The Corporal's Wife (2013) (36 page)

They wrote their cards.

He had chosen a view of the lake with a crumbling column of stone that rose out of the saltscape. It was a duty but would be well received at home, although they’d be back long before the postman dropped it through the front door.

They had a list of names to whom they had to send cards. Hers was of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, the interior of turquoise tiling. She ticked off a name and the Blue Mosque joined the pile.

There was a knock at the door, quiet but insistent.

He dragged back the blind: one man beside the door, another behind him and a third further away. Their bearing didn’t fit the place. They were not peasants, farmers, or tribespeople like they had met in other wildernesses, and there was no vehicle. He was reaching for the catch that would lock the door, and was checking that the keys were in the ignition, when the door was pulled open. Joey Farrow saw discomfort on the man’s face, as he filled the doorway, and hesitation.

‘Just do it nice and easy.’ A drip in Zach’s ear. ‘Best voice.’

‘Excuse me . . .’ No need for Farsi, just clear English.

‘Who are you? What can I do for—?’

‘It’s hard to explain but—’

Behind him: ‘Get to the point.’

In front of him: ‘What’s hard?’

‘I’m really sorry, but—’

In front: ‘What for?’

Behind: ‘Shift it on.’

Zach saw a pleasant-faced young man, but a frown was knitting the guy’s forehead, his chin was jutting, and his eyes had narrowed. It was an open face, and the cheeks had a rugged outdoor colour. It was the face of a man who looked after himself – and the young woman. She was behind him, boxed in by the table, and their postcards were scattered over it. She was pretty enough, in a scrubbed way, and wore neither cosmetics nor jewellery, not even ear studs. Zach reckoned, glancing from him to her, that she might prove as hard an adversary as him. A last look: a ring on her finger. They probably weren’t married but it was easier in Iran to wear it and escape the attentions of the modesty police. He had rehearsed what he would say as they had walked towards the wagon, but had forgotten most of it.

‘I’m British. I’m a fugitive in Iran and I need—’

‘What’s that to us?’

He ploughed on: ‘I’m British, with British colleagues. We’re fugitives and have no transport. To save ourselves we need to take your vehicle. You won’t be compromised and—’

‘Take our vehicle? Like fuck you will.’

‘You have – and I apologise for the intrusion – five minutes to clear what you need from inside.’

‘Yeah. And—’

‘Don’t, I urge you, make it harder. We’re taking the vehicle.’

The man lunged, his hand snaking out. Zach lurched back and was half out of the door, but the hand went past him to the dash where the keys hung. There was a blur of movement. Zach was pushed aside, stumbled, slipped on the step and hit the ground, and Mikey was over him. The boy squealed and the girl had begun to scream. Zach pushed himself up. Mikey had hold of the boy’s arm. Mikey pulled him out of the vehicle. The boy had sense. To have struggled more might have broken his arm or dislocated his shoulder. Zach thought of him as a boy: he was about the same age as himself, and had put together a gap-year trip that many dreamed of and few did. He was not traipsing along the ‘kids’ route’ from the Australian Great Barrier Reef to the Northern Territories rainforest, but was in the Islamic Republic, cockpit of the world, place of historic literature and the earliest cultures. The girl came after him, cleared the step and jumped to get her hands on Mikey’s throat or her fingers in his eyes. She hadn’t catered for Zach’s knee and went down, winded.

‘You’re just wasting time,’ Zach said. ‘I’m trying – God help me – to be sympathetic. We’re taking the vehicle and you’re losing the opportunity to get what you need – a bag, clothing, documentation. I’ll want your phones. Sorry and all that.’

He thought of the road block, his lies about the lost goats and the risk of wolves, of how he had lulled the men’s suspicious then the charge and the gunfire. He had seen two men killed.

The boy was supine and had made eye contact with the girl. They were both breathing hard. Zach had never been close enough to a girl for a glance between himself and her to tell a story.

