‘Yes. Yes. I was in the army. I was in the 504 from Cazin, but after – when there was a ceasefire with the Serbs in ’93 – we all thought, well, we’ve done it, we have peace and we came over. Babo signed for peace, with Karadzic. Everyone – everyone wanted to come over to Babo.’ Mohammed stopped in a little clearing under some willowy treelets and let me take the lead as the path led up away from the stream.
‘But not everyone did?’ I asked, stamping my feet hard on the ground in a way I had once been told would scare off snakes.
‘No. The crazy ones. And the politicians, they stayed, and some of the units of the 5th down there, they are crazy or scared. They would shoot you for coming over. In Bihac the government is strong, you know. It’s a big city town. But everyone wants to come to Babo. Have you seen the doctors we have here? The cheese? We have everything. Why do they want to have nothing?’
I smiled, though he couldn’t see my face, and nodded with exaggerated dips of my head. ‘But the Serbs, can you trust them?’ I asked.
‘Everything can be OK with Serbs. Everyone thinks the Serbs are the bad ones but let me tell you a story. Before the war, our neighbours were good ones. The only problems were with the other side, they were the ones who let thistle and weeds grow and the seed blows – you know? And they were Muslim. Well, not real Muslim, but the father was. He was different. He was from Kosovo originally but – his wife. You see, I am not Bosniak at all. I come from Bulgaria. A real Turk.’
I think he could sense this wasn’t coming over to me as compelling.
‘Look, you know about the Ustasha? You know about Pavelic, the Croat bossman, the Poglavnik and the barrel of eyeballs he kept, in the Second World War? On his desk? He ate them like oysters. Serb eyeballs. It’s complicated. You know there was a Muslim SS regiment? Yes? So, do we have clean hands? Does anyone? No. Fine. So if a man comes to my house and gives me a loaf of bread, he is my friend. If a man comes to my house and he kills my chicken, he is not my friend. After that then, maybe, “Is he Serb, is he this, is he that?” You understand? Right now, in Bihac, my Muslim friend from before would kill me. But here my Serb enemy keeps me safe. So. Yeah?’
‘OK? Yeah. No – I get it. Just people, take them as they all are, if you can?’ I said, like a slightly mistranslated greetings card.
‘Exactly. Yes,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘“Just people, take them as they all are, if you can.”’ Then he tapped me on the shoulder and we both stopped. He smiled widely and said, ‘Except the Russians. They’re just motherfuckers.’ And we both laughed a nice, naughty, complicated laugh.
We’d been walking for a while, on the path that rose up from the river and back to the road, when we saw a worrying flash of synthetic colour across the other side of the river. Like a soldier, Mohammed ducked down, and I copied him, keeping low. We crawled down into a little hollow and then up the other side to its brow to get a view across. I was up close to Mohammed’s body – he smelt of fresh sweat and tobacco and the sharp chemical citrus odour of cheap soap. He levered himself up on one of his sinewy brown arms and didn’t duck down.
Shannon was down there directing. Mohammed looked at me and I looked at him. This was obviously something we shouldn’t watch. On the other hand, it was quite interesting. She was directing sexual activity. Only slowly did the phrase ‘threesome’ come to mind. What it looked like, if you didn’t glamorise it with a name, was something more lumpy: a twosome, plus another. Or maybe, three interrelated onesomes.
Watching made me feel a little religious, or at least socially conservative. It suddenly occurred to me quite forcefully that two was a good number for sex, even that it was, perhaps, the ‘natural’ number.
Three did not look like it worked so well; it was too many, by a factor of one. Because while they tried, with Shannon lying back and Juso rubbing his beard into the beard between her legs, lapping like a cat, and Sara kneeling at his side trying to reach under and milk him cow-wise, it didn’t seem to quite fit. There was lots of organisation necessary when they shifted position. In fact, it looked like a further additional person was required, really, solely to be across the logistics. In their absence, Shannon was Napoleon, getting the baggage train in order and checking the supply lines before Sara now lay back and Shannon rolled up on top, sliding a hand under her, and Juso, the spare sticklebrick, arranged himself side-on, trying to get his member into some friction-providing crevice.
