Divided Kingdom

by Rupert Thomson

  As he came in again, he appeared to be travelling much faster than before. Knees bent, one arm extended, he cut across a wave’s steep inner curve, the water tearing in his wake like ancient silk. Abruptly, he swivelled and sped off in the other direction. At the same time, a dark-haired man who was surfing near by lost his balance and toppled backwards into the ocean. Bland didn’t see him until he surfaced, and by then it was too late. The leading edge of his board caught the man on the temple, and I saw the man go under.

  The lifeguard rushed past Bland and hurled himself headlong into the breaking waves. Only seconds later, he was hauling the man up on to the beach. Blood spilled from a gash just above the man’s hairline and slid over his face, the colour so intense, so vital, that it seemed to question the authenticity of everything around it.

  Laying the man flat on his back and tilting his head, the lifeguard opened the man’s mouth to check the position of his tongue. Just then, the man’s chest heaved. The lifeguard turned him over, on to his side. The man coughed, then vomited some water on to the sand. I noticed a new silence and, glancing round, I saw that the ocean was quite motionless. They must have switched off the waves.

  Frank Bland stood close by, head bowed. ‘I didn’t see him,’ he was muttering. ‘I just didn’t see him.’

  I went and stood beside him. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Frank.’

  ‘He came up right in front of me. There was nothing I could do.’ Bland’s teeth began to chatter. I fetched a towel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Still looking at the ground, he nodded in thanks.

  Meanwhile, the lifeguard was pressing a rag against the man’s head to staunch the bleeding. At last the man’s eyes opened. Rolling on to his back, he let out a groan, as though he suspected something might be wrong. He closed his eyes tight shut, then opened them again. They flitted across the bright-blue of the artificial sky.

  ‘Where am I?’ he murmured.

  I arrived outside the Concord Room at ten-past six, but the party was already in full swing, people talking and laughing as if they’d been there for most of the afternoon. Large crêpe-paper models of our national emblems hung from the ceiling, each in the appropriate colour – red peacocks, yellow salamanders, and so on. I glanced down at my name-badge, making sure it was still securely fastened to my lapel, and then moved on into the room. I had just accepted a glass of wine from a passing waiter when Walter Ming walked up to me. He was wearing the same unusual pale-blue suit.

  ‘We meet again,’ I said.

  ‘Just as you predicted.’ His mouth widened in one of his trademark smiles, humourless and fleeting.

  We shook hands. He didn’t have a name-badge on, I noticed.

  ‘I didn’t see you at the ocean,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t there.’ Looking out into the crowd of guests, he sipped from his glass. ‘I hear somebody died.’

  ‘There was an accident,’ I said. ‘No one died.’

  ‘Well,’ Ming said, ‘that’s what I heard.’

  ‘You don’t happen to come from the Green Quarter, do you?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just a feeling I had.’

  Ming nodded as if he understood such feelings, as if he often had feelings of that kind himself. ‘Are you going to the club tonight?’

  ‘What club?’

  He reached into his pocket and took out a card that was identical to the one I had been given.

  So, I thought. It was a club.

  ‘I’ve got one of those,’ I said. ‘Someone handed it to me. A stranger.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’ Actually I’d had no intention of going – not until that moment, anyway.

  ‘I think you’d find it interesting,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  Ming looked at me. His eyes had the opaque, almost filmy quality of stagnant water. I could read nothing in them, and yet the look seemed significant. Muttering something about the need to circulate, he shook my hand, then turned and moved away into the crowd.

  I finished my drink.

  Ming had used the same words as the man in the railway station. Was that a coincidence, or were the two men connected in some way? Or – more sinister still – was I mistaken in thinking that Ming didn’t know anything about me? Could he have been assigned to keep me under observation, for example, while I was attending the conference? If so, he clearly lacked finesse. If not, who was he?

  ‘You look lost.’

  I turned. A woman stood beside me, wispy grey-blonde curls hovering around her head like an aura. Her badge said Josephine Cox – Conference Organiser.

  ‘Just thinking.’ I gave her a smile that was intended to reassure her.

  She led me across the room and introduced me to a group of delegates. Almost inevitably, we found ourselves discussing the incident that had taken place that afternoon. The injured man was Marco Rinaldi, a social historian from the Green Quarter. He had suffered a mild concussion, Josephine told us, as a result of which he was being kept in hospital overnight. He was going to be all right, though. He was going to be fine. Just so long as none of us thought it augured badly for the conference. I looked at her carefully and saw that she was only half joking. We all shook our heads, some less convincingly than others.

  At one point I glanced around the room. There was no sign of the man in the pale-blue suit. It suddenly occurred to me that he might have been an intruder. After all, he hadn’t been wearing a badge, and the name Ming – as in dynasty – could easily have been a fabrication. He had even managed to avoid telling me where he was from – on two separate occasions. I wondered about the level of security in the hotel. Should I call Howard and voice my suspicions? I faced back into the group of delegates. Wait a minute. Maybe I was overreacting. I nodded vaguely in response to something a bearded man was saying. I should relax, I thought. I should relax and enjoy my stay, as the note from the organisers had encouraged me to do.

