She reached for her wine and drank. It was another humid night, and all the windows were open. The murmur of voices floated up from the other flats that gave on to the light-well.
‘Is that why you sounded so strange when I spoke to you last night?’ she said.
‘No. I didn’t know about it then.’
A shriek of laughter came from somewhere below.
Sonya was staring down into her glass. I had wanted her to be excited for me – after all, to be chosen for such a trip was an honour, whatever your profession – and her muted reaction caught me off guard.
‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said. ‘About what it’s like, I mean.’
‘So have I,’ I said. ‘It’s damp. Everyone’s ill all the time. I’ll probably get flu.’
She didn’t even smile.
I reached across the table. Her gaze shifted to my hand, which now covered hers. ‘It’s a conference,’ I said gently. ‘It’s just work.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and her chin lifted and she looked away from me, into the room.
‘Sonya …’ I rose to my feet and walked round the table. Standing behind her, I wrapped her in my arms and then just held her. Cool air from the window moved across my back.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘I’m being stupid.’
‘No.’
I had heard stories about the Blue Quarter too – tales of enchantment and possession, of pagan ritual, of bizarre religious cults – but I had heard them from relocation officers, and they had always been notorious for their lurid imaginations. It was partly due to the privilege of their position. They travelled to other quarters on a regular basis. They saw places no one else saw. They could invariably command an audience willing to hang on their every word. But it was also a result of their constant exposure to other people’s trauma. The stories they told were defence mechanisms, safety valves, ways of deflecting or releasing pressure. Their humour was gallows humour. The old joke about relocation officers was that they themselves often had to be relocated. They crossed too many borders. They burned out. It was an occupational hazard. I remembered what Vishram had said at lunch. One might lose a part of oneself. One might suffer injury or harm.
Sonya carefully detached herself from me and, tilting her head sideways, touched the back of her wrist to her right eye. Then she looked up at me and smiled.
‘It’ll be amazing,’ she said.
I rose out of sleep just after three o’clock, my head cluttered with disturbing images. Not wanting to wake Sonya, I eased out of bed and crept through the darkness to her bathroom. I drank some cold water from the tap, then turned to the window. A full moon hung in an almost cloudless sky. The street below was quiet. I saw three girls stop outside the building opposite. They talked for a while, then I heard the word ‘goodnight’, and two of them walked away. Alone now, the third girl leaned close to the building’s entrance with her head bent, her neck white in the moonlight. She must be having trouble with her keys, I thought. Eventually the door gave, and she disappeared inside. I had been watching with a feeling of nostalgia, even though I had never seen the girl before, and I realised I was thinking of Marie, and how she would have stood outside the house on Hope Street in much the same way, tired certainly, perhaps a little drunk as well, trying to fit her key into the lock. Once through the front door, she would climb the creaky staircase in the dark. As she crossed the landing, she would knock against the linen chest that jutted from the wall, and I would hear her swear under her breath. Fuck, I would whisper, imitating her. I’d be grinning. In the morning she would pull her skirt and pants down on one side and show me the mauve-and-yellow rose that had bloomed on her hip like a tattoo. Was it really eighteen months since I had seen her last?
I had been due to attend a seminar on the south coast, and on the spur of the moment I had phoned Marie and asked if I could stay with her. I remembered a cliff-top path, a bright November day. Skylarks were chattering high above, black splinters in the sky’s blue skin. The sea sprawled to my left, hundreds of feet down, its waves fluttering like gills. My blood felt fresher for the walk. Then I came over a rise and saw the cottage below, a roof of dark slates, smoke coiling upwards from the chimney and merging with the air. Even at a distance I could see Marie in the front garden, the only figure in a vast panoramic landscape. How solitary her life had become, I thought, now Victor was no longer there.
I drew closer, then stood still and watched her. Bending from the waist, her hair hanging loose on both sides of her face, she was weeding a bed of irises. At last she seemed to sense my presence. She looked round, then straightened slowly, squinting into the light. I raised a hand and waved.
‘Oh Tom. It’s you.’ She walked over in her clumsy wellingtons, touching her right sleeve to her nose. When she embraced me, she laid her head against my shoulder, and I could feel her voice vibrating in my collar-bone. ‘I forgot you were coming. I mean, I forgot it was today.’
I stood back. ‘You look good, Marie. You look really well.’
‘Do I?’ She glanced down at her cardigan, which was darned in several places and missing a button, then her eyes lifted again. ‘Look at you, though. How much did that coat cost?’
Later that day I sat at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea. She told me she had got a job at the local railway station, in the ticket office. Victor would have approved, I said. She nodded absently, and wrapped both hands around her mug, as if to extract warmth from it. Her bottom lip had split down the middle, and the shine had gone from her hair. She would be forty now. It was hard to believe.
‘You can’t imagine how anyone can live like this,’ she said.
I smiled faintly.
‘Things happen here. You’d be surprised.’ She had become defiant, as though my presence had ignited some aspect of her that had been lying dormant, just barely smouldering. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this – he made me promise not to – but I don’t suppose it matters now.’
He. Our father.
