The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  Benton watches a report about an attack in the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber has blown himself up in a market. The Iraqi Red Crescent was the first to arrive. It was a motorcycle medic, because they can navigate the crowds and debris. Once a critical mass of rescuers appeared around him — a hirsute man with delicate hands — an ambulance arrived packed with explosives. It detonated, killing the emergency rescuers and those who tried to help. There is footage of a mangled motorcycle, with its front wheel spinning in maudlin fashion. Later, after the dead were washed, the mourners were followed to the funerals, where they were met with another bomb.

  Benton turns off the television when there is a knock at the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  A nurse opens it. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have a phone call.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Your daughter. She is insistent.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll take it, thank you.’

  The nurse is Portuguese. She is reserved, and does not talk much. Benton suspects she has been here a long time. He takes the mobile phone from her.

  ‘Charlotte.’

  He has anticipated a long lecture and is braced for it, because he deserves it. Her voice, however, is not accusatory. She does not speak quickly.

  ‘I’ve been trying to speak to you for so long,’ she says, ‘that I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘I was told you were shot.’

  ‘In the leg. They say I’ll make a full recovery.’

  ‘And you have a broken nose, and severe dehydration, and bruising on your ribs, and abrasions on your knees—’

  ‘I’ll make a full recovery, and they are being very nice to me.’

  ‘And yet,’ she says, ‘there’s the story of how you got that way.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘Mum’s been staying with Vivian Bray.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I told Mum it’s time she moved back home. She says the choice isn’t hers.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her. You’re right.’

  ‘What are you doing there, Dad? How could you have run off like that, when we’re falling apart here?’

  ‘I’ve been asked that many times by many people in the last few days. All I can say for now is that I feel as though I’ve passed out of a tunnel that I’ve been walking through for over twenty years, and while there’s no bright light at the end, there is fresh air. And stars above.’

  ‘I wish I knew what that means,’ Charlotte says.

  ‘What it means in effect is that I very much want to talk to you, too. Is that enough for now?’

  ‘We’ll meet you at the airport. I’m told you’ll be home in two days.’

  ‘I’ll email the details. And Charlotte? Can you pass a message on to your mother, please?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Tell her that what I said over breakfast that day, it wasn’t true.’

  41

  Thomas Benton married Vanessa when he was twenty-seven. She was twenty-five. It didn’t seem young at the time. It started with a near run-in between her, in her late father’s sports car, and him and his brother, Edgar, out for a ride in their new, co-owned 1973 MGB Mark III. It was 1978. They’d just bought the car from a friend of a friend of someone their father knew by chance in Launceston, in east Cornwall. They’d paid too much money for it, and they didn’t care. They were splitting the cost, and each would have paid double for his share. The car was in British racing green, with beige leather. The chrome glistened. The exhaust note could have recited Yeats.

  Edgar was older by three years. He couldn’t drive on account of his gammy left leg. He had climbed a tree on holiday when he was nine and had fallen off it. The village doctor was incompetent, and had set the leg badly. It never healed properly, and, from then on, Edgar had chronic pain. He walked with a limp and was unable to work a clutch, but he could still feel the wind in his hair. Thomas drove; Edgar navigated, often too late. They weaved about the roads like madmen. The idea was to drive home south through Bodmin Moor and breathe fresh air, see the green countryside, and have a pint.

  The early autumn of 1978 was mild. For years, Vanessa had had the idea of driving her late father’s beloved Jensen Interceptor westwards, through the moor out to Penzance and then back to Exeter, where she’d grown up. Her dad had died eight years earlier, in 1970, when a hammer had fallen from a shelf and struck him at the base of his skull. It was a meaningless death that meant everything.

  Year by year, the car rested under a tarp in the garage, where she would sit with a torch to read and try to remember what he smelled like.

  Eventually, she and the car fitted one another, and she had the money to have it repaired, if not properly restored. The garage that towed it in was run by Phil Goddard. He was in his fifties then. The car needed a new battery, of course, but a near decade of inactivity had rotted most of what was rubber, and it needed work. A drive like the one she proposed was a good eight hundred kilometres if she took the most direct route — which she didn’t plan to do, as that route was charmless.

  Vanessa paid a crushing bill, donned her father’s leather jacket, which she cinched at the waist, rolled down the windows, and fired up the distinctive V8.

  It was to be an overnight trip. She carried an Italian leather duffel filled with clean clothes, a camera, two new paperbacks — one called The Thorn Birds, and the other The Shining — and a toothbrush.

  She had driven through Dartmoor from Exeter, and decided on an indirect route that would skirt the scenic southern road on Bodmin Moor. She was looking forward to it, as that road was loved by bikers and drivers, who weaved and bobbed gently through its meandering turns trimmed by hedges and modest homes. People in other impractical cars waved to her, and she waved back. It was a road of flowers, and fences, and the occasional reminder to go SLOW, painted in tall, white letters on the road. Everything promised to be green and blue. But she never made it to the road.

