Christmas at the Cornish Café

by Phillipa Ashley

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Medical supplies, mostly … some items of communications equipment …’ His voice tails off. ‘My boss must have known something was going on but she turned a blind eye, even though the supplies, antibiotics and analgesia, are like gold dust there. She probably thought they were all for civilians, but they were also used by local fighters and she had no idea about the comms and other military equipment.

  ‘Then one day my army friend asked me to do something else on one of my runs into town.’

  A door slams downstairs, startling us both. I can feel Cal’s heart beating – or is it mine?

  ‘Go on,’ I say.

  ‘My military friend asked me to take some weapons – guns, rocket-propelled grenades, an anti-tank mortar – to Soraya’s cousin to use against the insurgents. This was a step too far for me – or rather, it ought to have been a step too far. I refused at first, but my military contact pleaded with me. He said that he had intelligence there would be a major assault on the town by the insurgents and that I should take the hardware as soon as possible in our truck, hidden among the medical supplies. He said that insurgent sympathisers might have already infiltrated the town and would be on the lookout for soldiers, but they wouldn’t suspect me in our charity truck.’

  ‘Oh my God. I had no idea you were so close to the fighting.’

  ‘I told Soraya about my fears but she said that her cousin and his group needed the weapons. She said she’d take them if I didn’t. She’d do anything she could to help her cousin and his group and that after she’d delivered the weapons, she’d bring Esme straight back to the camp.

  ‘At first, I refused point blank and said it was too dangerous, but she said that the arms were vital and her group needed them. I wish I hadn’t told her at all, but I trusted her judgement. In the end, I said we’d both go. But that’s not how it turned out …’

  His words tail off and he’s silent. Beads of perspiration sheen his forehead. I touch his arm gently. ‘What happened?’

  He takes a breath. ‘I started to load the guns and supplies into our truck with Soraya. There was an explosion nearby. A school on the outskirts of the camp had been shelled. I didn’t know what to do. I was torn. I couldn’t take the arms then. The injured school kids came first. But I also knew that the fighting was very close and that Soraya’s friends would need the arms if they were to have any chance of defending themselves.’

  ‘What a nightmare situation. What did you do in the end?’

  ‘I told Soraya not to go without me and ran to help some of the kids. She said she’d wait for me, but I never saw her again. Not alive …’

  ‘Oh, Cal.’ My heart breaks for him.

  He takes a deep breath and pushes on, speaking faster now. ‘Even while I was helping with the school attack, word came that the insurgents had broken through the outskirts of the town faster than anyone expected and it could fall into their hands within hours. We were ordered by UN soldiers to evacuate all the civilians immediately and my boss and colleagues had no choice but to take their advice or be killed or captured. Esme was still in the town with her grandparents …

  ‘I had to do something. The truck was nowhere to be seen and I hoped that one of my colleagues had taken it to help evacuate people. Deep down, however, I was already worried that Soraya had gone into town in it. I looked everywhere for her in the camp, but it was mayhem as everyone tried to pack up to ship out. Eventually I found a note in my quarters from her, saying she’d left shortly after I’d run to the school. I can’t stop thinking that if I hadn’t told her about the arms or left her on her own, she’d still be alive and Esme would be safe.’

  ‘But you didn’t encourage her. You tried to stop her. It was her decision to go alone and she must have wanted to be with her daughter too.’

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that I should have died and not her … I wish I’d never become involved with the military.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, but you can’t change anything now, and beating yourself up won’t help. What happened when you got to town?’ I ask, though a big part of me can’t bear to hear.

  ‘I know. As soon as I realised where she’d gone, I left my colleagues to tend to the injured children and raced to the other side of town to find her and make her come back to the camp with Esme. It was like trying to fight against the rip tide. People flowed out of the town in rusty cars, on bikes and in carts – but mostly on foot with what they could carry on their backs. They were terrified. Some UN people tried to stop me and make me turn back, but I needed to find Soraya.

