Divided Kingdom (6 page)

Leaving our bicycles on the ground, we crept towards the drop and then looked over. Thirty or forty feet below lay a heap of shattered concrete and macadam. On either side of it a
motorway reached into the distance, its six lanes silent, utterly deserted. Nothing moved down there except the weeds and grasses shifting in the central reservation – a kind of narrow wild garden. All thoughts of the grim fate that might have been ours were obliterated by the mystery of what now awaited us.

Though the citizens of the Red Quarter still drove cars – no one could deny the pleasures of the open road, especially in a country where the population was relatively small, just over five million – they had launched a series of impassioned campaigns against the motorway. To sanguine people, motorways signified aggression, rage, fatigue, monotony and death. Motorways were choleric, in other words, and had no place in the Red Quarter. Some had been converted into venues for music festivals or sporting events, and others had been fortified, then turned into borders, their tall grey lights illuminating dogs and guards instead of traffic, but for the most part they had simply been allowed to decay, their signs leaning at strange angles, their service stations inhabited by mice and birds, their bridges choked with weeds and brambles or, as in this case, collapsing altogether. In time, motorways would become so overgrown that they would only be visible from the air, half-hidden monuments to an earlier civilisation, like pyramids buried in a jungle.

We only had to look at each other to know what should happen next. We hauled our bicycles over a fence, then wheeled them down the embankment and out on to the motorway's hard shoulder. We began to ride north – in the fast lane, naturally. There was the most peculiar sense of risk attached to this. We were like people who believed the earth was flat, and who, despite our belief, had decided to travel at high speed towards the edge. I suspected Bracewell felt it too because I saw a flicker of apprehension in the grin he gave me as we set out. There was also a feeling of suspended danger, as if the silence and emptiness were only temporary and the real life of the motorway might commence again at any moment. More than once, I turned and looked over my shoulder, just to make sure that nothing was coming.

But nothing came, not ever, not in all the many hours we
spent out there. I sometimes wonder whether we hadn't entered a parallel world which the two of us had somehow jointly imagined, a place where the anxieties of our daily lives could find no purchase, a place where we could finally throw off the wariness that informed so many of our thoughts and actions, and be ourselves.

I sometimes wonder if we weren't bound together after all.

One evening, while I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, Victor appeared in the doorway. He needed to have a word with me, he said. I put down my pen and followed him upstairs. The sky was already dark, and Marie had gone out with friends. A cushioned silence filled the house.

In Victor's bedroom I took a seat next to his workstation, its surface hidden beneath the usual clutter of drawings, letters, documents and maps. The TV was on, with the sound turned down. Michael Song was addressing the nation. I was always struck by how polished he looked, almost literally
polished
, and how convivial too, like some worldly uncle you wished you saw more often. I watched as Victor switched the TV off, then lowered himself pensively on to the edge of his divan. We sat in silence for a moment or two. A slightly blurred circle of lamplight trembled on the carpet, but the rest of the room lay in deep shadow, mysterious yet open to conjecture, like the prairie beyond a camp-fire. The muted lighting seemed to invite confidences, confessions even, an effect that may well have been intentional.

‘They're saying he's going to be re-elected,' Victor said, ‘which is no great surprise really, is it?' He looked steadily into my face, gauging my reaction, then his gaze dropped to his hands. ‘I've heard rumours, Thomas. Children being taken into families and then reporting to the authorities. Members of those families being imprisoned as a result.' There was another long pause. ‘I suppose what I want to ask you is this,' he said eventually. ‘Did the authorities tell you to spy on us?'

The question didn't surprise me particularly or make me nervous. At some deep level, perhaps, I had known that it would come.

‘Not exactly,' I said.

Victor's pale eyes seemed to blacken. ‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?'

I repeated what Mr Reek had said in his study on that bright spring afternoon, and then told Victor about my visit to the Ministry and the unexpected reappearance of Miss Groves. It came as a relief to be able to rid myself of all this information. Until that moment I hadn't realised quite how burdened I was.

