Free Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson Page A

her hair a flagrant chestnut-bronze that made her look anaemic. She showed no interest in men – or, if she did, she allowed them to treat her like something off the supermarket shelf: they consumed her, then disposed of her. Once, I walked through the front door after a morning at the library to find a stranger coming down the stairs buttoning his jacket and smiling plumply as though, like a squirrel, he had nuts stored in his cheeks. He muttered a few words as he edged past, his forehead damp all of a sudden. Perhaps he thought I was the husband. Marie appeared above me in the hallway, her dyed hair hiding half her face. She was wearing a bra and pants that didn’t match. And Victor in his bedroom the whole time, behind that locked door of his, oblivious …
    Usually, when I came home, Marie would be sprawled in front of the TV. She wouldn’t acknowledge me at all, not even a hello. Every now and then, she would imitate the sound a cash-till makes when it scans a bar-code, that monotonous beep, then she would direct a sickly grin at the sofa or the wall, but that was the most anyone got out of her. Everything about our lives was askew, off kilter. We were all adrift in that small house, with no notion of how to steer a course.
    I remember going into her room one evening to tell her that supper was ready. She was lying on her bed, one arm behind her head, a neat round bone showing on the inside of her elbow. Her uniform had ridden up so I could see her bare legs, right up towhere her knickers started. I knelt by the bed and put a hand on her thigh, my heart beating so hard that a black mark pulsed in the air between us.
    She watched me for a moment across her breasts, her eyes unlit, her breathing audible, almost abrasive, then she sat up fast and pushed me in the chest with the heel of her hand. I fell backwards, hitting my head on her cupboard door. She left the bed and walked past me, out of the room. I heard her footsteps, slow and deliberate, as she made her way downstairs, and then the pinched hiss as she turned the TV on.
    In October, I travelled north to take my place at university. There was a part of me that worried about how Victor and Marie would cope in my absence. At the same time, I couldn’t deny the feeling of relief that came over me as I walked out of the house. Grief ran down its walls like condensation, and the silence that lay in all the rooms had become so profound, so treacherous, that I feared I might sink into it, as one might sink into a marsh, never to be seen again. During the previous few weeks I had been aware that either Victor or Marie – or even, possibly, both of them – could be removed from the Red Quarter at any moment. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that they were not. We were just lucky, I suppose. Still, I was always waiting for that unfamiliar and yet predictable knock on the front door. As for Victor and Marie, I doubt they would have cared. Though they had followed different paths, they had both reached a state of mind where they didn’t believe that things could get any worse.
    When I returned to Hope Street for the Christmas holidays, the house seemed poky and ramshackle, but perhaps it suffered by comparison with the university I now attended, a typically sanguine confection of marble, steel and glass. Victor had celebrated his sixty-second birthday in November, and he had decided to take early retirement. Though he no longer locked himself behind his bedroom door, he rarely left the premises, preferring to drift from room to room in his frayed silk dressing-gown, his feet in a pair of leather slippers, the backs ofwhich were trodden flat. The bones showed in his forearms, and his neck had withered to such an extent that I didn’t understand how it could support that enormous imposing head of his. His thoughts seemed firmly rooted in the past, as if compensating for the degree to which he had aged. The book of shoes was never far