The Road Between Us (37 page)

He looks at it and sighs. If he is going to write he must write properly, at a table. There is one in the ruined temple, he recalls. That will be a better location.

That evening, while he looks around the house for the volume of poetry he is reading, Edward leaves the brass taps running on a claw-footed bath made from a single piece of granite. When he returns, he sees Hannah has climbed into it. She has her back to him and, with her hair coiled up, she looks more like her mother than ever – more Nordic, like a vein of sunlight refracted through snow. When he eventually moves, Hannah hears him, turns her head and smiles. Her slightly gapped teeth are bone white.

‘Beat you to it,’ she says.

‘Leave the water in when you’re finished.’ As he walks back downstairs he recalls that that was what he used to say to Frejya. He recalls too how much he used to enjoy the thought that it was her water he would be slipping into.

He realizes now that his memories of Frejya have not receded with time, but somehow grown more vivid. He surprises himself by
also realizing that he feels closer to his wife now than at any time since they parted. It is as if, through Hannah, she is coming back to life. He is falling in love again, with a ghost.

A few minutes later, Edward is carrying empty wine bottles to the recycling bin in the kitchen. Finding Hannah’s iPad, he looks at the BBC news website. There is still no sign of an end to the Norwegian volcano’s eruption. A photograph shows a mushroom cloud of ash. The Romantic poets would have approved, he thinks. Man humbled by the violence of nature.

He clicks on a report about the President of the United States announcing a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The tide of war is ebbing, the President says, and it is time to focus on nation-building. Edward finds himself wondering once more why he was released. Niall’s explanation seems too neat. Too easy. He reads on. ‘Taliban rules out UN talks.’ A statement from them declares that they believe they have the ‘upper hand’ and are certain that they are ‘winning’.

‘Anything interesting?’ Hannah asks as she saunters barefoot down the stairs wearing her mother’s dressing gown and towelling her hair.

‘The Taliban are winning in Afghanistan, apparently. Did you leave the water in?’

‘All yours.’

With a shiver, Edward realizes that this is what Frejya used to say when she vacated the bath. All yours.

Hannah slumps into a chair by the fireplace, puffs out her cheeks, exhales loudly. She can feel the tiny pinpoints of sweat on the sides of her nose and on her upper lip. Wiping them away with a finger and thumb she sits up again, reaches forward to the coffee table in front of her and picks up a German interiors magazine from a pile. She flicks through it distractedly before using it to fan herself. After a few seconds she tosses it on to the cushion beside her and sighs again, a throatier noise. Remembering an electric fan she has seen in the kitchen, she fetches it and plugs it in, directing it at the sofa.
She feels restless. There is a sensation like butterflies in her belly, yet she doesn’t feel nervous. It is more … excitement. Sensitivity.

She picks up her lighter and, as she taps it on the armrest, her eyes flit around the room before fixing on the ornate clock on the chimneypiece. How long has it been stopped? She rises to her feet. Behind it she finds a key, but it is obviously not the one for winding the clock.

She walks from room to room, trying to locate Walser’s office. Unable to find it she returns to the drawing room and looks under cabinets and behind paintings and tapestries, unsure what for. A wall safe perhaps. By pressing with her foot she tests the floorboards. Taps oak panels to see if they are hollow. Nothing.

Her mobile pings and she returns to the sofa. A text from Martin Cullen. She smiles as she types a reply: ‘Nothing to report so far. Over and out x’. When she puts the phone back on the table she sees the magazine she had been flicking through earlier was covering a notebook. She opens it. Written in a sloping hand so neat it looks like calligraphy are lines from a poem.

‘ “
Of peace and pity fell like dew / On flowers half dead – thy lips did meet / Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw / Their soft persuasion on my brain.” – Shelley
’

She wonders if this is her father’s handwriting. It seems so elegant and Victorian. How strange, she thinks, that she doesn’t even know what her own father’s handwriting looks like. She turns the page and finds more writing, prose this time. Realizing this is his memoir, she looks towards the stairs and listens. Satisfied that he is still in the bath, she begins to read.

Sometimes a song would enter my head and not leave. ‘What’s The Story Morning Glory?’ was one. It would
grown
grow louder and louder. As I lurched around the cave like a drunk, shouting at the dark and jumping at imagined shapes, I tried to rid myself of the song, and then it would disappear to be replaced with a nothingness so dense it left me questioning whether I could get through the next five minutes, whether there would be enough left in my head.

Hannah feels a chill pass up her nape to the base of her skull. She
looks at the stairs again, not wanting to disturb the air by breathing. Her eyes fall on the page again, hungrily now.

I would have vivid fever dreams about Frejya that would leave me confused about the difference between being asleep and awake. They were not erotic in content – I had long since been rendered impotent, even in my dreams – but sometimes, when I woke from them, I would recall how she used to touch my shoulder in the night. Even there in that cave I would sometimes wake to the sound of her voice saying:‘You were dreaming, Ed.’

I craved conversation. The monotonous repetition of my own
thinking
thoughts exhausted me. But the darkness offered no stimulation, nothing to feed my imagination. I no longer worried that the world outside the cave might have forgotten me, because I
had forgotten
was forgetting myself. I could spend hours trying to remember details about my life: my age, my phone number, even my own name.

As the solitary confinement ate into me I would talk to myself and fixate on the things I missed. A chair. If only I had a chair to sit on I could feel like a man again. A candle and a box of matches. A book. If only I had a book.

Concentrating on one thing at a time
sometimes
helped me push away the emptiness and silence of the cave. But half-remembered lines of poetry left me frustrated and
I couldn’t
often I couldn’t work out whether some poem circulating in my head was one I had made up or one I had learned. I would fantasize about having a pen and paper to write it down.

