I took her hand in both of mine and turned it over, as though I were thinking of telling her fortune. I stared down into her palm so hard that I felt I was falling.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘For now.’
She gently removed her hand from mine, then stepped away from me and left the room. I had to repress the urge to rush after her. Instead, I forced myself to face the window. A rancid stink lifted off the cloak. That part of me, at least, would be authentic. I gazed out over no man’s land. Beyond the concrete walls and the electric fences, beyond the eerie lunar glare, and seeming insubstantial by comparison, if not actually unreal, were the sheer glass towers of downtown Pneuma.
The stairs let out a creak. It would be Odell, returning. There was something she’d forgotten to mention, perhaps. Or perhaps – and my heart leapt wildly, absurdly – she wanted to kiss me before we parted. I spun round. In the doorway stood a girl of five or six. She was wearing a white dress and satin ballet pumps, and from her shoulders rose a pair of iridescent wings on which the light from the border pooled and glistened. I thought for a moment that Odell’s gift must have betrayed her, and that she had accidentally transformed herself into someone else, as people do in fairy tales.
‘Are you dead?’ the girl said.
I shook my head.
‘You’re not a ghost, are you?’
I shook my head again. This time I tried a smile.
‘It’s all right,’ the girl said quickly. ‘I’m not afraid of ghosts.’ She let her eyes run over me – my face, my hair, my clothes. ‘You look like a ghost.’
I knelt down in front of her. Taking one of her hands, I singled out the forefinger and placed it on the inside of my wrist, where my pulse was.
‘You’re real,’ she said.
As real as you are, I said inside my head.
She gave me a look from close up, a look that was shiny, clean somehow, as if she had understood me perfectly, and I remembered what a friend had told me once, that it’s the eyes of children that make you feel old.
The girl was reaching over her shoulders with both hands. ‘These wings are hurting. Could you help me take them off?’
I began to undo the ribbons that held the wings in place.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘You smell bad.’
I know, I said. That’s the whole idea.
Another brief examination from those oddly knowing eyes.
I handed the wings to her. She solemnly surveyed the room, then bent down and leaned them against the wall next to the fireplace. Straightening up again, she looked at me across the point of one shoulder.
‘I have to go now,’ she said.
She turned, just as Odell had done, and vanished through the doorway. Odell. I hurried to the window, but there was no sign of her. Had she already gone across? I strained my eyes, trying to look beyond the floodlights. Nothing.
Panic scurried through me.
It was time.
I withdrew from the window, making for the stairs. In the hallway, I doubled back towards the kitchen. As I passed the open fridge, I saw a figure crouched inside, hands round his ankles, knees pushed up into the space below his chin. It was Brendan Burroughs.
‘Take me with you,’ he whispered.
I had to steel myself against his pleading. I had to pretend he wasn’t there.
But whispers were still coming from the fridge. ‘I can’t stay here any longer. I’m going rotten.’
Leave me alone, I said inside my head.
I climbed out on to the patio. Stone steps led up into a tangle of undergrowth. If I looked round, I knew Brendan’s mysteriously unlined face would be framed in the broken window, and I didn’t even have a lighter on me any more.
I didn’t look round.
Scaling a brick wall at the end of the garden, I dropped down on to the pavement and then started towards the border. I summoned the spirits of all those who had travelled with me. Their innocence, their singularity. Their freakishness. I repeated their names inside my head, over and over. If nothing else, I would remember what they used to sound like, how they moved about.
Neg, I said inside my head. Lum. Neg. Ob.
People running, falling. Burning.
