Divided Kingdom

Chapter Six

They had ushered us on to a coach, fourteen of us, all adults, and we were heading east along the Orbital, an old motorway which circled the four capitals and which was only used by vehicles in transit. Sitting across the aisle from me was a woman of about my own age, perhaps a little older, her clothes expensive but severe, like those of a solicitor. In the bus station she had cried openly, her whole body shaking, but there had been another woman with her, a counsellor of some kind, and I hadn’t wanted to interfere. Though she didn’t appear to be crying now, she had one hand over her eyes. The other was loosely closed around a tissue.

I leaned towards her. ‘Are you all right?’

Keeping her hand where it was, she nodded.

I faced the window again. They had classified me as a melancholic, which was ludicrous, of course, but what did you expect from a bunch of Blue Quarter officials, known as they were for their endless vacillation and incompetence? Though I was beginning to question the way things were organised, there were times, I noticed, when I fell back on prejudice. I remembered what Fernandez had said about the system, how it was rooted in a form of racism and how it drew all its strength from our weaknesses, and I thought he might well be right about that. That doctor had really tried my patience, though. When he finally deigned to let me know where I was being sent — and he did it smugly, oh so smugly — I completely lost my temper, calling him all sorts of names. This outburst only confirmed his diagnosis, and he was almost nodding and smiling as he watched me, which infuriated me still further. I kicked my chair over, then I grabbed my file and hurled it across the room. Gilbert lowered his eyes and shook his head, as if he had just received news of the death of a distant relation. The only time I brought him up short was when I started telling him how vain he was, and how I’d like to cut off his hair, hack it all off and set fire to it. He had looked quite shocked for a moment. Then the security guards arrived.

Yes. Well.

My anger had died down since then. There was no going back to the club, I knew that now, and I would be fooling myself if I thought any different. I would have to make do with what I already had, a few brief glimpses of a buried past — the house I had lived in, my mother’s voice, my face pushed against her skirt … I wasn’t always sure if I was remembering, or just imagining, and in a way it didn’t matter. The point was, the fragments felt authentic. They felt real. In the absence of so much, they were something I could turn to when I needed to, something I could count on.

‘Would you do me a favour?’

It was the woman sitting opposite me. As I glanced over, she brought her hand down and pressed her crumpled tissue to one eye, then the other.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Would you hold me?’ She was looking down into her lap. ‘Just put your arms around me,’ she said. ‘Please.’

I was glad she had asked, though I couldn’t have explained why exactly.

When I sat beside her, she turned to me clumsily, almost blindly, and laid her head against my chest, both hands clasped beneath her chin. I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. She murmured, but I didn’t think she had spoken; it was the sort of sound people make just before they fall asleep, part pleasure, part relief. And then she did fall asleep, her breathing becoming coarser and more regular, her right arm reaching across my chest in a gesture that would have seemed too intimate had she still been conscious.

We left the motorway at an exit marked Cledge East, the slip-road leading directly to a checkpoint. The Green Quarter guards scarcely even glanced at our papers, their lax, fatalistic approach to security reflecting the fact that they were quite accustomed to the sight of new arrivals. The melancholic humour was associated with old age, so there was something logical, if not inevitable, about being transferred here. It was like a kind of natural progression.

Shortly after crossing the border, the woman woke up and lifted her face to mine, her eyes wide open but entirely blank. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said.

‘You’re safe,’ I said quietly. ‘Go back to sleep.’

She muttered something I didn’t understand, then her head dropped back against my shoulder, and her breathing deepened once again.

We meandered through the outskirts of Cledge — shops boarded up, street lights out of order — and before too long the city was behind us. On we went, past little restless towns. It was late now, almost one in the morning, but lamps still burned in many of the windows. This was a land much troubled by insomnia.

And then the spaces between towns began to widen. The road sliced unsentimentally through flat fields. There was nothing there, nothing to see, only the night rushing towards the coach’s windscreen, and the shrinking tail-lights of overtaking cars. My right arm was trapped behind the sleeping woman’s back, and I had to keep adjusting its position so as to keep it from going numb.

The brakes hissed. Our driver stood up and stretched, then he switched all the lights on and took down a clipboard from the rack above his head. Groans came from passengers who had just been woken up. We had stopped outside a semi-detached house, its front door open wide. The spill of light from the hall revealed a couple of brick steps, a concrete path and part of a rockery. In the foreground, by the gate, stood a large woman in a quilted housecoat and a pair of fluffy slippers.

The following people were to leave the bus at this point, the driver told us. He read out three names, one of which was mine. Everybody else should stay in their seats, he said. He read the names again, then lifted his eyes and looked down the aisle.

I tried gently to disentangle myself from the woman, but she sat up quickly, blinking. ‘Sorry to wake you,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’

‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’ Her hand skimmed lightly over her hair, touching it in several places. She seemed brisker, more businesslike. Even more of a stranger.

‘Will you be all right?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll be fine. And thank you for —’ She broke off, not knowing how to complete the sentence. As I rose to my feet and reached up for my bag, she caught hold of my wrist. ‘I’m Iris,’ she said. ‘Iris Gilmour.’

I told her my name, then wished her luck.

‘And you, Thomas,’ she said. ‘Good luck to you too.’

Stepping out of the bus, I felt a chill in the air and saw how the breath of the other two men ballooned in front of their faces. The sky had the hard, cold lustre of enamel. I knew then that we had come a long way north.

I turned towards the house. On one of the gateposts was an oval of wood, its varnished surface ringed with bark. The Cliff, it said. I smiled grimly. You’d think they would have banned names like that, along with all the bridges and high buildings. I waited for the other men to introduce themselves to the woman in the housecoat — the taller of the two was called Friedriksson, the other one was Bill something — then I walked over and held out my hand.

No sooner had I told the woman who I was than she began to shake her head. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘There must be some mistake.’ She turned her back on me and walked a few paces up the street.

I asked the coach driver what was wrong. Her husband had been called Thomas, he told me. He’d been run over a few years ago, and Clarise had never really recovered. We stood about on the pavement, the four of us, uncertain what to do. At the end of the street, beyond a row of black railings, I could see a park. Birds were beginning to fidget in the trees. Dawn could not be far away.

Clapping his hands and then rubbing them together, the driver said he should be going. He was behind schedule, he said. He wasn’t addressing anyone in particular, and nobody responded. I watched the door slot hydraulically back into position as he settled himself behind the steering-wheel. The coach reversed into a nearby side-street and then pulled away, Iris Gilmour’s face floating in the dark window like a moon trapped in a jar. When she gave me her name, there had been such intensity in her, such earnestness, as though she feared that I might be the last person ever to hear of her, and that if I didn’t remember her no one would. The coach reached the corner, tail-lights blushing briefly, then it was gone.

‘Not right,’ I heard the woman murmur.

