Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

She despised the subject and the words on the pages in front of her had no meaning.

Not quite ‘nothing’ happened in Dewsbury… three of the boys who had gone down on to the underground trains in London had come from Dewsbury. A teenager had been arrested and charged with terror offences, and been convicted. Two more boys had disappeared from Savile Town and one had driven a vehicle at the enemy and then detonated a bomb, and the other was missing, assumed dead. Not nearly ‘nothing’. It had been on the local radio. Two boys from that part of Yorkshire were reported killed in the defence of Raqqa, the caliphate city. Their home was raided by police. Zeinab had thought it a cruelty, and without justification, but the street where they had lived had been cordoned, and families evacuated, and their parents taken away, and a bomb team had gone through the house, grotesque in huge kit. She had bridled in anger. They had been gone nearly two years, by then. Would they have left a live explosive device in the home of their mother and father? She had thought the high visibility search was to inflict fear on the community. As if ownership of the street and their homes were was confiscated, taken from them, and they might, all of those who lived there, have been declared ‘pariahs’, all intimidated and scared and humiliated, and she believed that was the intention. Other homes had been raided, those of the friends of the boys’ parents. Not hers. Perhaps because the connection between the families was not proven on the computers, the police detectives did not visit her house and interrogate her parents. She thought often of those boys. Walked home in sunshine and rain and found herself straining to hear the note of that car’s engine on the road behind her, and the scrape of the window and the casual way in which she was greeted; almost, still, she could smell the smoke from their cigarettes. No funeral, no repatriated bodies, no confirmation of what had happened to them.

In the Students’ Union buildings, across a piazza from where she played at studying, were notice-boards that advertised seminars against radicalism. Kids were urged to report attempts to recruit them to extremism… and life had gone on in Savile Town on the south west side of Dewsbury, and the cousins seemed forgotten and were no longer talked of: Zeinab did not forget.

There was a cemetery out of town and across the Calder river. A part of the cemetery was given over to a muslim burial area. A stone wall separated the cemetery from the Heckmondwike Road. Zeinab had taken to going in darkness with a handful of flowers and reaching over the wall and leaving them on the grass. A mowing team came each week and trimmed the grass but she noticed that her flowers, if still in bloom, were always left there… It might have been that she was followed, certainly she would have been watched. There were people who looked for recruits, for sympathisers, for activists, for supporters… It could have been, before they went on their journey, that the cousins had mentioned her name and that it had been stored in a memory. She left the flowers and would look across the darkness of the cemetery, and she had not forgotten the cousins and an anger had grown in her.

She had been approached. First term at university. She had worn correct dress then, but not the full face veil. Two boys, one materialising on her right and one on her left, engaging her, and using the names of the cousins. Support had been teased from her. Not at one meeting, not at two or three; these boys were patient and respectful, never sought to hurry her. She would launch into monologues of resentment because of the deaths of the boys, and the value of their ‘martyrdom’, and their bravery… step by small step. They were not her friends but were associates, and showed a road ahead. Then, the big step.

No more dressing to advertise her modesty. All consigned to a cupboard in her room in the Hall. Down to second-hand clothing shops, and buying cheap, worn jeans, making the rips in the knees, and loose fitting T-shirts and sweaters and fleece tops, and a toggle hat from which her hair fell. She was no longer the dutiful daughter of her parents. And there was reason for it. Of course, there were spies on the campus. Of course inside the university buildings, watchers scrutinised any person thought to demonstrate faith in ‘strikeback’ or belief in the armed struggle. She was one of the few and had thrown aside the constraints of her upbringing, another girl hardly worth noticing. The boys had nurtured her, as if there would be, ultimately, at a time of their choosing, a use for her…

She had been walking, then was scrambling, now was running… the boys, Krait and Scorpion, had shown her the body. She had seen the face. Dead lips and a dead tongue between them and dead eyes above them, and fingers that were splayed out but held nothing, and she understood for the first time the stakes of the hidden world she had joined, understood also what happened to an informer, the lowest of the worst… she was running and the wind might have caught her hair, dragged it out behind her, as had happened when she had walked on a moor with him, and the boys had said that there was a purpose to them being together.

Unremarkable, an open-air conversation. ‘You are sure about him?’

She was sure.

A young woman huddled against the weather and clutching her pile of books and talking with two young men, unnoticed. ‘You could travel in two days or three?’

She would travel when they needed her to.

‘He will do it?’

Their question, her answer. He would do what she told him to do.

‘You are so sure?’

Not an issue. She was certain of it. He would do as she told him, and she had laughed lightly, had left the boys, had gone in search of a place in the library. She would have liked then to have been able to lean across the stone wall on the Heckmondwike Road, above where she laid her flowers, feel the night cold on her face and tell her cousins what she was tasked to do and imagine them nodding in admiration.

The city of Marseille… more than two and a half millennia ago, Greek traders had arrived here from an Ionian town in Turkey, had established a trading post, had quickly discovered a perfect climate for the cultivation of vines and olives. They developed an extraordinary depth of culture, moved inland but also established trading routes by sailing west out into the Atlantic and then south along the coastline of continental Africa. Next to exploit the safe anchorage of the harbour were the Roman colonists. Later, under Julius Caesar, veteran legionaries were awarded plots of land as reward for loyal service. Next to come were the barbarians, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and after them Arab armies sailing north across the Mediterranean. And then there was chaos and a breakdown in authority and Marseille was overrun by pirates. There were famines and plagues and disasters for centuries until papal power subjugated the unruly territory. Then prosperity, then absolute monarchy, then the construction of two of the finest fortresses in Europe – the Bas-Fort Saint-Nicolas and the Fort Saint-Jean, and the building of cathedrals to the glory of God, and fine public buildings. Marseille became the second city of France, but one that always showed a pithy, bitter, stubborn attitude to any form of subjugation from distant Paris. History, ancient and modern, drips from the civic buildings along with hedonistic streaks of rebellion. A visitor can stroll along bustling boulevards, always staying aware and keeping a firm grip on a bag and the zip fastened on a pocket with a wallet or purse, can visit magnificient museums, can take excursions to a coastline of amazing beauty, can eat well, feel a sense of anarchic freedom, can slip inside the dark quiet beauty of the Cathédrale de la Major and speak a few words of contemplation and feel purged and at peace. Those are a collection of aspects of Marseille.