Divided Kingdom (10 page)

She was appealing to my vanity, of course, but I couldn't afford to react. Instead, I had to turn her remarks to my own advantage.
Yes
, my silence said,
I'm just like them. Yes, that's exactly what I am.

Half an hour later, the road brought us up against the border, and once or twice, when the land fell away to the east, I caught my first ever glimpses of choleric territory. I was both horrified and enthralled by what I saw. There was an industrial complex whose cooling towers and pools of effluent covered an area of several square miles. There was a motorway, each of its eight lanes packed with speeding traffic. There were children on a building site, doing something to a cat.

‘You think that's where I belong?' Chloe said.

Her mood had altered during the past few minutes. The reality of her destination had hit her for the first time. I could hear a brittleness in her voice, which I took to be the outer edges of a new and unexpected fear.

‘You're wrong.' She let out a short bitter laugh. ‘You are so fucking wrong.'

Dunne turned in her seat, speaking to me. ‘This isn't bad. Sometimes they scream the whole way.'

I asked her how she dealt with that.

She opened the glove compartment and took out a pair of headphones. ‘I got them from a friend of mine who works at the airport.' She grinned. ‘Put these on, you can't even hear a plane taking off'.

‘What do you think this is,' Chloe said, ‘a game?'

The relocation officer spoke past me now, her voice hardening. ‘I could give you an injection if you like. Then you'd sleep like a baby.'

By the time we reached the checkpoint it was five o'clock. Knowing how long it could take to cross into choleric territory – hours usually, what with all the harassment and provocation – and aware of the dangers of travelling in that country once darkness had fallen, Pat Dunne decided we should spend the night in the Red Quarter. We wouldn't be the only ones. A tourist settlement called the Border Experience had sprung up in the vicinity, with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops. Sanguine people came from far and wide to climb the viewing platforms, each hoping for a brief taste of life on the other side. They all had their photos taken with a guard, and they all bought knick-knacks for family and friends back home. It was as if some of the cholerics' notorious materialism had seeped over the wall. On the way to our hotel, I stopped and looked in a shop window. There were ashtrays in the shape of watch-towers, and tiny, realistic attack dogs made of china. There were snowstorms with miniature replicas of no man's land inside. I saw tins of Border Shortbread and Border Fudge, and border guard dolls standing to attention in clear plastic cylinders. I saw mugs with words like ‘Furious' or ‘Livid' printed on them. My favourite souvenir was a T-shirt. On the front it said
I came I saw I lost my temper.
On the back, simply,
Welcome to the Yellow Quarter.

At the Frontier Lodge, we took three rooms – one each for Whittle and me, and one for Dunne and Chloe Allen. My room overlooked the car-park – there, below me, was our minibus, dwarfed by tourist coaches – but if I leaned on the window-sill and looked to my left I had a clear view of the border. Two walls ran parallel to one another, about a hundred yards apart. Between them, in no man's land, I could see life-size versions of the souvenirs I had noticed earlier: watch-towers, searchlights, concrete crosses, rolls of barbed wire and a sandy, mined section known as a death strip (in aerial photographs, the border often had the look of a stitched wound). Despite the fact that
nothing was happening, I couldn't seem to tear myself away. It was in these eerie halfway places that one was able to appreciate the full power and extent of the Rearrangement, and it inspired an inevitable reverence, a kind of awe.

As I stood by the window, I heard a click behind me and turned in time to see Chloe Allen slip into my room. I watched her lean back against the door until it closed. She was wearing the same outfit as before, only she had removed her black jacket and her shoes. She took a few quick steps towards me, stopping when she reached the bed.

‘You're not supposed to leave your room,' I said.

‘You don't mind, though,' she said, ‘do you.'

Thinking I should fetch one of the relocation officers, I tried to edge past her, but she moved to block my way.

‘Let's forget about the other two,' she said. ‘Let's run away together.'

Her smile was sly but genuine.

