A hand on him. George pulling him. They had all turned to run in different directions but he hadn’t heard them say where.
18
Floating now weightless without sound
fear
Fear so great it had washed him empty
Up through his bones his foot beats told him he was
running
Two thumps of explosion, mud splash, fire in it
small shots pecking the ground in several places
People lying on the ground like what are they?
Running, burn of ankle twist over
Like people, shaped like people?
over rocks. Behind rocks, a piece of sky,
towards that
Like dolls! Dropped.
Everything dead already.
Dead piece by piece
a man lying
with one arm already dead
the rest of him thrashing
Dead and running, fast as he could. Dropping to hide flat with the others and wait and his shoulder against the hip of a man in front solid bone, rapid trembling
Over there a man trying to dig a foxhole with his helmet metal pranging off the rocks
Just in front, something moving, effort to focus
to see, before it was too late, but
it was so close, a bug, nothing, moving in a
small circle
on its disturbed patch, jointed feelers dabbling
the ground.
Smart black. Crumb of sand on it.
Planes screaming over.
All matter just matter, jerking with life, some of it. Just jumping a little bit, tearing against itself, fraying, frittering, bleeding, lying still, scattered.
Whizz of eighty-eight. Just short. Throwing stuff in his face.
Pushing himself flatter against the earth. Nothing underneath. Earth darkness. Up.
Running.
Low ridge to get behind and settle and up.
He had to join in now, pulling his trigger at those shapes over there. The crack of his gun faint by his ear.
George! Was George doing the same? Or was he lying, dropped?
Couldn’t see him anywhere.
Smoke rolling across from something.
Up again, into blasts from all directions that he couldn’t survive.
running
19
Several days after seeing the prison, when Will finally cornered Draycott and told him his story, Draycott listened, wincing and shaking his head, and was no help at all. His gaze kept flickering past Will or over him; that reminded Will of their difference in stature. He complained relevantly at the bloody filthy behaviour of the French and affirmed that in no way could they be trusted. When pressed for support for action, he offered none. Will argued his position — something should be done just for decency’s sake and think of the advantage to Anglo-Arab relations here. Draycott, holding the door jamb, looking at Will’s dusty shoes, countered that they should be very wary of upsetting the local balance of power. Perhaps Will could gather intelligence and write something up. Draycott glanced again over the top of Will’s head, stepped backwards into his office and, without saying anything further, closed the door.
Since the nights of heavy bombing, Draycott had been behaving strangely. At breakfast the other morning, spooning trembling scrambled eggs onto his plate, he’d told Will that, from now on, whenever they were in a public place, Will should refer to him as Lieutenant Bryce loudly enough for people to hear. ‘Price?’ Will had asked. ‘No,’ Captain Draycott looked aghast, his plan about to be compromised. ‘No, “Bryce”, with a “b” and a “y”.’ Samuels had told Will that later that same day he’d walked in on Draycott and found him carefully repositioning every object in his office, dragging his desk to the other wall and changing the left — right order of all the items on it.
It was alone, with no concrete plan to offer, that Will went to meet again the man who had sent him to see the fish pond. He’d left a card days earlier: Dr Zakaria, a physician. In a small Arabic café he explained that he had patients only among the Arabs. He made less money but he didn’t want to risk intimate contact with the French or their idle, dangerous wives. Dr Zakaria sipped from a tiny cup of thick aromatic coffee, an iridescent sheen on its surface. Such contact, he went on, can lead to a bullet in the head or a convenient road accident. He set his cup back on its saucer and rotated it thoughtfully. ‘The prison,’ he said. ‘So now you have seen what it means to be Arab in this place.’
Will wanted to be precise, to resist any theatrics from this little man. ‘I have seen what happens in one part of the prison.’
‘All of this country is a prison.’
‘Dr Zakaria, if I might intrude a note of circumspection, you sent me to the prison, not anywhere else, and the people I saw would therefore be criminals.’
Dr Zakaria laughed, a short blast through the dark tufts of his nostrils. He tilted his head on one side, smiling, his eyes still on his coffee cup. ‘If only life were so logical. They were arrested. They were thrown into a sewer to rot to death. This is all true. But did they commit a crime? Have you any evidence that they did? I don’t. Perhaps there isn’t any. Perhaps they committed no crime. Perhaps they annoyed a Frenchman or the police needed to make up numbers.’
‘Of course I realise that’s possible.’
‘I am telling you as someone who understands that this is in fact the case. There is no justice here. This is not England.’
‘I do understand. You understand I have to ask questions.’
‘Of course.’
‘I do hope there’s something I can do.’
‘A man on his own cannot do anything.’
‘I think that depends on who the man is and what he does.’
Zakaria smiled again. ‘You are either an optimist or vainglorious. Either way, the prison is a small matter — no? Simple to use your authority and make a little bit of change there.’
‘Arguably it would be a small matter. Bureaucracy among us is rather Byzantine, I’m afraid. I have to pursue esoteric lines of inquiry.’
A crashing brilliance of noise outside the café. Trumpets and a rattling drum. Will and Zakaria looked at the doorway. As the band passed, the sound lurched even more loudly into the café. Senegalese soldiers, the man in front whirling a cane at chest height. Behind him, trumpeters blew and threw their trumpets spinning up into the air, caught them and blew again. Their scissoring strides cast rhythmical triangles of shadow across the café floor. At the back were the drummers, two of them, who produced an intricate, thrilling racket despite seeming merely to lay their sticks motionless over the tilted surfaces of the drums with their soft dark hands. Somehow from this languid action their sticks blurred and they generated a terrific battery of sound that was shockingly, almost embarrassingly loud as they crossed the open doorway. As the music receded along the street, Will turned smiling, mildly elated, to Dr Zakaria but Dr Zakaria did not smile back.
‘Our country,’ he said, ‘is not our own.’
Will swallowed, sobering his expression. ‘I understand. It must be horribly frustrating.’
‘Yes. That is one word you could use. It is frustrating. It is frustrating to have your goods stolen, to be killed, to be thrown to die into a pit full of shit for no reason, to have your own land filled with strangers, strange thieves, unclean people. That is all frustrating.’ He sipped his coffee once again then removed his spectacles. He polished the lenses with the edge of the tablecloth and returned them to his nose. He looked at something on the table then something else, checking their clarity.