CHAPTER 39
Amman, Jordan
Sally lived at the top of a crooked four-storey apartment block.
None of the buildings on the street matched; some were tiny, some tall, some had gardens of fig trees, some had balconies full of washing and plants.
It was right behind a cemetery and a miniature mosque with a turquoise dome.
When he unlocked his front door and pushed it open with his shoulder, there were framed pictures of tarot cards on the wall in a striking design she’d never seen before.
An old camera, the kind with a concertina section, sat on a tripod by the balcony window, and from the ceiling hung lines of string with photographs pegged to them.
Shelves full of books and film canisters and about forty different kinds of cameras from different centuries took up every scrap of space on the walls.
Sally went around turning on lamps. The little sitting room had two mismatched armchairs that looked like he’d salvaged them from a gentleman’s club two hundred years ago, and a view of the cemetery.
The air smelled of photographic chemicals.
The pictures must have been his: no wonder he knew how to develop the dosimetry tests.
“You like photography then?” she said, surprised. He was so young, he must have grown up attached to a smartphone.
“Love it,” he said, with some feeling. He took a roll of aluminium foil from the drawer, and some tape.
“I love how difficult it is, and how you can see the chemistry working in front of you. But don’t look at the ones hanging up, they’re all terrible.
” The pipes clicked as he turned the heating on.
“I haven’t got much of this stuff, so—what do you think?
Do we make a little shelter with the table, put it on ourselves, on the wall . . .”
“I think . . . if we put it on ourselves, we’ll just tear it. And the under the table—we still have to move around. We need to cook, go to the bathroom . . .”
“I haven’t got anything to cook,” he said.
“Oh. I have. I stole some stuff from those boys who were rude to you.”
He blinked. “You—really?”
She held up the shopping bag, feeling guilty. What if that boy had been taking it home for his family?
Sally started to laugh. “What was I worried about? Who needs money when you’ve got a Ninja Tallis who steals from horrible teenagers?”
“Were they horrible? What did they say?”
He told her.
“I did the right thing,” she concluded.
So Sally climbed on a chair, and they began to coat the west-facing wall with foil.
It seemed so mad and insufficient, the idea that aluminium would help even a little—there would be people making honest-to-God tinfoil hats now.
But the wall was small, the ceiling low, and within a few minutes, with foil left to spare, they had filigreed over the jungle-themed wallpaper until it looked like a mirror.
Once it was done, they both stood in front of it, and Tallis didn’t think either of them knew what to do now.
When she aimed her phone out the window and leaned out to the west, the salt light was closer to the city.
It was moving in a solid cloud, like a sandstorm.
In the reflection in the foil, she was much shorter than she always imagined herself; a head smaller than Sally.
Much older, too. She realized he had seen her looking and hunted frantically for something else to take an interest in.
She settled on a framed picture of a woman about her age and two little girls.
Sally had taken it off the wall and propped it against a skirting board.
“Right, cooking,” Sally decided. “What have we got. Chickpeas. Great—flour! Oh, we’re going to be fine.”
“Can I help with anything?” Tallis asked, freshly awkward. When had she last visited somebody’s house? She couldn’t remember. She went to the pub sometimes after work, or out to restaurants or cafés, but . . . she didn’t see anyone at home.
She didn’t know anyone well enough.
“Of course you can’t do anything, sit down and get warm. The heating should be coming through now.”
She perched on one of the armchairs and watched him in the foil reflections so that she wouldn’t stare straight at him.
When she was his age, she would have been paralysed at the prospect of hosting somebody unexpectedly with no chance to tidy up or to scream into a cushion first. But Sally looked happy, setting a copper kettle on the stove and measuring loose tea into a silver strainer shaped like a lemon.
The tattoos on his fingers carried on up his wrists.
He was all contrasts, she thought suddenly.
He had strong hands, like a rock climber, but those tattoos were delicate.
He looked as though he spent his whole life traipsing around outside, the old jacket getting more and more sandblasted, the sun bleaching more light patches in his hair—she would have thought he was one of those loud-laughing boys who hollered at each other across streets—but when he spoke, it was steady and quiet.
