I wondered whether they would ever realise I was an impostor. Surely, at some point, I told myself, their sixth sense would let them know. But then it occurred to me that they might actually be incapable of suspicion. To be suspicious, one needs a context or a precedent, and the White People had no understanding of either. The past meant nothing to them, and without that kind of framework suspicion simply couldn’t arise. Like children who had never grown up, the White People were sealed in an eternal condition of trust. As they floated ahead of me in the half-light, I was struck once again by their complacency, their good nature. They seemed so affable, so unruffled, so oddly content with their lot — and this despite the way society often mistreated them. They did not have an aggressive bone in their bodies. Luckily, they had learned to organise themselves into groups, responding to some deep-rooted instinct that told them there was safety in numbers. Could that be why they had accepted me so readily, why they had not, as Fernandez would have put it, seen through me? Because I’d made them stronger? We walked on in single file, the night wind pushing against our faces, and although I thought of Clarise and her boys from time to time I was glad to be leaving Iron Vale at last.
By my calculations we had been travelling for about a week when we came down out of the hills on to a plain, mist afloat in the dark fields, the bare trees loud with crows and magpies. Before too long, I saw signs informing us that the border lay just a short distance ahead, but we hurried on, unfaltering, the wet grass drenching the hems of our cloaks. We appeared to be about to cross into the Yellow Quarter, and at a point some eighty or ninety miles north of the place where I had attacked the guard. I had already been to the Yellow Quarter once, and I had no desire to repeat the experience, but I couldn’t part company with the White People. They were my passport, my camouflage; it would be a while before I had the confidence to strike out on my own. An expedition into choleric territory had only one advantage that I could think of: nobody would be looking for me there — or, if they were, then they’d be looking for a civil servant in a suit, and I had shed that version of myself whole lifetimes ago.
As we drew closer, it began to rain. I remembered my trip with Dunne and Whittle, and how the Yellow Quarter’s notorious commercialism had spilled over into the strip of sanguine land adjacent to the wall. There was none of that here. A community had grown up around the checkpoint, but there were no souvenir shops, no theme hotels. I saw an off-licence, a cut-price supermarket and a few drab streets of terraced housing, net curtains in all the downstairs windows. Some of the kerbstones had been painted a defiant patriotic shade of green.
The guard on duty waved us through without even bothering to glance up. Though I knew he must have seen us coming, I was disappointed all the same. I had wanted him to look deep into my eyes and be deceived by their apparent emptiness. One wall lay behind us, but a second loomed a hundred yards away, its concrete scarred and pitted like the back of an ancient whale. Head bent against the rain, which was falling more heavily now, I followed my companions across the mud of no man’s land. A ditch ran down the middle, with strips of sand on either side. There were searchlights on metal poles and rolls of razor wire. It was the first time I had crossed a border illegally. Actually crossed it. My cloak had soaked right through, weighing me down, and it was tiring just to walk. Up ahead, I saw a long, low shack raised up on breeze-blocks. This would be a guardhouse for Yellow Quarter personnel. I doubted we would have such an easy time of it with them.
When we drew level with the shack, the door swung open, just as I had feared, and an armed guard motioned us inside. We climbed into a large rectangular room that had a floor of mustard-coloured lino. Fluorescent tubes fizzed on the ceiling. A row of cubicles had been built against one wall. This was where the body searches would be conducted. At the far end of the room hung a detailed map of the entire region, the border marked by a wide green-and-yellow stripe criss-crossed with black. A grey metal desk stood near by, cluttered with computers, faxes and phones. It was hot in the room. The air smelled of sweat and damp cloth.
The guard who had let us in remained by the door. Three more guards stood in a tight cluster with their backs to us. They broke apart and turned towards us, muttering and cursing. They had been checking the lottery results, it seemed, and none of them had won. The guard holding the newspaper rolled it into a cylinder and swatted the palm of his hand with it.
We stood in the centre of the room while they fanned out in front of us, each guard approaching from a slightly different direction, as though they were each preoccupied by a slightly different aspect of our appearance. Their behaviour struck me as both patronising and sardonic. They were playing on the fact that interest was something we weren’t used to and didn’t deserve, and in doing so they were establishing their own superior status as a species. They wore crisp, pressed uniforms, the dark-green fabric trimmed with bright-yellow epaulettes, which crouched on their shoulders like tropical spiders. Guns lolled in polished leather holsters, truncheons swung seductively at hip-level. Although I had only been with the White People for a short time, I was overwhelmed by how perfect, how immaculate, the guards looked. I don’t think I could have spoken, even if I’d wanted to.
The one with the rolled-up newspaper seemed in artificially high spirits, so much so that I wondered whether he was on amphetamines. He darted towards the man with the sore mouth and made as if to strike. The man ducked, hands up about his ears, and then let out a moan. One of the other guards mimicked him — the ducking, then the moan. His colleague with the paper laughed out loud and wheeled away, his eyes glancing off the rest of us.
Hanging my head, I saw that water from my cloak had collected in a dark pool around my feet. As I watched, it found a gradient in the floor and crept away from me in one thin stream.
‘Hello. Somebody’s pissed himself.’
The rolled-up newspaper cannoned into the side of my head. I hadn’t even seen it coming. My right ear buzzed. The man standing next to me, the bearded man, was told to get down on all fours and drink. I watched as he knelt in front of me and tried to lick the water off the floor.
‘One of them’s a woman.’
Silence fell so emphatically that I could hear the rain falling on the roof, a beautiful and inappropriate sound, like a herd of wild horses galloping across open country. All three guards had gathered round the woman. She was staring into the middle distance. Maybe she thought she could hear horses too. Until that moment I had somehow assumed she was in her late-thirties or early-forties, but now, in the glare of the guardhouse, I saw she was probably no more than twenty-five.
The guards began to squeeze the woman’s breasts, which made her writhe and squeal, and only encouraged them to go further. Two of them held her by the arms while a third started rubbing between her legs. The man with the sore mouth had wandered over to the window, and he was staring through it at a section of the wall. I looked down at the bearded man, still kneeling at my feet. Though he returned my gaze, his veiled eyes showed nothing.
As the woman squirmed, something fell from beneath her cloak and rolled across the floor. It was a large carrot. The guard with the newspaper picked it up. ‘Fuck me. She’s got her own vibrator.’ He tossed the carrot to one of his colleagues. ‘You know what to do.’ The guards dragged the woman over to the desk. Shoving the phones and faxes to one side, they pushed her on to her back and held her down. They lifted the cloak over her head, then forced her legs wide open and ripped her sodden underclothes apart. Her thighs were red and chapped. As I turned away, the woman let out the most peculiar noise, a kind of long, shuddering sigh.