He put a hand on her shoulder, then turned and walked across the buckled forecourt, his whole body hunched against the cold. Though her tears had given him a kind of strength, he looked unequal to his surroundings; he had the air of a man who was about to be crushed by the weight of his own existence. At that moment, miraculously, a bus appeared on the road. Luke broke into the semblance of a run, waving an arm, but the bus passed smoothly by, and it was then, as his arm dropped back, that she climbed the steps to her front door and went inside.
Odell was picking at the edge of the hotel blanket. In the distance a siren swooped, then hiccuped. ‘What do you think?’ she said.
I looked up at her. I didn’t see it as a love story, despite the way it had begun. No, I saw it as more of a cautionary tale. The special substance that makes each one of us unique is finite, ethereal. It can be whittled away, almost without us knowing. It can be used up altogether. I had been so many different people during the past few weeks, and, in the end, I had been nobody at all. Odell knew that, and she was using stories from her life to try and bring me back. She wanted to return me to myself, but slowly, gently. In my own time.
‘You think it’s sad,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Who for? For me?’
For him, I said inside my head.
‘That’s right,’ she said quietly, looking out across the room.
Later, as I drifted on the edge of sleep, I heard her speak again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think too.’
The sky was ash smeared on silver where the sun was coming up. The pavements and gutters glittered with crushed beer cans and broken glass. Sunday. The city had a stunned feel to it – the temporary numbness of a dead leg. I wondered idly who had won the game. I never did find out.
We left the hotel early, just after seven, the girl on reception smothering a yawn as she handed us a copy of the bill. Most people would stay in bed until mid-morning, Odell told me, sleeping off their hangovers. It was a good day to be travelling. We bought bacon sandwiches and cups of tea from a café near the station, then set off along a main road that led south. I kept my face twisted into a permanent scowl and chewed sullenly on a wad of gum. I was thinking of my brief stay in Athanor, and how my cuts and bruises had protected me. If I looked dangerous enough, I’d be safe. That was the theory, anyway.
The bars were still open. Every once in a while, a drunk would stagger towards us, hands aloft and twitching in some mad semaphore, but we automatically crossed the road before any of them got close. Their curses reached us like the light from distant stars – faint messages from a world already superseded, left behind. We no longer needed to look at each other, Odell and I. We had a kind of understanding now. I swept my eyes from side to side, constantly aware of my environment. At the same time I walked through it all as though none of it could touch me.
By dusk my lungs felt tight with the exhaust fumes I had been forced to breathe, and my feet ached from walking on nothing but paving-stones and tarmac for hour after hour, and I let out a sigh when Odell, who seemed tireless, finally announced that we’d be stopping for the night.
She had chosen a place called the Hot Hotel, the word Hot glowing on and off like brake lights in a traffic-jam. To reach reception, which was located one floor up, we had to walk down an alley that ran along one side of the building. We were given a room on the third floor, with a circular bed and an orange shag-pile carpet. It had the atmosphere of somewhere that was rented by the hour, and if I turned my head fast enough I seemed to glimpse the shady outlines of those who had preceded us. Access to the room was from an open-air walkway or corridor. I leaned on the parapet, looking out over an all-night service station and a supermarket car-park. Opposite the service station I could see a strip club called the Tinder Box. Sometimes I wanted to question the wisdom of Odell’s decisions, but I wasn’t sure I had the right. Maybe she had been drawn by the number of people around, which would lend us a certain anonymity. She had already saved me once, I thought. Probably I should have more faith in her.
In fact, she had saved me a second time that afternoon. We had been walking along a main road, its four lanes packed with cars. To our left, some fifty feet below us, lay a river, its waters viscous, thick as soup. At one point, Odell had spotted a public toilet. It was in a shopping centre on the other side of the road. She told me to wait. She’d only be a moment. No sooner had she disappeared than I sensed something close by, a kind of force or pressure. Half turning, I saw a boy’s face on a level with my elbow, his eyes dark-brown and startled-looking, his teeth bared. Then my arm jerked backwards and the bag with my white clothes in it was gone. At the same time I felt hands reaching into all my pockets. I swung round. A dozen children swarmed on the pavement behind me, some as young as five or six. The boy who had snatched my bag was making off down a steep slope to the river. The others followed.
