The Road Between Us (38 page)

Sometimes I would bend down to pick something up and stay in that position for hours, saliva dripping from my open mouth
, as if I was catatonic
.

The guards sometimes stood around the opening staring down at me, like gods looking down on the world, determining the fate of mortals. They seemed to change fairly regularly, presumably to prevent me building up a bond with them, but there were two who kept coming back: Brains and the boy, who was now a teenager with a line of dark, downy hair above his top lip.

The boy, who I had nicknamed Becks, was kinder than the others. He gave me a candle one day and I stared at my reflection in a spoon for the first time in years. It was distorted, but that was not the reason I did not recognize myself. My skin was waxy, almost translucent. There were black pools under my eyes. All animation had gone from them. My cheekbones were raised and I had a straggly beard. Every minute of my confinement seemed to be graven into my face. With my Afghan clothes and beard, I looked like one of them.

Another small mercy was that after a few years the guards no longer bothered to roll the boulder back over the hole. I would spend hours
passively
staring up at it, imagining myself at the bottom of a well
looking up at the stars
. I would contemplate spiders’ webs, awed by their delicacy, by the way they caught the silky light.

The boredom was like a physical pain, raw and scratchy. It was the enemy, along with time. I tried to kill it, but could not. No strategy worked. I felt weightless. Hollow. Unanchored, as if asleep. Asleep and awake at the same time. I longed to see the stars and feel the sun on my face. But I’d forgotten what the sky looked like
, at night and during the day
.

Most days I would wake to the lonely, soundless dark only to find, after my initial disorientation, that it was not silent, after all, that it was loud with the pulse of my blood, my breathing, the tiny clicks my eyes made as I blinked.

Feeling as if I was being drowned by the darkness, that it was inside me, pouring into my lungs, I would put my hands over my mouth and nose and ears. It didn’t work. It was soon seeping in behind my eyeballs. If my veins were cut, I became convinced, my blood would be
black
, as black as ink.

My days did not separate in any meaningful way. There was nothing to distinguish them, nothing with which to measure their silent, monotonous drag. My mind had nothing to hang on to, nothing upon which to concentrate. I could no longer find a direction for my thinking, or even recall my dreams in the first few seconds after waking up.

And I could no longer bear to think of Frejya’s warmth. For so long she had seemed the opposite of that cold, colourless place, but now my memories of her were too painful. In place of memory, a thick and heavy loneliness poured into me. It was as sluggish as wet concrete and it left me feeling as if I was being drowned from the insi

Often I was driven so deep into myself, the daily arrival of my food came as an unwelcome intrusion, one that frightened and unnerved me, making me scuttle backwards into the shadows. In moments of insanity I no longer even wanted to be rescued. The thought of being freed filled me with as much panic as the thought of being held hostage had once done.

(Mention here ???? how random cricket statistics kept passing through my head and driving me mad because I couldn’t work out what the numbers meant … Sir Donald Bradman – average of 99.94. Geoffrey Boycott – 8,114 runs. Top score 246 not out. All abstract, all out of context. I knew I used to love cricket but by then I couldn’t remember how the game worked.)

In the early days, my emotions had been closer to the surface. Now
my feelings had been buried so deeply they no longer affected me. My
my eyes had dried up. In this I had finally found a way to deal with the painful, crushing boredom. I had decided to go mad on my own terms; allow myself to sink into it. Light-headed from hunger, I sometimes felt as if every thought I had ever had was passing through my mind all at once.
The cave was full of my thoughts, my memories, and my theories. They were all competing for space. I was drowning in my own thoughts; they were too heavy
,
too liquid, wave after crushing wave.

One day, in what might have been the morning, I thought I heard footsteps ‘upstairs’, first coming closer, then farther away, then coming back again. A guard I hadn’t seen before appeared. He was in his mid-twenties, at a guess, wearing glasses and a black waistcoat and
he appeared to be
he was holding a small video camera. He filmed me staring up at him and then said something gently in Urdu to someone hidden from view. A ladder was lowered. I stared at it in confusion. Then another guard appeared, this one with a gun, and he shone a torch in my face as the guard with the glasses began to climb down, carrying a torch in his mouth. He had a bag over his shoulder. When he reached the floor of the cave he covered his nose and made a wafting gesture with his hand.

