Divided Kingdom

by Rupert Thomson

  One evening towards the end of January, we were sitting in the front room, all nine of us, when Horowicz launched a vitriolic attack on the museum. He thought it self-indulgent, overblown – a total waste of tax-payers’ money. What was there to look at? Row after row of tiny bottles, each containing more or less the same amount of more or less the same transparent fluid. You could hardly call it an attraction, he said. If anything, there was something repellent about the whole idea.

  Clarise let him finish, then slowly shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

  Horowicz’s eyebrows lifted. When someone started complaining, people generally joined in, and the level of complaint would escalate. The sessions would go on for hours, becoming ever more self-righteous and extreme. But not tonight.

  ‘Think about happiness for a moment, Martin,’ Clarise said. ‘Can you remember being happy?’

  Horowicz let out a snort, as though he found the question absurd.

  There was a fundamental problem with happiness, Clarise went on, quite unperturbed. Happiness had a slippery, almost diaphanous quality. It gave nothing off, left nothing behind. Grief was different, though. Grief could be collected, exhibited. Grief could be remembered. And if we had proof that we’d been sad, she argued, then we also had proof that we’d been happy, since the one, more often than not, presupposed the other. In preserving grief, therefore, we were preserving happiness. The Museum of Tears stood for much more than its name might initially suggest. It wasn’t just to do with rows of identical glass bottles – though that, in itself, said a lot about equality, if you thought about it. It was to do with people trying to hold on to such happiness as they had known.

  Her eyes returned to Horowicz, who was staring at the carpet. ‘But maybe you don’t know what that feels like,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ve never lost someone. In which case, though it sounds odd to say it, I’m sorry for you, I really am.’

  ‘I know what it feels like,’ he muttered.

  Later, Clarise expanded on her thesis. She believed the museum was both a testament to individuality and a collective ode to the country in which we lived. We were all unique, she said, and yet we shared a common humanity, a common humour. I had never heard her so impassioned, so articulate.

  ‘And there’s also the little matter of immortality,’ she went on. ‘It’s hard to resist, the offer of immortality.’ She sent a sideways look at Horowicz, who reached for his beer and drank quickly. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, Martin, if you didn’t end up in there yourself one day.’

  He shook his head savagely but unconvincingly.

  ‘I’m in there,’ Jack Starling said.

  I watched Horowicz’s top lip curl. He would view Starling’s announcement as tantamount to a betrayal.

  ‘The night my still exploded,’ and Starling turned to Clarise, ‘remember? Half the outhouse went up with it. I shed a few tears over that, I can tell you.’

  ‘What, and you kept them?’ Horowicz’s voice was acidic with disbelief.

  ‘You know, you’re right,’ Starling said, still speaking to Clarise. ‘I can walk into that museum and look at my tears and it all comes back to me, that first batch of sloe gin I made, and the nights we had on it, those brilliant nights, and you know the really strange thing?’ He put down his glass so as to make the point more emphatically. ‘That little vial, it’s like a miniature. The vial’s the gin bottle, and my tears, they’re the gin. It’s like the whole thing’s there, the whole memory, only tiny.’

  Smiling broadly, Clarise told him he had just summed it all up, everything she’d been talking about, then she turned to me and asked if I’d been to the museum yet. I shook my head.

  ‘You should go,’ she said.

  A few days later I walked down into the town. The museum stood on a narrow street, directly opposite the public library. Looking at the staid red-brick façade and the antiquated ventilation units, I guessed that the building had once housed municipal offices – the council, maybe, or the gas board. A modest brass plaque had been bolted to the wall, just to the left of the double-doors: The Museum of Tears – Please ring for entry.

  Although I had gone along with what Clarise had been saying that night, I hadn’t known what to expect from the museum, or even why I was there, really, but I found a stillness settling over me as I ventured into the first of the rooms. All these people reduced to a few ccs of salty water, as if a kind of essence had been wrung from each of them. Was Marco Rinaldi here? What about Boorman? I wandered dreamily from floor to floor. Apart from the museum guards, I had the vast place to myself.

  The glass vials were arranged in three parallel rows at shoulder-height, and underneath each of them was a rectangle of white card indicating the donor’s name and date of birth (and, if necessary, death). In themselves, the vials had a somewhat medical aura. They reminded me of test-tubes and, by association, of hospitals and laboratories. In the manner of their presentation, though – the careful labelling, the fashionable austerity – I detected more than a hint of the art gallery. And yet the interior itself, its ambience, had something in common with a school – the grey-blue walls in need of redecoration, the dark, slightly greasy parquet floors. Research, creativity, nostalgia … In the end, the museum displayed characteristics of so many different kinds of institutions that I was no longer sure how to behave or what to think. There was something inherently awkward, or inchoate, perhaps, about the whole experience.

