‘What, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin fans?’ she said.
Bev was bumped, but then got it and laughed heartily, and what Penny had intended as a roadblock appeared to Bev to be an invitation to enter into foreign country.
‘Yeah. But – what’s it actually like to be black then?’ Bev said, and seeing Penny’s reticence, continued encouragingly. ‘I mean, I can see it, you can see it, it’s right there in front of our faces, it’s all right to say, isn’t it?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Penny said. ‘I’ve given up trying to hide it.’
Bev exploded with a laugh, his face all red. And I winced because I could see he now felt he was on the verge of a frank exchange on the topic of race relations such as had never been attempted in all history.
‘But what’s it actually like, being black and that?’
‘I don’t know, Bev. What’s it like being white?’
‘Fucking good question. Brilliant question. Yeah.’ Bev considered. ‘It’s just normal.’
I smiled at Penny and tried to deflect Bev into talking about the quality of Bosnian beer. But he wasn’t easily deterred. He was still worrying away at the brilliant question of what it was, like, actually like to be black?
Was Bev a racist? I wondered to myself as he pursued the question. He certainly had that thing that is not necessarily racism but also very much not the absence of racism, characterised by too much interest in race. Pre-racism: the classification, the bringing up, like a bad burp, of jokes about racial characteristics – old ones, imagined ones, ironised ones, non-ironised ones – to consider them anew. Racist words, what they meant, who could use them, why he couldn’t? So you felt in the end that his violin only had one string and you started to wonder if he couldn’t maybe play something else.
‘Yeah, white is normal for me, black’s normal for you, isn’t it?’ Bev was saying, with a satisfied sense he was heir to Dr King, before he then felt able to push the point. ‘But some of the shit your lot get up to, fair dos, I’m only saying this because we’re on a level, but it’s fucking disgusting?’
‘How do you mean?’ Penny asked.
‘Are these litres? I think they’re litres,’ I said. ‘Is a litre more than a pint?’
‘What some of these guys get up to? Gives you all a bad name.’
‘Is a litre more than a pint?’ I asked insistently.
‘Yes. What specifically are you thinking of, Bev?’ said Penny and drank down a swirling half-litre.
‘Oh, don’t give me that, mate, fucking, you know. Muggers, rapes, etc. You can’t be up for all that is all I’m saying?’
‘Oh fuck off,’ Penny said.
‘I thought we were on the level?’
‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’
‘We were on the level,’ Bev said, confused and menacing.
‘What level?’ Penny said.
‘On the level.’
‘I don’t know what you mean!’
‘All right, let’s fucking have it out then!’ Bev said.
As Penny got up, I stepped across in front of her and hustled her down the corridor and out of the bar.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.
*
‘He’s basically a good bloke, in a way – we all are, aren’t we? – but he is all right,’ I found myself saying towards the end of a long attack on Bev which accidentally turned into a hymn to common humanity.
‘I don’t think he is,’ Penny said.
‘No, you’re right. You’re right, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘But he could have been? I mean, he’s horrible and wrong, but he needn’t have been.’
‘What, if everything was different?’
‘Yeah. I mean, I know up there, and he’s just ended up like that, when really I bet he could have been, he sort of is, in a way, all right?”
‘Why do you keep saying he’s all right?’ Penny asked.
‘I don’t know. He’s a dickhead. I don’t know.’
As we made it to the kerb outside the hotel, she tripped one of those violent drunken trips where you fly to the floor before you know it. I bent to help her but she just rolled over on her back before scrambling to her knees and then a squat and finally, shakily, up, like she was an alien entity surprised to find herself in human form, with no idea how these limbs she’d been equipped with worked.
I sat on the wall with her and we waved goodnight to Christian as he passed. There was a riled-up and unfinished air to the atmosphere between us. We were both very drunk and we kept returning to how scared we’d been when the shells were landing, and what the dead woman in the river had looked like.
