Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  ‘Just – not really.’

  ‘I’m Shrewsbury. I was EBF,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Right.’ The English Border Front.

  ‘Right. I was. But I changed my firm in the end.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Fucking – just my mum went to live somewhere else from my old fucking man, so I ended up Llangollen, Wrexham Frontline?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I stuttered. ‘Yes. I worked outside Wrexham for a bit, in Gwersyllt, the supermarket, night shifts. Stock lad?’

  ‘Then you’ll know fucking, Sion and Neil?’

  ‘Er? No? Maybe? I think I –?’ Sion had held, while Neil screwed his knee in my face.

  ‘Yeah. Wankers.’

  I laughed, non-committal.

  ‘Fucking hell. How did you end up here, you sheep-shagger?’

  ‘I met these lot in Manchester,’ I said.

  ‘Student?’

  ‘These are, yeah. I was working on building, fucking, yuppie flats.’

  ‘All right, and what are you, a chippie, a brickie?’

  ‘No – fucking, general. I mixed the muck. But – good money up there.’ I could feel Penny regarding me. ‘Fucking good, great fucking – independent arts scene and that,’ I continued.

  ‘Tidy,’ he said.

  ‘Tidy,’ I agreed.

  As we drove on in silence, I wondered whether Bev might be someone I could confide in about the briefcase? His big shoulders under his black T-shirt spoke of a bull’s power packed into a human’s skin. Just looking at the red swelling spots across his neck you could feel their angry tautness, the pressure of the pus mantel beneath. He might be acquainted with explosives, able to think straight about life and death. But also . . . he might go wrong. Some men you can’t ask for advice safely, not real advice, because they can’t live in ambiguity. They can’t not know – even when they don’t know – for even a breath. They leap on a solution too quickly and then get tied up, confused between their advice and themselves, and their whole aim becomes having their counsel taken up. Any consideration or hesitation is taken as rebuke. So if I asked and he said we must throw the briefcase out of the window, that is what we would have to do, or else turn the situation into a trial of wills. And that would, in turn, colour his every other decision, and we might end up being made to drive into an ammunition dump, on fire, to be taught an obscure lesson about trusting his wisdom.

  The valley we travelled was shallow and a stream ran beside the road for the miles before we hit the small town of Mala Kladusa. The blacked-out burnt-through houses started to appear only gradually, an infection that took hold slowly the further we got from Velika.

  Most of the houses were the square, red-brick, almost Alpine villa-farms, large, simple Playmobil designs. Between two of these, up a little drive, we saw a smaller bungalow – a flat-roofed oddity, burnt and empty and turned into an X-ray of its own structure. The back wall was knocked down, so, as we travelled past, for a moment you could squint right through from its missing front door to violent, green nettles growing behind. On the road nearby, a group of four male pensioners stood looking seriously at a piece of engine lying black and oily in the centre of their huddle as they encouraged a boy of twelve or so to investigate it with a stick. Which one of you bastards burnt your neighbour out? I wondered – wanting to let rip the accelerator on revulsion, at the same time as pushing the brake down hard on a quick judgement. Everything is complicated. Everything is simple. It depends how far away you stand, I suppose.

  A little later, out of nowhere, Bev said, ‘Yeah, a direct hit from a shell will basically turn you inside out.’ This seemed to be a perfectly acceptable opening conversational gambit to him. ‘Your lungs, your guts, your intestines, still full of shit, burst inside out.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ I said. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘yeah. It’s like a fucking fig or a watermelon, smushed up.’ Christian and Penny glanced at me.

  ‘Hmm. That’s quite a thing,’ I said, looking at Penny, trying to broaden this disgusting discussion to the floor for input.

  Then, as we rode up towards the small settlement of Pecigrad, Bev announced we were about to hit ‘sniper alley’.

  ‘Sniper alley?’ asked Onomatopoeic Bob.

  ‘Yeah, this is the main road. This is what it’s all about – they’ve moved up and down here like a whore’s drawers,’ said Bev, relishing the fear that rippled through the van.

  ‘But they – they wouldn’t hit us on purpose, would they? I mean, sniper alley, actual, proper sniper alley is in Sarajevo, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘They popped a UN Frog,’ Bev said.

