by Lucy Wadham
My hip came out of its socket. He took her hand again. You have no idea, Astrid.
She covered his hand with hers.
I’m the one who’s going to look after you, he told her. Do you understand?
She recognised that remoteness and clarity that came over her when she was operating.
I got thrown from the top step of your father’s office, he went on. He was smiling and she remembered how beguiling his joy had been only four days before. Now she looked at him with detached curiosity.
You met my father, she said.
I did. What a sad old bastard he is.
He told you where to find me.
No. Kader paused. Let me turn a light on. I want to see you.
Astrid let him stand. He hobbled, without the crutches, over to the sink and turned on the light above it. The yellow tube gave off a warm light that filled the room with shadows.
I love this place, he said, returning to the bed. This village is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I mean it.
I hate it, she said.
You hate it now …
Who told you where to find me? she interrupted.
His secretary told me. She looks like she hasn’t slept for about ten years.
That’s not his secretary. That’s his mistress. She’s a lawyer too.
Well she took pity on me. Look at me, he said. This time his smile reached her.
I have to sleep, Kader. Will you let me sleep and then we’ll go?
Go where?
Back to Paris.
He lay down on the bed.
Sleep here, he said, opening his arms. Sleep in my arms.
Astrid shook her head.
I can’t sleep in someone’s arms.
Well it’s time you learned. Come on.
His innocence made her resistance seem petty. She lay down with him.
You had a row with your sister, he said.
She found out.
Found out what?
His voice had a softness. Astrid could not see him, she could only hear his breath and feel his voice vibrating in his chest.
What did she find out? he urged.
Astrid closed her eyes and was in the confessional again.
What I’ve been trying to hide for so long, she said. That I lied to her. That the man she’s been waiting for all her life is in love with me, that I let him love me.
And what about you? Do you love him?
She opened her eyes.
I don’t love anybody, she said.
You love your sister.
I don’t know.
Kader reached out and gathered an edge of the dusty counterpane and wrapped it around her, holding her more tightly.
I met her, he said. She’s like you and the opposite of you. She looked … He hesitated. She looked like she’d just been fucking.
She often looks like that.
He squeezed her.
You do love her, he said.
Astrid closed her eyes. She dreaded emerging from this embrace when she would see once again how separate they were.
Do you love him? he asked her for the second time.
No.
Are you sure?
I hate him. When I went to prison I made Lola promise to stop seeing him.
Kader lifted his head.
What do you mean, prison? Have you been inside?
For two years.
Fuck, Astrid. What for?
Logistical support of a terrorist organisation.
Fuck me, he said, lying back.
Astrid hoped he wouldn’t move again.
I was inside for eighteen months, he told her.
You told me.
It nearly did my head in.
I didn’t mind it. It was made bearable by the woman who ran it. She was called Ana Gonzalez. She was the first person I really admired. She had great courage and energy. She loved all of us and tried to make confinement as painless as possible.
You were lucky, Kader said. Ours was called Delorme. What a cunt. He used to strut around pretending that he was keeping an eye on things. Working for change, he’d say. He’d write down complaints like: We’re fucking four in a cell built for two, in this little notebook, and he wore caps. Fucking tweed caps. What a nerve. He paused and she knew his memory was conjuring the smells and colours of prison. But go on, he said. I want to hear about your time.
Mine was quite comfortable, she said. We all had a cell to ourselves. It was a new prison and it was built with that in mind. It was like a beehive with tiny geometric cells, about two metres square, where we slept and washed and crapped. The cells all stank, some more than others, but in the end you didn’t notice it.
Kader stroked her hair.
Luxury, he said.
For the first six weeks I did nothing but watch.
I did nothing but fight, he said.
Every afternoon we were locked out of our cells and I think that’s what I hated most. I didn’t like being locked out of my cell and I didn’t do any of the activities.
Nor did I. What did you have?
Hairdressing, cooking, theatre, art. I didn’t want to do anything but I liked to go and sit in the art room. I liked the smell. I hated the kitchens because they stank, and the smell of nail varnish in the hairdressing salon. I’ve hated hairdressers since then.
It shows, he said, clasping a handful of her hair. Look at this stuff.
Astrid smiled. She knew that she was experiencing a reprieve from her own nature and she did not expect it to last.
I liked the art teacher, she said. She was a big woman with a thick Galician accent. She stopped asking me if I wanted to paint and just let me sit in the corner.
What I hated most, Kader said, was time. Time in prison is fucked. Every day it crawls and when visiting time comes around it fucking races.
Ana had no clocks in her prison.
Good woman.
She was.
There was a pause.
Tell me, he said. Is there a lot of … you know …
Sex? Yes. There was frenetic erotic activity. In my first weeks I watched so many couples form and break up. I’d see the first flush of love. Girls would pin up their hair and show off their love bites. It always involved the same people, though. You were either part of it or you weren’t. People fell in and out of love very quickly. When there were fights, they were usually about love.
