by J. S. Monroe
Jar approaches the tent, cutting down through the rocks and tufts of grass, and is soon level with it. Is Rosa in there? He peers inside the open entrance. There is a roll mat, a sleeping bag and a rucksack.
He tries to control his breathing and turns to look around him. The headland is deserted. He walks over to the edge of the cliffs, where there is a path out to the furthest point, an exposed group of boulders below the big ugly rock that gives this place its piscine name.
There, sitting on a boulder, clutching her knees to her chest as she looks out to sea, is a woman, shaved head, baggy trousers, rocking gently. Her back is to Jar. He hesitates, feeling the pulse in his tired eyelids, and holds on to a rock to steady himself. His first thought is to call out her name, but he checks himself, in case it frightens her, in case she is not real. Instead he stares at her, perched on the edge of the sheer cliffs. Sometimes, when he has a hallucination, he shuts his eyes and opens them again, only for her to have disappeared. He closes his eyes and starts to count to five, willing her to stay. This time he knows she is real, that he has finally found her. At four, he opens his eyes, fighting back the tears.
‘Rosa?’ His voice is a whisper and the wind is against him. ‘Rosa,’ he manages again, louder this time.
She turns and looks at him, giving a distant smile, squinting in the sunlight. He has thought about this moment so many times. He wants to rush over, fold her in his arms, in case she disappears, fades through the brightening air.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she says, turning back to look out to sea. A shudder of relief runs through him. It’s Rosa. He’s not hallucinating. ‘I’ve seen so many seals today,’ she continues, ‘too many to count. We used to come here all the time. Dad had a way of talking to them, cupping his hands and blowing into his thumbs, making sounds more like an owl than a seal.’
‘Rosa,’ Jar repeats. He can already feel his euphoria slipping, giving way to a creeping dread. ‘Rosa, please come away from the edge.’
Rosa stands up, almost stumbling as she does so, and steps back from the cliff face. Jar can’t move as she picks her way down through the rocks and walks past him to the tent. Her eyes are cast down, as if he doesn’t exist.
‘I always forget to close it,’ she says, squatting down to zip up the front. Jar stares at the back of her, trying to work out what’s happening, take in her physical presence, the roll of her shoulders, the sound of her voice.
‘Where have you been, Rosa?’ he asks, watching her struggle to close the tent. ‘Where did they take you?’
Rosa doesn’t respond as she continues to wrestle with the jammed zip. ‘Festival tent,’ she says. ‘Dad always said don’t waste money on a cheap one. I think the zip’s gone.’
Jar bends down to help. ‘Here, let me try.’ His hand brushes against the back of Rosa’s, the contact making her real. A moment later, she is sobbing into his shoulder, her arms wrapped around him. Jar folds his arms around her, too, absorbing the shudders from her frail body, not daring to believe she is flesh and blood. Then he starts to sob. He knows he must stay strong, but five years of not knowing is way too long.
They stay like that for a while – ten minutes, half an hour, Jar cannot be sure, doesn’t care – hugging each other in silence as they sit beneath the rocks, the wind whipping the tops off the waves far below them. Eventually, he pulls away and looks into Rosa’s eyes, holding her face, smudging away the tears with his big thumbs. And then he kisses her lips. She turns away.
‘I know everything, Rosa. And I don’t blame you, for taking the chance to start again. I want you to know that.’
‘It’s true, then.’
‘What’s true?’
She looks at the ground. ‘My life.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Tell me, everything you know about me. Please.’
Jar searches her eyes, looking for an explanation and then turns away, realising there will be no quick or easy answers. She has the same distant look he saw in Amy: disengaged, lost.
He starts at the beginning, her unhappiness at college, Dr Lance, Karen the college counsellor, her trips to Cromer, the retreat in Herefordshire, the offer of starting over. Then he talks of how they met at the restaurant. Her reaction is the same: a blank indifference, deadness in the eyes. They are sitting close to each other, facing out to sea, but there is no intimacy.
