‘Crazy, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘It’s just the wheel-nut from some old bastard’s car.’
‘It’s more than that,’ I said.
He eyed me sceptically. I was presuming to speak for him, and I didn’t have the right. With an impatient sound, half sigh, half snarl, he snatched up the ring and thrust it back into his pocket, as if he hated himself for keeping it but couldn’t help himself, then he reached for his glass and swirled the contents. ‘Another drink?’
Wondering how late it was, I risked a look at De Vere’s watch. He noticed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘There’s somewhere I’ve got to be. I mean, I don’t –’
‘Yes. Of course.’ He jumped to his feet, rocking the table. His drink toppled over. ‘Sorry to have kept you.’
‘No, wait. I didn’t mean –’
But he was already brushing past me. By the time I twisted round in my chair, he had disappeared through the double-doors at the far end of the pool. Somehow, I felt I could still see him, though – his tousled red-brown hair, his tight, hoisted shoulders, the worn-down heels on his shoes.
When I left the bar moments later I half expected to find him on the towpath, pacing up and down, or scowling into the canal. He would still be smarting from what he would have perceived as an insult, but I was ready to apologise. I had been insensitive, unthinking. Also, I wanted to have the chance to explain myself. If I told him what I was doing, I was sure that he would understand. But he had gone. I listened for his footsteps, called his name. Out in the fog somewhere was De Vere, who I hadn’t seen for twenty-seven years.
I waited ten or fifteen minutes, but he didn’t return. I had lost him, probably for ever. Even an unexpected stroke of luck – a water-taxi gliding out of the fog with its ‘for hire’ light on – couldn’t lift my spirits. I flagged the taxi down. It cut its speed and drifted towards me. In a listless voice, I gave the driver the address.
‘That’s quite a way,’ he said.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve got money.’
I stepped down into the cabin. Everything I touched was damp and slightly sticky. If anything, the fog had thickened since the early evening, and the taxi’s engine had a flat, dead sound as we pulled out into the canal. There wasn’t a single second during that long ride out to the club when I didn’t regret my tactlessness.
I suppose I should’ve known that something would go wrong. There had been any number of warning signs, not least De Vere with his sinister disclosures. I was dreaming of a reunion, though, a kind of homecoming, and when the club’s white stucco rose out of the murk, lights burning in the ground-floor windows, my excitement was so great that I didn’t doubt that it was all about to happen. I didn’t really notice the figures standing on the towpath, let alone grant them any particular significance. I paid the taxi-driver. My hands shook so much that I almost dropped my wallet in the canal. There were no thoughts of a journey back to the centre, no thoughts of anything beyond this moment… Only when I approached the club did I realise that the figures were all dressed identically, in dark-blue tunics, and dark-blue hats with black plastic brims, and that their eyes were trained exclusively on me. They were police, of course. One of them stepped forwards, flipping open a small notebook. ‘Thomas Parry?’
I didn’t answer. Clearly they had been patrolling the quayside for some time. They had an excitement that was all their own – the thrill of a tip-off, a stake-out, a possible arrest. Their bodies trembled with stored tension.
‘You’re to come with us,’ the man with the notebook told me.
To have travelled so far, to have got so close – and now this … I hadn’t even considered such an outcome, and my reaction was suitably incongruous. I laughed out loud.
‘We’re taking you to the Ministry,’ the same man said, ‘for questioning.’ His voice had tightened. He nodded to one of his colleagues, who grasped me by the upper arm and tried to steer me towards a waiting motor launch. I immediately shook him off. I had never been able to bear the feeling of being held like that.
‘First I have to go into the club,’ I said.
The man with the notebook shook his head. ‘We’ve got our orders.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘it won’t take –’
‘It’s orders,’ one of the others said. ‘It’s not up to us.’
The inside of my head buzzed and flashed, as if something in my brain had blown. They were about to deny me the very thing that I’d been looking forward to, the thing I wanted most in all the world. I pushed past them, making for the entrance, and was aware, for a few moments, of people shocked into unnatural shapes.
Before I could reach the door, though, two of them grabbed hold of me. Then the third joined in, his notebook fluttering clumsily to the ground. As we struggled on the steps, one of the glass doors opened and the blonde-haired girl looked out. She was wearing her kimono with its pattern of exotic birds and trees, and her eyebrows, lifted a little in surprise, were plucked into two fine arcs, as usual. In order to recreate the experience of my other visits to the club – or to reproduce the same level of intensity, at least – I had always felt that conditions had to be similar, if not identical, and the blonde girl’s presence there that night, the fact that she would have been sitting in the ticket booth when I walked in, only added to the fury with which I resisted all attempts to restrain me. I was told later that I seemed to possess an almost superhuman strength, and that, if there hadn’t been three policemen at the scene, and if one of them hadn’t been a famous wrestler when he was young, I might actually have got away.
We passed beneath a bridge and swung sharply to the left, the canal splitting wide open in our wake, waves slapping against the sheer dark walls of town houses and then rebounding. The massive bulk of the Ministry towered above us now, its eaves all but shutting out the sky. Though it was after two in the morning, lights still showed in several of the windows. It could be a twenty-four-hour job, working for the government. Nobody knew that better than I did.
