The Adjacent (5 page)

He knew, though, that in many parts of the world the climate was so extreme, and the urgent re-use of waste so little understood, that the old and wasteful methods were still being employed.

He settled down on the thinly padded seat as comfortably as he could to endure the inevitably long hours of travel that must still lie ahead. Boredom was an enemy because of the mental blankness it created, allowing in the thoughts that normally he could guard himself against. It was still only a few days since Melanie had died. They had been together for more than twelve years and in spite of everything that had gone wrong he still did not yet know how he was going to get by without her.

Obviously it had been a mistake to travel with her – from the moment they arrived at the field hospital he realized he was at best superfluous and at worst in the way of the clinical work. He busied himself with his cameras, went out on shoots as often as possible, but the hospital inevitably drew attention to itself, and as the weeks went by it became increasingly dangerous to venture outside. Soon he was more or less confined to the compound, or to the clinical areas inside. Melanie hated that, and his presence became the endless, continuous aggravation that did so much damage to their relationship.

The journey to Anatolia was the first time they travelled abroad together, and at first the experience drew them together. For days they passed through blighted countryside, past barren slopes and dried-up lakes and rivers. They saw striking evidence of the abraded climate: sudden devastating storms that led to flash floods and mud-slides, blinding, airless heat, the fields of burnt crops, the fire-blackened forests. All that was what they saw as they passed through
southern France, through Provence, along the Mediterranean coast, as the Mebsher took them slowly to the north of Italy. After a total of more than a month of such travel, Tarent’s party had joined up with another OOR medical team in Trieste. They allowed themselves three days’ rest. A slow convoy of Mebshers then set off through the perilous mountains of the Balkans. It took another four weeks to reach the hospital compound in Eastern Anatolia, where work was already going on. The people they relieved left immediately in the Mebshers. Backed up by intermittent supplies brought in expensively by privately operated helicopter couriers, the staff managed to keep the hospital running for five months, two more than their original expectations, but towards the end everything about the work was becoming unsustainable.

When the refuelling was complete the Mebsher resumed its journey, but was now moving noticeably more slowly than before. Two more hours passed before another halt. Tarent again scrambled down the steps at the rear of the compartment and took some more food and a cup of coffee. None of the other passengers responded when he offered to bring them drinks, so he silently resumed his seat.

His fellow passengers were quietly aggravating him. They ignored him all the time, although Tarent had to admit they barely spoke amongst themselves. It was still impossible to work out if they were travelling together, although they were apparently of the same background of officialdom, or at least in roughly equivalent positions within those circles. The man who sat alone in the front row either concentrated hard on the screen of his laptop, or dozed for brief periods. Sometimes he spoke on his mobile phone – an indication of his high status since nearly all digital access was forbidden while inside a Mebsher, because of the sophisticated electronic equipment on which it depended for defence. In any event, the thick armour plating normally prevented any signal getting through, but the man had connected his cellphone through a cable of some kind, presumably gaining access to the network. When they had boarded that morning in Bedford, Tarent had glimpsed the flash of a CIA identification chip and briefly heard a New England accent. The man was tall, his close-cut grey hair grew thickly and his face was one of the most humourless Tarent could remember seeing. The man’s self-absorption was like a black hole, neutralizing any attempt at contact.

The other two passengers still appeared to Tarent to be together, although today they were sitting slightly more apart. It seemed not to be a personal relationship. The man was older than the woman.
All he could see for most of the day was the backs of their heads: the man’s dark, almost black hair was thinning over his crown, the woman’s brown hair mostly covered by the scarf. There was a gap above her collar, by her left ear, where part of the scarf had lifted away. As the Mebsher lurched along the uneven road surface, their heads shook and moved together. Sometimes she raised a hand and tweaked her fingers through the strands of hair falling behind her ear.

Tarent took a few surreptitious shots of the others. One picture caught the profile of the woman in what he recognized as a typical gesture: her head was tipped forward, her eyes were closed, a finger lifted the side of the scarf to touch her hair.

