‘That was grim. Are you OK?’ Penny asked, falling into step beside me. For once, I wasn’t so desperate to spend time with her, not after my unilateral declaration of like.
‘Yeah, good,’ I said. Then, ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. Perhaps I was something of a hero? A bog-roll-carrying hero.
‘Yeah. That was weird. I know. I just wanted to say that. About the liking.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said.
‘But, yeah. I do like you.’
We arrived back to the camp and she didn’t say anything more in reply and I was left with the uneasy feeling that, like the mines, my declaration had somehow failed to go off.
Chapter 23
ROUND THE FIRE, as the afternoon started to click and buzz about us, the CO pulled out a bottle of the local plum brandy, slivovitz, and some washed-out plastic yogurt pots to drink from. His face was full of an effortful melancholy, like someone had drawn a sad face on a cauliflower. He must have been forty or more and wore British Army camouflage, while the other mercenaries had a collection of weird odds and sods. His pronounced overbite sent his lower jaw jutting out like a battering ram and meant his sentences got all spliced up with spittle.
‘Do you mind me asking,’ Sara asked him, once we were all sitting back round the fire, ‘do you mind me asking what you actually think about the war?’
‘It’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ Bev said, looking round at Chapstick and Jonno and Mad Mike and finally the CO, who remained impassive.
‘I wish I wasn’t here,’ Chapstick said. ‘But no one else is sorting it out, so it’s muggins’s turn, isn’t it? Buggins here.’
‘But you’d rather not be here?’ Sara went on.
‘Oh no, I love it, don’t I? Living in a fucking tent using a hose pipe for a shower, what do you think?’ Chapstick got laughs for this from his fellow soldiers and also smiles from Von, Christian and me who found ourselves involuntarily drawn into the alliance of men. But not Juso. He was staying quiet – although he whispered something into Shannon’s ear.
‘But you could go home?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
‘They don’t want to go home, do they?’ said Sara. ‘They like it here, killing people.’
‘Sara, we are here asking our friends for a favour.’ Shannon held her gaze. Sara’s lip quivered, on the brink of saying something beyond the pale of normal human interaction, until, unwilling to lose face, she just made a little noise that signalled disgust with the world and in particular its most corrupt invention: all of us.
Even the soldiers seemed a bit embarrassed. Bev looked into the flame appearing and disappearing under the aluminium kettle and said, ‘You all live safe in your houses, but who’s keeping you safe? Fuckers like me?’
‘And what if you went home?’ Sara asked.
‘And leave it to someone else? Some poor other fucker? No thank you, that’s not my game.’
Sara stood up and stared down towards the river.
‘End of the day, I don’t give a fuck, to be honest with you. They’re all Russians to me. The lot of them. It’s their bed they’ve shat, so they can roll around in it,’ said Chapstick.
‘I’m all about the money,’ said Jonno.
Juso looked at Shannon and smiled secretly from within his big beard, as though something had been confirmed. Bev clocked this and poked at the fire with a twig. ‘The money we’re on, we’d be crazy to do it for the money,’ he said.
‘So look,’ Shannon interrupted, ‘what we want is an escort to go down to Bihac.’
‘What about the the Knobheads? The Helmets?’ Bev asked.
‘The UN?’
‘Yeah?’
‘We’re not accredited. We don’t have the blue cards. They say they can’t take us, so we wondered if you might escort us?’
‘I bet you fucking wonder,’ Bev said and all the mercenaries looked at the CO, who seemed not to have heard.
Then, without looking up, the CO said, ‘It’s not easy. It’s dangerous. There’s fighting. Bihac ragheads versus Babo’s ragheads. Never mind the fucking Serbs. Nasty. And you lot are what we call fuckslops.’
‘I mean, you are mercenaries. Presumably, you’ve been through fighting before?’ Shannon asked, innocently.
The kettle was boiling now, the steam hissing out into the warm air.
‘Oh, we’ve seen fighting, love,’ Bev said. No one wanted tea. We all sipped at our yogurt pots of spirits periodically.
