The woman took two or three steps towards me, and then stopped. Her expression hadn’t altered, and I felt that I had now been incorporated into whatever she was thinking about.
‘Come up to my room,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you some –’
Before I could finish my sentence, she launched herself at me, almost knocking me off my feet. Her strength took me completely by surprise. I staggered, but remained upright. She had wrapped her arms around me, trapping my own arms by my sides, then she had pressed her face into my chest. She had gone quite still. It wasn’t an assault, I realised, but an embrace, and I was reminded, for one brief, unnerving moment, of Marie.
‘Oh dear.’
Howard had appeared on the steps. He began to try and free me from the woman’s grasp, but she must have locked her hands behind my back. She had clamped her teeth together and turned her head to one side, her eyes fixed on some abstract point beyond my shoulder. There was a sense in which I had become incidental. She was clinging not so much to me, I felt, as to the idea of human contact, human warmth.
Howard moved round behind me. When the woman’s fingers were finally prised loose, she let out a bellow of distress and fell back, flushed and panting.
I looked at Howard. ‘Can’t we offer her some shelter?’
‘I’m afraid it’s against hotel regulations, sir,’ he said.
I watched as the woman lumbered down the steps and along the flagstone path that led to the canal. She appeared to dissolve into the rain.
‘Where will she go?’ I asked.
‘They have their places.’
I saw that Howard was trembling. ‘Are you all right, Howard?’
‘It upsets me too, sir.’ He eyed my raincoat. ‘Can I clean you up at all?’
I told him not to worry.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is something you could do for me. You could order me a taxi.’
Howard nodded, then withdrew into the lobby.
Standing on the steps, I could still feel the woman’s grip around my ribs. She had left damp marks all down my front. I could even see the place where she had pressed her face against me, a stain with three segments to it – the imprint of her forehead, nose and chin. My raincoat had become a shroud. I stared out into the darkness. The force with which she had attached herself to me had been testament to her loneliness, her desperation. I was reminded once again of what Bracewell had said, that the White People couldn’t help themselves, that they deserved better, and I rebuked myself for not having acted with more compassion.
By the time the taxi drew up outside the hotel, the rain had slackened off. The city seemed quiet, almost shocked, as if it had witnessed the entire episode and sided with the woman. Of the woman herself there was no sign. They have their places. I stepped down into the boat and gave the driver the address.
He frowned. ‘What do you want to go all the way out there for? There’s nothing out there.’
I didn’t answer. Curiously though, his reaction provided me with exactly the kind of stimulus I had been waiting for. You’re phlegmatic, I thought. What would you know? We were different people, the taxi-driver and I. We had different needs. A strong sense of conviction was flowing through me now. I could have been having drinks with John Fernandez, Philip de Mattos, and the rest of them. I could have been forging new contacts, furthering my career. Instead, I was in a water-taxi heading west, towards the airport.
There’s nothing out there.
That’s what you think, I thought with a smile.
Inside, it was all exactly as I remembered it. There before me was the foyer, half-moon-shaped, and decorated in flamboyant if slightly tattered red and gold, and there on the carpet lay the bright circle of light, trembling a little at the edges, and there in the ticket booth sat the girl with the blonde hair. I was filled to the brim with a joy which, even at the time, felt disproportionate. It was as though I had invested my whole being in this one image, and somehow, simply by walking in and seeing it, I had been repaid in full.
Well, not quite in full. There was still the pale-gold door, and what I would find when I stepped beyond it. I moved almost hungrily towards the ticket booth. The girl was wearing something different tonight, a silk kimono embroidered with exotic birds and trees. The backdrop was a landscape, lush mountains rising above calm bays, suns sinking heavily in skies of peach and lilac, and for a moment I was drawn into that world, and I was looking at the birds and trees from the other side, my face drenched in a lurid apocalyptic glow. The girl’s voice came to me from everywhere at once, and across a great distance, like the voice of God.
‘Can I help you?’
