The Follower (chapter1)


Waking/b

It was the hand on her shoulder that woke her. It grasped her shoulder, not violently, but calmly and firmly restraining her, as if she had been about to step into someone‘s way. But when she opened her eyes she was lying in clean white sheets in a narrow bed. The first thing she saw was the edge of the metal bed frame, ridiculously enlarged by its closeness, as if she had shrunk to the size of an eye. It was painted pale green, or perhaps, she thought, blue. The paint was peeling, and there was older, dark grey paint underneath. Next to the bed was a small white table.
She lay quietly, thinking about the hand on her shoulder. No one could have held her like that. There was no one there. But the pressure of the five fingers on her skin was still so clear and precise that she sat up in bed and pulled aside the collar of her pyjama jacket, looking for the marks they had left. She expected to see five red, fading lozenges. But there were no marks. There was just brown skin, and beneath it, the shape of the bone, moving back and forth as she wriggled her shoulder under the pressure of the hand that was not there.
The pyjamas were white cotton with pink and blue stripes. They looked as if they had been washed often.
Her mouth was dust-dry. There was a glass of water, half-full, by the side of her bed. She reached out and drank, it, thinking: someone will soon come. Minutes passed and no one came. Under the bed there were white slippers. They fitted her. Next to the bed there was a chair, and on the chair was a white cotton dressing gown. That fitted her too.
She put on the slippers and the gown, and went out hesitantly into the aisle between the beds. It was a long, white, still room. The only sound was the infinite whirr of the electric clock on the wall. There were sixteen beds: all narrow, all painted pale green, or perhaps blue, all with small white tables next to them. There were cut flowers in glass vases on some of the tables. Not on hers. All the beds were empty: pale and clean and made. The hands of the clock pointed to 11.30.
She thought: this is a hospital. She was glad she had worked that out. It explained why she felt as if she had recovered. The pressure of the fingers was still firm on her shoulder. She worried at the feeling like a loose tooth or a scab. It had to have been someone tall, because they could easily place their hand on her shoulder without stretching, and it felt like the touch of someone familiar, someone used to touching her. It might, she thought, have been my mother. She felt nothing when she thought mother. I don’t remember, she thought. I don’t think I have a mother.
“Hello?” she said.
Nobody answered.
At the far end of the ward was a glass door. She began to walk towards it. Tall windows looked out onto a flat grey roof where pools of rainwater lay like mirrors. Beyond the roof was a wall: yellow brick, and another window, behind which a staircase showed like a spine behind transparent skin.
“Hello?”
She pressed her face against the glass door. Behind it was a small office. There was a desk, a computer chair and a filing cabinet, but there was no-one inside. The wall within was lined with shelves, crammed with yellow folders. A computer, its screen dark, stood on the desk. There were papers scattered around; a woman’s pink, comfortable cardigan hung over the back of the chair.
She pushed open the door and went in. There was a half-full coffee mug on the desk, next to the computer. World’s Best Mum! it read. She touched it. It was tepid. The files all had words on their spines: two words: collections of letters she had never seen together before. Names, she thought. And realised: I don’t know my name.
She stood quite still, feeling like a cartoon character that has run off the edge of a cliff, and looks down too late, legs pummelling bare space. In the computer’s dark screen she was reflected, a small girl with eyes wide and frightened, black curly hair sticking out like a stop sign. Is that me? She looked down at her hands: thin brown fingers, each nail the colour and shape of a peeled almond or a small candle flame. She had a dark freckle on the knuckle of her right thumb. The hands seemed to fit the reflection. She lifted her hands to her hair and felt it and pulled it in front of her face. It looked like the hair she saw in the reflection. She reached up and took down a file from the shelf at random. Her reflection in the glass door was as transparent as she felt. I don’t know who I am. I’ve got no name. I don’t know where I come from. She opened the file. Inside, she recognised the letters but not the language. She closed the file again and put it back on the shelf.
She turned round and went quickly out of the office, away from the ward, out onto the landing. There was a big lift, wide enough to take trolleys and stretchers, but she already felt as if she was falling. She took the stairs.
Six flights down, she stood in an empty lobby. A revolving door opened onto the pavement. Outside, cars were parked along the kerb, pigeons scratched and ruffled in the gutter. She was glad to see the birds, they were the first living things she had seen since she had woken up.
She pushed through the doors and went out onto the street, blinking in the sudden natural light. The pigeons took fright and burst into the air in a scatter of wings. It was a long grey street of concrete buildings. The window ledges were splashed with bird droppings, and the windows were dirty. The tarmac was patched where old potholes had been filled. It was not too cold, it could have been a northern city in summer, or a southern city in winter. There was rain in the gutter but the sky was blue and fresh. She thought: this place doesn’t look like home.
Distantly she could hear the noise of busy people. Absently rubbing at her shoulder, she set off in the direction of the noise.

