Chapter Four
As we prepared for landing I saw Congreve below me, the city centre glittering in the gloom of the late afternoon like a solar system that had fallen from the heavens, like a grounded constellation, and then I was inside it, moving through it, buildings lifting steeply all around me, their upper storeys lost in the smoky, neon-saturated air. Seen at close range, they were less ethereal, more powerful; they seemed to emit pure energy, a deep turbine hum or murmur that I could feel in my rib-cage.
We were driving along a wide grand avenue, the traffic heavy in both directions, the pavements crowded. In the many-tiered emporia all the lights had been switched on, and I couldn’t help but notice the variety of goods on offer, the sheer lavishness of the displays. At the same time, beggars sat hunched over on every corner, their dogs lounging sloppily beside them. Most of these beggars had hung cardboard squares around their necks on bits of string, and even from a distance I could read their sorry messages: STARVING or HELP ME or, in one case, with bitter sarcasm, SMALL CHANGE ONLY PLEASE.
Braking smoothly, the limousine turned off the main road and eased its way into a maze of narrow streets. Here, suddenly, were strip clubs, peep-shows and sex shops, all jammed together, all different flavours, like a box of candied fruits.
‘A little tour,’ our driver joked over the intercom.
We had entered Firetown, the red-light district. I had listened to relocation officers boast of their exploits on these streets — how young the girls were, what they could do — and as I stared through the window, the air seemed to pulse and glow, a livid blush of scarlet, pink and purple. Once, as we stopped at a set of traffic-lights, a fight broke out on the pavement beside us. A burly ginger-haired man fell heavily against the car’s window, and the glass retained the print of his hand, as a cheek does when it’s been slapped. One of my fellow passengers murmured in alarm.
‘No need to panic,’ came the driver’s voice. ‘It’s reinforced.’
Not long afterwards, we pulled up outside the Plaza Hotel, and it was only then, with a sickening jolt, that I realised what our arrival in this new place actually entailed. I had forfeited my last chance to visit the club. We would be spending the night in Congreve, then returning to the Blue Quarter in the morning. A few hours later, my visa would expire, and I would have to leave the country. There would be no going back to the part of me that had been buried for so many years. There would be no more glimpses of that forgotten life.
A light clicked on in the limousine, and I saw myself reflected in the window. My face looked stiff, morose, vaguely ghoulish. I was in the Yellow Quarter for the first time ever, I had just arrived in one of its great cities, and yet I felt no elation. I didn’t even feel any fear. I was trying to adjust to the sudden, arbitrary loss of all my hopes.
My mind lay soft and cold on the floor of my skull like a carpet of ash.
When I walked into my room, it recognised me. Welcome to the Plaza, Mr Parry, it said. I hope you enjoy your stay. I should have been ready for something like this, perhaps, since choleric people were known to be obsessed with technology, but such was the hectic nature of our schedule that I had no time to dwell on my surroundings. Five o’clock had already struck when I set my case down on the bed, and I was expected for drinks at five-thirty. The venue was a roof garden on the seventeenth floor. While at the party, we would be able to watch the firework display, which was due to start at six. I took a quick shower. As I got dressed, I caught a few minutes of choleric TV. They were showing a documentary about the Prime Minister, Carl Triggs, who was so fiercely patriotic, apparently, that he had taken fire-eating lessons. I watched some rare footage of a bare-chested Triggs demonstrating his prowess in the grounds of one of his palatial mansions, then I went into the bathroom to clean my teeth. When I returned, the commercials were on. At midnight there would be a programme which featured topless female mud-wrestlers competing for a huge cash prize. It was called Rolling in It. I threw on my tuxedo, gave my shoes a polish and by five-thirty-five I was stepping out of the lift and into a space that resembled a conservatory, exotic trees and shrubs massing beneath a high glass ceiling.
The men were dressed in lounge suits or formal evening wear. As for the women, they had chosen much more elaborate confections — one girl was wrapped in jagged swathes of red and orange taffeta, which made her look as if she was being burned at the stake — and their ears, necks, wrists and fingers were all heavily freighted with jewellery. I found Frank Bland in the shade of a palm tree, holding a cocktail. His dinner jacket clung to his midriff as tightly as the skin of an onion.
‘Quite a place,’ he said as I walked over.
‘Does your room talk to you, Frank?’
‘Good evening, Mr Bland.’ He had put on a voice that was both disembodied and obsequious.
I nodded. ‘That’s very good.’ Though everything was reaching me through a veil of quiet desperation, it was a comfort to see Frank Bland. In these altered circumstances, he felt like an ally. A friend.
He took a gulp from his drink. ‘Did you hear me speak this morning?’
‘Of course. I really enjoyed it.’
‘Did I ramble?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose you did a bit.’
He laughed. ‘It was one of the worst hangovers I’ve ever had.’
I wanted to thank him for shedding some light on a subject that intrigued me, but Boorman and Rinaldi wandered over and I lost my chance. Not long afterwards we were ushered out on to the terrace.
I had always loved fireworks — even the most modest sparklers delighted me — but the fireworks we saw that night, unleashed from the roof of a nearby building, were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The colours alone almost defied description. Instead of the usual sprays of red and green and gold, we were treated to the most delicate tinctures, the subtlest of hues — violet, burnt sienna, damask, eau-de-nil. And the fireworks themselves did not explode so much as unfold, like hothouse flowers opening their petals, but in fast-motion, bouquet after bouquet tossed carelessly into the dark. Later, various messages were emblazoned across the sky — 27 GREAT YEARS, THANKS CARL, and so on. The display ended in a riot of sound, the noise rebounding across the city, so deafening and persistent that it seemed the office blocks surrounding us might topple and the ceiling above our heads might shatter in a murderous cascade of glass. For a while I had forgotten how I felt, but then we went back indoors, and people turned to each other and began to talk, and the disappointment I’d been harbouring since the early evening rose inside me once again, swift and remorseless, like floodwater.
Josephine Cox came and stood in front of me, her face flushed. ‘You don’t seem very happy.’
So it was that obvious. Ever since I first set foot in the Bathysphere, I had been feeling scratchy, discontented. My initial experience had been the strangest mixture of the unexpected and the sublime, and it had stopped too soon, of course, and if I nursed a sense of regret about that shortfall the events of the second night had only compounded it, since I had dropped down deep into my past only to have the journey cruelly cut short. Then, a few hours later, Josephine’s surprise announcement had cheated me out of my last chance to go back. But it wasn’t just that. Those two nights had established a kind of precedent, and my life in the Red Quarter, the life I would soon be returning to, now seemed pallid, if not sterile, by comparison. Nothing that happened to me from this point on, I felt, could ever match what had happened to me in that club.