Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

Sometimes I think I have got two people with fried brains. One is a native Mutt, victim of a technological advance. Not only his brain got fried in that accident, he has also lost control over his bladder. The slightest sign of trouble, a little change in weather, the appearance of anyone wearing the colour red, he’s gonna go bat shit and do things he never did before his brains got fried; he jumps and tries to reach for the jugular but he usually ends up sniffing someone’s crotch which, for a person with my reputation, is quite embarrassing. In his attempt at posing as a militant, crack dog, he relieves himself in all the wrong places.

  And the other one is a victim of the failure of war technology, a man separated from his machine.

  Ellie is essential but a potential risk. But he has what it takes. He is the right colour. He is the key. If we have him, we have a chance at negotiating with Bro Ali’s kidnappers. My bro for your man. My Ali for your Ellie.

  ‘So they sent you to bomb us? And they didn’t tell you that your planes have been falling in this area? Then nobody comes looking for you? They must not love you very much.’ Sometimes you need to make them see the truth.

  ‘I can’t talk about operational details. I lost my plane, now I want to go home,’ he doesn’t look me in the eye. He never looks me in the eye.

  ‘Take a walk. There’s the desert. But if you decide to come back, our doors are always gonna be open for you.’

  He is not gonna go anywhere. What are his choices?

  After I sort out this mess I am gonna move into real estate. That Hangar is prime property, if we take it over, imagine the potential. How many housing units, how many shops could we put in there. I’ll reserve a floor for my company’s headquarters. I am not God’s mercenary. I am God’s entrepreneur. Mutt is circling us at a distance, wagging his tail, wanting attention. I have asked him to keep an eye on Ellie and this is his idea of surveillance, running around in circles making question marks with his sad tail. My Mutt is God’s joker. Whenever I look at him I think the creator must be that man who tells a lame joke then laughs the loudest and the longest.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mutt

  ‘Have you got any bad potatoes, small ones?’ Doctor believes if a vegetable is small or deformed it has to be good for your health. He is on a mission to score organic veggies. He arrives on a motorbike, a Triumph 175, old with shiny double silencers, it seems he is carrying his whole household on this Triumph. There was a time when chasing his motorbike, yapping after him was the high point of my life. But my limp has restricted the speed of my movement, even though it’s added a certain elegance to my gait. I see his motorbike roll in, I lift my head and give a customary yap, which turns into a yawn. Momo is having yet another session with Lady Flowerbody, having his young mind studied, and I am taking a break from my daily inspection tour of the Camp.

  The main square is deserted. Royal Hardware scrap dealers have shuttered their shop and are taking a siesta under the carcass of a Bedford truck.

  I wonder if Momo will need Doctor’s help to get over what his young Muslim mind is being subjected to.

  Doctor himself seems ready to set off on a world tour. A rolled-up blanket tied to one side of the bike, balanced on the other side with two pairs of leather boots; an array of plastic shopping bags hangs from the handlebars of the motorbike. He wears the blue overalls of a US Army infantry sergeant complete with stripes and standard-issue Ray-Bans, held together with Scotch tape and a USAF helmet with WE DARE emblazoned on it. A long thin antenna shoots up towards the sky and quivers like an angry man wagging his finger at a tentative god in the sky.

  The store owner of Allah’s Servant’s Fresh Chicken and Veggies waves him away. ‘No bad potatoes today. It’s not the season.’ I sniff some chicken feathers. Doctor pretends as if he hasn’t heard. Doctor has heard the call of the apocalypse. We survived the bombs but we are not going to survive our own greed, he is always saying, always warning us about the perils of plastic bags and processed proteins. He has seen doomsday and he is not going to pay attention to a lowly trader who uses God’s name to sell vegetables and chicken.

