‘Sara . . .’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
‘We don’t know. He’s a Serb. Isn’t he?’
‘Are you sure something’s going on, Sara?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.
‘Yes yes fucking yes. Or it will, or it has. I don’t know. Blahdy blah. Yes no. Whatever. I know when something’s changed. He’s getting her treatment. I know you all want to fuck her.’
It was hard to say whether contradicting her would be soothing or infuriating. So I just said, ‘We all know you’re together. Everyone does.’
‘It’s just, you can’t make a team out of one. You can’t play tug-o-war on your own, pulling on just one end of the rope. If you give and give and give, you feel empty.’
It was true, I thought. Love is hard to do on your own, without encouragement. You can keep up interest for a certain amount of time; that’s nice. That’s romantic. But at a certain point a solo lovist becomes a unicyclist: proud, determined, even brave, but not entirely a serious proposition.
In the other canoe, Juso was asking disingenuously for a translation of the situation, shaking his head and making out he was innocently, foreignly, baffled at the crazy happenings among his anglophone friends. And all the while, he moved closer to Shannon.
Beside us, Sara dipped her face down again and stayed under water so long this time I wondered if she wasn’t trying to kill herself. But as she bubbled up, her wet face blank and chewy with grief, from the valley walls came the thud and whoosh of an explosion or an impact. Something warrish, for sure. But what? It felt like it was ahead of us. But as soon as the sound was over, it was gone, and the only coordinates left were in our memory.
‘What the fuck was that?’ I said.
‘I don’t know – where did it come from? What was it? Was it a bomb?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
‘Shannon?’ I shouted over.
‘I don’t know,’ she shouted back as her canoe paddled towards ours.
I noticed that all of us were looking at Juso now. The Balkan might be acquainted with the secrets of the bomb more than us.
‘OK. We go back,’ said Onomatopoeic Bob authoritatively.
‘You think it came from ahead?’ Shannon said as they pulled up next to us.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
Chapter 22
I THINK THE main reason we carried on was that when we stopped paddling, the river’s flow continued to take us downstream. It was the path of least resistance. All action was risky with decision; if we went with the flow, at least the universe wouldn’t punish us for a choice. But, as we drifted on down the river, the two canoes close, Sara between us like a corpse, one hand on each hull, I did have a strong sense that my actions might not be entirely explicable to an outsider.
– Why did you continue down the river into the hands of the death squad even after you’d heard the explosion?
– I don’t know, Your Honour. Er, I can only apologise.
When we made it round the next bend in the river we were confronted with three men in camouflage, waist-deep in the water. They were laughing and picking dead and stunned fish from the river’s skim, throwing some to shore and some at each other. Smaller dead fish, like little floating Roman coins, eddied all around.
‘Catch this, you fucking seal!’ one of the soldiers said as he spun a small trouty fish by the tail and another lad jumped in the air and gnashed at it as it passed. English speakers. Dynamite fishing. The Mercenaries.
They must have had some advance warning from Babo, because they didn’t look too surprised when we shouted hello. The fourth of them, the guy catching the fish on the shore, clonking them with a little mallet and sticking them in a plastic bag, called out to us.
‘So glad you could join us. Shall we put the jolly fucking kettle on?’
*
Bev, the fish killer, led us up to their camp. I walked right behind him. He had a convincing soldiering gait and thick muscled arms, but his bottom was wide and unglamorous inside his combat trousers and his khaki T-shirt rode up when he lifted his arms, showing wobbles of fat around his kidneys. The back of his neck bubbled with painful-looking spots boiling under the skin.
‘Nearly there,’ he said after we’d walked for four or five minutes. The top of his head was flattened off and his short brow came down in corrugated ridges. There was something eager to please in him which I recognised and liked, though I think he knew it was in him too, and didn’t think it befitted his role – so he followed his encouragement up by mumbling ‘You lazy cunts’, as though to himself, but loud enough for us to hear.
Their camp was a handful of civilian tents clustered around a permanent fire. There was a separate cooking-and-washing area formed from a set of water butts and a standpipe outside the ruins of a farmhouse. Nearby, some rows of low-growing cherry tomatoes and a tangle of pepper and aubergine plants made up the remains of a masonry-strewn vegetable garden.
