Chapters (50)
He had noticed the black car for a while, the man he came to know waiting for him after his afternoon lectures. The careful approach they took to gauge his interest. He was flattered, of course – his expertise was well known – but now he had an avenue to help. To strike back. Their satellites, their digital mapping still not accurate enough in rough terrain. There followed meetings in cafés. And he had felt good, when they confirmed their strikes against the regime. It was only afterwards that word had reached him that they had been ambushed. And Hamza had phoned them but where once they had been communicative, they were now unreachable. Single tones of cut-off mobiles. Then, one day, they came. Bundled him into the back of a van. Hussein screaming. A neighbour running out of her house to hold him. Comfort him. He had feared that they were regime soldiers, but they were not. The shock of capture. The beating at General Reeves’s hands, the colleague and close personal friend whom the General had lost in the ambush. The grudge he held. The lies they insisted that he was telling. And he had felt himself sink. Everything inaudible, far away.
The darkness was thinning now, an inky blueness seeping into the sky. The birds becoming louder. The moon thinking about dawn. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw dawn break over the sea. Felt the world turn into another day on the horizon. The night lift. The heaviness dissipate. He watched as the heavens and Earth started to separate once more into distinct colours. Watched as the cold sun slid along the horizon, inhabiting, for now, the same space as the moon. Both making the world turn. Then, he heard a noise in the distance. A car, far away. A door closing. Footsteps. She was home. She came to him, sat next to him. Leant in silently. She was cold, exhausted.
‘How is he?’
She looked out to sea. The moon was fading now, the light lifting the sun.
‘We’ll see.’
Hamza thought of Emrys’s old hands. How they knew their way instinctively around the boat. His fingerprints worn smooth now. The way his mind clung to the shape of life and the hope he could still give. Nefyn needed him; they both needed him. They sat and listened to the waves falling over each other as the tentative light grew around them.