Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

I didn’t answer. Clearly they had been patrolling the quayside for some time. They had an excitement that was all their own — the thrill of a tip-off, a stake-out, a possible arrest. Their bodies trembled with stored tension.

‘You’re to come with us,’ the man with the notebook told me.

To have travelled so far, to have got so close — and now this … I hadn’t even considered such an outcome, and my reaction was suitably incongruous. I laughed out loud.

‘We’re taking you to the Ministry,’ the same man said, ‘for questioning.’ His voice had tightened. He nodded to one of his colleagues, who grasped me by the upper arm and tried to steer me towards a waiting motor launch. I immediately shook him off. I had never been able to bear the feeling of being held like that.

‘First I have to go into the club,’ I said.

The man with the notebook shook his head. ‘We’ve got our orders.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘it won’t take —’

‘It’s orders,’ one of the others said. ‘It’s not up to us.’

The inside of my head buzzed and flashed, as if something in my brain had blown. They were about to deny me the very thing that I’d been looking forward to, the thing I wanted most in all the world. I pushed past them, making for the entrance, and was aware, for a few moments, of people shocked into unnatural shapes.

Before I could reach the door, though, two of them grabbed hold of me. Then the third joined in, his notebook fluttering clumsily to the ground. As we struggled on the steps, one of the glass doors opened and the blonde-haired girl looked out. She was wearing her kimono with its pattern of exotic birds and trees, and her eyebrows, lifted a little in surprise, were plucked into two fine arcs, as usual. In order to recreate the experience of my other visits to the club — or to reproduce the same level of intensity, at least — I had always felt that conditions had to be similar, if not identical, and the blonde girl’s presence there that night, the fact that she would have been sitting in the ticket booth when I walked in, only added to the fury with which I resisted all attempts to restrain me. I was told later that I seemed to possess an almost superhuman strength, and that, if there hadn’t been three policemen at the scene, and if one of them hadn’t been a famous wrestler when he was young, I might actually have got away.

We passed beneath a bridge and swung sharply to the left, the canal splitting wide open in our wake, waves slapping against the sheer dark walls of town houses and then rebounding. The massive bulk of the Ministry towered above us now, its eaves all but shutting out the sky. Though it was after two in the morning, lights still showed in several of the windows. It could be a twenty-four-hour job, working for the government. Nobody knew that better than I did.

I was escorted to a room on the first floor where two men were waiting for me. One wore glasses with no frames, his brown eyes floating beneath the lenses like a pair of sea anemones. The other man had the fleshy but solid build of a field athlete. Running along the far wall of the office was a soundproofed window that overlooked an indoor marina. The water was lit from below, an eerie jewelled green, and various small craft were going silently about their business.

The man with the glasses installed himself behind a desk. I took a seat in front of him. The other man lowered himself, grunting, into a swivel chair some distance to my left. We spent the first half-hour establishing the facts — name, address, occupation, and so on. As for the date of my arrival, I had entered the Blue Quarter on Monday the 7th of November, in the morning, and my visa had expired three days later, on the 10th. I had been at large, illegally, for about two weeks.

At one point the man to my left leaned forwards. ‘Thomas Parry,’ he said in a thin, high-pitched voice that sat awkwardly with his muscular physique. ‘You know, I’m not sure I didn’t speak to you once, on the phone.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ the man with the glasses said. ‘Why did you return to the Blue Quarter?’

‘There’s no point trying to explain,’ I said.

‘No point?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

The ferocity of what had flashed through me on the towpath seemed to have burned out entire circuits in my head. Only a kind of numb, childish truculence remained — but that seemed justifiable. I was once again the boy who had been abducted in the middle of the night, the boy who had been removed from his home against his will, only this time my feelings were right there on the surface.

‘If you hadn’t been arrested,’ the man with the glasses was saying, ‘what would you have done? What would you have done tomorrow, for example?’

I shook my head. For some reason I remembered Chloe Allen in that moment — her mockery of all authority, her cheek, the sweet smell of her breath through the van’s wire-mesh …

‘You know what you are?’ I said with a smile. ‘You’re drones.’

During the silence that followed, I happened to glance upwards. Slabs of reflected light from the marina were undulating on the ceiling. Distracting, hypnotic, oddly sensual, it was almost as if a belly dancer was performing in the room.

‘Drones,’ I said again.

The man with the glasses wanted to know who I had come into contact with since arriving in the Blue Quarter for the second time. He would be needing a list of names and places, he said — an inventory, in other words, of every one of my encounters. I brought my eyes back down from the ceiling. I didn’t have the slightest intention of betraying Owen or Rhiannon — or any other member of the community for that matter. No one was getting any names and places out of me.

‘Well?’ said the man with the glasses.

I had been in a shipwreck, I told him. I had nearly drowned. On reaching land, I had been exhausted and bewildered. I’d had no idea where I was. Though I had almost certainly met people, I didn’t know who they were or where they lived.

But he would not give up. ‘What about the route you took?’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shouted. ‘Are you deaf?’

Taking a deep breath, then letting the air out through his nose, the man shut down his computer. He glanced briefly at his colleague. The fleshy man’s face showed no discernible expression.

Even though I couldn’t recall any of the people to whom I had been exposed, the man with the glasses said, it was likely that I had been contaminated as a result. He would therefore be recommending a series of tests to determine the exact nature and degree of that contamination. He consulted his watch. Testing would begin at midday.

I slept poorly that night. Each time I woke up, my pillow would be hot, and when I lifted my head all I could see was a pale oblong hanging in the darkness. Guards had shown me to a small windowless room — a ‘secure unit’, as they called it — in the basement of the Ministry. There was a narrow bed, with sheets that smelled sharply of bleach, as though certain of my predecessors had soiled themselves. There was also a sink and a toilet, both made of metal. In the top half of the door was a single pane of reinforced glass. Once I had established where I was, I would turn my pillow over, cool side facing up, and then lie back. So the authorities had finally caught up with me … I couldn’t work out who the informer was. The woman who ran the hotel, perhaps. Or that sweaty waiter at the restaurant. Or perhaps De Vere had had good reason to be paranoid: if the police were keeping him under surveillance, as he suspected, then they couldn’t have failed to notice me. I remembered De Vere’s missing friend and wondered if I should be frightened.