Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

The room reminded her of the refectory at her boarding school. She hadn’t fitted in there either.

Anna stood up and smiled beneath her ringlets. ‘Check in OK?’ she asked. ‘This is my colleague Sanela.’ She raised a small hand and flicked it in the direction of a young woman sitting on the other side of the table.

Sanela gave Terry a weak smile, and then returned to her meal.

‘And this is Michael Baring. Michael, this is Dr Barnes.’

Baring was in his fifties. He had a thick grey beard and a lined face. A smoker, Terry could see, or had been once. He was thin. Beneath his wool crewneck he wore a silk cravat.

Terry was generally shrewd. She could spot a phoney from a great distance; she was instantly on her guard with Baring.

‘Why are you here, Dr Barnes?’ he asked.

‘I’ve come to evacuate a little boy. He will have emergency treatment in the UK.’

‘Ah!’ Baring chuckled. ‘A mercy bid!’

‘You’re that doctor,’ Sanela said, looking up from her plate, suddenly interested in the new arrival. Terry nodded. ‘My friend was supposed to meet you, but it was impossible to reach the airport,’ Sanela continued. ‘How did you manage to get here?’

‘We brought her,’ Anna said.

Sanela looked at Anna and then at Terry.

‘I can take you to the State Hospital after lunch if you like,’ Sanela said. ‘They were worried in case you had been sent back. They’re anxious to meet you.’

Terry felt a moment of exquisite relief.

‘Yes please!’

‘What room?’ the waiter asked Terry. He looked at her stony-faced, unblinking. She couldn’t immediately remember her room number. He asked again, impatiently.

She found her key and read the number. ‘Room 305.’

The waiter moved away without comment.

‘You’re next door to me!’ Baring said. There was triumph in his voice, as though he’d secured an advantage over everyone else at the table.

Terry had smoked her second Marlboro. Lunch had ended and the restaurant was practically empty. She was impatient to get to the hospital and she wanted to get away from Michael Baring.

Baring’s experience, of the city and of much else, was exhaustive. He enjoyed showing other people the many ways in which his own knowledge was superior to theirs. Terry was unfamiliar with her surroundings, and this seemed to please him. She made the mistake of admitting that her knowledge of the conflict wasn’t deep. He wouldn’t let this drop.

Anna had begun asking Terry about her mission to evacuate little Miro and his mother to London. However, in a subtly bullying way, Baring had taken over the interview, throwing Anna little bits of praise, which seemed to mollify her. ‘Anna’s been over to talk to the other side. She knows the score,’ he said. ‘Anna agrees with me on this. Anna was first with that story.’

‘Where’s Brad?’ Baring asked.

Anna lit a cigarette and said, ‘Who knows?’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be working together?’

She shrugged, but Baring continued snidely, ‘I think perhaps Brad would be more comfortable with a less demanding story. Especially after what happened in his last posting.’

‘What happened in his last posting?’ Terry asked.

‘Well, I’m not going to gossip,’ Baring said primly. He had been gossiping since she sat down at the table.

‘Actually,’ Anna said, ‘I’ve never heard the whole story. It was in Sri Lanka, right?’

‘You should know, because – heaven forbid – you could find yourself in the same position!’ He glanced around as though keen to maintain a certain discretion. ‘Apparently Brad got a lot of his best stories in Colombo from a local reporter… used to help Brad clinch exclusives and Brad got the credit. Then – this is what I heard – I don’t know the ins and outs, so…’ – he raised his hands to show that he was innocent of any slanderous intent – ‘Brad’s drinking was starting to raise concerns at the paper, and in order to shore up his position he prodded this chap into arranging an ill-advised interview with Prabhakaran—’

‘The Tamil Tiger guy?’ Anna said.

‘That’s the one. Hardly ever appears in public. They went up north and when they finally made it to the rendezvous everything unravelled. It turned out there was no interview. Then, when they came back into government territory they drove right into an ambush and the local guy was killed.’

‘How did Brad get out?’ Terry asked.

Baring shrugged. ‘Various opinions. There was some sort of checkpoint and apparently Brad thought he could talk his way through. In the event, it was the Sri Lankan they killed. They left Brad sitting at the side of the road with a few bruises.’

While Baring was holding forth, Sanela continued to sit a little apart, reading her newspaper and smoking Camel cigarettes. Two men strolled over and began talking to her. Both were in their thirties; one sported a thick flying jacket that made him look comically rotund, like the Michelin Man; he had wiry grey hair and a goatee and he spoke English. The other was more elegantly dressed – pressed jeans and a smart, wool-lined oilskin jerkin – and spoke to Sanela in her own language. He had a wry, almost professorial expression, peering over the top of his designer glasses. The man with the flying jacket began regaling Sanela with a story. Terry couldn’t hear everything, just a word here and there in between fits of giggling. The second man took up the thread from time to time before the first brought the tale to a raucous conclusion.

When they reached the punchline there was an explosion of laughter.

Sanela’s face was transformed.

She smiled and gesticulated in an animated, deprecating way. She looked young and pretty and her sudden cheerfulness was like oxygen in the room.

Then the two men moved to another table, and there was more laughter. Sanela decided lunch break was over. ‘Shall we go now?’ she asked Terry.

‘Michael Baring is not admired,’ Sanela remarked as they walked to the back door of the hotel. ‘He understands little, and you must not be offended by him.’

Outside, she said, ‘We must move quickly. This is a sniper area.’

They climbed broad steps from the hotel to the pavement and Sanela began to run across the snow.

For the second time since her arrival in the city Terry found herself racing behind a relative stranger across a piece of open ground. Sanela ran faster than Brad had done and the distance they had to cover now was much greater than at the airport. Sanela darted ahead and Terry felt as though she’d been abandoned. As before, she didn’t know where the danger lay, the direction the bullets might come from. She became aware of a smell, a kind of rottenness, floating over the whiteness of the snow. To her right she saw a pile of rubbish. She heard the sound her boots made. It seemed to be magnified by the surrounding silence. She counted her steps. She gasped for air as she laboured over the uneven surface. Again the terrible tightening in her chest.

Even if she’d been properly prepared, if she’d undergone some sort of conflict training, she would still have been scared. To be afraid was to respond rationally to danger. She considered this and the thought gave her comfort. Her brain was reasserting itself over animal instinct.

Sanela gained the cover of a building fifty yards from the hotel and waited for Terry. When she caught up, Terry was breathless.

‘It is still exposed here, but safer,’ Sanela said. ‘Come,’ she added in a firm, neutral tone. She led the way up a steep hill towards another road.

They walked haphazardly, following a barely delineated path in the snow.

At the road they turned to the right.