Say You Never Met Me
Page 2
As if the thought had called him forth, George put his head around the door, holding out a single, blue flower, plucked from the courtyard as a last minute peace offering.
“Still awake? Mind if I join you?”
“Of course not,” she grinned, accepting the flower. “I’m always touched by your presents, dear.” Moving across the bed and patting the space she had vacated she added, “And you can start off on the damp patch.”
George smiled. It was going to be all right and, swinging his legs on to the bed he leaned over to kiss her. There was an insistent pounding on the front door.
“George! George! You there?” It was Theodorus.
‘Shit!’ thought Susanna.
“Hell’s teeth!” said George.
*
After breakfast next morning, George returned from the village post office with a small handful of mail. Susanna called him into the kitchen-living room.
“George, you’d better come and have a look at this. Seems mother’s not too well.”
George had only met Valerie once when Susanna presented her ‘lovely new boss’ for maternal approval over a Saturday lunch. Valerie seemed absorbed in her own life and mildly obsessed with looking after herself and her appearance but he thought she was a pleasant enough and moderately attractive woman. She was also perceptive. George had realised that Valerie had correctly identified his status in her daughter’s life almost as soon as they arrived, even if she had said nothing. ‘I could quite fancy the mother,’ George remembered thinking, ‘and I hope that she likes me’.
“Mmm,” mused George, bending to peer at the letter over Susanna’s shoulder. “What do you make of it?”
“You never know with Mum. She really would be pretty worried about what the tests will show but she could be exaggerating the whole thing.” She came to a decision. “But a lump is still a lump, so she can’t take the chance. Nor can we. We’d better go and see what’s up. We should be there when she gets the test results.”
George experienced a moment of panic.
“Er… Do we both need to go? I mean, until we know whether or not it’s really serious. I’ve only met her once and I’d feel in the way. Why don’t you go and suss out what’s going on; I’ll stay and feed the cats and water the garden, at least until you know how she is. You’re right. If she’s told you about this, it’s because she wants you to be there, so you go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine and it’s only for a few days.” Susanna’s heart sank at the thought of a separation and she opened her mouth to protest that he must come but found she was experiencing conflicting emotions. Of course she would miss him and dreaded being apart but she also felt a liberating sense of impending freedom. She rephrased her objection to his staying behind.
“Oh, George, I don’t want to go on my own. But if you’re sure you don’t mind… you don’t mind, do you? I’ll miss you though, darling. Promise you’ll come over if I’m not back in a week.”
“Of course, of course.” George didn’t know if he was lying but a twinge of guilt told him he probably was. “I’ll ring the travel agent, shall I, and see if they can get you on a flight in the next day or two?”
Chapter 2
Standing in the check-in queue, George and Susanna exchanged the tolerantly amused but patronising glances of established residents in a foreign country when surrounded by visiting tourists. As usual some of the visitors hid their nervous excitement by talking more loudly to each other than was strictly necessary merely to overcome the airport hubbub, and more for the benefit and enlightenment of others within earshot.
“I insisted on a room with a pool view. I mean, I put my foot down and, for once, these people managed to understand me.”
“Our room was huge but the maid would insist on coming in every night to turn down the bed just as we were getting ready to go out. I gave up telling her. Sometimes you just can’t get through to them, can you?”
Others, usually the men, bolstered their self-confidence by offering their companions unnecessary pseudo-technical explanations of airline and airport procedures, reassuring themselves more than their listeners, with an accompaniment of forced laughter, that they were in the know and therefore, in control of the situation.
“I expect we’ll be using the same equipment outbound as we did inbound.”
”These bags are going to get checked by sniffer dogs; I hope that naff perfume of yours isn’t leaking, Dora.”
Just behind Susanna and George there were a couple of big, family groups of big people. Overweight, sun-burnt pre-teenagers tried to look cool but only achieved sulky; two solid, meaty mothers with curly tints were squeezed into bright tee-shirts and tight skirts that made them look older instead of younger, while fathers with vests stretched over paunches and sporting trainers worn with white sports socks in a parody of athleticism tried unsuccessfully to herd noisily excited children and piled luggage into a semblance of a queue. Further back still were two fluttery women in late middle age, sisters perhaps, twittering with suppressed excitement over the still-novel experience of international air travel. Judging from the airport trolleys piled with luggage, most of Susanna’s fellow travellers had been on a two-month visit without access to laundry facilities. She could guess what the suitcases would hold: crumpled and unworn dresses, jackets, jeans and chinos ‘for the evenings’ and several months’ supply of shampoos, lotions, hair conditioners, toothpaste and sun cream, in a range of strengths, ‘in case they don’t have them there’. One of the ‘cool’ teenagers bumped its trolley into the back of Susanna’s legs for the third time. She turned and looked into the expressionless face.
