Divided Kingdom (17 page)

I began to run towards the city centre. A pain started up in my right side, and I slowed to a fast walk. My feet felt only loosely attached to my ankles. My throat burned. The conference would be starting in four hours, and I hadn't gone to bed yet. I didn't even know where I was.

A plane went over, tearing the clouds to shreds. I swore at it. The next time I looked up I saw a dimly illuminated sign that said TAXI. I burst through the door. The small office was filled with grey-skinned men smoking cigarettes.

‘I need a cab,' I said.

Their heads turned in my direction, their lips purple in the drab yellow light. Somebody asked me where I wanted to go. The Sheraton, I told him. He named a price. It seemed expensive, but I agreed to it. In the circumstances, I suppose I would have agreed to almost anything. He consulted a clipboard which lay on the counter in front of him, then pointed at one of the younger men.

Twenty minutes later I was standing in my bathroom, staring into the mirror. It was hard to believe that I was back in the
hotel, that I was safe. It had the banality of a true miracle. And the face that was looking at me didn't appear to have altered. The same wide, slightly furtive brown eyes. The same low forehead, two uneven horizontal lines etched delicately into the skin. I touched my hair where the sweat had darkened it, then I brought my hand down and turned it over so the palm faced upwards. Studying it closely, I could just make out five tiny marks.

At breakfast on Tuesday I sat with Frank Bland. He had called the hospital first thing, he told me. Rinaldi was feeling much better. He would be discharged within the hour. Bland celebrated by ordering smoked haddock, a basket piled high with toast and a large pot of tea. Later, we were joined by John Fernandez. When the waitress came, he wanted scrambled eggs and black coffee, nothing else.

‘How was the bar?' I asked him.

He shrugged, then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘We were out till about two.'

‘What about you?' Bland said to me. ‘Did you get an early night?'

I smiled ruefully. ‘No. Not exactly.'

Waking at seven, after less than two hours' sleep, my first sensation had been one of almost painful nostalgia. I had been part of something wonderful, but it was over. At the same time, I didn't know quite what to believe. It was possible that I'd been drugged. That would explain the exquisite clarity, and the way the minutes, even the seconds, had seemed to slacken and stretch out. And the nausea that came afterwards, it might explain that too. How much of what happened had been imaginary? And if it had all been imaginary, could it be imagined again?

‘Parry?'

I looked up. Fernandez was staring at me.

‘I didn't get to bed till five,' I said.

‘Five?'
Fernandez and Bland both spoke at the same time. People at the other tables looked up from their breakfast.

Fernandez was the first to recover. ‘Where did you go?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I'm not sure.'

Bland and Fernandez exchanged a glance.

‘You know, you shouldn't be surprised,' said Sudhakant Patel, who had just arrived at the table. ‘After all, this is the country of the mystical, the unex –'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake,' Fernandez said. He produced a bottle of Tabasco from his jacket pocket and shook a few bloody drops on to his eggs.

The next few hours passed in something of a blur. I heard a phlegmatic delegate deliver a softly spoken and yet impassioned plea for the statue of the famous admiral to be removed from its column in no man's land and installed outside a maritime museum on the Blue Quarter's south coast, and though I acquitted myself reasonably well, I thought, making at least one contribution to the debate, my mind was restless and jittery throughout. I kept drifting back to the events of the night before. My gamble had paid off. I hadn't had any contact with the local population, not unless you counted the club's employees and the taxi-drivers. What's more, the experience itself had exceeded any expectations I might have had, so much so that all I could think about was going back again that evening.

When lunchtime came, I bought a map of the city from a kiosk in the lobby and took it into the restaurant with me, settling into a booth next to the window. I had just located the Great Western Canal and was following it with my finger when I sensed somebody at my shoulder. I looked up to see Walter Ming standing beside me. He had really surpassed himself this morning. He was wearing a green tweed suit with leather-covered buttons, a bright-yellow shirt and a knitted tie of an ambiguous brownish colour.

‘Walter,' I said. Somehow I felt I was beginning to know him a little, even though we hadn't seen each other since the cocktail party.

