Rupert Thomson: Divided Kingdom

‘Marie? Is that you?’ Victor’s head half turned, but only in time to hear the door to the street click shut. He let out a heavy, almost vaudevillian sigh. ‘You’ll have to forgive her,’ he said. ‘She’s always off out somewhere, doing God knows what.’

I had already forgiven her, of course. That dark hair curving in beneath her chin like the blade of a sultan’s dagger, those lips that slanted a little, as if one side of her mouth weighed more than the other. That conspirator’s wink, which the grown-ups hadn’t noticed. During the weeks that followed, Victor would often refer, half in jest, to the fact that Marie had abandoned him in his hour of need — and what’s more, as a result of her leaving the house like that and staying out for half the night, poor Thomas had been forced to wait until the next day before he even so much as set eyes on his new sister, whereupon Marie and I would exchange a look of barely suppressed amusement. We knew better. It was our secret, though. I loved Marie from the beginning — but not as a sister exactly, and not as a mother either.

I quickly realised how lucky I was to have been placed with the Parrys. Marie led her own life, the exuberant, dishevelled life of a seventeen year old, but she never made me feel excluded or unwanted. As for my father, Victor, it simply wasn’t in him to treat me badly, though he did tend to veer between mild hysteria and complete absent-mindedness, a pattern of behaviour which, like so much else, I would only fully understand in years to come. This much I knew: his wife, Jean Parry, had been taken on the same night as I had, another victim of the Rearrangement, and he was still mourning the loss of her, still adjusting to her absence. Marie seemed to care less — on the surface, at least. Maybe, like me, she kept all those feelings hidden. I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t a sense in which they looked on me as some sort of substitute for Jean, a kind of reimbursement. But perhaps that’s overstating it. Distraction might be a better word. I was something that would take their minds off the violence that had been done to them, something that would alter the shape of their sorrow. Marie took it upon herself to try and occupy the maternal role, just as my travelling companion had implied she might, while Victor assumed responsibility for the running of the household. Seen from the outside, then, my arrival had a beneficial effect, since it forced them to pull together and begin to function as a unit again.

As for my other parents, my real parents, I never heard what became of them, and I could never quite bring myself to ask. There was the loss itself, of course, which was hard enough, but I was also battling a sense of shame. I had turned my back on them, you might even say that I’d betrayed them, and I didn’t know how to come to terms with that. It was easier to pretend they didn’t exist. What’s more, in the circumstances, asking such a question would have seemed ungrateful, if not callous — and besides, I doubt whether Victor or Marie would have been able to tell me anything. The rift between past and present was absolute, for all of us. The image I was left with, of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night, people who hadn’t even had the time to dress properly, was one that I consigned to the very darkest corner of my memory, and there it remained, like a discarded childhood toy — the ukulele with its broken strings, the moulting, one-eyed teddy bear.

We were living in momentous times, historic times — the country had been dismembered, families had been torn apart, whole sections of the population were suffering from what became known as ‘border sickness’ — and yet I seemed to take it all in my stride. I remember Victor sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper on one of my first mornings in the house.

‘That Song fellow’s going to be Prime Minister,’ he said.

I remembered Miss Groves mentioning the name. To her, Michael Song had been something of a hero. He had attended the underground meetings that altered the nation’s destiny for ever, and later, when he had been classified as sanguine, he had founded a new political party, installing himself as leader.

‘I saw a poster yesterday,’ Victor said. ‘Michael Song. Voice of the People.’ He snorted. ‘Talk about putting the cart before the horse.’

He picked up his newspaper, but put it down again almost immediately.

‘There was rioting in the Yellow Quarter last night,’ he said. ‘The police used tear-gas and rubber bullets.’ He mentioned a place I’d never heard of ‘I used to live round there, when I was in my twenties.’

He wasn’t talking to anybody in particular. He was just talking. As I watched him, it struck me that he might be addressing the space that had formerly been occupied by Jean, his wife.

‘There are tanks on the streets,’ he said. ‘There are curfews.’ This last word came out high-pitched, a measure of his disbelief.

Marie was slouched over the table, face propped on one hand, eyes lowered. Her other hand rested loosely against a mug of tea, which she had yet to touch. I had heard her come in late the night before, swearing under her breath as she collided with the linen chest outside her room.

‘What’s a curfew?’ I asked eventually.

In truth, I wasn’t all that curious. I was just trying to fit in. The events that had upset Victor seemed academic to me, remote, even foreign. Perhaps I lacked the proper context — after all, I had spent five months in the middle of nowhere, shielded from the worst of what was going on — or perhaps it was the eerie matter-of-factness of a child who, having experienced a trauma of his own, decides simply to get on with the business of living, which in my case meant acquainting myself with my new environment. And there was so much to get used to, so much to explore.

The house itself was more than a hundred years old. Appropriately enough, an antiques dealer occupied the ground floor, though the over-elaborate and gloomy furniture didn’t sell, and a health-food shop soon took its place. We lived in the maisonette above. The staircase that led up from the pavement was dark and uneven, with creaking wooden steps, and the walls bulged, as if, like bodies, they contained a variety of soft yet vital organs. There was a sitting-room on the first floor at the front and three smaller rooms — kitchen, store-room and toilet — at the back. From the sitting-room I could look down into Hope Street, a narrow, bustling parade of shops, and if I leaned out far enough I could see the pub on the corner, the Peacock, where Victor sometimes stopped for a pint on his way home from work. Climb another flight of stairs, which felt still more rickety, and you would find three bedrooms and a bathroom. Victor spent most evenings up there with his door ajar and his radio tuned to the concerts of classical music that were broadcast live from the capital. He had become involved in redesigning a section of the Red Quarter’s railway network, a task which he appeared to relish. When going to bed, I would often glance into his room, and there he would be, poised over a sheet of tracing-paper with a pencil. His detailed maps of electrical systems covered every available surface, the long, slim cardboard cylinders in which his finished drawings travelled to and from the office leaning against the wall in the corner like so many snooker cues.

One night, though, just a few weeks after my arrival, I stopped in his doorway and saw a high-heeled silver sandal on the table, illuminated by a lamp. Victor was sitting in front of it, hunched over, a pair of kitchen scissors in one hand. When he sensed my presence, he almost jumped out of his chair, trying at the same time to hide the sandal under a newspaper. ‘Off — off to bed, Thomas?’ he stammered. ‘Well, goodnight. Sleep well.’ I looked at him for a moment longer, then I, too, said goodnight. I couldn’t expect to understand everything about these people, I thought to myself, not all at once, and there were probably questions I would never be able to ask.