Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

She had hoped to be invited inside, but she had had to hand over her welcoming gift on the step. A man had answered her sharp rap at the door, wispy-haired, slight, raggedly and dully dressed, and seemed to be astonished that a complete stranger brought an apple and blackberry pie to him.

He said his name was Blackmore. There were half-emptied packing cases in the hall behind him. He told her no more about himself other than his name. A woman came down the stairs, picked her way between the rolled carpets and the boxes, but the man did not introduce her and awkwardly held the pie he had been given.

Peggy chattered… Her name, where she lived, the societies and groups in the village… The woman had a sallow skin, a foreigner, perhaps from the Mediterranean… The bus timetable, the early closing day in the town, the best builder in the village, the walks, the milk delivery… Neither the man nor the woman responded… The lay-out of the village, the pub, the hall, the shop, the green -and they should not go near the green because of the disgraceful attitude of the people who lived there, endangered the whole community, protected by guns, showed no respect for the safety of the village… The man shrugged limply as if to indicate that he had work to be getting on with, and passed the pie to the woman behind him.

When she reached out her hands to take it, Peggy saw, very clearly that the woman had no nails on the tips of her fingers and thumbs. Peggy's nails were painted sharp red to match her lipstick, but where the woman's nails should have been there was only dried, wrinkled skin.

She came away feeling that they were uninteresting and unlikely to contribute to the life pulse of the village, and that her pie was wasted on them.

"Show me."

She had waited all through the night in the car, huddled in the passenger seat. As she had waited, her mind had been churned with the torment of her split identity. The quiet had been broken by the owls, and once a fox shadow had passed close. She had sat, hunched, cold, and waited. She remembered Yusuf's kindness, and the calmness of the teaching of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and the strength given her by the conversion to the Muslim faith, and she thought of the confidence that the name Farida Yasmin had brought to her. It was as if the old world, the existence of Gladys Eva Jones, demeaned and diminished her. Again and again, alone, she murmured the name that had given her strength and confidence. Without it, she was base and trivial. The old world was lustful and cheap, the new world proud and worthwhile.

"Show the wound to me."

Through the night she had listened for the crack of distant gunfire and she had heard only the owls.

As the hours had slipped away, so her anxiety for him had increased, nagging and worrying at her, until she could no longer bear the loneliness of the vigil. She had felt an increasing sense of disaster breaking. In the dawn light she had left the car and tried to trace the route he had taken her the day before. In Fen Covert, she'd avoided fallen dead branches, stepped lightly on the leaves and not scuffed them, kept wide from the path, as he'd shown her, and she had heard the baying of big dogs. Then she had walked more quickly and her anxiety for him had been at fever point. Across the marshes, beyond Old Covert, she had been able to see right to the tower of the village church. The early sun gleamed on the river that ran from the marshes, and by the river were the dogs.

Behind the dogs, controlling them, were the handlers. Behind the handlers, guarding them, were the marksmen with the guns on which the bulging telescopic sights were mounted. They hunted for him. They had not killed him, and the knowledge of his survival brought pricking tears of happiness to Farida Yasmin's cheeks.

"You don't have to be shy but you have to show me where you are hurt so I can help."

While the sun had risen and the clouds had gathered off the sea and chased it, the dogs had tracked back on the riverbank, then searched away from it, and she'd known they'd lost the scent. When the cloud had crossed the sun, and the greyness had dulled the marsh reeds, she had seen the handlers call off the dogs. But she had taken note of where the marksmen settled, where they watched from after the dogs had gone. She had kept in the trees. She had gone into the woodland of Fen Hill.

Because of what she had endured, the anxiety, her anger snapped.

"Fine, so you won't show me where, so you don't want help well, get up, keep walking, turn your back on it, go home. Don't think about me, what I've done."

If it had not been for the bird Farida Yasmin would not have found him. It had lifted off, flapped away, cried, then circled the bramble clump into which he'd crawled. He had seemed to be sleeping, which had amazed her because his face was furrowed in pain. She had wriggled on her stomach into the back of the thicket and been within arm's reach of him when he had woken, jerked up, slashed his face on the thorn barbs, gasped, grabbed at her, recognized her and then his eyes had closed, his body had arched as if the pain ran rivers in him. He had told her of his failure, of the car, the lost rifle. The words had been whispered and his head stayed down.

She whipped him with her hissed words, "Because of you what I've done for you I've police waiting for me. I'm on the line for you. Are you staying or are you going? Are you going to let me treat your wound or not?"

The rent was at the side of his fatigue trousers. The car must have caught his hip and upper thigh, ripping the seam of his trousers at the pocket. She had seen the long distance he had come, from where the dogs had lost his scent to Fen Hill. He could not have come that far with a broken femur or fractured pelvis.

Farida Yasmin thought the failure would have hurt him the worst.

Her hands trembled as she reached for his belt, unfastened it and dragged down the zip. It was hard to pull down. The trousers were sodden wet. She crouched low above him, under the roof of bramble and thorn, then pushed her arm under the small of his back and lurched his buttocks clear of the ground. He didn't fight her as she dragged the trousers down towards his knees.

She saw the mottled purple and yellow bruising.

She saw the hair at the pit of his stomach, the limit of the bruising, and the small contracted penis. He stared up at her.

Her fingers, so gently, touched the bruise and she felt him wince. She tried to soothe his pain. She told him of the dogs and where the marksmen were. She told him what she would do and how she would help him. Her fingers played on the bruising and caught the hairs and she saw him stiffen. It was where her fingers had never been before. His breathing came more slowly, as if the pain lightened. It was what the girls had talked about in the schoolyard, and in the coffee shop at the university, and in the canteen at work, and then she, the virgin, had thought their talk disgusting. Her fingers caressed the bruising as his fingers had stroked the neck of the bird.

The voices were soft, atmospheric, metallic, coming over the monitor.

"I don't know whether she can take it, not much more."

"I have to assure you, Mr. Perry, that your security is constantly under review."

"If I'd known, realized, what I said to you and that jerk who came with you, what it meant, Geoff what it would do to me, and, more important, what it would do to her…"

"There are now two more ARVs sorry, that's armed-response vehicles in the village, four in total, and eight highly trained men. That's in addition to Mr. Davies and Mr. Blake, and the men in the shed. You should see it, Mr. Perry, as a ring of steel dedicated to you and your family's safety."

In the hut, the speaker was turned down low. Paget was eating sandwiches, Rankin watched the screen and flicked between the image of the rear garden and the front door, while they listened to the two men talk.