Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

She walked out of the bathroom, the tips of her hair dark and wet. As she eased off her coat and let it slump to the floor, I took her in my arms. I felt her stiffen against me — she was thinking of pushing me away, perhaps — but then, in the next moment, all the tension left her and she relaxed.

You can’t do everything , I said inside my head.

‘What are you saying?’ she said. ‘Are you saying something?’

The warmth of her breath eased through my shirt. I became aware of the parts of her that I was touching — a shoulderblade, the small of her back. I could feel her spine under my right hand, the tip of my middle finger bearing the subtle imprint of a vertebra. I was getting an erection. I hadn’t meant anything like that to happen. In the meantime she had attained a new stillness, which seemed alert somehow, as though her body were listening to mine. I kissed the top of her head, where her parting was, then I kissed the outer rim of her ear. I could smell the beer and smoke of the bar, and the smell of her clean skin underneath reminded me that when she was only a few hours old she had been held against the window of a houseboat so she could watch the snow come down. And now she did push me away.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

I don’t know , I said inside my head.

She sat on the bed. As she bent over to unlace her boots, her hair fell forwards into her eyes. I sat beside her, tucking the loose strands back behind her ears.

‘Not you as well,’ she said.

Yes, me , I said. Me more than anyone.

I leaned forwards to kiss her mouth, and she didn’t move away. Her lips were cool, much cooler than the rest of her. I wondered if she had already withdrawn, if she had — what did she call it? — ‘absented herself.’

‘Somebody said once,’ she murmured, ‘somebody said my face looked like one of those road signs in the country that people have fired shotguns at …’

I stroked the face they’d said bad things about.

She lay on the counterpane, her arms thrown backwards, bracketing her head. I leaned down and pressed my lips to the milky insides of her wrists. She held herself quite still, her breathing shallow. I slowly unbuttoned her black cardigan. Underneath she was wearing a camouflage T-shirt. I untucked the T-shirt and pushed it up until I could see her stomach. I kissed the plump flesh around her belly button. A kind of vibration went through her, somewhere beneath the surface, deep down. Her heartbeat showed on the skin between her ribs, a shimmer on the drum of her body. I kissed her where the tremor was. I felt the beating of her heart against my mouth.

You’re not like any sign I’ve ever seen.

Her hand appeared as a slow blur to my left and came to rest on the back of my neck. It was my turn to go still. I waited to see what she would do next.

At that moment footsteps sounded on the walkway outside. I was hoping they would go past — there were plenty of rooms beyond ours — but they stopped and somebody knocked twice, firmly. Odell’s hand tightened in my hair. She wanted me not to move. The knocking came again, harder this time.

‘Open up.’

We lay on the bed, our faces turned towards the door.

‘I know you’re in there.’

It was the manager’s voice — the man who had served us in the bar downstairs. He rattled the door-knob, then swore under his breath. There was another silence, during which nothing happened. Finally his footsteps receded.

Odell levered herself upright. Without looking at me, she tucked her T-shirt back into her trousers, then bent quickly and did up the laces on her boots. She sat for a moment with both hands braced on her knees. She shook her head.

‘We’re going to have to leave,’ she said.

She put her coat on. Picking up a heavy glass ashtray from the top of the TV, she went over to the door and listened, then she opened it and peered out. Bag in hand, I stood behind her. Though it had stopped raining, I could hear water everywhere, dripping and tapping. The cars parked near the supermarket glistened. Out of the air came the quaint, exotic scent of petrol.

I followed Odell along the walkway to the stairs. On the first floor we tiptoed past the door that led to reception. Then down another flight, to street-level. We paused in the shadows. There was nobody about. Odell placed the ashtray on the ground at the base of the wall, then darted across the alley and into the carpark where she crouched between two cars. I was only seconds behind her.

Halfway across the car-park, we looked back. The manager was standing at the foot of the stairs. His paunchy upper body faced out into the night, but his head was turned to one side, the nose lifted, predatory. As we watched, two men joined him. I would have been prepared to bet that one of them wore crocodile boots. Stooping, the manager picked up the ashtray. He seemed to examine it for a moment, his chin tucked into his open shirt-collar, then his arm swung sideways and the ashtray landed further up the alley, a dull ringing that sounded like a hammer being brought down on an anvil.

We moved towards the service station, keeping our heads below the car windows. Still doubled over, we skirted the forecourt, its pumps lit by a fierce mauve-white glare, and ended up against the side-wall of a bar. Half-smoked cigarettes, the smell of urine. A used syringe. Odell put a hand on my arm. Her gaze had fixed on the row of motorbikes that stood outside the bar. They looked oddly muscular, their bodies gleaming in the sultry light. She told me to stay put until she gave me a signal, but when the signal came I was to move fast. I leaned against the wall, my eyes on the hotel entrance. The men had vanished. There was only a yellow rectangle now, divided into horizontal segments by the stairs. How I wished we hadn’t left that room on the third floor. I hadn’t known what was going to happen next and, if I had interpreted Odell’s behaviour correctly, nor had she, but the uncertainty had been fertile, exquisite — a kind of pleasure in itself. Who could say where it might have led? And then that knock on the door, that voice, and the whole situation had been instantly dismantled. I wasn’t sure how something so unlikely, so delicate, could possibly occur again. I turned to see where Odell had gone. She was loitering beside a bike that had a naked woman painted on its petrol tank. The woman was on fire. Beneath the flames that licked at her thighs were the words Burn Baby Burn. Swinging a leg over the saddle, Odell reached sideways and down. I heard a sudden snarling, deep and guttural. Before I could work out how she had done it, she was motioning to me. I hurried over and fitted myself behind her.

The next thing I knew, we were on the main road, doing fifty, her hair whipping against my cheeks. I felt I was following her through a forest, branches springing at me from the darkness.

When I opened my mouth, it filled with wind.

We joined the motorway. The traffic thinned to nothing. It was late now, almost two in the morning. From time to time I glanced round to see whether anyone was coming after us — the men from the hotel, the bikers from the bar — but the road stayed empty. It all looked too close back there, somehow, as though everything we were running from was just over our shoulders.

Thirty miles from the capital, we took a slip-road up to a roundabout. As we crossed the bridge over the motorway, I saw a cluster of single headlights to the north. I removed one hand from Odell’s waist and pointed.

She could have accelerated. By the time the bikes passed by, we would have been long gone. Instead, she braked and shifted into neutral. She switched off the lights, but left the engine turning over. When I thought about it later, I decided I would have done the same. It was something to do with trying to pinpoint the whereabouts of our pursuers. If it had been left to my imagination, I would have been unable to rid myself of the conviction that they could appear at any moment.