The Adjacent

by Christopher Priest

  One of the tasks he was anxious to get down to was to go through the thousands of frames he had shot while in Anatolia. There had been only intermittent digital access there. So far there had only been time for the hurried search through the frames for Melanie’s parents, the photos he had been able to glimpse as they were uploaded to the lab. It was therefore another small pleasure for him, to work properly with his camera again, shooting, grading, assessing and then archiving. His subjects were elderly government buildings and ordinary trees, but the process was enjoyable. CCTV cameras had been discreetly installed to cover most of the areas where he was walking, so he assumed he was being monitored.

  8

  Feeling hungry at last, Tarent wandered back to the place where he had been told meals would be provided. He found a large hall, deserted but for one man working in the kitchen at the far end. A choice of two meals was available, next to a microwave oven. Tarent chose the soyaburger. He cracked it out of its recyclable card container, waited while the oven irradiated it then sat alone at one of the tables while he ate. He saw none of the other passengers or crew from the Mebsher. While he was still eating, the man in the kitchen turned out all the lights at the far end of the room and departed.

  Tarent walked out again into the cool evening. The place seemed deserted. There were metal-hooded vents in the roofs of some of the buildings, and these whirred and clanged in the darkness. Condensation clouded out of them, soon dispersed by the breeze. He walked a different route this time and eventually reached the perimeter fence, a daunting combination of loops of razor wire, large concrete blocks and randomly electrified sections. Strict warnings to intending intruders were posted prominently, in five languages. Floodlights bathed the fence and the road. Tarent took a few pictures.

  A feeling of isolation and loneliness struck him. These trees, that road, this English evening, so familiar in many ways, but he was nowhere near home. He still had that to face up to. His actual home, the large apartment he lived in with Melanie, had formerly lived in with Melanie, was in the London suburbs on the Kent side. It lay directly under what he now knew was the main path of TS Edward Elgar so there would probably be some structural damage to cope with along with everything else. He still had no idea what future plans he should make: the apartment would be too big for him on his own, but it was full of their stuff. Especially, now, Melanie’s stuff. In one sense at least this enforced trip to a government debriefing office in Lincolnshire was a way of delaying that inevitability, but he had been away from home too long.

  He looked quickly at the graded downloads from the lab of the pictures he had just taken, then made minute adjustments to allow for the colour temperature of the floodlights. He felt paralysed by the sense of isolation, of displacement, of delay which had grown in him during the evening. Melanie’s loss was like a constant ache, but without warning it flared up into actual pain at random times. He wished nothing of the last few months had happened at all. He slipped the camera away without taking any more shots.

  While he still stood there, wrapped up in his sudden introspection, a woman’s voice said, ‘You took photographs of me without permission.’

  She had approached him soundlessly. Her accent was flat, free of region, educated. Tarent turned towards her. It was the woman who had been in the Mebsher. Light was playing on her from above. She looked tall and aggressive, standing with one leg before the other, resting on the large root of a tree where it rose out of the ground. Her hair was still covered by the scarf but now she was wearing an insulated puffer jacket with the hood pulled up over the scarf. She was holding out her right hand, expecting him to place something in it.

  There were human rights laws in the IRGB, protecting members of the public from being photographed without permission. Tarent, like every other photographer in the business, knew this well.

  ‘I took a couple of test shots,’ he said, with habitual half-truth. ‘It’s a new camera and I was trying it out. They will never be published.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant.’

  ‘A Mebsher on a diplomatic mission is usually accepted as being outside national boundaries.’

  ‘That’s also irrelevant. You didn’t have my permission. Please let me have the pictures.’

  ‘They aren’t here any more.’

  She gestured impatiently. ‘I know you’ve got them. Why do you suppose your cameras weren’t confiscated when we checked in here?’

  ‘Was that your doing?’

  ‘I interceded, yes. I need those pictures back from you.’

  ‘Did you write me that note?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you ask me about going to Hull?’

  ‘You don’t have to go to Warne’s Farm.’

  ‘I’ve been told I have to be debriefed about my wife’s death.’

  ‘I know about that. That’s an OOR establishment. I can intercede there too.’

  ‘Why should you?’

  She shrugged back the hood of her coat. Although she had been wearing the scarf under the hood she had unknotted it. Her face was uncovered and the long ends of the scarf were hanging loosely down on her shoulders and chest. She saw him looking, so she swept one end of the scarf across her throat, over her shoulder.

  Although the camera was out of sight, Tarent surreptitiously pressed the foldaway feature and the instrument silently reduced itself to a wafer-thin sliver of plastic and alloyed metals. He concealed it in the palm of his hand, like an illusionist palming a playing card. In past photo assignments Tarent had had two cameras taken away from him and destroyed: once when he was photographing a crowd of rioters in Belarus, the other time by a plain-clothes policeman in the French city of Lyon. The latest generation of miniature cameras had been developed specifically to meet the needs of photojournalists who had to be able to conceal their equipment quickly and effectively.

