Divided Kingdom (37 page)

One January night, standing in the middle of the bridge and looking down into the churchyard, I saw three scraps of white in the darkness. At first I couldn't decide what they were, then one of the scraps shifted, developing a head and arms, and in that same moment I remembered someone telling me that White People were often to be found in cemeteries. Various theories had been put forward, the most obvious being that they instinctively identified with dead people. After all, one could argue that White People were dead too. Dead in the eyes of the authorities, at least. Bureaucratically dead. As I watched, the three figures moved behind a row of yew trees, then they appeared again, their white cloaks showing in stark relief against one of the grander tombs. Thinking it might be interesting to observe them at close range, I crossed the bridge, swung a leg over the churchyard wall – the gate would have made too much noise – and stepped down into coarse grass. I wasn't sure why I was so curious, or what it was I hoped to learn. I felt compelled, though – guided even. It was as if my body comprehended something that my mind did not.

I crept slowly forwards, crouching among the gravestones. I imagined this would be, among other things, a test of their psychic powers. Would they detect my presence? And if they did, what then? My heart beat harder, as though there was the possibility of danger. As I reached the yew trees, the moon rolled out into a patch of clear sky, and I saw them ahead of me, passing through a gap in the fence at the back of the cemetery. Now, perhaps, I could close the distance between us. I ran to the fence, then knelt in the shadow of an overgrown holly bush to catch my breath. I could hear them on the other side. There weren't any words, just odd little grunts and snuffles. No wonder some people thought of them as animals.

I stole a look over the fence. Clouds hung before me, rimmed in silver. To my right was the bridge, the black river flowing underneath. I lifted my head a fraction higher. There they were, below me. They had removed all their clothes, and they were standing in the shallows, two men and a woman. Pale as stone or marble, they looked like damaged statues, half
their legs gone, the tips of their fingers too. They began to wash themselves. They didn't hurry, despite the fact that it was winter, and I wondered whether they had lost the ability to feel the cold, along with everything else. The river swirled around their knees with the dark glint of crude oil. I was struck by how methodical and self-contained they were. Their nakedness had no sexual overtone. In fact, they behaved as unselfconsciously as children. There was also an understated dignity about the scene which I found strangely poignant, and which gave me the feeling, just for a moment, that I was looking at a painting. These people had nothing – nothing, that is, except their freedom, the license to go wherever they pleased … As I watched them, an idea occurred to me. I wouldn't do anything just yet, though. No, I would wait. I needed to think things through. Prepare myself.

I had been standing by the fence for about five minutes when the woman's body stiffened. She had been bent over, scooping water on to her back, first over one shoulder, then the other, but now, suddenly, she had frozen, one hand braced on her thigh, the other still dangling in the river. Her head turned towards me. My chest locked, all the breath held deep inside. I didn't think she'd seen me. She acted more as if she'd picked up the scent of something foreign, something that didn't belong. Her eyes still angled in my direction, she slowly straightened up and, tilting her head sideways, wrung out the thick cable of her hair. Black water spilled from between her hands. Without even exchanging a glance, the two men stopped washing and began to wade towards the bank.

I ducked down, then hurried off through the churchyard. I wasn't embarrassed, or even afraid exactly – Victor had always maintained that White People were peaceful and harmless, and that people only feared them out of ignorance – but at the same time I didn't want to risk a confrontation. Vaulting over the wall, I kept low until I reached the far end of the bridge. There was nobody in the river now, and the cemetery lay quiet and dark and still. They must have fled along the bank. I glanced at the watch Clarise had given me for Christmas. Twenty-five to
twelve. It had been time for me to leave in any case, or she'd start worrying. She could never rest easy in her bed until she was sure that all her boys were home.

On arriving back, I saw that the downstairs lights had been switched off. I unlocked the front door, locked it again behind me and was just making for the stairs when a figure stepped away from the banisters.

‘You're up to something, aren't you?' Horowicz's face rose out of the grey gloom of the hall.

‘I've been out for a walk,' I said, ‘as usual.'

