All This by Chance Page 21

  She came back to tomorrow’s schedule. He realised how little she had really told him until now. As Franco would say, Whoever these people are, they know what they are doing. The long difficult name of a foreign haulage company along the vehicle’s high side, local people were unlikely to remember it if they saw it on one of the smaller roads. The driver who had brought it across on the ferry would leave the truck at the port, another would get behind the wheel and drop off the official freight before driving through to the meeting point, the farmhouse discreetly deserted for the afternoon. The fewer people who saw each other, the simpler such things were done. Her fingernail tapped at a junction on the map. Then an hour’s drive, at most, through to the hospital, the institution, whatever it was, to drop off what she called their consignment.

  Fergus said, ‘Her name’s Lisa. The patient’s name is Francis. They both have names.’

  Carol smiled, ignored the reprimand. ‘God folk, anyway. You can’t ask for a better cover than that.’

  And God knows, now he was brought into it, what it would be like. The thought keeping on at him. Seeing her again. Hearing her. The weirdness of it. But Carol breaking in, his having to ask her what was that, he was miles away, so she repeated, ‘We should be back by evening. Back home.’ She would drop him off first then get the van back to the depot. Franco would be waiting for her. She touched his hand. They could have the weekend together, though. ‘Seems ages since we had one.’

  ‘A fortnight.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ She closed the maps. The woman behind the bar came back to them. Carol smiled up at her, charming her, Fergus thought, as she can anyone when she sets her mind to it. ‘How can we not have another?’ The woman said it was made locally. And Carol, ‘As if one couldn’t tell?’

  When the woman brought fresh glasses she and Fergus tapped them lightly together. ‘These taste like that cough stuff my mother used to get from Mr Ross’s. If I tell the truth.’

  Two older couples came into the lounge. One woman carried a cat which she had brought with her from wherever home was. Again, Carol was back in Westmere. ‘My mother was like that, anything rather than humans.’ She liked watching the woman stroke the creature’s back and dabble her fingers beneath its throat. ‘I wouldn’t mind one myself one day. Does that surprise you?’

  Fergus raised his own glass, avoiding answering her.

  Carol laughed. ‘It surprises me.’

  They met again at breakfast. Carol said she had been reading, it was so unusual to lie in bed awake, but she did not say what, and Fergus did not ask her. They sat at the same table as the evening before, now reset for breakfast, with its fresh white diagonal cloth. Through the window he watched the Spaniards loading their car, a family taking a photograph of themselves outside the hotel, a man kicking at a front tyre. As they walked to the van he and Carol shared a cigarette. It delayed needing to talk. Their van with its shaded windows that reflected like black mirrors was the single vehicle still in the yard.

  Fergus noticed how she was dressed, as though wanting to seem subdued, conventional, in a dark business skirt, a green high-throated blouse, dull housewife shoes. She had said to him once how in work like hers, with men to placate and deal with and give instructions to as she checked fuel consumption and toll charges, confirmed deliveries and timetables, approved or queried invoices and dockets, you wouldn’t believe how a brassy touch did wonders. It had amused him, as it did her too, her using that word, brassy. The kind of thing his mother might have said quite seriously, Carol though sending herself up. Catch their eye, she had meant, lean towards them as you spoke, smile as you questioned. Top buttons of a blouse never done up. No, not cynical she had said, just a happier world all round. Fergus now struck again by her craft, her thinking of the day ahead. Her appearance of sober middle-class respectability, the kind of woman an enquirer might expect, should she tell them yes, she was driving friends to a religious home, where Doctor Bosco was expecting them. San Spirito, did they know it?

  She arranged the inside of the car. The map in the door pocket beside Fergus, her replacing the gun beneath the papers. ‘A Beretta. That’s the name.’

  ‘I know that at least,’ Fergus came back to her.

  ‘Sorry. Of course you do.’ Then, Routine, she said again, simply part of Franco’s insistence, his liking to tell her, ‘It is not always nice out there, cara.’

  Fergus made light of it. ‘I was a dab hand with stuff like that in school cadets.’ A lie he almost believed.

  She stretched her arm through the lowered window to adjust the outside mirror, then tilted slightly the one above her to watch the road behind. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘all in hand.’ Fergus more anxious than he would admit even to himself. He too had woken before six, lying there in the strangely single bedroom, the print of a Madonna looking out at him from the further wall, the kind of look he supposed was meant to make you think of spiritual things. The cheeks, the woman’s plump dimpled hands, in fact looked overfed. Going over what it would be like, why was it so hard to imagine that? What Lisa would say to him in a few hours’ time, what he might say to her? The madness of it. Why telling her in the first place he would look after things at this end? Would meet her truck? Would take her to where she needed to be? Fucking simple, he had said to Carol, right back when he first heard from her.

  ‘Anything for a laugh,’ she had said. Fucking Carol Sheridan.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ the old man saying, so much later, so much further on. His sleeve rolled back, worrying still at the eczema weals on his forearms. That girl there watching him like he’s some kind of freak who will disappear if she takes her eyes from him. While Esther is thinking, He is almost there, God knows what it must be like for him, amazed that he agrees to talk of it at all. Yet knowing too he cannot stop himself, that she is the last rapt listener he will ever have. His knowing that.

