The divide, p.5
The Divide, page 5
And we had both kept our copies, and this was the book we had used to create our first, simple code on that holiday. I could do it again, but the vital factor was that Jasmine too should still have her copy with her. It had to be the one she had always had, the identical edition. Identical to the one in the little chest of drawers beside my bed. I took it out, took a deep breath from it, stroked the covers tracing the familiar shape of the creature whose raised body swarmed over the front. I held it to my cheek. Might as well start now. The beauty of the code was its simplicity. Page.Line.Word. The drawback was the slowness, maybe having to flick through many chapters before hitting on the right word, or the risk that the word did not appear at all in the book.
I will make a start now, I thought, while I still had some time to myself. But what did I really want to ask Jasmine? ‘How are you?’ sounded ridiculously banal, polite. ‘Tell me how you are’ perhaps. ‘What is it like on your side?’ But how would she know what it was like compared to here? After Brexit, Anglia allied itself with some countries that had never been in the European Union, those that flowed off to the north and east: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, China, notorious always for not being communicative with other countries. How much were the Anglians told and how oppressed were they? ‘What happens to defectors from Wessex?’ That was what I really wanted to know. So I started.
43.21.6 15.1.8 31.12.5… It took a while, and you have to be a bit flexible with your choice of words, but eventually the message was written, folded, precious as a pearl, and hidden underneath my pillow waiting to be transported, via my underwear, to the museum the next day. I hoped I would not sweat so much that the ink would run.
I lifted the Hercules from his locked case. I stroked him and found myself muttering to him, explaining his mission, until I realised how ridiculous I must sound. Of course I could not send him back straight away; that would raise many questions and eyebrows. So he sat on my desk. I occasionally stroked him, because he is a very fine demi-god. Every time Marcus passed by, he would pause and look at it and nod a little.
‘Getting on alright, are we?’
‘Fine,’ I would answer, ultra-casual.
I measured Hercules; I weighed him. He was once one of a pair that decorated the shoulders of a massive bronze wine bowl. I started writing a short article comparing him with similar bronzes in our collection and in Paris, Naples, Athens. I pretended I was preparing it for publication, though I knew it was rubbish because my heart was not in it; my heart was only in my message to Jasmine.
For two weeks, I was on edge, taking no pleasure in the little things. I used to find joy in tiny things, found god in the details, but now everything was tedious, irrelevant. I was distant with Suyin, even though she and the family were suffering, still shunned by the teachers and some other parents. I had to make the effort with Noah. Luckily, Easter was looming and I had preparations to think about, so I threw myself into these. Mum always said – every year, in fact, with reliable monotony – that when they were kids they would get together with all their cousins for Easter and the parents would hide giant chocolate eggs wrapped in shiny, coloured tin foil under the bushes and in the trees and the children would run around hunting for them and make a huge pile of them in the middle of the lawn. Then she would sigh.
My Easter preparations centred on decorating the apartment with paper flowers: giant yellow daffodils, pink tulips, orange tulips, bluebells. The bluebells were very tricky, as each individual bell had to be shaped, teased out like a little frilly skirt, and then several of them attached to a single stem which needed to nod over in a gentle curve of exactly the right angle. Concentrating on these took my mind off everything else. Noah, meanwhile, was growing increasingly excited about the lamb.
‘We’ll have it with garlic and rosemary, I think,’ he said. ‘What would be good is anchovies. Do you remember? We did that a couple of years ago. You make little slits in the skin and poke in the slivers of garlic and sprigs of rosemary and thin pieces of anchovy. Brilliant.’
I did remember that.
‘Do you think we can get hold of any anchovies?’ he went on.
No chance. They used to come from the Black Sea, so now if any were exported to the British Isles, they would all end up in Anglia. If even Anglia could afford them.
I desperately hoped Noah was not going to try something innovative with anchovy substitutes, and luckily he did not. Our Easter feast was delicious.
