The Adjacent (22 page)

She was called Marie-Louise Pejman, born of Anglo-Iranian parents, both now deceased. Her father had been a government scientist in Teheran, her mother a teacher at the English school in the city. Their deaths were recorded as natural causes, but both had been in their forties at the time of death. Teheran was heavily shelled by anti-republican forces when régime change took place – from the dates it seemed likely they had been caught up in that. After their deaths she was evacuated to IRGB and after leaving school she changed her name to Louise Paladin. She was known to friends and some of her colleagues as Lou. She was now 39. She lived in London with a partner, but all references to the partner were greyed out on the screen and did not print in the hard copy. This was the convention used by the databank for information thought to be inaccurate or out of date.

Her profession was described as a supply teacher, English, Art, Design and Farsi, for students of either sex in the age group 11–18 years. She had become a full-time teacher in recent months, and was described as having been seconded to OOR.

Tarent had read many of these print-outs in the past and like most people had learned to try to see past the bureaucratic annotations and interpretations. In Lou Paladin’s case, there were not many of
these, although her matter of secondment to the OOR had been annotated as ‘provisional’. As well as all this, there were the usual extra factual details of no great interest to Tarent: her place of birth, education, security rating, address, and so on.

The working protocol of tactile or card ID was that users were able to access data at equivalence levels – this meant that the lower of the two was usually the level at which information would be available to read or be exchanged. It followed that Lou Paladin had learned as much about him as he had learned about her, or could do if he took an interest and read through to the end.

He handed her back her ID card.

‘Do you normally share this sort of thing with strangers?’

‘No. But because you palmed my door, I was able to read what they have on the record about you. Isn’t it fair that you should read mine?’

‘I suppose. Is that normal in this place?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘So you are a teacher. Does that mean there are children on this base?’

‘Not now. I’m waiting for a ride out of here, but my manager is not sure where I should go. London is off-limits at the moment and the DSGs are spread about, so no schools have been set up yet.’

‘Why not London?’

‘It depends if I want to go on working for the Office. If I do that I have to wait until a school is ready, which means staying here. If I hand in my resignation I could go back to London any time I like. But you know what happened in London.’

‘Yes, but I only heard about it yesterday. I’ve been abroad, out of contact with what happened. Were you living in London?’

‘I was in a flat in Notting Hill.’

‘That was under the—?’

‘The May 10 attack. Yes. I’d also have to find my own way back to London, and I’m not sure I’d know how to do that.’

‘Things are that bad?’ Tarent said.

‘Private travel has become almost impossible because of the restrictions. There have been insurgent attacks all over the country, so it’s risky to drive anywhere, even when the roads are opened. Trains were in use until recently, provided you could put up with the security measures, but the last storm did a lot of damage to bridges and embankments. I suppose you’re sorry you came back from wherever it was.’

‘I was in Turkey.’

‘Yes, of course. I read that. You were in Anatolia. And I know your wife died. I’m sorry.’

She glanced away. The wind was high again and rain was slanting down the window glass. There was a cold draught from the window.

‘Why did you come to my room?’ Tarent said.

‘Well, I thought I should apologize for last night. There was no way I was going to let you in, but I think I could have handled it more gently.’

‘It worked out all right,’ Tarent said, looking around at the satisfactory room where he had ended up. ‘I think I might have done the same if it was the other way around. I’m no longer sure why I’m here. There was supposed to be some kind of debriefing interview about what happened to me in Anatolia, but that seems to have been abandoned by the people here. Like you, I’m going to have to decide what to do next.’

She leaned towards him intently.

‘When you arrived back in Britain, did you travel through London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you go anywhere near May 10? In west London? Did you go through Notting Hill?’

‘We passed close to that part of London, but I saw nothing,’ he said. ‘I was not allowed to see. I was in a car but they dimmed the windows. There was a brief glimpse: I just saw blackened ground.’

‘Before I came here,’ she said, ‘I lived in Notting Hill. That was more or less the epicentre of the May 10 incident. I lived there for more than ten years. Please, tell me anything you saw. I need to know!’

‘Do you have friends there?’

‘My whole life was there!’

She was crying. She raised an arm against her mouth and face, wiped it roughly over her eyes, turned away, looked around. She went to the kitchenette, found a roll of paper towels, wadded two of them up and held them to her face. She was sobbing, saying words in such misery that Tarent could no longer make them out.

We are both casualties, he thought, watching her, this stranger, but because she was a stranger he was thinking about himself, thinking about what she had described as a whole life. Her whole life, but his too.

What did he have left of that life? His parents now gone, no sisters or brothers. No roots, just endless travel as a child and temporary stays in towns whose names he never discovered, a series of schools where he eventually learned to read and write English. That was his
liberation, an escape into the world of words. By the time he was ten he was more or less settled and the distractions of journeys were behind him. From there he finished school, passed through university, started work, moved into freelance photography, a further escape into the world of images. That was his career, but what had his life been? What was the whole life of which he had just become aware? Everything focused on Melanie, that relationship, all the good years, a few of the bad periods, the times of mute anger and difficult silences, the contented memories that filled in. The first romantic years, then later the rows, the tears, the sexy reconciliations, the brief holidays. No children, but they had tried for a while. Long worries about money: everyone knew how badly nurses were paid and his own income was intermittent and dependent on others hiring him and paying him. Then the trips abroad – first his, then hers. They disrupted everything, although they provided a gloss of achievement, a sense that something was actually being done, but in reality the foreign visits made them foreigners to each other. Finally Anatolia and the disaster. Since then, a return to the world of sanity he had left and once understood, only to discover everything in that was breaking down too, the peace, the society, the weather, the economy, law and order, even the stabilizing forces of consensus government, a civilian police force, a free press. Nothing was as it had been, nothing was safe. The world was being marked illogically with small triangular areas of destruction, like patches of amnesia which could never be penetrated or cured.

