Divinity Road
Page 18
Still, the panic of their flight, the fear of capture has sent his adrenalin soaring, dispelled the terror he’d felt at the prospect of horse-riding. Rasheed has the reins. His own passenger status and lack of responsibility for overall control make the ordeal tolerable. He begins again to hope.
Greg scans the horizon to get his bearings. Ahead is a flat plain, in the distance a jagged range of hills. It looks so similar to the crash site, minus the wreckage of course, that for a few moments, Greg believes that he has somehow found his way back there.
For over an hour they make good progress, but the animals have not been properly fed and watered, and gradually their strength is exhausted. Galloping has given way to trotting, then to a steady walk. Every few minutes Munia twists around in her saddle, expecting to see the jeeps approaching at high speed.
Rasheed examines the compass. As they approach the hills, he can see that the track they are on must take them through a gorge between two particularly prominent peaks and that according to the compass, the camp must lie just beyond. He realises that riding due north across the plain must make them very exposed and does his best to zigzag along concealed wadis where possible. But knows that the three of them cannot be difficult to spot.
Munia is just wondering how long the horses can continue without rest or sustenance when, turning in her saddle, she sees what she has been dreading. Away in the distance, the jeep, a cloud of dust rising in its wake, is heading straight for them at some speed. She pictures Goatman gazing at them through his binoculars and shudders, her feelings torn between revulsion, fear and anger.
She looks at her brother and sees that both he and Greg have observed the approaching danger. Without a word, the siblings urge their horses on, flicking the reins across the animals’ necks, kicking them on in a last desperate effort to reach safety.
The final few kilometres before they cut through the gorge seem to stretch on for an eternity. The horses somehow sense their riders’ terror and find a second wind, but even so, the jeep seems to eat up the distance between them effortlessly.
As they get closer, the three riders hear a series of loud cracks and simultaneously realise that their pursuers are shooting at them even though they must still be some distance out of range. Nevertheless, Greg finds himself braced for the deadly impact of these bursts of gunfire. With no control over the horse, it is he who feels most powerless.
As they draw nearer to the gorge, their route takes them around a modest hillock and the vehicle, still some way behind, temporarily disappears from view. Ahead is the gully and in the distance, across the flat, arid plain, he can see the camp, the ragged armada of makeshift tents scattered haphazardly across the landscape. Shabby and chaotic as it evidently is, he nevertheless recognises it as a place of sanctuary. The desire to be transported there at once is so powerful that he feels it like a twist in his stomach, an instant of lurching nausea.
The ravine is narrow and short, a flat corridor of some hundred or so metres with sloping rock on either side. A minute or two and they’ll be through, and after that it’s just the home stretch to safety.
But then Greg’s horse stumbles, a hoof caught in a treacherous crack in the baked ground. It all happens in a blur, the horse buckling, lurching, head over heels, folding and rolling, Greg and Rasheed tumbling off, spinning through space, the force of impact on the sandy soil, the air knocked out of them. Munia sees at once what has happened, pulls her horse up and is down on her feet and racing towards them in a matter of seconds.
Dragging the two figures to their feet, Munia unslings the rifle. Rasheed clutches his arm to his side, grits his teeth. He has heard a snapping noise when he fell and knows something is broken. As yet the adrenaline keeps the pain at bay. Munia hears the drone of the vehicle engine revving. It is still out of view but any minute it will sweep around the bend. With bitter rage, Munia sees defeat looming.
After the long period bound and blindfolded, his backseat role on horseback, Greg feels as if his fate has been in the hands of others, spiralling out of control. But this tumble has now given him back his independence, galvanised his spirit of resolve. He is calm, composed.
It takes him a few seconds to take stock of the situation, to estimate the distance between themselves and safety, themselves and the jeep, to assess the effect of Rasheed’s injury on their progress, to weigh up their options. In an instant he sees what has to be done.
The horse that he and Rasheed have been riding is clearly out of action, one of its front legs broken. It lies in the dust, its body trembling uncontrollably. Greg gestures to Munia to pass him the hunting rifle and motions for her to fetch their remaining beast. While she collects the animal, he takes off his belt and straps Rasheed’s injured arm to his torso. He helps him climb up onto the horse’s back and signals for Munia to follow. There is no time for words. He simply points off in the direction of the camp.
Munia gazes down at the man and understands what he is doing. Her overwhelming urge is to protect her brother, so she looks him in the eye and nods. Before she pulls on the reins, she remembers what she has in her pocket, salvaged from the shot soldier. She hands Greg the handful of shells.
Precious seconds have passed. A burst of gunfire throws them into action. The jeep has appeared from around the bend, is bearing down on them at speed. Munia turns the horse, kicks out and sets off at a gallop. Greg looks up at the rocky slope to his right, grasps his rifle tightly and makes a run for cover.
It takes him a couple of minutes to scramble up to a suitable ledge. He crouches down behind a boulder, checks the magazine, slips off the safety catch, aims through the telescopic sight and pulls the trigger.
