Divided Kingdom (25 page)

I hurried away across the grass. Hunger gripped me, keen as loneliness. Beyond a high brick wall was a kitchen garden, and my spirits lifted, but everything in there had been neglected for too long. The leaves of cabbages had turned to ragged dark-green lace, while the rhubarb stalks were thick as builders' wrists. As for the apples, wasps had drilled them through and through. I managed to dig up two potatoes, which I wiped clean on my shirt-tail and ate raw. Later, on a spindly tree by the far wall, I found a single pear. I plucked the fruit from its branch and studied the speckled skin, as if for instructions, then I bit into it, and the flesh, though hard and bitter, had a curiously refreshing quality. All the same, I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that I might have eaten something that was supposed to be ornamental.

I emerged from the garden and climbed a grass slope, making for the cover of the trees. Once there, I stopped and took a final
look at the place where I had spent the night. It struck me as odd that the asylum hadn't been put to better use – choleric people were meant to be so dynamic, so resourceful – but perhaps, in the end, the four countries didn't vary as much as was commonly believed. Perhaps our famous differences were no more than convenient fictions. I was aware that my thoughts were taking a new turn, and wondered if I had been influenced – contaminated, some might say – by Fay Mackenzie and her friends. Before I could reach any conclusions, I saw a white dog come lumbering round the edge of the building, its blunt muzzle close to the flagstones, as though following a scent. I could delay no longer. Keeping a firm grasp on the chair-leg, I set off into the woods.

After walking for some time, I stepped out on to a ridge, and there below me, to my astonishment, lay the border. From my vantage point I could see over the wall into the countryside beyond – its fields, its hawthorn hedges, its narrow twisting lanes. For a moment I thought I was looking at the Blue Quarter, but then I remembered it hadn't featured on the map in the café at all. The border with the Blue Quarter would have to be at least an hour away by car, and we hadn't been on the road for more than five or ten minutes. Leon and his friends had told me we were driving north, to the city where they lived, but actually we must have driven east. It was the Green Quarter that I could see. Those people had not only robbed me, they had lied to me as well. Maybe that was why they'd been laughing just before they left.

Tired and disconsolate, I sat down at the foot of a tree, laying my eccentric weapons on the ground beside me. It was a typical rural border, with a single concrete wall reaching away in both directions. There were no watch-towers, no death strips. No men with guns. A set of tyre-tracks ran parallel to the wall, worn in the grass by regular patrols. It made me think of the section of border that Marie had talked about.
We thought we must be seeing things. We just climbed through.
I couldn't see any gaps or holes in this wall, though – and, even if there had been, it wouldn't have
done me any good. I hadn't the slightest desire to enter the Green Quarter. There was nothing for me there.

Still, after a while, curiosity got the better of me, and I started down the hill. A few minutes later, I was standing in the shadow of the wall, and I saw at once that it was both immaculate and unassailable. No flaws or blemishes. Not even any cracks. The wall had been built to the standard height, with a smooth rounded lip at the top, a kind of overhang. It offered no handholds or footholds – no purchase of any kind. I placed my palm against the surface. It was cold as a gravestone. It promised death. Even here, under an innocuous November sky. Even here, in the middle of nowhere. I stood back. What now?

At that moment I heard a faint buzzing noise, not unlike a power drill or an electric razor. I looked northwards along the track. A motorbike came slithering and sliding over a rise in the ground, and as it drew nearer I saw that its rider was wearing the uniform of a choleric border guard, the black rainproof jacket trimmed with yellow piping, the gun strapped into a yellow holster.

The motorbike stopped beside me. I hadn't moved. The guard switched off the engine, then he removed his helmet and placed it on the petrol tank in front of him.

‘Hard to talk with one of those things on,' he said.

‘I imagine,' I said.

The guard had cut himself shaving, and the small circle of dried blood on his chin gave him an air of vulnerability. His black hair had been flattened by the helmet. I was reminded, incongruously, of the places in fields where people have had picnics or made love. Now that I was facing the danger I had hardly dared to picture, I felt curiously calm, and on the edge of a powerful and unforeseen hilarity.