Were you part of it?
No. But I suppose I was in love.
Who with?
With Ana.
What was she like?
She was tiny and she smoked all the time. She had a deep, gravelly laugh. I looked forward to her visits. Everyone did. When she came on her rounds, she always had a flock of women walking with her for as far as they were allowed to go. They’d all speak at once, like children, and she’d keep walking, answering gently, always with a smile on her face. Her one flaw was that she loved one of the prisoners, this woman called Gaia. It was a mystery to me. Gaia was a gypsy from Malaga. She didn’t love anyone. Except for her dog. She had photos of him all over her cell. He was a boxer with pointed ears called Cal. Short for calcetinas. Because he had white socks. Calcetinas means sock in Spanish.
I got that.
Gaia was like a stray dog herself. She was hungry and grasping. There were two groups in prison. Those who wanted money and wanted to work and those who didn’t care. Gaia only thought about work and she was rich. She wore tight, navy-blue overalls every day and every morning after breakfast she’d be the first in the workshop, making inner tubes.
And what did you do?
I studied medicine.
No shit. Fuck, I wish I’d studied.
What would you have studied?
Anything. History. The Koran maybe. Try and get some knowledge, so people can’t bullshit you so easily.
If I hadn’t been able to study, prison would have been very different. The other women disliked me because I was labelled a terorista. Then it became clear
that I wasn’t accepted by the political prisoners either, that I was something different. The women who belonged to the organisation stuck together. They had an aloofness about them, as if they were set on a higher goal than the rest of us. They were like nuns. After I’d been there for a few months Ana called me into her office. She offered me a filing job. I asked her why she’d chosen me and she told me that she had the feeling that I was there by accident, that she had experience in these matters and that it showed. Studying was her idea.
What happened to the woman with the dog?
She hit someone in the face with a fire extinguisher and got sent to a place that was a lot worse. I wasn’t there when it happened but I was told that she nearly killed this woman. They were fighting about shifts. I found Ana in her office and she’d been crying. She looked up and smiled at me without bothering to wipe away her tears. She just said, I’m a stupid woman, and I put my arms around her. I remember how she held me as though I was the one who needed consoling.
There was a pause. Astrid watched the shadows on the ceiling.
When I got out, Kader said, I wasn’t fit for normal life.
What do you mean by normal life?
Job, car, girlfriend, he said. When I came out I felt like I was invisible. It was like everyone was living their boring lives and I was this … this ghost. A ghost would come back and think everything everyone did or cared about was pointless, wouldn’t he?
Probably.
It was like that. In a man’s prison you have to be dangerous or else you get shat on. When I came out, every time I went to a bar or a club, I’d get into a fight. My friend Amadou said it was like I was trying to wake people up. He was right. It was like everyone else was on tranquillisers or something.
In my prison there was very little fighting, she said. Mostly we lay about in a torpor. Frustration turned itself into self-loathing more than anger. I got so used to the sound of women crying that I didn’t notice it after a while, like the sound of rain or bad plumbing.
They lay in silence. Astrid felt a wave of gratitude spread through her like heat.
Astrid? You said you made your sister promise to stop seeing her man. I want to know if that was because you hated him or because you loved him.
It was the right question but she knew that it signalled the end of her reprieve.
She pulled free of his arms.
I didn’t love him, she said. She stood up and walked over to the sink. He was ruining Lola. She turned on the tap, filled a plastic cup and drank.
Kader sat up and leaned against the wall.
How?
You wouldn’t understand, she said, walking over to the window.
What wouldn’t I understand?
The organisation. The people he worked for were killers. He murdered two people.
Kader kept silent. She pulled back the curtains and looked out at the moon, trailing a stripe of cloud. She wondered what time it was. She no longer wanted to sleep.
I don’t know the man, Kader said at last. But I know that sometimes it’s circumstances that make people kill.
I know, she said. And I wouldn’t care if it were just him. But he was pulling Lola into the organisation and I couldn’t bear that life for her. She started delivering pamphlets, then going to demonstrations. Then he taught her to throw Molotov cocktails, then before I knew it he had got her to plant bombs with him. She would have joined what they call a legal commando, then she would have been identified by the police and she would have had to go into hiding. She would have started killing people herself. It’s always the same path. If I hadn’t gone to prison, that’s what would have happened to her.
You were saving her from a life of crime.
You couldn’t possibly understand, she told him.
I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell your sister what an arsehole he was to be writing to you behind her back. I’m thinking that you must have loved him, otherwise you would have told her.
She saw that he had removed the bandage from his arm. She could not see from where she stood if the wound had healed or not.
It was vanity, she said. I was vain. That was all.
Maybe.
Suddenly she wanted him out of the room.
You’ll know when you see him, he murmured.
Know what?
If you love him.
I don’t love him.
She stood on the other side of the room, and he saw that she was responsible for all this pain he was in.