I backed away, shielding my eyes. There was the crackle of a walkie-talkie. As the guard approached me, he reached into his bag and pulled out a newspaper. He handed it to me, and then rummaged in his bag for the video camera. He pressed a button and held it to his eye. A recording light came on. He directed me to hold the newspaper up as he filmed. Then he said, and I can hear it now: ‘Go on then, say summat.’

I thought I could recognize these words. They were English. The accent was familiar. Was it Yorkshire?

‘Say summat for the folks back home then. Talk to your wife and kiddy. Go on.’

It
was
Yorkshire, I was sure of it. South Yorkshire. Bradford or Leeds.

Thoughts were tumbling
in my brain
but I could not give them shape. I could not deliver them. I had forgotten how to speak.

‘You’ve got a daughter, yeah?’ the man said. ‘Say hello to her.’

I remained silent. I recalled that there was something I had planned to do if ever one of the guards came down there, but I could not remember what it was.

He then said something like: ‘We need to show the people back home that you are still alive. They need proof, otherwise they won’t pay up.’

And he added something I had forgotten until this moment. At least I think he said this, but I cannot be sure because my mind was delirious
and weak
from hunger
at the time
.

‘We’ve been asking your people in the Foreign Office for years, but they keep ignoring us.’

Have I imagined this? The words have been so long buried they have decomposed in my memory, become worm-filled and barely recognizable.

After a minute, the guard lowered the camera and, when he pressed a button again, it made a two-tone pinging sound. When he gestured for the newspaper to be handed back, I hugged it to my chest like a petulant child
.

‘You want to read it? OK, mate.’ The guard smiled and handed me his torch and then he climbed back up the ladder, pulling it up after him.

I shone the torch on the newspaper and read the words ‘Daily’ and ‘Telegraph’. They had some traction. The
Daily Telegraph.
I remembered this newspaper. There was a photograph of a woman on the front page. She was in tears and was trying to cover her face from the intrusion of the camera lens. There was a man next to her. He was wearing a pinstripe suit and a tie and he was consoling the woman,
with
putting an arm around her shoulders. He looked familiar. They both did. It took me a long time to realize it was Niall and Frejya, they had both changed.

My eyes slid down to the words below the photograph, and, after a moment’s confusion, the ability to read returned to me. ‘Ten years after his UN convoy was attacked in Afghanistan, the British diplomat Edward Northcote was yesterday declared officially dead.’ According to the article, Frejya was said by friends to be ‘devastated’. She had asked that the media and the public give her and her family space to grieve in private. ‘For Edward Northcote’s obituary see page 28.’

I looked at the date at the top of the page – 31 March 2011 – and realized it meant I had been there for ten years. As I tried to take this in, I found myself edging backwards from the precipice of my silent
madness
hysteria. I shone the torch around my cave and saw dozens of cobwebs
, each an intricate piece of engineering
. I also saw my attempt at art, how I had once used my own excrement as paint
to daub the wall
.

As my eyes roamed the walls, I saw for the first time that there were Arabic words scratched there. It no longer felt like my cave
, my home. It was much smaller than I had imagined it
. I realized that for all those years of not seeing the walls I hadn’t appreciated how limited my space was. The yards had sometimes seemed like miles.

I
numbly
turned the pages of the newspaper until I came to the obituaries. There I saw another face I recognized. My own. It seemed to be guiding me gently out of madness, showing me where to place my feet. My lips moved as I read about my own life, and death.

II

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, EDWARD IS SITTING UNDER A TREE
again, unshaven, listening to
TMS
on the radio. Hannah approaches with something hidden behind her back. ‘Guess what I found in the garage,’ she says. Before he can answer, she produces a cricket bat. It looks old; dark with linseed oil. In her other hand she has a tennis ball. ‘Fancy a game?’

