A lot of the people Anna had seen had trouble speaking, either because of translation problems, or because a rain of blows had made them distrust words. Or both. Translation was sometimes itself a little rain of blows. How could what had happened to them be possible in one language, never mind be able to be retold in another?
In any language, it was almost always about what home was.
Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, what one man could remember of seeing his mother’s head being used by the border guards as a football. (This man was finally judged not credible.) Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, about the rooms one woman passed in the corridor, in which she could hear other people also being tortured, on her way to and from being tortured herself for seven months, daily, on different parts of her body by electric shock applied by the use of two small live electric wires which came out of the wall, like electric wires do, behind the chair she was made to sit in each time. For instance, hearing the voices of others being tortured was not as salient as being tortured yourself. The shock that came not from being tortured but from realizing that the wires were the exact same simple domestic wires that everybody who had electricity had in his or her house was not as salient either. (This woman had been pending judgement when Anna shifted career position.) Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, which was easy in this case, what the woman who had been a university professor said, it is like my chest stops and the words will not, just will not, who had proved unable to finish that sentence and say what it was that the words wouldn’t do, and about whom it was decided by Anna’s superiors that she couldn’t possibly be as clever as her summary indicated, being so demonstrably inarticulate. (This woman was finally judged not credible.)
You are really good at this, the area head had told her. You have exactly the right kind of absent presence. Best of all, your reports are 95 % word-length perfect.
Somewhere over the rainblow.
Anna Hardie was no longer responsible for the word-lengths which resulted in truth, credibility or redundancy.
She was out of there.
What would it be like, to be crouched, hidden, for thousands of miles in a dark lorry full of lightbulbs? Everything round you, to the sides of you, towering above you, would be light and fragile, cardboard and glass, and you would know, too, that each of the thousands of bulbs in the truck, heading blindly for a lightsocket somewhere, was held more secure, padded up in its box inside a box inside a box, and on its way to a surer destination, than you.
You would know yourself to be worth less than a lightbulb.
She put Miles Garth’s jacket over her head like she’d seen the tennis player do with the towel. It was hot in there, but momentarily soothing.
Then, after that moment, she felt stupid. She wondered if she looked, to passers-by, like someone in a special kind of deep purdah, or like an old-fashioned nun whose headdress thing was on the wrong way round, or like a mad person. You could only really put a jacket over your head if you were with friends and it looked like a jolly jape.
She wiped the sweat off her face into the silk lining of the jacket, then came back out into the world. Greenwich was full of people and nobody was looking at her; nobody had even noticed her putting a jacket over her head. But probably a CCTV somewhere had made a note of it.
To be noticed is to be loved. Who was it who’d said that, again? A novelist from the last century. Anna could spot, without even trying, three CCTV camera points from where she was sitting. She waved at the closest of the three, across the road on the wall of a derelict-looking office building. Hello. How like a brand new, insane sort of narcissism it would have seemed, this mad filming of ourselves all the time, had we had a preview of it even just twenty or thirty years ago. What a paranoid, jealousy-maddened love affair just walking down any street in a British city in 2009 resembled.
The inside of that jacket had smelled nice.
There was no sign yet of the child.
She checked her mobile. It was ten to three. She held it in her hand, weighed it, felt its lightness. Imagine. This phone. A historical object.
She took Miles’s mobile out of the jacket pocket. It wouldn’t switch on. Its battery would be dead. She put her hand back in and felt for the wallet. Vera Pelle, Made In Italy. Three credit cards, two debit cards, Royal Bank. An AA card with his name on it and the word Roadside. Six first-class stamps. A membership card for the Tate. Three twenty-pound notes.
The man in the picture on the driving licence was nobody she recognized. He was balding. Even on the rather poor reproduction you could see furrows in the forehead.
But when she saw the reproduction of his signature there on the licence, the little loop on the l in Miles, the slope of the G and the r and the way the t and the h ran together in Garth, she knew him again immediately. Even more, when she saw his handwriting she saw clearly in her head, in the same hand, the address of her own original home, the home of a total stranger now and as long gone and as ever-present to her as her own dead parents.
She was eighteen and home from university and a letter had come. It had said in it that he was playing or singing in a band called The Shakespearos. He had drawn a cartoon of The Pink Panther playing an electric guitar on the back of the envelope.
And — yes! — he had even come to visit her at home once, Miles Garth; she had seen him again, the next year, 1981, was it? He’d come all the way up the country because he was going camping in Ullapool and had been passing through her town and had called in. Her mother had made him a salad, with summer new potatoes, because he didn’t eat meat and they were having mince. At one point she’d left the room. When she’d come back — she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened in a story — she could see him sitting there so English and polite on the couch in the patio. She’d watched him for a moment through the kitchen partition. He didn’t know she was there. He’d been given a cup of tea and he’d felt the base of the cup with his hand and had realized it was wet and that some of the tea had spilled on the tiles by his feet. But because her mother was speaking to him, or her father was talking about something, tomato plants, this is what he did. He unzipped his ankle boot. He did it decorously, without looking down, without stopping listening, and in a way that meant neither of her parents noticed. Then he levered his foot by slight shifts and shakes out of his boot. He put his socked foot down where the tea was spilled, felt for it, and mopped it up with his sole. Then, still without looking down, he felt for the mouth of the boot with his toes and put the foot back into it again. He did this without ever once having looked away from whoever was speaking.
She sat in the future and turned the driving licence over in her hand. Valid till 17-03-32. She flipped it over again to the little bleached photograph. When this furrowed stranger was a boy in a foreign country, he had gone out of his way for her. He’d reinvented her. He’d moved up and made space for her on a bus. In her home he’d been kind to her parents.
Thirty years later that last memory revealed itself clean as a new potato in the soil it’s just been unearthed from.
She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of Miles’s jacket, which let her know she’d been crying, which was something she hadn’t done for quite some time. This knowledge, in turn, made something deep inside her chest crack open and shell off.