Divided Kingdom

Chapter Seven

Street lamps hung above the tarmac, buzzing. If I hadn’t known better I would have said that they were living things and that the rest of the world was dead. I looked both ways, then stepped out into the road. Halfway across, my boot caught in the hem of the cloak and I went sprawling. My clumsiness was greeted by a blast from the horn of a passing car. The mockery had begun, and it didn’t feel unwarranted. I already seemed to have altered in some indefinable way. It wasn’t the weight or the smell of the cloak. It wasn’t even the sheer unfamiliarity of such a garment. It was more as if I had entered a tradition, and the clothes themselves were imparting something of that responsibility, that lore, as a crown does when it is lowered on to the head of a king. In donning the cloak, I had parted company with the person I used to be without knowing quite who or what I was going to become. When I reached the far side of the road I stood and stared at the cracks between the paving-stones. They looked precise but temporary, as though they had been drawn in pencil. As though they could be rubbed out. There was something frightening about that, but something exhilarating too. Like turning your hand over and seeing that all the lines have gone. The world could disappear. I could disappear. A blank slate everywhere I looked. Staying close to the wall, I moved off down a quiet residential street.

You would think I would have realised sooner, but it was almost midnight before it occurred to me that I had nowhere to go. I had failed to work out any of the practical considerations. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? I found myself in a cobbled alley by the station, its clock tower lifting high above my left shoulder. There were railway tracks behind me, on the other side of a wooden fence. In front of me stood a terrace of red-brick houses. They faced away from me, their back yards silent, their garages locked up for the night. On top of the walls, glass splinters glittered where they had been embedded upright in cement. Each street light cast its own sullen dark-yellow glow. I was cold now, and tired. Teeth chattering. I could see Clarise Tucker’s front room with its tatty velour curtains and its misshapen furniture, coils of smoke unwinding from the ends of cigarettes, the air clouded with the pungent, yeasty fumes of Starling’s beer, and then, having climbed the stairs, I saw my single bed, and the reading lamp behind the door, its shade cocked like a bird’s head, and my book lying open on the chair, a book I would never finish now. Who would have thought I would miss that tiny, dingy room on the first floor of the Cliff? Who would have thought I would miss any of it? But a loneliness had risen up in me, keen, abrupt, and disproportionate, somehow, and it kept on rising, a sense of the smallness of my life, a rapid ebbing of conviction, and I stood on that bleak lane, beneath piss-yellow lights, and bellowed, and, much to my surprise, I sounded exactly like the man whose clothes I’d taken. A window grated open, and a woman shouted back. Some people are trying to sleep. I walked on, teeth clicking in my mouth like dice in a cup, no destination in my head.

All night I kept moving, aimlessly, hopelessly, my feet adrift in a stranger’s boots. All night I oscillated between moments of elation and longer stretches of despair. The town offered neither shelter nor guidance, and by half-past three I had come full circle. The station loomed before me once again, with its forbidding brickwork and its draughty doorways. This time I walked in. The concourse was brightly lit and quite deserted. No trains were due for hours. I stood outside a photo booth and, staring into the mirror, practised the faces for which the White People were renowned — the rounded, vacant eyes, the slack, half-open mouth. I made a few attempts at their trademark grunts and mumbles. The sounds boomed around and above me, the empty concourse acting as an echo chamber.

I was about to move on when a short bald man in a uniform burst out of one of the offices and collided with me. It was entirely his fault, and yet he swore and lashed out at me, the back of his hand catching me above the ear. I stepped backwards, laughing. So this was how it was going to be! My laughter had no effect on him. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he noticed it. He had hit me without looking, without so much as checking his stride, and I’d been unable to ward off the blow. My cloak was made out of a heavy, hard-wearing material, some kind of hemp or jute, and the slits for my arms were difficult to find in a hurry. Had this been done deliberately, to keep White People powerless? I also wondered about my overall reaction. If the man had been a little less distracted, would he have thought my behaviour untypical?

I had only been living as one of the White People for a few hours, but I could already see that I was lacking certain vital qualities and skills. In shedding the superfluous, they had reduced themselves — or been reduced — to some sort of residue or essence; their so-called emptiness was actually a distillation, a form of knowledge. I wasn’t acquainted with the labyrinth of pathways and alleys through which they moved with such apparent freedom and authority, and if I didn’t find out about them soon I would become too visible, I would begin to arouse suspicion. My only option was to attach myself to a group of genuine White People, and quickly; I needed to hide among them, learn from them. If I really wanted to step outside the system, if I wanted to be rid of it entirely, I would have to forget myself — everything I was, or ever had been. I would have to enter the fold in reality that the White People inhabited. Eyes of the dullest porcelain, and a black hole for a mouth. Words all swallowed up. Head like a guest-house for the wind. That sentence of Pat Dunne’s had stayed with me, but it had never been more relevant: You have to act like them, or you don’t survive.

I didn’t sleep at all, and yet afterwards, when I thought back to that first night, I came across blank patches, like periods of unconsciousness, where I couldn’t recall what I had done. There seemed to be no clear sequence of streets, just this place, and then another place, and then another place again, as if, like a giant, I had moved by leaps and bounds. Sometimes a place occurred twice — the river, the museum — which led me to suspect that I was clinging to small pockets of familiarity. Or else I had found myself in one of the circles of hell, perhaps, condemned to repeat myself…

By first light I was walking in a poor part of town, north-east of the station. A council estate had been built out there, among the weeds and puddles. White gulls whirled, screeching, above mounds of rubbish. I had been thinking it might be wise to hide myself away before too long, but then a small boy emerged from between two walls of pebble-dash and as I watched him turn in my direction I had a flash of inspiration and fell into step with him.

‘Morning,’ I said.

The boy stopped and stared. ‘You can talk.’

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

He weighed his decision, then shook his head. ‘No.’ He squinted up at me. ‘Can you say anything else?’

I noticed an old man cycling along the road towards us. ‘Not now.’

The man pedalled into the estate, leeks and sticks of celery poking out of the wicker basket lashed to his handlebars.

The boy was called Felix — an unusual name for a melancholic, I thought, though I chose not to comment on it — and he was on his way to the market to do some shopping for his mother. I asked if I could tag along. He didn’t see why not. He took me to a muddy expanse of wasteground where a number of vans stood about with their doors flung open. Traders in cheap leather jackets bent into the interiors, unloading endless brightly coloured streams of second-hand clothing. We moved on past stalls selling electronic goods, jewellery, shoes, kitchen equipment, old war medals, and even live birds in cages, arriving eventually at an area where one could buy fresh produce. While Felix queued out the front with all the women, I scavenged round the back. I came upon a box of badly bruised pears, several of which I was able to devour before the stall owner chased me away. A few minutes later I salvaged four tomatoes from a pile that had been dumped on the ground, and then, even better, I discovered a heap of unshelled peanuts and the wrinkled tail-end of a salami. I ate half of what I had found and stored the rest in the pocket of my cloak.