She found it at the other end of a back street, lined with old sleeping bags and flattened cardboard. Unseen, she watched as, in front of her, people hurried along a crowded street lined with shops. The street was packed with noise and conversation in a language she could not understand. Under a café awning, two pale, dark-haired women sat drinking coffee, gesturing with cigarettes as they chatted, their handbags wedged between their ankles under the table. One put her hand on the other’s arm and whispered something that made the other squawk with laughter and spill her coffee. A tall, blond family seriously examined the window of an electronics shop. The son, who seemed about fourteen, tapped the glass, pointing to a digital camera. Opposite were shops selling heavily embroidered clothes in strange colours. A woman dressed in a head to toe black robe walked past pushing a red buggy in which a little boy lay, watching the world. His face was three circles: two dark eyes and a dummy.
The girl made to step out into the street, hesitated, then went forward. She kept close to the edge of the street, hurrying along with her head down. No one noticed her. A man just in front of her talked into mid-air, waving his hands as if signalling to someone far away. Closer up she saw the ear piece and the microphone clipped to his jacket. On the other side of the road, a busker carefully laid down his guitar, bent and scooped up the change in his hat.
She glanced sideways at the shops. She recognised none of the signs or the words on the signs, except for one. Mariposa, read the sign above a shop selling fancy goods and greetings cards.
“Mariposa,” she said aloud. It sounded like a name.
She went on down the street, with no particular direction in mind, no goal except the feeling that she wanted to know where she was, and the hope that if she went far enough she would find a sign she could understand, that would tell her the name of the city. At times she could smell the sea, but it seemed to come from different directions according to the wind, and she could not follow it, it lost itself in corners and dead ends. She thought of trying to talk to someone, and rehearsed what she would say: I’ve been ill. I don’t know my name. I don’t know who I am. I don’t think this is my home. But every time she nervously looked at someone, thinking of approaching them, their breezy security, their certainty of who they were, where they came from and where they were going, turned her aside like a strong gale. They were foreigners.
At the end of the street there was a wide, cobbled square, surrounded by large stone buildings. One was decorated with black and gilt pillars. Seven wide steps led up to large brass doors. She watched people going in and out: a woman with three small children all holding hands, hurrying down the steps, a sedate old man in a smart suit and a fur hat mounting the steps, taking them one by one, making sure he had both shiny black shoes on each step before continuing upwards. A couple of girls of her own age, one with dyed red hair, sat close together at the top of the steps, exercise books open on their laps, glancing over now and then at each others work. But when she went closer, she saw a discreet board with some numerals on it, and saw that the people who went in paused at a small booth to open their bags and purses and hand something over. Money, she thought. Almost as she thought it, the same man she had seen earlier, talking into mid-air with his mobile phone head-set, walked past her and stopped, engrossed in something he was saying to the person on the other end of the line. He folded his arms and nodded seriously, as if he were approving of the building with black and gilt pillars.
She looked down. She could see a corner of brown leather, sticking out of his trouser pocket. A careless movement would shake it loose, it would fall onto the floor and not be noticed, kicked into the gutter or down a drain. It would be easy to lean forward and just slide it out.
I might be a thief, she thought, surprising herself. I don’t know. I could be anything.
The thought made her feel dizzy with possibility. She looked at the wallet uncertainly, put her hand out, and hesitated. In the moment of hesitation, the man said something, exclaimed in agreement or disgust, and marched off, still talking to nobody.
She was left with her hand out as if she were going to shake hands with someone who had already left. She blushed, and dropped her hand to her side, wondering if anyone had seen her.
On the other side of the square was a tall, thin building, with a square tower. Above the door was a large window, made of many pieces of coloured glass. The people going in and out did not seem to be paying anything. She crossed the square, and hurried after them into the shelter of the building.
Inside, it was vast and dimly lit and hushed almost to stillness. She felt as if she had stepped out of a hot dusty battle into a cool bath. In front of her was a large square floor tiled with various beautiful polished stones in an abstract mosaic. Men and women were standing or kneeling on the floor, facing towards her. As she watched, some who were standing knelt down, and others, who were kneeling, stood up, or prostrated themselves flat upon the floor. What she had thought was silence was really an almost inaudible susurration, many lips moving in whispering. The room was full of breath like the body of an instrument.
All around the square floor was a colonnade. The inner wall, which bordered the square floor, was pillars and space. The outer wall had many doors and alcoves, interspersed with painted murals. From the dark alcoves the voices of unseen people could be heard, adding to the murmuring that filled the building. She began to walk along in the shadow of the colonnade.
Someone exclaimed angrily at her. She jumped and turned round. An old woman, thin as a winter tree, wearing a black dress and thick white tights, pointed crossly at her feet, and waved a needle finger in her face. The girl looked down at her feet, in their white slippers, at the old woman’s bare, nubbly toes, and finally across at the door where she had come in, where rows of shoes were placed neatly like a flotilla of small ships. She slid off her white hospital slippers, and bent to pick them up. The old woman nodded, pleased, and went back to the square floor, where the girl saw her beginning to fold herself to her knees, stiff as a rusty hinge.
She took her slippers over to the other shoes and left them there. The floor was cold on her feet, and very slightly uneven. The pressure on her shoulder had finally begun to fade. Perhaps it’s something to do with my illness, she thought.
She began walking around the colonnade again, looking at the murals. Animals, men with wings, a man falling, curled like a baby, through clean blue air. Other pictures showed simply pillars, black and gold pillars, sometimes with flames upon them.
For some time she had been aware of the light that shone from the end of the building where the tower was, where she had entered, and now she turned and faced it. The long stained glass window showed a winged man or a winged horse or a pillar. It seemed to be neither or all three at once. The man or horse or pillar was dark, a very dark red, but the glass around it was fiery blue as a gas jet. If it was a man, he was smiling.
She continued all the way around the colonnade, back to where she had started. Under the window was a little archway with spiral stairs heading upwards.
Maybe, she thought, if I get to the top of the tower, I’ll be able to see where I am. She imagined - briefly - a land spread beneath her familiar as an old tablecloth: a red desert, beyond that a plain of grass, perhaps mountains in the distance, something she could point to at once and say There’s so and so… or That’s home.
She began climbing the spiral stairs. They turned her round and round and round until her knees were aching, and she was sick of the chilly stone under her bare feet. At last she came to a small door. It looked as if it had been cobbled together from scrap wood and old crates.
I hope it’s not locked, she thought. She reached out and tried it. For a moment she thought it was, and disappointment made her mouth dry. But it was just stiff. It opened outwards, into darkness.