The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘Go,’ he says, leaning his head back for a rest, but the vinyl only scorches his neck. He is too tired to move it away. He settles into the burn. ‘We’re done,’ Benton says.

  The girl sits between the two men. The camera is a grey stone that lies across his lap. Jamal is running the Toyota in third, as usual, and Benton hears the underpowered engine thump like a dated outboard.

  Jamal is not making a sound. Neither is the radio. There is only the breeze through the window and the breath of one extra passenger who has finally stopped eating.

  Benton musters the gumption to cock his head left. Arwood, on the far side of the car, is looking very pleased with himself. His eyes are closed. His sunglasses are off. He is enjoying a moment that shouldn’t be happening.

  The girl is quiet. Benton doesn’t want to stare, but he has no choice. She is the spitting image of the girl in green. They look at each other and — against all reason — he can’t help but wonder if she recognises him.

  By the truck, he wants to say. We were crouched together, hiding from the helicopter. We ran into the Americans, and you met Arwood, who tried to save you. I had more hair. Do you remember me?

  ‘How are we for petrol?’ Benton asks Jamal instead.

  ‘We’re good.’

  Jamal makes contact with the main road heading east and speeds up.

  They are all quiet in the car. There is little traffic, as people rest during the hottest times of the day. They will open their shops again later; for now, they are home with their families. The speed cools the car. Benton finally peels his neck from the seat, and drinks an entire bottle of water. Sated, he turns to the girl and decides to be sensible.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  The girl shakes her head.

  ‘My name is Benton,’ he says to her, touching his chest. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Adar,’ she says. ‘Adar.’

  18

  Märta stopped smoking ages ago. These days she doesn’t smoke, unless she’s socialising, drinking, worrying, fundraising, or needs a cigarette.

  She needs a cigarette now. She does not have one. And so she holds her Bic fountain pen as though it is the cigarette that she ought to have. She is sitting on an orange chair at a white table, listening to a briefing provided by a Swiss-based research organisation concerning affairs in eastern Syria that might affect operations in northern Iraq. It is early evening, and she is already tired.

  The researcher is young — late twenties. She has blonde hair and eyes that speak of her excitement at being part of something darker than herself, as though proximity to horror somehow might strengthen her own character. In most cases, though, it’s the opposite. It unravels us. But Märta isn’t about to explain this to her.

  The girl began her presentation, some thirty minutes ago, by quoting Thierry Lefebvre’s 1927 article ‘Le vilayet de Mossoul’, telling everyone that ‘Ninawa is no longer Iraq and not yet Kurdistan’. This remains true, Märta thinks, but, as a piece of analysis, sort of leaves you hanging. The girl then seemed to prove Märta’s point — and not her own — by focussing the rest of her talk on change and the future, rather than on continuity and the past, which was the West’s first error over here.

  The Swiss researcher holds a laser pointer, and the red dot dances over the bullet points in PowerPoint. There are twelve other people in the room, each from a different aid agency or governmental mission. Märta wants to feel more magnanimous about the young woman’s efforts to explain the Kurdish versus Sunni versus Shiite dynamics in Ninawa, but she feels the girl is misunderstanding what she’s otherwise accurately describing. She speaks in a cluster of words that have no organising principle:

  followed by ‘solutions’ such as:

  Märta’s national staff once explained to her — after she insisted that their annual report be translated into Arabic for the first time — that almost none of these words have homologues in Arabic. In fact, the ideas themselves are so foreign and often irrelevant that Arabic speakers, in speaking to one another, simply insert the English term into their conversation. This happens directly in front of senior Western diplomats, who are oblivious to its significance.

  The analysis being once again hors sujet, she checks her watch, and realises that Benton should have radioed in by now.

  By before, actually.

  She calls Benton’s phone. It rings and activates the voicemail.

  Why do men build the very systems they refuse to use? Why don’t they follow instructions? You look them dead in the eye; you snap your fingers to ensure brain activity; you tell them what you’re going to tell them, you tell them, then you tell them what you’ve told them, but still nothing.

  She calls Benton’s phone again. It rings and activates the voicemail.

  They do this with their health, too. They think they’ll be fine. They aren’t. Then they crumble like a dry sandcastle.

  Benton’s phone rings. He answers it.

  ‘Hello?’

  Märta stands, waves an excuse to the rest of the room, and then ducks out into the hallway before letting Benton have it: ‘Where the hell have you been? Why aren’t you following instructions? It’s late. The radio room can’t make contact, and you haven’t called in. If you’re not on your way back, you better turn that car around—’

  ‘We found her. She’s alive. She’s sitting next to us.’

  Märta places her hand against her cheek. ‘The little girl? The teenager?’

  ‘The girl in green. The one from the video. The reason Arwood made all this happen. She’s in the Toyota with us. She’s fine. She’s a little malnourished, I think, and she seems to like and trust Arwood, which might suggest shock and trauma, but otherwise she’s fine.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She’s been living off the rations that were in the convoy. We’re coming back.’

  ‘Have you been listening to the radio-room instructions?’

