I lay there in the dirt like someone paralysed. There was even a part of me that wanted to go to sleep. They had taken everything – and yet, no, that wasn’t quite true. At least I had those banknotes hidden in my collar. I would need them now. So why this sense of abandonment, this loss of all initiative? I could only think it was because I’d been attacked. Where I came from, things like that didn’t happen.
The brandy was beginning to wear off, and my mouth tasted of cinders. I forced myself to sit up. The bead curtain still hung in my head, undulating slightly, as if somebody had just passed through it, and each time I took a breath a sharp blade seemed to pierce the left side of my chest. I had been hoping to continue on foot, but it was after midnight and I didn’t know the exact nature of my injuries. It would make more sense to shelter in the asylum. Then, when morning came, I would reassess the situation.
I climbed to my feet and walked over to my bag. The sides had been slashed open, and my clothes lay scattered all around. I would only take what I could carry in my pockets – socks, a toothbrush, underwear. A sweater would be useful too, I thought. I removed my jacket, then pulled on the only sweater I had brought along, wincing as I lifted my arms above my head. I left everything else where it was. From a distance my bag looked cryptic, even faintly chilling, the sort of thing that leads people to believe in alien abduction.
Some gut feeling prevented me from trying the main entrance. Instead, I circled one of the towers and started down the left side of the building. There had been a path here once, but thistles and brambles had sprung up, and I had to inch forwards with my arms at shoulder-level and my elbows pointing outwards, like someone wading into cold water for a swim. The moonlight made space and distance hard to judge. A low branch almost took my eye out, and the backs of my fingers stung where they had brushed against blue-grey beds of nettles.
At last, towards the rear of the building, the undergrowth cleared, and I was able to approach a window. I began to hunt for a stone, kneeling down and running my hands over the ground, but I couldn’t find anything, so I unlaced one of my shoes and, gripping it by the toe, swung the heel sharply against the glass. The splintering noise was so loud that I was sure a caretaker or night-watchman would appear. I held still and listened. Nothing except an owl deep in the woods behind me. Knocking the rest of the window into the room, I put my shoe back on and clambered through.
There was a smell of yeast. Methylated spirits too. I moved towards a doorway, glass snapping underfoot. Then on into a corridor. Much darker here. Gloss paint on the walls, the dim outline of a stainless-steel trolley. When I came to a staircase, I began to climb. Again, I didn’t attempt to rationalise my decision. I simply assumed it was instinct, something primitive or vestigial kicking in.
In a small room on the third floor I found a bed, just a bare mattress resting on coiled metal springs, but a bed nonetheless, and for all my injuries, for all the exhausting twists and turns of the past day or two, I heard myself laugh out loud. The sound didn’t last. The huge empty building dispensed with it, as though it were unsuitable, improper, a habit that had been discredited or lost.
On the far side of the bed was a wooden chair. Beyond that, the room’s only window. The moon had lodged itself in the top right-hand pane, its bright face half-hidden by a strip of cloud. Lowering myself on to the bed, I reached out and touched the headboard. There were dark patches where the paint had been chipped away by inmates or intruders, the letters carved so crudely that they often overshot each other. I thought I detected a ‘J’, though, and I wondered whether it was to a place like this that Jones had been sent, and whether he had ever curled up on a mattress and tried to scratch his initials into part of a bed, or into a wall, and once again, despite all the time that had gone by, I felt for him. Then I remembered my first night at the club – Jones walking towards me, Jones unharmed. It was always possible that he’d survived, and even, maybe, prospered. And what of me? Would I prosper? Would I survive? I saw my bedroom, high up in the house, the copper beech outside, the road beyond. I’d had such a vivid sense of myself – just then, for those few moments. I had felt so present, so alive. And if I was here now, risking everything, it was because I was determined not to let that feeling go. I lay down on my side and, as I pulled my jacket over me and drew my knees in towards my chest, I found I had left the asylum, the Yellow Quarter too, and I was moving across the lobby of the club, one hand lifting to part the velvet curtain …
I woke several times that night. Once, the moon still hung in the window, though it had sunk into one of the lower panes. When I opened my eyes again, only seconds later seemingly, the moon had gone.
In all my dreams I was cold.
Towards dawn I heard a ticking somewhere outside. I rose to my feet and crept across the room. The door creaked as I turned the handle. All I could see when I peered to the left was a long corridor, like a tunnel, filled with milky light. I turned to the right. A dog stood twenty feet away, looking at me over its shoulder. It had small eyes and a blunt boot of a head. Some kind of bull terrier, I supposed. So pale, though. Unnaturally pale. I shut the door and leaned against it, my heart beating high up in my throat. I waited a few minutes, then I fetched the chair and wedged it beneath the door-handle. For the rest of the night I slept in snatches.
I woke and lay quite motionless, my breath showing against the wall like smoke. I pulled myself upright. My ribs had stiffened, but I didn’t think anything was broken. On my temple a lump had formed, the same shape as the back of a teaspoon, and my left eyebrow had split open. The crusting of blood crumbled like earth beneath my fingers. I slipped my jacket on over my sweater, then let my eyes travel slowly round the room. Pale-green walls, floorboards painted grey. A window showing treetops and a cloudy sky. A cupboard. Bookshelves, but no books. Then I saw the chair tilted at an angle against the door. There had been a dog, I remembered. It had stared at me over its shoulder, its jaws set in a mirthless grin.
