Divided Kingdom

by Rupert Thomson

  As the woman squirmed, something fell from beneath her cloak and rolled across the floor. It was a large carrot. The guard with the newspaper picked it up. ‘Fuck me. She’s got her own vibrator.’ He tossed the carrot to one of his colleagues. ‘You know what to do.’ The guards dragged the woman over to the desk. Shoving the phones and faxes to one side, they pushed her on to her back and held her down. They lifted the cloak over her head, then forced her legs wide open and ripped her sodden underclothes apart. Her thighs were red and chapped. As I turned away, the woman let out the most peculiar noise, a kind of long, shuddering sigh.

  ‘Think she’s enjoying it?’

  ‘Of course she is. Just look at her.’

  I hadn’t wanted to watch, but once or twice I glanced in that direction, and I realised that I was smiling. It could only be nervousness, I thought, or fear.

  The guard with the paper noticed and moved towards me. ‘Like it, do we?’ He brought his face so close to mine that I could smell the coffee, black and bitter, on his breath.

  I grinned like the idiot I was supposed to be.

  He reached up with one hand and pushed his fingers into my mouth. ‘Nice teeth.’ His tongue slipped out, blind and fat and glistening. He licked my lips and, sighing languorously, turned his eyes up to the ceiling. Then he danced backwards, burst out laughing. ‘Where’s that carrot?’

  A shrill ringing cut into the silence.

  One of the guards let go of the woman and picked up a phone. ‘Yes?’ He listened for a second or two, then shouted across the room. ‘Lieutenant, it’s for you.’

  The guard leaned close to me again. ‘It’s for me.’ He lifted both his eyebrows twice, quickly, and swung away. Shaking now, I watched him take the call. After a while, he wrapped his free hand over the receiver and spoke to his two colleagues in a brisk, clipped voice I hadn’t heard until that moment. ‘Get rid of them.’

  We were pushed out of the guardhouse and down the steps, the door slamming behind us. Seconds later, it opened again, and something flew in a brief bright arc over our heads. I watched the woman retrieve the carrot, wipe it clean and return it to a hidden pocket beneath her clothes. She saw me looking and nodded, as if to let me know that what she was doing was only right and proper. Still trembling, I stared at the ground. The rain had eased just when I wanted it to come down harder than ever. I wanted to feel the water crashing against my skull. I wanted to be able to lift my face up to the sky and have the rain wash off every trace of that guard’s tongue.

  I remembered Frank Bland talking about the borders that had been built on negative ley lines – black streams, he had called them – and how the trees and plants in those areas sometimes displayed warped or stunted growth. If people crossed such a border, he had claimed, their health could be adversely affected. If people worked there, though, day in, day out, then surely the effects would be that much more pronounced. Did Frank’s theory explain the scene I’d witnessed in the guard-house? Or was it our freedom that incensed them so? Yes, we were outcasts and rejects, but at the same time we could go wherever we pleased; moreover, in being cut loose from society, we had been liberated from the pressures and responsibilities of daily life. Perhaps, at some deep level, people were envious of that. Hence all the persecution … As I stood there wondering, I felt a surge of malignant energy in the air around me and I glanced at my companions to see if they had noticed, but their faces looked the way they always looked – complacent, unaware.

  The bearded man had already moved beyond the barrier into the Yellow Quarter, and the other two were following behind. I set off after them. They didn’t appear especially troubled by their ordeal. Even the woman seemed quite unconcerned. Was that because they had become accustomed to abuse? Had they, in some obscure sense, prepared themselves, conscious that it was the Yellow Quarter they would be dealing with? Or were they simply incapable of feeling? And, if so, had they been incapable of feeling all along? Was that part of what made them who they were? Or had they gradually been rendered numb by the endless horrors to which they had been subjected? I looked at the man walking ahead of me, his teeth and gums so ravaged that it often hurt him to eat or drink. On those days, the woman would chew up food for him and spit the pulp into his mouth, like a bird feeding her young. I shuddered to think how he might have come by such injuries. The hardest part of all, however, was not having a voice. I couldn’t ask them questions. I could express no sympathy. What did they think – if anything? I would never know.

