‘It has been very mild,’ I said, pushing the call button on the lift.
Loames stood beside me, gazing benignly at the illuminated numbers. ‘You’ve not noticed any flies, though, Mr Parry? In your flat?’
‘I can’t say I have.’
Loames was nodding to himself ‘. So,’ he said. ‘Busy at the moment?’
‘Pretty busy, yes.’
His head angled in my direction, eyes sharpening a little. He asked all the usual questions, but I could often sense others lurking just beneath, like predatory fish. He seemed to suspect that there were things he wasn’t being told, and with some justification — in my case, at least.
The lift doors finally slid open.
‘Well,’ Loames said, ‘if you should see anything —’
‘I’ll let you know.’ I stepped into the lift and pressed the button for my floor. ‘Have a good evening, Mr Loames.’
When I walked into my flat, the phone was ringing. Thinking it might be the caretaker again, I picked up the receiver and rather wearily said, ‘Yes?’
There was a soft pause. ‘Thomas? Are you all right?’
The voice belonged to my girlfriend, Sonya Visvikis. She had called to tell me that the people we were supposed to be seeing the following night had cancelled. We could still have dinner, though, just the two of us — or did I think that was a bit dull? Not at all, I said. Actually, I’d prefer it. I could be with her by eight. I paused, thinking she might say something else, but the line fell quiet. In the silence, I heard a faint whine and I glanced round, first one way, then the other, expecting to see one of Loames’s flies, but there was nothing there. The noise must have come from outside. A distant ambulance, perhaps. A gust of cold wind from my dream.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Sonya said.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Why?’
‘I don’t know. You sound different.’
‘I just ran into Mr Loames,’ I said. ‘He’s got flies, apparently.’
Sonya laughed.
‘He wanted to know if I’d got any,’ I said.
By now Sonya was laughing so hard that she could barely speak.
We had only been seeing each other for about four months, but I had loved her laughter the moment I heard it. It was voluptuous, somehow, and resonant, so much so that I often imagined she had a musical instrument inside her, something exquisitely crafted, one of a kind.
After the phone-call was over, I cooked myself a light supper, then I moved to the sofa by the window and tried to read. I couldn’t concentrate, though. My head buzzed, as if with interference. I had a feeling of incompleteness, of things being just out of reach. Towards nine o’clock I put on my jacket, picked up my keys and left the flat, thinking a walk might help me to relax.
The air that closed around me as I stepped through the glass doors had a dense, humid quality I would never have associated with October. An Indian summer, people were calling it. The first in years. I walked down the street, then along the passageway, and came out into the park, the deckchairs all stacked away now, the students gone. I hesitated for a moment, looking down the path. In the distance, I could see a man standing quite still, his face turned towards me. Afraid it might be Loames again, I struck out across the grass. Loames … I suddenly realised that the name had a melancholic aspect to it. The way it referred to the earth, even the lugubrious vowels. Extraordinary I hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe one day his name would appear on my desk, on a list of people being recommended for a transfer, and Stafford Court would have to find a new caretaker.
A few minutes later, I emerged in front of a building that used to be the palace, its austere façade reminding me, as always, of cold ash, then I walked slowly westwards, through a square of cream-coloured houses with black balconies, before turning south towards the river. By the time I reached the embankment I was sweating lightly under my clothes. I leaned on the stone parapet and looked out over the water. Had I been able to swim across, I would have found myself in the Blue Quarter. There had been a bridge here once, but it had been dismantled during the Rearrangement. Only bridges that complemented the partitioning of the city had survived. In the Red Quarter, for instance, we had several of our own, since we had been granted territory on both sides of the river, but in stretches where the river itself had become the border all the bridges had been destroyed. The roads that had once led to them stopped at the water’s edge, and stopped abruptly. They seemed to stare into space, no longer knowing what they were doing there or why they had come. During my early twenties I was gripped by the sense of history that emanated from such places; they were like abandoned gateways, entrances to forgotten worlds. Also, of course, I felt that I had stumbled on a physical embodiment of my own experience. There were bridges down inside me too. There was the same sense of brutal interruption.
I walked on, passing through the muted pools of light that lay beneath each of the street lamps. Like many people of my age, I’d had two names, two lives. Once, I had been someone called Matthew Micklewright, but that person no longer existed, and I wasn’t even curious about him now. It was just too long ago, too remote — too unlikely. What’s the point of clinging to something that has gone? What good does it do? That old name had become as hollow and empty as a husk. A name deprived of breath, of meaning. A name without a face. And then the night when my life began again … A strange beginning. Soldiers, bright lights. The cold. And me being lifted, as if by surgeons, into a new world — and crying probably, though I couldn’t remember that. But every birth is merciless, perhaps. Then the lorry, the train, and all the hardships and uncertainties of the holding station –
I put a hand on the parapet, my heart seeming to bounce against the inside of my ribs. The dream I had woken with that morning had come back in its entirety. I had been walking in a sunlit garden. A strong wind pushed at the trees and bushes, and the grass rippled on the ground. It was cold in the garden — though like someone who had drunk too much I couldn’t feel it. Or if I could, then only as a delicious extra layer to my skin. For a long time that was all I knew — the sunlight on the grass, the wind, the ceaseless rushing sound of leaves … And then I saw a boy with light-brown hair standing motionless beneath a tree. He didn’t seem to have noticed me, despite the fact that I was walking towards him. He didn’t see me. Not even when I stood in front of him. He was naked, I realised. Somehow this hadn’t registered until that moment. I looked all around, but couldn’t find his clothes. The tree shuddered in the wind. The trunk wasn’t visible, nor were the branches. Only a huge murmuring cloud of leaves, which seemed held together by some supernatural force.
Staring out across the water, I trembled, as if the cold wind of the dream had jumped dimensions and was in the world with me. The boy was Jones. Even though he had light-brown hair. Even though he wasn’t standing on one leg.
Jones.
Like me, he would be in his thirties by now. Was it true that he’d been sent to an asylum? What had become of him? Had he survived?
The following day I met Vishram in the lobby, as arranged, and we took a tram across town. In fifteen minutes we were standing in a grand but decaying square only a few hundred yards from the border. Though Vishram had stepped out on to the pavement with an air of sublime equanimity, he had brought me, at lunchtime, to the very heart of Fremantle, the red-light district. Here you could find establishments that catered to every taste, no matter how esoteric or degenerate, venery being the one vice to which those of a sanguine disposition were known to be susceptible.
Vishram paused outside a house that looked residential, then climbed the steps and pressed an unmarked bell. The door clicked open. A cool, tiled hallway stretched before us. The staircase curved up towards another door which stood ajar and through which came, in muffled form, the familiar hum and clatter of a crowded restaurant. Once upstairs, we were escorted into a space that skilfully contrived to be both generous and intimate. Lamps with scarlet shades stood on each table, deflecting attention from the height of the ceiling, while curtains of the same colour framed the three tall windows that overlooked the square. The waitresses wore white blouses and black skirts. They were all young and good-looking, and at least two of them knew Vishram by name.