One of the doctors says, ‘It’s good. Excellent tissue match.’
There’s a whining sound from the drill as they start to bore little holes in Darrell’s collarbone. It’s loud. She drifts in and out of time a bit, the clock on the wall is moving faster than it should, she can feel her whole body again, fucking hell, they left her clothes on, that’s shoddy, and it’s good, and she can work with it. On the next whine of the drill she wriggles her right hand out of the soft fabric restraint.
She looks around with one half-open eye. She moves slowly. Left hand out of the restraints, still no one notices what she’s doing, they’re so intent on the body of her brother. Left foot. Right foot. She reaches out to the tray next to her, grabs a couple of scalpels and some bandages.
There’s some kind of crisis on the table next to her. A machine starts beeping. There’s an involuntary jolt from the skein they’re stitching into him – good girl, thinks Roxy, that’s my girl. One of the surgeons falls to the floor, another swears in Russian and starts giving chest compressions. With two eyes open, Roxy gauges the distance between the table where she’s lying and the door. The surgeons are shouting and calling for drugs. No one’s looking at Roxy; no one cares. She could die now and no one would give a shit. She might be dying now; she feels like she could be. But she’s not going to die here. She tips herself off the table down hard on her knees into a crouch, and still none of them notices. She does a backward crawl towards the door, keeping low, keeping her eye on them.
At the door, she finds her shoes and pulls them on with a little sob of relief. She topples out the door, hamstrings taut, body singing with adrenaline. In the courtyard, the car is gone. But, limping, she runs out into the forest.
Tunde
There is a man with a mouthful of glass.
There is a thin, sharp, translucent sliver spearing the back of his throat, shiny with saliva and mucus, and his friend is trying to extract it with trembling fingers. He shines a light with his phone torch to see where it is exactly, and reaches in while the man retches and tries to hold still. He has to go in for it three times, until he grasps it, pulls it out between thumb and forefinger. It is two inches long. It is stained with blood and meat, a lump of the man’s throat on the end of it. The friend puts it on to a clean, white napkin. Around them, the other waiters and chefs and orderlies continue with their business. Tunde photographs the eight shards lined up on the napkin.
He’d taken photographs while the obscenity was happening at the party, his camera casual and low at his hip, seeming to dangle from his hand. The waiter is just seventeen; this is not the first time he’s seen or heard about such a thing, but the first time that he’s been subject to it. No, he can’t go anywhere else. He has relatives in Ukraine who might take him in if he ran, but people get shot trying to cross the border; it’s a nervous time. He wipes the blood from his mouth as he speaks.
He says quietly, ‘Is my fault, must not speak when the President is speaking.’
He’s crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he’s known them since the first day Enuma touched him.
He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: ‘At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.’
The waiter, whose name is Peter, writes some words on a scrap of paper. He gives it to Tunde and holds his hand clasped over Tunde’s fist. He looks into his eyes until Tunde thinks that the man is about to kiss him. Tunde suspects he would allow it because each of these people needs some comfort.
The waiter says, ‘Don’t go.’
Tunde says, ‘I can stay as long as you like. Until the party is over if you like.’
Peter says, ‘No. Don’t leave us. She is going to try to make the press leave the country. Please.’
Tunde says, ‘What have you heard?’
Peter will only say the same thing: ‘Please. Don’t leave us. Please.’
‘I won’t,’ says Tunde. ‘I won’t.’
He stands outside the kitchen for a smoke. His fingers are trembling as he lights the cigarette. He’d thought, because he’d met Tatiana Moskalev in the past and she’d been kind to him, that he understood what was happening here. He’d been looking forward to seeing her again. Now he’s glad he didn’t have a chance to reintroduce himself. He pulls the paper that Peter had given him out of his pocket and looks at it. It says, in shaky block letters: ‘THEY’RE GOING TO TRY TO KILL US.’
He gets a few shots of people leaving the party through the side door. A couple of gun-runners. A bio-weapons specialist. It’s the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ball. There’s Roxanne Monke getting into her car, queen of a London crime family. She sees him photographing her car, mouths ‘Fuck. Off’ at him.
He files the story with CNN when he’s back in his hotel room at 3 a.m. The photographs of the man licking the brandy up from the floor. The glass splinters on the napkin. The tears on Peter’s cheek.
Just past 9 a.m. he wakes involuntarily, gritty-eyed, sweat prickling his back and temples. He checks his email, to see what the night editor’s said about the piece. He’s promised anything that came out of this party to CNN first, but if they want too many cuts he’ll take it elsewhere. There’s a simple, two-line email.
‘Sorry, Tunde, we’re going to pass on this. Great reporting, pix excellent, not a story we can sell in right now.’
Fine. Tunde sends out another three emails, then has a shower and orders a pot of strong coffee. When the emails start to come back, he’s looking through the international news sites; nothing much on Bessapara, no one’s scooped him. He reads the emails. Three more rejections. All for similar foot-shuffling, non-committal we-don’t-think-there’s-a-story-here reasons.
He’s never needed a market, though. He’ll just post the whole thing to his YouTube.
He logs on via the hotel wifi and … there YouTube isn’t. Just a tiny take-down notice saying that this site is not available in this region. He tries a VPN. No good. Tries his cellphone data. Same deal.
He thinks of Peter saying, ‘She is trying to make the press leave the country.’
If he emails the files, they’ll intercept them.
He burns a DVD. All the photos, all the footage, his own piece.