He gave me a knowing look, then laughed softly, cynically, and shook his head. ‘You can't fool me, Wig. I've been watching you.'

After a brief silence, I moved past him and started to climb the stairs. When I reached the landing, he was still standing in the hall, looking up at me, his eyes glinting in the half-light like a drawer full of knives.

In recent years, Iron Vale had become home to the Museum of Tears, and it was the inalienable right of every melancholic, no matter where they might live, to have a sample of their tears stored within the museum walls. All you had to do was write to the curators, enclosing proof of identity. They would send you an air-tight glass vial, no bigger than a lipstick. The next time you cried, you collected your tears and transferred them to the vial. Some people waited for an important event – the death of a loved one being the most obvious, perhaps – but it was up to you to choose which aspect of your melancholy nature you wanted to preserve. When it was done, you sealed the vial and returned it to the museum, where it would be catalogued and then put on display, along with millions of others.

One evening towards the end of January, we were sitting in the front room, all nine of us, when Horowicz launched a vitriolic attack on the museum. He thought it self-indulgent, overblown – a total waste of tax-payers' money. What was there to look at? Row after row of tiny bottles, each containing more or less the same amount of more or less the same transparent fluid.
You could hardly call it an
attraction
, he said. If anything, there was something repellent about the whole idea.

Clarise let him finish, then slowly shook her head. ‘You don't understand,' she said.

Horowicz's eyebrows lifted. When someone started complaining, people generally joined in, and the level of complaint would escalate. The sessions would go on for hours, becoming ever more self-righteous and extreme. But not tonight.

‘Think about happiness for a moment, Martin,' Clarise said. ‘Can you remember being happy?'

Horowicz let out a snort, as though he found the question absurd.

There was a fundamental problem with happiness, Clarise went on, quite unperturbed. Happiness had a slippery, almost diaphanous quality. It gave nothing off, left nothing behind. Grief was different, though. Grief could be collected, exhibited. Grief could be
remembered.
And if we had proof that we'd been sad, she argued, then we also had proof that we'd been happy, since the one, more often than not, presupposed the other. In preserving grief, therefore, we were preserving happiness. The Museum of Tears stood for much more than its name might initially suggest. It wasn't just to do with rows of identical glass bottles – though that, in itself, said a lot about equality, if you thought about it. It was to do with people trying to hold on to such happiness as they had known.

Her eyes returned to Horowicz, who was staring at the carpet. ‘But maybe you don't know what that feels like,' she said. ‘Maybe you've never lost someone. In which case, though it sounds odd to say it, I'm sorry for you, I really am.'

‘I know what it feels like,' he muttered.

Later, Clarise expanded on her thesis. She believed the museum was both a testament to individuality and a collective ode to the country in which we lived. We were all unique, she said, and yet we shared a common humanity, a common humour. I had never heard her so impassioned, so articulate.

‘And there's also the little matter of immortality,' she went on. ‘It's hard to resist, the offer of immortality.' She sent a sideways
look at Horowicz, who reached for his beer and drank quickly. ‘I wouldn't be surprised, Martin, if you didn't end up in there yourself one day.'

He shook his head savagely but unconvincingly.

‘I'm in there,' Jack Starling said.

I watched Horowicz's top lip curl. He would view Starling's announcement as tantamount to a betrayal.

‘The night my still exploded,' and Starling turned to Clarise, ‘remember? Half the outhouse went up with it. I shed a few tears over that, I can tell you.'

‘What, and you kept them?' Horowicz's voice was acidic with disbelief.

‘You know, you're right,' Starling said, still speaking to Clarise. ‘I can walk into that museum and look at my tears and it all comes back to me, that first batch of sloe gin I made, and the nights we had on it, those brilliant nights, and you know the really strange thing?' He put down his glass so as to make the point more emphatically. ‘That little vial, it's like a miniature. The vial's the gin bottle, and my tears, they're the gin. It's like the whole thing's there, the whole memory, only tiny.'