  She presses her hands together on the folder she holds, as if she is the one who is nervous at the story she knows and has known for years, the one her father is obsessed with, the one in the folder with its photocopies from Italian papers, the legal documents, the inaccuracies that came into the retellings of it in papers back home. The man draws his lower lip together between his forefinger and thumb, pressing until the wedge of wet flesh turns dark. Then his living it again, the van turning to a side road, and another smaller one again, the fine crooked line on the map he has on his knees that is the small almost waterless river the road rose across, then again flattened out. His admitting, although more in the voice of one speaking to himself than to anyone who might attend, ‘Being so close, I was shit-scared after that.’ His agitation as he now speaks of it, the quivering of one hand that he attempts to subdue with the other. For a moment she fears that his arm will sweep across the table and send her recorder flying, that the security man will rush in and sort things out. But Fergus himself knows the threat of that and even smiles as he draws himself together. ‘You’re getting me on a good day,’ he says. ‘I’m medicated up to here.’ He taps his throat above his opened shirt. ‘You’d better listen.’

  ‘So we got there.’ He is back now. Back beside Carol who is quiet and alert, hunched forward a little over the wheel. A car travelling fast as it approaches them, blasts its horn and swerves on the narrow road. A few minutes when nothing was said. Carol’s eyes flick up to check the road behind, the dust now settled behind the vanished car. He does not quite comprehend what she means, as she says simply, ‘The driver.’ She means from the truck they are on their way to meet, although he will understand that only later. That the Polish driver has left his truck as instructed, he will return—that will be the plan—when the consignment has been transferred, the details he is better not to know.

  The fields they are driving past are empty, the neat rows of a crop he cannot name. There is a single farmhouse coming up on their left, a large square ochre-coloured building well back from the road, a sloping slab of vines across a framework at one side. The charm of such
places, that striking him, he remembers. Wondering what it would be like to live in a place like this. The same hankering to get out, he supposed, as you’d find any place else.

  ‘Did you check in there?’ Carol nods to the glove compartment. He tells her, ‘I know where it is if I need to know.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  Their speed now reduced. They hear the swish of a bush along the panels of the van. A blue tractor marks the driveway they wait for. The big truck then visible, at the far side of the house. Carol follows instructions she had not spelled out to him. She stops the van, walks the few paces to the tractor, runs her hand beneath the sacking covering its metal seat, returns with the keys she expected to find. She tells him one is for the cab of the truck. The other will open the less obviously noticed entry to the space between the driver’s cab and the cavernous area for whatever its official load might be. A neatly crafted place to hide. To conceal. So many trucks these days had ones like that built in. No shortage of custom. He’d read that too. One in ten ever caught. Less than. The space with its false panelling where two or three humans might travel concealed for days and pay to be taken across borders, delivered as the contraband they were. Risky but what’s the choice? Fergus assumes the girl he is talking to now must know all that, the details that came out in the hearings, the appeals, the legal tangles, before he was allowed back home. Being found crazy helped. The law his friend, can you imagine that? Twenty years back and immediate to him as he tells of it quickly, simply, now they are there. The van already placed to face the road, to move at speed as soon as. As soon as the day turns to something else. His voice surprising Esther with its almost gentle confiding. The last minutes of his life before it fell apart.

  Then the first thrust of something unexpected into what he had believed was so carefully planned. Like the sudden belt of something heavy against one. Like that, he says, this shove into a different world. Carol walks ahead of him but does not stop at the back of the truck where the big bolts have been slid across and the metal bars lifted, the courtesy he takes it of those who have helped them until now. Laddered steps lowered even, the great doors drawn back enough for the long slot of darkness from the depth inside. In his ignorance thinking it would be merely a matter of climbing the steps, entering the empty vault of the truck, finding the concealed apartment at the back. He smells the tang of something dry and pungent, the grain he supposes that must have been the official cargo dropped off before the vehicle came on to here. A distant meaty sweetness somewhere in it too. But Carol must have had her reasons for passing the partly opened doors and heading for the high gleaming front of the vehicle. He called to her but she gave no answer. He turns the towering corner of the truck to see her mounted at the metal steps to where a driver would take his place, the swinging out of the cab’s heavy door beyond her. At that point, he says. The intensity now as he recalls it, the frantic scrabbling and agitation in the cab. He thinks for a fraction that she is fighting with someone who has been concealed, then sees her agitation, her turmoil, whatever word one used, is in herself, her dragging at papers from the leather pockets, wrenching back the doors of the small compartments behind the driver’s seat, clawing from them whatever they contained, something in her hand then ripping at the leather coverings across the cab’s metal frame. Her leaning forward to find a lever was it, a catch of some kind, concealed beneath the dashboard? He had no idea of what she felt for until he hears the click, the released door he now saw opening above him from the side of the truck, not a door so much as a concealed fragment of wall there was no indication of from the vehicle’s smooth outside. The fear and certainty that at that moment gripped him, the fact that he and Carol were now in different stories.

