‘There was a moment when I thought we were going over the edge,’ he said, and I detected a kind of glee in his voice.
After I put the phone down, it occurred to me that what he might actually be doing in that cottage on the cliffs – what they both might actually be doing – was committing suicide very slowly, and in the weeks and months that followed I often wondered whether it was respite they were seeking or oblivion.
During my years at university I didn’t go down to see them more than three or four times. The ease I had once known in their presence, the feeling that I could share in their troubles and their celebrations, the sense of belonging – all that had fallen away like so much chalk. I didn’t think they objected to the comparative rarity of my visits. In fact, after a while, I’m not even sure they noticed.
I would have been in my third year when I heard about Simon Bracewell.
We had lost touch with one another, Bracewell and I. We hadn’t argued or fallen out; we’d just drifted apart, as if claimed by different currents. It is often said of the sanguine personality that it tires of things, that it becomes impatient. Well, maybe we reached an age where we simply ceased to interest each other.
I didn’t see him for four or five years. Then, one December, I ran into him in the precinct, no more than a hundred yards from where I lived. Though he looked much the same, with the rims of his big ears red with cold, and the sleeves of his coat not long enough to hide his bony wrists, he seemed offhand, distracted, in a hurry. He’d been working in a local garage, he said, as a mechanic. My gaze inadvertently dropped to his ring finger, though the wheel-nut from Mr Reek’s car was no longer there, of course. He planned to move to the city, he told me. Start a new life. He appeared to want to laugh at that point, but he couldn’t get his mouth to assume the right shape; he ended up frowning instead, as if to indicate the seriousness of his resolve. I was finding it hard to keep the conversation going.
‘Do you ever see Cody?’ I asked.
He looked at me sidelong, almost suspiciously. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘What about Jones? Did you ever hear anything about Jones?’
‘No. Nothing.’
His eyes kept shifting beyond me, so much so that, in the end, I actually glanced over my shoulder. There was nothing there except a man dressed as Santa Claus, collecting money for charity, and people doing their last-minute Christmas shopping. When I turned to face Bracewell again, he was staring at the ground, and it was then that he said something strange: ‘I really enjoyed our time together.’
At first I didn’t know what he was referring to. Then, deciding he must be talking about the days we had spent out on the motorway, I simply, and rather lamely, said, ‘So did I.’
I should have taken his words for what they were – an epitaph, a valediction.
Shortly afterwards, he disappeared into the crowds of people carrying rolls of wrapping-paper, and Christmas trees, and cones filled with roasted chestnuts.
About eighteen months later, while studying for my finals, I was called to the phone. To my surprise I heard Marie on the other end. I couldn’t remember the last time she had rung me, and I knew at once that something must be wrong.
‘How’s Victor?’ I said. ‘Is he all right?’
She hesitated. ‘It’s not Victor. It’s Simon Bracewell.’
The details were both sketchy and lurid, she warned me, and none of it had been confirmed by the authorities as yet, but she thought I ought to know. Apparently Bracewell had hidden in the undercarriage of a train bound for the Yellow Quarter. At some point he must have fallen on to the track, though, and he had been run over, either by the train in which he had stowed himself away or by the next train that came along. When the railway police found him, he was almost unrecognisable.
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
I remembered how little we had said to each other during what Bracewell had called ‘our time together’. We had talked about the holding station, and we had talked about school, but we had never mentioned the families we had been placed with, let alone those from which we had been taken. It had the feeling of a tacit agreement – an agreement we both instinctively abided by, but one which I’m not sure either of us really understood. Possibly we had a hunch that if the subject was raised we would have to admit to things that we would rather keep to ourselves. Or perhaps it had been too soon for us to make any sense of what had happened. He would often come over to my house, but I had never been to his, not in all the years we knew each other, not even once. The only member of his family I ever met was Lucky, the spaniel. Somewhere deep down, I suppose I must have suspected that my home life was easier than his, but this was just an intuition, and I made no attempt to look for evidence or proof. Our friendship had found its own level, its own idiom, and it would have been a mistake, I always felt, to try and tinker with any of that.