  He goes and stands next to the large blue drum used as a garbage can for rotting vegetables, it is overflowing with partially damaged greens, slightly bruised cauliflowers and moth-eaten spinach. Doctor believes that dignity lies in scavenging and not in a queue outside a ration depot. The vegetable-shop owner jumps from his till and comes and stands next to the blue garbage bin as if protecting it from some raiding army. Doctor takes off his helmet and turns around as if about to leave, even takes a step, then in a flash bends down, retrieves a partially rotten onion that has fallen out of the garbage can and rushes and mounts his bike. He kickstarts his Triumph after depositing the onion in one of his plastic bags. The owner takes a step towards him and then changes his mind.

  ‘I have got money,’ shouts Doctor, taking a bunch of crumpled notes from his pocket and waving them in the air. ‘Sell this to me. You can’t take rotting vegetables to your grave.’

  Doctor is champion forager in a community which lives on handouts, but insists on preaching about honest living, daily toil and daily bread. Doctor just turns up and takes what nobody wants. I watch him from behind the fruit baskets where the only fruit are small bomb-sized watermelons. Doctor is considered the biggest thief because he steals the smallest things.

  ‘You must have small, damaged potatoes, here, I am buying. I am not begging,’ Doctor waves his fist in the air again to demonstrate his buying power.

  Look at that motorbike again. It seems he has prepared it for a journey through treacherous terrains, its mudguards raised high, a camping gas stove hangs on its carrier. On his fuel tank is strapped a large Nestlé bottle, with an amber liquid sloshing in it. Doctor takes it out of the strap and waves it in the air. ‘I have got petrol. Low lead, super. I can get out of here when I want. If you keep hoarding those rotten potatoes, I’ll report you. I’ll report you to the World Food Programme. There are laws against hoarding potatoes. Even rotten potatoes.’

  The shop owner stands his ground next to the blue garbage can as if guarding a precious treasure. ‘Read what it says,’ he shouts at Doctor. ‘USAID doesn’t give us potatoes, Allah does.’

  Doctor straps his Nestlé bottle to his fuel tank, revs up his engine as if whispering a threat. ‘Those potatoes don’t belong to you. They were sent for us, the people. There will be a price to pay. There are red birds flying this way, little birds, the Hangar is filling up with hungry visitors. They don’t want your potatoes, they want their lives back. They are not bringing you cheap vegetables, they are bringing fire to roast you and your greedy brothers. I have got petrol, I’ll be out of here while you burn.’

  He disappears in a cloud of dust and the growl of his engine. I think thank God there is someone besides me who sees these red beauties.

  Poor man. He thinks he’ll escape the apocalypse because he has got a conscience and a bottle of low-lead petrol.

  ‘Bloody theatre nuts,’ says the owner of Allah’s Servant’s Chicken and Veggies. ‘They think every place is a stage where they can just start delivering their stupid monologues.’

  ‘He is an actor?’ asks Ellie, who has been watching this from behind a mountain of Persian watermelons. I followed him here to see what this white deserter is up to. It’s always wise to keep an eye on deserters. If they can betray their mother country, imagine what they are going to do to hostile nation states. White Ellie has a scientific mind. He sees fresh vegetables, he thinks transportation, he thinks here’s a way out. He is ready to desert again.

  ‘An impostor, more like,’ says the shopkeeper. ‘A born liar. He has probably got more cash than half the Camp but insists on stealing from garbage cans. A born thief. He thinks he cares about the environment. He wants to save the earth by eating bad potatoes. He keeps going on about ghosts. I’ll welcome those ghosts. Better than the thieves we have here.’

  I don’t know why they all keep saying this place is full of thieves, why they ca
n’t see the exceptions all around them. I have been under the chicken slaughter table for half an hour and I haven’t stolen a feather. There is no community pride left even when they see decency personified, limping around them with such élan and grace.

  ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can understand why people believe in them. It helps them deal with their loss,’ Ellie puts the watermelon back on the pile and picks up a smaller one. ‘Nice melons, really fresh. Where do you source these from?’ he says. He is obviously not here for fruit shopping. I am sure they have good enough watermelons wherever he comes from. He is picking up information, trying to cultivate moles.

  Allah’s vegetable seller is in no mood to share his supply routes.