“Sorry, love,” called a florid female popping out from the group three or four places back. “Watch what you’re doin’, Justine.” Susanna looked again at the shapeless teenager. She has assumed it was a boy.
“What can I have?” whined Justine’s sister, seeking a snack or sweets. Or was it a brother?
Somewhere in a parallel queue an Essex voice was whingeing.
“That ‘ire-car I just ‘anded in is the fourth motor I’ve ‘ad in two weeks. The first blew an oil seal goin’ up a mountain. Then they tried to palm me off with some little fing I couldn’t sit upright in. The third one blew a tyre an’ would you believe it, the spare was the wrong size! Anyway, the nuts was seized and I broke two studs tryin’ to get them off. Typical, in’it?”
The rest of the queue consisted mainly of young Britons. Their faintly green pallor, visible through the tan, and slow, painful movements suggested they had been partying right up to the last moment and probably hadn’t been to bed, at least not to sleep. Susannah guessed that the tour bus had plucked them straight from whatever they had been doing an hour ago and disgorged them at the airport. A squeal and a chorus of guffaws indicated where one of the girls had been groped; apparently one traveller, at least, was less hung-over than his companions. The British press had been having a ‘field day’ reporting the drunken antics of these youngsters in Greek resorts. George thought that the public sex and nudity were more amusing than reprehensible but was surprised that the local police had been so tolerant for so long. Probably the tourist board had had a hand. He pointed out the group with a sideways nod but Susanna didn’t understand. She just smiled and held his hand. George abruptly turned his back on the parallel queue as one girl pointed a camera at her companion, threatening to snap him as part of the background.
“God, I hate this,” he muttered.
“You could have come with me.” Susanna looked up into his face seeking confirmation that his annoyance was prompted by the imminent separation but realising, as she spoke, that queuing at a holiday airport was the cause of his irritation. “Why don’t you go? It’s a long drive and there’s the ferry back; I can manage one suitcase, you know.”
“No; I’ll see you safely checked in, at least. After that you’re the airline’s responsibility. Christ, if the air conditioning in here is working, it’s being ove
rpaid for the job it’s doing,” he added, seeking a change of subject. They shuffled forward and Susanna noticed four girls and two men at the check-in counter several places ahead. Although Mediterranean-skinned the girls looked pale. Certainly they weren’t returning holidaymakers. Their cheap, crumpled tops, poorly fitting jeans, and more than anything, nervous body language, fidgeting and fiddling with their hand baggage and their uncomfortable, frightened glances around them and at each other meant they were not locals looking forward to a trip to Europe. The men, who seemed overdressed for the climate in jackets and trousers, were at the counter and evidently handling the tickets and passports for the whole party with the girls only joining in to give monosyllabic answers to the check-in girl’s questions. At last Susanna found herself at the desk and responded to the mechanically-delivered questions to confirm that she had packed her bag herself, nobody had tampered with it and that she was carrying no knives, scissors or other sharp instruments in her hand baggage. Her case, bearing its Heathrow label rolled away from her on the conveyor belt before toppling on its side and disappearing, presumably to be subjected, she smiled inwardly, to the attentions of the sniffer dogs. Turning from the counter, she almost collided with the bleak-faced George who had been standing close behind her. He opened his mouth to say something but his words, whatever they were, changed to a grunt of annoyance as the suitcase on Justine’s trolley caught him behind the knees so that he sagged and stumbled forward into Susanna’s arms, and they both laughed.
