The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  I looked at the two youngsters, then at Morena, then I turned away. ‘Let’s have a look at those stiffs,’ I said.

  The callous way I said it made me realise how right he was. Young Nimmo and Phil hadn’t ever been seared in war. It never stopped a man loving or feeling, but it put iron into his soul forever.

  We walked across to where the bodies lay. One of them was a boy of about seventeen, and my throat went dry as I stared at him, thinking of the waste.

  ‘Poor little bastard,’ I said.

  The man who’d been shot in the throat was an older man in a frayed baseball cap, leather-skinned and lined, the sort of man who with a bit of training would have made the sort of sergeant Morena had made.

  For a second, neither Morena nor I spoke, then Morena pulled the lopsided cap down over the ruined face and straightened up.

  ‘We’ll bury them,’ I said. ‘We can’t just leave ’em. We’ll not ask the others. Let them stay where they are.’

  Morena stared at me for a second, then he nodded and went to fetch the spade. I saw Phil and Nimmo looking at him, their faces puzzled and uncomprehending, not realising what we were sparing them.

  We dug the holes right where the bodies lay and pushed them in and covered them up, with a few stones on top to keep the wild dogs out. Then we straightened up, sweating in the baking heat brought by the rising sun.

  ‘The bastards are in better company than they deserve,’ Morena said flatly, a brief weariness in his bloodshot eyes as he jerked a hand at the scattered skeletons of broken vehicles around us.

  I nodded and we walked back to where the tea was waiting for us and we sat down in silence and began to eat.

  After we’d finished we off-loaded everything from the lorry and put what we could into the Land Rover, first the money chest and then the flat boxes of drawings, and we stacked what we had left of water and food wherever we could get it. There wasn’t much room for the passengers, let alone extra equipment, and it was going to be an uncomfortable, cramped ride.

  Then Morena took the crowbar and smashed everything that was breakable in the engine of the lorry.

  ‘At least those bastards can’t use it against us now,’ he observed.

  I nodded and jerked my head at the others. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go!’

  They moved forward together, then Phil stopped, staring with horrified eyes at the Land Rover. At first it didn’t occur to me what was troubling her, then I realised it was the dried blood on the seats and on the floor of the vehicle. We’d got rid of as much of it as we could, and I’d been too tired to care much about the rest of it, and I jerked my hand angrily, still humiliated by her attitude towards me the night before.

  ‘Take your pick,’ I said. ‘You can walk if you prefer it.’

  She stared at me for a second, then she swallowed quickly and, without looking at me again, she climbed gingerly into the rear seat. Nimmo got in with her, and they huddled together among the equipment. Morena started up the engine and let in the clutch and we moved away, our eyes squinting against the glare that came up in hammer blows off the sand.

  The lorry and the burned-out jeep and the turned earth where we’d buried the dead men dwindled in size as we drew away, two more wrecks in a plain full of wrecks, two more ghosts in a plain full of ghosts.

  We saw nothing of Ghad Ahmed’s men that day. They’d had enough and they were probably even then in one of their villages fighting over the ownership of the remaining undamaged jeep.

  Nobody spoke and the noise of the engine didn’t encourage it. There was nothing else but the brassy sky and the ever-increasing sun. I was conscious of a raging thirst, but I kept the water well tucked away between my fret so that nobody could get at it. I didn’t expect for a minute that Morena would ask for it, but the other two might not understand its importance, especially for that last stretch when we were going to have to walk. There was no desire for food under the weight of the sun, and even the breeze of our own passage was hot and parched the throat as we progressed mile after uncomfortable mile, with first Morena and then me hunched over the wheel, hands slipping in their own sweat, watching the mirage bobbing and swaying in front.

  Just before dusk we ran into a patch of soft sand and, as the Land Rover lurched in a hole dug by the spinning wheels that ground the earth to the consistency of snuff, the petrol ran out and the engine dried up. In front of us there was a high dune, long and low like a crouching animal.

  ‘That’s it,’ Morena said, strained-looking through his beard and the mask of dust on his face.

