to that of ‘shadow’. Though I’d hitched a number of lifts that night, she was able to keep track of me. She sat behind me as I ate breakfast in that out-of-the-way transport café. She followed me as I climbed up into the hills. She stood at my shoulder during the burning of the animals, an event that had given her bad dreams. Afterwards, I had vanished into the crowd, and she was still trying to locate me when the riot squad arrived. In the ensuing chaos she had lost her favourite piece of jewellery. A ring. By the time she secured her release, I was already making for the coast –

Odell was still talking, but I had stopped listening. I slipped a hand inside my shirt and felt for the ring I wore around my neck. So you don’t drift too far… With an inscription like that, I should have guessed it would belong to a phlegmatic. Undoing the knot, I freed the ring and held it out to her. At first, in the dim light of the bar, she didn’t seem to recognise it. Then, slowly, she reached out and took it from me. For a long time she said nothing, her head lowered, then she lifted her eyes to mine.

‘That’s a miracle,’ she said.

I watched her slide the ring on to her finger.

‘The strangest thing about it is,’ she said, ‘it proves I was telling you the truth.’

We had more drinks to celebrate the return of the ring, which to my mind now linked us inextricably, and it was while Odell was buying another round, our third or fourth, that I overheard a man at the bar ask if she would dance with him. Odell told him she was sorry, but she was with someone. He seemed to be friendly with the bartender, who was also the manager of the hotel, because they exchanged a few words and laughed, then the man came over to the booth where I was sitting. He wore black jeans and a leather belt with a metal vulture for a buckle. His boots were crocodile-skin, and their toes were so sharp that he could have dipped one of them in ink and written with it. I thought of the book Victor had made. What stories would these boots have told?

‘You with her?’

He had lifted a hand, his thumb angled back over his shoulder, but I knew better than to look where he was pointing. I didn’t meet his gaze either. Instead, I stared at his other hand, which hung against his hip, the fingers curling and uncurling as if they were trying to work themselves loose.

‘You don’t mind if I have a dance with her, do you?’

Though the disco was still going on, a silence had risen underneath it, which made the music seem strident and hollow. We were only seconds away from the type of situation Odell had warned me about. I put my glass down and stood up. The man stepped back. He was probably hoping he would have to defend himself. He probably wanted a fight even more than a dance. His flexing fingers would not be satisfied until that happened. But I just walked around him and moved towards the exit. I didn’t touch him or brush against him, didn’t even acknowledge his presence. He could have been a column or a pillar. I could have been walking in my sleep. As I pushed the door open, he started to say something, his voice pitched high in disbelief, but I let the door slam behind me, cutting off his sentence halfway through.

Outside, a drizzle was coming down. I hurried round the corner and along the alley to the hotel. Cars hissed by on the main road as if they were carrying snakes. When I reached our room I locked myself in, as Odell had told me to, then I sat on the edge of the bed, my eyes veering constantly towards the door. Its stillness seemed temporary, unsustainable. I kept expecting the flimsy wood to crash inwards and shower me with splinters, but I couldn’t imagine who or what would be standing in the gap. Perhaps no one, nothing. An upright box of darkness. A piece of the night.

I sat there, motionless. The minutes passed.

Once, I lifted my wrist into the air in front of me to check the time, but the watch I was wearing had no hands.

In the end, I reached for the remote. Wrestling was on. Huge men with flaxen manes bounced off each other, their bodies the colour of roast chicken. I turned the sound down. Through the wall behind me came a series of breathy rhythmic cries. At first I thought it was the people next door having sex, but it went on far too long. Somebody must have tuned in to one of the many adult channels. The wrestlers with their roasted skin, the endless mechanical orgasms — I fell into a kind of trance. So much so that when I heard a voice whisper my name I almost leapt off the bed.

I opened the door and Odell slipped past me. By the time I had locked the door again, she was in the bathroom, running the tap. I heard her spit. Standing in the bathroom doorway, I watched her wash her face and hands.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

There was something about her that I didn’t understand. She clearly thought of herself as strange-looking, if not actually ugly, and yet it was precisely that sense of aberrant uniqueness that drew your eye to her and held it there. I remembered what she had said about Luke, how his looks overshadowed hers. Her beauty might be reluctant or arcane, but I could see it nonetheless. And another thing. In telling Luke what she could do, she believed she’d lost her air of mystery. Maybe for him. But true mystery could not be compromised, nor could it be dissipated quite so easily. It was as much a part of her as her freckles, or the fine lines below her eyes.

