I clambered over the fence. One of the men heard me and turned to watch, his jaw revolving, as I edged side-footed down the bank. A goods train approached, its trucks loaded with sand and gravel. By the time it had gone past I was standing beside the White People, attempting to replicate the unnatural complacency I saw on their faces. In front of them, on a sheet of wrinkled brown paper, they had laid out a few chunks of white bread and a fatty cooked meat that might have been pork. Both the men were still eating. I took some peanuts out of my pocket and placed them on the paper, then I added a couple of tomatoes. One of the men, the dark one, looked up and nodded. I nodded back. The other man appeared to smile at me, though it could have been wind. He had pale eyebrows, and cheeks that looked grazed. The inside of his mouth seemed raw too, with chipped teeth and swollen gums, and he chewed gingerly, wincing as he did so. The woman opened one of the peanuts and ate the contents, then she thumped the ground beside her with the flat of her hand. I sat down next to her. She nodded and stared out over the railway line, her eyes misting over. A humming sound came out of her, a series of monotonous notes that didn’t resemble any tune I’d ever heard. After a while she reached for a chunk of bread and pushed it into my hand. I took it from her and bit into it. It shattered between my teeth. Using saliva, I turned the fragments into a kind of paste, then swallowed hard and got it down. It must have been days old. I watched as the woman sorted through the meat, flicking it this way and that with the backs of her fingers. In the end she chose a piece that was mostly fat and handed it to me. Warts clustered on her knuckles, and the lines of her hands were inlaid with dirt, but I was past caring. I had eaten nothing since my foraging behind the market stalls just after dawn. As I chewed on the pork fat I transferred my gaze to the man sitting furthest from me. With his knotted black beard and his weather-beaten skin, he had the air of a prophet who had just walked out of the wilderness. His eyes were strangely matt and dusty-looking, as though, like blueberries or grapes, they were covered with a kind of bloom. I could see how the lost or the gullible might want to follow somebody like him.
Once they had finished eating, the woman wrapped the remainder of the food in the brown paper and tucked it out of sight beneath her clothes, then they set off along the embankment. I went with them. They didn’t appear to find my attachment to them at all unusual or suspicious. The weather was still and grey, oddly dreamy and exhausting. I had the feeling time had been suspended. Or perhaps it was place that seemed different, as if I were being shown things through a series of artfully positioned mirrors, as if the world, while looking just the same, were actually reflected, diluted, a distant cousin of itself. Once, I closed my eyes, and I would have lost my footing and gone tumbling towards the railway line had the bearded man not seized my arm at the crucial moment. I nodded, grunted. He let go of my arm and then moved on. Curiously, I felt the incident had lent me a certain credibility.
Towards evening we took refuge in a warehouse that backed on to the railway. On the top floor, in the corner, were three primitive beds built out of whatever came to hand — cardboard, polystyrene, scraps of rag and plastic. I watched my companions prepare themselves for sleep, two of them curling up on their sides. The man with the sore mouth lay on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, as though clutching a valuable possession. Their breathing slowed and deepened. I needed sleep too, more than anything, but first I had to make myself a bed. I walked down to the far end of the warehouse and started to hunt around for suitable materials. The building creaked gently as the light faded. Pigeons murmured on window-ledges.
That night a harsh, shallow panting woke me. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that the woman was sitting on top of one of the men. They were both still dressed. She had her hands laid flat on the man’s chest, and her head was thrown right back. Light caught on her teeth. It was the bearded man who was underneath her, the one I thought of as the prophet.
A train let out a long, mournful whistle.
I turned over and went back to sleep.
For the next few days we kept moving, sometimes basing ourselves in the outskirts of Iron Vale, sometimes traversing the town centre, but always using routes that meant we passed virtually unnoticed. I had found some old bandages in a rubbish bin behind the hospital and bound my feet in them, which made walking easier, and my blisters slowly hardened and healed. I was becoming used to the cloak too, managing the armholes with greater dexterity, and tripping far less often. There were times when I felt I was back in my childhood, dressed up like a vampire in my father’s cast-off gown … We generally slept at dawn, and then again in the afternoon, and never for more than four or five hours at a stretch. I gave myself up to their rhythms as one might surrender to an ocean’s currents. In a sense, I was deferring to their experience. After all, it was their life I was living, not mine. At first I assumed the constant movement was dictated by the search for food and shelter. Later, though, I realised it served an end in itself. If they had become nomadic, it was because they didn’t want their presence to weigh too heavily on any one section of the population. They were acting out a simple desire for anonymity and peace.
One evening we camped by the river, underneath a bridge. I had caught a chill that day, the first of many. As I sat close to the fire, trying to warm myself, the bearded man took hold of my wrist. He was peering at my watch. When I undid the strap and handed the watch to him, he placed it on the ground and reached for a piece of brick that lay near by. He carefully tapped the brick against the face until the glass disc shattered, then he tossed the brick to one side and bent over the watch, so close that his beard folded in the dirt. One by one, he began to pick out the tiny fragments of glass. He might have been removing lice from the head of his own child. His shadow leapt and ducked on the concrete stanchion behind him. Once all the glass was gone, he snapped off the two hands and threw them over his shoulder into the dark. He examined the watch again, then nodded and passed it back to me. The whole operation had been conducted with such serious intent and absolute precision that I had no choice, I felt, but to strap the watch on to my wrist again, as if it had just been mended. Later, as I curled up by the fire and closed my eyes, I saw the episode as an initiation ceremony. From now on I would be wearing a watch that didn’t have any hands. I had joined a people for whom time had no relevance at all. Even they appeared to be aware of that.
On the fourth evening, after our usual sleep, we set out along the east bank of the river, heading in a southerly direction, and I sensed a different mood, nothing so definite as a purpose, just the feeling that there had been a shift of some sort, a change of gear. After a while we arrived at an allotment, and my companions began to gather vegetables which they stored in the pockets of their cloaks. I did the same. The White People had no concept of property or ownership. If the man whose clothes I’d taken had been upset, it wasn’t because he thought the clothes belonged to him, but because he didn’t recognise what he’d been given in return. He’d been reacting not to loss but to the unknown. There were occasions, I suppose, when White People would be caught. They’d be accused of theft, but the word would have no meaning for them, nor would punishing them have much effect. Punishment only works if its relationship to the offence is clear. That night, though, we got away with it. A scarecrow watched us, its arms stretched wide as if to acknowledge its ineptitude, its face even blanker and more ghostly than our own. When we had filled our pockets, we moved through a gap in the hedge and on across the countryside.