I woke and lay quite motionless, my breath showing against the wall like smoke. I pulled myself upright. My ribs had stiffened, but I didn’t think anything was broken. On my temple a lump had formed, the same shape as the back of a teaspoon, and my left eyebrow had split open. The crusting of blood crumbled like earth beneath my fingers. I slipped my jacket on over my sweater, then let my eyes travel slowly round the room. Pale-green walls, floorboards painted grey. A window showing treetops and a cloudy sky. A cupboard. Bookshelves, but no books. Then I saw the chair tilted at an angle against the door. There had been a dog, I remembered. It had stared at me over its shoulder, its jaws set in a mirthless grin.
I began to look for something that might double as a weapon. In the cupboard I found some medical magazines, a plastic measuring jug and an empty pot of white emulsion. On the shelves, only a jam-jar filled with brownish liquid. There was nothing under the bed. In the end, I snapped one of the legs off the chair. It would serve as a cudgel. If I used the paint pot as a kind of gauntlet, I would be able to fend the dog off with one hand while I attacked it with the other. The whole thing seemed laughable — a charade, really — but how else was I going to protect myself?
I put an ear to the door. Silence. Hardly daring to breathe, I eased the chair out from beneath the handle and stood it behind me, then I opened the door. A lino floor stretching away. A scattering of leaves, fragile and ginger. Staying close to the wall, I set off along the corridor, the leaves exploding beneath my shoes. I hadn’t noticed them the night before, but then I hadn’t realised that if I made a noise I might put myself in danger. I reached the stairwell. Cool air slid up from below.
On the first floor I stopped again, imagining I’d heard a bark, though it was hard to tell above the fierce hiss of blood inside my head. I wondered how many dogs there were. It seemed unlikely there would be just one.
I didn’t try and make it back to the broken window. Instead, I moved through the kitchens and on into the laundry. At last I found a door I could unbolt. Ducking under tangled washing-lines, I mounted a flight of steps and came out on to a terrace that ran the entire length of the back of the building. Fragments of shattered roof-tile lay about, and dandelions had sprung up in the cracks between the wide uneven flags. From the balustrade I could survey the grounds. A lawn and then a hedge, both overgrown. In the distance, a jagged, tree-lined horizon. The sky was still and grey, and pressed down like the soft pedal on a piano, deadening all sound.
I hurried away across the grass. Hunger gripped me, keen as loneliness. Beyond a high brick wall was a kitchen garden, and my spirits lifted, but everything in there had been neglected for too long. The leaves of cabbages had turned to ragged dark-green lace, while the rhubarb stalks were thick as builders’ wrists. As for the apples, wasps had drilled them through and through. I managed to dig up two potatoes, which I wiped clean on my shirt-tail and ate raw. Later, on a spindly tree by the far wall, I found a single pear. I plucked the fruit from its branch and studied the speckled skin, as if for instructions, then I bit into it, and the flesh, though hard and bitter, had a curiously refreshing quality. All the same, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I might have eaten something that was supposed to be ornamental.
I emerged from the garden and climbed a grass slope, making for the cover of the trees. Once there, I stopped and took a final look at the place where I had spent the night. It struck me as odd that the asylum hadn’t been put to better use — choleric people were meant to be so dynamic, so resourceful — but perhaps, in the end, the four countries didn’t vary as much as was commonly believed. Perhaps our famous differences were no more than convenient fictions. I was aware that my thoughts were taking a new turn, and wondered if I had been influenced — contaminated, some might say — by Fay Mackenzie and her friends. Before I could reach any conclusions, I saw a white dog come lumbering round the edge of the building, its blunt muzzle close to the flagstones, as though following a scent. I could delay no longer. Keeping a firm grasp on the chair-leg, I set off into the woods.
After walking for some time, I stepped out on to a ridge, and there below me, to my astonishment, lay the border. From my vantage point I could see over the wall into the countryside beyond — its fields, its hawthorn hedges, its narrow twisting lanes. For a moment I thought I was looking at the Blue Quarter, but then I remembered it hadn’t featured on the map in the café at all. The border with the Blue Quarter would have to be at least an hour away by car, and we hadn’t been on the road for more than five or ten minutes. Leon and his friends had told me we were driving north, to the city where they lived, but actually we must have driven east. It was the Green Quarter that I could see. Those people had not only robbed me, they had lied to me as well. Maybe that was why they’d been laughing just before they left.
Tired and disconsolate, I sat down at the foot of a tree, laying my eccentric weapons on the ground beside me. It was a typical rural border, with a single concrete wall reaching away in both directions. There were no watch-towers, no death strips. No men with guns. A set of tyre-tracks ran parallel to the wall, worn in the grass by regular patrols. It made me think of the section of border that Marie had talked about. We thought we must be seeing things. We just climbed through. I couldn’t see any gaps or holes in this wall, though — and, even if there had been, it wouldn’t have done me any good. I hadn’t the slightest desire to enter the Green Quarter. There was nothing for me there.
Still, after a while, curiosity got the better of me, and I started down the hill. A few minutes later, I was standing in the shadow of the wall, and I saw at once that it was both immaculate and unassailable. No flaws or blemishes. Not even any cracks. The wall had been built to the standard height, with a smooth rounded lip at the top, a kind of overhang. It offered no handholds or footholds — no purchase of any kind. I placed my palm against the surface. It was cold as a gravestone. It promised death. Even here, under an innocuous November sky. Even here, in the middle of nowhere. I stood back. What now?
At that moment I heard a faint buzzing noise, not unlike a power drill or an electric razor. I looked northwards along the track. A motorbike came slithering and sliding over a rise in the ground, and as it drew nearer I saw that its rider was wearing the uniform of a choleric border guard, the black rainproof jacket trimmed with yellow piping, the gun strapped into a yellow holster.
The motorbike stopped beside me. I hadn’t moved. The guard switched off the engine, then he removed his helmet and placed it on the petrol tank in front of him.
‘Hard to talk with one of those things on,’ he said.
‘I imagine,’ I said.
The guard had cut himself shaving, and the small circle of dried blood on his chin gave him an air of vulnerability. His black hair had been flattened by the helmet. I was reminded, incongruously, of the places in fields where people have had picnics or made love. Now that I was facing the danger I had hardly dared to picture, I felt curiously calm, and on the edge of a powerful and unforeseen hilarity.
‘What are you doing here?’ the guard said.
‘Just out for a walk,’ I said.
‘You’re not thinking of —’ His eyes darted towards the top of the wall.
I smiled. ‘Climbing over? How could I?’ I held my arms away from my sides, to demonstrate my innocence, the fact that I had nothing to hide.
‘You’d be surprised,’ the guard said.
Removing his leather gauntlets, he took out a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers, and then embarked on a story about a man called Jake Tilney who had been transferred to the Yellow Quarter when he was in his forties. Though he seemed, outwardly, to be settling into his new life, Jake never stopped trying to find a way of returning to the Green Quarter, which had been his home before. At last he came up with something so obvious, so straightforward, as to merit the word genius. He designed and built his very own pocket ladder. It had an extension capacity of eleven and a half feet, which was the exact height of the wall, but it folded into a metal rectangle that measured no more than twelve inches by eighteen and weighed less than a bag of sugar. One day Jake travelled to a remote section of the border. Alone and unobserved, he assembled his ladder and climbed to the top of the wall, then he simply pulled the ladder up after him, placed it on the other side and climbed down again — and all in less than sixty seconds, or so he maintained in his statement.