Then he moved away and, considering the problem architecturally, chose to lie for a while on Shannon’s back; not looking, it seemed, to go up the bum, but to ride the groove of her buttocks. But the weight was clearly uncomfortable for Sara down at the bottom, and besides, the people-pile was unsteady and short-limbed Juso was having to strain his legs and arms like a human table to stay up top. After a while he climbed off, retreated and knelt uncomfortably, his kneecaps arrowing into the ground, and wanked generally – towards the scene from offstage, like a porno linesman.
‘So. What’s in there – the attaché case I’m taking to Bihac?’ I asked.
Mohammed looked at me. We were both embarrassed to still be there, half watching. He said he didn’t know and nodded his head for us to leave.
We retreated quickly and as we made it up to the path back towards town I asked him what he thought might be in the attaché case. A dissonance entered our communication. He didn’t lie, I don’t think. It was just that suddenly we were calling out to one another over or round some rock of circumstance that was too obvious or important for him to explain or address.
‘Nothing. I don’t know. Important things, but papers or so, I guess?’
I was left ignorant and dissatisfied, uncertain even what it was I didn’t understand. And apprehensive too, in case, like a frightened teenager waving down as he grips the cold steel of the pylon, my eagerness to make a friend had led me far beyond my nature.
Chapter 26
WHEN I WOKE, early – before seven – the mercenaries’ two Toyota jeeps were already idling, their diesel fumes chugging black and casually wasteful outside. The two vehicles, borrowed from Babo, were to drive in front and behind as protection vehicles for the van.
Bev hooted jauntily outside the apartments despite the hour. None of the mercenaries deigned to get out. Through the window I could see they all carried guns, at once tools and props; both serious and frivolous, threatening and protective. All the peace-play troupe made it up and out without central planning or chivvying – even Von. He and Cally had shared a bed for three nights now and had a bit of the couple’s self-bubbling disregard for the group. Von’s small Berghaus rucksack bulged – prolapsing out of the drawstring top were some of the apartment towels.
Juso said his farewells. I watched from the pavement as he kissed Shannon and then Sara too. He was red around his deep-set eyes and so was Sara. They’d all stayed up late drinking, playing gin rummy and swilling out the taste of one another with slivovitz. Juso pressed something into Shannon’s hand, and something else into Sara’s. Only Shannon was dry-eyed and clear.
‘Good night?’ I asked Von.
He, Cally and Onomatopoeic Bob had gone drinking in the unfriendly bar, where they’d got taken up as heroes, emissaries of reasonableness to the savage south, and been bought many rounds of booze.
‘Umm,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘Yeah.’ Penny and I had spent the evening going through the notes harvested from the day’s rehearsal. She had them all recorded in a thick black notebook like a policeman’s. Most were little changes we implemented right away. But as we went through the selection of bigger questions, we started striking down one by one the tantalising new directions proposed during the day. Each, as we got to it, seemed to wilt under examination; to become a suitable case for dismissal. Sometimes Penny drew a line through the new idea. Sometimes she just undid it with a big fat question mark. Or wrote: ‘Further discussion.’
‘I’m not quite sure they totally understand what they’re meant to be saying,’ she said a cou
ple of times, puzzling over some dick’s query from the rehearsal process, before writing in ‘No action required’ or ‘Try it again and see how it feels’. Soon enough we had dispensed with the lot and changed only a word or two.
‘Are those from the flats, Von?’ I asked as he tried to stuff in the towel that bulged from his bag, pulling out a Nerf gun to make room.
‘I need to finish that shit,’ Von said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Cally. Bullet in the head, I reckon.’ He nodded at her. She looked very fine, standing on the road in the morning sun, her thick hair hanging luxuriantly, shot through with sunlight as she talked to Penny – their friendship looking appealingly full of complicated intimacies.
‘Yeah, today’s the day. I’m out of there. I need to keep my options open.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. You don’t want to eat the same sausage every day, do you? That would be mad.’
