The Road Between Us (24 page)

Niall leads the way through the crowd and up through the tunnel into the watery afternoon sunshine. Their seats are three from the front, below and slightly across from the Royal Box. The Princess Royal is already in hers, having arrived a few minutes earlier by helicopter. Edward stands and stares out over an ocean of faces. The stadium seems to have doubled in size from how he remembers it.

‘What do you think?’ Niall shouts. He sounds pleased, as if this were his stadium.

‘A new stand?’

‘Yep. Seats eighty thousand now.’ Niall sees the French
ambassador arriving and holds out his arms in greeting. The two men kiss on each cheek. Niall introduces the ambassador to Edward with a comment that seems light but also vaguely patronizing: ‘He used to be our man in Oslo.’

‘I was only deputy head of mission,’ Edward corrects. ‘I never made it to full ambassador.’

‘I know all about Monsieur Northcote,’ the ambassador says. ‘Welcome home. You are looking well.’

‘I do feel better.’

‘You are a rugby fan?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must have missed it.’ The ambassador looks embarrassed by his comment, realizing too late how trivial it sounds.

Edward helps him out. ‘I did miss it, yes.’

Soldiers in desert uniform now carry the flags of England and Scotland around the pitch, prompting a cheer as they pass each stand. As they assemble on the try line at each end, a military band marches on to the field. The players follow them out, Scotland first.

Edward cannot believe the size of them. They are like creatures from another species; some look to be about seven feet tall. Their necks and shoulders seem bigger than human necks and shoulders, thicker and more muscular, like those of bulls. And their heads seem abnormally square, perhaps because of the shape some are given by scrumcaps. They look more handsome than he remembers rugby players being. When Edward last saw England play, the forwards had paunches, socks rolled down, baggy shirts. But these men are athletes. Supermen, like some sort of experiment in eugenics. Their brows are glistening with Vaseline and pre-match warm-up sweat.

There is an announcement over the speakers. A minute’s silence so that ‘the world rugby family’ can remember the victims of a coach crash in Wales, the seven members of a school rugby team who lost their lives. The roar of a thousand conversations falls away and the silence that follows seems charged with expectation.

A whistle blows to mark the end of the minute and then a blonde opera singer in an evening dress steps on to a podium and
leads the singing of the national anthems. As ‘Flower of Scotland’ is sung, Niall puts his hand over his heart in the American style. Edward chews his cheek. When did his friend become like this? He seems a parody of his former self.

The whistle sounds for the kick-off and a Scotland prop gathers the ball safely. The thump of the first contact follows. A flurry of movement now as boots churn up the grass. There is blood on one of them already, a Scottish player. The referee blows his whistle and sends him off to the blood bin. He is replaced from the benches. The Scotland scrum-half finds touch. The tallest forwards in the line-out reach almost double their heights because the other players are lifting them; another practice that is new to Edward. England wins.

As the ball passes to the fly-half, time seems to slow down. It is as if space is opening up around him, that some invisible force is holding the Scotland players back. With great composure, he slows the motion down even more, assessing his target, judging the weight and balance of the kick, making a thousand tiny calibrations in a second that seems to last a minute. He is going for a drop goal. The ball leaves his boot and spirals through the air in a perfect parabola before slotting through the posts. The linesman’s flag goes up. The referee blows his whistle and time resumes its normal speed.

In this moment, Edward understands something about his years in captivity that he hasn’t been able to grasp until now – that time does not tick forward in a steady and predictable way. It compresses, expands, doubles back on itself, skips beats and shimmers. It is not an external river flowing past him; it is a construction of his brain, part of him.

He turns to Hannah, wanting to share this revelation, but she is cheering and jumping up and down. He tries to work out why his senses feel heightened today. Is it because chemicals are no longer holding them down? He wants to sit. He wants to stand up. He doesn’t know what he wants.

The crowd starts singing ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for
to carry me home,’ but no one knows more than that one verse. Something else that hasn’t changed. In answer to this, the skirl of the bagpipes can be heard from the other side of the stadium.