When Felix appeared again, he was loaded down with bags. He wondered if I’d be willing to help him carry them. Fortified by my rudimentary breakfast, I said I would. As we trudged back along the main road, he asked whether I had a name. People called me Wig, I said. I told him how it had come about. He nodded soberly and said he thought it was a good name, under the circumstances.

As we turned into the estate where he lived, I decided it was time to ask the question that had been on my mind for much of the night. Did he have any idea where I could find others like me? His forehead crumpled, and he walked more slowly, staring at his shoes. He was giving the matter serious consideration, as I had suspected he might. Under the flyover, he said at last. The one out by the kennels. He had seen some White People there. Or try the railway line, he said. Going north. At his front door, he asked if I wanted to come in and rest. There was only his mother, he said, and she always got up late.

‘Better not.’ I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I enjoyed meeting you, though.’

‘Thanks for helping, Wig,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have done it by myself.’

‘If anybody asks about me, don’t say a word. All right?’

He tucked his lips into his mouth, then nodded.

‘It’s our secret,’ I said. ‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

I ruffled his hair and told him to look after himself, then I turned and walked back to the pavement.

When I reached the corner of the street I heard a voice call out. Glancing round, I could see a face showing above the dark wooden fencing. He must have climbed on to a dustbin. I waved to him, and he waved back, his hand moving so fast that it became a blur.

Felix.

I don’t know how I got through that day. I was so tired that I kept tripping over and though I’d stuffed bits of newspaper into the backs of my boots so they would fit a little better I already had blisters on both heels. Taking the advice I had been given, I followed the main branch of the railway line out to the north end of town — to no avail. The flyover didn’t yield anything either, only a torn, stained mattress and a circle of black ashes, the remains of someone’s fire. Every time I saw white, my heart jumped, but it was always just a man opening a newspaper or a woman hanging out a sheet, and afterwards fatigue would reclaim me. Each new false alarm took something out of me, depleting me still further.

Towards the middle of the afternoon I was on a railway bridge out near the unfinished housing estate when I happened to stop and lean on the parapet. I was only going to pause for a while before I continued on my way, but there below me, seated on a grass embankment, were three of the people I had been looking for — two men and a woman. Were they the same three that I had seen washing in the river? I had to assume so. In which case I was doubly relieved they hadn’t noticed me that night. After all, this was my chance, and it seemed unlikely I would get another. The authorities would know of my disappearance by now — Clarise would have to report me, if only to protect herself — though I had spent a good part of the day trying to keep that thought from entering my head, since it would have done nothing for my rapidly dwindling morale.

I clambered over the fence. One of the men heard me and turned to watch, his jaw revolving, as I edged side-footed down the bank. A goods train approached, its trucks loaded with sand and gravel. By the time it had gone past I was standing beside the White People, attempting to replicate the unnatural complacency I saw on their faces. In front of them, on a sheet of wrinkled brown paper, they had laid out a few chunks of white bread and a fatty cooked meat that might have been pork. Both the men were still eating. I took some peanuts out of my pocket and placed them on the paper, then I added a couple of tomatoes. One of the men, the dark one, looked up and nodded. I nodded back. The other man appeared to smile at me, though it could have been wind. He had pale eyebrows, and cheeks that looked grazed. The inside of his mouth seemed raw too, with chipped teeth and swollen gums, and he chewed gingerly, wincing as he did so. The woman opened one of the peanuts and ate the contents, then she thumped the ground beside her with the flat of her hand. I sat down next to her. She nodded and stared out over the railway line, her eyes misting over. A humming sound came out of her, a series of monotonous notes that didn’t resemble any tune I’d ever heard. After a while she reached for a chunk of bread and pushed it into my hand. I took it from her and bit into it. It shattered between my teeth. Using saliva, I turned the fragments into a kind of paste, then swallowed hard and got it down. It must have been days old. I watched as the woman sorted through the meat, flicking it this way and that with the backs of her fingers. In the end she chose a piece that was mostly fat and handed it to me. Warts clustered on her knuckles, and the lines of her hands were inlaid with dirt, but I was past caring. I had eaten nothing since my foraging behind the market stalls just after dawn. As I chewed on the pork fat I transferred my gaze to the man sitting furthest from me. With his knotted black beard and his weather-beaten skin, he had the air of a prophet who had just walked out of the wilderness. His eyes were strangely matt and dusty-looking, as though, like blueberries or grapes, they were covered with a kind of bloom. I could see how the lost or the gullible might want to follow somebody like him.

Once they had finished eating, the woman wrapped the remainder of the food in the brown paper and tucked it out of sight beneath her clothes, then they set off along the embankment. I went with them. They didn’t appear to find my attachment to them at all unusual or suspicious. The weather was still and grey, oddly dreamy and exhausting. I had the feeling time had been suspended. Or perhaps it was place that seemed different, as if I were being shown things through a series of artfully positioned mirrors, as if the world, while looking just the same, were actually reflected, diluted, a distant cousin of itself. Once, I closed my eyes, and I would have lost my footing and gone tumbling towards the railway line had the bearded man not seized my arm at the crucial moment. I nodded, grunted. He let go of my arm and then moved on. Curiously, I felt the incident had lent me a certain credibility.

Towards evening we took refuge in a warehouse that backed on to the railway. On the top floor, in the corner, were three primitive beds built out of whatever came to hand — cardboard, polystyrene, scraps of rag and plastic. I watched my companions prepare themselves for sleep, two of them curling up on their sides. The man with the sore mouth lay on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, as though clutching a valuable possession. Their breathing slowed and deepened. I needed sleep too, more than anything, but first I had to make myself a bed. I walked down to the far end of the warehouse and started to hunt around for suitable materials. The building creaked gently as the light faded. Pigeons murmured on window-ledges.

That night a harsh, shallow panting woke me. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that the woman was sitting on top of one of the men. They were both still dressed. She had her hands laid flat on the man’s chest, and her head was thrown right back. Light caught on her teeth. It was the bearded man who was underneath her, the one I thought of as the prophet.

A train let out a long, mournful whistle.

I turned over and went back to sleep.

