by Paul Torday
We started waving at the bus and by a miracle it stopped.
‘What we’re going to do,’ I told Adeena, as we climbed on board, ‘is get over to the west side of the country and then take the train down to London. They won’t be looking for us on the West Coast line.’
Adeena nodded as if she believed I knew what I was talking about. The fact is I had no idea exactly who was looking for us or where they would look. But it was important to sound as if I had a plan.
‘And then?’ she asked.
‘And then – then we’ll see.’
From Richmond we took another bus deeper into the Dales, and then another and another. We passed through villages whose names I remembered from my childhood: Muker, Thwaite and then through Hawes and Garsdale Head. Once a police car overtook us with its lights flashing and Adeena shrank against my side. It probably had nothing to do with us. Probably.
It was a cloudy, windy day with sudden patches of sunlight sailing over the fell, transforming it into a green and gentle place; then the sun would go in and the landscape would become dark and threatening. There were so many questions I wanted to ask Adeena but on the bus it didn’t seem safe to talk, even though we could hardly have been heard over the noise of the engine. Adeena’s head lolled once or twice and then she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.
It was many bus journeys and a taxi later that we arrived at Oxenholme. That was the station we always used when we travelled to London from home. By that time I was out of cash but I found an ATM and took out a few hundred pounds. It was Aseeb’s money but I was using it in a good cause. We bought tickets and headed south.
Twelve
The train to London was half empty. We sat opposite each other at a table and at last it was possible to talk.
‘We can’t stay at my flat tonight, it’s too dangerous. But we can probably risk going there for a few minutes. I need some clean clothes and I need to get my passport. Then we’ll find a hotel. Tomorrow we’ll go to your embassy.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then we will ask them to help you.’
‘What can they do?’ asked Adeena. ‘Send me back to Kabul where the Taliban will find me?’
‘Perhaps they can help you apply for refugee status. I don’t know. But right now I think we’ve got the security services looking for us. And we have Aseeb to worry about as well. I’m not that clever. I can’t think of any more places where we can hide.’
‘You want to get rid of me,’ said Adeena. ‘I understand. You are right. I am putting you in danger. You don’t have to look after me when we get to London. I will go to the embassy myself in the morning, if you will tell me how to get there.’
‘I don’t want to get rid of you,’ I replied. ‘I want to help you. But I don’t know how else to do it. If you have a better idea, tell me what it is.’
‘We have been together now for four days,’ remarked Adeena after a while. ‘To me, it seems like a much longer time. If we could stay in one place, and not be hunted by Aseeb or those other men, those secret police friends of that man who came and disturbed us, do you think we could have been happy? I do. But now we will not have four days more …’
We looked at each other. In those four days I had felt as if I had begun a completely new life. I thought: yes, four more days together is the least amount of time that I would like to spend with you. But it wasn’t going to happen. As for a relationship of any sort with Adeena – I wasn’t good at relationships. Why would I be any better at this one?
‘I am sorry we left that house so quickly,’ said Adeena. ‘I felt safe there, like a different person. I haven’t felt that way since I was a child.’
A memory came into my head of Adeena lying in her bed at Hartlepool Hall.
‘You talked in French in your sleep,’ I told her. ‘Why did you speak in French?’
Adeena put her hand to her mouth as if she wanted to stop it betraying her a second time.
‘I spoke French?’
‘You said – Papa, où est-tu?’
‘Did I say anything else?’
‘Nothing I could understand.’
‘I spoke in French because I am part French,’ she said after a moment. ‘I was brought up in Paris. Once my father was a French citizen.’
I was astonished; yet it made sense. I had been wondering how a woman who was supposed to be from a remote mountain province of Afghanistan could speak English so well, and look and behave like a European girl. She was a European girl.
‘But Aseeb said you were from some place with a strange name where Afghan women had fair hair.’
‘Aseeb told a lie. That is not unusual for him. If he has a choice between the truth and a lie he will always tell a lie.’
‘So you are French,’ I repeated, still getting used to the idea.
‘I said part French. My mother was a Palestinian. My father worked in Beirut. That is where he met my mother. They came back to France together. I was born there and we lived in Paris for a long time.’
‘Why did you not tell me this before? You said you were from Afghanistan.’
‘I did not. Aseeb told you that. I told you I worked in Kabul. That was all.’
‘Then how did you get to Afghanistan from Paris?’ I asked. ‘How did you get into so much trouble if you are a French citizen?’
Adeena was silent for a moment, looking at me. Then she said slowly, as if speaking to a small boy:
‘You don’t listen. I said I was part French. I said my father was a French citizen. After he came back from Beirut he became a journalist. He was a man of the left. My mother was very anti-Western. How could she not be, after life in the camps?’
I thought about what she had and hadn’t said to me. It was true she had never directly told me she was from Afghanistan, but she had allowed me to believe it. Now she was telling me another story. At least this one made more sense: so far.
‘My father was offered a job by an Arab news agency.’
