Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  I closed my eyes and turned my head. Then felt my stomach grab as the plane’s nose lifted – and the whole aircraft was pulling out and up, and wresting itself free of gravity.

  A new sound joined that of air and engine: a laugh, half-mad, the pilot cackling – head thrown back, all his face tossed open to the light streaming through the windows of the cockpit – as he righted the plane, and swung it in a vast turn over the desert and back around, to line the airstrip up once more.

  The pilot gave Logan a thumbs-up and Logan winked back before grabbing my arm roughly, shaking it, then pinching my cheek, long and hard, the side of my face stinging between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Get some colour back into you,’ he laughed. Was I now an initiate, or just the butt of a joke?

  *

  The wind bit our cheeks as we stepped from the plane, full of stinging particles of dust and sand. A UN landcruiser and two soldiers waited by the portable hangar. The building and the landcruiser and the plane looked like pieces of a set, white, clean, powerful and certain. After a round of back-slaps we got into the vehicle. It was midafternoon and we were beyond rank here.

  ‘Cleared the strip. The first thing we did,’ Logan said as the landcruiser pulled away. It seemed he expected me to ask and was saving me the trouble.

  But I had no idea what he meant.

  ‘Of landmines,’ Logan said, shaking his head at me and looking out the window.

  ‘You and Jack?’

  Logan laughed at this fresh absurdity.

  ‘Hell, no. We’re Signals. That’s sapper work.

  Tifariti was a collection of meagre buildings collapsing into the earth. In the heat and the cold the mudbrick had cracked, and chunks of wall had simply fallen out. The whitewashed shells were so marked by tiny pieces of missing wall it appeared they’d been strafed with machine-gun fire. And some must have been – I saw the collapsed ceilings of buildings broken violently apart and angled now sharply towards the earth. Bullets and bombs had accelerated an elemental process, and the wind and the sun and the earth were reclaiming them.

  In the middle of the village was the carcass of a Moroccan plane, shot from the sky by the Saharawi. The tangle of metal that was once a fighter had become a public sculpture at the centre of the village-square. Had they dragged it to this intersection, the body with its metal-and-wire innards spilling onto the ground, or was this where it crashed? Hanging from the fuselage were shirts and underwear drying in the sun and wind, the painted Moroccan flag on its flank obscured by flapping khaki trousers. The wind passing through it all was a kind of music.

  After dinner, after he’d polished his boots and buckle on the doorstep of the sleeping quarters, Logan unlocked a metal cabinet and produced a bottle of scotch. He peeled off his socks, stretched his toes and poured two glasses. He handed me one before closing his eyes and taking the first gulp in the back of his throat.

  Did he and Jack relax like this at the end of the day?

  ‘He drank back home,’ Logan said.

  ‘And here?’

  Logan took another gulp and finished the glass off.

  ‘He went off it when he got over here,’ he said, pouring himself another. ‘Not that it mattered.’

  The fumes stung my eyes as I raised the glass to my face.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Adams did a lot of things back home he got tired of here. The boys’d go out with him back at Enoggera, follow him, and get up to things they’d never think of themselves. Not really trouble – he wasn’t exactly wild – it was more . . . it was as if everything was a horizon to him, and he bloody well wanted to know what was over it. The boys went with him and if they stuck close enough they’d come away with a girl for the night.’

  He laughed quietly to himself.

  ‘But something happened . . . He stayed down here while you all went to the Canaries.’

  ‘He grew tired of it.’

  ‘Of what exactly?’

  Logan shrugged.

  ‘He started spending more and more time alone. He’d get up early and pick his way through the minefield to a rocky outcrop on the edge of town here. And he’d just sit there by himself and wait for the sun.’

  Logan closed his eyes, and started humming the bars of a song. When he spoke again, it was from a different angle.

  ‘In our first few days here at Tifariti, Adams and me set up the radio. We had no proper equipment so we made the fuses out of Alfoil from cigarette packets. Lucky we smoked,’ he said.

  I watched while he poured a third drink, wondering where he was going.

  ‘Camel,’ he continued when I didn’t respond. ‘If we’d smoked the local shit, we couldn’t have done it. No Alfoil, see?’

  Still I waited.

  ‘It’s the local shit that should have been called Camel. Tastes like camel shit, see? Funny, eh?’

  The room was quiet for a long time, just the wind hustling around outside. He took another gulp, and turned.

  ‘That was his bed, yeah?’ he said, pointing. ‘ And that locker was his. That was the mat he wiped his boots on when he came in at the end of the day. He stacked his books over there, and that was the sock drawer where he kept his rosary beads –’

  ‘Rosary beads?’