Smiling broadly, Clarise told him he had just summed it all up, everything she'd been talking about, then she turned to me and asked if I'd been to the museum yet. I shook my head.

‘You should go,' she said.

A few days later I walked down into the town. The museum stood on a narrow street, directly opposite the public library. Looking at the staid red-brick façade and the antiquated ventilation units, I guessed that the building had once housed municipal offices – the council, maybe, or the gas board. A modest brass plaque had been bolted to the wall, just to the left of the double-doors:
The Museum of Tears – Please ring for entry.

Although I had gone along with what Clarise had been saying that night, I hadn't known what to expect from the museum, or even why I was there, really, but I found a stillness settling over me as I ventured into the first of the rooms. All these people reduced to a few ccs of salty water, as if a kind of essence had been wrung from each of them. Was Marco Rinaldi here? What
about Boorman? I wandered dreamily from floor to floor. Apart from the museum guards, I had the vast place to myself.

The glass vials were arranged in three parallel rows at shoulder-height, and underneath each of them was a rectangle of white card indicating the donor's name and date of birth (and, if necessary, death). In themselves, the vials had a somewhat medical aura. They reminded me of test-tubes and, by association, of hospitals and laboratories. In the manner of their presentation, though – the careful labelling, the fashionable austerity – I detected more than a hint of the art gallery. And yet the interior itself, its ambience, had something in common with a school – the grey-blue walls in need of redecoration, the dark, slightly greasy parquet floors. Research, creativity, nostalgia … In the end, the museum displayed characteristics of so many different kinds of institutions that I was no longer sure how to behave or what to think. There was something inherently awkward, or inchoate, perhaps, about the whole experience.

After half an hour I felt I had seen enough, and I walked back towards the stairs that led to the exit. I was passing through a perfectly innocuous room on the second floor when my eye happened to fall on a name I recognised.
Micklewright.
The air around me appeared to sag and then fold in on itself. I looked away from the wall and blinked two or three times, then I looked back again. The name was still there. In fact, the name was there twice:
Micklewright, Sally
, and then, right next to it,
Micklewright, Philip.

My mother and father.

A trap-door opened in me somewhere and my heart dropped through it. My hand over my mouth, I sank on to the ottoman in the middle of the room.

My mother and father. My parents.

I had thought of them so seldom during the last twenty-seven years. Partly this had to do with survival. If I'd thought of them, I wouldn't have been able to go on. I'd had no choice but to put them behind me, out of sight. Partly, also, it came down to the image I carried in my head of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night. Her bare feet, his sleepy face – rain
slanting down … It was so timeless, so static. So complete. As the years went by, it had taken on an eternal unyielding quality, like a cenotaph, and it had been impossible for me to think around it, impossible for me to remember, or even imagine, anything that had happened before that moment. Then came my visit to the club, exposing the need in me, the ache – the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. When I stepped through that pale-gold door, something had given in me. Fragments of another life had been released. There had not been much, and it had come so late, so very late, but it had altered me for ever. Everything I had built had been revealed for what it was – mere scaffolding. Everything would have to be remade.

I stood up again and went over to the wall. This time I noticed the dates beneath my parents' names. They were both dead. I tilted my head to one side, as if I needed another angle on what I was being told. As if that might help me to comprehend. My father had died first. My mother had survived him by eight years. Neither of them had lived to a great age. My father had been fifty-nine, my mother sixty-three. Had they been melancholic all along, or had they been transferred at some point, as I had? What was their story? I had no way of knowing. Since the vials were exhibited in strict chronological order, the two belonging to my parents must have arrived at the museum simultaneously. It was quite conceivable then that they had been crying at the same time – possibly for the same reason – and that those were the tears they had chosen to collect. I wondered if they had been thinking of the boy they'd lost. I wondered if they'd ever forgiven him for turning away from them. Or perhaps they hadn't even noticed. All they had understood, in their confusion, in their distress, was that their only son was being taken from them. Gazing at their remains, I felt instinctively that they hadn't tried too hard to stay alive, that they had given up, in other words, and I couldn't really say I blamed them.