Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  There was silent consideration before Von shouted out, ‘What about a duel?!’ and rooted in his bag. Shannon had been creating a short straw with matchsticks but as Von pulled out his two Nerf foam dart guns (essential items only in his luggage) the atmosphere by the van changed. The laughter suggested to everyone that yes, this is who we really were. Not old fucks who got too wound up over who would go on a peace mission, but funsters who could settle disputes with a raised eyebrow. Why shouldn’t wars be fought with plastic and the Berlin Wall be reconstructed in foam? This is what we were all about!

  So it was settled. Simon and I laughed and took up the children’s blasters and giggled and goofed carefree to our friends as we each discreetly examined our weapons with minute attention. My spring loading felt rather slack. We joshed at Von as we took up positions, back to back.

  ‘I’m Onegin!’ Simon said and Penny and Christian laughed – and so I laughed too, though I had no idea what this meant. Von paced out what he, as owner of the munitions, estimated to be a reasonable size for the field of honour.

  ‘The gauntlet has been thrown!’ I said.

  ‘I demand satisfaction!’ said Simon.

  ‘Who shoots first?’ Shannon asked.

  ‘Me. I’m a fookin’ stoodent. He’s a townie,’ Simon suggested, smiling but not joking.

  ‘All right, you bag o’ shite!’ I replied.

  I offered my opponent good luck and Cally dropped a sheet of kitchen roll to signal that the paces should begin.

  In nearby estate cars families getting away before the school holidays looked on and smiled. My heart tick-tocked and my head was fuzzy with fear and desire. I could kill my rival and have unlimited access to Penny; off, out there, under gunfire, under canvas, huddled close in a ditch, tending a crying child – it was all possible. The glorious boring hours would stretch on and on. We might see horrible things which would bond us in complicated ways. I reached the sweatshirt lying on the tarmac that marked the end of my walk and turned. I could see the glint of real loathing in Simon’s eye as he extended his arm and took a second before the foam dart darted. I was not permitted by the code of honour to dodge. I must take the punishment beyond first blood, to the death. But as it flew its metres, I saw the tail fin swagger and the dart nipped past to my right, where, losing velocity, it floated to the ground.

  I let Simon sweat as a mocking ‘woo!’ went up from the little Colosseum of gloating patricians who circled us, unable to imagine the turmoil in the gladiators’ hearts. Then, with a dry mouth, I squeezed off the click of my gun and my dart popped into a nice parabola. Not such a brave shot, without so much drive, but my God – I’d estimated right – what accuracy! It arced through the air and everyone could see where it was going. At the last instant there was a brush of wind. Would it take it over him? Too high? No! My dart was finding its mark regardless. There, coming almost to rest – yes, as he saw there was no escape, Simon sloped his scalp so that it came in, landing right on top of his fucking head!

  People giggled. Simon did not even have the compensation of a flesh wound. He had lost in a fight to the death by getting big laughs, and as he wanted to cry for his forfeited life, he had to turn to the gang and pretend to chortle with them, balancing the orange thing on top of his head of shaggy black poet hair and then shaking it off into his palm with a mock bow. I had never known success so complete. To have won while Simon lost, and publicly, crushingly; to be victorious and magnanimous at once, how unbelievably sweet. Last night’s possible tumble and the hope, the fear, the worry, all became insignificant, for while Penny was not jumping with joy at his imminent departure, she was not weeping either. The cleavage was made, the break was clean, and if they had had one night together on the eve of departure, then it could become to ‘Penny & Andrew’ an amusingly sour starter to the delicious main course we would enjoy in the killing fields of the Balkans.

  As everyone poured out of their vehicles and bumped and nudged up through the throbbing innards of the ship, I considered the new make-up of our group. A poet down. A lunk up. It didn’t feel great. And yet, Von’s high spirits and charm were compensation. He apologised again and again until it became a joke. He asked, playing up the moron, where Bosnia was and whose side we were on. Beneath his pretend stupidity, he hid his real ignorance, and in our recapitulation of the Bosnian Muslims’ suffering at the hands of Milosevic and Karadzic we re-enforced our serious sense of ourselves. We were on a ship going to Europe to help stop a war.

