John Birmingham - Without warning

Once the water had boiled, Caitlin added a thick sheaf of dried spaghetti, pushing the long yellow stalks under as they softened. The tuna went into the frying pan, followed by the tomatoes and their sauce. She turned the heat right down to a simmer while the pasta cooked. It was an old and much-loved dish, one of only three meals her dad had been able to cook. One-eyed Egyptians. Shit on a shingle. And this bad boy right here. She knew nowadays that the recipe was a variation on an old Italian standard, usually made with porcini mushrooms and their soak, but for Caitlin it had always been ‘Dad’s big pasta sauce’. As a teenager, she’d begged him to cook up buckets of the stuff to freeze and take away with her on surfing holidays. After seven or eight hours of carving up the big sets off northern California, she could inhale three big bowls’ worth.

The small domestic scene in front of her blurred and disappeared behind diamonds and blue sapphires of light as tears filled her eyes. She rubbed away the moisture with the back of her hand. Her parents, of course, hadn’t known the exact nature of her work, but her dad, an old air force man, had filled in some of the blanks for himself. He never asked Caitlin why a bureaucrat from the US Information Service had to travel so frequently or spend so much time out of contact. He never asked how a junior civil servant came to acquire such an impressive array of scars, broken bones and deep-tissue injuries over the years, and when other family members did, she explained them away as surf injuries. But he had taken her aside at a family wedding a while ago, just after she’d returned from four months ‘out of contact’ in the aftermath of 9/11, and he’d told her that he knew his little girl was doing ‘good work’, and that she needed to know her family loved her and were very, very proud of her. Dave Monroe, a veteran of Tricky Dick Nixon’s undeclared war in Cambodia, had held his daughter’s gaze for what felt like an eternity, and while no more words had passed between them, understanding did. He knew his daughter was a soldier.

‘Caitlin?’

She had heard Monique shuffling up the hallway and rubbed the last of her tears away before the French girl caught her in a moment of weakness. Still, her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy as she turned around, holding the onion skin, by way of explanation. Monique seemed to think nothing of it. She herself was very sensitive to the smell. It had probably woken her.

‘You are hungry then?’ she asked. ‘You don’t feel sick anymore?’

There was a keen edge of hope to Monique’s questions. For a muddle-headed idealist, she had proven herself to be a lot tougher and more reliable than the American had thought possible. Long accustomed to isolation and loneliness, Caitlin had allowed herself to relax just a little around her companion.

She drained the pasta and poured it into a large serving bowl, tipping the rich, steaming sauce over it straight away. ‘Right now I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘So I’m going to eat, if you want to join me. A bit late for dinner, I know, but I have to take what I can get at the moment.’

‘I’m hungry too,’ Monique conceded. ‘I have not eaten since this morning. It is so difficult to get good food, non?’

Caitlin ladled two large serves of the meal into a couple of old china bowls that had seen better days. ‘It doesn’t help that we can’t move about freely because of me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about that, Monique. I’m sorry you got caught up in all this.’

‘All this?’ The French girl gestured expansively, taking in the disintegrating city, and a whole world of hurt beyond it. ‘This is not your doing. This would have happened whether we had ever met or not. Look out there. It is so sad. People behaving so badly towards each other. That is not your doing.’

She was gesturing towards the window where Caitlin had been standing earlier. With the apartment in darkness, the fires burning through the outer ‘burbs stood out prominently against large swathes of blacked-out city. Here and there, blue and red strobes marked the passage of emergency vehicles, but they looked… inadequate. Paris was heading towards a tipping point. Caitlin doubted most of the city’s residents realised that yet. Not down in their marrow, anyway. As soon as they truly understood what was coming, the unrest of the present moment would probably give way to savage anarchy. It would be a little while yet, however. The civilised mind was slow and deeply reluctant to throw off the habits of a lifetime, which meant that Caitlin and Monique still had a chance to escape.

They moved through to stand by the window as they forked up the pasta. It had become something of ritual between them, a way to push back the walls. It wasn’t so much a problem for Caitlin, but Monique felt very much the press of claustrophobia as their time in the hide-out dragged on, and the city itself seemed to contract around them, the sky lowering, the streets becoming mean and pinched and increasingly filthy. And of course, there were hunters, somewhere out there, still looking for them. The lack of a police response to the events at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre, the appearance of more anonymous gunned-up suits and the vans outside Caitlin’s other ‘official’ safe house did more to convince Monique that she’d been caught up in something weird and dangerous than anything Caitlin had said. She was not a believer. She hadn’t gone across to the dark side, as the American wryly put it. But she was more trusting of Caitlin than she had been, more willing to go along with her call.

The two women ate in silence, enjoying the luxury of being warm, dry and well fed in a world that had turned inexplicably hostile, just a few inches away, on the other side of a windowpane.

The recipe wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough to her dad’s to be both comforting and upsetting to Caitlin. She had accepted the fact of her family’s death. They were gone and the shock of it was doubly unsettling because she had never expected to outlive them. The familiar scent and taste of the dish brought home a flood of memories and threatened an even greater flood of tears. She would allow herself to grieve later. She knew that such feelings couldn’t be bottled up without doing damage. But likewise, she was not ready to let her guard down in front of Monique, no matter how much closer they had become under the stresses of the last week. In the end, she told herself, the French girl was just a contact on a job that had gone wrong.

‘We can’t stay here, you know, Monique. We will have to get going, and soon.’

‘But where? And how? Travel is so difficult for everyone right now. And for you it is worse. Where would you even go?’

Caitlin nodded. Three men ran through the intersection below, all of them young and white. Two had shaved heads while the third wore his lank, dark hair in a ponytail. They seemed to be laughing, but running as fast as they could. Whether towards or away from something, she could not tell. She waited for some further development but the cobbled street, wet with acidic rain and glowing a sick, jaundiced yellow under the street lamps, remained deserted.

‘Things are better in England,’ said Caitlin. The government seems to have a stronger grip.’

‘Social fascists,’ replied Monique with a shrug. ‘And racist too. Putting the army on the streets like that. And only in the Muslim districts, of course.’

Caitlin didn’t rise to the bait. There was no passion in the delivery. It was almost as though her companion was reciting a lesson by rote. A few days ago Caitlin would have argued with her, pointed out that the army had gone where the violence was worst. But she stayed silent and Monique abandoned her polemic, switching to a practical protest.