‘Al Jazeera?’ I asked. I’d heard of that one.
‘No. Not Al Jazeera. My mother had contacts with a pro-Palestinian organisation. It was through them my father got his job. We all moved to Qatar when I was seventeen. I learned to speak Arabic. My father was away a lot. He travelled in Afghanistan; in Pakistan; in Iran; in Syria. He told the other side of the story.’
‘The other side of which story?’
‘The other side of the stories you are told in the West about what is happening in Iran, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. My father used to say that history is written by the victors. He wanted to report on how the losers felt.’
‘Sounds like a dangerous thing to do,’ I said, without thinking.
‘It was dangerous. He knew that. But he wanted to do it. He had a reputation as an honest man. His writing was often printed in the Western press, especially in France.’
‘So how did you end up in Afghanistan?’
‘My father took us with him. He had an assignment to report on what was happening in the tribal areas in northwest Pakistan. He thought we would be safer with him than back in Qatar. He thought people might try to get at his family to stop him filing his stories.’
‘Which people?’
‘He didn’t say. People like those men who came to find us this morning …’
She stopped talking.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. It changes nothing. I am a citizen of nowhere. The French don’t want me. My father has always been in trouble with the authorities in France, ever since 1968. The Qataris won’t let me back. The only people who looked after me were in Afghanistan and now I can’t go back there either.’
‘Is Adeena even your real name?’ I asked.
‘Yes. It is what they called me in Afghanistan. They could not pronounce my proper name. In France I was called Nadine: Nadine Lemprière. I was brought up as a little French girl. I had friends I played with at school, friends whose houses I visited. I was a
normal, bourgeois child.’
Adeena spoke of her past with an odd mixture of regret and contempt for the little middle-class girl she had once been.
‘What should I call you?’ I asked her. ‘Adeena, or Nadine? Which name do you prefer?’
She shrugged.
‘It doesn’t matter. ‘Now I have told you enough about my family,’ she said. ‘You must tell me more about yourself.’
So I told her a little about how I had been brought up by my parents to believe I should go into the army.
‘Why the army?’ asked Adeena. ‘In Afghanistan it is very dangerous to go into the army. The people don’t trust the soldiers. It is not a good thing to do.’
‘We think it is honourable to serve our country,’ I stated, sounding pompous even to myself.
‘You were in Afghanistan with the army? Aseeb said so.’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And in Iraq. I was in the army for about ten years.’
Adeena frowned.
‘Why do British and American soldiers come to such a poor country? I understand about Iraq. You want their oil. But in Afghanistan there is nothing. Some walnuts. Some goats.’
That was easy. We had been told the answer in briefing after briefing.
‘We went into Afghanistan because al-Qaeda blew up the World Trade Center in New York. The Taliban would not surrender al-Qaeda to the Americans. That’s why we went there.’
‘No Afghan people blew up anything in New York …’
‘I don’t know about that.’ I shrugged. ‘They said we have to stop the Taliban growing opium. And we have to get rid of al-Qaeda. And we have to build roads and hospitals and make the country safe for democracy.’
‘The Taliban never used to grow opium,’ said Adeena. ‘They used to punish people who grew it, or made it into drugs. Now they grow it, it is true, but only to get money for the fight against the British and the Americans.’
‘I don’t know why you are defending them,’ I said. ‘You told me the Taliban were trying to kill you.’
‘Yes. But still I do not understand why all these foreign soldiers are in Afghanistan. They are there to protect politicians who don’t help the people, who take bribes, or who live from drug money. The aid money doesn’t get to the people who need it. I worked in an aid agency in Kabul. I know who gets the money that the British and Americans send. Not the poor people. If you go to Shirpur, where the rich people live, you will see what happens to the aid money. You will see the big houses and the armed guards and the big American cars. The bridges that are built collapse because once the bribe money is paid there is almost nothing left to do the work. The schools and clinics are not built, or they are built so badly they fall down straight away. After the bribe money is paid there is nothing left for teachers, or books, or medicines. The politicians don’t stop this. Their hands are dirty. Everyone knows this. That is why the Taliban can keep finding new recruits.’
It was the longest speech I had heard Adeena make since I had met her. She did not raise her voice. Nobody else in the carriage took any notice, but by the time she had finished talking her voice was shaking.
I couldn’t argue. Maybe Adeena was right. The truth was, I wasn’t really sure why we had been sent to Iraq or why we had been sent to Afghanistan. At different times we had been told it was about bringing democracy to the Middle East, or it had something to do with the ‘war on terror’. But when we were there it often seemed as if we weren’t wanted. It seemed as if a lot of the people we had been sent to save wanted us either dead or gone.
Some of the soldiers I had served with thought a tour in Afghanistan was the ultimate adventure. It was a ‘hot’ war and they got the chance to shoot off thousands of rounds of ammunition. Other less fortunate men may have had a different view: especially if they had been shot or blown up in a roadside ambush. We didn’t really go around thinking much about bringing democracy to the people, we concentrated on staying alive.