I was escorted to a room on the first floor where two men were waiting for me. One wore glasses with no frames, his brown eyes floating beneath the lenses like a pair of sea anemones. The other man had the fleshy but solid build of a field athlete. Running along the far wall of the office was a soundproofed window that overlooked an indoor marina. The water was lit from below, an eerie jewelled green, and various small craft were going silently about their business.
The man with the glasses installed himself behind a desk. I took a seat in front of him. The other man lowered himself, grunting, into a swivel chair some distance to my left. We spent the first half-hour establishing the facts – name, address, occupation, and so on. As for the date of my arrival, I had entered the Blue Quarter on Monday the 7th of November, in the morning, and my visa had expired three days later, on the 10th. I had been at large, illegally, for about two weeks.
At one point the man to my left leaned forwards. ‘Thomas Parry,’ he said in a thin, high-pitched voice that sat awkwardly with his muscular physique. ‘You know, I’m not sure I didn’t speak to you once, on the phone.’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ the man with the glasses said. ‘Why did you return to the Blue Quarter?’
‘There’s no point trying to explain,’ I said.
‘No point?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
The ferocity of what had flashed through me on the towpath seemed to have burned out entire circuits in my head. Only a kind of numb, childish truculence remained – but that seemed justifiable. I was once again the boy who had been abducted in the middle of the night, the boy who had been removed from his home against his will, only this time my feelings were right there on the surface.
‘If you hadn’t been arrested,’ the man with the glasses was saying, ‘what would you have done? What would you have done tomorrow, for example?’
I shook my head. For some reason I rememb
ered Chloe Allen in that moment – her mockery of all authority, her cheek, the sweet smell of her breath through the van’s wire-mesh …
‘You know what you are?’ I said with a smile. ‘You’re drones.’
During the silence that followed, I happened to glance upwards. Slabs of reflected light from the marina were undulating on the ceiling. Distracting, hypnotic, oddly sensual, it was almost as if a belly dancer was performing in the room.
‘Drones,’ I said again.
The man with the glasses wanted to know who I had come into contact with since arriving in the Blue Quarter for the second time. He would be needing a list of names and places, he said – an inventory, in other words, of every one of my encounters. I brought my eyes back down from the ceiling. I didn’t have the slightest intention of betraying Owen or Rhiannon – or any other member of the community for that matter. No one was getting any names and places out of me.
‘Well?’ said the man with the glasses.
I had been in a shipwreck, I told him. I had nearly drowned. On reaching land, I had been exhausted and bewildered. I’d had no idea where I was. Though I had almost certainly met people, I didn’t know who they were or where they lived.
But he would not give up. ‘What about the route you took?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shouted. ‘Are you deaf?’
Taking a deep breath, then letting the air out through his nose, the man shut down his computer. He glanced briefly at his colleague. The fleshy man’s face showed no discernible expression.
Even though I couldn’t recall any of the people to whom I had been exposed, the man with the glasses said, it was likely that I had been contaminated as a result. He would therefore be recommending a series of tests to determine the exact nature and degree of that contamination. He consulted his watch. Testing would begin at midday.
I slept poorly that night. Each time I woke up, my pillow would be hot, and when I lifted my head all I could see was a pale oblong hanging in the darkness. Guards had shown me to a small windowless room – a ‘secure unit’, as they called it – in the basement of the Ministry. There was a narrow bed, with sheets that smelled sharply of bleach, as though certain of my predecessors had soiled themselves. There was also a sink and a toilet, both made of metal. In the top half of the door was a single pane of reinforced glass. Once I had established where I was, I would turn my pillow over, cool side facing up, and then lie back. So the authorities had finally caught up with me … I couldn’t work out who the informer was. The woman who ran the hotel, perhaps. Or that sweaty waiter at the restaurant. Or perhaps De Vere had had good reason to be paranoid: if the police were keeping him under surveillance, as he suspected, then they couldn’t have failed to notice me. I remembered De Vere’s missing friend and wondered if I should be frightened.
Thoughts came to me one at a time, with no great urgency.
At midday I was taken to a room that resembled a laboratory. There were no windows here either, just pale-green walls and the steady rush of air through ventilation grilles. A technician asked me to remove my shirt, then she proceeded to wire me up to a number of machines. I was being put through various psychological tests, she said, but they would be monitoring my physiological responses at the same time, everything from heart rate and blood pressure to galvanic skin response, muscle tension and brain activity. Data of this kind added to the clarity of the picture that emerged.
I nodded.
‘We do pretty much the same where I come from.’
Though she gave me a smile, she didn’t seem remotely interested in the fact that I’d been involved in work that was similar to hers.
I spent most of the day in that room. To start with, I took a test designed to map out the basic structure of my personality. This was followed by a written paper, comprising several hundred true/false statements, which would allow the authorities to make predictions about my future behaviour. Later came the visual tests. In responding to a series of pictures, I would unconsciously reveal the kinds of ways in which I interacted with the world around me. In the middle of the afternoon I was allowed an hour’s break, during which I ate lunch in the Ministry canteen.
