By Light Alone (44 page)

Issa concentrated on trying to keep her breathing calm and level. Oddly, although she was genuinely terrified – although she had no doubt that her life might end at any moment – it took an effort of will to stop herself falling asleep.

‘She told you to go away with her,’ said Sergei. ‘Don’t deny it. It’s what she would do. She is in love with you. She gets to sleep with you. I don’t get to. Wouldn’t it be sweeter if I killed all three of us now?’

‘I wouldn’t like that at all,’ Issa said, in as matter-of-fact a voice as she could muster.

He narrowed his eyes, then he opened them very wide. Then, abruptly, he slumped back on his divan and fell instantly asleep.

Issa sat watching him for a long time. The sensible thing, now, would be leave and never come back. Of course. Get out of there. Escape with her life. But she did not move. She could not have told you, if you’d been in a position to ask her, why she did not move. The rational thing would have been flight. But Issa did not do the rational thing – because she was drained of energy, or because some existential inertia overcame her, or because she was foolish, or because her karma was to remain there. Instead of going away she surrendered to her exhaustion. She lay down and slept. And the following morning, sitting at the open window letting the sun warm her head, she was perfectly aware of how peculiar her behaviour was. When Sergei woke, he looked at the weapon still in his hand with puzzled eyes, before tucking it away under his pillow. He got up and shook himself all over, like a wet dog.

Roxan woke as blithe as a songbird. She drank water, and Issa drank, and they chatted together, and Sergei joined in. Then, afterwards Sergei and Roxan went out, laughing, and Issa sat on the floor in a parallelogram of sunlight. She asked herself why she was still there. Might this not be the moment to slip away, to take a bottle of water and make her way down to the coast? But she did not go. She did not know why she did not go.

In fact she stayed a further four days. Every night was a period of low-level anxiety, as Issa lay there, conscious of the fact that Sergei had a gun right there, under his pillow. But she did not say anything to Roxan, or to anybody else. And life continued in its regular, lassitudinous groove. What had nested inside Issa was the germ of passivity, and it was growing its bindweed complexities in amongst the branches of her spirit. Her life was a soil in which this seed could take root, as any life is. She thought about this, but part of the cunning of this decay is that it feeds precisely upon our self-absorption. She told herself: ‘He could kill me at any time.’ She felt the force of the threat. But she didn’t do anything. Or to be precise: what she did was to cycle through a series of notionals. Maybe she should get them all to talk about it, compel Sergei to talk through whatever it was he had done in Russia. Maybe she could offer to have sex with him. Maybe she could steal the gun when he was asleep and somehow dispose of it. But she did none of these things.

On the third evening, the three of them chatted with seeming good humour about Roxan’s state. ‘We’ll live together here and raise the child,’ Sergei announced. ‘The three of us will make a utopia-in-little. Utopia will be we three.’ Roxan blushed. ‘You’re such a Nudnik,’ she told him. But there was an unmistakable flavour of threat in the word
three
.

How does it go on? Breath stains the glass. The view is the same in the morning and in the evening. The sun slides a tray of light over the floor. When it rains, the streets fill with dancing longhaired figures, and pots and pans are waved, and plastic boxes and bags are held out at arm’s length. The world is slightly heavier after the rainfall than before.

Issa watches a religious parade – a dozen ragged-looking longhairs dancing along the street down below, carrying an icon of Neocles, who made the Hair.

Sergei fucked Roxan right there in front of her, on the floor of his shabby one-room hideout. She watched without interest. Afterwards the two of them slept on Sergei’s divan and Issa stared into the corner of the room. It was the afternoon; cool but bright. There was nobody there, of course. There was nobody in the room except Issa, Roxan and Sergei. Except that there
was
somebody there. It took Issa a long time to bring him into focus. It was Rageh. ‘What you doing?’ Rageh asked her.

‘Just sitting in the sunlight,’ said Issa, but quietly, because she didn’t want to wake the two of them up.

‘Where you going?’

