The Network - Jason Elliot [30]
I reach Gerhardt half an hour later, remove the parking ticket from the windscreen and, resisting a momentary urge to weep, start up and head for home.
5
For days I’m hoping to continue with life as if nothing’s really happened, feeling all the while like a man condemned. My meeting with Seethrough has stirred up memories I’ve preferred to forget, and now they return to me like ghosts, visiting at unexpected moments. From time to time I wonder whether Seethrough’s proposal is no more than an elaborate hoax, and imagine him jumping out at me one day in his long coat, waving his chequebook from Coutts and declaring the whole thing a joke.
My sleep grows disturbed, and I have strange dreams in which I’m wandering along the secret corridors of Vauxhall Cross. In one I’m walking under a giant portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh that hangs in the main atrium, but the face is Seethrough’s, grinning cynically at me. Recalling our meeting gives me a jittery feeling akin to panic. It’s as if the visible events of ordinary life are now no more than a stage set that ordinary people believe is real, but behind which I alone know what’s going on. I tell myself I’ll get used to keeping things secret, and push thoughts of the future aside. But I know too that a secret can enliven one’s life or poison it, and I’m wondering which way things will eventually turn out.
Seethrough has said he’ll contact me again in a week’s time. But the lack of news makes me anxious, and the evenings fall heavily. My working routine has gone haywire. I drink a bottle and a half of wine every night, and I’m smoking again, a vice I’ve managed to evade for over a year. For most of the week I avoid contact with people, stop shopping and, worst of all, run out of decent red wine. I take to going for long walks alone and driving Gerhardt cross-country on the muddy tank routes over Salisbury Plain, thinking to test my nerve in the event of getting caught and arrested by the Military Police. I shouldn’t, because it would be a bad moment to be arrested. But you do odd things when the craving for adrenalin begins to set in.
Then two things happen. The following Saturday morning, along with a reminder that I haven’t paid my television licence, a postcard arrives from Afghanistan. It’s strangely timely. On the front is a poorly reproduced colour photograph, probably taken in the 1970s, of a turbanned Kuchi tribesman leading a caravan of camels, silhouetted against a background of barren mountains. It’s postmarked Kabul, but I can’t make out the date. Nor do I recognise the hand. It reads,
Be doubly warned that the journey here takes at least thirteen hours, in temperatures of up to forty degrees. We all look forward to seeing you here. Please do keep in touch. Your old friend, Mohammed.
I’ve had the occasional letter and postcard from Afghanistan, but I’m embarrassed not to remember a Mohammed who considers himself to be my old friend. Certainly not one who speaks English well enough to know his prepositions and such an expression as ‘be doubly warned’. I think of the English-speaking people I’ve met in Kabul and on de-mining missions over the years. Most of them are foreigners. I wonder if Mohammed might be a Western-educated Iranian. But my mind’s a blank. I’ve simply forgotten. Odder still, it’s winter now and nowhere in Afghanistan does the temperature reach forty degrees. Perhaps the card was posted months before, and has only just been flown out. The Taliban postal service is hardly famous for its swiftness. I walk into the living room, put the postcard on the mantelpiece and stare at it. It bothers me that I can’t identify the sender. I decide I’ll leave it there until I can.
The second event is a phone call from Seethrough. I’ve yet to get into the habit of calling him Macavity. When