Divided Kingdom

by Rupert Thomson

  I followed Odell along the walkway to the stairs. On the first floor we tiptoed past the door that led to reception. Then down another flight, to street-level. We paused in the shadows. There was nobody about. Odell placed the ashtray on the ground at the base of the wall, then darted across the alley and into the carpark where she crouched between two cars. I was only seconds behind her.

  Halfway across the car-park, we looked back. The manager was standing at the foot of the stairs. His paunchy upper body faced out into the night, but his head was turned to one side, the nose lifted, predatory. As we watched, two men joined him. I would have been prepared to bet that one of them wore crocodile boots. Stooping, the manager picked up the ashtray. He seemed to examine it for a moment, his chin tucked into his open shirt-collar, then his arm swung sideways and the ashtray landed further up the alley, a dull ringing that sounded like a hammer being brought down on an anvil.

  We moved towards the service station, keeping our heads below the car windows. Still doubled over, we skirted the forecourt, its pumps lit by a fierce mauve-white glare, and ended up against the side-wall of a bar. Half-smoked cigarettes, the smell of urine. A used syringe. Odell put a hand on my arm. Her gaze had fixed on the row of motorbikes that stood outside the bar. They looked oddly muscular, their bodies gleaming in the sultry light. She told me to stay put until she gave me a signal, but when the signal came I was to move fast. I leaned against the wall, my eyes on the hotel entrance. The men had vanished. There was only a yellow rectangle now, divided into horizontal segments by the stairs. How I wished we hadn’t left that room on the third floor. I hadn’t known what was going to happen next and, if I had interpreted Odell’s behaviour correctly, nor had she, but the uncertainty had been fertile, exquisite – a kind of pleasure in itself. Who could say where it might have led? And then that knock on the door, that voice, and the whole situation had been instantly dismantled. I wasn’t sure how something so unlikely, so delicate, could possibly occur again. I turned to see where Odell had gone. She was loitering beside a bike that had a naked woman painted on its petrol tank. The woman was on fire. Beneath the flames that licked at her thighs were the words Burn Baby Burn. Swinging a leg over the saddle, Odell reached sideways and down. I heard a sudden snarling, deep and guttural. Before I could work out how she had done it, she was motioning to me. I hurried over and fitted myself behind her.

  The next thing I knew, we were on the main road, doing fifty, her hair whipping against my cheeks. I felt I was following her through a forest, branches springing at me from the darkness.

  When I opened my mouth, it filled with wind.

  We joined the motorway. The traffic thinned to nothing. It was late now, almost two in the morning. From time to time I glanced round to see whether anyone was coming after us – the men from the hotel, the bikers from the bar – but the road stayed empty. It all looked too close back there, somehow, as though everything we were running from was just over our shoulders.

  Thirty miles from the capital, we took a slip-road up to a roundabout. As we crossed the bridge over the motorway, I saw a cluster of single headlights to the north. I removed one hand from Odell’s waist and pointed.

  She could have accelerated. By the time the bikes passed by, we would have been long gone. Instead, she braked and shifted into neutral. She switched off the lights, but left the engine turning over. When I thought about it later, I decided I would have done the same. It was something to do with trying to pinpoint the whereabouts of our pursuers. If it had been left to my imagination, I would have been unable to rid myself of the conviction that they could appear at any moment.

  I could hear them now, their engines blending into one low growl. Would they be able to see us from down there? Would they even think to look up? Had it occurred to them that we might be watching? Apparently not. One by one, they flashed beneath the bridge. The bikes registered with brief but visceral force, like a series of punches. Then they were beyond us, heading south.

  They might not have been after us at all, of course. They might have been another motorcycle gang entirely. I watched their tail-lights sink rapidly into the night – a handful of red berries dropped in dark water.

  There was a click as Odell shifted into first. For the next hour she took less obvious roads and kept to the speed limit. I had my arms wrapped round her waist, and my upper body was moulded against her back. We both shook with cold. Parts of me felt as if they were plated with metal.

