They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  ‘It was a factory,’ Sabina tells him. ‘Aluminium something or other. Near the village of Ladina. We slept in this giant drum of metal sheets.’

  She watches the packet of Benson and Hedges he takes out of his pocket.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘They’re English.’

  Her eyes flit to the house behind them. She bites her lip. ‘Quickly – my mother doesn’t like me smoking.’

  They turn their backs to the house and walk down to the stream. Marko lights Sabina’s cigarette, and when she leans into the flame, he sees beneath the loose tracksuit top; a wrinkled patch of skin where her breast should be.

  Sabina zips the top up to her neck. ‘So you’re Marko? He talked about you. You were good friends.’

  ‘We used to come here,’ he explains. ‘When we were boys. Before Kemal moved in with us. Our fathers were both policemen, and we used to meet on those holidays in Bečići.’ Yesterday the men at the flat of Vesna’s father hadn’t wanted to know anything. Now the need to talk comes as a surprise to him. ‘You know when we were all happy socialists and state workers holidayed together,’ he tells her. ‘Then Kemal lost his parents and there was no one else, so he came to live with us.’

  Sabina looks over the stream to the fence and the field of wheat. The valley here is flat. Marko’s geography teachers had told him how it used to be the bed of the Pannonia Sea. Seabeds this old were extremely fertile. Which was why people had settled here, and why people would always want the valley.

  Sabina has closed her eyes against the light. ‘My mother always thinks that someone will come and take the house. But I have the paperwork.’ She opens her eyes and looks at him like she has just realised her mother might be right. ‘His signature, everything. Kemal was really good about it. Did it all properly. Never asked anything of us.’

  She drops the half-smoked cigarette, then folding her arms, grinds the end into the soil. ‘If you knew your friend you’d know how generous he was. I’d say he saved our lives at least twice.’

  Marko holds his hands up. ‘It’s your house,’ he says, ‘and I do know Kemal. He was a hero in Stovnik.’

  ‘Like an elephant,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elephants – they return to the old graves, don’t they?’

  ‘Two graves.’

  She smiles and moves her hands into the pockets of her hooded top. She has decided she might trust him. ‘We saw his name after the shelling – in the paper. We thought he was dead too. We went to the memorial, laid flowers. I don’t know why he ran away – I was going to ask you.’

  ‘When did he give you the house?’

  ‘When? Just before the shelling,’ Sabina thinks. ‘Maybe a few weeks before?’

  The weeks before the shelling. He can’t even remember whether Kemal was on duty or leave.

  She turns to look back at the new vegetable garden, and with one hand idly reaches for the frayed rope that hangs down from the branch of the willow tree. There is no tyre swing any more. Marko looks back up at the garden. He should be sad the old place has gone, but actually, what they have done is beautiful. When he looks down at the brook he expects to see Kemal standing in it.

  ‘Maybe he did have a plan,’ Sabina says. ‘It was like he was – tying things up. Moving on. Presenting us with this and the garden all new.’

  ‘But he didn’t say anything? About the women who went missing at the camp?’

  Sabina shakes her head.

  They walk back up to the house, to the porch where Marko used to sit and look up the skirts of Kemal’s mother when she stood on a ladder and cleared the gutters of leaves. The mystery of her thighs. The thought of what happened to her is a stone in his mouth.

  ‘It’s great to see the place looking so good,’ he tells Sabina. ‘Have you got a pen?’

  ‘A pen?’

  ‘If you need anything – my number – just give me a call.’

  ‘But you live in England?’

  Marko hadn’t even thought about it. ‘I mean, I’ll give you my parents’ number. And they can call me and,’ but he stops. Sabina’s smile makes him realise he doesn’t know what he is saying, only that if these people meant something to Kemal they should mean something to him. What she has told him is a gift. She has given Kemal back to him and he feels there is something he should give to her.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘We know plenty of people here now. The neighbours are good. Well, the immediate neighbours.’