Feeling slightly dizzy, I took out my card and showed it to her.
‘That was a special offer,’ she told me. ‘This time you’ll have to pay.’
‘That’s all right.’ I slipped the card back in my pocket. ‘I’m just really glad you’re open,’ I said. And then, not wanting to appear eccentric or over-eager, I added, ‘You must hear that all the time.’
She smiled uncertainly. I noticed how the sleeves of her kimono widened below the elbow, dark trumpets from which her arms emerged, like music. Her beauty was just the prelude to something even more exquisite. I looked away into the foyer, my happiness extravagant, baroque.
‘You’ve been here before, then?’ I heard the girl say.
Turning to face her again, I felt a momentary stab of disappointment. Somehow I had expected her to remember. ‘I was here last night.’
‘So you know where to go?’
‘I thought you wanted me to pay.’
She laughed and shook her head, the light skidding off her hair. ‘I don’t know what’s got into me today.’
I laughed with her. ‘It’s been an odd day for me too.’
She named an amount, and I slid the money into the shallow metal bowl at the base of the perspex screen. I took one final look at her, which she failed to notice, then I parted the velvet curtain and passed on into the corridor beyond.
When I reached the triangular room, the man in the black clothes stopped me by putting a hand on my arm. ‘You’ll have to wait.’
I sat down on the only other chair. The man was seated to my right. I hadn’t looked at him properly the previous night. There hadn’t been time. He had hooded eyes, which he kept lowered, and his hair was cropped so short that I could see his scalp. His face was made up of cavities and hollows, as if the bones had been broken and then imperfectly reset. Though his clothes looked new, they seemed dated, archaic. He was dressed like a footman, I thought, or notary – or even a church-warden. In his left ear he wore an earpiece, which would be how he received instructions from elsewhere in the club.
I looked still more closely.
His ankles, though long and spavined, were sheathed in expensive black silk socks. The ankle-bones protruded in the way that Adam’s apples sometimes do.
A pulse beat patiently in the thick vein on the left side of his neck.
This was like no waiting I had ever known. I wasn’t upset by the delay, or even curious. I simply assumed there must be a good reason for it. I felt physically comfortable, despite the cramped nature of the room and the hardness of the chair. Time was just a pool in which I happened to be floating. At one point I smelled violets. Not the real flowers, though. A synthetic version. They must have opened secret vents and released some kind of air-freshener into the room.
At last, and without looking up, the man signalled to me, a peculiar double gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing cobwebs from in front of his face.
‘You can choose a door.’
I chose the second door from the right. As my hand closed over the door-knob, I shut my eyes, and it wasn’t Jones I saw but the girl who looked like Marie, her face lifting slowly to mine … I stepped through the doorway. This time I felt nothing. I glanced instinctively at the palm of my hand. There were no marks, no tiny punctures, no telltale beads of blood. So
mething opened in my stomach, bottomless, like an abyss. I was standing in a room I hadn’t thought about in more than twenty years. There was my bed, the blankets and the eiderdown pulled back, part of the top sheet trailing on the floor. I had been sleeping in this room when the soldiers came, the beams from their torches lurching across the pale-blue walls. I had always slept here, even as a baby. The air itself seemed to remember me.
I moved into the alcove where the window was. Sunlight was falling on the copper beech in the front garden. I had climbed its branches so many times. I knew them off by heart. And the road beyond, I knew that too, its pavement smooth enough for rollerskates, and then the dark curving scar on the tarmac where a car had swerved to avoid me when I was six. I faced into the room again. Draped over the end of the bed was one of my father’s old gowns from the university. I would put it on when I was pretending to be a vampire or a wizard. I ran my hand over the white fur collar, and a word appeared on my lips, familiar but magical: ermine … Smiling, I turned away.