  That night Josephine took me out to dinner, along with John Fernandez, the bearded man, and two people he had met at previous conferences, Philip de Mattos and Sudhakant Patel. Fernandez was from Athanor, a major port in the Yellow Quarter. He worked as a shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. De Mattos also hailed from the Yellow Quarter, though he was employed as a stockbroker on the Isle of Cresset, an offshore tax-haven. As for Patel, he came from just around the corner, as he put it. He had lived in Aquaville for the past fifteen years, where he practised alternative medicine – acupuncture and aromatherapy. It was an unlikely group, and on the way to the restaurant Josephine had told me – in strictest confidence, of course – that she was a little nervous at having two choleric men in her charge and hoped that I might help her keep the peace, but in the end her anxieties proved unfounded. We spent three hours together, and I didn’t detect even a flicker of tension or unpleasantness. After dinner, the other men wanted to go to a bar they had heard about, and though tempted by their company, which was exuberant to say the least, I declined, thinking that an early night would stand me in good stead for the many surprises and excitements that undoubtedly lay in wait for me.

  Back in my room, I switched on the lights. The dark furnishings and massed rows of dusty second-hand books closed around me. I sat on the end of my bed and looked at the mural – men fishing under a full moon. I had drunk wine with the meal, and then a liqueur, and I finally felt as if I was adjusting to my new environment. Somehow I didn’t feel like sleeping, though. On a kind of impulse, I reached into my coat pocket and took out the card the man in the station had given me.

  ‘The Bathysphere,’ I said out loud.

  It was a club, Ming had told me. In the city I came from, we had all sorts of clubs – dance clubs in Terminus, drinking clubs in Gerrard and Macaulay, strip clubs in Fremantle – and I had been to most of them at one time or another, but I knew nothing about clubs in the Blue
Quarter. I glanced at the card again. Applied to a club, the name had a certain intriguing ambiguity, I thought, suggesting immersion in a foreign element, a descent into the deepest, darkest depths. Yes, there was definitely a hint of the illicit. If I went, though, I would be breaking the rules Jasmine had laid down for me. No contact with the locals, she had said. But what if I only stayed for an hour? How much damage could I really do? I’d have a drink – one drink – and see what was going on. I’d satisfy my curiosity. If challenged, I would claim to be meeting Walter Ming, a fellow delegate. Somehow, after all the equivocations and obscurities I’d had to put up with, it seemed only fair to use him as my alibi.

  Smiling, I shook my head, then I reached for the phone and pressed the button that said Guest Relations. Howard answered. I asked whether he had ever heard of the Great Western Canal. Certainly, he said. It led out to the airport. I told him I would like a taxi, if that was possible. He didn’t anticipate a problem. Replacing the receiver, I noticed that my heart had speeded up. As I turned back to the mural, one of the rowing-boats rocked quickly, the blink of an eyelid, and a fisherman toppled over the side, into the sea. I looked away for a moment, towards the curtained window. When I looked at the boat again, there was an empty space which I was sure had not been there before. But nothing else had moved or changed. I stared at the area of water into which the man had fallen. He failed to surface. Through the wall behind me I heard laughter followed by a burst of applause. Another hotel guest, watching television. Maybe I was more tired than I had realised. More overwrought. If I went out for an hour, though, I could still be in bed by midnight. Or, at the latest, one.

  I passed through the revolving doors and down the front steps. Dwarf palms lined the footpath, and lurking in among the shrubs were urns on pedestals. The flags of the four countries stirred above me like huge birds stealthily rearranging their wings.

  I emerged from the garden to find a taxi moored against the side of the canal, its engine muttering. It was one of the older boats, the cabin made of weathered blond wood, the bench-seats covered with imitation leather. I climbed on board and gave the driver the address of the club. He nodded lazily, then revved the engine. According to the licence displayed beside the meter, his name was Curthdale Trelawney. Dozens of charms and trinkets dangled from the narrow shelf above the helm. There were anchors, portholes and lifebelts, all predictable enough, but he had crowns too, and top hats, spanners and bibles and coins, the whole array glinting and swaying with the gentle motion of the boat. A superstitious man, Mr Trelawney.

  I stared through the window as the taxi glided away from the hotel. Bunting had gone up on many of the big canals. Blue pennants seemed to be popular, or sometimes I saw a lantern in the shape of a sea horse floating high above the water. All the decorations had a faded, slightly weather-beaten look, which led me to suspect that they were brought out year after year. Trelawney drove slowly, absent-mindedly, but I found I was in no hurry. We were travelling through a city that was entirely unfamiliar to me. Well, not entirely. Since I dealt with people from the other countries most days of the week – on my computer, usually, or by phone – and since phlegmatics were generally believed to be harmless, I had assumed, despite what Jasmine had told me, that I would adapt to the Blue Quarter without too much trouble. I couldn’t have been more wrong. During that short walk to the hotel, I had been overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place. It wasn’t just the architecture or the dialect; it was something much larger and more abstract, like the look on people’s faces, or the atmosphere itself. The citizens of Aquaville seemed to equate existence with peril. They spent most of their time and energy trying to protect themselves – against the present certainly, against the future too, and even, perhaps, against the past. Thoughts of this kind had never entered my head before, but now, as a result of having to negotiate the streets and breathe the air, I was absorbing a little of the local people’s trepidation, much as I had once absorbed well-being from Mr Page. I was even seeing figures move in paintings. Though, to some extent, it appeared to threaten or at least unsettle me, it was also proof of the theory I was going to expound in my talk on Wednesday, namely that the divided kingdom was self-perpetuating, and that the need for transfer and relocation would eventually die away. Each of the four quarters had already developed its own unique character and identity. In other words, although the idea of four types of people was fundamentally simplistic, there was a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy involved. Place someone in an environment for long enough and he starts to take on the attributes of that environment.