‘So what do the Taliban want?’
‘The Taliban want life as it was fifty or a hundred years ago. They dream of a time when all the land was fertile and there were no ruined villages and no foreign invaders. Perhaps there never was such a time. The Taliban want their villages rebuilt and their orchards replanted. They want the fields resown and the pastures cleared of landmines. They want the people to renounce the ways of the West. That is what they want.’
After that she didn’t speak again, but sat looking out of the window at the darkening sky.
‘God knows what we are doing there,’ I said after a while. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what to believe any longer.’
She was silent. Then she asked: ‘Then why were you there if you don’t know what you believe in?’
‘Do you know what you believe in?’ I asked her.
‘I know exactly what I believe in, Richard,’ she replied in a soft voice. ‘And that is more than you can say. That is more than any of you can say.’
For a long moment we looked at each other and then I looked away. I couldn’t face her gaze. I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want to think about what she had said.
We arrived at Euston in the early evening and made for the Underground. I hurried Adeena along through the crowds, clutching her arm above the elbow to keep her with me.
‘Why are we hurrying?’ she asked.
‘In case someone is looking for us at the station.’ I was thinking about how I had used an ATM earlier in the day. Could the security services have picked up on that transaction already? How efficient were they? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to take any risks. We took the tube to Camden Town and then walked through the streets to my flat. When we came to the head of the road, opposite Mohan’s grocery shop, I hesitated.
‘Adeena, go into that shop and buy something. Here’s some money.’
‘Buy what?’
‘Anything. I just want you out of sight for the next five minutes while I look around the flat and make sure that nobody is waiting for us. Can you do that?’
She took the money, nodding, and hurried across the road. I walked on, looking for … I was not quite sure what. Large unmarked vans or silver people carriers with aerials sticking up from the roof; men peering into shop windows and not moving on; people fiddling around at manholes, pretending to be workmen or telephone engineers. As far as I could remember most of the cars parked along the road were familiar. But this was Camden, not Baghdad. I hadn’t a hope of spotting a watcher if there was one in this safe, familiar environment.
There was no point in waiting. I went back up the road and found Adeena coming out of the shop with a family-sized pack of porridge oats.
‘What am I meant to do with that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I had to buy something. This is English food, is it not?’
We walked back to my flat, and I opened the door with my key. I stood for a moment on the threshold. Was there an unfamiliar smell? A stale smell, of someone’s body odour? I sniffed for a moment and then shook my head. I was imagining it. I looked into each room to check no one was lurking there, but it is difficult to lurk in a flat the size of a shoebox.
‘Are we going to stay here tonight?’ asked Adeena.
‘No. It’s too dangerous. Let me get some things and then we’ll go and check into a hotel for the night. In the morning we’ll decide what to do next.’
I found a bag and packed a few clothes, then grabbed my passport and my chequebook. I thought about taking the gun from its hiding place in the sofa but hesitated. If I was stopped and searched with that on me, life really would become very difficult. I hid it in a new place, in my sock drawer. That would fool them.
We were not in the flat for more than ten minutes. I had it covered. Keep moving, and they can’t catch you. I was determined to be too smart for whoever might be interested in us: the man called Nick Davies that Eck had told me about. Or Aseeb, wanting Adeena back.
From the moment we left my flat my pulse started racing. I was pa
ranoid: that was all there was to it. Two years of living on the edge in the Middle East had turned me paranoid. I was looking over my shoulder again. I was imagining people following us. There was a man walking along the pavement opposite, keeping abreast of us. As I glanced at him he went into a takeaway. It was probably nothing. I tried to calm down. We walked back to Camden High Street. From time to time I glanced behind me. The man I had noticed earlier was nowhere to be seen. God, I was jumpy.
As we passed a large supermarket Adeena said:
‘I need to get some things.’
‘What things?’
‘Woman’s things. Please can you give me some money? I have none.’
I gave her a couple of twenty-pound notes.
‘You go in there,’ I said, pointing her in the direction of the entrance. ‘Keep walking until you find what you want. I’ll wait for you here by the newsagent’s stand.’
‘Then afterwards we can eat,’ she announced. ‘I am hungry.’
While Adeena was in the supermarket, I tried to think where we could stay that wouldn’t involve too much more walking; and where we could eat. I wondered what sort of food Adeena liked. We could try a little Indian restaurant I knew not far from here.
After a few minutes there was no sign of Adeena. I waited a few minutes more, then decided to try to find her.
She wasn’t in Fresh Fruit and Vegetables. I imagined that she was probably in that shopping trance people sometimes go into, staring at the shelves. If she’d just come here from Kabul she wouldn’t be used to shops like this. She wasn’t in Wines and Spirits. She wasn’t in Dairy Products, or Frozen Foods. Then where was she? She wasn’t at the Bakery, or the Fish Counter. I continued to walk along the last aisle. Then, not finding her, I started to search the shop more thoroughly.
