I mounted the steps and pushed the door open. I’d walked into the public bar — a floor of stained wood, with chairs and tables to match. The air smelled of beer and green logs, and the horse-brasses pinned to the walls in vertical rows gave off a sullen gleam. A woman stood behind the bar, reading a note. Her hair was drawn back in a tight bun, which only served to accentuate the strong bones in her cheeks and jaw. When I asked if she had a room, she folded the note and put it in her pocket, then she came out from behind the bar and stood staring at me, hands on hips. She wore a white ribbed sweater, brown jodhpurs and a pair of tall, scuffed riding boots. Her face, which was lightly tanned, looked hard as a mask.
‘I didn’t hear a car,’ she said.
‘I don’t have a car,’ I said. ‘I walked.’
Her gaze dropped from my face to my coat, then further, to my shoes. ‘You don’t look like much of a walker to me.’
I let out a sigh. ‘Do you have a room or don’t you?’
‘All right, all right,’ the woman said. ‘Jesus.’
She led me through an archway and on into a second bar. On the wall hung a stag’s head, a dented hunting horn and several framed black-and-white photos of men squinting on the tops of mountains.
‘I don’t usually have people staying,’ she said, ‘not this time of year.’
Winter, I thought. Business would be slow.
The woman reached over the counter and plucked a key from a metal hook. As I took the key from her, I had the distinct feeling that it was accompanied by a warning, unspoken, but quite palpable.
My room was small, with a low ceiling. The walls were stained with the bodies of insects that had been swatted during the summer months, their blood no longer red but dark-brown or dull-pink. I put my bag down at the foot of the bed and moved to the window. The land fell away in front of me, the coarse grass studded with boulders. Rain smudged the horizon to the east. I faced back into the room. There was a washbasin in one corner, and opposite the bed was a fireplace that had been boarded up. A tall wardrobe stood behind the door, as if intent on ambushing the next person who walked in. I placed my watch on the bedside table, then took off all my clothes and climbed between the sheets. The pillowcase smelled of mildew, but I laid my head against it anyway, and I remembered nothing after that.
I woke to raucous applause, people clapping and whistling. I couldn’t see anything, though, nor, for a few moments, did I have any idea where I was. I reached out for my watch, which lay coiled on the table. The luminous green hands said ten to seven. Clutching the watch, I sank back among the blankets, my mind still stunned with sleep. Darkness had fallen outside. I let my eyes close, then forced them open again and swung my legs out of the bed. The cold air took hold of me, stippling my bare skin with goose-bumps.
As I rose to my feet, trying to remember where the light-switch was, a movement in the window caught my eye. Still naked, I went and looked through the glass. In the distance, perhaps a mile away, a monstrous creature glowed and flickered. A dappled brownish-golden colour, it had a long thick body and a tapering tail, and it was staggering, almost drunkenly, in the direction of the pub.
I found a light-switch by the door and turned it on, then walked over to the washbasin. I ran the hot tap. It coughed once, then shuddered, but nothing came out. I washed under the cold tap instead, bringing handful after handful of icy water to my face until I felt properly awake. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My eyelids were swollen, puffy, my forehead creased. How long had I been asleep? Five hours? Six? A towel in my hands, I returned to the window. The creature had edged closer. Its stubby head ended in a forked tongue which seemed to be licking at the night. I quickly threw on my clothes and went downstairs.
Both bars had filled with people, some dressed in army surplus, some in anoraks and wellingtons. Others wore fur hats with flaps over the ears. Several of the men had beards. Through the window I caught a glimpse of the woman I’d spoken to earlier. She was standing on the asphalt at the front of the pub, her legs astride, smoking a cigarette. I went outside and joined her. She continued to smoke, without acknowledging my presence.
‘I saw something from my room,’ I said. ‘I thought I should tell you.’
‘Did you?’ Holding her cigarette at thigh-level, she stared out into the dark.
‘It looked like a salamander.’
She said nothing. A thin spiral of smoke coiled upwards, past her sleeve.
‘Is something going to happen?’ I said.
‘You tell me.’
‘How could I tell you? I’ve never been here before.’
She looked at me sideways, steadily. She seemed to be debating something inside herself. Then she said, ‘It’s the burning of the animals.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Every year, around this time,’ she said, ‘we burn the animals. We always do it in a different place, or the authorities would interfere. It’s our little gesture of rebellion against the way things are.’
‘I know about rebellion,’ I said.
‘You do?’ Still watching me, the woman drew on her cigarette, then blew the smoke out of one corner of her mouth.
I found myself telling the woman who I was and what I had done. Perhaps I wanted to repay her for having been straightforward with me, but there was also something about the harsh planes of her face and the toughness around her mouth that invited confidences. I was sure that her initial hostility was only caution blown up large. And so I told her everything.
Towards the end she nodded slowly. ‘I heard about that bomb,’ she said. ‘Four people died.’
‘I didn’t know.’ I looked up into the night sky. The dull pewter of the clouds had brightened to silver where the moon was trying to push through. ‘There wasn’t anything about me, was there?’
‘You? No.’
‘Good.’
She looked at me head-on for the first time, her eyes narrowing at the corners, and I suddenly felt delicate, almost breakable. ‘So you’re on the run?’ she said.
I tried to smile. My mouth crumpled, though, which was something I hadn’t expected, and I had to look away. ‘Yes,’ I murmured, ‘I suppose I am.’
‘You’ve chosen an interesting time to do it.’ She threw her cigarette into the road. ‘Let’s go back inside. I’ll buy you a drink.’
I had seen people drink heavily during the conference, Fernandez, Boorman, and the rest of them, but their drinking paled in comparison with the drinking I saw at the Axe Edge Inn that night, and I drank too, more than ever before, more than I thought possible. After I had been handed a double brandy by Fay Mackenzie — for that was the landlady’s name — a friend of hers, Hugo, bought me another, then it was my round and I found myself embarking on a third. I always asked for brandy now. It had become my drink. I used it as a sort of touchstone, a way of throwing out a line from the immediate past to an uncertain future. Hugo had discovered I was a defector, as he called it, and he kept slapping me on the shoulder and offering me a top-up, even though my glass seemed constantly to be on the point of brimming over. He was also desperate to learn of my reasons for leaving the Red Quarter. ‘I know,’ he exclaimed, his big straw-coloured teeth showing, ‘you just couldn’t take all that contentment any more, could you?’ Clutching the side of his belly with one hand, like somebody with a stitch, he bent double, hugely entertained by his own joke.
Just then a fight broke out. The crowd parted, as though drawn to the edges of the room by some magnetic force, and two men staggered about in the makeshift arena, their arms wrapped around each other. They heaved and grunted, but neither could seem to gain the upper hand. I imagined for a moment that they were engaged in a form of primitive dance. At last one of them tore himself free and swung a blow. His fist circled the air like a wrecking ball, but demolished nothing, and as he tottered sideways, off balance, the other man clubbed him above the ear.