The Adjacent (3 page)

At that moment his phone rang, an insistent, high-pitched squeal. He took the call, grunted his understanding of something that was said, then spoke in Arabic again. Still holding the instrument to his ear, he nodded to the other man, who tapped again on the pane of glass that divided the driver from the rest of the car. The dome lights went off, the smoked glass lightened. Both men stared out of their side of the car.

Tarent looked out of his own side. For a few seconds he glimpsed the landscape outside the car. It was a blackened plain, flat, featureless, stretching away as far as he could see. There was nothing out there – everything had been levelled, reduced, annihilated. Were it not for the fact that much of the sky was visible and a low sun was glinting, Tarent could have imagined that the windows of the car were still blacked out.

He had seen this before, on a much smaller scale. The place where Melanie was killed had looked just like it.

Tarent turned towards the other men, seeking an explanation, but already the windows were being opaqued again. He briefly saw part of the sky on their side of the car: a deep, threatening purple. The shades were falling out there, while on his side the devastated landscape had been bathed in bright sunlight.

The glass quickly darkened again, cutting off his view.

HEAVY RAIN WAS POURING FROM A LOWERING SKY WHEN THE
car came to a halt outside a block of apartments on the Canonbury Road. The large car shook with the impact of the wind. The two men went with him to the main door, but did not enter the building. Tarent stood at the door, watching as the two men hurried back to the car, splashing in the rippling sheets of water blown along the street.

Although the apartment building was an old one the flat itself had been recently modernized. When Tarent turned on the lights he found a clean, livable space, with every modern convenience. He put down his bags, grateful to be on his own for the next few hours. He sank into one of the chairs and picked up the TV remote.

The storm had been dubbed TS Edward Elgar, by the World Meteorological Organization. Tarent discovered this when he turned on the TV, and although outer bands of heavy cloud had already hit London and the south-east of England the full central force of the storm was not due to strike until the early hours of the morning. It was expected to reach Level 3 or 4 at its height. There were repeated warnings to take shelter, and not to venture out in the storm. Hurricane-force winds were expected, with flooding and structural damage almost inevitable. To underline the message, the TV station played footage from an earlier storm, the Level 4 TS Danielle Darrieux. This had struck land in Ireland, crossed over into Wales, then travelled east towards Lincolnshire before moving out into the North Sea. It had eventually blown itself out as it encountered the colder and shallower waters off the coast of Norway. Blizzards had isolated the Norwegian town of Ørsknes. It was the beginning of September in Europe.

He looked in the kitchen: the refrigerator was working, but there was no real food inside. There was a bottle of soured milk, a carton of margarine spread, three eggs, a half-eaten bar of chocolate. Tarent was hungry. When he went to the main window of the apartment, which looked down into Canonbury Road, he discovered it had stopped raining. He decided to see if he could find a restaurant that was open, or at least a grocery where he could buy something to get him through the evening. As soon as he was in the street he realized there were almost no shops open. Most buildings were dark, or shuttered. The only restaurant he could find was closed – two streets away there was a small grocery still open, but three men were hurriedly boarding up the windows. Inside the shop, Tarent found a ready meal he could heat up, but the man who owned the shop warned him that power outages were likely. Thinking his stay would last for one night only, Tarent bought two bread rolls, some processed chicken and a couple of oranges. He remembered too late that he was carrying almost no cash, but the shop owner accepted a card from him.

As he left the shop, the power went off.

The flat was in darkness when he returned, and neither the fridge
nor the cooker would work. The power stayed off for most of the remainder of his stay in the flat, which instead of lasting one night only, extended to more than two days. There was no way he could leave. The storm broke in full force, as forecast, during the first night of his stay, at about two-thirty in the morning. The old apartment building was solidly built and was left relatively unscathed by the gales, torrential rain and hurtling pieces of wreckage, but Tarent was cold and hungry. In a small cupboard in the kitchen he found two unopened cans of food (one a mixed fruit salad, the other a supermarket-brand chili con carne), and he eked these out as long as possible. Without electricity he had no radio or television, and the digital network that he used before he went to Anatolia was down. On the second day the battery of his new smartphone became exhausted, and there was no way he could recharge it.