  For the rest of that day we moved with real urgency, and I wondered whether there might not, after all, be some desire on the part of my companions to put distance between themselves and what had happened at the border. At the same time it implied a knowledge of the territory. We had entered a place where one did all one could to avoid confrontation. To convey a sense of purpose, even to look as though one had a destination in mind, was to engage in a form of self-defence.

  We had crossed into the northern reaches of the Yellow Quarter, which was less densely populated, but we still couldn’t seem to get away from the roads, at least not to begin with. We walked on grass verges, in ditches, along hard shoulders, and the traffic hissed past us, endless traffic. People would blast their horns at us, or wind their windows down and jeer, and once a can of beer came cartwheeling through the air and struck the bearded man on the point of his elbow. After that, he held his arm across his chest, but he wore the same expression as before, his chin lifted upwards and a little to one side, his dusty-looking eyes unfocused, as if he was listening to distant music.

  By late afternoon we were approaching the outskirts of a city, the main road lined with car showrooms, designer-clothing outlets and fast-food restaurants. Our shadows appeared on the pavement before us like dark predictions. I looked over my shoulder. The sun had dropped out of a mass of shabby cloud, giving off an orange light that seemed unnatural, diseased. It was time to sleep. We started searching the yards and alleys behind the shops for bedding. We found several sheets of plastic in a skip and shook off the rainwater, then we carried them into the corner of a car-park and settled in the long grass up against a wire-mesh fence. I listened to the lorries pulling in – the clash of gears, the sneeze of brakes – and heard the drivers shouting at each other, trading insults and dirty jokes.

  Over the past few days, as we journeyed south-east across the moors of the Green Quarter, then west towards the border, I had been observing my companions and I had begun to form a theory. I had noticed certain sounds recurring, and made a point of recording how and when they were used. Created almost exclusively from consonants, they had an abrupt, glottal character. The sound ‘Ng’, for instance, was used in relation to the man with the sore mouth, and I wondered if this might not be a name the White People had given him. Once I’d had that idea, I turned my attention to the bearded man and quickly discovered a sound that was applied to him, a sound best represented by the word ‘Ob’. Likewise, ‘Lm’ was often employed around the woman, its comparative softness a subtle, almost poignant acknowledgement of her gender. Since crossing the border that afternoon, I had started using these curious sounds myself, tentatively at first, but then with increasing confidence, and I was usually rewarded with a grunt or a glance or a jerk of the head. Once, in response to my use of the word ‘Lm’, which I pronounced Lum, the woman came out with something that sounded like ‘Gsh’. Later, the bearded man used the same sound when looking in my direction. Could it be that I had a White name now?

  The woman, Lum, was leaning over me, shaking my shoulder. It didn’t seem possible that I had slept, and yet the sky behind her head had the murky burnt-orange glow of night. I sat up and looked past her. The other two were already awake and on their feet, Neg urinating through the wire-mesh fence.

  To the north of the city we stumbled into an area of heavy industry. The landscape was strewn with the tangled paste jewellery of chemical plants. All those buildings ticking, humming, breathing. All those strings of pearly lights. And w
hite smoke blossoming in tall chimneys, like stems of night-scented stock. Beauty of a sort, but poisonous. We didn’t cover the miles with our usual efficiency. We kept tripping on debris piled up at the edge of the road, then Lum fell into a narrow culvert and damaged her leg, and we had to take turns supporting her. That slowed us even more. We slept again at dawn, as always.

  The next night we left the road for an unpaved track. As we came over a rise, I heard a strange, inhuman squabbling, and there before us lay an enormous rubbish dump with hundreds of gulls wheeling and swooping, fighting over scraps. We forced an opening in the corrugated-iron fence and began to circle the dump in a clockwise direction. On the far side, out of sight of the entrance, a bonfire had been lit, its flames sending handfuls of red sparks into the air. The woman murmured and, looking away to my left, I saw a group of pale figures emerging from a wood. By the time we reached the fire, there must have been thirty of us. We had gathered in the same place, at more or less the same time, and yet, so far as I could tell, nothing had been arranged or discussed. There had been no communication – at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. It seemed like evidence of the telepathic powers that I had always been so sceptical about.

