The look on her face, though neutral, appeared to intensify, as if her heart rate had accelerated or her temperature had just gone up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think it does.’
‘In the end, you’re doing something you never thought you’d do. So there’s excitement, but there’s fear too. I don’t think that would ever go away.’
She smiled at me with her eyes, but said nothing.
We flashed through a country station and on into the dark. As I sipped my brandy, I thought back to the conference. I tried to place Odell at one of the events or functions, but her face refused to float up into my memory. Another face came floating up instead.
‘Do you remember somebody called Walter Ming?’ I said. ‘He was at the conference too. His hair looked like a wig, and he wore the most peculiar suits.’
She laughed. ‘Poor Walter.’
‘You met him? What did you make of him?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m not sure. I suppose I thought there was something suspicious about him.’
‘I think he was just lonely. He asked me out to dinner, but I said I was busy. He was rude to me after that.’
Lonely? It had never occurred to me that Ming might be lonely.
‘I saw the two of you together,’ Odell said. ‘You talked to him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. A couple of times.’
‘He seemed really taken with you. Maybe he’d never met anyone like you before.’
‘You think so?’ All I could remember was how offhand and aloof he had seemed, and how slippery. ‘How odd that you were there – that you saw it all …’
She finished her drink, then glanced out of the window.
‘Aquaville,’ she said.
I climbed down from the train. There, once again, was the station concourse, with its sluggish crowds and its posters advertising remedies for colds and flu. To think of how nervously I’d surveyed the scene when I arrived back in November! Imagine how I must have stood out! This time, though, I was dressed in phlegmatic clothes, phlegmatic shoes. This time, against all the odds, I looked the part. What had that girl said? You seem very much at home, if you don’t mind me saying so. I hadn’t minded at all. In fact, it had bolstered my confidence. And yet, as I hesitated on the platform, I half expected to feel a hand plucking at my sleeve, and when I swung round, there he would be, the man I’d seen before, with his slicked-back hair and his damp greenish complexion, something of the gambler or the ticket tout about him. He would be facing away from me, of course, pretending to consult the departures board, its litany of cancellations, and I would hear the words – something that might interest you – then he would slip a card into my pocket. Instead, it was the girl with the freckles who circled round in front of me. She had put on a black cloche hat and a long dark coat whose hem brushed the tops of her carefully polished brogues. She had the severe, otherworldly look of a lay preacher. For the first time I felt a flicker of recognition, as though, at some point in the past, I had smelled her perfume as she stood beside me in a lift, or caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror as she walked behind me, but the flicker stubbornly refused to resolve itself into anything more definite.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose this is goodbye.’
‘Yes.’ I shook hands with her.
‘Are you going to forget me again?’
‘Probably,’ I said.
We both laughed.
She thanked me for the drink, then turned away.
As soon as she had vanished into the crowd I felt desolate. Foolish too. Why had I let her go so easily? I should have arranged another meeting – a walk, maybe, or dinner. This was my new life, after all, and I had enjoyed her company. But then, almost immediately, I had the disturbing sensation that the encounter hadn’t taken place at all, that I had invented the whole thing, right down to her freckles and her bracken-coloured hair, right down to her name – Odell Burfoot – so awkward, like somebody talking with a mouthful of stones … Or, if it had happened, it was already fading. Even the one moment of physical contact – the handshake – was beginning to seem ephemeral, as if I had shaken hands with a figment of my own imagination.
A dense fog had descended on the city. The passers-by looked shadowy and incomplete, mere sketches. The weather couldn’t have been more appropriate. I would be able to make my way through the streets without the slightest fear of being recognised. I only wished I had something warmer to wear. Perhaps, in the morning, I would find a charity shop or a fleamarket and buy myself a second-hand coat. How easy to allow that thought to form, how natural it seemed, and yet, at some point between now and tomorrow, I would be turning the handle on that pale-gold door, and then – and then what? I didn’t know. I had hopes, of course, but that was all. I couldn’t possibly have predicted what I’d be feeling in twelve hours’ time.
