settled, where the tripwires were, where the military ruled. The first five miles were where the patrols would be most frequent. It was the fucking contradiction, was what Ham had said, that he must move most carefully in the first miles, and move fastest. When he could see the path, Penn hoisted the backpack onto his shoulders and went forward. Not running, not jogging, but going with a brisk pace. When he had gone half a mile, twelve minutes going on thirteen, he realized the futility of the map drawn by Ham. He had no detail. The farmhouse was not marked on the map. The farmhouse was two-storey, brick-built from the ground up and then heavy-set planking for the upper floor. There was a wide balcony area at the front on the upper floor. He could see the man clearly. The man on the balcony did not bother to look out, to wonder if he were watched. The man opened the front of his trousers and urinated through the bars of the balcony and down onto the waste ground near to the front door of the farmhouse. And then Penn saw the woman, nightdress under her coat and above her black rubber boots, and she had the washing basket on the ground beside her and was starting to peg out the clothes a bloody early start for the old house chores and she bawled. Penn heard her voice, full of rich complaint, and was near enough then to see the man scratch, and ignore her, and yawn and stretch and belch, and still ignore the beat of her complaint, and turn to go back inside. Penn moved on. Each time that he stopped he tried to be certain that he was against the line of a thicker birch trunk. As Ham had told him… never to be in Silhouette, never to be the unnatural Shape, and Sound and Smell and Shine could bloody wait, it was Silhouette and Shape that mattered. At the back of the farmhouse were outbuildings and barns, a mess of slumped roofs and corrugated iron and abandoned harvest equipment and the corrals for cattle and pigs and sheep. Parked up amongst them were three military lorries and a jeep. He could no longer see the front of the farmhouse but the woman's yelling carried to him, and there were new cries of encouragement and jeers from young troops. So young. Half asleep and paddling around in the mud, the troops, but they had their rifles slung on their half-dressed bodies. Hesitation, to move or not to move, but the light was growing all the time… None of the training on the Five surveillance courses seemed relevant. He had only his instincts to protect him, and the guidance that Ham had given him, and the instinct and the guidance seemed damn all of nothing. Going so carefully, tree to tree, along the track, and knowing that if the movement were seen… holy shit.. . going carefully. One of the troops, a fresh-faced young boy, a straggle of beard on his chin, walked purposefully from the barns and up the field towards the track. Carried his rifle and a small entrenching spade, and three dogs gambolled and chased around him. Penn had to move, because the line that the trooper had taken would cross the track ahead of where he now stood. He had to risk the movement. Going forward fast, too fast, going from tree to tree, spurt rushes. Just a boy coming up the hill behind the outbuildings, probably a shy boy, probably looking for a place where a shy boy could dig his small pit and defecate and not be watched. There was a terrier dog and a cross-collie dog and there was a big, slow, heavy-coated dog. His last surge, and the terrier had its hackles up and the cross-collie barked, and the heavy-coated dog didn't seem to know what the hell was happening. The boy was twenty paces from him. Slow hands, trembling, feeling into the flap of the backpack, twisting his arm round, finding the paper holding the sandwiches that Ham had given him. Ham had said there was cheese and beef and pickle in the sandwiches. The terrier growling as the boy dug. Slow hands, clumsy, un peeling the newspaper from the sandwiches. The cross-collie barking as the boy lowered his trousers and the rifle was beside him. Penn put the sandwiches gently to the ground, on the wet dead leaves. The heavy-coated dog wagging its tail in vigour. Penn understood dogs because that was his childhood. Dogs had poor eyesight but had the sense of smell and the sense of hearing. They came close. It was his luck that the boy had his crouched back to him. They were close, and he looked into the sharp teeth lines of the terrier and the barking fangs of the cross-collie and the happy friendship of the heavy-coated dog. With his boot he edged the sandwiches closer to them. He went on his toes. He went in silence and behind him was the snarling for possession of his sandwiches. Penn went with his chest heaving and his legs leaden and his heart pounding. He went, and all the time that he moved he waited for the shout and the metal scrape of the rifle being armed, but he heard only the dogs disputing for his sandwiches.
When he had gone past the farmhouse where the troops who guarded the front line were billeted, he looked back. The boy was walking down towards the farmhouse and with his bowels cleared the boy whistled. He wondered whether he could have knifed the boy. Just a shy boy, just a pack of farm dogs, and Penn understood what Ham had told him… a fucking dumb place to be.
