Divided Kingdom (4 page)

‘Marie? Is that you?' Victor's head half turned, but only in time to hear the door to the street click shut. He let out a heavy, almost vaudevillian sigh. ‘You'll have to forgive her,' he said. ‘She's always off out somewhere, doing God knows what.'

I had already forgiven her, of course. That dark hair curving in beneath her chin like the blade of a sultan's dagger, those lips that slanted a little, as if one side of her mouth weighed more than the other. That conspirator's wink, which the grown-ups hadn't noticed. During the weeks that followed, Victor would often refer, half in jest, to the fact that Marie had abandoned him in his hour of need – and what's more, as a result of her leaving the house like that and staying out for half the night, poor Thomas had been forced to wait until the next day before he even so much as
set eyes
on his new sister, whereupon Marie and I would exchange a look of barely suppressed amusement. We knew better. It was our secret, though. I loved Marie from the beginning – but not as a sister exactly, and not as a mother either.

I quickly realised how lucky I was to have been placed with the Parrys. Marie led her own life, the exuberant, dishevelled life of a seventeen year old, but she never made me feel excluded or unwanted. As for my father, Victor, it simply wasn't in him to treat me badly, though he did tend to veer between mild hysteria and complete absent-mindedness, a pattern of behaviour which, like so much else, I would only fully understand in years to come. This much I knew: his wife, Jean Parry, had been taken on the same night as I had, another victim of the Rearrangement, and he was still mourning the loss of her, still adjusting to her absence. Marie seemed to care less – on the surface, at least. Maybe, like me, she kept all those feelings hidden. I sometimes wonder if there wasn't a sense in which they looked on me as some sort of substitute for Jean, a kind of reimbursement. But perhaps that's overstating it. Distraction might be a better word. I was something that would take their
minds off the violence that had been done to them, something that would alter the shape of their sorrow. Marie took it upon herself to try and occupy the maternal role, just as my travelling companion had implied she might, while Victor assumed responsibility for the running of the household. Seen from the outside, then, my arrival had a beneficial effect, since it forced them to pull together and begin to function as a unit again.

As for my other parents, my real parents, I never heard what became of them, and I could never quite bring myself to ask. There was the loss itself, of course, which was hard enough, but I was also battling a sense of shame. I had turned my back on them, you might even say that I'd betrayed them, and I didn't know how to come to terms with that. It was easier to pretend they didn't exist. What's more, in the circumstances, asking such a question would have seemed ungrateful, if not callous – and besides, I doubt whether Victor or Marie would have been able to tell me anything. The rift between past and present was absolute, for all of us. The image I was left with, of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night, people who hadn't even had the time to dress properly, was one that I consigned to the very darkest corner of my memory, and there it remained, like a discarded childhood toy – the ukulele with its broken strings, the moulting, one-eyed teddy bear.

We were living in momentous times, historic times – the country had been dismembered, families had been torn apart, whole sections of the population were suffering from what became known as ‘border sickness' – and yet I seemed to take it all in my stride. I remember Victor sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper on one of my first mornings in the house.

‘That Song fellow's going to be Prime Minister,' he said.

I remembered Miss Groves mentioning the name. To her, Michael Song had been something of a hero. He had attended the underground meetings that altered the nation's destiny for ever, and later, when he had been classified as sanguine, he had founded a new political party, installing himself as leader.

‘I saw a poster yesterday,' Victor said. ‘Michael Song. Voice of the People.' He snorted. ‘Talk about putting the cart before the horse.'

He picked up his newspaper, but put it down again almost immediately.

‘There was rioting in the Yellow Quarter last night,' he said. ‘The police used tear-gas and rubber bullets.' He mentioned a place I'd never heard of ‘I used to live round there, when I was in my twenties.'

He wasn't talking to anybody in particular. He was just talking. As I watched him, it struck me that he might be addressing the space that had formerly been occupied by Jean, his wife.

‘There are tanks on the streets,' he said. ‘There are
curfews.'
This last word came out high-pitched, a measure of his disbelief.

Marie was slouched over the table, face propped on one hand, eyes lowered. Her other hand rested loosely against a mug of tea, which she had yet to touch. I had heard her come in late the night before, swearing under her breath as she collided with the linen chest outside her room.

