Stone Kingdoms (26 page)

‘You are a spy. We can shoot spies,' he said, searching my face.

‘I'm not a spy. You know I'm not a spy.'

He shrugged his shoulders as the man with the syringe came over and stood by my side and squirted water on my cheek. I wiped it off and turned to look at him. His eyes were fixed on the gold bracelet on my arm. The soldier opposite smiled a little and leaned forward on his chair.

‘You are frightened? He has killed many people.'

I said nothing and tried to keep looking at his face, but the soldier with the syringe grabbed my wrist and I pulled my arm away. He tried to grab my wrist again, pulling me towards him by the hair, but stopped suddenly as the soldier in the red macawis jumped from the chair and knocked his arm away. They shouted at each other, standing almost toe to toe, then pulled apart, and as their hands tightened on their guns the other soldiers jumped up in readiness, their voices joining in the argument. But just as it seemed that a sudden movement might start them shooting, the leader burst into the middle of them, screaming and pushing them apart, ordering everyone into the compound, shoving those whose exit wasn't quick or submissive enough. Then he too went outside and there was the sound of more shouting, until eventually a kind of calm settled, broken only by the short snap of his final orders and the rush of feet.

When he returned his face was glazed with sweat and he stared angrily at me as if I had provoked the soldiers. He said nothing as he turned his back and leaned against the door frame. A thin dark gully of damp ran down his shirt, and his shoulderblades pushed at the thin stretch of cloth as he scanned the world beyond the fence, and when he moved his face the light caught the black flanges on his cheek. He seemed to have
slipped
into his own thoughts for a few moments, oblivious to anything else. When he turned to look at us his gaze passed over me and lingered on Nadra, who sat still and silent on the clinic floor. He spoke to her in their own language, but she didn't lift her head to look at him and when he stretched out his hand, almost gently, to touch her, her body squirmed away and he pulled back again. As he walked towards the door he glanced at me and I felt his hatred, his blame for what he had done. He hurried into the compound and then there was the angry shout of his voice and a few minutes later two soldiers bundled us out and locked us in the shed.

The shed where Nadra slept under hessian sacks with her head in my lap, and where I sat with the coldness of the wall seeping slowly into my back. Flowing about me was the malleable light. I felt I could stretch out my hand and scoop a cold handful of it, let it trickle through my fingers. To let yourself be carried by a current, to stop struggling against it and let yourself be carried further and further out, must be a beautiful thing. No need to think or struggle any more, the coldness numbing and anaesthetizing. There would be no flash of past life or memory, only the letting go, the sweet joy of letting go, the first time in life when you could give yourself entirely. But they had found him in the end, tangling him in the trawl of their nets, pulling him back into the world. White blossom on the hedgerows brushing the black coats of the procession. In the house, the sudden empty spaces where the present re-formed and settled in a new pattern, old lineaments blurring and realigning. Our laughter fountaining above our heads before falling back silent as snow. And into the shed flowed the silver light, a swirl of sea, and I wanted to give myself to it, to stop struggling and drift beyond even the reach of the nets, beyond the taint and tug of fear. But in my lap she moved her head and I looked down at the stain of her cheek and knew it couldn't be.

Towards dawn she woke, looked up at me and for a second
strained
to remember where she was, but her hand brushed her face, she remembered and shivered. I smoothed her hair and pulled the sacking on to her shoulder and she closed her eyes again, as if she was in a dream and wanted to wake to a different world. I had to move and stretch my legs, but when I stood up they almost buckled under me and I reached out to the wall to hold my balance. She stood up too and draped one of the sacks across my shoulders like a cape, and together we walked the circulation back into our limbs, moving round and round the shed, until gradually we pushed some warmth into our bodies with our breath puffing in front of us like thistledown.

‘What will happen now?' she asked.

‘They will contact the Agency and ask them to pay money to get me back.'

‘So they will not harm you?'

‘They need me alive to get the money, but nothing is certain with them, nothing except that they want to hurt us.'