Bev introduced us to the other mercenaries as they returned to the camp to dry themselves by the open fire. ‘That’s Jonno. He’s hard as nails and a bastard with it.’ Jonno was younger than the other men, in his early twenties and pale-skinned, not sunburnt like Bev and the others. He looked pleased to be informed what sort of person he was.
‘OK,’ said Shannon.
‘Mad Mike. He’s loco. We call him El Loco.’
‘Does he prefer El Loco or Mad Mike, in general?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.
‘Hey,’ Mike said, and as he warmed his wet legs he began to slide pieces of metal in and out of a machine gun in a way which could conceivably not have been solely for our benefit.
‘Call him whatever you fucking like, he won’t do what you ask unless there’s a bottle of beer or a fifty-dollar bill in it for him,’ Bev explained. ‘And that’s Chapstick. You’ll get used to the nicknames. He fucking loves his ChapStick.’
‘Nice,’ Von said as Chapstick, on cue, applied some ChapStick to his unblistered lips.
‘And are you the commanding officer?’ Shannon asked.
‘No, love,’ Bev said, raising the eyebrows on his boxy head.
‘Can we talk to the commanding officer?’
‘The CO’s in his cave, but if we brew up, you can tell me what we can do you for. Sound fucking scrumptious?’
Jonno produced a large, crushed box of Tetley tea bags wrapped in many layers of cling film from out of his rucksack. You could see his muscles coiled tight around his bones like a soldier’s, but his face hadn’t yet learned impassivity.
Von looked at the fresh box and Jonno’s pale face and asked, ‘How long have you been here, Jonno mate?’
‘Long enough to know a tit from a teapot,’ Bev answered, as Jonno peeled away the layers of cling film like a field dressing. Bev tapped out some little spoonfuls of instant coffee from a tin. The mugs he made for me, Sara and himself were so stingy with the Nescafé that his economy destroyed its own purpose; he might make his stash last forever, but he’d never taste coffee again.
Shannon asked the soldiers if they’d been involved in any fighting locally. No one seemed to want to answer. Eventually Bev said that things were quiet in the surrounding area right now. Chapstick and Mad Mike had fought with the HVO, the Croat Army, in an international division, but a couple of months back had become irritated at the lack of action.
‘The Croats were knobheads anyway,’ Chapstick explained. ‘We wanted to help the Mozzies. On raghead protection, aren’t we? They’re the ones getting pasted. Done up the wrong ’un.’
Bev and the CO, meanwhile, had apparently seen action together near Travnik in central Bosnia the previous year, while Jonno, the youngster, claimed to have been ‘all over the shop’.
‘I’m here for the craic,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ Bev nodded like the kid was getting his lines right and spilled the collection of river fish onto the grass. He and the others began trying to gut them with knives longer than the fish. Chapstick sat on his combat helmet, onto which he had penned, like a Vietnam guy: �
��War is Swell’ and ‘Kill them all & let Bod sort them out’.
‘And – with your, your captain – is this all of you?’ Christian asked.
‘It’s enough, mate,’ Bev said.
‘Sure. I was just asking.’
‘And who’s actually paying you, as of now?’ Shannon asked.
‘We’re awaiting the mission. Could be the locals, your lot. Could be another crew. Whatever, guns for hire. That’s the game. If you don’t like the game, don’t sit down at the fucking table.’ Bev glanced round at the other mercenaries and smiled, and they laughed, although there was no humorous element to his observation.
If you’re a mercenary but you’re not getting paid, what exactly are you? I wondered. Is it better to be paid to kill people, or not? Paying for it is horrible, but I guess we do like people to take money for what they do. It makes it less like dressing-up.
‘Fucking logistics, isn’t it? We’ve got a whole posse a hundred clicks from here. Fucking Aussies, some Boers, Polacks, fucking liquorice allsorts. But movement is difficult. We’re trying to RV, rendezvous.’
‘We wouldn’t even actually be here, but the bus didn’t go to where we wanted to go,’ Jonno said and Bev looked at him sharply.
