Divided Kingdom (24 page)

April leaned forwards and spoke to him. ‘You drunk?'

‘No drunker than usual,' he said.

I held my bag on my lap, aware of the men's shoulders on either side of me. It was cold in the truck, and the cramped interior smelled of oil and cigarettes. I watched as the headlights picked out one bend after another.

I turned to Leon. ‘How far did you say it was?'

‘Where to?' he said.

‘Ustion.'

‘I don't know. It's a way.'

He seemed to consider the question irrelevant, beside the point. My stomach tightened. I stole a glance at his profile,
hoping for some reassurance, but all I saw was a low, brooding brow, and teeth that slanted back into his mouth like a shark's – features I had failed to notice while we were talking in the bar.

After driving for five or ten minutes, Leon took a sharp right-hand turn on to a much narrower road. Mike and I were thrown to the left, and April cried out, then swore, as she was crushed against the door. Leon just laughed. The truck lurched and bounced over potholes, unseen branches scraping at the windows and the roof. As I peered through the windscreen, trying to determine where we were going, the road opened out into a wide apron of gravel and weeds. Our headlights swept over part of a building, and I caught glimpses of a turret and an ivy-covered wall.

‘Where's this?' I asked.

Nobody answered.

Leon switched the lights and engine off, then opened his door and stepped out. April and Mike climbed out the other side. I hesitated, then I followed. We had parked next to a circular pond with a raised edge, the water hidden beneath a quilt of lily pads. I lifted my eyes to the building that lay beyond. The wings that extended sideways from the gate-house were topped by battlements, and the windows resembled those in medieval castles. I turned back to Leon, who seemed to have fallen into a kind of trance. His friends were standing near by, but facing in different directions, as though keeping watch. I wasn't sure why they had brought me to this place. I suspected I was becoming embroiled in some reckless agenda of theirs, as a result of which I might lose sight of my own.

‘It used to be an asylum,' Leon said, ‘but it was shut down years ago.'

The night was quiet and still. Moonlight coated everything.

I walked over to Leon. ‘I need to get moving,' I said. ‘Maybe you could tell me which way to go.'

He didn't take his eyes off the building. ‘First you have to give us something. For our trouble.'

I stared at him blankly. ‘Give you something?'

‘Some kind of payment.'

Mike seized me from behind, pinning my arms, then Leon reached into my pockets and felt around.

‘If it's money you want,' I said, ‘it's in my wallet.'

Leon stood back. Behind him, April cut my bag open with a knife and started tossing pieces of my clothing on to the ground.

‘There's nothing valuable in there,' I said.

Leon leaned in towards me again, blocking my view of the girl. ‘You know it all, don't you?' A grey gleam on his sloping teeth. ‘Actually, no, that can't be true,' he said. ‘Because if you knew it all you wouldn't have got yourself into this situation in the first place.' I watched as he opened my wallet and went through the contents. He shone a torch on my visa, then on my identity papers, and let out a low whistle.

Still stooping over my bag, April looked round. ‘What?'

‘I heard he was from somewhere else,' Leon said. ‘I just didn't know where.'

‘Where's he from?' April asked.

Leon told her.

‘What do you think he's doing here?' she said.

Still examining my papers, Leon didn't say anything.

April walked towards me. ‘He could be a spy.'

I had applied the same word to myself only the night before, but in a purely romantic sense. Now, though, it was being used seriously, as an accusation.

‘That's ridiculous,' I said.

Almost instantly there was an explosion in my head, and I dropped to the gravel, lights hanging in the left side of my field of vision like a curtain of garish elongated beads. Mike must have hit me.

As I lay there, April reached down and pulled off my coat. I made no attempt to resist. She put the coat on over her denim jacket, then paraded up and down in front of the pond as if she were on a catwalk. She was much shorter than me, and the coat's hem trailed along the ground behind her.

‘You're spoiling it,' I murmured.

Mike's boot caught me just below the ribs. ‘It's hers now,' he said. ‘She can do what she likes with it.'