‘We are heading into a war zone, Von?’
‘Yeah, but she’s not exactly going to get killed, is she?’
‘It’s just not a great time – to – end something, is it?’
‘I don’t know. I kind of like her, but she’s not a Bond Girl. She’s barely an eight. That’s not good. What if I get stuck with an eight? She’s not far from a seven. I’d be a laughing stock. Plus –’ he looked around furtively, and began to whisper – ‘she wanted me to put it in?’
‘Right? You mean . . .’
‘I don’t put it in,’ he explained.
‘You don’t put it in?’
‘No, I don’t put it in.’
‘Right? Why – not?’
‘It’s not my bag. I don’t play that weak.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s dirty. I’ve never put it in. Aids? Yeah? Suck jobs, handjobs. Sweet. Do you put it in?’
‘Er, well, yeah. When I – yes. When it’s . . . polite.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t put it in. It’s my choice.’
‘No, sure,’ I said, suddenly alive to the suggestion that I was somehow seeking jurisdiction over his complicated sexuality, forcing him to accept the culturally hegemonic demand that he put it in somewhere he didn’t want to. ‘But – is that – how does she . . . is that OK, by her?’
Before he could answer, and just as Shannon was chivvying the troupe to saddle up and depart, a Mercedes came past slowly, shuffling us all off the road and pulling up beyond. It was Mohammed with the case for me and a letter from Babo for any roadblocks and checkpoints we might encounter. I took them and clasped hands with my friend.
‘As well,’ Mohammed said quickly, ‘tonight I hear in Bihac town they are showing The Three Amigos?’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And?’
‘And?’ he asked.
‘And – what?’
‘I thought you should know.’
‘Right – is it dangerous – should we not . . .?’
‘No, you should go.’
I nodded, serious. ‘And the man – will I see the guy there, to make contact?’
‘No, just, it’s with – Mexicans and cowboys?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘My friend told me, they said on Bihac radio?’
‘Oh, OK – oh, right. Thank you.’ Mohammed walked away, leaving me feeling I was in danger of becoming too wary to enjoy the simple pleasures in life: Chevy Chase and the flowers in the hedgerow.
Just then Bev jumped out of his jeep and announced that the CO thought one mercenary should travel with us, and he was taking a seat up front, in case of ‘bullshit’.
‘What kind of bullshit?’ I asked.
‘Your kind of bullshit. Wagons roll!’ he shouted.
We all climbed in. Shannon and Onomatopoeic Bob joined Bev up front, with Bob taking the wheel. Before the van door swung shut, Shannon gave Juso a last quick dab of a kiss on the cheek. They said nothing. But, oh, his face. As Sara sat behind Shannon and rested a hand on her shoulder, I looked at Juso and wondered how do we have the balls, all of us, to walk around with our faces, these great meat plates, every thought baldly plastered across them? He looked so forlorn. It’s indecent, really, that we go about with these beacons stuck permanently on, flashing out everything to the whole world.
Whatever re-alignment or catharsis the three of them had been looking for down by the river hadn’t come out right. Sara put her arm round Shannon’s neck from behind. We pulled away, following the kick of the front Toyota.
*
When you break up there are a lot of different departures, but usually one solidifies in memory as the archetypal essence of the whole fucking mess. Somehow with me and Helen, it ended with her leaving at night in a taxicab. I was the one who was going to leave our rented flat first, so she could stay and pack up before returning to the borderlands, back to her mum and dad’s place at the end of the valley. But that night, she was going over to her friend Yvette’s, leaving me behind to put my stuff into cardboard boxes. We’d parted hard during various arguments. Some days she left for work with things so gloomy and oppressive that the weight pushed me small all day, till she came back to our little house to find it pressurised like a diving bell. But of all our various endings, that taxi departure felt like the one. It cost money, and also it was done without emotion.