At breakfast one morning, she told me, Victor had come up with an idea. He had decided to walk round the border. All the way round. He wanted to see exactly where he had been living for the past twenty years. He was curious about ‘the dimensions of the cage’. And they had done it, the two of them. They had walked nearly seven hundred miles. It had taken them most of the summer.
‘I didn’t know,’ I said.
‘We crossed the border too,’ Marie said. ‘Illegally.’
She seemed to relish the look that appeared on my face. She had startled me out of my complacency. At the same time, I had a sense of how comprehensively I had deceived her over the years. It had never occurred to her that I might work for the Ministry. She just saw me as someone who obeyed the rules.
‘We crossed it in broad daylight,’ she said. ‘We walked right through. There was no one there.’
‘Where was it?’
She named the place. I knew it as a marshy stretch of country, bleak and windswept – the only border we shared with the Green Quarter.
‘There must have been some kind of wall,’ I said.
‘There was. But it had a hole in it’.
‘A hole?’
‘A gap,’ Marie said. ‘I don’t know what had happened. Maybe the wall had collapsed. Or maybe it was being repaired. I don’t know. But there was definitely a gap. We couldn’t believe it at first. After everything we’d heard about national security and the integrity of the state. We thought we must be seeing things.’ Her eyes slanted towards the window – a thin stripe of grey-green sea, the grey sky above. She smiled. ‘We walked towards it, and we walked really slowly, as if it was alive and we might startle it. Then we just climbed through.’
‘Both of you?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I remember standing on the other side. It looked the same, of course – but it felt different. Completely different.
Like the moon or something. There was this moment when we looked all round and then our eyes met and we started laughing.’ She shook her head, as if what had been stored there still astonished her. ‘We jumped up and down and shouted things and danced, even though there wasn’t any music. We behaved like mad people. You should have seen us.’
You should have seen us.
‘Thomas?’
I jumped, the breath rushing out of me. Sonya stood in the doorway. She was naked, her face in shadow, one foot turned slightly inwards. I had gone so deep into my memory that I had forgotten where I was.
‘I woke up and you weren’t there,’ she said. ‘I thought for a moment you’d gone home.’
I smiled and shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t do that’.
She moved into my arms. ‘You’re cold.’
‘I couldn’t sleep, that’s all’.
‘You’ve been working too hard. When you come back, maybe we should go away – a long weekend …’
I held her tightly, kissed her hair.
‘Come on, my darling,’ she said. ‘Come back to bed.’
On the Wednesday before I left for the Blue Quarter, I went for a walk, thinking I might sit somewhere quiet and read for an hour. I crossed the main road, making for the park that lay to the west of the office. Though it was overcast, the sky seemed to have retreated a great distance from the earth, and I had a feeling of lightness, almost of vertigo, as if there was too much space above my head, as if I might fall upwards. I passed through the park gates and took a path that curved around the south side of the lake. A blackbird spilled rapid, trembling drops of sound into the air. Something about the way a willow hung its branches over the water, leaving its trunk exposed, reminded me of a woman washing her hair in a sink. Odd thoughts. I stood still and stared up at the clouds, my eyes pushing into the greyness. I was trying to detect a surface, gauge a depth. Impossible, of course.
Following our lunch in Fremantle, Vishram had invited me back to his office, where he loaded me down with reading material. He always insisted on thorough preparation, no matter what the assignment, but I had never seen him quite so openly enthusiastic. As I turned to leave, my forearms already aching with the burden of articles, essays and treatises, he murmured, Wait, Thomas, I forgot something and consulting his shelves again, he selected yet another volume, Nightmare in Pneuma by D.W.B. Forbes-Mallet, a high-ranking Green Quarter diplomat who had attended the inaugural cross-border conference. During the past fortnight I had got through a number of books – among them, an introduction to phlegmatic cooking called The Cautious Kitchen, with recipes for bread-and-butter pudding and fish pie, and a monograph on the mating habits of the sea horse – but now I had Nightmare in Pneuma tucked under my arm. Given the title, it was no surprise to discover that the first conference had gone badly wrong, with gangs of drunken Yellow Quarter delegates running amok in the streets, and a Green Quarter delegate jumping to his death from the roof of his hotel. He had been a colleague of the author’s, and a good friend. It was almost as if the authorities had brought everyone together in order to illustrate the wisdom of their grand design, as Forbes-Mallet rather sourly observed.
I sat down on a vacant bench and stared out over the lake – the ducks with their black velvet necks and their enquiring heads, the colour of the grass enhanced by the cloud cover, the air shifting at my back … A young couple walked past, arm in arm, and I overheard a fragment of their conversation. It’ll be great, the girl was saying. You’ll see. The future tense, I thought. The tense that comes naturally to sanguine people. Though everything was normal, it seemed at the same time to be heightened in some way, not unlike the feeling one might have during an eclipse.
‘How’s the reading going?’
I looked up to see Vishram standing on the path, then I glanced down at the Forbes-Mallet, which lay unopened on my lap. ‘It’s going well,’ I said, ‘though I’ve only read about half of what you gave me, I’m afraid.’
‘I did get rather carried away.’ Vishram turned his eyes towards the sky. Were the atmospheric conditions affecting him as well? ‘I was just going back to the office,’ he said. ‘Would you care to join me? Or perhaps you’re not ready?’