I glanced at Friedriksson, but he just shrugged and looked off towards the park, as if he was expecting someone to come for him. The other man had his back to me. He must have been feeling the cold because he was hugging himself. I could see the tips of his fingers on either side of his rib-cage.

In the distance a cock crowed, raucous and yet forlorn.

At last the woman blew her nose, then she looked at us over her shoulder, her face puffy and tragic. We followed her indoors. I waited in the hallway while she took the others down to the basement. The house smelled like a cheap hotel. Armpits, cigarettes and gravy. The stair-carpet had turned pale down the middle, its pile almost worn away, and the paint had chipped off the banisters, revealing the wood beneath. When the woman returned, she locked the front door, then led me up the stairs, letting out a faint but urgent grunt with every step.

Once she had showed me to my room, which was on the first floor at the side of the house, she went downstairs again, muttering something about the television. I said goodnight and closed my door. The room was small and square, almost exactly the same dimensions, curiously, as my room in the house on Hope Street. A single bed had been pushed up against the left-hand wall, and an armchair was wedged into the gap behind the door. A chest of drawers doubled as a bedside table. On the wall above the bed was a painting of a clown with a fistful of wilting marigolds. Putting my bag down, I went to the window and looked out. A yard, a wooden fence. A mangle. The sky was a grey lid on the new drab world to which I had been delivered. Once, as I stood there, a light came on in the bathroom of the house next door, a burst of yellow behind a pane of blurry scalloped glass, and then, perhaps a minute later, it went out again, and everything was the same as before. Lowering myself on to the edge of the bed, a great burden of familiarity settled over me, as though I had already spent long years in the room. I seemed to be looking back on something that hadn’t happened yet — my own existence, endless and unvarying. Was the Cliff, with its ominously precipitous name, the place where it would all, finally, come to an end?

Five men were already installed in the house when I arrived. The room below mine was occupied by a man with an unlined, almost childish face whom everyone referred to, mysteriously, as Marge. A sour-looking ex-town-planner called Martin Horowicz lived across the landing from me. His room looked out over the street. He appeared to have a fixation on Clarise Tucker, the landlady, but she was at least twice his size and had no trouble fending him off. She kept two rooms at the back of the house, both of which were painted pastel colours and filled with soft toys. Sandwiched between my room and that of the town-planner was a young man by the name of Aaron Moghadassi. I rarely heard him speak. Every now and then, while sitting at the kitchen table or in the lounge, he would bring his right hand slowly up out of his lap. He would examine the palm, then the back of the hand, then the palm again, and he would frown, seemingly baffled by the fact that they looked different. An old pot-smoking carpenter by the name of Urban Smith had made his home in the attic. The fifth man, Jack Starling, had moved into the converted outhouse. With the three new arrivals — myself, Lars Friedriksson and Bill Snape — the house was full.

To begin with, I kept to myself, never leaving my room except at mealtimes, or when there were chores to be done, but gradually I ventured out into the common parts of the house. I encountered despondency and gloom, which was only to be expected, but I also encountered merriment, and some, like Clarise, veered wildly between the two. I had thought, on first meeting her, that she was large, but she was actually a woman of such vast proportions that she was as wide when viewed sideways-on as she was from the front or back. She tended to raise the subject herself, and usually with hilarious results. ‘Why, I’m practically square!’ she shrieked on one of the first evenings I spent downstairs. ‘Yes, you are square,’ Jack Starling agreed. ‘Like a plinth.’ He grasped his chin between finger and thumb in a parody of thoughtfulness, and then added, with a sly glance in Horowicz’s direction, ‘Now what are we going to put on top of you?’ They had all howled with laughter, Clarise included.

Most nights, after supper, she would switch on the imitation coal fire in the front room, draw the brown velour curtains and gather us around her — ‘my boys’, as she called us. We would fog the air with cigarette smoke and down Jack Starling’s lethal home-made beer, and Urban Smith, who had a fine baritone voice, would entertain us with his extensive repertoire of morbid songs, or Lars Friedriksson would read excerpts from the autobiography he was writing, a work that wasn’t remotely amusing in itself but was rendered so by his unbelievably earnest and lugubrious delivery. Later, one of the men would start complaining with great relish about something or other — we all enjoyed a good moan — or else somebody would embark on an anecdote, and what anecdotes they were, riddled with mythomania and self-delusion. Since we were living in the Green Quarter now, these stories often hinged on some misfortune or disaster, and long before she retired to bed, Clarise would have tears in her eyes. She would not be the only one. The combination of her infectious sentimentality and the potent home brew was enough to bring anyone’s emotions to the surface. I didn’t take up smoking, but I drank and wept with the rest of them, and I laughed the peculiar, giddy, almost hysterical laughter of the melancholic.

Of all the tales that were told, none was stranger than Marge’s, and I heard it not in the front room but privately, during a walk through the neighbourhood. One afternoon in the middle of December I was returning from the town centre, where I had just collected my weekly allowance, when I spotted him on the road ahead of me. Drawing closer, I saw that he was clutching at a tree-trunk with both hands and squinting upwards through the branches. He seemed apprehensive, if not actually frightened. I stopped a few feet away and asked if I could help.

‘Help?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’ His eyes wobbled a little as he brought them down from the sky. ‘What’s that sun feel like?’

‘It feels good.’

‘Is it warm?’

‘No, not very.’

‘Oh.’ If his face looked unnaturally youthful, his voice sounded like that of a much older man, the tone uncertain, tremulous.

I asked him whether he was going back to the house.

‘I’d like to, yes,’ he answered mysteriously. As he spoke, the sun slipped behind a cloud. The day darkened. ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘No time to lose.’ He started up the road, bending forwards from the waist, his badly darned elbows jabbing at the air.

I watched for a second or two, then followed.

‘You’re Marge, aren’t you,’ I said when I had caught up with him.

He gave me a doleful glance. ‘It’s supposed to be a joke.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘They haven’t told you?’

‘No.’

He shook his head. ‘That Horowicz. He thinks he’s so clever.’

As we hurried back towards the Cliff, Marge told me something of his life, often stopping in mid-sentence to scrutinise the sky. Once, when the sun broke through unexpectedly, he looked wildly about and then flung himself beneath the bench in a bus shelter, where he lay quite motionless, eyes staring.

His real name was Brendan Burroughs, he said, and for as long as he could remember he had believed that he was made of butter. I thought I had misheard him, but I chose not to interrupt. Instead, I just watched him carefully, as before. That was why people called him Marge, he was saying. They thought it was funny. He had always known he was different, though, right from when he was a small boy, but he’d never found a way of telling anyone back then, not even his parents. Especially not his parents. If they had learned the truth about him, how could they have looked their neighbours in the eye? They would have been so embarrassed. He had been forced to live in a kind of solitary confinement, with no one to turn to for comfort or advice. He’d had to take great care at all times. In the summer, for instance. He shuddered. How he used to dread the summer! When it got hot, he would seek out the coolest places — the garden shed, the cupboard under the stairs, the cellar. Sometimes, when his parents were out, he would empty the fridge and climb inside. The presence of other butter on the shelves reassured him. His mother opened the door once when he was curled up in there. She screamed and dropped the bowl of trifle she was holding. He could still remember the look of all that sponge and jelly on the floor. As if something had been slaughtered. She asked him what he was doing. I don’t want to go bad, he said. It was as close as he ever came to revealing his secret.