She walked out of the bathroom, the tips of her hair dark and wet. As she eased off her coat and let it slump to the floor, I took her in my arms. I felt her stiffen against me — she was thinking of pushing me away, perhaps — but then, in the next moment, all the tension left her and she relaxed.

You can’t do everything, I said inside my head.

‘What are you saying?’ she said. ‘Are you saying something?’

The warmth of her breath eased through my shirt. I became aware of the parts of her that I was touching — a shoulderblade, the small of her back. I could feel her spine under my right hand, the tip of my middle finger bearing the subtle imprint of a vertebra. I was getting an erection. I hadn’t meant anything like that to happen. In the meantime she had attained a new stillness, which seemed alert somehow, as though her body were listening to mine. I kissed the top of her head, where her parting was, then I kissed the outer rim of her ear. I could smell the beer and smoke of the bar, and the smell of her clean skin underneath reminded me that when she was only a few hours old she had been held against the window of a houseboat so she could watch the snow come down. And now she did push me away.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

I don’t know, I said inside my head.

She sat on the bed. As she bent over to unlace her boots, her hair fell forwards into her eyes. I sat beside her, tucking the loose strands back behind her ears.

‘Not you as well,’ she said.

Yes, me, I said. Me more than anyone.

I leaned forwards to kiss her mouth, and she didn’t move away. Her lips were cool, much cooler than the rest of her. I wondered if she had already withdrawn, if she had — what did she call it? — ‘absented herself.’

‘Somebody said once,’ she murmured, ‘somebody said my face looked like one of those road signs in the country that people have fired shotguns at …’

I stroked the face they’d said bad things about.

She lay on the counterpane, her arms thrown backwards, bracketing her head. I leaned down and pressed my lips to the milky insides of her wrists. She held herself quite still, her breathing shallow. I slowly unbuttoned her black cardigan. Underneath she was wearing a camouflage T-shirt. I untucked the T-shirt and pushed it up until I could see her stomach. I kissed the plump flesh around her belly button. A kind of vibration went through her, somewhere beneath the surface, deep down. Her heartbeat showed on the skin between her ribs, a shimmer on the drum of her body. I kissed her where the tremor was. I felt the beating of her heart against my mouth.

You’re not like any sign I’ve ever seen.

Her hand appeared as a slow blur to my left and came to rest on the back of my neck. It was my turn to go still. I waited to see what she would do next.

At that moment footsteps sounded on the walkway outside. I was hoping they would go past — there were plenty of rooms beyond ours — but they stopped and somebody knocked twice, firmly. Odell’s hand tightened in my hair. She wanted me not to move. The knocking came again, harder this time.

‘Open up.’

We lay on the bed, our faces turned towards the door.

‘I know you’re in there.’

It was the manager’s voice — the man who had served us in the bar downstairs. He rattled the door-knob, then swore under his breath. There was another silence, during which nothing happened. Finally his footsteps receded.

Odell levered herself upright. Without looking at me, she tucked her T-shirt back into her trousers, then bent quickly and did up the laces on her boots. She sat for a moment with both hands braced on her knees. She shook her head.

‘We’re going to have to leave,’ she said.

She put her coat on. Picking up a heavy glass ashtray from the top of the TV, she went over to the door and listened, then she opened it and peered out. Bag in hand, I stood behind her. Though it had stopped raining, I could hear water everywhere, dripping and tapping. The cars parked near the supermarket glistened. Out of the air came the quaint, exotic scent of petrol.

I followed Odell along the walkway to the stairs. On the first floor we tiptoed past the door that led to reception. Then down another flight, to street-level. We paused in the shadows. There was nobody about. Odell placed the ashtray on the ground at the base of the wall, then darted across the alley and into the carpark where she crouched between two cars. I was only seconds behind her.

Halfway across the car-park, we looked back. The manager was standing at the foot of the stairs. His paunchy upper body faced out into the night, but his head was turned to one side, the nose lifted, predatory. As we watched, two men joined him. I would have been prepared to bet that one of them wore crocodile boots. Stooping, the manager picked up the ashtray. He seemed to examine it for a moment, his chin tucked into his open shirt-collar, then his arm swung sideways and the ashtray landed further up the alley, a dull ringing that sounded like a hammer being brought down on an anvil.

