A Foreign Country

48

He was not afraid of dying, but he was afraid of Slimane Nassah.

He could stand the waiting, he could stand the loss of his privacy, but François feared Slimane because he was the only one among them who was completely unpredictable.

The tone had been set almost immediately, as soon as they had driven him down from Paris. Luc and Valerie keeping their distance, never looking him in the eye; Akim playing good cop with his soft, innocent eyes — and Slimane taking every opportunity that came his way to crawl under François’ skin, to probe for weaknesses, to taunt him with threats and insults. It was worst when the house was deserted. On only the third day, Akim had gone for provisions, Luc and Valerie for a walk in the garden. Slimane had come into the cell, closed the door, indicated to François not to make a sound — then grabbed at his nose, blocking the air so that he was forced to open his mouth to breathe. Next thing François knew there was some kind of cloth or handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, a taste of petrol on his tongue; he thought that Slimane was going to light it and burn his face away. Then he had bound his hands and feet and François had started to struggle. He’d stood up off the bed and shuffled around the cell, falling over on the cold ground. Slimane had opened the door of the cell, walked outside and come back with a knife, the blade heated on the gas stove in the kitchen. He was smiling as he picked François up and sat him upright on the bed. Then he had drawn circles around his eyes with the black steel, the heat on the tip of the blade opening up a cut above François’ left eye so that tears slipped down past his cheek and Slimane began to laugh, taunting him for crying ‘like a woman’. A few moments later, the gag had been removed from his mouth, his hands and legs untied, and Slimane had gone next door, securing the bolt and putting some Arabic rap on the iPod in the sitting room, a smell of marijuana drifting into the cell.

François had always thought of himself as a brave person, difficult to unsettle, self-sufficient. At fourteen, his parents had told him that he had been adopted, that he was the son of an English mother who had not been able to care for him. So François had grown up with the idea that he was somehow uncherished and temporary; no matter how much Philippe and Jeannine adored him — and they had been wonderful parents — they could never have loved him in the same way as his natural mother. This had bred in François a certain stubbornness allied to a profound distrust of people. Terrified of being hurt and abandoned, he had always kept his friends and colleagues — with only one or two exceptions — emotionally at arm’s length. He was an honest man, and liked for this by those who knew him, and, for the most part, his choice of a solitary life had suited him well. François had made sure to move around, from job to job and from place to place, so that he was not obliged to put roots down, nor to forge links with people for any length of time. What he hated most in his captivity was that Slimane understood a lot of this almost instinctively. François came to dread not the loneliness or the fear of his imprisonment, but the knowledge that Slimane could, at any moment, humiliate him for the accident of his birth.

‘Think about it,’ he had whispered to him one night through the door of the cell. ‘Your own mother hated you so much that she was prepared to give you up, to abandon you. You ever think about that, about how ugly you must have been? A real cunt to do that to her son, too, don’t you reckon?’ It was perhaps three or four o’clock in the morning, the house asleep, not even the click of the cicadas outside to break the silence. François, lying on the bed, had wrapped the pillow around his ears but could still hear every word of what Slimane was saying. ‘I’ve seen a picture of your mother,’ he whispered. ‘Good-looking woman. I’d like to fuck her. Akim wants to fuck her too. Maybe we’ll both do it after we kill you. What do you think? You like that idea? We’ll both fuck her in the ass for what she did to you when you were just a little kid.’

That was perhaps the worst night, the one that François always remembered. But Slimane’s constant taunts were debilitating to his spirit. Whenever he brought food, for example, whenever he emptied the bucket, whenever he thought Akim was getting too close or too friendly to ‘the little boy’, Slimane would make a remark, put the gun in François’ groin, come up behind him and rip at the hairs on the nape of his neck or slap him hard around the head. François wondered if a braver man would have fought back or tried harder to escape. It made sense to try to run. If they had killed Philippe and Jeannine, they were surely going to kill him.

Often, at night, when he was on shift, Slimane would wake François as a kind of sleep deprivation for kicks, a way of passing the time through the boredom of a nightwatch. So François would sleep during the days, resting on his bed listening to the frogs and birds in the garden, dreaming of Paris, of his parents brought back to life and protecting him from what had happened. Then, in time, he began to dream of his real mother, of Amelia Levene, but had no picture of her in his mind’s eye, nor of the man who was his father. Did he look like either of them? Perhaps François was now too old for any family resemblance to have lasted. He had never wanted to find them, not since Philippe and Jeannine had given him the news of his adoption, but towards the third week of his captivity François began to pray that he would be rescued by them, that his real parents would somehow pay the ransom and return him to his life in Paris. At times, François would sob like a child for the mother he had never seen, for the father he had never known, but not so that his captors would hear him or see his face, never so that Slimane could enjoy the pleasure of his distress. François at least kept that dignity. But everything was complicated by Vincent. Everything was made worse by the knowledge that another man had replaced him, stolen his life, and was already making a relationship with Amelia.

‘Vincent’s living in your house,’ Slimane told him, day after day, night after night. ‘He’s wearing your clothes, he’s fucking your girls. He even went on holiday with your mother. Did you know that? Luc says she loves him, they can’t get enough of each other. He’s going to go and live with her in England. How do you feel about that, François? Amelia’s got the son she always wanted. So why would she ever think about cashing him in for a dumb prick like you?’