  They walk back through the house. It is dim, and thick with the smell of her mother’s cooking. At the door Sabina grabs his wrist – quick, just enough to stop him.

  ‘At the camp. Kemal rescued people. From the forest. Bringing them back,’ she says. ‘Not just us. He was going back and meeting them, night after night.’

  Her eyes are wet.

  ‘I can believe it,’ Marko says.

  He needs to get away from the house and out of the valley. He needs to do what Samir says. Pay his regards, bury his friend. Then get out of Stovnik and out of Bosnia. They can build their new lives here. Sabina with her vegetables and Samir with his business. Perhaps Kemal was screwing this woman. Perhaps it was nothing more than a fucked-up relationship which made him run away. He shouldn’t have doubted Kemal. What good does it do him? He wants to be on a plane over the Adriatic Sea. He wants to be opening the door on his sleeping Millie.

  Sabina lets go of his wrist. ‘Kemal never did anything wrong,’ she says.

  A tsunami should not be thought of as a single wave. It is a series of waves called a ‘wave train’. The time period between waves can last between a few minutes and two hours. The later waves are the strongest.

  Christmas Day, 2004

  Kao Lak

  Anya went under, the slap of the skiff’s hull a dull punching in her head. She began to count. The cold came up from the depths. She kicked against it. She didn’t want to look down until she had reached the main reef. William had already paddled ahead. He hovered over the giant white bloom in the sea; a reef so big it made the tall man look no bigger than a parasitic fish cleaning the mouth of a whale. One, two, three, four kicks and the coral came to meet her. She could feel the water warming. Plucking up the courage to look down, she saw the dead city of white rock like skulls looming from the black depths. A blue fish darted out of one eye and back into another. She reached the spot where Will was, where the coral almost broke the surface. She had to feel her way over the outcrop to reach him. The dead reef was suddenly alive. Beneath them, a shower of yellow fish shot past and turned as one, striking a perfect right angle around a bush of blood-red fingers. The bush projected from a carpet covering the coral in sulphurous orange, pink and green. Feathery nets of sea cucumbers, and banks of rubbery yellow filter-feeders ticked as though in admonishment. A translucent fish hovered in front of her mask, blue streak pulsing through its body like a cardiogram. With a snap the fish disappeared, and she found herself drifting towards a rock covered with bulbous growths the size of large vases, and painted with the blue veins of fine porcelain. She had an urge to touch one of the vases, just as you do the exhibits in a museum, but as soon as her finger made contact, the thing disappeared, setting off a chain reaction, like the folding spines of a frightened hedgehog. The ‘vases’ were one organism. Far from being solid growth, this was the skin of a living creature. Alarmed, it shrank to a brittle ball of shells clinging to the coral.

  As she kicked back, her flipper scraped against something and before she could orientate herself, a cloud of sand ignited and bloomed.

  When the cloud cleared, Will had gone.

  She turned around and kicked. She was hovering over a plateau, no sign of movement in the water. She turned again, and couldn’t remember whether she was facing the direction she had come from, or the direction in which she was going. She broke the surface. The air burned her throat. She pulled the snorkel out of her mouth. The sky wheeled overhead. Ripping the fog of the mask from her eyes, Anya turn
ed, trying to locate the thin black line of the coast. But for a panicked second she couldn’t. Then she saw the skiff. It was much farther than she had imagined and there was no one aboard.

  She couldn’t see the yellow pipe of his snorkel. Nothing but the flat sea. Where was he? And then right in the teeth of her panic a story formed. She would sit at a dinner table, or a gathering of their friends, many years from now, telling the tale of how she believed William lost, and how he had turned up again, on the boat, on the shore, back at the cabin. It would be one of the legends of their relationship. Like the legend of their three years apart. Then something moved in the corner of her eye – maybe twenty metres behind her, a tail disappearing into the water.

