Thank God for that. Thank God.
Chapter Eight
She ran ahead of me, her hair and coat-tails flapping. Snow poured into the gap between us. We passed to the left of a church, its roof partly gone, its stone floor open to the sky. There were other buildings, ancient-looking, some with walls still standing, some torn down to their foundations. Through a hedge and into a garden, the grass waist-high. Buildings here too. More recent. Tall chimneys, narrow windows. All in a state of disrepair. I looked round, eyes half-closed against the swirling snow. I thought I could hear men’s voices, but the men themselves weren’t visible.
We had reached the back of a house, the whole wall hidden behind a screen of vines and creepers. The girl heaved on a door and pushed me inside. Brick steps led down to a cellar. The smell of cold ashes and mouse-droppings. The faintest memory of candle wax. She motioned for me to follow, then parted a frayed curtain to reveal a second door, the wood untreated, dark as peat. She bolted it behind us and started up a narrow staircase. I could only tell where she was by listening to her footsteps on the bare boards. Once, a light flared in my head and I saw a hand splayed on the earth, pale as something that had just been disinterred, and I knew that it belonged to Lum, even though I couldn’t see any other part of her.
At last we came out into a room with a low ceiling and a single round window. There was no view, only a tangle of greenery, the snow a constant slanting movement just beyond. Again the girl bolted the door behind us, then she went to the window and put her face close to the criss-crossing bars. I squatted on my haunches, my heart beating so hard that it seemed to shake my whole body. Blood sizzled in my ears. They were still out there, all the rest of them.
The girl turned from the window. ‘Do you know who I am?’
I stared at her. It had gone all blank inside me. All hollow.
‘You don’t remember me, do you.’
What was she saying?
‘Can you talk?’ She moved towards me, knelt in front of me. I felt her eyes searching my face. All hollow. Just a space. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s not important.’
I’m sorry, I said inside my head.
‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now. You’re going to be all right.’ She placed her hand over mine. I was aware of its weight, its heat. ‘They’ll never find us here. It’s too rundown, too overgrown. There are too many rooms. They’ll lose interest. I know what they’re like.’
That’s not what I’m frightened of, I said inside my head.
She couldn’t hear a thing, of course, and yet she held herself quite still as she looked at me, and her look didn’t waver, not for a moment. She didn’t even seem to blink. She had lines in the thin skin below her eyes, which made me think that she had slept too little in her life, or seen too much. ‘You really don’t recognise me, do you?’ She tucked a strand of her bracken-coloured hair behind her ear. ‘Well, maybe it’s no wonder,’ she added, half to herself.
Faint cries reached me from outside. The window was a mouth belonging to someone in great pain.
‘Listen to me,’ the girl said.
I was receiving images of mud and roots, a clearing in the woods, and all from ground-level, as if my face had been forced sideways into the dirt. Men stood round me, a boy too. Thick fingers held his shoulder. A dog panted in my ear, its breathing coarse and hot. Far above me, out of reach, I saw a tree’s branches shifting against a darkening sky, and it was beautiful up there, and quiet, a kind of paradise. I was seeing through the eyes of one of my companions, a person was calling out to me, and there was nothing I could do.
‘Listen,’ the girl said.
And she began to speak to me. She had been with me all along, she said. She had made her share of mistakes. She had been too slow sometimes, too indecisive, which was only to be expected, perhaps, and once or twice she had lost me altogether. But when I slipped just now. When I fell. That was her. She’d pushed me.
What are you saying? I said inside my head.
There had been someone right behind me, she told me. One of them. I shouldn’t worry, though. Everything would be fine now. She was going to take me home. That was why she had appeared. That was what she did.
I still didn’t understand.
Later, she withdrew into the middle of the room, an elbow cupped in the palm of one hand, the fingers curled against her chin. She needed to go out for supplies, she said. I would have to stay put. I wasn’t to leave the room, not under any circumstances. She moved towards a second door, which I hadn’t noticed until that moment. Still sitting on the ground, I drew my knees up to my chest, then laid my forearms over them and lowered my head.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You rest for a while.’
The door closed behind her. Her footsteps receded.
As soon as she had gone, I began to doubt her existence. She seemed so convenient – too good to be true. Had I invented a saviour for myself? Was the only kindness imaginary?
Dusk crept into the room as though it, too, were seeking refuge.
The last of the light picked out a cobweb, its fragile hammock slung high up in one corner. The smell of earth grew stronger, earth that had never seen the sun.
When I finally heard noises, I flattened myself against the wall, expecting men with weapons. The door opened. The girl backed into the room. She had a rucksack over her shoulder, and she was dragging some lengths of material. Velvet, she said. She thought they might have been curtains. She had found a few hessian sacks as well. If we used the sacks as a kind of mattress, she said, we could pull the curtains over us like blankets and it might just be enough to keep us warm. She was sorry she’d been so long. She hoped I hadn’t worried.
While I arranged the bedding on the floor, she opened her rucksack and unpacked a wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread with a jagged crust. There was also a brown-paper bag filled with apples, some pickled onions in a jar and a flask of wine shaped like a teardrop. We could not risk a candle, she said. Someone might see it from outside. We made do with the dim glow that filtered through the window, starlight reflecting off the snow.
