Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  ‘It works on different levels,’ Sara was explaining.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘There’s a level below what’s happening. It’s actually saying, take a look. Stop just for a moment and think about your common humanity.’

  ‘I suppose for the people here – the message of peace . . . it’s a little more complicated?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ the professor said.

  ‘Everything’s always too fucking complicated,’ Sara said.

  ‘Yes,’ the professor said and looked like he was willing to leave it at that.

  ‘Peace? Yeah? You understand?’ Sara said.

  ‘Peace. Yes, very good, peace,’ he said. ‘Do not shoot today the man who wants to come kill you and your wife tomorrow?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Sara said, distracted, looking over at Shannon.

  Von walked past us and did a clasping handshake with a smile and a wink which pressed into my palm a little white pill. He certainly knew timing. We were at the top of something and he had the hedonist’s urge to push everything to the maximum. Most beautiful sunset ever? How about seeing it stoned! Breaking into the crypt at midnight? Why not trip while you go! Sara gobbled hers without hesitation, and after looking over at Penny and Shannon, so did I.

  I peered over at Penny and Simon to check they were not ‘sorting everything out’, which was my great fear. But no, he had walked off to congratulate Christian on his performance. Penny talked fervently with Shannon, and when she glanced over at Simon there was no warmth, I reckoned. He gestured to her queryingly when Von gave him a pill, but she gave the shortest smile and glanced back to Shannon. It looked like my poetics had created a virtuously vicious circle, whereby she was reluctant to engage in the very conversations which would allow the details of my sabotage to be revealed.

  I did fear, though, the effect that Ecstasy might have. After all, I thought, a hippy or BBC television had told me that it had started out as a relationship drug in some Swiss castle to help Hemingway types express their difficult feelings to their distant wives. But this worry was itself chased away by the first effects of the pill, the twinkle of moon dust popping candy drifting up my back.

  I was pretty good at drugs. Rural provincial nothingy England doesn’t offer you much, but if you want, it will teach you how to roll a very straight joint and say yes to any pill that comes to hand. That’s the basic skill of drug taking. Saying yes. Not too much fucking around. I could see Cally was meandering around the question, holding her pill in her palm and talking to Christian, who was also looking for little clues on the surface of his pill, asking it the amateur’s question: Will you kill me?

  Von pushed out beyond the gang to offer his stash to local girls who’d stayed hanging around, and – where he had to – boys. Bob, meanwhile, wrestled with the audio leads to connect our Sanyo tape player to the hall’s PA system. It came to life in a very loud burst of familiar magnetic-tape wobble we all knew from the van. Then, in a way that would have felt embarrassingly literal if I wasn’t in the midst of getting all that kind of self-consciousness washed away, as the vocal came in, and Bobby Gillespie sang that he was moving on up, I started to come up on my pill.

  *

  The party never started very clearly. At first it was us standing around. There was a little white wine in thin plastic cups; Yves and Elsa from the bunker congratulated us; there were still many municipal folk in the room; adults, I think, at that point. Most of those people started to evaporate when the music kicked in and even if they didn’t know what exactly was happening, they felt the atmosphere change as the first off-kilter smiles went round.

  Then there was a bad road bump: I clocked that Von was being questioned by a municipal policeman at the hall’s door. I went to hide from events by the tape player. But on my way, Simon intercepted and told me that the cop had become aware pills were being offered around and took me over to join the discussion. Von claimed he didn’t know what the guy was talking about. Then the cop opened up his fist and held out one of the pills in his palm as evidence.

  The night balanced on a cusp. Would the drug dealing and smuggling be waived, like a broken indicator during a bombing raid? Or would someone be summarily executed? We were in a war and wars are history, and you can get chewed in the cogs and come out a funny shape, or not at all, when you fuck with history. The cop was angry. He shouted something at Von. Yves and Elsa translated for Shannon, who tried to smooth things over. Then, presumably to prove its safety, Von plucked the pill out of the policeman’s hand and just ate it.

