Lost (19 page)

Since Raymond had come into her life, Nathalie had let her hair out of its plait. It now hung down in an undulating mass, stray pieces clinging to her tear-stained face. Her mother, sitting beside her on her bed, tried to tidy it a little. The news had come to the village in the early afternoon and they could still hear Raymond’s mother, Incarna Battesti, and the terrible monotony of her crying, echoing in the courtyard next door. Habit told people not to believe in the overdose. Then, when they discovered Nathalie had slept out, no one doubted Coco was behind the boy’s death.

Liliane contemplated her daughter’s misery. The horror of it had worn off. Now that she was bent on action it didn’t hurt so much so see her child’s suffering. Soon they would both be rid of him.

As if he’d heard her thoughts Coco banged once on the door, hard. She imagined the gesture, a clenched fist and a lateral punch outwards from the chest.

Liliane stood up and walked towards the door. Nathalie sat on her bed clutching her knees to her chest.

Coco stepped into the room and jabbed his finger at Nathalie, who hid her face.

‘I forbid you to shed a single tear over him. He was a junkie. He’d give you up for one dose of his drug. Don’t you understand that, you stupid child!’ He turned on Liliane. ‘You knew that!’ He flung an arm out, pointing to his daughter. ‘Why did you let her see him?’ Suddenly his face softened. ‘Did you have him here? he asked. ‘Did you receive him?’

Liliane faced him. She called to mind what she was about to do, how he would soon fall anyway. She closed her eyes.
Then he struck her for the second time that day. The force of the blow knocked her against Nathalie’s little desk. Her child’s clutter, carefully arranged, fell to the floor. While Liliane gasped for breath she saw Nathalie run at her father.

‘I hate you!’ she sobbed. ‘I hate you. I’ve always hated you and I always will.’

Coco watched her sink to the floor. She knelt on the carpet, her legs splayed on either side of her, shaking with tears. Coco towered over her, a new expression of detachment on his face. Without looking at Liliane, he left the room.

Liliane went to her daughter and put her arms around her. Downstairs the front door slammed.

‘He’s gone,’ Liliane said. ‘He’ll stay at the villa now. Nathalie?’

She looked up at her mother.

‘Why didn’t you call me? I could have told you he was coming home,’ Liliane said.

‘Why didn’t he stay with his whore?’

‘He’s in trouble.’

‘Good. I hope they kill him.’

Liliane was shocked. Nathalie had never indicated that she was aware of what her father was. Now it came as a relief to her. For the first time in her life, she felt she had an ally.

‘Mum.’

‘Yes, my angel.’

‘I loved him. I could have saved him.’

Liliane looked into her daughter’s face. The childishness was still there, in the swollen mouth, the full cheeks.

‘I know you loved him.’

‘I don’t want to go on living, Mum. I don’t. Do you understand?’

Liliane nodded, unable to speak.

‘They were the best moments of my life. They were the only moments.’

Liliane knew she had not acted quickly enough. But there was nothing to stop her now. She could avenge her daughter
and her son. She breathed in the smell of Nathalie’s hair and moved back and forth to the lullaby in her head. She would sit by her tonight and tomorrow night, and every morning she would be there when her child woke up.

Karim watched Philippe Garetta moving further away in the moonlight. A canvas army sack filled with their bedding hung across his back. He was walking too fast along the narrow path, loosening the splintered rock with his tread. They were on a narrow shelf overhanging a drop to their right so deep he could not see the bottom. There was something that spooked Karim about Garetta. His movements, his whole bearing, made him nervous. And he had noted the Browning that Garetta kept in his right boot.

Karim hugged close to the cliff wall, his eyes averted from the gorge. He was carrying the child on his shoulder. He could feel its body was stiff with fear. As soon as the path widened a little, he stopped. Denis halted behind him.

‘Garetta!’ Karim called, but Garetta carried on. Karim watched him, then turned to Denis. He was carrying a cardboard box and two holdalls, one on each shoulder, full of provisions.

