by Clare Carson
‘Yeah. I read something about it the other day in some journal or other I was leafing through in the college library. It’s when you experience some kind of shock, isn’t it? A near-death experience and can’t deal with it.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did you have a near-death experience in Afghanistan then?’
‘Not exactly. But it was six months of constant stress and fear about my safety. Not to mention a high death rate among the Afghans I was staying with. PTSD can be caused by prolonged exposure to stress, apparently, as well as one specific event.’
‘What are your symptoms?’
‘Flashbacks. Nightmares. Irritability. Some people deal with the trauma by distancing themselves emotionally from everybody around them.’
He gave her a meaningful stare which she wasn’t sure how to interpret.
‘Do you think you’ve got it then?’
‘Possibly.’
A mangy pigeon hopped on to their table; she shooed it away.
‘Do you have flashbacks?’
‘Yes, sometimes. And I do some wacky things when it comes to relationships.’ He gave her another meaningful stare. ‘You know. Sleep with people without really connecting with what I’m doing.’
Oh, now she understood the funny looks – he wanted her to know he only slept with her because he was emotionally fucked up. If he didn’t have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder he wouldn’t have bothered. Charming. PTSD, a licence to behave like a dick. Sod him. Although, of course, she had only slept with him because she wanted to prise some information out of him, but that wasn’t the point.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘For?’
‘Well, you know, the other night. I wanted to clear the air earlier, but you didn’t seem to be around.’
‘No need to apologize. I only slept with you because I’ve got Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as well.’
He pulled his baffled face.
‘Yes. Prolonged exposure to stress when I was a kid, growing up with a wacko dad who did a mad job. I can see, now you list the symptoms, it’s what I’ve got. It explains everything. I only ever sleep with people I have no emotional connection with whatsoever.’ She swigged a mouthful of coffee. ‘Like you.’
He seemed momentarily stumped, and then he smiled, realized she was joking, sort of. ‘You’re not bothered then?’
He sounded disappointed.
‘No.’
‘Good.’ He leaned forward on the table. ‘You know, there might be some truth in you and the PTSD.’
She glared.
‘Seriously. Perhaps Jim’s job did have a lasting impact on you. Emotional numbing, that’s what it’s called. When you try and distance yourself emotionally from people and events.’
It was true, Jim’s job had put pressure on all of them – at the time and later, in the aftermath of his death. But she wasn’t sure she had a psychological disorder. She thought about her evening in the catacombs with Anna; Sam hadn’t tried to distance herself from Anna, she wanted to talk. That was why she had followed Pierce in the first place. She wasn’t running away or numbing herself. She was doing her best to deal with her father’s legacy in her own peculiar way.
‘I don’t think I’ve got PTSD. I can see that when I was a teenager I dealt with a lot of painful stuff, including my dad’s death, by cauterizing it. I probably came across as emotionally detached. You know what, though, I didn’t really have much choice – it was a survival strategy.’ Getagrip. ‘I’m not sure how else I could have dealt with it. Now it’s not necessary, I don’t do it.’
Not much anyway.
He squished his mouth from side to side as if he was considering her answer, which she found irritating. In Tom’s case, she reckoned, it wasn’t that she was playing at being detached, more that she was aware that their relationship wasn’t particularly healthy, even if she did like him.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said.
They strolled along the Albert Embankment, crossed Westminster Bridge. Big Ben struck nine.
‘I’ve dropped the story about Davenport and the Czech arms dealer.’
‘Your editor wasn’t interested?’
‘Well, it never was much of a story, but it wasn’t that. I was paid a visit.’
‘Oh?’
‘Welsh bloke.’
She coughed, patted herself on the chest. ‘A Welshman? What was his name?’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
Harry wouldn’t.
‘What did he say then?’
‘He said he worked for Intelligence and he’d heard I was pursuing a story about some old MI6 sting involving a Czech arms dealer and a bunch of terrorists.’
