“Looks like Grand Central Station,” he says. “Only bigger. And emptier. As if it wasn’t really Grand Central at all but only . . . mmm . . . a movie set of Grand Central. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“I . . . I think so . . .”
“There certainly aren’t any trains . . . and we can’t hear any in the distance . . . but there are doors going everywhere. Oh, and there’s an escalator, but it’s broken. All dusty, and some of the treads are gone.” He pauses, and when he speaks again he does so in a lower voice, as if afraid of being overheard. “People are leaving. Some climbed the escalator – I saw them – but most are using the doors. I guess I’ll have to leave, too. For one thing, there’s nothing to eat. There’s a candy machine, but that’s broken, too.”
“Are you . . . honey, are you hungry?”
“A little. Mostly what I’d like is some water. I’d kill for a cold bottle of Dasani.”
Annie looks guiltily down at her own legs, still beaded with water. She imagines him licking off those beads and is horrified to feel a sexual stirring.
“I’m all right, though,” he adds hastily. “For now, anyway. But there’s no sense staying here. Only . . .”
“What? What, Jimmy?”
“I don’t know which door to use.”
Another beep.
“I wish I knew which one Mrs Corey took. She’s got my damn cards.”
“Are you . . .” She wipes her face with the towel she wore out of the shower; then she was fresh, now she’s all tears and snot. “Are you scared?”
“Scared?” he asks thoughtfully. “No. A little worried, that’s all. Mostly about which door to use.”
Find your way home, she almost says. Find the right door and find your way home. But if he did, would she want to see him? A ghost might be all right, but what if she opened the door on a smoking cinder with red eyes and the remains of jeans (he always travelled in jeans) melted into his legs? And what if Mrs Corey was with him, his baked deck of cards in one twisted hand?
Beep.
“I don’t need to tell you to be careful about the FedEx man anymore,” he says. “If you really want him, he’s all yours.”
She shocks herself by laughing.
“But I did want to say I love you—”
“Oh honey I love you t—”
“—and not to let the McCormack kid do the gutters this fall, he works hard but he’s a risk-taker, last year he almost broke his fucking neck. And don’t go to the bakery anymore on Sundays. Something’s going to happen there, and I know it’s going to be on a Sunday, but I don’t know which Sunday. Time really is funny here.”
The McCormack kid he’s talking about must be the son of the guy who used to be their caretaker in Vermont . . . only they sold that place ten years ago, and the kid must be in his mid-twenties by now. And the bakery? She supposes he’s talking about Zoltan’s, but what on Earth—Beep.
“Some of the people here were on the ground, I guess. That’s very tough, because they don’t have a clue how they got here. And the pilot keeps screaming. Or maybe it’s the co-pilot. I think he’s going to be here for quite a while. He just wanders around. He’s very confused.”
The beeps are coming closer together now.
“I have to go, Annie. I can’t stay here, and the phone’s going to shit the bed any second now, anyway.” Once more in that I’m-scolding-myself voice (impossible to believe she will never hear it again after today; impossible not to believe), he mutters, “It would have been so simple just to . . . well, never mind. I love you, sweetheart.”
“Wait! Don’t go!”
“I c—”
“I love you, too! Don’t go!”
But he already has. In her ear there is only black silence.
She sits there with the dead phone to her ear for a minute or more, then breaks the connection. The non-connection. When she opens the line again and gets a perfectly normal dial tone, she touches star-sixty-nine after all. According to the robot who answers her page, the last incoming call was at nine o’clock that morning. She knows who that one was: her sister Nell, calling from New Mexico. Nell called to tell Annie that her plane had been delayed and she wouldn’t be in until tonight. Nell told her to be strong.
All the relatives who live at a distance – James’, Annie’s – flew in. Apparently they feel that James used up all the family’s Destruction Points, at least for the time being.
There is no record of an incoming call at – she glances at the bedside clock and sees it’s now 3:17 pm – at about ten past three, on the third afternoon of her widowhood.