For the next few days we kept moving, sometimes basing ourselves in the outskirts of Iron Vale, sometimes traversing the town centre, but always using routes that meant we passed virtually unnoticed. I had found some old bandages in a rubbish bin behind the hospital and bound my feet in them, which made walking easier, and my blisters slowly hardened and healed. I was becoming used to the cloak too, managing the armholes with greater dexterity, and tripping far less often. There were times when I felt I was back in my childhood, dressed up like a vampire in my father’s cast-off gown … We generally slept at dawn, and then again in the afternoon, and never for more than four or five hours at a stretch. I gave myself up to their rhythms as one might surrender to an ocean’s currents. In a sense, I was deferring to their experience. After all, it was their life I was living, not mine. At first I assumed the constant movement was dictated by the search for food and shelter. Later, though, I realised it served an end in itself. If they had become nomadic, it was because they didn’t want their presence to weigh too heavily on any one section of the population. They were acting out a simple desire for anonymity and peace.

One evening we camped by the river, underneath a bridge. I had caught a chill that day, the first of many. As I sat close to the fire, trying to warm myself, the bearded man took hold of my wrist. He was peering at my watch. When I undid the strap and handed the watch to him, he placed it on the ground and reached for a piece of brick that lay near by. He carefully tapped the brick against the face until the glass disc shattered, then he tossed the brick to one side and bent over the watch, so close that his beard folded in the dirt. One by one, he began to pick out the tiny fragments of glass. He might have been removing lice from the head of his own child. His shadow leapt and ducked on the concrete stanchion behind him. Once all the glass was gone, he snapped off the two hands and threw them over his shoulder into the dark. He examined the watch again, then nodded and passed it back to me. The whole operation had been conducted with such serious intent and absolute precision that I had no choice, I felt, but to strap the watch on to my wrist again, as if it had just been mended. Later, as I curled up by the fire and closed my eyes, I saw the episode as an initiation ceremony. From now on I would be wearing a watch that didn’t have any hands. I had joined a people for whom time had no relevance at all. Even they appeared to be aware of that.

On the fourth evening, after our usual sleep, we set out along the east bank of the river, heading in a southerly direction, and I sensed a different mood, nothing so definite as a purpose, just the feeling that there had been a shift of some sort, a change of gear. After a while we arrived at an allotment, and my companions began to gather vegetables which they stored in the pockets of their cloaks. I did the same. The White People had no concept of property or ownership. If the man whose clothes I’d taken had been upset, it wasn’t because he thought the clothes belonged to him, but because he didn’t recognise what he’d been given in return. He’d been reacting not to loss but to the unknown. There were occasions, I suppose, when White People would be caught. They’d be accused of theft, but the word would have no meaning for them, nor would punishing them have much effect. Punishment only works if its relationship to the offence is clear. That night, though, we got away with it. A scarecrow watched us, its arms stretched wide as if to acknowledge its ineptitude, its face even blanker and more ghostly than our own. When we had filled our pockets, we moved through a gap in the hedge and on across the countryside.

I wondered whether they would ever realise I was an impostor. Surely, at some point, I told myself, their sixth sense would let them know. But then it occurred to me that they might actually be incapable of suspicion. To be suspicious, one needs a context or a precedent, and the White People had no understanding of either. The past meant nothing to them, and without that kind of framework suspicion simply couldn’t arise. Like children who had never grown up, the White People were sealed in an eternal condition of trust. As they floated ahead of me in the half-light, I was struck once again by their complacency, their good nature. They seemed so affable, so unruffled, so oddly content with their lot — and this despite the way society often mistreated them. They did not have an aggressive bone in their bodies. Luckily, they had learned to organise themselves into groups, responding to some deep-rooted instinct that told them there was safety in numbers. Could that be why they had accepted me so readily, why they had not, as Fernandez would have put it, seen through me? Because I’d made them stronger? We walked on in single file, the night wind pushing against our faces, and although I thought of Clarise and her boys from time to time I was glad to be leaving Iron Vale at last.

By my calculations we had been travelling for about a week when we came down out of the hills on to a plain, mist afloat in the dark fields, the bare trees loud with crows and magpies. Before too long, I saw signs informing us that the border lay just a short distance ahead, but we hurried on, unfaltering, the wet grass drenching the hems of our cloaks. We appeared to be about to cross into the Yellow Quarter, and at a point some eighty or ninety miles north of the place where I had attacked the guard. I had already been to the Yellow Quarter once, and I had no desire to repeat the experience, but I couldn’t part company with the White People. They were my passport, my camouflage; it would be a while before I had the confidence to strike out on my own. An expedition into choleric territory had only one advantage that I could think of: nobody would be looking for me there — or, if they were, then they’d be looking for a civil servant in a suit, and I had shed that version of myself whole lifetimes ago.

As we drew closer, it began to rain. I remembered my trip with Dunne and Whittle, and how the Yellow Quarter’s notorious commercialism had spilled over into the strip of sanguine land adjacent to the wall. There was none of that here. A community had grown up around the checkpoint, but there were no souvenir shops, no theme hotels. I saw an off-licence, a cut-price supermarket and a few drab streets of terraced housing, net curtains in all the downstairs windows. Some of the kerbstones had been painted a defiant patriotic shade of green.

The guard on duty waved us through without even bothering to glance up. Though I knew he must have seen us coming, I was disappointed all the same. I had wanted him to look deep into my eyes and be deceived by their apparent emptiness. One wall lay behind us, but a second loomed a hundred yards away, its concrete scarred and pitted like the back of an ancient whale. Head bent against the rain, which was falling more heavily now, I followed my companions across the mud of no man’s land. A ditch ran down the middle, with strips of sand on either side. There were searchlights on metal poles and rolls of razor wire. It was the first time I had crossed a border illegally. Actually crossed it. My cloak had soaked right through, weighing me down, and it was tiring just to walk. Up ahead, I saw a long, low shack raised up on breeze-blocks. This would be a guardhouse for Yellow Quarter personnel. I doubted we would have such an easy time of it with them.

When we drew level with the shack, the door swung open, just as I had feared, and an armed guard motioned us inside. We climbed into a large rectangular room that had a floor of mustard-coloured lino. Fluorescent tubes fizzed on the ceiling. A row of cubicles had been built against one wall. This was where the body searches would be conducted. At the far end of the room hung a detailed map of the entire region, the border marked by a wide green-and-yellow stripe criss-crossed with black. A grey metal desk stood near by, cluttered with computers, faxes and phones. It was hot in the room. The air smelled of sweat and damp cloth.

The guard who had let us in remained by the door. Three more guards stood in a tight cluster with their backs to us. They broke apart and turned towards us, muttering and cursing. They had been checking the lottery results, it seemed, and none of them had won. The guard holding the newspaper rolled it into a cylinder and swatted the palm of his hand with it.

