Leaving the cover of the trees, I crept out along the embankment and then climbed down to the river bed. At the pressure of my foot the mud belched softly, and a smell lifted past my face, a cloud of something rank, primeval. I started to move gingerly towards the place where the man had left his clothing. Once, I stopped, looked up. The river ran from right to left, all kinds of notches cut into its shiny surface, and the man’s head bobbed there, among the reflections, a small pale globe with careless dabs of black for hair and mouth and eyes. Then he began to swim in my direction. He must have noticed me at last. His arms beat fiercely at the water, white splashes showing in the darkness like matches being struck repeatedly against the side of a matchbox but never bursting into flame. I undid my jacket, took it off.
The man hauled himself to his feet, then staggered out of the water. His chest heaved with the exertion of his dash to the shore, and his underpants had slipped low on his left hip, revealing a smudge of pubic hair. By the time he reached me, I too had stripped down to my underwear. My shoes stood on a rock, the contents of my pockets placed near by. The man had come to a halt in front of me, no more than a few feet away, his chest still rising and falling.
‘I want you to take my clothes,’ I said.
The man tipped his head to one side, as if intrigued, or charmed.
I offered him the clothes I was holding. He stepped back. One of his feet sank deep into the mud, and he almost lost his balance. When I took his arm so as to steady him, his features seemed to scatter on his face. Air whistled past his teeth. His arm was cold and heavy.
‘I don’t mean you any harm,’ I told him.
Looking down, he lifted his foot out of the mud. An extravagant sucking sound accompanied the movement, and he grinned at me, a wide gap showing between his two front teeth. The strangest smell came off him. Bitter, like the milky sap in the stalks of bluebells.
‘There,’ I said.
I looked over my shoulder, scanning the embankment for signs of life. I saw nothing, no one. All the same, I couldn’t afford to waste any time, not if my plan was going to succeed.
I pushed my clothes against his chest. ‘Take them. Your life will be much easier.’ Bending swiftly, I picked up his vest and put it on.
The man was clutching my clothes now, but he hadn’t looked at them at all. He was still staring at me, transfixed. His mouth had fallen open, and his eyes had the dull flat shine of porcelain. A single drop of water hung from the lobe of his left ear like a pearl. Hung and hung. Then fell.
I slipped his undershirt over my head and pulled on the long johns, then I reached for the cloak. Fingers stumbling, I did up the buttons. The cloak weighed more than I had anticipated, and it was damp from lying on the river bed. That odour of bluebell sap again. I dropped my few possessions into the pocket at the front, then slid my feet into the man’s boots and tied the laces. I kept thinking that he would intervene, but he seemed paralysed. Then, as I turned away, a hoarse bellow came out of him. He had flung my clothes to the ground. I began to run. The boots were a size too big and the cloak swirled around my ankles. I floundered in the mud, expecting to be brought down from behind at any moment.
At last, and breathing hard, I levered myself up on to the embankment. Only then did I glance round. The man had not moved. My clothes still lay beside him in a small shapeless mound. Once again I heard him bellow, an inhuman noise, like a cow being butchered. I had wanted the exchange to benefit us both, but clearly it would take more than a new set of clothing to improve his lot. I had deceived myself. It occurred to me that I had done a kind of violence to him, and that I might, eventually, have to pay for this. Stealing one last look at the half-naked figure, as though to fix in my mind the debt I owed him, I turned and began to walk back through the trees.
Chapter Seven
Street lamps hung above the tarmac, buzzing. If I hadn’t known better I would have said that they were living things and that the rest of the world was dead. I looked both ways, then stepped out into the road. Halfway across, my boot caught in the hem of the cloak and I went sprawling. My clumsiness was greeted by a blast from the horn of a passing car. The mockery had begun, and it didn’t feel unwarranted. I already seemed to have altered in some indefinable way. It wasn’t the weight or the smell of the cloak. It wasn’t even the sheer unfamiliarity of such a garment. It was more as if I had entered a tradition, and the clothes themselves were imparting something of that responsibility, that lore, as a crown does when it is lowered on to the head of a king. In donning the cloak, I had parted company with the person I used to be without knowing quite who or what I was going to become. When I reached the far side of the road I stood and stared at the cracks between the paving-stones. They looked precise but temporary, as though they had been drawn in pencil. As though they could be rubbed out. There was something frightening about that, but something exhilarating too. Like turning your hand over and seeing that all the lines have gone. The world could disappear. I could disappear. A blank slate everywhere I looked. Staying close to the wall, I moved off down a quiet residential street.
You would think I would have realised sooner, but it was almost midnight before it occurred to me that I had nowhere to go. I had failed to work out any of the practical considerations. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? I found myself in a cobbled alley by the station, its clock tower lifting high above my left shoulder. There were railway tracks behind me, on the other side of a wooden fence. In front of me stood a terrace of red-brick houses. They faced away from me, their back yards silent, their garages locked up for the night. On top of the walls, glass splinters glittered where they had been embedded upright in cement. Each street light cast its own sullen dark-yellow glow. I was cold now, and tired. Teeth chattering. I could see Clarise Tucker’s front room with its tatty velour curtains and its misshapen furniture, coils of smoke unwinding from the ends of cigarettes, the air clouded with the pungent, yeasty fumes of Starling’s beer, and then, having climbed the stairs, I saw my single bed, and the reading lamp behind the door, its shade cocked like a bird’s head, and my book lying open on the chair, a book I would never finish now. Who would have thought I would miss that tiny, dingy room on the first floor of the Cliff? Who would have thought I would miss any of it? But a loneliness had risen up in me, keen, abrupt, and disproportionate, somehow, and it kept on rising, a sense of the smallness of my life, a rapid ebbing of conviction, and I stood on that bleak lane, beneath piss-yellow lights, and bellowed, and, much to my surprise, I sounded exactly like the man whose clothes I’d taken. A window grated open, and a woman shouted back. Some people are trying to sleep. I walked on, teeth clicking in my mouth like dice in a cup, no destination in my head.
All night I kept moving, aimlessly, hopelessly, my feet adrift in a stranger’s boots. All night I oscillated between moments of elation and longer stretches of despair. The town offered neither shelter nor guidance, and by half-past three I had come full circle. The station loomed before me once again, with its forbidding brickwork and its draughty doorways. This time I walked in. The concourse was brightly lit and quite deserted. No trains were due for hours. I stood outside a photo booth and, staring into the mirror, practised the faces for which the White People were renowned — the rounded, vacant eyes, the slack, half-open mouth. I made a few attempts at their trademark grunts and mumbles. The sounds boomed around and above me, the empty concourse acting as an echo chamber.