  As she travelled west into Upton Cross where the moor began, Thomas and Edgar were travelling south, planning to make the same turn. At that moment, Edgar was trying to prove — by way of demonstration — that Benton’s aural cavity was precisely the same diameter as a steaming chip he had left over from lunch. Benton was complicating Edgar’s proof by swiping wildly, which caused the car to swerve as they approached the intersection.

  On reaching the primary school on the corner, it looked to Vanessa as though the driver of the green convertible was being terrorised by a swarm of hornets, and the other man was trying to pluck them out of the air, one by one. Watching these men, these gestures, this car — all of this was distracting. In that distraction, she failed to brake hard enough before the turn, and entered it with too much speed. She froze, and drove directly into a red public telephone box.

  The impact was modest, breaking only a panel of glass on the phone box, ruining the grille of the car, and puncturing her front wheel. But it gave her a serious fright.

  Vanessa was therefore in a very fragile state of mind when she turned to find the green MGB pulled up beside her, along with the two men who had caused her accident. The first thing she asked Thomas Benton was not the first thing she had expected to say.

  ‘What’s that in your ear?’

  ‘It’s a chip.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see if it would fit.’

  ‘Are you going to leave it there?’ she asked him.

  It was Edgar, though, who replied. ‘I think it’s an improvement, don’t you?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Benton had the wherewithal to ask, ignoring Edgar, and making his brother immediately wish he’d asked the same.

  They bought her lunch, and called a garage to tow the Jensen, which — after they were married — they would k
eep for over a decade before relenting and buying a practical car. Edgar, who passed away in 2011 from colon cancer, never failed to remind his brother that Vanessa was a gift, and to not cherish her was to mock every decent man who would never have such an opportunity. Thomas knew that Edgar meant himself. With his leg and his feelings about it, he never managed to marry. He also never stopped loving Vanessa.

  Vanessa and Charlotte collect Benton at the airport, and board the train that runs to Fowey every ninety minutes. The trip takes five hours, and Benton and his two women are silent most of the way. They talk of small matters. Charlotte keeps glancing at his leg.

  When they arrive in Fowey, it is raining, in a persistent and steady drizzle. The school year has started. The kids don’t mind the weather, having been raised in it.

  You can drink it from the sky here, Benton thinks.

  The house is empty and dark when they arrive. It is as he’d left it. Vanessa has been staying at her girlfriend’s house down the road. He suggests to Charlotte they not come in immediately — he can see them later. Charlotte says she won’t return to Bristol until they’ve talked. And she is going to stay with him. He can keep his preferences to himself.

  He puts on music when they come home: Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, played by a Korean woman named HyeKyung Lee. Hers is smoother, rounder, more affecting than Glenn Gould’s, and more soulful than Daniel Barenboim’s. There are others on the shelf — Maurizio Pollini and Sviatoslav Richter — but he hasn’t listened to those. Vanessa went through a period a few years ago of buying numerous performances of the same pieces of music to try to understand better the relationship between composer, arranger, and interpreter. He never understood the theory. He only knew what he liked.

  He bathes, with the music playing from the other room. He drinks a beer, and sits there until the water becomes cold.

  The next morning is bright, and forecast to be clear. Benton and Charlotte eat in near silence. After breakfast, he puts the SDHC chip into his computer and watches the video from Iraq. Convinced by the quality, he copies the chip to his hard drive, compresses the footage, uploads it to a shared site for large files that the Times uses, and calls his editor.

  ‘I’m back,’ Benton says.

  ‘Productive trip, I’m sure.’

  ‘As it happens, I found out what happened at that mortar attack everyone’s been going on about. The Kurds didn’t do it. I have raw footage of ISIL setting the mortar. And this should matter, because if the Kurds, difficult though they are, don’t have political support in the West, there will no opposition against ISIL gains.’

  ‘You have this in your possession?’

  ‘I sent it before calling.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I took it from the camera the terrorists abandoned at the site after taking the film and killing everyone. Clearly, before they sent it to the international media, they edited the version everyone is now watching, and we all took it as proof positive, because no one gives a damn anymore, as they’d rather be fast and wrong than slow and right. And at the risk of overstating the matter, it’s because business depends on speed, and mere democracy depends on validity.’

  ‘I take your point, but democracy doesn’t pay the bills around here. And what about the girl? She’s the story. What happened to her?’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘In the green dress, Thomas. She’s the human interest in the story. Surely you know that. If she’s alive, there’ll be a prize in it for you.’

  ‘The girl is dead.’

  By mid-afternoon, the sky has darkened, and the colours of the day have already shown their best. It offers a chance to wallow and withdraw, but Benton feels, for a change, he’ll have none of it. He still isn’t ready for the conversation, though. So he puts on his shoes, his parka, and his hat, puts his crutches under his arms, and takes a very small folding stool with him. Prepared, he goes out to face it all.