Lying on my side, doubled up, I felt the bile rush into my mouth. At the same time, I had the feeling that the episode was already over and that it could have been much worse. They had what they wanted – my money, my documents, my coat. Clearly, though, there was a kind of protocol involved. They couldn't leave until their superiority had been properly established. It was important therefore that I didn't draw any more attention to myself. Better to grovel, play dead.

It appeared to work. The next time I looked, they had their backs turned.

‘I almost forgot,' Leon said over his shoulder. ‘You go that way.' He pointed off into the trees.

April made a remark I didn't catch. The two men laughed.

Doors slammed. My head still resting on the ground, I felt the surge of the engine in my teeth, a vibration conducted by the earth, a kind of bass note. The pickup truck turned in a slow, tight half-circle and I was blinded for a second as its bank of lights swept over me. I saw myself as they must have seen me, a crumpled man, eyes shut to slits. The roar faded. For some time afterwards I thought I could detect the reverberation, but then I decided it was just one of the many layers that made up the silence – or even, perhaps, some residue from the bomb that had gone off, a memory that was physical, a tremor stored below the surface of my skin.

I lay there in the dirt like someone paralysed. There was even a part of me that wanted to go to sleep. They had taken everything – and yet, no, that wasn't quite true. At least I had those banknotes hidden in my collar. I would need them now. So why this sense of abandonment, this loss of all initiative? I could only think it was because I'd been attacked. Where I came from, things like that didn't happen.

The brandy was beginning to wear off, and my mouth tasted of cinders. I forced myself to sit up. The bead curtain still hung in my head, undulating slightly, as if somebody had just passed through it, and each time I took a breath a sharp blade seemed to pierce the left side of my chest. I had been hoping to continue on
foot, but it was after midnight and I didn't know the exact nature of my injuries. It would make more sense to shelter in the asylum. Then, when morning came, I would reassess the situation.

I climbed to my feet and walked over to my bag. The sides had been slashed open, and my clothes lay scattered all around. I would only take what I could carry in my pockets – socks, a toothbrush, underwear. A sweater would be useful too, I thought. I removed my jacket, then pulled on the only sweater I had brought along, wincing as I lifted my arms above my head. I left everything else where it was. From a distance my bag looked cryptic, even faintly chilling, the sort of thing that leads people to believe in alien abduction.

Some gut feeling prevented me from trying the main entrance. Instead, I circled one of the towers and started down the left side of the building. There had been a path here once, but thistles and brambles had sprung up, and I had to inch forwards with my arms at shoulder-level and my elbows pointing outwards, like someone wading into cold water for a swim. The moonlight made space and distance hard to judge. A low branch almost took my eye out, and the backs of my fingers stung where they had brushed against blue-grey beds of nettles.

At last, towards the rear of the building, the undergrowth cleared, and I was able to approach a window. I began to hunt for a stone, kneeling down and running my hands over the ground, but I couldn't find anything, so I unlaced one of my shoes and, gripping it by the toe, swung the heel sharply against the glass. The splintering noise was so loud that I was sure a caretaker or night-watchman would appear. I held still and listened. Nothing except an owl deep in the woods behind me. Knocking the rest of the window into the room, I put my shoe back on and clambered through.

There was a smell of yeast. Methylated spirits too. I moved towards a doorway, glass snapping underfoot. Then on into a corridor. Much darker here. Gloss paint on the walls, the dim outline of a stainless-steel trolley. When I came to a staircase, I began to climb. Again, I didn't attempt to rationalise my
decision. I simply assumed it was instinct, something primitive or vestigial kicking in.

In a small room on the third floor I found a bed, just a bare mattress resting on coiled metal springs, but a bed nonetheless, and for all my injuries, for all the exhausting twists and turns of the past day or two, I heard myself laugh out loud. The sound didn't last. The huge empty building dispensed with it, as though it were unsuitable, improper, a habit that had been discredited or lost.

