Divided Kingdom (14 page)

‘All right'. Jasmine looked beyond me. ‘Mr Vishram? Anything to add?'

Vishram held his glasses at arm's length to check the lenses
for smears, but it seemed that he had done a good job. ‘No,' he said, putting the glasses back on. ‘I think you've covered everything.'

‘Don't let the rules and regulations suffocate you, Tom,' Jasmine said. ‘They're just there to provide you with a framework within which you can operate quite freely.'

‘Hopefully,' Vishram said, rising to his feet, ‘it will be an experience that you never forget.'

‘You make it sound rather daunting,' I said.

Vishram merely smiled and turned away. On reaching the door, though, he paused, and I assumed he was going to offer me one last piece of advice or reassurance. Instead, he returned to an earlier and unrelated topic of conversation.

‘Don't forget to have a word with Sonya, will you,' he said, ‘or this wretched book of mine will never get written.'

I stepped out of the train just after midday on Monday. A shiver shook me as I stood on the platform, and I wrapped my overcoat more tightly around me. The cloth felt clammy to the touch. Though it prided itself on its spas, its Turkish baths, and its swimming pools, Aquaville had never enjoyed a healthy reputation. In recent years it had been ravaged by flu epidemics, and locals were always falling prey to arthritis and pneumonia. Some argued that the maladies originated in the phlegmatic character itself, its innate quality being cold and damp, but others believed that the Blue Quarter's first administration should shoulder the blame. In adding some two hundred miles of new waterways to the canals and lakes that existed prior to the Rearrangement, it stood accused of actually altering the city's climate. I felt fortified by the vitamin supplements Sonya had given me at the weekend. Even so, it would be a miracle if I didn't come down with something.

I had been told that a conference official would meet me, but I couldn't see anybody waiting at the barrier. Phlegmatic people had never been known for their efficiency – and besides, the train was at least an hour late. I decided to make my own way to the hotel. According to Jasmine, it was only ten minutes on foot. Picking up my case, I set off towards the exit. I had walked no more than ten yards when a man seemed to rise up out of the crowd beside me. He had moist pale-green skin and a dark pencil moustache, and his black hair had been smoothed down with some kind of oil or pomade. He thrust what felt like a postcard into my pocket.

‘Something that might interest you.'

He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, his face angled away from me and lifted a fraction, as if he was scouring the busy concourse for someone he knew. Then he was gone – like a swimmer caught by a rip-tide, or a drowning man being taken down for the third time.

I walked on. The incident had lasted no more than a few seconds, and yet the contents of my mind had been upended. My thoughts flew past me in a jumbled state, like clothes in a tumble-dryer, and a light sweat had surfaced on my forehead and my chest. I didn't look at the card. I didn't even reach into my pocket to check it was still there. It seemed important to keep moving, to behave as though nothing had happened.

Outside the station the crowd thickened and grew sluggish, and I paused once again to take in my surroundings. The streets were narrower than I had expected, and many of the buildings had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Of the several hotels that I could see, for instance, only one – the Tethys – had been painted at all recently. There was a waterway to my right, with taxis moored against a floating wooden quay, but I decided to walk instead. I soon regretted it. I couldn't seem to synchronise my progress with that of the people milling all around me. They moved with so little purpose, with such a lack of certainty, that I kept colliding with them or treading on their feet. Once, I stepped aside to let a blind man pass only to stumble over an iron bollard and almost drop my suitcase in the canal. I'd not been hurt. All the same, I was beginning to wish I could sit down for a moment and close my eyes. I thought of Jasmine and her offer of medication. I would have swallowed something there and then, if I'd had it on me.

‘Mr Parry?'

I looked round. A young woman with pale-blonde hair was hurrying towards me. In her hand she held a placard on which was scrawled T. PARRIE.

‘Sorry I missed you at the station,' she said.

I didn't say anything. I had only just recognised the name on the placard as my own.

She talked on, a tiny muscle twitching under her left eye. ‘Shall we walk? Or would you rather take a taxi? We can take a taxi if you –'

‘Walking's fine,' I said.