He blinked. ‘Mind if I join you?'

‘Not at all'

He glanced at the remains of my lunch. ‘You know, before I sit down, I think I'll just go and get myself something to eat.'

While he was busy at the self-service counter, I folded up my map and put it away.

Ming returned with a white coffee and a bowl of rice pudding topped with two generous scoops of vanilla ice-cream. He took a seat opposite me, his eyes immediately sliding towards the place where the map had been.

‘So,' he said, ‘did you go?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘How was it?'

I nodded. ‘Like you said. Very interesting.'

He gave me a careful look, then turned his attention to his dessert.

‘I didn't see you there,' I said.

‘No. In the end I couldn't get away.'

I watched as Ming spooned rice pudding and ice-cream into his mouth. He had the unusual habit of biting his food up with his front teeth, which made me think of certain rodents. It pleased me to have noticed this about him. Though I had the feeling he possessed information to which I wasn't privy, I wanted him to realise that he, too, was under observation. It helped to redress the balance.

In less than a minute Ming had finished. He bent over his cup of coffee, took a quick sip and then sat back. ‘Will you go again?' he asked.

‘I'm not sure.'

‘From what I hear,' he said, ‘it can be a bit addictive.' He crushed his napkin into a ball and let it drop into his empty bowl. ‘Well,' and he shifted in his seat, ‘I probably won't be seeing you again.'

‘Oh? Why not?'

‘I've got to get back to work.' He rose to his feet. ‘I had a half-day off, so I thought I'd look in on the conference. Get some ideas, some inspiration.' He smiled in that mirthless way of his, then we shook hands. ‘It's been a pleasure meeting you,' he said. ‘Enjoy the rest of your stay.'

From where I was sitting, I was able to watch him leave the hotel. Something about his manner failed to convince me. He didn't look like a person who was going back to work. Not that he faltered or dawdled. No, he walked at a steady pace, looking neither to the right nor the left. But there was
something…
Then I realised what it was. He looked as if he was walking
away
from an appointment rather than
towards
it. One hand in his jacket pocket, the other lifting casually to smooth his hair, he had the air of someone who had just relaxed. The job had been done, the mission had been accomplished. What job, though? What mission?

I glanced at my watch. If I didn't hurry, I would be late for the afternoon session. Far from making sense of the previous night's events, I had somehow managed to wrap them in extra layers of mystery. I felt like the fly that struggles to free itself from the spider's web only to discover that it is contributing to its own imprisonment. As I rose from the table, there was a moment when the floor appeared to be sloping away from me and it seemed I might be about to faint.

Should I or shouldn't I?

I stood on the front steps, under the awning, and looked out into the dark. It was ten o'clock in the evening, and it had been raining continuously for hours. A light mist curled and drifted on the surface of the canal. I had found a gap in my schedule that afternoon and slept for two hours, and I felt calmer now, more balanced. I put my anxious, befuddled state of earlier in the day down to simple exhaustion. After my nap, I had showered and dressed, then I had eaten a quiet dinner with Patel and Bland. Once the meal was over, I had excused myself; I had an event in the morning, I told them, and I needed to prepare (not entirely true: I had written my paper weeks ago). Now I was lurking outside the entrance to the hotel, trying to decide whether I could risk going to the club a second time.

A water-taxi drew up, and a young couple got out. Their coats held over their heads, they ran through the garden and up the steps, then pushed hard on the revolving doors that spun them, laughing and breathless, into the lobby. As I turned back to
the canal again, still trying to make up my mind, I noticed someone sheltering in the shadows at the far end of the steps. The figure wore a long, pale, shapeless garment, a kind of cloak, and its face was hidden by a hood or cowl of the same colour. I knew instantly that this was one of the White People.