We moved towards the service station, keeping our heads below the car windows. Still doubled over, we skirted the forecourt, its pumps lit by a fierce mauve-white glare, and ended up against the side-wall of a bar. Half-smoked cigarettes, the smell of urine. A used syringe. Odell put a hand on my arm. Her gaze had fixed on the row of motorbikes that stood outside the bar. They looked oddly muscular, their bodies gleaming in the sultry light. She told me to stay put until she gave me a signal, but when the signal came I was to move fast. I leaned against the wall, my eyes on the hotel entrance. The men had vanished. There was only a yellow rectangle now, divided into horizontal segments by the stairs. How I wished we hadn’t left that room on the third floor. I hadn’t known what was going to happen next and, if I had interpreted Odell’s behaviour correctly, nor had she, but the uncertainty had been fertile, exquisite — a kind of pleasure in itself. Who could say where it might have led? And then that knock on the door, that voice, and the whole situation had been instantly dismantled. I wasn’t sure how something so unlikely, so delicate, could possibly occur again. I turned to see where Odell had gone. She was loitering beside a bike that had a naked woman painted on its petrol tank. The woman was on fire. Beneath the flames that licked at her thighs were the words Burn Baby Burn. Swinging a leg over the saddle, Odell reached sideways and down. I heard a sudden snarling, deep and guttural. Before I could work out how she had done it, she was motioning to me. I hurried over and fitted myself behind her.

The next thing I knew, we were on the main road, doing fifty, her hair whipping against my cheeks. I felt I was following her through a forest, branches springing at me from the darkness.

When I opened my mouth, it filled with wind.

We joined the motorway. The traffic thinned to nothing. It was late now, almost two in the morning. From time to time I glanced round to see whether anyone was coming after us — the men from the hotel, the bikers from the bar — but the road stayed empty. It all looked too close back there, somehow, as though everything we were running from was just over our shoulders.

Thirty miles from the capital, we took a slip-road up to a roundabout. As we crossed the bridge over the motorway, I saw a cluster of single headlights to the north. I removed one hand from Odell’s waist and pointed.

She could have accelerated. By the time the bikes passed by, we would have been long gone. Instead, she braked and shifted into neutral. She switched off the lights, but left the engine turning over. When I thought about it later, I decided I would have done the same. It was something to do with trying to pinpoint the whereabouts of our pursuers. If it had been left to my imagination, I would have been unable to rid myself of the conviction that they could appear at any moment.

I could hear them now, their engines blending into one low growl. Would they be able to see us from down there? Would they even think to look up? Had it occurred to them that we might be watching? Apparently not. One by one, they flashed beneath the bridge. The bikes registered with brief but visceral force, like a series of punches. Then they were beyond us, heading south.

They might not have been after us at all, of course. They might have been another motorcycle gang entirely. I watched their tail-lights sink rapidly into the night — a handful of red berries dropped in dark water.

There was a click as Odell shifted into first. For the next hour she took less obvious roads and kept to the speed limit. I had my arms wrapped round her waist, and my upper body was moulded against her back. We both shook with cold. Parts of me felt as if they were plated with metal.

Finally, at half-past three, we rode into the city centre — Thermopolis at last — the shop windows all lit up but nobody around, the bike in low gear, its engine popping and crackling in the eerie, incandescent silence.

‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said. ‘It’s the last one.’

We had checked into the Hyatt Regency, on a special weekend rate. Lying in bed with the curtains open, twenty-seven floors up, I could stare out into a forest of concrete, glass and steel. Office lights were left on throughout the night in what I imagined to be a deliberate configuration. Only people who worked in high finance would be able to decipher their true meaning. Odell lay beside me, fresh from the shower, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head. How would I survive without her stories? How would I survive without her?

An hour earlier she had joined me at the window. Between two towers we could just make out the river, identifiable only by the absence of illumination. Beyond it lay the murky, suicidal boroughs of Cledge. Given the east-facing aspect of our room, we hadn’t been able to see the Red Quarter, but it was there, behind us, no more than a mile away. ‘Not far now,’ Odell had murmured. Though I knew what she was saying, I couldn’t agree. The distance I had to cover seemed bigger than ever. Crossing a border illegally was daunting enough — I hadn’t forgotten those Yellow Quarter guards — but what if I succeeded? What would happen then? When I whispered the word ‘home’ to myself, I felt panic, a swirl of vertigo.

