Divided Kingdom (38 page)

So the museum was a graveyard too.

I stared at the names and dates until they blurred. I hadn't
found my parents – not really. Perhaps they had been present for a few minutes, while I was sitting, head lowered, on the ottoman, but now they had disappeared again. All in all, it hadn't been much of a reunion. I reached up slowly with one hand.

‘No touching, please.'

I looked round to see a museum guard standing in the doorway to the room. My hand dropped to my side. The guard nodded and moved on.

Out on the street again, I felt as though years had gone by. I wouldn't have been surprised if the library had been knocked down and new buildings had been erected in its place.

I walked back to the Cliff, the air glassy, dazzling.

When I opened the door, Clarise was standing at the far end of the hall. She asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. She was just about to put the kettle on, she said. I shook my head, then stepped sideways into the front room. I heard her come after me.

‘What is it, Wig?' she said. ‘What's the matter?'

‘This is a terrible place.'

‘Here?' Clarise's face whirled like a clumsy planet, taking in the mould-green three-piece suite, the velour curtains, the gas fire with its tile surround.

I shook my head again.

A boy could balance on one leg for hours. A man could make a book from his wife's shoes. A couple could stand on a road in the middle of the night and call their son's name, only to have him turn his back on them. Candles burned in windows all year round, memorials to those who had gone but were not dead. There were very few who didn't live in the shadow of some separation or other. The divided kingdom was united after all, by just one thing: longing.

I sank down among the sofa's sagging cushions. Clarise sat beside me. I told her that I had visited the museum and that I had found my parents, my real parents, but then my voice began to tremble and I couldn't carry on. The grief had been stored inside me for too long. It hurt to bring it out. Clarise took me in her arms and held me against her. I smelled the wool of her cardigan,
and her face powder, and the oil at the roots of her hair. My whole body jerked, as if caught on a fisherman's hook.

‘There, there,' she said. ‘Let it out.'

And though I was crying I learned something about myself just then. I saw it clearly for the first time. I had never been sanguine – at least, not so far as I could remember. No, wait – that was wrong. I had been sanguine until the moment I was classified as sanguine, but all my happiness had ended there, and all my optimism too. Ever since that night, the only thing I had ever really wanted was to find my way back. I was like someone who has died and can't let go, someone who wants desperately to rejoin the living. And it wasn't possible, of course. It wasn't even possible to remember, not really – or rather, there was a limit to what could be recovered. None of that mattered, though. It was enough to believe, enough to know. That my parents had mourned me while they were alive. That they had died still missing me. That they had loved me.

Clarise held me close and said the same words over and over.

Let it out. Let it all out.

As February began, gales swept the length and breadth of the country, causing untold damage. Several people were killed by falling trees. In the south a headless man was seen speeding down a village high street on his bicycle. He had been decapitated by a flying roof-tile only seconds earlier. The freak conditions and unusual sightings sparked off the kind of doom-laden apocalyptic talk that wouldn't have been tolerated even for a moment in the place I came from, though I found myself susceptible to it, perhaps because I was waiting for circumstances to favour me. As a result of what had happened to me during the previous month or so, a certain threshold had been crossed, a decision had been reached, but everything now depended on the White People, and they seemed to have vanished without trace. Weeks had elapsed since that night in the graveyard, and I hadn't so much as caught a glimpse of them. The only advantage was that Horowicz had lost interest in me. Whenever we spoke, which was rarely, he would berate me
for my apathy, my fecklessness, almost as though he was trying to goad me into an action that he could then expose, condemn. I still went for walks after supper. On returning to the house, however, I would often join the others for a drink in an attempt to dull my frustration, to anaesthetise myself.

