By late afternoon we had left the Wanings behind. In a sense, though, we had merely swapped one set of dangers for another. The Wanings may have lapsed into anarchy, but we had just as much to fear from the so-called forces of law and order, whose reputation for corruption and brutality was common knowledge. As the sun was setting, we saw our first roadblock. Fortunately the two officers were facing the other way, questioning a man on a bicycle, and we were able to slip behind a hedgerow and flatten ourselves against the ground. As their jeep finally roared past, a cigarette butt landed in the grass no more than a hand’s width from my right elbow. Though it had been discarded, it continued to smoulder, all the virulence of the Yellow Quarter concentrated into that stubborn quarter-inch of ash.
Following a meagre supper in the caravan, Odell began to talk. Before too long, she said, we would be passing through built-up areas. Things would move faster, and I would have to be ready to act decisively. If we got into any kind of confrontation, for instance, I should leave immediately. Just leave. If we already had a place to stay, I should go back there. Lock myself in. If not, I should wait near by. She would extricate herself. That was her speciality. If for some reason she failed to reappear, I was to carry on towards the border. I would have to cross it on my own. In the darkness I reached out and squeezed her hand to let her know that I had understood.
At dawn I was woken by a vicious scratching, and I sat up quickly, thinking someone was trying to get in. Then I realised it was coming from above me. Through the skylight’s blurry plastic I saw arrowheads, delicate as pencil drawings. It was just birds’ feet. Birds walking on the roof.
We left the caravan soon after, fells rising in blue-black curves above the mist. Later, the sun burned through. We drank from a stream that tasted metallic, as if we were sipping the water from a spoon. We walked south and then west, clouds tumbling in the sky, huge sweeps of land on every side. We saw no people, not even one. There was only the sound of our boots in the grass and, sometimes, the clatter of a pheasant’s wings as, startled by our approach, it heaved itself into the air.
That night we curled up in a hut that smelled of sheep, the ground outside littered with shotgun cartridges and brittle clumps of fleece. The wind kept me awake, levering its way into every crack and crevice in the walls. In the morning we climbed down to flat land. Houses now, and villages, with youths standing around. They would be smoking or kicking a football about or trying to put each other in headlocks. Their eyes would flick in our direction as we passed, and I sensed the shape of their thoughts, dark and splintery. I had to work hard not to show any fear. The memory of those strangers stretched across the road still lingered. I noticed a boy leaning against a wall next to a newsagent’s. He watched us go by, then slid a few words out of one side of his mouth, and the boys who were with him laughed, the noise so abrupt and harsh that two crows lifted from a nearby tree. No one actually confronted us, but that wasn’t the point. It was the constant, unremitting threat of violence that I found wearing. It was the sense of apprehension, the dread.
In the early afternoon we stopped to rest. The road shadowed a railway cut, and we climbed over the wall and installed ourselves on the embankment, so as to be hidden from any passers-by. Odell unwrapped the cold meat and bread, leftovers from the day before. A passenger train rushed past below us as we ate. Odell eyed it thoughtfully. The sky had clouded over. A chill wind bent the blades of grass beside me, and I huddled deeper into my creaky leather coat.
We were about to move on when a goods train rattled down the line towards us. Instead of the usual trucks, it was hauling several transporters, each of which had a tarpaulin lashed over its main frame. Odell began to slither down the embankment, signalling for me to follow her. When she reached the track she ran alongside one of the transporters. Catching hold of a stanchion, she swung herself up on to a metal footplate. I tossed her my bag, then hoisted myself on to the same section of the train. She was already loosening the ties on one corner of a tarpaulin. We ducked under the heavy plastic and found ourselves pressed up against a yellow sports car, one of three, all identical in make and colour. I tried the door on the driver’s side, fully expecting it to be locked, but it opened with an expensive click. I hesitated for a second, then climbed inside. The smell of leather upholstery enfolded me – the smell of newness itself. Odell climbed in after me. Settling behind the steering-wheel, she pulled the door shut. The smooth swaying motion of the car, the darkness beyond the windows, the presence of a girl beside me – for a moment I was able to fool myself into thinking that it was my first night at the Bathysphere and nothing else had happened yet.
‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said.
I turned to face her.
‘Not so long ago,’ she said, ‘I was in love with someone …’
I smiled. It was a good beginning.
His name was Luke, and they had met when she was twenty. One Sunday evening she was waiting on the platform of a provincial railway station. She wanted to get back to the city, but there had been all kinds of delays and cancellations, and people were standing three or four deep by the time the train pulled in. Then she saw him, through one of the carriage windows. He was reading a book, his face lowered, his black hair falling on to his forehead. In that same moment she noticed that a window in his carriage had been left open. She tended not to use her gift for her own personal gain, not any more, but that evening she decided to flout the rules for once. A damp flurry of wind took her over the heads of the other passengers, through the window and down into the seat directly opposite the dark-haired boy. When he looked up and saw her, his eyes widened and he breathed in sharply.
‘What are you staring at?’ she said. ‘Do I remind you of someone?’
‘No.’ He seemed momentarily dazed by the speed and boldness of her questions. ‘I didn’t hear the door open.’
‘Perhaps you were asleep.’
‘Asleep? I don’t think so.’ He glanced at his book. ‘I was reading.’
‘Then perhaps you were in another world,’ she said.
The train shook itself and then began to move. She stared out of the window, pretending to take an interest in the lights of unknown houses, distant towns.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’
What she had loved most of all about Luke was lying next to him while he was sleeping. He always looked so untroubled. She thought that if they slept in the same bed for long enough she would acquire that look of his. At the beginning she would stay awake for hours and try to draw the calmness out of him. She used to see it as a grey-blue vapour drifting eerily from his body into hers.
She had wanted to be with him for ever – in fact she’d been quite unable to imagine not being with him – but she had made a mistake: she told him what she could do. In bed one night, with all the lights out, she turned to him and said, ‘You know when we first met, on that train …’
‘I knew it,’ Luke cried when she had finished. ‘I knew there was something.’
Initially, he was seduced by the glamour of it. He saw a kind of peculiar, inverted celebrity, and that excited him. But he soon started to feel that their relationship had its roots in deception – her deception – and the subject would come up whenever they argued. The fact that she had fooled him. Made him look stupid.
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ she would cry. ‘It was because I loved you. And anyway, you almost guessed. Even then, at the beginning.’
She should never have told him. She should’ve been content simply to have profited from her gift. But she had been unsure of herself, perhaps. She had hoped to bind him to her still more closely. Once, many years ago, a great-aunt had given her some advice. An air of mystery is just as valuable as wit or beauty. It keeps people interested – especially men. And certainly, for the first few months, Luke had suspected there was a side to her that he hadn’t understood, and he would worry at it almost pleasurably, as you might push your
tongue against a loose tooth. When she told him the truth, however, it allowed him to think that the riddle had been solved. He had reached the end of her, and there was nothing more to discover. Far from binding him, the knowledge set him free. He could move on.
And another thing. Although she had sworn him to secrecy, he was always nearly giving the game away. He couldn’t bear it that people didn’t know about her. To start with, she thought it was because he was proud of her, but then she began to realise it was something far less healthy. He had sensed that people found the relationship odd, and that reflected badly on him. If they knew who she was, though, they’d get it. In other words, it wasn’t that he wanted people to know she was different, or special, or extraordinary. No, in the end he was only concerned with his own image.
Odell sighed. ‘I wasn’t as beautiful as he was. People were always admiring him, and he’d pretend he hadn’t noticed. I didn’t mind that, really. I just wanted him to see the beauty in me. A beauty others didn’t see. Maybe he couldn’t, though. Or maybe it wasn’t enough.’
I see it, I said inside my head.