But I wondered, in the end, at how imperfectly I had known him.
If our border games had been practice, I thought, if they had been some kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing, then they hadn’t served him very well. Had he been thinking of escaping even when he was a boy? Should I have seen it coming? Or had the games themselves given him the idea? I went back in my memory, but I could see no difference between his commitment and mine, nor could I remember which one of us had invented the game in the first place. I saw him staring at our names carved on the tree. Like something in a cemetery. Then I saw him standing in the precinct, tinny carols being piped through nearby speakers. The way his mouth had locked. He seemed to have forgotten how to smile. Should I have guessed?
The Yellow Quarter, though. Why the Yellow Quarter, of all places?
‘I’m sorry,’ Marie said. ‘He was your friend.’
‘Yes.’ I was quiet for a while. Then I said, ‘What about you, Marie? How are you doing?’
‘Oh, you know …’
In the silence that followed, I saw her with such clarity that she could have been standing right in front of me. A self-deprecating smile lifted on to her face, then just as swiftly dropped away. She lowered her head, and her black hair fell forwards against her cheek. Her mouth tilted, as though one side were heavier than the other. Like a pair of scales, I thought. The most beautiful pair of scales in the world. Despite the news I had received, a kind of joy burst through me. I felt that she’d come back to me. We were closer in those few seconds than we had been in years.
Towards the end of my time at university I was contacted by someone called Diana Bilal. She worked for the Ministry of Health and Social Security, she said, and she wanted to know if she could take me out for lunch.
We met in a country pub. Diana was already there when I arrived. I found her in the beer-garden at the back, her face lightly tanned, her brown hair twisted into a fashionable knot. From her voice I had imagined her to be an older woman, but she was young, no more than twenty-eight or –nine.
‘We’ve been watching you.’ She smiled at me across the rim of her wine-glass. Her eyes, which were dark, put me in mind of a secret glade in the middle of a forest. Thin gold spokes radiated outwards from the pupils.
She told me they were currently recruiting a new group of trainee assessment officers. When I asked her what the job entailed, she said it was hard to define, falling as it did somewhere between civil servant, psychologist and detective. I should think of it as a stepping-stone, though. Or a springboard, perhaps. I would find myself at the heart of an organisation whose responsibility it was both to guide and to protect society. She spoke briefly of her admiration for Michael Song, who had recently swept to power for the fourth time with a landslide majority. The Ministry worked closely with the government, she told me, which gave employees the opportunity to engage directly with the political process and to play a significant part in the shaping of the future. She named a starting salary that seemed generous. If I was interested, she said, they would be prepared to take me on as soon as I graduated. I would have t
o move to Pneuma. The capital.
I looked out into the idyllic sunlit garden. All I could see was Victor’s book of shoes. I knew full well that Victor blamed the current political system for the destruction of both his family and his happiness. How could I possibly tell him I was thinking of becoming part of that very system?
Diana leaned forwards, her eyes appearing to offer shade and rest. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘My family,’ I began, then faltered.
Her smile returned. ‘You’re worried about how they might react,’ she said, ‘which is perfectly understandable. The answer is, they’ll never know. We’ll arrange a phantom job for you. A front. Something they can be proud of’.
‘I would have to lie to them,’ I said slowly.
She looked at her right hand, which lay flat, palm down, on the lacy wrought-iron of the table. The fingers lifted, then dropped – one movement, over in a second. I sensed impatience in her for the first time, though she was doing her utmost to suppress it.
‘If it’s any help to you,’ she said, ‘we could offer them immunity.’
‘Immunity?’
It was Diana’s turn to look away into the garden, her fine-boned, agile face in profile. ‘They would be exempted from all future testing. They would be granted the right to remain here permanently.’ Reaching up, she made a minute adjustment to the wooden comb that held her hair in place. ‘Their status would be guaranteed.’
‘I didn’t know that was possible,’ I said.
She sent me a glance that was both ironic and cautionary, but said nothing.
