‘So I just choose a door and open it?’
He nodded.
How does one choose between objects that appear to be identical? I had entered the realms of the arbitrary, the intuitive, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable, but I spent a while studying the room and in the end I found what I was looking for. At the foot of the second door from the right the carpet had been worn away, which led me to believe that this particular door was more popular than the others. Now, at least, I had something on which I could base a decision.
I opened the door and stepped through it, closing it carefully behind me as if I were a guest in someone’s house. As I let go of the door-knob I became aware of a faint stinging sensation in my hand. Glancing down, I saw that I had scratched myself. Except they weren’t really scratches. They looked more like pinpricks – four or five neat punctures in the centre of my palm. It must have been the door-knob. Some jaggedness or irregularity in the metal.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
I looked up quickly. A boy was walking across the room towards me. His fair hair glinted as he passed beneath the light that hung from the ceiling.
‘Jones!’ I couldn’t believe that it was him. ‘What are you doing here?’
He just smiled.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’m fine. Just like you said I’d be.’ He took hold of my hand and turned it over. We both gazed down at my palm, the miniature beads of blood. His smile seemed to widen.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
He was still looking at my hand. ‘You shouldn’t worry so much.’
They were the very words I had used a quarter of a century ago. He had remembered them. I had so many questions, but they all merged, forming a kind of blockage, like leaves in a drain.
I stared at the top of his head. His hair had the gleam of beaten metal.
‘What happens next?’ I said.
And then it was as if I had blinked and missed half the evening. A girl stood in front of me. It was my sister, Marie – or rather it was a girl who looked just like her. Younger, though. Seventeen, eighteen. The age Marie had been when I first saw her.
‘Where’s Jones?’ I said.
‘Jones?’ she murmured, lips slanting a little.
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Jones is all right. Jones is fine.’
Her face slowly lifted to mine, as slowly as the sun crossing the sky, as slowly as a flower growing, and her skin glowed as if lit from the inside, and the whites of her eyes were the purest white imaginable. I became aware of a change in the temperature. The air in the room seemed warmer now, and it was scented too, not with perfume, though, and not with incense, no, with something sweeter, more indefinable, more rare – the breath of angels, perhaps …
I don’t know how we reached the street. I simply found myself standing on the kerb, the girl beside me, her eyes as dark as liquorice or mink. My heart seemed to have swollen in my chest. My heart felt like a beacon, a source of light.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never been happier,’ I said.
She took my hand and led me to a car.
‘Is this yours?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer.
Before too long, we were moving along a straight road, our progress fluid, cushioned. She handled the car with great efficiency and deftness. Lights streamed past my window, all different colours.
‘You drive beautifully,’ I said.
She looked across at me and smiled. The space between us glittered.
‘Where are we going?’ And then, before she could reply, I said, ‘I know. I shouldn’t talk so much.’ It didn’t matter where we were going. Our destination didn’t interest me at all. I just wanted everything to remain exactly as it was.
I wanted it to last for ever.
I stared out of the window, secure in the knowledge that she was still beside me. To look away from her felt like sheer extravagance. I was so confident of her presence that I could squander it.
The city faded. A glow in the rear window, a distant phosphorescence. I leaned forwards as the car took a series of long, sweeping curves at high speed. We seemed to be climbing, but I could see nothing through the windscreen, nothing except the headlights pushing into the darkness ahead of us. Every now and then a sign would loom up at the side of the road like a skeleton in a ride through a haunted house, only to fall away, insubstantial, obsolete. There was never a moment when I was frightened or even unnerved.
The girl didn’t speak again. Once in a while she would glance across the magical secluded space inside the car, and the looks she gave me meant more than anything she could have said. Those dark eyes in the dashboard lights, that darker hair, the muted howling of the wind as we rushed on into the unforeseen, the incomparable – and then I was sitting next to a canal, a street lamp hanging over me, and everything plunged deep in a sickly orange solution, everything deformed somehow and yet preserved, as if in formaldehyde. I couldn’t seem to focus properly. My throat contracted, and I coughed so hard that I thought I might vomit. I put my head in my hands and kept quite still. What had happened? I didn’t know. I sat there until I felt the cold air penetrate my clothes.
At last I was able to look up. I was at the top of a flight of stone steps which led down into flat black water. Was it the Great Western Canal? I couldn’t tell. There was no sign of the taxi. Perhaps I had fetched up somewhere else entirely. I risked a glance over my shoulder. No, there behind me was the tall white building. I climbed slowly to my feet, then stood still for a moment. The sweat had cooled on my face, and I felt more awake. My vision was sharper too. I made my way across the towpath to the club. When I tried a door, though, it wouldn’t open. I tried them one by one, methodically. They had all been locked. I peered through the glass, but the lights had been switched off. All I could see was a dim distorted version of my own face. I banged on a door with the flat of my hand. Nobody came. What would I have said anyway? I went back to the bottom of the steps and gazed up at the façade. The white neon strip above the entrance was quite blank; the letters that spelled THE BATHYSPHERE had been taken down. It was only then that I thought to look at my watch. Twenty-past four. I let out a strangled cry and swung round, staring wildly towards the motionless canal, the empty buildings with their broken windows and their barricaded doors. I had to get back to my hotel – but how?