The train had slowed, and I could feel every joint in its body as it picked its way cautiously through what felt like a maze of points. Odell sighed again. Opening her door, she said she was going to take a look outside.
When she returned, she told me we had reached a city. She thought it might be Ustion, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, it would probably be wise to leave now, before the transporters were either checked or unloaded.
Although the train was still moving, we had no trouble jumping down on to the tracks. The station loomed about half a mile ahead of us, a harsh recorded voice echoing from the cavernous interior. Any luggage found unattended will be destroyed. A mist had descended, and all the lights were ringed with gauzy haloes. Crouching low, I followed Odell across the rails, then we scaled a wall of dark bricks and dropped down into a side-street.
We weren’t prepared for the sight that greeted us when we turned the corner. Men rampaged along the main road, red shirts worn outside their trousers, open cans of beer in their hands. Cars raced past, honking their horns. Some had pennants tied to their aerials, others had scarves trapped and flapping in their wound-up windows. Odell bought a paper from a news-stand. The Ustion Gazette. She had guessed right. As she took her change, she asked the vendor what was happening.
‘Important game tonight,’ he said.
We ducked into a doorway as a second group of men swayed towards us. They were singing strange savage songs that I’d never heard before. With their cropped hair and their hard, exultant faces, they seemed to have sealed themselves off from the rest of us. It was like the divided kingdom in miniature – the same tribalism, the same deep need to belong. If you supported a football team, you saw all other teams as forces to be challenged, ridiculed, defeated. You stuck together, no matter what. You dealt with everything life threw at you. The triumphs, the disasters. The thick and thin of it. People have to have something they can identify with, Miss Groves had told us once. They have to feel they’re part of something. I watched as a man with a shaved head heaved a rubbish bin through a plate-glass window. His companions whooped and roared. They began to chant his name, breaking it into two raucous syllables. Then on they went towards the ground, which rose out of the terraced streets like some great cauldron, bubbling furiously with noise and light.
Given the conditions, Odell thought it best if we got off the streets. We found a hotel not far from the station and registered as Mr and Mrs Burfoot, a new name for me, and one that gave me an unexpected thrill. Later, we had dinner in a bar on the ground floor. We chose a table that had a view of the TV. The football was on. As we took our seats, the two teams walked out of the tunnel, flanked by police with riot shields and visors. Fights had already broken out on the terraces. The camera homed in as the crowd surged in two different directions at once, and I thought of how the sea looks when a wave rebounds from a breakwater and meets another wave head-on. We ordered steak pie and chips from the blackboard behind the bar, and I drank a pint of dark, flat beer, which was what the other men were drinking. Once the game began, I turned my back on Odell – a perfect example of choleric behaviour, I thought – and when we left more than an hour later I still hadn’t so much as glanced at her. At the door a shrill whistling from the crowd had me looking over my shoulder. One of the home side’s star players was being stretchered off the pitch with his hands covering his face. They showed a slow-motion replay of the foul. A defender from the opposing team hacked him to the ground and then stood back, arms raised in the air, palms outwards, as if innocent of any wrongdoing. They were like children, these footballers, with their transparent lying and their endless tantrums. Nothing was ever their fault. They wanted to get away with everything.
Once we were back in our room, Odell locked the door, then leaned against the wall with her hands behind her. I was reminded of Sonya for a moment – she often used to stand like that – but, at the same time, the comparison seemed obscure, even meaningless. I had loved Sonya, I really had, but she had become intangible to me, not quite real, as had almost every other aspect of the way I had lived before. When I considered my return to the Red Quarter, when I tried to imagine what that might entail, my mind closed down. The question Odell had asked me – Do you want to get out of here or don’t you? – expressed it perfectly. Yes, I wanted to get out of the Yellow Quarter, of course I did, and yet, once that had been achieved, I couldn’t actually visualise a life. If I thought about the people I used to see on a regular basis – Vishram, Sonya, Kenneth Loames – they appeared as ephemeral and irrelevant as ghosts, whereas the ghosts themselves – Ob, Neg, Lum – had true substance and even – strange, this – a kind of nobility. If I survived, who would I be exactly? Which version of myself would I be left with? How would I fit in? Turning away from Odell, I walked to the window. A helicopter hovered in the middle distance, its searchlight aimed at the ground directly below it.