The Ashmolean was old-fashioned enough to retain Bank Holidays, even though they had been banned in general, so I was going to make the most of a paid day off. I veloed over to Suyin’s, though it was a long slog because they live in Wytham. They have a small garden, a lush, miniature wilderness where the little girls had built a den deep amongst the shrubs. Suyin, Lucas and I sat in the kitchen with the French doors open and watched them running in and out of the bushes, chasing and squealing.
‘School better now?’ I asked.
The mood turned sombre, as though a thick veil had passed in front of the sun.
Lucas shifted in his seat. ‘Worse, if anything.’
‘Though it’s not just us,’ said Suyin. ‘It’s been subtle. Oh, so subtle.’ She threw her head back and breathed out a deep sigh of sorrow, anger, impotence. ‘All the children of colour are being sifted into lower attainment groups. It’s a slow, steady process – you might hardly notice it if you weren’t looking out for it.’
‘But more,’ said Lucas. ‘There’s a boy, Josh, in Ju’s class, so that makes him, what, six? And he’s got some sort of motor function problems, so he can’t run very well and he can’t swim.’ He picked up his mug, held it up to the light, though it wasn’t translucent. ‘And they’ve put him in the lowest group even though he’s quite bright.’
‘And the lower groups don’t get to go on the outings – they don’t have day trips to the wildlife parks or the outdoor adventure centres or the art galleries. They have to stay behind and do extra work,’ said Suyin. ‘And any child with a disability has been put in the lowest group.’
‘What?’
I looked out of the window and saw Fen and Ju squabbling over a ball, no greater care in the world. VE Day One Hundred was only five years ago. The whole world – well, most of it – had stood up and pledged that fascism would never rise again. On the centenary of the death of Adolph Hitler, the government in Wessex had pledged that eugenics would never be allowed to return to our country. There would be no racial discrimination; no gender or sexuality discrimination; no one would suffer because they were less able than other people. So they said.
‘Okay, so we never really believed all that stuff about total equality,’ I said. ‘Zero discrimination. But this is awful. They can’t do that! Not so openly!’
Suyin and Lucas looked down at the table and nodded.
‘Have you talked with the parents of these other children?’
Suyin shook her head. ‘We have tried, at pick-up time, but it’s not easy. They watch you. You know – the people who lurk.’
We all reached for pieces of flapjack and turned towards the windows to watch the girls. Fen had put Ju into goal and was trying to encourage her to dive for the ball. Ju was not having any of that and stood with her fists planted on her little plump hips, daring Fen to kick the ball at her.
‘Have you heard—’ Lucas coughed a bit, took a swig of tea and tried again. ‘Have you heard of the Astronomy Club?’
‘What? No. As in stargazing?’
Suyin and Lucas looked at each other. Eventually, Lucas said, ‘We believe not. From the little we’ve heard, they meet for an altogether different reason. But it’s hard to find out.’
‘One thing we have heard,’ said Suyin, ‘is that they sometimes meet up your way, in South Park.’
‘Good place for stargazing,’ I said, thinking of the wide sweep of grass at the top of the park from where one could gaze to the west and see the towers and spires of colleges, churches and government buildings in all their different shapes and curves, placed like chess pieces halfway through a complex game.
‘And sometimes in Wytham woods, up on the hill here,’ said Lucas, sweeping his arm behind him. ‘One of the other parents, George, started to tell me about it, but he couldn’t say much. You don’t know who’s listening.’
‘But?’
He folded his arms on the table, looked hard at me. ‘A lot of people seem to think, from what I gather, that there are people out there who do more than just moaning about the status quo like we do. That there is quite a sophisticated – or at least more widespread than we might think – network underground that is actually doing something about fighting for us all to get our rights back, fighting for us to get our freedom.’