She watched as I washed the food down with gulps of rough red wine.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’
After we had eaten, she wrapped up the rest of the food and put it in her rucksack, which she hung on a nail behind the door. Undoing my boots, I climbed into the bed and lay down on my side, one hand beneath my cheek. I was still receiving pictures. They belonged to the operating theatre or the mortuary, the bloodshed casual, plenteous. My whole body flinched each time they came.
She gave me something she called dwale. She kept it in a small glass bottle that she wore on a cord around her neck. The liquid tasted of alcohol and stale herbs. It would help to calm me, she said. I watched her settle beside me, on her back.
Night had filled the room. The darkness of her face against the lesser darkness of the air. Her even breathing. A silence had descended, a silence that didn’t necessarily mean peace. Through the window came the smell of snow. Clean, vaguely metallic. Like stainless steel.
My mouth had dried up. I had no spit.
Though the cries had stopped, I could still hear them.
I was exhausted, and yet I couldn’t seem to sleep – or if I did drift off for a while I was always on the verge of witnessing some terrible atrocity, violence the like of which I had never imagined before, let alone encountered. In my dreams people kept telling me not to look. If I didn’t look, they told me, I would be all right. But I couldn’t help looking. There was a part of me that was inquisitive, perhaps, or weak-willed, or even missing altogether. I was the woman who became a pillar of salt. The warrior who turned to stone.
All night she lay beside me, and I drew comfort from the warmth and nearness of her body. When the cold of the floor rose up through the layers of sacking, I pressed myself against her, the backs of her thighs on my lap, her hair in my mouth. She didn’t seem to mind. As for me, I was
used to sleeping next to strangers. I’d been doing it for weeks.
At some point she realised I was still awake and started telling me a story.
‘The night you were taken from your family,’ she said, ‘was the night I came into the world.’
I stared at her, wondering how she knew that, but she didn’t notice. She was looking at the ceiling, her profile showing as the finest of silver lines.
She had been born on a houseboat, which was where her parents had lived back then. Her father worked as a lock-keeper. At midnight, when she was five hours old, she had opened her eyes for the first time. It had been snowing all evening.
It was raining where I was, I said inside my head.
Her mother wrapped her in a shawl and held her up to the window. She had watched the snowflakes come showering out of the sky like white flowers, snowflakes landing on the canal and vanishing. She had no memories of that night – her parents had told her about it later, when she was older – but she sometimes wondered whether that was where it all began.
Where what began? I said inside my head.
The first time it happened, she had been standing on the towpath. She remembered the warm air on her bare arms, the drowsy sound of bees humming. It must have been summer. She couldn’t have been more than four or five. A dandelion floated out over the still green water. She had only stared at the delicate, almost transparent ball of seeds for a few moments, but when she returned to herself again she was standing on the other side of the canal. She had a tickle in her nose, as if she might be about to sneeze, and both her feet were wet. She began to cry. Her father appeared on the deck of the houseboat, his face the colour of a peeled apple. How did you get over there, Odell? She had no words for what she’d done.
After that, she kept ending up in strange places. She learned to look forward to the lost seconds, the thrilling, inexplicable journey from where she was to somewhere else. She would feel powerful yet passive. Years later, she had the same sensation on a funfair ride, the way the car whirled her backwards in a tight curve, a motion that was slow at first, oddly hydraulic, then high-speed, blurry, irresistible. She couldn’t always regulate it, though, certainly not in the beginning. Sometimes it took her by surprise, like the afternoon she stepped outside during a gale and her mother found her as the sun was setting, two miles down the towpath and halfway up a tree.
Under the velvet my body jerked, tension leaving my muscles at long last.
One day she went walking with her parents in the fields near the canal. The wind was blowing hard again, and she had lifted her arms away from her sides and leaned against it, as if it were a wall. Then she was gone. Her parents had been looking at her when it happened, waiting for her to catch up with them. In the next moment they heard her calling from the far end of the field. Though it scared them half to death, it also came as something of a relief. In the past they had often been at a loss to explain her movements, but now, perhaps, they had an answer. She should protect her gift, they told her. Keep it to herself. She did the opposite, of course.
I was falling away. Sinking. A light object dropping through thick liquid.
The trouble was, she had never been popular at school. Her looks seemed to unnerve people. They could never tell what she was thinking. To try and win them over, she started doing tricks. Once, while in the company of two girls from her class, she used a gust of wind to transport her from the school playground to the roof of the bicycle shed. Up here, she shouted. I’m up here. The girls wouldn’t have anything to do with her after that. They claimed she’d hypnotised them. All they would talk about was her weird eyes. Green, they said, but black too, somehow, like fir trees planted too close together. Black like a forest. And her face as well, the freckles. It made them think of one of those roadsigns in the country that people have fired guns at –
I woke to see bright fragments lying on the floor. Despite the barred window and its mask of vines and creepers, the sun had managed to penetrate the room. I turned in the bed. The girl’s eyes slid open.
‘You slept,’ she said.