She pushed herself up and used her hands to show that the fight was over. She forced a thin smile. ‘I’ll start to get our stuff.’

Wally had come to the boy, pistol drawn. The boy sat down.

Mikey eased Zach to one side and followed the girl inside the wagon. No trust. A rucksack was on the table and she was rooting in the cupboards filling the bag. Some food went in, and she heaved another bag onto the table, then dropped cameras and a radio inside it. He saw the passports and a wallet for airline tickets or money. She said nothing. Zach had not been involved in fights at school, or in a pub brawl – he had always made for the nearest door if matters got out of hand in the bar the builders used outside Coventry or on the way into Leamington Spa. The first bag was zipped and she threw it behind her. It was angular, bulky, and caught Zach’s hip as it went through the door.

Mikey said nothing, just watched.

She didn’t speak but continued to fill a second bag.

Zach said, ‘We’re not doing this for fun. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can’t tell you what it’s about, only that it’s important. We need the vehicle and . . .’

He tailed off. He realised that Mikey had made him their spokesman so that he and Wally were free to supervise the clear-out and watch the boy.

‘You’re talking horse-shit,’ she said.

‘I’ve tried to be polite.’

‘And fucked up. Just so you know, people here have gone out of their way to treat Joey and me with kindness and courtesy. They’ve made us welcome. You’re screwing us up. So, fuck you.’

He thought, in a fight, she would have killed him. He forced himself: ‘We want your phones, so put them on the table.’

Zach saw it, and Mikey, too, would have noted the tightness of her jeans at the left pocket. She put one phone on the table, had taken it off a shelf. She seemed to shrug, as if that was the only one they had. ‘That’s it.’

It was not about a mission and not about getting a defector’s wife over a border. It was not about saving humanity from a nuclear device, had nothing to do with supporting the democratic instincts of the Iranian people. It was about himself. First it was Zach Becket, then maybe the bed-fellows he hadn’t chosen – Mikey, Wally, Ralph – and somewhere it was about taking a young woman across a frontier, but not because she was a defector’s wife.

‘And the one in your pocket,’ he said.

He might – God willing – never again see a look of such loathing, directed at him, cross a woman’s face.

She swivelled, tried to make greater space between Mikey and the pocket where her phone was. Predictable that its card would hold the contact number of everyone dear to her, and an archive of pictures. He didn’t have a phone with him, had lodged it at the first departure lounge, and Zach had no idea whether here, on the salt flats by Lake Urmia and probably only twenty-five miles due west of Tabriz, there was a mobile signal. Her face said she would have called the police in a state of hysteria before the tail of salted dust had dispersed behind them.

Zach said again, ‘The one in your pocket.’

She wriggled away. Mikey went after it. His hands were at her waist, groping for it. There was a yell.

Zach turned.

The boy had to get past Wally to reach the door, where Zach was. Behind Zach, Mikey was struggling with the girl. The boy swung a fist at Wally, which was countered by the forearm, then pushed down. The boy sprawled, but came back with a momentum that took him past Wally and within range of Zach. Pain exploded in his face, a short-arm punch, and Zach reeled, but in time to see the retaliation – the swing with the pistol barrel. The boy jolted. Zach saw blood and teeth. The boy went down on his knees. She put a hand into her pocket, took out the phone and slapped it on the table. Mikey let her go and grabbed it. As resistance it had been futile, delaying them for less than a minute. The violence had been done in his name, Zach thought, but had served a purpose. He swallowed hard.

Mikey said to him softly, ‘We’re not army, we’re survivors. There are rules of engagement for the military, and doctrines of minimum force. And there’s yellow-card rules about what you can do and when you can do it. We’re outside that. If he plays stupid he gets whacked. If he plays sensible he doesn’t. Most people understand it.’

Zach nodded. Wally eyed him. The boy and girl sat beside each other, near to where they’d had their fire, with their possessions around them.

Zach thought Wally reckoned him weak.

