They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  ‘Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.

  When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center

  of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.’

  Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘For Hans Carossa’, translated by Stephen Mitchell

  Wednesday 13 April 2005

  Bangkok

  At the Emporium Skatepark, Missy sits on the lip of the vertical ramp hatching a plan. The Emporium has a metal ‘vert’ and two concrete bowls, one deep, one shallow, back to back, broken by a soft, rolling spine. Out on the concrete beach, a box, a jump and a rail.

  She watches the schoolkids pump round the park. Most of them fly into the bowl, and straight out the other side, but Angel pops out of the vertical, slips all the way to the edge and drops down the spine without taking a beat. It is beautiful. Angel has a great low-down style. He pulls his hand around the steeps of the bowls, hair trailing like a black banner, so much speed. With some skaters you see the sweat; bodies bobbing up and down like springs, as they pump. The build-up to a trick is just ugly grunt work, something to get them there. But Angel never seems to be working. When the trick comes, it is just part of the line he is taking, part of his way around things, part of the way he plays with the wave. He comes straight at Missy. Wheels whistling, loose shirt like the flapping of a bird, board almost glancing her and the metal lip of the rail, a knife sharpening. When he comes at her like that, she knows she can trust him, sure as a girl in hot pants trusts a magician throwing a sword. He drops left off the spine, cutting out the bowls altogether, jumping the box.

  Before the Emporium, skating in Bangkok sucked. The streets were begging for it, all those plazas around the malls, clean steps and wide pavements. But there were No Skating signs everywhere, the police were harsh and the locals were shy. Missy’s longing for Queen’s Park, and the street corners of Brick, had been physical. Just to spend a summer’s night in the cool breeze off Mantaloking Beach! She dreamed of grinding the rail outside the QuikTrip; of the line she used to take around Queen’s, dropping in from the vert, pumping off the edge of the bowl, low to the ground, air off the short hump, land on two wheels. It was Angel, a Spanish Embassy brat, a fifteen-year-old private tuition student no less, who had shown Missy the Emporium. Even with the floodlights and towers leaning over them, Missy knew she was home.

  Spotting a gap in the flow of skaters, she stands up, and drops in, off the vert, pumping again over the concrete nipple, straight into the shallow bowl, leaning back hard to gather the line around it. She wants to switch over the crest and into the deepest bowl, just at the right spot, giving her the highest possible line, at the fastest possible speed. The run is good but she can feel it might be faster.

  Popping out of the deep, Missy gets a little air, but not enough to land on two wheels or jump over the box. She hits the flat on four wheels, dives around the box and cruises back over to the vert with just enough speed to carry her to the lip, where she sits on her perch next to William.

  ‘Incredible,’ William says.

  Missy feels the jelly in her legs. She is out of touch, sketchy after these past few days, still sweating out the alcohol from the hotel in Cambodia. And then there are her knees: Missy has never minded the cuts and bruises of skating, but the carpet burns she picked up in the hotel with Henry are scabbing over, and something inside her, a new voice she doesn’t really want to hear, is telling her not to break them, to let them heal sensibly. In other words, at the age of twenty-four, she is getting lame.

  ‘Could be better,’ Missy says, and stands up, drops in, lower this time, higher off the spine, harder over the nipple, quicker into the shallow pool. Too quick. She can’t switch back. She can’t find a line around the bowl, and is forced instead, to cut directly across, right up and out of the other side, running off the board as it flies from beneath her feet.

  Missy is good enough at bailing to stumble onto the spine between the two pools, but the board is high in the air, and she watches as it crashes, nose down into the deep bowl, missing the head of a Thai kid by about an inch. A little self-conscious now, she turns to look up at William on the vert. He is on his feet. She waves to signal there is no problem; then Angel – Angel! – cruises around, not stopping for a beat, and leaves the board in her hands.

  Chastened, Missy pushes off again, negotiating the kids, back over to the top of the vert. The deck has taken a chip to the nose. But nothing crucial. As she crashes on her back, she has that wonderful feeling of the blood pumping in her head.

  ‘You OK?’ William asks.

  Missy shades her eyes from the floodlights hanging high above William and making a silhouette of his face. Those floodlights with the big heavy heads on their long thin necks, bowing down and emitting this pale light. So much pain there. Is that how it had to be? Getting older and sadder. More loss. More losing. Pale light.