She led the way, hesitating at several junctions, and even, once, taking a wrong turning, which meant we had to retrace our steps. She must have apologised at least a dozen times, her head sinking between her shoulders, her mouth curling at the corners in a hapless imitation of a smile. I would probably have fared better on my own – or no worse, at any rate. I still had a slight feeling of disorientation, though, and trembled every once in a while like someone suffering from a mild form of exposure, and when we finally got to the hotel, a majestic old building with wrought-iron balconies clinging to a mottled, off-white façade, I plunged into the lobby with a sigh of relief, as if I had been adrift on a stormy ocean for many days and had now, at long last, reached the safety of the shore.

‘Welcome to the Sheraton, sir.'

I spun round. A middle-aged man in a pale-grey top hat and a tail-coat of the same colour had appeared at my shoulder.

‘Are you here for the conference?' he said.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, I am.'

‘My name's Howard. Guest Relations.' Clasping one hand in the other, he bowed from the waist. ‘At your service, sir.'

‘Thank you.' I attempted a modest bow of my own.

Howard waited until the young blonde woman had taken her leave, then his right arm described a generous arc in front of me, rather as if he were scattering rose petals in my path. I understood that I was being ushered towards reception. He gave the man behind the desk my name and informed him that I would like to check in. Eyebrows raised, the man consulted a computer screen and slowly shook his head. My room wasn't ready, he told us. Clasping his hands again, almost wringing them this time, Howard asked whether I would mind waiting in the lobby. Aware of his mortification, I didn't feel I could object. I sat down in an armchair and took out my guide to the Blue Quarter.
Every now and then I would lift my eyes and look through the window at the garden, where the flags of the four countries flew side by side on tall white poles.

As I was finishing a passage on the economy – verdict: permanently on the brink of collapse – I became distracted by a fidgeting at the edge of my field of vision. Looking round, I saw a short thin man rise from a sofa and walk towards me. His suit was the most peculiar colour – the fragile pale-blue of a blackbird's egg. He had a slight cough, I noticed, and the rims of his nostrils were chapped and red.

‘My name's Ming,' the man said. ‘Walter Ming.'

At that moment a large suitcase slipped from the grasp of a passing bell-boy. The case promptly sprang open, spilling its contents across the lobby floor, including somewhat bizarrely, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, which came to rest against the toe of my left shoe. The disturbance partially obscured the thin man's words, just as a clap of thunder might have done.

‘Wing?' I said. ‘As in bird?'

‘Ming. As in dynasty.' He smiled mirthlessly.

I introduced myself, and we shook hands. Ming's palm had a dry, almost papery feel to it, and his black hair was thick and lustreless. Stooping quickly, I picked up the bottle of Tabasco and gave it to the flustered bell-boy.

‘You just arrived,' Ming said.

I nodded. ‘Yes.'

‘Where are you from?'

‘Pneuma,' I said. ‘The Red Quarter.'

Ming had turned away from me. He was watching the bellboy, who was trying desperately to force everything back into the suitcase.

‘What about you?' I said. ‘Where are you from?'

Ming didn't answer. In spite of his slight build, he seemed ponderous, like a city in which too much evidence of the past remains, and I thought of Cledge, the Green Quarter's capital, whose shabby low-rise tenements I could sometimes see from my office window if the air was clear. I was about to ask whether he was a melancholic by any chance when Howard appeared
before me. My room was ready, he was happy to say. Shaking Ming's hand again, I told him that it had been a pleasure and that I was sure we would run into each other later on. I thought I could feel his curiously lifeless gaze resting on me as I moved towards the lifts.

