Divided Kingdom (39 page)

At last he arrived at the water's edge, a ghostly shape against the river's glinting blackness. He started to undo the buttons on his cloak. This was better than I could have hoped for. I kept my eyes on him, watching his every movement. The wind slackened again. I realised that I was breathing through my mouth. Under his cloak he was wearing a collarless shirt, split open down the front, and a pair of long johns. He stooped to untie his laces. There was something infinitely touching about the way he conscientiously pushed each of his socks into the appropriate boot, as if somebody had taught him how to get undressed, as if, once upon a time, somebody had cared for him. You rarely thought of childhood or upbringing when confronted with the White People; they appeared to have emerged, fully fledged and yet unformed, into the world. Removing his undershirt and then a vest, he placed them on top of the cloak. Finally he peeled off the long johns. He stood on the mud in his underpants, his body wide and solid, hands dangling on a level with his thighs, and once again he seemed to be debating something inside himself, then he began to wade into the water. In that moment he became the same as anybody else, waving both arms in the air as he struggled to stay upright. When the blackness reached his knees, he crouched quickly and slid forwards, chin raised, moonlight silvering the flat plane of his forehead.

Leaving the cover of the trees, I crept out along the embankment and then climbed down to the river bed. At the pressure of my foot the mud belched softly, and a smell lifted past my face, a cloud of something rank, primeval. I started to move gingerly towards the place where the man had left his clothing. Once, I stopped, looked up. The river ran from right to left, all kinds of notches cut into its shiny surface, and the man's head bobbed there, among the reflections, a small pale globe with careless dabs of black for hair and mouth and eyes. Then he began to swim in my direction. He must have noticed me at last. His arms beat
fiercely at the water, white splashes showing in the darkness like matches being struck repeatedly against the side of a matchbox but never bursting into flame. I undid my jacket, took it off.

The man hauled himself to his feet, then staggered out of the water. His chest heaved with the exertion of his dash to the shore, and his underpants had slipped low on his left hip, revealing a smudge of pubic hair. By the time he reached me, I too had stripped down to my underwear. My shoes stood on a rock, the contents of my pockets placed near by. The man had come to a halt in front of me, no more than a few feet away, his chest still rising and falling.

‘I want you to take my clothes,' I said.

The man tipped his head to one side, as if intrigued, or charmed.

I offered him the clothes I was holding. He stepped back. One of his feet sank deep into the mud, and he almost lost his balance. When I took his arm so as to steady him, his features seemed to scatter on his face. Air whistled past his teeth. His arm was cold and heavy.

‘I don't mean you any harm,' I told him.

Looking down, he lifted his foot out of the mud. An extravagant sucking sound accompanied the movement, and he grinned at me, a wide gap showing between his two front teeth. The strangest smell came off him. Bitter, like the milky sap in the stalks of bluebells.

‘There,' I said.

I looked over my shoulder, scanning the embankment for signs of life. I saw nothing, no one. All the same, I couldn't afford to waste any time, not if my plan was going to succeed.

I pushed my clothes against his chest. ‘Take them. Your life will be much easier.' Bending swiftly, I picked up his vest and put it on.

The man was clutching my clothes now, but he hadn't looked at them at all. He was still staring at me, transfixed. His mouth had fallen open, and his eyes had the dull flat shine of porcelain. A single drop of water hung from the lobe of his left ear like a pearl. Hung and hung. Then fell.

I slipped his undershirt over my head and pulled on the long johns, then I reached for the cloak. Fingers stumbling, I did up the buttons. The cloak weighed more than I had anticipated, and it was damp from lying on the river bed. That odour of bluebell sap again. I dropped my few possessions into the pocket at the front, then slid my feet into the man's boots and tied the laces. I kept thinking that he would intervene, but he seemed paralysed. Then, as I turned away, a hoarse bellow came out of him. He had flung my clothes to the ground. I began to run. The boots were a size too big and the cloak swirled around my ankles. I floundered in the mud, expecting to be brought down from behind at any moment.