On the far side of the bed was a wooden chair. Beyond that, the room's only window. The moon had lodged itself in the top right-hand pane, its bright face half-hidden by a strip of cloud. Lowering myself on to the bed, I reached out and touched the headboard. There were dark patches where the paint had been chipped away by inmates or intruders, the letters carved so crudely that they often overshot each other. I thought I detected a ‘J', though, and I wondered whether it was to a place like this that Jones had been sent, and whether he had ever curled up on a mattress and tried to scratch his initials into part of a bed, or into a wall, and once again, despite all the time that had gone by, I felt for him. Then I remembered my first night at the club – Jones walking towards me, Jones unharmed. It was always possible that he'd survived, and even, maybe, prospered. And what of me? Would I prosper? Would I survive? I saw my bedroom, high up in the house, the copper beech outside, the road beyond. I'd had such a vivid sense of myself – just then, for those few moments. I had felt so present, so
alive.
And if I was here now, risking everything, it was because I was determined not to let that feeling go. I lay down on my side and, as I pulled my jacket over me and drew my knees in towards my chest, I found I had left the asylum, the Yellow Quarter too, and I was moving across the lobby of the club, one hand lifting to part the velvet curtain …

I woke several times that night. Once, the moon still hung in the window, though it had sunk into one of the lower panes. When I opened my eyes again, only seconds later seemingly, the moon had gone.

In all my dreams I was cold.

Towards dawn I heard a ticking somewhere outside. I rose to my feet and crept across the room. The door creaked as I turned the handle. All I could see when I peered to the left was a long corridor, like a tunnel, filled with milky light. I turned to the right. A dog stood twenty feet away, looking at me over its shoulder. It had small eyes and a blunt boot of a head. Some kind of bull terrier, I supposed. So pale, though. Unnaturally pale. I shut the door and leaned against it, my heart beating high up in my throat. I waited a few minutes, then I fetched the chair and wedged it beneath the door-handle. For the rest of the night I slept in snatches.

I woke and lay quite motionless, my breath showing against the wall like smoke. I pulled myself upright. My ribs had stiffened, but I didn't think anything was broken. On my temple a lump had formed, the same shape as the back of a teaspoon, and my left eyebrow had split open. The crusting of blood crumbled like earth beneath my fingers. I slipped my jacket on over my sweater, then let my eyes travel slowly round the room. Pale-green walls, floorboards painted grey. A window showing treetops and a cloudy sky. A cupboard. Bookshelves, but no books. Then I saw the chair tilted at an angle against the door. There had been a dog, I remembered. It had stared at me over its shoulder, its jaws set in a mirthless grin.

I began to look for something that might double as a weapon. In the cupboard I found some medical magazines, a plastic measuring jug and an empty pot of white emulsion. On the shelves, only a jam-jar filled with brownish liquid. There was nothing under the bed. In the end, I snapped one of the legs off the chair. It would serve as a cudgel. If I used the paint pot as a kind of gauntlet, I would be able to fend the dog off with one hand while I attacked it with the other. The whole thing seemed laughable – a charade, really – but how else was I going to protect myself?

I put an ear to the door. Silence. Hardly daring to breathe, I eased the chair out from beneath the handle and stood it behind
me, then I opened the door. A lino floor stretching away. A scattering of leaves, fragile and ginger. Staying close to the wall, I set off along the corridor, the leaves exploding beneath my shoes. I hadn't noticed them the night before, but then I hadn't realised that if I made a noise I might put myself in danger. I reached the stairwell. Cool air slid up from below.

On the first floor I stopped again, imagining I'd heard a bark, though it was hard to tell above the fierce hiss of blood inside my head. I wondered how many dogs there were. It seemed unlikely there would be just one.

I didn't try and make it back to the broken window. Instead, I moved through the kitchens and on into the laundry. At last I found a door I could unbolt. Ducking under tangled washing-lines, I mounted a flight of steps and came out on to a terrace that ran the entire length of the back of the building. Fragments of shattered roof-tile lay about, and dandelions had sprung up in the cracks between the wide uneven flags. From the balustrade I could survey the grounds. A lawn and then a hedge, both overgrown. In the distance, a jagged, tree-lined horizon. The sky was still and grey, and pressed down like the soft pedal on a piano, deadening all sound.