Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  ‘Well, fucking hell. Good on you, mate,’ he said, as the lager curled round my brain, wrapping it up tight.

  ‘Cheers then,’ I said and waved a salute through the window to his brother, who didn’t like the look of me and didn’t give anything back.

  I hoisted my rucksack on and started to walk, headed for a certain house where I knew a gang of stoners had managed to catch a lease. They’d turned it into something of a hangout and I’d heard once that Helen sometimes went there now she’d moved back.

  I was a little afraid as I walked across town that I’d hear she was dead. She had always been fragile and I worried that in letting things screw up so shittily I’d helped send her home to town. And in town, if you were clever, and nothing else happened, the most common career path was to become a smackhead.

  The house was down on a bit of council estate where many tenants had bought their places. You could tell the privately owned houses because they had usually replaced the solid blue-painted council doors for plastic white ones with a three-section wobbly-glazed fan light. I knocked at the back door and a lad I knew answered and let me in without hesitation.

  ‘Alright. Have you been away, Andy, or what?’

  He led me into the front room, where two other lads and a girl called Yvette on early lunch break from a hairdresser’s were smoking an incredibly long double-ended comedy joint. And there, sitting plum in the middle of the sofa, was Helen, smoking a cigarette. She looked sleek and clean and self-contained, like a cat wrapped up in its own warmth. I sat next to her and she said hello and asked me where I’d been and I said I’d been to Bosnia and she laughed and then so did everyone else, though I don’t think the others knew why they were laughing.

  Helen asked who I’d gone abroad with, was it ‘that lot’, and I said yes and she raised her eyebrows and I said they’d left me in the shit a bit and she smiled, not unkindly. I asked where she was living and I liked the way she told me about it: she was easy and calm and I felt like we were two scientists who were meeting up again after a period of contemplation who could now discuss objectively the rather disgusting sexual and emotional experiments we had conducted on one another in the past.

  I said I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself and she told me there were jobs going at a supermarket and not really knowing what else to do, after we’d listened to the Stone Roses for a while, and the cast of folk in the room started to revolve, I headed out and down to the job Centre.

  *

  I tried to explain my current situation to the lady down there. I came clean about my lack of degree; I think I came overly clean, probably. When she gave me an application form for Iceland, I told her everything.

  ‘I don’t know what to put here, about – “Anything I should tell them that might affect their decision”? The thing is, I might have been – sort of, I don’t know, it’s possible I’ve been recorded as a war criminal.’ I explained that I wasn’t really sure whether I was a war criminal or not. ‘The UN took my name for a list, but I was never incarcerated,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, right,’ the lady said. I tried to strip ten years or so off her – it was just possible I knew her from school, but I didn’t think so.

  ‘It’s something of a grey area. A Frenchman said I was a war criminal, but it was unclear if he was joking.’ I looked at the form hard. ‘The thing about being charged as a war criminal,’ I said, ‘is that it has a lot of negative associations.’

  ‘It does have a lot of negative associations,’ the woman from the jobcentre admitted, leafing through her fact sheets. ‘But we’re . . . our role is to be here – to be here – to . . .’ She was fumbling a little with her files. ‘To – to help you through those,’ she said, feeling, I think, increasingly uncertain a sheet could be located which applied to this particular client. ‘You should probably explain just why – and how?’

  ‘I mean, I’m not a . . . There are a lot of reasons I got listed as a war criminal,’ I went on, my pen wavering over the application form. ‘It’s difficult to fit in this box. It’s quite a – a – sort of complicated thing?’

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Jo Unwin, Alex Bowler, Dan Franklin, Milly Jenkins and Sam Bain.

  Also to Josh Freedman Berthoud and Faisal A. Qureshi, Imogen O’Rourke, Charlie Morrissey and my fellow Oswestry State Theatre street performers. To Mohammed and everyone in Velika Kladusa, Bihac, Sarajevo and Zagreb who showed me kindness and hospitality.

  Thanks to Cathy King, Georgia Garrett, Jon Elek, Matthew Broughton, Ruth Waldram, Rowan Routh, Carrie Plitt, and all at Jonathan Cape, RCW and Conville & Walsh.

  Thanks to my very good friends Abe and Annie, and Hannah and Shane.

  Thanks always to Ju, Jas, Mark, Rob, Will, Mungo and Sean.

  Thanks to the authors whose books have informed this one (though of course all errors are my own): Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia; Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour; Anthony Lloyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So; Brian Hall, The Impossible Country; Brendan O’Shea, Bosnia’s Forgotten Battlefield: Bihac; Adam LeBor, Milosevic; David Rohde, Endgame; Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina; Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde; Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor; David Leigh and Ed Vulliamy, Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament; Keith Cory-Jones, War Dogs; Bill Carter, Fools Rush In; Andrew Mueller, Rock and Hard Places; Aubrey Verboven, Border Crossings; Celia Hawkesworth, Colloquial Serbo-Croat; David Owen, Balkan Odyssey; Douglas Hurd, Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil; Martin Dunford and Jack Holland, The Rough Guide to Yugoslavia (1990); Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (and the TV series it accompanied), and in particular Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted inwriting by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781448139699

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Jonathan Cape is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Jesse Armstrong 2015

  Jesse Armstrong has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Jonathan Cape in 2015

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780224097345