  ‘You must have people like Doctor in your country? People who stuff their mattresses with currency? Who bury their gold under their bed and then go around panhandling, gimme a coin, I am a coin short of making my life worth living. And if you don’t give them a coin they tell you that the world is coming to an end.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ellie says. ‘We had one on our street. He had a dog and a sleeping bag and about a thousand plastic bags stuffed into a shopping trolley. He froze to death and then they found that every single plastic bag in his trolley had a chequebook in it and the sleeping bag was full of jewellery – many imitation pieces but some gold too. So how often does your supply truck come?’

  ‘And who took it?’ asks the shopkeeper, looking at Ellie suspiciously, as if he had killed the homeless man, taken his money and gold and was now hiding a world away, in this Camp.

  ‘The government of course. Our government is the biggest thief. It steals from the living, it steals from the dead.’

  ‘Thank God we don’t have that problem,’ says the chicken and vegetable man. ‘We just steal from each other.’

  Everything in the shop has a smell. Chickens smell of death by boredom. Bitter gourd smells of eternal struggle against that boredom. When Ellie walks out there’s no change in the olfactory map. The man doesn’t have a smell and he is going around cultivating an information network checking out our supply routes.

  He huddles with the vegetable man, two conspirators caught in the act. I can hear words like US visa, witness protection. Our man sells Allah’s vegetables and chicken and wants a US visa: traitors are us. There is no way out of here, not while I am responsible for the security here.

  Constant vigilance is what I have to do. Momo has plans for white Ellie, he thinks he can trade him for Bro Ali. He also thinks he can take over the Hangar and turn it into a shopping mall with a fountain in the centre. But why would Americans give us anything for free? They might have shut their military operation from the Hangar but I think they have other plans for it. The temperature has been dropping around the Hangar, it can be sizzling hot in the Camp but as you approach the Hangar perimeter the weather shifts as if you are walking into an air-conditioned room. Sometimes I can smell stoves being lit. Right now I can pick out a whiff of butter, real proper butter hitting a hot pan.

  I make a dash to check out the Hangar. And as I approach I can see that it’s back in business. I am just lurking around trying to track down the source of the butter smell when I see my first ghost. Of course, when I see it I have no idea that it’s a ghost.

  CHAPTER 24

  Ellie

  A few days loitering around in the Camp and I am thinking maybe I was better off in the desert. At least I had some hope of being rescued. This place is an open prison. Mutt follows me even when I go for a walk. I sneak in the Jeep Cherokee hoping to drive away and he starts barking as if a thief is trying to break in. Even Father Dear, that mouse of a man, stands in the door blocking my path when I try to sneak out in the middle of the night. ‘How can you leave us like this? There are people here with unpaid salaries. They keep asking me when should they expect their salaries now that you have returned. And now you want to leave? There are boys missing, what do I tell their families?’

  He is almost in tears and hasn’t even mentioned his own boy yet. ‘I was just going for a walk,’ I tell him. ‘Where do you think I can run away to?’

  This place reeks of neglect. An outpost in a war that the war itself is not interested in. Nobody is going to come and invade this place. Nobody cares for a bunch of goatherds, veggie smugglers and junk dealers and an abandoned Hangar. There is nothing to destroy here, nothing to be saved. Who wants to save angry teenagers and pampered mutts? No decent country takes these people into consideration when drawing up next year’s war plans. If they are searching for me, they are likely to search for me in the desert. Or invade a country far far away. Here, even the next plane carrying tinned food doesn’t arrive.

  They also keep telling me that they are a proud people. What does that even mean? Having a blue plastic sheet over your head, a little gas cylinder tethered to a small stove by a chain and lock, some songs they occasionally sing together and sweet memories of the time when there used to be a USAID plane every week, soldiers pouring out of the Hangar, patrols on the streets; that’s the sum total of their culture and their economy and they call themselves proud people. I have seen homeless folks back home who were better fed than this lot. And they only asked for loose change, they didn’t wave their pride in your face.