We stood in the centre of the room while they fanned out in front of us, each guard approaching from a slightly different direction, as though they were each preoccupied by a slightly different aspect of our appearance. Their behaviour struck me as both patronising and sardonic. They were playing on the fact that interest was something we weren’t used to and didn’t deserve, and in doing so they were establishing their own superior status as a species. They wore crisp, pressed uniforms, the dark-green fabric trimmed with bright-yellow epaulettes, which crouched on their shoulders like tropical spiders. Guns lolled in polished leather holsters, truncheons swung seductively at hip-level. Although I had only been with the White People for a short time, I was overwhelmed by how perfect, how immaculate, the guards looked. I don’t think I could have spoken, even if I’d wanted to.

The one with the rolled-up newspaper seemed in artificially high spirits, so much so that I wondered whether he was on amphetamines. He darted towards the man with the sore mouth and made as if to strike. The man ducked, hands up about his ears, and then let out a moan. One of the other guards mimicked him — the ducking, then the moan. His colleague with the paper laughed out loud and wheeled away, his eyes glancing off the rest of us.

Hanging my head, I saw that water from my cloak had collected in a dark pool around my feet. As I watched, it found a gradient in the floor and crept away from me in one thin stream.

‘Hello. Somebody’s pissed himself.’

The rolled-up newspaper cannoned into the side of my head. I hadn’t even seen it coming. My right ear buzzed. The man standing next to me, the bearded man, was told to get down on all fours and drink. I watched as he knelt in front of me and tried to lick the water off the floor.

‘One of them’s a woman.’

Silence fell so emphatically that I could hear the rain falling on the roof, a beautiful and inappropriate sound, like a herd of wild horses galloping across open country. All three guards had gathered round the woman. She was staring into the middle distance. Maybe she thought she could hear horses too. Until that moment I had somehow assumed she was in her late-thirties or early-forties, but now, in the glare of the guardhouse, I saw she was probably no more than twenty-five.

The guards began to squeeze the woman’s breasts, which made her writhe and squeal, and only encouraged them to go further. Two of them held her by the arms while a third started rubbing between her legs. The man with the sore mouth had wandered over to the window, and he was staring through it at a section of the wall. I looked down at the bearded man, still kneeling at my feet. Though he returned my gaze, his veiled eyes showed nothing.

As the woman squirmed, something fell from beneath her cloak and rolled across the floor. It was a large carrot. The guard with the newspaper picked it up. ‘Fuck me. She’s got her own vibrator.’ He tossed the carrot to one of his colleagues. ‘You know what to do.’ The guards dragged the woman over to the desk. Shoving the phones and faxes to one side, they pushed her on to her back and held her down. They lifted the cloak over her head, then forced her legs wide open and ripped her sodden underclothes apart. Her thighs were red and chapped. As I turned away, the woman let out the most peculiar noise, a kind of long, shuddering sigh.

‘Think she’s enjoying it?’

‘Of course she is. Just look at her.’

I hadn’t wanted to watch, but once or twice I glanced in that direction, and I realised that I was smiling. It could only be nervousness, I thought, or fear.

The guard with the paper noticed and moved towards me. ‘Like it, do we?’ He brought his face so close to mine that I could smell the coffee, black and bitter, on his breath.

I grinned like the idiot I was supposed to be.

He reached up with one hand and pushed his fingers into my mouth. ‘Nice teeth.’ His tongue slipped out, blind and fat and glistening. He licked my lips and, sighing languorously, turned his eyes up to the ceiling. Then he danced backwards, burst out laughing. ‘Where’s that carrot?’

A shrill ringing cut into the silence.

One of the guards let go of the woman and picked up a phone. ‘Yes?’ He listened for a second or two, then shouted across the room. ‘Lieutenant, it’s for you.’

The guard leaned close to me again. ‘It’s for me.’ He lifted both his eyebrows twice, quickly, and swung away. Shaking now, I watched him take the call. After a while, he wrapped his free hand over the receiver and spoke to his two colleagues in a brisk, clipped voice I hadn’t heard until that moment. ‘Get rid of them.’

We were pushed out of the guardhouse and down the steps, the door slamming behind us. Seconds later, it opened again, and something flew in a brief bright arc over our heads. I watched the woman retrieve the carrot, wipe it clean and return it to a hidden pocket beneath her clothes. She saw me looking and nodded, as if to let me know that what she was doing was only right and proper. Still trembling, I stared at the ground. The rain had eased just when I wanted it to come down harder than ever. I wanted to feel the water crashing against my skull. I wanted to be able to lift my face up to the sky and have the rain wash off every trace of that guard’s tongue.

I remembered Frank Bland talking about the borders that had been built on negative ley lines — black streams, he had called them — and how the trees and plants in those areas sometimes displayed warped or stunted growth. If people crossed such a border, he had claimed, their health could be adversely affected. If people worked there, though, day in, day out, then surely the effects would be that much more pronounced. Did Frank’s theory explain the scene I’d witnessed in the guard-house? Or was it our freedom that incensed them so? Yes, we were outcasts and rejects, but at the same time we could go wherever we pleased; moreover, in being cut loose from society, we had been liberated from the pressures and responsibilities of daily life. Perhaps, at some deep level, people were envious of that. Hence all the persecution … As I stood there wondering, I felt a surge of malignant energy in the air around me and I glanced at my companions to see if they had noticed, but their faces looked the way they always looked — complacent, unaware.

The bearded man had already moved beyond the barrier into the Yellow Quarter, and the other two were following behind. I set off after them. They didn’t appear especially troubled by their ordeal. Even the woman seemed quite unconcerned. Was that because they had become accustomed to abuse? Had they, in some obscure sense, prepared themselves, conscious that it was the Yellow Quarter they would be dealing with? Or were they simply incapable of feeling? And, if so, had they been incapable of feeling all along? Was that part of what made them who they were? Or had they gradually been rendered numb by the endless horrors to which they had been subjected? I looked at the man walking ahead of me, his teeth and gums so ravaged that it often hurt him to eat or drink. On those days, the woman would chew up food for him and spit the pulp into his mouth, like a bird feeding her young. I shuddered to think how he might have come by such injuries. The hardest part of all, however, was not having a voice. I couldn’t ask them questions. I could express no sympathy. What did they think — if anything? I would never know.

For the rest of that day we moved with real urgency, and I wondered whether there might not, after all, be some desire on the part of my companions to put distance between themselves and what had happened at the border. At the same time it implied a knowledge of the territory. We had entered a place where one did all one could to avoid confrontation. To convey a sense of purpose, even to look as though one had a destination in mind, was to engage in a form of self-defence.

We had crossed into the northern reaches of the Yellow Quarter, which was less densely populated, but we still couldn’t seem to get away from the roads, at least not to begin with. We walked on grass verges, in ditches, along hard shoulders, and the traffic hissed past us, endless traffic. People would blast their horns at us, or wind their windows down and jeer, and once a can of beer came cartwheeling through the air and struck the bearded man on the point of his elbow. After that, he held his arm across his chest, but he wore the same expression as before, his chin lifted upwards and a little to one side, his dusty-looking eyes unfocused, as if he was listening to distant music.

