Divided Kingdom (20 page)

A light clicked on in the limousine, and I saw myself reflected in the window. My face looked stiff, morose, vaguely ghoulish. I was in the Yellow Quarter for the first time ever, I had just arrived in one of its great cities, and yet I felt no elation. I didn't even feel any fear. I was trying to adjust to the sudden, arbitrary loss of all my hopes.

My mind lay soft and cold on the floor of my skull like a carpet of ash.

When I walked into my room, it recognised me.
Welcome to the Plaza, Mr Parry
, it said.
I hope you enjoy your stay.
I should have been ready for something like this, perhaps, since choleric people were known to be obsessed with technology, but such was the hectic nature of our schedule that I had no time to dwell on my surroundings. Five o'clock had already struck when I set my case down on the bed, and I was expected for drinks at five-thirty. The venue was a roof garden on the seventeenth floor. While at the party, we would be able to watch the firework display, which was due to start at six. I took a quick shower. As I got dressed, I caught a few minutes of choleric TV. They were showing a documentary about the Prime Minister, Carl Triggs,
who was so fiercely patriotic, apparently, that he had taken fire-eating lessons. I watched some rare footage of a bare-chested Triggs demonstrating his prowess in the grounds of one of his palatial mansions, then I went into the bathroom to clean my teeth. When I returned, the commercials were on. At midnight there would be a programme which featured topless female mud-wrestlers competing for a huge cash prize. It was called
Rolling in It.
I threw on my tuxedo, gave my shoes a polish and by five-thirty-five I was stepping out of the lift and into a space that resembled a conservatory, exotic trees and shrubs massing beneath a high glass ceiling.

The men were dressed in lounge suits or formal evening wear. As for the women, they had chosen much more elaborate confections – one girl was wrapped in jagged swathes of red and orange taffeta, which made her look as if she was being burned at the stake – and their ears, necks, wrists and fingers were all heavily freighted with jewellery. I found Frank Bland in the shade of a palm tree, holding a cocktail. His dinner jacket clung to his midriff as tightly as the skin of an onion.

‘Quite a place,' he said as I walked over.

‘Does your room talk to you, Frank?'

‘Good evening, Mr Bland.' He had put on a voice that was both disembodied and obsequious.

I nodded. ‘That's very good.' Though everything was reaching me through a veil of quiet desperation, it was a comfort to see Frank Bland. In these altered circumstances, he felt like an ally. A friend.

He took a gulp from his drink. ‘Did you hear me speak this morning?'

‘Of course. I really enjoyed it.'

‘Did I ramble?'

I thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose you did a bit.'

He laughed. ‘It was one of the worst hangovers I've ever had.'

I wanted to thank him for shedding some light on a subject that intrigued me, but Boorman and Rinaldi wandered over and I lost my chance. Not long afterwards we were ushered out on to the terrace.

I had always loved fireworks – even the most modest sparklers delighted me – but the fireworks we saw that night, unleashed from the roof of a nearby building, were like nothing I'd ever seen before. The colours alone almost defied description. Instead of the usual sprays of red and green and gold, we were treated to the most delicate tinctures, the subtlest of hues – violet, burnt sienna, damask, eau-de-nil. And the fireworks themselves did not explode so much as unfold, like hothouse flowers opening their petals, but in fast-motion, bouquet after bouquet tossed carelessly into the dark. Later, various messages were emblazoned across the sky – 27 GREAT YEARS, THANKS CARL, and so on. The display ended in a riot of sound, the noise rebounding across the city, so deafening and persistent that it seemed the office blocks surrounding us might topple and the ceiling above our heads might shatter in a murderous cascade of glass. For a while I had forgotten how I felt, but then we went back indoors, and people turned to each other and began to talk, and the disappointment I'd been harbouring since the early evening rose inside me once again, swift and remorseless, like floodwater.

Josephine Cox came and stood in front of me, her face flushed. ‘You don't seem very happy.'

