by David Savill
‘You know I am just shattered,’ she said. ‘I may have to go to bed.’
It was a disaster. She shouldn’t have come. It had been in Anya’s power to refuse Will’s suggestion. She knew when she was lying to herself but somehow thought that if she knew, it wasn’t really self-deception. It was like that thing about madness, the truly mad not knowing they are mad.
In the mirror of the dressing table, she saw through the open door of her own bedroom, across the dim hall of the bungalow, where Will stood over his bed presenting his back to her as he unzipped his suitcase. Quickly, she pulled off her vest and pushed down her yoga pants. If he turned, he would see her. The knickers were duck-egg blue now, no more black. Although the nightshirt she needed lay right on top of her things, she lingered for a moment. She heard the sound of the door, then the mirror turned black, and there was a second in which she anticipated him stepping out of the darkness to appear behind her. But when she opened her eyes, the mirror reflected the gloom of the passage between their rooms, the shadows of his legs moving in the light between the door and the floor.
Lying beneath the single sheet of the bed, her mind raced to catch up with the body that had taken the journey. The oriental faces, the looping characters on signs, the airport advertising products she didn’t recognise, the buzzing shoals of mopeds breaking around the charabanc, the people wearing shorts and vests and flip-flops at night, the palms springing out of pavements, the fairy-light fences and trees drooping with ribbons of torn clothing – offerings, William had said.
What did William Howell want from her? She thought about waking him up and asking. Cards on the table. She had no problem walking up to corporals at roadblocks and asking them what the rules of engagement were. She had no problem confronting men who killed for a living, but when it came to the man she knew better than any other, Anya couldn’t quite summon the courage.
Not even the courage to hold his hand. All those years together, and she could still remember the first time she had done it. It had come a week after the sex in her mother’s bedroom (which was no more than any other teenage experiment), and it was far more electrifying, more frightening than that. They had been standing at the window of a delicatessen on the high street of Stratton, Anya explaining how halloumi tasted, when suddenly she felt his palm slip into hers. Her first instinct was to pull away, as if he were kissing her in a public place. She had a feeling that it wouldn’t do to be seen, she felt as though she were suddenly surrounded by her friends and family, a congregation in her mind. But then she checked herself. What did it matter? And so she had slipped her hand back into his, gripping his fingers tightly to mitigate any offence she might have caused. When they turned from the window, they had to negotiate the pavement together, discover what distance to keep so the link between them held. They had to find a whole new pace at which to carry themselves through the world. It was showing the world they were together. But to hold hands would never feel like that again. It became something they took for granted, then something reserved for crises, for the encouragement before exams or for the consolation of a failed job interview. And now what? To start all over again?
What did she want from him? That was the real question, and the reason she couldn’t cross the dark corridor to ask him another.
Anya turned in the bed and fell through the floorboards. She dreamed of touching an elephant on the beach. A Bosnian woman stood next to it, not any particular woman (although Anya knew in her dream she was Bosnian), and behind her a man brushed an elephant with a broom. A sound like gravel being brushed from concrete. Scrape. Scrape.
Scrape. Her eyes opened on the bone light of mosquito curtains. She might have been asleep for hours, or only minutes. The room had filled with the sound of crickets. Wide awake and ready to work, she pulled herself up against the bedstead, and reached for her laptop.
Thursday 7 April 2005
Bangkok
William sits on the floor of his bedroom, back to the glass wall seventeen storeys over Bangkok. Something about the sound of the Windows signature tune stills him, like the tyres on the gravel of his childhood home or the hushing pipes behind the walls of a bathroom. Anya’s computer hums with life on his lap. The blue screen blinks once, twice, then shows its bright, blank face. Ctrl. Alt. Del., and she appears: her surname, initial and a number. TEALA01.
Their first holiday: Lake George
Their first gig: Sebadoh
Anya’s favourite Polish biscuits: Ciasteczka na święta
Anya’s teenage crush: Luke Perry
Anya’s school: Stratton Girls
Her research subject: Bosnia
After six attempts at the password, the computer locks him out.