  ‘It’s fine. It’s nothing!’ Von said, performing a kind of magic trick on the problem. Elsa said something soothing and with the disappearance of the offending item, and the fact that Von wasn’t writhing on the floor, it was as though the offence had disappeared. The pill was the problem and the problem was gone.

  ‘No body, no crime,’ Von said confidently and waltzed off on his double dose.

  The policeman’s intervention came to be symbolic of all the fractured events of the night, as time sped in jags away from itself and the kaleidoscope shifted and threw us all together in different patterns. I was high. My stomach ground on itself and I felt the play of benign electric across my skin. I tried to remember all the fascinating things I was thinking but didn’t really mind forgetting. Soon, Bev was dancing towards Christian, who did a military two-step in circles, ironising the thumbs ups that the mercenary was showing him, yet still not rejecting him.

  Then Bev was suddenly a friendly chatterbox at my side. He said he’d apologised to Penny for whatever he’d got wrong in his inquiries about the souls of black folk and she’d told him he was just a big arsehole, but he was sure it had all been somehow very friendly and rather brilliant and he carried straight on, telling me the name of his primary school and his secondary school and recounting his whole life like repeated throws of a grappling hook, looking for a connection to pull us close. It started to become funny to us – hilarious – that whatever place or name he dug up, I never knew it, and then occasionally I would pretend that I did.

  ‘Pete Broomwood?’

  ‘Pete? Big lad?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Yeah, never heard of him.’

  And we’d laugh, getting a connection out of our lack of connection, and like toddlers doing the same old joke over and over again as we leaned against a corner of wall away from the action and smoked his Drinas, which now slipped down like silvery chains as I tried to explain to him about race and culture and which things I thought you could look at straight on and which you couldn’t.

  ‘It’s like . . . it’s like, I don’t know, I know you’re all right, and you know I’m all right, but if I just came to you and said, “What’s it like being . . .?” I dunno? What could I say that would be a bit . . .?’

  ‘I dunno?’

  ‘If I said, “What’s it like being a meathead?” I mean, that’s not the same, cos being a meathead is bad but being black isn’t bad, but it – white people used to think, it was, so it’s like –’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bev said. ‘. . . You think I’m a meathead?’

  ‘No, I’m saying –’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘No, what I’m saying is, what could I say that would hurt your feelings?’

  ‘But she is black and I’m not a meathead?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean –’ and I thought I could see in his eyes that I was allowed this –‘you’re a bit of a fucking meathead,’ I said and we laughed.

  ‘The thing is, I’m not always sure my sister makes as much use of it as she could?’ Von interjected. He’d joined us in the delicious through-draught of the corridor. Just then it seemed the best place of all. Like when I’d been dancing: inconceivable that anyone would want to do anything else. Now it was clear that this spot was the centre of joy in the whole wide world.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Bev asked.

  ‘I just think, I’m not criticising, but you know, I think I’d make a good black guy,’ Von
said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Von said. ‘Oh yeah. Fuck yeah. I wouldn’t take any shit.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take any shit if I was black,’ Bev agreed.

  ‘You see some black guys and you do think, sometimes, are they wasting it a bit? I’d be like – I’d wear a hat, like a top hat. But also trainers? And know all about the euro. I’d be into hip hop and classical. Yeah?’

  ‘You’d get a fuck of a lot of fit girls,’ Bev noted.

  ‘I would,’ Von said and nodded seriously.

  On the dance floor an old man, forties at least, danced among the peace-play folk and the local kids and I joined the pack. I tried to ask some of the locals if they were on pills or just friendly, but my question seemed to get lost so I smiled and didn’t want to know any longer and danced with three boys who stomped their rhythm hard into the floor and I thought I was a soldier marching with them somewhere to do something brave.

