Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  In the kitchen, the big crisp packets were slit open along their sides for sharing and the gang were passing the bottles of water round. Sara hurried up to Shannon and asked after Juso. Was he OK, what had he said? But more than asking after him, she was asking after Shannon, trying to see if she was vibrating at all from the reunion.

  Then there was a burst of gunfire.

  It sounded horrible, the rattle sparking through the bare plastered walls and over the white-tiled floor like fat sizzling onto your skin. There were cries of shock and pain and horror then another hard clatter of shooting and everything shattered. We ran to the steps to get out, as men came down the internal stairs shouting and – not, I don’t think, shooting, but holding their guns like they might. As we made it outside into the rough garden area everything split. Some men ran past us back into the house, somebody pulled at my arm. I could feel hot holes in human flesh nearby, or smell them, or see them – I didn’t know what I knew except there were dark holes in people. Then I was down on my face eating the dirt of the garden, Penny was on my back and then her hand reached out and lifted me up and all the house lights were on and, sharply illuminated in the window, I saw a man dip a pistol almost elegantly so that it pointed out towards the garden. He shot a bullet through the glass – which fell away beautifully, not like in any film – towards a target in the garden. There were all sorts of bodies around, some up and some down and all of us scrambling, and I wanted to make a headcount and to stop everything and sort it all out.

  As I made it round to the front of the house, the main gate was being opened and a jeep drove out and it felt that maybe everything had stopped for a moment and I shouted for Mohammed and for Shannon, but then there was another shot and someone dropped or jumped or was pushed off the balcony and he fell like a person shouldn’t fall, not putting his arms out when he hit the steps leading up to the front door, but instead flopping like a doll. That’s what you do when you’re dead, I thought: nothing.

  Then I could hear a car revving harshly and stalling and revving outside the main gate and Penny shouted to us to get to the car. And I could make out Juso lifting his head up from the back seat and waving for us to climb over the perimeter wall and join him in a big Mercedes saloon. But Simon was beside us now, saying ‘stay’ to Penny, and to me that it wasn’t safe to go.

  At the same time, the Peace War van, right by me inside the forecourt, started up. The door opened by my side and I could see Christian crouching in the safety of the footwell as Bob, next to him, pumped the accelerator with his hand. Shannon climbed in. Simon shouted that he trusted the Bihac guys – we should stay. Von stood tall, looking alert and confused and blinking. The car out front with Juso inside began to pull away. There was another burst of gunfire round the back of the house and Mohammed’s friend with the long young face ran to us and shouted for us to follow Juso’s Mercedes. Then he carried on running, towards the gate, and he seemed to stumble and fall just when there was a pop from up on the balcony.

  The side door of the van was still open. Cally said something sharp and Von and Bev dived in to join Shannon. Then me and Sara and Penny jumped aboard, and then we were gone, everyone except Simon, driving down the hill as people fired guns at or near us and we all lay on the floor and just hoped to stay safe for one second then two then three, till eventually we could start to think about a minute and begin to feel our bodies around us and think about what had just happened.

  ‘Should we go back?’ Penny asked. As soon, I felt, as it was clear that we wouldn’t be going back. ‘Did everyone come who wanted to come?’

  ‘What the fuck happened?’ Von said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Someone started shooting,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.

  ‘Was that – who was that who fell off the balcony?’ Shannon asked.

  ‘It was Mohammed,’ I said, not really knowing for sure. But no one disagreed, so maybe it was. It looked like it was him. But I couldn’t really believe it. ‘It’s confusing. What happened?’

  ‘What did happen?’ Von asked.

  ‘They took them out,’ Bev said.

  ‘Who?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked. ‘Who took who out?’

  ‘The – I think the lads we came with, they took out Babo’s lot? Did they?’

  ‘We were downstairs, and it started, right? But were they shooting at us?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.

  ‘Yes, they were shooting at us, of course! There were guys with guns,’ Cally said.