I was still walking, but I had covered my face. My knees trembled, my ankles quaked. My joints appeared to have loosened, as if in readiness for a dismemberment. That little girl would be watching from a window, her gaze intent, dispassionate. Are you dead? I brought my hands down from my eyes. In front of me, no more than fifty yards away, stood the checkpoint with all its sinister and hostile apparatus. Though the three guards were silhouetted against the floodlights, I recognised the swagger, a casual brutality apparent in both their body language and their speech. I faltered. It was then that I noticed the piece of dog shit lying in the gutter. An idea came to me, and I experienced a burst of something like euphoria. What I was about to do would establish my authenticity beyond all doubt. It might even save me from harm. I pretended to notice the shit for the first time, taking an exaggerated step backwards, then bending low to study it more closely. I seemed to hear the guards draw breath. Now that I had their attention, I picked up the shit and examined it painstakingly from every angle, then I crushed it between my fingers and smeared it on to my cheeks and hair. That done, I began to move towards the checkpoint. The guards stepped away from me, waving their hands in front of their faces. Even the attack dog whined and shunted backwards. I just kept going, oblivious, serene. I might even have been smiling. As I passed the sentry hut I heard them talking.
‘It’s true what people say. They’re just like animals –’
‘They’re worse than animals …’
While two of them debated the point, a third aimed a kick at me and sent me sprawling on the tarmac. The dog barked excitedly but stayed well back. All three guards were arguing now. It hadn’t occurred to them to challenge me. In fact, they seemed eager to keep their distance. I’d made myself untouchable.
I picked myself up, walked on.
In no man’s land the lights were so intense that I could see the veins beneath the surface of my skin. I felt transparent. At the same time four shadows splayed out on the ground around me, as if I were a flower with black petals. My face itched, and the stench that lifted off me was unbearable. At the risk of drawing attention to myself, I started walking faster. I wanted this part over with.
The Red Quarter guards were already waiting for me. As I approached I held my hands out, fingers spread. I was making noises that were intended to communicate distress.
One of the men took me by the arm. ‘Who did this?’ he said.
I stared at him, round-eyed, slack-jawed.
He pointed back towards the Yellow Quarter. ‘Did they do this to you?’
My mouth still open, I nodded repeatedly, more than a dozen times.
The guard led me to a tap behind a prefabricated hut. He handed me a bar of carbolic soap and ran the tap for me. I gazed at the dark patch the water made as it splashed on to the concrete.
‘You can wash here.’ The guard mimed the act of washing for me.
I watched him carefully. Then, slowly, I put my hands under the tap and began to rub them together.
‘And your face.’ He patted his cheeks, his hair.
He went away, returning with a roll of paper towels, which he placed on the window-ledge above the tap. ‘When you’ve washed it off,’ he said, ‘use the paper to dry yourself. Then go that way.’ He pointed to the steel barrier behind me.
I nodded again, then pointed at the barrier, just as he had done.
The whole time I was washing off the muck and stink I was talking to myself inside my head. I don’t know what I was saying. Anything that would keep me from thinking, I suppose. All I had to do was turn off the tap, dry my face and hands, and then start walking, and yet I found myself delaying the moment, as if I couldn’t quite believe in the notion of safety or the possibility of home.
In the end the guard had to come over and
switch off the tap himself. He stood in front of me, smiling and shaking his head. ‘What are you trying to do? Flood the place?’ He tore a few sheets of paper off the roll and gave them to me, then he put a hand on my back and steered me towards the barrier. ‘Off you go now. Move along.’
Chapter Nine
As soon as I turned the first corner, I began to run as fast as the cloak and boots allowed. I was like something that had been wound up and then let loose, and I was laughing too. I could hear myself.
‘Thomas?’
I slowed down, stopped, looked round. Odell walked up the pavement towards me. In the light of the street lamps her bracken-coloured hair looked darker, almost black.
‘You took such a long time,’ she said. ‘I thought they’d got you.’ She reached out to take my hand, but I stepped back so sharply that she almost overbalanced.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch me.’
She listened carefully while I explained what I had done. She didn’t seem shocked or disgusted. On the contrary. According to her, it had been an inspired piece of tactical thinking. I had given both sets of guards something to react to. I had used myself to create a diversion. I’d become my own decoy. She was so enthusiastic that I could imagine the idea featuring in the next edition of some underground manual for asylum-seekers. I apologised for having been abrupt with her. I had washed pretty thoroughly, I said, but I wasn’t sure it had all come off. She moved closer, sniffing at my face and hair. I smelled of soap, she said. Border soap.
