The Power(77)

They’re ignoring her now. They’re working on him. They’ve sewed her up – just to be neat maybe, or surgeons can’t make themselves not sew up a wound they’ve made. Maybe her dad told them to. There he is. Her own dad. She should have fucking known that even not killing him wouldn’t be enough. Everything’s got its vengeance. A wound for a wound. A bruise for a bruise. A humiliation for a humiliation.

She’s trying not to cry but she knows she is: leaking from the eyes. She wants to mash them into the ground. The feeling’s coming back into her arms and legs and fingers and toes, there’s a tingling and an emptiness and an ache and she’s got one chance now because there’s no reason at all for Darrell not to kill her, he might think she’s dead already, with any luck. Fucking snake in the grass, fucking shit-stain on the earth, fucking fucking Darrell.

Bernie says, ‘How’s it looking?’

One of the doctors says, ‘It’s good. Excellent tissue match.’

There’s a whining sound from the drill as they start to bore little holes in Darrell’s collarbone. It’s loud. She drifts in and out of time a bit, the clock on the wall is moving faster than it should, she can feel her whole body again, fucking hell, they left her clothes on, that’s shoddy, and it’s good, and she can work with it. On the next whine of the drill she wriggles her right hand out of the soft fabric restraint.

She looks around with one half-open eye. She moves slowly. Left hand out of the restraints, still no one notices what she’s doing, they’re so intent on the body of her brother. Left foot. Right foot. She reaches out to the tray next to her, grabs a couple of scalpels and some bandages.

There’s some kind of crisis on the table next to her. A machine starts beeping. There’s an involuntary jolt from the skein they’re stitching into him – good girl, thinks Roxy, that’s my girl. One of the surgeons falls to the floor, another swears in Russian and starts giving chest compressions. With two eyes open, Roxy gauges the distance between the table where she’s lying and the door. The surgeons are shouting and calling for drugs. No one’s looking at Roxy; no one cares. She could die now and no one would give a shit. She might be dying now; she feels like she could be. But she’s not going to die here. She tips herself off the table down hard on her knees into a crouch, and still none of them notices. She does a backward crawl towards the door, keeping low, keeping her eye on them.

At the door, she finds her shoes and pulls them on with a little sob of relief. She topples out the door, hamstrings taut, body singing with adrenaline. In the courtyard, the car is gone. But, limping, she runs out into the forest.





Tunde



There is a man with a mouthful of glass.

There is a thin, sharp, translucent sliver spearing the back of his throat, shiny with saliva and mucus, and his friend is trying to extract it with trembling fingers. He shines a light with his phone torch to see where it is exactly, and reaches in while the man retches and tries to hold still. He has to go in for it three times, until he grasps it, pulls it out between thumb and forefinger. It is two inches long. It is stained with blood and meat, a lump of the man’s throat on the end of it. The friend puts it on to a clean, white napkin. Around them, the other waiters and chefs and orderlies continue with their business. Tunde photographs the eight shards lined up on the napkin.

He’d taken photographs while the obscenity was happening at the party, his camera casual and low at his hip, seeming to dangle from his hand. The waiter is just seventeen; this is not the first time he’s seen or heard about such a thing, but the first time that he’s been subject to it. No, he can’t go anywhere else. He has relatives in Ukraine who might take him in if he ran, but people get shot trying to cross the border; it’s a nervous time. He wipes the blood from his mouth as he speaks.

He says quietly, ‘Is my fault, must not speak when the President is speaking.’

He’s crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he’s known them since the first day Enuma touched him.

He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: ‘At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.’

The waiter, whose name is Peter, writes some words on a scrap of paper. He gives it to Tunde and holds his hand clasped over Tunde’s fist. He looks into his eyes until Tunde thinks that the man is about to kiss him. Tunde suspects he would allow it because each of these people needs some comfort.

The waiter says, ‘Don’t go.’

Tunde says, ‘I can stay as long as you like. Until the party is over if you like.’

Peter says, ‘No. Don’t leave us. She is going to try to make the press leave the country. Please.’

Tunde says, ‘What have you heard?’

Peter will only say the same thing: ‘Please. Don’t leave us. Please.’

‘I won’t,’ says Tunde. ‘I won’t.’

He stands outside the kitchen for a smoke. His fingers are trembling as he lights the cigarette. He’d thought, because he’d met Tatiana Moskalev in the past and she’d been kind to him, that he understood what was happening here. He’d been looking forward to seeing her again. Now he’s glad he didn’t have a chance to reintroduce himself. He pulls the paper that Peter had given him out of his pocket and looks at it. It says, in shaky block letters: ‘THEY’RE GOING TO TRY TO KILL US.’