The Adjacent (6 page)

After several more minutes two civilian officials wearing protective clothing and breathing apparatus squeezed their way through the entry hatch into the cramped compartment. Sitting close to the narrow hatch, Tarent felt a welcome draught of fresh air. One of the officials was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was wearing
hijab
, so with the oxygen mask and protective glasses nothing at all could be seen of her face. The man was wearing a dark work-jacket, with ‘Ministry of Defence’ stencilled on the flap of a breast pocket. Both of them were carrying large pressurized cans – the man squirted a fine aerosol into all corners of the compartment itself, while the woman sprayed all four of the passengers with the stuff. Tarent held his breath as soon as he realized what was about to happen, but his immediate concern was to protect his cameras. Inevitably, he soon had to breathe in. The aerosol was powder-dry, tasted vaguely acrid and where it landed on the skin it stung. As he and the others choked and coughed, the woman directed more spray at them.

They were left to recover on their own. Over the intercom, Hamid and Ibrahim could be heard in the control cab, also coughing. Ibrahim pleaded loudly for forgiveness, but for his own angry thoughts, not for the actions of the officials.

They were allowed to disembark. Although he was closest to the hatch, Tarent held back to allow the others out of the vehicle first. The woman stepped past him, without a glance or a word.

THE MEBSHER HAD HALTED NEXT TO ALONG BUILDING, BRICK
-built with a flat roof. There were trees everywhere, around the buildings and alongside the two or three tracks that could be seen leading to other parts of the compound. A breeze was moving through the trees. Tarent gulped in the fresh air, trying to calm his breathing. His lungs still felt aggravated by the chemical spray. He could smell the stuff on his clothes, in his hair, on his face and lips. It renewed the feeling he had had ever since arriving back in
Britain, that other people were taking over his life, determining his actions. Yet he was also convinced that none of the people he had encountered in the last few days had any conception at all of what he had been doing abroad, what the chaos of events there was like, the morbid sights he had witnessed and the terrifying events he had experienced, the parlous state into which so many parts of the world had fallen. Half of Europe was now virtually uninhabitable. Most people who were able to live here in the temperate world, the ever more narrow and meandering strips of livable land in the northern and southern hemispheres, were having to draw back from the rest, hold on to the remains of what they knew. Curiosity about the uninhabitable parts of the world had mostly died, shrouded by the need for self-preservation.

A white geodesic dome, and two vast satellite dishes, could be seen rising up beyond the trees.

The other three people from the Mebsher were walking ahead of him. He followed them in through a door guarded by a police officer, then along a corridor. The woman was lagging behind the others, and she glanced back at him. Her expression was openly enquiring.

Tarent shook his head, then tried to make a noncommittal gesture.

She turned away from him immediately, straightened the pack on her shoulder, and walked more quickly. She pushed past her male companion, leading the way into one of the rooms ahead.

A lengthy induction process followed. Apart from having to produce ID, they were made to sign disclaimers under freedom of movement and freedom of information legislation. The American man objected with formal words, citing a US Supreme Court judgement, but then cooperated without further demur. They were each given a tag to hang around their necks, to be worn at all times, even in bed. Tarent was relieved and surprised when they did not examine or take away his photographic equipment.

It was still the afternoon. The rest of the day loomed ahead with nothing much to do. Tarent knew nobody there, and Long Sutton’s own rules about banned activities and closed zones were posted on every door and most of the walls. He was allocated a room in one of the dormitory buildings – it was as sparsely furnished as the underground room in Bedford, but somewhat smaller.

He stripped off his clothes and lay naked on the bed for a while, then took a shower. Afterwards, still naked but for the obligatory identity tag, he lay on the bed with his head tipped back so that he could look up at the trees overhead. It began to feel warm in the
room, but there was no way of adjusting the temperature and the windows were sealed.

He watched TV for a few minutes, flicking through the channels to find a news service or current affairs programme. As so often before, channel browsing for more than five minutes in some hotel room or rented accommodation made him feel moronic and annoyed. When he found a news broadcast the main story was again the meeting in Toronto, so Tarent turned the television off.

