The Kingdoms

that nothing was right and he didn’t belong. He would keep racing after visions until one day he chased them in front of a carriage and killed himself.
‘Moo,’ said Lily, who was biting the rail of her crib and looking like she might explode if she didn’t tell her joke. She flapped her arms.
‘A flying cow?’ he smiled, glad she was awake. Alice had gone to bed, curled up in a ball. ‘Are there flying cows?’
Lily grinned and hid. She wasn’t too good at hiding, because she had a perpetual snuffle from the smog. He pretended to have lost her and he hunted around, then knelt down to settle her again once he’d found her under the blanket. He stayed there a good while after she’d gone to sleep, his back against his own bed and one hand on her chest to feel her ribs lift and fall. He’d sewn a picture of a duck on her nightshirt and the stitches were already faded, because she kept stroking it as if it were a real duck. Looking at her made him feel clean.
He heard that crack again, the sound of her going under the engine, clear as any other memory for all it hadn’t happened.
Maybe three months away from her was for the best.
Like always, he jerked awake at quarter past four in the morning with raging panic kneeling on his chest. He sat up and lit a cigarette, the base of his skull resting on the steel bar at the top of the bedstead. Nothing helped, but smoking was something to do.
The night-time panics had come on after that first epileptic attack at the Gare du Roi and never improved. Aching, he wished, again, that the man from the hallucination would reappear. Nothing was forthcoming. The purple electric lights from the club over the road flashed on the gloss paint on the skirting board.
He felt sick of the way the epilepsy infected everything. He left a baby girl to be run over by steam engines, he’d chosen a whole career because of a postcard, he pined for people he didn’t know and couldn’t bring himself to love the ones he did. It was cancerous.
A flash from the club caught on the gilt invitation poking from his coat pocket where it hung from the door. He could just make out RSVP Prof. E. Sidgwick, Secretary. If he set out in the morning and went north to Eilean Mòr straight from Pont du Cam, he would be able to go. He could find out why they were so interested in epileptic amnesia. Even better if they could help.
He wished Lily would wake up so he could have something to do, but she had slept like a rock since she’d been ten weeks old and now she scowled if you disturbed her before eight.
He calmed down after a couple of hours, and like he had done every few months, he dreamed about the man from his visions. He was always in the same place. It was a beach, cold and misty. The shore was full of old flotsam – bits of rope that had turned the same colour as the dull pebbles, pale spars – and black weed. The man was waiting on the tideline up ahead, and though there was nothing at all to say so, the dream always came with the perfect certainty that he was waiting for Joe.

6
Pont du Cam, 1900
Pont du Cam was much colder than Londres. The land changed on the way, from hills and dips to flat, flat fen. The fields were flooded. There were no trees, no walls; only drowned hedgerows. When the train pulled in, the station looked run-down, and in places the water had puddled between the tracks. The whole place looked like it had only been reclaimed lately from the fen, which was doing its best to take everything back again.
Joe had never been this far from home. As he stepped down on to the platform, he expected the station guard to demand to see his freedom papers and then declare that for whatever reason he wasn’t allowed to travel, but no one stopped him. The engine blew steam around disembarking passengers. People here looked much less smart than they did in Londres. Londres might have been the Black City, but it was alive, and busy, and full of people like de Méritens, with their expensive suits and brisk walks. Here, there was no one like that. Everyone was very English; all lumpy bones and clayish skin, wearing heavy shapeless clothes and the graven expressions of people who still had miles to go before they could sit down. In his properly tailored coat – he still couldn’t remember where it was from and he still missed the tartan lining – Joe stood out.
Wooden houses lined the station road, covered in graffiti so thick there were layers of it, like it had grown and died and grown again, a sort of ivy of paint; old English flags, scrawls of GOD SAVE THE KING, gang tags, and just like in Londres, Where is everyone?
From every roof protruded a short pole with a scrap of calico tied to it. The scraps were yellow, red, and blue. Yellow for a place that sold beer, red for a spare bed, blue for food. M. Saint-Marie had told him not to stop for any of it, looking like he did.
‘Like what?’ Joe had said, not understanding.
‘Valuable.’
He walked well away from the house fronts.
There were women outside, a good few of them, older ladies, selling meat on skewers and waving them at passers-by. Fried chicken hearts, tripe in paper cups. Behind them, children and younger women sat propped against the walls of the houses, with baskets of vegetables arranged on the pavement in front of them. Potatoes and swedes mainly, which they weighed out on rope scales hanging on hooks from the window ledges. At the cooking stalls, doomed chickens cocked their heads and scratched