She didn’t dare look at Tom, although there was nothing in his voice to suggest he suspected her of ratting on him, that Harry’s appearance was anything to do with something she might have said. He had to be a bit dim if he couldn’t guess, though – who else could it have been?
‘I think Karina got scared because she’d given away too much,’ he said. ‘She must have had a contact somewhere.’
‘Yes, that sounds plausible.’ Even if it wasn’t true.
‘This Welsh bloke said there was no way I could run the story.’
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘Not exactly. He said I was out of my depth – being naïve. He said it wasn’t the way it worked – not with the press and the secret services. Too many people in high-up places in Fleet Street have too many friends in Intelligence. He’s right, of course, they all went to school and college together. It’s an Old Boys’ club, isn’t it. The Establishment. Class loyalty. The press is as much part of it as...’ he waved his hand in the direction of the Houses of Parliament, ‘that lot. He was quite nice about it actually.’
Good old Harry.
‘Although he looked like a bruiser. Broken nose. Hefty build. Not somebody you’d like to meet in an alley on a dark night.’
No.
‘He was right, of course. It was a bit optimistic to think I could run with a story about the Firm. It was never going to get very far. It’s not even my brief. The security correspondent would have done his nut.’
Tom didn’t seem too upset.
‘He gave me a good snippet of info, though, which I think I can use.’
‘What’s that then?’
They had reached Lambeth Palace. Tom crossed to the embankment wall, leaned, peered upstream to Vauxhall.
‘You know that derelict piece of land up there by the bridge, the one you told me about?’
‘By the mouth of the Effra run-off? Near where Jim died?’
‘Yes. Guess who has bought it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘MI6.’
She spluttered. ‘MI6? The Firm?’
‘Yes. Apparently they’ve called in all these big-name architects and they’re planning some huge edifice. Changing times. They’re coming out of the shadows. New era of transparency... Well, the building’s not going to be discreet, put it that way.’
The news annoyed her. Jim would have been irritated. MI6 – bunch of public school boys – building on his grave?
Tom straightened himself. Scratched the back of his head. He was about to say something awkward.
‘I suppose I’d better say goodbye then.’
‘Yes.’ She certainly wasn’t inviting him back to her place again.
‘No. I mean I’m going. I’m leaving the country.’
‘I didn’t think it was that bad.’
‘Not because of you.’
‘I was joking.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘The States.’
‘What about the Sunday Correspondent?’
‘What about it? It’s a new paper. It might float, it might not. I’m not sure I can be bothered to hang around and find out. Anyway, I’ve been offered a job on the Miami Herald.’
‘Miami? Isn’t that another war zone? All those drugs
and mobsters.’
‘Possibly. But there was a vacancy for a crime correspondent. The last one left because he got fed up with writing reports about toddlers drowning in jacuzzis while their parents were snorting coke.’
‘Great.’
‘You know, I think the best way to deal with your fears is to face them. It’s no good hiding.’
She decided not to reply, watched the clouds scudding across the moon.
‘I’d better go now,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
A polite kiss and they parted. She was glad they had left each other on good terms. She paced on, turned away from the river, down a side street. She didn’t want to pass the building site, not now she knew it was owned by the Firm. And she didn’t want to watch Tom walk away, didn’t want to look over her shoulder and see he wasn’t turning to watch her go. A drop of water trickled down her cheek. Raining again. No. She was crying.
CHAPTER 32
London, November 1989
‘WELL, GOODBYE TO the Cold War,’ Sam said as they watched the BBC report of the Berlin Wall being dismantled by the crowds. The end of the German Democratic Republic, the Stasi, the StB, the Iron Curtain, the ideological East–West wars and counter-wars. Although possibly not, according to Harry, the end of the Soviet secret police, the KGB. They would wait it out one way or another, hang on through the thaw.
‘Goodbye and good riddance. Something positive to celebrate,’ she added.
‘The anniversary of Kristallnacht,’ Becky said.
‘Oh, is it?’