Chunks of white sunlight had appeared on the street ahead of us, and Brendan had to be circumspect, avoiding the bright areas as a child avoids the cracks between paving-stones. Climbing down into a strip of scrubby parkland, we followed a shallow gully for a while, the stream at the bottom coated with a frothy brownish-yellow scum. Sometimes the stream would burrow under a road, and we would join up with it on the other side. Above our heads the clouds seemed to be merging into a single gloomy canopy. Relieved, perhaps, Brendan became talkative again. He spoke about the dangers of winter — open fires, hotwater bottles, central heating … Once, when he was a teenager, he had accidentally leaned against a radiator and he had felt the backs of his thighs start to melt.

‘You can’t begin to imagine,’ he said darkly, ‘what that feels like.’

I agreed that I could not.

‘Where were you before this?’ I asked him.

He had spent most of his life in the Blue Quarter, he told me. They had seen his reticent behaviour as evidence of passivity. His caution they had taken to be indecisiveness. No one had ever suspected him of being melancholic — well, not until the greaseproof-paper phase began. That was four or five years ago. He had started wrapping himself in greaseproof paper before he went to bed. He thought he would stay fresher if he dressed like that. Looking down, he grinned and shook his head. He’d really given the game away, hadn’t he?

When I asked if he felt he was in the right place now, he nodded. He was more likely to be understood in the Green Quarter, he thought, than anywhere else. There were others like him — or not dissimilar, anyway. Also, people were more inward-looking, less meddlesome. They tended to ignore you. Except for Starling, that is. The other day Starling had come at him with a lighted match, the bastard.

As I followed Brendan up the path to the front door, he thanked me for keeping him company. He had enjoyed our talk, he said, but now, if I would excuse him, he thought he would go up to his room and lie down. He was feeling a bit soft around the edges, a bit rancid.

Shortly afterwards, I was formally incorporated into the household, and in a manner Brendan would himself have recognised. One night, as we were eating supper at the kitchen table, Horowicz turned to me. From now on, he declared, I would be known as Wigwam. ‘Why Wigwam?’ he said before I could open my mouth. ‘Because your initials are T.P.’ Despite the laughter that accompanied this declaration, the name stuck. I became Wigwam — or Wig, for short — not just to Clarise, for whom it was a huge relief, since she’d never been able to bring herself to use my first name, but to all the men living at the Cliff, and even, after a while, to myself.

Christmas was coming, Christmas in the Green Quarter, an event that filled the entire population with fear and dread. Everybody was aware of the statistics: some people would commit suicide, some would sink into severe depression, and so on.

‘There’s only one way of dealing with it,’ Clarise told me on a dark December morning as I was helping her with lunch. ‘Get drunk, then go to sleep.’

‘With a bit of hanky-panky in between, maybe,’ Horowicz said.

He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, just a few feet away from her. The space between them filled with the glint and glitter of his small sharp eyes.

But Clarise didn’t even look up from the shortcrust pastry she was rolling out. ‘No hanky-panky,’ she said. ‘Not for me. Not any more.’

Without another word, Horowicz rounded the table, hauled the back door open and slammed it shut behind him. A bird flew diagonally across the window like something chipped off by the impact.

Clarise turned to me. ‘You see? It’s starting already.’

Wind flooded round the edges of the house, making the lights in the kitchen flicker, and for a few moments the spirit of Christmas was in the room with us, glowering and baleful — pitiless.

Some years there would be three or four men who she felt might try and do away with themselves, but the only person who troubled her this year was Aaron. Did I know him? I shook my head. I’d had very little contact with Aaron. Whenever I spoke to him, he would look at me much as a statue might, with blank eyes. I had assumed he was heavily medicated, a fact which Clarise now confirmed. All the same, she was going to put a camp bed in his room, she said, and she wanted the rest of us to take turns sleeping in there, just to keep an eye on him.

That week, we drew numbers to see who would spend which nights in Aaron’s room, each number representing a date between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Much to the relief of the other men, I was lumbered with twenty-five.

We sat down to Christmas dinner at half-past three. Afterwards, we gathered in the front room, which had been decorated with sprigs of holly and bunches of cheap balloons, and Jack Starling, who wasn’t one to miss an opportunity, served a punch that he had concocted especially for the occasion. I never found out what the ingredients were, but within an hour Lars had passed out under the tree — somebody tied his ankles together with tinsel so he would trip over when he stood up — and Bill Snape, a man known for his scholarly ways and his reserved demeanour, was attempting a headstand on the top of the piano. I had been watching Aaron surreptitiously ever since breakfast. He had drunk almost nothing. Once the meal was over, he sat on the sofa examining the two sides of his hand, his air of studiousness contrasting oddly with the yellow paper crown he was wearing.

Towards eleven, with the party in full swing, Aaron went upstairs. I waited a couple of minutes, then I followed. Though Clarise was already pretty far gone, she caught my eye and nodded in approval. When I opened Aaron’s door, a wedge of light from the landing showed me that he was lying on his back in bed with his eyes open and his hands behind his head.

‘I’m sleeping in here tonight,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’

He let out a quietly mocking laugh. ‘Make sure I don’t kill myself.’

I decided not to respond to that.

‘Last night it was Starling,’ Aaron said. ‘He was so drunk I could’ve done it ten times over.’

I closed the door, then took off my clothes and got into the camp bed. Downstairs, in the front room, Urban Smith was singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, a carol that could easily have been the Green Quarter’s national anthem.

‘I still think about her all the time,’ Aaron said after a while.

‘Think about who?’

‘Lucette.’

She had been his fiancée, he told me. He had loved her bony wrists and the way her knees almost knocked together when she walked. She had been clever too. A mind so sharp you could cut yourself on it. One night, while they were sleeping, policemen had burst into their flat. He would always remember the sight of Lucette struggling, half-naked, in the arms of strangers. One of them pointed a finger at him and said, Stay. As if he were a dog. The shame of it, that he couldn’t rescue her, protect her. The immense, excruciating shame. He hadn’t seen her since that night, but he knew she would never forgive him for not coming to her aid.

‘There wasn’t anything you could have done,’ I said.

‘I could’ve tried.’

‘It wouldn’t have made much difference.’

‘It would to me.’ Aaron lay still for a moment, then I heard his bedclothes rustle. I sensed that he had turned to face the wall.

