Cold

by John Sweeney

  Once clear of the breakwater, the sea seemed no less wild than at the height of the storm, the dinghy sliding up peaks and smashing into troughs, the little two-stroke engine fizzing with anger when its propeller bit on air.

  Wet through, so soaked to the skin she could feel her flesh pucker, her back to the direction in which they were heading, Katya was astonished her misery had ended so quickly.

  Seamus judged the moment just right, edging the dinghy on the crest of a wave through two fingers of rock, and the suddenness of calm was shocking. From where they had come, the darkness was suffused with a red blur, and her eyes were adjusting to the gloom enough for her to make out, directly ahead, some rough steps, carved out of rock, and beyond that a small stone chapel, topped with a cross. Only later would she realise that it was entirely hidden from view from the mainland, and from the sea, by two great slabs of rock: there was no hiding place more perfect.

  ‘They built this place for a hermit monk long ago,’ said Seamus. There was no need to raise his voice. Here, on the island, sheltered from the wind, it was as if the storm did not exist. ‘Word was, the monk went quite mad. People say it’s haunted.’

  Katya could believe it.

  ‘In the old days, fishermen would come to keep out of a storm,’ Seamus continued, ‘but the world’s forgotten it now. It came in useful in the civil war, in the early 1920s, and then again in the Troubles. You’ll be safe here. You’ve got enough food for a while and there’s a fishing line in the bag, too. I’ll come for you in a week’s time.’

  He passed the black bag to Joe, judged the momentum of the dinghy just so – so that it bumped gently against the smooth rock at the base of the chapel. Joe, Reilly and Katya leapt out and the dinghy was reversing out, fast, and then it had gone.

  Hard to imagine that in the twenty-first century they could be so utterly alone, so remote from modernity. Katya pressed on the latch to open the wooden door of the chapel. It wouldn’t budge. Joe took over, and the grime and rust gave way under his strength. Inside were two rooms: an anteroom, with a wooden bed and an ancient, musty mattress that Reilly made his own – he went fast to sleep, instantly – and to the side, a fireplace; beyond that was a tiny door you had to crouch to enter, and through that was a pew for two people, if that, and a stone altar, on it a single stone cross.

  Windows looked west and east, where the light was fattening by the moment. Katya watched the Atlantic rollers smash into the island, jetting plumes of sea spray as tall as a house to be set on fire by the rising sun. Dark, dark crimson gave way to a fiery red. It was unutterably beautiful.

  Back in the anteroom, Joe was unpacking the bag. He lifted up a bottle of Bushmills whiskey and grinned. Seamus had packed a lot into the bag: two sleeping bags, tightly rolled, charcoal for the fire, matches, a fishing line and hooks, tins of fish and meat, two metal cups, teabags, a plastic bottle of milk, two loaves of bread, a big slab of chocolate and a book of poetry.

  Joe realised that they weren’t the first guests seeking sanctuary. That Seamus’s safe house must have been used by others in his organisation, and that, more likely than not, they would have had blood on their hands.

  Hunger consumed him. Joe wolfed down a tin of fish and half a loaf. He was about to demolish the chocolate bar when Katya stabbed him in the stomach with her index finger. Meekly, he put it down, zipped the two sleeping bags together so they made one, swung a hand towards Reilly so he nimbly stepped out of the way, and lay the makeshift bedding on the mattress. He climbed in and lost consciousness in seconds. And so, very soon, did she.

  Katya awoke an hour or so before sunset, Joe still sleeping by her side. It was tempting to wake him, but she let the sleeping giant lie for a little while longer, and donned her clothes and clambered up a jagged rock, gnarled by wind and waves and time, and found, just shy of the summit, a small triangle of grass and sea pinks, a throne for the island queen. The light was the colour of a glass of brandy. A cormorant eyed her coldly from a neighbouring rock, then ignored her. Close up, she could see its oily, black-green feathers giving off a rainbow glint, spilt petrol in a puddle.

