Wildfell

by Sam Baker

  ‘The jacket …’

  ‘I don’t need a flak jacket.’

  He looked at me, eyes skimming my floppy shirt and jeans, my Converse and the camera bag now hanging from my hand, but which would be on my hip when the limousine delivered us to where the pictures were.

  I knew where the pictures were. I could hear them. I also knew we wouldn’t be going there. The whoosh of rockets and the crump of tank fire and the small-arms chatter that became as familiar as birdsong in cities like this. Ahmed was impressed I didn’t want the heavy jacket he’d brought me. He thought it was bravery. Better that than the truth, which was that I hated the way they made you stand out.

  ‘We have another journalist joining us,’ Ahmed said. ‘We collect him from an appointment at the Excelsior.’ This wasn’t in the plan, but I went with the flow. By the hotel entrance, a thickset man, blond hair cropped short, was sheltering in the safety of a doorway. He looked left and right and ran at a crouch to the limousine, sliding himself in beside me.

  ‘You,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Carl …! Long time no … you know.’

  Ahmed was surprised. ‘You know each other?’

  ‘Old friends,’ Carl said. ‘Shouldn’t we get moving? Snipers …’

  ‘No snipers,’ Ahmed said firmly. ‘This area is loyal.’

  Carl rolled his eyes but said nothing. His hand reached across and found mine, squeezing briefly. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘You’re … friends?’ Ahmed was watching us in the mirror.

  ‘Not that kind of friends,’ I said, and behind his stubble and shades Ahmed blushed.

  ‘I knew his—’ I began to say.

  ‘We separated,’ Carl cut in.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Me too,’ Carl said. ‘We just couldn’t make it work. You know how it is …’

  We exchanged a glance and I decided to leave it there. Ahmed seemed OK for an official Syrian fixer but that was still what he was. Neither of us knew how he’d take to a conversation about Carl’s ex, a pretty, high-maintenance Venezuelan boy with a thing for black Lycra. In a bar, in Soho, one time when Art was away, Carl had showed me pictures on his iPhone. He accidentally flicked forward when he meant to flick back and the photograph I saw showed Kris looking very tanned, very nude and very excited … We agreed he was fabulous but probably a little too high maintenance for me.

  Ahmed was watching us closely in the rear-view mirror, trying to work out what this conversation was about, whether he should be worried by it. He saw me watching and I smiled, shrugged, and went back to business. ‘No corpses,’ I told Carl. ‘Has that been mentioned?’

  I could see him wondering what we were doing here.

  ‘What then?’ Carl asked.

  ‘Normal life … Schools, markets, playgrounds, women shopping, buildings.’

  It hadn’t bothered me too much, when I’d agreed. Since Iraq I’d lost my stomach for corpses, preferring my wreckage in the form of bricks and mortar. But I had a bad feeling about this and, as the day unfolded in a round of the Syrian equivalent of Potemkin villages, it was proved right. Ludicrously overstocked local shops selling fresh goods to neatly dressed women; smiling school children happily astonished to see us while being able to greet us in carefully rehearsed English.

  Carl slid a camera on to his lap in the car, changed the lens and adjusted to video. In the old days there’d be the click of the motor drive, but digital is silent; and I knew, as Carl lifted his lens in line with the bottom of the window, while trying to keep it low enough to stay out of Ahmed’s line of sight, that he was hoping to snap something, anything to make this day worthwhile.

  There was an absurd normality to the life these people were living. To me, this faux normality was worse than outright fear. How could anyone …

  Hot tears spilled over before I could look away. I shook my head in fury. How dare I compare my life to theirs?

  ‘Helen?’ Carl said.

  I turned my face to the window.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I shook my head. ‘Stop,’ I told Ahmed.

  He took one look at my face in the mirror and pulled over by a concrete substation. It had the skull for danger and a lightning zap for electricity you’d find anywhere in the world. He looked worried when I opened my door. No doubt there was a child lock but he’d left that too late.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘In there.’ I pointed to a blind alley brutally deserted in the afternoon sun. Shadow cut a sharp line down one wall and across the dirt floor. At best, it would smell of hot dog shit, infinitely preferable to the stench of bodies that had filled my head a few seconds earlier.

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  I had expected him to forbid me to leave the car. There were rules. In a situation like this there were always rules. I probably subscribed to them when I scrawled my name across the piece of paper Ahmed thrust in front of me earlier.

  ‘Ahmed …’

  He blushed.

  I’ve peed in worse places, but that wasn’t what I intended. Stumbling from the limousine I pushed myself into the shadows and threw up, only just missing my shoes. I threw up a second time and spat in the dry dust. It was disgusting of me to see my life with Art reflected in theirs. Yet I understood what was happening here in a way I doubted Carl could. I understood why these people were going through their routines, pretending everything was normal. They hoped that in pretending everything was normal they could make it so.

  At the end of the alley was an open door. All around was silent, but I could have sworn I saw a flicker of movement, a small boy watching me.