By late afternoon we were approaching the outskirts of a city, the main road lined with car showrooms, designer-clothing outlets and fast-food restaurants. Our shadows appeared on the pavement before us like dark predictions. I looked over my shoulder. The sun had dropped out of a mass of shabby cloud, giving off an orange light that seemed unnatural, diseased. It was time to sleep. We started searching the yards and alleys behind the shops for bedding. We found several sheets of plastic in a skip and shook off the rainwater, then we carried them into the corner of a car-park and settled in the long grass up against a wire-mesh fence. I listened to the lorries pulling in — the clash of gears, the sneeze of brakes — and heard the drivers shouting at each other, trading insults and dirty jokes.

Over the past few days, as we journeyed south-east across the moors of the Green Quarter, then west towards the border, I had been observing my companions and I had begun to form a theory. I had noticed certain sounds recurring, and made a point of recording how and when they were used. Created almost exclusively from consonants, they had an abrupt, glottal character. The sound ‘Ng’, for instance, was used in relation to the man with the sore mouth, and I wondered if this might not be a name the White People had given him. Once I’d had that idea, I turned my attention to the bearded man and quickly discovered a sound that was applied to him, a sound best represented by the word ‘Ob’. Likewise, ‘Lm’ was often employed around the woman, its comparative softness a subtle, almost poignant acknowledgement of her gender. Since crossing the border that afternoon, I had started using these curious sounds myself, tentatively at first, but then with increasing confidence, and I was usually rewarded with a grunt or a glance or a jerk of the head. Once, in response to my use of the word ‘Lm’, which I pronounced Lum, the woman came out with something that sounded like ‘Gsh’. Later, the bearded man used the same sound when looking in my direction. Could it be that I had a White name now?

The woman, Lum, was leaning over me, shaking my shoulder. It didn’t seem possible that I had slept, and yet the sky behind her head had the murky burnt-orange glow of night. I sat up and looked past her. The other two were already awake and on their feet, Neg urinating through the wire-mesh fence.

To the north of the city we stumbled into an area of heavy industry. The landscape was strewn with the tangled paste jewellery of chemical plants. All those buildings ticking, humming, breathing. All those strings of pearly lights. And white smoke blossoming in tall chimneys, like stems of night-scented stock. Beauty of a sort, but poisonous. We didn’t cover the miles with our usual efficiency. We kept tripping on debris piled up at the edge of the road, then Lum fell into a narrow culvert and damaged her leg, and we had to take turns supporting her. That slowed us even more. We slept again at dawn, as always.

The next night we left the road for an unpaved track. As we came over a rise, I heard a strange, inhuman squabbling, and there before us lay an enormous rubbish dump with hundreds of gulls wheeling and swooping, fighting over scraps. We forced an opening in the corrugated-iron fence and began to circle the dump in a clockwise direction. On the far side, out of sight of the entrance, a bonfire had been lit, its flames sending handfuls of red sparks into the air. The woman murmured and, looking away to my left, I saw a group of pale figures emerging from a wood. By the time we reached the fire, there must have been thirty of us. We had gathered in the same place, at more or less the same time, and yet, so far as I could tell, nothing had been arranged or discussed. There had been no communication — at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. It seemed like evidence of the telepathic powers that I had always been so sceptical about.

They sat themselves down all round the fire, and I sat with them. They nodded, muttered, scratched themselves. They prodded at the fire with bits of stick. In the side of the dump, which lifted above us like a tattered cliff-face, pieces of silver foil winked and glittered. A litre bottle was passed from hand to hand. The fumes that rose from the neck smelled floral, but the taste reminded me of gin, and I imagined for a moment that I was back in Clarise Tucker’s front room, sampling one of Starling’s deadly new concoctions. Between random bursts of animation, when the White People would either grunt or moan, a silence would fall during which they stared into the fire, apparently lost in thought. I didn’t understand what they were up to. It was like an assembly, a convocation, but of the most eccentric kind. Though our numbers had swelled, I felt more exposed, more of an outsider, and I found a stick of my own and stirred the embers in an attempt to disguise my growing sense of awkwardness.

And then, in a flash, I had the answer. They were sending pictures to each other in their heads. They were showing them to each other as you might show photographs, except they were doing it telepathically. How did I know this? Partly it was intuition. But also, if I concentrated hard enough, if I blocked out the rest of the world, I seemed to see images that I could not explain. They were only fragments — a burning house, a frozen lake, a naked man sat backwards on a horse — but they came from somewhere quite outside my own experience. It was another form of communication, a different language altogether, and yet, given time, I felt I could become fluent. Then, perhaps, I would receive whole sequences of images. Meanwhile, I was a mere novice, with no real contribution to make. I was the person who nods and grins, even though he hasn’t got the joke.

They stayed awake all night, only dozing off when the first blush of colour appeared in the eastern sky. In the middle of the day we moved on, travelling due north. I counted thirty-four of us. There were no children. Was that a coincidence, or was it true what I had heard, that White People were sterile? Certainly all the ones I had come across had been born either before or possibly during the Rearrangement, which lent weight to the view that they were the fall-out from that radical exercise in social engineering. The Rearrangement had been a kind of controlled explosion, sending a white-hot flash through the heads of everybody living in the country at the time. The vast majority had recovered, adapted, tried to make it work in their favour. But there were some who had been less fortunate. Their minds had been scorched; their thoughts had turned to cinders. That, at least, was the general consensus. Although I could see a certain logic in the sterility argument — how could life be created by people who were not themselves, supposedly, alive? — it also seemed rather too convenient, a piece of sophistry or wishful thinking on the part of those for whom the White People were an embarrassment. For if fertility had been destroyed, along with language and character, then the White People would die out. They would no longer be able to act as reminders of the system’s cruelties and its shortcomings. There would be no exceptions to the rule.

That afternoon, as I watched Neg inspect a cracked wingmirror that he had picked up at the dump, I realised I had seen his face before. Not literally, of course. But I remembered that Jones had had the same expression, or lack of it, when I found him standing on one leg in that gloomy passageway. Jones had been a White Person before anybody even knew White People existed. He would have to have been one of the first. If Jones was still alive, he would probably be living among the White People, just as I was. How strange to think that I could run into him at any moment!

After walking for several hours with a strong wind at our backs, it began to look as though we were making for a blighted area known as the Wanings. The provincial capital was Pyrexia, a city that manufactured chlorine, plastics and petrochemicals. The Yellow Quarter’s leadership had recently declared the Wanings to be ungovernable. I had heard stories of atrocities from various relocation officers, though none of them ever claimed to have actually set foot in the region.