At last, and breathing hard, I levered myself up on to the embankment. Only then did I glance round. The man had not moved. My clothes still lay beside him in a small shapeless mound. Once again I heard him bellow, an inhuman noise, like a cow being butchered. I had wanted the exchange to benefit us both, but clearly it would take more than a new set of clothing to improve his lot. I had deceived myself. It occurred to me that I had done a kind of violence to him, and that I might, eventually, have to pay for this. Stealing one last look at the half-naked figure, as though to fix in my mind the debt I owed him, I turned and began to walk back through the trees.

Street lamps hung above the tarmac, buzzing. If I hadn't known better I would have said that they were living things and that the rest of the world was dead. I looked both ways, then stepped out into the road. Halfway across, my boot caught in the hem of the cloak and I went sprawling. My clumsiness was greeted by a blast from the horn of a passing car. The mockery had begun, and it didn't feel unwarranted. I already seemed to have altered in some indefinable way. It wasn't the weight or the smell of the cloak. It wasn't even the sheer unfamiliarity of such a garment. It was more as if I had entered a tradition, and the clothes themselves were imparting something of that responsibility, that lore, as a crown does when it is lowered on to the head of a king. In donning the cloak, I had parted company with the person I used to be without knowing quite who or what I was going to become. When I reached the far side of the road I stood and stared at the cracks between the paving-stones. They looked precise but temporary, as though they had been drawn in pencil. As though they could be rubbed out. There was something frightening about that, but something exhilarating too. Like turning your hand over and seeing that all the lines have gone. The world could disappear. I could disappear. A blank slate everywhere I looked. Staying close to the wall, I moved off down a quiet residential street.

You would think I would have realised sooner, but it was almost midnight before it occurred to me that I had nowhere to go. I had failed to work out any of the practical considerations.
Where would I sleep? What would I eat? I found myself in a cobbled alley by the station, its clock tower lifting high above my left shoulder. There were railway tracks behind me, on the other side of a wooden fence. In front of me stood a terrace of red-brick houses. They faced away from me, their back yards silent, their garages locked up for the night. On top of the walls, glass splinters glittered where they had been embedded upright in cement. Each street light cast its own sullen dark-yellow glow. I was cold now, and tired. Teeth chattering. I could see Clarise Tucker's front room with its tatty velour curtains and its misshapen furniture, coils of smoke unwinding from the ends of cigarettes, the air clouded with the pungent, yeasty fumes of Starling's beer, and then, having climbed the stairs, I saw my single bed, and the reading lamp behind the door, its shade cocked like a bird's head, and my book lying open on the chair, a book I would never finish now. Who would have thought I would miss that tiny, dingy room on the first floor of the Cliff? Who would have thought I would miss any of it? But a loneliness had risen up in me, keen, abrupt, and disproportionate, somehow, and it kept on rising, a sense of the smallness of my life, a rapid ebbing of conviction, and I stood on that bleak lane, beneath piss-yellow lights, and bellowed, and, much to my surprise, I sounded exactly like the man whose clothes I'd taken. A window grated open, and a woman shouted back.
Some people are trying to sleep.
I walked on, teeth clicking in my mouth like dice in a cup, no destination in my head.

All night I kept moving, aimlessly, hopelessly, my feet adrift in a stranger's boots. All night I oscillated between moments of elation and longer stretches of despair. The town offered neither shelter nor guidance, and by half-past three I had come full circle. The station loomed before me once again, with its forbidding brickwork and its draughty doorways. This time I walked in. The concourse was brightly lit and quite deserted. No trains were due for hours. I stood outside a photo booth and, staring into the mirror, practised the faces for which the White People were renowned – the rounded, vacant eyes, the slack, half-open mouth. I made a few attempts at their trademark
grunts and mumbles. The sounds boomed around and above me, the empty concourse acting as an echo chamber.

I was about to move on when a short bald man in a uniform burst out of one of the offices and collided with me. It was entirely his fault, and yet he swore and lashed out at me, the back of his hand catching me above the ear. I stepped backwards, laughing. So this was how it was going to be! My laughter had no effect on him. In fact, I wasn't even sure he noticed it. He had hit me without looking, without so much as checking his stride, and I'd been unable to ward off the blow. My cloak was made out of a heavy, hard-wearing material, some kind of hemp or jute, and the slits for my arms were difficult to find in a hurry. Had this been done deliberately, to keep White People powerless? I also wondered about my overall reaction. If the man had been a little less distracted, would he have thought my behaviour untypical?

