At the Frontier Lodge, we took three rooms – one each for Whittle and me, and one for Dunne and Chloe Allen. My room overlooked the car-park – there, below me, was our minibus, dwarfed by tourist coaches – but if I leaned on the window-sill and looked to my left I had a clear view of the border. Two walls ran parallel to one another, about a hundred yards apart. Between them, in no man’s land, I could see life-size versions of the souvenirs I had noticed earlier: watch-towers, searchlights, concrete crosses, rolls of barbed wire and a sandy, mined section known as a death strip (in aerial photographs, the border often had the look of a stitched wound). Despite the fact that nothing was happening, I couldn’t seem to tear myself away. It was in these eerie halfway places that one was able to appreciate the full power and extent of the Rearrangement, and it inspired an inevitable reverence, a kind of awe.
As I stood by the window, I heard a click behind me and turned in time to see Chloe Allen slip into my room. I watched her lean back against the door until it closed. She was wearing the same outfit as before, only she had removed her black jacket and her shoes. She took a few quick steps towards me, stopping when she reached the bed.
‘You’re not supposed to leave your room,’ I said.
‘You don’t mind, though,’ she said, ‘do you.’
Thinking I should fetch one of the relocation officers, I tried to edge past her, but she moved to block my way.
‘Let’s forget about the other two,’ she said. ‘Let’s run away together.’
Her smile was sly but genuine.
Taking the hem of her T-shirt in both hands, she deftly lifted it over her head and tossed it on to the bed. She was wearing nothing underneath.
‘They’re pretty, aren’t they,’ she said.
‘Chloe,’ I said. ‘Put your clothes back on.’
‘You used my name.’
I attempted to edge past her again. This time she grabbed the front of my jacket. When I pulled free, she began to flail at me with loosely clenched fists. I caught hold of both her wrists and held her at arm’s length. I realised I was laughing. I had no idea why I might be doing that. There was nothing remotely funny about the situation. Chloe was insulting me now, not loudly, but in a malignant, strangled whisper, as though her fury was such that she couldn’t find her voice. I pushed her away from me, then turned and hurried out into the corridor.
I tried Pat Dunne’s room first. She wasn’t there. Whittle had disappeared as well. I stopped a couple who were making for the lift and asked if they happened to have seen a woman of about fifty with curly hair. The man thought he’d seen someone like that. She was further down the corridor, he said. By the drinks machine. She seemed to be having trouble with it, he added, grinning.
When I found Dunne, she was standing in front of the machine, banging the stainless steel with the heel of her hand. ‘The fucking thing,’ she said. ‘It ate my money.’
She must have noticed the look I was giving her.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but listen. If you go into choleric territory, you have to act like them, or you don’t survive.’
‘Chloe Allen’s in my room,’ I said.
Something loosened in her face. ‘What? When I left her, she was sleeping.’
‘Well, she’s awake now.’
When we burst into my room, it was empty. We found Chloe where she belonged, in the room she was sharing with Pat Dunne. She was lying on her side in bed and breathing steadily, the covers pulled up over her face, one strand of dark-gold hair forming an innocent question mark on the pillow. What, me?
Dunne looked at me sideways. I held her gaze.
‘I didn’t imagine it,’ I said.
Back in my own room, I locked the door. The air smelled of perfume, its sweetness rendered more intense by the grey walls, the dull blond furniture. I opened the window, then sat down on the edge of the bed.
Let’s run away together.
She had noticed me as soon as she walked into the living-room that morning. I had shown up on her adolescent radar. She’d identified me as the one unstable element, a weak point she could probe, exploit.
They’re pretty, aren’t they.
I decided not to risk another confrontation. I could already picture the sequence of looks that would appear on Chloe’s face at the breakfast table as she tried to turn me into her accomplice, her jilted lover, or even, possibly, her rapist. I stayed upstairs until I saw Dunne and Whittle walk her across the car-park. Halfway to the minibus she looked up, scanning the hotel façade, but I stepped back from the window. I don’t think she saw me. I waited until the minibus joined the queue of vehicles at the checkpoint, then I went down to the restaurant.
Dunne and Whittle didn’t return until mid-afternoon. As we drove back to the capital, they told me about their day. No sooner had they crossed the border than Chloe became totally unmanageable. She had used the foulest language and hurled herself repeatedly against the wire-mesh. In the end they had been forced to sedate her. Whittle thought her behaviour had been triggered by my absence. He found my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know, I think she took a shine to you.’
I laughed softly, then looked out of the window.
Pat Dunne turned to face me. ‘What actually happened in your room last night?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’
Later, I wondered whether the transfer I had witnessed had been an elaborate test of my moral fibre, with Chloe playing the role of temptress, but then I dismissed the idea as overheated, a paranoid fantasy brought on by the pressures of my new working environment. It was also conceivable that the authorities had been reminding me of the commitment I had made. After all, my family might have been treated much as Chloe had been treated, had immunity not been granted. I couldn’t be sure, though, and it wasn’t the kind of question you could ask. And even if I had been able to ask, I knew what the answer would be. The authorities would claim that being sent out on the road as an observer was a crucial part of the induction process. I had been given a look at the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the job, they would tell me, a ‘unique insight’ into what life was like ‘in the field’. I couldn’t really have taken issue with any of that.