  ‘I know how to bail,’ Missy says.

  It had felt strange to talk to her boss about Ricky. Not just strange talking to the boss she hardly knew, but to be talking to anyone about Ricky. She thought about Ricky all the time. She visited him in that place somewhere between imagination and memory. But to think of him, then to feel his name in her mouth, on her lips – leaving her lips. After the whole headfuck in William’s car, she had visited the corner store to buy some cranberry juice for the morning. Turning from the counter, she had seen a dead man. Ricky in his baseball cap and ripped jeans, ferreting through a basket of old DVDs. She thought: Why has he decided to wear his jeans halfway down his ass like that?

  ‘You don’t wear a helmet,’ William says.

  ‘Yeah?’ She sits up and holds her ankles. ‘I never have.’

  ‘I had a friend who used to work in a hospital. He said skateboards were responsible for maybe sixty per cent of the worst accidents he saw.’

  ‘You want to try it?’ Missy asks.

  William sits down next to her. ‘Here?’

  Talking to William about Ricky hadn’t brought her brother back to life. It had not helped her find new memories. In some ways, it had even felt wrong, almost like talking about him behind his back. But Missy had fallen asleep last night, and found herself weeping as she hadn’t since the week after the funeral. Weeping for so long, in the end she had been laughing. Laughter welling up in the space emptied out by the tears. And that was when she realised, she needed to talk to William again.

  ‘Not here, that would put you in hospital. Down there on the flat.’

  ‘I’m too old,’ William says.

  She watches Angel. Angel is busy killing it. Just fucking crushing it.

  Missy stands, flips her board up, back foot holding the tail down, front foot feeling the tension of the vertical drop beneath her.

  ‘Climb down, and I’ll see you round there. I’m a good teacher.’

  Not concrete but water. Not something to hit but something to dive into. Not something to master but something to ride. Not something still but something moving, changing, feeling – smooth down the vert, high off the spine, pumping over the nipple, gliding into the shallow, coasting over the crest and into the deep; a high, high line – the unbroken, marvellous curve; not riding now, but being ridden, letting the concrete wave carry her up and into the air where the landing is too awkward for the back wheels she wants, but better; tips her onto the front wheels and – Hey! She holds the trick all the way to the box, where she flips the deck around and jumps clean.

  Halle-fuckin-lujah!

  When Missy lands it is not on concrete but on a cloud.

  And when Angel glides by, he slaps the palm of her hand and says, ‘Yeah. All right – Fucking “A”, girl – Fucking “A”.’

  Thursday 14 April 2005

  Bangkok

  White morning light cleans his office. He switches off the air-conditioning unit. In the silence it leaves behind, he opens the old sash window, letting in the honk and zip of mopeds navig
ating the tight soi of the neighbourhood. At the back of the school is a patch of scrubbed lawn leading up to a yellow rain tree which decorates a wall of breeze blocks beneath a tangle of telephone wires. The tree belongs to the era of the clapboard colonial lodge. The new breeze blocks screen the old compound from tall wire fences built for a storm drain created when the downtown skyscrapers went up.

  It is the kind of morning that makes him want to smoke again. He sits with his back to the window. Instead of smoking, he takes a packet of ginger biscuits out of his desk drawer. While the kettle boils, he lays three of them, one on top of the other, next to the computer keyboard.

  Sitting is painful. The burn stretches from the small of his back, over the lower vertebrae of his spine, catching when he moves. But there is something pleasurable about being reminded of the moment the board left his feet, leaving him to slide down the concrete bowl.

  When the computer asks for his password, William thinks of Anya’s words. Anya’s laptop has been packed away in her suitcase. Her case is sealed and standing by the door of his apartment, ready to go.

  It does not take him long to find the address of Anya’s mother on the new ‘maps’ thing Missy showed him. Into the computer he types Stratton. From a distance he recognises nothing, but zooming in, sees the names of the roads he would walk to school. The road names return the memory of friends who lived on Middlefield Lane and Station Road, Monument Drive and Chapel Street. Lanes running into fields and farms, or into the bigger estates, which belonged to the edges of towns, growing out of the great sponge of the city.

