When we had finished, she asked me if she should go on with her story. I nodded, and she picked up exactly where she’d left off.
Ignoring her parents’ advice, she carried on performing for other children in the hope that they would become her friends, but her gift just frightened or bewildered them. She was lonelier than ever. And then, one morning, she received an official-looking letter. Her father opened it and read it first. ‘They know,’ he said.
‘Know what?’ she said.
Her father handed her the letter. She was required to appear before a tribunal, not locally, but in the capital, two hundred miles away. She couldn’t tell what the charge was – the summons contrived to be both menacing and utterly inscrutable – but she knew she was guilty.
On the appointed day she caught a train to Aquaville, her parents’ reproach clearly audible in the rhythm of the wheels on the track: If only you’d listened – if only you’d listened … If only I’d listened, she thought as she climbed the steps to the Ministry, her mouth dry, her heart stumbling inside her. She was convinced she was about to be severely punished. Borstal at the very least, maybe even a prison sentence.
A government official escorted her to a grey door high up in the building. He turned the handle, then stepped aside to let her through. On entering the room, she saw a man sitting behind a desk. In front of him was a piece of moulded plastic with the name Adrian Croy printed on it. The man was alone, which disconcerted her. She had been expecting a judge and jury, something that resembled a court of law.
‘Ah, Miss Burfoot,’ the man said.
Adrian Croy was a slight, dapper man with wrists as narrow as school rulers. His hands twirled and fluttered when he spoke in such a way that she imagined he was simultaneously translating what he was saying into sign language. She felt clumsy in his presence, as if surrounded by bone china.
‘You probably think that you’re in trouble.’ He was looking at her in a manner that did not endear him to her. She saw amusement and curiosity. A kind of craving too. ‘You have crossed the border illegally,’ he said. ‘Twice.’
She sighed. It was true. She had done it as a dare to herself, just to see if it was possible. Then she had done it again, to make sure the first time hadn’t been a fluke. She hadn’t meant anything by it. ‘I knew you’d find out,’ she said.
‘Oh yes, Miss Burfoot, we always find out.’ Croy leaned back in his seat and studied her. ‘We would like to offer you a position.’
‘A position?’
‘A job.’
‘I’ve never had a job,’ she said, ‘except for working on the canal.’
Croy allowed himself a small, neat smile. ‘I’d hardly call that making good use of your particular skills.’
They weren’t going to punish her. They were giving her a job instead. She could scarcely believe her luck.
I shifted uneasily on the bed of sacking and old velvet, reminded of a certain sunlit afternoon, Diana smiling at me across the rim of her wine-glass, the word ‘immunity’ suspended seductively in the air between us.
‘I was so innocent,’ Odell murmured, half to herself.
Me too, I said inside my head.
At the age of seventeen she had come to an arrangement with the authorities. She was paid a modest retainer, and reported to Croy twice a month. Sometimes he would brief her on a specific job – surveillance, usually – but more often than not he would attempt to justify their shadowy activities. At some point, though, the talk would always gravitate towards the nature of her gift. When she told him what she could do – somehow, with Croy, she couldn’t seem to help bragging about it – the black parts of his eyes would widen, and his hands would move more dreamily in front of him, like objects in space. He would claim that she was part of a tradition that dated back thousands of years. In her, he would say, one could see the true flowering of the phlegmatic character – adaptability, yes, but taken to extremes. He had theories about her too. In his opinion, she didn’t actually become invisible. She simply appeared to do so. He called what she did ‘escaping notice’. Frankly, it would bore her having to listen to all this, but she tried not to show it. She had to keep reminding herself that this dainty, middle-aged man was dangerous. If he were to turn against her, he could make things difficult for her. And so it paid to keep him sweet. Aware of this, she always played a little vaguer, a little more spiritual, than she really was.
‘Tradition?’ she said once. ‘What tradition?’