  They sat themselves down all round the fire, and I sat with them. They nodded, muttered, scratched themselves. They prodded at the fire with bits of stick. In the side of the dump, which lifted above us like a tattered cliff-face, pieces of silver foil winked and glittered. A litre bottle was passed from hand to hand. The fumes that rose from the neck smelled floral, but the taste reminded me of gin, and I imagined for a moment that I was back in Clarise Tucker’s front room, sampling one of Starling’s deadly new concoctions. Between random bursts of animation, when the White People would either grunt or moan, a silence would fall during which they stared into the fire, apparently lost in thought. I didn’t understand what they were up to. It was like an assembly, a convocation, but of the most eccentric kind. Though our numbers had swelled, I felt more exposed, more of an outsider, and I found a stick of my own and stirred the embers in an attempt to disguise my growing sense of awkwardness.

  And then, in a flash, I had the answer. They were sending pictures to each other in their heads. They were showing them to each other as you might show photographs, except they were doing it telepathically. How did I know this? Partly it was intuition. But also, if I concentrated hard enough, if I blocked out the rest of the world, I seemed to see images that I could not explain. They were only fragments – a burning house, a frozen lake, a naked man sat backwards on a horse – but they came from somewhere quite outside my own experience. It was another form of communication, a different language altogether, and yet, given time, I felt I could become fluent. Then, perhaps, I would receive whole sequences of images. Meanwhile, I was a mere novice, with no real contribution to make. I was the person who nods and grins, even though he hasn’t got the joke.

  They stayed awake all night, only dozing off when the first blush of colour appeared in the eastern sky. In the middle of the day we moved on, travelling due north. I counted thirty-four of us. There were no children. Was that a coincidence, or was it true what I had heard, that White People were sterile? Certainly all the ones I had come across had been born either before or possibly during the Rearrangement, which lent weight to the view that they were the fall-out from that radical exercise in social engineering. The Rearrangement had been a kind of controlled explosion, sending a white-hot flash through the heads of everybody living in the country at the time. The vast majority had recovered, adapted, tried to make it work in their favour. But there were some who had been less fortunate. Their minds had been scorched; their thoughts had turned to cinders. That, at least, was the general consensus. Although I could see a certain logic in the sterility argument – how could life be created by people who were not themselves, supposedly, alive? – it also seemed rather too convenient, a piece of sophistry or wishful thinking on the part of those for whom the White People were an embarrassment. For if fertility had been destroyed, along with language and character, then the White People would die out. They would no longer be able to act as reminders of the system’s cruelties and its shortcomings. There would be no exceptions to the rule.

  That afternoon, as I watched Neg inspect a cracked wingmirror that he had picked up at the dump, I realised I had seen his face before. Not literally, of course. But I remembered that Jones had had the same expression, or lack of it, when I found him standing on one leg in that gloomy passageway. Jones had been a White Person before anybody even knew White People existed. He would have to have been one of the first. If Jones was still alive, he would probably be living among the White People, just as I was. How strange to think that I could run into him at any moment!

  After walking for several hours with a strong wind at our backs, it began to look as though we were making for a blighted area known as the Wanings. The provincial capital was Pyrexia, a city that manufactured chlorine, plastics and petrochemicals. The Yellow Quarter’s leadership had recently declared the Wanings to be ungovernable. I had heard stories of atrocities from various relocation officers, though none of them ever claimed to have actually set foot in the region.

  By the middle of the fourth day we had reached a high, barren moor. The wind had died down, and the sky, which was overcast, seemed suspended just above our heads. If you touched the clouds they would be soft, I thought, like the breast of a bird. On we went, still heading north. Our cloaks whispered across the heather.

