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There were no seats left on my flight, so we flew out separately. The day after I arrived, when he was still in the air, a French journalist was shot by a rebel sniper. Her name was Helen too. Hélène Graham.

I was there when she died, which sounds more dramatic than it was. We were on opposite sides of the same square, I heard the snap of rifle fire and by the time I’d turned Hélène was dead. It wasn’t even that rare an occurrence and it’s getting worse. Once the news agencies started arming local teenagers with recording equipment, journalists and photographers began dying weekly. They were cheap and they would take risks no trained Western journalist or photographer was prepared to consider. That, and they brought new meaning to blending in.

What was special about Hélène’s death was that she was Western and a woman.

We barely knew each other, but when the man sent by the French embassy learned I also lived in Paris he assumed Hélène and I must have been friends and made me promise to write to her parents to say it was quick, she was wearing a flak jacket and she’d been warned of the dangers. I agreed, simply to get rid of him. But it made the whole thing even more fraught. The next day our original minder vanished and a new one turned up in his place.

‘Today will be different,’ was his opening gambit. ‘No bodies, all right?’

I nodded and he took it as assent.

Ahmed was in his mid-twenties, neatly dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt. He lost his tie the moment the government minder disappeared. Ahmed was also a government minder, but he was younger and spoke English with a Birmingham accent, because that’s where he went to university. He wanted to go to university in America, he said, but he wasn’t clever enough. I wondered if he knew how rude that was and realised he was too wide-eyed for the insult to be intentional.

He’d been told I was famous, poor boy. The famous English woman photographer he had to impress. I wanted to say it wasn’t true. I wasn’t famous, at least not in the way he meant. But then I was there for the
Herald Tribune
so maybe that counted.

I liked the hotel suite they gave me – who wouldn’t? – with its sitting room and two bathrooms and a huge television that got nothing except the official channel. It was a cocoon from the outside world. Just as it was intended to be. I liked the sleek black limousine waiting for me outside. To be honest, I liked the lack of a child’s cries echoing through the wall and the absence of school children screaming in the playground and the clang of a school bell.

That was how I found myself being nurse-maided round the safe – from Assad’s point of view – parts of Syria by a well-dressed young man with a Birmingham accent and a Marks & Spencer suit.

‘We’re agreed …?’ Ahmed asked, jerking me back to the air conditioning and tinted windows.

He was young and anxious and eager to impress; and on the wrong side of a particularly nasty war, as if all wars aren’t nasty; except his side used to be the right side, and he was too young to know what happened to people who used to be on the right side before the rules changed and they became the enemy.

‘The jacket …’

‘I don’t need a flak jacket.’

He looked at me, eyes skimming my floppy shirt and jeans, my Converse and the camera bag now hanging from my hand, but which would be on my hip when the limousine delivered us to where the pictures were.

I knew where the pictures were. I could hear them. I also knew we wouldn’t be going there. The whoosh of rockets and the crump of tank fire and the small-arms chatter that became as familiar as birdsong in cities like this. Ahmed was impressed I didn’t want the heavy jacket he’d brought me. He thought it was bravery. Better that than the truth, which was that I hated the way they made you stand out.

‘We have another journalist joining us,’ Ahmed said. ‘We collect him from an appointment at the Excelsior.’ This wasn’t in the plan, but I went with the flow. By the hotel entrance, a thickset man, blond hair cropped short, was sheltering in the safety of a doorway. He looked left and right and ran at a crouch to the limousine, sliding himself in beside me.

‘You,’ he said, grinning.

‘Carl …! Long time no … you know.’

Ahmed was surprised. ‘You know each other?’

‘Old friends,’ Carl said. ‘Shouldn’t we get moving? Snipers …’

‘No snipers,’ Ahmed said firmly. ‘This area is loyal.’

Carl rolled his eyes but said nothing. His hand reached across and found mine, squeezing briefly. ‘Good to see you.’

‘You’re … friends?’ Ahmed was watching us in the mirror.

‘Not that kind of friends,’ I said, and behind his stubble and shades Ahmed blushed.

‘I knew his—’ I began to say.

‘We separated,’ Carl cut in.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ Carl said. ‘We just couldn’t make it work. You know how it is …’

We exchanged a glance and I decided to leave it there. Ahmed seemed OK for an official Syrian fixer but that was still what he was. Neither of us knew how he’d take to a conversation about Carl’s ex, a pretty, high-maintenance Venezuelan boy with a thing for black Lycra. In a bar, in Soho, one time when Art was away, Carl had showed me pictures on his iPhone. He accidentally flicked forward when he meant to flick back and the photograph I saw showed Kris looking very tanned, very nude and very excited … We agreed he was fabulous but probably a little too high maintenance for me.

Ahmed was watching us closely in the rear-view mirror, trying to work out what this conversation was about, whether he should be worried by it. He saw me watching and I smiled, shrugged, and went back to business. ‘No corpses,’ I told Carl. ‘Has that been mentioned?’

I could see him wondering what we were doing here.

‘What then?’ Carl asked.

‘Normal life … Schools, markets, playgrounds, women shopping, buildings.’

It hadn’t bothered me too much, when I’d agreed. Since Iraq I’d lost my stomach for corpses, preferring my wreckage in the form of bricks and mortar. But I had a bad feeling about this and, as the day unfolded in a round of the Syrian equivalent of Potemkin villages, it was proved right. Ludicrously overstocked local shops selling fresh goods to neatly dressed women; smiling school children happily astonished to see us while being able to greet us in carefully rehearsed English.

Carl slid a camera on to his lap in the car, changed the lens and adjusted to video. In the old days there’d be the click of the motor drive, but digital is silent; and I knew, as Carl lifted his lens in line with the bottom of the window, while trying to keep it low enough to stay out of Ahmed’s line of sight, that he was hoping to snap something, anything to make this day worthwhile.

