Small Wars (21 page)
Hal sat at the breakfast table and drank his coffee, looking at Clara’s letter, lying near him. He had dismissed Adile the week before, embarrassed by having her around the house with him, a single man. A cleaning woman came in every few days. There wasn’t much to do. He didn’t make much mess.
He looked at Clara’s looped, schoolgirlish handwriting on the envelope, which was lightweight and battered, as if it had been all the way to some sorting office in Scotland or Arabia before coming to him. Just seeing her writing undid him, as if she were reaching out her hand and touching him, and he was endangered by it.
He put one finger on the letter and slid it towards him. He took out his pocket knife. The point found the gap, the secret crease gave to the blade. He pulled out the letter and laid it flat.
‘Hal,’ she had written. Then he read the crossed-out part, and seemed to see her do it. He heard her voice.
Do you remember all the letters we used to write?
This was no good. Just seeing her writing was impossible. He put his hand over the letter and looked up, out of the small window across the table from him. He lifted his hand, glancing down, and read sideways, out of the corner of his eye.
I did feel the ‘wronged wife’. Hal – I even hated you.
He didn’t have time now. Kirby was on his way. There was no time for this. He carefully refolded it, first along its original crease, then again and again, until it was a small, fat square, using the back of his thumbnail to force the folds. He got up and cleared his place, washing the plate under the tap and wiping the crumbs away carefully.
As he dried his hands he heard Kirby pull up outside. He folded the tea-towel. Passing the table he picked up the letter and put it into his pocket. He left the house.
Clara’s breakfast at the Ledra Palace with the girls was far from solitary. It was a rowdy affair. There were the other guests, and quite a few children. Waiters with thick linen cloths carried heavy hot silver pots, dodging the chairs and sticking-out feet. Clara had no letter from Hal, but a week-old copy of
The Times
, much read, that she was trying to glance at between buttering the girls’ toast.
‘No! Meg!’
Meg had pulled a big corner from the paper, tearing off a large piece and closing her hands over it, trying to fold it in half.
‘All right, here, then.’ Clara helped her, folding the torn piece of newspaper neatly, once in half, twice, smoothing it with her thumb. ‘See, darling? Like that…’
Meg patted it with her small hands, like starfish. Clara lifted one and kissed the dimples where the knuckles were.
‘There you are!’
Clara looked up. Gracie was marching towards her, breakfasted already, makeup on.
‘Shops today.’
The hotel was outside the old city walls. The streets within them were narrow and jumbled, more picturesque, but dirtier too. The best shops were inside the walls, though, and the main shopping street, Ledra Street, was where everybody went; it was a long straight road that ran the length of the old town.
The road that Hal’s Land Rover was on was high and narrow, a track between villages that, without the army vehicles rolling over the baked ground, would have been little used.
It was a white road. On all sides the island reached away from it. There were the pine-covered hills to the north, a giant falling-away to miles and miles of dry rocks, troughs and gullies to the west, and ahead, the small road ribboned downwards and there was a scattering of leaning buildings, derelict.
Hal’s vehicle, alone, crossed the spit between the villages and Kirby drove slowly. Hal, next to Kirby, had his hand in his pocket with Clara’s letter, compressed, closed inside it. He had left Lieutenant Thompson’s platoon at Omodos, and he was travelling to Kalo Chorio to get to McKinney and two sections that were doing a house-to-house there.
Ledra Street was lined with clothes shops filled with imported fashions, and cafés. Gracie loved going there, and would have gone every day if Clara had agreed. You could post your letters in the red post boxes. You could buy talcum powder, chocolates, gloves.
They would have the car drop them at the top, near the walls, then walk down, chatting and window-shopping, saying hello to people. They always saw people they – or at least Gracie – knew: diplomats’ wives, army wives, all kinds of other English people. Clara was coming to know them too.
‘Here,’ said Gracie to the driver. ‘Just here, thank you.’
The bicycles were small-looking and far away along the white road. There were two of them. Thin white dust hovered over the road and shimmered.
Hal didn’t think anything of them, apart from noting their approach, until one of the figures, seeing his vehicle, jumped off his bike and disappeared, down the steep hill into the bushes.
