Rupert Thomson: Divided Kingdom

Moving away across the landing and down a short corridor, I passed Marie’s room. I would often pause to gaze in wonder at her clothes, which would be lying in a tangle on the floor, her dresses drooping across the foot of the bed like people who had fainted, her underwear foaming and frothing out of her chest of drawers in little frozen waterfalls of cotton, silk and lace. The room I had been given was one of the smallest in the house, no more than eight feet square, and its single window gave on to a row of scrubby back yards and gardens, a car-park half buried in weeds, and the blank side-wall of a working-men’s club, but after the noise and overcrowding of the holding station I loved the feeling it had, of being an eyrie, a refuge, my own private domain.

Sometimes, when Marie came home after an evening out, she would look in on me. Light would open in a triangle across my bed and she would lean down, placing her lips on my forehead or my cheek, and a scent would float off her, not just the perfume she wore, but alcohol, cigarette smoke, and cold, clean sweat from all the dancing she had done, it was the sweet smell of the night, a world I didn’t know as yet, and I would lie there with my eyes closed and my heart leaping, and I would breathe her in, right to the bottom of my lungs. When she straightened up again, her clothes would seem to whisper to me, then the fan of light would fold itself away, the door would shut and I would hear her stumble back into her room and kick off her shoes, two quick tumbling sounds across the floor, like dwarves turning somersaults, and a new silence would descend, thicker than before and deeper, more inhabited somehow, the silence of my breath mingling with my sister’s and my father’s, the silence of our dreams.

Despite the promises I had made to other boys — I’ll look for you, I won’t forget — and despite the enduring clarity of my memories of those days, I thought I had left Thorpe Hall behind for ever, but this turned out not to be the case. I had only been living on Hope Street for a few months when I discovered that Maclean had been placed with a well-to-do family at the top of the town, and that he would be attending the same school as I was. The first time I saw him again, that autumn in the playground, I had no trouble recognising him, his wrists protruding from the arms of his blazer, his ears the size of dustbin lids.

‘What’s your new name?’ he asked.

‘Parry,’ I said. ‘Thomas Parry.’

He nodded.

‘What about you?’ I said.

‘Simon Bracewell.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s all right. Now listen,’ he said, and he threw a furtive glance round the asphalt yard, then drew me close. ‘About Cody,’ he said. ‘We’re divorced now, but we’re still good friends. He’s living with a family in the northwest. His new name’s De Vere, by the way.’

‘De Vere?’

‘I know.’ Bracewell shook his head.

I glanced at his left hand. ‘What happened to your ring?’

Bracewell grinned. ‘On our last night we took them off and tied them together with a piece of wire and threw them in the moat.’ He looked down at the ground, and his face became serious. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever marry again.’

Though we used to sit next to each other for lessons, we hadn’t been particularly close, but this now changed. In term-time he came round to my house at least twice a week, and during the holidays we spent whole days together. I was both intrigued and delighted by the way his mind worked. If it hadn’t been for Bracewell, for instance, I’m not sure I would ever have noticed Mr Page. There was a dry-cleaner’s on Hope Street, almost directly opposite our house. If you walked past the open doorway you could smell the fluid they used, which was called perchloroethylene and which would become — not inappropriately, I thought much later — the defining smell of my childhood. Mr Page ran the place. He had narrow eyes that curled up at the edges, and his mouth was the same — a wide, thin curve, like a slice of melon after you’ve finished eating it, like the rind seen sideways-on.

‘He looks as if he’s smiling all the time,’ Bracewell said.

He told me that it put him in a good mood, just to look at Mr Page. If everybody had a Mr Page living somewhere near by, the world would be a much happier place, he thought. One question did bother him, however, and he returned to it again and again. What if Mr Page lost his temper? Would he still appear to be smiling?

I persuaded Bracewell to push the prospect of Mr Page not smiling to the back of his mind, otherwise it would never happen. Bracewell agreed. Instead, we sat on my doorstep and were content simply to soak up a sense of well-being from the man on the other side of the road. Later, I realised that what we saw in Mr Page was something the authorities called ‘eucrasia’, a state of balance where all your humours are in harmony with one another. In that respect, at least, we were proving ourselves to be true disciples of the new regime.

By the following spring the work of rearranging the population had largely been accomplished. Throughout the divided kingdom the walls of concrete blocks had been reinforced with watch-towers, axial crosses and even, in some areas, with minefields, which rendered contact between the citizens of different countries a physical impossibility. If you had been classified as sanguine, then you remained in the Red Quarter for the term of your natural life. Attempts to cross the border illegally were punishable by prison sentences, and if you defied the guards they had the right to open fire on you. All this to prevent what was now being referred to as ‘psychological contamination’. In the hush between Christmas and New Year, a hush intensified by a heavy fall of snow, an Internal Security Act was simultaneously passed in all four countries. Anybody suspected of ‘undermining the fabric of society’ could now be arrested on unspecified charges and held without trial for up to two years. Some time afterwards, when I was in my twenties, I heard it rumoured that the government had introduced tranquillisers into the water supply in order to guarantee a peaceful transition. This seemed a little far-fetched. But even if the rumours had some truth to them, there were obviously quite a few who never drank from the tap. In the Yellow Quarter, for instance, where resistance to the new regime was at its strongest, not a day passed without somebody being shot dead for trying to escape. In the Green Quarter, on the other hand, a number of people killed themselves, leaving notes and letters which claimed the government had deprived them of the will to live; special cemeteries were set aside for those who had died by their own hand, and several bridges and tall buildings had to be pulled down since they were believed to encourage suicidal thoughts. Only in the Blue Quarter was the protest non-violent, but even there the authorities witnessed a spontaneous outpouring of grief and despair. Every morning border guards had to remove the bouquets, photographs and hand-written elegies that had been deposited at the base of the wall during the hours of darkness, and it was said that their barracks were so full of cut flowers that they resembled maternity wards.

We paid very little attention to any of this during those early years, Bracewell and I. One could make a case for the fact that we were behaving in character, I suppose. We were sanguine, after all. We liked to look on the bright side, make the best of things. But also — and more importantly, perhaps — our energies were entirely taken up with the man who ran the dry-cleaner’s. Though we spent many tranquil hours basking in Mr Page’s aura of well-being, there was always a part of us that remained on tenterhooks, waiting for the miraculous, the almost unimaginable moment when he no longer appeared to be smiling.