  Out there, she mused, beyond the sun, lay the Americas, three thousand miles away. She realised that she must be at the most westerly point of Eurasia. Many, many Chechens had ended up in Siberia; none, or none that she knew, had ended up so far west. The island she was on had two smaller sisters, all three links of a chain or ridge of rock, most of it submerged.

  The sea was calmer now – the waves still raw and dangerous, but no longer maddeningly wild. To the north of the island was a shingle beach, and the drag and tug of the surf on the pebbles made a melancholy yet haunting rhythm. Katya started when she made out three frogmen in shiny wetsuits flipping onto the shingle; it was only when they waddled fully onshore that she realised they were seals. One nipped another’s backside and the victim, outraged, barked at his fellow in comic irritation. The third, a neutral party, appeared to put his head to one side, dismissing the antics of the other two. Shortly, all three waddled back into the sea and the moment they did so they returned to a state of natural grace, dipping and rising through the waves. She watched them frolic until she realised she was shivering and it had gone quite dark, only a murmur of red in the sky.

  In the chapel, it was cold. She snuggled into the double sleeping bag and marvelled at Joe’s warmth and his mastery of endless sleep. Time to wake up the monster. Gently, she stroked his hair, massaged his earlobes. No response. She tweaked his nose. He snorted, shook his head, and resumed his slumber. Bored with him sleeping now, she started tickling him, then slapping his arms, then his legs. Nothing. Eventually, she twisted his right earlobe so tightly she began to worry that it might come away in her hand.

  ‘Ow! For feck’s sake, what are you doing woman?’

  ‘You have slept for hours You sleep like a monster.’

  Joe rubbed his eyes, got up and staggered naked out of the chapel. The noise of him relieving himself sounded like a horse. He got back into bed, turned his back to her, gathered the double sleeping bag to him like a miser with his pot of gold, and closed his eyes. Nimble fingers twisted his ear, again.

  ‘Ow!’

  Lithely, she eased herself over the barrel of his chest and drew herself up, so they were eye to eye. She kissed him on the nose, a ritualised display of affection.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Sleep, fish, eat. Make fire.’

  He clambered out of bed and found the candles and lit them. They flickered and gave off a feeble yellow light, his shadow casting a huge black shape against the wall. He upended the charcoal bag and guided the bricks into the open hearth, and then lit match after match until, eventually, the charcoal caught fire and a thin coil of smoke ascended the chimney. He blew on the charcoal until it grew hot, and a smudge of warmth crept into the cold stones.

  ‘Reikhman will find us and kill us,’ Katya said.

  ‘No, he won’t. Russians can’t swim.’

  Despite her base sorrow and unrelenting fear, her eyes wrinkled with amusement at that.

  ‘We’re safe here,’ Joe continued. ‘For a time, at least.’ He took a slug of the Bushmills, smacked his chops, made an aah sound of satisfaction and offered her the bottle: ‘Here, have some whiskey.’

  She took the bottle from him and smelt the hard, pungent odour of the liquor. Cold and scared as she was, she took a sip. It burnt the back of her throat and then she felt a warmth there.

  ‘Uisce beatha, we call it in the Gaelic. Water of life.’ He took a second deep swig, blew on the charcoal some more, and then found the stopper, plugged the bottle and put it away. ‘Better go gently with this beauty.’

  Silence, as they listened to the rhythm of the ocean’s roar. Joe picked up the book of poetry, a battered paperback. He opened the book at random and started to read:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean
-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.

  ‘Who wrote that?’ asked Katya.

  ‘An Irishman called Yeats.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Reilly lifted up his snout, nodded, then went back to sleep.

  ‘Joe,’ said Katya, ‘you’ve got to tell me. What did you do that has made your brother so angry with you?’

  The surge and suck of shingle, running forwards and backwards in the surf, sounded as regular as a metronome.

  ‘Seamus and I were in the IRA. We were idealists, romantics with a love of the Irish nation and the desire for a united Ireland. The enemy were the British. We hated them. They were monsters, inhuman, so we had to kill them. And then I went somewhere, somewhere far crueller than Northern Ireland, and I began to realise that I was like a frog that had spent its life at the bottom of a well, that I had no idea of what the real world looked like. This place made me realise that I had been brainwashed.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘North Korea.’