‘There’s something you haven’t noticed,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘You’re talking.’
‘The strangest thing. It just started. When you walked towards me.’ I stared past her, down the street. Light and shadow on the paving-stones. Overhanging trees. ‘Of course, I’ve been saying things all along,’ I said. ‘In my head, though.’
‘I thought so.’
‘You couldn’t hear me, could you?’
‘No. But sometimes I felt as if I understood you. And I talked to you before, on the train, so I knew what you sounded like.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
We looked into each other’s eyes. The air between us appeared to shrink.
In a nearby house somebody was playing the piano, each note separate, perfectly rounded, yet fragile, like a raindrop on a leaf. Odell turned to one side, as though captivated by the music. As I stood there with her, listening, the smell of coffee came and went. Some dinner party drawing to a close. We had crossed into one of Pneuma’s northern suburbs, an area called Gulliver.
‘What happens now?’ I said.
‘I make sure you get home safely.’
‘And that’s all? That’s it?’
She was looking at her feet. ‘You live here,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t.’
‘You could visit, though, couldn’t you, from time to time? If you felt like it. You could cross the border illegally. Nobody would know.’
She kept her eyes on the ground.
‘You told me you had to keep in practice,’ I said.
I was back on the peaceful tree-lined streets I knew so well, where crime didn’t exist and cheerfulness was second nature, but it seemed that things were being taken from me. I felt abandoned, deprived.
I felt bereft.
The direct route to my flat lay through the city’s most famous park. We followed a footpath that ran down one side of the zoo, stopping to watch the wolves lope with almost liquid grace through their enclosure, then we cut diagonally across an open grassy area where football was often played on Sundays. We circled the dark glitter of the lake. To the south, beyond the boathouse, I could just make out a crescent of creamy neoclassical façades and, further west, the mosque’s burnished dome. Though it was late now, after ten o’clock, the mildness of the night had tempted people outdoors. A man with a ponytail was trying to coax a squirrel on to a bench. Then an elderly woman walked past, holding a tennis racket. A black dog padded along beside her. She took a ball out of her pocket and hit it into the lake. The dog swam after it. Spring had come early, it seemed, with daffodils and primroses showing in the long grass beneath the trees, as pale and innumerable as stars.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ Odell said.
I looked glumly around and murmured in agreement, but all I felt was a faint tingle of resentment. I had so many questions for her, so many important questions, and yet, burdened by the knowledge that she would soon be gone, I couldn’t seem to give them voice. I fell into a kind of trance, paralysed by what I had not said and could not say.
As we neared my building, Odell went into a supermarket. From outside, I watched her moving up and down the aisles – her freckled face, her copper-tinted hair, her coat the colour of avocado skin. I tried to imagine that we didn’t know each other, that we had never met. It was all too easy. But I had hoped it would be difficult, if not impossible. I’d wanted confirmation that my life was irrevocably bound up with hers.
When she walked out of the shop she grinned and handed me a plastic bag. Groceries, she said. I might find I was hungry when I got home, and there wouldn’t be anything in my flat, not after all these months. Opening the bag, I peered down. The almost luminous glow of the oranges, the dull glint of the silver wrapping on the butter. The drops of condensation on the milk. Everything was mundane and practical, but at the same time improbable somehow, miraculous.
‘That’s the future,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’
She watched me carefully with her head at an angle, as though I were some kind of mechanism and she was trying to see how I worked. Her grin had faded. She trained a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then she pushed both hands into the pockets of her coat and looked across the street to where a theatre’s glass doors had just been flung open and members of the audience were spilling out on to the pavement, their voices raised in exhilaration against the night.