Odell turned in the bed to look at me. ‘This story starts really suddenly.’

All right, I said inside my head. I’m ready.

The man had hit her once, the bunched knuckles of his right hand solid as brass or stone; the curve of bone behind her ear was buzzing, numb. Now he was closing in on her again, his upper arms and shoulders looming. As he raised his fist to hit her for the second time, she rolled off the sofa on to the carpet. He swung and missed. Thrown off balance by the weight of his own wild punch, he stumbled into a lamp. The shade flew off horizontally, like a hat blown from a man’s head in a gale. The lampstand tilted; the bare bulb shattered against the wall. She remembered watching wafers of glass float to the floor.

The darkness filled with short, crude words — what he thought she was, what he was going to do to her. The stench of his breath was everywhere, a dense haze of beer and whisky. All the air she was breathing was coming from inside him. She scrambled to her feet and moved away, hands on either side of her hips, palms facing backwards, feeling for the wall. She had been to the Yellow Quarter many times, and yet she always forgot the violence, how quickly it occurred. It was like blood in an artery. It was stored at the same high pressure. One nick, and out it burst.

He had something in his hand, she saw, a piece of flex wrenched from the video. The plug came hissing towards her like the blunt head of a snake. She twisted out of reach. The teeth gnawed on empty air and then drew back, preparing to strike again. If she had wanted to, she could have got away. There were things she could have done. But then she would have been showing her secret self to him, then he would have known — and too many of the wrong people knew already.

At last the wall gave behind her. She fled down the hall. The front door lay ahead of her, and she was round the edge of it like water round a rock. The stairwell hummed with low-voltage electricity. From somewhere came the smell of garlic being fried. She took the stairs two or three at a time, almost turning her ankle at the bottom of the first flight. She didn’t remember climbing stairs on the way in. They must have used a lift. She heard him surge on to the landing, his voice ballooning in the dim air overhead. He was still listing all the things he would do to her. All the things he’d never do, more like. She couldn’t believe that she had almost slept with him. That thought was astonishing to her now.

On reaching ground-level, she slowed to a walk. She was a stranger, an intruder; if unmasked, she would probably be lynched. She invented a role for herself. I’ve been out for the evening, she thought. I’ve had a good time, but it’s late, and I’m looking forward to getting home. She nodded at the night porter in his office. He ignored her. She pressed the knob on the wall that released the front door and then slipped out into the street, absorbed at once into its humid smoky atmosphere. She glanced over her shoulder at the building she’d just left. The security light had clicked on, but there was no sign of the man whose name she had already forgotten. She doubted he would think of chasing after her. He would have realised by now that she was too fast for him. A man in his state only stood a chance in a small space.

She should never have agreed to go back to his flat. There she was, out on the town illegally, her first visit to choleric territory in months, and he had asked if he could buy her a drink, his brown hair pushed back to reveal a wide, clear forehead, his eyes blue as a jay’s wing — classically, almost foolishly good-looking. He was drunk, of course, but who wasn’t drunk in the Yellow Quarter on a Saturday night?

‘Why do you want to buy me a drink?’ she had said.

‘Because you’re different.’

‘Different?’

‘You’re not like all the others. You’re special.’

You got that right, she thought.

He bought her a drink that tasted of strawberries, a miniature paper umbrella leaning jauntily against the rim of the glass. She asked him what he did. He was a fire-safety officer, he told her. The previous year, he had been called to a train crash. She pretended to remember it. He talked about the bodies, and how they had melted, one into the other, making them impossible to identify. Then he bought her another strawberry drink with an umbrella in it.

She went back to his flat. In a large glass tank in the living-room, sinuous shapes glided this way and that, emitting tiny bolts of light.

‘Electric eels,’ he said, giving her an odd look. ‘Imported from the Blue Quarter.’

She thought he’d seen through her, but he only wanted to impress.

Later, he made a lunge at her, his hand closing round one of her breasts. She tried to push him away, but he laughed and pulled her roughly towards him. She threw her drink in his face. That was when he hit her.

No, she should never have gone back with him. Some people would say she was perverse, or just plain idiotic, but she liked to think that she could get out of any corner, no matter how tight. She got too cocky, though. Thought she could handle anything. Sometimes she needed reminding.