  The wolf eyes studied him coolly.

  ‘What was strange was that my un-brainwashing didn’t happen overnight. It took a year. When we got back from Pyongyang I became the brigade bomb-maker. Just before we were going to pull off a spectacular, I realised that this, what we were doing, was just hating, and hating is wrong. So I switched detonators. The bomb didn’t go off. They knew something was wrong and eventually they found a bent policeman in the Met. But the brigade leader, I’d saved his life in North Korea and he gave me the chance to run. So I vanished. Others in the IRA wanted to kill me. I’d gone, so they shot my brother in the back, in my stead.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘The far side of the world.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘There are some secrets you have to keep, else they’re no longer secret. After they shot Seamus, I came back to Europe. I didn’t want to run from them. But, maybe like you, I didn’t want to die before my time. So I ended up in London, using my own name but living very quietly, not making any fuss, avoiding the police as much as I could. It worked, for a time.’

  ‘When we get to Utah, what will we do?’ asked Katya.

  ‘Stop running.’

  ‘Stop running? That would be nice.’ She bent her head, nuzzling against his chest, and spoke so softly she was almost inaudible: ‘I never, ever meant to hurt you or place you in such danger.’

  ‘But you did. And you stole my dog. And you hit me. And it hurt.’

  He felt her fingers coil around his penis.

  ‘Oi, you can’t just—’

  She moved down him, her tongue lightly, tantalisingly flicking against his chest, once, his stomach, twice, the root of his balls once and then slowly, lingering, working its way up his penis. She toyed with him, licking and kissing everywhere but the tip until his hands found her head and gripped her, and she sucked him until he felt he would burst.

  Fully erect now, he bundled her out of the sleeping bag and lifted her and held her against the door, her hands planted squarely against it as he entered her with all his force, so powerfully she gasped. The two of them echoed the rhythm of the shingle, until she gave a long ohhh! of pleasure and simultaneously he came, his whole frame shuddering with release.

  They went back to the sleeping bag and lay in each other’s arms, watching the candlelight flicker.

  ‘I love you, Kasha,’ he said and kissed her ear.

  ‘Kasha means porridge. I am not porridge,’ she said, and kissed his lips.

  Reilly, lying in the puddle of their clothes, did a very ostentatious yawn, clearly bored by the strange antics of the humans.

  ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘you saved my life in that storm.’

  He smiled to himself. ‘I did, too.’ Her fingers untied the leather string of her silver moon necklace from around her neck.

  ‘Take this. Wear it. It will keep you safe.’ Joe held it in his hands. The silver was old, delicate, the Arabic script intricately etched on the crescent moon.

  ‘What’s the Arabic say?’

  ‘May God protect you.’ She tied it around his neck for him.

  ‘Did Reikhman give it to you?’

  She shook her head, almost contemptuously.

  ‘I would never cherish a gift from Reikhman.’

  ‘So who gave it to you?’

  ‘Timur. For a time I thought he was lost to me, I thought he was so brainwashed.’

  ‘Brainwashed like me, once.’

  ‘Like you. But I never quite gave up on him. I always wore his necklace. And now I know he wants to come back, he wants to tell the world about ISIS – Daesh, whatever you call it – about Picasso, but no one wants to know. It feels wrong, very wrong. Joe, what can we do?’

  ‘Get to Utah. Maybe we can find some answers there.’

  ‘I love you, Mr Tiplady.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  The two of them lay on the bed and listened to the ebb and flow of the sea, their lives at that moment as remote from the twenty-first century as it was possible to be.

  EASTERN UKRAINE

  The guns from the front could be heard even down here, far below ground, as the pipes carrying heat and water and shit crossed this way and that overhead. Down one end was the delivery room, because babies had an irritating habit of demanding to be born, demanding life, war or no war. Down the other – smellier, darker, grimmer – lay the casualties you couldn’t do much about, apart from not letting them get killed a second time.

