ShelfLife

by Barrie Seppings

  ‘Hey mister!’

  Gavin looked at Henri but saw the Frenchman’s jaw was clenched in fierce concentration, adding new veins to his temple.

  ‘Hey mister!’ the voice said again. Gavin turned to see a young boy standing in the doorway across the street. His hair unkempt but his smile was immaculate. He held the Nikkor lens aloft. ‘This you photo?’

  ‘Trois… deux…’ Henri’s voice was almost trembling with excitement.

  ‘Wait, Henri –’

  ‘Un.’

  Henri began pulling the trigger with one hand while the other shoved Gavin out into the laneway. The snipers returned fire.

  Gavin rolled through the dirt, holding his head and scrabbling hard with his legs. He glanced up but saw only dust. He heard swearing, in French, but not as close as before. More shots rang out, but he couldn’t tell where they were coming from or at whom they were directed. A tug on his collar brought Gavin the final couple of feet to the shallow doorway. Gavin looked up and saw the boy, still smiling and still holding the lens.

  ‘Mister, get up. Dangerous for you.’

  Understatement of the week, Gavin thought. He looked back across the laneway but Henri had vanished. So much for providing cover. Gavin steadied himself against the door frame and slid himself upright, trying to stay as flat as possible. He wondered if the snipers could hear his frantic breathing and were using it to train their scopes onto his heaving chest. A single bullet whistled past, kicking up stones and dust as it connected with the street.

  Panic. He wrestled with the door handle but it merely spun in his hands. He slammed the panel with his open palms but it brought only more gunfire. Backing up as far as he dared, he launched his shoulder into the timber. White pain flooded his arm, ringing through the nerve endings of his fingertips and drawing tears. It took a moment to register the tugging on his sleeve.

  The boy was still smiling. Gavin wondered if it was his only expression. A slender brown hand snaked inside his collar and fished out a single bronze key on a string necklace. He ducked into a half crouch and slid the key into the barrel. The door swung open, catching Gavin off balance. A fresh wave of pain crashed through his shoulder as he landed heavily on the dirt floor. The door swung shut and stole the light away before Gavin could take in any detail. A woman’s voice, cracked with age, began to yell from somewhere in the darkness.

  Gavin rolled off his throbbing arm and onto his back, looking up at the boy who was now pleading for the woman, presumably, to be quiet. The woman shuffled into the edge of Gavin’s frame of vision, still yelling at the boy in Arabic. She buttressed her side of the argument by poking the boy in the chest with a walking stick that looked as if it had been fashioned in Mordor. The argument ricocheted between the two as the boy tried to calm the woman, but progress was slow. Gavin pushed himself up to get a better look at the room but was returned swiftly to earth by the woman who placed her entire body weight on his shoulder, via her walking stick. The pain warped Gavin’s vision, and he closed his eyes for a moment.

  ***

  Gavin awoke to find the business end of a shotgun pointed directly at him. It wandered, as if trying to find target lock on a drowsy housefly, but never strayed far from Gavin’s forehead. The woman’s face, lined by decades of mistrust, appeared at the other end of the firearm.

  ‘Hello mister, you okay?’ said the boy. ‘You want tea?’

  Gavin shifted his gaze, being careful not to move his body. He cleared his throat. The barrel jerked then held steady, trained on his mouth. Target lock achieved.

  ‘My auntie does not trust strangers. Please forgive.’ The boy turned and spoke gently to the woman, then reached into his pocket and pulled out Peter’s battered lens. ‘You will buy this photo from me?’

  Gavin nodded and the boy spoke to his auntie. After some negotiation, she lowered the gun in disappointment and the boy rushed forward to shake Gavin’s hand.

  ‘Why you come here, mister?’ the boy’s mouth smiled but his eyes telegraphed confusion. ‘Everybody else want to leave.’

  ‘I had to come,’ Gavin winced as he rubbed his shoulder. The sniper fire had subsided to a few random cracks in the middle distance, but it still rendered the task of acting nonchalant a challenge. ‘I’m a photographer.’

  ‘You look more like tourist. Maybe you should go home.’