Taking the hem of her T-shirt in both hands, she deftly lifted it over her head and tossed it on to the bed. She was wearing nothing underneath.

‘They're pretty, aren't they,' she said.

‘Chloe,' I said. ‘Put your clothes back on.'

‘You used my name.'

I attempted to edge past her again. This time she grabbed the front of my jacket. When I pulled free, she began to flail at me with loosely clenched fists. I caught hold of both her wrists and held her at arm's length. I realised I was laughing. I had no idea why I might be doing that. There was nothing remotely funny about the situation. Chloe was insulting me now, not loudly, but in a malignant, strangled whisper, as though her fury was such that she couldn't find her voice. I pushed her away from me, then turned and hurried out into the corridor.

I tried Pat Dunne's room first. She wasn't there. Whittle had disappeared as well. I stopped a couple who were making for the lift and asked if they happened to have seen a woman of about fifty with curly hair. The man thought he'd seen someone like that. She was further down the corridor, he said. By the drinks
machine. She seemed to be having trouble with it, he added, grinning.

When I found Dunne, she was standing in front of the machine, banging the stainless steel with the heel of her hand. ‘The fucking thing,' she said. ‘It ate my money.'

She must have noticed the look I was giving her.

‘I know what you're thinking,' she said, ‘but listen. If you go into choleric territory, you have to act like them, or you don't survive.'

‘Chloe Allen's in my room,' I said.

Something loosened in her face. ‘What? When I left her, she was sleeping.'

‘Well, she's awake now.'

When we burst into my room, it was empty. We found Chloe where she belonged, in the room she was sharing with Pat Dunne. She was lying on her side in bed and breathing steadily, the covers pulled up over her face, one strand of dark-gold hair forming an innocent question mark on the pillow.
What, me?

Dunne looked at me sideways. I held her gaze.

‘I didn't imagine it,' I said.

Back in my own room, I locked the door. The air smelled of perfume, its sweetness rendered more intense by the grey walls, the dull blond furniture. I opened the window, then sat down on the edge of the bed.

Let's run away together.

She had noticed me as soon as she walked into the living-room that morning. I had shown up on her adolescent radar. She'd identified me as the one unstable element, a weak point she could probe, exploit.

They're pretty, aren't they.

I decided not to risk another confrontation. I could already picture the sequence of looks that would appear on Chloe's face at the breakfast table as she tried to turn me into her accomplice, her jilted lover, or even, possibly, her rapist. I stayed upstairs until I saw Dunne and Whittle walk her across the car-park. Halfway to the minibus she looked up, scanning the hotel façade, but I stepped back from the window. I don't think she
saw me. I waited until the minibus joined the queue of vehicles at the checkpoint, then I went down to the restaurant.

Dunne and Whittle didn't return until mid-afternoon. As we drove back to the capital, they told me about their day. No sooner had they crossed the border than Chloe became totally unmanageable. She had used the foulest language and hurled herself repeatedly against the wire-mesh. In the end they had been forced to sedate her. Whittle thought her behaviour had been triggered by my absence. He found my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know, I think she took a shine to you.'

I laughed softly, then looked out of the window.

Pat Dunne turned to face me. ‘What actually happened in your room last night?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Nothing happened.'

Later, I wondered whether the transfer I had witnessed had been an elaborate test of my moral fibre, with Chloe playing the role of temptress, but then I dismissed the idea as overheated, a paranoid fantasy brought on by the pressures of my new working environment. It was also conceivable that the authorities had been reminding me of the commitment I had made. After all, my family might have been treated much as Chloe had been treated, had immunity not been granted. I couldn't be sure, though, and it wasn't the kind of question you could ask. And even if I had been able to ask, I knew what the answer would be. The authorities would claim that being sent out on the road as an observer was a crucial part of the induction process. I had been given a look at the ‘nuts and bolts' of the job, they would tell me, a ‘unique insight' into what life was like ‘in the field'. I couldn't really have taken issue with any of that.