  ‘The boys bring all sorts of mementos with them. All sorts.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Adams is a bloody good bloke, you know that? A bloody good bloke.’

  As if I didn’t know. As if I didn’t know better than Logan. But I wanted to find Jack, not be lectured on what sort of person he was.

  ‘What’s the point of all this, Logan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The peacekeeping. The whole show, the whole operation, you all being down here.’

  ‘The point?’

  ‘Yeah. What’s the point. It sounds like it’s just somewhere new to drink.’

  Logan got up, went to the door, and spat out onto the sand.

  ‘Good,’ he said, turning back. ‘You’re doing good. Yeah?’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘You’re giving this place a chance. You’re making a difference. It’s bloody important. No one else will. And I’ll say it without a hint of sarcasm, mate – you’re making the world a better place.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Go on then, be a cynic. Cynicism’s easy. But one thing about cynics, mate –’ and here Logan pointed at my chest, challenging me – ‘they never do anything. Don’t try, don’t fail. Never accomplish anything. But not here, mate. Down here you’re having a go. A red-hot go. And it’s working. Don’t bloody knock it.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘Bloody oath. Your job’s to set it up so they can decide themselves if they want their own country, or if they want to stay part of Morocco.’

  ‘Stay?’

  ‘Become . . . join . . . unite . . . whatever, I don’t bloody-well care what word you use, but they’ll decide. Your job is to set it up for the referendum. That means making the place safe. They’ve already agreed to stop the fighting. You being here is proof of it.’

  He poured himself another glass.

  ‘And you stand for something here. You stand for peace. You don’t fool yourself it’s more that that. If they started up at each other again – if they resumed hostilities – you couldn’t do anything about it. You’d pull out. You couldn’t stop them. And you’re not naïve, you know they could turn on you – just look at what that nice young bloke you met on the bus did to you – you know all that. But they decided they wanted to stop their fighting and have a referendum to work out what to do with themselves. So, you’re a symbol of it. Their will to peace, that’s what the pollies called it. And if you know how to do it .
. . and we do . . . Cambodia and everything . . . if you know how to make it happen . . .’

  He trailed away.

  ‘And Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You reckon?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

  Logan looked at me.

  ‘What do you think?’

  I could tell he wasn’t certain he knew the answer himself. Perhaps he should though. Jack was my brother, but he’d long broken away. He’d spent months here with Logan, close months. What might Jack have said to him, what might they have shared? What should Logan know that I didn’t?

  ‘What’s in this for you, Logan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This trip now. Chaperoning me here to Tifariti . . . Looking for clues. I guess that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it. But why?’

  ‘Grose ordered it,’ Logan said. ‘It’s a soldier’s duty to follow orders.’

  ‘But you want to be here, don’t you?’

  When he spoke again his voice had softened, all the challenge gone out of it.

  ‘He’s a soldier, Sebastian. I want to find him. Make sure he’s OK. And he’s a friend. OK?’

  *

  The next morning I wandered around Tifariti. The wind was still up, perhaps even a little stronger than the day before, a little louder. It was a military base, becalmed by the ceasefire. There were no shops, or mosques, or homes being tended. The women and the children had left for the refugee camps long ago, and the school was deserted. There were only soldiers, a handful of peacekeepers but mainly Saharawi fighters. Men in old fatigues with fraying collars, scuffed boots and crooked teeth. Men who’d pass me in the street and lift their heads from the wind and smile, or raise a hand, or greet me. Invite me inside for a glass of tea.

  Who did they think I was? I wondered. A witness to their cause? A sympathiser? Perhaps even a partner in their struggle?

  That night Logan and I played chess with them by lantern-light.

  ‘We defend a genuine cause,’ one said, confident in his English, strong with this power he had which the others did not. Yet he was not one of their leaders – they were the bigger men with lean cheeks and penetrating stares who talked among themselves against the back wall and had no time for board games. This was his moment, his role, and I wasn’t the first he’d formed these words for.

  ‘We are not terrorists, or rebels. We defend our homeland which was colonised by a European country, Spain, then immediately occupied by Morocco.’

  The officers against the wall watched me for the effect his speech had.

  I moved my piece. He moved his. I moved again.

  ‘We are a country. We defend a just cause. As long as the UN is genuinely involved, we will continue to have faith in the UN. We are not terrorists. We are people who ask for liberty and freedom. We are not terrorists.’

  We exchanged our pawns, a bishop for a knight.

  ‘If there is no alternative to war we have to sacrifice ourselves, so our children can have a better life.’

  Two of his comrades came over from the back wall and stood behind him, watching.

  ‘But our first choice is peace, not war.’