‘What's a curfew?' I asked eventually.

In truth, I wasn't all that curious. I was just trying to fit in. The events that had upset Victor seemed academic to me, remote, even foreign. Perhaps I lacked the proper context – after all, I had spent five months in the middle of nowhere, shielded from the worst of what was going on – or perhaps it was the eerie matter-of-factness of a child who, having experienced a trauma of his own, decides simply to get on with the business of living, which in my case meant acquainting myself with my new environment. And there was so much to get used to, so much to explore.

The house itself was more than a hundred years old. Appropriately enough, an antiques dealer occupied the ground floor, though the over-elaborate and gloomy furniture didn't sell, and a health-food shop soon took its place. We lived in the maisonette above. The staircase that led up from the pavement was dark and uneven, with creaking wooden steps, and the walls bulged, as if, like bodies, they contained a variety of soft yet vital
organs. There was a sitting-room on the first floor at the front and three smaller rooms – kitchen, store-room and toilet – at the back. From the sitting-room I could look down into Hope Street, a narrow, bustling parade of shops, and if I leaned out far enough I could see the pub on the corner, the Peacock, where Victor sometimes stopped for a pint on his way home from work. Climb another flight of stairs, which felt still more rickety, and you would find three bedrooms and a bathroom. Victor spent most evenings up there with his door ajar and his radio tuned to the concerts of classical music that were broadcast live from the capital. He had become involved in redesigning a section of the Red Quarter's railway network, a task which he appeared to relish. When going to bed, I would often glance into his room, and there he would be, poised over a sheet of tracing-paper with a pencil. His detailed maps of electrical systems covered every available surface, the long, slim cardboard cylinders in which his finished drawings travelled to and from the office leaning against the wall in the corner like so many snooker cues.

One night, though, just a few weeks after my arrival, I stopped in his doorway and saw a high-heeled silver sandal on the table, illuminated by a lamp. Victor was sitting in front of it, hunched over, a pair of kitchen scissors in one hand. When he sensed my presence, he almost jumped out of his chair, trying at the same time to hide the sandal under a newspaper. ‘Off – off to bed, Thomas?' he stammered. ‘Well, goodnight. Sleep well.' I looked at him for a moment longer, then I, too, said goodnight. I couldn't expect to understand everything about these people, I thought to myself, not all at once, and there were probably questions I would never be able to ask.

Moving away across the landing and down a short corridor, I passed Marie's room. I would often pause to gaze in wonder at her clothes, which would be lying in a tangle on the floor, her dresses drooping across the foot of the bed like people who had fainted, her underwear foaming and frothing out of her chest of drawers in little frozen waterfalls of cotton, silk and lace. The room I had been given was one of the smallest in the house, no more than eight feet square, and its single window gave on to a
row of scrubby back yards and gardens, a car-park half buried in weeds, and the blank side-wall of a working-men's club, but after the noise and overcrowding of the holding station I loved the feeling it had, of being an eyrie, a refuge, my own private domain.

Sometimes, when Marie came home after an evening out, she would look in on me. Light would open in a triangle across my bed and she would lean down, placing her lips on my forehead or my cheek, and a scent would float off her, not just the perfume she wore, but alcohol, cigarette smoke, and cold, clean sweat from all the dancing she had done, it was the sweet smell of the night, a world I didn't know as yet, and I would lie there with my eyes closed and my heart leaping, and I would breathe her in, right to the bottom of my lungs. When she straightened up again, her clothes would seem to whisper to me, then the fan of light would fold itself away, the door would shut and I would hear her stumble back into her room and kick off her shoes, two quick tumbling sounds across the floor, like dwarves turning somersaults, and a new silence would descend, thicker than before and deeper, more inhabited somehow, the silence of my breath mingling with my sister's and my father's, the silence of our dreams.

Despite the promises I had made to other boys –
I'll look for you, I won't forget
— and despite the enduring clarity of my memories of those days, I thought I had left Thorpe Hall behind for ever, but this turned out not to be the case. I had only been living on Hope Street for a few months when I discovered that Maclean had been placed with a well-to-do family at the top of the town, and that he would be attending the same school as I was. The first time I saw him again, that autumn in the playground, I had no trouble recognising him, his wrists protruding from the arms of his blazer, his ears the size of dustbin lids.