As Niall shouts, ‘Come on, Scotland!’ he notices Edward staring at him and says: ‘Everyone thinks I’m English, this is the only time I …’ He smiles. ‘You’ve heard me say that before, haven’t you? Hey, listen, I’ve got to go and say hello to HRH at half-time. Would you like to meet her?’

Edward grimaces good-naturedly. Shakes his head.

‘Han, would you like to meet the Princess?’

‘I’m good, thanks. I was going to get a couple of beers in. Do you want one?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

Niall’s phone vibrates and he studies its screen. ‘Bollocks. Looks like the Princess won’t be having the pleasure of my company either. The PM has called a Cobra meeting. I can send the car back for you if you like.’

For the first time since his release from captivity, Edward finds himself in mourning for his lost career, missing the rush he used to feel at times of international emergency. ‘We’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Thanks again for the tickets, by the way, and the lift here. It’s been great.’

People stand to let Niall through, not taking their eyes off the ball as it is passed down the line.

With play stopped while medics attend to an injury, Edward hears his name being mentioned and a murmur begins in the seats around him. Someone in the row in front has recognized him, presumably from the documentary, and is nudging the person next to him. The recognition spreads through the stand and soon people are taking photographs of him on their mobile phones. When some start applauding, a TV cameraman turns his camera away from the pitch and focuses on Edward. His face suddenly appears on the giant screens at either end of the stadium. The whole crowd seems to be cheering now. Edward is forced to acknowledge them with a wave.

He is relieved when the referee blows his whistle for a re-start scrum. Sixteen bulls snorting in unison. Edward realizes he is losing himself in the game. For the first time in a year he isn’t thinking about the cave, or about Frejya, or about anything other than rugby. As he thinks this, the surrounding stadium seems to tilt away into darkness, drawing the eye to the action on the pitch.

There is a wild throw at the line-out and a Scotland pick-up. A forward makes ground, then the winger takes over and, before England can scramble its defences properly, he has put himself into touch. England wins the line-out and begins passing down the backs until Scotland intercepts and runs in a try. The kick misses the conversion, then the half-time whistle goes and the bloodied and muddied players jog off the pitch, steam rising from their shirts.

Edward sits down, only to stand up again straight away as an ironic cheer goes up from the crowd. There is a fox in the empty ground on the other side of the pitch. People are pointing at it and laughing. It must have been hiding in the stands and has now decided to make a dash for it, only to find itself penned in by a bewildering wall of noise.

The creature runs from one end of the empty pitch to the other, and every time it gets to a corner it sees more stewards and turns back into the centre with loping strides. Its tongue is out. It clearly doesn’t know where to hide, scuttling into the stand and lying flat, only to trot back out on to the pitch again.

When Hannah returns carrying two pints of Guinness in plastic cups, she sees the fox and says: ‘At least you’re not the half-time entertainment. I saw you on the screen.’

‘Why don’t they leave it alone?’ Edward says. ‘Can’t they see it’s frightened?’

Hearing the tension in his voice, Hannah says: ‘Hey, it’s OK; it’ll run off in a minute. It must be used to people. There are thousands of urban foxes around here.’

‘It won’t be used to eighty thousand people. It’s terrified.’

It is becoming apparent that the fox isn’t going to find a way off the pitch and the start of the second half will have to be delayed.
A dozen stewards in high visibility jackets now come out of the tunnel and run towards the creature. It doubles back past them and, when they turn in pursuit, the crowd begin laughing at the spectacle. The fox is jogging now, not out of nonchalance but exhaustion. Its tongue is lolling again. The crowd seems to be treating it as a parody of a bullfight, their cheers increasing in volume as the fox runs towards the stewards, then veers away at the last moment. A further dozen stewards come on.

‘Stop laughing at it!’ Edward says loudly, to no one.

Hannah hands him his Guinness. He takes a sip. His eyes are glistening.

‘Stop laughing at it,’ he repeats in a lower voice.