For a few seconds I saw the world as if through soundproof glass.
A concrete landscape. Sky creamy with pollution.
Then the sounds flowed back – the rush of traffic, the roar of yet another unknown city – and I was running towards the river. At the water’s edge the boys had already spread the contents of my bag out on the ground. Without thinking, I swooped down and took hold of the bag, together with my cloak, my long johns and my undershirt, then started up the slope again. The boys came after me, their voices shrill and jagged. Somehow I was aware of the smallness of the hands that pushed and pulled at me. Since I was clutching my possessions, though, I was powerless to defend myself. As I regained the pavement I saw Odell threading her way through the traffic towards me. She produced an aerosol and sprayed something into the faces of the two boys who were nearest. They doubled over, howling, hands pressed against their eyes. The other boys fell back. They watched us for a while from a distance, as though contemplating a second assault, and then turned reluctantly away. They would find richer pickings elsewhere, perhaps. Or less resistance. I began to tremble uncontrollably. ‘You were lucky not to get hurt,’ Odell told me. ‘Those gangs of kids, they often carry knives – or guns.’ She gave me a hard, steady look. ‘Next time, let it go.’ Later, she relaxed and smiled. ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to take you with me.’
Yes, I thought as I stood on the walkway, looking out over the car-park, I should probably have more faith in her.
We both had showers. Then, once we were dressed, Odell took me to the bar on the ground floor. It was still fairly early, and there was almost no one there, just an older couple on the dance floor at the back, shuffling beneath maroon and purple disco lights. While Odell ordered our drinks, I sat in a booth and let my eyes drift through the interior, trying to convey a sulky indifference to everything I saw. I stared at the couple, who seemed glued together. The woman had her eyes closed, and her head rolled on the man’s shoulder as though attached to her body by a piece of string. Their dancing bore no relation to the music, which was upbeat, corny, before my time.
Odell came back with two double brandies. When I seemed surprised that she knew what I drank, she told me we’d had brandy on a train, in late November. Again I thought back, but no matter how often or how hard I tried, I could never match what she said with anything that I’d experienced.
She smiled. ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’
It was part of her gift, she told me. She knew how to make herself unmemorable. A skill she had developed over the years was to shake hands without leaving the slightest impression. As she offered her hand, she simultaneously withdrew from it, retreating into the most distant part of herself, both physically and mentally. She had done it to me on the train to Aquaville, she said, and at the conference as well, a couple of weeks before.
‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ She shook her head and reached for her drink. ‘I must be better than I thought.’
And she started telling me her story, which was also my story, of course. She had first
met me, very briefly, at the cocktail party in the Concord Room – though she had used her gift to ‘absent herself’, as she put it. She’d been officially assigned to keep me under observation until I returned to the Red Quarter. Little did she know, at that point, how long the assignment was going to last! She had flown to Congreve, just as I had, her seat two rows in front of mine. She had watched the fireworks, and attended the banquet afterwards. When the bomb went off, she was in a club in the basement of the hotel, socialising with some other delegates. ‘As I told you once before,’ she said with a crafty grin. Anyway, they were all evacuated on the spot. Later, she slipped through a police cordon and found me on the fourteenth floor, walking back towards my room – walking in the wrong direction, in other words. It was enough to prompt her to call Adrian Croy, who immediately switched her role to that of ‘shadow’. Though I’d hitched a number of lifts that night, she was able to keep track of me. She sat behind me as I ate breakfast in that out-of-the-way transport café. She followed me as I climbed up into the hills. She stood at my shoulder during the burning of the animals, an event that had given her bad dreams. Afterwards, I had vanished into the crowd, and she was still trying to locate me when the riot squad arrived. In the ensuing chaos she had lost her favourite piece of jewellery. A ring. By the time she secured her release, I was already making for the coast –
Odell was still talking, but I had stopped listening. I slipped a hand inside my shirt and felt for the ring I wore around my neck. So you don’t drift too far… With an inscription like that, I should have guessed it would belong to a phlegmatic. Undoing the knot, I freed the ring and held it out to her. At first, in the dim light of the bar, she didn’t seem to recognise it. Then, slowly, she reached out and took it from me. For a long time she said nothing, her head lowered, then she lifted her eyes to mine.