I would be protecting them, I thought. They would be secure. For the rest of their lives. ‘Could you give me a few days,’ I said, ‘to think it over?’
When Diana faced me again, the spokes in her eyes seemed to be revolving, as though some machinery inside her head had just been set in motion.
Chapter Two
Shortly after joining the Ministry, I received an envelope in the internal mail marked Confidential. Inside, I found a document detailing the imminent transfer of a fifteen-year-old girl from the Red Quarter to the Yellow Quarter. Her name was Chloe Allen. I had been included in the transfer team, my role being described as ‘observer’. A covering letter informed me that I would only accompany the relocation officers as far as the border, and I remember feeling relieved about that, the Yellow Quarter being a wild and brutal country by all accounts, where every kind of barbarity was perpetrated in the name of profit or enterprise, or even, sometimes, for no good reason at all. The fact that Bracewell had wanted to escape to such a place still puzzled me.
I met the transfer team in the Ministry car-park one Friday morning, and we drove south in a white minibus. Behind the wheel was Tereak Whittle, strongly built, laconic, in his mid-to-late-twenties. Pat Dunne sat beside him. With her startled eyes, she looked like someone who had become accustomed to witnessing tragedy. I put her age at about fifty. In relocation work it was standard procedure to pair a man with a woman; they brought complementary skills to the job.
We parked outside a two-storey red-brick house. It had a bay window on the ground floor and a small front garden paved in concrete. I stood behind Dunne and Whittle as they rang the bell. The door swung open to reveal a breathless middle-aged man in a green cardigan. He introduced himself as Mr Allen, then showed us into the living-room. While Dunne took out the transfer documents, Mr Allen sat on the edge of his chair and fidgeted. He had the curious habit of rubbing his right thumb against the palm of his left hand, as though trying to remove a stain.
‘Should I call her yet?’ he said at last.
Dunne glanced up. ‘Please do.’
When Mr Allen opened the door, the girl was already on the other side. ‘Oh.’ He took a step backwards, then turned and smiled foolishly. ‘Here she is. Here’s Chloe.’
The girl moved past her father, into the middle of the room. Though she was probably no more than average height, she seemed larger than him. She took up all the space in that little house. She devoured the air.
Her eyes descended on Pat Dunne. ‘Weren’t you due here an hour ago?’
Dunne looked at her, but said nothing.
The girl shrugged. ‘Better late than never, I suppose.’ She went and stood in the bay window with her back to us, her blonde hair cut level with her shoulderblades and gleaming like gold leaf against the darkness of her jacket.
She didn’t seem in the least upset or even disconcerted by the impending transfer. On the contrary, in putting on a black suit for the occasion, she appeared to be mocking the notion that she might be sad to leave. Or she had dressed for the funeral of that part of her life, maybe. Somehow she managed to give the impression that the whole thing had been her idea.
Leaving Dunne and Whittle to fill in the forms with Mr Allen, I went outside to stretch my legs. In the hallway I paused, glancing up the stairs. I could hear someone crying. Chloe’s mother, I thought. Or a sister, perhaps. Backing away, I opened the front door and stood on the pavement. All the sunlight had gone. Clouds blundered across the sky, shapeless and clumsy, the colour of saucepans. I’m an observer, I kept telling myself. I’m only here to observe.
Towards midday we boarded the minibus again. The law required that Chloe travel in the back, separated from the rest of us by wire-mesh. Like a dog, she remarked as she climbed in. Pat Dunne corrected her. There was no shame attached to the transfer process, she said. It was simply a matter of doing what was best – for everyone. Chloe nodded but chose not to respond. She was gazing at the house where she had grown up, its curtains drawn against her, its front door closed. Was it relief she felt, or remorse? Or was it resentment?
As we crossed the river, heading north, I began to feel that I was in a draught. All the windows were shut, though. It didn’t make sense. After a while the sweet smell of chewing-gum came to me, and I looked round. Chloe was sitting right up against the wire-mesh screen, her face just inches from my own.
‘What,’ she said.
I turned away from her. She began to blow on my neck again, but much more gently this time. I leaned forwards, my elbows propped on my knees.