There was an absurd normality to the life these people were living. To me, this faux normality was worse than outright fear. How could anyone …

Hot tears spilled over before I could look away. I shook my head in fury. How dare I compare my life to theirs?

‘Helen?’ Carl said.

I turned my face to the window.

‘Are you all right?’

I shook my head. ‘Stop,’ I told Ahmed.

He took one look at my face in the mirror and pulled over by a concrete substation. It had the skull for danger and a lightning zap for electricity you’d find anywhere in the world. He looked worried when I opened my door. No doubt there was a child lock but he’d left that too late.

‘Where are you going?’

‘In there.’ I pointed to a blind alley brutally deserted in the afternoon sun. Shadow cut a sharp line down one wall and across the dirt floor. At best, it would smell of hot dog shit, infinitely preferable to the stench of bodies that had filled my head a few seconds earlier.

‘I’ll go with you.’

I had expected him to forbid me to leave the car. There were rules. In a situation like this there were always rules. I probably subscribed to them when I scrawled my name across the piece of paper Ahmed thrust in front of me earlier.

‘Ahmed …’

He blushed.

I’ve peed in worse places, but that wasn’t what I intended. Stumbling from the limousine I pushed myself into the shadows and threw up, only just missing my shoes. I threw up a second time and spat in the dry dust. It was disgusting of me to see my life with Art reflected in theirs. Yet I understood what was happening here in a way I doubted Carl could. I understood why these people were going through their routines, pretending everything was normal. They hoped that in pretending everything was normal they could make it so.

At the end of the alley was an open door. All around was silent, but I could have sworn I saw a flicker of movement, a small boy watching me.

Common sense said go back to the car, go back to the hotel, try again tomorrow. I went through the door all the same, through the door, through a ruined house and into a courtyard. There was no one here. No sign of anyone having passed through. The air was thicker here. It smelt of dog shit and open drains. A burnt-out motorbike lay on its side. I snapped it without thought. Turned to take a second shot as I walked away. At the street corner up ahead I froze. Office blocks had once stood either side. Now the street was a canyon of broken concrete, with sunlight lancing on to rubble. At the far end, the front wall of a bank had a hole blasted through it like a ragged rose window.

My throat tightened and my chest locked as I stood trapped in the cross hairs of something deadlier than a sniper’s rifle.

We talk of being frozen by terror. Of being struck dumb by shock. Mostly we keep talking because we don’t know how to say what we want to say. Those are the times that pictures say it for us.

I raised my camera to take the shot. I knew I should bracket the exposures, play with the field of focus, and see what changing the shutter speeds might do. I did none of these. I simply took my photograph and headed back to the car.

Carl noticed the splatter on my jeans. ‘You all right?’

I nodded, glanced at Ahmed, who was obviously listening.

‘Tripped,’ I said.

Ahmed wasn’t sure what I was talking about and Carl didn’t believe me anyway. Pulling his iPhone from his pocket, he opened the message app, set the screen for a new message with the place for the number left blank and slid it across.

I keyed in my own number.

We talked in silence, side by side on the hot plasticised leather of the limousine, and the most Carl did was open the window slightly when Ahmed asked, apologetically, if I might have stepped in something while I was in the alley.

‘Thank you,’ I said, when I climbed out of the car.

Ahmed smiled, looking young enough to still be at school, and I hoped I wasn’t about to get him into trouble. I knew what I had. The photograph said everything and nothing. Some people would simply see a ruined street. Others would see the cathedral.

Carl found me in the hotel bar later, nursing a vodka and tonic that tasted mostly of synthetic quinine. He nodded to the stool opposite, giving me the chance to say, No, I want to be alone. When I didn’t, he took it, ordered a beer, and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I shook my head, inclining it across the room to where Art sat glowering.

‘He’s pissed off,’ I whispered. ‘Thinks I should have told him where I was going. He could have come too.’

Carl made a
What-the-Fuck?
face and nodded.

‘Won’t hang around too long then. We all know how he feels about your gay best friend.’

Leaning over to see what I was looking at, he turned my iPad towards him and flicked through the images until he came to the photograph I’d taken earlier. I had already sent it down the wire to London. Unapproved and without permission. No bodies. And yet it was almost worse.

‘Fuck,’ he said, then sat in silence for a long while.

Eventually he handed me back my iPad and reached for his beer bottle, raised it to me and took a large swig. ‘There are days,’ he said, ‘when I wonder if I should simply give up. Most of them happen when I look at work like yours.’ Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, and with a glance at Art, wandered off.

All the rest of that evening I was aware of Art, on the far side of the bar. More a presence than a person. He appeared engrossed in his work; an in-depth report that his agency hoped would make the news section of a Sunday paper. His story. His big project. He’d seen the picture I took. He knew it would now dominate the front pages. He looked up only rarely. But never at me. Only shaking his head when I asked if he wanted a beer. He hadn’t been drinking. Just the one, to be polite. He didn’t really drink, not any more. Not like those early days when he could match pint for pint and shot for shot with the worst of them. Didn’t like what it did, he said pointedly.

I stared at him defiantly and ordered another. I knew I shouldn’t, alcohol mixed badly with my migraine pills, but it was part of my armoury of tiny rebellions.

Only once, when I glanced across, did I catch him looking my way, his eyes dark, his face full of shadows. Discomfort settling like acid in my stomach.

‘Do you even know what a team is, Helen?’

Art’s voice coming out of the darkness made my heart lurch.

It was almost an hour since he’d flipped his laptop shut, declared himself knackered and gone to bed. Until that moment, I realised, I’d nurtured a small hope that, if I lingered in the bar long enough, he’d be asleep; but he was leaning against the wall by the window, looking out across night-time Damascus.