‘Look, it’s obvious you’re going to send me to the Yellow Quarter,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you stop playing games and just get on with it?’
Gilbert had paused with the corner of a page between finger and thumb, and he was looking up at me. The lower half of his face appeared to have swollen slightly, as though he was concealing an entire plum inside his mouth.
‘The Yellow Quarter?’ he said. ‘Oh no. We’re not sending you there.’
Chapter Six
They had ushered us on to a coach, fourteen of us, all adults, and we were heading east along the Orbital, an old motorway which circled the four capitals and which was only used by vehicles in transit. Sitting across the aisle from me was a woman of about my own age, perhaps a little older, her clothes expensive but severe, like those of a solicitor. In the bus station she had cried openly, her whole body shaking, but there had been another woman with her, a counsellor of some kind, and I hadn’t wanted to interfere. Though she didn’t appear to be crying now, she had one hand over her eyes. The other was loosely closed around a tissue.
I leaned towards her. ‘Are you all right?’
Keeping her hand where it was, she nodded.
I faced the window again. They had classified me as a melancholic, which was ludicrous, of course, but what did you expect from a bunch of Blue Quarter officials, known as they were for their endless vacillation and incompetence? Though I was beginning to question the way things were organised, there were times, I noticed, when I fell back on prejudice. I remembered what Fernandez had said about the system, how it was rooted in a form of racism and how it drew all its strength from our weaknesses, and I thought he might well be right about that. That doctor had really tried my patience, though. When he finally deigned to let me know where I was being sent — and he did it smugly, oh so smugly — I completely lost my temper, calling him all sorts of names. This outburst only confirmed his diagnosis, and he was almost nodding and smiling as he watched me, which infuriated me still further. I kicked my chair over, then I grabbed my file and hurled it across the room. Gilbert lowered his eyes and shook his head, as if he had just received news of the death of a distant relation. The only time I brought him up short was when I started telling him how vain he was, and how I’d like to cut off his hair, hack it all off and set fire to it. He had looked quite shocked for a moment. Then the security guards arrived.
Yes. Well.
My anger had died down since then. There was no going back to the club, I knew that now, and I would be fooling myself if I thought any different. I would have to make do with what I already had, a few brief glimpses of a buried past — the house I had lived in, my mother’s voice, my face pushed against her skirt … I wasn’t always sure if I was remembering, or just imagining, and in a way it didn’t matter. The point was, the fragments felt authentic. They felt real. In the absence of so much, they were something I could turn to when I needed to, something I could count on.
‘Would you do me a favour?’
It was the woman sitting opposite me. As I glanced over, she brought her hand down and pressed her crumpled tissue to one eye, then the other.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Would you hold me?’ She was looking down into her lap. ‘Just put your arms around me,’ she said. ‘Please.’
I was glad she had asked, though I couldn’t have explained why exactly.
When I sat beside her, she turned to me clumsily, almost blindly, and laid her head against my chest, both hands clasped beneath her chin. I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. She murmured, but I didn’t think she had spoken; it was the sort of sound people make just before they fall asleep, part pleasure, part relief. And then she did fall asleep, her breathing becoming coarser and more regular, her right arm reaching across my chest in a gesture that would have seemed too intimate had she still been conscious.
We left the motorway at an exit marked Cledge East, the slip-road leading directly to a checkpoint. The Green Quarter guards scarcely even glanced at our papers, their lax, fatalistic approach to security reflecting the fact that they were quite accustomed to the sight of new arrivals. The melancholic humour was associated with old age, so there was something logical, if not inevitable, about being transferred here. It was like a kind of natural progression.
Shortly after crossing the border, the woman woke up and lifted her face to mine, her eyes wide open but entirely blank. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said.
‘You’re safe,’ I said quietly. ‘Go back to sleep.’
She muttered something I didn’t understand, then her head dropped back against my shoulder, and her breathing deepened once again.
We meandered through the outskirts of Cledge — shops boarded up, street lights out of order — and before too long the city was behind us. On we went, past little restless towns. It was late now, almost one in the morning, but lamps still burned in many of the windows. This was a land much troubled by insomnia.
And then the spaces between towns began to widen. The road sliced unsentimentally through flat fields. There was nothing there, nothing to see, only the night rushing towards the coach’s windscreen, and the shrinking tail-lights of overtaking cars. My right arm was trapped behind the sleeping woman’s back, and I had to keep adjusting its position so as to keep it from going numb.
The brakes hissed. Our driver stood up and stretched, then he switched all the lights on and took down a clipboard from the rack above his head. Groans came from passengers who had just been woken up. We had stopped outside a semi-detached house, its front door open wide. The spill of light from the hall revealed a couple of brick steps, a concrete path and part of a rockery. In the foreground, by the gate, stood a large woman in a quilted housecoat and a pair of fluffy slippers.
The following people were to leave the bus at this point, the driver told us. He read out three names, one of which was mine. Everybody else should stay in their seats, he said. He read the names again, then lifted his eyes and looked down the aisle.
I tried gently to disentangle myself from the woman, but she sat up quickly, blinking. ‘Sorry to wake you,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’
‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’ Her hand skimmed lightly over her hair, touching it in several places. She seemed brisker, more businesslike. Even more of a stranger.
‘Will you be all right?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I’ll be fine. And thank you for —’ She broke off, not knowing how to complete the sentence. As I rose to my feet and reached up for my bag, she caught hold of my wrist. ‘I’m Iris,’ she said. ‘Iris Gilmour.’
I told her my name, then wished her luck.
‘And you, Thomas,’ she said. ‘Good luck to you too.’
Stepping out of the bus, I felt a chill in the air and saw how the breath of the other two men ballooned in front of their faces. The sky had the hard, cold lustre of enamel. I knew then that we had come a long way north.
I turned towards the house. On one of the gateposts was an oval of wood, its varnished surface ringed with bark. The Cliff, it said. I smiled grimly. You’d think they would have banned names like that, along with all the bridges and high buildings. I waited for the other men to introduce themselves to the woman in the housecoat — the taller of the two was called Friedriksson, the other one was Bill something — then I walked over and held out my hand.
No sooner had I told the woman who I was than she began to shake her head. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘There must be some mistake.’ She turned her back on me and walked a few paces up the street.