After the break, my levels of fear, anxiety and depression were assessed. Finally, towards seven o’clock, I was moved to a different room. I noted the seascapes on the walls, the scatter cushions, the stacks of monthly magazines. The atmosphere had been carefully constructed so as to prevent subjects feeling nervous or threatened. In the subsequent ‘diagnostic’ interview I was required to react to a sequence of questions and statements which were intended to tap into my emotions. My responses were so full of anger that I felt transparent. I couldn’t pretend the anger wasn’t there, though, and I couldn’t seem to disguise it either.
By the time I had completed everything that was asked of me, it was late in the evening and I could hardly keep my eyes open. They took me back to my room. I didn’t have much of an appetite, but they brought me supper anyway. Not long afterwards I went to bed. My tests would be processed overnight, they had told me, then I would see a psychological assessment officer who would inform me not only of the findings but of any action that might be taken as a result.
Since they had such a dramatic effect on people’s lives, and since they dealt with these people face to face, psychological assessment officers were routinely subjected to considerable levels of pressure and stress, and it was no wonder, perhaps, if they were prone to delusions of grandeur, and no wonder if, from time to time, they became brittle and over-sensitive. Like plants growing in rarefied conditions, they tended to assume unusual or even distorted forms, and Dr Maurice Gilbert, whom I saw at five o’clock the following afternoon, was no exception. He had the doughy, etiolated look of someone who seldom ventured outdoors. Only his hair had flourished: glossy, thick, oxblood in colour, he wore it swept back and a little too long, a sure sign that it was a feature of which he was inordinately proud.
‘It’s not often,’ he mused from behind his desk, ‘that somebody leaves the Red Quarter for the Blue Quarter. I mean, why would anyone do that? Life’s supposed to be so harmonious over there, so full of purpose and good cheer – so perfect …’
I let my eyes drift past him to the window. The blinds had been lowered, though, and the slats were tilted shut. There was no view.
‘But perhaps it’s too perfect,’ Gilbert continued. ‘Perhaps one craves a little discord, a little mess. Perhaps, in the end, we tire of harmony.’ He adjusted one of his gold cufflinks, then leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, I’ve often thought that I belonged in the Red Quarter, but the results never came out quite right. It’s almost as if the tests we use aren’t capable of picking up the nuances that make us what we are, as if our methods of assessment simply aren’t fine enough. Have you ever had that feeling, Mr Parry, that our procedures, our techniques, are failing us?’
I thought at first that he might be trying to trick me into admitting something, but then I realised that the question had been rhetorical. Wholly preoccupied with himself, Gilbert was in love with the sound of his own voice, and he would need nothing from me except an occasional prompting.
‘It sounds strange to say it,’ he went on, ‘possibly even a touch arrogant’ – and his eyes veered towards me, and he let out an abrupt, abbreviated sound, not unlike a dog’s bark – ‘but we know ourselves, don’t we? Surely we know ourselves better than all this’ – and he looked around the room – ‘all this cumbersome machinery with which we surround ourselves?’
I smothered a yawn, but once again I chose not to reply. My patience was running out. I didn’t know how much more of Gilbert I could stand.
‘However,’ he said, and he rose to his feet with a finger raised, as if warning me not to jump to any conclusions, and then began to pace up and down in front of the drawn blinds, ‘the machines, the tests, the inventories – they’re all we have at the moment, poor creatures that we are. At times, you know, I can’t help feeling that we live in
an impossibly primitive age, and that future generations will look back at us and laugh.’ Staring at the carpet, he shook his head and smiled ruefully. ‘Still, that’s the way the system works – at this point in history, anyway – and if I find it primitive, well, who am I? Who’s going to listen to me?’
‘Nobody,’ I said.
Gilbert’s head came up sharply, and his eyes narrowed a fraction as he peered across the room at me. Until that moment, for reasons I didn’t completely understand, he had been treating me as an accomplice, a kind of ally, but now he saw that I was actually the enemy. I watched him return to his desk and flip through my case notes. I could restrain myself no longer.
‘Look, it’s obvious you’re going to send me to the Yellow Quarter,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you stop playing games and just get on with it?’
Gilbert had paused with the corner of a page between finger and thumb, and he was looking up at me. The lower half of his face appeared to have swollen slightly, as though he was concealing an entire plum inside his mouth.
‘The Yellow Quarter?’ he said. ‘Oh no. We’re not sending you there.’
Chapter Six
They had ushered us on to a coach, fourteen of us, all adults, and we were heading east along the Orbital, an old motorway which circled the four capitals and which was only used by vehicles in transit. Sitting across the aisle from me was a woman of about my own age, perhaps a little older, her clothes expensive but severe, like those of a solicitor. In the bus station she had cried openly, her whole body shaking, but there had been another woman with her, a counsellor of some kind, and I hadn’t wanted to interfere. Though she didn’t appear to be crying now, she had one hand over her eyes. The other was loosely closed around a tissue.
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