The Power(93)

Nothing. The throw was too short. The canister has thumped into the soft earth, dead as blood. The woman is climbing again, and making those broad sweeps with the metal rod. He takes up another film canister; this one’s heavier than the other and for a moment he’s puzzled as to why. Then he remembers – this is the one he put his American change into. As if he’d ever use those pennies again. It almost makes him laugh. But it’s good, it’s heavy. It’ll fly better. He has the momentary urge to bring it to his lips, like one of his uncles used to with a betting slip when it was neck and neck and his whole body was tense like the racehorses on the screen. Go on, thing. Fly for me.

He lets his hand dangle. He pendulums it back and forth once, twice, three times. Go on. Come on. You want it. He lets it fly.

The clang, when it comes, is so much louder than he’d expected. The canister had hit just at the rim. The noise means the vessel cannot be full of water. It is wild; the oil drum reverberates, it sounds intentional, like someone announcing their arrival. Heads turn across the camp. Now, now. Quickly, he does it again. Another canister, this one packed with matches against the wet. Heavy enough. Another wild gong. Now it seems like there must be someone there, someone making a stand. Some idiot calling the hurricane to descend on her.

They come, quick, from around the camp. Roxy has time to pull a thick stump of branch off the tree, hurling it towards the oil drum to make one more bang and shout of metal before they’re close enough to see what’s happening. The woman who was so nearly on her scrambles down through the branches of the tree in her rush to be the first to pull up whichever fool it is who thought they could stand against these forces.

Tunde’s whole body is aching now; there is no differentiation between the sources of pain, the cramp and the broken bones, and there’s little enough space between him and Roxy that when he looks down he can see her wound and scarring, and it hurts him as if the line had been cut along his own body. He stretches himself by the arms, feeling with his feet for the broad lower branch. Runs along it. Roxy’s doing the same. They drop down, hoping that the cover is enough to hide the shape of movement from the women in the camp.

Stumbling through the marshy earth, Tunde risks one single look back, and Roxy follows his gaze, to see if the soldiers have tired of the empty oil drum now, to see if they’re after them.

They’re not. The drum wasn’t empty. The soldiers are kicking it, and laughing and reaching in to lift out the contents. Tunde sees, and Roxy sees, as if in a camera’s flash, what they have found. There were two children in the oil drum. They’re lifting them out. They are perhaps five, or six. They are sobbing, still curled tight into balls as they’re lifted up. Tiny, soft animals trying to protect themselves. A pair of blue trousers frayed at the bottom. Bare feet. A sundress spotted with yellow daisies.

If Roxy had her power, she would return and turn every one of those women all to ash. As it is, Tunde grabs her hand and pulls her away and they run on. Those children would never have survived. They might. They would have died there, anyway, of cold and exposure. They might have lived.

It is a cold dawn and they run hand in hand, unwilling to let one another go.

She knows the way of the land and the safest roads, and he knows how to find a quiet place to hide. They keep running until they can only walk, and still they walk on mile after mile in silence, palms pressed together. Towards dusk, he spots one of the deserted rail stations that populate this part of the country; waiting for Soviet trains that never came, they are mostly home to roosting birds now. They smash a window to pile in, and find a few mouldy cushions on wooden benches and, in a cupboard, a single dry woollen blanket. They dare not make a fire, but they share the blanket, together in a corner of the room.

He says, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing,’ and she says, ‘You saved my life.’

She says, ‘You can’t even believe half the things I’ve done, mate. Bad bad things,’ and he says, ‘And you saved my life.’

In the dark of the night he tells her about Nina and how she published his words and his photographs under her name. And how he knows by that that she was always waiting to take from him everything he had. And she tells him about Darrell and what was taken from her, and in that telling he knows everything; why she carries herself like this and why she’s been hiding all these long weeks and why she thinks she can’t go home and why she hasn’t struck against Darrell at once and with great fury, as a Monke would do. She had half forgotten her own name until he reminded her of it.

One of them says, ‘Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?’

And the other answers, ‘Because they could.’

That is the only answer there ever is.

She holds his wrist and he is not afraid. She runs her thumb along the palm of his hand.

She says, ‘The way I see it, I’m dead, and so are you. What do dead people do for fun around here?’

They are both injured and hurting. His collarbone, he thinks, is broken. There is a grinding pain in it every time he shifts position. Theoretically, he is stronger than her now, but this makes them both laugh. She is short and stocky like her dad, the same thick bull’s neck, and she has fought more than him, she knows the ways of fighting. When he plays at pushing her back on to the ground, she plays at putting her thumb on the centre of his pain, where the shoulder joins the neck. She presses just enough to make him see stars. He laughs, and she laughs, breathless and foolish in the middle of the storm. Their bodies have been rewritten by suffering. They have no fight left. They cannot, in that moment, tell which of them is supposed to be which. They are ready to begin.