‘The bus never goes where you want it to go,’ said Mike.
‘Uh-huh. Tell me about it,’ said Von.
As I finished my watery coffee I felt a shift in my guts. A half-week’s worth of carbs coming loose and bearing down like a carrier bag full of pebbles. I asked where the latrine was and Bev laughed like I’d asked for a dry martini.
‘Oh, the “latrine”. It is situated to the left of the rose garden, adjacent to the gymnasium, sir.’ He got big laughs for this. ‘In the fucking woods, pal.’ He pointed vaguely and chucked me a ‘shit roll’.
I marched away fast, over a little access track for the ruined farm and towards the copse that was the suggested site for my necessary activity. But I fancied it was potentially still within earshot of the fire, so I ducked under a boundary wire, over a ridged hump, and reached the edge of a conifer plantation. Once in there, I crushed back some bracken to make my toilet, thinking about snakes, and mites and things that swim up your cock or drop from trees. I crouched and tried to push what felt like an entire length of Scots pine out of my body, all the while plagued by thoughts of that poor farmer, possibly raped with a bottle, or possibly just a man whose cover-up for his embarrassing wanking preference ended up as a vivid paragraph in the manifesto of a group of nationalist intellectuals.
It was as I started walking back towards the camp that I saw two of the mercenaries eyeing me, Bev and a new one (the commanding officer?). They looked serious.
‘Stop. Stop right there!’ Bev said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve walked into a fucking minefield, dickhead.’ This was the CO. He immediately started to massage his temples like I was a problem he’d been dealing with for hours.
I stopped stock-still. ‘Are you serious?’
‘I told you to shit in the fucking woods,’ Bev said. ‘What are you, the fucking Pope?’
‘Where is it? Really? Is this serious?’ Penny and Shannon and the rest were starting to join the men now.
‘Yes we are serious. Don’t fucking move.’
‘Where’s the minefield – who? What’s? What do –’ I said.
‘Just stop still,’ Bev said.
‘I am. I’m still!’ I felt suddenly extraordinarily irritated at the idea of minefields. It was just so dangerous to bury bombs where people might walk. ‘Whose minefield is it?’
‘The lot who were here before us – the town mob. It was a training camp. They mined the perimeter, they said.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me!’
‘I told you to shit in the woods. Why did you go a fucking mile off?’
‘I didn’t know which woods!’
But in fact the designated shitting copse was right there, obvious and distinct, and added to my current humiliation I was also revealed as someone with an unmanly need to shit far from civilisation.
‘Is there not a map – of the mines?’ I asked.
‘What are we going to do?’ Shannon asked.
‘Listen, to be honest, the other mob were jokers,’ Bev said. ‘There’s probably only twenty MURDs in the whole field. There might not be any?’
The fact that, as well as being a man standing in the middle of a minefield, I might also be a man not standing in the middle of a minefield, I didn’t find all that reassuring.
‘Do you think?’ I asked.
‘Fair dos, there probably is some. But not many, hardly any,’ said Bev.
‘It only takes one,’ the CO said. Which had also occurred to me. I took him in for a moment. Grey crew cut, a chewy, bovine, mouth. He looked around slowly, a sort of esteem Hoover canvassing every nook and cranny for endorsement.
‘What am I going to do?’ I asked.
‘All right. Fucking hell. Hold on. I’ll get the mine detector. Don’t move.’ And I admit I did feel a minute’s slight relief before Bev came back holding a broken swingball set and rotated the metal section so the tennis ball looped around his head. ‘All fucking clear, mate!’ he said and laughed raucously at his own joke.
‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘Nah, you’re just gonna have to come for it, matey.’
‘No,’ I said instinctively. ‘There has to be another way.’
‘Er – metal detector. No. Trained dog. No,’ Bev said.
‘Can’t you get a metal detector?’
‘Where from, mate?’
I wanted to say, ‘From anywhere.’ From the Littlewoods catalogue, mailed to Vienna; Penny can drive to pick it up, poste restante, and come back with it. And if it takes a week – so be it. Throw me fish. Raw fish. Actually, cook it, with a little salt, and lemon. I can wait.