5
The Smell of Rain
Hercules was packaged and sent. What were the chances of my note falling into the right hands, and of that person being able to locate Jasmine and pass it on, even if they wanted to? There can’t have been many Jasmine Joneses working at Cambridge University, but would someone unpacking a statue in the Fitzwilliam museum make the effort to find that person and give them that little envelope?
The days were getting longer. I do not like the endless hours of darkness in winter when the light starts to fall away by the middle of the afternoon, and you hold off for as long as possible before switching on lights, but I find high summer almost as bad. It was well off the solstice but already I found myself grumbling about it being too bright in the mornings. ‘It’s too early,’ I would groan, as the blackbird started up at 5am. Plus, the hay fever was especially bad this year. I could not afford the medicines so tried eating honey gathered by a couple of guys up the road from the hives in their garden. I liked to think it helped, but it probably didn’t.
I got in the habit of going for walks in the evening. Noah seemed to be preoccupied with his work and often said he would rather I went out than sat around moping.
‘You could show some sympathy,’ I sniffed.
‘Here. Tissues,’ was his response, passing me a box.
On one of these balmy evenings, when the pollen was finally settling and the air was still soft and warm, I was wandering through one of the little clumps of trees in South Park. It was deep twilight; the sky was indigo. People used to walk their dogs here, back in the day when dogs were allowed. Then I heard voices – low, muttering voices, quite close. They seemed to rise up, as from Hades, echoes of darkness and secrecy. I stood, still and patient as the tree trunks, to work out where the voices came from. This was where my den experience came in handy. I would be able to get fairly close, but after that, every snap of twig or crunch of leaf would give me away. Towards the centre of the copse lay what looked like a dense clump of brambles, impenetrable, prickly and uninviting. I was a big fan of blackberries and knew all the best places to forage nearby. There were never any blackberries in South Park, hence no bramble bushes. I managed to creep right up to the edge of this prickly mass and reached my hand forward to feel it, to try to find what it was really constructed of. A thrill, a sharpness, ran up my arm, a harsh tingle as of electric shock. I turned and fled.
I was panting by the time I reached the gate, so once I could see mundane, ordinary things like people hurrying home before curfew and I could hear the distant, familiar clanking of the cable car overhead, I stopped and clung onto the railings until I got my breath back. Only then did I dare turn back to look into the dark void that was the park. All light had gone from the sky, the grass, the trees, all gone into blackness. But as I stared, a figure appeared several metres away, even darker than its surroundings. It was the faintest vision of a man in a green and black jacket, out in the open now, arms hanging down by his sides, just looking at me.
Once I was back in the apartment, Noah grumbling that I should not have stayed out so late, me trying to appear cool and relaxed, bored even, I realised I could say nothing of all this. I would have to wait until I was somewhere quiet with Suyin before I could tell her that, just maybe, I had stumbled on the Astronomy Club.
And then it came, sooner than I thought. A reply.
One afternoon, Marcus came strolling into my office. ‘It seems the Fitzwilliam are keen on collaborating with your small figurines exhibition,’ he said, surprised, as I knew he would be, by anyone becoming excited about any statue smaller than a small elephant. ‘They’re offering to send their Cycladic figurine.’
I had to stop my jaw from dropping and my eyes from popping. I picked up a pen, casually, and twirled it. Yet I could confess I was pleased, obviously.
‘That’s very good news,’ I said. ‘Excellent news. I’ll make the arrangements.’
Marcus smiled and withdrew, and I had to clasp my hands over my heart to stop it thumping so loudly. This did not mean anything. It did not mean that someone at the Fitzwilliam had found my message and had managed to locate Jasmine and pass it on to her. It did not mean, just because they were sending me one of their artefacts, that anyone had a message for me. As I ran down to the basement and plunged along the corridors of the vast storage area, I kept telling myself it did not mean anything.