  I watched the holidaymakers bubble out from the stairways leading from the car decks, something heart-rending in the men of each family leading the way, checking the deck plan and memorising their stairwell colour and number and letter.

  Bob bustled ahead and found a corner spot where we could all sit together. He waved his arm towards us urgently, so we’d hurry and join him before he had to fight off the uninterested crowds. I looked at Penny and we shook our heads a little. Caring about things that didn’t need to be cared about – that’s what seemed to characterise getting old. It crept in. Where you’re going to sit. The location of small objects – little bits of paper. I’d seen it happen to relations. An ever growing army of unimportant things took on shadowy importance until it all overwhelmed you and you came to think everything mattered: and then you died.

  We ate in the family lounge from Shannon’s Co-op supermarket supplies: soft white baps that split in our hands, splatted with fat curlicues of butter, slices of Spanish onion and wedges of Cheshire cheese too crumbly to support themselves. It might have been the best thing I have ever eaten. We looked around at people picking at bowls of overpriced thick, hardening chips and silently reproached them with our good sense, our foresight and our benevolent vigour.

  Chapter 8

  THERE WERE NO clear plans about the sleeping arrangements over ‘in Europe’. Shannon had tried to keep things realistic, but when we’d talked about what would happen once we were on the Continent it was discussed as though we would be in a new realm, among a time of gifts where, who knew, maybe we’d make it into the Ardennes to sleep with a woodcutter or a charcoal-burner or an old woman with a cottage built of caramels?

  Where we in fact found ourselves that first night was pulled up outside a French service station. Onomatopoeic Bob had little time for the motorways and road markings of Europe, so it had taken us some hours to escape Calais and its hinterland, following the minor roads Bob found more to his taste.

  I couldn’t sleep on the parked-up minibus. I was worried I would fart or dribble in my sleep. Christian, irritatingly, slept soundly next to me as I looked at his white, white skin and imagined I could see the hairs pushing out of the follicles before my eyes. I watched the side of Penny’s face lit orange by the sodium lights until I was bored of my own yearning and climbed out of the van, through the car park and into the bright white of the service station.

  My single sausage looked dry and unpromising in an unbuttered bun on its white plate. I walked, my legs still gurgling under me from the ferry, and sat in the atrium to watch the truckers come and go, then opened up War and Peace. Heavy going: Pierre was involved in the internal politics of the Freemasons. I flicked between the pages of the novel and my biroed aide-memoire of who everyone was inside the front cover. Helene. Yes. Helene. I knew her. I wondered for a while if I was more stupid-clever Helene, looking for social advance. Or nice Pierre, lucky in my duel. Or in fact neither, just some nameless serf in the background of a less well-remembered scene. I looked at the cover illustration hard and felt very tired. The night-shift catering staff stood in the doorway of the kitchens, willing the trickle of incomers to stop entirely.

  Sara didn’t see me when she arrived. She was focused on the beverage woman as she held a styrofoam cup under a nozzle, as if she might get bilked on the deal, lose a few drops in a hot-choc heist. Sara was small and neat and self-contained. She was wearing her favourite white denim jacket and a white T-shirt under it, and white cotton trousers, all of it still immacula
tely clean. It looked like it cost her money to smile. While I had ambled back and forth considering all the products available before making my bad choice, she made the purchase of her hot chocolate look like the only sensible choice in the world. Her mouth chewed on itself in concentration as she watched the lid going on and the drink hitting the tray. Everything about her suggested she took her life extremely seriously. Her tray, was it clean? Her drink, was it full? Her change, was it correct? In her every move she was alert to someone trying to give her less than she was owed. I thought about bowing my head down in my book but she clocked me, so I waved her over.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  ‘I’m actually doing security watch,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, OK? Do you want me to do a turn?’

  ‘Yeah? You?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. What does it involve?’

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Andrew?’ she said, sitting and looking directly at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, which I guess is the answer people want when they use that self-dramatising preamble.

  ‘Why do you want to go to Sarajevo?’