  ‘I found the house where her cousin’s group met. One of the fighters said Soraya hadn’t been there at all so I knew that something bad had happened. I ran to her grandparents’ home, hoping against hope that she’d gone there first. I ran around the corner and … Oh, Jesus, I saw the truck. Or what was left of it.’

  ‘Oh God, Cal’ My hand flies to my mouth.

  Cal closes his eyes. He swallows hard.

  ‘The truck had been hit and was in pieces. I don’t know if the insurgents deliberately targeted it or if it was a random hit. All I know is that I should have been driving it. It had come to rest a little way from the grandparents’ house. I threw up when I saw the blackened, twisted metal, expecting Soraya to be inside.

  I feel sick myself at the image Cal has conjured in my mind.

  He squeezes my hand. ‘But she wasn’t in the truck. At least she didn’t end up like that.’

  ‘How … how did it end, then?’

  ‘I’ll never know for sure but I think that she decided things had become too dangerous and made straight for her grandparents’ house to find them and Esme, and drive back to the camp. In the end, I’m sure she put Esme first …’

  Cal stops, struggling for words now. My heart breaks for him, but he takes a breath and carries on.

  ‘I staggered forward, hoping against hope that Soraya had survived the hit on the truck and was in the rubble around us. You could feel the ground tremble from the mortars dropping, and smell the smoke and hear the gunfire. I knew I had only minutes to try to get back to safety, if that. I was frantic. I ran into the house. I thought I was already through the door when a fresh explosion knocked me off my feet, but some of the memories have gone now …’ He rubs his hand over his forehead, pushing back his hair. ‘I must have blacked out.’

  ‘Oh God, Cal.’

  ‘I was knocked off my feet and I must have been unconscious for a while. It might have only been for a few seconds or half a minute. When I came to, I saw that there had been a direct strike on the building. From who, or what, I don’t know. It might have been the insurgents. It could have been our own forces, government forces. It doesn’t matter now. It won’t make any difference. Even if I’d been right and Soraya had been in the house trying to get Esme, it was obvious to me now that she was dead. She lay on a pile of rubble. There was hardly a mark on her body, that happens sometimes in a blast, but I knew instantly that she was gone. Her body was as limp as a rag doll.’

  Tears trickle down my cheeks, but Cal’s voice is now steady. ‘I knew straight away, but I made sure of it before I had to leave her.’

  My face is wet with tears. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Cal. It was a terrible decision to have to make: to help her people and then to leave her. I know I wasn’t there but don’t think you could have made any other choice. How had Kit found out about this though? Why did he want to publish it?’

  ‘Kit mentioned the name of a contact to me and I did recognise it. It was some guy who used to be in Special Forces. He’s an ex-soldier now, apparently, and he’s known for passing on information to journalists if he’s paid enough money.

  ‘While we were working together after the floods, Kit told me that he’d found out I was working in this region of Syria and that his contact had some information about me. Kit must have been delighted when he found out I’d secretly been working for the military and that I’d been involved in the death
of a local woman. He thought it would make a human interest story and also make me look bad, especially as Kit admitted he also thought there might be more to my relationship with Soraya than just being colleagues.’

  ‘He thought you and Soraya were lovers?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s wrong. Soraya and I were more than friends, but we weren’t lovers. We were compatriots and I did love her, just not in the way I loved Isla – or you.’

  My stomach flips. I can’t believe Cal has said he loves me. I can’t process the joy of hearing it in the middle of such terrible circumstances.

  Cal holds me. ‘I feel that it was my responsibility, my fault that Soraya drove into town and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘But it wasn’t. She didn’t die in the truck accident. It was random, in the end, and if you’d both gone, you might both have been killed. Kit can’t blame you for her death, even if he wanted to expose you for working for the military.’

  ‘That’s why I was so upset with him. Not because I was worried about being in the newspapers, but I do feel responsible for putting Soraya in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kit rubbed salt in my wounds; he knew that I felt guilty and he wanted to hurt me by reopening the wound. He succeeded, until he had a change of heart.’