  ‘They killed a peacekeeper?’ Shannon asked.

  ‘Yup. In March. Fuck knows what they didn’t like about him.’

  ‘Will they shoot at us?’ Von said. ‘Who would shoot at us?’

  ‘Oh yeah, fuck yeah. The Serbs on a recce. The 5th Corps have been known to have a pop. Babo’s Velika mob, practice. Fun.’

  We all looked at one another, I guess checking if we were ready for this, if this was what we’d come for, to run this gauntlet. But Shannon didn’t look back, or across at Bob, who kept glancing at her. So eventually we all looked ahead too.

  The 5th Corps, the Bosnian Army unit left in Bihac and the surrounding pocket of land, was comprised of seven to ten thousand men, according to Bev. He sketched out how the 5th Corps faced Bosnian Serb forces to the east and south, Krajinan Serb forces to the west and Babo’s Velika Kladusa Autonomous Province forces to the north.

  ‘It doesn’t sound good,’ said Penny.

  ‘They’re fucked, to be honest, love,’ said Bev. ‘They should get into bed with Babo, I reckon. Most of them want to.’

  As Bev talked snipers, I slid myself down in my seat in what I hoped was an unobtrusive fashion. There is no shame in being afraid of death, I don’t think, but there is somehow a shame in being amateurish about it. Fine to wear body armour, shaming to be found to have packed your chest, as I had that morning, with the last couple of Independents pulled from your blue rucksack. Similarly there is no shame in saying, ‘Everyone lie on the floor, get down,’ as Bev did eventually, but that premature selfish slide hurt me in Penny’s eyes, I reckoned. She looked over and smiled quizzically at my slump, then got it, tapped Cally on the leg, and did likewise.

  As we made it through Pecigrad there was a gunshot. It didn’t hit us. It may not even have been aimed at us. We might easily have not realised it was gunfire without Bev. Inside the van it sounded like a distant pop, rather jolly, and then we heard the whizz of an irate insect on the pop’s tail. By then we had all been lying across the van’s floor for some time, in a pattern I dubbed ‘crazy herringbone’. Von was on top of me, his belly across my bum, making me feel protected, the bottom child in a fight-cuddle-scrum. Christian’s white Reeboks were near enough to my face that I could see the Union Jack stitched into the tongue in minute detail. Penny’s face had ended up close enough to mine that I turned my hot breath away from her in case it wasn’t fresh. My cheek lay flat on the cool briefcase as I supported it from underneath. If it blew now, it would take me head first.

  ‘Bob, you are OK driving, aren’t you? Bob?’ Shannon asked.

  ‘Pull over, mate, if you need to,’ I shouted up.

  But he said nothing, and we trucked on, listening for the next pop and whizz.

  I did truly believe that it was important that something was done – about the situation, about Bosnia. That was the prayer I said to myself to remind me why I was lying there. I was even willing to say I would, theoretically, lay down my life. The problem was that before I did any definitive laying down, I would prefer to see all the facts and figures laid out. Because if by some dash across a checkpoint I could get three thousand, or even just three hundred, women and children to safety, if I could shield the last infantryman as he planted the final flag of multi-ethnic victory, then yes – I was willing to let my brain say, at least – I would make the sacrifice. But get
ting my throat shot out by a sniper on my way to see The Three Amigos badly dubbed at an open-air screening? That wasn’t really for me. And nor was going out here, sweating and smelling on the bottom of Christian’s trainer the remnants of what I thought might be good old British dog shit.

  There was another pop and Cally made an odd noise that it took me a beat to clock as fear. From on top of me, Von stretched his arm out and his big soft hand took hers. And Penny raised her head to peck a kiss down on my cheek because I think I too might have made a little whimper.

  Soon, the light coming into the van altered, Onomatopoeic Bob chugged us back a couple of gears and we rose out of the most exposed part of the road.

  ‘Should be all right now,’ Bev said and I didn’t have the heart to overly query the qualifications around this reassurance. Instead we all shuffled back upright, to see a temporary roadblock of tyres and planks and barbed wire ahead.

  ‘They haven’t got time to be fucking around, these are front-line boys,’ Bev explained.