But as I surveyed the faces down below, they suggested – even in their supportive, anxious glances – that the fetching of a metal detector was an essentially impossible task. Penny, like the rest of the gang, looked horrified by my situation – but also somewhat resigned to it.
‘C’mon, mate,’ Bev said.
It seemed I was about to lose my life because taking the action necessary to safeguard it would just be such a colossal hassle.
‘You get so many false positives with a detector, anyway,’ the CO said.
False positives didn’t bother me so much. ‘What if I step on a correct positive?’
‘It doesn’t even pick up some,’ Bev said. Which probably clinched it. ‘Some of these mines don’t even show up.’
I stood for a long time while people asked various supportive and niggling questions.
‘Can you remember what way you walked out?’
‘Can you see your footsteps?’
‘Why did you go so far?’
‘C’mon, mate,’ Bev shouted again after a while. ‘Or it’ll get dark. Then you won’t be able to see a fucking thing.’
I sat down carefully, ‘to think’ for a while, and asked as many useful questions as I could about mines and what they might look like and whether I might not be able to use the toilet roll as a mine-clearance device in some way. To which Bev gave a number of sarcastic replies and told me that yes, shit roll would work as a ‘magic carpet’, and if I only stepped on a mine briefly it would not detonate, which I was certain was a joke. As Juso and Christian drifted back to the fire, I was considering simply refusing to move. That if I lay down and stayed the night, then everyone might see that I at least took my life seriously and might go to hunt out a metal detector, or requisition the items necessary to build what I had started to design in my head: a highly manoeuvrable small dirigible with a rope ladder that could hover above me until I climbed to safety.
In the end, the strongest impulse motivating my Walk of Death was the sense that people were waiting for a show that was late starting. I stood up and, trying not to sound reproachful, announced that, all right, I was coming
back and to make ready the preparations in case there was a need to evacuate me as a medical emergency.
Here was a moment. A moment of life or death. Or also, of walking across a patch of nothing-dirt carrying a toilet roll. Then, before I took the first step, something I would never have normally done seemed suddenly possible in this extra, super-oxygenated pocket of life. I looked up and shouted, ‘I like you, Penny!’ and took the step.
If there had been an explosion then, the scene might have ended well. As it was, with no explosion, she was left to smile and say, ‘Oh.’ And, ‘Thank you!’
Then, like a man tripping in the street and attempting to cover it by incorporating subsequent fake stumbles into his walk, I followed up my shout by adding, ‘I like you too, Christian! And Sara and Shannon! I like you all!’ They called back, after a beat, that they liked me too. I looked at Penny and the way she smiled, revealing no teeth and then looking at the ground, improved my situation a little, in that I now actively wanted to die.
My outbound tracks were not visible; the ground was miserly underfoot – dust over rock with just a few spidering clumps of grass. Sometimes I thought I saw a footprint; sometimes, often, I thought I could maybe, just maybe, spot a telltale divot of something buried, but then played mind games between myself and the mine-laying intelligence; perhaps the divot might be a ruse to head me onto a better hidden bomb?
There was something incredibly undramatic about each step. I never really expected the earth to blow under me; it was always the step-after-the-step I feared, not the step itself, because the notion that putting my foot down could kill me seemed so very mad. Initially, I high-stepped, like the red-coated soldiers on the edge of a cereal bowl I remembered from childhood. (Please don’t let that and everything else about me get blown to bits.) Eventually, however, I stopped the high steps and went – twelve or so paces in – for a more insouciant gait, something that, while not quite normal, tried to make out I wasn’t so fussed about losing my legs.
In a film there would have been a red line, and once I stepped over it, sweating, I’d have been in the clear. But in reality the end of the ordeal was gradual and unsatisfying – each step I took seemed to make it increasingly unlikely that I would be blown up. Once back in among the group, everyone patted me on the back and Shannon squeezed my hand and Penny kissed me on the cheek and we headed back to the camp. But as we walked, I still felt in the ground for the hard nub of something military. Killed by a mine right after making it out of the minefield, that was just the kind of joke wars liked to play, I thought.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 17