The journey to Athanor had gone smoothly — that is, until a woman got into my carriage. She had a boy of about four with her, and he had noticed me immediately. Children are like the police, I thought. No one can make you feel guilty the way a child can. Standing on his mother’s lap, the boy had levelled a finger at me. What’s that? The woman glanced in my direction. That’s a man. The boy hadn’t seemed at all convinced. In an attempt to deflect any awkwardness, I asked the woman what his name was. Thomas, she said. That’s my name, I told her. Did you hear that? the woman said to the child. The man’s called Thomas, just like you. The child shook his head. No, he said. I smiled at the woman and shrugged good-naturedly, then I stared out of the window, pretending to take an interest in the scenery. What’s that? Strange how appropriate those words seemed. With his innocent yet merciless gaze, his almost feral intuition, the boy had seen me for what I was — at large without papers, stateless, no longer properly a person.
Putting my drink down, I asked the landlord whether it was possible to make a call. He directed me to a pay-phone in the corridor that led to the toilets. The phone-book had been torn in two, but luckily the front half had survived. I ran through the ‘F’s. There he was, the only FERNANDEZ J. in the book. I memorised his address — 176 Harbour Drive — then returned to the bar and ordered another brandy. When the landlord brought me my drink, I asked if he knew where Harbour Drive was. He couldn’t think, but an old woman with a black eye-patch overheard and answered for him. Take a left out of the pub, she said, and then keep walking for about a mile. I’d see the road on my right. There was a chippie on the corner. I thanked her, and she promptly banged her glass down on the bar in front of me. She wanted a large vodka, with no ice. I bought her one. When she had swallowed it, which only took a moment, the glass hit the bar in front of me again. I smiled at her and shook my head, then I finished my brandy and eased down off my stool. As I turned to go, the woman put her face close to mine and lifted her eye-patch to reveal the scarred and hollow socket underneath. I pushed through the crowd to the door, then I was outside.
From the fish-and-chip shop Harbour Drive sloped upwards, becoming steadily more prosperous. After half a mile the road levelled out, and it was here that I found number 176, a detached house with a garage. I walked in through the front gate, climbed the steps to the porch and pressed the bell. The house looked closed up for the night. Even the stained-glass fanlight above the door showed only a faint glimmer from inside, as if a single lamp had been left on at the far end of the hall. I hoped John Fernandez hadn’t gone to bed. I pressed the bell again.
‘Who’s there?’
I jumped. It was Fernandez, and yet I had heard no footsteps, nor had I noticed any lights go on. Was it possible that he’d been watching out for me? Had he somehow known that I would come?
I put my mouth to the letter box. ‘It’s Thomas Parry. We met at the conference.’
A moment of absolute stillness, then two locks turned and the door swung inwards. We stood facing each other, in near darkness. Fernandez was wearing the same black-rimmed glasses he had worn on the night of the card game.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘Could you let me in?’ I said. ‘I’ll explain everything.’
He looked over my shoulder, scanning the street, then looked at me again. For a few tense seconds I thought he might turn me away — he would have been quite capable of such a reaction, I was sure — but finally he stood aside, and I stepped past him, into the hall. He closed the door and fastened both the locks.
‘I was just going to bed,’ he said with his back to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’
I followed him through a door on the right side of the hall. He told me to watch my head on the way down. At the bottom of the stairs we turned left into a long low-ceilinged room with a mustard-coloured sofa at one end and a desk with a swivel chair at the other. In the middle of the room two armchairs faced each other across a shag-pile rug. Dark-brown curtains hid the windows. On the desk, in an ornate silver frame, was a black-and-white photograph of a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had thick dark eyebrows, creamy skin, and black hair that curled in beneath her chin.
‘My sister used to have hair like that,’ I said.
Even as I spoke, I was overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion. Sinking into the nearest chair, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I gripped the arms of the chair like someone bracing himself for take-off. Like someone afraid of flying.
‘I should tell you,’ I said. ‘I’m here illegally.’
I opened my eyes again. Fernandez seemed to stand out against the furnishings, almost as though he had been superimposed.
He moved over to the desk and opened the deepest of the drawers. He took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. ‘The night the bomb went off,’ he said. ‘You disappeared.’
‘What happened to the conference?’
‘It was suspended. We were all sent home.’
I gave him an abbreviated version of what I had done during the hours immediately following the explosion.
‘And you’ve been missing ever since?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
I watched him carefully. This was the moment I hadn’t been able to predict, or even imagine. Either he would think of an excuse to leave the room, and then he would go upstairs and call the authorities, or he would — he would what?
‘Drink?’ Fernandez held the bottle out towards me.
I shook my head. ‘Thanks. I’ve had enough.’
He poured himself a single measure, then placed the bottle and the unused glass on the desk and stood facing the curtains. ‘How did you know?’
‘Know what?’
‘About me.’
‘I didn’t.’ I paused. ‘I don’t.’
‘No one told you anything?’
‘No.’
‘Strange,’ he murmured. ‘I had the feeling you’d seen through me. Something you said, I don’t remember what. Or it might’ve been a look you gave me.’
‘I had the feeling there was something unpredictable about you,’ I said. ‘When I thought of you this morning, when you came into my head, somehow I couldn’t imagine you turning me in. So here I am.’
‘You took a pretty big risk.’
‘I know. I seem to have been doing that lately.’
Fernandez flashed me a look over his shoulder. I ought not to be glib or flippant, I realised. I had almost certainly endangered him by coming to his house. Him and whoever he lived with. That woman in the photograph, perhaps.
‘I had no choice,’ I said. ‘You were the only person I could think of.’
‘What do you intend to do?’
‘I need to get back to the Blue Quarter.’
‘The Blue Quarter? Why?’
I had known that he would ask that question — or that someone would — and yet I hadn’t been at all sure how I was going to answer. I leaned forwards in the chair. ‘Remember the club I asked you about?’
‘What club?’
I started to describe the Bathysphere and what had happened there. I told him how I seemed to have crossed a kind of border in myself, and how, for the first time, I’d had a real sense of the person I used to be, the person I was first, before everything changed, and as I was talking I realised something extraordinary. I had always seen the moment when I was lifted out of bed as a birth, but actually the opposite was true. The cold hands, the bright lights — my parents grieving … I had died that night, and I’d been dead ever since. And now I was trying to do something about that. What was this whole journey in the end but an attempt to bring myself back to life?