‘Yeah?’ Sara said and raised her eyebrows just a bit too high.
Bev leapt at the little hint of mockery. ‘Men, made to eat fucking grenades and run at their own families? Yeah?’
‘Jesus,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said, like he’d panned a nugget of gold that could now be carried back home. The rest of the gang went silent and reverent. Even Sara bowed her head.
‘Sorry – they swallowed grenades?’ I asked.
‘You don’t forget that.’ For want of anything else to do with the hot water, Bev washed out his and Mad Mike’s yogurt pots, as though sterilising them, before filling them up for their next dram.
‘Wow. How?’ I asked, widening my eyes.
‘Fucking stuffed them.’
‘Yeah? A whole grenade?’
‘With lubricant,’ Bev offered.
‘And how did they pull the pins?’
‘Look, pal, human bombs. You wouldn’t ask that if you’d been there, OK?’ That was no doubt true. ‘Long fuckin’ delay.’
There was a wobble in the air. After a while, Bev said to the CO, ‘Show them.’
The CO looked into the embers, then intently at the backs of his pasty hands, as if he hoped the strong black hairs there were aerials which could send out terse communications without the need for him to speak. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause.
‘Go on,’ Bev said.
‘No, shut it,’ said the CO.
‘What is it?’ asked Sara.
‘Show them, sir.’
‘I’m not showing them.’ The CO got up.
‘Look, what the fuck have you got?’ said Sara.
‘He’s got a bit of somebody,’ said Jonno.
It sounded pathetic like that, so after a beat, having wandered over towards his ‘cave’ – a slightly larger Halfords trademarked tent set away from the others – the CO said, ‘I have an ear.’ But that also sounded rather small somehow, so he came back and stood above us and looked into the flames a while and added, ‘To remind me of the chaos.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Penny. ‘Yeah, I have a Filofax to remind me of the chaos.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Bev said and started to whittle on a piece of wood with his fish-gutting knife.
‘Don’t talk to her like that, you arsehole,’ I found myself saying, and Bev sprung to his feet to tower over me.
‘C’mon, hey, let’s all just shush,’ Shannon said, looking at the handgun the CO had pulled gently from his webbing belt.
‘Oh yeah, blah blah fucking blah, then a gun ends the conversation. Brilliant,’ Sara said. ‘Fucking brilliant. The man with the gun ends the conversation.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway? Ah? Getting your noses wet and your fingers red. You don’t know the first thing about a combat situation,’ the CO said.
‘Yeah I do,’ Sara said. ‘I know the first thing about a combat situation – the kids get killed and the women get raped. I know the first fucking thing all right.’
‘No. The first thing is the men fight and the men get killed,’ the CO said.
‘Yeah, and you fucking love it,’ Sara said.
‘I do not fucking love it.’
‘Course you do, you all do. Look at you, looking at your fucking gun. You’re pathetic. It’s a fucking pipe with a clicker on it and it pings and out come little cocks and it makes you all think you’re so fucking important. Well, it’s boring.’
‘You can’t understand killing, until you’ve seen killing,’ the CO said, putting his pistol down.
After
a beat Penny said, ‘Well, yes, you can.’
‘You can fucking shut your cakehole, little Lady Fauntleroy. How did you get here – in your fucking Jag?’
Penny looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I looked at the men and their guns and took a breath.
‘C’mon now,’ I said.
‘Come on now what, you prick?’ said Bev.
‘C’mon now . . .’ Feel the noize? Dance everybody? Touch me, babe? ‘C’mon now. Yeah?’ I said.
‘Look, if you’ve got a problem, come and tell me, don’t snivel like a quim,’ Bev said, letting his long knife catch the sunlight so the reflection zinged into my eyes.
The CO put his hand on Bev’s arm.
