No books, she insists. No notebooks, no prepared speeches, no pocket dictionaries. ‘We shall speak today about what we find in front of us. Today you will demonstrate a mix of tenses, you aren’t to worry about your vocabulary, you aren’t to worry about being perfectly correct. Today you are to walk with me and speak about things you have not prepared.’
Tomas’s reaction is stern. He’d much rather not, if she didn’t mind.
‘Believe me, you’ll find out that you know more than you realize. It won’t be so hard. I’ll help you.’
Tomas nods, and searches in his pockets for his keys.
In the stairwell, as he locks the door and tests to make sure it is shut, he asks about the museum. Did she go? Did she see that piece. The artists are German?
‘They are here, you know,’ he says in English. ‘The artists are in Limassol, and they’re making new work for the internet. I heard them interviewed on BFPS.’ He has a flyer, he says, something he picked up when he left the museum. He hasn’t yet checked to see what this work is, but now that he’s seen one piece by them — and here he falters a little — in fact participated in the piece, he’s curious to see other works. Not that he really understands them. But he’s curious.
Rike admits she’s also curious. Having participated in the piece it would be interesting to see what else they’ve done. Yes, she’s curious.
‘And you did take part?’ he asks.
‘I did.’
‘You recorded something?’
‘I did.’
‘Can I ask what it was?’
Rike comes down the stairs ahead of Tomas. ‘It’s a little complicated. I chose a date, but I didn’t save it because it isn’t my story. My sister lost a child before he was born.’ Even now, the bluntness of the fact hurts. Something so horribly complex, so easily described. ‘I left the date and name, but chose not to save it.’
She walks ahead to avoid his reaction, and is relieved when he doesn’t respond. It takes a great effort not to explain further, to allow the fact to sit.
‘And now,’ he asks, ‘you said she is going to have another child?’
They are further along already, Rike explains, and doctors, Henning, everyone, are prepared this time, and yes, everything is going very well. She is too superstitious to say more.
‘And your brother, he comes here as well?’
This, Rike explains, is a whole other issue. ‘When I first lived in London I lived with my brother and his partner. A man called Franco.’ For three months Rike lived with her brother and witnessed what she can only call wilful cruelty. ‘He’s a bully. He knows how to get inside people.’ This is the simple fact. ‘The trouble is, Franco couldn’t see it. He just let it happen, and it was like watching someone fall, who doesn’t put out their hands or make an attempt to save themselves.’ And here is the complication. The more hopeless Franco appeared, the more the situation mattered to her.
Tomas is quiet. For a moment she thinks that she is over-explaining herself.
They come to the entrance, stand side by side. It is an infinite relief when Tomas simply nods.
‘He’s here. In Cyprus, and I just don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to be part of it.’ The words embarrass her, but the facts are plain. ‘Right now. I would be happy if he just disappeared.’
They step into the street and a small but noticeable change overcomes Tomas. His discomfort is clear in how he shies away, walks close to the wall, seems in every way keen not to be seen or to take part in the outside world.
Rike’s confession emboldens her and she asks Tomas about his message. ‘It was your voice? February twelfth?’
‘I thought about speaking in Norwegian.’ He looks sideways, a little sly, ‘but I think they want messages that can be understood, no? In the end I also decided not to record a reason.’
Tomas looks ahead, wipes his hand across his mouth. ‘Did the school tell you anything? I spoke with the woman who runs it.’
Rike automatically answers no.
‘I was monitoring security and I caught a team of men stealing from a depot.’ He holds up his arms to describe the assault. ‘The thing is I remember very little. But they came at me with iron bars.’
Shocked, Rike stops walking. She’s sorry, she says. This is none of her business. She’s really sorry.
Tomas dismisses the apology. ‘It’s a fact. Yes? Something that happened.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I was unlucky. I was in the wrong place. I didn’t have to be there. But I saw them, and they came after me. I have no memory of this.’ He holds his hand first over his forehead, slightly to the right. ‘I was hit here, one time, at the front, and also on my chest, my arms. But the damage was worst for my head. This happened in the depot, but I was found at the security post, which is across a large car park. But I have no memory of this, of what happened, or how I got there. After, of course, everything was different.’
Rike can’t think of anything to say except how sorry she is. And isn’t this a lesson about caution, about how she needs to plan to keep them clean and clear of personal revelation — because this is none of her business.
Tomas points across the road. ‘I’m not much in the mood for walking. We should sit perhaps?’
Rike agrees, and follows as Tomas leads her across the road to a café.
* * *
They sit side by side with their coffees and face the street, both uncomfortable with the silence. Occasionally Rike feels an obligation to restart the conversation, but the impetus isn’t there. Tomas looks down at his cup and Rike apologizes and says they can forget about today.
‘I can make it up another time. I didn’t mean to ask about personal things.’
Tomas straightens his back. ‘I was painting the room today, in the basement. Christos came to see me. I asked him about what happened.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Nothing. Christos said these people were clever. They rented a room for a month. They had someone prepare it for them. They used it once, only for one weekend. They picked up the first person they met. There was no meaning to it. No intention. Except they wanted to do this horrendous thing.’
Tomas turns the spoon over on his saucer, And without fuss he begins to set the salt, pepper, the sauce pots in order on the table.
The air, stale with coffee from the café and the fruited malt from the wineries and breweries closes over them, and the room yaws open to the street with a long overhanging hood, so that the café might be a cave.
‘They rebuilt my skull. See. On this side.’ His hand traces an area from his temple to the crown.
The conversation falls into shadow, stops, and Rike wants desperately to open this into something new. She changes the subject, tells him about Sutler. Thinking that this subject is a remedy, strange enough to distract him.
‘He’s here. The man from the desert.’
The shift works, and she’s pleased with his reaction. It’s water to a dry plant the way he stirs and listens, becomes present.
‘They flew him to the hospital at Akrotiri, but I don’t think he’s staying there because the burns unit is in Limassol.’ She points left, indicates the hospital no more than two hundred metres away. You know about this? The hospital, she explains, has a burns unit. The British use the hospital for soldiers from Iraq, from Afghanistan, who have — it’s impossible to imagine — wounds you wouldn’t believe. The unit is world-leading for the treatment of burns, and it’s here, in Cyprus, right here, just up the street. So this man has been flown in, wrapped up — Rike combines details picked from Henning and pure invention. It isn’t that she wants to lie, she wants him distracted, she wants Tomas thinking about details, procedures, impossible tit-tats of information. ‘What they do is wrap you in this plastic film to stop the oxygen reaching the burn, it stops the air and bacteria from entering the wounds. They wash you in a saline solution, and they cover you in this wrapper and in these creams, and then lower your body temperature with these silver blankets. They keep you cold so the body slowly recovers, and this is what stops the scarring, the cold, the slow healing, and as with all burns the only problem they have to be particular about is infection, because these super-bacteria are resistant to all forms of antibiotic. Henning has seen this, she says, he’s sat with the man, observed him, and while the facilities look crude, he can assure you they have developed advanced techniques in treating skin and burns and lesions, and they’ve learned all of this through treating soldiers. They sent a group of doctors from here to Damascus to bring him back. They want this man to live.