‘New York,’ she said, although it took an effort to get the words up.

‘Why there?’

‘Because I am its queen,’ she said. The words were plastic and unreal on her lips, but she mouthed them anyway.

Rageh stepped forward a little. His face wore an unusual smirk, as if he were laughing at her. But then she saw that the back of his head was all broken open, the edges folded out in petals of bone, like a tin sheet through which a fist has punched. He turned to look at the couple asleep on the divan. Issa could see inside, could see right inside: scooped and void, clean as a washed gourd. When he turned back to look at her, she watched the distortion in his front-face with renewed fascination. There was a tiny pale-pink hole, like a button, on the bridge of his nose. There seemed no connection between this shallow filled-in circular depression and the monstrous distortion at the back of the head.

‘How are you getting there?’ he asked.

‘By air, or water, or land,’ she replied.

‘Not by lying here,’ he noted, looking again at Sergei and Roxan.

‘No.’

The uncanny moment prolonged itself.

‘I’m sorry,’ Issa said, at a loss, ‘that I got you killed.’

‘Did you get me killed? My memory isn’t vivid.’

‘You don’t remember them emptying your head, with their gun?’

‘I suppose. I suppose I do. Distantly. It felt like – I don’t know. This is what I remember: a big wind was blowing in both my ears. A big wind, the biggest. It started with a dog bark that stretched into a rolling breaker crashing on a long, straight, black-sandy shore. But it was all very gentle, really. But it was a slow sort of drawing-out.’

‘I feel responsible.’

‘You remember that Nature Fact Book you watched, the one about the giant bull seals?’

Issa couldn’t bring her mind to focus properly on this statement. ‘What?’

‘Sure you remember it. You watched it, like, a hundred times. There was this big colony of these huge seals, like long massive rubber sacks filled with jelly, with dog faces on one end. Whiskers and everything. And the biggest male had these great tusks, like walking sticks, poking out of its mouth. They were huge, these creatures, metres and metres long, big as a flitter. And the biggest male kept all the women in a harem. And if any of the younger males tried to creep up and
schlup
one behind his back, he’d get really furious, and flail around and sack-race chase the challenger over the beach, and head-hammer those teeth into the rival’s fleshy back, like big knives.’

‘Schlup doesn’t sound like the sort of word you would use, Rageh,’ she observed.

‘You
do
remember that book. It is the nature of the universe, that book. The only way for the younger male to get any women is to get fat enough to fight the old guy and kill him. The youngster needs to grow his teeth long as a sword, and then sheathe them in his rival’s flesh. The women just flop around, whilst the males fight over them.’

‘How can you know about that book, Rageh?’ Issa asked. ‘I saw that long before I ever knew you.’

Rageh looked at her, and something shivery went through her heart, so she said: ‘This is, like, a hallucination, isn’t it? I’m hallucinating you.’

‘You don’t drink enough,’ he chided. ‘And you need more minerals. You need to get your energy levels up.’

She was going to reply:
It’s not easy
! But she was going to say so in a whiny voice, and she squashed the sentiment before it emerged. Whining wasn’t going to help her.

‘You know I’m right,’ said Rageh, indulgently. ‘More water. And a little hardfood! He’s got money, why doesn’t he buy you a little, from time to time? All this lounging about!’

‘It’s in the way of me getting up and going.’

‘Get up and go,’ agreed Rageh.

‘I just . . .’ said Issa, searching for the elusive truth of it. What, though? ‘I just – I don’t know. I feel an attachment.’

‘But he threatened you with a gun!’ said Rageh, looking disapprovingly.

‘Not just him. Roxan. Can I just abandon them?’

Rageh laughed. When he opened his mouth wide, it was possible to see the far wall right through, on the other side. This, more than the laughter, made Issa tremble. ‘That’s the
easy
abandonment! You’ve had the giving-up of food thrust upon you, that’s the hard part. Perfect freedom is almost yours! But you keep getting tangled up in new addictions. Glued down by them. People!’

