Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

a thickly wooded area somewhere to the north-west of the town. To record our presence, we decided to carve our names on a tree. Bracewell used the penknife first. I watched him work, a knob of bone protruding on his wrist, as if he had a marble sewn beneath the skin. When my turn came, I used one of the letters in his name to make my own. Apart from anything else, I thought it would save time.

    Afterwards, I stood back, pleased to have found a connection between our names. In demonstrating that they could be interwined, I had harked back to the secret ceremonies that had taken place at Thorpe Hall, the mingling of who one was with someone else, the sense of a shared destiny.
    But Bracewell just frowned. ‘Like something in a cemetery,’ he said.
    Which, in the light of what happened moments later, I came to perceive not as a rebuke so much as a presentiment.
    As the road left the wood, it dipped downwards, curving right then left, with grass banks on either side. By the time it straightened and levelled out, we were pedalling frantically, racing each other. I saw the danger first and shouted out. We both braked hard, Bracewell’s back wheel sliding sideways and spilling him on to the tarmac. No more than fifty yards ahead of us, the road broke off in mid-air.
    Leaving our bicycles on the ground, we crept towards the drop and then looked over. Thirty or forty feet below lay a heap of shattered concrete and macadam. On either side of it amotorway reached into the distance, its six lanes silent, utterly deserted. Nothing moved down there except the weeds and grasses shifting in the central reservation – a kind of narrow wild garden. All thoughts of the grim fate that might have been ours were obliterated by the mystery of what now awaited us.
    Though the citizens of the Red Quarter still drove cars – no one could deny the pleasures of the open road, especially in a country where the population was relatively small, just over five million – they had launched a series of impassioned campaigns against the motorway. To sanguine people, motorways signified aggression, rage, fatigue, monotony and death. Motorways were choleric, in other words, and had no place in the Red Quarter. Some had been converted into venues for music festivals or sporting events, and others had been fortified, then turned into borders, their tall grey lights illuminating dogs and guards instead of traffic, but for the most part they had simply been allowed to decay, their signs leaning at strange angles, their service stations inhabited by mice and birds, their bridges choked with weeds and brambles or, as in this case, collapsing altogether. In time, motorways would become so overgrown that they would only be visible from the air, half-hidden monuments to an earlier civilisation, like pyramids buried in a jungle.
    We only had to look at each other to know what should happen next. We hauled our bicycles over a fence, then wheeled them down the embankment and out on to the motorway’s hard shoulder. We began to ride north – in the fast lane, naturally. There was the most peculiar sense of risk attached to this. We were like people who believed the earth was flat, and who, despite our belief, had decided to travel at high speed towards the edge. I suspected Bracewell felt it too because I saw a flicker of apprehension in the grin he gave me as we set out. There was also a feeling of suspended danger, as if the silence and emptiness were only temporary and the real life of the motorway might commence again at any moment. More than once, I turned and looked over my shoulder, just to make sure that nothing was coming.
    But nothing came, not ever, not in all the many hours wespent out there. I sometimes wonder whether we hadn’t entered a parallel world which the two of us had somehow jointly imagined, a place where the anxieties of our daily lives could find no purchase, a place where we could finally throw off the wariness