  The phrase he used for it. ‘In different stories.’ The conviction he was now part of some overarching fraudulence, some lie too big for him to comprehend. At that instant the door swung fully open, its lower edge level with his head, so it seemed he looked into a room he entered at floor level as if from a trapdoor. The stench came at him more like a solid cloth pressed against his face than the mere impact of stalled air. The space he looked into for no more than seconds deeply shadowed, yet what he saw vivid and sustained as if the glare of lights exposed it to him. A quick column of bile rose in his throat, its force splashed back against him from the side of the truck he leaned towards. The body of a woman, her white blouse suddenly and grotesquely brilliant as the light moved on it, slumped across a dark leather couch. Her legs and feet were bare. Her head tilted forward so that all Fergus saw of it was the black tangle of her hair. Another body, darker, as small as her own, looked as though it slept on her lap. The quick pinpointed glint from the fixed opened eyes. And again the hauling of his guts as he looked to the confusion and mess on the floor of the tiny space, the torn plastic bags of food, the tipped and strewn bottles of water, the gaping haversack from which clothes and books and medical stuff had been pulled and tossed aside as though in some desperate search. Beside one of the dead woman’s naked feet the glitter of a broken phial he did not for the moment take in for what it was.

  And then the curtain. The red curtain Esther will hear him repeat, her not understanding at first that it is not reality out there he speaks of but is describing something in his mind. Knowing it was God, something that hated God, as if he gave a fuck he said what you wanted to call it, it was the red blinding hood that comes on a man when he is lifted further than he has ever been, what Homer means when he tells you of the insane possessing rage of battle. Like that, Fergus says, the ancient image as seemingly his own as the leap of spit from the side of his mouth as he recounts it now, as he listens to Carol through the narrow wall between the bodies and where she continues to ransack the truck’s elevated and now ripped-at cab, that he and Carol are in different worlds—again his putting it like that. There is something so much more important to her than us. For that is all he was thinking, Fergus says. Lisa and myself. As if his saying it like that, saying us, made sense, yet under the red hood there was nothing else but rage at what had been defiled.

  Carol has now jumped down from the cab. Not descended fully by the metal steps but thrown herself towards the ground, half-sprawled there, jerking herself back up, running her hands along and beneath the great silver fender and metal guards at the front of the truck. It so immediately obvious to him that Fergus hears his own raking burst of laughter, even that. He held the gun in his hand, unaware of having taken it from his jacket. As if at that moment it had become an actual part of his body, as natural to his hand as the thumb he ran along the butt warm from his pocket, and found the nub his finger craved.

  Justice, you must remember that, as he will later explain to those who question him. The police. The psychologists. The authorities. The level certainty of his voice as he told them, ‘My saving grace,’ putting it as clearly, as perversely, as that. Not an excuse. You do not offer excuses for justice. He turns at the front of the truck to see her kneeling as if before some huge altar, both her hands now at whatever it is they seek beneath the curved shining metal strip. Her dark shirt has come loose and the whiteness of her skin shows where the cloth has rucked up against her back. The dark skirt covers her crouching so she is shaped like a bell. And then the weight of the gun so suddenly apparent to him as he raises his arm, as Carol flings back several feet from her crouching at the front of the truck. He sees the quick movement at the window on the upper floor of the farmhouse, the tilt of a rifle barrel, a black sleeve, and that is all. All too rapid to even think of as a blur. There and not there. Before and after and between. He looks at Carol, her skirt hauled back by her fall, immodest. The awful calm that descends on him. Then the stillness as big as the sky, the stretch of empty fields.

  It not occurring to him that the figure at the window might have shot at him as well. His attention entirely on the woman lying in front of him, the dark stain spreading across the fabric of her blouse. For no reason he could later explain, and yet as obvious to him as the sur
ge of satisfaction it carried with it, he fires twice into the dry earth beside her, ‘the pointless malice’ as the court would hear it described, and yet finally the telling plea as well for the insanity that drove him. A desecration, for the woman already was dead. His second bullet smashed into the palm of Carol’s outflung hand. One of the police who helped remove her two hours later said it was like a photo he had seen of Padre Pio with his stigmatist’s bandage unwrapped. The same officer who gave the simple evidence of time and place and the anonymous phone call that directed them to the farmhouse, to the foreigner who had simply sat there at the table beneath the framework meshed with vines, who had taken a pot of purple flowers from the porch at the back door and set it at the entrance to the fetid space where the other woman and the African boy lay dead. After the injections she had given them. The morphine she carried for emergency. Her believing that with the truck delayed at the docks for several days at the North African port, in implacable and unbearable heat, they had been abandoned. But the foreigner had touched nothing, just set the clay pot near the woman’s feet and gone and waited for the Polizia to arrive. Yes, the officer confirmed, the straniero leaning back against a post, his eyes closed even when spoken to, as if resting until the heat of the afternoon had passed. As if merely that.