Someone raps briefly on the door and her brother calls, “Anne? Annie?”
“Dressing!” she calls back. Her voice sounds like she’s been crying, but unfortunately, no one in this house would find that strange. “Privacy, please!”
“You okay?” he calls through the door. “We thought we heard you talking. And Ellie thought she heard you call out.”
“Fine!” she calls, then wipes her face again with the towel. “Down in a few!”
“Okay. Take your time.” Pause. “We’re here for you.” Then he clumps away.
“Beep,” she whispers, then covers her mouth to hold in laughter that is some emotion even more complicated than grief trying to find the only way out it has. “Beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.” She lies back on the bed, laughing, and above her cupped hands her eyes are large and awash with tears that overspill down her cheeks and run all the way to her ears. “Beep-fucking-beepity-beep.”
She laughs for quite a while, then dresses and goes downstairs to be with her relatives, who have come to mingle their grief with hers. Only they feel apart from her, because he didn’t call any of them. He called her. For better or worse, he called her.
During the autumn of that year, with the blackened remains of the apartment building the jet crashed into still closed off from the rest of the world by yellow police tape (although the taggers have been inside, one leaving a spray-painted message reading CRISPY CRITTERS LAND HERE), Annie receives the sort of e-blast computer-addicts like to send to a wide circle of acquaintances. This one comes from Gert Fisher, the town librarian in Tilton, Vermont. When Annie and James summered there, Annie used to volunteer at the library, and although the two women never got on especially well, Gert has included Annie in her quarterly updates ever since. They are usually not very interesting, but halfway through the weddings, funerals, and 4-H winners in this one, Annie comes across a bit of news that makes her catch her breath. Jason McCormack, the son of old Hughie McCormack, was killed in an accident on Labor Day. He fell from the roof of a summer cottage while cleaning the gutters and broke his neck.
“He was only doing a favour for his dad, who as you may remember had a stroke the year before last,” Gert wrote before going on to how it rained on the library’s end-of-summer lawn sale, and how disappointed they all were.
Gert doesn’t say in her three-page compendium of breaking news, but Annie is quite sure Jason fell from the roof of what used to be their cottage. In fact, she is positive.
* * *
Five years after the death of her husband (and the death of Jason McCormack not long after), Annie remarries. And although they relocate to Boca Raton, she gets back to the old neighbourhood often. Craig, the new husband, is only semi-retired, and his business takes him to New York every three or four months. Annie almost always goes with him, because she still has family in Brooklyn and on Long Island. More than she knows what to do with, it sometimes seems. But she loves them with that exasperated affection that seems to belong, she thinks, only to people in their fifties and sixties. She never forgets how they drew together for her after James’s plane went down, and made the best cushion for her that they could. So she wouldn’t crash, too.
When she and Craig go back to New York, they fly. About this she never has a qualm, but she stops going to Zoltan’s Family Bakery on Sundays when she’s home, even though their raisin bagels are, she is sure, served in heaven’s
waiting room. She goes to Froger’s instead. She is actually there, buying doughnuts (the doughnuts are at least passable), when she hears the blast. She hears it clearly even though Zoltan’s is eleven blocks away. LP gas explosion. Four killed, including the woman who always passed Annie her bagels with the top of the bag rolled down, saying, “Keep it that way until you get home or you lose the freshness.”
People stand on the sidewalks, looking east toward the sound of the explosion and the rising smoke, shading their eyes with their hands. Annie hurries past them, not looking. She doesn’t want to see a plume of rising smoke after a big bang; she thinks of James enough as it is, especially on the nights when she can’t sleep. When she gets home she can hear the phone ringing inside. Either everyone has gone down the block to where the local school is having a sidewalk art sale, or no one can hear that ringing phone. Except for her, that is. And by the time she gets her key turned in the lock, the ringing has stopped.
