To the north of the city we stumbled into an area of heavy industry. The landscape was strewn with the tangled paste jewellery of chemical plants. All those buildings ticking, humming, breathing. All those strings of pearly lights. And white smoke blossoming in tall chimneys, like stems of night-scented stock. Beauty of a sort, but poisonous. We didn’t cover the miles with our usual efficiency. We kept tripping on debris piled up at the edge of the road, then Lum fell into a narrow culvert and damaged her leg, and we had to take turns supporting her. That slowed us even more. We slept again at dawn, as always.
The next night we left the road for an unpaved track. As we came over a rise, I heard a strange, inhuman squabbling, and there before us lay an enormous rubbish dump with hundreds of gulls wheeling and swooping, fighting over scraps. We forced an opening in the corrugated-iron fence and began to circle the dump in a clockwise direction. On the far side, out of sight of the entrance, a bonfire had been lit, its flames sending handfuls of red sparks into the air. The woman murmured and, looking away to my left, I saw a group of pale figures emerging from a wood. By the time we reached the fire, there must have been thirty of us. We had gathered in the same place, at more or less the same time, and yet, so far as I could tell, nothing had been arranged or discussed. There had been no communication — at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. It seemed like evidence of the telepathic powers that I had always been so sceptical about.
They sat themselves down all round the fire, and I sat with them. They nodded, muttered, scratched themselves. They prodded at the fire with bits of stick. In the side of the dump, which lifted above us like a tattered cliff-face, pieces of silver foil winked and glittered. A litre bottle was passed from hand to hand. The fumes that rose from the neck smelled floral, but the taste reminded me of gin, and I imagined for a moment that I was back in Clarise Tucker’s front room, sampling one of Starling’s deadly new concoctions. Between random bursts of animation, when the White People would either grunt or moan, a silence would fall during which they stared into the fire, apparently lost in thought. I didn’t understand what they were up to. It was like an assembly, a convocation, but of the most eccentric kind. Though our numbers had swelled, I felt more exposed, more of an outsider, and I found a stick of my own and stirred the embers in an attempt to disguise my growing sense of awkwardness.
And then, in a flash, I had the answer. They were sending pictures to each other in their heads. They were showing them to each other as you might show photographs, except they were doing it telepathically. How did I know this? Partly it was intuition. But also, if I concentrated hard enough, if I blocked out the rest of the world, I seemed to see images that I could not explain. They were only fragments — a burning house, a frozen lake, a naked man sat backwards on a horse — but they came from somewhere quite outside my own experience. It was another form of communication, a different language altogether, and yet, given time, I felt I could become fluent. Then, perhaps, I would receive whole sequences of images. Meanwhile, I was a mere novice, with no real contribution to make. I was the person who nods and grins, even though he hasn’t got the joke.
They stayed awake all night, only dozing off when the first blush of colour appeared in the eastern sky. In the middle of the day we moved on, travelling due north. I counted thirty-four of us. There were no children. Was that a coincidence, or was it true what I had heard, that White People were sterile? Certainly all the ones I had come across had been born either before or possibly during the Rearrangement, which lent weight to the view that they were the fall-out from that radical exercise in social engineering. The Rearrangement had been a kind of controlled explosion, sending a white-hot flash through the heads of everybody living in the country at the time. The vast majority had recovered, adapted, tried to make it work in their favour. But there were some who had been less fortunate. Their minds had been scorched; their thoughts had turned to cinders. That, at least, was the general consensus. Although I could see a certain logic in the sterility argument — how could life be created by people who were not themselves, supposedly, alive? — it also seemed rather too convenient, a piece of sophistry or wishful thinking on the part of those for whom the White People were an embarrassment. For if fertility had been destroyed, along with language and character, then the White People would die out. They would no longer be able to act as reminders of the system’s cruelties and its shortcomings. There would be no exceptions to the rule.
That afternoon, as I watched Neg inspect a cracked wingmirror that he had picked up at the dump, I realised I had seen his face before. Not literally, of course. But I remembered that Jones had had the same expression, or lack of it, when I found him standing on one leg in that gloomy passageway. Jones had been a White Person before anybody even knew White People existed. He would have to have been one of the first. If Jones was still alive, he would probably be living among the White People, just as I was. How strange to think that I could run into him at any moment!
After walking for several hours with a strong wind at our backs, it began to look as though we were making for a blighted area known as the Wanings. The provincial capital was Pyrexia, a city that manufactured chlorine, plastics and petrochemicals. The Yellow Quarter’s leadership had recently declared the Wanings to be ungovernable. I had heard stories of atrocities from various relocation officers, though none of them ever claimed to have actually set foot in the region.
By the middle of the fourth day we had reached a high, barren moor. The wind had died down, and the sky, which was overcast, seemed suspended just above our heads. If you touched the clouds they would be soft, I thought, like the breast of a bird. On we went, still heading north. Our cloaks whispered across the heather.
In the late afternoon we hauled a dead sheep out of a disused mineshaft. Luckily, it hadn’t started rotting yet, and we roasted the carcass over a peat fire. Our bellies full, we slept for longer than usual. It was almost light before we set off again.
Although we tended to keep to the high ground, out of sight of human habitation, we would sometimes climb down to a road and look for animals that had been run over. We found plenty of rabbits and even, once or twice, a pheasant. We carried a supply of stale bread and raw vegetables with us, but the roads became, for a while at least, our chief source of food.
We had no choice but to sleep in the open. Every six or seven hours we would huddle down, packing ourselves tightly together, like children playing sardines.
Time began to blur.
Once, we had to cross an eight-lane motorway. I heard it long before I saw it, a sustained but airy roar that I mistook for a waterfall. A man was hit by a truck that day. I watched his body spin, then crumple. He was dead when I reached him, one side of his head grazed and bloody, his spine smashed, the pulse in his neck nowhere to be found. The truck hadn’t even slowed down. We laid him on his back on the hard shoulder. Curiously, his hands were still moving, folding inwards, as if he wanted to touch the inside of his wrists. A woman tried to arrange blades of grass across his face, but the slipstream from the traffic kept disturbing them. In the end we had to use a piece of shredded tyre instead.
Beyond the motorway the land turned bleaker still. Only the wind and the clumps of blackened heather and the shifting pale-yellow grasses. The further north we went, the more use we seemed to be making of the daylight hours; we had removed ourselves from society to such an extent that we no longer needed to hide. Also, there were the mineshafts, which would pose a threat if we were travelling at night. And I had seen notices warning of unexploded ammunition. At some point in the past the area must have been used as a firing-range.