Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

Yes, I thought as I stood on the walkway, looking out over the car-park, I should probably have more faith in her.

We both had showers. Then, once we were dressed, Odell took me to the bar on the ground floor. It was still fairly early, and there was almost no one there, just an older couple on the dance floor at the back, shuffling beneath maroon and purple disco lights. While Odell ordered our drinks, I sat in a booth and let my eyes drift through the interior, trying to convey a sulky indifference to everything I saw. I stared at the couple, who seemed glued together. The woman had her eyes closed, and her head rolled on the man’s shoulder as though attached to her body by a piece of string. Their dancing bore no relation to the music, which was upbeat, corny, before my time.

Odell came back with two double brandies. When I seemed surprised that she knew what I drank, she told me we’d had brandy on a train, in late November. Again I thought back, but no matter how often or how hard I tried, I could never match what she said with anything that I’d experienced.

She smiled. ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’

It was part of her gift, she told me. She knew how to make herself unmemorable. A skill she had developed over the years was to shake hands without leaving the slightest impression. As she offered her hand, she simultaneously withdrew from it, retreating into the most distant part of herself, both physically and mentally. She had done it to me on the train to Aquaville, she said, and at the conference as well, a couple of weeks before.

‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ She shook her head and reached for her drink. ‘I must be better than I thought.’

And she started telling me her story, which was also my story, of course. She had first met me, very briefly, at the cocktail party in the Concord Room — though she had used her gift to ‘absent herself’, as she put it. She’d been officially assigned to keep me under observation until I returned to the Red Quarter. Little did she know, at that point, how long the assignment was going to last! She had flown to Congreve, just as I had, her seat two rows in front of mine. She had watched the fireworks, and attended the banquet afterwards. When the bomb went off, she was in a club in the basement of the hotel, socialising with some other delegates. ‘As I told you once before,’ she said with a crafty grin. Anyway, they were all evacuated on the spot. Later, she slipped through a police cordon and found me on the fourteenth floor, walking back towards my room — walking in the wrong direction, in other words. It was enough to prompt her to call Adrian Croy, who immediately switched her role to that of ‘shadow’. Though I’d hitched a number of lifts that night, she was able to keep track of me. She sat behind me as I ate breakfast in that out-of-the-way transport café. She followed me as I climbed up into the hills. She stood at my shoulder during the burning of the animals, an event that had given her bad dreams. Afterwards, I had vanished into the crowd, and she was still trying to locate me when the riot squad arrived. In the ensuing chaos she had lost her favourite piece of jewellery. A ring. By the time she secured her release, I was already making for the coast –

Odell was still talking, but I had stopped listening. I slipped a hand inside my shirt and felt for the ring I wore around my neck. So you don’t drift too far… With an inscription like that, I should have guessed it would belong to a phlegmatic. Undoing the knot, I freed the ring and held it out to her. At first, in the dim light of the bar, she didn’t seem to recognise it. Then, slowly, she reached out and took it from me. For a long time she said nothing, her head lowered, then she lifted her eyes to mine.

‘That’s a miracle,’ she said.

I watched her slide the ring on to her finger.

‘The strangest thing about it is,’ she said, ‘it proves I was telling you the truth.’

We had more drinks to celebrate the return of the ring, which to my mind now linked us inextricably, and it was while Odell was buying another round, our third or fourth, that I overheard a man at the bar ask if she would dance with him. Odell told him she was sorry, but she was with someone. He seemed to be friendly with the bartender, who was also the manager of the hotel, because they exchanged a few words and laughed, then the man came over to the booth where I was sitting. He wore black jeans and a leather belt with a metal vulture for a buckle. His boots were crocodile-skin, and their toes were so sharp that he could have dipped one of them in ink and written with it. I thought of the book Victor had made. What stories would these boots have told?

‘You with her?’

He had lifted a hand, his thumb angled back over his shoulder, but I knew better than to look where he was pointing. I didn’t meet his gaze either. Instead, I stared at his other hand, which hung against his hip, the fingers curling and uncurling as if they were trying to work themselves loose.

‘You don’t mind if I have a dance with her, do you?’

Though the disco was still going on, a silence had risen underneath it, which made the music seem strident and hollow. We were only seconds away from the type of situation Odell had warned me about. I put my glass down and stood up. The man stepped back. He was probably hoping he would have to defend himself. He probably wanted a fight even more than a dance. His flexing fingers would not be satisfied until that happened. But I just walked around him and moved towards the exit. I didn’t touch him or brush against him, didn’t even acknowledge his presence. He could have been a column or a pillar. I could have been walking in my sleep. As I pushed the door open, he started to say something, his voice pitched high in disbelief, but I let the door slam behind me, cutting off his sentence halfway through.

Outside, a drizzle was coming down. I hurried round the corner and along the alley to the hotel. Cars hissed by on the main road as if they were carrying snakes. When I reached our room I locked myself in, as Odell had told me to, then I sat on the edge of the bed, my eyes veering constantly towards the door. Its stillness seemed temporary, unsustainable. I kept expecting the flimsy wood to crash inwards and shower me with splinters, but I couldn’t imagine who or what would be standing in the gap. Perhaps no one, nothing. An upright box of darkness. A piece of the night.

I sat there, motionless. The minutes passed.

Once, I lifted my wrist into the air in front of me to check the time, but the watch I was wearing had no hands.

In the end, I reached for the remote. Wrestling was on. Huge men with flaxen manes bounced off each other, their bodies the colour of roast chicken. I turned the sound down. Through the wall behind me came a series of breathy rhythmic cries. At first I thought it was the people next door having sex, but it went on far too long. Somebody must have tuned in to one of the many adult channels. The wrestlers with their roasted skin, the endless mechanical orgasms — I fell into a kind of trance. So much so that when I heard a voice whisper my name I almost leapt off the bed.

I opened the door and Odell slipped past me. By the time I had locked the door again, she was in the bathroom, running the tap. I heard her spit. Standing in the bathroom doorway, I watched her wash her face and hands.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

There was something about her that I didn’t understand. She clearly thought of herself as strange-looking, if not actually ugly, and yet it was precisely that sense of aberrant uniqueness that drew your eye to her and held it there. I remembered what she had said about Luke, how his looks overshadowed hers. Her beauty might be reluctant or arcane, but I could see it nonetheless. And another thing. In telling Luke what she could do, she believed she’d lost her air of mystery. Maybe for him. But true mystery could not be compromised, nor could it be dissipated quite so easily. It was as much a part of her as her freckles, or the fine lines below her eyes.