Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch me.’

She listened carefully while I explained what I had done. She didn’t seem shocked or disgusted. On the contrary. According to her, it had been an inspired piece of tactical thinking. I had given both sets of guards something to react to. I had used myself to create a diversion. I’d become my own decoy. She was so enthusiastic that I could imagine the idea featuring in the next edition of some underground manual for asylum-seekers. I apologised for having been abrupt with her. I had washed pretty thoroughly, I said, but I wasn’t sure it had all come off. She moved closer, sniffing at my face and hair. I smelled of soap, she said. Border soap.

‘There’s something you haven’t noticed,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You’re talking.’

‘The strangest thing. It just started. When you walked towards me.’ I stared past her, down the street. Light and shadow on the paving-stones. Overhanging trees. ‘Of course, I’ve been saying things all along,’ I said. ‘In my head, though.’

‘I thought so.’

‘You couldn’t hear me, could you?’

‘No. But sometimes I felt as if I understood you. And I talked to you before, on the train, so I knew what you sounded like.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

We looked into each other’s eyes. The air between us appeared to shrink.

In a nearby house somebody was playing the piano, each note separate, perfectly rounded, yet fragile, like a raindrop on a leaf. Odell turned to one side, as though captivated by the music. As I stood there with her, listening, the smell of coffee came and went. Some dinner party drawing to a close. We had crossed into one of Pneuma’s northern suburbs, an area called Gulliver.

‘What happens now?’ I said.

‘I make sure you get home safely.’

‘And that’s all? That’s it?’

She was looking at her feet. ‘You live here,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t.’

‘You could visit, though, couldn’t you, from time to time? If you felt like it. You could cross the border illegally. Nobody would know.’

She kept her eyes on the ground.

‘You told me you had to keep in practice,’ I said.

I was back on the peaceful tree-lined streets I knew so well, where crime didn’t exist and cheerfulness was second nature, but it seemed that things were being taken from me. I felt abandoned, deprived.

I felt bereft.

The direct route to my flat lay through the city’s most famous park. We followed a footpath that ran down one side of the zoo, stopping to watch the wolves lope with almost liquid grace through their enclosure, then we cut diagonally across an open grassy area where football was often played on Sundays. We circled the dark glitter of the lake. To the south, beyond the boathouse, I could just make out a crescent of creamy neoclassical façades and, further west, the mosque’s burnished dome. Though it was late now, after ten o’clock, the mildness of the night had tempted people outdoors. A man with a ponytail was trying to coax a squirrel on to a bench. Then an elderly woman walked past, holding a tennis racket. A black dog padded along beside her. She took a ball out of her pocket and hit it into the lake. The dog swam after it. Spring had come early, it seemed, with daffodils and primroses showing in the long grass beneath the trees, as pale and innumerable as stars.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ Odell said.

I looked glumly around and murmured in agreement, but all I felt was a faint tingle of resentment. I had so many questions for her, so many important questions, and yet, burdened by the knowledge that she would soon be gone, I couldn’t seem to give them voice. I fell into a kind of trance, paralysed by what I had not said and could not say.

As we neared my building, Odell went into a supermarket. From outside, I watched her moving up and down the aisles — her freckled face, her copper-tinted hair, her coat the colour of avocado skin. I tried to imagine that we didn’t know each other, that we had never met. It was all too easy. But I had hoped it would be difficult, if not impossible. I’d wanted confirmation that my life was irrevocably bound up with hers.

When she walked out of the shop she grinned and handed me a plastic bag. Groceries, she said. I might find I was hungry when I got home, and there wouldn’t be anything in my flat, not after all these months. Opening the bag, I peered down. The almost luminous glow of the oranges, the dull glint of the silver wrapping on the butter. The drops of condensation on the milk. Everything was mundane and practical, but at the same time improbable somehow, miraculous.

‘That’s the future,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’

She watched me carefully with her head at an angle, as though I were some kind of mechanism and she was trying to see how I worked. Her grin had faded. She trained a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then she pushed both hands into the pockets of her coat and looked across the street to where a theatre’s glass doors had just been flung open and members of the audience were spilling out on to the pavement, their voices raised in exhilaration against the night.

We arrived at the cul-de-sac where I lived. I had already told her that she didn’t need to see me to the door. Apart from anything else, there would be Loames to deal with — unless, of course, he’d been transferred during my absence. The fact that nothing could be relied upon was the one sure sign of a stable society, Vishram had told me once, and I had never been able to work out whether or not he was joking.

Odell scraped at the join between two paving-stones with the heel of her boot. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Did you see me cross the border?’

‘No. I missed it.’

She tried to hide her disappointment, but didn’t quite succeed. I could have mentioned the girl with the wings, I suppose. It might have made her feel better. In the end, though, I couldn’t summon the energy. Or perhaps I wanted to punish her for leaving me.

‘Maybe another time,’ I said.

‘Maybe.’ She took a breath. ‘I should be going.’

I reached up and touched her cheek. When I took my hand away I could still feel the heat of her skin on my fingertips. She turned and walked off down the hill, the gate-house of the old palace rising into the sky ahead of her.

When she was fifty yards from me, she appeared to hesitate. Swinging round, she lifted both her hands up to her mouth to make a megaphone.

‘Watch this,’ I heard her say.

For a moment she seemed to be turning away from me again, but turning at great speed, as if spun by an unseen force. Then she simply vanished. I thought I must have blinked. Or had she tricked me? I felt dull-witted, slow. I stared hard at the place where she’d been standing.

‘Thomas?’

The voice came from behind me. I whirled round. Odell was leaning against a pillar box at the other end of the street with her arms folded, and even though she was some distance away I could see that she was smiling.

She cupped her hands around her mouth again. ‘Believe me now?’

‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘I believe you.’

I kept my eyes fixed on her until she reached the top of the street. Once there, she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Just like anybody else.

I had to ring the caretaker’s bell half a dozen times before the shadowy figure of Kenneth Loames appeared in the lobby and the glass front door clicked open. I watched various reactions pass across his face — indignation, then distaste, and finally astonishment as he looked more closely and realised who it was.

‘Mr Parry!’

‘How are you, Mr Loames?’ I said.

‘Fine, sir,’ he said. ‘How about you?’

‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all.’