Once we were back in our room, Odell locked the door, then leaned against the wall with her hands behind her. I was reminded of Sonya for a moment — she often used to stand like that — but, at the same time, the comparison seemed obscure, even meaningless. I had loved Sonya, I really had, but she had become intangible to me, not quite real, as had almost every other aspect of the way I had lived before. When I considered my return to the Red Quarter, when I tried to imagine what that might entail, my mind closed down. The question Odell had asked me — Do you want to get out of here or don’t you? — expressed it perfectly. Yes, I wanted to get out of the Yellow Quarter, of course I did, and yet, once that had been achieved, I couldn’t actually visualise a life. If I thought about the people I used to see on a regular basis — Vishram, Sonya, Kenneth Loames — they appeared as ephemeral and irrelevant as ghosts, whereas the ghosts themselves — Ob, Neg, Lum — had true substance and even — strange, this — a kind of nobility. If I survived, who would I be exactly? Which version of myself would I be left with? How would I fit in? Turning away from Odell, I walked to the window. A helicopter hovered in the middle distance, its searchlight aimed at the ground directly below it.
She came and stood beside me. ‘It’s only crowd control.’
Of course. The football would be over any minute. Even so, when the helicopter veered towards us, with its head lowered and its searchlight sweeping the streets and buildings, we both instinctively stepped back from the window. All of a sudden the angry stutter of its rotor blades was on top of us, the air itself vibrating. I shaded my eyes as blinding light flashed through the room. It was as though some supernatural force had just flown in one wall and out the other, as though we had been visited by a creature to whom concrete and plaster meant nothing. The helicopter moved on, heading westwards, restless, inquisitive.
‘I didn’t finish my story about Luke,’ Odell said.
I drew the curtains, shutting out the night.
‘You’re not too tired?’ she said.
I shook my head. We settled on the bed, Odell leaning against the pillows with her knees drawn up while I lay on my side, my cheek propped on one hand.
Luke had left her eighteen months ago, she said, and in all that time she had heard nothing from him. Then, in late November, the day after she saw me being arrested by the Blue Quarter police, she had gone home for a few hours. She lived in an old petrol station on the outskirts of Aquaville. The ground floor had been a working garage — it still smelled of diesel oil and spray-paint — but the upstairs was like a loft, with windows running along one side and a view over the fields.
She was just sorting through her mail when there was a knock on the door. It was Luke. His dark hair stuck up at all angles, and the whites of his eyes looked dingy, almost stained. He was in trouble, he said.
It took another hour and most of a bottle of wine for him to get to the point. His girlfriend was about to be transferred. He didn’t want to lose her, though, so he had hidden her. When Odell reminded him of the penalties he would face if he was caught, he snapped at her. Yes, he knew about the penalties. He knew. Then he lowered his voice again. He was sorry. He was tired. He hadn’t slept.
‘You have to help me,’ he said.
She couldn’t, she told him. Didn’t he have any idea who she worked for? It turned out that he didn’t — so she’d kept something from him after all! — but once he got over the shock he tried to persuade her that it was perfect. They’d never suspect a person in her position. She shook her head. She couldn’t risk it. When he made a half-hearted attempt to blackmail her, she lost her temper. He backed down.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said after a while. ‘I feel so hopeless.’
Outside, a bitter wind scoured the cracked concrete where the petrol pumps stood. Ice had formed on the puddles, as fragile and transparent as a layer of skin. She bled the radiators with a small grey key. They groaned and clanked a little, but the room didn’t seem to get much warmer.
Later that night Luke asked if he could stay. When she hesitated, he told her not to worry. He’d be gone in the morning. It was strange how he could still wound her, how words like that made her heart hurt.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’
‘Do you want me to sleep in the chair?’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep in the chair, if you like.’
‘You’ll freeze,’ she said.
He climbed beneath the blankets. His body smelled of nutmeg, the way it always used to. She knew she shouldn’t have slept with him, but she did it anyway. She hadn’t been doing it for him. She’d done it for herself.
No one ever bothers to imagine how alone other people are.
It was almost dawn before she noticed that the grey-blue vapour she’d once coveted had disappeared. Turning in the bed, she looked straight at him. She saw how the surface of his skin fluttered, and how he brushed constantly at phantoms with his hands. From his lips came whimpered protests and entreaties. He had become as phlegmatics were supposed to be — tremulous, inert — but unlike most of them he had nothing to fall back on.
In the early morning they stood near the car-wash, the big blue brushes foolish, incongruous, like someone’s idea of a joke, and she knew this was the last time she would ever see him. The tears ran from her eyes. She had lost him, but that wasn’t really why she was crying. She was grieving for all the things that don’t come again. She was grieving because things end, and she wished they didn’t have to.
He put a hand on her shoulder, then turned and walked across the buckled forecourt, his whole body hunched against the cold. Though her tears had given him a kind of strength, he looked unequal to his surroundings; he had the air of a man who was about to be crushed by the weight of his own existence. At that moment, miraculously, a bus appeared on the road. Luke broke into the semblance of a run, waving an arm, but the bus passed smoothly by, and it was then, as his arm dropped back, that she climbed the steps to her front door and went inside.
Odell was picking at the edge of the hotel blanket. In the distance a siren swooped, then hiccuped. ‘What do you think?’ she said.
I looked up at her. I didn’t see it as a love story, despite the way it had begun. No, I saw it as more of a cautionary tale. The special substance that makes each one of us unique is finite, ethereal. It can be whittled away, almost without us knowing. It can be used up altogether. I had been so many different people during the past few weeks, and, in the end, I had been nobody at all. Odell knew that, and she was using stories from her life to try and bring me back. She wanted to return me to myself, but slowly, gently. In my own time.