Ford could feel Martin’s attention. Nathalie leaned forward, the glass clasped between her hands, her voice now private.
‘Why don’t you ask me questions? You never ask questions. You are always so quiet. Is that what makes you so interesting? A man who listens but never asks questions.’
Ford shrugged in apology.
‘See? Do you mind if I ask? The woman you were travelling with, was she your wife?’
‘No.’
‘But you were married?’
‘I was with someone for a while.’
‘For how long?’
‘Seven years.’
‘You don’t have children?’ Her voice sounded small, without interest in a reply. ‘I have a daughter.’ She repeated the fact and nodded. ‘She lives with her father in Paris.’
They looked, both of them, at a bottle of wine on the paving at their feet, almost gone. Beside it Martin’s whisky, a blend not a single malt, which Ford thought telling about the man in some way — cheap or economic — but couldn’t decide.
‘I buy this wine in Paris.’ Nathalie tapped the bottle, fingernail against the neck. ‘The same wine. There’s a shop run by two men from Algeria. I used to see them every day, but I know nothing about them. Their wine was the same price as the wine from anywhere else, but I always believed I was saving money, because these men know nothing about wine so the prices are too low, so I’m always winning. I told myself that I was always one step ahead.’ She stroked her hair behind her ears.
‘Do you see your daughter?’
‘Yes. She comes to stay with me sometimes. Her name is Elise.’
‘And her father?’
‘It’s not possible to spend time with him.’ Nathalie set her shoulders forward, a slight move with a hint of exclusion. ‘At first we were not going to be together. I was to going to raise Elise. But after my father died, I don’t know, we thought that maybe we should try. It was a mistake. The whole idea. The world for him is very organized. We took two holidays to see if we could be together. The first in Thailand — we booked a hotel at a place called Ban Hai, and took a room on the beach facing the ocean — and it went, you know, it went well, but afterward he wasn’t so certain. I thought, maybe, I thought it was possible. It might work. I don’t know, so I persuaded him to move in. The next year we booked the same place for our second holiday, but there was a problem with the date, so we changed our minds. Elise was older and we thought we should try a different kind of holiday. Anyway, we changed our minds. Australia was Mathieu’s idea. So we found flights into Perth and out of Sydney. Have you been to Australia?’
Ford shook his head.
‘You have this idea about how big it is, but you’ve no real idea just how big until you’re there. Mathieu worked out that we could drive three hundred miles a day, which didn’t sound so bad. But everything is the same. The same bush. The same trees. The same sky. Whatever direction you head in everything is the same. On the first afternoon we were driving to these mountains. The radio said there was a fire four hundred miles away which didn’t sound so bad, until we realized that these mountains weren’t mountains, they were smoke from the fire which took up the entire horizon, and we were driving toward it. Mathieu found a campsite and we decided to stop. Another fire had passed through a week before. Everything was reduced to sand, to charcoal. There were no trees, but you could smell the eucalyptus even though the trees were gone. The sky was grey, just smoke, and the sun was red, you could stare right at it, this red circle. That night the fire crossed the highway three hundred miles south, and we woke up to a clear sky and drove onto the Nullarbor Plain, which is this stone desert. Endless.’ Nathalie poured herself the last of the wine.
‘How was your daughter?’
‘Elise? She slept most of the way. At first everything was strange and interesting, but by the second day she just listened to her headphones and slept. I forgot to say but this was the same time as the tsunami. We came off the Nullarbor when we heard the news. We listened to the radio and it didn’t make sense. It didn’t touch us until we heard about Thailand, and we realized that if the town of Cham Lek was gone then the hotels at Ban Hai would also be gone. It didn’t make sense. We were at this place where the desert stops at the ocean, it just stops, like the end of the world. We found a campsite and Mathieu called home. It sounds stupid now, but no one knew what was going on. They knew we were in Australia but there was this idea that we were also going to Thailand. People were worried for us. We kept saying that we were lucky. We were lucky. Anyhow. Mathieu looked at the tsunami and how we’d changed our plans as a sign. I couldn’t see it. And that’s when everything, in the end, started to come apart — because I wouldn’t see this as a sign.’
Done with speaking, Nathalie set her glass at her feet and excused herself. Ford watched as she walked into her room, a weight upon her, and was surprised when she did not return. Martin and Eric both paused and looked to him and he became uncomfortable.
* * *
Ford lay in bed curled on his side. Nathalie’s broodiness drew out his own. Their situations unnervingly similar. He turned the dog tags between his fingers one by one.
3.6
Parson sat in the car, parked at the side of the road, door open, one foot firm on the dusty blacktop, the sun falling hard on that leg. A choice ahead of him. A map of Turkey open across his lap, buckled over the steering wheel. Earlier in the morning, after seeing the coach station at Kopeckale and learning the bus routes, he’d circled the main points of exit: Ankara, Izmir, Istanbul, then numerous cities along the long western coast, which meant, clearly, heading west to the coast, or north then west to the cities. The bus routes superimposed on this showed three key towns: Kopeckale, Narapi and Birsim, where the buses offered a choice of north-to-south and east-to-west routes. Three feasible options.
He decided on Birsim but couldn’t make himself go. Something about the open plains on either side sucked out his interest. When the call came, he’d been sitting in the one place for over thirty minutes.
The call, from HOSCO, but no one he’d spoken with before, said that they had information about a sighting. Sutler.
Parson pushed the map to the back seat, clear on his directions. He drew in his leg, shut the door, and felt certain as he started up the car, lucky.
3.7
In the morning Ford waited while Eric took a shower. The clap of water sang loose across the courtyard. Nathalie spoke with Eric while he showered. Eric’s phone lay on his bed beside his pillow.
‘But you should say? You must tell her. I don’t understand why you don’t want to go? Everything is finished here in two or three days, we can spend a week on the coast before you go. You have to go, she will be disappointed if you don’t go.’
He couldn’t hear Eric’s reply.
‘Tell her,’ Nathalie insisted. ‘Talk to her. If she’s in Rome she might prefer to stay. You should let her know that you want to change your mind. She might have other things she would prefer to do?’
Eric returned to the room with a towel wrapped about his waist. He asked Ford how he was, then took off the towel to dry himself. Along the boy’s right buttock ran a sour yellow bruise and a trail of parallel scratches. Eric tested the skin, the gesture seemed strangely feminine.