‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said. ‘About what it’s like, I mean.’
‘So have I,’ I said. ‘It’s damp. Everyone’s ill all the time. I’ll probably get flu.’
She didn’t even smile.
I reached across the table. Her gaze shifted to my hand, which now covered hers. ‘It’s a conference,’ I said gently. ‘It’s just work.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and her chin lifted and she looked away from me, into the room.
‘Sonya …’ I rose to my feet and walked round the table. Standing behind her, I wrapped her in my arms and then just held her. Cool air from the window moved across my back.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘I’m being stupid.’
‘No.’
I had heard stories about the Blue Quarter too — tales of enchantment and possession, of pagan ritual, of bizarre religious cults — but I had heard them from relocation officers, and they had always been notorious for their lurid imaginations. It was partly due to the privilege of their position. They travelled to other quarters on a regular basis. They saw places no one else saw. They could invariably command an audience willing to hang on their every word. But it was also a result of their constant exposure to other people’s trauma. The stories they told were defence mechanisms, safety valves, ways of deflecting or releasing pressure. Their humour was gallows humour. The old joke about relocation officers was that they themselves often had to be relocated. They crossed too many borders. They burned out. It was an occupational hazard. I remembered what Vishram had said at lunch. One might lose a part of oneself. One might suffer injury or harm.
Sonya carefully detached herself from me and, tilting her head sideways, touched the back of her wrist to her right eye. Then she looked up at me and smiled.
‘It’ll be amazing,’ she said.
I rose out of sleep just after three o’clock, my head cluttered with disturbing images. Not wanting to wake Sonya, I eased out of bed and crept through the darkness to her bathroom. I drank some cold water from the tap, then turned to the window. A full moon hung in an almost cloudless sky. The street below was quiet. I saw three girls stop outside the building opposite. They talked for a while, then I heard the word ‘goodnight’, and two of them walked away. Alone now, the third girl leaned close to the building’s entrance with her head bent, her neck white in the moonlight. She must be having trouble with her keys, I thought. Eventually the door gave, and she disappeared inside. I had been watching with a feeling of nostalgia, even though I had never seen the girl before, and I realised I was thinking of Marie, and how she would have stood outside the house on Hope Street in much the same way, tired certainly, perhaps a little drunk as well, trying to fit her key into the lock. Once through the front door, she would climb the creaky staircase in the dark. As she crossed the landing, she would knock against the linen chest that jutted from the wall, and I would hear her swear under her breath. Fuck, I would whisper, imitating her. I’d be grinning. In the morning she would pull her skirt and pants down on one side and show me the mauve-and-yellow rose that had bloomed on her hip like a tattoo. Was it really eighteen months since I had seen her last?
I had been due to attend a seminar on the south coast, and on the spur of the moment I had phoned Marie and asked if I could stay with her. I remembered a cliff-top path, a bright November day. Skylarks were chattering high above, black splinters in the sky’s blue skin. The sea sprawled to my left, hundreds of feet down, its waves fluttering like gills. My blood felt fresher for the walk. Then I came over a rise and saw the cottage below, a roof of dark slates, smoke coiling upwards from the chimney and merging with the air. Even at a distance I could see Marie in the front garden, the only figure in a vast panoramic landscape. How solitary her life had become, I thought, now Victor was no longer there.
I drew closer, then stood still and watched her. Bending from the waist, her hair hanging loose on both sides of her face, she was weeding a bed of irises. At last she seemed to sense my presence. She looked round, then straightened slowly, squinting into the light. I raised a hand and waved.
‘Oh Tom. It’s you.’ She walked over in her clumsy wellingtons, touching her right sleeve to her nose. When she embraced me, she laid her head against my shoulder, and I could feel her voice vibrating in my collar-bone. ‘I forgot you were coming. I mean, I forgot it was today.’
I stood back. ‘You look good, Marie. You look really well.’
‘Do I?’ She glanced down at her cardigan, which was darned in several places and missing a button, then her eyes lifted again. ‘Look at you, though. How much did that coat cost?’
Later that day I sat at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea. She told me she had got a job at the local railway station, in the ticket office. Victor would have approved, I said. She nodded absently, and wrapped both hands around her mug, as if to extract warmth from it. Her bottom lip had split down the middle, and the shine had gone from her hair. She would be forty now. It was hard to believe.
‘You can’t imagine how anyone can live like this,’ she said.
I smiled faintly.
‘Things happen here. You’d be surprised.’ She had become defiant, as though my presence had ignited some aspect of her that had been lying dormant, just barely smouldering. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this — he made me promise not to — but I don’t suppose it matters now.’
He. Our father.
At breakfast one morning, she told me, Victor had come up with an idea. He had decided to walk round the border. All the way round. He wanted to see exactly where he had been living for the past twenty years. He was curious about ‘the dimensions of the cage’. And they had done it, the two of them. They had walked nearly seven hundred miles. It had taken them most of the summer.
‘I didn’t know,’ I said.
‘We crossed the border too,’ Marie said. ‘Illegally.’
She seemed to relish the look that appeared on my face. She had startled me out of my complacency. At the same time, I had a sense of how comprehensively I had deceived her over the years. It had never occurred to her that I might work for the Ministry. She just saw me as someone who obeyed the rules.
‘We crossed it in broad daylight,’ she said. ‘We walked right through. There was no one there.’
‘Where was it?’
She named the place. I knew it as a marshy stretch of country, bleak and windswept — the only border we shared with the Green Quarter.
‘There must have been some kind of wall,’ I said.
‘There was. But it had a hole in it’.
‘A hole?’
‘A gap,’ Marie said. ‘I don’t know what had happened. Maybe the wall had collapsed. Or maybe it was being repaired. I don’t know. But there was definitely a gap. We couldn’t believe it at first. After everything we’d heard about national security and the integrity of the state. We thought we must be seeing things.’ Her eyes slanted towards the window — a thin stripe of grey-green sea, the grey sky above. She smiled. ‘We walked towards it, and we walked really slowly, as if it was alive and we might startle it. Then we just climbed through.’
‘Both of you?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I remember standing on the other side. It looked the same, of course — but it felt different. Completely different. Like the moon or something. There was this moment when we looked all round and then our eyes met and we started laughing.’ She shook her head, as if what had been stored there still astonished her. ‘We jumped up and down and shouted things and danced, even though there wasn’t any music. We behaved like mad people. You should have seen us.’