‘Hello,’ said Kirby, and Hal leaned out to see better.
The second bicycle stopped. They were nearer now, just a couple of hundred yards away. The boy – it was a boy – still on the bike was shouting down the hill to his friend, and the abandoned bike lay on its side.
After a moment, the boy stopped shouting, glanced towards Hal’s Land Rover, and started towards them again. There was a basket on the front of his bike, covered by a cloth.
Kirby stopped the Land Rover and cut the engine. They could hear the bike squeaking as the boy laboured up the stony hill towards them on the white road. He was whistling. Nice touch, thought Hal, getting out. Kirby got out, too.
‘Halt,’ he said. ‘
Stamata. Dur
.’
And the boy halted. He was about fifteen. He rested on one foot, his forearms leaning on the handlebars, squinting at them.
Hal walked over to him. If the other hadn’t stopped, he never would have noticed them. He was still in two minds whether to search him.
‘What’s in there?’ said Kirby, not expecting to be understood, but gesturing.
The boy suddenly abandoned his pretence, and made a lunge away from them, but Kirby, nimble on his big feet, grabbed his thin arm with his big hand, restraining him.
‘We would have passed him,’ said Hal.
He went to the bicycle, which had fallen in the scuffle. A bundle in a white cloth had fallen from it onto the stony road. He picked it up and lifted the corners of the cloth. Inside it was a smoothly oiled pistol, standard British Army issue, a Webley .38. The boy wriggled in Kirby’s grasp.
Stupid, thought Hal. Stupid. Some bloody uncle, or his father or some other sneaky Cyp bastard having kids do things like this. Bloody hell. And now – He looked at the boy. Now he’d have to take him in.
‘Sir? What are we going to do? Take him on to Kalo with us? Where will we put him? We could go back to Epi with him.’
Yes. It was eleven o’clock. They could take him to the guardroom at Episkopi and still be up at Kalo in time.
The boy had gone silent and was staring at the ground. He could be in the Episkopi guardroom, in a cell there, waiting for questioning, in less than an hour.
‘Which village are you from?’ Hal said to the boy. ‘Where’s your mother? Are you coming with us now?’
‘Sir,’ said Kirby. ‘He don’t understand you, does he?’
Hal walked off, ten feet away from them. He was still holding the pistol. He took the cloth off it. The gun was sleek and heavy in his hand. He checked the chamber. It was empty. He walked fast up to the boy. ‘Stupid!’ he shouted. ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’ He held the gun up to the boy’s temple and pressed it hard into his head, shouting, ‘
Do you know what will happen to you? Do you know?
’
There was silence for a moment, just the boy staring at him, then Hal lowered the gun and walked away again. Kirby, nervous now, wiped the sweat from his face with his free hand.
Hal stood with his back to them both.
Kirby looked up and down the empty road and said, ‘Sir, he’s old enough to know better.’ After a moment, he added, ‘We’ve taken in kids younger than him before, sir. That gun was on its way somewhere.’
Hal saw the other boy in his mind, the blood and water on him and the floor, his breath dragging in and out of his throat. He didn’t know if that boy had been one of his arrests – he hadn’t been able to see his face properly. He wouldn’t be able to tell one from another anyway.
He turned back to them and came up to the boy and looked, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the gun loosely in his hand.
This boy, this particular boy, had jaggedly cut hair, short into the neck but growing out. He had a slightly flattened nose and high cheekbones, giving his face a Slav look. He had scars on his knees. Sweat was soaking in patches through his shirt and a wristwatch with a dirty canvas strap, much too big for him, hung down over his hand. This particular boy looked back at Hal bravely.
Hal didn’t have a choice. ‘We’ll take him back to Epi,’ he said.
Getting back into the Land Rover, he pulled his hand from his pocket, unthinkingly throwing the small thick square of paper away from him onto the road as Kirby put the cuffed boy into the back seat.
Clara and Gracie left the car at Eleftheria Square at eleven o’clock, walking through the darkness under the deep medieval arches as the clocks struck the hour. Clara hadn’t wanted to be on Ledra Street, but Gracie was very keen to find a new dress to impress David. His leave was at the end of the week.