  Anya kicked for the boat, gathering armfuls of sea, but the flippers were rocks tied to her feet and it was like reeling in an endless sheet—

  Something touched her ankle and she couldn’t kick it free.

  ‘Anya! Anya – I was waving!’ Will said.

  Anya had read it somewhere. You make memories of an event even before it happens. Which means in a certain sense, memories exist in the future. But she hadn’t really understood it until now. Until in her panic at losing Will, or drowning, or whatever it was she was panicking about, she had turned her loss into the memory she would have. It was like taking out an insurance policy, a way of mitigating the trauma to come. Except this time, the trauma she expected hadn’t arrived, and her insurance policy wasn’t needed. Anya wasn’t at all used to panicking. She was not a panicker.

  Will pulled on the cord of the outboard motor, and she felt the exhilaration of being in the present again.

  Will. The Indian Ocean. A skiff.

  He pulled on the cord, but nothing happened. The boat bobbed on the lagoon, as though the land turned around the sea, not the boat on the water. Leaning back on the cross-bench, Anya closed her eyes. Her disorientation had started not in the ocean but as they walked the smile of beach, through the kelp, broken shells and watermelon rinds, towards the boat-hire hut. With each step, the feeling of déjà vu grew stronger. An elephant stood in the shade of a tall palm tree and a man on a stepladder brushed its neck. Brushing, brushing with a stiff bristled broom. She had remembered her dream from the night before, the elephant, the Bosnian woman she didn’t recognise. Scrape. Scrape.

  Scrape. How had she ended up in a picture which belonged in a woman’s house in Sarajevo? It had been so easy to find Kemal Lekić’s girlfriend. Googled once, and there she was on the staff pages of a tourist agency in the capital. And there was Anya, passing through Sarajevo with a couple of hours to kill before her flight out. It was all so easy. Vesna’s employers even gave Anya the address. Only when Vesna opened the door did Anya realise she had no idea what she was going to ask the girlfriend of a dead man accused of rape.

  ‘Fucking thing!’ Will ripped at the engine. It coughed politely but delivered nothing. Anya rubbed her eyes, she had forgotten to take out her contact lenses.

  In the boat-hire hut of the resort, Anya hadn’t found the hero of Stovnik alive. They were served by a young New Zealander with dreadlocks. Exactly the kind of young New Zealander with dreadlocks you would expect to find working on a Thai beach.

  ‘Do you want me to try?’ she asked William.

  ‘No, no,’ William laughed. ‘This is personal now.’

  He stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the outboard motor like a father staring at an insolent child.

  ‘Are we stranded?’

  ‘I think that might be the word.’

  Anya stood up, and walked the tightrope of the skiff, her stomach brushing the rough knot of Will’s shorts as they passed. The rear of the boat dipped to the waterline and Will clambered to the front. When she pulled on the cord of the outboard motor, it didn’t even cough. She tried again and the cord burned her palms.

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ she asked.

  ‘No petrol.’

  ‘I think there’s no petrol in it.’

  ‘We are of like mind.’

  Shading her eyes, Anya could just about see the beach. The bristle of figures moving in the heat. A red and yellow rash of umbrellas.

  ‘How far, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Mile and a half?’

  ‘Swimmable.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Will said, ‘I don’t think there are any oars in this boat.’ He was on his knees, looking beneath the benches.

  ‘We should have checked.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have to check.’

  Anya looked across the water, ‘What about that boat?’ but even as she pointed along the reef, she knew the next skiff was just as far. Really, what was she doing here? It was the question Vesna Knežević had asked her.

  What are you doing here?

  Perhaps not so angry at first.

  I’m sorry, what did you say your research was about?

  Anya had picked up the picture in the hall as a distraction. She just needed a moment to think. This picture, she asked Vesna. A holiday? Somewhere nice?

  It was an elephant on a beach, and over its tabard the words, Kao Lak, Heaven Resort.

