‘You think it’s sad,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Who for? For me?’
For him, I said inside my head.
‘That’s right,’ she said quietly, looking out across the room.
Later, as I drifted on the edge of sleep, I heard her speak again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think too.’
The sky was ash smeared on silver where the sun was coming up. The pavements and gutters glittered with crushed beer cans and broken glass. Sunday. The city had a stunned feel to it — the temporary numbness of a dead leg. I wondered idly who had won the game. I never did find out.
We left the hotel early, just after seven, the girl on reception smothering a yawn as she handed us a copy of the bill. Most people would stay in bed until mid-morning, Odell told me, sleeping off their hangovers. It was a good day to be travelling. We bought bacon sandwiches and cups of tea from a café near the station, then set off along a main road that led south. I kept my face twisted into a permanent scowl and chewed sullenly on a wad of gum. I was thinking of my brief stay in Athanor, and how my cuts and bruises had protected me. If I looked dangerous enough, I’d be safe. That was the theory, anyway.
The bars were still open. Every once in a while, a drunk would stagger towards us, hands aloft and twitching in some mad semaphore, but we automatically crossed the road before any of them got close. Their curses reached us like the light from distant stars — faint messages from a world already superseded, left behind. We no longer needed to look at each other, Odell and I. We had a kind of understanding now. I swept my eyes from side to side, constantly aware of my environment. At the same time I walked through it all as though none of it could touch me.
By dusk my lungs felt tight with the exhaust fumes I had been forced to breathe, and my feet ached from walking on nothing but paving-stones and tarmac for hour after hour, and I let out a sigh when Odell, who seemed tireless, finally announced that we’d be stopping for the night.
She had chosen a place called the Hot Hotel, the word Hot glowing on and off like brake lights in a traffic-jam. To reach reception, which was located one floor up, we had to walk down an alley that ran along one side of the building. We were given a room on the third floor, with a circular bed and an orange shag-pile carpet. It had the atmosphere of somewhere that was rented by the hour, and if I turned my head fast enough I seemed to glimpse the shady outlines of those who had preceded us. Access to the room was from an open-air walkway or corridor. I leaned on the parapet, looking out over an all-night service station and a supermarket car-park. Opposite the service station I could see a strip club called the Tinder Box. Sometimes I wanted to question the wisdom of Odell’s decisions, but I wasn’t sure I had the right. Maybe she had been drawn by the number of people around, which would lend us a certain anonymity. She had already saved me once, I thought. Probably I should have more faith in her.
In fact, she had saved me a second time that afternoon. We had been walking along a main road, its four lanes packed with cars. To our left, some fifty feet below us, lay a river, its waters viscous, thick as soup. At one point, Odell had spotted a public toilet. It was in a shopping centre on the other side of the road. She told me to wait. She’d only be a moment. No sooner had she disappeared than I sensed something close by, a kind of force or pressure. Half turning, I saw a boy’s face on a level with my elbow, his eyes dark-brown and startled-looking, his teeth bared. Then my arm jerked backwards and the bag with my white clothes in it was gone. At the same time I felt hands reaching into all my pockets. I swung round. A dozen children swarmed on the pavement behind me, some as young as five or six. The boy who had snatched my bag was making off down a steep slope to the river. The others followed.
For a few seconds I saw the world as if through soundproof glass.
A concrete landscape. Sky creamy with pollution.
Then the sounds flowed back — the rush of traffic, the roar of yet another unknown city — and I was running towards the river. At the water’s edge the boys had already spread the contents of my bag out on the ground. Without thinking, I swooped down and took hold of the bag, together with my cloak, my long johns and my undershirt, then started up the slope again. The boys came after me, their voices shrill and jagged. Somehow I was aware of the smallness of the hands that pushed and pulled at me. Since I was clutching my possessions, though, I was powerless to defend myself. As I regained the pavement I saw Odell threading her way through the traffic towards me. She produced an aerosol and sprayed something into the faces of the two boys who were nearest. They doubled over, howling, hands pressed against their eyes. The other boys fell back. They watched us for a while from a distance, as though contemplating a second assault, and then turned reluctantly away. They would find richer pickings elsewhere, perhaps. Or less resistance. I began to tremble uncontrollably. ‘You were lucky not to get hurt,’ Odell told me. ‘Those gangs of kids, they often carry knives — or guns.’ She gave me a hard, steady look. ‘Next time, let it go.’ Later, she relaxed and smiled. ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to take you with me.’
Yes, I thought as I stood on the walkway, looking out over the car-park, I should probably have more faith in her.
We both had showers. Then, once we were dressed, Odell took me to the bar on the ground floor. It was still fairly early, and there was almost no one there, just an older couple on the dance floor at the back, shuffling beneath maroon and purple disco lights. While Odell ordered our drinks, I sat in a booth and let my eyes drift through the interior, trying to convey a sulky indifference to everything I saw. I stared at the couple, who seemed glued together. The woman had her eyes closed, and her head rolled on the man’s shoulder as though attached to her body by a piece of string. Their dancing bore no relation to the music, which was upbeat, corny, before my time.
Odell came back with two double brandies. When I seemed surprised that she knew what I drank, she told me we’d had brandy on a train, in late November. Again I thought back, but no matter how often or how hard I tried, I could never match what she said with anything that I’d experienced.
She smiled. ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’
It was part of her gift, she told me. She knew how to make herself unmemorable. A skill she had developed over the years was to shake hands without leaving the slightest impression. As she offered her hand, she simultaneously withdrew from it, retreating into the most distant part of herself, both physically and mentally. She had done it to me on the train to Aquaville, she said, and at the conference as well, a couple of weeks before.
‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ She shook her head and reached for her drink. ‘I must be better than I thought.’
And she started telling me her story, which was also my story, of course. She had first met me, very briefly, at the cocktail party in the Concord Room — though she had used her gift to ‘absent herself’, as she put it. She’d been officially assigned to keep me under observation until I returned to the Red Quarter. Little did she know, at that point, how long the assignment was going to last! She had flown to Congreve, just as I had, her seat two rows in front of mine. She had watched the fireworks, and attended the banquet afterwards. When the bomb went off, she was in a club in the basement of the hotel, socialising with some other delegates. ‘As I told you once before,’ she said with a crafty grin. Anyway, they were all evacuated on the spot. Later, she slipped through a police cordon and found me on the fourteenth floor, walking back towards my room — walking in the wrong direction, in other words. It was enough to prompt her to call Adrian Croy, who immediately switched her role to that of ‘shadow’. Though I’d hitched a number of lifts that night, she was able to keep track of me. She sat behind me as I ate breakfast in that out-of-the-way transport café. She followed me as I climbed up into the hills. She stood at my shoulder during the burning of the animals, an event that had given her bad dreams. Afterwards, I had vanished into the crowd, and she was still trying to locate me when the riot squad arrived. In the ensuing chaos she had lost her favourite piece of jewellery. A ring. By the time she secured her release, I was already making for the coast –