So it was that obvious. Ever since I first set foot in the Bathysphere, I had been feeling scratchy, discontented. My initial experience had been the strangest mixture of the unexpected and the sublime, and it had stopped too soon, of course, and if I nursed a sense of regret about that shortfall the events of the second night had only compounded it, since I had dropped down deep into my past only to have the journey cruelly cut short. Then, a few hours later, Josephine's surprise announcement had cheated me out of my last chance to go back. But it wasn't just that. Those two nights had established a kind of precedent, and my life in the Red Quarter, the life I would soon be returning to, now seemed pallid, if not sterile, by comparison. Nothing that happened to me from this point on, I felt, could ever match what had happened to me in that club.

I summoned a feeble smile. ‘I'm just tired, that's all.'

‘I hope you're not too tired to enjoy the banquet,' Josephine said. ‘I've put you on a rather special table.'

‘What's special about it?'

She didn't answer. Instead, she placed one finger upright against her lips and lifted her shoulders towards her ears, then she moved off into the crowd.

Eleven o'clock was striking as I stepped into my room. I shut the door behind me and leaned back against the cool smooth wood.
Goodnight, Mr Parry
, the room said.
Sleep well.
Outside, in the street below, a siren squawked once, abruptly, and then went quiet.

It had been an awkward dinner. I'd been seated at the table of honour, next to the Mayor's wife. Dressed entirely in black, she had furtive eyes and though she wore expensive rings the skin around her nails was ragged. Between courses her clenched hands rested in her lap like two plucked quails. Trying to be diplomatic, I asked her about herself, but the answers I received were curt and dismissive. The only time she came alive at all was when she mentioned her sixth child, a son, who had been born the year before, and even then she sent a glance in the direction of her husband, seeking his approval, perhaps, or fearing his reaction. Halfway through dessert, she reached under the table, her head turned sideways, one ear only inches from her plate. I assumed she had dropped her napkin, and I shifted in my chair, ready to help her retrieve it. Then I saw that she had drawn her dress up, almost to her hips. Her unexpectedly voluptuous thighs, white as meringue, were darkened in two places by large bruises, both of which bore the imprint of somebody's knuckles.
Look what he does to me
, she said in a harsh whisper. She gave me a look of such fury that I thought for one surreal moment that I might be the culprit.

After the banquet, the Mayor himself walked up to me. We shook hands. He was a thick-set, fleshy man with a shaved head. Knowing what I knew, I found it hard to meet his gaze, but I suspected that he might be used to having people look away from him, that he might even see it as proof of his natural
authority, his manhood.
Thank you
, he said,
for taking such
good care
of my wife.
His lips parted on a set of strong, widely spaced white teeth. I had never heard gratitude so heavily laden with menace and innuendo. Just then, I thought of something I hadn't thought of in years. I remembered Pat Dunne in the border hotel the night before she crossed into the Yellow Quarter with Chloe Allen. I saw the heel of her hand slamming into the drinks machine.
You have to act like them
, she'd told me,
or you don't survive.

I slowly levered myself away from the door and unfastened my bow tie. I was genuinely tired now, my fatigue given a sombre, despairing edge by the knowledge that I could have been in Aquaville, in a water-taxi heading west. I took off my tuxedo and threw it over the back of a chair, then squatted down and unlocked the mini-bar. Inside, I found two miniature bottles of brandy. I emptied one of them into a glass, then closed my eyes and brought it up to my nose. The smell instantly transported me to Charlie Boorman's room in the Sheraton – the unmade bed, the half-eaten meals, the green crêpe-paper rabbit revolving in the air. My eyes still closed, I drank. The first mouthful sent a thin blade of warmth through me. Brandy. It was the taste of the Blue Quarter to me now. It was the taste of the club with its velvet curtain and its blonde ticket girl. The taste of a gold door opening
… To speak to my mother, but not to be allowed to see her. To be so close to her, and then – and then nothing
… A low murmur came out of me, and I opened my eyes. Everything was edged in bright pale light. The Yellow Quarter. I finished my first brandy and poured the second.

