To the Lions

by Holly Watt

  Miranda had tied her blonde hair up under the long scarf that turns women into ghosts. Casey, too, disappeared into a long, baggy dress, covering everything from neck to ankle. But still they stood out.

  Ed supervised the purchase of two of the battered Toyota Hiluxes, the pickups that rove all over Africa. Cheap, endlessly reliable and easy to fix when they finally conk out, the Hilux shifts everyone from farmer to warlord. Plus they are Japanese, and therefore slightly less hated than the American equivalent.

  They went on a test drive, shifting through the gears, and slamming on the brakes. Casey thought about the last time she had been in a Hilux, her body armour pushed against the door because it might stop a bullet. She never wore it, if she could avoid it. It’s heavier than people realise, body armour, and it was never designed for women.

  They hadn’t brought it anyway, this time.

  A couple of days later, they were ready to drive south, in convoy. Algeria is huge. Ten times the size of France, which colonised this patch of Africa, bloodily, in the nineteenth century. The journey took hours, jolting over rough patches and sweating in the sun.

  They saw just two cars in a hundred miles.

  They stopped for lunch, near some of the strangest rock formations, a petrified madness of orange on orange, spiking into the blue.

  ‘Where did you two meet?’ Miranda asked abruptly. She was tucking away the last of the kesra, the Algerian flatbread she liked so much.

  ‘You know where.’ Casey batted away the fat flies that survived somehow. ‘When I was on board the Apollo.’

  ‘No,’ said Miranda. ‘Where are you going to tell them you met?’

  Ed got it, ‘We have to have the same story.’

  It worked best when almost everything was true, and Casey knew all the details of Miranda’s life. They only ever changed the minimum.

  ‘My mother died in a car accident’ was true for both Casey and ‘Carrie’. Both Miranda and ‘Anna’ were married to Toms. Both Toms never did the washing-up and always forgot anniversaries. It was so easy to share the joke of a forgotten birthday. Wedding rings went on and off, depending on the situation. Casey’s wasn’t real, but it was gold. Bought in a junk shop, sometimes she wondered who had worn it before.

  When Casey left a meeting, she would note down the lies and read them again before the next meeting. The truth usually stayed the truth.

  Like any actor, she watched people. Actors study reactions to secrets and shocks, and joy and despair. And Casey did the same.

  She had learned, quite precisely, how to change the mood. A scientist adding a chemical drop to change the colour blue to pink, pink to blue. She leveraged her likeability, she thought once. And she did it quite deliberately. A laugh here, a pause there. Sometimes even a half-wink. She could change the mood from giggles to seriousness in a blink. From bored impatience to delicious conspiracy without even thinking about it. Now, sometimes, she did it almost by accident.

  They walked back down to the cars, parked in the shade where the empty road wrapped around a low red cliff.

  ‘Favourite colour,’ recited Miranda. ‘Favourite food, favourite holiday, favourite song. And annoying habits, of course. You two have to learn your lines.’

  ‘And where do we live?’ wondered Ed. ‘And what do we do?’

  ‘Right.’ Miranda winced at the oven waft of her car. ‘And you’d better know it all, by the time we get to Djanet.’

  ‘She’s right, you know.’ Casey climbed into the passenger seat. ‘We will have to rehearse all those funny little things about each other. And we’ve never really spoken about anything like that.’

  ‘Just about pirates, and kidnappers.’

  Not in the letters, she thought. Not in the letters.

  Ed drove down the road, trailing dust, and waiting for her to speak. She stole looks at him, sideways. He was always so calm, she thought, and watchful.

  She’d watched him, once, as a fight flared on the Apollo. Cabin fever was real. Ed read his book, as the voices got louder and meaner. She knew he was listening, ready to step in with a ruthless speed, if needed. But the argument died away, and Ed turned a page, and they never even knew he was there.

  Casey rolled down her window.

  ‘It will be odd’ – she straightened her back – ‘if we don’t know enough about each other. They help, those bits and pieces of truth.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ed.