  ‘They weren’t shooing at us. None of us was hit, were we?’ Shannon said.

  ‘Should we go back?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Everyone who wanted to come, came,’ Von said. ‘I think.’

  ‘Simon wanted to stay, didn’t he?’ I said and suddenly my heart ratcheted up further – in case – in case it wasn’t true and he’d said ‘let me come’ and I’d double-crossed him again somehow in the confusion, done something awful I was failing to admit to.

  ‘Yes,’ Bob said. ‘I think. He wanted to stay. Right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right? Right?’ Shannon agreed.

  ‘Right. He was posturing,’ Christian said.

  ‘Yeah? I mean, he really did stay. That’s quite a big posture,’ I said and Christian shrugged while Penny looked back into the night.

  ‘So they started shooting, and we went up, and then we left and I guess, the whole thing, was . . . was . . . what happened?’ Shannon said.

  We drove in silence for quite a while as we rattled along, trying to keep up with Juso in the Mercedes. They were gunning it fast, leading us north, travelling on back roads, like English country lanes but without the hedgerows. Soon the one we were on petered out into an untarmacked track.

  We followed the Mercedes up a farm road to a hamlet, where Juso’s car stopped. He got out and walked back towards the van illuminated in our headlights, a force field of mosquitoes and midges hissing around him. He told us to drive and not to stop, whatever happened to him or us when we went over the brow of the next hill, because we were about to cross the internal confrontation line back into Babo territory.

  ‘What happened, Juso?’ I said.

  ‘Later,’ he said.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Shannnon asked.

  ‘Later,’ he said and started back towards the Merc.

  ‘What about . . .’ Onomatopoeic Bob had my guidebook on his lap, open to the pages on the Pliva Lake district, just over in Croatia. ‘I think there’s another road, another way round . . . see?’ He was bending the book hard so that the gluey white ribs of the spine were evident. I could just about see, at the tip of his hippy’s hash-browned finger, a squiggle. ‘That might be better . . . Juso!’ Onomatopoeic Bob shouted. But the Mercedes was already going.

  ‘Bob, is that where we are, is that even a road?’ I asked, looking at the map.

  But at that point he turned left and down a hard-topped side road.

  ‘Fucking hell, Bob! For fuck’s sake!’ I said.

  ‘Bob?’ Cally said.

  A little moonlight came through the gauze of cloud, enough only to make out an idea of the countryside. My anger and self-righteousness was all mixed up, to such an extent I didn’t know if I wanted us to make it through, or for gunfire to blurt from the trees and pepper us with our just deserts.

  ‘Are we not following the car?’ Von said, insouciant and invulnerable. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’

  ‘Bob. Seriously, man?’

  ‘I think this will be good,’ he said as the road bent to the left, south with the curve of a hillside. ‘If they get into trouble, we’ll be OK,’ as if that related to anything or was even true.

  ‘Penny. We should go back – let’s go back,’ I said. But then we curved up a hillside and straight along a little plateau until we could see lights ahead of us.

  ‘Just go fucking slow. Do not get us shot,’ I said.

  The lights were the Mercedes idling in the road.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Juso asked thr
ough his window.

  ‘Round the back,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said, and Juso didn’t admonish him.

  ‘Good, we had to pass a checkpoint but they must be on patrol or back in their farms, but, good. OK. Twenty kilometres for Velika, OK? But we make some stops.’

  Five or so more kilometres north beyond the internal confrontation line Juso stopped again in the centre of a little hamlet. This time he got out and we had time to ask him about the shooting at Izacic. We asked him what had happened so far as he could see.

  ‘Double cross.’

  ‘So – what, they weren’t really part of the coup, our guys, Hamdo? The guys we came with?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.

  ‘I guess . . . I don’t know? Was the coup even real, even? My driver says maybe it was a trick, to make out a coup for peace, but really they just wanted weapons. And to screw us?’

  ‘Fuck,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said, considering.