Shutdown. Restart.
The traffic lights of Bangkok below. The red tail-lights of cars smeared in the rain, and a Skytrain’s winking yellow windows threading a needle of carriages through glass buildings. During the day, William manages the commute to work. But at night he does not go out. He orders in food. He orders in films. Orders in eleven complete seasons of Frasier. He is not interested in the operation of the city below. All that movement. He can’t understand what it is for, or where people find the courage for it. He prefers it up here, where red altitude lights on skyscrapers blink across the roof of the city.
Cairo
Juchinar
Four Winds
Underground
Hula Hoops
Stoke Newington
The name of Anya’s first dog.
Her best friend at school.
The restaurant where they first met as waiters.
Her favourite film.
Her guilty pleasure.
The neighbourhood of London where they had their first flat.
All these things they shared. All these things had become a part of him. Now he has the laptop. A cold metal box which will not talk to him. When after the wave he visited the bungalow on the beach, William somehow felt he should take the laptop because it was one of those things people might steal. And one of those things he knew Anya would ask about straight away. Her laptop. Her work. She wouldn’t want to be without it. The rest had been sent on. And he had every intention of collecting the suitcase from the airport. He had even got as far as stepping to the opposite side of the Skytrain platform, the side which would take him to the airport. But then he had discovered something he already knew but hadn’t admitted. William could not deviate from the route between the school and his apartment. These were the co-ordinates pinning him to Earth. Without them, his feet would simply leave the ground, and he would drift into space.
He lies down on the bed and darkens the windows of the room with a switch in the headboard. Inside the sea is silent, and this silence is where he wants to return. Above the water, only noise; people shouting, car alarms, snapping buildings, cracking trees. It all happens in the roaring throat of the ocean. The unmooring of the world. The wave picks up a car and pushes it slowly through the window of a shop. The buildings drift like unanchored ships. The street slips, water grabbing William by the ankles and pushing him down where a cold silence pours in and he is free. Here in the wave, where he holds Anya’s hand.
When William surfaces, it always takes him a moment to believe. To believe he can breathe. To believe in the dark walls of the bedroom, blinking red and then black, red and then black, a giant eye, opening and then closing.
On the first night in Kao Lak, Anya had stood in the dark of her room and he had watched across the hallway of the bungalow as she dropped her clothes, stepped out of her knickers and stood in her blue socks. She had a system for socks. White popsocks for trainers, and midnight blue ankle-length socks for everything else. William bought the same ones – still did – because then there would never be a problem with sorting pairs. It wasn’t OCD, Anya had never been anally retentive about things. Quite the opposite, she was capable of being far more impulsive than William. It was just one of the extremely practical ideas she had brought to their life,
along with the Post-it notes and the cork-board, and the twelve-month plans. Her actions in the bedroom that night felt as though they were planned too. A striptease, a performance, as if she knew he was there. And hadn’t she known? She stood in front of her suitcase, but didn’t turn. She waited for him, but he did not go. How many steps between them? It wasn’t the physical distance that mattered. You could lie next to someone and, without touch, be on the other side of the world. It was Anya standing with her back to him but at the same time, an entirely new woman standing in the cottony light of the mosquito curtains; soft, flickering like a moth in the unstable glow of a weak electric supply. So luminous that, like the schoolboy he was when they first met, William had lost all belief in himself. No faith to take the steps which might have led to a different future, which might have led away from the path of the wave. No faith in the touch which might have sealed the canyon opening in the bed of the Indian Ocean. If he had gone to her then, where might they have been when the wave came?
In Bangkok, William has to believe in the touch of the cold carpet beneath his feet, the dull sounds of the traffic seventeen stories below; he needs to have faith the phone is ringing, or that any of his life now is real. As he treads the dark he lets go of Anya’s words, the count before the dive – Bosnia. Juchinar. Stoke Newington, and—
‘Hello?’