‘I thought so,' Victor said. ‘My God.' His left hand closed into a fist, and he wrapped his other hand around it and held it tightly. His great bald forehead gleamed. ‘So have you said anything? Have you reported us?'

‘No.'

‘And would you?'

I hesitated. ‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Why not?'

This time I paused for longer. I wanted to express what it was that I had felt within a day or two of arriving at the house – what I still felt, in fact – but it was difficult. I had never thought to put the feeling into words before, not even in my head. Then, suddenly, I had it – or something that seemed close enough.

‘Because I want you to be happy,' I said.

Victor rose to his feet and walked over to his wall of books. He stood with his back to me, touching the spines of certain volumes with fingers that seemed unsure of themselves. Finally he turned to face me again. His eyes had a silvery quality that hadn't been there before. ‘You're a good boy, Thomas, and we're glad to have you here. You know that, don't you?'

I nodded.

‘We haven't talked a great deal,' he went on. ‘That's my fault entirely. I've had other things on my mind, I'm afraid. Also, to be honest, I didn't trust you. I was sorry for you, of course, being taken from your family like that, and I felt responsible for you in some strange way, but I didn't trust you.' He looked at me. ‘That sounds dreadful, I know.'

I shook my head. ‘I understand.'

‘Do you?' He squatted down in front of me, gripping my shoulders. ‘Do you really?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is there anything you want to ask?'

I was about to shake my head again, then checked myself. ‘There is one thing.'

‘What?' Victor leaned forwards, his eyes intent on mine.

‘It's Mr Page,' I said.

Victor's head tilted a little, and an upright line showed in the gap between his eyebrows.

‘What happens when he gets angry?' I went on. ‘I mean, does he still look as if he's smiling?'

For a moment Victor remained quite motionless, then his mouth opened wide and several odd inhaled sounds came out of him.

It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh.

Although I had asked about Mr Page and then reported my findings to Bracewell, his influence on us both had waned considerably. Once in a while, out of a quaint sense of loyalty, we would sit opposite the dry-cleaner's, but we were no longer expecting any miracles and we never stayed for very long. After all, we had a new passion now – the motorway.

We had only ridden out to the broken bridge a handful of times when we chanced upon an abandoned service station about a mile to the north. We immediately adopted it as our headquarters. There were curving roads with pompous white arrows painted on them, which we delighted in disobeying. There were meaningless grass-covered mounds. Inside the building was an arcade that was lined with video games, their screens all smashed, and a restaurant with wicker light-shades that hung from the ceiling like upside-down waste-paper baskets. Sometimes we would sit in the entrance, under the glass roof, and try to imagine what it was like before. Cars would park in front of us and people with weird old-fashioned hairstyles would get out. They would walk right past us, relishing
the opportunity to stretch their legs, and we'd be sitting there, in the future, invisible.

We must have absorbed something of the atmosphere of the times, I suppose, since we invented a whole series of what we referred to privately as ‘border games'. One morning we cycled further north than usual and found a section of the motorway that was in the process of being dug up. In our minds, the area instantly became a no man's land, with construction workers standing in for guards. We would pretend to be people from the Blue Quarter – unstable, indecisive types – or, better still, violent criminals from the Yellow Quarter, and it would be our mission to cross into sanguine territory, which was on the far side of the road. Camouflaged by pieces of shredded tyre, we would hide in the long grass at the edge of the building site and study the guards' movements through binoculars made from chopped-up bits of one of Victor's cardboard tubes. The game required audacity, cunning and, above all, patience. Each escape attempt was carefully orchestrated and timed to perfection, and it could take an entire morning to carry it out successfully. Once, we were spotted by a man in a yellow hard hat. He lifted an arm and took aim at us, two fingers extended like the barrel of a gun, thumb upright like a trigger. Ducking down, we imagined the thrilling zip of bullets in the air above our heads. On weekends one of us would have to assume the role of guard. I would prowl among the cement-mixers and scaffolding poles, clutching a second-hand air rifle I had bought in a junk shop on Hope Street. On my head I would be wearing an old motorbike helmet that was the shape of half a grapefruit. If it was Bracewell's turn to patrol the border, he would often bring his mother's spaniel along and pretend it was an attack dog.