On the pavement outside his building, she snapped her eyes from left to right, scanning her surroundings. The streets weren’t safe, CCTV or no CCTV. No public spaces were. All the same, she stood still for a moment until the gaps between her heartbeats lengthened. The whisper of banknotes came to her, the chink and jangle of loose change. Shock waves from that fist of his. Or maybe it was the soundtrack of the Yellow Quarter, she thought. Listen hard enough and you could hear all the money being made. Listen hard and you could hear the wealth.

She started to walk again.

The border lay ahead of her, the high pale wall topped by rolls of glinting razor wire. She could see a watch-tower too. Squat body, spindly legs. It looked as though a spider had built a nest in the night sky. At the checkpoint itself, a bright-yellow barrier had been lowered, blocking her path. An armed guard stood suspended in the sentry hut’s bright cylinder like something on display in a museum. He would only let her pass if she had documents. She had no documents, of course.

The next ninety seconds, from the guard’s point of view:

Glancing up, he thought he saw a young woman walking towards him. When he stepped out of the hut, though, gun at the ready, the road was empty. He called up to the watch-tower. See anything? The answer came back. Only the top of your fucking head. You’re going bald, you know that? The guard shrugged. But he still couldn’t take his eyes off that stretch of road. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was out there. Or had been.

Just as he was turning away, seeking the comfort of his newspaper and his mug of tea, a breeze pushed past him. The hair stirred on his forehead; even the stiff bristles of his moustache shifted a little. It was only air, a gust of wind, and yet it seemed personal. He felt that he’d been touched. He reached up and wiped his face, one quick downwards motion of his hand, then he stared out along the road again, but his gaze was unfocused now, without object. He remained in that position for some time, as though he believed that an explanation would eventually present itself.

The wind dropped. All was still.

Something altered at the very edge of his field of vision, something minute, almost imperceptible, but he had been trained to pay attention to such things. He looked over his shoulder, into the wide, bleak strip of no man’s land. Beyond the concrete obstacles and areas of heavily mined ground, beyond the electric barrier that controlled admittance to the Red Quarter, he could just make out the figure of a woman walking away from him, erect, unhurried, oddly familiar …

He tried to shout ‘Halt!’ but the word came out husky, strangled, as if he had phlegm in his throat. The guard in the watch-tower peered down at him. Did you say something? He shook his head.

That woman, that was her. She had just crossed the border illegally. She had broken the only law that really mattered. Her name was Odell Burfoot, and she was a shadow. They told her there were others like her, but she’d never met one yet.

As I lay in the hotel bed, close to sleep, I finally realised what she was doing — what she’d been doing all along, in fact. She wasn’t telling me stories to distract me (though, obviously, they performed that function too). No, every narrative had a specific purpose of its own. Some were supposed to create an atmosphere of serenity and trust. Others were intended to console, or to warn, or to encourage. Different situations demanded different narratives, and each one had its proper moment. A tale about a war would precede a war, for instance. A tale about a death would follow a funeral. But if you wanted something to happen, then you told a story in which that ‘something’ happened. Look at Odell’s most recent offering. She had walked into the lion’s den and then walked out again. The task that lay ahead of us might have its dangers, she was saying, but they were not insurmountable. We had to believe in ourselves without succumbing to complacency. We should be confident, but not reckless. A story of this type had a magical or spiritual dimension, as befitted the phlegmatic tradition out of which it came. It cast a spell over the people listening, enabling them to accomplish feats similar to those described. It also bestowed a blessing. In short, it acted as a catalyst, an inspiration, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The order in which she had told her stories seemed important too. The first had been set in the long-distant past. The second had approached the present, but in a roundabout, almost incidental manner, as though to diffuse anxiety. The third had closed in rapidly, both in space and time. Taken as a sequence, they led up to the task in hand, and I knew that everything I needed was contained within them, if only I looked carefully enough. Like any good story-teller, Odell had resisted the temptation to spell it all out for me. If knowledge was imparted in that way, it had no purchase. She had showed patience, insight. She had allowed me to see things for myself.

My name is Odell Burfoot, and I’m a shadow.

They tell me there are others like me, but I’ve never met one yet.

