Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

He left them, and went into the kitchen. Meryl didn't look up. She was at the kitchen table with her sewing machine, and her boy was feeding her the lengths of cut net. In the back garden more of the men from the lorry were laying heavy planks on the grass lawn, cursing because they were awkward to move and heavy. She'd spent half of last summer's evenings working at that grass, digging out the weeds to make it perfect. The kitchen, in spite of the long fluorescent strip-light, was dark. She was looking at the window and he could see her teeth gnawing at her lower lip. The hut was being lowered past the window to the shouted instructions of the men, who eased it towards the planks on her perfect lawn. He'd heard that a man was left hanging dead for a whole day before they lowered the arm of the crane. The hut jolted, and the cable slackened. Davies was calling their names.

Paget and Rankin came through the kitchen. They had the machine-guns, their rucksacks, their food-boxes, their magazine and the crossword book. The tall one tousled Stephen's hair. It was the first time Perry had seen the child half smile since Meryl had brought him home. They walked out through the kitchen door to inspect their hut. There was the roar from the front of the house as the crane backed out of the gap between the houses.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes." Her head was down, but her tone was aggressive. She fed the net on to the needle of the machine.

"I was only asking…"

"Why shouldn't I be all right? I've got you, I've got my home, I've got my friends. What have Ito complain about?"

"Look, don't be sarcastic."

Davies rapped at the kitchen door. He was carrying his gear: the case with his machine-gun, his heavy coat, a duffel bag for his sandwiches and Thermos, a clean shirt on a hanger, and a pair of heavy boots. Through the window, Perry saw Paget and Rankin taking possession of their hut. They'd dumped their kit inside, and were supervising the link-up of the cables from the house. One of the lorry men brought them two plastic chairs and a kettle; another, a small television set and a microwave cooker. Outrage had been building with Meryl throughout the day, but she had held on to her control because of the men in her dining room. If Davies hadn't been at the door he thought she would have screamed. Everything around them was worse for her than for him.

"Yes?" He turned on Davies.

Davies said quietly, "It's been decided that I should be inside with you. It's not a matter of comfort or anything like that, it's about my safety when I'm sitting in the car. It's because of a reassessment of the security threat. The car is too vulnerable, that's the assessment now. The boys in the hut are behind armour-plated walls. They're certainly proof against low-velocity bullets and there's a good chance they'd stop high-velocity, but the car doesn't have that protection. They want me inside."

"I've been asked, again, to run away. I'm staying."

"I've been told that, Mr. Perry. That's your decision, not for me to comment on. But, the car outside, with the new assessment, is too vulnerable."

The strangers were with them inside the house, and in the hut, which blocked the precious view of their garden. Later, the strangers would be all around them as the laminated plastic was fixed to the windows. It would be late in the afternoon, When Paget and Rankin were safe in their hut, when Davies was safe in the dining room, before the lorry rumbled away and the crane's wheels dug another track across the green.

And there was nothing he could do, except run. All his life he had made for himself the decisions that mattered. He had always been self-reliant: at school he, not his parents and not his teachers, had decided what subjects he would specialize in; at university ignoring his tutors' advice, he had decided what braHch of engineering he would concentrate on; at the company, his only employer, he had decided that the opening he wanted was in the sales division, and he had explored the tentative, difficult trade openings that were possible with Iran. First his wife, and then Meryl, had left decisions to him. He had never been frightened of backing his judgement, and now he was helpless and snared in a web. It was a new sensation to him. He couldn't, of course not, go out of the house and man a personal roadblock at the end of the village and check the cars coming in, and couldn't beat across the common ground beside the road for the people sent to kill him, and couldn't thrash around in the marshland. No action was open to him, except to run. He was neutered, and the men were all around him, inside and outside his house, and they ignored him as if he were an imbecile and incapable of independent thought. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait.

"It isn't my fault."

She had come where and when he had told her to come. Farida Yasmin Jones hung her head, pressed her face against her knees. The damp of the evening was in the air. She had driven her car down the narrow lane off the wider, busier road, and after the bend that prevented it being seen from the road she had parked near to the track that led to the tumulus.

"I do not criticize you."

"You look as though you do when I came with Yusuf there wasn't protection."

"Perhaps he lived."

"You said he'd die."

"Perhaps he lived and talked."

"Yusuf Khan would never talk."

"All men say they would never talk, and believe it."

"You're insulting him."

"He was stupid, he was like a child. He spoke too much and he could not drive why should I believe he would not talk?"

"You've no right to say he'd talk. What're you going to do?" He had come from Fen Hill and across Fen Covert and he had sat for close to twenty minutes hidden in bushes watching her before he had shown himself. After twenty minutes Vahid Hossein had gone in a wide loop around her to check that she was not followed, was not under surveillance. He had seen the men at the house with the guns. He had no trust in anything he had been told. There had been an Iraqi ruse in the marshland in front of the Shattal-Arab: an ambush would be set by a patrol; they would lie up and their guns would cover a raised pathway through the reed-banks; a cassette recorder would play a conversation, men's voices, in the Farsi tongue; men of the Revolutionary Guards would be drawn towards the voices of their own people. Friends had been killed because they trusted what they heard. He had watched her. She had eaten mint sweets from a packet, and scratched the white skin of her legs above her knees, and looked frightened around her in the quiet. She had rubbed hard against the softness of her breast, as if there was irritation there. She had snapped her fingers together in impatience. All the time he had watched her. He had no trust in her and yet he was yoked to her.

"Think, plan."

"Think about what? Plan what?"

"Think and plan."

"Don't you trust me?"

"I have faith only in myself."

Her face was against the white skin of her legs and her hair cascaded over her knees. He thought that she might be crying.

"I'll do whatever you want."

"You cannot think for me and you cannot plan for me."

"Is that because I'm a woman?"

"Because…"

"What is your name?"

"You have no need to know my name. You have no need to know anything of me."

She gazed into his face and the half-light made shadows at her mouth and her eyes, but the eyes held the brightness of anger.

"Then I'll tell you my name and everything about myself, because that shows you my trust. I take the chance, the trust, that you'll not talk."

"You believe that? You believe I would-' She mimicked, "All men say they would never talk, and believe it"."

His hand went instinctively to her shoulder, caught it, gripped it to the bone.