I began to look for something that might double as a weapon. In the cupboard I found some medical magazines, a plastic measuring jug and an empty pot of white emulsion. On the shelves, only a jam-jar filled with brownish liquid. There was nothing under the bed. In the end, I snapped one of the legs off the chair. It would serve as a cudgel. If I used the paint pot as a kind of gauntlet, I would be able to fend the dog off with one hand while I attacked it with the other. The whole thing seemed laughable – a charade, really – but how else was I going to protect myself?
I put an ear to the door. Silence. Hardly daring to breathe, I eased the chair out from beneath the handle and stood it behind me, then I opened the door. A lino floor stretching away. A scattering of leaves, fragile and ginger. Staying close to the wall, I set off along the corridor, the leaves exploding beneath my shoes. I hadn’t noticed them the night before, but then I hadn’t realised that if I made a noise I might put myself in danger. I reached the stairwell. Cool air slid up from below.
On the first floor I stopped again, imagining I’d heard a bark, though it was hard to tell above the fierce hiss of blood inside my head. I wondered how many dogs there were. It seemed unlikely there would be just one.
I didn’t try and make it back to the broken window. Instead, I moved through the kitchens and on into the laundry. At last I found a door I could unbolt. Ducking under tangled washing-lines, I mounted a flight of steps and came out on to a terrace that ran the entire length of the back of the building. Fragments of shattered roof-tile lay about, and dandelions had sprung up in the cracks between the wide uneven flags. From the balustrade I could survey the grounds. A lawn and then a hedge, both overgrown. In the distance, a jagged, tree-lined horizon. The sky was still and grey, and pressed down like the soft pedal on a piano, deadening all sound.
I hurried away across the grass. Hunger gripped me, keen as loneliness. Beyond a high brick wall was a kitchen garden, and my spirits lifted, but everything in there had been neglected for too long. The leaves of cabbages had turned to rag
ged dark-green lace, while the rhubarb stalks were thick as builders’ wrists. As for the apples, wasps had drilled them through and through. I managed to dig up two potatoes, which I wiped clean on my shirt-tail and ate raw. Later, on a spindly tree by the far wall, I found a single pear. I plucked the fruit from its branch and studied the speckled skin, as if for instructions, then I bit into it, and the flesh, though hard and bitter, had a curiously refreshing quality. All the same, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I might have eaten something that was supposed to be ornamental.
I emerged from the garden and climbed a grass slope, making for the cover of the trees. Once there, I stopped and took a final look at the place where I had spent the night. It struck me as odd that the asylum hadn’t been put to better use – choleric people were meant to be so dynamic, so resourceful – but perhaps, in the end, the four countries didn’t vary as much as was commonly believed. Perhaps our famous differences were no more than convenient fictions. I was aware that my thoughts were taking a new turn, and wondered if I had been influenced – contaminated, some might say – by Fay Mackenzie and her friends. Before I could reach any conclusions, I saw a white dog come lumbering round the edge of the building, its blunt muzzle close to the flagstones, as though following a scent. I could delay no longer. Keeping a firm grasp on the chair-leg, I set off into the woods.
After walking for some time, I stepped out on to a ridge, and there below me, to my astonishment, lay the border. From my vantage point I could see over the wall into the countryside beyond – its fields, its hawthorn hedges, its narrow twisting lanes. For a moment I thought I was looking at the Blue Quarter, but then I remembered it hadn’t featured on the map in the café at all. The border with the Blue Quarter would have to be at least an hour away by car, and we hadn’t been on the road for more than five or ten minutes. Leon and his friends had told me we were driving north, to the city where they lived, but actually we must have driven east. It was the Green Quarter that I could see. Those people had not only robbed me, they had lied to me as well. Maybe that was why they’d been laughing just before they left.
Tired and disconsolate, I sat down at the foot of a tree, laying my eccentric weapons on the ground beside me. It was a typical rural border, with a single concrete wall reaching away in both directions. There were no watch-towers, no death strips. No men with guns. A set of tyre-tracks ran parallel to the wall, worn in the grass by regular patrols. It made me think of the section of border that Marie had talked about. We thought we must be seeing things. We just climbed through. I couldn’t see any gaps or holes in this wall, though – and, even if there had been, it wouldn’t have done me any good. I hadn’t the slightest desire to enter the Green Quarter. There was nothing for me there.
Still, after a while, curiosity got the better of me, and I started down the hill. A few minutes later, I was standing in the shadow of the wall, and I saw at once that it was both immaculate and unassailable. No flaws or blemishes. Not even any cracks. The wall had been built to the standard height, with a smooth rounded lip at the top, a kind of overhang. It offered no handholds or footholds – no purchase of any kind. I placed my palm against the surface. It was cold as a gravestone. It promised death. Even here, under an innocuous November sky. Even here, in the middle of nowhere. I stood back. What now?