The figurine was not, I believed, part of their current display, so they would not need to go through the rigmarole of applying to a departmental committee for temporary removal from a cabinet and all the concomitant paperwork. In the cool, dim room in which it lay, it would be silently hibernating. It would be waiting to be summoned upstairs for the glory of being pressed into a glass case and having bright lights shone at it from all sides and round and hairy human faces peer at its every angle. I imagined someone opening the crate, pushing aside the shreddings that cushioned it and lifting it up. My hope, my messenger. I had only ever seen pictures of it, but I had always liked it – a simple figure, about twenty-four centimetres high and made of marble in the third century BCE in, probably, Melos in the Cyclades. It stood in front of the onlooker with attitude. No face, just a beautiful oval, and with crossed arms it seemed to be saying, ‘Yeah? What are you looking at?’
Again, Noah had to go off to a conference, this time a ‘planning symposium’. Again, the idea of it made him grumpy and edgy. And again, he tried to hide that by appearing over-relaxed, casual, jolly and attentive. He took my jacket when I walked in the door, hung it up, poured me a drink, wanted to make love on the Navajo rug while one of his ‘specials’, chicken sausage, roasted red pepper and tomato pasta bake, was mellowing in the oven. This time it was a mid-week conference, somewhere near Cardiff, but I decided on a whim to take a couple of days’ annual leave and go over to my parents’ again. I had just enough money to buy another permission-to-stay overnight pass.
I found Gran sitting in her cool Scandi chair in the corner of my parents’ living room with one of her detective novels. I sat beside her and watched her while she finished her chapter, because she said it was too riveting to put down. She was frail now but in her day had been a real activist. ‘I delivered Labour Party leaflets in my pram, in Golders Green,’ she used to say. That was way, way before the Labour Party imploded. Gran was a student in the 1970s. Her heroes were people like Tony Benn and Tariq Ali. She listened to bands called Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, music from the Dark Ages, or more like the days of light, really.
‘You have to take things in your stride’ was a popular phrase of hers. Her conversations featured the freedom they had when she was younger: freedom to move around, freedom to vote, but she did not talk about it too often. She did not like to rub it in. She had always encouraged us, though, to believe that the mind was free to roam wherever it chose. And that the brain and hands were free to create. She had painted a few watercolours over the years and some of them weren’t bad. Her favourite was framed and hung on the wall behind her chair. It showed a single-storey cottage with mismatched tiles on the roof and windows with no right angles. She swore the windows were actually that shape. A low row of purple hills stretched across in the distance under a pale-blue sky dotted with clouds. This was a house in Scotland that had been left to her by a great-aunt with no other family.
Gran rented this cottage out long-term to a local farm worker, apparently. Mum and Dad occasionally grumbled that she wasn’t ‘making any money out of it’, but everyone knew how desperately impoverished Scotland had become. Since going independent, its industry had shrunk away; there was no money to support farming, no money for welfare.
She was also a sculptor. When Jasmine and I were little, we would go round to her house and trot down to the studio at the bottom of the garden. She would roll up our sleeves and give each of us a lump of clay and a bucket of water and the permission to get mucky and to do whatever we wanted with our lump. Jasmine liked modelling animals. ‘Look, Gran, it’s an elephant!’ Or ‘a puppy’ or ‘a cow’. Though she had never seen any of these animals for real; only in pictures. Gran would encourage and maybe tweak the thickness of a leg here and there or help with the placement of facial features. They were not great, but that did not matter. Jasmine’s best one, and I remember this because Mum and Dad had it still on a shelf in the living room, was the cobra. One day in Gran’s studio she had just started rolling her clay into a great long sausage. She splashed water on it, rolled her hands rhythmically backwards and forwards as the sausage grew impossibly long and thin. ‘It’s a snake.’
I stood up and went over to the windowsill where it sat now. It coiled round and round, the end of the tail twisting out slightly. The neck rose from the middle, rearing up in a delicate arch, the flaring wings of the neck elegantly curving, the head arched down slightly in eternal preparation for the strike that would never come. It was painted a pale green, merging to creamy yellow down the edges of its curves, and highly glazed.