  The taxi bumped against a row of car tyres, the engine noise subsided. We had stopped outside a tall stucco-fronted building that was set back from the canal. Wide steps led up to glass doors with vertical brass handles, and the words that featured on my flyer – THE BATHYSPHERE – were spelled out in black block capitals on the white neon strip above the entrance. If I hadn’t known the place was a club, I would have assumed it was a cinema, The Bathysphere being the title of the film that was showing. But there were no queues outside. I couldn’t see any doormen either. There was no one around at all, in fact.

  ‘Not much happening, is there?’ I said.

  My driver surveyed the building. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

  I told him.

  ‘Maybe you’re early,’ he said.

  Though I had my doubts about the club, I thought I should give it a try. After all, I had gone to the trouble of finding it.

  ‘Could you come back later on and pick me up?’ I said.

  ‘How long are you going to be?’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Let’s say an hour.’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  Once on the quay, I glanced behind me. In the boat’s cabin, Curthdale Trelawney was lighting a cigarette. When he exhaled, the smoke unfolded against the dark glass of the windshield like a flower that only blooms at night.

  The air roared and trembled as a plane went over, its wheels already lowered for landing. I adjusted my coat collar and looked around. Most of the buildings that lined the canal had once been business premises – factories, offices, warehouses – but they had long since been vacated. Bleak sodium lights stooped over a deserted towpath. The whole area had a forlorn, abandoned feel to it. I checked the address again – a nervous reaction, obviously, since the club’s name was there above me in foot-high letters – then I climbed the steps and opened one of the glass doors.

  The foyer was semicircular in shape. Its walls were red, with a gold picture-rail. The centre-light, housed in a black metal shade, cast a bright, unsteady circle on the carpet. In front of me stood an archway, sealed off by a velvet curtain. To my right, and built into the curve of the wall, was what appeared to be a ticket booth. A girl sat behind the perspex, reading a magazine. She had plucked her eyebrows into two perfect arcs, and her blonde hair shone. She glanced up as I walked over.

  I took the card out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘Have I come to the right place?’

  ‘Yes, you have. And that card means you get in free.’

  ‘And it’s a club?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m not too early?’

  She smiled. ‘You haven’t missed a thing.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ I hesitated. ‘How long does it stay open?’

  ‘You can leave any time you want.’

  I tilted my head at a slight angle. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I can’t hear any music,’ I said.

  She smiled again, more winningly. ‘It’s not that kind of club.’

  Her answers seemed precise and clear, and yet she consistently told me less than I wanted to know. It was vagueness in a most sophisticated form. Though it did occur to me that I might have been asking the wrong questions.

  ‘Which way do I go?’ I said.

  ‘Through the curtain, then round to the right.’

  As I was turning away, one of the glass
doors swung open, and I glanced over my shoulder, half hoping to see Walter Ming walk in. After all, there was a sense in which I needed him to justify my presence in this place. I could have bought him a drink. We might even have joked about the whole experience. But the couple who entered the foyer weren’t people I knew or recognised. The man had an equine face and bad teeth, and his muscular figure was wrapped in a long, tight-fitting pale-grey overcoat with a black velvet collar. His companion wore a wide-brimmed hat at such an extreme angle that I could only see the powdered whiteness of her neck and the scarlet of her mouth. Her high heels were sharp as ice-picks. Well, I thought, at least I won’t be the only person here.

  I followed the directions the girl had given me and soon found myself in a narrow corridor that sloped gently downwards and to the left. Dim lights studded the walls at regular intervals, and there was the smell of warm trapped air. I had assumed the corridor would lead to a theatre of some kind, with rows of plush seating and a stage. I had been listening for the muted buzz of an expectant audience. Instead, I walked into a triangular room which had red walls and a black ceiling. In front of me were four doors, all painted pale-gold. To my right, on a simple wooden chair, sat a man in dark clothes. His hands rested on his lap, and his head was bowed, as if in prayer. For a moment I thought he might even be asleep.

  ‘Choose a door.’ His voice sounded automatic, almost prerecorded. Presumably he had to say the same words every time somebody came into the room.

  ‘What am I choosing between?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re choosing without knowing what you’re choosing. You’re taking a chance. You’re going into the unknown.’

  ‘The unknown?’ I said.

  ‘You’re free to leave at any time,’ the man said in the same bored monotone. His head was still bowed, his hands still folded in his lap.