Divided Kingdom (11 page)

If the authorities fulfilled their side of the bargain, so did I. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my new job. As far as Marie was concerned, I was a quality engineer – I looked at companies and came up with ways of improving their performance – but in fact I was employed by a branch of the civil service that was generally considered to be the government's right arm. I worked long hours, arriving home at nine or ten at night. Most weekends, too, I could be found in the office. I had almost no social life. I went out with a girl called Alex, who was a violinist, but she ended it after three months, claiming that we hardly saw each other. Somehow I didn't question the need for such sacrifices – or rather, I always seemed able to justify them to myself. It was up to people like me, I thought, to safeguard the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. Only later did I start to understand why I might have been pushing myself so hard. I
had
to fight for the system, I
had
to believe in it, or my removal from my family would all have been for nothing.

Over the years I rose through the ranks, from a glorified filing clerk to one of a handful of people whose responsibility it was to advise on all transfers, both into and out of the country, but the big promotion came just before my thirtieth birthday. During our lunch together in the beer garden, Diana Bilal had mentioned words like psychologist and detective, hoping to capture my imagination, perhaps, and yet the word that seemed to define my new position most accurately was ‘diplomat'. A transfer was, in itself, a highly complex and delicate procedure – no one knew that better than I did – but, viewed in the wider context, it also became a matter of negotiation between two parties who didn't necessarily see eye to eye. I had to deal, on a regular basis, with people who held equivalent positions in other parts of the divided kingdom, and despite all the obvious differences in temperament and perception it was important to try and maintain good working relations. If I disputed one of their initiatives, it could be regarded as an example of Red Quarter impatience or naivety. If they disputed one of mine, I could just as easily see it as Blue Quarter dithering, Green Quarter cynicism or Yellow Quarter recklessness. The job
required flexibility and patience as well as sound judgement, and for that reason, perhaps, it was seen by some as a stepping-stone into the world of politics.

Despite all the lies and the deprivation, despite the fact that my original existence seemed buried beneath layers of artifice – not for the first time the image of Russian dolls occurred to me, my lives concealed neatly, one inside the other – despite all that, my work gave me a real sense of fulfilment. If the Red Quarter was a contented and harmonious place in which to live, it was because we, the public servants, had made it so. What's more, I had done everything I could to ensure that my new family was taken care of.

Every now and then, though, especially as I left my twenties behind and moved into my thirties, I thought back to the day when the government official arrived at Thorpe Hall in his chauffeur-driven limousine, and I remembered how he had told us that we were special, and that the fate of the kingdom rested in our hands, and unease would flash through me like a blast of heat. Had I simply become what they had wanted me to become? Was I really so malleable?

Was I the man in the chauffeur-driven limousine?

I was sitting in my office one morning, working my way through a pile of recent case histories, when I heard a knock on the door. I glanced up. The door opened, and Mr Vishram's face appeared in the gap. ‘Am I interrupting, Thomas?' Before I could reply, he had installed himself on the only other chair in the room, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose with the tip of a forefinger.

As head of the Department of Transfer and Relocation, Ajit Vishram belonged to the select high-powered group that ran the Ministry. He was also a brilliant scholar, with several works of non-fiction to his name, all of which I had read. People said that he had the ear of the Prime Minister, which wouldn't have surprised me particularly, though I had never raised the subject with him. He openly admitted to a streak of melancholy – all writers are sanguine melancholics, he would declare with a
dismissive gesture, as if something so obvious was hardly worth saying – an admission which, given his immediate working environment, was daring to say the least, but also cunningly preemptive. Though he must have been approaching sixty, he didn't have a single white hair, and if you chose to overlook the crescents of puckered, purplish skin beneath his eyes, his face was quite unmarked by age. He wore carefully tailored pale-grey suits made from a light, shiny fabric in which silk almost certainly played a part, and he carried himself with a quiet gravity that was often misconstrued as self-importance by those who didn't know him. He seemed to have no sense of the impression he created, however – or, if he did, then it simply failed to engage his interest. He was consistently both stately and impervious. I saw him as the ruler of a small, influential and untroubled country – which, in his rumoured closeness to Michael Song, he very nearly was, perhaps.