One Thursday evening I was on my way upstairs to change – Urban Smith was taking part in a talent contest in the local pub that night, and some of us were going along to support him – when I chanced to look out of the landing window. Across the street, beneath the drooping branches of a magnolia, stood a man in a white cloak. The tree had flowered early, and the man blended with its creamy blooms so perfectly that I had almost failed to notice him. I steered an uneasy glance over my shoulder. The landing was deserted, all the bedroom doors were closed. Somewhere below, I could hear Urban doing his voice exercises. Quickly, I went through my pockets. All I had on me was a cigarette-lighter, my dream notebook and a key to the front door. I had some money too, saved for precisely this eventuality. Round my neck was the silver ring I had found, which I now regarded as a sort of talisman. I couldn't think of anything else I might need. I looked out of the window again. The man was still standing in the shadow of the magnolia tree. I thought of Victor and Marie lost in the mist and shivered. I didn't know if I should feel apprehensive or reassured. I checked the time. Twenty to seven. What with the excitement of the competition, I doubted anybody would notice my absence, and if Urban won and the men drank enough of Starling's latest brew, a lethal poteen, then it might easily be morning before they realised I was gone.

My abrupt departure would not come as a surprise to everyone. Clarise had treated me so kindly that I had felt duty bound to let her in on at least part of the secret. I had waited until it was my turn to help her with the dinner. On the night in question, I stood at the kitchen sink, washing spinach, while she sat at the table behind me and coated veal in egg and breadcrumbs. The men were out somewhere, playing darts. Only Lars Friedriksson had stayed behind, and he was in the basement, poking,
two-fingered, at his ancient portable. Though he had already written a thousand pages, he claimed that he had hardly scratched the surface. He would not disturb us.

‘I'll be leaving soon,' I said.

Clarise's wide, unblinking eyes veered towards me.

‘I'm not going to give you the details,' I said. ‘I just want you to know that it'll happen sometime in the near future.'

‘You can't leave,' she said, ‘not unless they relocate you. It's not allowed.'

I couldn't help smiling. She only ever invoked the law out of anxiety or panic.

‘I'm telling you now because I don't want it to upset you,' I said. ‘I wouldn't want you to think' – and I paused – ‘that I had come to any harm.'

‘Are you so unhappy here?'

I went over, took her hand. ‘You've been good to me, Clarise. I owe you a lot. It wouldn't be fair if I did it behind your back. You mustn't try and stop me, though.'

She looked up at me, tears beginning to fill her eyes. ‘Where will you go?'

‘It's better you don't know. And anyway, it might all go wrong, in which case I'll end up here again.'

She tried to smile through her tears, which were dripping off her cheeks and down into the breadcrumbs. Later that evening, at dinner, Bill Snape would tell her, in that precise, fastidious voice of his, that although the veal was delicious she had, in his opinion, used a little too much salt.

Yes, she would realise what had happened, I thought, as I turned from the window, and I knew I could trust her not to give anything away. She had even promised to wait a few hours before she informed the authorities.

I managed to reach the kitchen without running into anyone. The lid vibrated gently on a saucepan of root vegetables and chicken bones, stock for a risotto Clarise would be making in the morning. I opened the back door, then eased it shut behind me, and I was just setting off along the narrow passageway that led to the street when a voice called my name. Brendan Burroughs was
standing by the outhouse. He had one hand cupped in the other, and his chin had moved into the air above his right shoulder, as if he had to peer round a corner to see me. He asked where I was going.

‘A walk,' I said. ‘To clear my head.'

‘Aren't you coming to the pub?'

‘Maybe later on.'

‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘I'll come with you.'

‘No,' I said.

‘Yes, I'd like a walk. My head needs clearing too. And, after all, moonlight can't hurt me, can it?' He took several rapid steps in my direction, half tripping on a drain in his eagerness to join me.

I took out my lighter and struck the flint. A flame sprang up between us. ‘Didn't you hear me, Brendan? I said no.'

Shrinking back, his mouth opened in a crooked, incredulous grin. He couldn't believe I'd done such a thing. I wasn't Starling or Horowicz. I wasn't cruel like them.

‘Wig,' he said, his voice balanced precariously between pleading and reproach.

‘No.' I snapped the lighter shut again. With one last look at him, a steady look, to show him that I wasn't joking, I turned away.

When I stepped out on to the pavement, the space beneath the magnolia tree was empty. I looked left, then right, just in time to see the cloaked man shamble through the gate and down into the park. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Brendan was still loitering in the shadows at the side of the house, one hand clasping the other, hoping that I might relent.