  For a moment nobody moved. At first I was unable to absorb that this was as far as we could ride, and that from now on it depended on our own limbs and strength and guts. Then Morena climbed down slowly, and I noticed he moved awkwardly as though he were dizzy, and I followed him, stiff-legged with sitting.

  ‘From now on,’ I said, ‘we walk.’

  Phil’s jaw fell and I could see this was something she couldn’t really believe, even though she’d known at the back of her mind like all of us that it was inevitable eventually.

  ‘Walk?’ she repeated. ‘It must be forty miles to the road from here.’

  ‘All of that,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t do it,’ Nimmo burst out wearily.

  ‘You’ve got to. Nothing’s going to carry you.’

  They began to protest and as I pushed them away young Nimmo’s temper flared and he lifted his hand. Immediately Morena’s thick arm was round his throat and he was gagging on his own words.

  He glared as he was released, knowing that for all his youth, he was no match for Morena and me. ‘Christ,’ he said slowly. ‘You old soldiers! You don’t half stick together! It’s like a club that nobody else can join! What about the money?’

  ‘We can’t take it with us,’ I said. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘We could manage it between us.

  ‘Son,’ I said, trying hard not to sound too much like Big Brother. ‘Half an hour from now, you’ll be sorry you’ve even got a water bottle and a packet of sandwiches.’

  He looked at Morena, who nodded slowly.

  ‘What can we do with it?’

  ‘Bury it.’

  ‘We’ll never find it again.’

  ‘We will if we push the jeep over it and burn it. There’ll be enough petrol in the tank to start it off and we’ve got a drop in the can.’

  ‘Christ!’ He spoke bitterly. ‘If we’ve got more petrol, why the hell don’t we push on?’

  ‘Take your pick,’ I said. ‘If we push on, we can’t burn the jeep. If we don’t push on, we can mark where the dough is and come back and pick it up.’

  ‘What about the drawings?’ Phil asked.

  ‘We can bury them.’

  ‘They’ll be ruined.’ Her voice was full of anger and dislike.

  ‘Not here under the sand,’ I pointed out. ‘We’ll be in safety inside a couple of days. Three days from now you can pick them up again.’

  Nimmo gestured at the glaring arc of the sky. ‘Are you proposing to walk in this lot?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much choice,’ I said.

  ‘But, Christ, man, the sun! Why can’t we walk at night?’

  ‘Because we can’t afford to wait. What food we can carry won’t last us long. We can’t even afford long rests. We’ll walk tomorrow, rest in the evening and carry on after the moon’s up. That way we’ll cover a lot of ground before the food gives out. We can’t dawdle, and that’s a fact.’

  Phil gave me a bitter look, as though she held me responsible for all the disasters, then she turned away abruptly and flung herself down in the sand. Morena spoke to her as he always did, like a father.

  ‘We’ve still got food and water,’ he pointed out slowly. ‘And we’re all sound in wind and limb.’

  We drained the radiator, but the water was warm and too evil-tasting to drink, so, because we had more water now than we could hope to carry, we used it to cool and clean our bodies, trying to get rid of the st
ink of the sweat and the feel of the dust that we’d begun to wear like hair shirts.

  Nobody worried much about nakedness, and I saw Phil strip off her clothes unconcernedly at the other side of the Land Rover, her face taut and angry, and the sheen of lukewarm water trickling across the dusty skin of her neck and the curve of her spine and hips as she scrubbed away the sand with the soggy ball of a dirty handkerchief.

  When we’d finished we ate our evening meal in silence. It was only the usual bully beef and biscuit and water that had been too long in the container, and afterwards Morena sat with his back against the wheel of the jeep, silently staring across the desert. We’d tried once more to dress his wounds, but they were puffy and ugly looking now and obviously in need of proper attention. From his sluggish manner I could see the poison from the infection in them was affecting him, but he seemed unworried and after a while took out his mouth organ and began to play it softly.

  Nimmo growled something in protest and Morena put the instrument away at once without a word. I offered him a cigarette and sat down alongside him.

