Divided Kingdom (50 page)

That woman, that was her. She had just crossed the border illegally. She had broken the only law that really mattered. Her name was Odell Burfoot, and she was a shadow. They told her there were others like her, but she'd never met one yet.

As I lay in the hotel bed, close to sleep, I finally realised what she was doing – what she'd been doing all along, in fact. She wasn't telling me stories to distract me (though, obviously, they performed that function too). No, every narrative had a specific purpose of its own. Some were supposed to create an atmosphere of serenity and trust. Others were intended to console, or to warn, or to encourage. Different situations demanded different narratives, and each one had its proper moment. A tale about a war would precede a war, for instance. A tale about a death would follow a funeral. But if you wanted something to happen, then you told a story in which that ‘something' happened. Look at Odell's most recent offering. She had walked into the lion's den and then walked out again. The task that lay ahead of us might have its dangers, she was saying, but they were not insurmountable. We had to believe in ourselves without succumbing to complacency. We should be confident, but not reckless. A story of this type had a magical or spiritual dimension, as befitted the phlegmatic tradition out of which it came. It cast a spell over the people listening, enabling them to accomplish feats similar to those described. It also bestowed a blessing. In short, it acted as a catalyst, an inspiration, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The order in which she had told her stories seemed important too. The first had been set in the long-distant past. The second had approached the present, but in a roundabout, almost incidental manner, as though to diffuse anxiety. The third had closed in rapidly, both in space and time. Taken as a sequence, they led up to the task in hand, and I knew that everything I needed was contained within them, if only I looked carefully enough. Like any good story-teller, Odell had resisted the temptation to spell it all out for me. If knowledge was
imparted in that way, it had no purchase. She had showed patience, insight. She had allowed me to see things for myself.

My name is Odell Burfoot, and I'm a shadow.

They tell me there are others like me, but I've never met one yet.

That evening we broke into a derelict house next to the border. We found a smashed window on the ground floor at the back and climbed through into the kitchen. Ivy had wrapped itself around the taps. Dead insects filled the grooves on the stainless-steel draining-board. Against the far wall stood a fridge with its door flung open, like a man selling watches from the inside of his coat. I followed Odell down a passage that led past two or three dim rooms, then opened out into a hallway with a chess-board tile floor. The house smelled dry and peppery – of plaster, cobwebs, dust. Through the clear glass fanlight came an alien glow, glittery as quartz, reminding me that a checkpoint lay just beyond the door.

We started up the stairs. On reaching the first floor, we entered a room whose three tall windows let in slanting rectangles of light. I moved over the bare boards and positioned myself to one side of a window. The concrete wall stood opposite the house, no more than a hundred feet away. Some Yellow Quarter guards huddled by the barrier. I saw one of them laugh, then wag a finger. His colleagues exchanged a knowing look. I was that close. Beyond them, further to the left, a viaduct of sooty brick angled across the street. Trains would once have passed this way, linking the northern suburbs of the old metropolis, but a section of the structure had been knocked down to accommodate the border, and the railway line now came to an abrupt halt in mid-air. Its one remaining arch, though monumental, served no purpose other than to frame a view of the deserted road that ran adjacent to the wall. I had forgotten how the city borders looked. They had an operating theatre's ruthless glare. They were bright, lonely places. Last places. I swallowed. Stepping back into the room, I opened my bag and pulled out my white clothes.

Once I was dressed, Odell gave me my final instructions. She
would cross first, she said. I could watch, if I liked. See whether Croy's theory about her ‘escaping notice' was right. When she was safely over the border, I should wait five or ten minutes, then I should follow. She would meet me on the other side.

I took her hand in both of mine and turned it over, as though I were thinking of telling her fortune. I stared down into her palm so hard that I felt I was falling.

‘Goodbye,' she said. ‘For now.'