I began to run towards the city centre. A pain started up in my right side, and I slowed to a fast walk. My feet felt only loosely attached to my ankles. My throat burned. The conference would be starting in four hours, and I hadn’t gone to bed yet. I didn’t even know where I was.
A plane went over, tearing the clouds to shreds. I swore at it. The next time I looked up I saw a dimly illuminated sign that said TAXI. I burst through the door. The small office was filled with grey-skinned men smoking cigarettes.
‘I need a cab,’ I said.
Their heads turned in my direction, their lips purple in the drab yellow light. Somebody asked me where I wanted to go. The Sheraton, I told him. He named a price. It seemed expensive, but I agreed to it. In the circumstances, I suppose I would have agreed to almost anything. He consulted a clipboard which lay on the counter in front of him, then pointed at one of the younger men.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in my bathroom, staring into the mirror. It was hard to believe that I was back in the hotel, that I was safe. It had the banality of a true miracle. And the face that was looking at me didn’t appear to have altered. The same wide, slightly furtive brown eyes. The same low forehead, two uneven horizontal lines etched delicately into the skin. I touched my hair where the sweat had darkened it, then I brought my hand down and turned it over so the palm faced upwards. Studying it closely, I could just make out five tiny marks.
At breakfast on Tuesday I sat with Frank Bland. He had called the hospital first thing, he told me. Rinaldi was feeling much better. He would be discharged within the hour. Bland c
elebrated by ordering smoked haddock, a basket piled high with toast and a large pot of tea. Later, we were joined by John Fernandez. When the waitress came, he wanted scrambled eggs and black coffee, nothing else.
‘How was the bar?’ I asked him.
He shrugged, then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘We were out till about two.’
‘What about you?’ Bland said to me. ‘Did you get an early night?’
I smiled ruefully. ‘No. Not exactly.’
Waking at seven, after less than two hours’ sleep, my first sensation had been one of almost painful nostalgia. I had been part of something wonderful, but it was over. At the same time, I didn’t know quite what to believe. It was possible that I’d been drugged. That would explain the exquisite clarity, and the way the minutes, even the seconds, had seemed to slacken and stretch out. And the nausea that came afterwards, it might explain that too. How much of what happened had been imaginary? And if it had all been imaginary, could it be imagined again?
‘Parry?’
I looked up. Fernandez was staring at me.
‘I didn’t get to bed till five,’ I said.
‘Five?’ Fernandez and Bland both spoke at the same time. People at the other tables looked up from their breakfast.
Fernandez was the first to recover. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’
Bland and Fernandez exchanged a glance.
‘You know, you shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Sudhakant Patel, who had just arrived at the table. ‘After all, this is the country of the mystical, the unex –’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Fernandez said. He produced a bottle of Tabasco from his jacket pocket and shook a few bloody drops on to his eggs.
The next few hours passed in something of a blur. I heard a phlegmatic delegate deliver a softly spoken and yet impassioned plea for the statue of the famous admiral to be removed from its column in no man’s land and installed outside a maritime museum on the Blue Quarter’s south coast, and though I acquitted myself reasonably well, I thought, making at least one contribution to the debate, my mind was restless and jittery throughout. I kept drifting back to the events of the night before. My gamble had paid off. I hadn’t had any contact with the local population, not unless you counted the club’s employees and the taxi-drivers. What’s more, the experience itself had exceeded any expectations I might have had, so much so that all I could think about was going back again that evening.
When lunchtime came, I bought a map of the city from a kiosk in the lobby and took it into the restaurant with me, settling into a booth next to the window. I had just located the Great Western Canal and was following it with my finger when I sensed somebody at my shoulder. I looked up to see Walter Ming standing beside me. He had really surpassed himself this morning. He was wearing a green tweed suit with leather-covered buttons, a bright-yellow shirt and a knitted tie of an ambiguous brownish colour.
‘Walter,’ I said. Somehow I felt I was beginning to know him a little, even though we hadn’t seen each other since the cocktail party.
He blinked. ‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all’
He glanced at the remains of my lunch. ‘You know, before I sit down, I think I’ll just go and get myself something to eat.’
While he was busy at the self-service counter, I folded up my map and put it away.
Ming returned with a white coffee and a bowl of rice pudding topped with two generous scoops of vanilla ice-cream. He took a seat opposite me, his eyes immediately sliding towards the place where the map had been.
‘So,’ he said, ‘did you go?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘How was it?’
I nodded. ‘Like you said. Very interesting.’
He gave me a careful look, then turned his attention to his dessert.
‘I didn’t see you there,’ I said.
‘No. In the end I couldn’t get away.’
I watched as Ming spooned rice pudding and ice-cream into his mouth. He had the unusual habit of biting his food up with his front teeth, which made me think of certain rodents. It pleased me to have noticed this about him. Though I had the feeling he possessed information to which I wasn’t privy, I wanted him to realise that he, too, was under observation. It helped to redress the balance.