She came and stood beside me. ‘It’s only crowd control.’
Of course. The football would be over any minute. Even so, when the helicopter veered towards us, with its head lowered and its searchlight sweeping the streets and buildings, we both instinctively stepped back from the window. All of a sudden the angry stutter of its rotor blades was on top of us, the air itself vibrating. I shaded my eyes as blinding light flashed through the room. It was as though some supernatural force had just flown in one wall and out the other, as though we had been visited by a creature to whom concrete and plaster meant nothing. The helicopter moved on, heading westwards, restless, inquisitive.
‘I didn’t finish my story about Luke,’ Odell said.
I drew the curtains, shutting out the night.
‘You’re not too tired?’ she said.
I shook my head. We settled on the bed, Odell leaning against the pillows with her knees drawn up while I lay on my side, my cheek propped on one hand.
Luke had left her eighteen months ago, she said, and in all that time she had heard nothing from him. Then, in late November, the day after she saw me being arrested by the Blue Quarter police, she had gone home for a few hours. She lived in an old petrol station on the outskirts of Aquaville. The ground floor had been a working garage – it still smelled of diesel oil and spray-paint – but the upstairs was like a loft, with windows running along one side and a view over the fields.
She was just sorting through her mail when there was a knock on the door. It was Luke. His dark hair stuck up at all angles, and the whites of his eyes looked dingy, almost stained. He was in trouble, he said.
It took another hour and most of a bottle of wine for him to get to the point. His girlfriend was about to be transferred. He didn’t want to lose her, though, so he had hidden her. When Odell reminded him of the penalties he would face if he was caught, he snapped at her. Yes, he knew about the penalties. He knew. Then he lowered his voice again. He was sorry. He was tired. He hadn’t slept.
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‘You have to help me,’ he said.
She couldn’t, she told him. Didn’t he have any idea who she worked for? It turned out that he didn’t – so she’d kept something from him after all! – but once he got over the shock he tried to persuade her that it was perfect. They’d never suspect a person in her position. She shook her head. She couldn’t risk it. When he made a half-hearted attempt to blackmail her, she lost her temper. He backed down.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said after a while. ‘I feel so hopeless.’
Outside, a bitter wind scoured the cracked concrete where the petrol pumps stood. Ice had formed on the puddles, as fragile and transparent as a layer of skin. She bled the radiators with a small grey key. They groaned and clanked a little, but the room didn’t seem to get much warmer.
Later that night Luke asked if he could stay. When she hesitated, he told her not to worry. He’d be gone in the morning. It was strange how he could still wound her, how words like that made her heart hurt.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’
‘Do you want me to sleep in the chair?’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep in the chair, if you like.’
‘You’ll freeze,’ she said.
He climbed beneath the blankets. His body smelled of nutmeg, the way it always used to. She knew she shouldn’t have slept with him, but she did it anyway. She hadn’t been doing it for him. She’d done it for herself.
No one ever bothers to imagine how alone other people are.
It was almost dawn before she noticed that the grey-blue vapour she’d once coveted had disappeared. Turning in the bed, she looked straight at him. She saw how the surface of his skin fluttered, and how he brushed constantly at phantoms with his hands. From his lips came whimpered protests and entreaties. He had become as phlegmatics were supposed to be – tremulous, inert – but unlike most of them he had nothing to fall back on.
In the early morning they stood near the car-wash, the big blue brushes foolish, incongruous, like someone’s idea of a joke, and she knew this was the last time she would ever see him. The tears ran from her eyes. She had lost him, but that wasn’t really why she was crying. She was grieving for all the things that don’t come again. She was grieving because things end, and she wished they didn’t have to.
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