  As the darkness began to spread across the desert, he held the cigarette up. ‘I’ve one more after this,’ he said. ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Wish I were like those two.’

  ‘Kids have a lot more sense these days,’ I said. ‘More intelligent and better looking. They don’t smoke much now.’

  His eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘Drink milk instead of beer,’ he said.

  I managed a laugh, a mere shaking of the shoulders.

  ‘That’s it. Milk instead of beer.’

  ‘And worry about the bomb.’

  ‘And worry about the bomb.’

  He looked at me. ‘Do you ever worry about the bomb?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nor me.’ He paused. ‘I never met an old soldier who was scared of the bomb.’

  He threw away his fag end, and as it curved in an arc to the sand and fell in a shower of sparks, I lay down in my blanket, thinking I’d have to abandon that, too, tomorrow. The prospect scared me, because the desert was so immense and I was full of sick anxiety and overpowering weariness that struck at the depths of my soul, full of all the apprehensions and misgivings that were never far below the veneer of civilisation. It was the old Adam that lurks in all of us, the old instinctive prehistoric fears that hide in the disused chambers of a civilised mind, and I couldn’t sleep for it. Disaster had made a tangle of my nerves and I was restless under the numberless stars. I needed comfort and kept thinking dumbly of Phil and, finally, I sat up and lit one of my last cigarettes.

  It was pitch dark and I couldn’t see her. She’d taken her blanket away from the rest of us and lain down quietly after the meal, and in the end, in desperation, I walked across to where I’d last seen her.

  As I approached, I heard whispering and knew that Nimmo was with her, and I dropped to the sand at once, frightened of being seen, and lay still, not wishing to hear them but afraid they’d think I was spying on them.

  I could hear them breathing and knew they’d come together with infinite understanding and the tenderness of youth, and I heard her shuddering moan of ecstasy and felt my fingernails bite at the palms of my hands as I realised it was Nimmo, not me, who was close enough to her now to hear the thud of her heart and feel the beating of her pulsing blood. Then I heard her voice, thick with passion and choked with tears.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy!’

  I lay there for a long time, my fingers curling in the sand, trying to scour myself of the jealousy I felt inside myself, while the shuddering sighs ceased. Then they became silent and I guessed he was kissing her wet flushed face as they sprawled on the disturbed sand, and I crept away, humiliated and feeling as old as the desert itself.

  As I curled up in my blanket, I realised Morena was awake. Without a word, he lit a cigarette and drew a couple of deep puffs at it. Then he jabbed my shoulder with his fist and, as I sat up, he passed it to me without a word in a gesture full of gentleness and sympathy and understanding.

  It was only when I’d finished it and thrown it away that I remembered it was the last one he had.

  Four

  It was still dark when Morena woke me next morning. We sat up together and, guiltily, I lit a cigarette and offered it to him.

  He grinned and took it from me, but after a couple of drags at it he pushed it back towards me with a ‘Thy-need-is-greater-than-mine’ look.

  I could see the other two a little way away, huddled together under their blankets, unashamedly close, their bodies entwined for warmth and reassurance in the empty desert.

  Morena and I did the digging, going down deep to sink the tin chest. Then we piled stones on top of it and filled the hole up with sand again and dug another hole, twenty yards away due east, towards the sun, to bury the drawings. We marked the spot with a few carefully arranged stones that looked as though they might just have happened to be there, and left it to the sun to reduce the new smoothed sand to the same texture as the baking surface of the desert.

  Finally, we pushed the Land Rover over the spot where we’d put the money, and Morena lifted out the can with the remains of the petrol in it and began to scatter it over the seats and the pile of discarded equipment against the wheels. When it had burned, Ghad Ahmed would never guess what was underneath it. There wasn’t much in the petrol tank to help out, however, and the vehicle burned badly until the tyres caught and the air began to shimmer with the heat. The minute it was alight, the enormity of what we’d done struck me with full force and I began to wonder if we were right. Only Morena’s confident movements reassured me.

  As we turned away, picking up what scattered equipment we felt we needed, I saw the other two standing close together, watching us and faintly defiant.