She gently removed her hand from mine, then stepped away from me and left the room. I had to repress the urge to rush after her. Instead, I forced myself to face the window. A rancid stink lifted off the cloak. That part of me, at least, would be authentic. I gazed out over no man's land. Beyond the concrete walls and the electric fences, beyond the eerie lunar glare, and seeming insubstantial by comparison, if not actually unreal, were the sheer glass towers of downtown Pneuma.

The stairs let out a creak. It would be Odell, returning. There was something she'd forgotten to mention, perhaps. Or perhaps – and my heart leapt wildly, absurdly – she wanted to kiss me before we parted. I spun round. In the doorway stood a girl of five or six. She was wearing a white dress and satin ballet pumps, and from her shoulders rose a pair of iridescent wings on which the light from the border pooled and glistened. I thought for a moment that Odell's gift must have betrayed her, and that she had accidentally transformed herself into someone else, as people do in fairy tales.

‘Are you dead?' the girl said.

I shook my head.

‘You're not a ghost, are you?'

I shook my head again. This time I tried a smile.

‘It's all right,' the girl said quickly. ‘I'm not afraid of ghosts.' She let her eyes run over me – my face, my hair, my clothes. ‘You
look
like a ghost.'

I knelt down in front of her. Taking one of her hands, I singled out the forefinger and placed it on the inside of my wrist, where my pulse was.

‘You're real,' she said.

As real as you are
, I said inside my head.

She gave me a look from close up, a look that was shiny, clean somehow, as if she had understood me perfectly, and I remembered what a friend had told me once, that it's the eyes of children that make you feel old.

The girl was reaching over her shoulders with both hands. ‘These wings are hurting. Could you help me take them off?'

I began to undo the ribbons that held the wings in place.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘You smell bad.'

I know
, I said.
That's the whole idea.

Another brief examination from those oddly knowing eyes.

I handed the wings to her. She solemnly surveyed the room, then bent down and leaned them against the wall next to the fireplace. Straightening up again, she looked at me across the point of one shoulder.

‘I have to go now,' she said.

She turned, just as Odell had done, and vanished through the doorway.
Odell.
I hurried to the window, but there was no sign of her. Had she already gone across? I strained my eyes, trying to look beyond the floodlights. Nothing.

Panic scurried through me.

It was time.

I withdrew from the window, making for the stairs. In the hallway, I doubled back towards the kitchen. As I passed the open fridge, I saw a figure crouched inside, hands round his ankles, knees pushed up into the space below his chin. It was Brendan Burroughs.

‘Take me with you,' he whispered.

I had to steel myself against his pleading. I had to pretend he wasn't there.

But whispers were still coming from the fridge. ‘I can't stay here any longer. I'm going rotten.'

Leave me alone
, I said inside my head.

I climbed out on to the patio. Stone steps led up into a tangle of undergrowth. If I looked round, I knew Brendan's mysteriously unlined face would be framed in the broken window, and I didn't even have a lighter on me any more.

I didn't look round.

Scaling a brick wall at the end of the garden, I dropped down on to the pavement and then started towards the border. I summoned the spirits of all those who had travelled with me. Their innocence, their singularity. Their freakishness. I repeated their names inside my head, over and over. If nothing else, I would remember what they used to sound like, how they moved about.

Neg
, I said inside my head.
Lum. Neg. Ob.

People running, falling. Burning.

I was still walking, but I had covered my face. My knees trembled, my ankles quaked. My joints appeared to have loosened, as if in readiness for a dismemberment. That little girl would be watching from a window, her gaze intent, dispassionate.
Are you dead?
I brought my hands down from my eyes. In front of me, no more than fifty yards away, stood the checkpoint with all its sinister and hostile apparatus. Though the three guards were silhouetted against the floodlights, I recognised the swagger, a casual brutality apparent in both their body language and their speech. I faltered. It was then that I noticed the piece of dog shit lying in the gutter. An idea came to me, and I experienced a burst of something like euphoria. What I was about to do would establish my authenticity beyond all doubt. It might even save me from harm. I pretended to notice the shit for the first time, taking an exaggerated step backwards, then bending low to study it more closely. I seemed to hear the guards draw breath. Now that I had their attention, I picked up the shit and examined it painstakingly from every angle, then I crushed it between my fingers and smeared it on to my cheeks and hair. That done, I began to move towards the checkpoint. The guards stepped away from me, waving their hands in front of their faces. Even the attack dog whined and shunted backwards. I just kept going, oblivious, serene. I might even have been smiling. As I passed the sentry hut I heard them talking.