What could he tell this woman about her home, her past whole life, that had existed somewhere in Notting Hill, now an illogical black scar on the face of London?

She was sitting between him and the window, her head bent forward. She was hiding her face – perhaps she did not want him to see her crying. She threw aside the paper towels, which had become a sodden pulp, tore off two more. Behind her head was the square of sky revealed by the window. It was still early in the morning, yet there was hardly any light coming down from the sky. A great blackness of cloud obscured everything. The wind was rising, and every now and then the building shook as a stronger than usual gust impacted against the outer walls.

The woman moved across to him, and sat on the floor beside his legs.

‘You’re crying,’ she said, and rested a hand on his arm.

‘You are too.’

‘I –’

Tarent folded himself sideways to reach towards her, letting an arm rest on her shoulders. He clamped his eyes closed, trying to hold back the tears. When he breathed in he had to sob because he could not help it, but his chest was still stiff after receiving the blast and the irregularity of trying to breathe through sobs made him cough and gasp aloud with pain. He slid further forward in the chair and down, so that he landed on the floor beside her.

She was holding his head now, gently brushing his hair. They were acting as lovers who did not know each other, who had no love, just need – she pulled his face so that it rested on her breast while he tried to control his breathing, tried to remember what it was she had asked him.

When he moved suddenly her spectacles fell from her nose, knocked against his face, slid down his arm and landed on the floor. She made no move to recover them. He could see their half-moon shapes beside her legs. They were stained with tears. He remembered the hard, level look those lenses had given to her eyes as she slammed the door against him the night before, but now she was caressing his head and neck, trying to calm him with a compassionate touch. Her chest was heaving.

She said, ‘I’m sorry, Tibor. I don’t know what we can do.’

So he closed his eyes and waited for his breathing to subside, feeling once again that he was cracking out of the hardened carapace of his past, sliding vulnerably into an unknown future. The reality of the present moment was temporary, incomprehensible. Behind him was loss, ahead danger, and nothing that followed would be as it should be, and nothing was certain any more.

Feeling her hand on the side of his head, one of her fingers resting on his cheek, the rest of them reaching down tenderly towards his lips, he said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Louise. Lou Paladin.’

‘Oh yes. Did I tell you mine?’

‘Of course.’

The darkness outside increased. They could hear the roof above them creaking and groaning as the gale swept roughly against it. The time went by while they pressed against each other, no longer speaking, just holding and touching, waiting for something to change. Hailstones rattled against the window.

MY NAME IS JANE FLOCKHART AND FOR MOST OF MY CAREER I
worked as a feature journalist for a web-based newspaper. I was one of the last people to see Professor Thijs Rietveld alive. He committed suicide during the evening of the day on which I interviewed him.

Colleagues and friends have sometimes asked me how I feel about that, their implication being, I suppose, that it was my line of questioning or my aggressive or confrontational stance that tipped the great man over. He was widely perceived to be undergoing a period of deep disillusionment, self-absorption and depression, answering no letters or emails, never agreeing to meet journalists or fellow researchers, and had famously buried himself in a small village somewhere in the English countryside, living under an assumed name. There were reported to be MI5 operatives monitoring his activities, and keeping all strangers away.

Almost none of this was in fact the case. It was true that he was living alone in a quiet village, but it was an open secret to the people who lived there who he was. The place was, incidentally, not at all an obscure hamlet concealed from the world, but a fairly large village in a popular area, much favoured by City workers who commuted to their jobs in London. There was a mainline station there, with trains every half-hour into Charing Cross Station. Rietveld’s house was on the main street of the village, although not close to where the shops were. There were no secret agents anywhere near him and probably never had been. As for him not speaking to journalists: I contacted him from the office of my
newspaper in London, made no secret of who I worked for and requested an interview and photographs. He agreed at once, and I travelled down to meet him early the following week.

I went by train because I wanted to see for myself what the village was like from his point of view – he did not drive and was known to dislike cars. I planned to walk around the village before approaching his house: to see where the nearest shops were, how far it was to walk to the station, and so on. The photographer was planning to drive down and would meet me at the house later, towards the end of my interview.

I had interviewed a Nobel laureate before – the writer, philosopher and pacifist Bai Kuang Han, who was awarded the Peace Price in 2023 – but Thijs Rietveld was a much more formidable challenge for a non-specialist journalist. Until about twenty years earlier he had been working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, engaged in theoretical physics. It was for this work in sub-particulate dynamics that he was belatedly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, but the making of the award coincided with the first results of his more recent work. This had the unfortunate effect, for Rietveld, of drawing attention to it. Working with a team of quantum field theorists Rietveld’s analytical research work into the so-called Perturbative Adjacent Field had been until then shrouded in secrecy and high-level security.

At the time the Nobel was announced, few people had heard of him – he emerged from the obscurity of the closed unit where the PAF was being developed, flew to Oslo, made a short, gracious speech of acceptance in Dutch, then returned to Strasbourg, the location of the laboratory. It was only then that the public became aware of the PAF in the most general of terms – the popular press, guessing and simplifying, immediately described it as an infallible weapon of passive defence. It was soon known as The Weapon That Will End War. Within a year, though, the wider scientific community had been informed of the result of the PAF research, and not long afterwards it was universally understood in those circles. Rietveld modestly shared the credit for the development with the other scientists, but because he was a Nobel laureate he was assumed to be the team leader. It was in fact his theoretical work that led to the development of a practical application.