Jar looks across at her again. If only he had trusted himself when he saw her at Paddington, for he is certain now that it was Rosa rushing for the train. He should have followed her to Penzance, trusted his instincts. So much of the last two weeks could have been avoided.
‘Am I right?’ he asks. ‘About the Herefordshire retreat? Karen?’
She nods. Jar lets out an involuntary sigh of relief: no one’s playing him. The diary was written by Rosa.
‘I never knew how unhappy you were at college,’ he says.
She looks away, out to sea.
‘Of course I knew you missed your dad, I just didn’t realise…’
‘It’s OK.’
Jar stares at her again as they sit there, the wind rippling her baggy trousers, a realisation mounting like nausea. She hasn’t said his name yet.
‘Rosa?’
She turns to him with the same look that she gave from the train: stranger to stranger. ‘Yes?’
‘Do you know who I am? My name?’
Tears start to well in her eyes again and she turns away. Jar puts an arm around her and, after a few seconds, she rests her head against his shoulder.
‘It’s Jar. My name’s Jar. Jarlath Costello. We were at Cambridge together.’
‘I know who you are, babe. Sometimes I know everything. Then it all clouds over.’
‘What did they do to you, Rosa?’
It’s a while before she answers. ‘I was on my own.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know, Jar. I don’t remember ever being flown anywhere, but an airbase was mentioned. Lakenheath? I think someone once said Lakenheath.’
The US airbase in Suffolk, Jar thinks.
‘There was a pale light. They shaved my head and I was forced to wear an orange jumpsuit. Day and night, food lowered down to me like they were feeding a dog.’
‘How long were you there?’
‘Six months, six years? I don’t know, Jar. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ Jar says, cradling her. But he knows it’s not.
‘They are going to come for me again, aren’t they?’
Jar glances across the bay. ‘Did you tell anyone you were coming here?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘Have you got a phone?’
‘No.’
‘You’re “off grid”?’
Rosa looks at him again, her eyes seeming to flicker with recognition at the expression. ‘The pub has Wi-Fi, though,’ she says.
She must have used it to send the emails, he thinks, borrowed someone’s phone or iPad. ‘They can’t track you if you don’t have a phone,’ he continues.
‘No. They can’t.’
Jar stands up, looks out at the old engine house across the bay. A tall figure has appeared at the foot of the track. He tells himself to stop being so paranoid.
‘Are you warm enough?’ she asks. ‘It’s getting cold.’
‘I’m fine,’ Jar says. He sits down on the ground next to her, like two school friends on a park bench. He never meant their reunion to be like this, never thought it would be so mundane.
‘So this is the place where we agreed to meet if “the world ever slipped off its axis”,’ he says, looking out to sea. ‘I got your emails.’
She pauses, smiling at a distant memory. ‘I’ve seen some shooting stars. No meteorites, not yet.’
‘You wrote about it in your diary once but never said where it was.’
‘I never told them,’ she says. ‘Our secret.’
And now I’ve revealed it, Jar thinks, as he looks across to the figure again, its familiar gait. His heart
sinks. It’s the man who tried to board his train at Paddington. He is walking at pace along the coast path towards the headland where they’re sitting. Jar looks around him, searching for an escape route, but there is no place for them to hide, nowhere to run. The headland is surrounded by sheer cliffs and the sea. Jar’s led Rosa’s captors to her.
‘You need to tell me everything you can about where you’ve been, what happened,’ he says, his voice more urgent.
‘It’s all in my diary. My whole life’s written down there.’
‘Have you got it with you?’ Jar doesn’t know whether to tell her that he’s already read most of it.
‘I know it all anyway. They made me memorise a different entry every day.’ She pauses. ‘“There was only one thing unnerving about Karen: she did this short intake of breath just before she spoke. It was as if she’d suddenly remembered to breathe. The more she talked… the more I couldn’t help noticing it, until in my mind it became a deafening gasp. Dad would have found it funny.”’
