Richard House - The Kills

3.9

Ford waited in the van with Martin, while Nathalie, Eric, and Mehmet ran errands in the market. Martin elected to stay with the equipment and sat with the camera nestled between his legs. Still peevish he leaned out of the window and avoided conversation, pretending he couldn’t hear because of the street. Parched, Ford hoped that Nathalie would remember to buy bottled water. She’d made a list but left it on the seat, and he suspected some other agenda behind the trip. Late afternoon and the sun scalded his bare arms.

He began to entertain Eric’s ideas that Martin preferred men, or rather boys, or rather his students, and that through some perversity he was attached to Nathalie, who could, in her own manner, be considered peerless. How then, and why, would such a woman satisfy herself with such a man? Whatever Martin’s charms, whatever his appeal, Ford couldn’t see it.

Martin, lost to his thoughts, tugged at his beard.

Ford redirected his attention to the town.

Larger than Narapi, Birsim’s streets span out from a central market. Mehmet had parked facing the main square and left them with a packet of coloured pencils to hand out to children. It was better, he said, to give crayons, but the children wouldn’t accept them. Instead they bothered Martin for cash, or took the pencils and poked him with them, then slapped the van’s sides when he refused to give them money. Bored, Ford watched a line of mules progress toward them. A whole other order of information: sweaty and exhausted beasts hauling sticks and sacks of concrete with tourist shops on either side; glass windows, white tiled floors, then these animals of bone and pelt tethered one to another, exhausted by the heat. The streets busy. The shops empty. No tourists, not this far east, not this season.

A gentle percussive ba-boom, nothing more suggestive than a firework pop, reverberated down the street. Martin perked up, sat forward, and some moments after the stink of scorched rubber overpowered the air. From the far side of the market rose a pall of grey smoke. Martin sniffed and muttered that something was on fire. The smoke, now black, ran thick across the square and clogged the mouth of the street. Wisps of ash — burnt paper, rubber — coiled delicately down upon them.

The crowd immediately became confused. People facing the square collided with people escaping so that the street became impassable. Alarmed by the acrid stink and the unearthly black snow the mules stopped immediately alongside the van. One slumped hard against the door so that the vehicle began to lean. Camera ready, Martin struggled with the door in an attempt to shove the beast aside, but the animal would not budge. Ford clambered into the front seat, wound down the window, and pulled himself out, then up, to the van’s roof.

Martin struggled after, and Ford helped him up, his arms streaked with ash. When children attempted to scramble onto the van he pushed them down and they slipped back into the adult crowd. The smoke began to thin, and from their vantage point they could see the source of the fire.

On the far west side of the square smoke pumped through the open windows of a burning bus, the contents of the hold — shoes, clothes, baskets, suitcases, fruit, tatters of paper — spat out across the market. Flames roiled from the undercarriage.

Martin filmed the muddle using Ford as a support, and Ford sighted Eric and Nathalie among the crowd in the square with a pinch of relief. Behind them, a good number of red and black berets of the military police. Bothered by the crowd Nathalie wrapped her arm about Eric’s shoulder and Eric directed her forward. Behind them, only just in view, came Mehmet, surrounded by soldiers. When he spotted Ford and Martin on top of the van he began to shout.

* * *

Ford drank his share of the coffee, then helped himself to another cup. The bus-burning came as a reminder of the promise he had made in Kopeckale that he would avoid crowds, keep away from public spaces and gatherings, situations which he could not control. Eric finished and then re-started the novel because there were things he didn’t follow, he said, things he’d missed, and there wasn’t anything else to read but old newspapers. The idea that you could read the chapters in any order appealed to him, even though it wouldn’t change anything he already knew. He might go into town. He might try the hammam. He asked Ford if he was interested: you could get proper coffee with hot milk at the barber shop served by a giant ape of a man. There were pastries, honey and almond, yet to be tasted.

Ape. This choice of word, surely a poke at Martin?

Nathalie sat on the bench with her back against the wall, a bowl of olives on her lap. She’d had words with Eric and now they weren’t speaking. Her sights fixed on Martin, visibly brewing discontent. Martin picked dough from the bread and rolled it into pellets which he stacked on his plate. None of them were interested in making conversation. Ford couldn’t see his place in this. Nathalie moved the bread from Martin’s reach, and with a deep intake, a long single breath, she asked if Ford could help settle an issue.

‘Tell me, and be honest, I want to know what you think. Was it wrong to take pictures yesterday?’

The discussion which should have been exhausted still had legs.

‘Why are you asking him?’ Martin spoke in French.

‘Do you think it was right to film that bus? Do you think he had any business being there?’ She challenged Ford to take her side.

‘What difference did it make? There wasn’t anything we could do and he had the camera with him.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Nathalie disagreed, ‘he didn’t do it because he happened to have a camera.’

Martin interrupted. What was her problem? Seriously?

‘The problem is all about taking pictures like this,’ she reached across the table and held her hand flat, close to his face, ‘with the camera this close. It’s a terrible thing to do, to watch and do nothing. Suppose that somebody was hurt, what would you have done?’

‘Nobody was in trouble. I’m not a doctor. I make films. I couldn’t have helped even if the situation was different.’ Martin reached for his cigarettes.

‘But you were filming.’

‘You know what goes on here. It wasn’t an accident. The fire was deliberate. What do you expect? This is exactly why I came here.’ The appearance of one digital camera on the streets of Birsim was a ridiculously small infringement of anyone’s liberty. ‘I don’t see why you have a problem with this?’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘but that isn’t the issue. You know this. What would you do if your students behaved like this? Anyway, now you have what you wanted.’ Nathalie untied her hair and drew it back inside a closed fist, her voice an aside, low and sulky. ‘Go see for yourself, now we have someone watching us. Just like you said.’

Martin stood up, a motion left incomplete, his hands dithering on the armrests. He asked what she was talking about.

‘There is a man, outside, just as you said, he’s been there all morning.’

‘What man?’

‘Go see for yourself. Your activities have finally brought you to the attention of the police.’

Sulky and wronged, Nathalie stood up, and said pertly that she would see them all later, she was going out. Martin could do as he pleased.

* * *

They gathered in Mehmet’s small office at the front of the house, Ford, Martin, and Eric, and leaned cautiously into the window for a view of the street. A car, a grey and dusty Peugeot, was parked on the opposite side in a street with no other vehicles. Inside, as Nathalie had said, sat a man, visible in silhouette.

* * *

An hour later Ford and Eric checked the street and found the man still outside, waiting. Ford kept an eye on the street and kept up the reports: ‘He’s still there … hasn’t moved … I think she’s right,’ while Eric and Martin downloaded the digital film onto separate portable hard drives. When Nathalie returned the man in the car did not disguise his interest — he turned to watch as she came to the door, then kept his attention on the house once she was inside.