Authors: Catherine Sampson
When we were seated in a Middle Eastern restaurant, dipping pita bread into a plate of hummus, it became clear that Sevi wanted
to say more about his relationship with Melanie. “I think that when she met me,” he said, “she was looking for a way to have
a normal life, with a man and perhaps a family. She knew, of course, as people generally do, that she was in psychological
trouble, and she was casting around for a way to fix it. I’m emotionally stable, inasmuch as any of us are, I’m psychologically
solid. In hard terms, I appealed as a potential mate. But people are who they are. She had chosen a lonely, dangerous job
that pushed her to the limit, because actually that was what she wanted. She was willing to talk about the stresses of war
in an objective way. But when I told her that I thought
she
was suffering, she didn’t want to hear it. I was becoming an irritation to her. That was what we rowed about—and not for
the first time.”
“How did she feel about the HazPrep training course?” I asked. “Was that making her anxious?”
“Anxious?” Sevi considered, chewing on a piece of bread. “I would describe her mood the day before she left as profoundly
fed up. She wouldn’t talk to me about her work, because it had become such a big point of contention between us. From what
little I could gather, there was some problem at work. Maybe it was just logistics—the amount of time taken up just by arranging
flights and visas and the eternally changing diary was a constant frustration. It was, I think, symptomatic of her condition
that she was increasingly irritated, not only by me but by last-minute changes of plan, and the demands of editors. She saw
HazPrep as a distraction. She knew she should go, but she just wanted to get away from it all and be her own master again.”
It was not a long lunch. Sevi had to rush off to teach, and I stayed for a couple of minutes after he had left to settle the
bill and finish my coffee. Sevi, I thought, had been remarkably open with me about the state of his relationship with Melanie.
I wondered how much of it he had shared with the police. Yet despite my sense that he had been very frank with me, I couldn’t
shake the impression that he was hiding something. But perhaps I was just developing a chronically suspicious mind.
That night I had an early dinner with Sal, who wanted to hear what I had learned from Sevi. I’d been reluctant, but then he’d
said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got a date with PC Plod,” and I realized afterward that Sal had actually antagonized me into going
to eat with him. He smiled at me sweetly and bent to kiss my cheek as he arrived, pulling off his coat and shaking raindrops
from his shaggy hair.
“You see,” he said, “I’m almost punctual.”
“There’s no such thing as almost punctual.”
“Well”—he threw up his hands—“it’s a long story, but if you insist.”
He proceeded to regale me with a tale that involved a watch still set on some foreign time, a taxi, a prostitute from Bristol,
and a government minister from somewhere Nordic. I took a slug of wine.
“Maeve thinks you’re losing it, chasing after Melanie like this when she’s warned you off.” He must have finished the story
without my even noticing, and now he was sitting hunched over. When he is on television his size fills the screen, dominates
whatever the scene. His size is less solid in real life. If you prod Sal, your fingers encounter flesh, not muscle.
I gazed at him. “Well, I think Maeve’s losing it.”
He didn’t grace my weedy comeback with a response. Instead he pretended not to hear, greeting the waiter who had arrived carrying
a salad for me and something deep-fried and garlicky for Sal.
“Fred Sevi told me that Melanie had symptoms of post-traumatic stress. That she had nightmares and flashbacks, and startled
reactions to sudden noise. It started about a year before she disappeared, but she wouldn’t talk to him about it.”
“You know,” Sal said when the waiter had gone, “I remember . . .” He paused to fill his mouth with food, and this time he
forgot to finish his sentence and carried on eating. I picked at my salad until, after a few minutes, Sal reemerged. I don’t
know what had prompted it, but his story seemed to be a litany of the most inhumanly cruel things Sal had seen, civilians
dead because their organs had been shaken loose in the shock wave of a bomb; soldiers in a variety of awful deaths, their
wounds infected with the atomized flesh of their comrades, or clutching armfuls of their own guts as they collapsed, or burning,
trapped inside tanks or buildings, and strung up from bridges or dragged along roads. For the past decade, Sal had flown from
one beleaguered country to the next and had been disgorged from the plane always clutching his microphone and his satellite
phone to jog from one murderous scene to another. Yet he told it with the same sort of cynical, world-weary finesse. Here
a narrow escape, a friendly hand extended by a local, there a moment of quick thinking that saved the day.
