3/11/07
6:00 PM
The Truro Centre

Adam had been gone about eight hours, by Zaf's reckoning. He couldn't see a clock from where he was, it was dark outside, but he knew he was due pain relief every four hours and antibiotics every twelve. The pain relief was a small syringe that went straight in, the antibiotics went in a drip over about an hour. He knew which was which because they timed the painful stuff so it happened shortly after the injections. Someone tapped at the door, he lifted his head. The door opened a bit. Abi's head, the nurse on duty at the moment, appeared round it.

"Someone here to see you?"

He nodded. "Let her in."

"I didn't tell you-"

"I know who she is." All that surprised Zaf was how long it had taken her. It was around a six hour drive from where she lived to here, if it had been eight hours, Zaf was willing to bet that the two hour delay hadn't been her choice. He tried to sit up, he didn't get very far, he didn't dare put weight on his hands. He couldn't get far enough to pull himself the rest of the way with his elbows. He wasn't sure if he was dreading this or not. She… she wouldn't be calm about this. And he wasn't sure how he was going to cope with that. He thought he'd hold his nerve, he wouldn't tell her anything she wasn't supposed to know. But there were other ways this could turn nasty. She'd tell him to leave his job, go corporate or freelance, but she'd been doing that for years, ever since she'd started noticing bruises on him. He'd tried to come up with plausible explanations, but black eyes were hard to explain unless someone had punched you. She'd been suspicious that what he told her about his work wasn't the whole truth for years. This was not going to help. When you went in to The Service, they told you you'd have to lie to your family. They didn't tell you about putting off arrangements because there were marks on you that were hard to conceal and looked too much like fight wounds.

There she was, hair covered, hands clasped in front of her. Even though he was worried about how this could go, he was still glad to see her. As though some childish part of him still believed that now she was here it would be okay. The door swung closed behind her. Her eyes were wet with tears. She crossed the room to him in four strides and threw her arms around him. She shook for a second, then began to weep. Not like the British professional woman she'd made herself become in order to survive here, like the Arab wife and mother she'd been brought up to be. She wasn't even trying to restrain herself. Zaf had seen parents pulling their children, alive and dead, from bombsites in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria… That was how she was crying. She pulled him forward, off his elbows, so he could support himself sitting. He put his arms around her, keeping his hands away. He could feel himself shaking. He let himself cry. For anger at what they'd done to him. For shame that he'd broken rather than making them kill him. For relief that it was over. For shame that he was putting her through this; he'd made his choice. He'd chosen to risk himself trying to protect his home, his world. She'd never been party to that. She would never have agreed.

They stayed like that for a while, both crying, her saying his name over and over again, as though she needed to keep reminding herself that he was really there.

She pulled back and put her hands on the sides of his face.

"I thought you-"

"Ow!" Pain shot through his jaw. He pulled his head up sharply, out of her hands.

"I'm sorry!" He moved his hand up towards his face, but stopped short of touching it. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"It's alright." He'd dropped in to Urdu almost without realising. He almost always spoke Urdu to his mother.

"Where are you hurt?"

"Face, hands and feet." That was most of the truth.

She shook her head. "Why did they do it?"

"I don't know."

"They must have wanted something."

"I don't think they knew who we were."

"They said you were with a diplomatic unit."

"Who said?"

"A woman came, I don't remember her name, she said you'd been with a diplomatic unit in Syria and you'd been captured and…"

Zaf nodded. "They just assumed we were spies or something."

"So…"

Zaf nodded. Neither one of them quite had the guts to say the word. His mother sighed heavily.

"I don't - I can't - understand why anyone – anyone - would do that."

"I think they just hated the West so much that being in a car with a local driver and two white men was reason enough."

"They hate the West so they torture a Muslim to make it right."

"Do extremists ever make sense?"

There was a long silence.

"When did they bring you back?"

This was going to be fun. "Last weekend. I don't remember much of it. I wasn't in a good way."

"So why has it taken a week for them to let me see you?"

Zaf hesitated. "That was my choice."

"What?"

"You didn't see the state I came back in, Mum. I didn't want you to see that."

"Zaffar, how could you think that… Did you think I would care? I am your mother. However bad it is, I would always want to see you." She was hurt by that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn't say that civilians weren't allowed near him until he was sober enough not to violate the Official Secrets Act. He looked down, away from her. "Do you understand that?"

He nodded. "All I can do is say I'm sorry. Between pain and pain meds I might not have been thinking that clearly." She made a sound as though she'd thought of saying something back, but thought better of it.

There was a tap at the door. Zaf glanced at his Mum, then told whoever they were to come in. Abi's head appeared round the door again.

"I found a chair, if you want it."