  In the gloom of the hospital basement it wasn’t so easy to see the detail in the photo Kristina had given him of her brother Max, the boy soldier. But the hair of the boy in the photo was extraordinarily white, just like the boy in front of him. Where his eyes should have been lay a thick, bloodied bandage. The young nurse lingered at the end of his bed, attentive, respectful, perhaps a little in love with the blinded boy.

  ‘I’m a family friend,’ whispered Gennady. ‘They’re worried sick about him.’

  The lights flickered and dust descended on the quick and the dying as the battle of the big guns on the surface world intensified. The nurse shook her head, bereft.

  ‘With reason,’ she said. Down the other end of the pipework, someone began screaming for a nurse, a high-pitched keening that demanded a response.

  ‘Got to go,’ she said, but kept looking back at the soldier for as long as she could.

  ‘Max? Max?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My name’s Gennady – Genya. I’m a friend of your sister Kristina. She told me about you.’

  His face was almost as pale as his brush of hair. This boy, he was so terribly young, it hurt Gennady to see him sightless. He’d lost a leg, maybe two, judging by the hollow under the blankets where his limbs should have propped up the bed sheets. Gennady looked for the USB stick around his neck, but of that there was no sign.

  ‘I’m so sorry to find you like this. What happened?’

  ‘The hohols sent us a mortar,’ Max said. ‘It passed directly in front of my eyes. It didn’t touch my face but the pressure of the air blew my eyeballs in. Later, a second shell did for my legs.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Max.’

  Something in the boy soldier stiffened.

  ‘Who are you and what do you want from me?’

  ‘My name is General Gennady Semionovich Dozhd and I—’

  ‘And you are a Hero of the Soviet Union, the defender of Jalalabad. I have a photograph of you in my bedroom.’

  ‘I have a photograph of you, too.’

  ‘How so?’ asked the boy, genuinely puzzled.

  Gennady sat down on the bed and seized his hand.

  ‘Listen, lad, I’m no soldier any more. I was a librarian and then I got the sack. These days, if I’m lucky, I fish in the ice.’

  ‘Do you want a drink, General? The nurse got me some vodk
a. She’s kind of sweet on me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be drinking in a state like this.’

  ‘Oh yeah? You mean it might be bad for me?’

  Gennady laughed out loud.

  ‘It’s in this cabinet. Not cold, I’m afraid.’

  In a little wooden cupboard by his bed was a brown paper bag, in it a litre of vodka, two-thirds full, and two shot glasses. Gennady poured stiff drinks for both of them, gave one to the boy, and they clinked glasses. Max, in his eagerness to drink, still not practised at being blind, missed his mouth and spilled it down his chest. Gennady said, ‘Wait, lad,’ took the glass, refilled it and tenderly held the glass against Max’s lips so he could sip it. Enough vodka made it down his throat for him to cough, splutter and gasp with a kind of pleasure.

  ‘So?’ asked the boy.

  ‘My daughter, Iryna’ – Gennady’s voice started to crack – ‘has vanished.’

  Something about this brave, foolish, blind boy got to him, unwrapped the sense of waste and pointlessness he had felt so purely when he’d got the phone call, what seemed a lifetime ago, in Arkhangelsk. ‘I showed your sister Kristina a photograph of Iryna and she recognised her, and gave me a photograph of you so I could track you down. You saw what happened in the lift.’

  ‘The blond woman? I filmed the whole thing on my phone. Murder, no doubting it. The guy who killed her was – there was a madness in him. I phoned the police, anonymously, but there was something in their manner I didn’t trust. I got the feeling that he was connected.’

  ‘Do you still have the film?’

  ‘Yes. I took it off my phone and downloaded it onto a flash drive.’

  It was hard to tell because he’d lost so much blood and was naturally pale, but Gennady was pretty sure the boy had started to blush.

  ‘I, er – I stuffed it in the back of my teddy bear. The bear’s a joke. It’s somewhere that’s safe, that’s all.’ He reached behind his pillow and found an ancient, little brown teddy bear, and handed it to Gennady. There was a small zip in the back that Gennady undid. Jammed up against the bear’s button nose was a flash drive.