  After half an hour I felt I had seen enough, and I walked back towards the stairs that led to the exit. I was passing through a perfectly innocuous room on the second floor when my eye happened to fall on a name I recognised. Micklewright. The air around me appeared to sag and then fold in on itself. I looked away from the wall and blinked two or three times, then I looked back again. The name was still there. In fact, the name was there twice: Micklewright, Sally, and then, right next to it, Micklewright, Philip.

  My mother and father.

  A trap-door opened in me somewhere and my heart dropped through it. My hand over my mouth, I sank on to the ottoman in the middle of the room.

  My mother and father. My parents.

  I had thought of them so seldom during the last twenty-seven years. Partly this had to do with survival. If I’d thought of them, I wouldn’t have been able to go on. I’d had no choice but to put them behind me, out of sight. Partly, also, it came down to the image I carried in my head of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night. Her bare feet, his sleepy face – rain slanting down … It was so timeless, so static. So complete. As the years went by, it had taken on an eternal unyielding quality, like a cenotaph, and it had been impossible for me to think around it, impossible for me to remember, or even imagine, anything that had happened before that moment. Then came my visit to the club, exposing the need in me, the ache – the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. When I stepped through that pale-gold door, something had given in me. Fragments of another life had been released. There had not been much, and it had come so late, so very late, but it had altered me for ever. Everything I had built had been revealed for what it was – mere scaffolding. Everything would have to be remade.

  I stood up again and went over to the wall. This time I noticed the dates beneath my parents’ names. They were both dead. I tilted my head to one side, as if I needed another angle on what I was being told. As if that might help me to comprehend. My father had died first. My mother had survived him by eight years. Neither of them had lived to a great age. My father had been fifty-nine, my mother sixty-three. Had they been melancholic all along, or had they been transferred at some point, as I had? What was their story? I had no way of knowing. Since the vials were exhibited in strict chronological order, the two belonging to my parents must have arrived at the museum simultaneously. It was quite conceivable then that they had been crying at the same time – possibly for the same reason – and that those were the tears they had chosen to collect. I wondered if t
hey had been thinking of the boy they’d lost. I wondered if they’d ever forgiven him for turning away from them. Or perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. All they had understood, in their confusion, in their distress, was that their only son was being taken from them. Gazing at their remains, I felt instinctively that they hadn’t tried too hard to stay alive, that they had given up, in other words, and I couldn’t really say I blamed them.

  So the museum was a graveyard too.

  I stared at the names and dates until they blurred. I hadn’t found my parents – not really. Perhaps they had been present for a few minutes, while I was sitting, head lowered, on the ottoman, but now they had disappeared again. All in all, it hadn’t been much of a reunion. I reached up slowly with one hand.

  ‘No touching, please.’

  I looked round to see a museum guard standing in the doorway to the room. My hand dropped to my side. The guard nodded and moved on.

  Out on the street again, I felt as though years had gone by. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the library had been knocked down and new buildings had been erected in its place.

  I walked back to the Cliff, the air glassy, dazzling.

  When I opened the door, Clarise was standing at the far end of the hall. She asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. She was just about to put the kettle on, she said. I shook my head, then stepped sideways into the front room. I heard her come after me.

  ‘What is it, Wig?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘This is a terrible place.’

  ‘Here?’ Clarise’s face whirled like a clumsy planet, taking in the mould-green three-piece suite, the velour curtains, the gas fire with its tile surround.

  I shook my head again.

  A boy could balance on one leg for hours. A man could make a book from his wife’s shoes. A couple could stand on a road in the middle of the night and call their son’s name, only to have him turn his back on them. Candles burned in windows all year round, memorials to those who had gone but were not dead. There were very few who didn’t live in the shadow of some separation or other. The divided kingdom was united after all, by just one thing: longing.

  I sank down among the sofa’s sagging cushions. Clarise sat beside me. I told her that I had visited the museum and that I had found my parents, my real parents, but then my voice began to tremble and I couldn’t carry on. The grief had been stored inside me for too long. It hurt to bring it out. Clarise took me in her arms and held me against her. I smelled the wool of her cardigan, and her face powder, and the oil at the roots of her hair. My whole body jerked, as if caught on a fisherman’s hook.

  ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Let it out.’

  And though I was crying I learned something about myself just then. I saw it clearly for the first time. I had never been sanguine – at least, not so far as I could remember. No, wait – that was wrong. I had been sanguine until the moment I was classified as sanguine, but all my happiness had ended there, and all my optimism too. Ever since that night, the only thing I had ever really wanted was to find my way back. I was like someone who has died and can’t let go, someone who wants desperately to rejoin the living. And it wasn’t possible, of course. It wasn’t even possible to remember, not really – or rather, there was a limit to what could be recovered. None of that mattered, though. It was enough to believe, enough to know. That my parents had mourned me while they were alive. That they had died still missing me. That they had loved me.

  Clarise held me close and said the same words over and over.

  Let it out. Let it all out.

