Tell the Moon to Come Out Read online

  There were two of them, the sergeant and a constable. The latter was holding a rifle and had a chain looped round his wrist to which was attached an evil-looking red-eyed dog with long fanged teeth. It was some kind of wolfhound and it liked the look of Nick no more than the men did.

  ‘Lower your hands!’

  Nick lowered them.

  His wrists were seized and forced behind his back, then clipped roughly into handcuffs.

  ‘Search the cave, Manuel!’

  The constable dived into the cave and came back out with Nick’s knapsack, bedroll and water-bottle. His survival kit. Manuel had to sling his rifle over a shoulder so that he could carry it all and keep hold of the dog’s chain.

  ‘Right, march!’ The pistol prodded Nick in the back.

  He marched, or rather, stumbled, his way across the campo, the pistol urging him forwards every time he tripped. It took all the effort of his will to stay upright. He would not let the men see him humiliated. He could not look at them since they were behind him, but the dog kept in step with him, snarling and snapping at his ankles.

  They came into the village at Dr Fuentes’ end. Glancing sideways, Nick saw Marina’s face at the window as he went by. She might have seen them coming across the fields. She did not wave or give him any signal, but he knew that she felt for him.

  The village was bigger than Nick had thought. The narrow potholed main street stretched away ahead, curving out of sight. On either side, houses huddled together, terraced for the most part, their doors opening on to the broken pavement. Everything looked in need of renewal.

  They walked up the middle of the street. There was no traffic to get in their way, apart from a man leading a donkey with a load of sticks on its back. When the man saw them he tugged the animal quickly into the side to give them room to go by. They passed a shop, nothing much more than a hole in the wall, from what Nick could see, with its door open. Two women clad in black, who’d been chattering volubly on the step, fell silent at the approach of the Civil Guards with their prisoner. Another woman came out of her house to stare openly. Faces were to be seen at windows. Everywhere there seemed to be eyes, watching. News must have spread quickly. A few men in overalls lounged against walls, smoking. One tossed his smouldering butt right in front of Nick, startling him. He’d never known such a wave of hatred coming from people.

  The street, at this point, widened out into a square, with a church on one side. Nick lifted his eyes to look at the familiar spire. It had been a landmark for him, seen from his cave in the campo. When he had looked at it he had thought of Isabel.

  On the corner of the square four men sat outside a bar, at two round zinc-topped tables, with small glasses of brandy in front of them. They stopped drinking to scrutinize Nick. One spoke.

  ‘Got a Red there, have you, Sergeant?’

  ‘Maybe even a spy.’

  ‘You’ll be having some fun then!’

  Another drinker muttered something about all that being over. A third said, ‘It’ll never be over until all the bastards are done for!’

  They were back in the narrow part of the street and Nick was urged forwards again. It was getting dark and a few windows showed dim lights. He was on the brink of exhaustion, but if he fell down in the gutter they would doubtless kick him until he got up. He knew enough not to expect mercy in any quarter.

  The Civil Guard station was at the extreme end of the village. It was a small, one-storeyed building, attached to a two-storeyed house which looked bigger than most of the ones they had passed. This must be where Isabel lived! There was no sign of anyone at any of the windows.

  ‘Inside!’

  Nick was pushed into a dim hall and through to a room at the back. The sergeant lit a lamp on the desk and seated himself behind it. The constable threw Nick’s bedroll and water-bottle on the floor, then tipped out the contents of the knapsack.

  ‘Socks, underpants, pullover, shirt, pencil, note pad, nothing written on it, plasters, tube of antiseptic cream. Copy of Don Quixote. A reader, eh?’

  ‘Can I see it?’ The sergeant held out his hand to take the book. He flipped open the cover and when he saw the name inscribed on the flyleaf he pursed his lips and his eyes narrowed. He then summoned Nick to come and stand at the desk in front of him. Nick wanted to put a hand on the desk to steady himself but did not. The constable remained by the back wall.