I stared up at the ceiling, sleep eluding me. I had been at the Cliff for almost a month now, and though I had settled into the rhythms of life in the house my nights hadn’t been particularly restful. I woke too often, and had too many dreams. I would be walking through an empty building or caught in two minds on a street corner, or I would be running along a towpath, but whatever the location there was always something missing, something I had to find. I began to write my dreams down in a small green notebook, as if the process of transcription might reveal their truth, as if, once the dreams had been recorded, once they had been retained, they might be persuaded to give up their meaning. Sometimes I had the feeling that I cried out, as I had cried out when I stayed with John Fernandez, but in the morning nobody mentioned it, not even Horowicz, who slept in the room opposite mine. I wasn’t alone, perhaps. We were all troubled, it seemed, in one way or another. Once, I heard my own name being shouted in the middle of the night — Tom? Tommy? — and I sat upright in my bed and answered, Yes? but then I realised it was Clarise at the far end of the landing, Clarise calling for her dead husband in her sleep.

‘It’s never the things we do that we regret the most,’ I said. ‘It’s the things we didn’t do. Or haven’t done. Or can’t.’

I heard Aaron’s head turn on his pillow, but he didn’t say anything, and a curious, almost savage impatience took hold of me.

‘You know, there’s nothing particularly special about you,’ I said. ‘You’re just like all the rest of us. We’re all the same. Not because we’re melancholic — whatever that means — but because we’re haunted by the lives we could have had. The lives we never had a chance to live.’

I wasn’t talking to Aaron any more. I wasn’t even aware of him in the room — or even of the room itself. The air above my face vibrated like a cloud of midges. I remembered how I had tried to explain myself to Fernandez, and how, simply by talking, I’d made new discoveries about myself. Though Fernandez had listened, he had, in the end, become exasperated with me. You people who don’t know what you’re doing. Or perhaps it was because I had turned up on his doorstep. Because I’d seen through him, as he put it. But yes, I must have sounded delirious, frenetic. I had been suffering from shock, of course — I’d cut myself loose, left everything behind — and there had been exhaustion too. Now, though, I had more clarity. The authorities had deprived me of a life that was mine, and mine alone. They hadn’t asked my permission or given me a choice. They’d just taken it. By force. In a sense, then, I had been murdered. How I wished I’d shouted that at Dr Gilbert. You murderer!

A glass smashed one floor below.

I listened to the yelling and the helpless laughter, then I listened to people staggering to bed, doors slamming shut, the throaty flushing of the lavatory, and when all that eventually died down, I listened to the window creak with cold and the air sigh in and out of Aaron’s lungs. Thinking back to the night of the bomb, the moment I disappeared, it seemed to me that what I’d done was both defy those in power and take a kind of revenge on them. It had been my way of saying, No, I won’t accept what you offered me. And no, I’m not going to be grateful. Finally, after twenty-seven years, I had asserted myself. Twenty-seven years! That’s how long it takes sometimes. To make the connections, to determine what you feel. To realise.

Aaron fell asleep, and then, perhaps an hour later, so did I, and by the time I woke again, at nine in the morning, Aaron was already dressed and standing at the bedroom window, watching the snow.

A white Christmas, the first in many years.

And nobody had killed themselves.

In fact, nothing terrible happened, not unless you counted the bizarre events of Boxing Day night. Sometime towards dawn on the 27th I was woken by shrill screams coming from below. As I opened my door, Clarise thundered past in her quilted housecoat, a beige eye-mask pushed high up on her forehead. I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen where we found Brendan Burroughs stretched out on the table, his naked torso slathered in flour, sugar and raw eggs. Starling and Horowicz were standing over him, beating him with wooden spoons.

When Clarise finally found her voice, she asked the two men what in the world they thought they were doing.

‘What’s it look like?’ Horowicz said.

‘I don’t know,’ Clarise said. ‘I’ve no idea. That’s why I’m asking.’

Horowicz came round the table and stood in front of her, his body swaying, and he spoke very slowly, as though he thought she was stupid.

‘Can’t you see?’ he said. ‘We’re making a cake.’

In the New Year I began to go for long walks after supper, partly because I wanted to escape the endless drinking sessions in the front room, which left me feeling irritable and jaded, but also because I was finally becoming curious about the town to which I had been sent. Iron Vale was famous for its trains. It was here, once upon a time, that locomotive engines for the entire country had been manufactured. During the last two decades, however, the foundries and rolling mills had closed, and all that remained of the glory days was the railway station, which stood high on a ridge with its own ornate red-brick clock tower. Certainly Victor would have known about the town, and during my first desultory walks I often felt his presence quite distinctly, Victor as a young man, his big head topped with unlikely corrugations of black hair, his eyes pale with enthusiasm.

I quickly settled on one or two favourite routes. I would often make my way out to a piece of flat land that lay at the edge of a housing estate. It was the strangest place. There were roads and pavements, there were street lights too, but there were no buildings. The roads turned corners, linking up with one another, forming orderly rectangles and squares, and yet the areas of scrub grass in between, where the houses should have been, were strewn with rubbish — umbrellas, condoms, microwaves. Crows sat on top of every street lamp like memorials to some dark event. I suppose the council had simply run out of money, but it always looked to me as if something sinister or supernatural had occurred. Other times I would wander out into the country, to a village a couple of miles south of where we lived. I would walk over an old stone bridge and down into a churchyard that stood right on the river. Though small, the church was exquisite, its walls built from a mixture of red and white sandstone, most of which had been quarried from the river bed itself, while the bridge, with its elaborate arches, seemed to hark back to a more dynamic era, when local people had been full of energy and aspiration. On my first visit I entered through a heavy iron gate that groaned loudly on its hinges. Moving among the tombs, I found the most beautiful surnames — Story, Eden, Raine. Towards the rear of the church, where the property had been allowed to go to seed, the dead became anonymous, their dim brown slabs illegible and tilting haphazardly among the weeds and tall grasses. Even here, though, there was a sense of release, a feeling of having been freed from time’s net. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to be buried, I thought. The river’s constant presence near by. Trees shifting in the breeze that lifted off the water. And, in the distance, a long low ridge — the moors — on which, that very afternoon, unearthly bright-orange sunlight fell. No, not a bad place at all.

One January night, standing in the middle of the bridge and looking down into the churchyard, I saw three scraps of white in the darkness. At first I couldn’t decide what they were, then one of the scraps shifted, developing a head and arms, and in that same moment I remembered someone telling me that White People were often to be found in cemeteries. Various theories had been put forward, the most obvious being that they instinctively identified with dead people. After all, one could argue that White People were dead too. Dead in the eyes of the authorities, at least. Bureaucratically dead. As I watched, the three figures moved behind a row of yew trees, then they appeared again, their white cloaks showing in stark relief against one of the grander tombs. Thinking it might be interesting to observe them at close range, I crossed the bridge, swung a leg over the churchyard wall — the gate would have made too much noise — and stepped down into coarse grass. I wasn’t sure why I was so curious, or what it was I hoped to learn. I felt compelled, though — guided even. It was as if my body comprehended something that my mind did not.