‘I don't work for the Agency, Naomi. No one will pay money for me.'

We walked on, pulling the split sacks round us like cloaks, the smell of the hessian and must spuming into our faces. ‘We must find a way to get out of here and away from Bakalla. Sooner or later they will hurt us both. We have to try and get away.' She nodded and we went on walking, determination quickening our pace and joining us in a sense of purpose. With the slow return of body warmth we crouched against the wall and talked about what had happened. She told me everything. I had already seen the worst. And when silence flowed into the wake of our words we stared through the ivory light at the shed which enclosed us.

We tried the door first, but it was locked with a chain that rattled loudly when we pushed against it. Through the narrow gap between the metal doors we could see the truck in the deserted compound, and a square of yellow light in a window
of
the clinic. There was a gap of a few inches between the bottom of the doors and the floor, but when we tried to scrape away the earth we met the concrete blocks of the foundations and could go no further. The ventilation holes proved no better, for although we could support each other long enough to reach them, we couldn't sustain it long enough to widen the hole, and even if we had succeeded, only one of us could have clambered out, leaving the other stranded. By now the grey wash of light had risen and thickened, leavening the darkness and revealing most of the shed. We walked around it again, feeling along the walls with our hands.

It was Nadra who found it, down low in the corner farthest away from us. At first it looked just like another shadow, a dark patch of shade and indeterminate shape, but as more light filtered through the gap in the doors and ventilation holes, we saw that in a space occupying the size of a concrete block, mud bricks had been used. A shortage, a miscalculation, maybe a change of mind about ventilation – it hardly mattered.

We started to scratch at the mortar with our fingers but made little impression; the bricks were baked hard and impervious as stone. But we kept on, taking it in turns to scratch, until our nails broke and the tips of our fingers were red and raw. We needed a knife, some sort of blade, but the best we could find was a hair clasp belonging to Nadra which had a metal fastening, and so we gouged away with that until slowly and painfully we succeeded in digging out the granules of mortar. We knew dawn was coming quickly and it spurred us on to greater effort, one working in a short burst of intensity, then resting and trying to stem the soft papery blisters, while the other worked on. We scraped away enough to know that we could probably kick out the bricks and squeeze through the narrow space into the compound, and then we stopped and looked at each other. Suddenly the shed felt safer than what waited outside. There was still the compound fence, still a soldier on the roof of the clinic. Neither of us spoke, but as we
looked
at each other we recognized each other's thoughts. We sat with our backs pressed against the wall on either side of the opening. I glanced over at her and saw her finger the side of her face, and knew that we had to go.

I draped one of the sacks over my feet to muffle the noise, lay on my back and kicked out. On the second kick the bricks pushed out almost noiselessly, and with my head sideways to the earth I wriggled my shoulders and body through the narrow slit and helped her to follow. We stood under the sky that was beginning to redden, its greyness burnishing into a coppery band. The back of the shed was about thirty metres from the compound fence, and if we picked the right angle it shielded us from the clinic and the gaze of the guard stationed on its roof. The earth at the fence was sandy and we burrowed and scooped it away until we were able to slip under it then ran, crouched low, across open ground and into the shelter of the huts which straddled the rim of the compound, hearing in our heads at every step the warning shout and the crack of gunfire that never came.

We knew we could not seek shelter in the camp itself, but had to make our way into the bush beyond and put as much distance as we could between ourselves and Bakalla. Our breath streamed ahead of us as slivers of yellow sky began to cut open the strands of red, and gradually as our run petered into a walk the cold clutched at our bodies and made us shiver and the whisper of our voices was fretted and tremulous. I wanted the warmth of the sun, but knew that with it would come the light and the discovery of our absence. All around us the shelters looked frozen in sleep, laced with the mist and grey seepage of light, silent except for the occasional baby's cry. We passed through the tight narrow alleys, separated from the life within, until we worked our way through the rings of shelters which led to the open plain. But as we reached the open stretch of scrub we saw the bouncing, blinking lights of a jeep slowly circling this outer area. They were still too far away to see us
and
we pulled back and crouched in a space between two huts. Then I followed Nadra as she wove her way towards the south of the camp and the river bed. Without her saying anything, I understood that it was probably our best hope of escape. But as we headed towards it, the lights of the jeep suddenly changed direction and cut across the open plain at a sharp angle, forcing us to seek shelter. We were already beyond the last straggle of dwellings with only a few minutes to avoid being caught in the open, and so as Nadra pointed we scurried into the field of sunflowers.

