INCARNATION

by Daniel Easterman

  Nabila pointed beyond it to the highest peak of all. ‘That’s Muztagata,’ she said. ‘The Father of Ice Mountains. There’s an ancient city hidden deep in the ice. They say its inhabitants cannot die, but live for ever in peace and happiness. Sometimes I wish I could be one of them.’

  ‘Would it be cold, do you think, to be inside all that ice?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t expect so, otherwise how could they be happy? They experience no discomfort, they can’t feel anything.’

  ‘Poor people,’ he said, looking at the ice. But he knew why she was tempted, all the same.

  Pauline Potter looked out of her bedroom window at the dark street. The people in the top flat opposite were holding a party, and every now and then a snatch of music would escape and hurry to her side of the road. She didn’t go to parties herself much. Museums and art galleries were more in her line. She’d had a dull life, she didn’t mind admitting it. If her mother hadn’t died when she did, it would have been even duller. It didn’t cause her much concern, though, just as it didn’t bother her that she was still unmarried at the age of forty-seven and a half. She was discreet in her liaisons, in control of their outcomes, and, on the whole, preferred solitude to smelly socks and inarticulate cries of ‘Break his leg, Shearer!’ Other people made a fuss, other people worried about her being on her own when it came time to draw her pension. 'I’ll get a cat,' she said. ‘Or a snake.’

  Nervously she fingered the slip of paper in her pocket, the one Tursun had passed to her in the debriefing chamber. All this time, and she still hadn’t made up her mind what to do about it. All she knew was that, if there really was a traitor in the China Desk as the boy claimed, it wasn’t her. That left fourteen other people, not counting the desk head himself. Whoever she shared the message with, she’d be taking a gamble.

  The only course of action open to her was to take it higher, go above desk level, but keep it in the service. Internal Security would take it seriously. But that was a gamble too. Once they started poking their noses into everything, nobody’s life would be worth living. If the leak was traced back to her, she might as well resign the service on the spot. Nobody would forgive her, least of all that bastard Farrar. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. This Sinkiang business was about as serious as things got, and from the sound of it, they were getting worse.

  She’d been trying to make contact with Carstairs on and off all day, the last time around ten o’clock. It wasn’t good practice to keep the house out of touch for so long. She’d looked at her watch. Just after midnight. She’d check again, then ring Dan McGuire at Safe House Control, see what was going on. She wanted to talk to Tursun again. On her own.

  Somebody smashed a bottle against the kerb three storeys below. Pauline glanced out again. It looked as though the party was starting to turn rowdy. A sports car pulled away and tore off up the street with a screeching of over-inflated tyres.

  Any more of this and she’d go over to protest. There was no point in ringing the police unless things got seriously out of hand.

  Somebody knocked something over. She looked out again, then a chill went through her as she registered that it hadn’t been in the street. It had been in her kitchen.

  Someone must be in her flat. A burglar who’d chosen his moment badly. Except that the alarm, which was of very good quality, had already been set. No ordinary burglar could have got past without triggering it. She went to the door and listened hard. Silence. But she knew he was there. Or more than one, perhaps. Not a burglar, something else.

  There were six rooms in her flat: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a cubby hole she called her study. That meant he’d find her within seconds. She hurried to the sofa and pushed it with all her strength across the door. He wouldn’t take long to push it back, but it might give her time. Time for what, she didn’t know.

  She remembered the panic button. It came with the alarm, a little round box with a red button that you could press if you thought something was going on that shouldn’t be. Like the alarm itself, it connected directly to her local police station. Her alarms took priority over other people’s (except, presumably, for the MP who lived in the next street, or the up-and-coming TV show host at number seventeen).

  The box was on a cord that she was supposed to keep draped round her neck whenever she was in the flat. She’d done that for the first week or two after getting it; but slowly it had faded from consciousness, and in the end she’d shoved the whole thing in a drawer somewhere. Somewhere in here, she hoped, running frantically to the desk under the window.

  As she pulled out the first drawer, she heard something behind her. She turned and saw that the door was being pushed hard against the sofa. Not a burglar, then, she thought. Not here to nick the family silver. She tipped the contents of the drawer wholesale on to the floor and watched despairingly as a bottle of ink unscrewed itself and covered the pink carpet with a slowly spreading pool of black.

  The lake was a shifting mirror across whose surface the tall peaks all around were forever reflected. They left the jeep and strolled to the water’s edge. She walked close to him, carrying a wicker box. Reeds fringed the edge of the lake like tiny flagpoles, swaying in the light breeze that came in across the water. A little further out, a fleet of blue-headed ducks moved at a leisurely pace across the lightly ruffled surface.

  ‘It can be terrible here in winter,’ said Nabila. ‘Storms start up in the mountains, and the wind fights its way down here and tears the lake to shreds.’

  She had brought tea in a flask, and a box of biao stuffed with mutton and onions. With quick fingers she unwrapped a slab of goat’s cheese and laid it on a cloth upon the grass.

  ‘It’s best we eat a little now,’ she said. ‘Lunch is still a while away.’