  As our convoy pulled up, the soldiers, all smoking cigarettes, looked in at each vehicle cool and hard, making out they were predators and we were prey. Beside the roadblock a tape player rested on top of a metal saw bench, blowing battery-powered Bruce Springsteen into the summer morning. A few of the soldiers wore uniforms bearing the crossed-sword badge of Babo’s Autonomous Province. One man, despite the growing heat, had a long coat that looked Second World War, Russian. He was short and the coat went all the way to the floor so he resembled an undersized wizard. I sensed, hoped, that they cared a bit too much for their rough look to be real killers. And yet – this supposed, I guess, there was something somehow authentic about a killer.

  In the car ahead of us, the CO said something to the lead roadblock officer. It didn’t look like a difficult negotiation; it seemed they had received advance warning of our convoy and we got waved through without offering our papers. As we filed through the soldiers stared in hard and frank at the women. Shannon stared right back.

  It was just a kilometre or two until we reached the hamlet of Skokovi, where we would pass though the mirror to the other side, into the pocket of territory protected by the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  ‘It’s changed hands three or four times,’ Bev said as we arrived.

  Skokovi was the most brutally and recently fucked of any village we’d seen. The houses were all burnt out entirely and what remained of the blackened masonry was badly shot up. The tarmac was chewed with bomb, mortar and grenade craters and caterpillar-track indentations. The houses that you could tell were once houses had ended up as open-sided sheep pens or cowsheds. The single remaining staircase, as on a stage set, led nowhere. All over the place, interior decoration, wallpaper and woodworked details never intended for exposure to the elements were forced to make new accommodations.

  At the outer edge of the village was a UN armoured personnel carrier. We stopped up. They looked at us, waiting for a question, and we looked at them, expecting to be challenged. But as Shannon stepped off to demand free passage it became clear that they had no mandate to check our progress. The lack of intercession left me feeling mournful: the authorities were no longer interested in safeguarding our well-being; we were outside the pale, swimming free. This was a land beyond jurisdiction, where no papers obtained.

  Bev got us all to lie on the floor of the van once again as we exited Skokovi. I tried to position myself so my head would be near Penny’s again, in case more kisses of reassurance were available; or so that I could ask to marry her if I was hit in the belly by a sniper’s bullet. Onomatopoeic Bob, the captain of the ship, could officiate, and maybe then I might pull through against the odds and we’d still be married and we could tell our kids how it happened on the deck of a Transit in Bosnia. But this time I was late down and my groin ended up between Von’s spread legs. My head was on the small of Christian’s back and Penny was a way off, nearer the back doors.

  The van bumped onto bad road, and I clutched the briefcase tight, hoping very hard that it wouldn’t blow. For a half-kilometre or so, I pretty much equally prayed the vibrations didn’t shake the blood into my bone so that I ended up with a hard-on rubbing against Von’s legs. Even in a battle zone he wouldn’t observe any decorum about not mentioning it and in a flash I imagined my embarrassing hard-on both remarked upon, revealed, and then, immediately after, blown clean off, twirling through the summer air like a cheerleader’s baton.

  Once we were back on smoother road, there was a murmur from the front and the van halted. We sat back up in the seats to see the first glimmer of the Bosnian state embodied by a man with no left eye, a decent military uniform and a purple Miami Dolphins baseball cap. Even I recognised that the weapon he carried was not quite of the modern era.

  ‘What is that gun?’ I asked Bev.

  ‘Second World War,’ Bev said, and some additional information about calibres and so on.

  While Shannon focused on talking to Miami Dolphins in broken English about the transformative possibilities of theatre, suddenly, from out of their jeeps, front and back, the mercenaries were on the floor, pulled and forced down onto the road, spreadeagled, their guns kicked, swivelling and skittering on the tarmac, while all around them Bosnian soldiers shouted unfriendly instructions very loud and very fast.

  Chapter 27

  BEV HAD NO weapon visible, so he was left in the van with us while the CO, Jonno, Chapstick and Mad Mike were patted down and had all their small items confiscated.