She still reminded him of Melanie, and he wished she did not. Maybe it was guilt. The sense of the years wasted and his failure to do anything about that. Melanie was thirty-eight now, or had been thirty-eight until the week before last. Memories of her kept returning, maddeningly. Tarent sometimes imagined he could hear her voice, trying to break in over the racket of the Mebsher’s engine. Her scent was still on his skin, or so he thought.

The night before she was killed they made love, something they sometimes did after a row. It was unsatisfactory for them both. The bunk they were in was too narrow and the walls of the safehouse were treacherously thin. It was hot. Humidity and heat, endlessly, invariably. They made the effort, an unspoken attempt to try to tell each other they were still together, but they both knew they were not. After those fevered minutes of physical and sexual exertion, the habitual distance spread out again between them, not a real barrier but a painful and familiar reminder of how fragile their marriage had become.

Lying in the dark they riffed a fantasy they both knew well, the one about returning to Britain, taking a vacation, going to a good hotel in London or one of the other cities and spending the back-pay on a few nights of selfish luxury. But it would never happen, they both knew, and even then they had no idea how disastrous the next day was going to be.

She resented him, he resented her. But how can you resent a nurse? Tarent had found several ways, a defence mechanism. His own practical qualification, a degree in environmental sciences, was where there were jobs for the taking. Allegedly. After university, Tarent had found there was no apparent need for an inexperienced pyrologist. After a year’s visit to the USA he returned to Britain while the political and social upheaval that accompanied the foundation
of the IRGB was still in progress. No jobs were going at all at that time, so he drifted into photography, working first with a friend from uni, later striking out on his own as a freelance. That was what he was doing when he met Melanie.

She once described photography as a passive activity, receptive, non-interventionist. It recorded events but never influenced them. She believed that nothing was worthwhile that was not practical, hands-on, proactive. That was her function, but not his. He defended himself in what he saw as a candid way, but which Melanie described as ineffectual. Photography was a form of art, he said ineffectually. Art had no practical function. It only was. It informed or it showed or it simply existed. But it could move the world. Melanie derided him for that, pulling open the loose neck of her shirt and pulling it down, exposing yet again her shoulder and upper arm. That was where a deranged patient had scraped a soiled needle against her, trying to infect her with whatever it was he had. That was her trophy, the personal reward for proactivity.

‘So photograph it, why don’t you?’ she yelled at him once, during the second week of their transit across Turkey, somewhere in the high arid deserts beyond the coastal strip. That day their Mebsher convoy had run short of water, and they were waiting to be resupplied. Tarent could still remember the grim surroundings of stone and desiccated vegetation, the abandoned town of Hadimá down the hill, the mountains of yellow rock, the distant glimpse of the sea, the blasting hot wind and the cloudless sky.

The resentment hurt, but he still loved her. He remembered what she seemed to have forgotten, their early days, their intensive letters and long phone calls, the excitement of all that, the immense emotional challenge. Love was stronger than resentment.

But now he was to go back to his damned passive photography.

HE CLOSED HIS EYES, DOZED FOR A WHILE. SUDDENLY, A VOICE
came through the intercom, the Glasgwegian accent.

‘This is Ibrahim, your second driver. Peace be unto you. There’s some kind of fault with our power cells and unfortunately many of the usual recharging points are unavailable. We need to make our overnight stop earlier than planned, so we’re going to divert and make an overnight at a place called Long Sutton. They can take us
for one night. It means another delay, but that’s probably better than running out of energy. We can have replacement cells fitted there, and we’ll make up time tomorrow. The weather forecast is good.’

There was a pause. The microphone stayed on. Behind the hiss of the communicator they could hear the two men in the cockpit speaking to each other. The woman in front of Tarent had reacted visibly to the announcement, looking up in surprise. Now she turned her head and spoke quietly to the man beside her. He shook his head, listened to more. Then he silently agreed with her, nodding, eyebrows briefly raised, looked away.