‘Here. We’ll swap. You can carry him. He’s so stiff, he weighs a ton.’

‘I’m not taking him here,’ Denis said.

Karim studied him. His dark eyes shone like an innocent’s no matter what he put into his body and no matter what evil he did. But there was a leak in the left eye, a little of the black had spilled into the white like a tiny worm. Karim patted him on the cheek.

‘I need a smoke,’ Karim said.

‘Let’s move,’ Denis said. ‘Or we’ll lose him.’

Garetta had disappeared.

They walked on. The child on Karim’s shoulder was in some kind of spasm. It occurred to him that he might die.

‘Inshallah,’ he said aloud.

The path curved sharply to the left and stopped in front of a steep rock. Karim looked up to find Garetta leaning over him, his long curls hanging down.

‘Pass me the kid,’ Garetta said.

An unpleasant hierarchy seemed to have settled between them: Garetta at the top, then himself, then Denis. Karim was not used to taking orders from anyone except Santini, who had led him to believe that Garetta would be his equal in this. But Garetta had forced him into a two-hour ride on the back of a trial bike when there was room in the car. Denis rode Garetta’s Cagiva hunched over and with such concentration, it was tiring to be a part of it. Karim had so far not found the opportunity of talking about his feelings. Relieved to get the child off his back, he held him up to Garetta, who grabbed him under the arms and hauled him out of sight. Karim stepped away from the rock face to avoid the shower of dust and stones that fell in his wake.

‘This is no good for me,’ Karim said to Denis. ‘We’re going to have to have a conversation.’ He reached out to find a hold on the rock and pulled himself up.

Before him stretched a plateau of long grass flooded with moonlight that sloped gradually upwards to a wood in the distance. Garetta was already halfway towards the trees, the child and the sack on his back. Karim stood there looking at the silver plain until Garetta had disappeared into the wood.

‘Hey, Karim!’

Karim turned and looked down at Denis.

‘Take the fucking box.’

He knelt down and took the box. There seemed to be a lot of tinned cassoulet.

‘Shit. He knows I don’t eat this shit.’

‘Karim! For fuck’s sake.’

Denis handed up the bags to him, one after the other, then climbed up.

‘You can take the bags,’ Denis said and he picked up the box. ‘Where’s he gone?’

Karim nodded towards the wood and Denis walked off.

Garetta had flattened the grass, leaving a trail that caught the moonlight and shone brighter. Karim opened his eyes wide. It felt as if he was experiencing night for the first time and he did not like it. Night in the city was nothing like this. This sky with all its stars was too close. It felt as if the night were pressing up against him like some whore licking his face and the moon coating everything with its sleazy light.

Denis was far ahead of him. Karim hung the bags from each shoulder and followed. The long grass brushing against his legs as he walked sickened him. Nothing had prepared him for a place like this. Not his life in Massaccio where he was a prince with a black BMW 328i which yelped and flashed its headlights when he pressed the remote-control locking device; not his origin, which he draped over his person like a mantle but of which he knew nothing, for all he had from Algeria was a photo of the Djijelli football team taken in 1965, his father in the front row, second from the left. His dad had died the year he was born in a stupid accident at the port and so he told people he had been killed by the French during the war of independence. Karim had managed to live his whole life on the island without ever coming near a place like this. As if he had known all along that if Allah was anywhere, He was up here.

When he reached the trees, Denis had disappeared. The wood was so dark, for a moment he could not see and he held his arms out in front of him, moving forward step by step, afraid to breathe. He wished he knew one prayer, just one of the many his mother had sung to him at bedtime when he was little, before she had lost him. She had never learned French and he had never learned Arabic, and so they had been separated and all her weeping and kissing had just set them further apart.

When he emerged from the wood into the clearing, Garetta and Denis were waiting for him. Garetta had a smug look on his face.

‘You got a problem?’ Karim said, dropping the bags.

Garetta shook his head slowly.