  ‘Where are you going, Dad?’ Charlotte asks.

  ‘For a hobble. I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘We haven’t spoken a word.’

  ‘It’s part of the process. It’s going better than it looks.’

  He takes a cab to Squires Field on Park Road, only a short ride up the hill. The driver lets him out, and Benton crosses the road north to where a few stout-hearted parents watch their boys playing football in the English rain on a plush pitch. The boys are fit and young and focussed. Their energy is boundless.

  A man he’s known for years, Albert Crowley, recognises him and comes over to shake his hand.

  ‘Don’t get up, for heaven’s sake, man. What happened to you?’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘That’s the leading cause of death, I hear. Going to heal?’

  ‘Better than most things.’

  ‘They said it would be sunny today. It occurred to me recently that they get paid either way. I would say you made a mistake with all the war stuff. Weather was the smart money.’

  ‘I rather like this weather.’

  ‘You know the players?’ Albert asks about the footballers.

  ‘No. I wanted to watch the future of the Commonwealth run around a bit.’

  ‘It’s dire, isn’t it? Little fuckers. Be getting drunk and ripping up bus stops before you know it.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘We’re going to get a pint when the clock runs down. Come along?’

  ‘Safe Harbour?’

  ‘Is there somewhere else?’

  ‘Lester working today?’

  ‘Hasn’t missed a day since ’78.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  Benton watches the game for an hour before making his way by cab to the pub. Albert, with family obligations, hasn’t arrived yet, so Benton seats himself at the bar. Lester places a coaster with a pint on top of it.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in a week,’ Lester says. ‘Staying in London these days?’

  ‘No. An overseas assignment. Over now. Don’t think I’ll be going away for a while.’

  ‘What happened to the leg?’

  ‘Nothing permanent, I’m told.’

  ‘Interesting job?’

  ‘A little too interesting. Ask me again sometime.’

  ‘Eat something?’ Lester says.

  ‘Not for now. Switch to the news for me?’ Benton asks. ‘These reality TV shows are unbearable.’

  ‘So, Benton,’ Lester says, leaning over the bar a bit. ‘I don’t want to step in anything, but Vanessa was in here looking for you a few days ago. Now that I know you were travelling, I’m a little surprised she didn’t know. So … how are you? Anything you want to talk about?’

  ‘On second thought, bring me a prawn sandwich. And turn up the volume. I’m old.’

  Benton checks the time. It is past 5.00 p.m., and so 7.00 p.m. in Dohuk. Märta is probably still at the office. She’ll be busy as the camp swells. He could call them. Tigger and Herb and Märta can be right here in the pub with him if he presses the right combination of numbers on the phone that he can so easily dial with his fingers.

  Still nothing from Arwood.

  The trail is not completely cold, if he wants to follow it. The note he sent to Märta was also sent to Arwood’s Kurdish friends, and Märta will have that number on her phone, too, having been copied into the message. He could ask her for it. Place the call. Maybe it would ring. Maybe the person on the other end speaks English, and survived the assault on the fortress. He may know what happened to Arwood: whether he survived, where he is now, where he’s going next.

  For now, though, Benton does not call Märta for the number. As Arwood correctly said, Benton is not hard to find. If he’s alive and wants to contact him, he will. If he’s dead, Benton would rather not know. It is better for now to believe he is alive, and simply obscured from view by the dirt and debris kicked up by al
l the mortars.

  Benton takes a long pull on his beer, and dials the only number important to him right now. It is answered quickly.

  He tells his wife that he is at the pub drying off — if not drying out. He was watching the local boys play some ball at Squires Field. It was somehow uplifting. He’s ordered a sandwich. There is a long pause that Vanessa does not fill. Finally, he says, ‘Would you like to come join me?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘Very much.’

  And then Vanessa starts to cry, and he tells her not to because there is no need to cry, and that he has been away but now he is back and will stay. And while he knew it all along, he appreciates even more how lucky they both are. Everything else seems childish or trite at this point.

  She sniffles once, and suggests he finish his lunch and come back to the house. She’s going to move back in. He needs the help.

  He suggests that all of them rent Ferris Bueller’s Day Off tonight. He doesn’t say why. She laughs, thinking he’s joking. He insists he’s not. ‘I need a laugh. And there are things I need to tell you both about the past.’

  Benton watches the news, and drinks the remainder of his beer before ordering another. He had promised the Syrian with the footballer son that he would raise a toast to his dead wife and daughter. But it is too soon to fulfil that obligation. To rush would be to unburden himself of the promise, rather than to respect it. He will hold that for a moment when he is not alone. When he has friends near him. When he can find the courage to make death less of a private matter, and speak about it with the confidence of voice it requires. When he can find his inner Arwood Hobbes.