I had only been living as one of the White People for a few hours, but I could already see that I was lacking certain vital qualities and skills. In shedding the superfluous, they had reduced themselves – or been reduced – to some sort of residue or essence; their so-called emptiness was actually a distillation, a form of knowledge. I wasn't acquainted with the labyrinth of pathways and alleys through which they moved with such apparent freedom and authority, and if I didn't find out about them soon I would become too visible, I would begin to arouse suspicion. My only option was to attach myself to a group of genuine White People, and quickly; I needed to hide among them, learn from them. If I really wanted to step outside the system, if I wanted to be rid of it entirely, I would have to forget myself – everything I was, or ever had been. I would have to enter the fold in reality that the White People inhabited. Eyes of the dullest porcelain, and a black hole for a mouth. Words all swallowed up. Head like a guest-house for the wind. That sentence of Pat Dunne's had stayed with me, but it had never been more relevant:
You have to act like them, or you don't survive.

I didn't sleep at all, and yet afterwards, when I thought back to that first night, I came across blank patches, like periods of
unconsciousness, where I couldn't recall what I had done. There seemed to be no clear sequence of streets, just this place, and then another place, and then another place again, as if, like a giant, I had moved by leaps and bounds. Sometimes a place occurred twice – the river, the museum – which led me to suspect that I was clinging to small pockets of familiarity. Or else I had found myself in one of the circles of hell, perhaps, condemned to repeat myself…

By first light I was walking in a poor part of town, north-east of the station. A council estate had been built out there, among the weeds and puddles. White gulls whirled, screeching, above mounds of rubbish. I had been thinking it might be wise to hide myself away before too long, but then a small boy emerged from between two walls of pebble-dash and as I watched him turn in my direction I had a flash of inspiration and fell into step with him.

‘Morning,' I said.

The boy stopped and stared. ‘You can talk.'

‘You won't tell anyone, will you?'

He weighed his decision, then shook his head. ‘No.' He squinted up at me. ‘Can you say anything else?'

I noticed an old man cycling along the road towards us. ‘Not now.'

The man pedalled into the estate, leeks and sticks of celery poking out of the wicker basket lashed to his handlebars.

The boy was called Felix – an unusual name for a melancholic, I thought, though I chose not to comment on it – and he was on his way to the market to do some shopping for his mother. I asked if I could tag along. He didn't see why not. He took me to a muddy expanse of wasteground where a number of vans stood about with their doors flung open. Traders in cheap leather jackets bent into the interiors, unloading endless brightly coloured streams of second-hand clothing. We moved on past stalls selling electronic goods, jewellery, shoes, kitchen equipment, old war medals, and even live birds in cages, arriving eventually at an area where one could buy fresh produce. While Felix queued out the front with all the women, I scavenged
round the back. I came upon a box of badly bruised pears, several of which I was able to devour before the stall owner chased me away. A few minutes later I salvaged four tomatoes from a pile that had been dumped on the ground, and then, even better, I discovered a heap of unshelled peanuts and the wrinkled tail-end of a salami. I ate half of what I had found and stored the rest in the pocket of my cloak.

When Felix appeared again, he was loaded down with bags. He wondered if I'd be willing to help him carry them. Fortified by my rudimentary breakfast, I said I would. As we trudged back along the main road, he asked whether I had a name. People called me Wig, I said. I told him how it had come about. He nodded soberly and said he thought it was a good name, under the circumstances.

As we turned into the estate where he lived, I decided it was time to ask the question that had been on my mind for much of the night. Did he have any idea where I could find others like me? His forehead crumpled, and he walked more slowly, staring at his shoes. He was giving the matter serious consideration, as I had suspected he might. Under the flyover, he said at last. The one out by the kennels. He had seen some White People there. Or try the railway line, he said. Going north. At his front door, he asked if I wanted to come in and rest. There was only his mother, he said, and she always got up late.