‘You,’ he said, adjusting the position of the child’s body on his shoulder. ‘I think you have a problem. I think you’re out of your depth.’

Denis was staring at him too and Karim realised he was perspiring heavily.

‘Let’s just move, okay?’ he said. ‘How far is it?’

‘We’re here,’ Garetta said.

On the far side of the clearing was a low stone hut with no windows. The roof had caved in at one end and a tree had sprung up inside the hut, its branches growing out through the hole.

‘That?’ Karim said. A toothpick had materialised in Denis’s fingers and he began picking his perfect teeth. ‘If they find us here, there’s no way out,’ Karim told Garetta. ‘We’re trapped.’

But Garetta was carrying the child towards the hut.

‘They won’t find us,’ he said, ducking to pass through the door.

Karim looked at Denis but he was still picking his teeth. It was impossible for him to think straight in this place, so he sat down on one of the bags and began to roll a spliff.

Sam could feel the hard ground against his back but it still felt as if he was falling through the air. His whole body was tense, waiting for the landing. His legs and arms were tied up so tightly he couldn’t feel them any more. There was a small hole in the roof and he could see the big round moon. He knew that if he turned over and faced the ground, the falling might stop, but he could not take his eyes off the moon, which was trying to tell him something.

Sam wished they had left him in the cupboard. When they had pulled him out he had felt like one of his stick insects being ripped off its branch. He wished they had left him in the dark with the man talking to him through the wall. The new men didn’t talk. The tall one looked like his wolf
puppet
.
Sam kept his eyes on the moon. As long as he looked at the shining moon he would not see the skinny man’s head again, all bloody on the floor.

As he fell backwards Sam felt that he was un-growing. He was seven years old – the age of reason, his mother called it – but now he was going back through his life to before he was born. He could remember what it had been like inside his mother. It was warm, as though he had an invisible blanket on him that weighed nothing. Sometimes tiny bubbles ran along his skin and burst, which felt like the lightest rain in the world. He had heard his father’s voice and felt him pressing down on his mother and he had smiled and said, Hello, Dad, but his dad couldn’t hear. He remembered being a little kid, too. His nose ran all the time and he could hardly walk and hardly talk. His life was like a dream. Then he had woken up; when Dan arrived, he had woken up. Now he was back in that dream again. He was un-growing.

When he had come out of the dream he had wanted to know what other people saw when they looked at him. He had held his mother’s face in his hands and looked into the dark mirror of her eyes.

‘Mummy. What do you see when you look at me?’

‘A handsome boy.’

‘No, I mean what do you see?’

His mother never completely understood.

The moon was her face smiling down at him in his cot.

Karim woke up with a headache and a dry mouth. He was lying on the long, brittle grass, his head resting on his bedroll, which he had not bothered to undo. It was the moonlight that had woken him and there was a noise, like a distant motorway, which had reached him in his sleep. He stood up and looked around. The moon was still covering the clearing with its obscene light. Denis was asleep a few paces away from him, tucked up in his sleeping bag like a dead knight, his hands folded on his belly. He was forcing air out through
his closed lips with little puffing noises. Garetta was in the hut with the child.

Karim walked round to the back of the hut. He walked through the long grass to a track that disappeared into a gorse thicket. He followed the track towards the noise. The gorse pricked his legs through his jeans. The track began to descend steeply and the gorse was replaced by thin, twisted trees that rose on either side of him. Karim began to jog, keeping his knees bent, down the track that had become a staircase of stones. A breeze had come up and there was a smell of mildew. The track levelled out and stopped suddenly on the edge of a precipice. He was standing on a ledge, looking into another gorge. Down below him the waterfall sprang from the dark forest into a deeper darkness. He could see its white foam shining in the moonlight and feel the cold air it generated on his face. The sound of the water was terrible.

He stood there swaying on the edge of the precipice, the noise emptying his mind. Then he pulled back and ran up the path as fast as he could.

When he reached the hut he stood beside the entrance breathless, his back against the wall, and listened to Garetta talking on the phone.