  The sergeant lit a pungent-smelling cigarette, blew a long stream of smoke into Nick’s face, smiled a little smile, and said, ‘Now then, my friend with the English clothes, you must tell me who you are.’

  ‘My name is Nicolás MacIntosh,’ he said, using his mother’s maiden name. He could not go on pretending to be a native Spaniard. He had a story ready, prepared with Jean-Luc. ‘I am from Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland eh? Why, then, are you not wearing a skirt?’ The sergeant laughed and the constable sniggered.

  ‘We only wear kilts for special occasions.’

  ‘And this is not a special occasion? Tut, tut! So, Scotsman, what are you doing here in our country and how is it you speak Spanish like a native?’

  ‘My mother is a teacher of Spanish.’

  ‘Ah, that is so? She has lived here, then?’

  ‘For a while.’ Nick’s throat was bone-dry. He swallowed and carried on, ‘When she was a student. A long time ago. Twenty years or so.’

  ‘And your father. Does he teach Spanish as well?’

  ‘He is a gamekeeper.’

  ‘In Scotland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, then, are you, the son of these two Scottish people, doing wandering about in Spain?’

  ‘I was curious.’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘I want to be a journalist so I thought if I could write a piece about General Franco and the new Spain it might give me a chance to get started on a newspaper.’

  ‘A scoop?’

  ‘Well, in a way.’

  ‘Plausible, I suppose.’ The sergeant leant forward and said in a soft voice, ‘The only thing is I am not convinced.’ He smiled and sat back again.

  Then he got up, walked slowly round the table and struck Nick across the face with the back of his hand. ‘I want the truth now, boy!’

  ‘It is the truth,’ spluttered Nick, tasting blood. His lip was split and he thought one of his teeth might have gone.

  The sergeant struck him again and putting his face close to Nick’s he said, ‘That was for daring to lay a hand on my daughter!’

  As Nick fell to the floor he felt a heavy boot meet the tail-end of his spine. The pain was acute. He groaned. He had no energy to make any other sound. He lay with his cheek flattened against the cold concrete floor, watching a large hairy black spider scuttle towards the crack under the door.

  ‘Take him into the cell!’ The sergeant was almost screaming now.

  The constable lugged Nick along the floor, through a narrow passage, into a small white-walled room. The only window was a horizontal slit high up on one wall. On the floor lay a stained lumpy-looking mattress with a grey blanket thrown over its foot. In the corner stood a slop pail and an earthenware bowl.

  The constable banged the door shut, removed Nick’s handcuffs and proceeded to strip off his clothes. Nick felt like a rag doll, floppy, with limbs made of straw.

  The sergeant came in. ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I think we’ll have to leave him to cool off for a few hours and then see if he’s ready to talk to us. But first of all, he needs to be taught a lesson. Get up, Scotsman!’

  The constable yanked him to his feet and held him while his superior delivered Nick a few more hard, well-aimed punches. He stopped when Nick passed out.

  Thirteen

  Nick was cold and shivering violently when he came round. His head felt like a drum, tight and hot and sore. Every part of him hurt and for a moment he could not think where he was. It was pitch dark. He was not in the cave, that was as much as he knew. The cave had a
soft earth floor; the one he lay on now was hard and unyielding. Then he remembered the sergeant and the violent look of hate there had been in the man’s eyes when he’d swung his fist at him. He had to adjust to the knowledge that he was locked in a cell, naked, a prisoner of the Civil Guard, though civil was the last word he would have thought of giving to his two jailers, one of whom was Isabel’s father.

  There had been a mattress, he seemed to remember, with a blanket lying on top. He crawled around until he felt it, then inched himself bit by bit on to the low pallet and pulled the rough blanket over him and went to sleep. His dreams were lurid and even though he was not properly conscious he was aware that he was crying out aloud. Whenever he did, he wakened with a jerk but was immediately sucked back down into a vortex of terror in which he was endlessly running, running, running, and a dog with flaring eyes like light bulbs was snapping at his heels.