Looking out of the window he noticed that the sun was lowering, so he dressed again and walked slowly around the immediate area of the dormitory block. No one else was about. He carried his camera on his belt as usual but this time he kept it half-concealed beneath a woollen pullover. In truth he was not particularly interested in the place, but he was relishing the chance to walk around under trees. When the extremes of climate change struck it was the trees which usually disappeared first: by forest fires, by storm damage, by desperate scavenging for fuel. So many landscapes had been denuded. The trees at Long Sutton provided him with a rare, harmless pleasure. With the Canon set for the lighting conditions, Tarent took several shots of the canopy above, nothing special or picturesque, but a record of the leafy ambience.

He kept walking, heading away from the main group of buildings. He conscientiously stayed away from any area marked as a secure zone. He took several more photos of trees, lining up the shots so that some of the buildings were visible in the distance. In several places it was possible to take advantage of the compound’s floodlights, which were neither bright nor numerous. The environment was not pictorially stimulating but Tarent enjoyed the feeling of old instincts returning, to shoot foreground and background, frame the pictures, use exposure imaginatively. Now he was out of the Mebsher he had managed to get a digital link to his remote electronic lab, which graded each of the pictures according to his own default settings. He then downloaded back several of the shots and was satisfied by the deep shades of grey and black, the striking greens. There was electronic noise visible in several of the deeper shades, even after the images had been regenerated by the lab. The sun was now close to setting, and finding the right exposure was difficult in the varying light under the trees.

One of the tasks he was anxious to get down to was to go through the thousands of frames he had shot while in Anatolia. There had been only intermittent digital access there. So far there had only been
time for the hurried search through the frames for Melanie’s parents, the photos he had been able to glimpse as they were uploaded to the lab. It was therefore another small pleasure for him, to work properly with his camera again, shooting, grading, assessing and then archiving. His subjects were elderly government buildings and ordinary trees, but the process was enjoyable. CCTV cameras had been discreetly installed to cover most of the areas where he was walking, so he assumed he was being monitored.

FEELING HUNGRY AT LAST, TARENT WANDERED BACK TO THE
place where he had been told meals would be provided. He found a large hall, deserted but for one man working in the kitchen at the far end. A choice of two meals was available, next to a microwave oven. Tarent chose the soyaburger. He cracked it out of its recyclable card container, waited while the oven irradiated it then sat alone at one of the tables while he ate. He saw none of the other passengers or crew from the Mebsher. While he was still eating, the man in the kitchen turned out all the lights at the far end of the room and departed.

Tarent walked out again into the cool evening. The place seemed deserted. There were metal-hooded vents in the roofs of some of the buildings, and these whirred and clanged in the darkness. Condensation clouded out of them, soon dispersed by the breeze. He walked a different route this time and eventually reached the perimeter fence, a daunting combination of loops of razor wire, large concrete blocks and randomly electrified sections. Strict warnings to intending intruders were posted prominently, in five languages. Floodlights bathed the fence and the road. Tarent took a few pictures.

A feeling of isolation and loneliness struck him. These trees, that road, this English evening, so familiar in many ways, but he was nowhere near home. He still had that to face up to. His actual home, the large apartment he lived in with Melanie, had formerly lived in with Melanie, was in the London suburbs on the Kent side. It lay directly under what he now knew was the main path of TS Edward Elgar so there would probably be some structural damage to cope with along with everything else. He still had no idea what future plans he should make: the apartment would be too big for him on his own, but it was full of their stuff. Especially, now, Melanie’s stuff.
In one sense at least this enforced trip to a government debriefing office in Lincolnshire was a way of delaying that inevitability, but he had been away from home too long.