That evening we broke into a derelict house next to the border. We found a smashed window on the ground floor at the back and climbed through into the kitchen. Ivy had wrapped itself around the taps. Dead insects filled the grooves on the stainless-steel draining-board. Against the far wall stood a fridge with its door flung open, like a man selling watches from the inside of his coat. I followed Odell down a passage that led past two or three dim rooms, then opened out into a hallway with a chess-board tile floor. The house smelled dry and peppery — of plaster, cobwebs, dust. Through the clear glass fanlight came an alien glow, glittery as quartz, reminding me that a checkpoint lay just beyond the door.

We started up the stairs. On reaching the first floor, we entered a room whose three tall windows let in slanting rectangles of light. I moved over the bare boards and positioned myself to one side of a window. The concrete wall stood opposite the house, no more than a hundred feet away. Some Yellow Quarter guards huddled by the barrier. I saw one of them laugh, then wag a finger. His colleagues exchanged a knowing look. I was that close. Beyond them, further to the left, a viaduct of sooty brick angled across the street. Trains would once have passed this way, linking the northern suburbs of the old metropolis, but a section of the structure had been knocked down to accommodate the border, and the railway line now came to an abrupt halt in mid-air. Its one remaining arch, though monumental, served no purpose other than to frame a view of the deserted road that ran adjacent to the wall. I had forgotten how the city borders looked. They had an operating theatre’s ruthless glare. They were bright, lonely places. Last places. I swallowed. Stepping back into the room, I opened my bag and pulled out my white clothes.

Once I was dressed, Odell gave me my final instructions. She would cross first, she said. I could watch, if I liked. See whether Croy’s theory about her ‘escaping notice’ was right. When she was safely over the border, I should wait five or ten minutes, then I should follow. She would meet me on the other side.

I took her hand in both of mine and turned it over, as though I were thinking of telling her fortune. I stared down into her palm so hard that I felt I was falling.

‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘For now.’

She gently removed her hand from mine, then stepped away from me and left the room. I had to repress the urge to rush after her. Instead, I forced myself to face the window. A rancid stink lifted off the cloak. That part of me, at least, would be authentic. I gazed out over no man’s land. Beyond the concrete walls and the electric fences, beyond the eerie lunar glare, and seeming insubstantial by comparison, if not actually unreal, were the sheer glass towers of downtown Pneuma.

The stairs let out a creak. It would be Odell, returning. There was something she’d forgotten to mention, perhaps. Or perhaps — and my heart leapt wildly, absurdly — she wanted to kiss me before we parted. I spun round. In the doorway stood a girl of five or six. She was wearing a white dress and satin ballet pumps, and from her shoulders rose a pair of iridescent wings on which the light from the border pooled and glistened. I thought for a moment that Odell’s gift must have betrayed her, and that she had accidentally transformed herself into someone else, as people do in fairy tales.

‘Are you dead?’ the girl said.

I shook my head.

‘You’re not a ghost, are you?’

I shook my head again. This time I tried a smile.

‘It’s all right,’ the girl said quickly. ‘I’m not afraid of ghosts.’ She let her eyes run over me — my face, my hair, my clothes. ‘You look like a ghost.’

I knelt down in front of her. Taking one of her hands, I singled out the forefinger and placed it on the inside of my wrist, where my pulse was.

‘You’re real,’ she said.

As real as you are, I said inside my head.

She gave me a look from close up, a look that was shiny, clean somehow, as if she had understood me perfectly, and I remembered what a friend had told me once, that it’s the eyes of children that make you feel old.

The girl was reaching over her shoulders with both hands. ‘These wings are hurting. Could you help me take them off?’

I began to undo the ribbons that held the wings in place.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘You smell bad.’

I know, I said. That’s the whole idea.

Another brief examination from those oddly knowing eyes.

I handed the wings to her. She solemnly surveyed the room, then bent down and leaned them against the wall next to the fireplace. Straightening up again, she looked at me across the point of one shoulder.

‘I have to go now,’ she said.

She turned, just as Odell had done, and vanished through the doorway. Odell. I hurried to the window, but there was no sign of her. Had she already gone across? I strained my eyes, trying to look beyond the floodlights. Nothing.

Panic scurried through me.

It was time.

I withdrew from the window, making for the stairs. In the hallway, I doubled back towards the kitchen. As I passed the open fridge, I saw a figure crouched inside, hands round his ankles, knees pushed up into the space below his chin. It was Brendan Burroughs.

‘Take me with you,’ he whispered.