‘No, I’d be happy to join you.’
As we set off round the lake, I thought of our recent visit to Fremantle. It was now my conviction that Vishram had had affairs with several of the waitresses and, intending to draw him on the subject, I told him how much I had enjoyed the restaurant. We should go again, I said, on my return. Maybe next time I would try the famous crème brûlée, I added, remembering the white china pot that had been placed in front of him, the lid of melted caramel like a small round pane of amber glass. Vishram nodded, his usually opaque eyes lighting up at the prospect, but he seemed disinclined to speak.
Or perhaps not affairs exactly, I thought. Because, in the end, what the restaurant had reminded me of more than anything was a brothel – refined, discreet, infinitely sophisticated, but a brothel nonetheless – and I suddenly wondered if the whole establishment might not be a front, and all the talk of ambience and cuisine – of crème brûlée! – an elaborate euphemism, a code.
‘And how’s Miss Visvikis?’
Vishram’s question dropped into my thoughts with a studied innocence, a certain delicious incongruity, and he smiled at me across his shoulder as though perfectly aware of the effect he had just created. As far as I knew, though, his many gifts did not include mind-reading. I had introduced him to Sonya at a party fund-raiser in August, and he had spent the best part of an hour discussing book-binding with her – or so he’d told me afterwards.
‘She’s very well,’ I said. ‘She’s worried about me going away, of course. I think she’s a bit jealous too, in a way.’
‘That’s only natural’. Vishram paused. ‘Is she still working at the library?’
‘Yes, she is. Though she’d like a change, I think.’
‘Really?’ Vishram lowered his eyes almost coyly. ‘It just so happens that I’m looking for a research assistant’.
One of his impeccable eyebrows arched, as if he had just made a joke, but at his own expense. He was starting work on a new book, he told me. He had been commissioned to write the official biography of Michael Song.
‘I can’t think of a better person for the job,’ I said.
Vishram thanked me for the kind words.
With so much of his time taken up by the Ministry, he went on, and by other related obligations, he doubted he would be able to carry out all the research himself. Perhaps I could mention it to Sonya, when I saw her next. He felt sure that she’d be equal to the task. Of course he wouldn’t be able to pay very handsomely –
‘I’ll ask her,’ I said. ‘You never know.’
On Friday afternoon I reported to Jasmine Williams in Personnel for a briefing on my forthcoming trip. When I walked into her office she looked up and smiled. She had altered her hairstyle since I had last seen her, the neat cornrows drawing attention to the natural elegance of her head. Jasmine and I had gone out together for a while, when we were both trainees. She’d had a lovely unruffled quality about her, the ability to view any mishap with a kind of amused tolerance. She’d also had the most beautiful body I had ever seen, with breasts that tilted upwards, as if in eagerness, and skin that smelled like butter and sugar melting slowly in a pan. She had been posted to a branch of the Ministry up north, though, which meant we could only see each other at weekends, and after several months we had gradually drifted apart.
‘So,’ she said. ‘This time it’s you.’
‘Yes.’ I moved across the room towards her. ‘I like your hair.’
‘Thanks.’
As I lowered myself into a chair, there was a knock at the door and Vishram appeared. ‘I hope neither of you mind if I sit in on the meeting?’
Jasmine smiled at me again, a little more inscrutably this time. ‘We don’t mind, do we?’
‘Not at all,’ I said.
Vi
shram seated himself at the back of the room, against the wall. Crossing one leg over the other, he took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses. I would be issued with a standard business visa, Jasmine told me, valid for up to seventy-two hours. The visa permitted travel between the Red Quarter and the Blue Quarter, one journey in each direction. It was a stipulation of this type of visa that contact with local people be kept to an absolute minimum. Obviously the system worked on a trust basis – but then presumably I had earned that trust, she added with a glance in Vishram’s direction, or I wouldn’t have been selected in the first place. I should remember that the laws of both countries were equally specific about the dangers of psychological contamination. She need hardly say that the kingdom had been divided for its own good, and that it was in no one’s interest to jeopardise twenty-seven years of comparative equilibrium.
‘What about contact with other delegates?’ I said.
‘No restrictions.’ Jasmine consulted her computer. ‘We haven’t mentioned medication.’
‘Medication?’
‘As you might imagine, things are a bit different over there. The pace of life is slower, but it’s also more unpredictable. There’s more indecision, more ambiguity. If you like, we can issue you with medication that will help you to adapt’.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said.
Jasmine watched me carefully.
‘I want to experience the Blue Quarter for myself,’ I went on. ‘I want to see it as it is. Not diminished in any way – or enhanced, for that matter.’
‘All right’. Jasmine looked beyond me. ‘Mr Vishram? Anything to add?’
Vishram held his glasses at arm’s length to check the lenses for smears, but it seemed that he had done a good job. ‘No,’ he said, putting the glasses back on. ‘I think you’ve covered everything.’
‘Don’t let the rules and regulations suffocate you, Tom,’ Jasmine said. ‘They’re just there to provide you with a framework within which you can operate quite freely.’
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