“What,” I eventually interrupted, “are you trying to say? I mean, you act like a buffoon, you know you do. And you ooze cynicism,
if you don’t mind my saying. But the things you see are awful beyond words. How can you bear it?”
He shot me a look from under long-lashed eyes.
“Perhaps you’re not really a buffoon at all,” I said.
He scowled, as if he found my suggestion offensive. “It falls to us to spread the word,” he said slowly. “No greater honor
is there than that truth is heard because of us. A bit of sleeplessness, irritation, jumpiness, who doesn’t have that? Melanie
carried on filming. Well, of course she did, we all do.”
Sal’s pomposity and his tongue-in-cheek delivery meant that it was impossible to know how much of any given sentiment was
genuine and how much simply theater. It made this conversation impossible. Sal saw this on my face and made another effort.
“Adrenaline’s the thing,” he continued. “War is life in the raw. You sleep in dirt, you shit in a hole in the ground, your
body stinks. Here you think your body fails you, but out there it seems indestructible, set on continuing to draw breath.
Life inside of you, optimistic, looking forward, death and dirt and evil all around, not touching you. It’s . . . exquisite!”
I stared at him for a moment, shaken by that last word. Was it just another unreliable verbal flourish? Sal, it appeared,
had even shocked himself. He stared down at the table.
“I’m not sure Melanie was finding it exquisite.”
I spoke quietly, aware that our conversational matter was drawing glances from the next table.
In one move, Sal licked some sauce from his sleeve, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and shook his head. Then he made a very
pertinent point.
“You have only Fred Sevi’s word that she was in a state at all. Now, if she’s dead, he’ll be one of the very first people
DCI Coburn looks at. How convenient, then, that he has already been telling people of her confused state of mind.”
I thought of Fred Sevi’s permanently pained expression, his hurt eyes. I thought of his comment that if Melanie had run, she
had gone to find hellfire and damnation.
Sal returned to his theme. “You have to learn to focus on the job, be detached. You can’t go crusading around, because you
don’t know enough. You don’t know who to trust because you don’t know anything. Turn around and they’ll likely stab you in
the back. And I mean your fellow hacks. I land and I’m clutching a bundle of printouts. History, culture, religion, useful
phrases in Tajik, or Tagalog, or whatever, a couple of maps, and the last twenty-four hours of wires, which might at least
tell me where the front line is. Insta-expert. And I am. Expert. I mean it. Question me at the airport on the way out, and
I’m word perfect. And the whole bloody bundle of paper is in my head, because by then I’ve seen it with my own eyes. By the
time I’m on my way out, I know who to trust, and I’ve seen the front line, and I’ve made one lifelong friend and lost another.
And”—here he held up a plump finger to instruct me that this was an important point—“you have to leave behind any illusion
that you can change anything, or you might as well be dead. You have to be able to say, This is bigger than me, this is beyond
me. Then you can relax, you are no longer torn by moral anxiety. When I was in Rwanda I saw a mother and child hacked—”
“For Christ’s sake!”
The exclamation came from the next table. Sal and I both turned to look. A man and a woman were gazing at us, annoyed, but
they were struck dumb as soon as they had our attention. The man made a gesture that said, “We’re trying to eat.” Sal gave
a ghoulish smile that was, I think, intended to be apologetic, and the man looked away, still angry.
“This is why we don’t fuck up,” Sal murmured, still slightly too loud, indicating the rest of the clientele with a jerk of
his head that took in the whole room. “This is why we don’t get grounded. This is why we don’t piss off Maeve or Ivor or any
one of them. You asked if I have nightmares. This is it, this is my nightmare. This is complacent bloody PC Plodland. Put
any one of them where I’ve been, and they’d be mincemeat.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I interjected, but Sal was on a roll.
“Look, I like Finney.” Sal had met him once at a party and I remembered they had nothing to talk about. “But you and he are
different animals, Robin. He’s a fucking elephant.”