At one point I attempted a hunger strike, but the stomach cries out to be fed and this, I sometimes thought, was what I had been reduced to: a stomach without a brain. An empty stomach and an open mouth. (MORE ON THIS??? TOO UPSETTING FOR H TO READ???)

When weakened by lack of food I sometimes hallucinated and imagined that I was sharing the cave with … something, a presence. Not malign necessarily. Sometimes I can hear it purring throatily, like

At other times, when I thought I might have managed a new idea, I would find myself turning to tell someone, only to be reminded of my solitude. My memory was growing slack, my emotions loose. I realized familiar faces were turning blank. I could no longer remember
properly
what Hannah looked like, not properly. I could see her hair but not the details of her face. Even Frejya was becoming a ghost.

Slowly closing the notebook, as if fearing to disturb the words any more than she already has, Hannah shakes her head. Having often tried to imagine how her father had coped in that cave, without light, without conversation, without love, she now realizes that he barely had. She is about to place the notebook back under the magazine when she hesitates. Listens. Her father is still in the bath. She opens it again.

The daily arrival of food created a brief pool of fuzzy light in which I was able to mark off the weeks on the ground, six vertical lines crossed with one diagonal, scratched into the
ground
stone. After a few months of doing that I ran out of space, but it didn’t matter because I had other ways of measuring time, such as the length of my nails and my beard. It was so long it reached below my ribs.

Night-time was detectable by a slight drop in temperature. The mornings,
meanwhile
, I could sometimes work out from the sound of a cockerel crowing, or a muffled call to prayers
somewhere
in the distance.
Allahu Akbar.
This was usually followed by the bubble of a kettle ‘upstairs’, walkie-talkies being tested, blankets being rolled up and, finally, a campfire being stamped out.

I could even work out the seasons. In the summer the dripping water stopped. In the winter it froze. One
year
winter I worked out how I might get some warm clothes. There was a guard
nicknamed
I had nicknamed Brains, because he had a dull, bovine look about him. As well as being
a moron
stupid, Brains was also sadistic. He liked to spit on me and sometimes he would amuse himself by pulling the trigger on an empty gun, laughing to himself when it clicked. It was Brains I
had
decided to trick.

Knowing that Muslims were offended by nudity, I removed my tattered clothes and, when the boulder was rolled back and I saw Brains
on guard duty
, I stood directly in the light spilling through the hole. It had the desired effect. After cursing at me to put
the
my clothes back on, and making a show of clicking fresh bullets into the magazines of his AK-47, Brains threw down a shalwar kaneez (sp??), a sheepskin jerkin and a pakul (sp?) for my head. A small victory. As I put them on, I found myself laughing
for the first time since my arrival in Afghanistan
.

(MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE GUARDS HERE???)

While thinking of Frejya gave me strength, thinking of Hannah weakened me, making me slip into self-pity and sentimentality – emotions I knew were dangerous in that place. I pitied myself for not being there to look after my little girl. I would think of her performing in school plays
without me being there to watch
; how she would be playing in hockey matches; singing in the choir; growing up …

I longed to read her one more bedtime story before she left her childhood behind. What did she use to call them? ‘Bednight stories’. By the time I had left, she had been able to read books for herself, but she liked me to do it. What were her favourites?
Little Babaji … The Tiger Who Came to Tea … The Twits.
Afterwards I would kiss her goodnight, on her brow. I missed her so much …

Hannah stops reading to blot a tear that has fallen on to the page. It has made the ink run and she blows on the paper to dry it. She sniffs and dabs at her eyes with the sleeve of her dressing gown before closing the notebook and hugging it to her chest. Realizing she hasn’t heard her father in the bath for a while, she wonders if he is OK. Then she hears the sound of a tap running for a few seconds and opens the notebook again.

Sometimes when I woke to find the darkness hissing about my ears, I would wonder whether I had been talking to myself again, whether that was what had woken me. I would widen my eyes, searching for something to focus on. But
there was nothing. The
the blackness was complete. There was almost a purity to it.

The sound of my voice would seem muffled. At other times I would force myself not to speak, feeling that I must not disturb the darkness with my words because I would awaken it, and I would rather it was asleep.

Feeling concussed, I would close my eyes
once more
and points of light would blotch behind my eyelids. I could no longer be sure when I was hearing my voice in my head or when the words were being spoken out loud. Questions were coming from somewhere. ‘How does Frejya know I am alive?’ ‘How do I know I am here?’ I would pinch my skin or tug at my beard and say out loud: ‘If I can hurt myself, does that mean I am alive? That I exist?’

I would sometimes think of Sartre’s idea that

As a coping strategy I began thinking of myself in the third person, to stand outside my body. This was not happening to me, the inner man, but to Edward Northcote, the outer man. In this way I would allow
myself
my self-awareness to be swallowed up in the black incubus around me. I meant the white, for that was another coping strategy: the darkness was, in fact, lightness. I was merely living in a negative world where white was black. In this parallel world, the tarry blackness was not palpable. You could not touch it with your fingers like something liquid, something heavier than air, something that seeps into your blood like ice water. In this world the blackness was my friend, not my enemy.

Sometimes when the food basket was lowered and pulled back up again
,
I would resist the urge to plead with my guards not to roll the boulder back into place. It did no good anyway and they seemed to enjoy my fear. On these occasions, as the last blur of light disappeared, I would think of it as the light being dimmed before a performance at the theatre. This was good
,
I told myself. I could be alone with

Sometimes the guards couldn’t be bothered to lower my food and just threw it down to me, like scraps to a dog. I found the potato peelings hardest to eat
, but I ate them nonetheless
.