At that moment a white van accelerated round the bend, its headlights flashing as it came towards her. The man behind the wheel showed her his tongue, just the tip of it; she saw it flicker in and out between his lips. His face was pale and damp, like mushrooms after they’ve been peeled.
She stared after the van, waiting until it had dipped down into the underpass, then she turned and walked in the opposite direction. For the next few minutes she walked faster than usual, past the timber yard, over the railway bridge and down into the station, using the back entrance, and it was only then, when she was under its high, curved roof, among the rushing people and the strange, burnt smell of trains, that she slowed down.
The sorrow that washed over her that morning stayed with her. At work she pretended to have hayfever — she even took the medication, so as to lend her story authenticity — but, in private, she cried so much that her eyes swelled and her throat tasted of blood. Sometimes, on the good days, she painted pictures of the mountain. Each picture was bathed in the same fierce orange glare. She wasn’t sure it was such a great improvement — the landscape now looked apocalyptic, the train in the background on its way to some terrifying destination — but she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Then, towards the end of May, Charlie Moore sent her a postcard. He wanted her to visit him the following weekend. She could think of nothing she would rather do. This was the sign of a true friend, she thought, that he could time something so perfectly without even realising.
A Saturday, then. Just after two-thirty in the afternoon. The bus roared and staggered along the narrow, tangled streets of Camberwell. Outside, the heat pressed down out of a strangely dazzling grey sky. Everything she could see looked dusty: the buildings, the cars — even the grass. London could look like that in the summer, as though it needed wiping with a damp cloth. She imagined for a moment that the world was the size of a tennis ball, and that it was lying on a high shelf in her father’s caravan.
From the bus-stop on the main road she had to walk a distance of about a mile to reach the squat where Charlie lived. A woman called from behind a fence, a boy on a bicycle turned circles in a drive. The stillness of the suburbs. She stopped on a bridge and, leaning on the parapet, stared at the railway tracks below. A polished silver stripe down the middle of each rail, the bright-brown of the rust on either side. Nettles massed on the embankments and, further up, a stand of buddleia grew tall against a freshly painted fence. She supposed she was waiting to see a train, but she stayed on the bridge for fifteen or twenty minutes, the sun breaking through the high cloud cover, and no train came. Perhaps, after all, the line was disused. So many were, in England. And suddenly she realised that this was the feeling she would like to pass on, to her children, if she ever had any, the feeling of standing on a bridge somewhere, the sun warming the back of her head, her shoulders, and just the smell of buddleia, its blunt mauve flowers, the smell of rust and nettles too, and almost nothing moving. The feeling of being entirely in the present, with nothing to look back on, nothing to look forward to. A feeling of reprieve, a kind of grace. This feeling more than any other.
She arrived outside the squat to find the front door open. From the top of the steps she could see through the house to the back garden, an upright rectangle of sunlight at the far end of a long, dark hall. Four or five people sprawled on the lawn with their shirts off, their bodies white, almost ghostly. She recognised Paul, who used to be a skinhead in Newcastle, but she didn’t know any of the others. And Charlie was not among them. She thought he would probably be upstairs. He had two rooms on the fourth floor, under the roof. She climbed slowly, one hand sliding along the cool, curved wood of the banister rail. She could smell plaster and damp, a smell that hadn’t altered in the year since she’d last visited.
She opened the door to Charlie’s living-room and stepped inside. He was sitting in an armchair by the window reading a book. He wore a collarless shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
‘Glade.’ He closed the book and stood up. ‘As you’ve probably noticed,’ he said, ‘we’ve been invaded. I had to retreat indoors.’ He smiled his peculiar, straight-lipped smile.
While he was downstairs, making tea, Glade looked around the room. The pale-blue walls were so cracked in some places that they reminded her of china that’s been smashed and then glued back together. The floorboards had the bleached, grey colour of driftwood washed up on a beach. An oval mirror hung on a chain over the fireplace, and below it, on the mantelpiece, stood an invitation to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and a pair of green glass candlesticks that had once belonged to Charlie’s grandmother. On the opposite wall, above his work-table, there was a large black-and-white photograph of a famous Austrian philosopher. Glade put her bag on the floor and settled on the camp-bed that doubled as a sofa. Outside, in the garden, she heard laughter. She imagined they were stoned. That was what usually happened when they sat in the garden in fine weather.
Charlie returned with a pot of tea, some biscuits and a can of beer. Once he was sitting in his armchair again, he asked her how things had gone in America.
‘Not too well,’ she said.
‘Tom?’
She nodded.
‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
So she talked about the wedding instead — the old man in the linen suit, the creamy smell of the gardenias. Then, suddenly, she broke off.
‘I keep feeling strange,’ she said.
Charlie’s face didn’t alter. ‘What kind of strange?’
She told him about being on the plane and ordering a drink which, at that point, she had never heard of, and how, later that day, a similar thing had happened in the house on Chestnut Street. She seemed to know all about something she didn’t know anything about, if that made sense. She glanced at him. His face was lowered, and he was nodding. She told him that she sometimes saw orange. She didn’t notice it exactly (though that happened too). She actually saw it — when it wasn’t there. She told him that she’d mentioned it to Tom and that Tom thought she should see a psychiatrist.
‘It’s all part of the same thing, you think?’ Charlie said.
‘It feels like it.’
‘And you can’t control it?’
She shook her head.
‘Have you told anyone?’ he said. ‘Apart from Tom, I mean?’
‘No. Who else would I tell?’
He looked at his can of beer for a moment, then he lifted it to his lips and drank.
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Charlie?’ She paused. ‘I think maybe there’s something wrong with me.’ It frightened her to think that she might have asked him a question he couldn’t answer. She waited a moment, aware of her heart suddenly, how it shook her entire body, and then, cautiously, in a low voice, she said, ‘I’ve started making lists.’
‘Lists?’ he said.
She reached sideways and down, into her bag, and pulled out a black notebook with a dark-red spine. It was a kind of diary, she told him, of all the orange things she saw. She gave him the first page to read. She could only remember two of the entries: Crunchie Wrapper, Heathrow and Man’s Tie, Piccadilly Line.
‘It’s just like a normal day,’ Charlie said when he had reached the bottom of the page, ‘only you’re telling it in orange.’