  ‘OK.’ Casey looked at him. ‘You first.’

  Cigarette burns were dotted all over her seat, and she was tugging fretfully at the padding, picking it out, shred by shred.

  ‘Why me?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I need to practise telling the truth.’

  She heard him take a breath.

  Normal, he called his childhood, because doesn’t everyone think their childhood is normal?

  A small village, somewhere in the Home Counties. An old vicarage. Pillars and iron gates, too nice for the vicar, nowadays. Rolling green fields all around, and conkers in autumn. Mum made cakes and fixed things, because it’s a waste otherwise. A sensible village school, then the smart local. University, as expected.

  ‘And why the Marines?’

  ‘My father,’ he gestured. ‘And my older brother too. It was a big deal, to both of them. My father loved it all. He never really got over leaving the Navy. And my brother, he’s still in it. Climbing the ladder. One of their stars.’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know that he would tell me if he wasn’t. I don’t know how he would find the words.’

  ‘And you liked the Marines?’

  ‘I liked being part of something,’ he said. ‘Friendship is a building block there, to make it all possible. And it’s a challenge, but designed so you can succeed. But the war . . . Too many . . . Not just the deaths, and the injuries . . . It was more than that. No one came back the same . . .’

  He stopped.

  ‘No,’ she decided. ‘The Marines are too easy to check. You can’t risk someone knowing someone knowing someone. We’ll have to come up with something else, for you. A different story.’

  He looked sideways at her, almost amused, watching as her long dark hair whipped into knots. She usually scraped it back, tied it into an unforgiving bun. Pulled it away from a face of angles, taut across the cheekbones, with a few freckles in the sun.

  Casey glanced across at him, and caught him looking at her now. And they smiled, in that moment of recognition.

  ‘You lie to get to the truth,’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes I lie just to practise,’ she said. ‘And it’s only real when it’s on the front page.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you instead, for now.’

  She began, fiddling with her safety belt.

  ‘I grew up in London. All very normal, you know. It was just me, though. No brothers or sisters. And I always wanted a sister.’

  She stopped, flicking over the stories she was leaving out. Casey only knew how to ask questions.

  ‘It’s easier to be mysterious, I find,’ Miranda had laughed once. And it was, when lies were easier than truth.

  The silence drifted on, and she wished she hadn’t spoken. It seemed endless, this road. The horizon receding like a rainbow, in a sky that had forgotten to rain.

  Casey stared out of the window, remembering the childhood she had almost discarded, beneath all those layers of lies.

  She wondered, now, whether he watched over her. Looked out for her name, flaunted on the page.

  Yes, that name.

  And she met his grey eyes, every day, in the mirror.

  She wondered if he ever felt pride.

  Or fear.

  Her existence, a threat. I can make your life a lie.

  Or maybe he never even cared at all.

  20

  Ed reached over for the map, and she was back in the red desert, the sun burning the air.

  ‘Not much further now,’ he reassured. ‘Friends. Who are y
our friends?’

  Casey put on smiles like a dress in the morning, and sparkled for a thousand acquaintances. Few friends, though. None, really. She kept them all in the same orbit. Not too close. Never too close. Miranda was the only one who understood, in the end.

  ‘I had a lot of friends at university,’ she said, over the grumble of the Hilux.

  And that was almost true. She’d learned to blend in at university, escaping her mother and the flat, and the memories. She had giggled and danced and cried with the best of them. And it was only more recently that the wise ones had stopped, and wondered, did we ever know you at all? Because you’re so visible, as a journalist. Everyone knows your game. Or the version of it seen in the paper.

  ‘It was a struggle to buy my flat,’ she said. ‘But I wanted somewhere that was just mine. And I was lucky.’

  Thinking: I wasn’t lucky. I worked and worked, so very hard. And it was after my mother died, and I couldn’t bear her flat and her memories and her secrets.

  ‘Boyfriend in London?’

  ‘They,’ she said, ‘won’t need to know about that.’