  Finally, at half-past three, we rode into the city centre – Thermopolis at last – the shop windows all lit up but nobody around, the bike in low gear, its engine popping and crackling in the eerie, incandescent silence.

  ‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said. ‘It’s the last one.’

  We had checked into the Hyatt Regency, on a special weekend rate. Lying in bed with the curtains open, twenty-seven floors up, I could stare out into a forest of concrete, glass and steel. Office lights were left on throughout the night in what I imagined to be a deliberate configuration. Only people who worked in high finance would be able to decipher their true meaning. Odell lay beside me, fresh from the shower, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head. How would I survive without her stories? How would I survive without her?

  An hour earlier she had joined me at the window. Between two towers we could just make out the river, identifiable only by the absence of illumination. Beyond it lay the murky, suicidal boroughs of Cledge. Given the east-facing aspect of our room, we hadn’t been able to see the Red Quarter, but it was there, behind us, no more than a mile away. ‘Not far now,’ Odell had murmured. Though I knew what she was saying, I couldn’t agree. The distance I had to cover seemed bigger than ever. Crossing a border illegally was daunting enough – I hadn’t forgotten those Yellow Quarter guards – but what if I succeeded? What would happen then? When I whispered the word ‘home’ to myself, I felt panic, a swirl of vertigo.

  Odell turned in the bed to look at me. ‘This story starts really suddenly.’

  All right, I said inside my head. I’m ready.

  The man had hit her once, the bunched knuckles of his right hand solid as brass or stone; the curve of bone behind her ear was buzzing, numb. Now he was closing in on her again, his upper arms and shoulders looming. As he raised his fist to hit her for the second time, she rolled off the sofa on to the carpet. He swung and missed. Thrown off balance by the weight of his own wild punch, he stumbled into a lamp. The shade flew off horizontally, like a hat blown from a man’s head in a gale. The lampstand tilted; the bare bulb shattered against the wall. She remembered watching wafers of glass float to the floor.

  The darkness filled with short, crude words – what he thought she was, what he was going to do to her. The stench of his breath was everywhere, a dense haze of beer and whisky. All the air she was breathing was coming from inside him. She scrambled to her feet and moved away, hands on either side of her hips, palms facing backwards, feeling for the wall. She had been to the Yellow Quarter many times, and yet she always forgot the violence, how quickly it occurred. It was like blood in an artery. It was stored at the same high pressure. One nick, and out it burst.

  He had something in his hand, she saw, a piece of flex wrenched from the video. The plug came hissing towards her like the blunt head of a snake. She twisted out of reach. The teeth gnawed on empty air and then drew back, preparing to strike again. If she had wanted to, she could have got away. There were things she could have done. But then she would have been showing her secret self to him, then he would have known – and too many of the wrong people knew already.

  At last the wall gave behind her. She fled down the hall. The front door lay ahead of her, and she was round the edge of it like water round a rock. The stairwell hummed with low-voltage electricity. From somewhere came the smell of garlic being fried. She took the stairs two or three at a time, almost turning her ankle at the bottom of the first flight. She didn’t remember climbing stairs on the way in. They must have
used a lift. She heard him surge on to the landing, his voice ballooning in the dim air overhead. He was still listing all the things he would do to her. All the things he’d never do, more like. She couldn’t believe that she had almost slept with him. That thought was astonishing to her now.

  On reaching ground-level, she slowed to a walk. She was a stranger, an intruder; if unmasked, she would probably be lynched. She invented a role for herself. I’ve been out for the evening, she thought. I’ve had a good time, but it’s late, and I’m looking forward to getting home. She nodded at the night porter in his office. He ignored her. She pressed the knob on the wall that released the front door and then slipped out into the street, absorbed at once into its humid smoky atmosphere. She glanced over her shoulder at the building she’d just left. The security light had clicked on, but there was no sign of the man whose name she had already forgotten. She doubted he would think of chasing after her. He would have realised by now that she was too fast for him. A man in his state only stood a chance in a small space.