‘Yep. The ninth of November 1938. The beginning of the end. If you were Jewish and you weren’t out by then, you’d probably never get out.’
Becky opened a bottle of San Miguel with her teeth, necked its contents.
‘Do you think the protestors planned to do it today, on the anniversary?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wonder whether it’s a good or a bad omen.’
‘It feels quite ominous to me. Spooky. God knows exactly what that wall was holding back – on both sides. Anti-semitism doesn’t just evaporate, it runs too deep.’
She thought of the Red Army Faction, their attempts to root out fascism in the West sliding into violence and support of the totalitarian East. They stared at the screen in silence, the ebullient tone of the reporter suddenly sounding off-key.
*
SAM ARRANGED TO meet Liz at Jim’s grave, 12th November. Their wedding anniversary. Liz was busy – autumn term and she had been made Head of the Department. Roger, the former head and Liz’s partner after Jim’s death, had run off with one of his students and found himself some well-paid professorship on the West Coast of the States. Not Ivy League, Liz had pointed out scathingly. She had applied for his vacated post and yes, she added, she would jump in his grave just as quickly. It was a Sunday and Liz had said they could meet in the afternoon, but then she realized she had to prepare some paper so she phoned and they postponed it until the evening. Sam drove south to the periphery of London in Becky’s Moggie Minor, arrived before Liz.
Dark already, the evening clear, she strolled through the familiar graveyard, the grass and fallen leaves on its shaded side still embalmed in an icy coating from the previous night’s deep freeze. Jim’s headstone was to the south. The bony trunks of the birches beyond the churchyard gleamed. The silver disc of the moon shone through the tangled branches, rising so fast she could almost see it moving. By the time Liz arrived, it was swinging above the canopy of the small copse.
‘Full moon,’ Sam said.
‘Jim would have liked that.’ Liz remembered Jim more kindly with the passing years, Sam reckoned. Or perhaps Roger doing a bunk with a younger woman had given her a different perspective on her late husband. Liz was carrying a carved turnip head, dried and shrivelled, its gaping mouth grotesquely twisted.
‘Jess gave it to me to put on the grave. She turned up for Halloween and Helen came down for the day as well. They carved it together before going off to the pub.’
‘They had a Halloween celebration without me?’ The injustices of being the younger sister excluded from her older sisters’ activities still rankled.
‘Jess said she phoned you in the morning to see if you wanted to come over, but Becky said you weren’t there.’
Of course; that was the morning she was running around buying a plane ticket to Kirkwall. She had spent Halloween on Hoy – she had already shoved that night as far down in her memory as possible.
Liz stooped, placed the gnarled lantern in front of the headstone.
‘Have you got a light?’
Sam jiggled in her pocket, produced a box of Swan Vestas, squatted and lit the tea light Jess had left inside the lantern. The candle spluttered and, when she placed the lid on top, burned black smoke that filled the air with the sourness of mouldy turnip.
‘Did you bring the tile?’ Sam asked.
Liz nodded.
Sam fiddled in her coat pocket again, removed the tiles she had collected, held them in her left palm and counted them off one by one into her right. The two white tiles Anna had given to Pierce – one on a pendant from Karina, the other found on Betty Corrigall’s grave. The blue tile that Sam had retrieved from Pierce’s kitchen. The two red tiles that Anna had placed on Valerie’s grave – one for her mother and one for the baby that was never born. Five tiles. Liz rummaged in her bag and removed the sixth, the red tile Anna had given her because she thought Liz was cool. Only one missing – the red tile Sam had buried at the Raven’s Nest behind Pierce’s croft. The summer of the heatwave. Anna’s instruction to Sam to deal with the tiles had felt like a challenge, a fulfilment of the bond they had sealed in ’76 when they had cut their thumbs with her rusty penknife and become blood sisters. Miranda charging Ariel with a final task. Sam had decided it was fitting to leave them on Jim’s grave. She had brought an empty Marmite pot with her to hold them.