Penny had kicked it off, though I don’t think she knew it. After a big peace-play meeting, we’d driven to Rusholme together to buy relief supplies in the Indian supermarkets. We prodded sceptically at various sacks of rice, and I ended up sluttishly spilling my feelings about Helen and the whole situation: her probable, well, definite, infidelities, the ways we didn’t match up quite right (I didn’t mention the ways we did, as I looked up from under my indie-boy fringe, like Princess Diana). I felt, as we walked back to her Fiat Panda, like I’d gone over the top; slit the belly of a ewe and let the whole disgusting mess of the thing disgorge in front of her. But she didn’t seem to take it that way. She took it in her stride and didn’t say anything dramatic like ‘Leave her’ or ‘Why do you put up with that?’; the only thing she did to express any opinion at all, as I recall, was to make a face at one point.
Right after I’d laid it all out and said, ‘Ah well, maybe that’s just what I have to put up with?’ – that’s when she did it: she made a curl of her lip and I felt a crack zigzag through me. It wasn’t a big intervention – I’m not sure she knew she’d made it (though she definitely did) – but it was enough. At once I saw it all through her eyes, with a bit of perspective. A definitive declaration – I was being fucked over. And in addition, wasn’t I also getting a hint that I shouldn’t be treated this way? That someone else wouldn’t do this to me?
*
As the van farted off Sara massaged Shannon’s shoulders and the two of them looked only forward. They started to discuss how well everything was going and how amazing we all were and how everything was so exciting in a kind of balming call-and-response chant.
The road out of Velkia Kladusa was flat and wide. White vehicles from the French UN garrison buzzed past us a couple of times like hover vehicles from Star Wars, inhabiting a cleaner parallel reality. At the very edge of town there was a vast and churning cement works where men seemed to work still. The compound next to it was a big Agrokomerc food-processing plant. It featured a central tower, an oblong of narrow steel-framed windows extending up many storeys against a grey, rendered exterior. It all looked New Dealish and socialist-honourable. Then, as the commercial stuff receded, we rolled down into a happy valley of fat cows and sheep.
I looked at the briefcase at my feet. And then, with an almost physical convulsion, the fear that had been abstract for the last day suddenly flipped itself into a solid realisation: it was a bomb. It was clearly a total fucking bomb.
The best – almost the only – defence against concluding that it was a bomb was that no one else had suggested it might be. Everyone knew I’d been asked to make this delivery. I’d told them and no one had raised a fear. They’d all seen
it arrive and me carry it aboard. Perhaps it was too obvious? To send your enemy a bomb with a timer, or a switch set off by opening or some such – that was too much like a child’s game. No one would actually attempt it, would they?
Surely it was too risky? What if it was set off accidentally by a jolt in the van, or poor manufacture? How could Babo trust we wouldn’t check? Unless, of course, he considered us to be what we certainly were: entirely expendable.
The more I considered The Case of the Case Between My Legs, the more it seemed that there could be no very good reason for thinking it was anything other than a bomb. It ballooned down there in the footwell, filling my consciousness. It tick-tocked its silence, and my intimate relation to its hard edges, its cheap lock, made me nauseous. Every glance down I blinked into my last ever look, the blast triggered by a little road bump. Using my calves, I cushioned the bomb with all my concentration. But I said nothing. I had accepted the item, therefore I swallowed up the fear for the gang. I was a little Jesus. So that my friends could chat and buzz, I suffered the agonies on my plastic-seat cross, nailed to the spot with a stupid smile across my face.
*
I’d noticed the twang in Bev’s accent at the river camp, but hadn’t chosen to explore it. Up in the north English-Welsh Marches the pitch of accent gets squeezed four ways: from the south, swelling it up, comes something West Country, slow and rural; from the east, the Midlands, a doltish murmur; from the west, a Welsh rhythm that’s made hard under the pressure from above: Merseyside and the black rock of Corwen and Ruthin pushing down. So it pops up, this dialect bubble, as something you might name Hard-Country-Lilting-Stupid.
Bev had it. And in the corners of my mouth, so did I. Enough for Bev to ask me as we settled into the drive, ‘Where you from, mate, by the way?’
‘Chirk way.’
‘Yeah, I thought you sounded like a twat,’ he said affectionately. ‘Who do you know? Do you know any lads?’
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 20