Opposite the station were three high-class hotels – the Aral, the Tethys and the Varuna. I remembered their ornate, decaying façades from my previous visit, but with my limited finances and little or no idea of what the next few days might bring, I decided it might be prudent to economise. I turned right, then right again, away from the city centre, opting for the maze of obscure canals that lay to the west of the station. Within minutes, I found myself in a different world – rubbish bags dumped everywhere, the scuttle of rats, and a smell that was almost sweet, like rotting celery. Wooden boards had been nailed over the ground-floor windows of all the houses. Once, I was able to peer between two slats that had come loose. The dark glint of floodwater, a framed photo of three children floating on the surface … Further on, a crudely painted arrow pointed to a basement. A palm-reader known as Undine plied her trade down there. I pictured Undine as a fat woman in a rowing-boat, which she would steer from one room to another using a frying pan or a spatula or the lid from an old biscuit tin. I hurried on, passing beneath the tattered awning of a fish restaurant. Sooner or later I was bound to find a cheap hotel, the kind of place where they wouldn’t care about documents or think it untoward if someone had no luggage.
As I crossed a metal footbridge, I looked to my left and saw a pale-blue neon sign fixed vertically to the front of a building and glowing weakly through the fog. HYDRO HOTEL, it said. Then, in smaller horizontal letters, vacancies. The canal was so narrow that there was only room for a path along one side, the houses opposite sliding straight into the water like teeth into a jaw. I retraced my steps and turned along the path, pausing when I reached the hotel entrance. The lobby had a beige tile floor with a strip of orange carpet running up the middle. Reception was a hatch cut in a chipboard partition. I pressed the buzzer on the counter. Behind me, on a drop-leaf table, stood an aquarium. I put my face close to the glass. A single goldfish was swimming upside-down among the weeds.
‘You know anything about fish?’
I straightened up. The hatch framed a woman, middle-aged, with dyed blonde hair and fleshy arms. Aquaville was printed on the front of her white T-shirt in silver script, as if a snail had crawled across it in the night.
‘When they swim upside-down like that,’ I said, ‘it means they’re dying.’
The woman nodded gloomily. ‘Oh well.’
‘Have you got a room?’
I told her I would be staying for two nights and paid in advance. This would establish my respectability, I thought, and stop her asking any awkward questions. She handed me a key. It was on the second floor, she said. At the front. Thanking her, I set off up the stairs. When I had rounded the first corner, I allowed myself a brief smile. Documents hadn’t even been mentioned.
My room smelled of cologne, something lemony, as though it had only recently been vacated. Either that, or nobody had cleaned. I walked into the bathroom. At first I thought the washbasin was cracked, but then I realised it was a black hair, six inches long. I flushed it down the toilet. Back in the room, I stood at the window, staring out into the fog. For days, if not for weeks, I’d hardly dared to think about the city in case a
ll my attempts to return to it were thwarted. But I had managed it. Everything I wanted was no more than a few light steps away. Her hand resting on my forehead, her skirt a blur of brightly coloured flowers. There you are… A motor launch passed by below, its engine beating like a bird’s heart, soft and rapid.
That evening I ate dinner at the restaurant I had seen earlier. Called, rather touchingly, My Plaice – a fish which, as it happened, did not feature on the menu – it was a small, chaotic establishment where each new arrival was treated as an almost insurmountable catastrophe. My waiter, a bony, long-fingered man in his late twenties, seemed threatened by every word that was addressed to him. When I ordered fish of the day, for example, and a carafe of dry white wine, he just stared at me, his forehead pearled with sweat. Surprisingly, the food was quite good, and I lingered over it, exchanging a few words with Mr Festuccia, whose ‘plaice’ it was, and accepting a liqueur on the house. By the time I paid my bill it was almost eleven o’clock.