By the middle of the fourth day we had reached a high, barren moor. The wind had died down, and the sky, which was overcast, seemed suspended just above our heads. If you touched the clouds they would be soft, I thought, like the breast of a bird. On we went, still heading north. Our cloaks whispered across the heather.

In the late afternoon we hauled a dead sheep out of a disused mineshaft. Luckily, it hadn’t started rotting yet, and we roasted the carcass over a peat fire. Our bellies full, we slept for longer than usual. It was almost light before we set off again.

Although we tended to keep to the high ground, out of sight of human habitation, we would sometimes climb down to a road and look for animals that had been run over. We found plenty of rabbits and even, once or twice, a pheasant. We carried a supply of stale bread and raw vegetables with us, but the roads became, for a while at least, our chief source of food.

We had no choice but to sleep in the open. Every six or seven hours we would huddle down, packing ourselves tightly together, like children playing sardines.

Time began to blur.

Once, we had to cross an eight-lane motorway. I heard it long before I saw it, a sustained but airy roar that I mistook for a waterfall. A man was hit by a truck that day. I watched his body spin, then crumple. He was dead when I reached him, one side of his head grazed and bloody, his spine smashed, the pulse in his neck nowhere to be found. The truck hadn’t even slowed down. We laid him on his back on the hard shoulder. Curiously, his hands were still moving, folding inwards, as if he wanted to touch the inside of his wrists. A woman tried to arrange blades of grass across his face, but the slipstream from the traffic kept disturbing them. In the end we had to use a piece of shredded tyre instead.

Beyond the motorway the land turned bleaker still. Only the wind and the clumps of blackened heather and the shifting pale-yellow grasses. The further north we went, the more use we seemed to be making of the daylight hours; we had removed ourselves from society to such an extent that we no longer needed to hide. Also, there were the mineshafts, which would pose a threat if we were travelling at night. And I had seen notices warning of unexploded ammunition. At some point in the past the area must have been used as a firing-range.

I suppose we must have been in the Yellow Quarter for about ten days when we scaled a stony ridge and then came to a halt, a wide shallow valley sprawling before us. A single road ran across the land from north to south. I couldn’t imagine who it might be for. The military, perhaps. To the west of the road lay a stretch of ground that seemed to have been dug up or turned over, and a crowd of White People had gathered there. While it looked as though we might have reached our destination at last, I couldn’t see anything in this desolate place to justify the long and perilous journey we had just undertaken.

We began our descent, and before too long we were on the valley floor ourselves. The White People were not in the habit of exchanging greetings. There was no embracing, for instance, no physical contact. They stood in front of each other or beside each other in a muted show of acknowledgement, or else they circled one another with their eyes lowered and their hands fidgeting among the folds of their cloaks, as if overwhelmed by a sudden attack of nerves. I could never tell whether they were renewing their acquaintance or meeting for the first time.

I walked over to the muddy area I had seen from the ridge. It was the rough size and shape of a swimming-pool. Tyre tracks led from the road to one of the longer sides. At the far end, I saw a man on his knees. I moved towards him, curious, but not wanting to intrude. Every now and then he would lean forwards and lay his cheek tenderly against the earth. When I reached him, I nodded and murmured, an all-purpose mode of conduct that I had picked up from my three companions. The man ignored me. Staring out over the land, I thought I understood. Something had happened here.

I returned to the main group. Lum and Neg had built a small fire by the roadside. Potatoes nestled among the embers. I squatted down and hunted through my pockets, bringing out apples and red peppers that I had found at the back of a village supermarket several days before. I also produced a few muddy beetroot, stolen from someone’s kitchen garden. Lum placed the peppers round the fringes of the fire so they would sear. Neg bit gingerly into one of the apples. As for Ob, he was gazing into the distance with his usual mystical intensity.

Most of the White People had set up camp by now. Some even owned billy cans in which they were heating water or broth. The curved shape of the valley amplified our murmurs. Once we had eaten, though, a hush settled over us, a silence that had the patient, reverential quality of a vigil. The air itself appeared to have tightened as if, like a crisp new sheet, it had been snapped out over the mattress of the earth. I wrapped my cloak around me and lay down.

When I woke it was dusk, and our fire had burned low, the mound of grey ash delicately embroidered with scarlet threads. As I tried to rub some feeling back into my legs, I looked up and saw a full moon balanced on the ridge above me, a moon so huge that I imagined for a moment that both the land and all the life in it had shrunk. The colour, too, astounded me. A lavish, creamy pale-gold, it had the gleam of antique satin or newly minted coin. Glancing round me, I saw that people were rising to their feet as if they had just received a signal.

I watched them move towards the rectangle of earth. Arranging themselves around the edge, they started taking off their clothes. I had no choice but to join them and do the same. Once undressed, we stepped out on to mud that had a particular coldness of its own — far colder, somehow, than the grass, far colder even than the air. Our flesh gave off the pale, almost transparent glimmer of a puddle when it freezes. The people nearest me were scooping up the mud and plastering their bodies with it, their faces too. As I bent down, a light seemed to flare inside my head, and I saw a lorry reversing towards a wide, deep trench. Its tail-lights glowed, then faded. Glowed again. Then the back end lifted on hydraulic rods, and the load began to spill … All this I received in a split-second, then it went dark again, and there was only my bare arm reaching out and the mud below, and the hairs rose on my skin, but not with cold.

I started covering myself, then stopped, aware of a sound coming from the people gathered round me. They were calling out, not to each other, but to some larger thing, or even to the void, perhaps, their voices tentative, enquiring. Slowly the volume grew, the voices becoming less distinctly individual, less obviously human. I thought of a swarm of bees, a reverberation that was partly music, partly noise, and I found that I had been caught up in it and that my voice had merged with theirs. I was ridding myself of burdens I had been carrying for years — the collusion, the deceit, the lies I had told to others, and to myself as well; everything was being dumped on this rectangle of ground, and I could leave it here, I could leave the whole lot here. The sound made earth and air vibrate, and that was all we were just then, a single voice raised against the elements, a resonance, a kind of harmony.

When I woke the next morning, I didn’t know what to believe. Were the images I had seen the product of my own fevered imagination? Or could it be that I was beginning to receive the pictures that the others were receiving? Was I gradually gaining access to their peculiar, unspoken language? If my vision of the night before could be relied upon, it looked as if White People had been slaughtered in their hundreds and then buried here. I hadn’t actually seen the bodies tumbling out of the truck, but somehow I knew that that was what had taken place. We were camped on the edge of a mass grave. In covering themselves with mud, the White People had been remembering their dead, and the chilling, unearthly music had been both requiem and homage. If that was true, they were more conscious of the past than people said.