  Common sense said go back to the car, go back to the hotel, try again tomorrow. I went through the door all the same, through the door, through a ruined house and into a courtyard. There was no one here. No sign of anyone having passed through. The air was thicker here. It smelt of dog shit and open drains. A burnt-out motorbike lay on its side. I snapped it without thought. Turned to take a second shot as I walked away. At the street corner up ahead I froze. Office blocks had once stood either side. Now the street was a canyon of broken concrete, with sunlight lancing on to rubble. At the far end, the front wall of a bank had a hole blasted through it like a ragged rose window.

  My throat tightened and my chest locked as I stood trapped in the cross hairs of something deadlier than a sniper’s rifle.

  We talk of being frozen by terror. Of being struck dumb by shock. Mostly we keep talking because we don’t know how to say what we want to say. Those are the times that pictures say it for us.

  I raised my camera to take the shot. I knew I should bracket the exposures, play with the field of focus, and see what changing the shutter speeds might do. I did none of these. I simply took my photograph and headed back to the car.

  Carl noticed the splatter on my jeans. ‘You all right?’

  I nodded, glanced at Ahmed, who was obviously listening.

  ‘Tripped,’ I said.

  Ahmed wasn’t sure what I was talking about and Carl didn’t believe me anyway. Pulling his iPhone from his pocket, he opened the message app, set the screen for a new message with the place for the number left blank and slid it across.

  I keyed in my own number.

  We talked in silence, side by side on the hot plasticised leather of the limousine, and the most Carl did was open the window slightly when Ahmed asked, apologetically, if I might have stepped in something while I was in the alley.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, when I climbed out of the car.

  Ahmed smiled, looking young enough to still be at school, and I hoped I wasn’t about to get him into trouble. I knew what I had. The photograph said everything and nothing. Some people would simply see a ruined street. Others would see the cathedral.

  Carl found me in the hotel bar later, nursing a vodka and tonic that tasted mostly of synthetic quinine. He nodded to the stool opposite, giving me the chance to say, No, I want to be alone. When I didn’t, he took it,
ordered a beer, and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I shook my head, inclining it across the room to where Art sat glowering.

  ‘He’s pissed off,’ I whispered. ‘Thinks I should have told him where I was going. He could have come too.’

  Carl made a What-the-Fuck? face and nodded.

  ‘Won’t hang around too long then. We all know how he feels about your gay best friend.’

  Leaning over to see what I was looking at, he turned my iPad towards him and flicked through the images until he came to the photograph I’d taken earlier. I had already sent it down the wire to London. Unapproved and without permission. No bodies. And yet it was almost worse.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, then sat in silence for a long while.

  Eventually he handed me back my iPad and reached for his beer bottle, raised it to me and took a large swig. ‘There are days,’ he said, ‘when I wonder if I should simply give up. Most of them happen when I look at work like yours.’ Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, and with a glance at Art, wandered off.

  All the rest of that evening I was aware of Art, on the far side of the bar. More a presence than a person. He appeared engrossed in his work; an in-depth report that his agency hoped would make the news section of a Sunday paper. His story. His big project. He’d seen the picture I took. He knew it would now dominate the front pages. He looked up only rarely. But never at me. Only shaking his head when I asked if he wanted a beer. He hadn’t been drinking. Just the one, to be polite. He didn’t really drink, not any more. Not like those early days when he could match pint for pint and shot for shot with the worst of them. Didn’t like what it did, he said pointedly.

  I stared at him defiantly and ordered another. I knew I shouldn’t, alcohol mixed badly with my migraine pills, but it was part of my armoury of tiny rebellions.

  Only once, when I glanced across, did I catch him looking my way, his eyes dark, his face full of shadows. Discomfort settling like acid in my stomach.

  ‘Do you even know what a team is, Helen?’

  Art’s voice coming out of the darkness made my heart lurch.

  It was almost an hour since he’d flipped his laptop shut, declared himself knackered and gone to bed. Until that moment, I realised, I’d nurtured a small hope that, if I lingered in the bar long enough, he’d be asleep; but he was leaning against the wall by the window, looking out across night-time Damascus.

  Hoping he couldn’t smell my anxiety, I hovered just inside the bedroom doorway, not helped by the alcohol fuelling my bloodstream. I’d had more vodka than I wanted just to make a point and had felt sick before I even realised he was awake. Art flicked his half-smoked roll-up out on to the courtyard below and pulled the shutters to, extinguishing what little light the moon provided. The heat of the day had vanished with the sun and the room was as cold as his rage. An icy controlled fury. If I’d been able to see them, I knew his lips would be set in a tight white line, his eyes flat. For a moment, I was glad I couldn’t.

  I took a tentative step forward. Instinct shrieking at me to step back.

  ‘Answer me,’ he breathed.

  I tried not to jump. He was close, so close.

  Close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. I had neither heard nor felt him move. He didn’t touch me, and I didn’t reach out to touch him. It wouldn’t calm him. He didn’t want to be calmed. ‘Well? Tell me, the great Helen Lawrence, what is a team? Or is that something else they didn’t teach you at school?’

  So much malice in one sentence, my head spun. I was drunk. Very drunk. My head already starting to pound. Art was utterly sober.

  ‘A team?’ he repeated quietly. Hot breath in chill air.