He beamed. Her unworldliness never failed to delight him. ‘The shape-shifter, the psychopomp,’ he said. ‘The seer.’
‘What’s a psychopomp?’ This time she was genuinely curious.
‘They’re spirit guides,’ Croy told her. ‘They pilot dead people to their place of rest. They oversee the process whereby souls are purified, transformed.’ He paused. ‘I suppose you could say they teach the craft of dying.’
On another occasion he startled her by proposing that they should become a magic act. ‘Burfoot & Croy,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see it?’ His right hand slid sideways across the air in front of him, palm facing outwards, fingers uppermost and slightly curled, as if to enclose an exotic painted sign. She smiled but said nothing. He had such peculiar fantasies. Was he really suggesting that they should run away together, or was it just another test? She could never quite be certain. If she hadn’t been so strange-looking, she would have said that Adrian Croy was in love with her.
For all his ambiguities, though, and despite the power he wielded over her, they were, at some fundamental level, of one mind. Yes, she had crossed borders illegally, but that didn’t mean she wanted them removed. Far from it. Without borders they would return to the chaos of a quarter of a century ago. Without borders they would find themselves living in what used to be called, laughably in her opinion, the ‘united kingdom’ – a kingdom united in name only, a kingdom otherwise characterised by boorishness, thuggery and greed. She had no desire to live in a place like that. The Blue Quarter might be deficient in some respects, she said, but at least those who lived there were socially aware and ecologically responsible, prizing gentleness above aggression and spiritual development above material success, and on the whole she wanted to preserve things pretty much the way they were. She just liked to bend the rules once in a while, that was all.
‘I still cross the border illegally from time to time,’ she said. ‘You know what I tell them now, if they find out?’
I lay still, waiting for the answer.
‘I tell them I’m practising my craft. That’s the kind of language they understand.’ She fell silent. ‘I’m not breaking the law,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m doing my duty.’ And she laughed softly, delighted by her own capricious logic.
Odell shook me out of a deep sleep, letting me know that it was dawn. I had a feeling I hadn’t had since I was a boy – a panic that uncoiled slowly as a snake, a powerful dread of what the day might bring. I wished I could have stayed in bed or hidden somewhere. I wanted it all to be over. She shook me again. I sat up, blinking. A weak light leaked through the window, grubby as the skin on boiled milk. Birds fumbled in their nests. I pushed my feet into my boots and pulled on the stiff leather coat. We ate the few scraps left over from the previous night’s meal, sharing the inch of red wine in the bottom of the bottle, then it was time to go.
I followed Odell through the second of the two doors and into a small high-ceilinged room. The only piece of furniture in there was a wardrobe, its mirror-panelled door ajar. Our figures crept across the glass, furtive as thieves. On we went, through other, larger rooms, most of which showed evidence of looting. Paintings had been removed, leaving ghostly after-images. Wallpaper had been defaced or gouged. In one room a fire had been lit in the middle of the floor, and I imagined I could smell it, the air inlaid with a thin blue seam of smoke. We stepped out on to a landing, its uneven boards sloping away from us, slippery with light. Pinned to a door at the far end was a life-size black-and-white picture of a
soldier with a gun, concentric circles radiating outwards from his heart. There were holes in the paper, and the wood. At the head of the stairs I stooped and peered through a diamond-paned window. Pines lifted before me, their red-brown trunks showing dimly through the mist. To my surprise, the snow had melted. The land looked waterlogged and drab.