  She filled their tea-glasses with steaming black chai that she’d strained before putting it in the flask.

  He took his cup and sat for a while in silence, waiting for it to cool, gazing out over the long expanse of the grey lake.

  ‘Tell me about your wife,’ Nabila said. ‘There wasn’t time the other night.’

  ‘Is it important?’ He took some bread and tore it in half.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘How important?’

  ‘Very important,’ she said. She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on a small boat that floated far out on the lake.

  He drank a little tea and ate a little of the bread, and wiped his lips, then told her about Elizabeth. He told her everything, he left out nothing important. She listened to him carefully, and without comment. A cormorant swooped low across the lake’s surface, and darted suddenly into the blue water to seize a fish. It re-emerged, glistening, leaving a trail of sparkling water in the air as it flew back to the shore.

  ‘What about children?’ she asked. ‘Do you have any?’

  He didn’t know what to say. "Yes" and "No" were both lies in their way, evasions at best. She did not press him. A cool wind came from the mountains, lifting her hair to one side. She caught it up with her right hand and pinned it back in place.

  ‘I have a daughter called Maddie,’ he said. And he went on to talk about a little girl with her hair tied in a blue ribbon. Every time he paused, he looked round at her, and he saw that she was looking directly at him, that all her attention was focused on him. And he told her what had happened to the little girl. That she’d grown up and gone to China, where she’d fallen in love. That her lover had been a student and a dissident called Zheng Juntao. And that one night the security forces had come for him and made him vanish as if he’d never been, and the little girl had not seen him since.

  When he next looked, her gaze had turned from him and was fixed on the far shore of the lake.

  ‘I had a son as well,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. And her voice spun away across the lake’s expanse until it was lost on the air.

  A voice spoke to her through the crack of th
e open door. The sofa was heavy, but it was giving way inch by inch. She looked at the wall opposite the sofa. The bookcase she’d inherited from Uncle Simon stood against it, its upper half tilted by one or two inches outwards from the wall. She’d always meant to have it properly fastened. The case was tall and heavy and full of huge books, some hers, some relics of the late Simon Masters.

  Mentally, she measured the width of the room against the height of the case. Much depended on how it chose to fall, but she reckoned it would span the gap almost perfectly.

  ‘Miss Potter,’ came the voice, a man’s voice, very hard, very insistent. ‘Please don’t make this difficult. Please don’t force us to break down the door.’

  ‘Clear off,’ she said. ‘Nobody asked you to come here.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, they did, Mrs P. This is out of your hands. Other people are making the big decisions. Now, please let us in and we’ll get it over quick.’

  Her answer was an extraordinary crash. She dreaded to think what the couple downstairs must think. With any luck they’d ring the police. The bookcase, glass shattered and contents thrown all over its insides, lay like a bridge between the sofa and the wall. Pauline stuck an old sewing machine in the little gap that remained, and reckoned she’d be safe for a bit longer.

  She hurried back to the table and extracted the second drawer. She turned it upside down, and its contents bounced and skittered across the carpet. The panic button rolled beneath the television stand.

  She snatched it up and pressed the button. There was no light to show whether the little box had sent its signal or not. She hoped the battery hadn’t gone dead.

  There was a crashing sound behind her. She looked round to see a great gash in the door, and an axe-head sticking through it. As the axe-head was drawn back, ready for another swing, the doorbell sounded.

  Small flowers dotted the meadow, their red and blue and yellow petals bright in the late morning sunshine. She’d gone ahead of him a hundred yards or more, and every time he straightened he could see her slender figure, bent over the grass, and the basket in her hand. He would look at her for a while, and she would sense his eyes on her, and turn and wave, then bend again to her search.

  He could not believe that he was in a flower-filled meadow and not sneezing. Her medicine had worked a miracle.

  High up, an eagle lifted through currents of empty sky, and turned, and drifted as if in a silent dance. He’d heard that the Kirghiz hunted with them, training them like falcons.

  Just ahead of him he saw a cream-coloured flower. It was like a lotus, but larger. ‘Nabila!’ he called.

  She looked round and saw him beckoning. She put down her basket and came across. ‘Is this what you’ve been looking for?’ he asked. She bent down, nodding, then looked up at him, and smiled.

  ‘Let me have your knife,’ she said. She didn’t cut the flower at the stem, but dug it out carefully from the earth, exposing its roots. She held it up before him, its perfect whiteness like bone against the tanned skin of her hand.

  ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘You’ve got very sharp eyes.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I was just lucky. It was right in front of me - I couldn’t have missed it.’

  ‘Well, here it is anyway. It may be the only one we find today.’

  She held it out to him, and he cupped his hands and let her drop the flower into them. He was astonished by how soft its petals felt. He looked into her eyes. There were tears in them.

  He bent and put the flower gently in the basket. Then he straightened. ‘Nabila,’ he said.

  She looked at him, but she did not move. He took a tentative step towards her, and reached for her hand, and held it in both of his. She smiled awkwardly. ‘Tell me ... what to do,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to worry.’ But his heart was beating behind his ribcage like an animal trying to tear free.