  The woman stood her ground, disconcerting him again. Her authoritative manner was of someone used to getting her own way, but unexpectedly it also seemed to reveal a kind of physical vulnerability. He knew so little of her, after two days of physical proximity. Just the hand, the hair, the neck.

  They continued to stand apart, facing each other in the semi-darkness. She was breathing hard: with anger, fatigue, stress? White clouds from their breath drifted between them.

  He said, ‘What exactly is it you want?’

  She glanced down towards his hand, where the Canon was concealed. He was allowing his arm to swing freely, trying to make it look like a natural gesture.

  ‘The pictures you took. I have to have them. It’s a matter of security.’

  ‘I’ve already told you they’re not here any more. All my frames are transmitted to the agency laboratory. That’s how the camera works.’

  ‘It’s impossible to transmit anything from inside one of those vehicles.’

  ‘The frames were uploaded when we left. Automatically.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. The camera has a memory.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t use it. Once the pictures are at the lab the memory is cleared. Anyway, I took no pictures of you.’ The camera had been in stealth mode ever since he left Anatolia. There was no way she could have heard it.

  ‘You’re not telling the truth.’ She raised the left side of the scarf, turned her head and lightly tapped the area immediately behind her ear. ‘I know what you did. You took three shots in quick succession. I can give you the timestamp of each exposure, the EXIF data and the exact coordinates of where we were at that moment.’

  She turned her face further away from him and lifted her hair. Light from the overhead flood fell on her and Tarent saw the gleam of a metallic implant there, a tiny sliver of chased alloy, with three tactile keys. He instantly felt an irrational urge to cross to her, take hold of her, tip her head tenderly to one side and peer closely at the device. He could imagine how she would feel with her body against him, his hands on her, smelling the skin of her neck, feel the light touch of the hair that fell across her s
houlders, see her lips close to his.

  The thought dazed him.

  She said nothing, but continued to stare at him. She let her hair fall.

  He said, ‘All right.’ He felt as if he were about to faint, that if he stepped forward he would stumble against her. He groped around in his mind, trying to focus on what they had been saying. ‘Those shots are at my lab. They’ve been archived. I have to use the camera’s controller to access them. It’s in my room, with the rest of my gear. Come with me and I’ll download them now.’

  He thought of the cramped space in the room, its constricting walls, the airless warmth, the narrow bed.

  ‘That’s a Canon S-Lite Concealable, isn’t it? The pro model.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I told you I have the EXIF data. You don’t need a controller with that version.’

  ‘You can view the pictures, but they can’t be downloaded.’

  ‘Are you using any other cameras I don’t know about?’

  ‘A Nikon and an Olympus. They’re in my room too, unless your friend has been in to take them.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘The man you’re travelling with.’

  ‘He’s a security officer from the department I work in. His name is Heydar. His official role is my minder, but they don’t call him that.’

  ‘Is he with you now?’

  ‘He’s taking an early night. He thinks I’m in my room.’ She made it sound like a confidence, then added, ‘He won’t go to your room unless I call him there.’

  They had both already turned by unspoken consent and were walking back in the direction of the accommodation block. She strode ahead of him but as the entrance to the building came in sight she unexpectedly slowed her pace, allowing Tarent to come abreast of her. She walked at his side, looking down at the ground, the scarf hanging beside her face. They went along the disordered gravel path, under the silent trees, through the intermittent spills of light. Tarent’s hand, still palming the camera, swung beside hers.

  ‘Will you tell me your name?’ he said. He was surprised by the sound of breathlessness in his own voice.

  ‘Why should you need to know?’

  ‘Not need. I should like to know.’

  ‘Maybe later. Which room are you in, Tibor Tarent?’

  ‘So you know my name.’

  ‘I know a lot about you. More than you probably realize.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘That you met Thijs Rietveld.’

  Tarent did not understand. He made her repeat what she said.

  ‘Thijs Rietveld,’ she said. ‘The theoretical physicist. He was Dutch. Apparently you met him about twenty years ago.’

  ‘If that’s true I have no memory of it. Twenty years is a long time.’

  ‘Which room is it?’ she said, gripping his upper arm with her hand.

  They passed through the main entrance to the block. They reached for their ID tags. Tarent found the slot first and swiped the card. He went through ahead of her, but she slipped in behind him before the door could close against her. Again she walked beside him. The corridor was narrow – sometimes they brushed against each other.

  There was barely room for two people to stand inside his room. He had let her in first, so now she stood on the narrow strip of carpet, her legs pressing against the bed, her back towards him. The room was hot and airless. The bed was as he had left it, with the clothes he was wearing earlier scattered across it. He allowed the door to close behind him.