On the mantelpiece was my favourite piece of rock. I had found it halfway up a mountain while on holiday. It had rained so hard that morning that the footpath had become a shallow stream. Veined with turquoise and tawny-gold, the rock looked valuable, like treasure. Back home, though, it dried out, quickly fading to a dull grey-green. My parents told me I should keep it in water – in a fish-tank, perhaps – then it would always look the way it had when I first saw it and I would never be disappointed, but somehow I had never taken their advice, and it had sat there above the fireplace ever since …
That dropping feeling in my stomach again, though steeper this time, and faster. I had been so startled by the room and then so caught up in its spell that I had overlooked the fact that it was just one fraction of the house, and that the bedroom door would take me to the rest of it, and that my mother and father might be somewhere close by. I stood still and listened. No voices came to me, and yet I had the sense that they were both downstairs. I thought I could hear the washing-machine, for instance. The whirr of it, then the shudder.
I opened the door, stepped out on to the landing. The dark wood of the banisters, almost black. The stairs, carpeted in pale-pink. And then the hall below, in shadow … There was another noise now, harsh and rhythmic. It was me, I realised. It was the sound of my own breathing.
‘Matthew?’
My stillness seemed to thicken, to intensify.
‘Darling, are you coming down?’
I couldn’t see my mother, but I knew she would be standing by the kitchen door, the fingers of her right hand curled around the leading edge. She would be looking upwards, in the rough direction of my bedroom. Beyond her, the table would be set, with bread and marmalade, a pot of tea, and if it was the weekend my father would be there.
Though I couldn’t move, I found my voice and called out, ‘Coming.’
I felt so buoyant in that moment, so free, and I stepped back into my bedroom, thinking I would take one more look at it, only to be confronted by walls that were red and a ceiling that was black. I swung round. My bedroom was no longer there. The piece of rock, the gown, the window framing sunlit trees – all gone. There was only a row of pale-gold doors. I reached for the door that was second from the right, but a voice stopped me.
‘Only one choice allowed.’
I turned to see the man in dark clothes sitting on his chair. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You never told me that.’
The man rose to his feet. Standing only a few inches from me, he somehow gave the impression that he could expand rapidly to fill an enormous space. He was like something in its concentrated form.
‘This way.’ Taking me firmly by the arm, he propelled me through a curtain and out into an unlit corridor. If only I had not turned back. If only I’d gone on across the landing down the stairs …
I stood on the towpath, my eyes angled towards the ground, one hand wrapped around the lower half of my face. The rain had stopped, but I could hear water everywhere, like a tongue moving inside a mouth.
A blast on a horn made me jump. I looked up. My taxi was still waiting, the small craft rocking and swaying in the wake of another boat. I nodded at the driver to let him know I was aware of him, but couldn’t bring myself to leave.
In the end, though, there was nothing for it. I crossed the towpath and climbed down into the taxi. The driver turned in his seat with the self-righteous air of someone whose perfectly good advice has been ignored.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘I told you there was nothing there.’
I had the feeling I’d been turning and turning in the bed for hours, but when I finally gave up trying to sleep and switched on the light I saw that it was only five-past one. Maybe I should try and read for a while – after all, the shelves on either side of me were full of books – or else I could go through my lecture one last time … I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Leaving the lights off, I peered into the dim well of the mirror. My face floated there, not on the surface seemingly, but just below it, like someone underwater looking at the sky. As I stared at myself I heard my mother calling me again. Matthew? I had recognised her voice immediately. It was as much a part of me as blood or hair. Each layer of my skin had been inlaid with it. And it had sounded different to the voice I remembered from that night on the road, not piteous, not pleading, but tender, even, calm – the voice I had lived with, day in, day out, for years … I filled a glass with water, drank it down.
As I put the glass back on the shelf, loud laughter came from the corridor outside my room. I opened the door. There were five of them out there, arms round each other’s shoulders – Fernandez, Bland, de Mattos and two I didn’t recognise. Fernandez was holding a huge rabbit made of green crêpe paper. Bland appeared to have lost one of his shoes. When they noticed me standing in the doorway, their mouths opened wide, and they lifted glasses and bottles in a collective salute.
