by Tony Salter
‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘I’m great, thank you. Look Mom, I’m halfway out the door. Can I call you later?’
‘I guess. But …’
‘… That’s great. About seven.’ Dan felt slightly bad as he hung up the phone, but the guilt had evaporated by the time he’d locked the door behind him. She’d have told him if anything was seriously wrong and he was probably going to miss his bus in any case.
He missed the bus.
There is something deeply sorrowful in the sight of a bus or train shrinking into the distance; it leaves you abandoned in its wake, solitary and breathless.
Dan was not one for cursing – again a consequence of his background – but he remembered making a special exception that day. The next bus wasn’t for half an hour which was about the same time it would take him to walk in. One way or the other, by the time he got settled, he would have lost a precious hour of his day.
Nothing he could do about it, but typical of his mother. She’d always had uncanny timing.
As Dan thought back to his mother and that phone call, he felt the same confused mix of feelings that he always did. The same ones that had fed his colourful curses over fifty years earlier.
It was lucky she hadn’t called often as his first reaction was always anger. She’d always been self-centred in a way that couldn’t be ignored, which somehow announced itself even before the phone had stopped ringing.
There was no point in feeling that way any more. His mother had been dead for fifteen years. It was long past time to forgive and forget. What was done couldn’t be undone, and she’d probably made the right choices. Would it have been better if she’d rejected her chance of happiness and stayed in a loveless marriage? And why? Out of convention or misplaced loyalty?
For himself, he could forgive … but for his father …
The Hintze hall was busier than earlier. It was steadily filling with brightly coloured tourists, some in twos or threes; other, much bigger groups were sporting matching T-shirts and following pennants and umbrellas as mindlessly as Hamelin’s children.
The older of the two guards was talking to a smartly dressed woman and, if anything, he looked more sour-faced than before. Ramona hadn’t come back.
As far as the phone call went, and thinking about what had happened as a result of him missing his bus half a century earlier, he could only be grateful.
The walk into Austin had been pleasant enough and, after fifteen minutes, Dan convinced himself that the exercise and time to think would actually help him get more work done, even with the late start.
As he approached the main square, he remembered the other reason he’d had for starting earlier in the day; the student demonstrations had been going on for weeks now and the noise – which could hardly be heard from the library – carried easily for several blocks.
They didn’t usually start much before 10:00 and Dan suspected that most of the demonstrators came from the all night partying and studying under the trees demographic. By arriving late, he was obliged to push his way though the crowds and couldn’t help seeing the banners and hearing the chants.
For a Toronto boy, the whole circus was absurd. It was obvious why they were fighting for equal rights and he couldn’t understand how the government could still be defending the status quo. Austin wasn’t too bad but, take a short drive out of town and it was like stepping back a hundred years. It baffled him but, until his Green Card came through, he was going to keep his head down.
A girl pushed out from the crowd in front of him and thrust a leaflet into his hands. ‘You need to take a side,’ she said. ‘Are you with us, or are you with them?’ The contemptuous flamenco flick of her head towards the ranks of white policemen was filled with pride and youthful passion and he caught barely a glimpse of her flashing brown eyes before she moved on to her next target.
It was enough. Dan clutched the leaflet between his clammy fingers like a holy relic as he watched her disappear into the crowd.
His world would never be the same again.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
Dan was far away in a different time and the woman’s voice was outside him. A dream voice floating in space.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and the voice intruded again. ‘Excuse me. Is everything all right?’
He pulled back reflexively and opened his eyes; the smartly dressed woman was leaning over him.
‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I must have nodded off.’
The woman continued to stare as she leant towards him. Concerned eyes, but no warmth.
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he continued. ‘I’m just waiting for my wife. She’ll be along in a few minutes. She’s shopping in Harrods and I wanted to give her some space. Do you work here?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m the security team supervisor.’
‘Huh. Sounds pretty impressive.’
The woman almost smiled, but appeared to think better of it. What was it with the English?
‘Yes. Well,’ she said. ‘As long as you’re OK. Not in need of medical attention?’
‘No. I’m full of beans,’ he said. ‘No need to worry about me.’
‘Good,’ she said and turned around.
As she walked away, Dan amused himself by wondering whether the poker was stuck up the back of her jacket or somewhere more permanent.
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes, hon. How are you doing?’
‘I’m not feeling so great, actually. Are you nearly done?’
‘Pretty much. Would you like me to swing by a little sooner?’
‘If it’s not a problem, that would be great.’
‘Sure. I’ll quickly pay for these things and I’ll be with you in ten minutes. Are you OK?’
‘Yeah. I’m just tired. Sorry to be a pain.’
‘You’re never a pain. I’ll see you in a jiffy.’
Nadia
‘I think you’re being too hard on yourself,’ said Ed. ‘It strikes me that you took the right decision based on what was in front of you. What else could you do?’
Nadia shrugged. She’d always found blaming herself to be the easiest option. Not always, perhaps, but for a very long time.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed. It must have been terrifying. What about the right-wing guy, Stu? Did you kill him?’
