Gerald Seymour: A Line in the Sand

None of the crew approached him except to offer him a plastic bottle of water and a bag of dried dates. Then the man had lifted his face. The scarred redness around his eyes, the upper part of his cheeks and his forehead were raw. The crewmen, swabbing the deck, stowing ropes, taking turns at the wheel, understood: he had come through the stinging ferocity of a sandstorm. He had talked quietly into his telephone and none of them could hear his words in the several minutes the call had taken. It would be late afternoon before he would see the raised outline of the city's buildings, the mosque minarets and the angled, idle cranes of the port. They did not know his name, but they could recognize his importance because they had sailed with their hold half empty, at night, to bring him home.

He wore the torn, dirtied clothes of a tribesman, he smelt of camels' filth, but the crewmen and the owner simple, devout men who had sailed through the worst gale storms of the Gulf waters -would have said that they held this quiet man in fear.

Later, when they had a good view of the buildings, minarets and cranes of Bandar Abbas, a fast speed boat of the pasdaran intercepted them, took him off and ferried him towards the closed military section of the port used by the Revolutionary Guards.

They felt then as if a chill winter shadow was no longer on their dhow, and they tried to forget his face, his eyes.

"The last time I did what I was told to do."

"For your own good. You were sensible, Mr. Perry."

"I had only two suitcases of clothes. I even cleared out the dirty washing from the bathroom basket and took that with me."

"Self-pity is always degrading."

"The men in bloody raincoats, they packed all my work papers, said I wouldn't need them again, said they'd lose them. Where did my work life go into a landfill?"

"Dredging history rarely helps."

"I had six hours to pack. The men in raincoats were crawling all through my house. My wife-' "As I understand, about to divorce you, and with a "friend" to comfort her."

"There was my son. He's seventeen now. I haven't seen him since – I don't know what exams he's passed and failed, where he's going, what he's doing…"

"Always better, Mr. Perry, not to sink into sentimentality."

"I had damn good friends there, never said goodbye, not to any of them, just walked away… "I don't recall from the file that you were under duress."

"It was a good company I worked for, but I wasn't allowed to clear my desk. The raincoats did that."

Fenton sneered, "The directors of that company were lucky, from what I've read, not to face a Customs and Excise prosecution, as you were lucky."

"You bastard!"

"Obscenities, Mr. Perry, in my experience are seldom substitutes for common sense."

"I gave up everything!"

"Life, my friend, is not merely a photograph album to be pulled out each Christmas Day for the relations to gawp at. Little to be gained from wallowing in the past. Life is for living. Your choice -move on and live or stay and write your own funeral service. That's the truth, Mr. Perry, and the truth should be faced."

The rain was heavier outside, beating a drum roll on the window-panes. The darkening cloud came out of the east, off the sea. Geoff Markham stayed by the door. He could have reached beside him to switch on the lights to break the gloom, but he did not.

Markham knew his superior's performance was a disaster. He doubted Fenton had the sensitivity to appreciate the castration of a life Perry had run away from a wife who no longer loved him, a son, friends and neighbours, even his office, the banter and excitement of the sales section, everything that was past. Frank Perry was a damned ordinary name. If there had been six hours for him to quit his house, then the time allotted to choosing a new name would have been about three short minutes. Maybe the raincoats had saddled him with it.

Perry had turned back to the window, and Fenton paced as if he did not know what else to say… Markham wondered whether Perry had gone, a year or two later, to watch a school gate, from the far side of the street, to see the boy come out from school, a leggy youth, with his shirt hanging out, his tie loosened. Maybe the kid would have been alone, still traumatized, from his father's disappearance. The raincoats would have told him that kids couldn't handle secrets, that they blabbed, that he endangered himself and the kid if he made contact… They would have tracked Frank Perry's former footsteps, his one-time life, until they were convinced that the trail was broken. Fenton wouldn't have understood.

"You have to face facts, and facts dictate that you move on."

"And my new home, new family, new life, new friends?"

"Start again."

"Dump my new home, put my new family through the hoop?"

"They'll cope. There's no alternative."

"And in a year, or three years, do it all again? And again after that, and again. Do it for ever peer over my shoulder, wetting myself, keeping the bags packed. Is that a life worth living?"

"It's what you've got, Mr. Perry." Fenton rubbed his fingernail against the brush of his moustache. Despite the gloom, Markham could see the flush on his superior's cheeks. He didn't think Fenton was an evil man or a bully, just insensitive. He'd do a memo they liked memos back at Thames House to Administration, on the need for counselling courses in sensitivity. They could set up a sensitivity sub-committee and they could call in outside consultants. There could be a paper "Sensitivity (Dealing with Obstinate, Bloody-minded, Pig-headed "Ordinary" Members of the Public)'. There could be two-day courses in sensitivity for all senior executive officers.

Fenton beat a path between the toys and the embroidery.

"I won't do it."

"You're a fool, Mr. Perry."

"It's your privilege to say so, but I'm not going to run, not again." Fenton picked up his coat from the arm of a chair, and shrugged himself into it, covered his neatly combed hair with his hat. Geoff Markham turned and quietly opened the living-room door.

Fenton's voice was raised: "I hope it's what you want, but we're going into an area of unpredictability…"

It would be in the third week of its migration. The bird would have left its sub-Saharan wintering grounds around twenty days earlier, have stored weight, strength and fat in the wetlands of Senegal or Mauretania. It would have rested that last night in the southern extreme of the Charente Maritime, and hunted at dawn.

He sold insurance for a Paris-based company annuities, fire and theft, household and motor, life and accident policies, in a quadrangle of territory between La Rochelle in the north, Rochefort in the south, Niort and Cognac in the west. The trade to be gained at a weekend, when clients were at home and not tired, was the most fruitful, but in March and October he never worked weekends. Instead, early in the morning, he left his home at Loulay with his liver-white spaniel and drove a dozen kilometres into the winter-flooded marshland of the Charente Maritime. In the boot of his car was his most prized possession: an Armi Bettinsoli, over and under, shotgun. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, in the early spring and the late autumn, he parked his car and carried the shotgun, wrapped in sacking, a kilo metre away. His sport, as practised by his father and grandfather, was now opposed by the city bastards who claimed to protect the birds. It was necessary to be covert, to move after each shot, because the bastards looked for men enjoying legal sport, to interfere. In the remaining months, he shot pheasants, partridges, rabbits and foxes, but the sport he craved was in March, when the birds migrated north, and October, when they returned south to escape the winter.

That Sunday morning in late March, he saw the bird first as a speck and swung his binoculars up from his chest to make the distant identification. He had already fired and moved twice that morning. The dog had retrieved a swallow, crushed by the weight of shot, and a spotted redshank, which had been alive. He had twisted its neck.