The jeep is twenty yards from the entrance to the corridor when the bullet strikes. Greg had aimed for the driver, misses, hits Goatman in the chest. The driver panics momentarily, the jeep skids, swerves, then pulls to a stop. The soldiers, all except Goatman, pile out and throw themselves behind the jeep or run for cover behind bushes, trees, termite mounds.
One of the soldiers has seen the horse gallop off and thinks that perhaps the danger has passed. He emerges from behind a thorny shrub. Greg understands that to buy time for the children he must keep the soldiers pinned down for as long as possible. He raises the rifle, aims and fires. Again a wobbly shot, the bullet just grazing the man’s shoulder. But the sound is loud and his action has the intended effect. The soldiers poke their rifles out from their hiding places, letting off volley after volley of gunfire in Greg’s general direction, but remain concealed behind their protective cover. Every few minutes, Greg raises his head and fires off a shot. For the moment, they have reached a stalemate. Behind his boulder, Greg closes his eyes to visualise the jeep as it was before he fired his first shot and tries to calculate how many soldiers he’s up against. Six, seven, eight, he guesses. He raises the gun and pulls the trigger, but is rewarded with nothing more than a click. He slides out the magazine and checks his pockets for the bullets Munia gave him. He counts them out. Six, seven, eight. He reloads the rifle.
When he looks up next, he realises that he needs to be more vigilant. He catches a glimpse of a soldier throwing himself behind a rock directly below him. He strains to see where else the advancing militiamen have moved to, but ducks down as a shower of bullets crack against the rocks just above him. It dawns on him that it is he who is now pinned down. The tables have turned.
He needs to keep moving, so he squats down, shuffles along the ledge, then scrambles up as quickly as his exhausted legs can carry him, zigzagging his way between a series of boulders. There’s an angry salvo of gunfire, bullets smash against the rocks, ricochet off at random angles. My God, he thinks. That was close.
Now he has a line of cover he can use to add an element of surprise to his counterattack. He turns and looks northwards and sees the dot of the horse drawing ever closer to the encampment in the distance. He knows that he has almost succeeded.
He lifts the gun with his good right hand, wedges it between two rocks, looks down and spots a soldier making his way along a ridge to his left. He aims, fires, the bullet hits home. A lucky shot, the soldier cries out, spins and falls. His movements are now slow, laboured. He ducks back behind the rock, edges over to a new position ten metres to his right as another salvo of bullets strikes the boulders around him. A few more minutes bought.
Focus, Greg, focus, he tells himself. The giddy feeling is growing, as is his sense of peaceful composure. He notices that the gunfire has stopped, reasons that his shooting of the last soldier may have made them more cautious, that knowing that he cannot escape, they have perhaps dug in to wait it out. Suits me, he thinks as he drops down to the ground, turns and rests his back against a rock. The rifle slips from his grasp and he’s suddenly too tired to pick it up. Suits me fine.
Nuala 2
To grieve is to abandon hope, to abandon Greg. So for those first months after the event, Nuala concentrates on Not Grieving.
With no body to mourn, her fury towards the world at large burns unabated. But despite the intensity of her inner turmoil, if Nuala were to ask herself, during those first months, what she was doing with herself, she would shrug and think, ‘I’m not grieving’. And it is this Not Grieving that is characterised by the vacillation in her emotions, the illogical fluctuations, the irrational switching between courses of action, feelings and attitudes relating to Greg’s absence.
Not Grieving, for instance, means at times wanting to tell the world about Greg’s disappearance – after all it consumes her every waking moment so why pretend to want to discuss anything else? – but at other times an inability to address this unspeakable event, an almost superstitious feeling that by maintaining silence she can prevent confirmation of her loss. When Greg’s agent, Burnley, calls to discuss cooperating with the media on Greg’s obituary, she point-blank refuses.
Not Grieving means at times an obsessive researching of every facet of Greg’s disappearance, a need to peel back and reveal the truth behind the events. The media have speculated on which terrorist group was responsible, and she spends hours googling the names of the alleged perpetrators, researching details of the air crash, the regional conflict, then aviation accidents in general. She goes over every moment she can claw back from her memory of Greg’s final days in Oxford, of their transcontinental phone calls. She phones Farai twenty, thirty times to ask him about the details of that last week in South Africa, the minutiae of their daily conversations, what Greg ate and drank, his sketching, the funeral, the visits to town, the market, the pub.
But then at other times she refuses to allow herself to explore what has happened and banishes such thoughts from her mind. It’s a painful area, of course. And after all, he’ll walk back through the door any day, so why waste time on an episode that they can soon put behind them? To allocate time to the contemplation of Greg’s disappearance is to concede to its significance. So Not Grieving means an ebb and flow, an initial tendency followed up by some contradictory manifestation.
Driving to London to meet a Foreign Office official, drugged by a feeling of utter recklessness, she finds herself hitting over a hundred miles an hour on the motorway; the next day, consumed by acute anxiety, she cannot sleep for fear that the washing machine will leak and flood the house.