‘Oh. Hey. William Howell?’
It is not Anya. It is an American voice. The American voice tells William its name is Missy. This Missy woman has been arrested. She needs him to come and verify her employment status. She needs him at the police station to sign the forms. William waits for Anya to tell him he should take responsibility. But Anya doesn’t speak. He puts down the phone and gathers his clothes, creeping around in the dark until he realises he is not in his London flat, nor on the beaches of Kao Lak, and Anya is not there to be disturbed.
Sarajevo
Marko pushes his overnight bag through the headrests. It lands on the back seat in front of the cracked shell of a TAXI light.
‘I’m not a taxi driver.’ Samir lowers himself into the driver’s seat. He sits half in, half out, detaches the left leg and pulls the right into the car. He gives the false leg to Marko. The cuff of his trouser is stitched around the remaining stump, and the stump pushes into some sort of metal lever connected to the pedals.
‘I don’t taxi.’ Samir engages the engine. ‘You can’t make any money on it. What I do is I just drive our guests to and from the airport.’ They pull out of the short-stay bay, and scrape over the speed bumps of the airport car park. The Renault’s suspension is shot. ‘With the taxi sign I can park right out in front of arrivals,’ Samir explains.
His cousin’s car smells like a basket of dirty laundry. In the passenger door, where the window handle should be, Marko finds only an exposed bolt.
Samir hands him a bent fork, and Marko cranks the window down.
‘From last week,’ Samir says.
A newspaper lands in Marko’s lap.
For a brief moment the marks on the page are not a language but gibberish. Shapes without meaning. Then he learns to read again. It is not the lead story about negotiations between police chiefs in Sarajevo and Republika Srpska, or the second story about the opening of a new festival of literature. It is at the foot of the front page.
Stovnik’s Hero Comes Home
– and ten years after his funeral.
The body of a soldier presumed dead in Stovnik’s Youth Day massacre has been returned to the town almost a decade after his funeral.
Kemal Lekić, commander of Stovnik’s 2nd brigade, was given a ceremonial burial in 1995, after searches failed to recover his body from the shelling of Stovnik’s Kapija.
Yesterday morticians in Stovnik confirmed they had received the body of Mr Lekić, who died in a Thai hospital this January.
Doctors in Thailand say his death had been caused by head injuries sustained in the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Problems of identification had delayed repatriation, but locals who knew Mr Lekić were able to identify Stovnik as his hometown.
Mr Lekić was well known in Stovnik. His command was considered instrumental in the operations which broke two years of siege. The 2nd brigade created safe-corridors for thousands of displaced persons from Biljelina and Srebenik.
Oslobođenje contacted friends of the deceased, but they did not wish to comment on the news. Former colleagues in the battalion expressed their shock.
A number of the shelling’s 58 victims were also given ceremonial burials after bodies were lost or went unidentified.
Mr Lekić had no surviving family.
‘You look pale,’ Samir says. ‘You want to stay and get a tan. You look like you’ve been living in a foxhole . . . in a forest . . . under a fucking . . . mountain.’
‘Just England.’
When Samir laughs, Marko might be seventeen again. Almost ten years. The man sitting next to Marko is definitely his cousin, but the brown cords and denim shirt are a costume, silvery stubble sponged on like stage-make-up.
They pass the housing estates near the airport, the patchwork tower blocks with their sticking plasters of pink alabaster and balconies boxed up to make spare rooms. Vesna’s father had lived somewhere around here.
‘Are you angry?’ Marko asks.
‘What do you think? Aren’t you?’
Marko is looking at the picture of Kemal in the paper. It is the official brigade photograph, the one cut into Kemal’s headstone. But anger isn’t the right word for what he feels. It is too weak. That night there had been too many things in the flat Marko could break, so he found himself outside without any idea of where his feet were leading. The dark circling the lamp post of Parker’s Piece was dark only when observed from the street. In the place of disappearing, everything became apparent. Marko could see across the green, as far as the chain of street lights, the old greyhound following the trail of kebab meat which he had left behind him like Hansel in the woods.
