Divided Kingdom (35 page)

When I sat beside her, she turned to me clumsily, almost blindly, and laid her head against my chest, both hands clasped beneath her chin. I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. She murmured, but I didn't think she had spoken; it was the sort of sound people make just before they fall asleep, part pleasure, part relief. And then she did fall asleep, her breathing becoming coarser and more regular, her right arm
reaching across my chest in a gesture that would have seemed too intimate had she still been conscious.

We left the motorway at an exit marked
Cledge East
, the slip-road leading directly to a checkpoint. The Green Quarter guards scarcely even glanced at our papers, their lax, fatalistic approach to security reflecting the fact that they were quite accustomed to the sight of new arrivals. The melancholic humour was associated with old age, so there was something logical, if not inevitable, about being transferred here. It was like a kind of natural progression.

Shortly after crossing the border, the woman woke up and lifted her face to mine, her eyes wide open but entirely blank. ‘I don't know who you are,' she said.

‘You're safe,' I said quietly. ‘Go back to sleep.'

She muttered something I didn't understand, then her head dropped back against my shoulder, and her breathing deepened once again.

We meandered through the outskirts of Cledge – shops boarded up, street lights out of order – and before too long the city was behind us. On we went, past little restless towns. It was late now, almost one in the morning, but lamps still burned in many of the windows. This was a land much troubled by insomnia.

And then the spaces between towns began to widen. The road sliced unsentimentally through flat fields. There was nothing there, nothing to see, only the night rushing towards the coach's windscreen, and the shrinking tail-lights of overtaking cars. My right arm was trapped behind the sleeping woman's back, and I had to keep adjusting its position so as to keep it from going numb.

The brakes hissed. Our driver stood up and stretched, then he switched all the lights on and took down a clipboard from the rack above his head. Groans came from passengers who had just been woken up. We had stopped outside a semi-detached house, its front door open wide. The spill of light from the hall revealed a couple of brick steps, a concrete path and part of a rockery. In
the foreground, by the gate, stood a large woman in a quilted housecoat and a pair of fluffy slippers.

The following people were to leave the bus at this point, the driver told us. He read out three names, one of which was mine. Everybody else should stay in their seats, he said. He read the names again, then lifted his eyes and looked down the aisle.

I tried gently to disentangle myself from the woman, but she sat up quickly, blinking. ‘Sorry to wake you,' I said. ‘I have to go now.'

‘Oh. Yes. Of course.' Her hand skimmed lightly over her hair, touching it in several places. She seemed brisker, more businesslike. Even more of a stranger.

‘Will you be all right?' I said.

She nodded. ‘I'll be fine. And thank you for –' She broke off, not knowing how to complete the sentence. As I rose to my feet and reached up for my bag, she caught hold of my wrist. ‘I'm Iris,' she said. ‘Iris Gilmour.'

I told her my name, then wished her luck.

‘And you, Thomas,' she said. ‘Good luck to you too.'

Stepping out of the bus, I felt a chill in the air and saw how the breath of the other two men ballooned in front of their faces. The sky had the hard, cold lustre of enamel. I knew then that we had come a long way north.

I turned towards the house. On one of the gateposts was an oval of wood, its varnished surface ringed with bark.
The Cliff
, it said. I smiled grimly. You'd think they would have banned names like that, along with all the bridges and high buildings. I waited for the other men to introduce themselves to the woman in the housecoat – the taller of the two was called Friedriksson, the other one was Bill something – then I walked over and held out my hand.

No sooner had I told the woman who I was than she began to shake her head. ‘No, no,' she said. ‘There must be some mistake.' She turned her back on me and walked a few paces up the street.

I asked the coach driver what was wrong. Her husband had been called Thomas, he told me. He'd been run over a few years ago, and Clarise had never really recovered. We stood about on
the pavement, the four of us, uncertain what to do. At the end of the street, beyond a row of black railings, I could see a park. Birds were beginning to fidget in the trees. Dawn could not be far away.

