‘Do you ever see Cody?’ I asked.
He looked at me sidelong, almost suspiciously. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘What about Jones? Did you ever hear anything about Jones?’
‘No. Nothing.’
His eyes kept shifting beyond me, so much so that, in the end, I actually glanced over my shoulder. There was nothing there except a man dressed as Santa Claus, collecting money for charity, and people doing their last-minute Christmas shopping. When I turned to face Bracewell again, he was staring at the ground, and it was then that he said something strange: ‘I really enjoyed our time together.’
At first I didn’t know what he was referring to. Then, deciding he must be talking about the days we had spent out on the motorway, I simply, and rather lamely, said, ‘So did I.’
I should have taken his words for what they were — an epitaph, a valediction.
Shortly afterwards, he disappeared into the crowds of people carrying rolls of wrapping-paper, and Christmas trees, and cones filled with roasted chestnuts.
About eighteen months later, while studying for my finals, I was called to the phone. To my surprise I heard Marie on the other end. I couldn’t remember the last time she had rung me, and I knew at once that something must be wrong.
‘How’s Victor?’ I said. ‘Is he all right?’
She hesitated. ‘It’s not Victor. It’s Simon Bracewell.’
The details were both sketchy and lurid, she warned me, and none of it had been confirmed by the authorities as yet, but she thought I ought to know. Apparently Bracewell had hidden in the undercarriage of a train bound for the Yellow Quarter. At some point he must have fallen on to the track, though, and he had been run over, either by the train in which he had stowed himself away or by the next train that came along. When the railway police found him, he was almost unrecognisable.
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
I remembered how little we had said to each other during what Bracewell had called ‘our time together’. We had talked about the holding station, and we had talked about school, but we had never mentioned the families we had been placed with, let alone those from which we had been taken. It had the feeling of a tacit agreement — an agreement we both instinctively abided by, but one which I’m not sure either of us really understood. Possibly we had a hunch that if the subject was raised we would have to admit to things that we would rather keep to ourselves. Or perhaps it had been too soon for us to make any sense of what had happened. He would often come over to my house, but I had never been to his, not in all the years we knew each other, not even once. The only member of his family I ever met was Lucky, the spaniel. Somewhere deep down, I suppose I must have suspected that my home life was easier than his, but this was just an intuition, and I made no attempt to look for evidence or proof. Our friendship had found its own level, its own idiom, and it would have been a mistake, I always felt, to try and tinker with any of that.
But I wondered, in the end, at how imperfectly I had known him.
If our border games had been practice, I thought, if they had been some kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing, then they hadn’t served him very well. Had he been thinking of escaping even when he was a boy? Should I have seen it coming? Or had the games themselves given him the idea? I went back in my memory, but I could see no difference between his commitment and mine, nor could I remember which one of us had invented the game in the first place. I saw him staring at our names carved on the tree. Like something in a cemetery. Then I saw him standing in the precinct, tinny carols being piped through nearby speakers. The way his mouth had locked. He seemed to have forgotten how to smile. Should I have guessed?
The Yellow Quarter, though. Why the Yellow Quarter, of all places?
‘I’m sorry,’ Marie said. ‘He was your friend.’
‘Yes.’ I was quiet for a while. Then I said, ‘What about you, Marie? How are you doing?’
‘Oh, you know …’
In the silence that followed, I saw her with such clarity that she could have been standing right in front of me. A self-deprecating smile lifted on to her face, then just as swiftly dropped away. She lowered her head, and her black hair fell forwards against her cheek. Her mouth tilted, as though one side were heavier than the other. Like a pair of scales, I thought. The most beautiful pair of scales in the world. Despite the news I had received, a kind of joy burst through me. I felt that she’d come back to me. We were closer in those few seconds than we had been in years.
Towards the end of my time at university I was contacted by someone called Diana Bilal. She worked for the Ministry of Health and Social Security, she said, and she wanted to know if she could take me out for lunch.
We met in a country pub. Diana was already there when I arrived. I found her in the beer-garden at the back, her face lightly tanned, her brown hair twisted into a fashionable knot. From her voice I had imagined her to be an older woman, but she was young, no more than twenty-eight or — nine.
‘We’ve been watching you.’ She smiled at me across the rim of her wine-glass. Her eyes, which were dark, put me in mind of a secret glade in the middle of a forest. Thin gold spokes radiated outwards from the pupils.
She told me they were currently recruiting a new group of trainee assessment officers. When I asked her what the job entailed, she said it was hard to define, falling as it did somewhere between civil servant, psychologist and detective. I should think of it as a stepping-stone, though. Or a springboard, perhaps. I would find myself at the heart of an organisation whose responsibility it was both to guide and to protect society. She spoke briefly of her admiration for Michael Song, who had recently swept to power for the fourth time with a landslide majority. The Ministry worked closely with the government, she told me, which gave employees the opportunity to engage directly with the political process and to play a significant part in the shaping of the future. She named a starting salary that seemed generous. If I was interested, she said, they would be prepared to take me on as soon as I graduated. I would have to move to Pneuma. The capital.
I looked out into the idyllic sunlit garden. All I could see was Victor’s book of shoes. I knew full well that Victor blamed the current political system for the destruction of both his family and his happiness. How could I possibly tell him I was thinking of becoming part of that very system?
Diana leaned forwards, her eyes appearing to offer shade and rest. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘My family,’ I began, then faltered.
Her smile returned. ‘You’re worried about how they might react,’ she said, ‘which is perfectly understandable. The answer is, they’ll never know. We’ll arrange a phantom job for you. A front. Something they can be proud of’.
‘I would have to lie to them,’ I said slowly.
She looked at her right hand, which lay flat, palm down, on the lacy wrought-iron of the table. The fingers lifted, then dropped — one movement, over in a second. I sensed impatience in her for the first time, though she was doing her utmost to suppress it.