  Then Sara was shouting in my ear, her breath hot, and I thought she looked so attractive, her torso wriggling to the music in a black elasticated leotard top. I told her I was sad about her and Shannon having a difficult time, because they were both so good. I explained I’d almost been sort of married to someone, or at least we had lived in a house, so I sort of knew what it was like, a big relationship, and I think she heard me and she said something indistinct and punched the air and danced off. But I felt proud of us all, of the whole gang, for coming.

  ‘Even if nothing happens, even if we make things worse, I think it was worth us coming, don’t you?’ I said to Penny and she gave me a hug and nodded.

  We must have played Screamadelica five times in a row until it was half a joke, half an addiction, then we put on a tape of Von’s low-quality DJing, and though the execution of the mixing was very poor, the songs were good.

  For a while, sometime after two, the lights went out totally and we danced in the dark and then by the flash of Bob’s head torches. Through those minutes or hours of dancing in the black and flash, I imagined my solid middle was a fishy shimmer and my retreat-from-Moscow-steps were tap-dance quick. It was like a non-sexual orgy. Warm bodies in the dark, bumping without fear or favour – let the bearer pass without let or hindrance.

  At four or so we were out in the warm air, still smoking cigarettes that came from somewhere, and Simon had an arm round me. His hair was wet but somehow his shirt was soft and dry. How was that?

  ‘I didn’t, you know. With Pen. In London?’ he said.

  ‘It’s fine. It’s all fine,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think she even likes me,’ he said and I said that I thought she did, and though a flutter of guilt made its way through, I didn’t feel the need to confess anything. The tidal surge of serotonin told me everything was for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.

  Chapter 32

  WHEN THE LIGHTS flickered on and a caretaker cleared everyone out of the municipal hall, we reassembled in the bar of the hotel. It had a low ceiling and the smoke soon banked up in layers. We took possession of it comprehensively, Simon arranging for us to buy cases, boxes of beer. We asked permission from the night porter to rearrange the furniture, dragging one of the small slippery settees from another part of the room; and he neither assented nor disapproved, just walked his beat behind the front desk. For a while every time someone skinned up they did it in the toilet and we smoked the joints out of a big picture window that pivoted open horizontally from its middle. But in the end Von said, ‘I’m making a herbal cigarette,’ and Yves tried to translate, but the porter was uninterested, so joints were on the go all over by the time the armed men arrived to lock us all in.

  The lead officer I recognised as Mr Miami Dolphins from the checkpoint, although a new cap suggested that maybe his real allegiance was to the Baltimore Ravens. He didn’t wear a patch today, and where his eye was missing, the flesh puckered up like a tied balloon. His initial announcement was in English. We were, he said, to: ‘Stay in hotel, for safety.’

  We were full of an enlarged sense of humanity; our empathy glands throbbed. Was everything OK? Was everyone OK? we wanted to know. He strode in with two other guys who went about closing and padlocking the emergency exit doors. ‘Not to worry, not to worry, all is good,’ Baltimore Ravens announced, and was gone. We were left with a taciturn guy guarding the front entrance of the hotel, his rifle slung low like Peter Hook’s bass guitar. We offered him cigarettes, we offered him booze, but his responses were terse. He emanated bad vibes.

  Outside, the world was turning grey and real and when, in response, we turned the Sanyo up full blast, we chased the last of the night away even as we pursued it. One after another we tried to gauge what had happened and what this lock-in related to – the play, or the drugs, or the conflict – and one by one we went to see our guard with his gun, and tried to make a man or woman or human or food or drink connection.

  Our huddle grew tighter and a rumour came through from Yves via the night porter that the French UN garrison was also confined to barracks.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Could be anything,’ Bev said.

  From the centre of town, we saw a couple of curls of smoke, and shortly after came the sounds of artillery rounds and then small arms fire.

  ‘That is not – that is from – that is not coming from the normal positions, is it?’ Elsa said and she looked at Yves.