  Gavin smiled thinly. The kid’s face was stuck on mindless grin, but his smarts were in overdrive. ‘What about you?’

  ‘This is my home. Where is yours?’

  ‘I live in Singapore.’ The words had fallen out of his mouth before he remembered that, as Peter Hasenberg, he would have a basic level of combat immunity and a more comprehensive insurance policy. As Gavin Higgs, he’d be toast. ‘No, wait, I used to live in Singapore. But I’m from Berlin, Germany. My name is Peter. Peter Hasenberg.’

  ‘German?’ the boy’s smile shrank a fraction.

  ‘Yes. Cherman.’

  ‘Du bist wirklich nur ein dummer Tourist, der keine Ahnung hat, was ich Sie fragen, nicht wahr?’

  Not for the first time, he wished Shanti were with him.

  ‘Look, I need to get back to my hotel and send these pictures to my editor.’

  ‘One thousand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One thousand dollars American. I take you to hotel, no problem.’

  ‘No way, kid. For that kind of money I could buy myself a hotel.’

  ‘OK, time for you to go now.’ The kid trotted to the door and began unfastening the deadbolt.

  ‘Whoah. OK, OK. How about a hundred?’ Gavin started to fish inside his vest.

  ‘No hundred. Thousand,’ said the kid. The snick of a rifle bolt recaptured Gavin’s attention. The old woman smiled from across the room where she had been watching the negotiations. Her smile had the same slightly demented quality as the kid’s. Clearly they were related.

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Five hundred. Last offer.’

  Shanti’s lessons in roadside bargaining in Bali had paid off. ‘Okay. Five.’

  Gavin removed his vest and laid it on the concrete floor. He took a leatherman from one of the pockets and sliced open a seam to reveal a handful of banknotes. The boy started forward but Gavin held up a palm.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Amir.’

  ‘Okay, Amir, you get half now.’ He drew the blade through the notes, picked up one stack and handed it over. ‘The other half when I get to the hotel.’

  The boy’s smile froze, but his eyes betrayed a hint of admiration for a fellow negotiator.

  Amir led Gavin on a snakes and ladders route through the neighbourhood, turning into tiny laneways and doubling back through peoples’ homes to avoid the main streets. Amir slid through gaps in fences and rock walls as if he were water. Several times Gavin lost his young guide in an alley full of doorways and felt that he was truly lost, indisputably alone in a city that no-one appeared to understand or wanted to trust. His Boys’ Own adventure was now more a dangerous blunder. His breathing became ragged and his heart rate skidded like a stone on a lake as he imagined the windows above him sprouting rifle barrels. Amir’s smiling face appeared from an alcove up ahead and Gavin scrambled through the dust to join him, not because he trusted the boy, but because he had no other option.

  Gavin and Amir found themselves boxed in behind a series of DIY roadblocks installed by the gangs of militia who emerged to patrol the streets as night fell. They banded together in gangs of a dozen or so, wearing military colours of various shades, but it was impossible to tell which side they were on or, indeed, how many sides there were. Many didn’t appear to know themselves.

  The good news, said Amir, was that roadblocks meant they were getting closer to the hotel. The bad news: it was now too dangerous to keep going. The dark made the militia jumpy, and jumpy militia made people dead.

  The boy took a few notes of local currency from Gavin to
purchase a night’s worth of relative security on the bare floor of a front room in a modest family home. Gavin spent the night wrestling with sleep in between the sounds of random gunfire and the throbbing of his shoulder. The bulk of his waking moments were spent wishing he had simply told Shanti that she meant far more than a little crush, instead of choosing to run and sulk.

  ***

  ‘Where the fuck is Gavin?’

  Shanti spun her office chair to find Charles, uncharacteristically unkempt and fuming.

  ‘His customer experience team is behind on vetting and approving the new listings. Our investors were promised fifteen hundred new listings this week, with a stretch target of two thousand. And I’m tired of telling you kids that the stretch target is the real target. Trent is going to be in a world of pain if we miss that number.’

  ‘Why Trent?’

