Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

He sat in his chair with the lights off and the bungalow creaking and it would have been good if he had a dog, by his feet or on his lap, and he hoped to sleep – not dream and not remember.

Four days of hell, and then a minute in which it seemed to Gaz that a cloud had lifted.

She was coming first thing the next morning, had a ride on a boat that needed a minor repair done in the Pierowall harbour, and she was bringing stock for the hotel’s gift shop. In the kitchen he shrugged into full waterproofs, nearly dry from the day before. It was lunatic to be out on such a day but he was a man persecuted by the weight of obligation and must get up the hill and beyond the castle and repair a paddock fence that had come down because of rotten posts. He would do it because he had promised it would be done, and the weight of the wind would make his efforts ludicrous but he was driven, could not escape a sense of duty.

In Gaz’s life Aggie shared twin roles. She was both lover and carer, companion and therapist. She would have acknowledged the first, was ignorant of the second. Fetching the tools from the shed, which shook in spite of the steel-woven cables anchoring it, he was belted by the wind and rain splattered on him. No man and no beast would have volunteered to be out that day. Gaz thought that love came to Aggie on a ‘take it or leave it’ ticket, but to him it was precious and his life had had little of it.

The friends of his ‘aunt’ were Betty and Bobby Riley, childless, with a 200-acre farm east of Stoke on Trent and off the A50. A new life. Nothing had prepared him, aged five, for rural life. He had gone to the village school, arriving first because he was taken directly after milking was finished and last to be collected, after the second milking in the afternoon. Different to other kids and never belonging; every mother within miles would have masked her mouth and gossiped about the child now living at the Riley farm… he knew some said he was bought for cash. A rough and ready life, without frills or luxuries, and a gruff fondness shown him but not open love. Treated, in fact, like one of the dogs, cursed at, head ruffled and given a decent place by the fire in winter – love of a sort. He had understood it best when one of the older dogs, bad hips and sagging on its haunches, had been taken outside by Bobby Riley who had carried a shotgun and had cartridges in his pocket and put a spade by the kitchen door. Just one shot in the early morning fog, and he’d returned for his breakfast, nothing said, but dirt on his boots and the smell of the discharge on his hands, and his eyes swollen. That sort of love was shown him. Nor was his mother ever spoken of, and he had never returned to the tower block. At first he had been driven to school and back, then had walked both ways, at least an hour, then had bicycled. Then there had been a comprehensive in Stoke and a school bus… there were girls there, and he was ridiculed for his shyness. What love he did know as a teenager was for the isolation and the quiet of the farm, and most of his spare time was spent out in the woodland beyond the fifteen-Acre. He knew the haunts and habits of badgers and foxes and occasional deer, and the rabbits: killed none of them, never used a snare or a trap or a net.

He worked hard at the fallen fence. There would have been time on the Orkney islands when all the barriers that marked a division of property or ensured livestock kept to their own patch were dry stone walls. Stone, there to last, was a currency. The cemetery close to the hotel was filled with headstones, functional and dignified and scoured clean by wind and rain. Many of the men buried within sound of the sea and close to the calling gulls would have shortened their lives by building stone walls, back-breaking work. What had he, Gaz, to complain of as he hammered three new posts into sodden ground, then tapped home the staples? The men and women who had been where he had – the Province, Afghan’s Helmand, and in Syria – did not complain, thought it diminished them… but that was before and this was now.

He worked steadily. He did not hurry. When he had finished he would tidy away his tool bucket in the back of the pick-up, and go home. He had a radio that he rarely listened to and a TV that was seldom watched, and he would get the place as presentable as was necessary, not that Aggie would have noticed.

One day, not soon, he might try to share with her what had happened in a storm in a place far away… but might not. It would open the can, let the worms wriggle free. ‘Be careful what you wish for’, what a teacher or a sergeant, or the psychiatrist assigned to him, could have said. He might one day, but not soon.

Time to be killed before he went home, before she came, and the gale to be endured and the rain to be sheltered from. He drove to the castle. He had no reason to be there. He would go inside, often did, through its low entrance and duck through arches, and would hunker down in what would have been a great hall where a man of authority would have held court. Where such a man would have believed himself in a safe haven, even if his future was death on a scaffold… He would sit there, contemplate, and be the better for it because Aggie was coming, a dose of the therapy he needed. Had found, inside those strengthened fifteenth-century walls, what he looked for, reckoned himself secure from the reach of his history.

Faizah was busy in the bar with customers. Early lunches for office workers and the visitors who flocked to Hamburg. A popular haunt, and the artefacts of the harbour and the traditional trades of the city were prominent, gave atmosphere. Impatient customers flicked fingers for her attention, and a shadow came across the door.

The door was held wide as if a potential customer needed more light to see better inside, and a gust of wind – carrying diesel and petrol fumes and the scent of the street – riffled her hair and lay on the bare skin of her neck, and tickled her scar. There were many times when the bar door opened, heavy and antique, and men and women hesitated there, but she sensed the difference. Had been waiting for someone to come, four days and four nights. She looked up, stared at the door, and a customer was snapping at her: how much longer before she took his order? At first she could not see the face because the light was behind it. The bar was kept low lit because the owner thought that enhanced its atmosphere and its replicas of ships’ figureheads and coiled ropes and imitation firearms. She knew it was what she had waited for.

It had not been easy for her at the consulate on Hohe Bleichen.

“I don’t know why you have come here. We’re only a consulate.”

Where else to go?

“The sort of people you are asking for, we don’t have them here.”

A message should be passed, responsible people should be contacted.

“And we’re about to close. We’re not open all day.”

She said why she needed to speak urgently to people who would understand.

“I don’t really know what I should do, and anyway I’m due to collect my daughter from nursery, and I only do part-time.”

She had exploded. A gabble of names and a village that was Deir al-Siyarqi, her finger pressing at the scar on her chin, and no tears, just a hard-fought calm, and the controlled anger of Faizah must have struck at a place of pain. A telephone was lifted. First call was to a woman, demanding that she cut short her art class and get to the kindergarten to pick up a child. A second call to Berlin, and delays and impatience, and obvious transfers, and finally…

“…I don’t know who I am speaking to but don’t dare to put the phone down on me, just don’t. There is a young lady here with a story that would freeze blood, and I believe each word she has said to me. And you will listen to her, hear me, listen, and you will do what is needed. So, here she is.”