  The greenbelt, on the edge. Where they lived. Anya’s family home on one of the newer estates. She went to the Catholic school, and William went to the state, which meant as children, their paths never crossed. It was only when William left school that he got to know Anya properly. A summer job at a restaurant called the Four Winds, on the dual carriageway between the suburbs.

  He drags the little orange man over the screen, and drops him down at the place where the white loop of Lodge Crescent begins, a lace tied to Park Road. When the ‘Street View’ appears, he thinks for a moment he is in the wrong place. This is some other, Hobbit world. It is so green. Perfectly doctored trees line the pavements, the edges of lawns nail-scissor straight, manicured bushes screening one life from another. Theme-park hedges. He scrolls down the freshly painted white lines of the road, and the picture jumps, lost in a blur before puzzling back into place. It is like having the eyes of God.

  There is so much space between the houses, each with its own driveway, the white doors of garages, and white window frames, red-brick pairs of seventies-built semi-detached houses interrupted by Victorian mansions. Is this how he grew up? As a teenager William was horrified by the suburban uniformity of his existence; but now, turning the image so he is facing the front of the house owned by Anya’s mother, England feels like the extreme ideal of an extreme culture. An extraordinary place to live.

  Anya’s old house is partially hidden by a row of fern trees. But it is there: the golden mahogany of the front door, a porch window next to a carport where Anya would park her mother’s car. There is no car in the picture, the curtain of the porch window is drawn back on the hallway. When he tries to zoom in and see through the windows of the house, he gets as close as the pixelated folds of a russet curtain. This was the place Anya had grown up with her divorced mother, the place where he stood on a ladder and trimmed the fern trees for Diane, a nineteen-year-old boy, eager to impress his girlfriend’s mother.

  Number 56, Lodge Crescent.

  He cross-references the address with a postcode, and writes it down for the suitcase and letter he is sending to Anya’s mother. He will let her go. It is what he has always been afraid of. It is why he felt so relieved that day on the beach. Why he split up with Anya in the first place. He was never strong enough for the things he loved. Better not to love than to lose love. He is still staring at the closed door of Anya’s house in Stratton, when someone knocks on his door in Bangkok.

  ‘William, good.’ It is Karin. ‘William, I wanted to introduce you to Melissa Ammanucci, she starts today.’

  Missy steps into William’s office. Everything about her is different. Her bob is clipped back, opening up her face. No shorts or vest or skatepark clothes but a pair of modest cargo-pants, and a black V-neck T-shirt, with black pumps. Missy in her role as a teacher.

  ‘Great to meet you.’ She extends her hand over the desk and William finds himself standing up, playing along.

  Karin says, ‘I thought I would show Ms Ammanucci the staffroom and facilities. She is scheduled to be teaching in the B corridor today.’

  ‘It’s great to be starting.’ Missy smiles.

  ‘It’s great to see you again,’ William says. ‘We were very impressed with your interview.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Will there be anything else?’ Karin asks.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ William says.

  When he sits down, the burn reminds him it is there.

  He looks at the disorganised desktop of his computer. A little mental housekeeping and organisation can save you a lot of time, Anya says.

  From the drawer in his desk, he takes the new sketch pad and unwraps its cellophane, turning his desk chair to face the open window. Holding his pencil straight, he lines it up with the yellow rain tree.

  Sarajevo

  Marko has the seat over the wing. The thunder of the plane fills his ears, and beneath the spinning black holes of the turbines, his country falls away. Beyond the city’s suburbs, there appears no order to the place, no straight lines between towns, no cul-de-sacs or planned streets at the heart of ancient villages, only a shatter of terracotta roofs, caught in the green folds of the mountains, and silver rivers which can’t make up their minds about where they are going. What idiot would try and draw borders in a place like this? Borders where each valley is already a world away from the next? A land where mountains rise between Asia and Europe, as if a direct consequence of all human efforts to crush east and west together. The perfect place to divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide and conquer. He reads the landscape like he reads the pages of Millie’s history books. From a distance.

  Marko didn’t want to hear Samir’s story, but Samir wanted to tell him. And so he had listened. It seemed like a better reason to come to Bosnia than the ghusl.