‘No,' I said.

Once I was safely out of sight of the Cliff, I broke into a run. I had waited so long, and it might be weeks before another chance presented itself. I needn't have worried. When I reached the black railings I could see the man below me, beneath the overhanging trees, his pale cloak appearing to hover in the gloom.

He followed the polluted stream for a while as it wound
behind the backs of houses and under roads, then he turned to the south, using a maze of lanes and alleys I had never been along before. He seemed to know the town in such detail – its recesses, its hiding places. I realised that if I'd seen so little of the White People recently it was because they had mapped out an alternative geography. Their existence lay parallel to everybody else's.

At last he stepped out on to a road I recognised. It led downhill past a school, fetching up close to the river. His hood had fallen back, and the light from a street lamp caressed his bare head as he passed beneath it. No more than fifty yards separated us, but he didn't appear to have noticed me. Was he preoccupied, or merely simple? I couldn't have said. It would be a kind of suicide, what I was about to attempt, but at the same time it would be a transformation – another life entirely. The White People were treated either as scapegoats or as deities, depending on the territory into which they wandered, and this, I thought, was the basic yet paradoxical truth about them, namely that, although they had been certified as non-persons, they had access to a far wider range of experience than the rest of us. We were limited, imprisoned, but they walked free. Another life indeed …

The man reached a junction and seemed to hesitate. To his left the road angled back into the centre of Iron Vale, while to the right it ran out into the country, passing through the village with its graveyard and then on towards towns that were famous for their racecourses. On the far side of the road was a thinly wooded area, the treacly blackness of the river just visible beyond. Although it was still early, not even eight o'clock, very few cars were travelling in either direction, and there was nobody out walking – nobody except us, that is. I hoped he wasn't thinking of meeting up with others like him. My plan would only work if he was on his own. Instead of making for the graveyard, though, as I had feared he might, he crossed the road and disappeared into the old dark trees that lined the pavement.

I stood on the kerb, exactly as he had done. If I kept quite still, I could hear people weeping. I wanted to dismiss it as my
imagination, but then it occurred to me that the sound might be happening inside my head. It might be my own grieving that I could hear – for those who had been unable to protect me, and those I myself, in turn, had been unable to protect. The sorrow I had always known about was more in evidence these days. It was as if I lived in a house that had a stream running under it. There wasn't a moment when I didn't feel the damp. At the same time, high in the air above me, traffic-lights were swaying on their slender wires, and I knew that it might just have been the wind. It might have been the wind all along. Maybe the man in the cloak had heard it too. Maybe that sound, and nothing more than that, was what had held him on the pavement for so long.

Once across the road, I found a narrow lane that led through a picnic area and then on down a gentle, curving incline to the river. Tables and benches, all built out of wooden slats, had been arranged among the trees. The moon had risen, bright and swollen, gleaming like an heirloom, and the short grass was crazed with the shadows of bare branches, shadows so black that the ground seemed to have cracked wide open. I glanced up. There he was, ahead of me, unmistakable in white, and quite alone. He followed the lane to where it became a car-park. Though he wasn't hurrying, he appeared determined, as if he had a purpose. They weren't supposed to be capable of that. I dropped back, allowing a distance to open up between us. It didn't seem likely that I would lose him, not here.

Beyond the car-park was a concrete embankment that overlooked a weir. The man stood at the railings, staring out over the river. Above the weir the water was smooth and dark. A notice warned of strong currents, hidden dangers. Further down, the river narrowed a little, its surface becoming ruffled. Part of the river bed on our side had been exposed, forming a beach made up of grassy banks, stretches of mud, and big white stones. After a few minutes the man clambered down off the embankment and on to the river bed. I was still standing at the edge of the carpark, beneath the trees. The wind lifted. The branches' shadows swung and shuddered on the ground before me, which made me feel unsteady on my feet. To my right, where the railings were,
something knocked and clanked. I watched the man pick his way across the stones. I decided to wait under the trees until I discovered what his intentions were. There would be nowhere for me to hide down there.