‘What's your new name?' he asked.

‘Parry,' I said. ‘Thomas Parry.'

He nodded.

‘What about you?' I said.

‘Simon Bracewell.' He shrugged. ‘It's all right. Now listen,' he said, and he threw a furtive glance round the asphalt yard, then drew me close. ‘About Cody,' he said. ‘We're divorced now, but we're still good friends. He's living with a family in the northwest. His new name's De Vere, by the way.'

‘De Vere?'

‘I know.' Bracewell shook his head.

I glanced at his left hand. ‘What happened to your ring?'

Bracewell grinned. ‘On our last night we took them off and tied them together with a piece of wire and threw them in the moat.' He looked down at the ground, and his face became serious. ‘I don't think I'll ever marry again.'

Though we used to sit next to each other for lessons, we hadn't been particularly close, but this now changed. In term-time he came round to my house at least twice a week, and during the holidays we spent whole days together. I was both intrigued and delighted by the way his mind worked. If it hadn't been for Bracewell, for instance, I'm not sure I would ever have noticed Mr Page. There was a dry-cleaner's on Hope Street, almost directly opposite our house. If you walked past the open doorway you could smell the fluid they used, which was called perchloroethylene and which would become – not inappropriately, I thought much later – the defining smell of my childhood. Mr Page ran the place. He had narrow eyes that curled up at the edges, and his mouth was the same – a wide, thin curve, like a slice of melon after you've finished eating it, like the rind seen sideways-on.

‘He looks as if he's smiling all the time,' Bracewell said.

He told me that it put him in a good mood, just to look at Mr Page. If everybody had a Mr Page living somewhere near by, the world would be a much happier place, he thought. One question did bother him, however, and he returned to it again and again. What if Mr Page lost his temper? Would he still appear to be smiling?

I persuaded Bracewell to push the prospect of Mr Page not smiling to the back of his mind, otherwise it would never happen. Bracewell agreed. Instead, we sat on my doorstep and were content simply to soak up a sense of well-being from
the man on the other side of the road. Later, I realised that what we saw in Mr Page was something the authorities called ‘eucrasia', a state of balance where all your humours are in harmony with one another. In that respect, at least, we were proving ourselves to be true disciples of the new regime.

By the following spring the work of rearranging the population had largely been accomplished. Throughout the divided kingdom the walls of concrete blocks had been reinforced with watch-towers, axial crosses and even, in some areas, with minefields, which rendered contact between the citizens of different countries a physical impossibility. If you had been classified as sanguine, then you remained in the Red Quarter for the term of your natural life. Attempts to cross the border illegally were punishable by prison sentences, and if you defied the guards they had the right to open fire on you. All this to prevent what was now being referred to as ‘psychological contamination'. In the hush between Christmas and New Year, a hush intensified by a heavy fall of snow, an Internal Security Act was simultaneously passed in all four countries. Anybody suspected of ‘undermining the fabric of society' could now be arrested on unspecified charges and held without trial for up to two years. Some time afterwards, when I was in my twenties, I heard it rumoured that the government had introduced tranquillisers into the water supply in order to guarantee a peaceful transition. This seemed a little far-fetched. But even if the rumours had some truth to them, there were obviously quite a few who never drank from the tap. In the Yellow Quarter, for instance, where resistance to the new regime was at its strongest, not a day passed without somebody being shot dead for trying to escape. In the Green Quarter, on the other hand, a number of people killed themselves, leaving notes and letters which claimed the government had deprived them of the will to live; special cemeteries were set aside for those who had died by their own hand, and several bridges and tall buildings had to be pulled down since they were believed to encourage suicidal thoughts. Only in the Blue Quarter was the protest non-violent, but even there the authorities witnessed a spontaneous outpouring of
grief and despair. Every morning border guards had to remove the bouquets, photographs and hand-written elegies that had been deposited at the base of the wall during the hours of darkness, and it was said that their barracks were so full of cut flowers that they resembled maternity wards.