Tarent leaned against the wall of the compartment, peering again through the narrow window. As he did so, two things happened simultaneously. Something was thrust insistently, firmly, inexplicably, into his hand, and he folded his fingers reflexively around it. And a second voice, the other sergeant in the cab, took over the announcement.

‘This is Hamid, senior driver.’ Tarent recognized Hamid as the young sergeant who had helped him on board, out of the flood-waters of north London, when he joined the Mebsher. ‘Peace be unto you. This is to let you know that we have been ordered to port your security clearances ahead, because of where we’ll be stopping. The Long Sutton base is normally off-limits, as you no doubt know. No cause for alarm – just routine. Everyone on board today is cleared to the required MoD level. Just thought we should mention it in case anyone has concerns. You will have to check in with your chips and ID tags, but they’ll be handed straight back to you.’

Tarent had distant memories, from years back, of a number of protest demonstrations when the Long Sutton base was opened. In those days it had been operated by the US Air Force as an advance early-warning listening site, but presumably these days, long after the dissolution of NATO, it was being run by the Ministry of Defence. But early warnings? About whom?

He still had trouble recognizing himself in the role of high-ranking official of some kind, one with a security clearance. His past contacts with government departments had usually been intermittent, mostly when he was assigned to some event that needed permission from the Home Office or Emirate Liaison. Even then he was acting only as a freelance photographer, commissioned by a web magazine or a TV channel, needing accreditation.

As the lumbering vehicle continued on along the road, Tarent was working his fingertips around the slip of paper that had been pushed
so forcefully into his hand. He twisted it, making it into a tight cone, sharp at one end, for the moment not thinking about how it had come into his possession. Finally he opened it, smoothing it across his thigh.

Written in erratic handwriting, apparently scribbled in haste, were the words:
I am travelling to Hull DSG. Come with me? The Warne’s Farm appointment can be skipped.

It could only have been the woman in front of him. Tarent screwed up the paper and looked again at the back of her covered head, where her hand rested against her neck. While watching her earlier, bored with everything, he had thought those restlessly moving fingers were a mannerism, an uneasy habit, but now he wondered if she might have been sending some kind of unrecognized signal to him.

He remembered the early impression he had had of her, a sense that she was somehow alert to him. There was nothing but coldness in her overt manner towards him, but now this note. His look turned into a stare he found difficult to unlock. Apart from the fretting of her fingers she was making no movement at all, apparently unaware of him.

If he raised his hand he could touch those fingers, feel her neck and hair.

Nothing happened, nothing changed. Soon he was dozing, a dreamless state of near-sleep, half-aware of the reality around him: the movements of the vehicle, the vibration and noise of the engine, the jerking forward or back if there was a gear change. He thought vaguely about the woman, so close to him, so remote.
Come with me?
To what? The question mark made it into an offer, not a command. An offer of Hull? In other circumstances he might see the note as a proposition, but it was the same woman who had brusquely checked his photographer’s licence. And the only certainty in his life at that moment was the fact he had been given strict instructions to attend a debriefing at an OOR establishment somewhere in the Lincolnshire Wolds, called Warne’s Farm. The woman’s note said he could skip it. He did not see how.

He returned to full awareness when the vehicle slowed suddenly and came to a halt, the whine of its engine running down to silence. Through half-open eyes, yawning, Tarent glimpsed a military presence: two young marines stood on guard, clad in low-vis camo fatigues, Kevlar vests and pads, masked into anonymity with automatic rifles at the ready.

He was aware of his fellow passengers shifting in their seats, as
keen as he was to be out of the Mebsher at last. Now that the vehicle was silent and stationary, Tarent felt trapped. The air-con was off, the fans were no longer blowing. It looked cold outside.

At the window again, Tarent saw Hamid outside, signing a number of documents. There were arguments going on, but not ill-natured. Something about the vehicle they were in, to judge by the gestures.