There was a stillness in him. He went down fathoms deep, to where there were no currents.
He saw her looking, and she dropped her eyes, pretending to be looking at the picture.
“Tea bags are full of microplastics,” he said—he must have thought she was having opinions about the strainer—then laughed at himself and held his hands up. The kettle whistled, and he held it in the air to wait for it to stop bubbling, then poured the water out in a cloud of steam.
She checked the salt light again.
“Fuck,” she said.
“What?”
She showed him. It was rolling in like fog; much less than it must have been at the centre of the blast, but noticeable, and it was already in the graveyard just outside.
They both snapped to the east side of the room, away from the silvered wall. Sally snatched up the picture of the lady and the girls and sat with it flat against his chest.
She kept the phone trained on the west wall, dark for now, but she could almost feel the light billowing closer, scalp crawling.
If this was it, if this was the exposure that killed them, then surely she should say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either glib or reprehensible.
She had an unbearable need to tell him that he was the most quietly extraordinary human being she had met for decades, but that would do nothing except ensure that Sally died feeling repulsed and embarrassed—if perhaps glad he would turn to salt before he had to tell her to get out of his house.
Almost equal was the need to disguise that, and say something idiotic, like that it had been nice to work with him.
Crushing banality to end a crushingly banal life.
No. The best and only thing she could do now was to say nothing. Wasn’t your strength measured by what you could carry without breaking? And this was nothing new. She had carried it often before. However badly that old musculature wanted not to take the weight again—it could.
Sally was praying.
The lights fluttered. Tallis’s phone screen distorted too, and just before it died, it showed them the thinnest vapour of salt light seeping into the room through the corner of the ceiling.
Right across the city, spread below them down the punishing hill, the lights went out in blocks, first those further away, then closer, closer.
Then the lights in the cemetery. Then their own.
The hum of the oven died. For a few seconds the darkness was total, but gradually she started to see the outlines of the furniture, the concertina camera on its tripod, the shine of the copper kettle and the flicker of the gas flames on the stove.
There was light from somewhere; red and cold.
Tallis dug her nails into her palm, daring them to start crumbling into salt, waiting to feel that vile stiffness through the roots of her hair, to feel sick like Veronique had. It didn’t come.
Sally breathed out, half voiced, high. Very carefully, he was unfastening the back of the picture frame to get to the photograph inside.
“This has to be minimal exposure,” Tallis murmured, examining a light bulb as well as she could.
“No salt in the electricity. Glass isn’t discoloured.
” She realized she was pushing her fingertips through the roots of her hair again and snatched her hand down.
She wasn’t going to turn to salt. The archaeologists had felt ill; she felt fine.
“For how long?” Sally said towards the window.
“I don’t know. But . . . other people are okay. Look.”
There were tiny points here and there, but soft: candles.
Now, without electricity, the dark city was tinted red.
It took her a moment to see why. She had missed it before, hidden by all the light pollution, but now it was huge and brilliant in the sky.
“Wow. Lunar eclipse,” she remarked pointlessly.
He straightened up to look outside, holding the rescued photograph. “Sign of the apocalypse,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“A red moon. Then a solar eclipse.”
“Oh, right,” she said, assuming he meant it as trivia, but she frowned when she saw the blank way he was staring at nothing. He had put a candle on the table between them, and it had made him into an amber-enamelled ghost in the dark. “Sally . . . do you believe in that?”
He smiled thinly. “Believing in Judgement Day is a basic pillar of Islam. It comes with the package.”
“Sounds stressful.”
“People don’t believe in it because it sounds like a good idea,” he said, laughing a little bit and pretending to kick her ankle. “They believe it because it’s, you know. True.”
“Insufficient evidence,” she said, trying to make him laugh more. “Next?”
“You’re one of those people who invites Mormons in and then tells them how their conception of the infinite universe is garbage because of the speed of light, aren’t you?”