I told Sal to shut up again, and he, realizing that he had gone too far, set about smothering me in the balm of his boozy
good humor. But I’d lost whatever taste I’d had for his company. I drove him home. As we pulled up outside his door, he invited
me in.
“Can I offer you brandy and an adrenaline surge?”
“You’re seeing someone, Sal.”
“I’m resting. No strings, no illusions, just friendship and sex. It’s all there is at the end of the day.”
“That’s what you’ve learned in the face of death, is it?”
“Fuck off,” he said cheerfully.
“Sal, who in their right mind wouldn’t be tempted? But we share an office.”
“So? We can save time, fuck on the desk. It would be superbly efficient. You can tell Maeve it’s therapeutic. She can put
it in a time management study. Ten minutes of aerobic exercise.”
“Ten minutes? I can’t wait.”
“Best not to hang round when it’s in public.”
“You’re going to regret this in the morning,” I muttered.
I leaned over to open the door for him and pushed him gently out. He landed like a cat on the pavement. I waved and drove
off, my car feeling strangely empty. When I got in, the house felt empty, too. I thought of our fellow diners and how Sal
had probably ruined their evening. And then I thought of Sal, arriving home to his empty flat and his memories and his alcohol.
I had never heard him talk like that before about the carnage he’d witnessed. It was rare to hear him sounding earnest about
anything, unless he was on the air. But that evening it was as though, once he’d started, he couldn’t stop.
Carol had gone to bed, the children were fast asleep. I went around switching on lights. I turned on the TV, then turned it
off again. I sat on the sofa and thought of Melanie and what Sevi had said. He’d made her sound so alone. I felt like phoning
Finney. I wanted to hear his voice. But I mustn’t start thinking about him like that, I told myself, I must not depend on
him even for comfort. I must resist, I must get by on my own. People have so many ways of vanishing.
T
HE twins were playing with the contents of my mother’s underwear drawer. Hannah had a pair of my mother’s underpants on her
head, and William had wrapped a graying bra around his neck.
“Look at me, look at me!” he shouted, bouncing up and down.
I was sitting on the bed and watching my mother pack. Into the suitcase she dropped several very worthy books, a selection
of legal journals, cotton shirts and skirts in pastel shades, trousers, a digital camera, still in its box, sunglasses still
with a price tag attached, a new swimsuit, goggles, and an unopened bottle of sunblock. My mother has long white-gray hair
and a dowdy gray wardrobe. She had never, as long as I remember, exposed her white skin to the sun.
“I thought this was supposed to be a spiritual retreat,” I said. “They have a pool?”
“They have a pool,” my mother answered firmly. “There’s no rule that says Buddhists can’t swim.”
“I’m sure they’re wonderful swimmers,” I agreed, and my mother gave me a look. The look was not unamused—she was aware that
this was a very New Age expedition for a very middle-aged person—but neither did the look invite me to poke further fun.
She started to battle good-naturedly with Hannah. “I need them, darling. People still have to wear underpants in California,”
she told her, “it’s the law.”
My mother was going to California to find herself. Or to lose her family, which probably amounted to the same thing. Her life
has not been easy since she met my father more than forty years ago. He left her six years later, but somehow he’d left such
a mess behind him—not to mention three daughters—that things didn’t get much easier.
The past couple of years have been particularly tough. She works full-time as a lawyer. On top of that, she had to nurse my
sister Lorna through chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating condition that is what it sounds like, an almost perpetual state
of physical exhaustion. In Lorna’s case, she was almost bed-bound for two years. Her recovery over recent months has been
of the two steps forward, one step back variety. She is no good at pacing herself, she never has been. She rushes forward,
and then she is brought up short by a wall of fatigue. But she rarely needs nursing now, and she has a part-time job, although
she is frustrated by the limitations her body imposes on her.
My mother was seeing Lorna through all this, and then came Adam’s death, and the attack on me, and she ended up playing nurse
to me and baby-sitter to my twins through the long months while I recovered. It was hardly surprising she needed a rest and
perfectly natural that she should at long last decide to accept a standing invitation to her friend Nancy’s place in Santa
Barbara. But she had an open ticket, and she wouldn’t say when she was coming back. She was practically going into exile.