‘Are you free for lunch tomorrow?' Vishram toyed idly with the power line that led to my computer. ‘There's something I need to discuss with you.'

‘Yes, I'm free,' I said. ‘What's it about?'

He would meet me in the lobby, he said, at half-past twelve, then he rose from the chair and with a humorous glint in his dark eyes and an enigmatic nod he passed out of my office, his progress so smooth that I imagined for a second that he had castors instead of feet. Smiling faintly, I shook my head. The whole episode had been typical of him: he liked nothing better than to tantalise and then withdraw. My concentration broken, I stood up and moved over to the window.

The offices were situated in a part of the city from which the entire kingdom had once been governed. These days, though, everything looked different. The old metropolis had been divided so as to create four new capitals, and my building backed directly on to a section of the border. On the other side of the concrete wall lay the choleric capital, Thermopolis. Sitting at my desk, I could often hear attack dogs barking, and once, when I was working late, I had been startled by the sudden brittle chatter of machine-gun fire. I gazed down into the narrow
strip of no man's land. To the left, the border moved in a northwesterly direction, incorporating a square where people used to get drunk on New Year's Eve. The famous admiral now stood in a mined wasteland, peering out, one-eyed, over a tangle of barbed wire. To my right, the border ran across an iron bridge and then turned east along the south bank of the river. The bridge itself had been fortified, with watch-towers at either end and a steel dragnet underneath. Sometimes, in fine weather, I would lean on the window-sill and train my binoculars on the gardens that lay just to the east of the bridge, and I would study the inhabitants of Thermopolis as they gesticulated, insulted one another, and, more often than not, came to blows, and because I couldn't hear anything they said I found it curiously soothing, like watching mime.

As I stared out of the window, my gaze lost its focus and turned inwards. It had been a tricky sort of day from the very beginning. My alarm clock had failed to go off, and I jerked awake at five-past six, which was twenty minutes later than usual. I had been in the middle of a dream, but the dream had faded, leaving nothing except the dimly remembered sensation of a cold wind blowing against my skin, and even then, still half-asleep, I knew that the partial and elusive nature of that memory would frustrate me, and that I would carry that feeling around with me all day. There was something about Vishram's proposal that reminded me of the dream. They shared a sketchy quality, a seemingly deliberate ambiguity, as though they belonged to the same family of experiences. I swung back into the room, trusting that if I plunged into my paperwork once more, if I buried these ambiguities beneath the weight of familiar problems, then I could forget again. I didn't hold out too much hope, though. What was it about these hints and glimpses that disturbed me so?

Seen from above, Pneuma looked a little like an hour-glass, the narrowest point of which measured scarcely a mile across, and it was here, right in the city centre in other words, and a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll from my office, that I had been lucky enough to find a flat.

On leaving work that day, I set off through the park, as usual. Most people moved about on foot, or else rode bicycles. Cars were more or less extinct. As for the underground, it had been deemed both antiquated and unsafe, not to mention bad for the health, and the authorities had shut it down years ago. Our city was a clean, quiet place in which snatches of music could often be heard. Taking off my jacket, I folded it over my arm. It was a warm evening, and groups of students sat in casual circles on the grass. Rows of green-and-white-striped deckchairs faced down the slope, awaiting collection by the park-keeper. To the west, and back-lit by the setting sun, I could see the sheer pale concrete of the Hilton, its rooftop bristling with all manner of aerials and lightning conductors. The Blue Quarter's capital – Aquaville – lay just beyond, with its rheumatic population and its network of canals.

On nearing the north side of the park, I turned down a narrow passageway. It ran between two walled gardens, under a block of flats and out into a cul-de-sac so small and well concealed that hardly anybody knew it existed. Stafford Court stood at the far end, its entrance flanked by two miniature bay trees in square black tubs. As I walked into the lobby, the caretaker's front door opened. Kenneth Loames was an amiable, if slightly cloying man – the human equivalent of glue, I sometimes felt, or chewing-gum; once he made contact, he was almost impossible to dislodge. Normally I slipped by unnoticed, or tried to, but on this occasion, unfortunately, he had spotted me and, still more ominous, he had a subject, he said, that he would like to raise with me. I waited by the lift as Loames searched for the right phrasing.

‘I've got flies,' he said at last.

I looked at him. ‘I'm sorry?'