  Morena began to empty his pockets of money and the old photographs we’d all brought with us and, as they lay on the sand, staring up at us, the faces looked faded and long-vanished. They were all of them gone now, except me and Morena, and I felt I wanted to cry with lost illusions.

  Morena saw the expression on my face. ‘They weren’t the same men,’ he reminded me. He took the mouth organ out of his back pocket, stared at it then, giving me a sheepish grin, pushed it back again.

  ‘Had it a long time,’ he said.

  None of us said anything and it was Morena who opened the bully beef and handed round the biscuits. We sat on the sand in a little circle, almost in two groups, Morena and myself in one, Nimmo and Phil in the other.

  Then we began to put our belongings into containers and stood up ready to move off.

  I knew I’d lost Phil for ever now, but because I still wanted to show her she was wrong there was a sudden senseless urge in me to prove that I was a better man than Nimmo, a nagging foolish drive that made me want to demonstrate how much better I understood the desert, how much more I could endure in spite of my age.

  Morena had saved one or two rags of clothing, which we wound, round our heads like turbans, and he poured the remains of the spare water over them to keep the temperature of our heads low.

  ‘It’ll help,’ he said shortly.

  I had a jerrican half full of clear water that I knew would taste of petrol and would feel as though it weighed a ton before I’d gone a mile. Nimmo had a side-pack containing the biscuits. Morena had another pack with a few tins of bully beef in it. We also had a water bottle and the rifles and the revolver.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Move off, Wop. Due north. I’ll be back marker.’

  We set off in Indian file, moving away from the curving sun as we shuffled through the shaly sand. Nimmo had rolled up a blanket and put it round his shoulder, probably for Phil to lie on, but I noticed that when we stopped at midday it had vanished.

  The sun was already high, raging above us, so that as we plodded northwards the sweat burst out of me and ran down my body and legs, and the heat caused my face to blister and my lips to crack. The low hills
in front of us shimmered and receded, and when we called a halt the shaly rock was too hot to lie on and we sat with our heads down, our faces raw, in a stupor of exhaustion. Only Morena stayed on his feet because he knew, as I did, that it became harder after every stop to get going again. As we started off once more, my body felt as though it weren’t flesh and blood any longer but a construction of wants and aches and pains, and my stomach was knotted with hunger. My tongue, nostrils and eyes were sore and the skin of hands and arms crawled with burns so that I felt I’d been grilled like a steak by the flaring sun.

  The afternoon was worse than the morning. The sun bored into us like a gimlet, jabbing us along in the shadeless dust, the sweat running down our faces like water from a guttering. The light took away my sense of perspective and the plain seemed endless and without horizon, like a brassy bowl curving away from us up into the heavens, blank in the insufferable afternoon light. The dust on my face, mixed with the sweat, became a thin film of mud that was smeared across my features as I wiped it away.

  The figures in front of me seemed to weave and stagger in the heat, first Morena, plodding onwards, one heavy step after another, head low, eyes slitted against the dust he kicked up, and then Phil and Nimmo, and then me, afraid of falling and being left behind in the awful loneliness of the vast plain.

  We stopped again as the sun began to sink, in the fiercest heat of the afternoon, the tiredness coming back with a heavy urgency that begged for relief in rest, and the figures in front of me merely crumpled up as I called out the time, and stretched flat on the sand, hands shielding their eyes. Only Morena stayed splendidly upright, solid as a rock and immovable. His arm was red and inflamed and stiff now and his face was drawn and strained, but there was no anger or resentment in his expression. In Phil’s face there was blind bewilderment and in Nimmo’s sheer unadulterated hate.

  In my bitterness there was a childish fear that he looked better than I did after the gruelling journey and that I was going to weaken, after all, before he did, and though I knew it would never make any difference now, it was terribly important that I shouldn’t. Somehow it had become urgent that I should show Phil that in spite of twenty extra years I was still young and strong and that she’d been wrong in rejecting me, but even as I needed the proof for myself, I knew it meant nothing to her. It never would now, and she was too far gone with exhaustion to notice, anyway.