There is another cheer now as a man in an RSPCA uniform comes on carrying a cage and a metal rod with a wire loop on the end. The stewards organize themselves into a giant circle around the fox and begin walking in, driving it into the centre. The fox is pacing from side to side, a few feet at a time. Seemingly realizing it has run out of options, it lies down, resigned to its fate. The RSPCA man walks forward and loops the wire around the fox’s neck. It begins writhing and struggling, then goes still again. It looks smaller now, more the size of a cat. The RSPCA man drags it into the cage, releases the loop and closes the cage door behind it. There is another cheer.

Hannah is staring at her father. He blinks slowly and, after two plump tears wind down the contours of his cheeks, he wipes their trails with the heel of his hand.

Back at the house, Edward pours a glass of milk, opens one of the five folio-sized lined notebooks he bought on the way back from Twickenham and unscrews the top of his fountain pen. The ink bottle is already open on his desk and, when he dips the nib into it and turns the piston first anti-clockwise then clockwise, he is reminded of blood being drawn into a syringe.

Hannah has taken a train down to Brighton to go clubbing with friends and he, alone overnight in the house for the first time since
his return, feels restless and galvanized. He closes his eyes and absorbs the silence. For a moment he thinks he can smell the ink, but he is not sure.

Though his fingers have hovered several times over the keyboard of his laptop, he hasn’t so far been able to think of a way into the autobiography he has promised Niall, not least because his years of captivity have blurred in his memory, one into the other. Now, as he feels the pen between his finger and thumb, senses the pulse of its black blood, he finds an opening line.

When he begins to write it is in the scrolly copperplate he spent months refining in his youth, the thin steel nib scratching as it moves across the paper. A few minutes later he blots the first page and re-reads it, corrects a spelling, crosses out a clumsy phrase, blots again and turns the page.

Five hours later, the flow of his writing has still to ebb.

II

PEOPLE ASK ME WHAT I MISSED MOST DURING THE ELEVEN YEARS I
was held captive in a cave in Afghanistan. It is not an easy question to answer. I missed my wife and daughter, of course. Missed my father. Missed my friends. Missed milk, and proper food, and soap, and toothpaste, and a bed with sheets, and books, and music, and sunlight …

But only now as I sit in my study in London do I recollect that the things I craved, more often than anything else, were a pen and paper, and a candle to write by. If I had only had these simple tools, I think I could have
held
retained my sanity.

I have them now, and should
perhaps
begin this memoir with an account of my capture,
a time
before time lost its definition and the years began collapsing one into the other.

Our landing in Kabul on 31 March 2001 was not smooth. The plane spiralled down abruptly; a jerky manoeuvre intended to make it harder for surface-to-air missiles to lock on to their target. To the same end, the fighter plane that escorted us in released magnesium decoy flares. It was clear we were entering a war zone, even if the war had yet to be declared.

There was a rest for a couple of hours and then
I remember thinking, as we were being driven from the airport, how strange it was that the road had no white lines or central reservations. As it shimmered in the afternoon heat, it looked as if its surface was melting. Because it had no kerbstones either, its edges looked ragged, like a lava flow that had cooled at the point where it met the desert.

I was in the third of four white UN Land-Cruisers spaced well apart in case of mines. All were clearly marked on their bonnets, roofs and doors with the large blue letters ‘U’ and ‘N’. The lead vehicle also had a UN flag flapping from its bonnet and I had noticed, when we set off, the two UN
peacekeepers
‘Blue Helmets’ sitting inside it wearing flak jackets and armed with assault rifles. They were peacekeepers. A reassuring sight.

As we sped through a basin surrounded by ochre-coloured mountains, past a train of camels carrying what looked like woolsacks, the two long radio aerials on the vehicle in front of ours bent over backwards like loose-jointed gymnasts. The only other vehicles on the road were old and overladen trucks and equally old motorbikes ridden by bearded men wearing turbans rather than helmets.

As we drove, I studied the brief I’d been handed: a manila folder with the Foreign Office crest embossed on its flap. It revealed that we would be meeting Abdul Wali, the minister for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (check???). He had been the one to declare the Buddhas of Bamiyan ‘idolatrous’ under sharia law, another thing to be banned.