I crept slowly forwards, crouching among the gravestones. I imagined this would be, among other things, a test of their psychic powers. Would they detect my presence? And if they did, what then? My heart beat harder, as though there was the possibility of danger. As I reached the yew trees, the moon rolled out into a patch of clear sky, and I saw them ahead of me, passing through a gap in the fence at the back of the cemetery. Now, perhaps, I could close the distance between us. I ran to the fence, then knelt in the shadow of an overgrown holly bush to catch my breath. I could hear them on the other side. There weren’t any words, just odd little grunts and snuffles. No wonder some people thought of them as animals.

I stole a look over the fence. Clouds hung before me, rimmed in silver. To my right was the bridge, the black river flowing underneath. I lifted my head a fraction higher. There they were, below me. They had removed all their clothes, and they were standing in the shallows, two men and a woman. Pale as stone or marble, they looked like damaged statues, half their legs gone, the tips of their fingers too. They began to wash themselves. They didn’t hurry, despite the fact that it was winter, and I wondered whether they had lost the ability to feel the cold, along with everything else. The river swirled around their knees with the dark glint of crude oil. I was struck by how methodical and self-contained they were. Their nakedness had no sexual overtone. In fact, they behaved as unselfconsciously as children. There was also an understated dignity about the scene which I found strangely poignant, and which gave me the feeling, just for a moment, that I was looking at a painting. These people had nothing — nothing, that is, except their freedom, the license to go wherever they pleased … As I watched them, an idea occurred to me. I wouldn’t do anything just yet, though. No, I would wait. I needed to think things through. Prepare myself.

I had been standing by the fence for about five minutes when the woman’s body stiffened. She had been bent over, scooping water on to her back, first over one shoulder, then the other, but now, suddenly, she had frozen, one hand braced on her thigh, the other still dangling in the river. Her head turned towards me. My chest locked, all the breath held deep inside. I didn’t think she’d seen me. She acted more as if she’d picked up the scent of something foreign, something that didn’t belong. Her eyes still angled in my direction, she slowly straightened up and, tilting her head sideways, wrung out the thick cable of her hair. Black water spilled from between her hands. Without even exchanging a glance, the two men stopped washing and began to wade towards the bank.

I ducked down, then hurried off through the churchyard. I wasn’t embarrassed, or even afraid exactly — Victor had always maintained that White People were peaceful and harmless, and that people only feared them out of ignorance — but at the same time I didn’t want to risk a confrontation. Vaulting over the wall, I kept low until I reached the far end of the bridge. There was nobody in the river now, and the cemetery lay quiet and dark and still. They must have fled along the bank. I glanced at the watch Clarise had given me for Christmas. Twenty-five to twelve. It had been time for me to leave in any case, or she’d start worrying. She could never rest easy in her bed until she was sure that all her boys were home.

On arriving back, I saw that the downstairs lights had been switched off. I unlocked the front door, locked it again behind me and was just making for the stairs when a figure stepped away from the banisters.

‘You’re up to something, aren’t you?’ Horowicz’s face rose out of the grey gloom of the hall.

‘I’ve been out for a walk,’ I said, ‘as usual.’

He gave me a knowing look, then laughed softly, cynically, and shook his head. ‘You can’t fool me, Wig. I’ve been watching you.’

After a brief silence, I moved past him and started to climb the stairs. When I reached the landing, he was still standing in the hall, looking up at me, his eyes glinting in the half-light like a drawer full of knives.

In recent years, Iron Vale had become home to the Museum of Tears, and it was the inalienable right of every melancholic, no matter where they might live, to have a sample of their tears stored within the museum walls. All you had to do was write to the curators, enclosing proof of identity. They would send you an air-tight glass vial, no bigger than a lipstick. The next time you cried, you collected your tears and transferred them to the vial. Some people waited for an important event — the death of a loved one being the most obvious, perhaps — but it was up to you to choose which aspect of your melancholy nature you wanted to preserve. When it was done, you sealed the vial and returned it to the museum, where it would be catalogued and then put on display, along with millions of others.

One evening towards the end of January, we were sitting in the front room, all nine of us, when Horowicz launched a vitriolic attack on the museum. He thought it self-indulgent, overblown — a total waste of tax-payers’ money. What was there to look at? Row after row of tiny bottles, each containing more or less the same amount of more or less the same transparent fluid. You could hardly call it an attraction, he said. If anything, there was something repellent about the whole idea.

Clarise let him finish, then slowly shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

Horowicz’s eyebrows lifted. When someone started complaining, people generally joined in, and the level of complaint would escalate. The sessions would go on for hours, becoming ever more self-righteous and extreme. But not tonight.

‘Think about happiness for a moment, Martin,’ Clarise said. ‘Can you remember being happy?’

Horowicz let out a snort, as though he found the question absurd.

There was a fundamental problem with happiness, Clarise went on, quite unperturbed. Happiness had a slippery, almost diaphanous quality. It gave nothing off, left nothing behind. Grief was different, though. Grief could be collected, exhibited. Grief could be remembered. And if we had proof that we’d been sad, she argued, then we also had proof that we’d been happy, since the one, more often than not, presupposed the other. In preserving grief, therefore, we were preserving happiness. The Museum of Tears stood for much more than its name might initially suggest. It wasn’t just to do with rows of identical glass bottles — though that, in itself, said a lot about equality, if you thought about it. It was to do with people trying to hold on to such happiness as they had known.

Her eyes returned to Horowicz, who was staring at the carpet. ‘But maybe you don’t know what that feels like,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ve never lost someone. In which case, though it sounds odd to say it, I’m sorry for you, I really am.’

‘I know what it feels like,’ he muttered.

Later, Clarise expanded on her thesis. She believed the museum was both a testament to individuality and a collective ode to the country in which we lived. We were all unique, she said, and yet we shared a common humanity, a common humour. I had never heard her so impassioned, so articulate.

‘And there’s also the little matter of immortality,’ she went on. ‘It’s hard to resist, the offer of immortality.’ She sent a sideways look at Horowicz, who reached for his beer and drank quickly. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, Martin, if you didn’t end up in there yourself one day.’

He shook his head savagely but unconvincingly.

‘I’m in there,’ Jack Starling said.

I watched Horowicz’s top lip curl. He would view Starling’s announcement as tantamount to a betrayal.

‘The night my still exploded,’ and Starling turned to Clarise, ‘remember? Half the outhouse went up with it. I shed a few tears over that, I can tell you.’

‘What, and you kept them?’ Horowicz’s voice was acidic with disbelief.

