'I don't fathom you. I'll miss you, been good having you alongside, does the ego wonders.. Yes, I'll miss you — but I don't understand you.'
'You shouldn't try to.'
He saw the rise of the packed steps, heard the clock ahead strike the quarter-hour, saw the snaking lines of the queues in the square. He thought of betrayal and death, and what a sniper had done, and of a psalm not spoken.
Chapter 20
The square opened out to their left. Nothing was said between them, and his Principal led, Banks following. Every eye that passed him, men and women who bustled forward as if delay were a crime, was fixed on the steps and the great monolith that was the shopping centre; rock music played loudly. He studied each front display window — used the reflections off them to check his rear — and each business doorway and each alleyway between them, because that was his training.
He reckoned his training protected him. It was not his business how one stranger ended a relationship with another. Should worry about himself, not about others, should lock himself in a cocoon of selfishness. He noticed, because he was trained to, each front window and each narrow cut where rubbish bins were stored, where there were the bottles, shit and cardboard sheets of vagrants.
The music, beating down from the centre's loudspeakers, grew in intensity. He took in faces, but none was important to him…He felt cold. Realized he was in shadow thrown down by the tower of the town hall. Shivered. Quickened his stride. In shadow, sensed a threat. Came to his Principal's shoulder, then burst back into the sunshine. But it stayed with him, lingered on the skin of his face, and his hand had flipped, without reason, to the weighted pocket of his jacket — no cause — . and his fingers had dropped to the hardness held in the pancake holster. Could not have explained it.
But David Banks had been told he was useless, had told himself he had no future.
He snapped, 'Are we nearly bloody there?'
Wright stopped, turned, gazed at him, a grin on his face. 'You seeing ghosts again, Mr Banks?'
'I just want to know if we're nearly there.'
'You're white as a damn sheet. Breakfast's what you need. Yes, we're nearly there.'
He could not have explained, to a stranger or to himself, the chill that had come to him when he had walked through the shadow cast on the pavement.
They were 'nearly there': He should have seen it, but hadn't. There was an alley with a big wheeled rubbish bin half across its entrance, then the A-shaped hoarding outside the newsagent's door and window that announced the grand opening of the bonanza sale in the town, as if it was the biggest, most vital and critical matter in the whole wide world. Now, breaking the training, his glance came off his Principal and flitted to the crowds on his left, dense and close, with the murmur of excitement given off like hot breath.
'Patience, Mr Banks, patience…We're there.' Then the mocking laugh. 'Did you really see a ghost?'
Banks snarled, couldn't help himself, 'Just bloody get on with it.'
The bell rang as his Principal opened the door. He saw that the shop was full, that it would be an age before Wright was served. The door closed after his man and Banks turned away from it, looked back up the street where they had come, and waited.
Now she spoke, said what she had rehearsed. 'There, in front of you, is the crowd. You go close to it, into it. Push hard among it. But look at nobody.'
They had come down the hill and had walked past places she had known all of her life. Had left the big stores far behind. And the turning into the road where the mosque dominated — she had prayed there before moving to the smaller mosque where she had seen the videos and been recruited — and they had gone along a road with stalls, on which were laid out the fruit and vegetables, from which she shopped. The scent of spices had billowed at her from the open doors of the edge of the ghetto where her society lived, and soft silks for clothing had danced in the sunlight from racks. She had brought him to the square. As they had walked, there had been silence between them. What had happened at the top of the hill, the attack, was gone, irrelevant; all that remained of it was the knife in her bag. The square was wide in front of her. She could not fathom his mind, but the smile on his face — spread and open — ,was childlike. She thought him at peace, but did not believe she could be certain of it, not when he walked the last steps.
'There are women there, and children, and men of our Faith — many others. Do not see their faces. Look at them and you will, want it or not want it, identify with them and hesitate. Do not join your eyes to theirs. Promise me.'
No answer was given her. He had been in step with her, had matched her stride. If she stopped, he had stopped. If she had gone quicker, so had he. She realized her power over him, his dependence on her. She-checked her step, and he slowed.
'You do not look at them…You think, when you are with them, when you have the button in your hand, of God and of your Faith — of where you will go and who you will be with, and of the pride of your family. Hear, as God welcomes you, the praise of your family, and of all those who love you.'
She did not know if it was enough, but had nothing more to say.
Most days, Faria walked through that square. Most weeks she climbed those steps and entered the shopping centre. She pointed to it, had no reason to but did. Her arm, loose in the folds of the jilbab, gestured towards it. Her vision was blurred, clouded by the enormity of what she did. She did not see, misted in her eyes, the shape of the man in the old raincoat who held the clipboard and gazed round him, or the expectation and pleasure on his features. What she saw, as she directed him with her arm, were the images from the videos that had been shown to her: the statements to camera of martyrs, the movement of crowds in street markets, the passing of convoys of Humvee personnel carriers, the guns of the enemy…did not see the man in the raincoat turn, break away from the little cluster close to him and advance towards her.
'You're just in time. I had started but it doesn't matter,' Steve Vickers chattered. 'You've come for the inner town's historic tour…Well, you've found it. I've done the Roman period, but we can do that again — no one will mind. Now, if you could just follow me…'
They were rooted. Oh, people were so strange. The young woman had waved at him, clearly. Had seen him, had waved — he had explained that repeating what he'd already said did not make a difficulty for him, had asked them to follow, but they stood stock still. It would be shyness, perhaps embarrassment.
Vickers, the amateur historian, saw the smile on the young man's face. So many of them, so often — and absolutely he rejected prejudice and would have thought stereotyping beneath him — were so defensive, so withdrawn and uninterested in learning the heritage of the society they had become part of. It was a fine smile, so filled with youth, almost with happiness. The woman was different, had a chill in her eyes — and he thought he saw a gleam of anger there. It dawned on him.