Karen, the counsellor who saw her at college, Jar thinks. The one she never mentioned to him. The one Max could never find any record of. ‘Do you remember Herefordshire?’ he asks. ‘Going to the retreat?’
‘Eating dark chocolate with Sejal.’
‘And being briefed by the Americans?’
She pauses. ‘I think so.’
This is what he needs her to talk about: the last, incomplete diary entry, the one that was cut short, in which she was going to reveal all.
‘Can you tell me anything else about the programme? Eutychus?’
‘Our nickname was “the invisibles”. We were dead to the outside world, no one knew we existed. Dad never meant it to be like that. We were supposed to be given new lives, and we were, for a while, but the Americans…’ Her voice tails off. ‘They had other ideas, saw us as dispensable.’
‘What was your new life like?’
It’s a while before she answers. Jar tries not to be impatient. The man is almost with them now. Jar should have taken a train back to Paddington instead of coming out here from Penzance, led his tail down a few rabbit holes, taken him far away from Rosa and Cornwall. Instead he’s brought him here, and they are trapped.
‘There was a lot of training.’
‘Encryption?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Is that how you found out about your dad?’
‘Then I escaped. I wanted to tell the world. But they caught up with me, put me in…’ Rosa’s voice breaks off again, her eyes welling.
‘It’s OK.’ He cradles her in his arms, telling himself that she is real. Will they ever be together like this again? Just the two of them? He glances once more at the approaching man.
‘Awful things happened,’ she whispers. ‘Like you never imagined.’
‘To you?’
‘He said he owned my soul.’
‘Who did?’
Rosa pauses. ‘“When we save a human life, we own their soul…”’
‘Was he part of the programme?’
Rosa appears not to have heard him. ‘Then I was taken away.’
‘To the airbase?’
She pauses again, this time for longer, and starts to sob. ‘They tried to drown me.’ Her voice is barely a whisper now.
‘Jaysus, Rosa. I’m so sorry.’ Curiosity is giving way to anger.
‘You think you’re going to die. The cloth in your mouth, pouring water. You can’t breathe, so you panic, which makes it worse.’
Waterboarding, Jar thinks. An American speciality at Guantánamo. He wasn’t aware it’s also on the menu at Lakenheath.
‘And then they…’ Rosa whispers. ‘Again, and again, and again.’
Jar closes his eyes, remembers Cato’s words of warning. I don’t think you quite realise what or who you are dealing with here.
‘We have to tell the world, Rosa. Tell everyone what happened. To you, to your father. We need to prove that you are alive.’
‘Am I?’ She manages a weak laugh, a trace of a smile. Jar holds her tighter, in case she disappears.
‘I hoped you’d come here,’ she whispers. ‘To our secret meeting place. I knew you would. It’s one of the few things I did know about my life. My old one. We really had something, didn’t we? You and I.’
‘We need to take a photo,’ Jar says. The tears are coming again. Her diary entries had begun to raise doubts as to whether their relationship was as strong as he remembered. He pulls out his phone and holds it at arm’s length in front of them. His hand is shaking. They lean in to each other.
‘A selfie,’ Rosa says, smiling.
‘Quick. Look at the camera.’
He takes a photo and checks the phone.
‘No signal. There was a signal.’
‘Wait for the wind to blow,’ Rosa says.
‘We don’t have time.’ Jar stands up, holding the phone high above him like he’s asking a question in class. ‘One bar’s enough.’
He has already typed in Carl’s number. The photo is attached to the text, which just says ‘Rosa and Jar today’ with the date in brackets. He presses send.
‘Jaysus, send, will you?’ he shouts, watching the data wheel spin on the phone.
A moment later, the man has appeared on the rocks above them, silhouetted against the Blue Curaçao sky. He is wearing a black balaclava now and holding a handgun. Jar stares at him, trying to imagine the features underneath, the gimlet eyes, rash-red skin. Then he hurls the phone high into the air, over the cliff, and watches it twist and spin in the sunshine as it arcs out to sea and drops out of sight. A second later, the man has jumped down next to him. Jar steps forward to protect Rosa, but the man is too quick, whipping the butt of the gun across Jar’s face. He falls to the ground, his cheek against the soft, mossy grass. He tries to get to his feet, to stop this man from taking Rosa away, but he can’t move. His legs are heavy, his head spinning.