We arrived at the cul-de-sac where I lived. I had already told her that she didn’t need to see me to the door. Apart from anything else, there would be Loames to deal with – unless, of course, he’d been transferred during my absence. The fact that nothing could be relied upon was the one sure sign of a stable society, Vishram had told me once, and I had never been able to work out whether or not he was joking.
Odell scraped at the join between two paving-stones with the heel of her boot. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Did you see me cross the border?’
‘No. I missed it.’
She tried to hide her disappointment, but didn’t quite succeed. I could have mentioned the girl with the wings, I suppose. It might have made her feel better. In the end, though, I couldn’t summon the energy. Or perhaps I wanted to punish her for leaving me.
‘Maybe another time,’ I said.
‘Maybe.’ She took a breath. ‘I should be going.’
I reached up and touched her cheek. When I took my hand away I could still feel the heat of her skin on my fingertips. She turned and walked off down the hill, the gate-house of the old palace rising into the sky ahead of her.
When she was fifty yards from me, she appeared to hesitate. Swinging round, she lifted both her hands up to her mouth to make a megaphone.
‘Watch this,’ I heard her say.
For a moment she seemed to be turning away from me again, but turning at great speed, as if spun by an unseen force. Then she simply vanished. I thought I must have blinked. Or had she tricked me? I felt dull-witted, slow. I stared hard at the place where she’d been standing.
‘Thomas?’
The voice came from behind me. I whirled round. Odell was leaning against a pillar box at the other end of the street with her arms folded, and even though she was some distance away I could see that she was smiling.
She cupped her hands around her mouth again. ‘Believe me now?’
‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘I believe you.’
I kept my eyes fixed on her until she reached the top of the street. Once there, she turned the corner an
d disappeared from sight. Just like anybody else.
I had to ring the caretaker’s bell half a dozen times before the shadowy figure of Kenneth Loames appeared in the lobby and the glass front door clicked open. I watched various reactions pass across his face – indignation, then distaste, and finally astonishment as he looked more closely and realised who it was.
‘Mr Parry!’
‘How are you, Mr Loames?’ I said.
‘Fine, sir,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all.’
His eyes dropped to my cloak, then veered away again, lifting past my shoulder.
‘I seem to have mislaid my keys,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disturb you like this. I know it’s late.’
I waited while he went to fetch the spare set for me. I hadn’t mislaid my keys at all, of course. I’d left them in that hotel in Congreve, along with most of my clothes and the final draft of my lecture. At that point I hadn’t known whether I would have a use for them again – but here I was, four months later, with the pale-green carpet stretching before me and the marble-topped table standing over by the wall beneath the oval gilt-framed mirror. Nothing had changed. The lobby smelled as it had always smelled, of something sweet and baked. Like the inside of a cake tin.
When Loames returned with the keys, I thanked him and said goodnight, then I moved towards the lift and pressed the call button. Although I sensed him loitering behind me, I didn’t look round. He would pretend to be doing his job – checking the post on the table, or straightening the mirror – but he would actually be staring at my filth-encrusted garments and my ill-fitting boots, his curiosity more rampant than ever and even harder to articulate. Only when the lift’s cables looped down into the bottom of the shaft did I hear his front door softly close.
In my flat, all the lights were on. I stared at the switches, wondering if I could have forgotten to turn them off when I left for the conference. It would have been unlike me, certainly. And anyway, a light bulb couldn’t last four months, could it? Perhaps Loames had let himself in while I was away. After all, there might have been meters to read, or a gas leak to take care of – though surely he would have mentioned it … Perhaps he’d just wanted to have a snoop around. I was standing in the hall, weighing the various possibilities, when a rapid but subtle movement registered to my immediate right, in the very corner of my eye. I turned slowly. The toe of a man’s black shoe showed beyond the jamb on the right side of the living-room door. He was sitting in my favourite chair, it seemed, and if my reading of the movement I had caught a glimpse of was correct then he had just either crossed or re-crossed his legs. I walked towards the living-room. There in the armchair, and looking very much at home, was Ajit Vishram.
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