He worked hard at the fallen fence. There would have been time on the Orkney islands when all the barriers that marked a division of property or ensured livestock kept to their own patch were dry stone walls. Stone, there to last, was a currency. The cemetery close to the hotel was filled with headstones, functional and dignified and scoured clean by wind and rain. Many of the men buried within sound of the sea and close to the calling gulls would have shortened their lives by building stone walls, back-breaking work. What had he, Gaz, to complain of as he hammered three new posts into sodden ground, then tapped home the staples? The men and women who had been where he had – the Province, Afghan’s Helmand, and in Syria – did not complain, thought it diminished them… but that was before and this was now.
He worked steadily. He did not hurry. When he had finished he would tidy away his tool bucket in the back of the pick-up, and go home. He had a radio that he rarely listened to and a TV that was seldom watched, and he would get the place as presentable as was necessary, not that Aggie would have noticed.
One day, not soon, he might try to share with her what had happened in a storm in a place far away… but might not. It would open the can, let the worms wriggle free. ‘Be careful what you wish for’, what a teacher or a sergeant, or the psychiatrist assigned to him, could have said. He might one day, but not soon.
Time to be killed before he went home, before she came, and the gale to be endured and the rain to be sheltered from. He drove to the castle. He had no reason to be there. He would go inside, often did, through its low entrance and duck through arches, and would hunker down in what would have been a great hall where a man of authority would have held court. Where such a man would have believed himself in a safe haven, even if his future was death on a scaffold… He would sit there, contemplate, and be the better for it because Aggie was coming, a dose of the therapy he needed. Had found, inside those strengthened fifteenth-century walls, what he looked for, reckoned himself secure from the reach of his history.
Faizah was busy in the bar with customers. Early lunches for office workers and the visitors who flocked to Hamburg. A popular haunt, and the artefacts of the harbour and the traditional trades of the city were prominent, gave atmosphere. Impatient customers flicked fingers for her attention, and a shadow came across the door.
The door was held wide as if a potential customer needed more light to see better inside, and a gust of wind – carrying diesel and petrol fumes and the scent of the street – riffled her hair and lay on the bare skin of her neck, and tickled her scar. There were many times when the bar door opened, heavy and antique, and men and women hesitated there, but she sensed the difference. Had been waiting for someone to come, four days and four nights. She looked up, stared at the door, and a customer was snapping at her: how much longer before she took his order? At first she could not see the face because the light was behind it. The bar was kept low lit because the owner thought that enhanced its atmosphere and its replicas of ships’ figureheads and coiled ropes and imitation firearms. She knew it was what she had waited for.
It had not been easy for her at the consulate on Hohe Bleichen.
“I don’t know why you have come here. We’re only a consulate.”
Where else to go?
“The sort of people you are asking for, we don’t have them here.”
A message should be passed, responsible people should be contacted.
“And we’re about to close. We’re not open all day.”
She said why she needed to speak urgently to people who would understand.
“I don’t really know what I should do, and anyway I’m due to collect my daughter from nursery, and I only do part-time.”
She had exploded. A gabble of names and a village that was Deir al-Siyarqi, her finger pressing at the scar on her chin, and no tears, just a hard-fought calm, and the controlled anger of Faizah must have struck at a place of pain. A telephone was lifted. First call was to a woman, demanding that she cut short her art class and get to the kindergarten to pick up a child. A second call to Berlin, and delays and impatience, and obvious transfers, and finally…
“…I don’t know who I am speaking to but don’t dare to put the phone down on me, just don’t. There is a young lady here with a story that would freeze blood, and I believe each word she has said to me. And you will listen to her, hear me, listen, and you will do what is needed. So, here she is.”
Nothing prepared. Did not know where to start and a woman’s voice on the phone that was accompanied by a metallic humming and she assumed her words were being recorded. She was rarely prompted, not interrupted, and she told it – most of it. She spoke of the boy, the British soldier, and spoke of a man whom she had seen that day when she had been a witness to an atrocity, and now she had seen his photograph, on a Norwegian site and in military uniform. She told it as she remembered it from two years before and did not doubt her recall of each hour that it had lasted, all as sharp in her mind as a knife’s blade. Her name was taken, the address on Rostocker Strasse. It would be passed on, but no promises given for the attention her story might receive. The wait had started. She had thanked the consul who had shrugged, held her hand longer than necessary as if to signal that all that was possible had been done and something might happen – or not. Faizah had gone back to work and for four days and four nights had noted each time that the old wooden door of the bar was pushed open.
Her waiting was done. Not a tall man. Looked like a bureaucrat and she had experience of them in Hamburg as she had endured the hoops and jumps she’d passed through and scaled to achieve refugee status in Germany. A senior bureaucrat and with a good suit on him, a laundered shirt with a sober tie, and polished shoes. She saw his face, his little moustache, lightweight steel-framed spectacles, recognised him. A smile slipped to his mouth. She remembered him from a Portakabin, Gaz taken away by medics, and her fingers holding her wound because the makeshift work he had done to cover it was loosening. Then he had had a sympathetic smile, and she might have believed it had she not seen his eyes, cold as when the winter settled on the Norder-elbe channeclass="underline" they had raked over her. He passed her, went to the bar, would have asked for the owner, who gestured towards her, would have said something but not entered into a debate or negotiated for her time. Had gone to a table where a single customer lingered over his coffee, and was invited to vacate the place, and must have looked for a moment into the intruder’s eyes. He pointed to the seat opposite.
She left her order pad on the counter, wiped her hands on her apron, and joined him. He took her hand. Said what his name was, that he had come from London, that her story had taken time to find the right pigeon-hole, and apologised for the delay.
“If you need a name to call me by then it’s Knacker, don’t ask its origin. What I want to say is very simple… We don’t forget. Days, months, years go by and events seem clouded in a haze of time, except that we have not forgotten. We have a message for such criminals: Never underestimate the long reach of our arm. Tell me.”