Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

At last, and breathing hard, I levered myself up on to the embankment. Only then did I glance round. The man had not moved. My clothes still lay beside him in a small shapeless mound. Once again I heard him bellow, an inhuman noise, like a cow being butchered. I had wanted the exchange to benefit us both, but clearly it would take more than a new set of clothing to improve his lot. I had deceived myself. It occurred to me that I had done a kind of violence to him, and that I might, eventually, have to pay for this. Stealing one last look at the half-naked figure, as though to fix in my mind the debt I owed him, I turned and began to walk back through the trees.

Street lamps hung above the tarmac, buzzing. If I hadn’t known better I would have said that they were living things and that the rest of the world was dead. I looked both ways, then stepped out into the road. Halfway across, my boot caught in the hem of the cloak and I went sprawling. My clumsiness was greeted by a blast from the horn of a passing car. The mockery had begun, and it didn’t feel unwarranted. I already seemed to have altered in some indefinable way. It wasn’t the weight or the smell of the cloak. It wasn’t even the sheer unfamiliarity of such a garment. It was more as if I had entered a tradition, and the clothes themselves were imparting something of that responsibility, that lore, as a crown does when it is lowered on to the head of a king. In donning the cloak, I had parted company with the person I used to be without knowing quite who or what I was going to become. When I reached the far side of the road I stood and stared at the cracks between the paving-stones. They looked precise but temporary, as though they had been drawn in pencil. As though they could be rubbed out. There was something frightening about that, but something exhilarating too. Like turning your hand over and seeing that all the lines have gone. The world could disappear. I could disappear. A blank slate everywhere I looked. Staying close to the wall, I moved off down a quiet residential street.

You would think I would have realised sooner, but it was almost midnight before it occurred to me that I had nowhere to go. I had failed to work out any of the practical considerations. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? I found myself in a cobbled alley by the station, its clock tower lifting high above my left shoulder. There were railway tracks behind me, on the other side of a wooden fence. In front of me stood a terrace of red-brick houses. They faced away from me, their back yards silent, their garages locked up for the night. On top of the walls, glass splinters glittered where they had been embedded upright in cement. Each street light cast its own sullen dark-yellow glow. I was cold now, and tired. Teeth chattering. I could see Clarise Tucker’s front room with its tatty velour curtains and its misshapen furniture, coils of smoke unwinding from the ends of cigarettes, the air clouded with the pungent, yeasty fumes of Starling’s beer, and then, having climbed the stairs, I saw my single bed, and the reading lamp behind the door, its shade cocked like a bird’s head, and my book lying open on the chair, a book I would never finish now. Who would have thought I would miss that tiny, dingy room on the first floor of the Cliff? Who would have thought I would miss any of it? But a loneliness had risen up in me, keen, abrupt, and disproportionate, somehow, and it kept on rising, a sense of the smallness of my life, a rapid ebbing of conviction, and I stood on that bleak lane, beneath piss-yellow lights, and bellowed, and, much to my surprise, I sounded exactly like the man whose clothes I’d taken. A window grated open, and a woman shouted back. Some people are trying to sleep. I walked on, teeth clicking in my mouth like dice in a cup, no destination in my head.

All night I kept moving, aimlessly, hopelessly, my feet adrift in a stranger’s boots. All night I oscillated between moments of elation and longer stretches of despair. The town offered neither shelter nor guidance, and by half-past three I had come full circle. The station loomed before me once again, with its forbidding brickwork and its draughty doorways. This time I walked in. The concourse was brightly lit and quite deserted. No trains were due for hours. I stood outside a photo booth and, staring into the mirror, practised the faces for which the White People were renowned — the rounded, vacant eyes, the slack, half-open mouth. I made a few attempts at their trademark grunts and mumbles. The sounds boomed around and above me, the empty concourse acting as an echo chamber.

I was about to move on when a short bald man in a uniform burst out of one of the offices and collided with me. It was entirely his fault, and yet he swore and lashed out at me, the back of his hand catching me above the ear. I stepped backwards, laughing. So this was how it was going to be! My laughter had no effect on him. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he noticed it. He had hit me without looking, without so much as checking his stride, and I’d been unable to ward off the blow. My cloak was made out of a heavy, hard-wearing material, some kind of hemp or jute, and the slits for my arms were difficult to find in a hurry. Had this been done deliberately, to keep White People powerless? I also wondered about my overall reaction. If the man had been a little less distracted, would he have thought my behaviour untypical?

I had only been living as one of the White People for a few hours, but I could already see that I was lacking certain vital qualities and skills. In shedding the superfluous, they had reduced themselves — or been reduced — to some sort of residue or essence; their so-called emptiness was actually a distillation, a form of knowledge. I wasn’t acquainted with the labyrinth of pathways and alleys through which they moved with such apparent freedom and authority, and if I didn’t find out about them soon I would become too visible, I would begin to arouse suspicion. My only option was to attach myself to a group of genuine White People, and quickly; I needed to hide among them, learn from them. If I really wanted to step outside the system, if I wanted to be rid of it entirely, I would have to forget myself — everything I was, or ever had been. I would have to enter the fold in reality that the White People inhabited. Eyes of the dullest porcelain, and a black hole for a mouth. Words all swallowed up. Head like a guest-house for the wind. That sentence of Pat Dunne’s had stayed with me, but it had never been more relevant: You have to act like them, or you don’t survive.

I didn’t sleep at all, and yet afterwards, when I thought back to that first night, I came across blank patches, like periods of unconsciousness, where I couldn’t recall what I had done. There seemed to be no clear sequence of streets, just this place, and then another place, and then another place again, as if, like a giant, I had moved by leaps and bounds. Sometimes a place occurred twice — the river, the museum — which led me to suspect that I was clinging to small pockets of familiarity. Or else I had found myself in one of the circles of hell, perhaps, condemned to repeat myself…

By first light I was walking in a poor part of town, north-east of the station. A council estate had been built out there, among the weeds and puddles. White gulls whirled, screeching, above mounds of rubbish. I had been thinking it might be wise to hide myself away before too long, but then a small boy emerged from between two walls of pebble-dash and as I watched him turn in my direction I had a flash of inspiration and fell into step with him.

‘Morning,’ I said.

The boy stopped and stared. ‘You can talk.’

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’