Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson Page A

understand.’
    â€˜Do you?’ He squatted down in front of me, gripping my shoulders. ‘Do you really?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Is there anything you want to ask?’
    I was about to shake my head again, then checked myself. ‘There is one thing.’
    â€˜What?’ Victor leaned forwards, his eyes intent on mine.
    â€˜It’s Mr Page,’ I said.
    Victor’s head tilted a little, and an upright line showed in the gap between his eyebrows.
    â€˜What happens when he gets angry?’ I went on. ‘I mean, does he still look as if he’s smiling?’
    For a moment Victor remained quite motionless, then his mouth opened wide and several odd inhaled sounds came out of him.
    It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh.
    Although I had asked about Mr Page and then reported my findings to Bracewell, his influence on us both had waned considerably. Once in a while, out of a quaint sense of loyalty, we would sit opposite the dry-cleaner’s, but we were no longer expecting any miracles and we never stayed for very long. After all, we had a new passion now – the motorway.
    We had only ridden out to the broken bridge a handful of times when we chanced upon an abandoned service station about a mile to the north. We immediately adopted it as our headquarters. There were curving roads with pompous white arrows painted on them, which we delighted in disobeying. There were meaningless grass-covered mounds. Inside the building was an arcade that was lined with video games, their screens all smashed, and a restaurant with wicker light-shades that hung from the ceiling like upside-down waste-paper baskets. Sometimes we would sit in the entrance, under the glass roof, and try to imagine what it was like before. Cars would park in front of us and people with weird old-fashioned hairstyles would get out. They would walk right past us, relishingthe opportunity to stretch their legs, and we’d be sitting there, in the future, invisible.
    We must have absorbed something of the atmosphere of the times, I suppose, since we invented a whole series of what we referred to privately as ‘border games’. One morning we cycled further north than usual and found a section of the motorway that was in the process of being dug up. In our minds, the area instantly became a no man’s land, with construction workers standing in for guards. We would pretend to be people from the Blue Quarter – unstable, indecisive types – or, better still, violent criminals from the Yellow Quarter, and it would be our mission to cross into sanguine territory, which was on the far side of the road. Camouflaged by pieces of shredded tyre, we would hide in the long grass at the edge of the building site and study the guards’ movements through binoculars made from chopped-up bits of one of Victor’s cardboard tubes. The game required audacity, cunning and, above all, patience. Each escape attempt was carefully orchestrated and timed to perfection, and it could take an entire morning to carry it out successfully. Once, we were spotted by a man in a yellow hard hat. He lifted an arm and took aim at us, two fingers extended like the barrel of a gun, thumb upright like a trigger. Ducking down, we imagined the thrilling zip of bullets in the air above our heads. On weekends one of us would have to assume the role of guard. I would prowl among the cement-mixers and scaffolding poles, clutching a second-hand air rifle I had bought in a junk shop on Hope Street. On my head I would be wearing an old motorbike helmet that was the shape of half a grapefruit. If it was Bracewell’s turn to patrol the border, he would often bring his mother’s spaniel along and pretend it was an attack dog.
    We spent whole days out at the motorway, fortifying our headquarters against intruders or thinking up variations on the border game or just lying on our stomachs observing the guards, and every now and then we