He takes the bat and shakes his head. ‘I don’t believe it. A Gunn and Moore. Dad bought me one exactly like this for my tenth birthday. It was his favourite make.’ He runs his hand over the face of the bat. ‘This has hardly been used. I wonder what it’s doing here? Germans don’t play cricket.’

‘Are you going to bat to me or what?’

‘Bowl to you. OK. We can use the tree as the stumps. Go and stand in front of it and take your guard.’

When Hannah starts tapping the ground with the bat, as if tamping down bumps, Edward laughs. ‘OK, Michael Atherton,’ he says, ‘I’m going to teach you what a googly is. Ready?’

They play for a few minutes, until Hannah loses the ball by hitting it over the wall. ‘Four!’ she shouts.

‘Actually, six,’ Edward corrects.

Later, while Hannah works on her painting, sitting on a wicker chair in an alcove of the Doric temple, Edward sits nearby trying to read the book of poetry on his lap, but he cannot concentrate
on the words. His gaze keeps rising from the page to his daughter’s face. He feels mesmerized. It is Frejya. Her tangible double. Without looking up from her easel, Hannah loosens her hair before gathering it into a band and says: ‘You’re staring at me again.’

To divert himself, he points at her tattoo. ‘It’s Sanskrit, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it means Father.’

Edward wishes he hadn’t asked. Her answer seems to be charged with meaning. ‘I thought we could have mozzarella and beef tomatoes for lunch,’ he says, looking down at his book. ‘There’s some pesto and vinaigrette that could go with it. Something simple.’

‘I don’t mind, you know,’ Hannah says. ‘You can stare at me if you want.’ With a creak from the chair, she leans forward to pat his head. As she stands up and walks past him, he notices the marks left by the wicker chair on the backs of her legs. His arm rises up involuntarily and his fingers lightly trail her hip as she passes. The hand remains suspended in the air for a few seconds after she has gone.

Resisting the urge to follow her back to the house, Edward wanders towards a barn he has noticed on the east side of the garden, along a path scythed through nettles. Stacked against its gabled end he finds a pile of seasoned but unchopped logs. Inside, there are dead leaves on the wooden floorboards and house martins fluttering under the cobwebbed eaves. Stacked randomly against the walls are harnesses, pitchforks, rakes and spades, and weighing down some musty sacks in the corner, an axe.

He practises swinging it above his head, narrowly missing the low beams of crankled oak. Its shaft has been worn smooth and shiny from use, the sweat of several generations ingrained in its wood, and as his own hand slips down from its shoulder, and over the gentle bow of its belly, he feels a chemical pulse pass through his muscles.

The logs all appear to be from the same tree, a beech, and, judging by their circumference of about five feet, it had been an old and tall one. Edward selects the biggest and knottiest as his
chopping block, dragging it sideways into position, and then he lifts a smaller one on top of it. Working from the outside in, following the grain, he is able to split one log every four or five minutes. When the heel of the axe becomes too firmly embedded, he picks it up with the log still attached and rotates it in the air. Then, in an underarm action, he uses the heft of the log against itself by bringing the blunt side of the axe down against the block. It makes a satisfying noise, a clean and brittle crack. It also seems to be giving off a smell. A red smell. Is that resin? Yes. A red, sappy smell of beech resin. His sense of smell seems to be returning in glimpses, and it is bringing back memories of chopping logs in Norway, at his in-laws’ cabin near the fjords, with Frejya bringing him out a cold beer.

Drawn by the noise coming from behind the barn, a repeated sound that is sometimes an echoey crack, sometimes a thud, Hannah collects from the fridge a bottle of cold French lager and walks towards it. At the corner of the barn she stops. She has seen her father, but he hasn’t seen her. Even from a distance of twenty yards the sweat on his brow is visible, glistening in the sun. She watches as he swings the axe in an arc above his head and then brings its blade down on the log, splitting it cleanly in two. How contented he seems as he bends to pick up the pieces, tosses them on a pile beside him, places another log on the block. The swing again, the muscles working in harmony, the unselfconscious grunt. She has never seen her father in this way before, fine-looking and fervent in the bright sunlight. The dark and disturbing world he described in his notebook seems a million miles away.