‘Is she bothering you?’ Dunne asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
Halfway through the afternoon we stopped for petrol. While Whittle filled the tank, Pat Dunne took Chloe to the toilet. The clouds had broken up, and I walked out across the forecourt, the warmth of the sun pressing itself evenly against my shoulder-blades. A tractor laboured through the field behind the petrol station, gulls fluttering in the air behind it like a handful of torn paper. Time drifted.
After a few minutes I became aware that Chloe was moving towards me, not directly, but in a series of contrived half-circles and hesitations as she feigned an interest in the scenery. She ended up standing beside me, facing the same way. She had unbuttoned her jacket, I noticed, revealing a tight white T-shirt underneath. Once again, her presence seemed to demand something from me. I felt it as a weight, a burden, as if she had fainted and I had caught her in my arms.
‘Can you imagine what it’s like to be transferred?’ she said.
‘I don’t have to imagine it,’ I told her. ‘I’ve already been through it’.
‘It was a long time ago, though, wasn’t it? You’ve forgotten.’
I gave her a neutral look.
‘You’re just like the others.’ Half-disappointed, half-provocative, she appeared to be trying to tempt me into some disloyalty or misdemeanour.
‘And what are the others like?’ I asked, keeping my voice light.
‘Look at them.’ She glanced across at Dunne and Whittle, who were standing shoulder to shoulder, studying the map. ‘They can’t think for themselves. They just do as they’re told. They’re drones.’
She was appealing to my vanity, of course, but I couldn’t afford to react. Instead, I had to turn her remarks to my own advantage. Yes, my silence said, I’m just like them. Yes, that’s exactly what I am.
&
nbsp; Half an hour later, the road brought us up against the border, and once or twice, when the land fell away to the east, I caught my first ever glimpses of choleric territory. I was both horrified and enthralled by what I saw. There was an industrial complex whose cooling towers and pools of effluent covered an area of several square miles. There was a motorway, each of its eight lanes packed with speeding traffic. There were children on a building site, doing something to a cat.
‘You think that’s where I belong?’ Chloe said.
Her mood had altered during the past few minutes. The reality of her destination had hit her for the first time. I could hear a brittleness in her voice, which I took to be the outer edges of a new and unexpected fear.
‘You’re wrong.’ She let out a short bitter laugh. ‘You are so fucking wrong.’
Dunne turned in her seat, speaking to me. ‘This isn’t bad. Sometimes they scream the whole way.’
I asked her how she dealt with that.
She opened the glove compartment and took out a pair of headphones. ‘I got them from a friend of mine who works at the airport.’ She grinned. ‘Put these on, you can’t even hear a plane taking off’.
‘What do you think this is,’ Chloe said, ‘a game?’
The relocation officer spoke past me now, her voice hardening. ‘I could give you an injection if you like. Then you’d sleep like a baby.’
By the time we reached the checkpoint it was five o’clock. Knowing how long it could take to cross into choleric territory – hours usually, what with all the harassment and provocation – and aware of the dangers of travelling in that country once darkness had fallen, Pat Dunne decided we should spend the night in the Red Quarter. We wouldn’t be the only ones. A tourist settlement called the Border Experience had sprung up in the vicinity, with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops. Sanguine people came from far and wide to climb the viewing platforms, each hoping for a brief taste of life on the other side. They all had their photos taken with a guard, and they all bought knick-knacks for family and friends back home. It was as if some of the cholerics’ notorious materialism had seeped over the wall. On the way to our hotel, I stopped and looked in a shop window. There were ashtrays in the shape of watch-towers, and tiny, realistic attack dogs made of china. There were snowstorms with miniature replicas of no man’s land inside. I saw tins of Border Shortbread and Border Fudge, and border guard dolls standing to attention in clear plastic cylinders. I saw mugs with words like ‘Furious’ or ‘Livid’ printed on them. My favourite souvenir was a T-shirt. On the front it said I came I saw I lost my temper. On the back, simply, Welcome to the Yellow Quarter.
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