Sarah, the only one of her sisters who never married, is there, it turns out, but there is no need to ask her why she didn’t answer the phone; Sarah Bernicke, the one-time disco queen, is in the kitchen with the Village People turned up, dancing around with the O-Cedar in one hand, looking like a chick in a TV ad. She missed the bakery explosion, too, although their building is even closer to Zoltan’s than Froger’s.
Annie checks the answering machine, but there’s a big red zero in the MESSAGES WAITING window. That means nothing in itself, lots of people call without leaving a message, but—
Star-sixty-nine reports the last call at eight-forty last night. Annie dials it anyway, hoping against hope that somewhere outside the big room that looks like a Grand Central Station movie set he found a place to re-charge his phone. To him it might seem he last spoke to her yesterday. Or only minutes ago. Time is funny here, he said. She has dreamed of that call so many times it now almost seems like a dream itself, but she has never told anyone about it. Not Craig, not even her own mother, now almost ninety but alert and with a firmly held belief in the afterlife.
In the kitchen, the Village People advise that there is no need to feel down. There isn’t, and she doesn’t. She nevertheless holds the phone very tightly as the number she has star-sixty-nined rings once, then twice. Annie stands in the living room with the phone to her ear and her free hand touching the brooch above her left breast, as if touching the brooch could still the pounding heart beneath it. Then the ringing stops and a recorded voice offers to sell her The New York Times at special bargain rates that will not be repeated.
SARAH PINBOROUGH
* * *
Our Man in the Sudan
SARAH PINBOROUGH IS THE British author of six horror novels from Leisure Books, the most recent being Feeding Ground. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and she has also written a Torchwood novel, Into the Silence, for BBC Books.
She has recently completed A Matter of Blood, the first of a supernatural thriller trilogy for Gollancz, which will be published in 2010.
The author has twice been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and when she’s not writing she can normally be found laughing with friends and drinking wine, probably with a cat in her lap.
“When I was a little girl back in the early 1980s,” she recalls, “my dad was posted to Khartoum. One night, when I was about ten, I had a sleepover at another girl’s house. We decided – completely missing the point of a sleepover to try and stay up all night. At around 6:30 am, in a final attempt to stay awake, we went outside and mucked around in the dusty street in front of her house.
“By 6:45 we could see the sandstorm rolling towards us from the desert and were totally transfixed by it. It wasn’t my first, but it was the first time I’d seen one approach like some kind of tidal wave. We stayed outside as it rolled over the ramshackle city and didn’t go back inside until we couldn’t take the sting of the sand on our skin anymore. It was an experience and sight I’ll never forget.
“My mother also dragged me out to sit in the baking desert to hear a historian talk about the battle of Omdurman. As much as I hadn’t wanted to go, I found his stories of the men with swords who hid in the sand dunes and slashed at the horses quite terrifying and, like the sight of the haboob, they have stayed with me.
“This story gave me an opportunity to blend those two memories into something with a life of its own and, I hope, also create a photograph of a city that I loved very much as a child.”
“I WANT TO SEE the body,” Fanshawe said.
His eyes burned and his sockets were gritty as he blinked, as if the infernal dust that covered everything in this back end of beyond hell hole had somehow also coated the inside of his eyelids. Sat stiffly as he was in the leather-backed chair in Cliff’s office, sweat itched under his collar and he fought his fingers’ urge to creep up and at least loosen his tie. Instead, he just lifted his chin slightly and made a valiant effort to ignore it.
His shirt clung soaking to his back. It wasn’t helping his rising irritation. He was tired, not so much from the flight that had landed at two o’clock that morning, but from the constant heat. It had been a baking black furnace when he’d walked across the runway to fight for his suitcase in the tatty terminal building, and there’d been no respite since. It seemed the air-conditioning on some floors of the Nile Hilton was refusing to work and unfortunately, he’d been placed on one of those floors. He suspected from the weary expressions of all those who made it to the buffet breakfast, that it was all rooms that were affected, but the management refused to confirm or deny.