I had to steel myself against his pleading. I had to pretend he wasn’t there.

But whispers were still coming from the fridge. ‘I can’t stay here any longer. I’m going rotten.’

Leave me alone, I said inside my head.

I climbed out on to the patio. Stone steps led up into a tangle of undergrowth. If I looked round, I knew Brendan’s mysteriously unlined face would be framed in the broken window, and I didn’t even have a lighter on me any more.

I didn’t look round.

Scaling a brick wall at the end of the garden, I dropped down on to the pavement and then started towards the border. I summoned the spirits of all those who had travelled with me. Their innocence, their singularity. Their freakishness. I repeated their names inside my head, over and over. If nothing else, I would remember what they used to sound like, how they moved about.

Neg, I said inside my head. Lum. Neg. Ob.

People running, falling. Burning.

I was still walking, but I had covered my face. My knees trembled, my ankles quaked. My joints appeared to have loosened, as if in readiness for a dismemberment. That little girl would be watching from a window, her gaze intent, dispassionate. Are you dead? I brought my hands down from my eyes. In front of me, no more than fifty yards away, stood the checkpoint with all its sinister and hostile apparatus. Though the three guards were silhouetted against the floodlights, I recognised the swagger, a casual brutality apparent in both their body language and their speech. I faltered. It was then that I noticed the piece of dog shit lying in the gutter. An idea came to me, and I experienced a burst of something like euphoria. What I was about to do would establish my authenticity beyond all doubt. It might even save me from harm. I pretended to notice the shit for the first time, taking an exaggerated step backwards, then bending low to study it more closely. I seemed to hear the guards draw breath. Now that I had their attention, I picked up the shit and examined it painstakingly from every angle, then I crushed it between my fingers and smeared it on to my cheeks and hair. That done, I began to move towards the checkpoint. The guards stepped away from me, waving their hands in front of their faces. Even the attack dog whined and shunted backwards. I just kept going, oblivious, serene. I might even have been smiling. As I passed the sentry hut I heard them talking.

‘It’s true what people say. They’re just like animals —’

‘They’re worse than animals …’

While two of them debated the point, a third aimed a kick at me and sent me sprawling on the tarmac. The dog barked excitedly but stayed well back. All three guards were arguing now. It hadn’t occurred to them to challenge me. In fact, they seemed eager to keep their distance. I’d made myself untouchable.

I picked myself up, walked on.

In no man’s land the lights were so intense that I could see the veins beneath the surface of my skin. I felt transparent. At the same time four shadows splayed out on the ground around me, as if I were a flower with black petals. My face itched, and the stench that lifted off me was unbearable. At the risk of drawing attention to myself, I started walking faster. I wanted this part over with.

The Red Quarter guards were already waiting for me. As I approached I held my hands out, fingers spread. I was making noises that were intended to communicate distress.

One of the men took me by the arm. ‘Who did this?’ he said.

I stared at him, round-eyed, slack-jawed.

He pointed back towards the Yellow Quarter. ‘Did they do this to you?’

My mouth still open, I nodded repeatedly, more than a dozen times.

The guard led me to a tap behind a prefabricated hut. He handed me a bar of carbolic soap and ran the tap for me. I gazed at the dark patch the water made as it splashed on to the concrete.

‘You can wash here.’ The guard mimed the act of washing for me.

I watched him carefully. Then, slowly, I put my hands under the tap and began to rub them together.

‘And your face.’ He patted his cheeks, his hair.

He went away, returning with a roll of paper towels, which he placed on the window-ledge above the tap. ‘When you’ve washed it off,’ he said, ‘use the paper to dry yourself. Then go that way.’ He pointed to the steel barrier behind me.

I nodded again, then pointed at the barrier, just as he had done.

The whole time I was washing off the muck and stink I was talking to myself inside my head. I don’t know what I was saying. Anything that would keep me from thinking, I suppose. All I had to do was turn off the tap, dry my face and hands, and then start walking, and yet I found myself delaying the moment, as if I couldn’t quite believe in the notion of safety or the possibility of home.

In the end the guard had to come over and switch off the tap himself. He stood in front of me, smiling and shaking his head. ‘What are you trying to do? Flood the place?’ He tore a few sheets of paper off the roll and gave them to me, then he put a hand on my back and steered me towards the barrier. ‘Off you go now. Move along.’