Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

A water-taxi drew up, and a young couple got out. Their coats held over their heads, they ran through the garden and up the steps, then pushed hard on the revolving doors that spun them, laughing and breathless, into the lobby. As I turned back to the canal again, still trying to make up my mind, I noticed someone sheltering in the shadows at the far end of the steps. The figure wore a long, pale, shapeless garment, a kind of cloak, and its face was hidden by a hood or cowl of the same colour. I knew instantly that this was one of the White People.

I had seen White People before — once at school, with Bracewell, and once with Victor, while out on a walk — but only from a distance. I remembered how Bracewell had pulled me away from a gang of boys who were taunting one of the poor creatures. He had been disappointed in me, assuming — wrongly, as it turned out — that I’d been actively involved. They were helpless, he said. They deserved better. I could still recall the rhyme the boys had chanted: You don’t belong/ You don’t fit/ You’re not a he/ You’re an it. Almost a decade later, on seeing a small group of White People on the cliff-tops, I had recited the rhyme for Victor, and he had winced. Cruel , he said, but not wholly inaccurate. They were society’s untouchables, he explained on that occasion. The past had been taken from them, as it had been taken from everyone alive at the time of the Rearrangement, but these were people who had been either unwilling or unable to find a place in the future. They didn’t fit into any quarter, he said, or any humour. They had ended up marooned between the old kingdom and the new one. Lost in a pocket of history. Once I joined the Ministry, I began to learn a little more about these strange nonentities. Known formally as achromatics, they were required to wear white because white had no status as a colour. Since they were perceived as having no character, they were deemed incapable of causing psychological damage, and as a result they were allowed to cross borders at will, to wander freely from one country to another. They were commonly believed to be both sterile and psychic — sterile because the idea of non-beings giving birth to non-beings was too bizarre to think about, and psychic because their apparent inability to speak had led to a reliance on other, more obscure forms of communication. Perhaps, after all, they had something to impart, and yet this had never really been acknowledged — except for here in the Blue Quarter, that is, where they were sometimes viewed as mystical beings or spiritual guides. In the Red Quarter, a far more secular environment, they could rely on charity: among other things, for instance, we had started a foundation that provided them with food and clothing. Throughout the divided kingdom they were, generally speaking, either tolerated or ignored, though in the Yellow Quarter, predictably enough, they were held in such low esteem that they were often treated as scapegoats.

I moved towards the figure slowly, so as not to frighten it.

‘Do you need any help?’ I said.

The figure looked round. It was a woman of about my own age. Though she had chapped skin and a runny nose, the expression on her face was remote and strangely benign, as if she had been contemplating an object of great beauty.

‘You’re wet through,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you some dry clothes?’ I pointed to the revolving doors behind me. ‘I have a room here.’

The woman took two or three steps towards me, and then stopped. Her expression hadn’t altered, and I felt that I had now been incorporated into whatever she was thinking about.

‘Come up to my room,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you some —’

Before I could finish my sentence, she launched herself at me, almost knocking me off my feet. Her strength took me completely by surprise. I staggered, but remained upright. She had wrapped her arms around me, trapping my own arms by my sides, then she had pressed her face into my chest. She had gone quite still. It wasn’t an assault, I realised, but an embrace, and I was reminded, for one brief, unnerving moment, of Marie.

‘Oh dear.’

Howard had appeared on the steps. He began to try and free me from the woman’s grasp, but she must have locked her hands behind my back. She had clamped her teeth together and turned her head to one side, her eyes fixed on some abstract point beyond my shoulder. There was a sense in which I had become incidental. She was clinging not so much to me, I felt, as to the idea of human contact, human warmth.

Howard moved round behind me. When the woman’s fingers were finally prised loose, she let out a bellow of distress and fell back, flushed and panting.

I looked at Howard. ‘Can’t we offer her some shelter?’

‘I’m afraid it’s against hotel regulations, sir,’ he said.

I watched as the woman lumbered down the steps and along the flagstone path that led to the canal. She appeared to dissolve into the rain.

‘Where will she go?’ I asked.

‘They have their places.’

I saw that Howard was trembling. ‘Are you all right, Howard?’

‘It upsets me too, sir.’ He eyed my raincoat. ‘Can I clean you up at all?’

I told him not to worry.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is something you could do for me. You could order me a taxi.’

Howard nodded, then withdrew into the lobby.

Standing on the steps, I could still feel the woman’s grip around my ribs. She had left damp marks all down my front. I could even see the place where she had pressed her face against me, a stain with three segments to it — the imprint of her forehead, nose and chin. My raincoat had become a shroud. I stared out into the darkness. The force with which she had attached herself to me had been testament to her loneliness, her desperation. I was reminded once again of what Bracewell had said, that the White People couldn’t help themselves, that they deserved better, and I rebuked myself for not having acted with more compassion.

By the time the taxi drew up outside the hotel, the rain had slackened off. The city seemed quiet, almost shocked, as if it had witnessed the entire episode and sided with the woman. Of the woman herself there was no sign. They have their places. I stepped down into the boat and gave the driver the address.

He frowned. ‘What do you want to go all the way out there for? There’s nothing out there.’

I didn’t answer. Curiously though, his reaction provided me with exactly the kind of stimulus I had been waiting for. You’re phlegmatic, I thought. What would you know? We were different people, the taxi-driver and I. We had different needs. A strong sense of conviction was flowing through me now. I could have been having drinks with John Fernandez, Philip de Mattos, and the rest of them. I could have been forging new contacts, furthering my career. Instead, I was in a water-taxi heading west, towards the airport.

There’s nothing out there.

That’s what you think, I thought with a smile.

Inside, it was all exactly as I remembered it. There before me was the foyer, half-moon-shaped, and decorated in flamboyant if slightly tattered red and gold, and there on the carpet lay the bright circle of light, trembling a little at the edges, and there in the ticket booth sat the girl with the blonde hair. I was filled to the brim with a joy which, even at the time, felt disproportionate. It was as though I had invested my whole being in this one image, and somehow, simply by walking in and seeing it, I had been repaid in full.

Well, not quite in full. There was still the pale-gold door, and what I would find when I stepped beyond it. I moved almost hungrily towards the ticket booth. The girl was wearing something different tonight, a silk kimono embroidered with exotic birds and trees. The backdrop was a landscape, lush mountains rising above calm bays, suns sinking heavily in skies of peach and lilac, and for a moment I was drawn into that world, and I was looking at the birds and trees from the other side, my face drenched in a lurid apocalyptic glow. The girl’s voice came to me from everywhere at once, and across a great distance, like the voice of God.