‘What are you doing here?' the guard said.

‘Just out for a walk,' I said.

‘You're not thinking of –' His eyes darted towards the top of the wall.

I smiled. ‘Climbing over? How could I?' I held my arms away
from my sides, to demonstrate my innocence, the fact that I had nothing to hide.

‘You'd be surprised,' the guard said.

Removing his leather gauntlets, he took out a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers, and then embarked on a story about a man called Jake Tilney who had been transferred to the Yellow Quarter when he was in his forties. Though he seemed, outwardly, to be settling into his new life, Jake never stopped trying to find a way of returning to the Green Quarter, which had been his home before. At last he came up with something so obvious, so straightforward, as to merit the word genius. He designed and built his very own pocket ladder. It had an extension capacity of eleven and a half feet, which was the exact height of the wall, but it folded into a metal rectangle that measured no more than twelve inches by eighteen and weighed less than a bag of sugar. One day Jake travelled to a remote section of the border. Alone and unobserved, he assembled his ladder and climbed to the top of the wall, then he simply pulled the ladder up after him, placed it on the other side and climbed down again – and all in less than sixty seconds, or so he maintained in his statement.

‘He was caught,' I said.

The guard nodded.

When Jake Tilney appeared in front of the tribunal, claiming that he belonged in the Green Quarter, the judges laughed at him. In the very manner of his escape attempt, they said, he had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was unqualified to live there.

Perhaps if you had done something less practical
, they said,
less daring –

But then it wouldn't have worked,
Jake cried.

The judges exchanged a knowing glance.

Jake was transferred back to the Yellow Quarter. Two years later he died of a heart attack, a common cause of death for those of a choleric disposition. His ladder, now known as the Tilney, won him a posthumous award for significant achievement in the field of industrial design.

‘A cruel irony,' I said.

The guard nodded again and looked at the ground, his roll-up dead between his fingers. He was not at all the kind of brute or bully I would have expected to encounter at the border. Though he seemed a little indiscreet – should he be telling me about escape attempts? weren't all those details confidential? – I felt he was a man I could get along with. I offered him a light, which he accepted.

‘There is another possibility, of course,' he said, removing a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘You could have something hidden in the grass. Or up there' – and his eyes lifted to the ridge behind me – ‘among the trees.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like maybe a pole,' he said. ‘As in pole-vault.'

I raised my eyebrows. ‘I would never have thought of that.' And it was true. I wouldn't.

‘We had one of those last month. Ex pole-vault champion. Fellow by the name of Alvis Deane.'

‘Can't say I've heard of him.'

‘Well, nor had I, to be honest.'

‘Did he make it?'

‘Yes and no.' The guard fell silent. The art of suspense appeared to come naturally to him. ‘There was something on the other side,' he said, tossing the soggy stub of his roll-up into the grass. ‘A greenhouse.'

I imagined the scene. ‘Noisy.'

‘And painful,' the guard said. ‘He broke his pelvis and both his legs. An elbow too, if I remember rightly. And there were severe lacerations, of course.' He shook his head.

It had all been going so easily. We were like two men talking in a pub, so much so that I had been lulled into believing that the guard could be disarmed by the mere fact of conversation, that any suspicion he might normally have felt in a situation like this could be overridden, and that, in no time at all, I would be allowed to continue on my way without further ado. During his most recent silence, however, his eyes had been roving across my suit, which was creased and
stained, and he gradually assumed a resigned, almost forlorn expression.

‘I'm afraid I'm going to have to search you,' he said.

‘In case I've got a ladder on me?'

Smiling bleakly, the guard stepped off his motorbike and heaved it up on to its stand. ‘Could you empty your pockets?'

I did as he asked, producing the lighter, my toothbrush, some loose change, a pair of underpants and some socks.

‘Nothing else?' he said.

‘That's it.'

The guard pushed his hands into all my pockets, much as Leon had done a few hours earlier. Then, like a customs officer, he ran his hands over the outside of my clothes, along both my arms, down both my legs. Up close, he smelled of wintergreen, as if he might be carrying a sporting injury. I looked beyond him, at the wall, its smooth blank concrete unable either to help or to remember.

