The Power(96)

She’s got something back already. She’s twice her natural size.

He thinks he likes her, but he has no way to know for certain. She has too much to offer him to be a simple proposition right now.

She gives him a dozen ways to find her, as they walk the long miles from here to there. This email inbox will go to her, even though it looks like a shell company. That person will always know how to reach her, eventually.

She says, more than once, ‘You saved my life.’ And he knows what she means.

At a crossroads between fields, next to a shelter for a twice-a-week bus, she uses a payphone to call a number she knows by heart.

When the call’s finished, she talks him through what’s going to happen: a blonde woman in an airline hat will pick him up this evening and drive him across the border.

He’ll have to be in the boot; sorry, but that’s the safest way. It’ll take about eight hours.

‘Waggle your feet,’ she says, ‘or you’ll get a cramp. It hurts and you’re not going to be able to get out.’

‘What about you?’

She laughs. ‘I’m not getting in the boot of a bloody car, am I?’

‘What then?’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

They part just after midnight outside a tiny village whose name she cannot pronounce.

She kisses him once, lightly on the mouth. She says, ‘You’ll be all right.’

He says, ‘You’re not staying?’ But he knows how this goes; the process of his life has taught him the answer. If she were seen taking particular care of a man, it’d make her look soft, in her world. And it’d put him in danger if anyone thought he meant something to her. This way, he could be any kind of cargo.

He says, ‘Go and take it back. Anyone worth knowing will think more of you for surviving this long without it.’

Even as he says it, he knows it’s not true. No one would think anything much of him for surviving this long.

She says, ‘If I don’t try, I’m not myself any more anyway.’

She walks on, taking the road to the south. He puts his hands into his pockets and his head down and strolls into the village, trying to look like a man sent on an errand that he has every right to be about.

He finds the place, just as she described it. There are three shuttered shops; no lights in the windows above them. He thinks he sees a curtain twitch in one of the windows and tells himself he’s imagined it. There’s no one waiting for him here and no one chasing him. When did he get so jumpy? And he knows when. It wasn’t this last thing that made it happen. This fear has been building up in him. The terror put its roots down into his chest years ago and every month and every hour has driven the tendrils a little deeper into the flesh.

He can bear it, somehow, in the moments when the imagined darkness matches the real. He hasn’t felt this dread when he was actually in a cage, or in a tree, or witnessing the worst thing in the world unfold. The dread stalks him on quiet streets or waking alone in a hotel room before dawn. It has been a long time since he’s felt comfort in a night walk.

He checks his watch. He has ten minutes to wait on this empty street corner. He has a package in his bag – all of his camera film, all the footage he’s shot on the road, and his notebooks. He had that envelope ready from the start, stuck with stamps. He had a few; he’d thought if things got dicey he might post his film to Nina. He’s not going to post anything to Nina. If he sees her again, he’ll eat her heart in the marketplace. He has a marker pen. He has the envelope, packed neatly. And on the opposite corner of the street there’s a postbox.

How likely is it that the postal service is still working here? He’d heard in the camp that it did still work in the larger villages, the towns and cities. Things have broken down on the border and in the mountains, but they’re miles from the border and the mountains now. The box is open. There’s a time listed for a pick-up tomorrow.

He waits. He thinks. Maybe there will be no car. Maybe there will be a car and instead of a blonde woman with a hat there’ll be three women who’ll bundle him into the back seat. Maybe he’ll end there, thrown out on to the road between one town and the next, used and torn. Maybe there’ll be a blonde woman with a hat who’ll take the money she’s being paid for this and say she’s crossed the border. She’ll let him out of the car to run in the direction she tells him is freedom, but there’ll be no freedom there, only the forest and the chase and the end of it in the soil, one way or another.

It suddenly seems a remarkably stupid thing to have trusted his whole life to Roxanne Monke.

There is a car coming. He sees it from a long way off, its headlights sweeping the dirt road. He has time to write a name on this package, and an address. Not Nina, obviously not. Not Temi or his parents; he can’t let this be his final message to them if he disappears into this dark night. He has an idea. It is a terrible idea. It is a safe idea. If he doesn’t come through this, there is one name and mailing address he could write on this package which would make sure the images would be sent around the world. People should know, he says to himself, what has happened here. To witness is the first responsibility.

He has time. He scribbles quickly, without thinking too hard. He runs for the postbox. He slots the package into the chute and closes the lid again. He is back in position when the car stops at the kerb.