Entering one of the compartments, I slid the door shut behind me. Two bench-seats faced each other, both covered in a faded turquoise velour. I sat by the window for a few moments. The sun draped itself across my lap. Twisting quickly, I pulled my trousers and pants down, then I lay full-length on the seat and began to rub myself against the rough, almost prickly upholstery. I was thinking of the time I came home to find Marie sunbathing on the small tar-papered roof below my bedroom window. It was one of those warm, still afternoons when the sky forfeits all its colour. The smell of dandelion sap floats in the air, and the tarmac softens at the edge of the road, and if you put your weight on one foot you can leave a print that lasts for ages. Marie had been lying on her back in a blue-and-white-striped bikini with a pile of unopened text-books beside her, one hand beneath her head, the other resting lazily across her belly, and I had to step away from the window, into the shadow of my room, so as to hide my erection. Closing my eyes, I thought of Marie in her bikini, then I thought of how she often bent down to kiss me late at night and how, once, by accident, our lips had touched, and before too long a cloudy juice came springing out of me.
I was just pulling my trousers up when I heard Victor calling.
‘Thomas? Where are you?’
I dropped to the floor between the seats, then slowly lifted my head until my eyes were on a level with the window. Victor stood fifty yards away, next to something that looked like a giant cotton-reel. He was staring southwards, the fingertips of his right hand pressed upright against his mouth. Still crouching low, I crawled out of the compartment and into the corridor.
‘Thomas?’
I could tell he was worried, and somehow that made me feel good. I took it as proof of something. I didn’t want it to end, not yet.
Leaving by the same half-open window, I lowered myself on to the loose chippings and edged cautiously along the row of carriages, back in the direction of the station. Once, I kneeled down and peered past the great brown disc of a wheel. I watched Victor take a few paces and then stop. He called my name again. Bending double now, I hurried on. Only when I was clear of the last carriage did I straighten up and walk out into the bright white sunshine.
‘I’m over here,’ I shouted.
Victor moved towards me, shading his eyes. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘Sorry. I was just exploring.’
Victor nodded approvingly. ‘Just think what we could do with this place …’
Driving home, we wound all the windows down. The warm air that rushed through the inside of the car smelled of creosote and new-mown grass. Victor put on one of his opera tapes and we both sang along as loudly as we could, even though it was in a foreign language and we hardly knew any of the words.
That summer Bracewell and I would often cycle out into the lush countryside that surrounded Belle Air. One cool grey morning we found ourselves in a thickly wooded area somewhere to the north-west of the town. To record our presence, we decided to carve our names on a tree. Bracewell used the penknife first. I watched him work, a knob of bone protruding on his wrist, as if he had a marble sewn beneath the skin. When my turn came, I used one of the letters in his name to make my own. Apart from anything else, I thought it would save time.
Afterwards, I stood back, pleased to have found a connection between our names. In demonstrating that they could be interwined, I had harked back to the secret ceremonies that had taken place at Thorpe Hall, the mingling of who one was with someone else, the sense of a shared destiny.
But Bracewell just frowned. ‘Like something in a cemetery,’ he said.
Which, in the light of what happened moments later, I came to perceive not as a rebuke so much as a presentiment.
As the road left the wood, it dipped downwards, curving right then left, with grass banks on either side. By the time it straightened and levelled out, we were pedalling frantically, racing each other. I saw the danger first and shouted out. We both braked hard, Bracewell’s back wheel sliding sideways and spilling him on to the tarmac. No more than fifty yards ahead of us, the road broke off in mid-air.
Leaving our bicycles on the ground, we crept towards the drop and then looked over. Thirty or forty feet below lay a heap of shattered concrete and macadam. On either side of it a motorway reached into the distance, its six lanes silent, utterly deserted. Nothing moved down there except the weeds and grasses shifting in the central reservation — a kind of narrow wild garden. All thoughts of the grim fate that might have been ours were obliterated by the mystery of what now awaited us.
Though the citizens of the Red Quarter still drove cars — no one could deny the pleasures of the open road, especially in a country where the population was relatively small, just over five million — they had launched a series of impassioned campaigns against the motorway. To sanguine people, motorways signified aggression, rage, fatigue, monotony and death. Motorways were choleric, in other words, and had no place in the Red Quarter. Some had been converted into venues for music festivals or sporting events, and others had been fortified, then turned into borders, their tall grey lights illuminating dogs and guards instead of traffic, but for the most part they had simply been allowed to decay, their signs leaning at strange angles, their service stations inhabited by mice and birds, their bridges choked with weeds and brambles or, as in this case, collapsing altogether. In time, motorways would become so overgrown that they would only be visible from the air, half-hidden monuments to an earlier civilisation, like pyramids buried in a jungle.
We only had to look at each other to know what should happen next. We hauled our bicycles over a fence, then wheeled them down the embankment and out on to the motorway’s hard shoulder. We began to ride north — in the fast lane, naturally. There was the most peculiar sense of risk attached to this. We were like people who believed the earth was flat, and who, despite our belief, had decided to travel at high speed towards the edge. I suspected Bracewell felt it too because I saw a flicker of apprehension in the grin he gave me as we set out. There was also a feeling of suspended danger, as if the silence and emptiness were only temporary and the real life of the motorway might commence again at any moment. More than once, I turned and looked over my shoulder, just to make sure that nothing was coming.
But nothing came, not ever, not in all the many hours we spent out there. I sometimes wonder whether we hadn’t entered a parallel world which the two of us had somehow jointly imagined, a place where the anxieties of our daily lives could find no purchase, a place where we could finally throw off the wariness that informed so many of our thoughts and actions, and be ourselves.
I sometimes wonder if we weren’t bound together after all.
One evening, while I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, Victor appeared in the doorway. He needed to have a word with me, he said. I put down my pen and followed him upstairs. The sky was already dark, and Marie had gone out with friends. A cushioned silence filled the house.
In Victor’s bedroom I took a seat next to his workstation, its surface hidden beneath the usual clutter of drawings, letters, documents and maps. The TV was on, with the sound turned down. Michael Song was addressing the nation. I was always struck by how polished he looked, almost literally polished, and how convivial too, like some worldly uncle you wished you saw more often. I watched as Victor switched the TV off, then lowered himself pensively on to the edge of his divan. We sat in silence for a moment or two. A slightly blurred circle of lamplight trembled on the carpet, but the rest of the room lay in deep shadow, mysterious yet open to conjecture, like the prairie beyond a camp-fire. The muted lighting seemed to invite confidences, confessions even, an effect that may well have been intentional.