  Kemal left the camp with a party to recce a potential route of escape in the south-east and left Samir in charge. When he returned he discovered what the men had been doing. He had intended to visit the women, to reassure them, to let them know his soldiers would be punished. But the women had run. It was in the early evening. Ljuba and the others had simply sprinted across the car park towards the fences. The soldiers were dumbstruck. It was their job to keep people out, not in, and the women were over the fences before anyone made a move. Kemal gave the order. Samir and Bogdan followed. The three women ran along the road, not even keeping to the treeline. They were running in the failing light, no telling what they might be running into. Kemal signalled for the men to keep their guns down. They were going to catch up, that was all, bring them back. Then the firing started from the trees; bursts from a bend in the road, only a hundred metres or so ahead. Ljuba dived into the treeline. Everyone else hit the ground. Samir, Bogdan, Kemal. They scrabbled in the dust of the road to get their stupid Russian rifles into firing position. Samir fired into the trees. He was trying to save the life of the woman he had just raped. Funny thing, he told Marko, life.

  One of the women stood up, and as soon as she did, fell down. The second woman knelt up to reach the first, and went down at her side. The soldiers held their position. Sometimes, Samir felt like he was still holding that position. But reinforcement came, and when someone pointed a grenade launcher into the trees, the firing stopped.

  They had crawled to the bodies, uncertain of being clear. The women were still alive when they reached them. Samir remembers they were breathing. The
woman he knelt beside – her breath sounded like it was being pushed through a hole the size of a needle puncture. She stared at him, unblinking. Lips powdered with the yellow dust of the road.

  The first woman had taken a Chetnik bullet in her chest. The second, a bullet in her back. Kemal believed he had shot her. And he never forgave himself. Not as far as Samir knows. They took the bodies when they left the camp, and buried them the next day. A full funeral, deep in Kemal’s back garden. Kemal had spent the following spring terracing the slopes, building up plant boxes. He said he was tending the garden. But really he was tending their graves.

  The plane’s shadow slips over patches of green forest, snow on the higher ground, sudden lakes.

  Had Samir forgiven himself?

  ‘That’s not my job,’ Samir said.

  Marko picks up another shadow; a train of black clouds which form into a single trail of smoke and narrows to a point before stopping abruptly over a concrete tower in the middle of nowhere.

  Filter down, smoking end up.

  Marko, Samir, Bogdan and Vesna were just kids when they planted cigarettes in the soil of Kemal’s first grave. To Marko, it would always be the real grave. The grave among martyrs. The town’s martyrs were the children who wanted to celebrate Youth Day with a drink on the square; boys who wanted to see girls in their patched-up dresses, and girls who wanted to see the boys looking. In the months after the shelling, it became a tradition among the kids left behind in Stovnik to visit the graves together. The survivors would sit among their friends, drinking homemade plum šljivovica from emptied Pepsi bottles, transistor radios playing whatever they could catch in the air. Cigarettes were still expensive, and Marko would pass one between them. Between himself, Vesna, Bogdan, Samir, before planting it in the soil for Kemal. Filter down, smoking end up.

  Marko undoes his seat belt. He takes a magazine from the seat pocket, feeling the tight skin of his knuckles, still swollen from Samir’s face. The magazine is called Heart of Bosnia. The editorial page tells him this first edition is generously funded by USAID, and BHTourism. The magazine’s mission is to promote the beauty of the people, and the nature of ‘the heart-shaped land’. He recognises some of the photographs from the leaflets in Samir’s reception. White water rafting on the Drina. Mountain walking in the north-east. A golden statue of Bruce Lee. His heart can still quicken at the sight of the man. The article tells him the statue has been erected in the town of Mostar. In the picture, Bruce Lee stands in first position, right arm outstretched, tensing his famous fist. Bruce Lee in Mostar. The subject of the statue had been chosen by the youth of the town, Bosnian Muslims and Croats alike. They were asked to agree on a suitable figure to symbolise the struggles of the recent past. ‘Martial arts is a shared passion,’ the spokesman of something called the Mostar Urban Movement said, ‘We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats. But Bruce Lee is one thing we can agree on.’ A sudden brightness fills the window of the plane. Marko puts down the magazine and cups his hands against the cold, toughened plastic. The clouds have broken. The plane banks over a blinding sea; the Adriatic, between Italy and Croatia. A cloud whips beneath the wing and the metal tube in which he sits buoys up. For a moment, Marko doesn’t know whether he is flying or falling.