She oscillates between lethargy and sleeplessness, between razor-sharp concentration and cognitive deficiency, between an inability to leave the house and a desire to flee.
And most of all, in her process of Not Grieving, she shifts between anger and guilt. How could she have let him go? How could he have allowed himself to take such risks? How can she blame him? How can he allow her to feel such guilt? Why don’t the authorities do more? Why are her friends and relatives so insensitive? So oversensitive? How can people carry on as if nothing has happened, as if the world hadn’t stopped, a cataclysmic permanent time-out, when Fran first knocked on her classroom door? So the months pass, and Nuala concentrates on Not Grieving.
***
Despite the best efforts of the government officials she meets, Nuala does not give up her plans to visit the crash site. As she threatened, she does go to the newspapers, as do many of the other victims’ families. Through one national paper, she meets a number of the bereaved. They swap details and begin communicating by phone and email. There are profiles and interviews in magazines, a petition to Downing Street, a demonstration outside the foreign embassy. There is no shift in diplomatic positioning, but she doesn’t give up.
Still, though, she feels apart from these grieving relatives. She suffers a secret guilt for the loss that they have suffered and which she, in her mind, has not. The DNA testing process is near to completion and almost all the other people she campaigns with have received conclusive confirmation of their loved ones’ demise. The officials continue to insist Greg must be presumed dead. According to them there’s no reasonable scenario that can explain his status as alive but unaccounted for. But without a body, Nuala remains unconvinced.
***
When the children were younger, they were inseparable, due partly at least to a natural pleasure they found in each other’s company, a genuine lack of sibling rivalry. In recent years, though, as their different characters have developed, they’ve grown apart. Their interests have sent them in different directions.
Now, through the fog of her own self-obsession, Nuala realises that she’s in danger of damaging her relationship with her children. It’s another example of unhealthy vacillation, a tendency to switch between smothering and neglect. She’s aware that she needs to nurture each one on their own, to seek opportunities to share their individual passions separately. Her instinct now, though, tells her to corral the children. It’s a kind of misguided laager mentality. Sammy doesn’t mind this. He is used to a working mum with a hectic lifestyle and enjoys the extra attention. He hasn’t yet seen that although he finds himself in close proximity to his mother more frequently, she is, for the most part, incapable of engaging with him at any meaningful level. She seems permanently distracted, absorbed in a world apart.
Beth, two years older, is more astute. At first she feels a natural empathy for her preoccupied mother. She accepts the periods of absent-mindedness, the erratic displays of emotional warmth, the lack of connectedness. But she grows increasingly frustrated and without any conscious rejection of her mother, she begins to look elsewhere for a maternal figure.
It is Nuala’s friend, Mary, who recognises the early onset of puberty. She buys Beth a stock of sanitary pads in preparation for the first loss of blood. And so it is to Mary that Beth goes to ask for help shopping for her first set of bras, one pink, one white, one patterned with pale blue and yellow forget-me-nots.
Does Nuala notice these significant landmarks in Beth’s development? She puts the bras through the wash every week, sees the box of pads in Beth’s drawer each time she puts away her clean, folded knickers. When she finds out from Beth about where they came from, she smiles and nods, but there’s something a little robotic in her response. Beth sighs, shrugs, small signs of a growing impatience
***
As she had suspected, work does bring some relief, though there are a number of early setbacks beginning with a panic attack during her first day back when she is forced to flee the classroom for the shelter of the ladies’ loo.
The autumn term is demanding, with students preparing for s
peaking exams and teachers gearing up for a spring inspection. Nevertheless, she looks ahead to the Christmas break with a sense of dread.
The children have never known a Christmas without Greg. How many of the rituals are associated with him? His practice of taking Sammy to choose a tree at the sea scouts’ hut; his habit of baking three Christmas cakes with Beth the Sunday after she breaks up from school; his custom of taking both kids off to the Ashmolean one afternoon in the pre-Christmas run-up to give Nuala a chance to get on top of her own preparations; his penchant for filling the children’s stockings with practical jokes – stink bombs, snap-shut gum, itching powder and fake turds – and Nuala’s with a single piece of jewellery, always silver, always featuring a green or blue semi-precious stone. To match your eyes, he’d say, and wink seductively. She’d tut and groan disapprovingly, feel secretly thrilled, then punch him on the shoulder.
And of course it’s not just Christmas that lays bare the pain of Greg’s absence. The longer that he is gone, the more Nuala finds the present begging a comparison with how things used to be. So many routines are either no longer possible or else soured and therefore undesirable. So much, once taken for granted, she deems priceless now that it has become unobtainable. In identifying the extent of her misfortune, Nuala makes new discoveries every day.
It’s too daunting to gauge her loss in such terms as ‘widow’ or ‘single parent’, even though increasingly she feels pressure from those around to accept one or other of these as her newly-acquired status. At the moment, the most she can manage is to measure her loss according to the number of small practices that have changed.