‘It’s OK. It’s OK,’ Shannon said and tried to shift the balance of the afternoon. ‘You are a group of warrior men. We haven’t seen the things you’ve seen. For our reality, peace is the thing, but we can’t know your reality, we just have to accept it, but what we’re here to do is, as another tribe, to ask your tribe for help?’
She said more soothing things to the men, words that were not so important in themselves but the tone and pitch of which lulled them. She explained how we were aiming to take a play to Bihac to spread peace and also hinted that the money we were carrying was not insubstantial.
The CO said they would have to think about it and he and his soldiers retreated to his aluminium-framed cave.
When they came back, they stated their price for escorting us. Three hundred marks. Plus a number of self-aggrandising provisos: that we would travel the journey in silence, ‘for security reasons’; that the mercenaries would travel in separate vehicles, and that they would take us to Bihac town limits and no further. Shannon bargained them down a few marks and shook the CO’s hand as he looked at his watch, like he had a busy afternoon in store. It was decided that we would rendezvous in town the morning after next. The junior mercenaries walked us down to the river to push us off – roughly, in big unfriendly zooms.
‘Oh yeah. Oh fuck yes,’ Bev said and then shouted to us as we floated out of earshot, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’ as a sort of meaningless all-purpose upper-hand-grabbing almost-joke.
Paddling back, the river water splashed in and made my jeans squeaky and cold, while the back of my neck, in the August sun, felt like a clothes iron was being pressed against it. We didn’t talk much. I considered whether I was suffering some form of shock from my mine ordeal, but couldn’t really find a way to claim I was. Looking across to the other boat, I frequently met Sara’s gaze and she smiled at me for the first time in a while. I smiled back, both of us obscurely disgraced.
Then, in an eddy, up close to the riverbank, we saw something. It took a moment to work it out, but snarled up among some yellowing sheet plastic and a bobbing blue bleach bottle, there was also a corpse. A woman, jammed up so that she jarred against the sides of a little inlet, the debris around her surrounded by a scum of opaque bubbles.
While we stopped and looked, both canoes started to drift backwards with the river’s flow. Eventually Shannon said something and we started up again. Our paddles dipped in with little distinct plops afterwards. It was difficult making headway against the big push of the river. Then we began to discuss what it had been like for each of us, when we had first seen the body, and whether it was slightly before or after another person had seen it and what we had first thought it was and what we had then thought it was and when we’d realised what it really was.
Then after that it went quite quiet, and that flurry of discussion felt like a party compared to what we were left with, each thinking about a dead woman in silence. For a while I tried to play detective and wondered if she might not perhaps be something less obvious than a dead body in a war – a fisherwoman who’d stumbled, or was she pushed?
We’d most likely passed it on the way downstream as we’d chatted and laughed and Sara cried. Sara pointed this out. At first I refused to accept it and said it must have happened while we were at the camp. But thinking about it, the way it was stuck in its bit of river, like a huge Poohstick jammed out of the game, the body must have been there for days. It made me feel giddy, teetering on the edge of something bottomless, to have been so oblivious. But you can’t know everything, I guess – some secret thing will always be out of sight waiting to prove you stupid.
Chapter 24
WE HAD FORTY-EIGHT hours to wait before we took the long dangerous road south across the internal conflict line to Bihac. Shannon intended for us to use this period to finally rehearse the play. Once upon a time, the plan had been that we would ‘workshop’ in Sarajevo, so that the locals had a chance to ‘engage with the piece’. I didn’t really know what this meant. I assumed it meant more than watching, but less than actually being in it, and didn’t see quite what room there was between these two poles. The planned workshop had meant we’d never got ourselves too hung up on boring old rehearsal. But now that we knew how hard it was going to be to physically get into a Safe Area, Shannon worried that our stay there might have to be brief. We would need to be ready to put on the play quickly, ‘like theatrical commandos’.
So with no indoor space available, and in a nod to the workshop idea, she scheduled a rehearsal period the following day out in Velika’s main square. Penny smiled and said that would be fine: we’d start with a read-through and from there she’d want to keep the text ‘flexible and open’. But as we walked up to the usual bar that night, she was worried. ‘Do you think it’s ready?’ she asked.