  A team, I wanted to say, is something that never wanted me in it. A team is something I never wanted to be picked for. A good job, because I never was picked. A team is something I have no interest in being any part of. But I know what you think a team is, Art. You think a team is something that has a captain and people who do what the captain tells them. And you think that captain is you.

  Rage, alcohol and fear mingled inside me. It was on the edge of my tongue to say those things, to unleash the genie, to shout and scream and yell and see what happened. It was unlikely to be worse.

  I didn’t. I didn’t answer him at all.

  ‘I’ll tell you what a team is … Helen.’

  His tongue wrapped around my name and I shuddered, instinctively taking a step back. Hit wall. Or door. When had the door shut? I hadn’t heard it click to.

  ‘A team, Helen …’ he said, repeating my name, as if in repeating it he owned it. Owned me. ‘… is what we are meant to be. A team. Professionally and personally. In work … and in life.’ He took one more silent step, I felt the air change this time, closing what little gap I’d managed to open up between us. His body just millimetres from mine.

  I stood very still. Said nothing. Waited.

  In the courtyard below a raucous yell, followed by a laugh. Tomorrow was another day. Anything could happen, and would. We knew that. We’d seen it. Yesterday morning, Hélène Graham had been alive. I tried to concentrate. All I had to do was open my mouth and shout. Art hated shouting. Hated embarrassment. But what would I say? And what would anyone say who came running?

  Domestic.

  Drunk.

  Clash of the egos.

  All of the above.

  Would they even be wrong?

  If neither of us moved, neither of us spoke, I told myself, it might yet be all right. We could go to bed, get some sleep, or pretend to, lying side by side untouching in the dark, and in the morning it would have passed. It could happen. It had happened before. But not often.

  Then he gripped my upper arms and I felt my feet leave the ground. My tendons shrieked and I knew bruises would have blossomed a livid violet on my pale freckled arms by morning. In one movement, I was face down on the bed. Half lifted, half thrown. My legs thrashed, but there was nowhere to go. A hand heavy on my neck forced my face into the mattress and I felt consciousness begin to slip, peeling away at the edges. Frantically I tried to free my arms, but they were trapped beneath my weight and his knee pinning my spine, his hand working at my jeans. Struggling for breath, I inhaled … the unmistakable taste of stale cloth choked me … and something else … acrid, sour … last night’s sweat … my own rising nausea. I heard him unbuckle himself noisily.

  Just as I thought I was going to vomit, light exploded behind my eyes. Then everything bloomed black.

  Morning took forever to arrive.

  ‘It wasn’t …’

  Helen looked up, blinking as if seeing the room for the first time in many hours. The grey of pre-dawn seeped through the gap in the curtains.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time. He saved his fury for the bedroom. His bruises for places that didn’t show. It wasn’t even the most painful. But this was by far the worst.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave before this?’ Gil asked.

  Helen sighed at the inevitability of the question.

  No idea didn’t seem an adequate answer.

  ‘I did, remember. And he wore me down I suppose,’ she said, twisting the hem of her sweatshirt in her hands. ‘Little bits of me got cut away, until I wasn’t me any more. When I did leave, that first time, everyone said I was wrong. I didn’t have the self-belief not to go back. What he did to me in Syria … It flicked a switch in my head.

  ‘Next morning, I pretended to be asleep until he went out, then I packed my case and flew to London. I booked an emergency appointment with … A doctor I’d seen on and off since Iraq for migraines …’ Helen took a deep breath. ‘And other things. She knew me, was familiar with the situation. Still is. She’d seen me with injuries there before.’

  Helen looked at Gil to gauge his reaction, then down at her feet.

  ‘I stayed here for a few days, in London, holed up in a hotel, healed, I suppose you’d say. Then I went back.’

  Gil inhaled sharply.

  ‘No, not back back. I mean bac
k to Paris. I waited for him outside his office, somewhere nice and public. Told him it was over. I’d be filing for divorce.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  Helen snorted. ‘How d’you think? He was contemptuous, mocking. Said I was nothing without him. Worthless. He didn’t know why he’d bothered with me. Some people couldn’t be helped. Then he just turned on his heel and stalked away. Didn’t turn, didn’t look back. I know, because I stood and watched until he vanished round the corner. That’s why I chose there. I knew he’d never make a scene in the street, never.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘What do you mean, and then? ’

  ‘What happened next?’

  Helen shrugged.

  ‘Somehow I ended up here.’

  PART THREE

  The Scar

  ‘There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart.’

  Caitlin Moran

  25

  It had been a long time since Gil had done the walk of shame. Best part of forty years and even then he could have counted the times on one finger. But there was no way to reach his house other than through the centre of the village, so he fingered his last B&H, rolling loose in his pocket, for comfort, decided against, and strolled up the high street trying to affect the air of an insomniac on his way back from an innocent early morning stroll.

  He had nothing to hide, after all – more’s the pity.

  It was not yet six a.m. but already the village was waking. That was the trouble with old people, Gil thought, feeling Maude Peniston’s curtains twitch as he passed. They didn’t know how to lie-in. It would be a few days yet before he could consider the General Stores safe ground. He’d have to make another trip to the wretched garage on the bypass for his supplies.