It was impossible to venture out. He spent hour after hour sitting by the window, looking down Canonbury Road, watching fearfully as the violent squalls skirled along the street, carrying water and debris, thrashing against the concrete stanchions that blocked the roadway and shooting cascades of water against the walls of the old buildings. A small office-block directly opposite his apartment window was demolished on the first night, and every scrap of its wreckage and contents was swept away by the gales. Sheets of metal, cables, parts of car bodies, traffic signs, branches of trees, skidded endlessly along the street, adding to the cacophonous racket of the howling gale. The sight of the endless damage was awful but the screeching of the wind was the true terror. It seemed never to let up, never to vary, except, impossibly, to worsen. Tarent had rarely felt more alone or vulnerable than during those two days and night. He was no worse off than anyone else, or so he imagined, and that became a consolation of sorts. For all that he remained uninjured by the violent weather, and indeed safe and dry, he suspected he came through the storm better than many. The building stayed intact, the windows did not blow out, or at least not those in his apartment, and he was too high above street level to be affected by the flooding.

On the second night he slept for a few hours and when he awoke at first light he discovered that by some miracle the electricity supply had returned. He found his mobile phone charging – he had left it plugged into the mains in the eventuality the power might come on again. He cleared all the uneaten food out of the refrigerator and threw it away. He then phoned the number he had been given, and gave the necessary code word.

A Mebsher, he was told, was passing through north London at that moment. It was quickly arranged that it could divert to the Islington area to collect him. His location was known. All he had to do was wait for a coded message on his phone, and he would find the personnel carrier waiting for him in the street outside.

He returned the phone charger to the power source and less than three hours later a message came through. When he went down to the street the Mebsher was waiting. The floodwater was receding, but even so it reached above the axle level of the huge wheels. Tarent waded across to the extensible access steps. Dripping water from his legs and shoes, he clambered inside and took a seat.

THE MEBSHER WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED FOR MILITARY USE
: a means of transporting troops and matériel through hostile territory in a vehicle that could withstand most forms of violent attack, including RPGs and IEDs. As conditions around the world deteriorated, Mebshers were used increasingly by aid agencies and government departments, and civilian variants had been developed.

Tarent was familiar with the Mebsher, because in places like drought-stricken Eastern Anatolia, with insurgent militias roaming the hills, it had become the vehicle of necessity. The interior of a Mebsher was utilitarian, every metal surface painted a drab grey, or left bare. Visibility to the outside was restricted, and the few windowed apertures were made of thick, toughened glass. There were always minor variations in the number or type of seats, the interior fittings usually on a scale from rudimentary to broken or not working.

The seat he took was next to one of these tiny windows. He apologized to the three people already on board as he clambered in, his luggage bag and cases of camera equipment bulking through the narrow doorway, floodwater draining from his legs and pooling around him. The other passengers briefly acknowledged him. The Mebsher was under way almost as soon as he had seated himself. He fidgeted around for a while, stacking his bag in the rack at the rear, placing his cameras close to him and trying to find a spare cushion of some kind – there was nothing to be had, so he took a towel from his luggage and rolled it up to make a head-rest. He leaned his head against the metal wall, closed his eyes and tried to
relax. The vehicle rocked and jarred constantly, but there were no extreme movements: the Mebsher was designed for rough terrain. Tarent did not care about the discomfort – he just wanted to be taken to wherever it was intended he should be, and not to think or do anything until he was there. Gradually, his soaked lower legs and feet began to dry out.

It was as usual noisy inside the compartment. The huge turbine engine was in theory surrounded by sound-proofing, but the roaring whine of it could always be heard. The intercom from the driver’s compartment, which was hidden away from the passengers in the front of the vehicle, was switched on. The voices of the two drivers could be heard, communicating in Glaswegian accents. From time to time a radio voice from somewhere else burst in, screeching with static.