I sat up and yawned, the memory of her story still with me. It seemed to have been addressed to the naive or credulous side of me. It appeared to be testing my ability to suspend my disbelief. But maybe that was the whole point. She had claimed to be capable of extraordinary things. I was supposed to have faith in her.
She had been out, she said, just before dawn. The men had gone. As for my friends …
I rose to my feet and walked into the corner of the room. I found a cobweb that spanned both walls and pushed gently at the sticky threads. They had surprising resilience. Behind me, the girl had fallen silent, aware that I had heard enough. When she spoke again, she approached the subject from a different angle.
We would have to lie low, she said. Let things settle. In the meantime, she had a change of clothes for me. It wouldn’t be wise to be dressed as one of the White People, not at the moment. If I wanted to wash, there was a water-butt outside. I turned to face her. She was sitting on the faded velvet, lacing up her boots.
Yes, I said inside my head. I’d like to wash.
She handed me a bag containing the clothes, then she unbolted the door. I followed her down the staircase and into the cellar. While she looked outside, to make sure there was nobody around, I stared at the walls. I’d just noticed the graffiti. Genitals, both male and female, all highly exaggerated.
‘Originally this would have been a guest-house for the priory,’ the girl said. ‘Later, it became the vicarage. The vicar was moved out during the Rearrangement.’ She was standing just inside the room, shaking water off her hands. ‘After he went, the place was taken over by the military. They trained border guards here. You can see what kind of people they must have been.’ Her eyes drifted across the walls without showing any expression. ‘I don’t know why they left. Maybe the novelty wore off. It’s been empty for a while now.’ She glanced at me. ‘You go and wash if you like. I’ll wait here.’
The hinges let out a croak as I pushed the door open.
It was the most perfect morning. Beneath a blue sky the snow had the restrained glitter of caster sugar, and it lay evenly on everything, the branches of the trees half white, half black. The air had absolute clarity and crispness; simply to stand and breathe felt like a luxury. I thought I could hear the trickle of a stream, but it might have been the river on the far side of the field – or perhaps the snow had already started melting. There was a tension to the stillness, as if the beauty of the day could not be sustained for long.
I moved to the water-butt and stripped off my white garments. Spattered with mud, ashes and dried blood, they stood out quite distinctly against the snow. I kicked off one boot, then the other. They lay there awkwardly like a pair of crows that had been shot in mid-air and then plummeted to earth. Bending over the barrel, I brought handful after handful of water to my face. The cold made me gasp. My skin stung. The ring that hung around my neck knocked against the barrel’s lip as I leaned forwards. My fingers soon went numb. I took care not to lift my eyes towards the ridge. I didn’t want to think about what had happened there.
I dried myself on my undershirt, then dressed in the clothes the girl had given me – jeans, a black sweater, thick wool socks and a cheap brown leather coat. I felt in my cloak pocket. It was empty. The key to the front door of the Cliff was gone. So was the lighter and the book of dreams. I must have lost them when I fell. Still fastened to my wrist, though, was my watch, the one that didn’t tell the time. I pulled my boots back on, then folded up the cloak.
When I walked back into the cellar, the girl glanced round, and a single ray of sun reached through a broken pane high in the wall, lighting up her face. I understood what her classmates had meant about her eyes. They were neither black nor green, and yet both colours were involved, somehow.
‘Let’s go back up,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’
Like peasants from another period of history, we breakfasted on bread, ch
eese, pickled onions and red wine. While we ate and drank, the girl outlined her plan. We were deep in the Yellow Quarter, so there was no easy option. If we travelled south and luck was on our side, we could reach the Red Quarter in four or five days. It might be dangerous, but it would be better than heading east and crossing into the Green Quarter, where the authorities were probably still looking for me. Also, we would only have to cross one border, not two. We would have to pretend to be a couple, though. A choleric couple. Had I seen how they behaved? No? Well, the beauty of it was I didn’t need to talk. The kind of man she had in mind was more likely to hit a woman than speak to her. The women tended to nag and moan, while the men just grunted or read the papers.
‘That’s all you have to do,’ she said. ‘Ignore me. You can do that, can’t you?’
I nodded slowly. Of course I could ignore her. I didn’t know her. When we first arrived in the room, she’d asked if I remembered her. What was that about? I still had no idea.
After breakfast she suggested a game of draughts to pass the time. I scratched out a board on the floor with a stone while she went to look for objects we could use as pieces. She returned with some chunks of burnt wood and fragments of stained glass, all of which she had collected in the church. We played for most of the morning, and I didn’t win once.
In the middle of the day she had to go out again for provisions. I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. It was a way of protecting myself from the images that were appearing in my head, images that were graphic, almost medical. Also, if I stayed awake, I would only worry. What if something were to happen to her? I didn’t believe I could survive by myself. Not out here. Without her, I would be dead – or worse.
I slept fitfully, but the images still came, disguised as dreams.
She returned with cold sausage, bread, pickled cabbage and more red wine, but she seemed different, more preoccupied, and we ate in silence. The light gradually faded, the room darkening long before the world outside.
Divided Kingdom Page 34