‘No,’ said Nadia. ‘He was sentenced to ten years last October. He’s appealing the conviction of course … and still threatening a civil action against me for unnecessary force. Sometimes I wish I had killed him.’
Nadia looked at her phone. With the increased threat level, new info was flowing in continuously, most of it already out of date. There were, however, a slew of likely CCTV matches around South Kensington. They were going to the right place.
‘You worked as a cleaner in the mosque?’ said Ed as they finally turned away from the river.
Nadia nodded. ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘Fucking awful job. Had to stay fully covered, and they ran the heating overtime. I’ll tell you, salwar kameez can be comfortable enough, but not if you’re on your knees scrubbing floors. It was grim.’
Ed laughed. ‘No, Nadia. Tell me what you really think.’
Nadia realised she’d been ranting like a mad woman and smiled. ‘Sorry. It’s been a crazy time and I haven’t had a chance to adjust. No reason to take it out on you, though.’
‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘So … are you a Moslem, then?’
‘No,’ said Nadia. ‘Although my mum was. My dad was French and, despite the fact that neither of them were particularly religious, they decided to bring me up learning about both.’ She reached up and squeezed the small crucifix under her blouse. Her father had given it to her when she was ten and she could still picture his smiling eyes as he’d hung it around her neck. ‘Just in case,’ he’d said. ‘… Just in case.’
‘They wanted to give you the chance to make your own mind up when you were older?’ said Ed.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And I d
id. I decided there was way too much misery in the world for either of those Gods to deserve my belief and trust. I try not think about religion to tell you the truth. It only makes me angry.’
‘This is the part when I tell you that I’m a passionate born-again Evangelist,’ said Ed.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Nadia, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. God … I didn’t mean …’
‘Hey,’ said Ed, sharply. ‘Hello? Only joking … You really are uptight, aren’t you?’
He grinned like a schoolboy and Nadia realised for the first time that he was actually a very good looking man.
As they took a squealing left turn up Franklin Row, Nadia realised she’d shared more personal details with this virtual stranger than she had with any of her other colleagues. And she’d only known him for twenty minutes. Enough was enough. She had no wish to share her parents’ tragic story with anyone. She’d learnt to keep that well and truly buried. And as for her own relationship status, she hadn’t even begun to process the previous night’s debacle. The clock was ticking and allowing herself to imagine a life without Jamie would have to wait.
‘Enough about me,’ she said, checking their position on Google Maps. ‘We’ve still got a couple of minutes. Tell me how a nice boy like you got caught up in all this?’
‘The usual way, I guess,’ said Ed. ‘I studied psychology because I’ve always been fascinated by what makes us tick. It didn’t take me long to realise that the bills weren’t going to get paid by working as a counsellor and that I’d need to find a real job. I’ve always found programming easy – I used to be a bit of a hacker when I was a kid – and managed to get accepted for a Computer Science masters at Imperial.’
‘Imperial?’ said Nadia. ‘Impressive. So you know South Ken well, then?’
‘Yeah. I guess,’ said Ed. ‘Although if you saw the workload of my course, you’d be surprised I ever got out of the labs.’
‘And GCHQ picked you up from there?’
‘That’s right. The idea had never crossed my mind, but a few years in Cheltenham on a good salary had its appeal.’
‘… and they didn’t have a problem with you being some sort of anarchist hacker?’
‘Funnily enough, no,’ said Ed, laughing. ‘Although to be fair, the closest thing to anarchy we ever managed was hacking the Conservative Party website and putting a picture of a floating duck island on the front page.’
Nadia looked at him with wide eyes. ‘That was you?’ she said.
Ed nodded. ‘Afraid so.’
‘That was probably what got you the job,’ said Nadia.
The security guard turned around to face them, no sign on his face that he’d been listening in. ‘We’ll be there in two minutes,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’
‘Hang on,’ said Nadia. ‘I’ll just check the updates.’
‘There’s a cafe called Muriel’s – on Cromwell Place,’ she said as she scrolled to the end. ‘Can you drop us there, please? You’ll need to wait, I’m afraid.’
‘No worries. That’s what we’re here for,’ said the guard.
11:30
Jim
Jim looked at his watch.
Hatchet Face had finished with the old codger – surprise, surprise, he wasn’t dead – and had stalked off to bother some of the other guards.
He hung the purple fleece carefully over the back of his folding chair and walked over to Will who was looking surprisingly alert. Maybe the boyish charm hadn’t worked so well after all and the arrogant bugger had also had his ear bent by the boss lady.
‘I’m off on my break,’ he said, lifting his right hand to get Will’s attention. ‘You’re on your own.’
‘OK,’ said Will, flashing his perfect teeth – no shortage of dentist’s bills there. ‘I think I’ll cope.’
The truth was that neither of them would have been too fussed if the next batch of school kids had decided to use the dinosaur skeleton as a climbing frame. It wasn’t only that they had the boss from hell, the job itself was almost impossible to care about.