George’s preoccupied look was the result of daydreaming, not heartache. The words ‘field day’, applied to the press coverage of holidaymakers’ behaviour, had summoned up for him a vivid image of a schoolboy incident. Joining the Combined Cadet Force had not been exactly compulsory but everyone, including George, did it anyway. The headmaster, formerly a public school housemaster, made it clear to parents that he considered the CCF to be character building and that a number of valuable privileges depended heavily on membership. References to potential employers and to universities would of course describe academic achievements but there would also be comments on a boy’s character and the role played in important school activities such as the cadets. In particular, nobody who had not been a cadet was likely to be suitable to become a prefect. The prefectorial privileges of wearing brown shoes and walking on the quadrangle grass meant little to most pupils but as only prefects were allowed to leave the school at lunchtime, most fourth and fifth years aspired to the role, especially those who regularly spent hours in Saturday morning detention as a result of illicit, midday trips to the nearby betting shop. George’s Saturdays were mostly spent blanco-ing his webbing to the correct shade of matt, khaki green and Brasso-ing his beret-badge and belt fittings to the point where, carefully aimed, they could be used on sunny days to inflict temporary blindness on the enemy. Pressing the creases into his battle-dress had been soul-destroying. The trousers and blouse (why not jacket?) were made of thick, hairy and horribly itchy material that stubbornly refused to take or keep a crease. Some cadets shaved the insides of their creases in an effort to make it more amenable to a wet cloth and iron. Others used soap inside their trousers to ‘set’ the material in shape with interesting results on rainy days. George used Copydex to glue the creases in, effective when standing but producing a raised ridge on the knee and thigh when seated. But the greatest effort was reserved for the boots. Issued new, these were iron-hard and dimpled all over, so naturally the dimples had to be polished out – especially on the toecaps and heels. Hours of character-building work with the back of a heated spoon would eventually reduce the dimples to the smoothness they could have been made with in the first place. Then the polishing started. Some recommended pouring molten, black polish over the toecaps and heels, then putting the boots in the fridge before quickly polishing them. Others favoured using a banana skin to reach the required, glittering shine. High-gloss varnish was a good short-term fix but it tended to crack, chip and flake giving rise to more work that it originally saved. On the advice of his father, George stuck to spit and polish; a good layer of Cherry Blossom applied with a rag-covered finger then spit and round and round and round with the finger and spit again and round and round and round. Eventually the shine slowly emerged on the boot as the tip gradually wore away on the finger. All this military finery was worn to normal lessons every Friday morning before being paraded, inspected and marched around on Friday afternoons. During the day, belts were carried by the edges with finger-tip care, sitting was avoided or, if unavoidable, done with straight legs to preserve creases; steel boot-studs and heel plates made boys slither on polished concrete corridors so that the ban on running was enforced by necessity. Gleaming toecaps were guarded against scratches and chalk dust more carefully than dragons’ gold. Once a year, instead of marching up and down in the playground all afternoon shouting, ‘one-two-three, one-two-three, one!’ in unison, while themselves being shouted at by prefects dressed as corporals and the school caretaker dressed as a sergeant major, they would take a packed lunch (to be eaten, like all packed lunches, as soon as they got on the bus) and trundle off to be taught field craft and hiding in ditches. The high spot of the day was the opportunity for a mock battle when they would be rewarded for lugging around bolt-action, Lee Enfield rifles stamped ‘WD 1939’ by being allowed each to fire five blank rounds. Some would be told off to lie behind trees or bushes and provide ‘covering fire’ while the rest charged, like Dad’s Army, through thunder-flashes towards an imaginary enemy. A real enemy, would, of course, have mown them down but their characters would have been fully formed first, so that was all right. The field day in George’s mind had been held somewhere in gently undulating open country dotted with hawthorn bushes and covered with tussocks of grass. They had just been issued with the usual five rounds of blank .303 ammunition and the instruction that, on pain of a year’s detention, they must account, on completion of the exercise, for all ammunition by producing either the unfired rounds (an extremely unlikely eventuality) or the empty brass cartridge cases. As usual, they were dressed in full, hairy-wool battle dress but some individuality in the form of old belts painted in camouflage patterns, army-surplus water canteens and similar accoutrements was permitted. The keener cadets and NCOs wore khaki face nets, intended to make snipers invisible to their victims, as rakish scarves. In the interests of preserving the hard-won gleam of their best boots, most boys wore something else. George was in Wellingtons and was with a group of half a dozen or so other boys, probably a ‘section’, and they were ‘waiting for orders’. There was always plenty of time spent hanging around waiting to be told what to do and when they questioned their NCO about it, they were told it was to create military realism. Faced with the prospect of more hanging around followed by an hour of crawling around in long grass with an antique and exceptionally heavy firearm cradled in their bent arms, the topic of how to get out of doing it naturally came up. Cooper described how ‘Tommies’ in the First World War would sometimes shoot themselves in the foot to avoid having to go over the top. However, he continued, having been issued with blanks instead of live rounds, they did not have that option. He demonstrated. Cooper was wearing dirty white plimsolls. The ambulance left just as the boys were being paraded by Major Crabtree, alias the woodwork master, for a lecture on safety with firearms. The lecture was interrupted by someone pushing an airport trolley into the back of George’s legs.