Downstairs, in the hall, wooden chairs were arranged against opposing walls, making me think a party had been held here once. Trainee border guards would have cavorted with girls from nearby villages, the guards resplendent in their dress uniforms, all pressed serge and polished brass, the girls in short skirts and white stilettos, their bare legs marbled with the cold. I could almost hear the live band with its thrashing drums, its raunchy lead guitar. Odell led me across the hall and down a passage. Then, as we passed through yet another door, the space seemed to explode above my head. We were in a church. The roof must have been sixty feet high, and the nave could have held a congregation of many hundreds. Here too, though, the vandals had been at work. Pews had been upended and set on fire. Windows had been smashed. The stone flags underfoot were crunchy with stained glass – the blue of saints’ robes, the yellow of their haloes, the green of a green hill far away. I noticed some incongruous additions to the church’s interior – relics of the military occupation, no doubt. Leaning nonchalantly against the font was a motorbike, its back tyre flat. Further up the aisle, empty bullet casings and beer bottles lay scattered about. And there were even more recent intrusions: a pigeon chuckled in the organ loft, and on the altar steps some sheep had deposited their neat but convoluted droppings, each of which looked exactly like a small black brain.
We left through the sacristy. Once outdoors, I paused and looked around. Some fifty yards ahead of me was a drystone wall, and on the hillside beyond were the evergreens I had seen from the landing. Behind me rose the great hunched back of the church. A few traces of snow lingered under trees and bushes, and against the base of north-facing walls.
As I stood there, Odell stepped in front of me. ‘Your face is all wrong.’
I stared at her, perplexed.
‘You look as if you’ve never been here before,’ she said, ‘as if you come from somewhere else. They’ll notice that immediately. You can’t show any surprise or curiosity. I want you to look fed up, long-suffering. We’re a couple, remember, and we don’t get on.’
I nodded. All right.
‘Show me,’ she said, ‘before we go any further.’
I pushed my hands deep into my trouser pockets, then I scowled. I could feel the skin buckling on the bridge of my nose.
‘That’s more like it,’ she said.
We passed through a wicket gate and set off along a footpath. On my shoulder was a bag that held my cloak and undergarments. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to cross back into the Red Quarter. If we were stopped and searched, Odell was going to claim that they were trophies from the recent hunt, as was the watch I was wearing, the one that had no hands. She would tell the story with relish, how we had chased the White People through the woods, how we had terrorised and raped and butchered. I had become so carried away, she would say, that I had completely lost my voice. When she first suggested this strategy, I felt something contract inside me. She noticed the look on my face and said simply, ‘Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?’
We climbed over a stile and down into a country lane, then walked on, side by side, in silence. Stone walls hemmed us in. We passed barns of corrugated-iron, some faded red, some green. Once, the sun broke through, alighting on a piece of rough pasture to the north-east of us, the land all round still deep in shadow. Like a memory of happiness, I thought, that single illuminated field. Like the bits of my life that had been given back to me … We were quiet for so long that I almost forgot the role I was supposed to be playing, but then I saw a man come hobbling towards us. Chained to his wrist was a hawk, its head sheathed in a leather hood.
As the man approached, Odell began to grumble. ‘How much further? My feet ache.’
I chose not to answer. Instead, I gathered a ball of phlegm into my mouth, rolled it on my tongue, then fired it past the end of her nose and into the ditch.
She grasped me by the sleeve. ‘I said, how much further?’
I shook her off and lengthened my stride, giving the man a curt nod as he passed by. The man grunted in reply. I watched him move on down the road, a stocky figure dressed in brown, the bird of prey so motionless that it could have been stuffed. Knowing it was alive beneath that hood sent a shiver through me.
‘Good,’ Odell said. ‘Just right.’
To the south the landscape brooded. The sky had lowered, and the air above the hills was smeared with rain.
By the time we reached our first village, something unexpected had occurred. My mood had soured. I was in a bad temper after all, a genuine bad temper, which meant I no longer had to worry about standing out.
As soon as we entered the village, Odell said, ‘I thought you told me we were there,’ and she stopped in the middle of the street and put her hands on her hips. ‘You fool,’ she said, ‘you stupid fool. Hey!’ And she grabbed me by the upper arm.
I’d always hated being touched like that. Swinging round, I raised my fist as if to strike her. At the last minute, though, I turned aside and slammed my hand into the front wall of a house. I watched the grazed skin ooze blood, then whirled away from her and stormed up the street, scattering the chickens that darted, cackling, across my path. I might even have trodden on one of them. I felt something squirm out from under my boot, but I didn’t bother looking down.