  She glanced back, turning her head, watching for the tiny scarlet LED that confirmed the door was secure.

  She unzipped her puffer jacket and shrugged it off. She slid the scarf away from her shoulders, shook out her hair. The scarf bunched lightly on the floor. Tarent swept his own clothes from the bed. She still had not turned, still presented her back to him.

  She tilted her chin down, then lifted the hair away from her neck, exposing the implant. His face was a finger’s length away from her. The implant glittered in the light from the overhead bulb. She leaned towards him, pressing her back against him and presenting her bare neck. Tarent leaned into her with his lips parted. He briefly glimpsed a company logo, deeply etched in the metal of the implant shield: it was a tiny letter ‘a’, stylized, surrounded by a pentagon. Nothing else. Then the hard shallow dome of the implant was in his mouth, his lips sucking on the skin around it, the metal rough and grainy against his tongue. She yielded, sideways in his arms, as his mouth roamed greedily across her neck, her ear, tasting her, wetting her, feeling the light brushing of her hair against his lips and chin and eyes. In his eagerness his front teeth grated audibly against the hard surface of the implant, and he pulled back from her.

  ‘You can’t damage it,’ she said, her voice sounding deeper, tremulous.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m beyond damage. You’ll find out.’

  9

  It was half an hour later. Crushed against her on the narrow bed, slimy with sweat, Tarent reached up and switched off the overhead light under the glare of which they had made love. One of the floodlights outside was close to the window and there was a spill of harsh light glancing through the top of the blinds. He reached across to the cord pull, managed to move the blind to block the worst of the light. Her limbs, her body, radiated heat at him.

  She disentangled herself and sat upright, moving away from him along the bed. She faced him with her legs apart. Tarent sat up as well, arranged his own legs so they went around her. The light from outside still pouring in over the top of the blind laid a diagonal line across her, a pale radiance. She too was damp with perspiration – her hair clung wetly to the sides of her face.

  Tarent felt his own sweat running through his hairline, down the sides of his face. He caught a bead of it, then smoothed a line of faint dampness across her left breast. He was short of breath in the stuffy room.

  ‘The window won’t open,’ he said. ‘I tried earlier.’

  ‘They’ve all been sealed. Every window in the building. MoD regulations. Shall we open the door?’

  They had been hearing footsteps and voices outside. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you wanted fresh air.’

  He leaned towards her, put his arms around her and they briefly caressed each other. He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that. What we did.’

  ‘I was. I thought you knew. I’ve been waiting two days for you to make a move.’

  He shook his head, remembering the hours in the Mebsher, what he had interpreted as the silent cold disdain pouring out of her towards him. Had he totally misunderstood? Well, it no longer mattered.

  Now he could look at her directly he saw that she bore no physical resemblance to Melanie, even superficially. She was broader, taller, her breasts were slightly fuller, her waist was narrower. He guessed she was younger than Melanie had been, but it was difficult to tell by how much.

  ‘I still don’t know your name. Or who you are.’

  ‘You needn’t know.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because of what I am and why I’m here with you.’

  ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘A woman with physical needs.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘The same needs.’

  ‘More than that.’

  ‘A woman whose job doesn’t allow her a private life, so her physical needs become urgent.’

  ‘So you take what you can.’

  ‘No, I have almost no life outside my work. You have no idea of the arranging I’ve had to go to for you, tonight. Or the risk I’m running.’

  ‘Please tell me your name,’ he said.

  She held up her fingers, touched each one with her other hand, as if counting. She smiled. ‘Flo,’ she said. ‘You can call me Flo.’

  ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘It could be.’ She was sitting erect, her back straight, her arms stretched out before her. She touched her fing
ertips to his chest. Her legs were folded around each other. She held his gaze steadily. It was an unnerving kind of calmness, not created by inner peace but by seeming to use some kind of tight control on herself. Tarent realized it made him tense up in reaction to it, because he did not know what she might do. He knew she was for some reason playing with him. ‘Flo was what they called me,’ she said. ‘Years ago. No one uses that name now, so you can.’

  ‘Is it based on Florence?’

  ‘For a time I was a Florence. But that was never who I was. Nor what I am. Not then, not now.’ She was obviously tiring of his questions about her name, and used her fingers to flick his bare shoulder in mock annoyance. ‘I still want those pictures you took of me.’

  Trying to tease, he said, ‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for a couple of photographs, Flo.’

  ‘No. I wanted to fuck you. If you think that was trouble, you should see the trouble I can make for people if I have to. Going after a fuck is not what I call trouble.’

  ‘OK. Shall we have another fuck? Flo?’

  ‘In a while.’ She shifted her position, leaning back a little and stretching out her legs in front of her. She pinned them against his sides. ‘I’m still too hot.’