I had seen White People before – once at school, with Bracewell, and once with Victor, while out on a walk – but only from a distance. I remembered how Bracewell had pulled me away from a gang of boys who were taunting one of the poor creatures. He had been disappointed in me, assuming – wrongly, as it turned out – that I'd been actively involved. They were helpless, he said. They deserved better. I could still recall the rhyme the boys had chanted:
You don't belong/ You don't fit/ You're not a he/ You're an it.
Almost a decade later, on seeing a small group of White People on the cliff-tops, I had recited the rhyme for Victor, and he had winced.
Cruel
, he said,
but not wholly inaccurate.
They were society's untouchables, he explained on that occasion. The past had been taken from them, as it had been taken from everyone alive at the time of the Rearrangement, but these were people who had been either unwilling or unable to find a place in the future. They didn't fit into any quarter, he said, or any humour. They had ended up marooned between the old kingdom and the new one. Lost in a pocket of history. Once I joined the Ministry, I began to learn a little more about these strange nonentities. Known formally as achromatics, they were required to wear white because white had no status as a colour. Since they were perceived as having no character, they were deemed incapable of causing psychological damage, and as a result they were allowed to cross borders at will, to wander freely from one country to another. They were commonly believed to be both sterile and psychic – sterile because the idea of non-beings giving birth to non-beings was too bizarre to think about, and psychic because their apparent inability to speak had led to a reliance on other, more obscure forms of communication. Perhaps, after all, they had something to impart, and yet this had never really been acknowledged – except for here in the Blue Quarter, that is, where they were sometimes
viewed as mystical beings or spiritual guides. In the Red Quarter, a far more secular environment, they could rely on charity: among other things, for instance, we had started a foundation that provided them with food and clothing. Throughout the divided kingdom they were, generally speaking, either tolerated or ignored, though in the Yellow Quarter, predictably enough, they were held in such low esteem that they were often treated as scapegoats.

I moved towards the figure slowly, so as not to frighten it.

‘Do you need any help?' I said.

The figure looked round. It was a woman of about my own age. Though she had chapped skin and a runny nose, the expression on her face was remote and strangely benign, as if she had been contemplating an object of great beauty.

‘You're wet through,' I said. ‘Can I offer you some dry clothes?' I pointed to the revolving doors behind me. ‘I have a room here.'

The woman took two or three steps towards me, and then stopped. Her expression hadn't altered, and I felt that I had now been incorporated into whatever she was thinking about.

‘Come up to my room,' I said. ‘I'll find you some –'

Before I could finish my sentence, she launched herself at me, almost knocking me off my feet. Her strength took me completely by surprise. I staggered, but remained upright. She had wrapped her arms around me, trapping my own arms by my sides, then she had pressed her face into my chest. She had gone quite still. It wasn't an assault, I realised, but an embrace, and I was reminded, for one brief, unnerving moment, of Marie.

‘Oh dear.'

Howard had appeared on the steps. He began to try and free me from the woman's grasp, but she must have locked her hands behind my back. She had clamped her teeth together and turned her head to one side, her eyes fixed on some abstract point beyond my shoulder. There was a sense in which I had become incidental. She was clinging not so much to me, I felt, as to the idea of human contact, human warmth.

Howard moved round behind me. When the woman's fingers
were finally prised loose, she let out a bellow of distress and fell back, flushed and panting.

I looked at Howard. ‘Can't we offer her some shelter?'

‘I'm afraid it's against hotel regulations, sir,' he said.

I watched as the woman lumbered down the steps and along the flagstone path that led to the canal. She appeared to dissolve into the rain.

‘Where will she go?' I asked.

‘They have their places.'

I saw that Howard was trembling. ‘Are you all right, Howard?'

‘It upsets me too, sir.' He eyed my raincoat. ‘Can I clean you up at all?'

I told him not to worry.

‘You're sure?'

‘Actually,' I said, ‘there is something you could do for me. You could order me a taxi.'

Howard nodded, then withdrew into the lobby.

Standing on the steps, I could still feel the woman's grip around my ribs. She had left damp marks all down my front. I could even see the place where she had pressed her face against me, a stain with three segments to it – the imprint of her forehead, nose and chin. My raincoat had become a shroud. I stared out into the darkness. The force with which she had attached herself to me had been testament to her loneliness, her desperation. I was reminded once again of what Bracewell had said, that the White People couldn't help themselves, that they deserved better, and I rebuked myself for not having acted with more compassion.