On opening the door to my room, I was immediately struck by the oppressive quality of the furnishings, which had more in common with a museum, I felt, than a hotel. The sofa and the armchair were covered in a heavy plum-coloured brocade, and both the wallpaper and the curtains were dark-blue. My sense of claustrophobia was heightened by the bookshelves, which had been built into the wall on both sides of the bed and which were crammed with ancient, musty-looking hardbacks. In the middle of a stack of pillows and carefully positioned on a folded paper napkin was a complimentary chocolate in the shape of a smiling mouth. On the wall opposite the bed was a mural depicting a scene in which men in rowing-boats fished under a moonlit sky. I walked over to the writing desk. Here I found a bouquet of flowers and a wicker basket filled with fruit. A card from the organisers of the Sixteenth Cross-Border Conference wished me a rewarding and relaxing stay. I turned to the window. It looked west, over grey rooftops, the clutter only interrupted by the vertical spikes of a number of church spires. In the distance lay a smudged, uneven strip of countryside.

As I stood there, taking in the view, I remembered the man in the railway station – his sweaty pale-green skin, his oiled hair. The image had a surreal clarity about it, like the last fragment of a rapidly evaporating dream, something which, in the ordinary run of things, I would have automatically discounted or ignored. I slipped a hand into the pocket of my overcoat, half expecting it to be empty. There was something there, though – a sharp edge, a piece of card.

When I looked at the card for the first time I was slightly disappointed. I don't know what I had hoped to find. Something typical of the Blue Quarter, I suppose – a kind of souvenir. But this was nothing more than a flyer for a place called the
Bathysphere. It could be a new restaurant, I thought, or a bar. Or it might be a show. I studied the card more closely – the name and address written in dimly visible steel-grey, the background midnight-blue – then lifted my eyes to the window again. I remembered bathyspheres from adventure stories I had read when I was young. Round metal contraptions, large enough to hold a person, they were designed to be lowered to the bottom of the sea. A profoundly phlegmatic idea, then. Perhaps, after all, the flyer did typify the country I had entered. I wondered why the man in the station thought I'd be interested. Or did he hand out the cards indiscriminately to anybody who passed by? After staring over the rooftops for a while, I shrugged, then slid the card back into my pocket and forgot all about it.

The first event of the conference involved a visit to the Underground Ocean, which Vishram had alluded to, of course, and which the programme described as ‘one of the Blue Quarter's most extraordinary attractions'. It would provide delegates with a chance to ‘mingle informally' before the real business of the conference began. We were to assemble in the hotel lobby at three-thirty that afternoon. Transport would be laid on. As the programme breezily assured me, this was an opportunity
‘not
to be missed!'. It would be followed by a cocktail party, which would be held in the Concord Room on the ground floor of the hotel from six o'clock onwards.

We gathered in the lobby at the appointed time, about forty of us. Several of the delegates had met before, it seemed, and were busy renewing their acquaintance, talking and nodding and laughing, while the rest of us stood in awkward silence, at slight angles to each other. Hotel staff were putting up decorations – blue streamers looping from one light fixture to another, and a sparkly golden banner above reception that said
Happy Rearrangement Day!
A portrait of the Queen gazed impassively down at me. She had been classified as a phlegmatic during the Rearrangement, and now, twenty-seven years later, she was still alive, having outlasted both her choleric husband and her melancholic eldest son.

A conference official finally arrived, and we were guided through the garden to the canal where a glass-topped barge was waiting for us. Climbing on board, I sat down next to a big pale man in a sports jacket. I had noticed him earlier, in the lobby, part of a group of delegates who had greeted each other like old friends. As the boat pulled out into the canal, I turned and introduced myself.

‘Nice to meet you,' the man said. ‘I'm Frank Bland.'

We shook hands.

‘You seem to know a few people,' I said.

He grinned sheepishly. ‘I've been on the circuit for a while.' He gave me a glance that slid sideways across my face, like an ice-cube on a mirror. ‘You ever swum underground?'

I shook my head. ‘I've never been here before.'

‘It's something else.' He stared straight ahead, then nodded, as though his opinion needed reinforcing.

A woman with a microphone stood up and started pointing out the sights.

In less than half an hour we were drawing up outside an enormous rectangular building with a flat roof and no windows. It had the dimensions of a film studio or an aircraft hangar, and was painted a colour that reminded me of fired clay. A sign on the roof said THE UNDERGROUND OCEAN in huge white letters. Above the entrance, in blue neon, were the words
subterranean surfing.