I had made a pact with the ruling powers, and they were as good as their word: Victor and Marie were left alone. No visits from state officials, no check-ups, no brown envelopes with scarlet peacocks stamped in the top left-hand corner.
They've obviously given up on us
, Victor would tell me over the phone with undisguised glee.
We're hopeless cases.
The way things turned out, though, Victor needed less protection than I had imagined.
I had only been at the Ministry for eighteen months when he succumbed to a massive stroke, his death occurring unexpectedly, and in slightly unusual circumstances.

Marie called me one Tuesday evening, and I caught a train to the coast the following day, but I didn't hear the full story until after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. I sat at the kitchen table, the jagged line of the cliff-edge showing halfway up the window. Marie opened a bottle of gin and poured us both a drink. She told me how she had woken early on the morning of Victor's death, and how the silence had a quality she didn't recognise. When she drew the curtains, she was almost blinded by the whiteness of the world outside. Snow had fallen in the night, three inches of it. To the east, the cliff rose in a glistening curve, smooth as a sugared almond. She went into Victor's room to tell him, but he wasn't there. Though she could just make out the imprint of his body on the counterpane, evidence of a nap the day before, it didn't look as if the bed had been slept in. She searched the cottage from one end to the other, upstairs and down. She couldn't find him anywhere.
Perhaps he's gone into the village
, she thought. And then she thought,
Perhaps he's gone on a journey.
After all, he'd done it before. He was always threatening to up sticks, make tracks. He peppered his conversation with words like ‘vamoose' and ‘skedaddle'. He was capable of almost anything, she said, in his wild old age.

‘What do you mean, he'd done it before?' I asked.

But Marie didn't appear to have heard me.

She found him later that morning, she said, in the back garden. She had come across two shapes lying on the ground, one long and vaguely cylindrical, the other smaller, squarer. She approached the small object first. It seemed safer. She bent down and began to brush the snow away. A piece of pale-green leather showed beneath her fingers. The book of shoes. She knew then what the other shape was. Rising to her feet, she circled him slowly, as though he was asleep and she was trying not to wake him. She couldn't quite believe he was under there. Then, as she stood uncertainly beside him, she heard a quick, stealthy sound and, looking down, she saw that the snow had slipped, revealing
the rim of an ear, already bloodless, and some brittle wisps of hair.

‘Weren't you frightened?' I asked.

‘I screamed.' She grinned at me. ‘Have you ever screamed after it's snowed? It's the strangest thing. You feel like you're in a box. The kind of box a ring comes in, or a trumpet. A box lined with velvet.' Something lifted in her just then, and she became Marie again, Marie as she had been when I first saw her, framed in the living-room doorway of the house on Hope Street, mischievous, carefree. Then it dropped again, whatever it was, and she turned back into a woman I didn't really feel I knew. ‘I screamed,' she said a second time, her voice without inflection now, ‘but there was no one there. A ship on the horizon. A few gulls.'

Later, when we'd finished the bottle, I watched her run her index finger along the table, following the grain in the wood. Outside, the wind swirled against the walls. I was almost sure I could feel the cottage rock on its foundations.

‘What will you do?' I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘Stay here.'

‘Won't you be lonely?'

‘I'd be lonely if I moved,' she said.

At least no one would bother her, I thought as I travelled back to the city the next day. My head ached, and my mouth was strangely perfumed from all the gin I'd drunk. It had been a good funeral, though. People had made an effort to be there. At the graveside I had lifted my eyes from the coffin to see Mr Page standing across from me. His black suit looked immaculate – one would have expected nothing less – but something about him seemed out of character, abnormal, just plain wrong. After a while I realised that although his mouth was still doing its best to turn up at the corners it had crumpled in the middle – or to put it another way,
he no longer appeared to be smiling.
How I wish I could have caught Bracewell's eye right then! How I would love to have seen the expression on
his
face! The miraculous, the almost unimaginable moment had arrived, and sadness had brought it about, not anger, but it was too late to have any real impact on me, it was all too late.