Clapping his hands and then rubbing them together, the driver said he should be going. He was behind schedule, he said. He wasn't addressing anyone in particular, and nobody responded. I watched the door slot hydraulically back into position as he settled himself behind the steering-wheel. The coach reversed into a nearby side-street and then pulled away, Iris Gilmour's face floating in the dark window like a moon trapped in a jar. When she gave me her name, there had been such intensity in her, such earnestness, as though she feared that I might be the last person ever to hear of her, and that if I didn't remember her no one would. The coach reached the corner, tail-lights blushing briefly, then it was gone.

‘Not right,' I heard the woman murmur.

I glanced at Friedriksson, but he just shrugged and looked off towards the park, as if he was expecting someone to come for him. The other man had his back to me. He must have been feeling the cold because he was hugging himself. I could see the tips of his fingers on either side of his rib-cage.

In the distance a cock crowed, raucous and yet forlorn.

At last the woman blew her nose, then she looked at us over her shoulder, her face puffy and tragic. We followed her indoors. I waited in the hallway while she took the others down to the basement. The house smelled like a cheap hotel. Armpits, cigarettes and gravy. The stair-carpet had turned pale down the middle, its pile almost worn away, and the paint had chipped off the banisters, revealing the wood beneath. When the woman returned, she locked the front door, then led me up the stairs, letting out a faint but urgent grunt with every step.

Once she had showed me to my room, which was on the first floor at the side of the house, she went downstairs again, muttering something about the television. I said goodnight and closed my door. The room was small and square, almost exactly the same dimensions, curiously, as my room in the
house on Hope Street. A single bed had been pushed up against the left-hand wall, and an armchair was wedged into the gap behind the door. A chest of drawers doubled as a bedside table. On the wall above the bed was a painting of a clown with a fistful of wilting marigolds. Putting my bag down, I went to the window and looked out. A yard, a wooden fence. A mangle. The sky was a grey lid on the new drab world to which I had been delivered. Once, as I stood there, a light came on in the bathroom of the house next door, a burst of yellow behind a pane of blurry scalloped glass, and then, perhaps a minute later, it went out again, and everything was the same as before. Lowering myself on to the edge of the bed, a great burden of familiarity settled over me, as though I had already spent long years in the room. I seemed to be looking back on something that hadn't happened yet – my own existence, endless and unvarying. Was the Cliff, with its ominously precipitous name, the place where it would all, finally, come to an end?

Five men were already installed in the house when I arrived. The room below mine was occupied by a man with an unlined, almost childish face whom everyone referred to, mysteriously, as Marge. A sour-looking ex-town-planner called Martin Horowicz lived across the landing from me. His room looked out over the street. He appeared to have a fixation on Clarise Tucker, the landlady, but she was at least twice his size and had no trouble fending him off. She kept two rooms at the back of the house, both of which were painted pastel colours and filled with soft toys. Sandwiched between my room and that of the town-planner was a young man by the name of Aaron Moghadassi. I rarely heard him speak. Every now and then, while sitting at the kitchen table or in the lounge, he would bring his right hand slowly up out of his lap. He would examine the palm, then the back of the hand, then the palm again, and he would frown, seemingly baffled by the fact that they looked different. An old pot-smoking carpenter by the name of Urban Smith had made his home in the attic. The fifth man, Jack Starling, had moved into the converted outhouse. With the three
new arrivals – myself, Lars Friedriksson and Bill Snape – the house was full.

To begin with, I kept to myself, never leaving my room except at mealtimes, or when there were chores to be done, but gradually I ventured out into the common parts of the house. I encountered despondency and gloom, which was only to be expected, but I also encountered merriment, and some, like Clarise, veered wildly between the two. I had thought, on first meeting her, that she was large, but she was actually a woman of such vast proportions that she was as wide when viewed sideways-on as she was from the front or back. She tended to raise the subject herself, and usually with hilarious results. ‘Why, I'm practically
square!'
she shrieked on one of the first evenings I spent downstairs. ‘Yes, you
are
square,' Jack Starling agreed. ‘Like a plinth.' He grasped his chin between finger and thumb in a parody of thoughtfulness, and then added, with a sly glance in Horowicz's direction, ‘Now what are we going to put on top of you?' They had all howled with laughter, Clarise included.