Blasted heat. He hated it. Crisp, elegant European winters were his choice; civilized and organized. This African climate left him cold, and even his own poor joke couldn’t raise his mood.
On the other side of the desk, Clift smiled. But then it was probably easier for him to do so, dressed casually as he was in shorts and a T-shirt and making no apology for it. The First Secretary poured thick sweet black tea from a tall metal pot.
“We’ll have to have it local style today, I’m afraid. Had a blasted power cut and the night watchman didn’t start the genny.” He slid a cup and saucer across the desk. “He was probably asleep. Wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, all the long life’s gone off.”
Fanshawe stared at the cup but didn’t touch it. How anyone could drink anything hot in these temperatures was beyond him.
“The body?” he repeated.
“Ah yes. The body. Well, that is a touch embarrassing as it happens.” Clift took a sip of his own tea and sat back in his chair. With his tan and easy grin he didn’t look at all perplexed by the heat. It didn’t endear him to Fanshawe. Neither did his next sentence.
“I’m afraid we don’t have the body. Not anymore.”
Fanshawe stared. Outside, in the white brightness below, car horns blared loudly and two torrents of guttural Arabic raged over each other.
“What do you mean, you don’t have it?” His own Queen’s English was as dry as the occasional patches of Khartoum grass and scrub that he’d passed on his way to the Embassy.
Spreading his fingers, Clift shrugged. “It was the coffin, you see. God only knows where our standard issue has got too. We haven’t needed one since that poor sod flipped his Land Rover and broke his neck on the way back from Port Sudan, and that was a couple of years ago now.” He shook his head slightly and frowned. “I’m not even sure it was replaced. I’d only been in post a couple of months then, and you know how these things are.”
Fanshawe wasn’t entirely sure that he did. In the cool sophistication of Europe’s Embassies, those on her Majesty’s diplomatic service wore suits and ties and typed everything in triplicate. He swatted a fly away and raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
Clift took another sip of his tea and leaned forward, his arms resting on the desk. “We tried to borrow one from the Germans but then one of their buggers bloody went and died too and so they needed it back. Didn’t want to ask the Yanks or the Russians. They’d ha
ve had a bloody field day with that.” He peered at Fanshawe. “We telexed the FCO. They said he had no next of kin so, to be honest, we didn’t think anyone would be that concerned. In the end we just buried him.”
Fanshawe sighed and looked over to the window. Even through the thick mosquito gauze stretched across it, he thought he’d have to flinch in the white of that sun. Maybe it reflected back up from the dusty, dirty cream of the ground. Perhaps that’s why it seemed so endlessly bright under the empty blue skies of North Africa. He chewed the inside of his mouth slightly. He’d wanted to see the body. There were things he needed to verify.
Clift rummaged in the desk drawer and pulled out a folder. “The doctor examined him and was pretty sure he’d had a heart attack.” He slid the death certificate over so that it sat next to Fanshawe’s untouched tea.
“Local doctor?” Happy to bring his eyes back to the more comfortable view of the 70s furniture that had seen better days, Fanshawe picked up the paper.
“Yes, we’re a minimum staff in a post like this. He’s a good chap, though. Did his training in London.” Clift lit a cigarette, the match barely touching the side of the box before bursting into flames. “I have to say, I don’t really understand this interest in Cartwright’s death. He seemed like an ordinary Second Secretary. So, what’s the story?”
Fanshawe refused the offered cigarette, even though he was a smoker himself. The smoke and the dust combined would probably make him choke. Watching Clift, he wondered how long you had to spend in a place like this before you acclimatized. Too long, was the only conclusion he could reach.
“He was MI6,” he said, eventually. “He’d had some trouble behind the Iron Curtain so he was laying low here. Having some R and R while things quietened down.”
Clift laughed. “Well, a year out here is certainly long enough to be forgotten. Are you worried the Russians tracked him down? If so, I wouldn’t be overly concerned. It’s too hot for spying games out here. I doubt they’d have the energy for it.” He laughed again.
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