Another possibility occurred to me. Though I had been living among the White People, I hadn’t actually become one, and that had given me the license to create my own mythical version of their lot, which wasn’t something they were necessarily capable of doing themselves. After all, if my own feeling of release was anything to go by, then the removal of their white clothes and the smearing of themselves with mud might simply have been their way of ridding themselves of the abuses to which they had been exposed, a ritual that enabled them to go on living as they did — from hand to mouth, from pillar to post. When the singing came to an end, we had walked down to a brook that ran between two banks of heather. Stepping into the ice-cold water, we had washed off the mud, then put our cloaks and boots back on, and I remembered how clean I had felt, how light, how free.

As I packed up our few remaining provisions and scattered the last embers of the fire, I decided that it didn’t much matter where the truth lay. They could have been reliving the agony of those who’d gone before or shedding pain they had themselves endured. The ritual lent itself to a number of interpretations. In the end it seemed likely that it was part of a process of purification and renewal. It was also part of their own unique culture, which was relentless in what it required of them. To suffer. To continue.

Just as they didn’t greet one another, so the White People didn’t say goodbye. There was no leave-taking, not even so much as a backwards glance, only a gradual dispersal, a miniature diaspora. Along with Ob, Neg, and Lum, I joined a group of about twenty others, setting off in a north-westerly direction that would bring us, sooner or later, to the sea. Lying a few miles offshore were several holy islands, most of which belonged to the phlegmatics. Some distance further north, the border with the Green Quarter came curving round to meet the coast. I wondered which of these destinations the group had in mind.

The land quickly became harder to negotiate, the fells much higher and topped with splintered crags, the woods thornier, more dense. Though deserted, the moors had had their dangers, but the country we entered that day felt all the more hazardous for being populated. As we passed through a village during the afternoon we were pelted with manure and bits of coal by a horde of vicious, foul-mouthed children, and then a bucket of slops was tipped from an upstairs window. We suffered cuts and bruises, nothing more serious than that, but I still thought we should be circling places like these, especially since the terrain now offered so many opportunities for concealment — or else we should hurry through on light feet, while everybody slept. I had no say in the matter, though. There didn’t seem to be any decision-making as such. There was only a momentum, which was neither questioned nor explained.

Some miles beyond the village, the path we were following began to loop back on itself as it coiled down into a gorge. Far below, I heard the breathy race of water. Growing sideways out of walls of rock were trees whose branches had the look of flayed limbs, the flesh stripped away, the sinews and tendons all exposed. From somewhere to the south came a muffled roll of thunder. On reaching the floor of the valley, we crossed a stretch of spongy turf to the edge of a river, its waters running thin and green across great beds of pale stones. I watched as my companions settled on the ground. Some dozed off almost immediately. It was strange how their expressions never altered, their faces as blank when conscious as they were in repose. Lum sat on a bank below me, studying the crooked gash on the front of her calf. The wound was black with dried blood, but I knew it to be free of infection; I had cleaned it myself only a day or two before. We exchanged a glance. When I looked into her eyes I was aware of neither emotion nor intelligence. My gaze could find no purchase. Instead, it travelled on into a kind of dizzying infinity.

I lay on my side, facing the river. The cold seeped up into my hip. I turned over, on to my back. These days I could sleep almost anywhere; I could even sleep if I was shivering. Once it was dark, Lum came and lowered herself on to me. Opening my underpants, she coaxed me into her. She began to move up and down, slowly at first, then faster, more rhythmically, her hands spread on my chest, her teeth clamped on her bottom lip. Afterwards she fell asleep beside me. Her breath smelled of onions and sour milk. Though I was tired, the rush of water kept me awake, and when we struck camp several hours later I didn’t feel as if I had slept at all.

It seemed we had chosen to ignore the one road that led through the region, and for once I approved: we were in the heart of the Wanings, and it paid to be cautious. Still, there were repercussions. One of our number was attacked by a feral cat, which tore at his throat and hands. We bound his lacerated flesh as best we could, with strips of cloth and crushed dock leaves. Later, we found our way blocked by a rock-fall, and we were forced to retrace our steps. With its steep climbs and its sheer drops, the land itself appeared to be against us. The injured man wouldn’t stop whimpering. A few more miles of this, I kept telling myself. Just a few more miles.

Towards dawn we filed down a farm track into a clearing. I saw no dwelling of any kind, only a barn and a wrecked white car. The wheels had been removed, and the sockets that once held its headlights were empty. I walked over to where Ob stood. He was staring at the barn door. A rat had been nailed to the wood in a manner that made me think of crucifixion. I heard a steady crashing noise behind me and turned quickly, thinking people were coming through the undergrowth, but it was just the rain. A few of us took refuge in the barn. There was nothing much inside, only straw bales piled against one wall and some broken tools. The rain drew a heavy curtain over the doorway. I made a bed out of several old sacks and tried to sleep. The world beyond the barn was murky, indistinct.

Only seconds later, it seemed, I woke to see men standing in the entrance. Shotguns lounged in the crooks of their elbows. Their hat-brims dripped. Without saying a word, they hoisted their rifles and fired over our heads, and the air filled with sawdust, feathers and straw. I managed to roll sideways and duck through a gap in the wall where a board had come loose. Outside, I found Neg and Ob. As the three of us plunged back into the rain-soaked trees, Lum rose up out of the bracken where she’d been hiding. We moved deeper into the woods. All sounds came to me through a loud, insistent buzzing. It was hours before I could hear properly.

We didn’t sleep again that day. Though we were able to link up with some other members of our group, there were, ominously, fewer of us than before. For the first time I sensed a loss of heart. Our supplies were running short. Every time our clothes dried on us, the clouds would open, drenching us in seconds. We could find neither food nor shelter. We continued to move in a north-westerly direction, but there was a drifting quality about our progress that did nothing to reassure me.

In the afternoon the clouds thinned to the west, and the sun slanted through at a low angle, its white light laying the landscape bare. The rest of the sky hung above us, a weighty, marbled grey. It seemed likely that the rain would sweep down again at any moment. As we rounded a bend, with farm buildings on our left and dark woods bristling to our right, a kind of stockade showed about half a mile ahead, the top as jagged as newspaper torn against the grain. What could it be for? Why block a thoroughfare like that? Drawing closer, I lifted a hand to shade my eyes. In the pale glare of the sun the structure stirred and shifted, and now, at last, I could see what it was, not a stockade at all, not a barrier, but a line of people stretched across the road. A cry went up. I turned around. Neg stood motionless, his eyes pinned open, his skin congealed. The sound he was making was like no sound I had ever heard before, no consonants this time, just a note, soft and yet high-pitched, monotonous, and I was suddenly aware of my spine, the entire length of it, like something hard and cold inserted into me against my will.