In less than a minute Ming had finished. He bent over his cup of coffee, took a quick sip and then sat back. ‘Will you go again?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘From what I hear,’ he said, ‘it can be a bit addictive.’ He crushed his napkin into a ball and let it drop into his empty bowl. ‘Well,’ and he shifted in his seat, ‘I probably won’t be seeing you again.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘I’ve got to get back to work.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I had a half-day off, so I thought I’d look in on the conference. Get some ideas, some inspiration.’ He smiled in that mirthless way of his, then we shook hands. ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you,’ he said. ‘Enjoy the rest of your stay.’
From where I was sitting, I was able to watch him leave the hotel. Something about his manner failed to convince me. He didn’t look like a person who was going back to work. Not that he faltered or dawdled. No, he walked at a steady pace, looking neither to the right nor the left. But there was something… Then I realised what it was. He looked as if he was walking away from an appointment rather than towards it. One hand in his jacket pocket, the other lifting casually to smooth his hair, he had the air of someone who had just relaxed. The job had been done, the mission had been accomplished. What job, though? What mission?
I glanced at my watch. If I didn’t hurry, I would be late for the afternoon session. Far from making sense of the previous night’s events, I had somehow managed to wrap them in extra layers of mystery. I felt like the fly that struggles to free itself from the spider’s web only to discover that it is contributing to its own imprisonment. As I rose from the table, there was a moment when the floor appeared to be sloping away from me and it seemed I might be about to faint.
Should I or shouldn’t I?
I stood on the front steps, under the awning, and looked out into the dark. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and it had been raining continuously for hours. A light mist curled and drifted on the surface of the canal. I had found a gap in my schedule that afternoon and slept for two hours, and I felt calmer now, more balanced. I put my anxious, befuddled state of earlier in the day down to simple exhaustion. After my nap, I had showered and dressed, then I had eaten a quiet dinner with Patel and Bland. Once the meal was over, I had excused myself; I had an event in the morning, I told them, and I needed to prepare (not entirely true: I had written my paper weeks ago). Now I was lurking outside the entrance to the hotel, trying to decide whether I could risk going to the club a second time.
A water-taxi drew up, and a young couple got out. Their coats held over their heads, they ran through the garden and up the steps, then pushed hard on the revolving doors that spun them, laughing and breathless, into the lobby. As I turned back to the canal again, still trying to make up my mind, I noticed someone sheltering in the shadows at the far end of the steps. The figure wore a long, pale, shapeless garment, a kind of cloak, and its face was hidden by a hood or cowl of the same colour. I knew instantly that this was one of the White People.
I had seen White People before – once at school, with Bracewell, and once with Victor, while out on a walk – but only from a distance. I remembered how Bracewell had pulled me away from a gang of boys who were taunting one of the poor creatures. He had been disappointed in me, assuming – wrongly, as it turned out – that I’d been actively involved. They were helpless, he said. They deserved better. I could still recall the rhyme the boys had chanted: You don’t belong/ You don’t fit/ You’re not a he/ You’re an it. Almost a decade later, on seeing a small group of White People on the cliff-tops, I had recited the rhyme for Victor, and he had win
ced. Cruel, he said, but not wholly inaccurate. They were society’s untouchables, he explained on that occasion. The past had been taken from them, as it had been taken from everyone alive at the time of the Rearrangement, but these were people who had been either unwilling or unable to find a place in the future. They didn’t fit into any quarter, he said, or any humour. They had ended up marooned between the old kingdom and the new one. Lost in a pocket of history. Once I joined the Ministry, I began to learn a little more about these strange nonentities. Known formally as achromatics, they were required to wear white because white had no status as a colour. Since they were perceived as having no character, they were deemed incapable of causing psychological damage, and as a result they were allowed to cross borders at will, to wander freely from one country to another. They were commonly believed to be both sterile and psychic – sterile because the idea of non-beings giving birth to non-beings was too bizarre to think about, and psychic because their apparent inability to speak had led to a reliance on other, more obscure forms of communication. Perhaps, after all, they had something to impart, and yet this had never really been acknowledged – except for here in the Blue Quarter, that is, where they were sometimes viewed as mystical beings or spiritual guides. In the Red Quarter, a far more secular environment, they could rely on charity: among other things, for instance, we had started a foundation that provided them with food and clothing. Throughout the divided kingdom they were, generally speaking, either tolerated or ignored, though in the Yellow Quarter, predictably enough, they were held in such low esteem that they were often treated as scapegoats.
I moved towards the figure slowly, so as not to frighten it.
‘Do you need any help?’ I said.
The figure looked round. It was a woman of about my own age. Though she had chapped skin and a runny nose, the expression on her face was remote and strangely benign, as if she had been contemplating an object of great beauty.
‘You’re wet through,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you some dry clothes?’ I pointed to the revolving doors behind me. ‘I have a room here.’
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