‘He’s asleep,’ he said. There was a pause. ‘If you don’t, he’ll sleep for ever,’ he said. ‘No. Thirty million or nothing. You’ve got a week to get the rest.’

Karim waited, listening to the sound of Garetta moving about inside the hut. Then he stepped through the door. Inside it was cold and it smelled of goat-shit.

‘You called her,’ he said.

Garetta was standing in the middle of the hut with his back to him. His head almost touched the rafters. He turned round. His expression was calm.

‘You said we’d call in the morning,’ Karim said.

‘It is the morning,’ Garetta said.

‘We should have made the call together.’

‘I heard you get up and I went out to get you. But you’d disappeared.’

Karim stared. He recalled his terror before the waterfall and felt ashamed. He drove his hands into his pockets.

‘So what did she say?’

Garetta glanced at the boy, who was lying on his back in the corner, his knees up. Karim could not see if his eyes were closed or open. Garetta stooped as he passed through the door. Karim followed him outside.

‘So?’ Karim said.

‘No more weed,’ Garetta said. ‘I don’t want you stoned up here.’

Karim smiled.

‘Let’s talk about the phone call.’

Garetta pointed at him.

‘No weed up here or you’re out.’

Karim looked at him. He was not taking orders from Garetta. Still he grinned and swiped the air with his palm.

‘I need all my faculties, right?’ he said. Garetta studied him. ‘So what did you say to the woman?’

‘I told her we wanted thirty million and I gave her a week.’

‘And? What did she say?’

‘She said she wouldn’t even talk about ransom until she’d heard her child’s voice. I told her he was asleep, so she said she wouldn’t pay a penny until she heard him. I said if you don’t pay he’ll sleep for ever.’

Garetta reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out some tobacco and papers. Karim watched him roll a very thin cigarette.

‘And?’ he said.

Garetta lit the paper.

‘She asked me to take the nine million she already had.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I wasn’t interested.’

‘What?’

‘I said I wasn’t interested.’

‘What’s all this “I” shit?’

Garetta was concentrating on smoking his roll-up.

‘This is Santini’s deal, not yours. I’m here because Santini hired me. I’m not working for you.’

Garetta exhaled the smoke noisily, studying the roll-up in his hand.

‘Listen, Garetta. I’m not staying up here in this shithole for another week.’

Garetta looked up.

‘Do you know how long ETA holds people?’

‘I don’t fucking care.’

‘They can hold a man for two years. Do you understand? They cut themselves off from the world and they sacrifice their petty appetites for a higher cause. They’re strong and they’re focused. You’ve been up here five minutes and you’re already shitting yourself.’

‘All I’m saying is you’re going to have to be a bit cooler, man. I mean share,’ he said, making a give-and-take motion with his hands. ‘We’re in this together.’

Garetta appeared not to be listening. Karim shifted slightly and Garetta turned on him.

‘And this place is not a shithole!’ he shouted, stepping towards Karim. ‘This is the most beautiful place in the world.’ The man was too close. Karim could see his jaw muscles working. ‘You’re not up here to get rich,’ Garetta went on. ‘You’re up here so that we can take back this paradise for the oppressed.’ He flicked his roll-up into the long grass. ‘I’m not interested in her nine million. I’m not going out for nine million. We won’t even get started on nine million.’

Karim looked up into Garetta’s dark face. The moon was behind him.

‘You’re not joking, right? You never did have a sense of humour, so this isn’t a joke. Right? Am I right, or what?’ Garetta folded his arms and waited. He was much too close but Karim did not move. ‘Listen, man, I don’t give a shit about politics,’ he said. ‘If I needed politics I’d have joined the FNL,
but I didn’t. I chose to work for Santini because the man has an independent mind. If I’m up here’ – he paused, looking around him – ‘in this shithole, it’s because Santini asked me to come. And if you’re here it’s because Santini wants you here. So if the woman offered nine million, I think you should have talked to Santini before you turned it down.’