‘You’re wrong.’ She let out a short bitter laugh. ‘You are so fucking wrong.’
Dunne turned in her seat, speaking to me. ‘This isn’t bad. Sometimes they scream the whole way.’
I asked her how she dealt with that.
She opened the glove compartment and took out a pair of headphones. ‘I got them from a friend of mine who works at the airport.’ She grinned. ‘Put these on, you can’t even hear a plane taking off’.
‘What do you think this is,’ Chloe said, ‘a game?’
The relocation officer spoke past me now, her voice hardening. ‘I could give you an injection if you like. Then you’d sleep like a baby.’
By the time we reached the checkpoint it was five o’clock. Knowing how long it could take to cross into choleric territory — hours usually, what with all the harassment and provocation — and aware of the dangers of travelling in that country once darkness had fallen, Pat Dunne decided we should spend the night in the Red Quarter. We wouldn’t be the only ones. A tourist settlement called the Border Experience had sprung up in the vicinity, with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops. Sanguine people came from far and wide to climb the viewing platforms, each hoping for a brief taste of life on the other side. They all had their photos taken with a guard, and they all bought knick-knacks for family and friends back home. It was as if some of the cholerics’ notorious materialism had seeped over the wall. On the way to our hotel, I stopped and looked in a shop window. There were ashtrays in the shape of watch-towers, and tiny, realistic attack dogs made of china. There were snowstorms with miniature replicas of no man’s land inside. I saw tins of Border Shortbread and Border Fudge, and border guard dolls standing to attention in clear plastic cylinders. I saw mugs with words like ‘Furious’ or ‘Livid’ printed on them. My favourite souvenir was a T-shirt. On the front it said I came I saw I lost my temper. On the back, simply, Welcome to the Yellow Quarter.
At the Frontier Lodge, we took three rooms — one each for Whittle and me, and one for Dunne and Chloe Allen. My room overlooked the car-park — there, below me, was our minibus, dwarfed by tourist coaches — but if I leaned on the window-sill and looked to my left I had a clear view of the border. Two walls ran parallel to one another, about a hundred yards apart. Between them, in no man’s land, I could see life-size versions of the souvenirs I had noticed earlier: watch-towers, searchlights, concrete crosses, rolls of barbed wire and a sandy, mined section known as a death strip (in aerial photographs, the border often had the look of a stitched wound). Despite the fact that nothing was happening, I couldn’t seem to tear myself away. It was in these eerie halfway places that one was able to appreciate the full power and extent of the Rearrangement, and it inspired an inevitable reverence, a kind of awe.
As I stood by the window, I heard a click behind me and turned in time to see Chloe Allen slip into my room. I watched her lean back against the door until it closed. She was wearing the same outfit as before, only she had removed her black jacket and her shoes. She took a few quick steps towards me, stopping when she reached the bed.
‘You’re not supposed to leave your room,’ I said.
‘You don’t mind, though,’ she said, ‘do you.’
Thinking I should fetch one of the relocation officers, I tried to edge past her, but she moved to block my way.
‘Let’s forget about the other two,’ she said. ‘Let’s run away together.’
Her smile was sly but genuine.
Taking the hem of her T-shirt in both hands, she deftly lifted it over her head and tossed it on to the bed. She was wearing nothing underneath.
‘They’re pretty, aren’t they,’ she said.
‘Chloe,’ I said. ‘Put your clothes back on.’
‘You used my name.’
I attempted to edge past her again. This time she grabbed the front of my jacket. When I pulled free, she began to flail at me with loosely clenched fists. I caught hold of both her wrists and held her at arm’s length. I realised I was laughing. I had no idea why I might be doing that. There was nothing remotely funny about the situation. Chloe was insulting me now, not loudly, but in a malignant, strangled whisper, as though her fury was such that she couldn’t find her voice. I pushed her away from me, then turned and hurried out into the corridor.
I tried Pat Dunne’s room first. She wasn’t there. Whittle had disappeared as well. I stopped a couple who were making for the lift and asked if they happened to have seen a woman of about fifty with curly hair. The man thought he’d seen someone like that. She was further down the corridor, he said. By the drinks machine. She seemed to be having trouble with it, he added, grinning.
When I found Dunne, she was standing in front of the machine, banging the stainless steel with the heel of her hand. ‘The fucking thing,’ she said. ‘It ate my money.’
She must have noticed the look I was giving her.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but listen. If you go into choleric territory, you have to act like them, or you don’t survive.’
‘Chloe Allen’s in my room,’ I said.
Something loosened in her face. ‘What? When I left her, she was sleeping.’
‘Well, she’s awake now.’
When we burst into my room, it was empty. We found Chloe where she belonged, in the room she was sharing with Pat Dunne. She was lying on her side in bed and breathing steadily, the covers pulled up over her face, one strand of dark-gold hair forming an innocent question mark on the pillow. What, me?
Dunne looked at me sideways. I held her gaze.
‘I didn’t imagine it,’ I said.
Back in my own room, I locked the door. The air smelled of perfume, its sweetness rendered more intense by the grey walls, the dull blond furniture. I opened the window, then sat down on the edge of the bed.
Let’s run away together.
She had noticed me as soon as she walked into the living-room that morning. I had shown up on her adolescent radar. She’d identified me as the one unstable element, a weak point she could probe, exploit.
They’re pretty, aren’t they.
I decided not to risk another confrontation. I could already picture the sequence of looks that would appear on Chloe’s face at the breakfast table as she tried to turn me into her accomplice, her jilted lover, or even, possibly, her rapist. I stayed upstairs until I saw Dunne and Whittle walk her across the car-park. Halfway to the minibus she looked up, scanning the hotel façade, but I stepped back from the window. I don’t think she saw me. I waited until the minibus joined the queue of vehicles at the checkpoint, then I went down to the restaurant.
Dunne and Whittle didn’t return until mid-afternoon. As we drove back to the capital, they told me about their day. No sooner had they crossed the border than Chloe became totally unmanageable. She had used the foulest language and hurled herself repeatedly against the wire-mesh. In the end they had been forced to sedate her. Whittle thought her behaviour had been triggered by my absence. He found my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know, I think she took a shine to you.’
I laughed softly, then looked out of the window.
Pat Dunne turned to face me. ‘What actually happened in your room last night?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’
Later, I wondered whether the transfer I had witnessed had been an elaborate test of my moral fibre, with Chloe playing the role of temptress, but then I dismissed the idea as overheated, a paranoid fantasy brought on by the pressures of my new working environment. It was also conceivable that the authorities had been reminding me of the commitment I had made. After all, my family might have been treated much as Chloe had been treated, had immunity not been granted. I couldn’t be sure, though, and it wasn’t the kind of question you could ask. And even if I had been able to ask, I knew what the answer would be. The authorities would claim that being sent out on the road as an observer was a crucial part of the induction process. I had been given a look at the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the job, they would tell me, a ‘unique insight’ into what life was like ‘in the field’. I couldn’t really have taken issue with any of that.