  As February began, gales swept the length and breadth of the country, causing untold damage. Several people were killed by falling trees. In the south a headless man was seen speeding down a village high street on his bicycle. He had been decapitated by a flying roof-tile only seconds earlier. The freak conditions and unusual sightings sparked off the kind of doom-laden apocalyptic talk that wouldn’t have been tolerated even for a moment in the place I came from, though I found myself susceptible to it, perhaps because I was waiting for circumstances to favour me. As a result of what had happened to me during the previous month or so, a certain threshold had been crossed, a decision had been reached, but everything now depended on the White People, and they seemed to have vanished without trace. Weeks had elapsed since that night in the graveyard, and I hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of them. The only advantage was that Horowicz had lost interest in me. Whenever we spoke, which was rarely, he would berate me for my apathy, my fecklessness, almost as though he was trying to goad me into an action that he could then expose, condemn. I still went for walks after supper. On returning to the house, however, I would often join the others for a drink in an attempt to dull my frustration, to anaesthetise myself.

  One Thursday evening I was on my way upstairs to change – Urban Smith was taking part in a talent contest in the local pub that night, and some of us were going along to support him – when I chanced to look out of the landing window. Across the street, beneath the drooping branches of a magnolia, stood a man in a white cloak. The tree had flowered early, and the man blended with its creamy blooms so perfectly that I had almost failed to notice him. I steered an uneasy glance over my shoulder. The landing was deserted, all the bedroom doors were closed. Somewhere below, I could hear Urban doing his voice exercises. Quickly, I went through my pockets. All I had on me was a cigarette-lighter, my dream notebook and a key to the front door. I had some money too, saved for precisely this eventuality. Round my neck was the silver ring I had found, which I now regarded as a sort of talisman. I couldn’t think of anything else I might need. I looked out of the window again. The man was still standing in the shadow of the magnolia tree. I thought of Victor and Marie lost in the mist and shivered. I didn’t know if I should feel apprehensive or reassured. I checked the time. Twenty to seven. What with the excitement of the competition, I doubted anybody would notice my absence, and if Urban won and the men drank enough of Starling’s latest brew, a lethal poteen, then it might easily be morning before they realised I was gone.

  My abrupt departure would not come as a surprise to everyone. Clarise had treated me so kindly that I had felt duty bound to let her in on at least part of the secret. I had waited until it was my turn to help her with the dinner. On the night in question, I stood at the kitchen sink, washing spinach, while she sat at the table behind me and coated veal in egg and breadcrumbs. The men were out somewhere, playing darts. Only Lars Friedriksson had stayed behind, and he was in the basement, poking, two-fingered, at his ancient portable. Though he had already written a thousand pages, he claimed that he had hardly scratched the surface. He would not disturb us.

  ‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ I said.

  Clarise’s wide, unblinking eyes veered towards me.

  ‘I’m not going to give you the details,’ I said. ‘I just want you to know that it’ll happen sometime in the near future.’

  ‘You can’t leave,’ she said, ‘not unless they relocate you. It’s not allowed.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. She only ever invoked the law out of anxiety or panic.

  ‘I’m telling you now because I don’t want it to upset you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think’ – and I paused – ‘that I had come to any harm.’

  ‘Are you so unhappy here?’

  I went over, took her hand. ‘You’ve been good to me, Clarise. I owe you a lot. It wouldn’t be fair if I did it behind your back. You mustn’t try and stop me, though.’

  She looked up at me, tears beginning to fill her eyes. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘It’s better you don’t know. And anyway, it might all go wrong, in which case I’ll end up here again.’

  She tried to smile through her tears, which were dripping off her cheeks and down into the breadcrumbs. Later that evening, at dinner, Bill Snape would tell her, in that precise, fastidious voice of his, that although the veal was delicious she had, in his opinion, used a little too much salt.r />
  Yes, she would realise what had happened, I thought, as I turned from the window, and I knew I could trust her not to give anything away. She had even promised to wait a few hours before she informed the authorities.

  I managed to reach the kitchen without running into anyone. The lid vibrated gently on a saucepan of root vegetables and chicken bones, stock for a risotto Clarise would be making in the morning. I opened the back door, then eased it shut behind me, and I was just setting off along the narrow passageway that led to the street when a voice called my name. Brendan Burroughs was standing by the outhouse. He had one hand cupped in the other, and his chin had moved into the air above his right shoulder, as if he had to peer round a corner to see me. He asked where I was going.

  ‘A walk,’ I said. ‘To clear my head.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming to the pub?’

  ‘Maybe later on.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’d like a walk. My head needs clearing too. And, after all, moonlight can’t hurt me, can it?’ He took several rapid steps in my direction, half tripping on a drain in his eagerness to join me.

  I took out my lighter and struck the flint. A flame sprang up between us. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Brendan? I said no.’

  Shrinking back, his mouth opened in a crooked, incredulous grin. He couldn’t believe I’d done such a thing. I wasn’t Starling or Horowicz. I wasn’t cruel like them.

  ‘Wig,’ he said, his voice balanced precariously between pleading and reproach.

  ‘No.’ I snapped the lighter shut again. With one last look at him, a steady look, to show him that I wasn’t joking, I turned away.