Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

He weighed his decision, then shook his head. ‘No.’ He squinted up at me. ‘Can you say anything else?’

I noticed an old man cycling along the road towards us. ‘Not now.’

The man pedalled into the estate, leeks and sticks of celery poking out of the wicker basket lashed to his handlebars.

The boy was called Felix — an unusual name for a melancholic, I thought, though I chose not to comment on it — and he was on his way to the market to do some shopping for his mother. I asked if I could tag along. He didn’t see why not. He took me to a muddy expanse of wasteground where a number of vans stood about with their doors flung open. Traders in cheap leather jackets bent into the interiors, unloading endless brightly coloured streams of second-hand clothing. We moved on past stalls selling electronic goods, jewellery, shoes, kitchen equipment, old war medals, and even live birds in cages, arriving eventually at an area where one could buy fresh produce. While Felix queued out the front with all the women, I scavenged round the back. I came upon a box of badly bruised pears, several of which I was able to devour before the stall owner chased me away. A few minutes later I salvaged four tomatoes from a pile that had been dumped on the ground, and then, even better, I discovered a heap of unshelled peanuts and the wrinkled tail-end of a salami. I ate half of what I had found and stored the rest in the pocket of my cloak.

When Felix appeared again, he was loaded down with bags. He wondered if I’d be willing to help him carry them. Fortified by my rudimentary breakfast, I said I would. As we trudged back along the main road, he asked whether I had a name. People called me Wig, I said. I told him how it had come about. He nodded soberly and said he thought it was a good name, under the circumstances.

As we turned into the estate where he lived, I decided it was time to ask the question that had been on my mind for much of the night. Did he have any idea where I could find others like me? His forehead crumpled, and he walked more slowly, staring at his shoes. He was giving the matter serious consideration, as I had suspected he might. Under the flyover, he said at last. The one out by the kennels. He had seen some White People there. Or try the railway line, he said. Going north. At his front door, he asked if I wanted to come in and rest. There was only his mother, he said, and she always got up late.

‘Better not.’ I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I enjoyed meeting you, though.’

‘Thanks for helping, Wig,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have done it by myself.’

‘If anybody asks about me, don’t say a word. All right?’

He tucked his lips into his mouth, then nodded.

‘It’s our secret,’ I said. ‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

I ruffled his hair and told him to look after himself, then I turned and walked back to the pavement.

When I reached the corner of the street I heard a voice call out. Glancing round, I could see a face showing above the dark wooden fencing. He must have climbed on to a dustbin. I waved to him, and he waved back, his hand moving so fast that it became a blur.

Felix.

I don’t know how I got through that day. I was so tired that I kept tripping over and though I’d stuffed bits of newspaper into the backs of my boots so they would fit a little better I already had blisters on both heels. Taking the advice I had been given, I followed the main branch of the railway line out to the north end of town — to no avail. The flyover didn’t yield anything either, only a torn, stained mattress and a circle of black ashes, the remains of someone’s fire. Every time I saw white, my heart jumped, but it was always just a man opening a newspaper or a woman hanging out a sheet, and afterwards fatigue would reclaim me. Each new false alarm took something out of me, depleting me still further.

Towards the middle of the afternoon I was on a railway bridge out near the unfinished housing estate when I happened to stop and lean on the parapet. I was only going to pause for a while before I continued on my way, but there below me, seated on a grass embankment, were three of the people I had been looking for — two men and a woman. Were they the same three that I had seen washing in the river? I had to assume so. In which case I was doubly relieved they hadn’t noticed me that night. After all, this was my chance, and it seemed unlikely I would get another. The authorities would know of my disappearance by now — Clarise would have to report me, if only to protect herself — though I had spent a good part of the day trying to keep that thought from entering my head, since it would have done nothing for my rapidly dwindling morale.

I clambered over the fence. One of the men heard me and turned to watch, his jaw revolving, as I edged side-footed down the bank. A goods train approached, its trucks loaded with sand and gravel. By the time it had gone past I was standing beside the White People, attempting to replicate the unnatural complacency I saw on their faces. In front of them, on a sheet of wrinkled brown paper, they had laid out a few chunks of white bread and a fatty cooked meat that might have been pork. Both the men were still eating. I took some peanuts out of my pocket and placed them on the paper, then I added a couple of tomatoes. One of the men, the dark one, looked up and nodded. I nodded back. The other man appeared to smile at me, though it could have been wind. He had pale eyebrows, and cheeks that looked grazed. The inside of his mouth seemed raw too, with chipped teeth and swollen gums, and he chewed gingerly, wincing as he did so. The woman opened one of the peanuts and ate the contents, then she thumped the ground beside her with the flat of her hand. I sat down next to her. She nodded and stared out over the railway line, her eyes misting over. A humming sound came out of her, a series of monotonous notes that didn’t resemble any tune I’d ever heard. After a while she reached for a chunk of bread and pushed it into my hand. I took it from her and bit into it. It shattered between my teeth. Using saliva, I turned the fragments into a kind of paste, then swallowed hard and got it down. It must have been days old. I watched as the woman sorted through the meat, flicking it this way and that with the backs of her fingers. In the end she chose a piece that was mostly fat and handed it to me. Warts clustered on her knuckles, and the lines of her hands were inlaid with dirt, but I was past caring. I had eaten nothing since my foraging behind the market stalls just after dawn. As I chewed on the pork fat I transferred my gaze to the man sitting furthest from me. With his knotted black beard and his weather-beaten skin, he had the air of a prophet who had just walked out of the wilderness. His eyes were strangely matt and dusty-looking, as though, like blueberries or grapes, they were covered with a kind of bloom. I could see how the lost or the gullible might want to follow somebody like him.

Once they had finished eating, the woman wrapped the remainder of the food in the brown paper and tucked it out of sight beneath her clothes, then they set off along the embankment. I went with them. They didn’t appear to find my attachment to them at all unusual or suspicious. The weather was still and grey, oddly dreamy and exhausting. I had the feeling time had been suspended. Or perhaps it was place that seemed different, as if I were being shown things through a series of artfully positioned mirrors, as if the world, while looking just the same, were actually reflected, diluted, a distant cousin of itself. Once, I closed my eyes, and I would have lost my footing and gone tumbling towards the railway line had the bearded man not seized my arm at the crucial moment. I nodded, grunted. He let go of my arm and then moved on. Curiously, I felt the incident had lent me a certain credibility.