Marko brings one of Samir’s cigarettes to his mouth. It had been a day, but he can still smell the dog on his fingers.
‘Did you know?’ Marko lights the cigarette.
Samir only has to look at him to register his offence. They swing around a hairpin turn. Beneath them, the city begins to fill the mouth of the valley. An illusion of completeness; in his memory still, the broken teeth of white towers so familiar from the news bulletins of the war. He knows it is supposed to mean something to him. He knows the word ‘home’ should contain some magic. They slow in the early evening traffic and light the colour of weak tea floods the hills.
‘The little shit only had to call us,’ Samir says. ‘You were like a brother to him – and to think of your poor parents!’
‘I don’t know what the fuck they think,’ Marko says.
He could have been telling his father Kemal had returned from the moon to lead an alien invasion of earth. When Marko called his parents that morning, he could hear the stately Austro-Hungarian calm of his grandparents’ Zagreb apartment at the other end of the line. Clocks ticking. Newspaper pages turning. (All in his imagination of course.)
‘I never expect the craziness of that war to end,’ his father had said. He told Marko it would only upset his mother to come to the funeral. What did it matter Kemal had been alive? They had buried him once – wasn’t that enough? Then before Marko could hang up, a final punch: ‘You know it has been over a year since you called, Marko?’
They stop before a pedestrian crossing. An old woman in a headscarf wheels a shopping trolley behind her, and two dun-coloured street dogs follow silently. Marko thinks of the greyhound on Parker’s Piece. When he killed the dog, he hadn’t expected her to fight so hard.
‘Do you realise that when we turn into the next street, we will be in Republika Srpska?’ Samir says.
‘What are people saying?’
Samir taps on the driver’s window with his wedding-ring knuckle, ‘Look. Half these graves are ours.’ They ar
e passing one of those prickly thickets of white crosses and obelisks which grow in the hills: ‘Bosnian buses, Bosnian ćevapi, Bosnian dead. And now they call this Serbia.’ Samir sighs. ‘Republika Srpska. Kemal didn’t do anything. He had nothing to run away from. I think he just wanted out. Can you blame him?’
Until now, Marko hadn’t realised how much he needed to hear his cousin say it.
‘There are stories about this and that.’ Samir wipes his nose with the back of his hand. ‘They say he might have crossed someone in the villages; someone’s family.’
‘Crossed them?’
They stop in the tail-lights of a bus. Red light fills the car. Samir says how it was all bullshit; not Kemal, he always played it straight, and Marko nods and agrees because this is how they always talked of Kemal. Because Kemal was the hero who died, and the friend they had grieved for, the only one whose life made any sense of the war, and if they didn’t believe that, if they didn’t believe in Kemal, then what the fuck had it all been about anyway?
The bus moves and Samir puts the car into gear. ‘There were two women who went missing.’
‘Missing?’
But Samir is already wagging his finger. ‘No, no, no. It’s just they were last seen at this place where the brigade was, but it has nothing to do with Kemal. I fought every battle with the man! The guy was a fucking saint!’ Samir slaps the steering wheel. ‘The bastard.’
They laugh. How has Marko lived ten years without this kind of laughter?
‘Have you ever performed the ghusl?’ Marko asks.
Samir shakes his head and tells him it’s nothing, tells him you don’t really wash the body, tells him it’s just ceremonial.
‘I’m not even a Muslim,’ Marko says.
‘The imam said it would be shameful to bury Kemal without the ceremony. If there are no Muslims it should be family. So I tell him there is no family and he asks after your parents, and I ask your parents and they suggest you. What can I do? A crazy Bosnian imam. Already the hospital autopsied and prepared the body to be sent back. What difference does it make?’