At the hotel we took more beer from behind the bar and I lifted my blue M&S T-shirt up to pull some Deutschmarks out. My tummy flashed bare for a second. Penny flicked a slap at it with the back of her hand. I laughed, tried to catch her hand, and then, having stuffed not quite enough money into the box, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to slide towards our room and start kissing at the door and fall inside.
Penny pulled me onto her on one of the single metal beds. She kissed me hard, but I kept finding myself slipping away from the moment, back to the bar, or forward to tomorrow and how clearly I might be able to remember the current moment.
It seemed we had an unnaturally large number of layers of fabric to deal with, and getting them off or aside or out of the way was surprisingly complicated and irritating. I was twanging at a lot of elastic and shuffling socks off my own feet and maybe hers, while somehow the fibrous blanket over the rough sheet wedged itself up between us and scratched at my bare chest. Eventually, though, we got sufficient portions of ourselves naked that we could lock in and she rocked me between her legs.
My dream had come true. But like a child on their birthday morning who joylessly unwraps the present they have moithered for all year, it seemed I’d imagined the moment out of being. I wanted to be lost in the passion of it, but I needed to piss again.
My cock doinged off her thigh, a blunt instrument that then prodded to find the good groove and, failing to nuzzle any purchase, like a branch under tension, bounced up, and flopped onto her belly. Penny was lusty but abandoned, not at all focused on helping me. She left me to tackle the mechanics while she waited for the good stuff to happen. I felt like a man in the rain, struggling to get the jump leads set up right so the engine will fire, while the other car owner absolved themselves of responsibility, waiting in the warm.
‘Simon?’ she said.
‘What!’ I said.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What. It’s Andrew,’ I said. ‘Yeah?’
‘Andy?’
‘Did you say Simon?’ I said, shrinking in my own hand like a burst lilo.
‘Andy. Simon?’ she said.
‘Andy. It’s Andy.’
‘I know,’ she said, quite pissed off all of a sudden.
‘You – just – I think you said Simon?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You did.’
From there on in, we misfired. She came on strong, angry-horny and pressing hard, which got me going a bit, but after a while she faded strongly, like a marathon runner hitting the wall, and left me feeling I was being over-ardent. Then I worried again she didn’t exactly know that I was me rather than my rival, so I said her name a lot to prompt her to respond with mine, which she did from time to time.
Slowly, like a once vibrant religion, whose believers end up tempted away by less demanding philosophies, the sex died out. Each of us kindling it again for a moment, but then forgetting what it was we believed in. As the last embers cooled I forced a bump of excitement and squirmed out a curlicue of wallpaper paste onto her belly before drifting into one of those tiny sleeps you jerk out of suddenly. At some point, Penny untacked our bellies and moved down to her bed.
I looked at the beautiful twist and bow of her side, where adolescent growth had stretched her long and lighter spangles of pulled-skin had opened up. I suddenly saw how disastrously things had gone and t
ried to make a clean start, going over and kissing the top of her head, but it felt dry and unresponsive and it was all wrong. She kissed me with a gentle pushing-off pressure that sent me to the bathroom to sit on the toilet and feel the room swing around me, slow and sad.
Chapter 30
SHE WAS GONE when I woke up. As soon as I came to, I raised my head off the pillow and saw where she wasn’t with an urgency that lit up the red-hot shovelful of wet cement that filled my head. I tried to stay totally still. Left my head cocked like a gun dog, to stop my poor liquid brain from slopping up against my skull, throbbing for release.
There’s a special slab of dead meat that sits in your gut on the morning of a truly terrible hangover. While your head crackles with an unfriendly fizz, the slab pumps out a venom. And the venom transmits a message of terrible foreboding: something awful happened. Something dreadful, last night, and all is lost. Usually some Coca-Colas and the passing of the hours eats up the bad meat. But on especially horrible mornings you feel that something awful happened the previous evening not just because you are full of poison, but also because it did.
