I had the feeling I’d been turning and turning in the bed for hours, but when I finally gave up trying to sleep and switched on the light I saw that it was only five-past one. Maybe I should try and read for a while — after all, the shelves on either side of me were full of books — or else I could go through my lecture one last time … I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Leaving the lights off, I peered into the dim well of the mirror. My face floated there, not on the surface seemingly, but just below it, like someone underwater looking at the sky. As I stared at myself I heard my mother calling me again. Matthew? I had recognised her voice immediately. It was as much a part of me as blood or hair. Each layer of my skin had been inlaid with it. And it had sounded different to the voice I remembered from that night on the road, not piteous, not pleading, but tender, even, calm — the voice I had lived with, day in, day out, for years … I filled a glass with water, drank it down.
As I put the glass back on the shelf, loud laughter came from the corridor outside my room. I opened the door. There were five of them out there, arms round each other’s shoulders — Fernandez, Bland, de Mattos and two I didn’t recognise. Fernandez was holding a huge rabbit made of green crêpe paper. Bland appeared to have lost one of his shoes. When they noticed me standing in the doorway, their mouths opened wide, and they lifted glasses and bottles in a collective salute.
‘It’s the mystery man,’ Fernandez said.
I grinned self-consciously and shook my head. The mystery man. That’s what they had started calling me. Because I had gone to bed at five in the morning, and they still hadn’t found out why. They staggered towards me, all at the same time, as if they had been pushed from behind. I took an involuntary step backwards.
‘Sorry,’ Bland said, ‘but we’re drunk.’
‘I’d never have guessed,’ I said.
They reeled back again, wheezing and chuckling, bumping against each other gently like boats in a harbour. Yes, they’d been drinking all evening, so many drinks, but now they were going to play cards. I’d play cards, wouldn’t I?
‘I’m not very good at cards,’ I said.
‘Well, you can watch,’ de Mattos said. ‘How about that?’
I thought about it. Probably anything was better than lying in bed and being unable to sleep — and besides, the idea of company appealed to me.
‘All right,’ I said.
With a resounding cheer, the five men swept me off down the corridor in my pyjamas and bare feet. Fernandez danced a celebratory rumba with the enormous bright-green rabbit. Bland offered me his one remaining shoe, which I graciously declined. They were going to Boorman’s room, de Mattos told me. Charlie Boorman was the name of one of the men I hadn’t met before. The other was Rinaldi. Marco Rinaldi. They were both miserable bastards, de Mattos said. You know, from the Green Quarter. From Cledge. Boorman and Rinaldi grinned queasily.
I noticed the surgical tape on Rinaldi’s forehead. ‘You’re the one who had the accident, aren’t you?’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Rinaldi said. ‘He did it on purpose. He was trying to kill me.’
I stared at him. ‘Really?’
The others fell about laughing, Bland included.
Boorman’s room was at the far end of the corridor. His bed hadn’t been made, and empty beer bottles lay scattered about, together with dirty clothing, old newspapers and the remains of a meal.
‘Talk about melancholy,’ Fernandez said. ‘Talk about fucking gloom.’
Bland and Rinaldi said they were going off to find some chairs. I looked at the wall opposite the bed. Where I had a mural of men fishing, Boorman had a beech forest in the autumn.
‘Dangerous, that wall.’ Boorman stood next to me, one hand resting heavily on my shoulder.
‘What’s dangerous about it?’
‘See that tree?’ He pointed, the tip of his finger revolving unsteadily, like a fly circling a light bulb. ‘I pissed all over it.’
‘I thought I could smell something,’ de Mattos said.
‘Woke up in the night,’ Boorman went on, ‘needed a slash. Thought I was outside, didn’t I. Pissed on the first tree I could find.’ His eyes squeezed shut, and he was shaking his head. ‘Maid didn’t like it.’
‘What about this game?’ Standing on a table, Fernandez was fastening his rabbit to the centre-light with someone’s tie. ‘Are we going to play or not?’
Rinaldi and Bland returned with extra chairs, and the five men settled round the table. Sitting on the bed, looking over Boorman’s shoulder, I watched as Fernandez shuffled the cards. He was due to speak tomorrow, after lunch. He would be discussing terrorism in his native Yellow Quarter, with special reference to the supposed links between various disaffected elements and the trade unions.
‘I’m looking forward to your talk,’ I told him when I caught his eye.
He grunted. ‘At least someone’s interested.’
The game began. They were drinking Boorman’s brandy. Old, it was. Aged in special oak casks. I’d have some, wouldn’t I? I said I would, secretly hoping it might make me sleepy. The green rabbit rotated solemnly above the table.
‘We had a peacock too,’ de Mattos said, ‘but Rinaldi fell on it.’
‘I just fell over. Squashed it flat.’ Rinaldi looked at me. ‘Nothing personal.’ He glanced down, fingered his lapel. ‘Lost my name-badge too.’
‘Rinaldi’s name-badge,’ de Mattos said, ‘it’s not for people at the conference. It’s so he knows who he is when he wakes up in the morning.’
The mention of name-badges reminded me of Ming, and when the laughter had died down I asked if anybody knew him. Fernandez looked blank. So did Rinaldi.
‘He wears strange-coloured suits,’ I said.
‘I saw someone like that,’ de Mattos said. ‘What’s his name again?’
‘Walter Ming.’ I had begun to see Ming’s enigmatic behaviour as a kind of indecisiveness, and that, together with his persistent cough, led me to believe that he might come from the host nation, that he might, after all, be phlegmatic. ‘I think he’s from here.’ I turned to Bland. ‘But if that was true you’d know him, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Bland said. ‘Our civil service, it accounts for something like three per cent of the population. There are thousands of us.’ He threw down a card. ‘What about him, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. He seems devious, somehow — and he keeps following me around —’
‘Sounds like Rinaldi,’ Fernandez said.
Rinaldi grinned uneasily, then put a hand over his mouth. Standing up, he lurched towards the bathroom.
‘He’s going to vomit.’ Boorman hadn’t taken his eyes off his cards.
‘He always vomits,’ Bland said.
A terrible noise came from behind the bathroom door, somewhere between a roar and a groan, as though Rinaldi was being tortured.
Bland looked across at me. ‘Don’t worry. It always sounds like that.’
‘Rinaldi,’ someone said.
There was a general shaking of heads.
A few minutes later I asked if anybody had been to a club called the Bathysphere. None of them had even heard of it. De Mattos wanted to know whether it had live girls. He knew a couple of places, if I was interested.
‘It’s not like that,’ I said.
It was true, I suppose, that there had been an erotic edge to my first night at the club, but something else was happening now, something quite miraculous. I had gained access to a part of me that I had assumed was gone for ever. The club’s name conveyed exactly what was being offered: a journey into the depths, a probing of the latent, the forbidden, the impenetrable … As for Ming, the suspicions I’d been harbouring now seemed ludicrously exaggerated and melodramatic. He was like the Blue Quarter, I decided, only in microcosm. He was fluid, elusive, a source of disorientation, but he didn’t necessarily pose a threat. I was glad I had come to watch five drunk men playing cards. In an oddly paradoxical way, it had put everything in perspective.