  I groan. ‘I told him he must be wrong about you when I went to London. He understands how you feel now, I think … What happened after you came to and discovered Soraya had gone?’ I say.

  ‘I searched for Esme, of course. I’d assumed she must still be in the wreck of the house and that was a horrific thought, but I had to make sure. There were still people running and crawling around, some horribly injured, others fleeing for their lives. The noise, the smell, the screams. I’ll never forget it. But Esme wasn’t there.’

  ‘There’s hope, then, that she escaped?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I daren’t hope too much. A local fighter who I recognised arrived and tried to drag me away. He was injured himself and I think I’d dislocated my own shoulder and knee, but I carried on searching for Esme. She might have been injured or trapped in the ruins. I might have been able to help her. If the worst had happened, I reasoned, I might have found her body and at least known what happened so I could break the news to her relatives if I saw them. But she was nowhere. I carried on looking for God knows how long but the bombs were deafening by this point and the air was full of dust from the collapsed buildings.’

  ‘You could have been killed.’

  ‘I didn’t care. I didn’t think about it. I was so hell bent on finding Esme even though I knew it might be hopeless. Eventually, I heard the rumble of the terrorists’ armoured vehicles and decided to get out of there, hoping to renew my search for Esme back at the refugee camp. It was barely a mile to the border where the military would be defending the camp …’

  He pauses again. I touch his arm, but I don’t think he can feel me.

  ‘And I almost made it. I got as far as the edge of the town before I was caught by two lads – I can’t call them men – in a Jeep, armed to the teeth and high on something. They overtook me and I had no choice but to stop. Later, I often wished I’d kept running and let them shoot me. In fact I expected them to shoot me on the spot. Part of me wanted them to, because I knew worse might follow if they didn’t.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘But they didn’t kill me, as you can see, and I’m here.’

  ‘So they held you in the town?’

  ‘To start with, in some cellar underneath a bombed-out building.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Don’t ask. I never thought I’d see home again. I thought I’d end up in a YouTube video and the last thing my friends and family – Isla and Robyn – would see was me being shot or possibly even worse. But far worse than that was the guilt about Soraya and Esme. I had no idea, and I still don’t, if she was still alive. She wasn’t in the rubble. Someone must have taken her with them when they had to evacuate. Or perhaps the insurgents had taken her too. I’m sick at the thought of that even now.’

  Can your blood run cold? It feels like it. I hug him tightly, still feeling his heart beat. His skin is cool and clammy. My mind is racing, so many thoughts, all vile and nightmarish, tumbling through it. My mind is flooded with images from the TV news, horrible things that most of us switch off to avoid. Places on the Internet we dare not go. Things so far from cosy Cornish cafes, so far from people laughing and enjoying their holidays, children playing on the sand, the oldies laughing over a cuppa and a cake in the cafe, wandering through the wildflowers, paddling in the sea …

  ‘Demi? It’s OK, you know. I’m here. I survived.’ I lift my head. He smiles at me. ‘Though I may pass out from suffocation if you don’t let go of me.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I hadn’t realised I was holding you so tight.’

  I release my grip but I can’t relax. ‘My God, I can’t even imagine what you went through. But you’re here now. How did you get away?’

  ‘The insurgents persuaded some poor local guy, who I’d actually once helped to treat, to identify me as working undercover with the western Special Forces. Which wasn’t true, of course, but it wasn’t strictly untrue because I had been involved with them. I don’t blame the poor man: they’d probably threatened to kill his family if he didn’t say it.

  ‘Either way, I thought I was a goner. I’m amazed they didn’t kill me on the spot. After a couple of days, they moved me to another house. I say house, it was just a shack that had been part of a goat farm in the desert. That was worse because of the heat.’ He throws off the cover even though the bedroom’s as chilly as ever. ‘I could see light though the edges of the corrugated iron roof. I was there for a few weeks. I scratched each sunrise on the wall so I could keep track of the time.’