‘In my living-room. There are flies.' He gestured vaguely towards the half-open door behind him.

‘It has been very mild,' I said, pushing the call button on the lift.

Loames stood beside me, gazing benignly at the illuminated numbers. ‘You've not noticed any flies, though, Mr Parry? In your flat?'

‘I can't say I have.'

Loames was nodding to himself ‘. So,' he said. ‘Busy at the moment?'

‘Pretty busy, yes.'

His head angled in my direction, eyes sharpening a little. He asked all the usual questions, but I could often sense others lurking just beneath, like predatory fish. He seemed to suspect that there were things he wasn't being told, and with some justification – in my case, at least.

The lift doors finally slid open.

‘Well,' Loames said, ‘if you should see anything –'

‘I'll let you know.' I stepped into the lift and pressed the button for my floor. ‘Have a good evening, Mr Loames.'

When I walked into my flat, the phone was ringing. Thinking it might be the caretaker again, I picked up the receiver and rather wearily said, ‘Yes?'

There was a soft pause. ‘Thomas? Are you all right?'

The voice belonged to my girlfriend, Sonya Visvikis. She had called to tell me that the people we were supposed to be seeing the following night had cancelled. We could still have dinner, though, just the two of us – or did I think that was a bit dull? Not at all, I said. Actually, I'd prefer it. I could be with her by eight. I paused, thinking she might say something else, but the line fell quiet. In the silence, I heard a faint whine and I glanced round, first one way, then the other, expecting to see one of Loames's flies, but there was nothing there. The noise must have come from outside. A distant ambulance, perhaps. A gust of cold wind from my dream.

‘Are you sure you're all right?' Sonya said.

‘Yes, I'm fine. Why?'

‘I don't know. You sound different.'

‘I just ran into Mr Loames,' I said. ‘He's got flies, apparently.'

Sonya laughed.

‘He wanted to know if I'd got any,' I said.

By now Sonya was laughing so hard that she could barely speak.

We had only been seeing each other for about four months,
but I had loved her laughter the moment I heard it. It was voluptuous, somehow, and resonant, so much so that I often imagined she had a musical instrument inside her, something exquisitely crafted, one of a kind.

After the phone-call was over, I cooked myself a light supper, then I moved to the sofa by the window and tried to read. I couldn't concentrate, though. My head buzzed, as if with interference. I had a feeling of incompleteness, of things being just out of reach. Towards nine o'clock I put on my jacket, picked up my keys and left the flat, thinking a walk might help me to relax.

The air that closed around me as I stepped through the glass doors had a dense, humid quality I would never have associated with October. An Indian summer, people were calling it. The first in years. I walked down the street, then along the passageway, and came out into the park, the deckchairs all stacked away now, the students gone. I hesitated for a moment, looking down the path. In the distance, I could see a man standing quite still, his face turned towards me. Afraid it might be Loames again, I struck out across the grass.
Loames
… I suddenly realised that the name had a melancholic aspect to it. The way it referred to the earth, even the lugubrious vowels. Extraordinary I hadn't noticed it before. Maybe one day his name would appear on my desk, on a list of people being recommended for a transfer, and Stafford Court would have to find a new caretaker.

A few minutes later, I emerged in front of a building that used to be the palace, its austere façade reminding me, as always, of cold ash, then I walked slowly westwards, through a square of cream-coloured houses with black balconies, before turning south towards the river. By the time I reached the embankment I was sweating lightly under my clothes. I leaned on the stone parapet and looked out over the water. Had I been able to swim across, I would have found myself in the Blue Quarter. There had been a bridge here once, but it had been dismantled during the Rearrangement. Only bridges that complemented the partitioning of the city had survived. In the Red Quarter, for instance, we had several of our own, since we had been granted
territory on both sides of the river, but in stretches where the river itself had become the border all the bridges had been destroyed. The roads that had once led to them stopped at the water's edge, and stopped abruptly. They seemed to stare into space, no longer knowing what they were doing there or why they had come. During my early twenties I was gripped by the sense of history that emanated from such places; they were like abandoned gateways, entrances to forgotten worlds. Also, of course, I felt that I had stumbled on a physical embodiment of my own experience. There were bridges down inside me too. There was the same sense of brutal interruption.