Gerald Seymour - Rat Run

Her temper snapped. She had played gentle and it had taken her to bloody nowhere.

In her fluent and best German, she barked against the wind: 'You hide, then, see if it matters to me – or bloody keep running and see if I'm bothered. Not that it would interest you, with your problem, but I am attempting to save lives. That's the lives of ordinary, totally innocent people, but you wouldn't care, would you? So bloody absorbed in your own foul little world, voyeuring kids… Watching the dancing, bare feet of children and, no doubt, imagining what's under their skirts and shorts. You make me, with your selfishness, sick. Hear me? Sick… '

He did not turn. At her attack, his shoulders seemed to crumple.

His voice was frail, uncertain: 'My uncle drove a lorry from the KZ at Neuengamme that took children to a school's cellar. Medical experiments had been performed on them and they were killed so they could not testify against the doctors. The feet that danced were those of the children who were hanged in the cellar of the school… Leave me alone. Go away.'

She rocked, reeled.

She had nothing to say.

The cold engulfed her. She went, dismissed, and shame blistered her.

He had heard the sluicing of the water and the screams.

Now Timo Rahman heard the whimpers of his wife and the stamp down the stairs of Alicia's aunt. It could not have been otherwise.

The last night he had slept in the guest room, which was never used because no guests were invited to stay at their home. The Bear had driven the girls to school and they had gone, sullen and frightened, aware of but not understanding the crisis afflicting their parents. They would never challenge their father and neither had dared to ask why their mother was locked, a prisoner, in her bedroom.

He sat in the living room, his head and body statue still, the coat with the Harris tweed label clutched in his fists on his lap, and he waited for her aunt to come off the stairs and cross the hall, which he could see.

The Bear, who loved Alicia to the point of devotion, was in the garden and away from sight through the window. He raked leaves and perhaps wept – but it could not have been otherwise.

In the village, in the mountains where Timo

Rahman had been raised, she would have been beaten to death at his own hand, then buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, and would never again have been spoken of.

Her aunt passed the door. She did not stop to show her long arms and the skin on them wet from the bath, soiled with blood. She did not hold up the brush of steel bristles that had last been used by the Bear to scrape rust from an old bucket. She went by the door, but he had seen the blood and the brush.

He knew that his wife had met a man in the summer-house of their garden – knew it because Ricky Capel would not have dared to lie to him and had denied the man was at the house because of him

– and knew that, for her betrayal of him, she was now cleaned.

He could hear each sound she made through the bedroom's locked door and down the stairs and across the hall and into the living room – and knew her body was now cleaned by a brush of steel bristles, the dirt scoured away so that the skin bled, It could not have been otherwise.

The man, Dean – or whatever he was supposed to call him – cleaned the gun.

Ricky said, 'I'm alive… Why am I alive?…

Because I lied. I lied to Timo Rahman. If I hadn't lied, I'd be dead. He'd have strangled me or broken my head open with a hammer, if I hadn't lied. For giving him the truth, he wouldn't have shot me because that would be too quick and he'd have wanted to hurt me.'

His body shook in spasms and he watched as each part of the weapon was laid out on a coat and meticulously wiped. He rambled.

'A man came after me where I live – I don't know who he is and I don't know what his problem is. A guy I do business with, his home was burned down with petrol. This man came to where I live and his coat stunk of petrol – the coat was distinctive, sort you see once and not again, but you don't forget it from the once… and I'm at Rahman's. All bloody hell breaks out, alarms and things, and there's a man legging it over the fence at the back of the garden, but his coat catches on the wire, and they'd have had him if he hadn't slipped off the coat. The coat came in the house, brought in by that bloody gorilla, and it was the same coat and it had the same stink, petrol. He asked me straight, Rahman, did I know the coat?

Basically, what he's asking me, was a man in his garden because of me? Simple question. I lied, said I didn't know nothing about it. I'd have been dead if I hadn't lied. I'm thinking now – the man whose coat was lost, Rahman'll believe he'd come to meet his wife. Poor cow, but not my problem. You look after yourself, in this world, first and second and third.'

The cold ached in every joint of his body but he had lost feeling in his feet however hard he rubbed them.

He did not hear his own voice.

'What's just amazing, he swallowed it. I hadn't the lie off my lips before I'd reckoned it out. Nobody lies to him, don't dare to. Get caught in a lie to him and he'd take a week to kill you. Sort of making a judgement, isn't it? Get killed in an hour or two for telling the truth… get killed in a week because you lied and got caught out – matter of judgement. I'm telling you because I like you, because I trust you.'

The weapon was reassembled. Ricky could not have stripped it, cleaned it, put back the parts.

'We get on that boat, get across the water, and we drop you off, then you're gone. It's like you never existed. My secret and your secret, carried to your grave and mine. I don't hear of you ever again and you don't ever meet up with me. What you do, I thought it was my concern, thought it mattered to me.

Isn't – doesn't. I'm telling you, honest, when I realized what you did then I told Rahman I wasn't taking you and he twisted my bloody arm, like it was right out the socket… Then he showed you the picture of that girl, bawled you out for what you done to her. Me, I don't have an opinion, not any more. You see, Dean, we're friends – I like you – friends with trust. That's good, us as friends.'

The weapon was loaded, cocked and laid down.

Hands slipped to Ricky's feet, peeled off the socks, squeezed the last moisture from them and started to massage his skin, the soles and the insteps, and he felt the first flicker of heat. There was wet at his eyes.

'Brilliant, Dean. That's just bloody brilliant.'

'What have I done? Something brutal. What are the consequences of it? Nothing. What am I saying, Malachy? I'm saying this bloody awful place has brought out the bitch in me.'

He lifted his arm, swung it, hooked it round her shoulder. In front of them was the beach and the surf and the horizon where the sea met the clouds.

'Don't think, Malachy, that anyone from my crowd will ever thank you. They don't do that. All except one, they're as awful as here is. I'm saying that you have to stand tall for yourself. Got me?'

She wriggled. She worked her body closer to his and he tightened his grip on her shoulder. Her hair was against his chin.

'It's what you deserve, to stand tall – whatever it was that happened. You get to a time when you've paid your dues, owe nobody anything.'

He felt the warmth of her.

'I want to be there and I want to see it – you standing tall, Malachy.'

The tide had turned to reveal the wide depth of the beach, and the gulls wheeled while searching for washed-up crabs and shells.

And they ate.

From the rucksack she had taken a tin of chicken in white sauce, another of rice, and one of peach slices in syrup. They passed the tins between them and scooped with their fingers at the meat, the rice and the peaches, licked the sauce and syrup off themselves.