‘You know, you’re right,’ Starling said, still speaking to Clarise. ‘I can walk into that museum and look at my tears and it all comes back to me, that first batch of sloe gin I made, and the nights we had on it, those brilliant nights, and you know the really strange thing?’ He put down his glass so as to make the point more emphatically. ‘That little vial, it’s like a miniature. The vial’s the gin bottle, and my tears, they’re the gin. It’s like the whole thing’s there, the whole memory, only tiny.’

Smiling broadly, Clarise told him he had just summed it all up, everything she’d been talking about, then she turned to me and asked if I’d been to the museum yet. I shook my head.

‘You should go,’ she said.

A few days later I walked down into the town. The museum stood on a narrow street, directly opposite the public library. Looking at the staid red-brick façade and the antiquated ventilation units, I guessed that the building had once housed municipal offices — the council, maybe, or the gas board. A modest brass plaque had been bolted to the wall, just to the left of the double-doors: The Museum of Tears — Please ring for entry.

Although I had gone along with what Clarise had been saying that night, I hadn’t known what to expect from the museum, or even why I was there, really, but I found a stillness settling over me as I ventured into the first of the rooms. All these people reduced to a few ccs of salty water, as if a kind of essence had been wrung from each of them. Was Marco Rinaldi here? What about Boorman? I wandered dreamily from floor to floor. Apart from the museum guards, I had the vast place to myself.

The glass vials were arranged in three parallel rows at shoulder-height, and underneath each of them was a rectangle of white card indicating the donor’s name and date of birth (and, if necessary, death). In themselves, the vials had a somewhat medical aura. They reminded me of test-tubes and, by association, of hospitals and laboratories. In the manner of their presentation, though — the careful labelling, the fashionable austerity — I detected more than a hint of the art gallery. And yet the interior itself, its ambience, had something in common with a school — the grey-blue walls in need of redecoration, the dark, slightly greasy parquet floors. Research, creativity, nostalgia … In the end, the museum displayed characteristics of so many different kinds of institutions that I was no longer sure how to behave or what to think. There was something inherently awkward, or inchoate, perhaps, about the whole experience.

After half an hour I felt I had seen enough, and I walked back towards the stairs that led to the exit. I was passing through a perfectly innocuous room on the second floor when my eye happened to fall on a name I recognised. Micklewright. The air around me appeared to sag and then fold in on itself. I looked away from the wall and blinked two or three times, then I looked back again. The name was still there. In fact, the name was there twice: Micklewright, Sally, and then, right next to it, Micklewright, Philip.

My mother and father.

A trap-door opened in me somewhere and my heart dropped through it. My hand over my mouth, I sank on to the ottoman in the middle of the room.

My mother and father. My parents.

I had thought of them so seldom during the last twenty-seven years. Partly this had to do with survival. If I’d thought of them, I wouldn’t have been able to go on. I’d had no choice but to put them behind me, out of sight. Partly, also, it came down to the image I carried in my head of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night. Her bare feet, his sleepy face — rain slanting down … It was so timeless, so static. So complete. As the years went by, it had taken on an eternal unyielding quality, like a cenotaph, and it had been impossible for me to think around it, impossible for me to remember, or even imagine, anything that had happened before that moment. Then came my visit to the club, exposing the need in me, the ache — the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. When I stepped through that pale-gold door, something had given in me. Fragments of another life had been released. There had not been much, and it had come so late, so very late, but it had altered me for ever. Everything I had built had been revealed for what it was — mere scaffolding. Everything would have to be remade.

I stood up again and went over to the wall. This time I noticed the dates beneath my parents’ names. They were both dead. I tilted my head to one side, as if I needed another angle on what I was being told. As if that might help me to comprehend. My father had died first. My mother had survived him by eight years. Neither of them had lived to a great age. My father had been fifty-nine, my mother sixty-three. Had they been melancholic all along, or had they been transferred at some point, as I had? What was their story? I had no way of knowing. Since the vials were exhibited in strict chronological order, the two belonging to my parents must have arrived at the museum simultaneously. It was quite conceivable then that they had been crying at the same time — possibly for the same reason — and that those were the tears they had chosen to collect. I wondered if they had been thinking of the boy they’d lost. I wondered if they’d ever forgiven him for turning away from them. Or perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. All they had understood, in their confusion, in their distress, was that their only son was being taken from them. Gazing at their remains, I felt instinctively that they hadn’t tried too hard to stay alive, that they had given up, in other words, and I couldn’t really say I blamed them.

So the museum was a graveyard too.

I stared at the names and dates until they blurred. I hadn’t found my parents — not really. Perhaps they had been present for a few minutes, while I was sitting, head lowered, on the ottoman, but now they had disappeared again. All in all, it hadn’t been much of a reunion. I reached up slowly with one hand.

‘No touching, please.’

I looked round to see a museum guard standing in the doorway to the room. My hand dropped to my side. The guard nodded and moved on.

Out on the street again, I felt as though years had gone by. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the library had been knocked down and new buildings had been erected in its place.

I walked back to the Cliff, the air glassy, dazzling.

When I opened the door, Clarise was standing at the far end of the hall. She asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. She was just about to put the kettle on, she said. I shook my head, then stepped sideways into the front room. I heard her come after me.

‘What is it, Wig?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘This is a terrible place.’

‘Here?’ Clarise’s face whirled like a clumsy planet, taking in the mould-green three-piece suite, the velour curtains, the gas fire with its tile surround.

I shook my head again.

A boy could balance on one leg for hours. A man could make a book from his wife’s shoes. A couple could stand on a road in the middle of the night and call their son’s name, only to have him turn his back on them. Candles burned in windows all year round, memorials to those who had gone but were not dead. There were very few who didn’t live in the shadow of some separation or other. The divided kingdom was united after all, by just one thing: longing.

I sank down among the sofa’s sagging cushions. Clarise sat beside me. I told her that I had visited the museum and that I had found my parents, my real parents, but then my voice began to tremble and I couldn’t carry on. The grief had been stored inside me for too long. It hurt to bring it out. Clarise took me in her arms and held me against her. I smelled the wool of her cardigan, and her face powder, and the oil at the roots of her hair. My whole body jerked, as if caught on a fisherman’s hook.

‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Let it out.’

And though I was crying I learned something about myself just then. I saw it clearly for the first time. I had never been sanguine — at least, not so far as I could remember. No, wait — that was wrong. I had been sanguine until the moment I was classified as sanguine, but all my happiness had ended there, and all my optimism too. Ever since that night, the only thing I had ever really wanted was to find my way back. I was like someone who has died and can’t let go, someone who wants desperately to rejoin the living. And it wasn’t possible, of course. It wasn’t even possible to remember, not really — or rather, there was a limit to what could be recovered. None of that mattered, though. It was enough to believe, enough to know. That my parents had mourned me while they were alive. That they had died still missing me. That they had loved me.

Clarise held me close and said the same words over and over.

Let it out. Let it all out.

