‘I was good at my job,’ he said. ‘Very good.’ He took a breath. ‘Some people thought a little too good.’
‘You made enemies,’ she guessed.
He nodded. ‘And when you soak yourself in your undercover life and you reel people in and you make them believe you are their brother-in-arms, they get very pissed off when they find out it was all a lie and they are going to pay for it for the rest of their lives.’
She was getting it now. He was usually a man of few words because he’d had to be to survive. He had kept many secrets. He was guarded because he didn’t know how to be any other way.
‘They offered me another new identity, but what was the point? You cannot give somebody a new face and these people are powerful. They have connections all over the world.’
‘I understand,’ Orla said, nodding as she took a sip of her drink.
‘Do you?’
‘The bones of it,’ she admitted. ‘Obviously not the effect it’s had. Isstillhaving?’
‘I am no longer in danger. So my superiors keep saying. People were imprisoned. People died. The organisation was in turmoil and they ended up selling out.’
‘But you still keep yourself hidden,’ she breathed.
‘Because how do I know if it is safe? What happens if one day a godchild or second cousin of the men I helped kill or imprison decides that they want retribution? These people don’t ever stop. Why do you think I live in this place? Why do you think I get scared whenever Tommy visits? Why I don’t like visitors?’ He swigged the drink back.
‘You’ve imprisoned yourself.’
Her words seemed to bounce around the room, but had they hit the target? Jacques was gripping his empty glass, eyes looking into it. This man was buried alive by his past. No wonder he was here in this desolate place choosing to dip into the quirkylittle village sporadically, not truly engaging, not making more than surface level connections.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, with a nod of acceptance and a sigh. ‘That is what my girlfriend said before she left.’
He’d had a girlfriend. Of course he’d had a girlfriend. He’d already told her he didn’t know what a situationship was. He’d had something real with someone. She was all at once jealous yet intrigued to know more. Although she didn’t need her journalistic instincts to know if she pushed too hard he was in danger of shutting this conversation away and locking it up tighter than this room of memories.
‘When… did that happen?’ she asked softly.
‘When did she leave? Or when did I start imprisoning myself?’ He looked up from his glass then, put it on a shelf next to some boxes.
‘Just… tell me what you want to tell me.Onlywhat you want to tell me.’
He sighed, leaning back against a countertop. ‘I don’t want to tell you anything. I don’t want to tell anyone anything but…’
‘But?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It is like your articles, no? What are these people’s lives if they aren’t shared with somebody? I mean, the places you go to, the people you meet, the animal kingdoms you grow close to, no one would know so much about them if their stories weren’t shared.’ He looked at her. ‘And if their lives weren’t connecting with others, how would they be able to inspire or encourage or change the thinking of the world?’
His eyes were locked on hers now and Orla was trembling, but not on the outside, on the inside. His words had hit spots of her she had long forgotten about. Her passion for discovering the previously unknown and untalked about. People doing things outside of the norm in a rapidly changing world, animalson the verge of extinction that doggedly adapted and survived, phenomenon that was happening because of how the people of the world were screwing up, phenomenon because of this that some people still thought was punishment from the gods. What she had always wanted to achieve wasn’t about website hits or magazine sales, it was so much more.
‘You give those people a voice, Orla,’ he carried on. ‘And, in doing that, you’re allowing all the people who read your stories an insight into something precious, a story that will change what they do or make them feel grateful for what they have. If those communities didn’t let you in, if you didn’t share their lives, the world would be a much poorer place.’
Her heart was pounding in her chest now, so many emotions licking her insides like flames around a bonfire. He was telling her her own heart, the one she had let get hidden amidst deadlines, heartbreak and family drama she was always expected to be the solver of… It was like having her eyes opened and her soul set free all at once. And it was completely overwhelming. So overwhelming that all her now heightened senses were dancing like revellers on New Year’s Eve.
‘And, maybe, if I don’t tell someone something, there is no point to my story and everything I went through. Perhaps I will have imprisoned myself for no reason at all.’
He was being so raw with her now. She could see it in his face and she could feel it in the air. She had never felt so drawn to someone despite of, or maybe,becauseof everything that he had just confessed to her. Before her brain had any chance to redirect her emotions, she was crossing the space between them. And when her mouth met his it seemed it was as much of a shock to him as it was to her. For the briefest of moments she felt his lips hold hers and it was like a desperate ache being immediately soothed. But then the connection broke.
‘We… can’t,’ he told her, his mouth still close but not attached.
‘Why not?’
‘Because this is… too emotional.’
As he said this sentence he reached up and held her face with those huge, beautiful hands. She looked into his eyes.