Awkwardly silent with the imminence of their first separation, George and Susanna weaved through the queues and abandoned trolleys towards the departure gate.
“See you in a week… or less,” said Susanna.
“Yeah. Give me a call as soon as you’ve seen Valerie. And give her my love, won’t you?”
“Of course. I’ll ring as soon as I arrive. Look after yourself, won’t you? Drive carefully on the way back.”
They kissed fleetingly and unsatisfactorily, unsure what to say now the moment of separation had arrived, before Susanna turned and walk
ed quickly through the gate, turning once to wave briefly as she hesitated at the immigration desk long enough to hold out her boarding pass and passport to the bored, cursory glance of the official behind his glass screen and turning a corner to vanish from George’s view.
Chapter 3
Just around the corner, Susanna immediately found herself at the back of yet another queue, this time moving slowly toward the hand luggage, X-ray machine. Screened bags were building up in piles beyond the machine. Several passengers triggered the alarm as they shuffled through the security screen and had to be laboriously hand searched before sheepishly producing a huge handful of loose change, the accumulated product of two weeks’ transactions with unfamiliar, high-denomination notes, or slipping off a massive wristwatch or heavy gold or silver chains and other chunky jewellery, bargains from local tourist shops. George would have hated this, she thought and would have been asking under his breath why people could not think to take all the metal from around their necks or out of their pockets before walking through the detector.
Susanna was just behind the four anxious looking girls and their male escorts. The girls and the first man passed through the machine without incident but the second man triggered the alarm. Probably the heavy zip in his leather jacket, thought Susanna. Shame he did not have the sense to take it off and put it on the conveyor through the X-ray machine. The bored security officer stepped forward patiently and signalled to the man to raise his arms so he could run his hand over his pockets, but the man just stood with his arms at his sides. The official signalled again more insistently and reached forward with both hands to raise the man’s arms and feel his clothing. The man stepped back with his hands outstretched in a defensive gesture and spoke loudly in a language Susanna did not understand or recognise, apparently refusing to be searched. He spoke quickly and volubly, offering some explanation as to why he could not or would not be searched and waving his hands in emphasis. His attention drawn by the raised voice, a young policeman strolled towards the group, his machine gun still slung casually across his chest. The leather-jacketed man shouted, swung round and punched the policeman in the stomach. As he turned away, Susanna saw the blood on the policeman’s tunic as he crumpled to the floor and realised in horror that he had been stabbed. She stood, transfixed, while other passengers scattered, some scurrying silently, some shouting warnings, some screaming. The first man shouted something at the girls and pushed back past them to snatch the policeman’s machine gun from around his neck. Leather Jacket yanked open the holster and dragged the heavy pistol from the writhing policeman’s holster and, slicing through the white lanyard with his knife, stuffed the gun in his jacket and grabbing Susanna’s wrist, dragged her unresisting behind him. Herding the four girls in front, he and his companion dashed into the nearby security office and slammed the door. The metal desk was tipped on its back with a crash and pushed, screeching over the terrazzo, against the closed door. The older man shouted something at the girls and Susanna and emphasised his orders with a wave of the machine gun and the five women scuttled into a corner and crouched between and against a row of battered and chipped, grey filing cabinets. He shouted at Leather Jacket, clearly berating him for his stupidity than signalled him and the women to say nothing. The sudden silence was broken by the sound of heavy breathing. Christ Almighty, thought Susanna. I’m a hostage. She discovered that her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in gasps. Must get control, she thought. ‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared.’ She repeated it silently in her head until she found she could take several deep breaths and the mist clouding her vision seemed to lift. ‘Okay’, she said to herself. ‘I’m just going to miss this one flight. There are plenty more. It’s okay.’ Then she thought, ‘bloody hell! My bags will go on the first flight and bloody hell again, Mum will be worried sick if I’m not on the plane. And I forgot to remind George to defrost the freezer while I’m away.’ It dawned how ridiculously unimportant this was to a hostage held by armed men and she found herself beginning to giggle and coughed, more a choke, to hide it. I’m not scared; I’m not scared.