I started running. Then we were all running, fifteen or twenty of us, our cloaks flapping round our legs. The road offered no hiding place, no protection. We made for the woods instead. A grass track led off to the right, trees closing overhead. We stumbled, fell. We scrambled to our feet. We were ungainly, almost comical, like a flock of birds that has forgotten how to fly.

Turning, I saw Neg behind me. His mouth gaped open, a black hole ringed by mangled gums and stumps. He had been beaten once before, somewhere down south. I knew that now. They had threaded his teeth into a necklace and hung it, bleeding, round his neck. His own teeth. They’d made earrings too. He had showed them to me in a picture, flashed from his head into mine. I watched him run. He seemed to be leaning backwards, both hands clawing at the air as if it were in his way. Beneath his clothes, his breasts and belly hurled themselves about. He was carrying too much fat. One look at him, and you knew he was done for.

They’d been waiting for us. Dusk hadn’t fallen yet, and us in our white cloaks. A cruel colour, white. No mercy in it. We had passed through a village only minutes earlier, its doors and windows shut. Eyes to keyholes, though. Curtains twitching. Then a crowd of figures looming, the winter sun behind them. Men mostly, though I saw women too. And children. Heads shaved on account of lice. Or was it the custom in these parts, to shave the heads of children? They must have been told of our approach. They had weapons. The kind of things you end up with when you don’t have too much time. A bicycle chain, a tin of paraffin. A scythe.

Once, I could have reasoned with them, perhaps. I had the words back then, the charm. Not any more. Only noises issued from me now. I could do a cow in labour, rain on leaves. I could do a foot sinking into a bog. None of that would be much use. But even if I’d talked fluently, I doubt they would have listened. They’d worked themselves up to something, and they weren’t about to be denied.

I looked for Neg again. He’d fallen back. I heard him calling me — Gsh? Gsh! — but I faced forwards and ran faster. Trees jumped out at me. Trunks moist and black as if they had risen from a swamp, roots like tentacles. My breath burned in my throat. Soon, please God, it would be dark.

In my veins my blood was chasing its own tail.

A shriek came from somewhere, and I turned. They had him now. I heard them laughing as they ripped his clothes with vicious downward movements. In the half-light his naked body had the texture of a mushroom. The delicate, creamy underside — the stalk. They bound his wrists behind him with fencing wire, his elbows too, then they stood back. His eyes were closed, and his feet stamped up and down in the mud, but in slow-motion, almost tenderly, as though he was trampling ripe grapes. Making wine. They unleashed one of their hunting dogs, a blunt-looking thing, all jaws and shoulders. It tore at his genitals, and then, when he pivoted in agony, his buttocks, then his genitals again.

It’s hard to run with your hands over your ears.

Was I complacent once? Was I too full of myself? I don’t know. I don’t remember. If I was, I regret it. I take it all back.

I denounce myself.

One of our number had been set on fire. No, more than one. Deep in the woods, white birds were sprouting bright-orange crests and wing-feathers.

On I went, the spit thick in my mouth. Trees jolted and staggered as ships’ masts do in a storm. The earth heaved, threatening to unburden itself of all its darkest mysteries. Any moment it would vomit blood-stained treasure, murder weapons, human bones. It was just me running, though. Just me running. The world stood still like someone frightened or amazed.

Over to my left I saw a woman go down, two men in hunting clothes on top of her, their mouths split open, red and wet and grinning. You’d think somebody had taken an axe to their faces. One of the men had pulled the woman’s head back by the hair, as if she were a horse and her hair the reins. Her throat stretched tight against the air, the crown of her head almost touching her shoulderblades. Was that Lum? I couldn’t tell. In any case, I didn’t want to see what followed. It would be worse than I could possibly imagine. There were more of my companions among the trees, most of them with dark figures fastened to their heels or curved against their backs. We were trying to outrun our shadows.

I’m not sure how I came to lose my balance. In taking my eye off the path for a moment, I missed my footing, perhaps. Then I was rolling and sliding down a steep bank that was slippery with mud, wet leaves and ivy. Down I tumbled, branches whipping at my face and arms. A tree brushed one of my legs aside. I even turned a somersault, the sky whirling like the skirts of a woman doing some old-fashioned dance. At last I reached the bottom. I lay on my back next to a track, my heart about to spring from between my ribs, the breath crushed out of me. I stared at the bare branches laid out peacefully against the clouds. All the cries came from high above me now. I got to my feet. My leg hurt, but not too much. I didn’t think I’d broken anything. On the other side of the track were more trees, then a river, and in the wide green field beyond I saw a building that had the look of a ruined church or priory. As I stood there, uncertain what to do, the sky appeared to shift and then disintegrate. Out of a heavy charcoal greyness, something incongruously light and soft began to fall.

Snow.

It was as though bits of us were falling through the air. Bits of who we were. A snowflake landed on my sleeve and promptly vanished. If the snow settled, I would vanish too. A disappearing trick. This was more luck than I could ever have expected. Just then, though, I heard a shout. Several figures had paused on the ridge above me, motionless and wizened. They were staring at me through the snow, one in a cap with ear-flaps, one in fatigues. A third was looking back over his shoulder, his arm raised, beckoning. I hurried across the track, then climbed down to the river’s edge, its water the colour of beer, its flow interrupted here and there by smooth round boulders. Weeds stretched full-length beneath the surface like a drowned girl’s hair. I began to splash through the shallow water, my boots skidding on the smaller stones. I was alone, I realised, alone for the first time in I didn’t know how long. I felt a flicker of something against my stomach walls.

On the far side, hoof-prints showed in the mud. Sheep, I thought. Or deer. This was where they’d come to drink. A bank rose in front of me, red earth bound in roots. Above it, outlined against the sky, I saw a battlement. I climbed the bank and found myself in the lower reaches of a field. There was no cover here at all. I glanced over my shoulder. Two men were scrambling down the slope towards me, cursing as their feet caught in the brambles. One had a pitch-fork and a coil of rope. The other was carrying a pair of shears. At least they didn’t have a dog. I couldn’t explain the calm that welled up in me just then. Was it the snow, which was falling still more thickly now, flakes the size of oak leaves sticking to my cloak? Or did I have an inkling of what was about to happen?

As I set off across the field, a girl jumped out in front of me. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. I let out a cry. She put a hand over my mouth, then placed one finger upright against her own. Her face was covered with freckles. I’d never seen so many. She gave me a queer blurred smile.

‘This way,’ she whispered. ‘Quick.’

She wasn’t one of them. She was somebody else.

Thank God for that. Thank God.