  Anya stepped down the hull as Will shuffled along the cross-bench to make room for her. She was glad she had told him nothing. It would confirm his fears that she was nothing but her work. When Vesna had grabbed the picture and ordered Anya out of the house, it was one of the most professionally embarrassing moments in her life. Tell Will one thing, and all the rest would fall out. It would be like opening the cupboard which hides the mess of your house.

  ‘Well,’ he said as she sat down next to him. ‘This is another fine bollocks.’

  ‘How could he send us out without enough petrol?’

  ‘He’s a New Zealander living on a beach in Thailand.’

  Anya pushed a drop of water along her thigh with her fingernail, then flicked it off her knee, leaving a white track in her sun-blushed skin.

  ‘Maybe it’s a test,’ Will said.

  ‘A test?’

  ‘You know, see how long we can survive without eating each other. Or arguing.’

  ‘I think there would be arguments before we ate each other.’

  She felt the presence of Will’s hand near her own.

  He held up her wrist. ‘I don’t think your Chairman Mao watch was waterproof.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ Anya took off the watch. The plastic had misted. She held it up, and tapped at the back. ‘To be honest, I don’t think it worked in the first place. And I forgot to give you your present.’ She clipped the watch back on her wrist.

  ‘Why didn’t we stay in touch?’ The question surprised even Anya.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Will said.

  ‘I did try. You must have known that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And then I find out you’ve moved to Bangkok!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How was I supposed to feel about that?’

  Will wasn’t looking at her, but down the boat, over the sea. In his silence, the ocean sucked at the hull.

  ‘Do you know how long we were together?’ she says.

  ‘Was it thirteen years?’

  ‘Longer than most marriages.’

  ‘You never believed in marriage.’

  ‘Neither did you.’

  ‘Do you remember when I took the coach from London to Kraków?’ Will asked.

  ‘I remember you took a coach from London to Kraków.’

  ‘And when I reached the place you were staying, you’d run out of those butane gas canisters, and it was absolutely freezing in the flat. That flat above the shops by the cemetery.’

  ‘I do remember we were always running out of gas.’

  ‘Yes, but this was the night I arrived. And then the next morning we had to go out and buy a new gas canister, and we ended up looking all over the place for one with the right kind of attachment, because the fires your cousin had were so outdated. And there was this little place somewhere in an estate, Nowa Huta, I think, and the ma
n in the hardware shop had one of those dogs with no back legs but a trolley with wheels somehow attached to the body of the dog – a little Jack Russell.’

  Will drew the shape of the biomechanical dog with his hands but Anya had no recollection of it, or of what happened the day after he arrived on the coach from London. Or even of being in Nowa Huta with William.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

  ‘I just always remember it.’ He sighed and looked out over the water, ‘I didn’t ever think I would end up managing an English Language school in Bangkok.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t know. How did it happen?’

  ‘Because it’s what you’re good at.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Language. That’s your thing. Language and art and music and everything. Honestly. You talk like your life is over and you’re not even forty. Do you still even draw?’

  ‘Some bits of it are over.’

  He stretched his legs out and flexed his feet, like he was testing their function.

  ‘You know what I miss?’ Anya said. ‘Going to art galleries. And gigs. We used to do that all the time. I don’t think I realised, but that was you. You always organised those things. I didn’t have a clue. I can’t believe you’re not still drawing.’

  ‘The problem is I could never commit to anything I was serious about,’ Will said. It took her a moment to understand he wasn’t talking about art galleries and gigs.

  ‘Oh come on!’

  ‘I did call you though,’ he added.

  ‘After three fucking years.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And why did you?’

  It was only when he turned his head to look at her that she realised quite how close they were sitting. She could feel his breath on her lips.

  ‘Are we going to fail the test?’ he asked.

  ‘What test?’

  ‘The stranded-in-a-boat test.’

  Anya hung her head, looking down between her legs to the red purse of her swimming suit. ‘I thought you’d bloody drowned.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just now. In the water.’

  ‘Oh that.’