‘It could be readier,’ I said.
‘Readier and steadier. I’m going to stay up all night and rewrite it.’ Or indeed write it, I thought.
‘Do you want help?’
‘Sure. If you like. Thanks.’ She stopped to get something down in her notebook and smiled, to let me know she was brimming with material.
In the bar, things went well. We found a good spot across from the pinball machine and the owner brought us lager in stemmed glasses and a meagre one-nut-deep scattering of complimentary peanuts in a clean Heineken ashtray. It was dark in our air-conditioned corner and I shivered in my baggy khaki shorts as she talked in general terms about things she thought her play should be like. ‘Like Friel’s Translations?’
‘Yes!’ I said, in total ignorance. My reading at the University of Supermarket had been wide, but, like Offa’s Dyke, there were huge gaps in the edifice.
‘Like Catch-22?’ I said.
‘Yes. Like – like Evelyn Waugh mixed with Walt Whitman!’ she said enthusiastically.
‘Umm. God? Yeah!’
The general principles were actually fun to discuss. She rather liked being hard on her old self as she sipped the frothy heads off the Karlovac lagers with limitless ambition for her new self. It was engaging to see such enthusiasm, although the realisation that everything you wrote yesterday was total shit seemed not entirely compatible with the expectation that everything you wrote tonight was going to be utter perfection.
Nevertheless, we went back to the flat on our three or four beers high and buzzing. The process started out with Penny writing and passing me pages as she went. Initially, we discussed them, I made suggestions and she rewrote accordingly. But slowly she started to nod for me to make the agreed amendments myself.
‘This is fun? Isn’t this fun?’ she said as we got to page five of the hundred needed.
‘This is fun,’ I said.
‘I mean, it’s obviously going to be terrible. But right now I feel hugely optimistic!’ she scrunched up the page she’d just written and popped it in her mouth and then spat it in the bin. We both laughed.
She did seem to be remarkably relaxed about my level of liking for her. If someone had told me they liked me like I’d told her, it would have cramped me up and made me all jerky and unusual. But I suppose she was more used to people liking her than I was. Perhaps, in fact, she was more likeable.
Getting down to the writing, a sense of freedom coursed through me. It was because I felt that ‘I’
wasn’t really writing. All the bits that were trite and overly neat, boring, flat or clichéd, I put down to ‘her’. Then every four or five pages I smuggled in something which I thought of as worthy of myself (though often, when I read these bits back, I decided they were actually still more ‘hers’ than mine). We followed the Castle Plan, largely, the one we’d sketched on our walk to Babo’s based on the Foreign Secretary’s short story.
When I passed my pages back to Penny, sometimes I saw her nod and smile, or look over at me with something like admiration. Other times, her pencil went to work and she passed back a further improvement. Unswallowable gobbets of plot or difficult changes of character trajectory, we erased by tackling head on. We worked well together. I could hear how people talked and she was not afraid to guess or make up how they felt.
And as the hours went on, I couldn’t help feel that our collaboration was proof of a greater potential compatibility. Because it was a little sexual, the tussle. Sometimes when I’d rewrite her and she’d rewrite me back, we’d create a scrawly little tangle over which one of us had to relent. But the hour tended to massage out the knots. Two, three o’clock concentrated the mind. Powered by slivovitz and instant coffee and water and crackers, I shuddered with caffeine, and as the morning approached I relented here and there. Or we came back to some great divergence of opinion an hour after it happened and could no longer remember which side of the argument we had each manned.
We finished our draft at four and read it back silently, Penny sitting at the table on a stool, me standing at her shoulder. I leaned against her back, a mini-spooning after the dry hump of the writing. She wore a thin sheer-cotton top and I could feel her body’s warmth through it. At five, we finished reading, smiled in satisfaction at having brought an artefact into the world and went to separate beds for a couple of hours before rehearsals.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 18