  When he wakened finally, the room was filled with grey light. He saw that they had taken his knapsack but had left his clothes in an untidy heap on the floor. It took him almost half an hour to dress himself, after which he had to rest. They had left him his watch, too. Nick was grateful for that, at least. His father had given it to him on his thirteenth birthday. Lifting his arm, Nick saw that the hands had stopped at seven minutes past nine. Had he forgotten to wind it? Or was that the time when the sergeant had knocked him to the floor? The watch might have been broken in the fall. He began to turn the little winder but his fingers fumbled and kept slipping. He persevered, and eventually he succeeded. He smiled when he heard its steady ticking. The sound was familiar and reassuring. Nothing else about his situation was.

  He suddenly remembered that he should have some painkillers left in one of his trouser pockets, unless Manuel, the constable, had found them. He scrabbled around in the pocket and deep down in the seam his fingers encountered three round pills. He felt as if he had found gold. He eased them out and gazed at them lying in the palm of his hand before putting one into his mouth and gulping it down dry. There was water in the earthenware basin but it did not look clean and the last thing he would want was dysentery to add to his troubles. He put the remaining pills back into his pocket, pushing them down as far as they would go.

  Exhausted, he lay on his back and listened. He thought he heard the vague rumble of a cart, a dog barking. Not much sound would come through that narrow slit of a window. It would be too high for him to see out and there was no chance of it offering an escape. The door, too, looked solid and he could be sure that it was firmly bolted on the other side.

  As the pain receded a little he was able to think about his situation. The veterans’ stories had prepared him for some of the things that might happen to him, but only partially. He had listened but, foolishly perhaps, he had not really expected such tribulations to befall him. In the end, when it had come to this, being beaten up and left naked on the floor of a prison cell, he had been alone and the pain was no less because other people had suffered similarly. But many of them had survived much worse than this, he told himself. Always hold on to hope, Jean-Luc had said, whatever happens.

  The sergeant would be back and he would demand answers to questions. Nick pondered on what he should, or could, tell him. He could say that he had come to look for his father but claim that he was a Nationalist. He could give him a false surname, say his family lived in Granada. He had visited cousins in Granada a couple of times and knew the city well enough to pin down a district if pressed. He didn’t think the Civil Guard here in the north would be particularly interested in trying to track down his father. Why should they? They had enough going on on their own patch. He thought the punishment meted out to him had been about Isabel as much as anything else.

  He thought about her for the first time since his arrest. She wouldn’t have betrayed him to her father, of course she wouldn’t! But she had persuaded him to stay an extra night in the cave, hadn’t she, when he had wanted to leave straight away? Perhaps her father had beaten her up when she got home and made her talk. He couldn’t blame her if that had been the way of it. Perhaps Pedro had changed his mind and decided to tell on her. Isabel, though, had seemed fairly sure that her brother could be bought off, since money meant so much to him.

  A key was rattling in the lock. Nick’s pulse quickened. Was the next interrogation to begin again so soon? He had just managed to pull himself together after the last one. The door swung open to admit the constable carrying a pitcher and a brown paper bag. He booted the door shut behind him and put the stuff on the floor.

  ‘We’re not going to let you starve, Scotsman. Sergeant Morales wants you to be in shape for another little session with him. He’ll be coming in to have a chat tomorrow. Today, we are busy. We have bigger fish to fry than you. We have a report of two Americans being sighted out in the campo. They could have been left behind by the International Brigade. Serves them right, interfering in our war.’ The man snickered and said, touching the paper bag with his toe, ‘Don’t eat it all at once!’ He went out and once more locked the door.

  There was water in the pitcher – all right to drink, Nick presumed – and in the bag, bread and olives. He ate and drank, leaving half of everything for another time, and went back to his bed. Jean-Luc had advised him, if he should find himself in such a situation, to think of something definite: recite songs or verses of poetry to himself, go over the story of a novel trying to remember the names of each character, do anything other than lie, letting random, anxiety-provoking thoughts fill his mind.

