Rupert Thomson: Divided Kingdom

‘The border,’ my companion murmured.

I opened the window and looked out. A poorly made wall of concrete blocks had been erected at right angles to the track. Starting on level ground, it sloped up the embankment and then vanished from sight. Two parallel lengths of barbed wire straggled along the top, making the wall higher and more difficult to scale. Soldiers with guns stood in the spring sunlight. Their shadows pooled around their feet, blackening the stones. Half closing my eyes, I pretended that everyone was melting. A man walked an Alsatian down the outside of the train, the dog tugging on its lead so forcefully that the lead and the man’s arm formed a continuous straight line. I crossed to the window on the other side. Here, too, the wall stopped just short of the rails, but the gap was filled by a sliding wire-mesh gate. Soldiers began to pass through our carriage, some with green braid on their uniforms, some with scarlet, and each time they appeared the woman travelling with me had to produce a sheaf of official documents, which the soldiers scrutinised, their eyes shifting between the lines of writing and my face. At last, after a delay of perhaps an hour, the train lurched forwards again and the border was behind us.

‘I hate being checked like that,’ the woman said. ‘I always feel guilty.’

I nodded, as if I understood. ‘Me too,’ I said, which made her laugh.

The train gathered speed. We had entered the Red Quarter, which was to be my new home, and I felt my heart beat harder. Our destination was Belle Air, the woman said. A pretty place, apparently. She’d never been before. As the train swayed through a landscape of open fields and narrow lanes, she told me a little about the family to which I was going to belong. My father’s name was Victor Parry. He was fifty-two years old and worked for the railways, as coincidence would have it. He was an electrical engineer. My sister, Marie Parry, had just turned seventeen. She wanted to go to university, to study environmental law.

‘And my mother?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to be my mother?’

The woman’s face clouded over for a moment. I was to have no mother, she told me, but she was sure that Marie, my sister, would be more than capable of looking after me.

‘No mother,’ I said quietly.

Gripping the point of my chin between finger and thumb, the woman tilted my face upwards until I was staring into her eyes, which were round and solemn. ‘You must take things slowly,’ she said. ‘Give everyone time to adjust, yourself included.’

We changed trains in the capital, then travelled south, passing red-brick houses with grey slate roofs, street after street of them, all parallel, as if that part of the city had been combed. One row of terraced housing swept up towards the railway line, and I was able to look through windows into people’s homes. I saw a young woman pulling a sweater over a child’s head. Then another woman, older, standing at a sink. Something about these glimpses made the breath catch in my throat, and I had to look away, but before too long the houses were gone and we were out in the countryside again.

By the time we approached Belle Air, the sky had taken on a pale, almost supernatural colour, neither green nor blue, and a shoal of tapering clouds swam close to the horizon, their bellies tinted amber by the setting sun. In the foreground a river coiled lazily through flat meadows. A man sat huddled on the far bank, fishing. Two swans paddled near by, a disdainful arch to their long necks. The town itself stood on a hill, the houses clustered round a medieval castle that appeared to have been carefully restored. While at the holding station, I hadn’t tried to imagine what the next stage of my life was going to be like. I hadn’t dreaded it, as Jones had done, nor had I looked forward to it particularly. I suppose I simply assumed that everything would somehow fall into place. But now, for the first time, I could see the future taking shape around me, and I felt that my faith in things was about to be tested.

The train stuttered and slowed. Through the windows of a brewery I saw beer bottles jostling on a conveyor belt. It occurred to me that similar bottles would pass along the belt tomorrow, and the next day, and in six months’ time. Where would I be by then? Who would I be with? On the bottles went — impervious, determined, slightly unsteady. Next door, at the bowling club, the floodlights had been switched on. A solitary man in a white shirt and grey trousers stood on a lawn that was so smooth that it might have been shaved rather than mown. As I watched, the man leaned down. His right arm swung forwards, and a big dark ball came curving across the perfect grass towards me. No sooner had the man released the ball than he began to follow it with nimble, urgent steps, as though he regretted having let go of it, as though he no longer trusted it, as though he feared what it might do. The ball kept rolling, growing larger and larger, until it seemed that its voluptuous, hypnotic revolutions might swallow me completely, but then the train slid into a tunnel, its brakes wincing and grinding, and when we emerged again into the fading light, the brick walls and hanging baskets of a station rose up before me, and the train shuddered to a halt. My companion touched me on the arm. We were there.

I had been hoping for a long walk, which would have given me the chance to prepare myself, but the woman stopped outside a green door no more than a few hundred yards from the station. My nerve had held all day. Now, though, I found my stomach tightening, and the palms of my hands were wet. She heaved a sigh — almost, I felt, on my behalf — and pressed the bell once, firmly. A window on the first floor scraped open, and an elderly man with a huge bald head peered down.

‘Ah,’ he said.

The man’s head withdrew, and the window crashed shut. The woman smiled at me, dimples showing in her cheeks. She was trying to convince me that what was happening was normal.

When the front door opened, the man’s eyes jumped from the woman’s face to mine and his lips drew back and his teeth appeared, grey-white, like ancient cubes of ice. Was he smiling or gloating? I couldn’t tell. It was even possible that he had suffered an involuntary spasm of some kind. Clearly we had come to the wrong address. I’d been led to believe that people who lived in the Red Quarter were special and rare, like black pearls or white whales, like four-leafed clover, but so far as I could see there was nothing remotely special or rare about the man standing in the doorway. He was just plain odd. I turned and gazed at the woman who had brought me there, endeavouring to compress all my doubts and fears into a single look, but she merely nodded at me and those smooth dents showed in her cheeks again.

‘You must be Thomas,’ the man said finally. Reaching down, he took my right hand in his and shook it vigorously. ‘Very pleased to meet you. Very pleased indeed.’ He tried to step back, so as to let the woman pass, but the doorway was too narrow. ‘Do come in,’ he said. ‘Both of you. Follow me.’

There had been no mistake. This was Victor Parry, my new father.

My first glimpse of my new sister, Marie, came half an hour later, and with her appearance I felt the anxieties that had taken hold of me begin to loosen their grip. I was sitting in the living-room with Victor Parry and my travelling companion, about to reach for a cup of tea, when I heard light footsteps on the stairs — or, rather, I heard a series of subtle creaks, as though someone was walking on tiptoe, trying their utmost not to make a sound. Glancing beyond Victor Parry’s shoulder, I saw a girl framed in the open doorway. She was dressed in a black ribbed sweater, a short, slightly flared red skirt and a pair of black tights. As I caught her eye, she winked at me and put a finger to her lips, then she disappeared from view.