I asked my waiter to call me a taxi, but he gave me a look of such consternation that I instantly revised my request. Did he know where I could find transport at this time of night? Yes, he knew. I’d just have to let him think for a moment. Fingers in his mouth, he squinted at the ceiling. Yes, he’d seen a taxi-rank, he said finally. In the direction of the railway station. Five minutes’ walk. Well, maybe seven.
Once outside, I walked as fast as I could. I saw no point in delaying any longer. I seemed to have been waiting an eternity for this moment without ever knowing whether it would actually arrive. Now, at last, it was just a matter of a taxi ride. The city was still wrapped in fog, the light of the street lamps blurred as candy-floss. As I turned into a narrow passage that linked two canals, a door slammed open and a man whirled out on to the pavement with such velocity that I assumed he’d just been forcibly ejected from the house. We collided. He almost fell. As we muttered our apologies, I caught a glimpse of him. Something vulpine about the face, something canny. A quarter of a century collapsed in a split-second.
‘Cody!’ I said.
‘What? Who are you?’ He pushed his face close to mine, and I smelled his breath, sugary and yet corrupt, like over-ripe fruit. He must have been drinking for hours. Days even.
‘We were at Thorpe Hall together. I sat next to –’
Gripping my sleeve, he led me down a cul-de-sac that was still more narrow and obscure, then pushed me into a doorway. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Then or now?’
‘Now,’ he hissed. ‘Now, of course.’
‘Thomas Parry.’
‘And before?’
‘Micklewright. Matthew Micklewright.’
‘You really expect me to believe this is a coincidence?’
I laughed. ‘What else?’
His head swivelled towards the alley, as if he had heard something. He kept one hand on my chest, though, pinning me against the door. We remained in that position for at least a minute. I could probably have freed myself, but I chose not to. He turned to me again. ‘We could go somewhere,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right.’
He stepped away from me, sliding both hands into his trouser pockets. Though he was still staring at me, his face seemed to have been decanted of all expression, like someone daydreaming. For the first time he was thinking back, perhaps, trying to place me. I straightened my jacket, brushed myself down.
‘Are you still called De Vere?’ I asked.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Bracewell told me.’
‘Bracewell…’ He looked off down the cul-de-sac to where a cat crouched by a dustbin, its eyes lustrous and flat.
We didn’t say much after that – at least, not for a while. De Vere jerked his head and started walking. Over bridges we went, through a housing estate, across a park. Every now and then he would give me a rapid sideways glance. He still appeared to suspect me of some kind of trickery or subterfuge.
At last we reached a building whose double-doors were paned with frosted glass. De Vere knocked twice. A stooping grey-haired man let us in. The interior was poorly lit, the floor bare concrete, the walls pale-blue to waist-height and then cream beyond. The man locked the doors behind us, grumbling about the weather. As we set off down a corridor, I thought I could smell chlorine.
‘A swimming-pool,’ I said.
‘Used to be,’ De Vere said. ‘It’s a bar now.’
We passed through another set of double-doors and into a vast dark hall that was lit only by candles, the air filled with the murmur of people talking in lowered voices. Glass-topped tables had been arranged on the floor of the pool. More tables stood around the edge. The fact that it had been drained was supposed to be a political statement, De Vere told me, a slight sneer on his face. Clearly he thought such gestures either immature or futile.
There were no free tables in the pool itself, so we sat above it, near the diving-board. I studied De Vere as he ordered drinks, large ones – gin for him, brandy for me. He looked pretty much as I remembered him. He had the same unusually red lips and cocky features, and he gave off the same subtle aura of debauchery – or perhaps it wasn’t quite so subtle any more, I thought, as I noted the faint but uneven growth of beard, the stained teeth, the eyes that looked bloodshot, almost infected. He had acquired a curiously indefinite quality. I could see the boy he used to be, but I could also see the old man he was going to become. He was like somebody trapped between different versions of himself, unwilling – or unable – to decide between them.