  ‘You can’t judge a whole community by making a list of things they don’t have’, Lady Flowerbody tells me. I can’t decide whose side she is on. One moment she is sweet on me, the next moment she wants to be Mother Teresa. A bunch of young men loiter around her makeshift office, probably waiting to get their young minds examined or desperate for some career counselling or fantasizing about losing their virginity. ‘Surely there is some skill you know that you can teach these people?’

  ‘Like what? I should teach them skydiving. Oh wait, we are in a no-fly zone. Should I teach them how to weave baskets from date palms, teach their goats how to jump through fire hoops? Sorry, I am not good at any of those things. Look, all I can do is fly and that’s niche work, I mean not just here, anywhere. You can’t just get together a bunch of people and start a flying club.’

  She is not the type to take a no after no for an answer. I was warned about her. Momo’s visceral hatred for outsiders disguised as news: Lady Flowerbody is a crazy lady. She is a spy but there is nothing to spy on. So she has become a welfare organization worker, a surveyor of Young Muslim Minds. She keeps hoping for more raids so that she can study more Young Muslim Minds, but nobody takes her seriously. If you believe Momo, she is the resident evil since he got rid of the last resident evil researcher who came down to study his mind, his people’s way of life and share their observations with the world. He is quite proud that he made the writer of The Way of the Nomad bet on his first scorpion racing circuit. The author of And the Sands Wept. . . was offered mining rights on equity share basis.

  ‘You could teach in the school? We can reopen it, lots of boys have gone but there still some around who should be in school. Think of the children. Think of all these children who should be in school.’

  Think of the children. That is the basic premise of extreme weather survival. Any kind of survival, desert, snow, cannibals’ dinner party. I saw it first in a preliminary brief for Advanced Desert Survival. Think of the children: a picture went up on the wall, a child without arms, a child without legs. I thought, as fucked-up ideas go this was pretty fucked up, especially for my childless self. Why would I think of children? Why would I think of children without hands and feet, like the ones they showed us in that slide, half human, half gauze bandages. Sick fucks. What has this got to do with survival? What has this got to do with the desert?

  I raised my hand. ‘Why the children?’ Let’s talk about it after the coffee break, I was told.

  Faced with extreme cold or heat or someone beating steadily on the soles of your feet, always think of the children, we were told. Now, it may not be normal for someone my age not to have any children to think of. They don’t give you and your wife a fertility test before they hire you
, but when it comes to desert survival they want you to think of children after the fifth day. But it’s probably not normal for someone my age – someone of any age, children or no children – to be stranded in a desert after wrecking a Strike Eagle and with no children to think of. You are still supposed to. Something to live for, they say. How the hell am I going to think of children? I can think of all the things about to go bad in my fridge. I can worry about an avocado turning pulpy grey because Cath refuses to use it. How am I going to think about children? The last time I thought of children was when I was a child myself. The only time I think of children is when I am on a commercial flight and even then I only think there’d better be no children on board. If there are some on the plane then their parents better be carrying some sedatives to administer to them, they better not scream because they scream louder than a five-thousand-pound bomb and by the time they leave home and go away to start their own shitty lives they have probably cost you as much as a five-thousand-pound bomb. But Strike Eagle’s cockpit doesn’t accommodate any children, not the weak black ones with bloated tummies and not the gurgling white ones with their pink bottoms.

  Now she is telling me think of the children.

  ‘That school by the sewer? It’s not even safe for grown-ups and you have got five-year-olds running around on the edge of a twenty-foot-deep gorge. It’s a buffalo shed.’

  ‘That’s not a sewer, it’s a dried-up stream. And we have never had a problem.’ Her positivity would be bothersome if it wasn’t so fragrant. She has the certainty of a war survivor, the ones we were warned against, whose only possessions are a crutch and a Quran and the memory of a missing limb, the most dangerous people in this most dangerous place.

  ‘You could help out with my research, this is going to be a very serious study, local yes, but it’ll shed light on the global plight of young Muslim—’

  ‘I have no interest in the young Muslim mind. It’s probably full of football and filth like young anybody’s mind anywhere in the world.’