Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

He had spent most of his life in the Blue Quarter, he told me. They had seen his reticent behaviour as evidence of passivity. His caution they had taken to be indecisiveness. No one had ever suspected him of being melancholic — well, not until the greaseproof-paper phase began. That was four or five years ago. He had started wrapping himself in greaseproof paper before he went to bed. He thought he would stay fresher if he dressed like that. Looking down, he grinned and shook his head. He’d really given the game away, hadn’t he?

When I asked if he felt he was in the right place now, he nodded. He was more likely to be understood in the Green Quarter, he thought, than anywhere else. There were others like him — or not dissimilar, anyway. Also, people were more inward-looking, less meddlesome. They tended to ignore you. Except for Starling, that is. The other day Starling had come at him with a lighted match, the bastard.

As I followed Brendan up the path to the front door, he thanked me for keeping him company. He had enjoyed our talk, he said, but now, if I would excuse him, he thought he would go up to his room and lie down. He was feeling a bit soft around the edges, a bit rancid.

Shortly afterwards, I was formally incorporated into the household, and in a manner Brendan would himself have recognised. One night, as we were eating supper at the kitchen table, Horowicz turned to me. From now on, he declared, I would be known as Wigwam. ‘Why Wigwam?’ he said before I could open my mouth. ‘Because your initials are T.P.’ Despite the laughter that accompanied this declaration, the name stuck. I became Wigwam — or Wig, for short — not just to Clarise, for whom it was a huge relief, since she’d never been able to bring herself to use my first name, but to all the men living at the Cliff, and even, after a while, to myself.

Christmas was coming, Christmas in the Green Quarter, an event that filled the entire population with fear and dread. Everybody was aware of the statistics: some people would commit suicide, some would sink into severe depression, and so on.

‘There’s only one way of dealing with it,’ Clarise told me on a dark December morning as I was helping her with lunch. ‘Get drunk, then go to sleep.’

‘With a bit of hanky-panky in between, maybe,’ Horowicz said.

He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, just a few feet away from her. The space between them filled with the glint and glitter of his small sharp eyes.

But Clarise didn’t even look up from the shortcrust pastry she was rolling out. ‘No hanky-panky,’ she said. ‘Not for me. Not any more.’

Without another word, Horowicz rounded the table, hauled the back door open and slammed it shut behind him. A bird flew diagonally across the window like something chipped off by the impact.

Clarise turned to me. ‘You see? It’s starting already.’

Wind flooded round the edges of the house, making the lights in the kitchen flicker, and for a few moments the spirit of Christmas was in the room with us, glowering and baleful — pitiless.

Some years there would be three or four men who she felt might try and do away with themselves, but the only person who troubled her this year was Aaron. Did I know him? I shook my head. I’d had very little contact with Aaron. Whenever I spoke to him, he would look at me much as a statue might, with blank eyes. I had assumed he was heavily medicated, a fact which Clarise now confirmed. All the same, she was going to put a camp bed in his room, she said, and she wanted the rest of us to take turns sleeping in there, just to keep an eye on him.

That week, we drew numbers to see who would spend which nights in Aaron’s room, each number representing a date between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Much to the relief of the other men, I was lumbered with twenty-five.

We sat down to Christmas dinner at half-past three. Afterwards, we gathered in the front room, which had been decorated with sprigs of holly and bunches of cheap balloons, and Jack Starling, who wasn’t one to miss an opportunity, served a punch that he had concocted especially for the occasion. I never found out what the ingredients were, but within an hour Lars had passed out under the tree — somebody tied his ankles together with tinsel so he would trip over when he stood up — and Bill Snape, a man known for his scholarly ways and his reserved demeanour, was attempting a headstand on the top of the piano. I had been watching Aaron surreptitiously ever since breakfast. He had drunk almost nothing. Once the meal was over, he sat on the sofa examining the two sides of his hand, his air of studiousness contrasting oddly with the yellow paper crown he was wearing.

Towards eleven, with the party in full swing, Aaron went upstairs. I waited a couple of minutes, then I followed. Though Clarise was already pretty far gone, she caught my eye and nodded in approval. When I opened Aaron’s door, a wedge of light from the landing showed me that he was lying on his back in bed with his eyes open and his hands behind his head.

‘I’m sleeping in here tonight,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’

He let out a quietly mocking laugh. ‘Make sure I don’t kill myself.’

I decided not to respond to that.

‘Last night it was Starling,’ Aaron said. ‘He was so drunk I could’ve done it ten times over.’

I closed the door, then took off my clothes and got into the camp bed. Downstairs, in the front room, Urban Smith was singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, a carol that could easily have been the Green Quarter’s national anthem.

‘I still think about her all the time,’ Aaron said after a while.

‘Think about who?’

‘Lucette.’

She had been his fiancée, he told me. He had loved her bony wrists and the way her knees almost knocked together when she walked. She had been clever too. A mind so sharp you could cut yourself on it. One night, while they were sleeping, policemen had burst into their flat. He would always remember the sight of Lucette struggling, half-naked, in the arms of strangers. One of them pointed a finger at him and said, Stay. As if he were a dog. The shame of it, that he couldn’t rescue her, protect her. The immense, excruciating shame. He hadn’t seen her since that night, but he knew she would never forgive him for not coming to her aid.

‘There wasn’t anything you could have done,’ I said.

‘I could’ve tried.’

‘It wouldn’t have made much difference.’

‘It would to me.’ Aaron lay still for a moment, then I heard his bedclothes rustle. I sensed that he had turned to face the wall.

I stared up at the ceiling, sleep eluding me. I had been at the Cliff for almost a month now, and though I had settled into the rhythms of life in the house my nights hadn’t been particularly restful. I woke too often, and had too many dreams. I would be walking through an empty building or caught in two minds on a street corner, or I would be running along a towpath, but whatever the location there was always something missing, something I had to find. I began to write my dreams down in a small green notebook, as if the process of transcription might reveal their truth, as if, once the dreams had been recorded, once they had been retained , they might be persuaded to give up their meaning. Sometimes I had the feeling that I cried out, as I had cried out when I stayed with John Fernandez, but in the morning nobody mentioned it, not even Horowicz, who slept in the room opposite mine. I wasn’t alone, perhaps. We were all troubled, it seemed, in one way or another. Once, I heard my own name being shouted in the middle of the night — Tom? Tommy? — and I sat upright in my bed and answered, Yes? but then I realised it was Clarise at the far end of the landing, Clarise calling for her dead husband in her sleep.