‘What happens now?’ I said.
‘I make sure you get home safely.’
‘And that’s all? That’s it?’
She was looking at her feet. ‘You live here,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t.’
‘You could visit, though, couldn’t you, from time to time? If you felt like it. You could cross the border illegally. Nobody would know.’
She kept her eyes on the ground.
‘You told me you had to keep in practice,’ I said.
I was back on the peaceful tree-lined streets I knew so well, where crime didn’t exist and cheerfulness was second nature, but it seemed that things were being taken from me. I felt abandoned, deprived.
I felt bereft.
The direct route to my flat lay through the city’s most famous park. We followed a footpath that ran down one side of the zoo, stopping to watch the wolves lope with almost liquid grace through their enclosure, then we cut diagonally across an open grassy area where football was often played on Sundays. We circled the dark glitter of the lake. To the south, beyond the boathouse, I could just make out a crescent of creamy neoclassical façades and, further west, the mosque’s burnished dome. Though it was late now, after ten o’clock, the mildness of the night had tempted people outdoors. A man with a ponytail was trying to coax a squirrel on to a bench. Then an elderly woman walked past, holding a tennis racket. A black dog padded along beside her. She took a ball out of her pocket and hit it into the lake. The dog swam after it. Spring had come early, it seemed, with daffodils and primroses showing in the long grass beneath the trees, as pale and innumerable as stars.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ Odell said.
I looked glumly around and murmured in agreement, but all I felt was a faint tingle of resentment. I had so many questions for her, so many important questions, and yet, burdened by the knowledge that she would soon be gone, I couldn’t seem to give them voice. I fell into a kind of trance, paralysed by what I had not said and could not say.
As we neared my building, Odell went into a supermarket. From outside, I watched her moving up and down the aisles — her freckled face, her copper-tinted hair, her coat the colour of avocado skin. I tried to imagine that we didn’t know each other, that we had never met. It was all too easy. But I had hoped it would be difficult, if not impossible. I’d wanted confirmation that my life was irrevocably bound up with hers.
When she walked out of the shop she grinned and handed me a plastic bag. Groceries, she said. I might find I was hungry when I got home, and there wouldn’t be anything in my flat, not after all these months. Opening the bag, I peered down. The almost luminous glow of the oranges, the dull glint of the silver wrapping on the butter. The drops of condensation on the milk. Everything was mundane and practical, but at the same time improbable somehow, miraculous.
‘That’s the future,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’
She watched me carefully with her head at an angle, as though I were some kind of mechanism and she was trying to see how I worked. Her grin had faded. She trained a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then she pushed both hands into the pockets of her coat and looked across the street to where a theatre’s glass doors had just been flung open and members of the audience were spilling out on to the pavement, their voices raised in exhilaration against the night.
We arrived at the cul-de-sac where I lived. I had already told her that she didn’t need to see me to the door. Apart from anything else, there would be Loames to deal with — unless, of course, he’d been transferred during my absence. The fact that nothing could be relied upon was the one sure sign of a stable society, Vishram had told me once, and I had never been able to work out whether or not he was joking.
Odell scraped at the join between two paving-stones with the heel of her boot. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Did you see me cross the border?’
‘No. I missed it.’
She tried to hide her disappointment, but didn’t quite succeed. I could have mentioned the girl with the wings, I suppose. It might have made her feel better. In the end, though, I couldn’t summon the energy. Or perhaps I wanted to punish her for leaving me.
‘Maybe another time,’ I said.
‘Maybe.’ She took a breath. ‘I should be going.’
I reached up and touched her cheek. When I took my hand away I could still feel the heat of her skin on my fingertips. She turned and walked off down the hill, the gate-house of the old palace rising into the sky ahead of her.
When she was fifty yards from me, she appeared to hesitate. Swinging round, she lifted both her hands up to her mouth to make a megaphone.
‘Watch this,’ I heard her say.
For a moment she seemed to be turning away from me again, but turning at great speed, as if spun by an unseen force. Then she simply vanished. I thought I must have blinked. Or had she tricked me? I felt dull-witted, slow. I stared hard at the place where she’d been standing.
‘Thomas?’
The voice came from behind me. I whirled round. Odell was leaning against a pillar box at the other end of the street with her arms folded, and even though she was some distance away I could see that she was smiling.
She cupped her hands around her mouth again. ‘Believe me now?’
‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘I believe you.’
I kept my eyes fixed on her until she reached the top of the street. Once there, she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Just like anybody else.
I had to ring the caretaker’s bell half a dozen times before the shadowy figure of Kenneth Loames appeared in the lobby and the glass front door clicked open. I watched various reactions pass across his face — indignation, then distaste, and finally astonishment as he looked more closely and realised who it was.
‘Mr Parry!’
‘How are you, Mr Loames?’ I said.
‘Fine, sir,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all.’
His eyes dropped to my cloak, then veered away again, lifting past my shoulder.
‘I seem to have mislaid my keys,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disturb you like this. I know it’s late.’
I waited while he went to fetch the spare set for me. I hadn’t mislaid my keys at all, of course. I’d left them in that hotel in Congreve, along with most of my clothes and the final draft of my lecture. At that point I hadn’t known whether I would have a use for them again — but here I was, four months later, with the pale-green carpet stretching before me and the marble-topped table standing over by the wall beneath the oval gilt-framed mirror. Nothing had changed. The lobby smelled as it had always smelled, of something sweet and baked. Like the inside of a cake tin.
When Loames returned with the keys, I thanked him and said goodnight, then I moved towards the lift and pressed the call button. Although I sensed him loitering behind me, I didn’t look round. He would pretend to be doing his job — checking the post on the table, or straightening the mirror — but he would actually be staring at my filth-encrusted garments and my ill-fitting boots, his curiosity more rampant than ever and even harder to articulate. Only when the lift’s cables looped down into the bottom of the shaft did I hear his front door softly close.
In my flat, all the lights were on. I stared at the switches, wondering if I could have forgotten to turn them off when I left for the conference. It would have been unlike me, certainly. And anyway, a light bulb couldn’t last four months, could it? Perhaps Loames had let himself in while I was away. After all, there might have been meters to read, or a gas leak to take care of — though surely he would have mentioned it … Perhaps he’d just wanted to have a snoop around. I was standing in the hall, weighing the various possibilities, when a rapid but subtle movement registered to my immediate right, in the very corner of my eye. I turned slowly. The toe of a man’s black shoe showed beyond the jamb on the right side of the living-room door. He was sitting in my favourite chair, it seemed, and if my reading of the movement I had caught a glimpse of was correct then he had just either crossed or re-crossed his legs. I walked towards the living-room. There in the armchair, and looking very much at home, was Ajit Vishram.