Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

I could hear them now, their engines blending into one low growl. Would they be able to see us from down there? Would they even think to look up? Had it occurred to them that we might be watching? Apparently not. One by one, they flashed beneath the bridge. The bikes registered with brief but visceral force, like a series of punches. Then they were beyond us, heading south.

They might not have been after us at all, of course. They might have been another motorcycle gang entirely. I watched their tail-lights sink rapidly into the night — a handful of red berries dropped in dark water.

There was a click as Odell shifted into first. For the next hour she took less obvious roads and kept to the speed limit. I had my arms wrapped round her waist, and my upper body was moulded against her back. We both shook with cold. Parts of me felt as if they were plated with metal.

Finally, at half-past three, we rode into the city centre — Thermopolis at last — the shop windows all lit up but nobody around, the bike in low gear, its engine popping and crackling in the eerie, incandescent silence.

‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said. ‘It’s the last one.’

We had checked into the Hyatt Regency, on a special weekend rate. Lying in bed with the curtains open, twenty-seven floors up, I could stare out into a forest of concrete, glass and steel. Office lights were left on throughout the night in what I imagined to be a deliberate configuration. Only people who worked in high finance would be able to decipher their true meaning. Odell lay beside me, fresh from the shower, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head. How would I survive without her stories? How would I survive without her?

An hour earlier she had joined me at the window. Between two towers we could just make out the river, identifiable only by the absence of illumination. Beyond it lay the murky, suicidal boroughs of Cledge. Given the east-facing aspect of our room, we hadn’t been able to see the Red Quarter, but it was there, behind us, no more than a mile away. ‘Not far now,’ Odell had murmured. Though I knew what she was saying, I couldn’t agree. The distance I had to cover seemed bigger than ever. Crossing a border illegally was daunting enough — I hadn’t forgotten those Yellow Quarter guards — but what if I succeeded? What would happen then? When I whispered the word ‘home’ to myself, I felt panic, a swirl of vertigo.

Odell turned in the bed to look at me. ‘This story starts really suddenly.’

All right , I said inside my head. I’m ready.

The man had hit her once, the bunched knuckles of his right hand solid as brass or stone; the curve of bone behind her ear was buzzing, numb. Now he was closing in on her again, his upper arms and shoulders looming. As he raised his fist to hit her for the second time, she rolled off the sofa on to the carpet. He swung and missed. Thrown off balance by the weight of his own wild punch, he stumbled into a lamp. The shade flew off horizontally, like a hat blown from a man’s head in a gale. The lampstand tilted; the bare bulb shattered against the wall. She remembered watching wafers of glass float to the floor.

The darkness filled with short, crude words — what he thought she was, what he was going to do to her. The stench of his breath was everywhere, a dense haze of beer and whisky. All the air she was breathing was coming from inside him. She scrambled to her feet and moved away, hands on either side of her hips, palms facing backwards, feeling for the wall. She had been to the Yellow Quarter many times, and yet she always forgot the violence, how quickly it occurred. It was like blood in an artery. It was stored at the same high pressure. One nick, and out it burst.

He had something in his hand, she saw, a piece of flex wrenched from the video. The plug came hissing towards her like the blunt head of a snake. She twisted out of reach. The teeth gnawed on empty air and then drew back, preparing to strike again. If she had wanted to, she could have got away. There were things she could have done. But then she would have been showing her secret self to him, then he would have known — and too many of the wrong people knew already.

At last the wall gave behind her. She fled down the hall. The front door lay ahead of her, and she was round the edge of it like water round a rock. The stairwell hummed with low-voltage electricity. From somewhere came the smell of garlic being fried. She took the stairs two or three at a time, almost turning her ankle at the bottom of the first flight. She didn’t remember climbing stairs on the way in. They must have used a lift. She heard him surge on to the landing, his voice ballooning in the dim air overhead. He was still listing all the things he would do to her. All the things he’d never do, more like. She couldn’t believe that she had almost slept with him. That thought was astonishing to her now.

On reaching ground-level, she slowed to a walk. She was a stranger, an intruder; if unmasked, she would probably be lynched. She invented a role for herself. I’ve been out for the evening, she thought. I’ve had a good time, but it’s late, and I’m looking forward to getting home. She nodded at the night porter in his office. He ignored her. She pressed the knob on the wall that released the front door and then slipped out into the street, absorbed at once into its humid smoky atmosphere. She glanced over her shoulder at the building she’d just left. The security light had clicked on, but there was no sign of the man whose name she had already forgotten. She doubted he would think of chasing after her. He would have realised by now that she was too fast for him. A man in his state only stood a chance in a small space.

She should never have agreed to go back to his flat. There she was, out on the town illegally, her first visit to choleric territory in months, and he had asked if he could buy her a drink, his brown hair pushed back to reveal a wide, clear forehead, his eyes blue as a jay’s wing — classically, almost foolishly good-looking. He was drunk, of course, but who wasn’t drunk in the Yellow Quarter on a Saturday night?

‘Why do you want to buy me a drink?’ she had said.

‘Because you’re different.’

‘Different?’

‘You’re not like all the others. You’re special.’

You got that right, she thought.

He bought her a drink that tasted of strawberries, a miniature paper umbrella leaning jauntily against the rim of the glass. She asked him what he did. He was a fire-safety officer, he told her. The previous year, he had been called to a train crash. She pretended to remember it. He talked about the bodies, and how they had melted, one into the other, making them impossible to identify. Then he bought her another strawberry drink with an umbrella in it.

She went back to his flat. In a large glass tank in the living-room, sinuous shapes glided this way and that, emitting tiny bolts of light.

‘Electric eels,’ he said, giving her an odd look. ‘Imported from the Blue Quarter.’

She thought he’d seen through her, but he only wanted to impress.

Later, he made a lunge at her, his hand closing round one of her breasts. She tried to push him away, but he laughed and pulled her roughly towards him. She threw her drink in his face. That was when he hit her.

No, she should never have gone back with him. Some people would say she was perverse, or just plain idiotic, but she liked to think that she could get out of any corner, no matter how tight. She got too cocky, though. Thought she could handle anything. Sometimes she needed reminding.

On the pavement outside his building, she snapped her eyes from left to right, scanning her surroundings. The streets weren’t safe, CCTV or no CCTV. No public spaces were. All the same, she stood still for a moment until the gaps between her heartbeats lengthened. The whisper of banknotes came to her, the chink and jangle of loose change. Shock waves from that fist of his. Or maybe it was the soundtrack of the Yellow Quarter, she thought. Listen hard enough and you could hear all the money being made. Listen hard and you could hear the wealth.