At Risk

15

In the tiny bedroom at the east end of the bungalow, Faraj Mansoor slept in unmoving silence. Was this something he had learned to do? the woman wondered. Was even this aspect of his life subject to control and secrecy? Slung over the bedhead was the black rucksack that he had been carrying when she met him. Would he trust its contents to her? Would he be open with her, and treat her as a partner? Or would he expect her, as a woman, to walk behind him? To behave as his subordinate in all things?

In truth, she didn’t care. The essential thing was that the task should be executed. The woman prided herself on her chameleon nature, her preparedness to be whatever she was required to be at any given moment, and was happy to assume whatever role was required of her. At Takht-i-Suleiman, to begin with at least, the instructors had barely acknowledged her existence, but she hadn’t minded. She had listened, she had learned, and she had obeyed. When they had told her to cook, she had cooked. When they had told her to wash the other recruits’ sweat-stinking combat fatigues, she had carried the baskets uncomplainingly to the wadi, squatted on her haunches, and scrubbed. And when they had tied her eyes with a scarf and told her to field-strip her assault weapon, she had done that too, her fingers dancing fast and fluent over the machined parts whose names she had only ever known in Arabic. She had become a cipher, a selfless instrument of vengeance, a Child of Heaven.

She smiled. Only those who had undergone the experience of initiation knew the fierce joy of self-nullification. Perhaps-inshallah-she would survive this task. Perhaps she would not. God was great.

And in the mean time there were things to do. When he woke Mansoor would want to wash-the smell in the car the night before had been of stale body-odour and vomit-and he would want to eat. The water was heated by a temperamental Ascot which seemed to gasp and die every five minutes-half a box of spent matches lay in the bathroom bin-and the Belling electric stove looked as if it was on its last legs too. The salt air, she guessed, probably shortened the lives of these kind of goods. The fridge whirred noisily but otherwise seemed to work, and after Diane’s departure the day before she had driven into King’s Lynn and stocked up with oven-ready meals from Tesco. Curries, for the most part.

Her name was not Lucy Wharmby, as she had told Diane Munday. But what she was called no longer mattered to her, any more than where she lived. Movement and change were in her blood now, and any kind of permanence was unimaginable.

It hadn’t always been so. In the far beginning, in a past over which a kind of frozen unreality now shimmered, there had been a place called home. A place to which, with the simplicity of a child, she had thought she would always return. She could remember, in great detail, isolated moments from this time. Feeding stale bread to the greedy, snappish geese in the park. Lying in her paddling pool in the tiny south London garden, looking up at the apple tree and pressing her neck downwards on the rim of the pool so that the water rushed out through her hair.

But then the shadows had begun to fall. There was a move from the cosy London house to a cold block in a Midlands university town. Her father’s new teaching job was a prestigious one, but for the bookish seven-year-old it meant permanent separation from her London friends and a hellish new school in which bullying was rife, especially of outsiders.

She was desperately lonely, but said nothing to her parents, because by then she knew from the tense silences and the slammed doors that they had their own problems. Instead, she began to withdraw into herself. Her schoolwork, once sparkling, deteriorated. She developed mysterious stomach pains which kept her at home but which refused to yield to any kind of treatment-conventional or otherwise.

When she was eleven her parents separated. The separation would conclude with their divorce. On the surface the arrangement was amicable. Her parents walked around with fixed smiles on their faces-smiles which didn’t quite reach their eyes-and made a point of telling her that nothing would change. Both, however, quickly took up with new partners.

Their daughter moved between the two households, but kept herself to herself. The mystery stomach pains persisted, further isolating her from her contemporaries. Her periods failed to materialise. One evening she punched her fist through a frosted glass door and had to be given ten stitches in her hand and wrist by a junior houseman at the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital.

When she was thirteen, her parents took the decision to send her away to a progressive boarding school in the country which had a reputation for accommodating troubled children. Classroom attendance was optional and there was no organised sport. Instead, pupils were encouraged to undertake free-form art and theatre projects. In her second year her father’s girlfriend sent her a book for her birthday. It sat on her bedside table for a fortnight; it was not the sort of thing which interested her, by and large. One night, however, unable to sleep, she had finally reached for it and begun to read.