Divided Kingdom (45 page)

‘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.

When we had finished, she asked me if she should go on with her story. I nodded, and she picked up exactly where she'd left off.

Ignoring her parents' advice, she carried on performing for other children in the hope that they would become her friends, but her gift just frightened or bewildered them. She was lonelier than ever. And then, one morning, she received an official-looking letter. Her father opened it and read it first. ‘They know,' he said.

‘Know what?' she said.

Her father handed her the letter. She was required to appear before a tribunal, not locally, but in the capital, two hundred miles away. She couldn't tell what the charge was – the summons contrived to be both menacing and utterly inscrutable – but she knew she was guilty.

On the appointed day she caught a train to Aquaville, her parents' reproach clearly audible in the rhythm of the wheels on the track:
If only you'd listened – if only you'd listened …
If only I'd listened, she thought as she climbed the steps to the Ministry, her mouth dry, her heart stumbling inside her. She was convinced she was about to be severely punished. Borstal at the very least, maybe even a prison sentence.

A government official escorted her to a grey door high up in the building. He turned the handle, then stepped aside to let her through. On entering the room, she saw a man sitting behind a desk. In front of him was a piece of moulded plastic with the name
Adrian Croy
printed on it. The man was alone, which
disconcerted her. She had been expecting a judge and jury, something that resembled a court of law.

‘Ah, Miss Burfoot,' the man said.

Adrian Croy was a slight, dapper man with wrists as narrow as school rulers. His hands twirled and fluttered when he spoke in such a way that she imagined he was simultaneously translating what he was saying into sign language. She felt clumsy in his presence, as if surrounded by bone china.

‘You probably think that you're in trouble.' He was looking at her in a manner that did not endear him to her. She saw amusement and curiosity. A kind of craving too. ‘You have crossed the border illegally,' he said. ‘Twice.'

She sighed. It was true. She had done it as a dare to herself, just to see if it was possible. Then she had done it again, to make sure the first time hadn't been a fluke. She hadn't meant anything by it. ‘I knew you'd find out,' she said.

‘Oh yes, Miss Burfoot, we always find out.' Croy leaned back in his seat and studied her. ‘We would like to offer you a position.'

‘A position?'

‘A job.'

‘I've never had a job,' she said, ‘except for working on the canal.'

Croy allowed himself a small, neat smile. ‘I'd hardly call that making good use of your particular skills.'

They weren't going to punish her. They were giving her a job instead. She could scarcely believe her luck.

I shifted uneasily on the bed of sacking and old velvet, reminded of a certain sunlit afternoon, Diana smiling at me across the rim of her wine-glass, the word ‘immunity' suspended seductively in the air between us.

‘I was so innocent,' Odell murmured, half to herself.

Me too
, I said inside my head.

At the age of seventeen she had come to an arrangement with the authorities. She was paid a modest retainer, and reported to Croy twice a month. Sometimes he would brief her on a specific job – surveillance, usually – but more often than not he would
attempt to justify their shadowy activities. At some point, though, the talk would always gravitate towards the nature of her gift. When she told him what she could do – somehow, with Croy, she couldn't seem to help bragging about it – the black parts of his eyes would widen, and his hands would move more dreamily in front of him, like objects in space. He would claim that she was part of a tradition that dated back thousands of years. In her, he would say, one could see the true flowering of the phlegmatic character – adaptability, yes, but taken to extremes. He had theories about her too. In his opinion, she didn't actually
become
invisible. She simply
appeared
to do so. He called what she did ‘escaping notice'. Frankly, it would bore her having to listen to all this, but she tried not to show it. She had to keep reminding herself that this dainty, middle-aged man was dangerous. If he were to turn against her, he could make things difficult for her. And so it paid to keep him sweet. Aware of this, she always played a little vaguer, a little more
spiritual
, than she really was.

‘Tradition?' she said once. ‘What tradition?'

He beamed. Her unworldliness never failed to delight him. ‘The shape-shifter, the psychopomp,' he said. ‘The seer.'

‘What's a psychopomp?' This time she was genuinely curious.

‘They're spirit guides,' Croy told her. ‘They pilot dead people to their place of rest. They oversee the process whereby souls are purified, transformed.' He paused. ‘I suppose you could say they teach the craft of dying.'

On another occasion he startled her by proposing that they should become a magic act. ‘Burfoot & Croy,' he said. ‘Can't you see it?' His right hand slid sideways across the air in front of him, palm facing outwards, fingers uppermost and slightly curled, as if to enclose an exotic painted sign. She smiled but said nothing. He had such peculiar fantasies. Was he really suggesting that they should run away together, or was it just another test? She could never quite be certain. If she hadn't been so strange-looking, she would have said that Adrian Croy was in love with her.

For all his ambiguities, though, and despite the power he
wielded over her, they were, at some fundamental level, of one mind. Yes, she had crossed borders illegally, but that didn't mean she wanted them removed. Far from it. Without borders they would return to the chaos of a quarter of a century ago. Without borders they would find themselves living in what used to be called, laughably in her opinion, the ‘united kingdom' – a kingdom united in name only, a kingdom otherwise characterised by boorishness, thuggery and greed. She had no desire to live in a place like that. The Blue Quarter might be deficient in some respects, she said, but at least those who lived there were socially aware and ecologically responsible, prizing gentleness above aggression and spiritual development above material success, and on the whole she wanted to preserve things pretty much the way they were. She just liked to bend the rules once in a while, that was all.