‘That’s a miracle,’ she said.
I watched her slide the ring on to her finger.
‘The strangest thing about it is,’ she said, ‘it proves I was telling you the truth.’
We had more drinks to celebrate the return of the ring, which to my mind now linked us inextricably, and it was while Odell was buying another round, our third or fourth, that I overheard a man at the bar ask if she would dance with him. Odell told him she was sorry, but she was with someone. He seemed to be friendly with the bartender, who was also the manager of the hotel, because they exchanged a few words and laughed, then the man came over to the booth where I was sitting. He wore black jeans and a leather belt with a metal vulture for a buckle. His boots were crocodile-skin, and their toes were so sharp that he could have dipped one of them in ink and written with it. I thought of the book Victor had made. What stories would these boots have told?
‘You with her?’
He had lifted a hand, his thumb angled back over his shoulder, but I knew better than to look where he was pointing. I didn’t meet his gaze either. Instead, I stared at his other hand, which hung against his hip, the fingers curling and uncurling as if they were trying to work themselves loose.
‘You don’t mind if I have a dance with her, do you?’
Though the disco was still going on, a silence had risen underneath it, which made the music seem strident and hollow. We were only seconds away from the type of situation Odell had warned me about. I put my glass down and stood up. The man stepped back. He was probably hoping he would have to defend himself. He probably wanted a fight even more than a dance. His flexing fingers would not be satisfied until that happened. But I just walked around him and moved towards the exit. I didn’t touch him or brush against him, didn’t even acknowledge his presence. He could have been a column or a pillar. I could have been walking in my sleep. As I pushed the door open, he started to say something, his voice pitched high in disbelief, but I let the door slam behind me, cutting off his sentence halfway through.
Outside, a drizzle was coming down. I hurried round the corner and along the alley to the hotel. Cars hissed by on the main road as if they were carrying snakes. When I reached our room I locked myself in, as Odell had told me to, then I sat on the edge of the bed, my eyes veering constantly towards the door. Its stillness seemed temporary, unsustainable. I kept expecting the flimsy wood to crash inwards and shower me with splinters, but I couldn’t imagine who or what would be standing in the gap. Perhaps no one, nothing. An upright box of darkness. A piece of the night.
I sat there, motionless. The minutes passed.
Once, I lifted my wrist into the air in front of me to check the time, but the watch I was wearing had no hands.
In the end, I reached for the remote. Wrestling was on. Huge men with flaxen manes bounced off each other, their bodies the colour of roast chicken. I turned the sound down. Through the wall behind me came a series of breathy rhythmic cries. At first I thought it was the people next door having sex, but it went on far too long. Somebody must have tuned in to one of the many adult channels. The wrestlers with their roasted skin, the endless mechanical orgasms – I fell into a kind of trance. So much so that when I heard a voice whisper my name I almost leapt off the bed.
I opened the door and Odell slipped past me. By the time I had locked the door again, she was in the bathroom, running the tap. I heard her spit. Standing in the bathroom doorway, I watched her wash her face and hands.
‘Don’t ask,’ she said.