At last the guard stood back. ‘You don't appear to have any papers.'

‘No,' I said. ‘Well, I was attacked, you see.'

‘Attacked?'

‘Three people in a pickup truck. They attacked me. They took my papers and all my money. They took my coat as well.'

‘You're aware, of course,' the guard said slowly, ‘that it's a criminal offence to travel anywhere without your papers?'

‘I just told you. They were stolen.'

We weren't like two men in a pub any more. The mood had altered, the sense of common ground had dropped away. A hierarchy had been established in its place. The guard was beginning to work himself up into a state of necessary indignation. He might even achieve outrage. And if that happened, I would be in trouble.

You have to act like them.

I snatched up the guard's helmet and hit him full in the face with it. He cried out. Hands covering his face, he sank to his knees and toppled sideways, bright blood dripping through his fingers. I took the gun out of its holster and used the butt to
smash the radio, then I hurled the gun over the wall. It landed on the other side with a dull thud like ripe fruit dropping from a tree. No greenhouse there, then. I grabbed my possessions and stuffed them back into my pockets. As I turned away, the motorbike fell over, crushing one of the guard's legs. He cried out again, even louder this time. I hesitated for a moment, then I started running.

I leaned against a tree at the top of the hill. My mouth tasted of tin, and I felt sick. I had never hit anyone before. Maybe that was why. Down below, the guard was on the ground, the motorbike still lying across his leg. My mind began to spin, hurling out thoughts the way a lawn-sprinkler hurls out water. A motorbike like that might weigh as much as three hundred pounds. It would be hard to shift. There was even a possibility that his leg was broken. Without a radio he wouldn't be able to raise the alarm, in which case he'd have to wait until a colleague came along, and that might not be for hours. Still, it was only a matter of time before word got out.
There's a man on the loose. He's wearing a dark suit. He's not carrying any documents.
A pause.
He could be dangerous.
With a hollow, frightened laugh, I turned and plunged into the woods. I couldn't form a coherent strategy as yet. I was simply trying to put some distance between myself and what had happened.

Half an hour later I waded out of waist-high bracken and on to a farm track. On the far side, behind metal railings, was a field of green wheat. A light wind blew. The wheat ears swayed. It was peaceful, but suspiciously so, as though the crops hid an entire battalion of soldiers. When the signal was given, they would all rise up, the barrels of their rifles trained on my head and heart. As I started along the track, I tried to put myself in the guard's position. There he was, trapped under his motorbike, and with a bloody nose into the bargain. It was an absurd predicament. Humiliating too. Would he be prepared to admit that someone had hit him in the face with his own helmet? Imagine the teasing that would go on at his local barracks! Imagine the nicknames he'd be given!
Helmethead, Nosebleed. Arse.
Rounding a bend, I saw a five-bar gate ahead of me. A country lane beyond. My mind was still whirling with theories, hypotheses. What if the guard claimed that his bike had skidded in the mud? What if he pretended that he'd never even set eyes on me? I began to see how his discomfiture might work in my favour. It seemed conceivable that I might not be reported after all – in which case I could return to the Axe Edge Inn, where Fay would help me.

I looked up into the sky. The clouds had thinned, unveiling a strip of the purest pale-blue. I could be in the bar by lunchtime, and think of the tale I would be able to tell! I vaulted over the gate and, buttoning my jacket against the wind, set off along the lane with rapid, determined strides.

It looked exactly like a crime scene. The pub had been sealed off with bright-yellow plastic tape, the words POLICE – DO NOT CROSS repeated every few feet in black. Two of the downstairs windows had been smashed, and the car-park glittered with broken glass. A plank had been nailed at an angle across the front entrance. There were dark stains at the edge of the road. I couldn't tell whether it was oil or blood. As I stood there, I noticed something glinting in the ditch. At first I took it for a coin, but then I bent closer and saw it was a ring. Though made from silver, it was uneven, almost crude, and it had blackened here and there, either with neglect or age. On the inside an intriguing inscription had been carved into the metal, with an anchor to separate the first word from the last.
So you don't drift too far
, it said.