  Shannon tried to explain that they were just guarding us during our journey. To which Miami Dolphins replied, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. We don’t shoot them now.’ Which I hoped was intended to be more reassuring than it sounded. There were three Bosnian soldiers at the front jeep, four at the back one. The ones at the front got the CO and Jonno to crawl on their hands and knees towards Mad Mike and Chapstick by the back jeep. I smiled supportively at them as they passed, but the CO didn’t care to look up. All four of them were then ordered to roll and shuffle like seals on a beach till they were in a line.

  ‘Is it OK?’ I asked Bev.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Miami Dolphins was clearly not the commanding officer. The top guy seemed to be a man in a soft beret and aviators. He looked lean and engaged and, unlike a lot of the soldiers we’d seen around, as though he might be quite good at war. While he asked questions of the mercenaries on the floor, he constantly surveyed the scene up and down the road. He soaked up everything and emanated a deep knowledge that the circumstances of any one second could be vastly different to those of the previous. He said something final to one of his soldiers, a gentle-faced man, a baker without hat or bread, and stepped aside to consult with Miami Dolphins.

  The baker and a troop of six other soldiers got the mercenaries to their feet and marched them to the side of the road towards some birch trees. The guy in aviators supervised the collection of the weapons left on the road.

  If I was one of the soldiers in the baker’s squad and he said ‘the big man says shoot them, shoot this scum’ or something, I wouldn’t want to. I’d hate to. God knows what nightmares you’d suffer after. But honestly, in the moment? Wouldn’t it be simpler, less fuss, to squeeze the finger a few times and hope you didn’t get the burial detail? Wouldn’t it be a bit self-regarding to refuse; almost like suggesting everyone else enjoyed it? Of course they didn’t. It was a job to be done and to excuse yourself would be pernickety. To privilege your own purity over the dirty job in hand, it would make you look like you thought you were some small-time saint.

  ‘Are they – are they going to be OK? They’re our friends,’ Shannon said out of the window to Miami Dolphins. He glanced at the guy with the shades, who came over to us. He let us know the order of priorities by handing Miami Dolphins a length of hosepipe, which he took down to the back of the van, where he removed the petrol cap and fed the pipe down into the tank.

  ‘Umm . . .?’ Shannon said.

  ‘I am Ejup,’ said the
boss. ‘Those men will not be hurt. They will be sent back. We are taking their weapons and vehicles. You are the Americans on a peace mission, yes?’

  ‘British. And American. And we are bringing a theatrical piece to change the situation here?’

  ‘Yes. You have word from Babo?’

  Shannon looked back at me.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I have something for – for the commander,’ I said, passing forward our letter and holding tight my case, rather reluctant to give up the bomb for the moment.

  ‘Is he taking all our gas?’ Shannon asked. The man in the Dolphins cap had just, to the amusement of a couple of buddies, got a mouthful of diesel as he started the siphoning.

  ‘We need diesel. You will have enough to make it to Bihac. The rest we need.’

  When he had sucked enough of our juice to fill three old motor-oil containers, Miami Dolphins held the hose high to stop the fuel coming and Ejup waved for us to depart.

  Shannon looked at Bev to see what he made of it. ‘I think we go, shall we go?’ she said.

  Bev held quiet for a long beat. I feared he was going to say something like ‘You take the big guy! I’ll handle the other three.’ But he had no plan, no secret man knowledge, and he just squinted through the birch trees to where his friends were lined up and said, ‘I hope they’ll be all right.’

  ‘They’ll be all right,’ Bob offered.

  And then there was a burst of gunfire, close and loud. In the van we all ducked and Ejup waved us off. Bob put his foot down. As we looked back we saw the mercenaries run out of the wood and back up the road towards Pecigrad and Velika Kladusa.

  ‘Are they . . .?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think . . . I think it’s warning shots?’ Bev said.

  ‘Is it?’ Shannon said.

  ‘If they were going to do something, they’d wait for us to go. Wouldn’t they?’ I said, not wanting a war crime. As I counted up, it looked like three, then four – definitely all four I was pretty sure – made it to the road. They ran, stumbling, away. Bob calmed the pace as we humped over the hill and began to wind down through fine trees on a steady steepish descent towards the largest town before Bihac: Cazin.