At that moment I heard a faint buzzing noise, not unlike a power drill or an electric razor. I looked northwards along the track. A motorbike came slithering and sliding over a rise in the ground, and as it drew nearer I saw that its rider was wearing the uniform of a choleric border guard, the black rainproof jacket trimmed with yellow piping, the gun strapped into a yellow holster.
The motorbike stopped beside me. I hadn’t moved. The guard switched off the engine, then he removed his helmet and placed it on the petrol tank in front of him.
‘Hard to talk with one of those things on,’ he said.
‘I imagine,’ I said.
The guard had cut himself shaving, and the small circle of dried blood on his chin gave him an air of vulnerability. His black hair had been flattened by the helmet. I was reminded, incongruously, of the places in fields where people have had picnics or made love. Now that I was facing the danger I had hardly dared to picture, I felt curiously calm, and on the edge of a powerful and unforeseen hilarity.
‘What are you doing here?’ the guard said.
‘Just out for a walk,’ I said.
‘You’re not thinking of –’ His eyes darted towards the top of the wall.
I smiled. ‘Climbing over? How could I?’ I held my arms away from my sides, to demonstrate my innocence, the fact that I had nothing to hide.
‘You’d be surprised,’ the guard said.
Removing his leather gauntlets, he took out a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers, and then embarked on a story about a man called Jake Tilney who had been transferred to the Yellow Quarter when he was in his forties. Though he seemed, outwardly, to be settling into his new life, Jake never stopped trying to find a way of returning to the Green Quarter, which had been his home before. At last he came up with something so obvious, so straightforward, as to merit the word genius. He designed and built his very own pocket ladder. It had an extension capacity of eleven and a half feet, which was the exact height of the wall, but it folded into a metal rectangle that measured no more than twelve inches by eighteen and weighed less than a bag of sugar. One day Jake travelled to a remote section of the border. Alone and unobserved, he assembled his ladder and climbed to the top of the wall, then he simply pulled the ladder up after him, placed it on the other side and climbed down again – and all in less than sixty seconds, or so he maintained in his statement.
‘He was caught,’ I said.
The guard nodded.
When Jake Tilney appeared in front of the tribunal, claiming that he belonged in the Green Quarter, the judges laughed at him. In the very manner of his escape attempt, they said, he had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was unqualified to live there.
Perhaps if you had done something less practical, they said, less daring –
But then it wouldn’t have worked, Jake cried.
The judges exchanged a knowing glance.
Jake was transferred back to the Yellow Quarter. Two years later he died of a heart attack, a common cause of death for those of a choleric disposition. His ladder, now known as the Tilney, won him a posthumous award for significant achievement in the field of industrial design.
‘A cruel irony,’ I said.
The guard nodded again and looked at the ground, his roll-up dead between his fingers. He was not at all the kind of brute or bully I would have expected to encounter at the border. Though he seemed a little indiscreet – should he be telling me about escape attempts? weren’t all those details confidential? – I felt he was a man I could get along with. I offered him a light, which he accepted.
‘There is another possibility, of course,’ he said, removing a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘You could have something hidden in the grass. Or up there’ – and his eyes lifted to the ridge behind me – ‘among the trees.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like maybe a pole,’ he said. ‘As in pole-vault.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘I would never have thought of that.’ And it was true. I wouldn’t.
‘We had one of those last month. Ex pole-vault champion. Fellow by the name of Alvis Deane.’
‘Can’t say I’ve heard of him.’
‘Well, nor had I, to be honest.’
‘Did he make it?’
‘Yes and no.’ The guard fell silent. The art of suspense appeared to come naturally to him. ‘There was something on the other side,’ he said, tossing the soggy stub of his roll-up into the grass. ‘A greenhouse.’
I imagined the scene. ‘Noisy.’
‘And painful,’ the guard said. ‘He broke his pelvis and both his legs. An elbow too, if I remember rightly. And there were severe lacerations, of course.’ He sh
ook his head.
It had all been going so easily. We were like two men talking in a pub, so much so that I had been lulled into believing that the guard could be disarmed by the mere fact of conversation, that any suspicion he might normally have felt in a situation like this could be overridden, and that, in no time at all, I would be allowed to continue on my way without further ado. During his most recent silence, however, his eyes had been roving across my suit, which was creased and stained, and he gradually assumed a resigned, almost forlorn expression.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to search you,’ he said.
‘In case I’ve got a ladder on me?’
Smiling bleakly, the guard stepped off his motorbike and heaved it up on to its stand. ‘Could you empty your pockets?’
I did as he asked, producing the lighter, my toothbrush, some loose change, a pair of underpants and some socks.
‘Nothing else?’ he said.
‘That’s it.’
The guard pushed his hands into all my pockets, much as Leon had done a few hours earlier. Then, like a customs officer, he ran his hands over the outside of my clothes, along both my arms, down both my legs. Up close, he smelled of wintergreen, as if he might be carrying a sporting injury. I looked beyond him, at the wall, its smooth blank concrete unable either to help or to remember.
At last the guard stood back. ‘You don’t appear to have any papers.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, I was attacked, you see.’
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