‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said.
I turned to face her.
‘Not so long ago,’ she said, ‘I was in love with someone …’
I smiled. It was a good beginning.
His name was Luke, and they had met when she was twenty. One Sunday evening she was waiting on the platform of a provincial railway station. She wanted to get back to the city, but there had been all kinds of delays and cancellations, and people were standing three or four deep by the time the train pulled in. Then she saw him, through one of the carriage windows. He was reading a book, his face lowered, his black hair falling on to his forehead. In that same moment she noticed that a window in his carriage had been left open. She tended not to use her gift for her own personal gain, not any more, but that evening she decided to flout the rules for once. A damp flurry of wind took her over the heads of the other passengers, through the window and down into the seat directly opposite the dark-haired boy. When he looked up and saw her, his eyes widened and he breathed in sharply.
‘What are you staring at?’ she said. ‘Do I remind you of someone?’
‘No.’ He seemed momentarily dazed by the speed and boldness of her questions. ‘I didn’t hear the door open.’
‘Perhaps you were asleep.’
‘Asleep? I don’t think so.’ He glanced at his book. ‘I was reading.’
‘Then perhaps you were in another world,’ she said.
The train shook itself and then began to move. She stared out of the window, pretending to take an interest in the lights of unknown houses, distant towns.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’
What she had loved most of all about Luke was lying next to him while he was sleeping. He always looked so untroubled. She thought that if they slept in the same bed for long enough she would acquire that look of his. At the beginning she would stay awake for hours and try to draw the calmness out of him. She used to see it as a grey-blue vapour drifting eerily from his body into hers.
She had wanted to be with him for ever — in fact she’d been quite unable to imagine not being with him — but she had made a mistake: she told him what she could do. In bed one night, with all the lights out, she turned to him and said, ‘You know when we first met, on that train …’
‘I knew it,’ Luke cried when she had finished. ‘I knew there was something.’
Initially, he was seduced by the glamour of it. He saw a kind of peculiar, inverted celebrity, and that excited him. But he soon started to feel that their relationship had its roots in deception — her deception — and the subject would come up whenever they argued. The fact that she had fooled him. Made him look stupid.
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ she would cry. ‘It was because I loved you. And anyway, you almost guessed. Even then, at the beginning.’
She should never have told him. She should’ve been content simply to have profited from her gift. But she had been unsure of herself, perhaps. She had hoped to bind him to her still more closely. Once, many years ago, a great-aunt had given her some advice. An air of mystery is just as valuable as wit or beauty. It keeps people interested — especially men. And certainly, for the first few months, Luke had suspected there was a side to her that he hadn’t understood, and he would worry at it almost pleasurably, as you might push your tongue against a loose tooth. When she told him the truth, however, it allowed him to think that the riddle had been solved. He had reached the end of her, and there was nothing more to discover. Far from binding him, the knowledge set him free. He could move on.
And another thing. Although she had sworn him to secrecy, he was always nearly giving the game away. He couldn’t bear it that people didn’t know about her. To start with, she thought it was because he was proud of her, but then she began to realise it was something far less healthy. He had sensed that people found the relationship odd, and that reflected badly on him. If they knew who she was, though, they’d get it. In other words, it wasn’t that he wanted people to know she was different, or special, or extraordinary. No, in the end he was only concerned with his own image.
Odell sighed. ‘I wasn’t as beautiful as he was. People were always admiring him, and he’d pretend he hadn’t noticed. I didn’t mind that, really. I just wanted him to see the beauty in me. A beauty others didn’t see. Maybe he couldn’t, though. Or maybe it wasn’t enough.’
I see it, I said inside my head.
The train had slowed, and I could feel every joint in its body as it picked its way cautiously through what felt like a maze of points. Odell sighed again. Opening her door, she said she was going to take a look outside.
When she returned, she told me we had reached a city. She thought it might be Ustion, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, it would probably be wise to leave now, before the transporters were either checked or unloaded.
Although the train was still moving, we had no trouble jumping down on to the tracks. The station loomed about half a mile ahead of us, a harsh recorded voice echoing from the cavernous interior. Any luggage found unattended will be destroyed. A mist had descended, and all the lights were ringed with gauzy haloes. Crouching low, I followed Odell across the rails, then we scaled a wall of dark bricks and dropped down into a side-street.
We weren’t prepared for the sight that greeted us when we turned the corner. Men rampaged along the main road, red shirts worn outside their trousers, open cans of beer in their hands. Cars raced past, honking their horns. Some had pennants tied to their aerials, others had scarves trapped and flapping in their wound-up windows. Odell bought a paper from a news-stand. The Ustion Gazette. She had guessed right. As she took her change, she asked the vendor what was happening.
‘Important game tonight,’ he said.
We ducked into a doorway as a second group of men swayed towards us. They were singing strange savage songs that I’d never heard before. With their cropped hair and their hard, exultant faces, they seemed to have sealed themselves off from the rest of us. It was like the divided kingdom in miniature — the same tribalism, the same deep need to belong. If you supported a football team, you saw all other teams as forces to be challenged, ridiculed, defeated. You stuck together, no matter what. You dealt with everything life threw at you. The triumphs, the disasters. The thick and thin of it. People have to have something they can identify with, Miss Groves had told us once. They have to feel they’re part of something. I watched as a man with a shaved head heaved a rubbish bin through a plate-glass window. His companions whooped and roared. They began to chant his name, breaking it into two raucous syllables. Then on they went towards the ground, which rose out of the terraced streets like some great cauldron, bubbling furiously with noise and light.
Given the conditions, Odell thought it best if we got off the streets. We found a hotel not far from the station and registered as Mr and Mrs Burfoot, a new name for me, and one that gave me an unexpected thrill. Later, we had dinner in a bar on the ground floor. We chose a table that had a view of the TV. The football was on. As we took our seats, the two teams walked out of the tunnel, flanked by police with riot shields and visors. Fights had already broken out on the terraces. The camera homed in as the crowd surged in two different directions at once, and I thought of how the sea looks when a wave rebounds from a breakwater and meets another wave head-on. We ordered steak pie and chips from the blackboard behind the bar, and I drank a pint of dark, flat beer, which was what the other men were drinking. Once the game began, I turned my back on Odell — a perfect example of choleric behaviour, I thought — and when we left more than an hour later I still hadn’t so much as glanced at her. At the door a shrill whistling from the crowd had me looking over my shoulder. One of the home side’s star players was being stretchered off the pitch with his hands covering his face. They showed a slow-motion replay of the foul. A defender from the opposing team hacked him to the ground and then stood back, arms raised in the air, palms outwards, as if innocent of any wrongdoing. They were like children, these footballers, with their transparent lying and their endless tantrums. Nothing was ever their fault. They wanted to get away with everything.