So the museum was a graveyard too.
I stared at the names and dates until they blurred. I hadn’t found my parents — not really. Perhaps they had been present for a few minutes, while I was sitting, head lowered, on the ottoman, but now they had disappeared again. All in all, it hadn’t been much of a reunion. I reached up slowly with one hand.
‘No touching, please.’
I looked round to see a museum guard standing in the doorway to the room. My hand dropped to my side. The guard nodded and moved on.
Out on the street again, I felt as though years had gone by. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the library had been knocked down and new buildings had been erected in its place.
I walked back to the Cliff, the air glassy, dazzling.
When I opened the door, Clarise was standing at the far end of the hall. She asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. She was just about to put the kettle on, she said. I shook my head, then stepped sideways into the front room. I heard her come after me.
‘What is it, Wig?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘This is a terrible place.’
‘Here?’ Clarise’s face whirled like a clumsy planet, taking in the mould-green three-piece suite, the velour curtains, the gas fire with its tile surround.
I shook my head again.
A boy could balance on one leg for hours. A man could make a book from his wife’s shoes. A couple could stand on a road in the middle of the night and call their son’s name, only to have him turn his back on them. Candles burned in windows all year round, memorials to those who had gone but were not dead. There were very few who didn’t live in the shadow of some separation or other. The divided kingdom was united after all, by just one thing: longing.
I sank down among the sofa’s sagging cushions. Clarise sat beside me. I told her that I had visited the museum and that I had found my parents, my real parents, but then my voice began to tremble and I couldn’t carry on. The grief had been stored inside me for too long. It hurt to bring it out. Clarise took me in her arms and held me against her. I smelled the wool of her cardigan, and her face powder, and the oil at the roots of her hair. My whole body jerked, as if caught on a fisherman’s hook.
‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Let it out.’
And though I was crying I learned something about myself just then. I saw it clearly for the first time. I had never been sanguine — at least, not so far as I could remember. No, wait — that was wrong. I had been sanguine until the moment I was classified as sanguine, but all my happiness had ended there, and all my optimism too. Ever since that night, the only thing I had ever really wanted was to find my way back. I was like someone who has died and can’t let go, someone who wants desperately to rejoin the living. And it wasn’t possible, of course. It wasn’t even possible to remember, not really — or rather, there was a limit to what could be recovered. None of that mattered, though. It was enough to believe, enough to know. That my parents had mourned me while they were alive. That they had died still missing me. That they had loved me.
Clarise held me close and said the same words over and over.
Let it out. Let it all out.
As February began, gales swept the length and breadth of the country, causing untold damage. Several people were killed by falling trees. In the south a headless man was seen speeding down a village high street on his bicycle. He had been decapitated by a flying roof-tile only seconds earlier. The freak conditions and unusual sightings sparked off the kind of doom-laden apocalyptic talk that wouldn’t have been tolerated even for a moment in the place I came from, though I found myself susceptible to it, perhaps because I was waiting for circumstances to favour me. As a result of what had happened to me during the previous month or so, a certain threshold had been crossed, a decision had been reached, but everything now depended on the White People, and they seemed to have vanished without trace. Weeks had elapsed since that night in the graveyard, and I hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of them. The only advantage was that Horowicz had lost interest in me. Whenever we spoke, which was rarely, he would berate me for my apathy, my fecklessness, almost as though he was trying to goad me into an action that he could then expose, condemn. I still went for walks after supper. On returning to the house, however, I would often join the others for a drink in an attempt to dull my frustration, to anaesthetise myself.
One Thursday evening I was on my way upstairs to change — Urban Smith was taking part in a talent contest in the local pub that night, and some of us were going along to support him — when I chanced to look out of the landing window. Across the street, beneath the drooping branches of a magnolia, stood a man in a white cloak. The tree had flowered early, and the man blended with its creamy blooms so perfectly that I had almost failed to notice him. I steered an uneasy glance over my shoulder. The landing was deserted, all the bedroom doors were closed. Somewhere below, I could hear Urban doing his voice exercises. Quickly, I went through my pockets. All I had on me was a cigarette-lighter, my dream notebook and a key to the front door. I had some money too, saved for precisely this eventuality. Round my neck was the silver ring I had found, which I now regarded as a sort of talisman. I couldn’t think of anything else I might need. I looked out of the window again. The man was still standing in the shadow of the magnolia tree. I thought of Victor and Marie lost in the mist and shivered. I didn’t know if I should feel apprehensive or reassured. I checked the time. Twenty to seven. What with the excitement of the competition, I doubted anybody would notice my absence, and if Urban won and the men drank enough of Starling’s latest brew, a lethal poteen, then it might easily be morning before they realised I was gone.
My abrupt departure would not come as a surprise to everyone. Clarise had treated me so kindly that I had felt duty bound to let her in on at least part of the secret. I had waited until it was my turn to help her with the dinner. On the night in question, I stood at the kitchen sink, washing spinach, while she sat at the table behind me and coated veal in egg and breadcrumbs. The men were out somewhere, playing darts. Only Lars Friedriksson had stayed behind, and he was in the basement, poking, two-fingered, at his ancient portable. Though he had already written a thousand pages, he claimed that he had hardly scratched the surface. He would not disturb us.
‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ I said.
Clarise’s wide, unblinking eyes veered towards me.
‘I’m not going to give you the details,’ I said. ‘I just want you to know that it’ll happen sometime in the near future.’
‘You can’t leave,’ she said, ‘not unless they relocate you. It’s not allowed.’
I couldn’t help smiling. She only ever invoked the law out of anxiety or panic.
‘I’m telling you now because I don’t want it to upset you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think’ — and I paused — ‘that I had come to any harm.’
‘Are you so unhappy here?’
I went over, took her hand. ‘You’ve been good to me, Clarise. I owe you a lot. It wouldn’t be fair if I did it behind your back. You mustn’t try and stop me, though.’
She looked up at me, tears beginning to fill her eyes. ‘Where will you go?’
‘It’s better you don’t know. And anyway, it might all go wrong, in which case I’ll end up here again.’