  In his silence, Märta finds meaning. She can visualise the look on his face. It is the look that men get after women use such phrases as ‘Did you call about that appointment? Did you remember to mail that? Did you unload the dishwasher like I asked?’

  Every moment waiting for a man to answer such questions is a moment wasted.

  ‘If you had been listening, like you were supposed to, you’d know you need to take the northern route through Zakho and stay there tonight at a DSS-registered and -qualifying hotel if it’s after five-thirty. There’s a list in the folder I gave you. Where are you?’

  ‘Travelling south, the way we came. Too late to turn north now. Hold on. There’s something happening up ahead,’ Benton says. His voice sounds far away from the phone. ‘Lots of traffic suddenly.’

  ‘There are roadblocks being set up,’ she explains, ‘which is what you would have known if you’d been maintaining your radio contact. Apparently the police are looking for someone. I don’t know the details. You want to stay away from any traffic jams, any official roadblocks, and anything that could constitute a target.’

  ‘What do you mean, a target?’

  ‘Benton, just tell me what you see.’

  She can hear Jamal shouting something, but his distance from the telephone, coupled with his Arabic accent and high voice, keep her from distinguishing a word. All she can hear is Arwood yelling, in response, ‘Turn around. I don’t care. Turn us around!’

  His instructions are the last words she hears before the explosion.

  19

  Dr Charlotte Benton sits at a private work desk in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. It is mid-afternoon and quiet. The window to the lab is open. Her room is filled with fresh air and suffused with solitude. Her fellowship at the institution has provided her with an assigned workspace, where she stores her papers, reference books, instant coffee, and fossil collection of Silurian-era brachiopo
ds. She takes a moment to send her father her third text message of the day, in an effort to spark a conversation with him. He hasn’t responded so far.

  To the uninitiated, Silurian-era brachiopods look like modern brachiopods, which most people would call shells — the kind you find in spaghetti vongole. To be fair, it’s close to the truth; they haven’t evolved much in four hundred million years, because they were so wickedly perfect even back then. But these are very old, and they are hers, and so they are special.

  Many of her fellow graduate students in palaeontology went on to study dinosaurs. Charlotte likes dinosaurs, too, but the trouble with dinosaurs is that everyone likes them. So there’s a lot of competition for research grants and university positions. The big problem is that there aren’t enough dinosaur bones around. Movies aside, you don’t grab a spade and a paintbrush and uncover a T. rex in your backyard, and then rope it off and call the media.

  With a greater supply of dinosaur scholars than a demand for them in the market, and way more demand for the bones than a ready supply, her buddies are now looking at a professional life filled with longing, searching, hoping, and fundraising. ‘You need to be sensible,’ she’d told Todd Jenkins, a fellow graduate student. He was choosing his dissertation topic, and not wisely in her view. ‘Dinosaurs are not a path to stability and contentment in palaeontology. In your heart, you know this.’

  Poor Todd. Now he’s divorced, because his wife wouldn’t move to Nevada to chase early Jurassic bones.

  But Silurian-era brachiopods? Totally different story. There are thousands and thousands of them within easy reach. All she needs to do is chip away some shale, and there they are: satisfaction by the bucketful. Also, the world was a supercontinent four hundred million years ago. It was called Pangaea. This was the late Paleaozoic era and early Mesozoic. Charlotte’s brachiopods were clustered together in what are now very scenic places near wonderful beaches with great coffee, many of them on the Mediterranean and in the Levant. To be an evolutionary biologist with an interest in plate tectonics, and to have specialised in brachiopods, is to be a happy human.

  At this moment, aside from mild hunger pains, the only thing standing in her way to complete contentment is the fact that her father is trying to divorce her mother because she slept with someone else, and that now he’s being a baby by refusing to pick up the phone and talk to her.

  Messages have been left and words have been spoken into an old Panasonic answering machine — though, apparently, not enough of them. She sends another text. This afternoon, while taking a break from compiling a bibliography, she has committed herself to talking sense into her father and trying to reinvigorate her parents’ marriage. Her mother has been dismissive but not resistant, so attention is now on her father.

  Charlotte is thirty-three years old. She knows she cannot manage her parents’ marriage. To some extent, she accepts this. But the circumstance itself doesn’t require their separation. There is a possibility here of reconciliation, a chance to live a unified life as they have in the past, if they can both overcome their pride and their vanity, and their apathy, and their unwillingness to compromise. She doesn’t see her actions as meddling or naïve; she sincerely believes that rational people can be talked into what’s good for them if they can be made to see their situation clearly. And that means she’s obliged to try.

  And there is also the fact that it’s never too late to come from a broken home. So she’d rather not.

  Charlotte removes a brachiopod from under an old-fashioned lab microscope, where she had been using a tiny probe to clear out sand and debris to mask four hundred million years of inner morphology. She blows on it, better exposing the growth lines of the inner brachial valve.

  How old were you? she wonders aloud.

