The Walking Dead

It played in Faria's mind. Was it merely a mechanism to give him strength? Was it the same, the equivalent, of making a speech that inspired, as the recruiter had to her? She did not know…She heard his breathing soften and calm. She felt, inside her, that he shrank. In the morning, as she had been told to, she would walk with him and lead him to the place of his death — she would not see it. She would have gone from his side as he took the last several paces, and would head for the Dallow Road, and her home. Long before she reached the side-street off that road, she would have heard the explosion, the silence, then the scream of sirens. She would open the front door, greet her father — and tell him nothing. She would start to prepare lunch for her parents — as if she had not been away for sixteen days. She would tell them nothing and they would ask nothing, and she would go upstairs, sit with her mother and concoct lying anecdotes of days spent on the computer course. She would ask dutifully if there was news of her brothers, in Islamabad, students of religious studies. From the kitchen, she would hear the television baying out the news of an atrocity, and she would have returned to her sleep…She did not know if, ever again, she would be woken. That day, and the next, and the next week and the next month, she would be back at the drudgery of caring for her parents and perhaps, one dawn, when she was in her bed and alone, she would hear the door cave in below her, and her room would be filled with masked, armed policemen, and rifles would be aimed at her, or. perhaps she would be left to sleep.

She lay on him. His breathing was even and regular.

She could not stop the coming of the morning when she would help him to dress. Would she be damned by God, or praised for giving strength to him? She shivered, but felt his warmth.

The boy slept in her arms…and she wondered if the man thought of her and of where his hands had been, and if he would remember her.

* * *

He sat on a bench with the stars for company, and the moon's light. A man had come to the bench an hour before, had sat with him for less than two minutes, had gone. The man had come to the bench, past the hour of midnight. Would have come on each of three previous evenings. There had been relief on his face that the rendezvous was successful. He had been asked if it had gone well — he had shrugged, replied that the morning would give the answer. He had thought the man was perplexed that he displayed no enthusiasm…He had given the man the video-cassette, had seen it pocketed, had been promised that it would be moved on at speed. The man had kissed his cheek and left him. Muhammad Ajaq had shown no enthusiasm because he felt none…His work was elsewhere, and those he had been with had slipped from his mind — were worthless.

In front of him was the sea. He heard the rumble of the waves against the pillars of a pier, and beyond the quay was the harbour into which the ferry would sail. Ajaq dreamed because he felt himself free, already beyond reach.

* * *

Beside him, Naylor did not speak.

They were on big roads, empty freeways, and Hegner sat easily.

Near to the end — near enough for him to have rung far away Riyadh, to have roused Cindy from her bed, to have heard her voice, first drowsy, then alert, to have asked her to make the reservation for him to return the next evening. And she'd asked him, was it going well? 'Just fine,' he'd said, and had not cared that Naylor heard him. They went south. There was a phrase impregnated in his mind from childhood. It was his grandfather's, used in the smithy where the community's ironwork was repaired, and where the bellows heated a fire for the shoeing of horses. He'd been a kid then, still near to Big Porcupine Creek, and had not yet gone to the high school at Forsyth, and his grandfather had softened the iron of the shoes in the bright charcoal, and had used the phrase for a certain type of horse. A horse that was not for riding but for dragging a cart or a light harrow, that was not pretty and not loved, was a 'useful beast'. A 'useful beast' had a purpose, and was willing. The car took him at speed towards the Twentyman.

It was his good fortune — and when he was back with Cindy he would tell her — to have met up with a 'useful beast'.

It was better fortune than laying the woman in Naylor's office, good but not great…It was his best good fortune to have met up with a 'useful beast' and harnessed him.

* * *

The farmer lay on his back and snored, and his wife had turned away from him. The clock in the hallway below, a fine piece handed down by his grandfather, struck the, quarter-hour after midnight.