In the hotel buffet room Von and Cally sat together, him morosely squirting mustard and tomato ketchup sachets onto a paper plate, where Cally was mixing and using them to ‘paint’ another plate. But neither of them was able to soothe me or help reconstruct the evening. Penny, they said, had upped and gone with the rest to start rehearsing. I tasted one sip of bitter coffee and placed a dry cut of baguette in my mouth. Unable to chew, I tried to suck some sustenance from it, but nothing came and I took the bread out of my mouth and left it on the wood-effect plastic tabletop. I followed Cally and Von out, stomach churning, limping with self-loathing.
Bihac was tired, huddled and shell-wrecked. Yet the main drag of the town still bustled. No vehicles came through, so the many peasant-farmer women in headscarves and men with trousers tucked into boots gathered in the road, all vibrating with a nervous listlessness. They intermingled everywhere with young folk, students in bad denim, band T-shirts and white trainer-boots. I walked by like a young lady at a finishing school, trying to keep a pile of books on her head. My cargo was more volatile; if I nudged my brain in its box I felt it would pull a rip cord in my stomach and I would throw myself up, throw myself inside out.
There was no electricity most places, gunshot splatter across every expanse of exterior plaster and render. Many buckets. Generators here and there. Huddles of people with nothing to huddle over. No products to seek. People had blankets laid out with a few wares to sell or exchange. Nothing really of value; there was no diesel or bread or booze on the blankets, just piles of stuff the owners could live without.
We headed into the complex of municipal buildings that was to host the play, built in a higgledy-piggledy modernist tumble in the centre of the old town. The clerks looked reproachful as we asked where to find our friends.
‘Will you tell Clinton how we live?’ one of them said, to which Von helpfully answered, numbly, ‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘I think it was a rhetorical question, Von,’ I said.
‘These poor fuckers,’ he said. ‘They’re trapped. They just have to fucking take it and starve. What fun is that?’
‘No fun. It’s true. It’s no fun.’
The room we were to rehearse and perform in had a high ceiling like a school assembly hall, a stage under a proscenium arch, and chairs stacked all around the walls. Several holes in the fabric of the building had been patched up with breeze blocks and mortar – from the inside, so the repairs were more like the patching of a sandcastle with handfuls of wet sand than proper building work.
Once Shannon saw the three of us arriving she called us down to the front and shuffled herself to sit on the stage at the centre of our troupe. She wanted to make a little speech. I looked over to Penny, but she was fixed on Shannon, lips parted as though she might mouth along to her address.
We should be proud, Shannon said, of getting to Bihac. Then she stood up and started to prowl the stage in full Colorado Rocky Mountain lion mode. ‘We should be proud of ourselves for refusing to listen to the cynical voices of inertia.’
Penny, eyes fixed forward in admiration, smiled at her. I smiled too.
‘We believe in peace and we have seen on our travels that peace can happen. Even here, even now, communities, Serb, Croat and Muslim, can still cooperate. Tonight, we perform to the people of this town. And we have reason to believe that our performance here could push things just a little, nudge them perhaps, towards peace.’ She went on to say that she had had another idea, if we wanted to hear? That if peace did not arrive, perhaps then we should consider staying in Bihac? All of us, ‘even, perhaps especially, if the situation deteriorates?’ Shannon imagined we might become what she called ‘hostages to ourselves’ – who, like cyclists on a motorway, might terrify the powerful with our vulnerability. ‘If the world – if our parents – fails to see that real people are dying here perhaps they might care if it’s their own sons and daughters? Intervention, decisive intervention, is what is needed, we all know that. But they are too cynical to come. But we can make them come. We will make them come!’
We all clapped the speech and went to find the scripts we were supposed to no longer need. Looking at the words numbly, I walked up behind Penny and touched a hand out to her waist, but the way she turned, outwards, away from the hand, suggested that there was no continuum from last night. We were starting afresh, with no base camp of intimacy.
‘Are you feeling OK?’ I asked.
‘No. I feel like death,’ she said.
‘Me too, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘Just a – a generalised apology for being – I don’t know. I feel terrible, and I have a feeling it didn’t, we didn’t . . . It wasn’t what – perhaps – I just think . . . I wasn’t . . .?’ This was actually a pretty lucid expression of my feelings.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘we were so drunk.’
