‘Think she’s enjoying it?’
‘Of course she is. Just look at her.’
I hadn’t wanted to watch, but once or twice I glanced in that direction, and I realised that I was smiling. It could only be nervousness, I thought, or fear.
The guard with the paper noticed and moved towards me. ‘Like it, do we?’ He brought his face so close to mine that I could smell the coffee, black and bitter, on his breath.
I grinned like the idiot I was supposed to be.
He reached up with one hand and pushed his fingers into my mouth. ‘Nice teeth.’ His tongue slipped out, blind and fat and glistening. He licked my lips and, sighing languorously, turned his eyes up to the ceiling. Then he danced backwards, burst out laughing. ‘Where’s that carrot?’
A shrill ringing cut into the silence.
One of the guards let go of the woman and picked up a phone. ‘Yes?’ He listened for a second or two, then shouted across the room. ‘Lieutenant, it’s for you.’
The guard leaned close to me again. ‘It’s for me.’ He lifted both his eyebrows twice, quickly, and swung away. Shaking now, I watched him take the call. After a while, he wrapped his free hand over the receiver and spoke to his two colleagues in a brisk, clipped voice I hadn’t heard until that moment. ‘Get rid of them.’
We were pushed out of the guardhouse and down the steps, the door slamming behind us. Seconds later, it opened again, and something flew in a brief bright arc over our heads. I watched the woman retrieve the carrot, wipe it clean and return it to a hidden pocket beneath her clothes. She saw me looking and nodded, as if to let me know that what she was doing was only right and proper. Still trembling, I stared at the ground. The rain had eased just when I wanted it to come down harder than ever. I wanted to feel the water crashing against my skull. I wanted to be able to lift my face up to the sky and have the rain wash off every trace of that guard’s tongue.
I remembered Frank Bland talking about the borders that had been built on negative ley lines — black streams, he had called them — and how the trees and plants in those areas sometimes displayed warped or stunted growth. If people crossed such a border, he had claimed, their health could be adversely affected. If people worked there, though, day in, day out, then surely the effects would be that much more pronounced. Did Frank’s theory explain the scene I’d witnessed in the guard-house? Or was it our freedom that incensed them so? Yes, we were outcasts and rejects, but at the same time we could go wherever we pleased; moreover, in being cut loose from society, we had been liberated from the pressures and responsibilities of daily life. Perhaps, at some deep level, people were envious of that. Hence all the persecution … As I stood there wondering, I felt a surge of malignant energy in the air around me and I glanced at my companions to see if they had noticed, but their faces looked the way they always looked — complacent, unaware.
The bearded man had already moved beyond the barrier into the Yellow Quarter, and the other two were following behind. I set off after them. They didn’t appear especially troubled by their ordeal. Even the woman seemed quite unconcerned. Was that because they had become accustomed to abuse? Had they, in some obscure sense, prepared themselves, conscious that it was the Yellow Quarter they would be dealing with? Or were they simply incapable of feeling? And, if so, had they been incapable of feeling all along? Was that part of what made them who they were? Or had they gradually been rendered numb by the endless horrors to which they had been subjected? I looked at the man walking ahead of me, his teeth and gums so ravaged that it often hurt him to eat or drink. On those days, the woman would chew up food for him and spit the pulp into his mouth, like a bird feeding her young. I shuddered to think how he might have come by such injuries. The hardest part of all, however, was not having a voice. I couldn’t ask them questions. I could express no sympathy. What did they think — if anything? I would never know.
For the rest of that day we moved with real urgency, and I wondered whether there might not, after all, be some desire on the part of my companions to put distance between themselves and what had happened at the border. At the same time it implied a knowledge of the territory. We had entered a place where one did all one could to avoid confrontation. To convey a sense of purpose, even to look as though one had a destination in mind, was to engage in a form of self-defence.
We had crossed into the northern reaches of the Yellow Quarter, which was less densely populated, but we still couldn’t seem to get away from the roads, at least not to begin with. We walked on grass verges, in ditches, along hard shoulders, and the traffic hissed past us, endless traffic. People would blast their horns at us, or wind their windows down and jeer, and once a can of beer came cartwheeling through the air and struck the bearded man on the point of his elbow. After that, he held his arm across his chest, but he wore the same expression as before, his chin lifted upwards and a little to one side, his dusty-looking eyes unfocused, as if he was listening to distant music.
By late afternoon we were approaching the outskirts of a city, the main road lined with car showrooms, designer-clothing outlets and fast-food restaurants. Our shadows appeared on the pavement before us like dark predictions. I looked over my shoulder. The sun had dropped out of a mass of shabby cloud, giving off an orange light that seemed unnatural, diseased. It was time to sleep. We started searching the yards and alleys behind the shops for bedding. We found several sheets of plastic in a skip and shook off the rainwater, then we carried them into the corner of a car-park and settled in the long grass up against a wire-mesh fence. I listened to the lorries pulling in — the clash of gears, the sneeze of brakes — and heard the drivers shouting at each other, trading insults and dirty jokes.
Over the past few days, as we journeyed south-east across the moors of the Green Quarter, then west towards the border, I had been observing my companions and I had begun to form a theory. I had noticed certain sounds recurring, and made a point of recording how and when they were used. Created almost exclusively from consonants, they had an abrupt, glottal character. The sound ‘Ng’, for instance, was used in relation to the man with the sore mouth, and I wondered if this might not be a name the White People had given him. Once I’d had that idea, I turned my attention to the bearded man and quickly discovered a sound that was applied to him, a sound best represented by the word ‘Ob’. Likewise, ‘Lm’ was often employed around the woman, its comparative softness a subtle, almost poignant acknowledgement of her gender. Since crossing the border that afternoon, I had started using these curious sounds myself, tentatively at first, but then with increasing confidence, and I was usually rewarded with a grunt or a glance or a jerk of the head. Once, in response to my use of the word ‘Lm’, which I pronounced Lum, the woman came out with something that sounded like ‘Gsh’. Later, the bearded man used the same sound when looking in my direction. Could it be that I had a White name now?
The woman, Lum, was leaning over me, shaking my shoulder. It didn’t seem possible that I had slept, and yet the sky behind her head had the murky burnt-orange glow of night. I sat up and looked past her. The other two were already awake and on their feet, Neg urinating through the wire-mesh fence.