  It’s not necessary to work this way, but she has recently argued in print that both students and scholars benefit from tactile experience, because — as recent cognitive work has found — it adds to memory retention, and the more ways scholars can experience the old shells, the greater their capacity to make creative associations, thereby advancing the field. Plus, touching shells is fun. And happy people are productive people.

  ‘Just imagine,’ she told her students at Bristol, ‘holding in the palm of your own hand a tiny shell that has survived intact for four hundred million years. Imagine the near impossibility of two organisms — you, on the one hand, and it, on the other — coming into contact and creating inspiration after all that time. It is as unfathomably unlikely as our existence itself, and almost as wonderful. It is no wonder that Stephen Jay Gould called his book Wonderful Life. That was exactly right.’

  Charlotte sends her father another text message, and waits.

  It is ridiculous for him to avoid her.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asks the shell. ‘Should we call him?’

  Charlotte calls the Times and asks for her father. She has the number in her mobile. The call is passed through to the editorial department. Someone named Dick answers, and she wonders, again, why anyone would call himself that.

  ‘He is in Iraq,’ Dick says.

  What Charlotte did not tell her students was that, of the few people in the world who know the feeling of holding a 400-million-year-old shell in the palm of their hands, even fewer know the feeling of breaking one.

  ‘Well … shit,’ she says.

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ Dick says flatly. ‘He’ll be back in a few days. He’s at the Domiz refugee camp. Near Dohuk, in the north.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve probably seen that video of the girl in that mortar attack. He’s … I guess he’s investigating it, or something. I don’t have the file. I’m sorry.’

  ‘This was something urgent?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m his daughter — Dr Charlotte Benton.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I wouldn’t call it that. Word at the water cooler is that he asked for it. Personally, I don’t see any open questions of actual importance to our readers. It’s not like any British nationals were in the attack, or anything. But, well, there he is. Should be easy to reach. It’s a UN camp, so it has excellent Internet access.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says to Dick, and they end the call.

  ‘Bastard fled the scene,’ Charlotte says to the broken shell. ‘In all your years, have you ever?’

  The Domiz refugee camp has its own page on the Internet, and is easy to find. One of the first things she learns is that Eddie Izzard has been there to help draw attention to the needs of children, which was rather good of him. Thankfully, he had been wearing a black UNICEF T-shirt and sporty trousers, rather than his traditional garb as an executive transvestite. Which was probably a good call. Otherwise, the camp looks utterly miserable, and for a moment she is less angry at her father.

  Charlotte calls the UN office there, and is connected to someone with a heavy Arabic accent. He clicks some keys and shuffles paper. He says her father is registered in with Safety and Security, under a call sign reserved for the International Refugee Support Group — the IRSG. He provides her with a local number at the camp. He cannot connect her. She’ll have to call herself.

  Charlotte calls using an Internet telephony service. If she used her department line, her grant money would be gone after three minutes.

  It does not ring for long before a young man’s cheerful voice answers. He sounds European. She can’t place the accent.

  ‘Hello,’ he begins. ‘This is Miguel, IRSG. How may I help you?’

  ‘Yes, hello. My name is Charlotte Benton. I’m looking for my father, Thomas Benton. I was told he might be with your organisation right now.’

  Miguel begins to answer her. Or to speak, anyway, because the words flow from him like notes from a tightly wound music box.

  Charlotte does not know when or how to interrupt Miguel. The conversation turns rapidly from her father, to the NGO,
to the camp, to his own motivations for joining the NGO and going there. Maybe she missed a transition, because now Miguel is saying, ‘… political awakening, for me, was definitely the bombing in Madrid on 11 March 2004. I was eighteen, and until then I had no real interest in politics. It was always something far away from me. Maybe a little dirty. A little cold. I am not sure. So it was both shocking and yet not a surprise to me when my own government blamed the Basque separatists. Not that ETA had not done terrible things in the past, but they did not do this. What my government showed us was that they would use the blood of our citizens to advance their own agendas, rather than seek the truth and act in our best interest. The time of Franco was not so long over. I was so angry. It motivated me into political science, and then into practitioner work, and eventually into humanitarian relief operations. You know?’

  Charlotte looks down at her broken shell. For a moment, it becomes a broken heart.

  Mi corazón roto.

  ‘So… do you know where my father is?’ she asks.

  He is in the area, Miguel explains, but he has left the camp. A driver of theirs named Jamal is taking him and Mr Hobbes to the location of an attack that happened a few days ago.

  ‘Who?’ she asks.

  ‘Hobbes,’ he says. ‘Like the philosopher from Oxford who wrote Leviathan and introduced the idea of the social contract. But this man does not seem to be a philosopher.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘You never seem to meet people with the names of philosophers, do you?’ he asks. ‘You never hear, for example, “Would Mr and Mrs Kierkegaard please proceed to Gate 43.” I wonder why not.’

  ‘No,’ she agrees. ‘You never do.’

  ‘I’ve been to many places. I have never met anyone named Kant, or Machiavelli, or Spinoza, or Wittgenstein, or Aquinas. Have you?’

  No, she hasn’t. But she has met a Marx or two.

  ‘That is true,’ says Miguel thoughtfully.