Tarent let himself doze for about an hour although real sleep was an impossibility. He drifted for a while, but he was constantly aware of his surroundings. When he opened his eyes he regarded the other passengers, looking at them properly for the first time. There were two men and a woman.

One of the men sat alone in the front row of seats, a laptop computer plugged into the cable socket, and various papers spread out on the other seats beside him. He had short grey hair and what looked like a muscular build beneath his clothes. He had a lip-mic clipped somehow to his jaw and as he read data off the computer monitor, which he held at an angle so that no one else could see it, or from some of the papers, he muttered into the mic. He was using the recognition language applied to certain kinds of software, not English nor any spoken Euro language but a kind of machine jargon, a dialect of code.

The other man and the woman appeared to be travelling together: they sat beside each other in the row in front of him. From time to time they spoke quietly to each other. As Tarent stared at them the man turned slightly away from her, pulled on a black sleep mask and screwed in earphones. He let his head droop forward and he relaxed in his seat, rocking with the endless jerking movements of the Mebsher.

Tarent regarded the woman. He had not yet seen her face. It was half shrouded by a scarf or shawl, a concession many Western women made to Islamic convention, but not formally
hijab.
The woman had not yet looked directly back at him, nor even shown any awareness he was in the row of seats behind her, but he sensed
that she was as alert to his presence as he was to hers. Her shoulder-length hair, partially revealed where the scarf did not cover her, reminded him of Melanie’s.

Inevitably, he started thinking about Melanie again, what the first attraction had been. Her hair, straight and fine, not too long, had framed her face well. He simply liked the way she looked, and on that afternoon in Bracknell, where he had just completed a photo-shoot, he struck up a conversation with her. It was then they discovered the link between them that had created the initial superficial bond: they were both semi-foreigners.

Tibor Tarent – American father, Hungarian mother, born and mostly brought up in England, feeling British, but always with that revealing European first name, and because of his father speaking with an ineradicable sound of East Coast USA. Melanie was more remotely descended from another culture. Her grandfather had moved to Britain from Poland after the Second World War, married a British girl and changed his name from Roszca to Roscoe. His son Gordon had been brought up without any knowledge of his Polish background, and only discovered it from family papers after his father died. Melanie had even less awareness than that of her distant heritage, saw it as amusing and irrelevant, and had never really thought about it until she and Tarent met. Yet he discovered, early on, that some of her friends called her by an affectionate nickname, Malina, or Mally. Malina was a Polish name meaning raspberry, Melanie said, quietly making the rude noise with her mouth. They were married a few months after they met.

Tarent was less comfortable about his background. It led him to the habit of feeling different, an outsider. He had known it all his childhood, and it worsened when his father was killed in Afghanistan, in circumstances never explained, even by the US State Department for whom he had worked. Tibor was a child at the time, only six. The concealed bomb beneath the roadway that destroyed the armoured Jeep in which his father was travelling was in its own way comprehensible through the familiarity of so many other similar incidents, but why his father had been out there at risk in the rugged hills was never established, or at least never made known to his family. Officially his father was a diplomat but clearly he was more than that, or less. Something other than diplomacy was going on, putting him in a role that sent him out there to a mountain road, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Tibor’s mother, Lucia, also a diplomat, remained in Britain
afterwards. She was a cultural attaché at the Hungarian Embassy in London, so never in the same kind of danger as her husband, but she too died a few years later, victim to breast cancer, as Tibor was leaving university.

That sense of foreignness became more remote as he and Melanie began a more or less conventional married life. No children appeared. She worked at a hospital in London, but his freelance photography caused him to travel, took him away from her, sometimes for a week or more at a time. After ten years in London, Melanie found the hard routines of hospital work were telling on her. She enrolled with Médecins Sans Frontières, loved the work, but it took her away too, often for many weeks at a time. Their marriage began to crumble. The expedition to Eastern Anatolia, not with MSF but with a new aid body set up by the British government, had been a last-ditch attempt by them both to try to cement themselves together again.