  ‘We heard it? The coup. They locked us in,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t buy it. The coup was for real. I’m sure,’ Shannon said. But I could see certainty was a bulwark she was sending up, behind which she could contemplate the alternative.

  ‘Why would they take us? Why did they bring us?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.

  ‘Babo was worried. He sent his guys south, and trucks of weapons. So he wanted UN there, or at least you guys. He thought it would make it more – official, more safe. He insisted,’ Juso said.

  ‘And why did you come?’ Sara asked.

  ‘Oh. Well. You know, I was invited and . . . I wanted to see you guys,’ he said and looked at Shannon, then Sara.

  ‘That was dangerous,’ Shannon said.

  ‘That was fucking stupid,’ Sara said.

  The driver of the Merc was leading an old woman and a young woman and a couple of other folk from a nearby house to our van. He motioned for us to make room and the old woman eased herself up and sat next to me, not smiling, not happy, her suitcase and an extra bundle of clothes pushed into the space at my feet.

  ‘We think this is it, a big push north by the 5th Corps out of Bihac. With the weapons Babo sent. Mujahideen, bad guys, very fierce guys, will come, to take revenge now,’ Juso explained. ‘So, we want you to give as much space as you can. For refugees.’

  We stocked up with five of the displaced folk from the hamlet and smiled at them benevolently, but then looked at one another discreetly and frowned, feeling compromised and invaded. We didn’t sign up for this.

  Then we started up again, driving north. Juso said this was dangerous territory, a no-man’s-land. Though we were beyond the internal confrontation line, the moves and counter-moves away from the road made drawing a definitive front line impossible. We could easily run into some 5th Corps or local Bihac or Cazin militia hereabouts, so we were to make a straight run for Velika and not stop till we got there, every car for itself.

  We were all quiet for a while, embarrassed of our youth and health and fear in front of our passengers. The old woman next to me drove her elbow hard into the seat back. It was a thick peasant arm that wasn’t interested in subtle shifts or urban negotiations. It would take ordinance to move it out from where it pressed uncomfortably into my side. I tried another smile, but she was comprehensively wrapped up in herself. As we drove on, the aggressive accelerations and breaks at bends and dips in the road made me feel unwell.

  But as well as the motion sickness, when I looked at the side of my neighbour’s face, lit up enough by the dashboard instruments of the van to see her tightly wrinkled skin, spotted with a lifetime’s abrasions and eruptions, I felt sick also at the unknowability of others. Even if I could find the foreign words to ask what her life had been – all the years, the whatever, the pre-war, the war, Tito, the farm, kids? and now this, another or a first evacuation – even if she could tell me a version of all that, what would I know about what it was actually like, from the story she pulled together?

  My seat-mate made a loud burp, and for some reason I found myself saying, ‘Excuse me.’ Then Onomatopoeic Bob said from up front, ‘Oh. OK. Yeah,’ as the van slowed.

  ‘Don’t fucking stop,’ I said. But the van continued to decelerate until it reached a gentle halt.

  ‘Bob, you dickhead!’ Von said. ‘I am ordering you, Bob, no more bullshit, let’s get out of here. Come on!’

  ‘Thanks for the order. We’re actually out of diesel.’

  We looked at one another for bright ideas and the old woman made her first social contact, raising her eyebrows towards me as if to say, ‘What’s going on, dipshit?’

  I said, ‘Diesel, kaput, no diesel.’ She looked at me blankly.

  ‘What do we do?’ Cally asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Shannon.

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here,’ I said definitively.

  But in fact there was very little else we could do. So, after talking it all through, we planned to rest until either Juso – whose brake lights had long disappeared – came back with a jerry can, or it grew light.

  Chapter 34

  I BARELY SLEPT, staring avid and awake out of the window, seeing all kinds of commandos and ghosts, panthers and holy warriors stalking the van from the wood beyond the fence. The hours passed impossibly slowly. I was a resentful sentinel, pissy about being defaulted into responsibility as the one watchman who would have to raise the alarm when the attack came.

