Free Notorious by Roberta Lowing Page A

yells into the spiralling light. ‘She said it was the poem you learned for her. I carry you in my heart. It was you.’
    ‘You’re wrong,’ I shout. ‘I hate poetry.’
    I blunder down the steps, slip on the rubbed smooth stone, and hurry past the fall of stronger light at the archway on the second level. I come out into the ground arcade, nearly tripping over a chicken sleeping against a pillar. I run through the main gateway. I run, head uncovered, clutching my briefcase, a ridiculous man running out into the noonday desert sun.
    The cleared circle where my pilot had landed the day before is empty.
    Away from the shadow of the walls, the air is gasping with heat. I am gasping. I can barely see. I shove on my sunglasses and run to the edge of the plateau.
    Almost immediately I stumble. I slow to a fast walk, then a stroll, then a careful plodding. The ground here isn’t red or even brown. It is a pitted grey landscape of nothing but stones.
    I reach the edge and look down to the plain. The helicopter sits half on the road below, at an angle, as though it has been carelessly parked. Some malfunction?
    A man gets out of the helicopter. White shirt, black tie, black trousers: Mitch’s uniform. I open my briefcase and use the binoculars to scan the body of the helicopter. Arabic markings, unsurprisingly. Officially, the Hafid Street office is a small import export firm, tight on money, forced to charter from the local businesses.
    The windows are tinted. I calculate: twenty minutes to walk to the plain. Mitch would have water there.
    I hang the binoculars around my neck and set off.
    The road is steeper than it looks and roughly cleared of the larger stones. I try to keep an eye on the helicopter but if I don’t watch my step I slip on jagged pieces of flint.
    A row of white pebbles edges the road. There seems little difference between the stony ground of the road and the stony desert next to it. But it is a valiant gesture. I plod on, feeling my tongue swell in my mouth, checking every now and again that the helicopter has not moved. I begin to see patterns between the rocks; the glaze of lizard tracks. Fragments of pottery, red and crumbling. The dust has coated my shoes; there are big smears on my trousers. I slap some of it off but it seems to settle again almost immediately. The heat is pushing into my bones, my knees feel disconnected. The briefcase is heavy in my hand. I am almost tempted to put it down and come back for it later.
    I am walking into the sacred empty, I tell myself, leaving behind the technological marvels of the world.
    That sounds right. That sounds like something Laforche would say.
    Desert speak.
    I stop. I have almost reached the bottom. Behind me, the road slopes up steeply. The Asylum is pugnacious against the white sky.
    It is bigger than it looks from the inside. The turrets rise like buds, holding the Asylum’s secret stories. Stories within stories; lives flowering within. Rimbaud, the nomad poet, could well have thought he could create here.
    I stumble over a large stone and another. Not stones: two bloodstained goats’ hooves. They are cut raggedly above the fetlock, the white hair pink-tinged, the split hooves as grey as the desert soil. I back away but it is too late; a scarlet splash is thrown over my shoe.
    I plod on. I think I am moving quicker now that I am on level ground but the helicopter is no nearer. I look through the binoculars.
    On the ground next to the man in the white shirt is a small black briefcase. Beside him is a man dressed in the immaculate white robes of the Sahara. They both have their backs to me. As I look, the second man jerks his wrist. Something dark flies into the sky. I tilt my head but the sweat runs into my eyes.
    The ground shifts.
    The desert is the true seer, I see that now. I recognise the immensity of the landscape. It has a kind of purity: the ultimate truth. But do I want it? I shake my head. I want the sweat to run into my dry mouth. But all