Most nights, after supper, she would switch on the imitation coal fire in the front room, draw the brown velour curtains and gather us around her – ‘my boys', as she called us. We would fog the air with cigarette smoke and down Jack Starling's lethal home-made beer, and Urban Smith, who had a fine baritone voice, would entertain us with his extensive repertoire of morbid songs, or Lars Friedriksson would read excerpts from the autobiography he was writing, a work that wasn't remotely amusing in itself but was rendered so by his unbelievably earnest and lugubrious delivery. Later, one of the men would start complaining with great relish about something or other – we all enjoyed a good moan – or else somebody would embark on an anecdote, and what anecdotes they were, riddled with mythomania and self-delusion. Since we were living in the Green Quarter now, these stories often hinged on some misfortune or disaster, and long before she retired to bed, Clarise would have tears in her eyes. She would not be the only one. The combination of her infectious sentimentality and the potent
home brew was enough to bring anyone's emotions to the surface. I didn't take up smoking, but I drank and wept with the rest of them, and I laughed the peculiar, giddy, almost hysterical laughter of the melancholic.

Of all the tales that were told, none was stranger than Marge's, and I heard it not in the front room but privately, during a walk through the neighbourhood. One afternoon in the middle of December I was returning from the town centre, where I had just collected my weekly allowance, when I spotted him on the road ahead of me. Drawing closer, I saw that he was clutching at a tree-trunk with both hands and squinting upwards through the branches. He seemed apprehensive, if not actually frightened. I stopped a few feet away and asked if I could help.

‘Help?' he said. ‘I don't know. I'm not sure.' His eyes wobbled a little as he brought them down from the sky. ‘What's that sun feel like?'

‘It feels good.'

‘Is it warm?'

‘No, not very.'

‘Oh.' If his face looked unnaturally youthful, his voice sounded like that of a much older man, the tone uncertain, tremulous.

I asked him whether he was going back to the house.

‘I'd like to, yes,' he answered mysteriously. As he spoke, the sun slipped behind a cloud. The day darkened. ‘Quick,' he said. ‘No time to lose.' He started up the road, bending forwards from the waist, his badly darned elbows jabbing at the air.

I watched for a second or two, then followed.

‘You're Marge, aren't you,' I said when I had caught up with him.

He gave me a doleful glance. ‘It's supposed to be a joke.'

‘I don't get it.'

‘They haven't told you?'

‘No.'

He shook his head. ‘That Horowicz. He thinks he's so clever.'

As we hurried back towards the Cliff, Marge told me something of his life, often stopping in mid-sentence to scrutinise the
sky. Once, when the sun broke through unexpectedly, he looked wildly about and then flung himself beneath the bench in a bus shelter, where he lay quite motionless, eyes staring.

His real name was Brendan Burroughs, he said, and for as long as he could remember he had believed that he was made of butter. I thought I had misheard him, but I chose not to interrupt. Instead, I just watched him carefully, as before. That was why people called him Marge, he was saying. They thought it was funny. He had always known he was different, though, right from when he was a small boy, but he'd never found a way of telling anyone back then, not even his parents.
Especially
not his parents. If they had learned the truth about him, how could they have looked their neighbours in the eye? They would have been so embarrassed. He had been forced to live in a kind of solitary confinement, with no one to turn to for comfort or advice. He'd had to take great care at all times. In the summer, for instance. He shuddered. How he used to dread the summer! When it got hot, he would seek out the coolest places – the garden shed, the cupboard under the stairs, the cellar. Sometimes, when his parents were out, he would empty the fridge and climb inside. The presence of other butter on the shelves reassured him. His mother opened the door once when he was curled up in there. She screamed and dropped the bowl of trifle she was holding. He could still remember the look of all that sponge and jelly on the floor. As if something had been slaughtered. She asked him what he was doing.
I don't want to go bad
, he said. It was as close as he ever came to revealing his secret.