  ‘How did you cope?’

  ‘Part of me didn’t care what happened to me, except for the pain it would cause my uncle, Robyn, Polly and Isla. I thought I should have been dead anyway. Only the thought of home and the people I loved kept me going – and even then, I felt guilty that I might live to see them while Soraya and Esme were dead.’

  ‘No wonder you looked so thin when I saw you at the Beach Hut. I just thought you were a hipster on a faddy diet.’

  He manages a smile and shakes his head. ‘I wish. Put it like this, my hosts’ hospitality wasn’t a patch on Demelza’s.’ He kisses me.

  ‘So that’s why no one heard from you for a while.’

  ‘Yes. My boss – the head of the charity – heard from my military friend that I’d been kidnapped. She was confused and horrified.’

  ‘How did you escape after they took you?’ I ask.

  ‘After I’d disappeared, the Special Forces guys found out what had happened. I think some of the local fighters must have seen or heard and together they formulated a plan to rescue me. They told my boss I’d been kidnapped off the street and was being held as a hostage, and they persuaded her not to tell my family I was incommunicado until they could get me out.’

  He props himself up and fixes his eyes on my face. ‘Demi, you must swear on my life not to talk about this to anyone. Not to Robyn or Polly even. Let’s face it, most of the people here think I was exhausted and had a breakdown, and that I went AWOL. Let them think that, it’s easier for everyone.’

  He takes a breath, then begins again. ‘I can’t live my life looking over my shoulder and I don’t give a toss about being abused and flamed in the papers or on social media. I just couldn’t handle the guilt when Kit accused me. He was right, and that’s why I was so angry.’

  ‘I don’t think Kit will publish the story now. He promised,’ I say.

  ‘You’re right. I don’t think he will.’ He pauses.

  ‘You know I was worried when you went back to London,’ I say.

  He looks puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d gone to see if you could get your old job back.’

  ‘No. I can’t go back unless I have a death wish … a
nd the charity doesn’t want me after what happened. I’m too much trouble, but I’d like to try and find Esme, if she survived. When I went to London, I heard that the locals have re-taken the town and the camp has been rebuilt, but there was no news about Esme or the rest of her family. There are so many people displaced that it’s impossible to tell …’ He sighs. ‘I hate facing the truth but my boss is right. I’ll probably never see Esme again.’

  Cal is quiet for so long, staring into space, I wonder if he’ll ever speak again.

  ‘I thought when you went to London, that you might decide life wasn’t exciting running a holiday resort and cafe in Cornwall when you could save the world. Sorry, that sounds stupid now. I’d no idea what really happened out there.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve done much saving, though at one time, when I started out, I thought I could. I’ve helped a few people, and made life worse for a few others. I think it’s time to concentrate on my family and friends and the people I love now.’

  The people I love now.

  ‘I spent a lot of time apart from the people I loved when they needed me as much as the people thousands of miles away did. I won’t make that mistake again. Demi, you can try to get rid of me if you like, but I intend to stay put here.’

  I believe him. I think I do. What if he hadn’t been caught, I ask myself? If he could safely return, would he? Would Kilhallon be enough? Now I know why he threw himself into renovating it. What else was he going to do?

  ‘If I could only find out where Esme is and if she’s safe, it would put my mind at rest.’

  ‘Is there no way?’

  ‘I could try my military contact again, but he’s told me it’s virtually hopeless. My boss too. They both told me to focus my energy here, not on guilt and regrets. Slowly, over the last nine months, I’ve begun to come to terms with what happened. So if I’ve been a moody arse, I’m sorry.’

  He kisses me.

  ‘I don’t blame you. I understand why now. I’ve always tried to understand, but knowing all of this helps,’ I sigh, keeping my voice light even though I can hardly take in what Cal has shared with me. It’s so big, so much bigger than our little world at Kilhallon. ‘Even though you drive me mad at times, I’m glad you plan on staying here with us too.’