They had the children with them. The girls were in pinafores and Larry and Tommy had shorts and white shirts, Tommy with braces because his shorts always slipped down.
Clara had no sense of being followed or watched. Her anxiety, the current of fear that had run underneath everything, had quieted recently. There were crowds here, anyway, and open daytime normality, nothing to fear. ‘I think I must surrender to the inevitable,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘It’s smocks for me from now on. I may as well get used to the idea. I can’t possibly keep on like this – look at me!’
‘You’ll be much more comfortable,’ said Gracie, ‘and cooler too. Perhaps we’ll find something today.’
‘I shall look like an old Greek lady.’
‘Never. Elegance always.’
They had emerged into the inner city, and crossed the roads that circled it to enter Ledra Street, which, in late morning, was teeming.
The women held the children’s hands firmly in the crowds.
‘I saw a printed organza,’ said Gracie, and – exactly at that moment – Clara heard the shots.
She didn’t recognise them as shots. She couldn’t place the sound. It was a cracking sound – a sharp knocking – and she saw Gracie going sideways away from her and falling.
The world slowed. Clara saw the crowds near them pull back as Gracie fell. A woman in a yellow dress was putting her hands up to her face, her handbag hanging from her wrist. An old man with a sagging belly over belted trousers threw his arms out wide. Then again, in that infinite second, the sharp high crack, and Clara felt a quick hot pricking feeling low down in her stomach.
That’s odd, Clara thought slowly, letting go of Lottie’s hand. She heard screams. They weren’t hers. She saw that Gracie, falling, had pulled Tommy down with her into a heap on the dirty pavement. There were cigarette ends on the pavement. The strong heat was still there in her abdomen, but Clara didn’t feel any pain. She thought, Poor Tommy – then her vision was splashed with black. There were dark fireworks across her sight. She looked down, aware of Lottie’s face looking up at her, through the dark patches. She saw that her hand and the front of her dress were covered with blood. She didn’t know where it was coming from. She was falling. She saw the pavement, detailed, come up at her but didn’t feel herself hitting it.
Like Gracie, she had kept hold of Meg’s hand, and they fell – with Lottie standing alone, watching – like people being tripped up in a race at a village fair, tumbling, and they lay, jumbled together, the blood fast pooling out, creeping shinily over the pavement.
The mass of people reacted, pulling back in a wave, then there were sounds of panic, people looking to see where the shots had come from, but the gunman, hiding the smooth pistol easily, had walked away.
After just a very few seconds, English people, Greek and Turkish, strangers to them, came closer. Somebody leaned down. Somebody knelt. The woman in the yellow dress tried to pull the children away, her husband helped her. Most, though, carried on walking, turning their faces away. Some covered their mouths, as if the two Englishwomen shot down were run-over dogs, to be passed with eyes averted and hurriedly left behind.
Gracie was lying on her back, with her hips and legs twisted in the opposite direction from her shoulders. Her eyes were unflinching in the brightness. The children began to scream. It was hard to tell which ones were screaming.
Clara’s eyes were blinking fast. She was trying to sit up and see past the black shapes in her vision, but she couldn’t seem to move at all. She was sharply aware of her children, and that she was lying down. The heat had spread out now through her hips and stomach and become the centre of her. She was trying to speak, and stuttering. A part of her could see she was lying on the street, but the rest of her was lost in it. She wanted to say, ‘My girls, please, help,’ but she couldn’t speak. She could see people leaning over her. She didn’t know any of them. There were strangers leaning over her and touching her. She couldn’t hear anything. She began to be very frightened. She thought, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no…
It took an hour to get back to Episkopi.
Hal put the boy into the guardroom, hating the time it took, the paperwork. It was hard to make himself keep standing there as the sergeant on the desk fiddled with the carbon paper, clumsily, unable to adjust it so that it wasn’t creased, oblivious to Hal’s tension and the fearful boy in front of him. The air was stifling in that place. It still stank.
‘Just a mo,’ he said, smoothing out the creases, registering the oiled pistol, tagging it, and it was nearly another hour before they could get away.
At last they were released, and the boy taken inside. Hal didn’t watch him go.