‘It’s the mystery man,’ Fernandez said.
I grinned self-consciously and shook my head. The mystery man. That’s what they had started calling me. Because I had gone to bed at five in the morning, and they still hadn’t found out why. They staggered towards me, all at the same time, as if they had been pushed from behind. I took an involuntary step backwards.
‘Sorry,’ Bland said, ‘but we’re drunk.’
‘I’d never have guessed,’ I said.
They reeled back again, wheezing and chuckling, bumping against each other gently like boats in a harbour. Yes, they’d been drinking all evening, so many drinks, but now they were going to play cards. I’d play cards, wouldn’t I?
‘I’m not very good at cards,’ I said.
‘Well, you can watch,’ de Mattos said. ‘How about that?’
I thought about it. Probably anything was better than lying in bed and being unable to sleep – and besides, the idea of company appealed to me.
‘All right,’ I said.
With a resounding cheer, the five men swept me off down the corridor in my pyjamas and bare feet. Fernandez danced a celebratory rumba with the enormous bright-green rabbit. Bland offered me his one remaining shoe, which I graciously declined. They were going to Boorman’s room, de Mattos told me. Charlie Boorman was the name of one of the men I hadn’t met before. The other was Rinaldi. Marco Rinaldi. They were both miserable bastards, de Mattos said. You know, from the Green Quarter. From Cledge. Boorman and Rinaldi grinned queasily.
I noticed the surgical tape on Rinaldi’s forehead. ‘You’re the one who had the accident, aren’t you?’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Rinaldi said. ‘He did it on purpose. He was trying to kill me.’
I stared at him. ‘Really?’
The others fell about laughing, Bland included.
Boorman’s room was at the far end of the corridor. His bed hadn’t been made, and empty beer bottles lay scattered about, together with dirty clothing, old newspapers and the remains of a meal.
‘Talk about melancholy,’ Fernandez said. ‘Talk ab
out fucking gloom.’
Bland and Rinaldi said they were going off to find some chairs. I looked at the wall opposite the bed. Where I had a mural of men fishing, Boorman had a beech forest in the autumn.
‘Dangerous, that wall.’ Boorman stood next to me, one hand resting heavily on my shoulder.
‘What’s dangerous about it?’
‘See that tree?’ He pointed, the tip of his finger revolving unsteadily, like a fly circling a light bulb. ‘I pissed all over it.’
‘I thought I could smell something,’ de Mattos said.
‘Woke up in the night,’ Boorman went on, ‘needed a slash. Thought I was outside, didn’t I. Pissed on the first tree I could find.’ His eyes squeezed shut, and he was shaking his head. ‘Maid didn’t like it.’
‘What about this game?’ Standing on a table, Fernandez was fastening his rabbit to the centre-light with someone’s tie. ‘Are we going to play or not?’
Rinaldi and Bland returned with extra chairs, and the five men settled round the table. Sitting on the bed, looking over Boorman’s shoulder, I watched as Fernandez shuffled the cards. He was due to speak tomorrow, after lunch. He would be discussing terrorism in his native Yellow Quarter, with special reference to the supposed links between various disaffected elements and the trade unions.
‘I’m looking forward to your talk,’ I told him when I caught his eye.
He grunted. ‘At least someone’s interested.’
The game began. They were drinking Boorman’s brandy. Old, it was. Aged in special oak casks. I’d have some, wouldn’t I? I said I would, secretly hoping it might make me sleepy. The green rabbit rotated solemnly above the table.
‘We had a peacock too,’ de Mattos said, ‘but Rinaldi fell on it.’
‘I just fell over. Squashed it flat.’ Rinaldi looked at me. ‘Nothing personal.’ He glanced down, fingered his lapel. ‘Lost my name-badge too.’
‘Rinaldi’s name-badge,’ de Mattos said, ‘it’s not for people at the conference. It’s so he knows who he is when he wakes up in the morning.’
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