There was something about her that I didn’t understand. She clearly thought of herself as strange-looking, if not actually ugly, and yet it was precisely that sense of aberrant uniqueness that drew your eye to her and held it there. I remembered what she had said about Luke, how his looks overshadowed hers. Her beauty might be reluctant or arcane, but I could see it nonetheless. And another thing. In telling Luke what she could do, she believed she’d lost her air of mystery. Maybe for him. But true mystery could not be compromised, nor could it be dissipated quite so easily. It was as much a part of her as her freckles, or the fine lines below her eyes.
She walked out of the bathroom, the tips of her hair dark and wet. As she eased off her coat and let it slump to the floor, I took her in my arms. I felt her stiffen against me – she was thinking of pushing me away, perhaps – but then, in the next moment, all the tension left her and she relaxed.
You can’t do everything, I said inside my head.
‘What are you saying?’ she said. ‘Are you saying something?’
The warmth of her breath eased through my shirt. I became aware of the parts of her that I was touching – a shoulderblade, the small of her back. I could feel her spine under my right hand, the tip of my middle finger bearing the subtle imprint of a vertebra. I was getting an erection. I hadn’t meant anything like that to happen. In the meantime she had attained a new stillness, which seemed alert somehow, as though her body were listening to mine. I kissed the top of her head, where her parting was, then I kissed the outer rim of her ear. I could smell the beer and smoke of the bar, and the smell of her clean skin underneath reminded me that when she was only a few hours old she had been held against the window of a houseboat so she could watch the snow come down. And now she did push me away.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
I don’t know, I said inside my head.
She sat on the bed. As she bent over to unlace her boots, her hair fell forwards into her eyes. I sat beside her, tucking the loose strands back behind her ears.
‘Not you as well,’ she said.
Yes, me, I said. Me more than anyone.
I leaned forwards to kiss her mouth, and she didn’t move away. Her lips were cool, much cooler than the rest of her. I wondered if she had already withdrawn, if she had – what did she call it? – ‘absented herself.’
‘Somebody said once,’ she murmured, ‘somebody said my face looked like one of those road signs in the country that people have fired shotguns at …’
I stroked the face they’d said bad things about.
She lay on the counterpane, her arms thrown backwards, bracketing her h
ead. I leaned down and pressed my lips to the milky insides of her wrists. She held herself quite still, her breathing shallow. I slowly unbuttoned her black cardigan. Underneath she was wearing a camouflage T-shirt. I untucked the T-shirt and pushed it up until I could see her stomach. I kissed the plump flesh around her belly button. A kind of vibration went through her, somewhere beneath the surface, deep down. Her heartbeat showed on the skin between her ribs, a shimmer on the drum of her body. I kissed her where the tremor was. I felt the beating of her heart against my mouth.
You’re not like any sign I’ve ever seen.
Her hand appeared as a slow blur to my left and came to rest on the back of my neck. It was my turn to go still. I waited to see what she would do next.
At that moment footsteps sounded on the walkway outside. I was hoping they would go past – there were plenty of rooms beyond ours – but they stopped and somebody knocked twice, firmly. Odell’s hand tightened in my hair. She wanted me not to move. The knocking came again, harder this time.
‘Open up.’
We lay on the bed, our faces turned towards the door.
‘I know you’re in there.’
It was the manager’s voice – the man who had served us in the bar downstairs. He rattled the door-knob, then swore under his breath. There was another silence, during which nothing happened. Finally his footsteps receded.
Odell levered herself upright. Without looking at me, she tucked her T-shirt back into her trousers, then bent quickly and did up the laces on her boots. She sat for a moment with both hands braced on her knees. She shook her head.
‘We’re going to have to leave,’ she said.
She put her coat on. Picking up a heavy glass ashtray from the top of the TV, she went over to the door and listened, then she opened it and peered out. Bag in hand, I stood behind her. Though it had stopped raining, I could hear water everywhere, dripping and tapping. The cars parked near the supermarket glistened. Out of the air came the quaint, exotic scent of petrol.
Divided Kingdom Page 37