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, I want to help. I mean, I think that as well as the practical help we can give with the food and the supplies and the – message of the play – I guess – in another way I want to go merely to register a certain common humanity with –’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘And can I ask you another question? Would you mind stopping all the staring at Shannon? It’s rude and it’s actually a bit weird.’

  ‘I’m sorry? What do you –’

  ‘It’s obvious what you want to do to her and she’s not interested. We’re an item.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry.’

  Sara was an actor. We’d all had to go out and see her on a peace play bonding-and-inspiration evening in a Movement Piece about the pharmaceuticals industry, in which it was rumoured several cast members got naked. To everyone’s eventual disappointment, they in fact did. For about a quarter of an hour Sara and two male cast members lay on separate lab tables in a gesture possibly symbolic of the way the big drug companies treat their subjects. Also, possibly in a gesture symbolic of the director’s desire to see if he could cause enough of a sensation that a reviewer from a national paper might come in to watch the show. However boring it was, Sara’s willingness to lie there nevertheless marked her out as the Real Deal in terms of artistic commitment. It was that night Shannon publicly confirmed their relationship, by giving Sara a long, long kiss of congratulation when we all went down to acclaim her in the large photocopying cupboard that served as the dressing room.

  ‘You know, I don’t think I do stare at her.’

  ‘Well, you definitely do. Whenever she says anything.’

  ‘OK.’ I sat for a moment and looked at my sausage. ‘You don’t think you could be confusing me looking at her with me staring at her, do you?’

  ‘Everyone wants a piece of her, fair enough. Penny, you, Bob. I’ve had a lot of things taken away from me in my life, but not this one. Do you get it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you promise to leave her alone?’

  ‘OK. Yes. Absolutely.’ It didn’t seem to be a huge concession, like Poland renouncing territorial claims on Wyoming.

  ‘OK. Good.’

  There was then a period when I found it very hard to think of anything to say.

  ‘I can do a security watch if you like?’ I said finally.

  ‘Thank you, but Bob and Shannon and I have agreed a rota.’

  I took a bite out of the meal which I was now very unhungry for. The bun caked against the roof of my mouth and the sausage bounced about like a fucked-out squash ball.

  *

  Nothing grinds out the romance of travel for an English person like the rainy fields of northern France. That sour-mouthed morning, I had to look at my map to summon any thrill at all for being abroad. ‘Artois. Picardy,’ I said to myself, trying to jazz up the whitening humps of land that swelled beside the motorway like a much less interesting England. The red-roofed houses looked prim and unwelcoming. Thinking of the war dead ought to have ennobled the land, but I felt sure wherever I looked was just a patch of backstage nothing rather than glamorous former battlefield.

  Shannon, though, was high with being on the road – and she started to sing a song loudly with everyone repeating her lines after her. ‘Oh Jehovah, I am dying!’

  Everyone: ‘Oh Jehovah, I am dying!’

  Shannon: ‘Please put the cat on the table.’

  Everyone: ‘Please put the cat on the table.’

  Shannon: ‘If it’s eaten, we are beaten, by a once and future king!’

  Everyone (growing triumphant): ‘If it’s eaten, we are beaten, by a once and future king!’

  Looking at her singing, abandoned, almost free-associating, I could see what Sara was so eager to protect. For although she could get insistent and prickly on the topic of the murder of innocent families in the former Yugoslavia, she did also have this demonic streak of pure fun. She felt things deeply: joy, pain, the suffering of others, and once you’d been around it you wanted to plug into her vital force.

  Shannon: ‘I don’t know, but I’ve been told, Shannon Vanzetti’s growing old!’

  Everyone: ‘I don’t know but I’ve been told, Shannon Vanzetti’s growing old!’

  Shannon: ‘If I get shot, gotta call me a medic, shoot me full of that funky anaesthetic!’

  Everyone: ‘If I get shot, gotta call me a medic, shoot me full of that funky anaesthetic!’

  Perhaps I did love her and Sara knew me better than myself?