  Charles blinked as if to reset himself. ‘I know you’re supposed to be a whizz with the code, Shanti, but you should pay more attention to how this business functions. Trent is the CEO. If the investors get upset with the performance of the business, ipso facto they get upset with him. My job right now is to protect the CEO. If we could get Gavin to come into the office and do his fucking job, it would make that small part of my very difficult job significantly easier.’

  ‘Did Trent promise the investors fifteen hundred additional listings this week?’ Shanti folded her arms. ‘Or did you?’

  ‘I think you should concentrate on finding Gavin.’

  ‘Didn’t you just say I should to pay more attention to how this business functions?’

  ‘And right now, this business will function much more smoothly when that moody little hipster gets his bunch of brain-dead keyboard monkeys to load up those fucking listings on the fucking website.’ Charles rolled his cuffs up and smoothed his hair. ‘If you kids aren’t interested in putting in the effort required to take this company to the next level I’ll have no hesitation in replacing you with talent that are. I trust I’ve made my position clear?’

  Then he was gone. Charles was a best-in-class douchebag, but he did have a point. Gavin was a moody little hipster who hadn’t really been doing his job, even before he went AWOL. She took a quick tour through the row of ShelfLife staff on the other side of the office floor, but no-one had seen or heard from Gavin in the last few days. She’d assumed he was sulking, perhaps working from his apartment or a café. Truthfully, she’d been ignoring him with extreme prejudice. The little-boy-hurt routine was wearing thin. If he couldn’t understand the importance of her no-fraternising-with-colleagues rule, at least he could have the decency to accept it with stoicism. And if he couldn’t have decency, he could at least have a little discipline. Just because you want something, doesn’t mean you should automatically have it, right? She hadn’t got to where she was today by simply giving in to every impulse that struck, had she?

  ‘Miss Shanti, please. I was responding to this request for information and I think I found a mistake in the listings. There’s a whole category that’s live in the database on the server, but it’s hidden on the website, like a restricted access section.’

  A slim Chinese girl in jeggings and t-shirt thrust a printout at Shanti and scurried back to her desk. Shanti looked around at the incubator floor. This was where her years of toil and self-denial and rule-abiding had got her: thirty-three storeys in the sky, in the middle of a manufactured Asian metropolis, taking abuse from ignorant managers, making money for anonymous investors and cleaning up after the sloppy work of inherited coders barely out of their teens. Maybe her self-imposed rules had passed their use-by date.

  The printout was of an email sent from an address administered by an arm of the Singapore Government Investment Oversight Committee. The body of the message contained a lot of all caps. The author wanted to know why the managers of ShelfLife continued to approve listings that were outside the extensive and detailed guidance for morally and socially acceptable content as specified by the board (and subsequently enshrined as a central tenet of the terms of agreements between aforementioned board and the specified shareholders in ShelfLife, the company); wanted to know if the company’s standard indemnities and policy notes would cover them (the board, not the shareholders) for damages, injuries or fatalities sustained while renting these off-limits ShelfLives; and could they (the author, personally, not the board nor the shareholders), be informed immediately should any listings become available for a coach of a professional cheerleading squad.

  Shanti rolled her eyes, stuffed the printout into the back pocket of her jeans and logged back on to investigate this alleged cache of ‘restricted access’ listings.

  ***

  The crow of roosters and the smell of frying onion suggested they were close to the city markets. The morning call to prayer suggested it might be wise to lie low until the streets quietened. Gavin hadn’t eaten for over a day and a half, which could well have been a new personal record. Amir had insisted they wait until the midday prayers before moving out. It was only then the militia left their roadblocks for the day, significantly reducing the chances of being shot. Even snipers needed to pray.

  ‘There. You hotel,’ Amir pointed through the slow-moving crowd of traders at the end of the street. A white, semi-colonial building stood out among the row of slab-sided concrete structures, but all were similarly pockmarked.

  ‘How did you know that was my hotel?’ Gavin asked, rubbing his stubbled head.

  ‘This. In your vest,’ the boy held up a matchbook bearing the logo of The Gungor.

  Gavin reached for the internal pocket of his vest and found it empty.