I had made a pact with the ruling powers, and they were as good as their word: Victor and Marie were left alone. No visits from state officials, no check-ups, no brown envelopes with scarlet peacocks stamped in the top left-hand corner. They’ve obviously given up on us, Victor would tell me over the phone with undisguised glee. We’re hopeless cases. The way things turned out, though, Victor needed less protection than I had imagined. I had only been at the Ministry for eighteen months when he succumbed to a massive stroke, his death occurring unexpectedly, and in slightly unusual circumstances.
Marie called me one Tuesday evening, and I caught a train to the coast the following day, but I didn’t hear the full story until after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. I sat at the kitchen table, the jagged line of the cliff-edge showing halfway up the window. Marie opened a bottle of gin and poured us both a drink. She told me how she had woken early on the morning of Victor’s death, and how the silence had a quality she didn’t recognise. When she drew the curtains, she was almost blinded by the whiteness of the world outside. Snow had fallen in the night, three inches of it. To the east, the cliff rose in a glistening curve, smooth as a sugared almond. She went into Victor’s room to tell him, but he wasn’t there. Though she could just make out the imprint of his body on the counterpane, evidence of a nap the day before, it didn’t look as if the bed had been slept in. She searched the cottage from one end to the other, upstairs and down. She couldn’t find him anywhere. Perhaps he’s gone into the village, she thought. And then she thought, Perhaps he’s gone on a journey. After all, he’d done it before. He was always threatening to up sticks, make tracks. He peppered his conversation with words like ‘vamoose’ and ‘skedaddle’. He was capable of almost anything, she said, in his wild old age.
&
nbsp; ‘What do you mean, he’d done it before?’ I asked.
But Marie didn’t appear to have heard me.
She found him later that morning, she said, in the back garden. She had come across two shapes lying on the ground, one long and vaguely cylindrical, the other smaller, squarer. She approached the small object first. It seemed safer. She bent down and began to brush the snow away. A piece of pale-green leather showed beneath her fingers. The book of shoes. She knew then what the other shape was. Rising to her feet, she circled him slowly, as though he was asleep and she was trying not to wake him. She couldn’t quite believe he was under there. Then, as she stood uncertainly beside him, she heard a quick, stealthy sound and, looking down, she saw that the snow had slipped, revealing the rim of an ear, already bloodless, and some brittle wisps of hair.
‘Weren’t you frightened?’ I asked.
‘I screamed.’ She grinned at me. ‘Have you ever screamed after it’s snowed? It’s the strangest thing. You feel like you’re in a box. The kind of box a ring comes in, or a trumpet. A box lined with velvet.’ Something lifted in her just then, and she became Marie again, Marie as she had been when I first saw her, framed in the living-room doorway of the house on Hope Street, mischievous, carefree. Then it dropped again, whatever it was, and she turned back into a woman I didn’t really feel I knew. ‘I screamed,’ she said a second time, her voice without inflection now, ‘but there was no one there. A ship on the horizon. A few gulls.’
Later, when we’d finished the bottle, I watched her run her index finger along the table, following the grain in the wood. Outside, the wind swirled against the walls. I was almost sure I could feel the cottage rock on its foundations.
‘What will you do?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘Stay here.’
‘Won’t you be lonely?’
‘I’d be lonely if I moved,’ she said.
At least no one would bother her, I thought as I travelled back to the city the next day. My head ached, and my mouth was strangely perfumed from all the gin I’d drunk. It had been a good funeral, though. People had made an effort to be there. At the graveside I had lifted my eyes from the coffin to see Mr Page standing across from me. His black suit looked immaculate – one would have expected nothing less – but something about him seemed out of character, abnormal, just plain wrong. After a while I realised that although his mouth was still doing its best to turn up at the corners it had crumpled in the middle – or to put it another way, he no longer appeared to be smiling. How I wish I could have caught Bracewell’s eye right then! How I would love to have seen the expression on his face! The miraculous, the almost unimaginable moment had arrived, and sadness had brought it about, not anger, but it was too late to have any real impact on me, it was all too late.
If the authorities fulfilled their side of the bargain, so did I. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my new job. As far as Marie was concerned, I was a quality engineer – I looked at companies and came up with ways of improving their performance – but in fact I was employed by a branch of the civil service that was generally considered to be the government’s right arm. I worked long hours, arriving home at nine or ten at night. Most weekends, too, I could be found in the office. I had almost no social life. I went out with a girl called Alex, who was a violinist, but she ended it after three months, claiming that we hardly saw each other. Somehow I didn’t question the need for such sacrifices – or rather, I always seemed able to justify them to myself. It was up to people like me, I thought, to safeguard the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. Only later did I start to understand why I might have been pushing myself so hard. I had to fight for the system, I had to believe in it, or my removal from my family would all have been for nothing.