Even after the stripping of everything left by the Agency, the crops of sorghum and sunflowers had remained untouched. The serried rows of flowers stood tall and heavy-headed, the splurge of yellow drained away by the grey light. We moved slowly, deeper into the thickening screen, conscious even then of the smell of greenness and flower, until we reached what must have been the centre and lay down, letting the white tails of mist snake around us. Too frightened even to whisper, we listened to the sound of the jeep's engine become louder, hoping and hoping that it wouldn't fall into silence. The headlights fanned through the rows of plants, throwing their light over our heads and then away again as the jeep moved back to the surrounding band of scrub.

We lay facing each other in separate drills, a double line of plants between us, and I saw her face gilded and framed by the ovate leaves, her hair braided with tendril and leaf. We lay there in silence a long time as the light tightened and stretched itself into a blue thinness, stirring new scent from the plants and stiffening the yellow faces of flower as they lifted their heads to the morning light.

‘We must stay here until it is dark,' she whispered, ‘then follow the river bed.'

‘Can we not go now?' I asked.

‘
It is too dangerous. They will search for us. They will find us by daylight if we are in the open.'

I nodded and stretched my hand to her through the stems of the plants, and she took it for a second, and then we curled back into ourselves again and tried to find some comfort on the thin bed of earth. Slowly, bit by bit, the rising heat of the day crept over our bodies, loosening the tight knot of our limbs and stirring a restlessness for which there was no respite, but we stayed where we were, afraid that movement or noise would betray our presence. We suffered ant bites, and constantly had to brush away the insects which flitted through the terrain in which we were trespassers. Once, a couple of drills away, a snake slithered languidly through the base of some plants and we threw small stones to scare it away, and with the rising heat came the first powerful pangs of thirst but there was nothing with which to satisfy them; we could only push deeper into the dappled shade and try to distract our minds with other thoughts and focus on how we would make our escape.

By then we knew they had discovered our disappearance; there was the frequent angry rev of engines and bursts of voices from many different directions, but only the excited voices of children drifted close by, the high tremble of their laughter lingering after them like the notes of a wind chime. I imagined their faces, for a second almost wanted to call out to them because then everything would be a game, a game that children played. As the day wore on and the heat pressed tightly against us I longed for water and tried to force myself into sleep but it eluded me, throwing me back into other worlds. Some of the swelling had gone out of Nadra's face and the badge of bruising had softened and lightened in colour, like a smear of childish make-up. Once she pulled some leaves from a plant and held them tightly to her cheek while above us the heads of the sunflowers stared blankly like children's paintings of yellow suns, their faces ringed and whorled by a black penumbra of seed. Sometimes small birds swooped through the narrow
drills
or hopped between the rows, their wings bright snaps of iridescence.

Hiding as a child in the dunes, darting through the tussocky tunnels to spy on strollers on the beach, watching their solitary skirting of the tide, their ritual stooping to finger some shell or stone. An old couple throwing sticks to a dog, the surf foaming and splashing white around its paws. Lovers arm in arm, their tight enclosure shutting out any eyes that might follow their synchronized steps. Their deliberate printing of the moment in the sand. Sometimes, after they have gone I walk in the woman's steps, imagine the consoling, protective arm of her lover around me. Sometimes I sit and wait for the encroaching tide to swirl away the traces. When the sharp-edged grass cuts like the slice of paper, it's so fine it doesn't bleed.