  ‘I already take my pay,’ the boy held a wad of half-banknotes in each hand. ‘Thank you mister and good luck.’

  Gavin began to protest but Amir had already melted into the markets and was gone. At least he hadn’t taken the lens.

  Gavin shuffled through the foyer of the hotel like a weekend jogger crossing the finish line of a professional marathon. He rested against a wall and weighed the effort of ordering something from the kitchen against his overwhelming desire for sleep.

  A collective groan welled from the dining hall, followed by agitated chatter that unravelled into several simultaneous arguments. Gavin recognised the group from his first day in the city. A couple of the journalists were from heavyweights like The Times and Le Monde, but most were stringers and freelancers, hoping their coverage of the Syrian conflict would be the break they needed to land one of the last remaining salaried correspondent gigs in the international press corps.

  They jostled for position around a laptop, pointing at the screen. A few were holding hands over their mouths, heads slowly shaking. Gavin craned his neck over the small crowd to see a grainy video of a figure, kneeling at the rear of a bare concrete room, head covered by a black cloth bag. A masked gunman yelled as he entered the frame and held a small book directly up to the lens. The autofocus struggled to keep pace with the shift in scene but eventually the image sharpened to reveal the photo page of a French passport. The watching journalists fell silent.

  ‘Oh god,’ the words escaped from Gavin as he stumbled backwards. The journalists turned as a group to stare at him as he slumped to the floor. A flash of recognition lit up the face of a Korean reporter, who pointed and stammered at Gavin. More talking, all at once. A Frenchwoman leapt up, grabbed Gavin by the shirt collar and went nose to nose, demanding to know why he had abandoned Henri to die in the streets of Antakya.

  There was a frenzy of pacing, shouting and finger pointing, and it took more than an hour of interrogation before the reporters were satisfied Gavin had not delivered Henri personally to the jihadis who were now threatening, via YouTube, to separate Henri from his head. The Frenchwoman promised to do the same to Gavin, possibly in Gavin’s sleep. It made for an exhausting afternoon.

  ***

  The mechanical ring of the Bakelite telephone jolted Gavin awake.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mister Hasenberg?’
/>   ‘No. Who?’

  The other end of the line gave him another chance.

  ‘Oh, right, yes. Hasenberg here. Who’s this?’

  ‘Reception. You have a visitor. Can I send them up to your room?’

  Gavin realised he had been sleeping in the same clothes for several days. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven-thirty.’

  It couldn’t be good news to have a visitor this late at night. He’d retreated to his room to hide from the thousands of questions everyone fired at him about Henri. No-one cared that Gavin himself had been shot at by snipers, slept in the dirt and had to bribe his way back to the hotel. And all to rescue a camera lens.

  ‘Did you want to order breakfast, Mr Hasenberg? Kitchen is closing.’

  Gavin looked up and saw shafts of light stealing in past the edges of the blackout drapes. He must have passed out and slept the clock completely around. God, he was hungry.

  ‘Yes. Eggs. Toast. Coffee. Thanks.’

  ‘Very good. And your visitor?’

  ‘Did they say who they were?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hasenberg. It’s you.’

  Gavin almost cried when he saw the German through the spyglass of his hotel door.

  ‘Jesus, Peter, I’m so fucking glad to see you, man. Come in, before you get shot or something.’

  The two men shared a fierce bro hug.

  ‘You’re the one who’s been getting shot at,’ Peter made a pistol with his fingers. ‘You spent the night out there in the streets because of a lens?’

  ‘It’s right here, mate. I wasn’t going to let you down,’ Gavin retrieved the fifty millimetre from the shabby bedclothes. ‘Not after Henri told me how much it meant to you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Peter briefly examined the lens before dumping it in one of his pockets. ‘Piece of shit. Bought it in Kabul. Chinese copy.’

  ‘No! Henri told me it belonged to Eddie Adams,’ Gavin sank onto the bed. ‘You won it off a girl? In Rwanda?’

  ‘That’s Henri. Always telling stories,’ Peter sat on a wicker chair opposite Gavin and lit a cigarette. ‘Only the story he’s in now might not have such a good ending for him.’