  There were, of course, sometimes. But when there were so many versions of her, she never knew the one they loved. They fell for the glamour, and the danger, and the beauty, and the mask. I miss you, she would say. On the phone, because she could only say it a thousand miles and a war zone away.

  I’ll see you on Wednesday, won’t I? She would hear the hope in his voice, and despise it, quite suddenly. And Wednesday would come, and she’d fly to Islamabad instead.

  She’d tried to make it work, once, properly. He was in finance, a bank just off Green Park. Deals that didn’t matter, one way or the other. Millions, a toy.

  A kind man, who liked to hold her hand. A nice family, with a mother who balanced cushions on corners. And a gentle smile, so that she tried to care about the things he loved. The car. The house. The holidays.

  Trapped, once, on an all-inclusive fortnight in Antigua. Country club and club sandwiches. Peering over the barbed wire at people laughing, down the road, outside. Pacing around the swimming pool.

  Happy? he’d ask.

  Oh yes. A lie.

  He’d forgive, again and again.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ One night, she was wailing, couldn’t stop.

  ‘I know I don’t.’ He was so patient. ‘But I love you. I do love you. Believe me.’

  And she turned away.

  ‘You deserve to be loved,’ he’d said once, side by side in the dark.

  ‘I don’t know how.’ A whisper.

  In the morning, she ignored those deliberate words as if they’d never existed. And let them drift into the quiet, as all words do.

  Do you have to go? In the grey misty morning, late for a flight.

  Yes. Meaning no.

  Because no one made her go.

  And didn’t say: when you hold my hand, I feel like a fox in a snare. And when you get on top of me in the night, I howl in my mind.

  She’d broken it, quite deliberately, in the end. Smashing it, like a favourite vase, and crying over the pieces. Cheating, because it was the only way to kill it, for ever. He was married now. Gone. A blonde, her opposite, in every way. The pastel version, in a terrace in Wandsworth, fully extended.

  She pried into their lives, once, from an electronic distance. Invisibly invading. Two children, dull names. A boy and a girl.

  That could have been me.

  Could it?

  No.

  She watched them, pastel at parties, occasionally. Lives overlapping, ever so slightly. Housewife: she screamed the insult in her head. And wished it could be enough. Wondered, with spite: do you ever fuck, now?

  If I had a hundred lives – she meant it kindly – I’d have spent one of them with you.

  You’re following a rainbow, he said. And no one ever reaches the end of the rainbow.

  You’re the one who wanted gold.

  No, he said. I wanted you.

  The car hit a bump, and skidded. Ed straightened it out.

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘No.’

  She let the silence grow.

  ‘We’re not very good at this,’ Ed said, after a while.

  ‘I’m better,’ she said carefully, ‘at making friends when I fake it.’

  And I can seduce anyone unless I care, she didn’t say.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Ed steered around a rusty oil drum lying in the middle of the road.

  ‘Do you find it hard?’ he asked. ‘Being someone else?’

  ‘It’s easier,’ she said, ‘than being me.’

  ‘Tell me about Miranda,’ he said, letting her off. ‘She can be the friend I talk about. We’ll call her, I don’t know . . . Jasmine.’

  ‘Miranda grew up somewhere in Hampshire,’ and Casey could talk easily, at once. ‘She had it all, you know, the pony and the tennis lessons, and the hair straighteners and the violin teacher.’

  ‘Unlike you?’ Ed suggested.

  ‘But it wasn’t enough for her, all that. She used to laugh and say that she’d been swapped at birth, but that isn’t funny, when you think about it. She would leave her Fisher Price radio to record, after bedtime, to find out what her parents said when she’d gone to sleep.’ Casey laughed, then hardened. ‘I think there were endless loops of lies in her house. Her mother on pills, and her father sleeping with the secretary.’

  Meeting Miranda had made her glad she hadn’t shattered those lives, on that high street, one lazy Sunday.

  ‘You’re none of you easy, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Casey honestly. ‘We’re searching for something, all the time. And we never know why.’