‘Oi,’ said a woman in an apron. They were probably her chickens.
I glared at her, and she sprang back into her doorway as though pulled from behind by an immensely powerful hand.
Rage surged through me. Such a rage.
The air filled with the jangle of fairground music, and I turned to see a white high-sided van grinding its way up the street, a loudspeaker bolted precariously to its roof. Every so often, the driver interrupted his music to proclaim the delights of his hams and sausages, his tongue. Odell stopped the van and bought a few items, then it passed me and dipped down an incline to the village green. A crowd had gathered there, beneath a large, gnarled oak, and once the racket the van was making had died away I could hear the shrieks and squeals of children. There must be an attraction of some kind, I thought. A juggler, perhaps. A puppet show.
As I drew nearer, Odell caught up with me and took my arm. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘Keep going.’
This time I didn’t shake her off. Something in her voice told me she wasn’t acting. She led me down the road, past grim, grey houses, their windows either too low or too high, and oddly asymmetrical, as if only dwarves and giants lived inside. Before long, the village was behind us, and the children’s cries had faded into the distance.
‘It was nothing you need know about,’ she said.
The smell of melted snow on the grass verges, the sky above the fields grey and pale-yellow.
After a while two men in work clothes appeared on the road ahead of us. I pushed my hands into my pockets, feeling the rips in the lining. Each new encounter was a test of our authenticity, our nerve, and I couldn’t help but believe that, sooner or later, we would be found out.
The men slowed as they reached us.
‘Seen the heads?’ said the shorter of the two.
‘We just came from there.’ Odell pointed back along the road. ‘There’s three of them. All bitches.’
The short man laughed lasciviously. He looked at his companion, eyes like bits of wet glass, then the two of them moved on, quickening their pace.
I waited until they were hidden by a bend in the road, then I went and leaned on a farm gate. I had received an image of a woman. Ears and nose cut off. An apple wedged into her mouth as if she were a suckling pig. Seen the heads? I retched once or twice, but nothing came up. Cold sweat all over me.
Odell laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry you had to hear that. It was the only way.’
I know, I said inside my head. I understand.
Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?
It was dark by the time we entered the next village, but Odell made no attempt to find a room. It might have been the gingerhaired twins sitting on a bench outside the post office, one gnawing avidly at his thumbnail, the other aiming a kick at a dog as it loped by, or perhaps it was the fat woman in her front garden who took one look at us, spat sideways and withdrew into her house. This was a sour embittered place, a place that had turned its fury against itself, and it would have no patience with the likes of us.
We had reached the edge of the village and were beginning to prepare ourselves for a night in the open when we saw a caravan parked in the corner of an orchard, a white shape seemingly afloat among dock leaves and thistles. Odell forced the door – a sharp dry snap, like the cracking of a nut – and we climbed inside. The curtains were already drawn, but a faint glow eased through the frosted-plastic sky-light, just enough to see by. There were cushioned bench-seats, ideal for sleeping on. There was even a sink, with running water. We fastened the door, using a metal catch. If anyone came, Odell said, we would escape through the window at the back.
Though she had promised me nothing but tantrums that day, she had broken her own rules within the first few hours. She had been aware of my fragile state, I think, and whenever we found ourselves alone she would link her arm through mine and tell me how well I was doing. Once, as we stood beneath a tree, sheltering from the downpour that had been threatening all morning, I turned to look at her. I had no memory of ever meeting her before, or even seeing her, but that now seemed irrelevant. In the tarnished half-light of the storm her eyes had taken on the strangest colour, a new commingling of green and black, ambiguous but vivid, and the breath stalled in my throat. All of a sudden I wanted to touch her. Did she guess what I was thinking? Possibly. Because she chose that moment to announce that the rain was letting up and it was time to push on.
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