As February began, gales swept the length and breadth of the country, causing untold damage. Several people were killed by falling trees. In the south a headless man was seen speeding down a village high street on his bicycle. He had been decapitated by a flying roof-tile only seconds earlier. The freak conditions and unusual sightings sparked off the kind of doom-laden apocalyptic talk that wouldn’t have been tolerated even for a moment in the place I came from, though I found myself susceptible to it, perhaps because I was waiting for circumstances to favour me. As a result of what had happened to me during the previous month or so, a certain threshold had been crossed, a decision had been reached, but everything now depended on the White People, and they seemed to have vanished without trace. Weeks had elapsed since that night in the graveyard, and I hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of them. The only advantage was that Horowicz had lost interest in me. Whenever we spoke, which was rarely, he would berate me for my apathy, my fecklessness, almost as though he was trying to goad me into an action that he could then expose, condemn. I still went for walks after supper. On returning to the house, however, I would often join the others for a drink in an attempt to dull my frustration, to anaesthetise myself.

One Thursday evening I was on my way upstairs to change — Urban Smith was taking part in a talent contest in the local pub that night, and some of us were going along to support him — when I chanced to look out of the landing window. Across the street, beneath the drooping branches of a magnolia, stood a man in a white cloak. The tree had flowered early, and the man blended with its creamy blooms so perfectly that I had almost failed to notice him. I steered an uneasy glance over my shoulder. The landing was deserted, all the bedroom doors were closed. Somewhere below, I could hear Urban doing his voice exercises. Quickly, I went through my pockets. All I had on me was a cigarette-lighter, my dream notebook and a key to the front door. I had some money too, saved for precisely this eventuality. Round my neck was the silver ring I had found, which I now regarded as a sort of talisman. I couldn’t think of anything else I might need. I looked out of the window again. The man was still standing in the shadow of the magnolia tree. I thought of Victor and Marie lost in the mist and shivered. I didn’t know if I should feel apprehensive or reassured. I checked the time. Twenty to seven. What with the excitement of the competition, I doubted anybody would notice my absence, and if Urban won and the men drank enough of Starling’s latest brew, a lethal poteen, then it might easily be morning before they realised I was gone.

My abrupt departure would not come as a surprise to everyone. Clarise had treated me so kindly that I had felt duty bound to let her in on at least part of the secret. I had waited until it was my turn to help her with the dinner. On the night in question, I stood at the kitchen sink, washing spinach, while she sat at the table behind me and coated veal in egg and breadcrumbs. The men were out somewhere, playing darts. Only Lars Friedriksson had stayed behind, and he was in the basement, poking, two-fingered, at his ancient portable. Though he had already written a thousand pages, he claimed that he had hardly scratched the surface. He would not disturb us.

‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ I said.

Clarise’s wide, unblinking eyes veered towards me.

‘I’m not going to give you the details,’ I said. ‘I just want you to know that it’ll happen sometime in the near future.’

‘You can’t leave,’ she said, ‘not unless they relocate you. It’s not allowed.’

I couldn’t help smiling. She only ever invoked the law out of anxiety or panic.

‘I’m telling you now because I don’t want it to upset you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think’ — and I paused — ‘that I had come to any harm.’

‘Are you so unhappy here?’

I went over, took her hand. ‘You’ve been good to me, Clarise. I owe you a lot. It wouldn’t be fair if I did it behind your back. You mustn’t try and stop me, though.’

She looked up at me, tears beginning to fill her eyes. ‘Where will you go?’

‘It’s better you don’t know. And anyway, it might all go wrong, in which case I’ll end up here again.’

She tried to smile through her tears, which were dripping off her cheeks and down into the breadcrumbs. Later that evening, at dinner, Bill Snape would tell her, in that precise, fastidious voice of his, that although the veal was delicious she had, in his opinion, used a little too much salt.

Yes, she would realise what had happened, I thought, as I turned from the window, and I knew I could trust her not to give anything away. She had even promised to wait a few hours before she informed the authorities.

I managed to reach the kitchen without running into anyone. The lid vibrated gently on a saucepan of root vegetables and chicken bones, stock for a risotto Clarise would be making in the morning. I opened the back door, then eased it shut behind me, and I was just setting off along the narrow passageway that led to the street when a voice called my name. Brendan Burroughs was standing by the outhouse. He had one hand cupped in the other, and his chin had moved into the air above his right shoulder, as if he had to peer round a corner to see me. He asked where I was going.

‘A walk,’ I said. ‘To clear my head.’

‘Aren’t you coming to the pub?’

‘Maybe later on.’

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Yes, I’d like a walk. My head needs clearing too. And, after all, moonlight can’t hurt me, can it?’ He took several rapid steps in my direction, half tripping on a drain in his eagerness to join me.

I took out my lighter and struck the flint. A flame sprang up between us. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Brendan? I said no.’

Shrinking back, his mouth opened in a crooked, incredulous grin. He couldn’t believe I’d done such a thing. I wasn’t Starling or Horowicz. I wasn’t cruel like them.

‘Wig,’ he said, his voice balanced precariously between pleading and reproach.

‘No.’ I snapped the lighter shut again. With one last look at him, a steady look, to show him that I wasn’t joking, I turned away.

When I stepped out on to the pavement, the space beneath the magnolia tree was empty. I looked left, then right, just in time to see the cloaked man shamble through the gate and down into the park. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Brendan was still loitering in the shadows at the side of the house, one hand clasping the other, hoping that I might relent.

‘No,’ I said.

Once I was safely out of sight of the Cliff, I broke into a run. I had waited so long, and it might be weeks before another chance presented itself. I needn’t have worried. When I reached the black railings I could see the man below me, beneath the overhanging trees, his pale cloak appearing to hover in the gloom.

He followed the polluted stream for a while as it wound behind the backs of houses and under roads, then he turned to the south, using a maze of lanes and alleys I had never been along before. He seemed to know the town in such detail — its recesses, its hiding places. I realised that if I’d seen so little of the White People recently it was because they had mapped out an alternative geography. Their existence lay parallel to everybody else’s.

At last he stepped out on to a road I recognised. It led downhill past a school, fetching up close to the river. His hood had fallen back, and the light from a street lamp caressed his bare head as he passed beneath it. No more than fifty yards separated us, but he didn’t appear to have noticed me. Was he preoccupied, or merely simple? I couldn’t have said. It would be a kind of suicide, what I was about to attempt, but at the same time it would be a transformation — another life entirely. The White People were treated either as scapegoats or as deities, depending on the territory into which they wandered, and this, I thought, was the basic yet paradoxical truth about them, namely that, although they had been certified as non-persons, they had access to a far wider range of experience than the rest of us. We were limited, imprisoned, but they walked free. Another life indeed …

The man reached a junction and seemed to hesitate. To his left the road angled back into the centre of Iron Vale, while to the right it ran out into the country, passing through the village with its graveyard and then on towards towns that were famous for their racecourses. On the far side of the road was a thinly wooded area, the treacly blackness of the river just visible beyond. Although it was still early, not even eight o’clock, very few cars were travelling in either direction, and there was nobody out walking — nobody except us, that is. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of meeting up with others like him. My plan would only work if he was on his own. Instead of making for the graveyard, though, as I had feared he might, he crossed the road and disappeared into the old dark trees that lined the pavement.