  Living with Shannon, what would that be like? A lot of brown rice and weeping and laughing; a kitchen tabletop slopped with tea and milk and the coarse grains of demerara sugar, and probably homeless people brought home for supper occasionally. The parts didn’t really fit together – I could see myself coming into the kitchen in a denim shirt to a fug of smoke and chat and laying a beetroot from the garden on the table, but I didn’t look happy. Plus, of course, she seemed to like women more than men. No, Penny was the one for me, with her shelves and shelves of novels and, I imagined, her many, many drawers of clean underwear. For want of a better plan, I playfully tugged on a braid of her hair. She looked round and I said how sorry I was that Simon had got bumped and she said it was OK, warmly, and I said, ‘But on the other hand, you know, fuck him. He was a dick.’ And she laughed at my brutality.

  ‘I’m only joking, obviously,’ I said.

  ‘Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke.’

  ‘Yeah, but Freud was depressed. I think he’d just watched Police Academy 3: Back in Training,’ I said, and we smiled in a way I hoped might be conspiratorial.

  Chapter 9

  HOW LONG DOES it take to drive to the Balkans? In my head, I’d always assumed we’d somehow be on the road for a week. A week-ish. A day for the crossing, then France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia; it had to be a day per country, surely, given what a ramshackle outfit we were? Then there would be breakdowns, probably, and garage stops. That’s what my revision timetable was based on: a fat week of eight-hour minibus days listening to my Serbo-Croat tapes; that would get me somewhere. So as Shannon drove on, I gave myself the morning off to watch the big and little nations out of the window. We flew high on elevated motorways through Belgium, which seemed, at a speeding hazy distance, to be a land of shallow industrial hollows, filled with grey Lego.

  Crossing into Holland, Christian fell asleep on my shoulder. He wasn’t heavy, but small and compact, a tight little package, as if his body had been oven-shrunk onto his bones. Though he was thoroughly well connected – his parents government lawyers or university teachers or both – he’d gone to a comprehensive school in north London, so he would sometimes roll his eyes at the things Penny and Cally said. But then, as often as not, he knew the party or the people or the club they were talking about and would join in the chat, sniffy, pissy and dismissive. I knew he wouldn’t like to wak
e resting on me – it was a sign of a certain weakness – so I let him loll there, his dribble dampening my shoulder.

  ‘Maastricht,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said to no one and shook his head and laughed a little laugh that begged someone to ask him what he was laughing about. But we all punished him by leaving him hanging.

  Maastricht. The name resonated like a boring Austerlitz. John Major’s Waterloo. It made me smile. Had Simon been here, he would have rolled out the sophisticated-sounding theory that the UK had supported the recognition of independent Croatia as a bargaining chip to ensure that British workers wouldn’t get generous European Union job protection. I could see, if you had a certain slant of mind, it made a nice conspiracy: that the smashing of Yugoslavia had taken place on the backs of British workers. But I didn’t buy it. And that Simon wasn’t here to say it made me happy.

  What was surprising to me was how quickly Germany went. I mean, Germany is a considerable nation, any geographical or historical analysis would confirm that. But we seemed to eat up the fucker like it was nothing at all. We hugged the slow lane, yes, but Onomatopoeic Bob was becoming depressed and acquiescent about the route. For a while he continued to claim that a lot of times there were ‘less famous’ roads that took you just as quickly as the motorway, but increasingly he just muttered his dissenting addendums once Shannon was rolling us up a slip road to the autobahn.

  So Cologne, Bonn, Nuremberg – all these big guys came and went so fast I couldn’t believe it. Up in its north-west corner, Germany felt gristly with life – rich with tissue and organs and nerves all twisted up around the arterial Rhine. Aachen, Dortmund, right down to Frankfurt: there was really no relief from this great length of heart and brain and muscle, pumping money and cars and tin-openers out and round the whole of Europe.

  It seemed rude to race past them. Cologne Cathedral? Bonn, so recently a capital? Surely worth an hour? Frankfurt! Were we not going to linger for Frankfurt? I was in a state of anxious stasis. I knew theoretically I needed to get some Serbo-Croat into my head, that the available hours were drifting past, but in every actual minute I found something new to look at out of the window.