Free The Inbetween People by Emma McEvoy Page B

that night in the end, though I vowed to myself I would not sleep until my mother was safe; it came to me, descended upon me, an anxious tortured sleep, even now I remember that. I remember that night, waking in the darkness, raising my head to look around me, the peaceful breath of my sleeping comrades, the dim light where Yefat sat reading a book and humming to herself, the large windows of light the moon cast across the floor. And all the time knowing that she was gone, lost, that Father and I could not find her, could not locate her in the darkness.

    A VI , D AVID says, his whisper loud in the night, you are awake, I can hear you. He is pacing around his cell again, his footfall relentless, purposeful in the silence. Avi, he says, don’t you wonder why I am here. You want to know why I’m here, don’t you, Avi? You want to know?
    David, I answer, we are all here by choice. I walk to the door of my cell, his face appears through the bars of the door opposite me. It’s good to talk, Avi, he says. A jackal howls in the distance, and I move to my window, waiting for dawn to arrive. One month, I say, I’m here for one month, you’re here for one month. The time we should be in the Reserves doing our service. After that we leave, I say, that’s it.
    David calls after me, my last army service, he says. I sit down on the stone floor of my cell, trace my finger through the dust, the scar on my face throbs in the cooler night air. We were on the way to the territories, he says, when we were diverted. Some sort of protest, he says, things got out of control, and we were diverted there to help regain control of the situation. He sighs. A man, he says, a man got shot. I was near him.
    I hear him shuffling around in the darkness, turning away from the door of his cell, moving back to the bars. I didn’t pull the trigger, he says, but I was near him. I saw everything. He is silent for a few moments. He went down right away, he says. There was a woman with him, she was pregnant and in distress. I tried to help her, he says, I tried to calm her down, but it was obvious pretty quickly that something was wrong. I stand, move to my doorway again, he is standing at his door, hands clasped against the bars. Something wrong medically I mean, he says. Maybe shock, I don’t know. But she couldn’t calm down, she was leaning over the man and she was hysterical, clutching her stomach and screaming. I tried to tell her he was dead and that she needed to save herself. And the baby. He starts to cry. She was about six months pregnant. I held her hand, he says, I tried to calm her down, tried everything I could think of, though I don’t think she realised I was there, but then I was ordered to move away.
    What did you do, I say.
    I moved away, he says, what else was there to do. I don’t know what happened after I left, but I heard her screams for a long time.
    David, I say, you need to be quiet. They will hear you. He turns away. He says, they are watching television they won’t hear, and anyway they don’t really care most of the time. They will, I say, they will hear and they’ll punish us. After I left her, he says, I noticed the crowd watching her, but they were scared to approach. I stare into the dimly lit corridor, at the black door of his cell opposite me. I knew the man was dead immediately, David says, I knew he was dead. She did too. I took his hand to feel for a pulse but there was none there. When I let go, his hand just fell to the ground.
    He turns back to the door of his cell, peers at me through the bars. One minute he was running through the crowd, he says, and then he was dead. I think of him, he says, but mostly I think of her. After that, he says, after that I couldn’t go back to serve, couldn’t search another house or stand at another checkpoint. When the letter came, I told them I won’t go, I told them it is impossible for me to go. I presented myself at the base and told them that I am a conscientious