‘It’s natural,’ she said. ‘It’s the human thing.’

‘And you’re content with that,’ said Rageh, in a sly voice. He came a little closer. ‘Queen of New York? Or just some girl?’

Issa breathed in through her nose. ‘What must I do?’

‘Drink more. Eat as much as you can get your hands on. Energy levels! See that spider?’

‘Spider?’

‘There. Start with that. Just that, and then you can go.’

This spider was all elbows, and a self-important manner, lodged in the corner of the ceiling. It tasted shockingly bitter,
howlingly
bitter, and made her tongue stretch and
gah
. She drank a gutful of water after, and then spread himself flat in the window’s patch of sun and fanned out his hair. The aftertaste of the spider was foul, but she’d done a good thing by eating it. She looked around and noticed that Rageh had vanished.

She stole two bottles of water and left.

It was easy enough making her way along the Trabzon road, skirting the western bank of the lake. It was late afternoon. Crowds lined the way, shifting reluctantly every few minutes. The setting sun, going behind the eastern peaks, pushed shadow further up the slope, and the crowds shuffled to stay on the light. Issa kept her head down, and ignored the various hoots, or hellos, or offers of sex, or pleas for a drink of water from her bottles. There were many of these, some aggressive. Issa wished she had cached the bottles in a bag or sack, to disguise them a little, rather than having to carry one in each hand. As the sky darkened and deepened overhead, and the first stars jabbed the points of their needles through the cloth, she found a place to rest and sat down. People were all around her, all of them settling for the night; and Issa fell into conversation with a woman called Ay
ş
e who was walking in the opposite direction up the road. This woman stood out because she had a backpack. She was from Rize, she said, and was trying to get enough money together to buy hardfood to see her through a pregnancy.

‘Aren’t you scared somebody will steal your pack?’ Issa asked.

‘At this time of day,’ she replied, ‘people get sluggish, and it’s not usually a problem. But I have a
gun
,’ she added, bringing out a small iron pistoletta red with rust. ‘And I’m careful. I’m travelling the coast, buying and selling in a small way. I pick up a euro here, a euro there.’

Issa held up one of her bottles of water. ‘Would you buy this?’

‘I’m on the way home,’ said Ay
ş
e, cautiously, ‘so I’m more interested in selling than buying.’

‘I’ll give you a good price,’ Issa pressed, eager to be rid of the weight of the thing. ‘I don’t really want it, anyway.’

‘You shouldn’t tell me that!’ said Ay
ş
e, laughing. ‘That’s no way to bargain!’

‘I’m not skilled at bargaining,’ said Issa.

‘Your accent,’ said Ay
ş
e. ‘I can’t quite place it. Where are you from?’

‘Several places,’ said Issa.

They sat down together and each drank a little from the bottle in question. Ay
ş
e talked a little more about the challenges involved in raising the money to have a baby. ‘I wouldn’t try it in spring or summer. With the stronger sunlight, and after months of enforced winter sluggishness, all the men go a little crazy. Leaping about, grabbing at you – rape, even. They wouldn’t think twice about stealing anything I was carrying. But look at them now—’ She gestured with her right arm. ‘Late autumn, they’re much quieter. It’d be even safer in the wintertime, but then I’d end up eating half the food I collected, just to keep going.’

‘You can’t, you know,
do
it on insects and leaves?’ Issa asked.

‘No,’ said Ay
ş
e, gravely. ‘I mean: this will be my first child, so I’m not speaking from experience. But speaking to the older women in my village, it takes a
lot
of energy to bring a child to term. And then you’ve got to feed it, with milk. It comes out of the nipples, on your front!’ Ay
ş
e shook her head at the strangeness of this. ‘They come out bald. Have you ever seen one?’

‘I have a brother,’ said Issa, remembering very vaguely the arrival of a blue-rompered little creature, all red in the face.

‘Well then you know!’

‘And the Boss of your village wouldn’t help with food?’