Next step
CASPIAN We stop at a transport café attached to a layby — the kind of building that has never been new. It smells of heat and oil and the exhaustion of people moving between places with things to carry. I get two teas. Farah has chosen a table at the back, angled so she can see the door. Her back against a wall. A different kind of need than mine, but I understand it. I sit. She looks at me. It is a particular kind of looking. I have been looked at my whole professional life — across tables, across interrogations conducted with and without that name — and most looking is measurement, or pressure applied to see what yields. Hers is neither. It is just attention, full and undefended, and it costs her nothing to give it, which is the part I have never been able to account for. “The next
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