Jim walked down the wide aisle to the North of the hall, his step quickening almost to a run. He only had fifteen minutes and didn’t want to waste any of them. The girl at the ticket desk nodded and smiled as he walked by. This was where he’d spent every minute of every break since the exhibition had started a week earlier.
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year was the world’s most prestigious photography exhibition and every one of the hundred or so prizewinners on display was jaw-droppingly beautiful. Jim would have given his right arm to have taken just one shot which was half as good as any on display.
He’d decided to focus on a single image each time he went and today’s selection was from India. A parakeet family was trying to evict a large monitor lizard which had decided to squat in their tree-branch apartment. The photo showed one parakeet leaning back in the air, outstretched wings flapping green and yellow in a David versus Goliath tug-of-war as it pulled on the lizard’s tail. The lizard was a massive grey-brown dullard in comparison, hanging upside down, dug in to the branch with every claw, long tail flexing in a perfect ‘S’ as it struggled to dislodge the crimson beak clamped onto its tip.
There was always a story behind these pictures – they were almost never simply lucky snaps; it took days and weeks of hard work to be in the right place at the right time. In this case, the evicted family had spent two days persecuting the lizard – biting, tugging, scratching and clawing – until it finally accepted defeat and slunk off in search of alternative accommodation. The photographer had sat high in a neighbouring tree keeping them company throughout.
Jim had loved wildlife photography with a secret passion for almost forty years; it wasn’t possible to talk about it with anyone he knew. He’d half-tried a couple of times, but the piss-taking was comprehensive and immediate. Even Julie – especially Julie – would have thought there was something wrong with him.
Like almost everything good in Jim’s life, it had started in the Army. He’d been posted for six months to Belize in the late seventies. Belize was the ultimate cushy number and sadly he’d only had the one tour. As a first posting after being promoted to Sergeant, it was ideal and, for a couple of months, there had only been about twenty of them, setting things up ahead of a big jungle warfare exercise with the Americans.
His Second Lieutenant, Alastair, was a classic Rupert, fresh out of Sandhurst, all teeth and confidence – a bit like Will. He and Jim were the same age, but Jim already had five years service under his belt and knew enough to fill in the gaps in his boss’s knowledge and experience.
Under the unwritten rules dividing the NCOs from the officers, friendly banter was fine, but real friendship was frowned upon. It interfered with the proper functioning of the machine, especially if things got lively.
Belize was different. Rules – written or unwritten – hadn’t seemed to matter under the tropical sun and base protocol was exceptionally relaxed. Alastair had a lot to learn and Jim helped him to get through his early months in command without making too much of a prat of himself. The two young men’s backgrounds couldn’t have been more different but, despite that, they became good mates.
It was Alastair who introduced Jim to photography. Still years before digital cameras, proper photography wasn’t an option for most people. What with dark rooms, chemicals, coated paper, film, lenses and the cameras themselves, you needed time and a lot of money … And, for a professional squaddie from the East End, it wasn’t exactly a manly pursuit.
One particular afternoon, the troop had just finished recce-ing an island in the middle of a lake which was set to be the target command centre for the exercise. Jim was taking a breather, sat leant against a tree, swigging warm, brown water from his canteen. The water wasn’t actually brown, but it tasted that way. The rest of the troop had gone to fetch the raft and Alastair was messing about with his bloody camera as always.
‘Do you want to try?’ he s
aid to Jim, holding out the camera.
‘Nah. Not really for me, boss,’ said Jim. ‘We didn’t do artistic at my school.’
‘So, how do you know it’s not for you then? Go on. Give it a go.’
Jim had been secretly watching Alastair for weeks, fascinated by the way he set up the camera for each individual situation, clicking different lenses in and out without thinking about it. And then the photos he came up with – birds, monkeys, flowers, insects – it was like he saw things differently. Jim was actually aching to have a try.
‘What the fuck! There’s bugger all else to do.’
Alastair gave him a five minute course in exposure and focus and handed over the camera.
‘Have a look around,’ he said. ‘Find something interesting and take pictures of it.’
It had been almost a week later when they were having their morning catch-up meeting. Alastair pushed an envelope across the desk.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ he said. ‘I needed to finish the film.’
They were Jim’s photos, but nothing like he’d expected. There were a few rubbish ones, of course, but five or six of them looked like the real thing. The best one was of a macaw, zoomed in so that the head and massive beak filled the frame and the yellow eye stared straight at him like it was popping out of the paper. It was amazing.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jim. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
‘Get it now?’ said Alastair. ‘You’ve got an eye, Jim.’
And that was it; he was hooked. Jim became more and more engaged with the ways you could twist and bend light and shadow and spent as much time as he could taking photographs with Alastair. Unsurprisingly, their long walks in the jungle and the hours in the darkroom together fuelled plenty of rumours.
Luckily, Jim got on well with the rest of the troop which, combined with a reputation for being hard as nails, made sure that no-one was stupid enough to accuse him of being limp-wristed. And, in any case, Belize was like a holiday from real life; they’d all done things on nights out which would be best forgotten when they got home.