Taking my drink with me, I walked into the bathroom and switched on the light. I put the glass on the shelf above the sink, next to my travel clock, then I examined myself in the mirror. The areas below my eyes seemed to have been shaded in, and the hollows in my cheeks had deepened. It made me think that the distance between myself and my shadow was narrowing, that I had begun to change places with my darker half. I was about to turn on the tap and drink a few handfuls of cold water when a sudden dull reverberation shook the room. Several
things occurred at once. My clock tipped off the shelf and landed in the sink. The shower-curtain rattled on its rail. The mirror leapt in its chrome brackets, and then, almost as an afterthought, cracked down the middle, from top to bottom. My head divided into two sections that no longer quite fitted together. I thought fleetingly of stroke victims, and how one side of the face will often freeze or slip. My right hand lifted to my cheek, as if to check for damage. I picked up my clock and put it back on the shelf. 11:14, it said. And then, more than a minute later, 11:14. I still couldn't imagine what had happened.

A hush had fallen, and I had the sense that the reverberation had silenced everything that came after it, that it had robbed the world of all its sound. I stepped into the short passageway outside the bathroom. A pale smoke or powder had forced its way beneath my door. I stood quite still and watched as the particles settled on the carpet, a sprinkling of greyish-white, discreet but enigmatic, like a messenger who has been trusted with only part of the news. I moved to the door and pulled it open.

The air outside my room swirled with dust. To my left, about fifty yards away, my corridor met another. At the junction of the two I could see people rushing this way and that, their outlines hazy, their features smudged, as if they were in the process of being erased. Some had towels or handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Others were doubled over, coughing. I heard the word ‘bomb', and though I had never experienced anything like this before I replayed every detail of the last ninety seconds, and then I thought,
Of course. A bomb.

I withdrew, closing the door behind me, and stood looking at my feet for a moment, then I moved on into the middle of the room. Again I stood still, my face lowered. I was seeing images, each of them deliberate, carefully chosen, pressed to my mind's eye like a licked stamp to an envelope. The hand splayed on the window of the limousine, Frank Bland crammed into his tuxedo. The bruises staining the thighs of the Mayor's wife, as if wild berries had been piled on to her lap.
Look what he does to me.
I couldn't marshal even one coherent thought.

A piece of paper whirred out of the fax machine and spilled languidly on to the carpet. It was blank. I put on my coat and picked up my overnight case, then opened the door again. By now, the vacuum that had followed the explosion had been filled with the constant shrill ringing and almost festive whoops of various alarms and sirens. I turned to the right, making for the emergency stairs.

Beyond the fire doors I came across the spindly, bewildered figure of Marco Rinaldi. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped nightshirt, and his eyelids were swollen with sleep. His black hair lifted above one ear in a single eccentric wing.

‘I think I'm still drunk,' he said. ‘What's going on?'

‘There's been a bomb,' I said.

‘A
bomb?
' He looked around, then back at me again, as though he expected me to offer him some proof.

We started down the stairs, Rinaldi leading the way. Our rooms were on the fourteenth floor. It would take a while, I thought, to reach ground-level. Every so often Rinaldi glanced at me over his shoulder, a nervous, enquiring look, and I would smile and nod. We passed the twelfth floor, the eleventh. By the tenth I noticed that my pace had slowed and that a gap had opened up between us. Other guests kept pushing past me. Part of my mind seemed to be examining the current situation from an entirely different viewpoint; it had begun to question my behaviour and was about to suggest alternatives. As we approached the eighth floor, two middle-aged men burst through the fire doors and out on to the stairs.
I can't find Angela
, one of them was babbling.
I can't find her anywhere. I've looked in her room, I've looked –
The other man took him by the shoulders.
John
, he said,
calm down. She's probably downstairs. She's probably waiting for us down there.
I stood stock still. My ambivalence had gone. Resolved itself. You have to use all this confusion and hysteria, I told myself. Use the dust, the hours of darkness, the uncertainty.
Use it.
No one will know what's become of you. They might think you're trapped under the rubble. They might think you're dead. They won't
know
, though. They won't be sure of anything. This is your chance, I said to myself. This is a
gift.