Our drinks arrived. De Vere snatched up his gin and drank half of it straight down, then he apologised for his behaviour in the alley.
‘You did seem a bit nervous,’ I said.
He let out an explosive sound that was only distantly related to laughter. ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on round here?’ He watched me across the candle flame, the shadows shifting on his face. ‘No. Probably not.’ He drank from his glass again, icecubes jostling against his teeth.
The authorities pretended to be initiating transfers, he told me, but what they were actually doing was throwing people into prisons or detention centres, or even, and here his voice trembled, into unmarked graves.
‘It’s true,’ he said when he saw my reaction. ‘At least one person I know has disappeared. Because he spoke out. Because he said it was wrong, the way our country’s organised, and that no government should have the right to –’ He shook his head, as if it was useless to go on about such things, then he finished his drink and stared fiercely into the empty glass.
‘It doesn’t sound very phlegmatic,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to be strong to abuse power. You can abuse it out of weakness or insecurity. Out of fear. We’ve had so many governments during the last decade that every new one spends most of the time looking over its shoulder, trying to consolidate its position – using whatever means it can.’ Once again, he saw the expression on my face. ‘You think I’m exaggerating.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Do you still live in the Red Quarter?’ he said.
‘It’s where I’ve been living,’ I said, ‘yes.’
‘Well, let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘It’s happening there too.’
I started to remonstrate, but he talked over me.
‘Maybe not the killings, but the arrests, the imprisonment without trial, the interrogations. That’s why we all have an Internal Security Act. That’s what it’s for. He looked at me and shook his head again, as though he couldn’t believe my naivety. ‘Why do you think you have the same leader year after year?’
‘Maybe people are happy with the way things are,’ I said quietly.
‘Happy?’ He almost choked on the word. Then he beckoned to the waiter and ordered two more drinks.
‘I don’t know how you know all this,’ I said.
‘Because I talk to people,’ he said. ‘Because I listen. Because I don’t go round with my head burie
d in the sand.’
We sat in silence until the waiter brought our drinks. This time I paid.
I glanced down into the pool where a young couple were sitting at a table, kissing. ‘So you knew about Bracewell.’
De Vere looked up slowly. ‘That’s not his name.’
‘Maclean,’ I said. ‘How did you find out?’
‘A policeman I was having sex with told me.’ He stared at me, chin lifted, and I caught a glimpse of Cody, the boy I used to know – his combative spirit, his iconoclasm – then he looked down and began to fidget with his plastic swizzle-stick. ‘I used to have a thing about policemen in those days. Border guards as well. Maybe it was the uniforms – or maybe it was as close as I could get to being somewhere else.’
The policeman in question was one of the people who had found Maclean. Haunted by the case, he had given De Vere a graphic description of the mutilated body, as if by recording every detail he might exorcise himself.
‘He even told me about –’ De Vere broke off. He wiped at his nose savagely with the palm of his hand. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck it.’ He wiped at his nose again, then his eyes, and then sniffed loudly. ‘What did you have to turn up for? What are you doing here, anyway?’
I was silent for a moment.
Then I spoke again. ‘So you were sent to the Yellow Quarter?’
‘I spent eight years in the Yellow Quarter. Now I’m here. They don’t seem to know what to do with me. Can’t make up their minds.’
‘And he knew you were there?’
‘Maclean? Yes, he knew.’ De Vere’s face twisted, and he looked away. ‘He wanted to join me. He wanted to be with me. That’s why he tried to escape.’ De Vere laid his hand flat on the table, the palm facing down. The way he was staring at it, it could have belonged to someone else. ‘He never stopped loving me – did he?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He talked about you all the time.’
With a single violent gesture, De Vere reached into his pocket and tossed something on to the table. The object behaved much as a dice would have done, only it seemed heavier, clumsier. When it came to rest, I saw it was his wedding ring. I remembered Bracewell telling me that they had both thrown their rings into the moat. Was that a lie, or had De Vere gone back later and fished his out again?
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