‘Where does this come from anyway?’ Liz lifted her glasses and examined her tile. ‘I’ve never looked at it properly before. I dumped it in a drawer and forgot about it.’
Liz’s question made Sam feel sheepish. She had long ago ceased thinking about the tiles as stolen ancient artefacts – in her mind they were the Fisher King’s treasures. Anna’s colour-coded grand design which told the story of her and Pierce, Valerie and Karina, Sam and Liz. And Jim who was, Sam reckoned, the ghost in the machine. Sam wasn’t prepared to confess their true origin to Liz.
‘How extraordinary. It looks just like the Roman mosaic tiles I saw when I went on a Mediterranean trip with Roger.’
Sam remembered Liz going on that trip – ’86. She had always hated Roger and she had been annoyed with Liz for bunking off with him and enjoying herself when she was still dealing with the emotional aftermath of Jim’s death.
‘Yes. We were in Corinth, and I wanted to visit a Roman villa, but Roger was being ridiculously snotty and said he didn’t come to Greece to visit Roman villas, so I went on my own, left him sulking in the hotel. It was probably the best day of the holiday. There was an incredibly interesting tour, and I was given a Roman mosaic tile to hold. There’s something about the weight and density...’
She held the tile in the air and the moon cast a silvery light on it, made it glisten in the dark.
‘Something... magical,’ Liz added.
A crow landed on Jim’s gravestone, caught Sam’s eye, winked and flew away.
‘You’re right, they are Roman tiles actually.’
Liz lowered her arm. ‘Really?’
Sam stuck her boot in a tussock of grass, nudged it with her toe.
‘They come from Blackstone Villa.’
‘Sam. I hope you didn’t steal them.’
Were you ever old enough not to feel like a naughty child when your mother told you off?
‘It wasn’t me.’ She was about to blame Anna. What a cowardly thing to do. She had to take her share of responsibility.
‘It was both of us. Anna and me in ’
76.’
‘Anna. That poor girl, and her mother who didn’t look much older than her daughter and was pregnant, poorly and having to deal with her husband’s... issues.’
‘That’s right. And Anna and I were left to our own devices.’
‘You never took kindly to being told what to do...’
‘It wasn’t a criticism. I was just saying, we were doing our own thing and we cycled over to Blackstone...’ She smiled when she remembered that day. ‘We were acting out the Fisher King.’
‘The Fisher King? Chrétien de Troyes? Perceval?’
‘If you say so.’
Sam could see she was on to a winning line here – Liz was likely to judge a crime less harshly if she thought the act had some literary merit.
‘I was going by Jim’s version, which he claimed came from the Celts – the wounded king who is supposed to be guarding a precious object, the holy grail, but it gets stolen from him. So we were pretending to be Celtic warriors – well, I was a Druid with magical powers and Anna was Boadicea, and we decided the tiles were the stolen treasure, the sacred objects of the Celts that the Fisher King was guarding, so we had to reclaim them. It was the year of the drought – do you remember? And I reckoned if we reclaimed the sacred objects, we would heal the Fisher King and it would rain. And, in fact, as soon as we had pocketed the tiles, there was a thunderstorm. Well, actually there wasn’t; in the end the storm didn’t break. It was all rumble and no rain.’
‘Yes, but that’s not how the story is resolved anyway.’
‘Oh?’
‘In Chrétien’s version, the king can be cured if Perceval, the young knight, asks the right question, but he never does.’
‘What’s the question?’
‘The healing question? It’s, who does the grail serve? To me it’s a myth about wounded masculinity and...’
Sam dropped the tiles into the Marmite pot which she had removed from her coat pocket.
‘Sam, you can’t leave those on Jim’s grave. You have to take them back to Blackstone.’
Sam swirled the tiles around the pot.
‘Jim wouldn’t want you to leave them on his grave, I’m sure. I’ll say one thing about your father: he always had the greatest respect for ancient monuments.’