Mikey took the phones, opened them, took out the cards and pocketed the batteries. An afterthought: he dropped them. He smiled, pleasantly enough. The cards would be in the glove box, and he said, they’d look after the wagon as best they could.

She put up her hand, as if she were asking her teacher for permission to speak.

From Mikey: ‘Yes?’

Beth Skelton did her smile. It was always a winner, and had been since she was a child. ‘You’ll look after our wagon?’

‘We’ll try to.’

‘It’s about all we have that’s a home. We’re fond of it, and it’s way older than us.’

‘We did what we have to do.’

She said, ‘If you’re telling me and Joey that you’ll look after her, and I believe you, there’s something you should know.’

‘What?’ The man in charge was at the front and had waved the boy to the driver’s seat. The one who had hit Joey went to the side door but had the pistol and covered but didn’t aim at them.

‘We filled up with fuel in Tabriz. More than fifty litres. It cost us.’

Mikey pulled the wad from his hip pocket and peeled off two hundred dollars. He tossed it at her.

‘Thanks. You didn’t need to do that to Joey. You look after her. We expect the police to give her back to us. Only one thing wrong.’

‘What?’

‘The fuel gauge. It won’t go further than halfway – it hasn’t all the time we’ve had her. It says she’s empty but doesn’t mean it. Half on the dial means about full, empty on the dial means about half full.’

The engine gunned and the exhaust belched. Her Alex pulled away.

She held Joey’s hand and pursed her lips. ‘Do you think they believed that?’

‘They might have.’ Slurred words through the blood and the swelling.

‘Then they’re fucked,’ she said. ‘If they go cross-country and believed us.’

‘Do you want to say it or not?’

Zach drove. It responded sluggishly to the gears and the steering, but the engine rhythm, even on the rough surface, seemed reasonable. Mikey was beside him and Wally crouched behind them: it had been his question. To ignore it, massage it or confront it? Zach saw in his mind’s eye the face that had been pistol whipped and the blood and the tooth.

He answered: ‘I thought the violence was unnecessary and, unforgivably, you looked like you enjoyed handing it out.’

Sarcasm. ‘You can read me, right? That goes with intelligence?’

‘It was heavy-handed, almost brutal. They were good kids.’

Wally said, ‘Do it polite? Sit down, have a cup of tea and ‘‘ask’’ for a hitched ride? Give them the opportunity to say, ‘‘That’s not convenient’’? Go on to the next stop, and hope it’s an X37 bus on that route, and going where we want? Or take what we need? Facts of life, kid. If, when we’re having the cup, making the request, or waiting for a bus, we’re lifted, what happens then? You reckon it’ll be probation or a community-service order? Do you think the mullahs will put us to work decorating old people’s homes? Kid, we’ll hang.’

‘I was trying to say—’

‘Hang high, and hang slow. What were you trying to say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Final word. Better to knock out a tooth than to hang high and slow.’

‘I hear you,’ Zach said.

He gazed at the ground ahead, looking for places where the salt had made ridges or there were deep holes. He didn’t look at the old boats stranded in the salt flats. When they came to the cluster of trees, they stripped out all that was important from the builders’ van and loaded the wagon. The woman helped.

When they were loaded, and all aboard except Mikey, Zach drove clear of the van and stopped at the furthest line of the trees. He saw the fuel dial was at a fraction less than halfway. Mikey ran towards him and scrambled in beside him. Zach saw the flames rising behind, and the smoke. He drove fast and hoped the maps they’d brought would cover side roads to bring them wide of Tabriz and Marand, then take them, from the west, into Khvoy. They bumped towards a track, leaving a trail behind them.

He felt chastened, small, and hadn’t spoken to Farideh, who seemed alone.

A few days ago it had been important to play his part in opening a defector’s memory, but that was a lifetime past. He could barely see the man’s face now, the photograph, or what had been said of his importance.

‘I do not believe anything I am told. I have been deceived and tricked.’