"Thank you." His Mum dropped abruptly back in to English and went to take the chair from Abi and brought it round to his bedside. Abi left again. "What's that?" She asked in Urdu, indicating the tube sticking out of his neck.

"This? Feeding tube. It has a proper name, but I have no idea how to say it in Urdu. My mouth hurt, so I couldn't eat, so they put the tube in so I didn't have to." He took a breath to say he didn't really need it anymore, but his chest wouldn't let him. He started coughing violently. Pain shot through his left shoulder with every cough. It would stop. He just had to wait.

It did stop. Of course it stopped. Zaf took a couple of steadying breaths and looked back at his Mum, who was looking worried.

"Just a chest infection. It's not TB or anything like that."

"Did you catch it in..?"

"Yeah." No need to tell her how. No need to tell her that they thought he had the cough because he'd been sick while drugged out for transport and breathed his own vomit. "They're loading me with medicine for it, I'll be fine."

There was another long silence.

"Surely, now you have to leave."

Zaf blinked slowly. This was going to be nasty, but it wasn't going to unbearable. She wasn't going to wring the broken bones in his hands or shock him until his muscles were so shot he didn't even twitch any more. Whatever happened here, he had had worse. Much worse. "This was not work's fault, Mum."

"They sent you in to the path of those men and they left you there."

"We disappeared off the road. Nobody knew where we were. They came after us and they did find us."

"You would never have been anywhere near them if you hadn't been working with the diplomats. I know you don't want to teach, but there are companies that will employ translators like the government does, but without…"

"Mum, this could have happened to anyone in the area who was seen within twenty feet of a white man. They had no idea who we were. Diplomats or businessmen, it wouldn't have mattered. If anything it would have taken longer for the soldiers to start looking for us if we'd been corporate."

"How do you know the men you were with were who they said they were? What if they were spies?"

"Mum, they needed me to say anything to anyone. They could barely manage 'hello', 'goodbye', 'please' and 'thank you'. You can't hide much from your translator."

"This does not happen to most people Zaffar. You can't come to family things because you're abroad, then you come home with bruises. Sooner or later you are going to get yourself killed. You need to get out." Zaf hesitated. The problem was that most of that was true. "When you don't call, I worry like I have a son who is a soldier. But my son is only a translator. Translators are not supposed to risk their lives."

"I didn't set out to. I don't think anyone could have predicted what happened, so I don't know how anyone could have prevented it."

"By not sending you through places where men like that might be hiding? Zaffar, do you ever think about what would happen if you died?"

"It doesn't often look likely. I spend most of my time wondering what to do with the word 'you' behind a desk in Whitehall." Being flippant didn't have any effect at all, so he changed tack. He looked down. "I did." She waited. "In the last day or two before they got us out. We didn't have the answers they wanted, they didn't believe us, they hadn't asked for ransom, I gave up. I thought I was going to die there." He could feel his throat tightening. This was almost too easy to fake. "I thought about it. I wondered how you'd find out, who'd come and tell you…" He'd half-convinced himself she'd be okay. He'd needed to. He'd needed to not feel guilty about wanting them to kill him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his Mum dip her head and clasp her hands tightly in her lap. That was a tell with her. If he could make her uncomfortable enough, maybe he could make her drop this. It wouldn't make the problem go away, but it would let him put off dealing with it. "I thought about how I'd never get to meet Asma's kid, how we'd never swap bad translation stories again, how we'd never laugh at Rashid speaking Urdu with a Birmingham accent again…" He tailed off. Most of that was true. Your mind did strange things between bouts of torture. He waited. She didn't look up, neither did he. He might have won this. He waited longer, then "Can we talk about something else?"

"Yes, of course." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. That might have been overkill.

"How's Asma?" Asma, Zaf's older sister, had announced a couple of months ago that she was expecting her first baby. It shouldn't be too hard to get his Mum to talk about that.

"Better. The sickness is settling down now."

"How's Rashid doing?"

"As expected, he's turned in to a mother hen."

"How's Asma taking that?"

"She either likes it or pretends she does. I think the former."

"Do they know if it's a boy or a girl yet?"

"You find that out at twenty weeks, Zaffar."

"Well how would I know that?" He'd done it. He'd got her off topic. "Are you looking forward to having children around again?"

Note: If anyone is interested, Zaf is coughing because he has localised aspiration pneumonia. He has aspiration pneumonia because he inhaled vomit while in the boot of the car. He was drugged with a mix of ketamine and methadone, this causes very deep sedation, under which some reflexes may be lost, so when the methadone made him vomit (which it tends to), his airway wasn't entirely successful in closing itself. His vomit was very thin because he had eaten so little in the preceding days, so he didn't choke, but what little did get in to his lungs caused an infection.