  I looked at Penny. Lamenting the way things had gone and wondering if I shouldn’t touch her gently on the shoulder and whisper my regrets. I was caught for a long time considering if that was a brilliant idea or a terrible one; my hand quivering on my leg waiting to hear from my brain what it was to do. I felt strongly that every action is a kind of tragedy. As soon as you act all the alternative worlds of possibility dissolve so they never existed, like castles of ash collapsing. Other futures, lives; love you might have known for a day or a lifetime, all of them are blasted in a furnace wind which scorches away everything but the black twig of you, faltering forward, doing whatever you stupidly choose to do.

  I didn’t touch her shoulder. I kept my hand on my leg. And thought that of course not acting is a kind of action too. My senses were skewed. I’d watched out of the window so long that I could hardly tell by the time I whispered to everyone to wake up whether it was still basically dark and I’d just wished it into comparative morning, or if it was in fact midday and I’d let them all sleep far too long.

  ‘Penny? Hey? Do you think we should get up?’

  The others roused too. We looked around at our exposed spot and the decision was made to get out and walk the road to Velika. Onomatopoeic Bob said it was about six kilometres. Some left their bags in the van but I strapped my blue aluminium-framed rucksack on. I liked to keep my stuff near me. We mimed to our refugee friends that we would be walking, and I took up my seat-mate’s bundle of clothes tied in a rough sheet or tablecloth while she carried a very long and sagging black leather Puma holdall. Von tried to ignore her obvious need for aid, but when I’d nodded a few times at her struggling, he took her bag with elaborate courtesy, like he’d only just noticed her distress and couldn’t bear it a second longer.

  Shannon set the pace, taking Sara and Penny and Cally to the head of our column as the pathfinders. My old woman kept up a good lick. One leg was bad but she had a fast swivelling-jerk of a walk that took her tick-tocking beyond me as I shuffled, loaded up front and back. I had no real internal conception of what six kilometres might mean. I knew it wasn’t much in a car. But on foot? Was that a hike to boast of, or just a walk from one edge of town to the other? Also, of course, to estimate the journey’s length we were trusting a man I considered to be a congenital idiot. It was quite possible it was double or triple or half Onomatopoeic Bob’s thumb-spanning measure.

  ‘So, I put it in,’ Von said, sidling up beside me.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah. After the party. When we all had a sleep.’

  ‘OK. Right. And what did you think?’

  ‘Yea
h.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Nice.’

  ‘Nice, right?’

  ‘Yeah. No, I liked it. I liked it a lot.’

  The morning air was clear and the thin cloud fried off leaving us under a hot sun an hour into the walk. Von sped up to talk a while to Cally and then dropped back again.

  ‘Just gave her a warning. For the old heave-ho,’ he said merrily.

  ‘Oh? Right?’

  ‘She’s a slut. Letting me put it right in?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m gonna kick it in the head. Once we’re safe.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. She looked round and blew a kiss to Von. He caught it in the air and sent one back, all like a stupid game they were too cool for. ‘Is that what you really want to do?’

  ‘Don’t give me the fucking third degree, mate,’ he said.

  Bev trudged on my other side.

  ‘It is nice country,’ I said, looking across a meadow where a fat game bird squawked up into the sky.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll be all the fucking bodies under there, fertilising,’ Bev said.

  Onomatopoeic Bob, at our rear, picked grasses from the side of the road and chewed on a stalk.

  ‘That good, mate?’ Von asked.

  ‘Mmm?’ Bob said, discarding it and plucking another, like he knew one kind of hedge grass from another.

  ‘Yeah, I just pissed on that,’ Von said.

  Ahead of us, Penny, Sara, Shannon and Cally were talking. Sandwiched between our two groups were the refugees – my old woman, her daughter, another young woman and two boys of twelve or thirteen in nylon jogging bottoms, both carrying old-fashioned hard-sided suitcases. One case was heavier than the other and they swapped occasionally to keep things fair.