Tom works quickly, as his discipline has taught him. Quick dabs and strokes of the brush, the journey from water bottle to paint to paper almost unconscious. Soft lines for the men lying or squatting in rubble, greens and browns of camouflage, red slashes for their berets. Hard outlines of the windows and sandbagged doorway, the curve of a Bren gun magazine. White daubs, the lettering on the walls, KKE. BAΛATOΣ scrawled across a painted advertisement: fat butter beans spilling from a jar, golden-yellow on green. Observation Post Beans. When he moves his leg, the cleats of his boot rattle across dried olives and spent cartridges. The tiles beneath him are sticky with olive oil and the air around him is heavy with it, cloying and rancid, twisted through with cordite and other things rotting in the chaos of tumbled crates and cases around him.

The Bren starts up again, the gunner squeezing off short bursts, his spotter pointing and shouting in his ear. ‘Left. Left! See him?’ Tom winces. He licks his thumb and smudges the rectangle of the doorway. The ash from his cigarette is drifting and speckling the damp painting. It isn’t a bad effect.

The soldier crouching next to him adjusts his sights and tenses. ‘I see you, you little bastard,’ he mutters. ‘Can you get that fucking sniper, Jim?’

‘If I could find him,’ says the Bren gunner tersely.

Tom blots the painting carefully, and folds it back to reveal a fresh page. He rolls over and stands up, crouches so he can look over the soldier’s shoulder. He doesn’t feel anything at all, except for a cold emptiness. But he still needs to look. He’s still working, though he is almost finished. He stares out at the long, shallow trench in the grass near the burnt car, where the bodies are. He takes a cigarette, lights it and puts it between the stiff fingers of his left hand. He notices that his right hand is shaking slightly. He makes a fist and when he opens it again, his hand is steady. He picks up his brush and paints.

Surrounded by a wash of dirty green, a black hole. He begins to mix grey. Bodies in sunshine. He knows the exact shade. She isn’t there, he says to himself. Don’t worry: she isn’t there any more.

A runner comes with a message: the corporal is ordered to blow through the side wall into the next shop and consolidate the position. The level of excitement inside the observation post increases but Tom hardly notices. He sees that he has given the bodies next to the painted grave small individualities: quirks of hair, face shape. One woman has heavy blonde hair and he has picked out her eyebrows, two tiny black commas above blank eyes. But that isn’t what she looks like. Not now. Not out there. He rubs his numb hand again.