  Nick closed his eyes and imagined the jagged outline of a map of Scotland. He marked first of all the names of all the islands lying off the coast. He had spent many holidays with his parents in the Western Isles, as well as Orkney and Shetland to the north. His father had loved Scotland. Next came the hills and mountains: the Grampians and the Cairngorms, the two ranges he knew best. Then he marked in the hills of Wester Ross, Argyll and Perthshire, and the lower Sidlaws, Campsies and Moor-foots. He saw in his mind’s eye the peaks he had climbed with his father, recalled the exhilaration he’d felt standing up there on top of the world, with the countryside stretched out before them. Lords of all they surveyed. Then he put in the major rivers: the Tweed, the Clyde, the Forth, the Tay, the Spey, the Dee, and the Don, and after that some of their tributaries. He could not remember all of them but he was pleased by how many did come to him when he concentrated. Now for the lochs: Lomond, Ness, Lochy, Oich, Linnhe, Tay, Rannoch, and others. After that he set himself to fill in the names of as many cities, towns and villages as he could remember.

  By the time he had finished he felt as if he had travelled the length and breadth of Scotland. He fell asleep, and this time slept more peacefully.

  The day had gone when he awoke but tonight there was a moon which sent a shaft of light through the window slit into the room. He ate some bread and olives, drank a little more water, and took another painkiller. That left him with one. He used the slop pail, rinsed his left hand in the earthenware bowl, noting that the dressing on his right was looking grubby, but it would have to do. The remaining clean ones were in his knapsack.

  He stood in the middle of the floor and stretched himself, pushing his arms high above his head and out to the side, reaching as far as he could, and then walked gingerly round the room a few times, feeling his legs. He had to keep mobile. Keep the blood circulating in your muscles. Jean-Luc could write a manual on survival.

  Having slept all day, Nick felt wide awake now. He lay on the mattress and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, listening to the silence. They said you could never have perfect silence, that there was always some ambient noise, but the quiet seemed deathly, as if everyone in the world had died. Could he hear a beetle scuffling? He was listening so intently that he might have been able to hear the proverbial pin drop. But that was a noise, surely it was, outside the door. He sat up.

  A key was scraping in the lock, more tentatively than before, as if searching for the groove. Was it the sergeant coming t
o dish out more punishment? He might think it would be more effective in the middle of the night. Nick felt the trembling begin in his limbs. His eyes remained riveted on the door while it creaked slowly open. Isabel slid into the room.

  ‘Isabel!’ He sprang up.

  ‘Shh!’ She put a finger to her mouth. ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You’ll have to try.’

  ‘But how on earth –?’

  ‘Ask no questions now, Nick. Just come!’

  He went.

  Fourteen

  The deserted village street looked eerie under the pale light of the moon. A ginger cat was sitting on a doorstep, its green eyes gleaming. It turned its head to watch them.

  ‘Do you think you could carry these?’ Isabel handed Nick his bedroll and knapsack. Another bedroll was strapped to her back and over one shoulder she wore a rectangular saddle-bag similar to one he’d seen a shepherd wearing. ‘Let’s go!’ she said. He followed her as if in a dream.

  Since the Civil Guard station was on the edge of the village they did not have to pass any houses. A short distance along the road they struck off into the campo, going in the opposite direction from Nick’s old hideaway. He was still stunned by the speed at which Isabel had released him from his prison. His head buzzed with questions that would have to wait.

  He managed to walk for an hour before he had to stop for a rest and a drink of water. His bottle was in his knapsack, full. Isabel had another in her shoulder bag.

  ‘You’re doing very well,’ she said.

  He could feel the adrenalin running in his system. He’d felt it surge the moment Isabel had said, ‘Just come!’

  They set off again, with her leading the way, keeping a pace or two in front of him so that he kept up his pace, too, determined not to lag behind. They reached a main road.

  ‘Wait!’ She put out a hand to hold him back. They crouched down in the undergrowth.