Come here, he said. Fucking come here. I can’t move.
He watched her hook a lock of her hair behind her ear and there was the same feeling, like a string breaking in his gut, that he had felt when he had watched her walk around her car on the first day. The first day. He could not remember who he had been.
I want you to look at my fucking heel. It’s killing me.
He pulled up the leg of his tracksuit. She knelt by the bed to look at the wound.
It’s all green and yellow, he said. It looks like the fucking Brazilian flag.
She prodded the area around the bite. The pain was unbelievable. He closed his eyes.
It’s septic, she said. Is it a dog bite?
Yes. Fucking Raoul. Racist Raoul.
You need antibiotics.
I need a kiss.
She looked up. Her face was full of pity.
I can’t kiss you, she said.
Why not? I’ve been through hell for you, you heartless bitch.
I don’t feel anything, Kader. I can’t kiss you.
You can let me kiss you.
But he could not move. Pain was waiting for him everywhere.
You know you smell like a dessert my mum’s sister Leila used to make, he told her. It was a white dessert. I think it had almonds in it. My mum kept it in a plastic box in the fridge. I used to scoop spoonfuls of it off the top, thinking she wouldn’t notice. When she brought it out for lunch with the family, there was hardly any left. It tasted of cold flowers, flowers soaked in sugar.
Astrid smiled.
My mum is Kabyle, he said. She had a beautiful voice. She wanted me to be a Rai singer. Do you know Rai?
Yes.
But I wanted to be a footballer.
You said. Astrid stood up. I’m going to get you some antibiotics.
I’ll come with you.
No.
I’ll come, he said, swinging his legs off the bed.
The chemist will be closed, she said. I’ll have to get them to open up for me. It’s better if you stay here.
And she grabbed her handbag and left the room.
*
Kader lay on his back, ankles crossed, hands behind his head. He closed his eyes and saw his mother’s lovely face floating in the darkness. She was smiling, showing the gap between her two front teeth: les dents du bonheur, teeth of happiness, the French called them. How, with a mother so happy, could he love a woman as sad as Astrid? Because Astrid’s sadness was what made her beautiful. It hung in her eyes like a lantern, it floated on her forehead like a veil. Kader began to hum a tune to go with the words. He hummed with his eyes closed, the words forming in his mind. The smile spread on his face and his stomach filled with heat. The song began to float out of him into the room: an Arab song in French. He was an Arab, singing a French song for the Spanish woman he loved.
He threw back the bedclothes and got out of bed. He looked at his face in the mirror above the sink. It had changed. Or he had changed and didn’t recognise his face any more. That face no longer belonged in Nanterre. He grinned. You’re free, he told himself.
He bent over and drank from the tap. Then he went and climbed into bed. In the morning they would go and buy him some decent clothes. In the car on the way, he would sing her his song.
*
The village was quiet. As she walked down the hill past Txema’s bar, she braced herself. This time she would not be caught off guard. She would not forgive him for what he had done to Lola. And me, she thought, feelin
g her hatred gather momentum as she walked. She searched for ways to hurt him. She knew that she had shaken him with her mention of their arrest. Perhaps something had happened up there on the mountain. There had been four of them and all of them had been caught or shot except for Txema. The circumstances of their arrest had always been strange, not just to her. For a short time everyone was discussing how lucky Txema had been. They had been discovered in the hills by a mobile unit of the Guardia Civil called the FAR. But while Mikel had been taken into custody by the Guardia Civil and given life, Txema had been arrested by the French gendarmerie, had spent nine months in Bayonne prison for possession of a weapon and then been put under house arrest, which meant in those days that you could come and go as you pleased, so long as you did not try and cross the border.
Why had he eluded punishment? She cursed Mikel for having taken his own so meekly.
The chemist was dark and the metal grille was drawn across the window. She walked round to the side door and rang the bell. At length a man’s sleepy voice came across the intercom.
Milo, is that you? It’s Astrid Arnaga. I’m sorry to wake you. I need antibiotics.
Astrid, he chuckled. Wait. I’m coming.
Milo was wearing pyjama bottoms and a string vest. He grinned at her as he scratched his side. He had not changed: still the same weary good humour.
Good to see you here, he said. At this time of night at my door. Strange but good.
When he returned with the medication, he held it out to her and pulled it back as she reached for it.
Will you come back and see us before you go?
Yes Milo.
In the daytime, he said.
She took the drugs and smiled.
And Lola? he asked.
She’s here.
Good. Come back and see us, both of you. Mirabel and I have a baby boy. That’s why I have these, he said, pointing to the shadows under his eyes.
Suddenly she felt tears rising. She had to get away. She squeezed his hand then turned and walked off. It was a few moments before she heard him close the door.
*
Kader was asleep when she got back to the room. She crept to the sink and prepared the injection.
I thought you weren’t coming back, he said.
He was lying on his back with his arms behind his head.