He looked quickly at the graded downloads from the lab of the pictures he had just taken, then made minute adjustments to allow for the colour temperature of the floodlights. He felt paralysed by the sense of isolation, of displacement, of delay which had grown in him during the evening. Melanie’s loss was like a constant ache, but without warning it flared up into actual pain at random times. He wished nothing of the last few months had happened at all. He slipped the camera away without taking any more shots.

While he still stood there, wrapped up in his sudden introspection, a woman’s voice said, ‘You took photographs of me without permission.’

She had approached him soundlessly. Her accent was flat, free of region, educated. Tarent turned towards her. It was the woman who had been in the Mebsher. Light was playing on her from above. She looked tall and aggressive, standing with one leg before the other, resting on the large root of a tree where it rose out of the ground. Her hair was still covered by the scarf but now she was wearing an insulated puffer jacket with the hood pulled up over the scarf. She was holding out her right hand, expecting him to place something in it.

There were human rights laws in the IRGB, protecting members of the public from being photographed without permission. Tarent, like every other photographer in the business, knew this well.

‘I took a couple of test shots,’ he said, with habitual half-truth. ‘It’s a new camera and I was trying it out. They will never be published.’

‘That’s irrelevant.’

‘A Mebsher on a diplomatic mission is usually accepted as being outside national boundaries.’

‘That’s also irrelevant. You didn’t have my permission. Please let me have the pictures.’

‘They aren’t here any more.’

She gestured impatiently. ‘I know you’ve got them. Why do you suppose your cameras weren’t confiscated when we checked in here?’

‘Was that your doing?’

‘I interceded, yes. I need those pictures back from you.’

‘Did you write me that note?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you ask me about going to Hull?’

‘You don’t have to go to Warne’s Farm.’

‘I’ve been told I have to be debriefed about my wife’s death.’

‘I know about that. That’s an OOR establishment. I can intercede there too.’

‘Why should you?’

She shrugged back the hood of her coat. Although she had been wearing the scarf under the hood she had unknotted it. Her face was uncovered and the long ends of the scarf were hanging loosely down on her shoulders and chest. She saw him looking, so she swept one end of the scarf across her throat, over her shoulder.

Although the camera was out of sight, Tarent surreptitiously pressed the foldaway feature and the instrument silently reduced itself to a wafer-thin sliver of plastic and alloyed metals. He concealed it in the palm of his hand, like an illusionist palming a playing card. In past photo assignments Tarent had had two cameras taken away from him and destroyed: once when he was photographing a crowd of rioters in Belarus, the other time by a plain-clothes policeman in the French city of Lyon. The latest generation of miniature cameras had been developed specifically to meet the needs of photojournalists who had to be able to conceal their equipment quickly and effectively.

The woman stood her ground, disconcerting him again. Her authoritative manner was of someone used to getting her own way, but unexpectedly it also seemed to reveal a kind of physical vulnerability. He knew so little of her, after two days of physical proximity. Just the hand, the hair, the neck.

They continued to stand apart, facing each other in the semidarkness. She was breathing hard: with anger, fatigue, stress? White clouds from their breath drifted between them.

He said, ‘What exactly is it you want?’

She glanced down towards his hand, where the Canon was concealed. He was allowing his arm to swing freely, trying to make it look like a natural gesture.

‘The pictures you took. I have to have them. It’s a matter of security.’

‘I’ve already told you they’re not here any more. All my frames are transmitted to the agency laboratory. That’s how the camera works.’

‘It’s impossible to transmit anything from inside one of those vehicles.’

‘The frames were uploaded when we left. Automatically.’

‘I don’t believe you. The camera has a memory.’

‘Yes, but I don’t use it. Once the pictures are at the lab the memory is cleared. Anyway, I took no pictures of you.’ The camera had been
in stealth mode ever since he left Anatolia. There was no way she could have heard it.

‘You’re not telling the truth.’ She raised the left side of the scarf, turned her head and lightly tapped the area immediately behind her ear. ‘I know what you did. You took three shots in quick succession. I can give you the timestamp of each exposure, the EXIF data and the exact coordinates of where we were at that moment.’