‘Yeah,’ I said and looked at my feet, wriggling my toes in my Dunlop Green Flash, feeling I was letting too much of the evening fall into the category of things which were to be written off as no good and broken.
‘I mean, it was fun but – just I was a bit drunk,’ I said.
‘I was very, very, very drunk,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ I pretended to laugh and then turned away and did a tiny gulp’s worth of sick into my mouth. I headed out quickly to find a toilet as prickles of sweat forced themselves out over my entire body – I could feel the dewy specks, viscous with the resin of self-loathing, coating me entirely. I made it into a room that looked right and threw up into a dry toilet bowl. No water came from any tap.
It wasn’t much of an extra burden I was putting on the besieged enclave, but the fact that up to this point my net contribution to their difficult situation had been to drink a good deal of the beer that was presumably not easy to come by, and then throw it up in a government building with no water connection, did not feel great.
I snuck away from rehearsal and back to bed, telling Von I was off to finally nail my lines. I did try, lying on the metal bed at the hotel like it was my own personal torture rack, twisting and turning, looking in vain for a calm stretch of pillow until my restlessness itself tired out and I subsided into sleep.
*
I made it back just in time for the dress rehearsal. Shannon had decided that we should forget the stage and perform our play in the round. A set of chairs was arranged around the walls but most of the townspeople were to be invited to sit cross-legged in concentric circles on the floor.
The dress rehearsal was such a shambolic effort that the fact I hardly knew my words was entirely lost in the barrage of missed cues and recriminations. That I said anything at all, at roughly the right points, put me on the side of the angels, so I was able to sit on the stage in between my few scenes and smile supportively as Shannon marched around, her hair swinging wildly when she wasn’t tugging on it in frustration.
‘Do you want this war to succeed?’ Sara, the assistant director, shouted at Christian at one point, when he left the stage area in the wrong direction. ‘Do you want this play to fail? Do you enjoy people being killed?’
To which he answered, ‘No.’
Simon had been appointed lighting director. There was still power in the building and with some extension cords and desk lamps, a few interior effects were being attempted and two shocking blackouts. He missed the cues for both. The poor guy was working from a handwritten version of the script, the photocopies being a suddenly valuable commodity. There was neither copier nor paper available in Bihac, or at least not to us. Once the dress rehearsal had ended – with Sara standing in front of Cally repeating the word ‘no’ many many times, staring at the top of her bowed head until Cally started softly crying – Shannon called everyone to order. There would be another dress rehearsal immediately, she announced.
But since the ‘soldiers’ had performed adequately I was given a small number of rewrites to complete while Penny discussed higher matters and ‘performance notes’ with Shannon and Sara. Von, our narrator, was also released to look for missing props: a replica gun, a candle, a child’s teddy bear, and some stage blood or ‘Kensington Gore’, as Sara revelled in calling it, as though the term was common knowledge.
The style of the play, a kind of phoney minimalism, meant the few speeches which weren’t composed in this style stuck out badly. I fixed them by changing things like ‘The bread is fine and chewy this morning, Ivana. Is Mr Tomic using a new recipe?’ to ‘Good bread. Bread is good. [Satisfied tearing at the crusts].’ I finished the changes in under five minutes and then strolled the building, noting that there was in fact a working photocopier in one office.
Outside, Bev and Von were smoking cigarettes with a man and woman from the Bihac European Community Monitoring Mission – charged with observing and reporting compliance with the non-existent ceasefire. They invited the three of us in to their sandbagged bunker near the town council offices and made coffee as they asked about developments in the UK indie music scene. Yves, with fine sandy hair and red-rimmed eyelids, delicate and rabbit-gentle, was attuned enough to the pop and whizz of sniper bullets and the random sprays that raked into town that, even over a mixtape of jittery techno, he could hear enough to say, ‘Two Deutschmarks, four Deutschmarks, six Deutschmarks,’ counting off the cost of each incoming round, while Elsa, stubby and sparkly, with bright blue eyes, marked down the shots as bars on a tally. It was comforting that someone was keeping count.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 24