Tallis paused, feeling, as she was starting to suspect was normal with Sally, uncomfortably seen. “No,” she tried.
He laughed, and when he stopped, the laughter faded only gradually from the tiny lines around his eyes.
The longer she spent with him, the more she was noticing that he did everything much more steadily than most people.
He didn’t fidget or shift around, he didn’t flicker awkwardly through different expressions, trying to find the right one.
She would have called it zen, but there was something sad about it, as though he hadn’t so much moved beyond all that worry about what other people thought as given up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have made you stay in the city.”
“No, you were right. I think we’re safer here with the light than in some camp without it.” He swallowed. “Do you think paper will turn faster than a person?”
She tore a strip of aluminium off the wall and gave it to him, for the photograph.
“Thanks.” He set the picture down to wrap it up.
Tallis studied it, wondering who they were. It was a brilliant picture; the lady was looking at the girls, not the camera, and the girls looked like she had just told them a rude joke.
“That’s my mother,” Sally said. “And my sisters.” He folded the aluminium carefully over them.
“She was a judge. I was at college here when they started arresting women at home. She should have been eligible for asylum in the U.S., she prosecuted extremists for years, but . . . she couldn’t get to the airport. ”
Tallis noticed she had been pushing her fist against her mouth. “What happened to them?”
Somewhere outside, there was a rattle, as if someone were shaking a gutter to try to persuade a kitten out of it. Distantly it was reassuring to know people were still doing ordinary things.
“Don’t know,” he said, and she could hear fossilised pain in it. “I’d be arrested if I tried to cross the border.”
She didn’t say she was sorry, because everyone would have said that, and she doubted it had ever helped.
“People think that you’ll be okay if you’re rich, whatever happens . . . but you’re not.” He smiled slightly. “Which is why I don’t think the apocalypse is going to be about being arrested on park benches.”
Tallis wished she knew what to say, but she hadn’t the faintest idea.
The closest to armed conflict she had ever come was an argument with the local council about bin collection days.
She was ludicrously insulated, her life small and safe, and there was nothing in it that she could have used to offer Sally anything but the shallowest kind of sympathy.
The rattle came again, and on the edge of everything else, Tallis thought it came from nearer this time: further up the wall. Was something stuck in a . . . Christ, who cared.
“I can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be repulsively naive,” she said. “I’ve never even seen anything like that.”
He lifted his eyes. “Don’t be silly. Do you know how good it is, to meet someone who’s never even seen it?”
She nodded once, not believing him at all.
“Well,” he said, “the stove’s fine. Flatbreads and rice and chickpea curry coming soon.”
That sounded like heaven.
Rattle, scrape, rattle. She glanced towards the window. “Sorry, is there something stuck outside? Can you hear that pipe? Has someone got a cat?”
“I’ve got a cat somewhere, but I think she bounces between me and Mrs—” He stopped. “Look down there.”
He wasn’t trying to see any guttering. He was looking down into the graveyard.
It was crowded.
The rags of old shrouds flickered in the wind. The ground crawled. Some people weren’t standing but crabbing out from behind monuments, joints bending wrongly. Once they were upright, they stopped and stood, blank, as if they were waiting.
But seeing them didn’t feel like seeing. It felt like remembering having seen.
She waited for them to disappear, but they didn’t. Sally could see them too. He looked mired somewhere between awestruck and horrified.
He said something in Arabic she didn’t understand, but the cadence had music in it; he was quoting scripture. He glanced at her. “All bodies shall be resurrected.”
Tallis had never, ever been wrong in telling the difference between a real thing and a hallucination, not even once. That difference, that seeing versus the memory-of-seeing, it was always there, and it was always right.
She pushed her hands over her face. If that was wrong now, if she couldn’t tell, she was going to go mad. She was going to start trying to open doors that weren’t there, and not running from men with guns that were.
Rattle, scrape, rattle.
It was very close.
A shape still half bound in a decaying shroud dropped off the gutter and onto their balcony, and stood motionless outside, staring in through the glass.