We spent whole days out at the motorway, fortifying our headquarters against intruders or thinking up variations on the border game or just lying on our stomachs observing the guards, and every now and then we would talk about the old days, that peculiar, almost dreamlike time when Thorpe Hall had been a kind of home to us. On one such afternoon we decided to fit the
service station with an alarm system. We used a length of fishing-twine as a trip-wire, fastening one end to a pile of dinner plates which we'd found in the kitchens at the back. As Bracewell unwound the twine across the main entrance, he surprised me by saying, ‘Do you remember Jones?'

My heart speeded up. I had never married Jones, I hadn't even mixed my blood with his, but I had listened as he voiced his worries and I had done my best to reassure and comfort him. When he began to act strangely, I believed it was at least partly my fault. I had failed him, somehow, and that was a source of private shame to me. Then, when he was taken away, my shame redoubled, because secretly, somewhere deep down, I was relieved that our awkward friendship was over. Even now, more than three years later, I blushed at the mention of his name, but fortunately Bracewell was busy stacking plates and didn't notice.

‘Jones,' he said. ‘You know. Stork.'

‘What about him?'

‘I know what happened.'

‘He was transferred,' I said. ‘Reek told me.'

Bracewell sat back on his heels and steered a crafty look in my direction. ‘Reek was lying.'

‘So what happened then?'

‘They sent him to a mental home.'

My throat hurt now, as though I had been shouting.

‘He was round the twist,' Bracewell said. ‘Don't you remember?'

He told me that he had been waiting in Reek's office one day when he noticed a letter lying on the desk. The letter had the name and address of an asylum in the top right-hand corner, and it confirmed Jones's recent arrival.

‘Where did they send him?' I asked.

Bracewell shrugged. He hadn't bothered with the details.

‘The way he used to stand there on one leg like that – for hours. I could never work out how he did it.' Bracewell stared into space for a few moments, then shook his head and, getting to his feet, walked out into the car-park. Once there, he turned and
studied the place where the twine stretched across the entrance. ‘I don't think they'll see that,' he said, ‘do you?'

It seems to me that part of the true function of a mystery is precisely that it remains unsolved. The world would be far too neat a place if the things that puzzled us were always, eventually, explained. We need unanswered questions at the edges of our lives. In fact, I'd go further. It's important
not
to think we can understand everything.
Not to understand.
The humility that can come from that. The wonder. Every now and then, though, one of the less pressing mysteries is revealed to us, as if a god had decided to satisfy, in some small way, our natural craving for symmetry and resolution.

I had forgotten all about the silver sandal until Victor took me upstairs one evening to show me a book that he'd been working on. We sat facing each other in the lamplight, our knees almost touching. The book rested on his lap. Two feet high, some six or seven inches thick, it had the formidable dimensions of a family bible. He had bound it himself, he told me.

‘You know what it's made of?' His eyes had grown paler and brighter, as light bulbs do before they blow.

I scrutinised the book. ‘I can see leather –'

‘Yes,' he interrupted, ‘but what
kind
of leather?'

I bent closer and ran my fingertips across the cover. There were pieces of leather, but there were pieces of suede too, and rubber and canvas and raffia, all ingeniously and meticulously stitched together into a sort of patchwork.

‘It's
shoes,'
Victor said, unable to wait any longer.

‘Shoes?'

When they came for his wife, he said, they hadn't given her the chance to pack. She had taken almost nothing with her – none of her shoes, for instance, and she had always loved shoes. He had bought many of the pairs himself, of course. After she had gone he couldn't bear to look at them, and yet, at the same time, he couldn't bring himself to throw them away. Whenever a pair of shoes caught his eye, he remembered something that had happened – a dinner party, a walk in the mountains, a game of
tennis. He remembered their life together, and how happy, how very happy, they had been. There were some shoes that she hadn't worn at all, that she'd been saving for a special occasion, perhaps, and it saddened him still more to think that she would never even put them on. Then, as he lay in bed one night, unable to sleep, the idea came to him: he would turn the shoes into a book.