  Gunfire continued to pop and crackle, without rhythm or orchestration, no crescendo call or reply.

  ‘Are the Serbs coming? Are the Serbs here?’ Shannon asked.

  ‘Could be. Could fucking be,’ Bev said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Yves said. ‘I don’t think . . . that’s coming from the area for it to be . . .’

  ‘Is Babo coming? Has Babo’s lot pushed south?’ Simon said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Bev said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It’s possible but . . .’ Elsa said.

  ‘Could the Krajina Serbs be pushing in?’ Christian said.

  ‘Or NATO. Could it be NATO? Are NATO coming?’ Shannon wondered.

  ‘I really think that is not likely,’ said Yves.

  Tripping on MDMA through automatic gunfire was something I had never experienced before. But one of the effects of the drug is to declaw reality, so nothing seemed too scratchy. Sitting there through the war felt not unlike certain nights at bad clubs in Liverpool and Stoke and Manchester: Konspiracy and Quadrant Park, the Kitchen in flaking Hulme, where Helen and I had gone in shaky overloaded Fords.

  ‘We’ll be OK,’ I said to Penny as I passed her a cigarette. ‘We’ll be all right. People survive. Laurie Lee, Orwell, that Mitford, they all came back from Spain.’

  ‘Well, not the ones who died?’ Penny said. ‘The Julian Bells. They didn’t write any books?’

  It struck me forcefully that this was true. The dead don’t write their books. And I suddenly felt strongly that those were actually the books I really wanted to read. The ones that didn’t exist. The missing ones. It’s so unfair, the tyranny of the living. The shouty beating ones making out the whole time that the survivor’s story is the true story.

  I blinked my stinging eyes in the fugged-up smoke. My throat was just starting to register a rasp from all the Drinas. The drugs were thinning out and my elastic spinal cord was beginning to suffer the first injection of crunchy calcium. Baltimore Ravens returned and spoke to the guard out front. Yves, Elsa and Shannon went to ask questions and soon returned with news.

  ‘OK. Fuck,’ Yves began and took a big breath. ‘Well, if you want to know the situation, it seems it is this: we are in something. A local commander is leading, in a coup against this town authorities and the 5th Corps. These people, the coup people, this so-called Peace Force, including our guard, they want to join with Babo in Velika and make a pocket of peace.’

  As we tried to take this in, Shannon, by Yves’ side, clasped her hands together to make it clear that it was possible our mission had come to fruition in the
most extraordinary and immediate way possible. The Forces of Peace were on the march!

  Onomatopoeic Bob called it the Miracle of Bihac, playfully, but it only had to get said three or four times before the playfulness rubbed off.

  ‘It’s a little – civil war,’ Yves said. But Shannon just shook her head in dumb wonder and went around kissing each of us in turn on both cheeks.

  The gunfire started up again very close by, so that it echoed off the buildings. It made us huddle together in the bar. There was a bite now to the skitter – each burst followed by the shatter of glass, plaster getting cracked and hewn.

  ‘What are they . . .?’ I said to Bev.

  ‘You don’t fire a gun at nothing,’ he said. People were probably dying nearby.

  Our guard came in from outside to check on us and he didn’t seem so comical in his reticence any more. What would the Bihac town forces do to collaborators if they managed to resist the coup? Everyone knew we were on the side of peace, that we had arrived in Bihac directly after visiting Babo. What would they do to us? I looked up at the ceiling that was bobbled with a sort of pebble-dash, sealed in a thick smooth plasticky gloss paint, and imagined the whole lot getting shattered and blood-spattered by a hand grenade rolled in on us.

  The small arms fire ended, replaced by more artillery thuds. Yves made a call from the hotel payphone. Many numbers weren’t working, but he came back with a report that apparently the 5th Corps central HQ was taking a pounding; that the battle in the centre of the town had subsided; some dead, many dead. But the town was definitely going Babo’s way. That was the word.