  In the late afternoon we hauled a dead sheep out of a disused mineshaft. Luckily, it hadn’t started rotting yet, and we roasted the carcass over a peat fire. Our bellies full, we slept for longer than usual. It was almost light before we set off again.

  Although we tended to keep to the high ground, out of sight of human habitation, we would sometimes climb down to a road and look for animals that had been run over. We found plenty of rabbits and even, once or twice, a pheasant. We carried a supply of stale bread and raw vegetables with us, but the roads became, for a while at least, our chief source of food.

  We had no choice but to sleep in the open. Every six or seven hours we would huddle down, packing ourselves tightly together, like children playing sardines.

  Time began to blur.

  Once, we had to cross an eight-lane motorway. I heard it long before I saw it, a sustained but airy roar that I mistook for a waterfall. A man was hit by a truck that day. I watched his body spin, then crumple. He was dead when I reached him, one side of his head grazed and bloody, his spine smashed, the pulse in his neck nowhere to be found. The truck hadn’t even slowed down. We laid him on his back on the hard shoulder. Curiously, his hands were still moving, folding inwards, as if he wanted to touch the inside of his wrists. A woman tried to arrange blades of grass across his face, but the slipstream from the traffic kept disturbing them. In the end we had to use a piece of shredded tyre instead.

  Beyond the motorway the land turned bleaker still. Only the wind and the clumps of blackened heather and the shifting pale-yellow grasses. The further north we went, the more use we seemed to be making of the daylight hours; we had removed ourselves from society to such an extent that we no longer needed to hide. Also, there were the mineshafts, which would pose a threat if we were travelling at night. And I had seen notices warning of unexploded ammunition. At some point in the past the area must have been used as a firing-range.

  I suppose we must have been in the Yellow Quarter for about ten days when we scaled a stony ridge and then came to a halt, a wide shallow valley sprawling before us. A single road ran across the land from north to south. I couldn’t imagine who it might be for. The military, perhaps. To the west of the road lay a stretch of ground that seemed to have been dug up or turned over, and a crowd of White People had gathered there. While it looked as though we might have reached our destination at last, I couldn’t see anything in this desolate place to justify the long and perilous journey we had just undertaken.

 
We began our descent, and before too long we were on the valley floor ourselves. The White People were not in the habit of exchanging greetings. There was no embracing, for instance, no physical contact. They stood in front of each other or beside each other in a muted show of acknowledgement, or else they circled one another with their eyes lowered and their hands fidgeting among the folds of their cloaks, as if overwhelmed by a sudden attack of nerves. I could never tell whether they were renewing their acquaintance or meeting for the first time.

  I walked over to the muddy area I had seen from the ridge. It was the rough size and shape of a swimming-pool. Tyre tracks led from the road to one of the longer sides. At the far end, I saw a man on his knees. I moved towards him, curious, but not wanting to intrude. Every now and then he would lean forwards and lay his cheek tenderly against the earth. When I reached him, I nodded and murmured, an all-purpose mode of conduct that I had picked up from my three companions. The man ignored me. Staring out over the land, I thought I understood. Something had happened here.

  I returned to the main group. Lum and Neg had built a small fire by the roadside. Potatoes nestled among the embers. I squatted down and hunted through my pockets, bringing out apples and red peppers that I had found at the back of a village supermarket several days before. I also produced a few muddy beetroot, stolen from someone’s kitchen garden. Lum placed the peppers round the fringes of the fire so they would sear. Neg bit gingerly into one of the apples. As for Ob, he was gazing into the distance with his usual mystical intensity.

  Most of the White People had set up camp by now. Some even owned billy cans in which they were heating water or broth. The curved shape of the valley amplified our murmurs. Once we had eaten, though, a hush settled over us, a silence that had the patient, reverential quality of a vigil. The air itself appeared to have tightened as if, like a crisp new sheet, it had been snapped out over the mattress of the earth. I wrapped my cloak around me and lay down.