  He reached out and wiped away the tears that had gathered on her cheeks. He did not ask what they were for. For him, perhaps, or for herself, he had no way of . knowing. She’d tell him in the end, he wouldn’t push.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. Words almost forgotten, like a phrase in a foreign language learned years ago and not used since. ‘Do you understand?’ She nodded and said nothing.

  ‘It’s not because I’m here alone,’ he said, ‘not because I need a woman. There’s nothing like that in it.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘If you tell me to leave, I’ll go. I would understand. I know how difficult this is for you ...'

  He stopped talking as she reached up and put her hands behind his head, and drew his face close to hers, and kissed him, gently, then hard. And he pulled her close, her whole body touching his. She was like someone who has been asleep for months or years, and then woken to find the whole world changed. Drawing her head back, she looked at him and stroked his cheek. ‘God forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I love you too.’

  ‘What has God to forgive you for?’ he asked.

  ‘For being a woman. For being a Muslim woman in love with an unbeliever. If my father knew of it, he would kill me.’

  ‘And do you truly love me?’

  She put her lips against his and began to kiss him again. Not hastily as before, but softly and slowly now, and with real intention. The simple movement of her tongue in his mouth excited him more deeply than Elizabeth and her bedroom games had ever done. He put his hands behind her and sank slowly with her to the soft grass.

  Wham! The axe tore away another chunk of door. She could already see the face of the man wielding it. Crash! The sharp blade tore into the wood as if it were straw.

  She pressed the panic button several more times, then ran for the window. The sash rolled up without effort, and she looked down into the street, three storeys below.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, Miss Potter. You don’t have the strength or the training. You’ll just kill yourself.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ she shouted back as she stepped through the window.

  He smashed down the rest of the door and started climbing through the gap. He was dressed from head to foot in black, and in one hand he held a semiautomatic pistol equipped with a silencer. The sofa got in his way, giving her time to move away from the open window. He was right about her not having the strength or training. Not in the sense he meant. But she worked out in her local gym most evenings. She went on long walks at weekends. The drainpipe didn’t look too safe, but it was the only way down. She started tier descent.

  He sauntered across to the window, gun in hand. This was less tidy than he’d planned, but in the end it made no difference to him where she ended up. She was the last one they needed to eliminate, and after this he could have a little rest.

  At the window, he stared down, trying to pick her out. A single bullet in the head would send her down into the area below. He’d be gone by the time anyone came to investigate. Her head came into view just to the left of the drainpipe. He admired her pluck. As he raised the gun, she looked up, right in his eyes. It didn’t put him off, but it distracted him. At that moment, a police car came screaming down the street, its blue light flashing, and its siren competing with the party opposite. Faces appeared at several windows. He drew back inside the room, cursing his bad luck. How could she possibly have brought the police here in such a short time?

  Behind him, the doorbell rang again. He removed his balaclava and opened the door. The downstairs neighbours were standing there, a gay couple, one middle-aged and paunchy, the other young and slim.

  ‘Is Pauline all right?’

  ‘We heard a crash.’

  ‘And then all that banging.’

  He brought the pistol round from behind his back and shot them, one shot each, in the forehead. As he stepped back to let the second one fall, he saw a policeman appear at the head of the stairs. Stepping across the bodies, he walked towards the policeman, gun in hand.

  ‘Put t
he gun down,’ ordered the policeman.

  ‘I’m doing my job,’ he said. ‘If you’d just let me get on with it.’

  The policeman was frightened. Well, he had a right to be. But he did his best to stay on top of it.

  ‘You’ll only make things worse. Believe me.’

  ‘In my case, it couldn’t be further from the truth.’

  He pointed and fired in as much time as it took to say "Bang".

  At the bottom of the stairs, he saw the second policeman running for the door. He let him go. After all, he hadn’t seen his face.

  Outside, partygoers had gathered to watch what was going on. Windows had been opened, letting loud music out into the street.

  He checked the area, but she wasn’t there. He shrugged and slipped his pistol back into his pocket. She wouldn’t get far. Where was there for her to go?

  The frightened policeman was in his car frantically radioing for reinforcements. A red sports car moved away from the kerb opposite.

  He walked to his motorbike, pulled it straight, and sped off in the opposite direction. What an absolute shambles, he thought. The traffic and the night swallowed him up.

  They lay naked on the grass. He picked small flowers idly and strewed them across her breasts and belly.

  ‘I love your body,’ he said.

  ‘Men are supposed to love women for their minds or their souls.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That isn’t true,’ he said. ‘It’s just what women want to be true. When a woman has a body like yours, it’s impossible to do anything but love it.’

  ‘Were you loving my body just now, or loving me?’

  ‘Oh, that? I was certainly enjoying your body. And I was loving you as well.’

  She rolled closer to him and ran her fingers gently from his chest to his groin and up again.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said. He reached for his jacket and fumbled in the pocket, then brought out a tiny object that caught the sun.