‘It's true what people say. They're just like animals –'

‘They're worse than animals …'

While two of them debated the point, a third aimed a kick at me and sent me sprawling on the tarmac. The dog barked excitedly but stayed well back. All three guards were arguing now. It hadn't occurred to them to challenge me. In fact, they seemed eager to keep their distance. I'd made myself untouchable.

I picked myself up, walked on.

In no man's land the lights were so intense that I could see the veins beneath the surface of my skin. I felt transparent. At the same time four shadows splayed out on the ground around me, as if I were a flower with black petals. My face itched, and the stench that lifted off me was unbearable. At the risk of drawing attention to myself, I started walking faster. I wanted this part over with.

The Red Quarter guards were already waiting for me. As I approached I held my hands out, fingers spread. I was making noises that were intended to communicate distress.

One of the men took me by the arm. ‘Who did this?' he said.

I stared at him, round-eyed, slack-jawed.

He pointed back towards the Yellow Quarter. ‘Did they do this to you?'

My mouth still open, I nodded repeatedly, more than a dozen times.

The guard led me to a tap behind a prefabricated hut. He handed me a bar of carbolic soap and ran the tap for me. I gazed at the dark patch the water made as it splashed on to the concrete.

‘You can wash here.' The guard mimed the act of washing for me.

I watched him carefully. Then, slowly, I put my hands under the tap and began to rub them together.

‘And your face.' He patted his cheeks, his hair.

He went away, returning with a roll of paper towels, which he placed on the window-ledge above the tap. ‘When you've washed it off,' he said, ‘use the paper to dry yourself. Then go that way.' He pointed to the steel barrier behind me.

I nodded again, then pointed at the barrier, just as he had done.

The whole time I was washing off the muck and stink I was talking to myself inside my head. I don't know what I was saying. Anything that would keep me from thinking, I suppose. All I had to do was turn off the tap, dry my face and hands, and then start walking, and yet I found myself delaying the moment, as if I couldn't quite believe in the notion of safety or the possibility of home.

In the end the guard had to come over and switch off the tap himself. He stood in front of me, smiling and shaking his head. ‘What are you trying to do? Flood the place?' He tore a few sheets of paper off the roll and gave them to me, then he put a hand on my back and steered me towards the barrier. ‘Off you go now. Move along.'

As soon as I turned the first corner, I began to run as fast as the cloak and boots allowed. I was like something that had been wound up and then let loose, and I was laughing too. I could hear myself.

‘Thomas?'

I slowed down, stopped, looked round. Odell walked up the pavement towards me. In the light of the street lamps her bracken-coloured hair looked darker, almost black.

‘You took such a long time,' she said. ‘I thought they'd got you.' She reached out to take my hand, but I stepped back so sharply that she almost overbalanced.

‘No,' I said. ‘Don't touch me.'

She listened carefully while I explained what I had done. She didn't seem shocked or disgusted. On the contrary. According to her, it had been an inspired piece of tactical thinking. I had given both sets of guards something to react to. I had used myself to create a diversion. I'd become my own decoy. She was so enthusiastic that I could imagine the idea featuring in the next edition of some underground manual for asylum-seekers. I apologised for having been abrupt with her. I had washed pretty thoroughly, I said, but I wasn't sure it had all come off. She moved closer, sniffing at my face and hair. I smelled of soap, she said. Border soap.