  She should never have agreed to go back to his flat. There she was, out on the town illegally, her first visit to choleric territory in months, and he had asked if he could buy her a drink, his brown hair pushed back to reveal a wide, clear forehead, his eyes blue as a jay’s wing – classically, almost foolishly good-looking. He was drunk, of course, but who wasn’t drunk in the Yellow Quarter on a Saturday night?

  ‘Why do you want to buy me a drink?’ she had said.

  ‘Because you’re different.’

  ‘Different?’

  ‘You’re not like all the others. You’re special.’

  You got that right, she thought.

  He bought her a drink that tasted of strawberries, a miniature paper umbrella leaning jauntily against the rim of the glass. She asked him what he did. He was a fire-safety officer, he told her. The previous year, he had been called to a train crash. She pretended to remember it. He talked about the bodies, and how they had melted, one into the other, making them impossible to identify. Then he bought her another strawberry drink with an umbrella in it.

  She went back to his flat. In a large glass tank in the living-room, sinuous shapes glided this way and that, emitting tiny bolts of light.

  ‘Electric eels,’ he said, giving her an odd look. ‘Imported from the Blue Quarter.’

  She thought he’d seen through her, but he only wanted to impress.

  Later, he made a lunge at her, his hand closing round one of her breasts. She tried to push him away, but he laughed and pulled her roughly towards him. She threw her drink in his face. That was when he hit her.

  No, she should never have gone back with him. Some people would say she was perverse, or just plain idiotic, but she liked to think that she could get out of any corner, no matter how tight. She got too cocky, though. Thought she could handle anything. Sometimes she needed reminding.

  On the pavement outside his building, she snapped her eyes from left to right, scanning her surroundings. The streets weren’t safe, CCTV or no CCTV. No public spaces were. All the same, she stood still for a moment until the gaps between her heartbeats lengthened. The whisper of banknotes came to her, the chink and jangle of loose change. Shock waves from that fist of his. Or maybe it was the soundtrack of the Yellow Quarter, she thought. Listen hard enough and you could hear all the money being made. Listen hard and you could hear the wealth.

  She started to walk again.

  The border lay ahead of her, the high pale wall topped by rolls of glinting razor wire. She could see a watch-tower too. Squat body, spindly legs. It looked as though a spider had built a nest in the night sky. At the checkpoint itself, a bright-yellow barrier had been lowered, blocking her path. An armed guard stood suspended in the sentry hut’s bright cylinder like something on display in a museum. He would only let her pass if she had documents. She had no documents, of course.

  The next ninety seconds, from the guard’s point of view:

  Glancing up, he thought he saw a young woman walking towards him. When he stepped out of the hut, though, gun at the ready, the road was empty. He called up to the watch-tower. See anything? The answer came back. Only the top of your fucking head. You’re going bald, you know that? The guard shrugged. But he still couldn’t take his eyes off that stretch of road. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was out there. Or had been.

  Just as he was turning away, seeking the comfort of his newspaper and his mug of tea, a breeze pushed past him. The hair stirred on his forehead; even the stiff bristles of his moustache shifted a little. It was only air, a gust of wind, and yet it seemed personal. He felt that he’d been touched. He reached up and wiped his face, one quick downwards motion of his hand, then he stared out along the road again, but his gaze was unfocused now, without object. He remained in that position for some time, as though he believed that an explanation would eventually present itself.

  The wind dropped. All was still.

  Something altered at the very edge of his field of vision, something minute, almost imperceptible, but he had been trained to pay attention to such things. He looked over his shoulder, into the wide, bleak strip of no man’s land. Beyond the concrete obstacles and areas of heavily mined ground, beyond the electric barrier that controlled admittance to the Red Quarter, he could just make out the figure of a woman walking away from him, erect, unhurried, oddly familiar …

  He tried to shout ‘Halt!’ but the word came out husky, strangled, as if he had phlegm in his throat. The guard in the watch-tower peered down at him. Did you say something? He shook his head.