‘I still cross the border illegally from time to time,' she said. ‘You know what I tell them now, if they find out?'

I lay still, waiting for the answer.

‘I tell them I'm practising my craft. That's the kind of language they understand.' She fell silent. ‘I'm not breaking the law,' she said after a while. ‘I'm doing my duty.' And she laughed softly, delighted by her own capricious logic.

Odell shook me out of a deep sleep, letting me know that it was dawn. I had a feeling I hadn't had since I was a boy – a panic that uncoiled slowly as a snake, a powerful dread of what the day might bring. I wished I could have stayed in bed or hidden somewhere. I wanted it all to be over. She shook me again. I sat up, blinking. A weak light leaked through the window, grubby as the skin on boiled milk. Birds fumbled in their nests. I pushed my feet into my boots and pulled on the stiff leather coat. We ate the few scraps left over from the previous night's meal, sharing the inch of red wine in the bottom of the bottle, then it was time to go.

I followed Odell through the second of the two doors and into a small high-ceilinged room. The only piece of furniture in there was a wardrobe, its mirror-panelled door ajar. Our figures
crept across the glass, furtive as thieves. On we went, through other, larger rooms, most of which showed evidence of looting. Paintings had been removed, leaving ghostly after-images. Wallpaper had been defaced or gouged. In one room a fire had been lit in the middle of the floor, and I imagined I could smell it, the air inlaid with a thin blue seam of smoke. We stepped out on to a landing, its uneven boards sloping away from us, slippery with light. Pinned to a door at the far end was a life-size black-and-white picture of a soldier with a gun, concentric circles radiating outwards from his heart. There were holes in the paper, and the wood. At the head of the stairs I stooped and peered through a diamond-paned window. Pines lifted before me, their red-brown trunks showing dimly through the mist. To my surprise, the snow had melted. The land looked waterlogged and drab.

Downstairs, in the hall, wooden chairs were arranged against opposing walls, making me think a party had been held here once. Trainee border guards would have cavorted with girls from nearby villages, the guards resplendent in their dress uniforms, all pressed serge and polished brass, the girls in short skirts and white stilettos, their bare legs marbled with the cold. I could almost hear the live band with its thrashing drums, its raunchy lead guitar. Odell led me across the hall and down a passage. Then, as we passed through yet another door, the space seemed to explode above my head. We were in a church. The roof must have been sixty feet high, and the nave could have held a congregation of many hundreds. Here too, though, the vandals had been at work. Pews had been upended and set on fire. Windows had been smashed. The stone flags underfoot were crunchy with stained glass – the blue of saints' robes, the yellow of their haloes, the green of a green hill far away. I noticed some incongruous additions to the church's interior – relics of the military occupation, no doubt. Leaning nonchalantly against the font was a motorbike, its back tyre flat. Further up the aisle, empty bullet casings and beer bottles lay scattered about. And there were even more recent intrusions: a pigeon chuckled in the organ loft, and on the altar steps some
sheep had deposited their neat but convoluted droppings, each of which looked exactly like a small black brain.

We left through the sacristy. Once outdoors, I paused and looked around. Some fifty yards ahead of me was a drystone wall, and on the hillside beyond were the evergreens I had seen from the landing. Behind me rose the great hunched back of the church. A few traces of snow lingered under trees and bushes, and against the base of north-facing walls.

As I stood there, Odell stepped in front of me. ‘Your face is all wrong.'

I stared at her, perplexed.

‘You look as if you've never been here before,' she said, ‘as if you come from somewhere else. They'll notice that immediately. You can't show any surprise or curiosity. I want you to look fed up, long-suffering. We're a couple, remember, and we don't get on.'

I nodded.
All right.

‘Show me,' she said, ‘before we go any further.'

I pushed my hands deep into my trouser pockets, then I scowled. I could feel the skin buckling on the bridge of my nose.

‘That's more like it,' she said.

We passed through a wicket gate and set off along a footpath. On my shoulder was a bag that held my cloak and undergarments. Without them, I wouldn't be able to cross back into the Red Quarter. If we were stopped and searched, Odell was going to claim that they were trophies from the recent hunt, as was the watch I was wearing, the one that had no hands. She would tell the story with relish, how we had chased the White People through the woods, how we had terrorised and raped and butchered. I had become so carried away, she would say, that I had completely lost my voice. When she first suggested this strategy, I felt something contract inside me. She noticed the look on my face and said simply, ‘Do you want to get out of here or don't you?'

We climbed over a stile and down into a country lane, then walked on, side by side, in silence. Stone walls hemmed us in.
We passed barns of corrugated-iron, some faded red, some green. Once, the sun broke through, alighting on a piece of rough pasture to the north-east of us, the land all round still deep in shadow. Like a memory of happiness, I thought, that single illuminated field. Like the bits of my life that had been given back to me … We were quiet for so long that I almost forgot the role I was supposed to be playing, but then I saw a man come hobbling towards us. Chained to his wrist was a hawk, its head sheathed in a leather hood.

As the man approached, Odell began to grumble. ‘How much further? My feet ache.'

I chose not to answer. Instead, I gathered a ball of phlegm into my mouth, rolled it on my tongue, then fired it past the end of her nose and into the ditch.

She grasped me by the sleeve. ‘I said, how much further?'

I shook her off and lengthened my stride, giving the man a curt nod as he passed by. The man grunted in reply. I watched him move on down the road, a stocky figure dressed in brown, the bird of prey so motionless that it could have been stuffed. Knowing it was alive beneath that hood sent a shiver through me.