  ‘Do you both think the same way, you and Miranda?’

  ‘No,’ said Casey, half smiling. ‘We always say that she wants to know what people did, and I want to know why they did it. But we’re outsiders, we have that much in common.’

  ‘I don’t think of you as an outsider.’

  ‘That’s all part of the act,’ she said. ‘Miranda called it a form of self-inflicted schizophrenia, once.’

  Another silence. Casey remembered that she’d wished once that she could see the layers of a human being, like an archaeological dig. Here a good year, a happy year. That would be a kind lover, or a glossy summer. There, a dark layer. A death, maybe, of a friend. Scab-like. Black almost. Leaked down – or would it be up? – over several layers.

  A buried emerald, a chip of pottery, the long-lost sparkle of some battered coin. And guessing, really, what it might mean, all of it.

  Or if your skin could show what you’d been. A scar for every sorrow, and a burn for a broken heart.

  Casey shook her head, and tried to think of secrets she could tell Ed. Secrets that would be enough.

  ‘I love dancing,’ she said, in the end. ‘Sometimes, I go to a club all on my own, just to dance. My favourite colour is silver. My cleaner is called Tania, and she probably knows more about me than anyone else in the world, and she doesn’t care, not even a bit. I’m a terrible cook. I tried to cook beef bourguignon once, and it was so disgusting that I had to give it to the neighbour’s dog. I don’t know my neighbours’ name. I would love my own dog, too, but I never know when I will next be home.’

  And then she ran out of throwaway facts to share.

  ‘Let’s say that I work in PR,’ she almost snapped. ‘Because I can lie about that all day long. We’ll have to sit down and work out your job, because that will be complicated. And we might need different options. And we live in my flat, in east London, but neither of us thinks we’ll last for ever. We met in a bar; love across a crowded room and all that. And we don’t know when we’re going home, because we’re looking for something, and we’ll never know what it is.’

  ‘My favourite colour,’ Ed tried, ‘is blue.’

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to make it up as we go along.’

  21

  Djanet was ugly and crowded,
and surrounded by crumbling beige hills. As they drove into the town, the call to prayer was echoing through the streets.

  The oasis, coffee brown, was fringed with dusty palm trees, a precarious toehold in the wilderness. They booked into a small hotel, set around a peaceful courtyard. It took ten minutes to see Djanet. They explored every street and then there was nothing more to do, other than wait.

  In her early days, Casey enjoyed the hours outside houses. Houses famous for fifteen minutes, as she gossiped with her opposite number at the Telegraph. You learned the value of patience. Journalists learn to wait, and watch. They learn to wait on a doorstep. For hacks, doorstep is a verb.

  Ross liked sending out his reporters to doorstep in the rain, because he had decided people were 20 per cent more likely to let the reporter in when they looked like a drowned rat. This ploy did not endear him to his newsroom. After the education correspondent went down with a nasty case of pneumonia, human resources killed the strategy. Even now, Ross was outraged.

  *

  In the quiet courtyard, Casey lay in a hammock slung between two scrubby trees. She spent hours staring at the map of Libya. The map looked very empty.

  ‘Hic sunt dracones,’ whispered Casey.

  ‘What?’ Miranda looked up from her book.

  ‘Here be dragons,’ said Casey. ‘They wrote it on the edge of a globe, in olden times, when they’d reached the end of the known world.’

  ‘Here be dragons,’ Miranda repeated. ‘Well, let’s hope not.’

  Casey compulsively checked her equipment again.

  There were a few tourists in Djanet, at least, so the three of them blended in, just about. A couple of Germans were off to hike through the park. Some French archaeologists had flown down to immortalise the cave paintings, buried deep up in the hills. Mystical drawings of dancing men, swimming men, dying men.

  Every tourist in Djanet was ignoring embassy guidance. There had been terrorist attacks in southern Algeria before, several of them. But the memories had faded just enough for a few determined explorers to make the trek.