  That woman, that was her. She had just crossed the border illegally. She had broken the only law that really mattered. Her name was Odell Burfoot, and she was a shadow. They told her there were others like her, but she’d never met one yet.

  As I lay in the hotel bed, close to sleep, I finally realised what she was doing – what she’d been doing all along, in fact. She wasn’t telling me stories to distract me (though, obviously, they performed that function too). No, every narrative had a specific purpose of its own. Some were supposed to create an atmosphere of serenity and trust. Others were intended to console, or to warn, or to encourage. Different situations demanded different narratives, and each one had its proper moment. A tale about a war would precede a war, for instance. A tale about a death would follow a funeral. But if you wanted something to happen, then you told a story in which that ‘something’ happened. Look at Odell’s most recent offering. She had walked into the lion’s den and then walked out again. The task that lay ahead of us might have its dangers, she was saying, but they were not insurmountable. We had to believe in ourselves without succumbing to complacency. We should be confident, but not reckless. A story of this type had a magical or spiritual dimension, as befitted the phlegmatic tradition out of which it came. It cast a spell over the people listening, enabling them to accomplish feats similar to those described. It also bestowed a blessing. In short, it acted as a catalyst, an inspiration, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The order in which she had told her stories seemed important too. The first had been set in the long-distant past. The second had approached the present, but in a roundabout, almost incidental manner, as though to diffuse anxiety. The third had closed in rapidly, both in space and time. Taken as a sequence, they led up to the task in hand, and I knew that everything I needed was contained within them, if only I looked carefully enough. Like any good story-teller, Odell had resisted the temptation to spell it all out for me. If knowledge was imparted in that way, it had no purchase. She had showed patience, insight. She had allowed me to see things for myself.

  My name is Odell Burfoot, and I’m a shadow.

  They tell me there are others like me, but I’ve never met one yet.

  That evening we broke into a derelict house next to the border. We found a smashed window on the ground floor at the back and climbed through into the kitchen. Ivy had wrapped itself around the taps. Dead insects filled the gr
ooves on the stainless-steel draining-board. Against the far wall stood a fridge with its door flung open, like a man selling watches from the inside of his coat. I followed Odell down a passage that led past two or three dim rooms, then opened out into a hallway with a chess-board tile floor. The house smelled dry and peppery – of plaster, cobwebs, dust. Through the clear glass fanlight came an alien glow, glittery as quartz, reminding me that a checkpoint lay just beyond the door.

  We started up the stairs. On reaching the first floor, we entered a room whose three tall windows let in slanting rectangles of light. I moved over the bare boards and positioned myself to one side of a window. The concrete wall stood opposite the house, no more than a hundred feet away. Some Yellow Quarter guards huddled by the barrier. I saw one of them laugh, then wag a finger. His colleagues exchanged a knowing look. I was that close. Beyond them, further to the left, a viaduct of sooty brick angled across the street. Trains would once have passed this way, linking the northern suburbs of the old metropolis, but a section of the structure had been knocked down to accommodate the border, and the railway line now came to an abrupt halt in mid-air. Its one remaining arch, though monumental, served no purpose other than to frame a view of the deserted road that ran adjacent to the wall. I had forgotten how the city borders looked. They had an operating theatre’s ruthless glare. They were bright, lonely places. Last places. I swallowed. Stepping back into the room, I opened my bag and pulled out my white clothes.

  Once I was dressed, Odell gave me my final instructions. She would cross first, she said. I could watch, if I liked. See whether Croy’s theory about her ‘escaping notice’ was right. When she was safely over the border, I should wait five or ten minutes, then I should follow. She would meet me on the other side.