He made ground, went hard, had to cover good distance before the daylight settled.
It was a response to the rejection.
The rejection was of him, not his wife, which made it wound the more. For his wife there was normality in Salika village. She was the nurse. She could still move amongst the people of the village, visit the elderly, examine the children, weigh the babies, while her husband stayed at home with his books and his loneliness. Each of the days that she had gone out, since his challenge at the school and his beating, the Headmaster had asked her what was said of him, how he was spoken of… She had thought she, too, would be rejected, and she was not, his wife could go into the homes of the village and talk, gossip, advise and drink coffee… and she answered him straight, always had spoken to him in frankness since the youth of their marriage. Simply nothing was said of him. It was as if, she had said the night before and that morning as she hurried his breakfast, he did not exist in the life of the village. His wife had gone to visit the two sisters who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, to offer them comfort instead of drugs that were no longer available. He was alone in his house. He was with his loneliness and the books that he could read when he held them as far as his arm would stretch in front of his face and when he sat close to the light of the window. 11 The Headmaster believed there were two women and one man who had cared about him, and the two women and the one man had now rejected him.
Evica Stankovic had taken over the running of the school and used his office as her own.
The Priest had missed another evening when he might have called by. To counter the agony of his rejection the Headmaster determined, that morning when there was still insufficient light for him to sit in his window and read, that he should pray to the good God, if the good God was there. He did not believe that the good God was known to his former friend, the Priest who rejected him. Their bond had been intellectual, not religious. He resolved that he would struggle in his own way, to find the necessary words of prayer. He was a communist, of course, and he would not have been elevated to the Headmaster's position if he had not been a member of the Party; he did not know the way of prayer. His mother and his father, dead so long, knew of prayer and he would try to summon the memory of them. He would go in darkness to that place of evil. He would pray alone where evil had been done. He would pray in that place of evil for guidance as to how he should utilize the secret he held. If they had not been sitting on the track, if they had not been squabbling over cigarettes, if they had not been scuffling for the bottle, Penn would have walked into the patrol, into the arms of the five militia men. But they were sitting on the track and one yelled as he snatched the cigarettes and one shouted as he grabbed the bottle. First statue still, rock still, stone still, then retreating back along the track, cat careful, cat cautious. He edged back up the track from them, testing each footfall, looking behind him to be certain there was no dried wood that he might step on. He slunk away from the track and into the depth of the trees, and he lowered his weight down slowly and then he knelt and then he lay on his stomach and there was a thick bush of holly between himself and the track. He heard their laughter and their cursing. They were moving again, coming to that part of the track closest to where he lay. Not daring to move… He could have been pitching up for work at Alpha Security, first in and climbing the stairs to the office above the launderette, he could have been hearing the wail as the shutters went up on the shops beside the launderette. He could have been going to work with the smell of Jane on him, and the taste of Tom's food from the kiss on the cheek. He could have been going in to collect the Legal Process to serve, or going in from the night-time watch on a husband's cheating, or going in to meet a builder whose competition knew the contracts he was bidding for… Not daring to move, and seeing the young faces of the militia men. Ham hadn't told him what to do if he were bounced. Ham hadn't been through the capture bit. Each one of them had a knife at his belt. They went by him close enough for him to see that. They went off down the track. He had almost walked into them. He felt a true excitement. The excitement was an exhilaration. Truth was that he had never before known such excitement. The blood pumped in him. They wouldn't have known what he meant, about the excitement, at Alpha Security, how it coursed in him and lifted him. The excitement was danger. They wouldn't have known what he meant in A Branch. The excitement was his own. He would move for another hour, and then rest up till the dusk. 'Nothing I can do for you, Mr. Jones. It's the pressure of space…' The Danish woman in Administration (Property) deflected him. 'We all have our little crosses, Mr. Jones. Better we learn to accept them and live with them
…' The Libyan man in Administration (Headquarters) put him down. 'Can't help you, Mr. Jones. My good fortune, I don't have a dog in that fight…' The Canadian man in Administration (Finance) moved him on. 'It's sardine time here, Mr. Jones. You're lucky to have what's been allocated you without sharing…' The Swiss woman in the Civilian Affairs Office (Central Directorate) dismissed him. 'The question is one of protocol, Mr. Jones.