‘Rosa!’ he cries out. ‘Rosa!’
He watches, helpless, as Rosa is led away across the rocks, her wrists tied behind her back and a cloth held to her mouth. He has failed her, he thinks. Then his world darkens.
PART TWO
46
‘Did you get the photo?’ Jar asks.
The young woman behind the bar at the pub, the one with the green eyes, is pretending not to watch him. Jar has offered to pay for the phone call, but she won’t hear of it. She is more concerned by the gash on his forehead – received, he told her, when he stumbled on the rocky cliff path – and how long he was unconscious for.
‘What photo?’ Carl says.
‘I texted you a photo of me with Rosa. Carl, she’s alive. I’ve just been with her.’
‘Are you prangin’ out, bro? You don’t sound so good. Where are you?’
Jar’s aware of what Carl is thinking. His friend has had another episode, like the one at Paddington (he won’t try telling Carl he knows that was Rosa too). Jar hoped the photo would clinch it, end all doubt, but Carl hasn’t received it. Jar’s sure the photo went through before he threw his phone over the cliff.
‘Will you look at your messages again? Please? Are you sure it hasn’t arrived? They can often take a while to go through. You can check the date and location on the photo when you get it.’
There’s a long pause. ‘Jar, listen, bro, there’s no photo. To be honest, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. We’ve really got to deal with this, you seeing Rosa everywhere. Get yourself back to London, talk to the Feds and I’ll make sure Kirsten sees you again – in a professional capacity.’
‘You don’t understand. This is different, Carl. You’ve got to publish the photo. Put it up on our website. Send it to a newspaper. Anything. Just get it out there as soon as it arrives.’
Jar glances up at the barmaid and forces himself to smile. He knows he’s talking too fast, not getting enough oxygen into his lungs. His life never used to run at this pace.
‘It might not look like Rosa, but it was her. She’s
shaved her head, lost a lot of weight. This wasn’t a hallucination, Carl. Not this time. I’ve just been with her. Before they took her away.’
‘Are you with anyone now?’
‘Carl, listen to me. I’m fine. Rosa’s alive. She’s not well, but she’s alive.’
Jar hangs up, holding the receiver firmly down on the base for ten seconds, maybe longer, extinguishing all life from it, as if he’s drowning a kitten. When he takes his hand away, the barmaid is staring at him.
47
Cromer, 2012
I picked up Rosa from Norwich this morning. A insisted on it, despite the perfectly good, if slow, train service that operates between Norwich and Cromer. Rosa was more moody than ever – takes after her father. A says she’s been through a lot in recent months, tells me that I’m being unsympathetic. I know I need to care more, but it’s hard when someone won’t accept help. I’ve talked to her about the benefits of benzodiazepines, but she’s not interested.
My latest creative-writing task is to keep this daily journal, gradually mixing in some fiction with the facts of my unexpectedly early retirement. It’s my literary Petri dish, before I start on the big novel. I’m to write it as if I’m addressing someone in particular, a person in a room. Like a letter only more direct: right up close, in your face. The danger is lapsing into an overly chatty style – ‘first person on steroids’, as my online tutor put it, in what I assume was a touching attempt to bridge the gap between my previous life in the lab and the writer’s one that beckons. (‘First person on nootropics’ would have been more appropriate.)
I’d prefer to sit down with a published author for a few hours rather than do all these tedious exercises. Last week’s was the worst: compose a CV for each of your main characters. I thought I’d left the corporate world behind.
The good news is that Rosa’s got herself a new man. He’s evidently not doing a great job of cheering her up, but he has written a collection of short stories. They’ve also been published – and not by himself. I tried to extract some information from Rosa in the car, but she was even less interested in conversation than usual, so I looked up the book on Amazon when we got back.