I stood on the kerb, exactly as he had done. If I kept quite still, I could hear people weeping. I wanted to dismiss it as my imagination, but then it occurred to me that the sound might be happening inside my head. It might be my own grieving that I could hear — for those who had been unable to protect me, and those I myself, in turn, had been unable to protect. The sorrow I had always known about was more in evidence these days. It was as if I lived in a house that had a stream running under it. There wasn’t a moment when I didn’t feel the damp. At the same time, high in the air above me, traffic-lights were swaying on their slender wires, and I knew that it might just have been the wind. It might have been the wind all along. Maybe the man in the cloak had heard it too. Maybe that sound, and nothing more than that, was what had held him on the pavement for so long.

Once across the road, I found a narrow lane that led through a picnic area and then on down a gentle, curving incline to the river. Tables and benches, all built out of wooden slats, had been arranged among the trees. The moon had risen, bright and swollen, gleaming like an heirloom, and the short grass was crazed with the shadows of bare branches, shadows so black that the ground seemed to have cracked wide open. I glanced up. There he was, ahead of me, unmistakable in white, and quite alone. He followed the lane to where it became a car-park. Though he wasn’t hurrying, he appeared determined, as if he had a purpose. They weren’t supposed to be capable of that. I dropped back, allowing a distance to open up between us. It didn’t seem likely that I would lose him, not here.

Beyond the car-park was a concrete embankment that overlooked a weir. The man stood at the railings, staring out over the river. Above the weir the water was smooth and dark. A notice warned of strong currents, hidden dangers. Further down, the river narrowed a little, its surface becoming ruffled. Part of the river bed on our side had been exposed, forming a beach made up of grassy banks, stretches of mud, and big white stones. After a few minutes the man clambered down off the embankment and on to the river bed. I was still standing at the edge of the carpark, beneath the trees. The wind lifted. The branches’ shadows swung and shuddered on the ground before me, which made me feel unsteady on my feet. To my right, where the railings were, something knocked and clanked. I watched the man pick his way across the stones. I decided to wait under the trees until I discovered what his intentions were. There would be nowhere for me to hide down there.

At last he arrived at the water’s edge, a ghostly shape against the river’s glinting blackness. He started to undo the buttons on his cloak. This was better than I could have hoped for. I kept my eyes on him, watching his every movement. The wind slackened again. I realised that I was breathing through my mouth. Under his cloak he was wearing a collarless shirt, split open down the front, and a pair of long johns. He stooped to untie his laces. There was something infinitely touching about the way he conscientiously pushed each of his socks into the appropriate boot, as if somebody had taught him how to get undressed, as if, once upon a time, somebody had cared for him. You rarely thought of childhood or upbringing when confronted with the White People; they appeared to have emerged, fully fledged and yet unformed, into the world. Removing his undershirt and then a vest, he placed them on top of the cloak. Finally he peeled off the long johns. He stood on the mud in his underpants, his body wide and solid, hands dangling on a level with his thighs, and once again he seemed to be debating something inside himself, then he began to wade into the water. In that moment he became the same as anybody else, waving both arms in the air as he struggled to stay upright. When the blackness reached his knees, he crouched quickly and slid forwards, chin raised, moonlight silvering the flat plane of his forehead.

Leaving the cover of the trees, I crept out along the embankment and then climbed down to the river bed. At the pressure of my foot the mud belched softly, and a smell lifted past my face, a cloud of something rank, primeval. I started to move gingerly towards the place where the man had left his clothing. Once, I stopped, looked up. The river ran from right to left, all kinds of notches cut into its shiny surface, and the man’s head bobbed there, among the reflections, a small pale globe with careless dabs of black for hair and mouth and eyes. Then he began to swim in my direction. He must have noticed me at last. His arms beat fiercely at the water, white splashes showing in the darkness like matches being struck repeatedly against the side of a matchbox but never bursting into flame. I undid my jacket, took it off.

The man hauled himself to his feet, then staggered out of the water. His chest heaved with the exertion of his dash to the shore, and his underpants had slipped low on his left hip, revealing a smudge of pubic hair. By the time he reached me, I too had stripped down to my underwear. My shoes stood on a rock, the contents of my pockets placed near by. The man had come to a halt in front of me, no more than a few feet away, his chest still rising and falling.

‘I want you to take my clothes,’ I said.

The man tipped his head to one side, as if intrigued, or charmed.

I offered him the clothes I was holding. He stepped back. One of his feet sank deep into the mud, and he almost lost his balance. When I took his arm so as to steady him, his features seemed to scatter on his face. Air whistled past his teeth. His arm was cold and heavy.

‘I don’t mean you any harm,’ I told him.

Looking down, he lifted his foot out of the mud. An extravagant sucking sound accompanied the movement, and he grinned at me, a wide gap showing between his two front teeth. The strangest smell came off him. Bitter, like the milky sap in the stalks of bluebells.

‘There,’ I said.

I looked over my shoulder, scanning the embankment for signs of life. I saw nothing, no one. All the same, I couldn’t afford to waste any time, not if my plan was going to succeed.

I pushed my clothes against his chest. ‘Take them. Your life will be much easier.’ Bending swiftly, I picked up his vest and put it on.

The man was clutching my clothes now, but he hadn’t looked at them at all. He was still staring at me, transfixed. His mouth had fallen open, and his eyes had the dull flat shine of porcelain. A single drop of water hung from the lobe of his left ear like a pearl. Hung and hung. Then fell.

I slipped his undershirt over my head and pulled on the long johns, then I reached for the cloak. Fingers stumbling, I did up the buttons. The cloak weighed more than I had anticipated, and it was damp from lying on the river bed. That odour of bluebell sap again. I dropped my few possessions into the pocket at the front, then slid my feet into the man’s boots and tied the laces. I kept thinking that he would intervene, but he seemed paralysed. Then, as I turned away, a hoarse bellow came out of him. He had flung my clothes to the ground. I began to run. The boots were a size too big and the cloak swirled around my ankles. I floundered in the mud, expecting to be brought down from behind at any moment.

At last, and breathing hard, I levered myself up on to the embankment. Only then did I glance round. The man had not moved. My clothes still lay beside him in a small shapeless mound. Once again I heard him bellow, an inhuman noise, like a cow being butchered. I had wanted the exchange to benefit us both, but clearly it would take more than a new set of clothing to improve his lot. I had deceived myself. It occurred to me that I had done a kind of violence to him, and that I might, eventually, have to pay for this. Stealing one last look at the half-naked figure, as though to fix in my mind the debt I owed him, I turned and began to walk back through the trees.