Over the years I rose through the ranks, from a glorified filing clerk to one of a handful of people whose responsibility it was to advise on all transfers, both into and out of the country, but the big promotion came just before my thirtieth birthday. During our lunch together in the beer garden, Diana Bilal had mentioned words like psychologist and detective, hoping to capture my imagination, perhaps, and yet the word that seemed to define my new position most accurately was ‘diplomat’. A transfer was, in itself, a highly complex and delicate procedure – no one knew that better than I did – but, viewed in the wider context, it also became a matter of negotiation between two parties who didn’t necessarily see eye to eye. I had to deal, on a regular basis, with people who held equivalent positions in other parts of the divided kingdom, and despite all the obvious differences in temperament and perception it was important to try and maintain good working relations. If I disputed one of their initiatives, it could be regarded as an example of Red Quarter impatience or naivety. If they disputed one of mine, I could just as easily see it as Blue Quarter dithering, Green Quarter cynicism or Yellow Quarter recklessness. The job required flexibility and patience as well as sound judgement, and for that reason, perhaps, it was seen by some as a stepping-stone into the world of politics.
Despite all the lies and the deprivation, despite the fact that my original existence seemed buried beneath layers of artifice – not for the first time the image of Russian dolls occurred to me, my lives concealed neatly, one inside the other – despite all that, my work gave me a real sense of fulfilment. If the Red Quarter was a contented and harmonious place in which to live, it was because we, the public servants, had made it so. What’s more, I had done everything I could to ensure that my new family was taken care of.
Every now and then, though, especially as I left my twenties behind and moved into my thirties, I thought back to the day when the government official arrived at Thorpe Hall in his chauffeur-driven limousine, and I remembered how he had told us that we were special, and that the fate of the kingdom rested in our hands, and unease would flash through me like a blast of heat. Had I simply become what they had wanted me to become? Was I really so malleable?
Was I the man in the chauffeur-driven limousine?
I was sitting in my office one morning, working my way through a pile of recent case histories, when I heard a knock on the door. I glanced up. The door opened, and Mr Vishram’s face appeared in the gap. ‘Am I interrupting, Thomas?’ Before I could reply, he had installed himself on the only other chair in the room, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose with the tip of a forefinger.
As head of the Department of Transfer and Relocation, Ajit Vishram belonged to the select high-powered group that ran the Ministry. He was also a brilliant scholar, with several works of non-fiction to his name, all of which I had read. People said that he had the ear of the Prime Minister, which wouldn’t have surprised me particularly, though I had never raised the subject with him. He openly admitted to a streak of melancholy – all writers are sanguine melancholics, he would declare with a dismissive gesture, as if something so obvious was hardly worth saying – an admission which, given his immediate working environment, was daring to say the least, but also cunningly preemptive. Though he must have been approaching sixty, he didn’t have a single white hair, and if you chose to overlook the crescents of puckered, purplish skin beneath his eyes, his face was quite unmarked by age. He wore carefully tailored pale-grey suits made from a light, shiny fabric in which silk almost certainly played a part, and he carried himself with a quiet gravity that was often misconstrued as self-importance by those who didn’t know him. He seemed to have no sense of the impression he created, however – or, if he did, then it simply failed to engage his interest. He was consistently both stately and impervious. I saw him as the ruler of a small, influential and untroubled country – which, in his rumoured closeness to Michael Song, he very nearly was, perhaps.
‘Are you free for lunch tomorrow?’ Vishram toyed idly with the power line that led to my computer. ‘There’s something I need to discuss with you.’
‘Yes, I’m free,’ I said. ‘What’s it about?’
He would meet me in the lobby, he said, at half-past twelve, t
hen he rose from the chair and with a humorous glint in his dark eyes and an enigmatic nod he passed out of my office, his progress so smooth that I imagined for a second that he had castors instead of feet. Smiling faintly, I shook my head. The whole episode had been typical of him: he liked nothing better than to tantalise and then withdraw. My concentration broken, I stood up and moved over to the window.
The offices were situated in a part of the city from which the entire kingdom had once been governed. These days, though, everything looked different. The old metropolis had been divided so as to create four new capitals, and my building backed directly on to a section of the border. On the other side of the concrete wall lay the choleric capital, Thermopolis. Sitting at my desk, I could often hear attack dogs barking, and once, when I was working late, I had been startled by the sudden brittle chatter of machine-gun fire. I gazed down into the narrow strip of no man’s land. To the left, the border moved in a northwesterly direction, incorporating a square where people used to get drunk on New Year’s Eve. The famous admiral now stood in a mined wasteland, peering out, one-eyed, over a tangle of barbed wire. To my right, the border ran across an iron bridge and then turned east along the south bank of the river. The bridge itself had been fortified, with watch-towers at either end and a steel dragnet underneath. Sometimes, in fine weather, I would lean on the window-sill and train my binoculars on the gardens that lay just to the east of the bridge, and I would study the inhabitants of Thermopolis as they gesticulated, insulted one another, and, more often than not, came to blows, and because I couldn’t hear anything they said I found it curiously soothing, like watching mime.
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