  When it came time for me to ask about Jack – when I could wait no longer – I took out my photos, one of him in his army fatigues, the second at home in a work shirt, his collar upturned, leaning against the back fence, the anthill paddock behind him. They knew him, of course, from when he’d been posted here. Had all probably been quizzed by the army when it did its own investigation. Still, they passed the photos carefully around, hand to hand, as if it was Jack himself they were nursing in their palms.

  ‘You are brothers?’

  They’d guessed it before I told them – our likeness – but wanted to hear me say it.

  ‘Yes. We are brothers. The same mother.’

  They murmured amongst themselves until one of their officers leant and whispered into the ear of their spokesman, neither taking his eyes off me.

  ‘You must go to the camps,’ my chess companion said quietly as he packed the board away.

  ‘Is he there?’

  ‘The camps,’ he repeated. They rose then, all of them, leaving Logan and me and our swaying lantern flame.

  FOURTEEN

  We woke before dawn. The wind had fallen away, and all was quiet. The night itself might still have been dreaming. We pushed open the barracks door and stepped outside. Logan had the torch. The sand was crisscrossed with boot prints and tyre tracks. We piled our bags into the back of the landcruiser. There were more trips back and forth – for food and water, but even when that was all done we lingered. Logan disappeared, and returned fifteen minutes later with an armful of warm bread he’d bought from a bakery somewhere. He opened the front passenger door of the landcruiser, and in the light thrown by the ceiling bulb peeled the wrapping off little triangles of processed soft cheese, each portion stamped with the comic-book image of a red, smiling cow.

  ‘This is great stuff,’ he said as he passed me a piece of bread with the cheese smeared roughly over the top. ‘Even the Muslims’ll eat it.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘No rennet,’ he said.

  A few stars were still holding on against the dawn, but bodies were stirring. There was the sound of boot soles being banged together, a throat being cleared. A call to prayer from someone. From beyond the edge of town a goat cried out.

  ‘You’d swear that was a child, wouldn’t you?’ Logan said. ‘So goddam human. They’re halal too. If you kill ’em right. Goats, I mean.’

  When daylight broke we headed into the east, towards the refugee camps. If the Saharawi fighters told us to go to the camps, Logan had said before we went to sleep the night before, it’s because they know something. The camps were on the other side of the border, a day’s drive. It was worth a look.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Logan said. ‘You got more out of them than we did.’

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Not much. They only ever tell you half the story.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t they have told you?’

  ‘Who knows? Some superstitious belief in the power of blood.’

  The road was a mere track. All was engine thrum, and rumble of tyres on rough ground. I shifted in my seat after the first big bump.

  ‘Piste,’ said Logan. ‘As in, pissed off I’ll be spending the next ten hours giving my kidneys a hammering on this sorry excuse for a road.’

  It sounded false, the joke. The flooding light, the vast space, our vibrating bodies.

  We followed the track. The land undulated at first, covered by low plants, the odd acacia tree breaking the contours of the earth. We crossed a dried-up watercourse, impossibly wide. There were low ridges on the horizon to the north, an outcrop of rocks rising from the sand at intervals, plateauing, then falling away once more. The colours of the early morning were soft: gentle reds and ochres, soft blues and grey shales. Clouds shuffled across the sky, gathering in knots, unravelling, reforming. In time the day rose and the clouds began to disintegrate, before disappearing entirely. The landscape too began to lose shape. I blinked from the brightening sun.

  Logan smoked, cigarette after cigarette, casting butts out the window. I reached for one.

  ‘See that?’ he said, as he handed me his pack.

  Up ahead, just off the side of the track, was a shape, perhaps two. Trees, I thought at first, sewn as they all seemed to be randomly into the landscape. But is anything really random, or is that an idea we’ve latched onto for comfort?

  As we got closer I saw the shapes were not trees at all. They had more bulk. One, I realised, was a hut and I guessed the second was a vehicle. When we got nearer still, I saw it was a four-wheel drive, and that the hut and vehicle were oddly separated, further apart than they should
have been in the vastness of the desert. We slowed as we approached. Logan did not pull off the track as we neared the vehicle, but stopped in the centre of the piste.

  He cut the engine, wound down his window, and sat there for a long time, alert in a way I could never have been, an animal sniffing the breeze. When eventually he got out, I opened my door and followed him to where he stood, arms folded, in front of the vehicle, staring at it like it was a beast he aimed to subdue. But it was already beaten. The marked lean on it was obvious now, the bonnet and the roof, the whole thing sloping away from left to right, fallen already to its knees. Half the front of the vehicle had been blown away, and the front left tyre was shredded, the metal peeled back with a force that could only have been a landmine.

  Logan leant his head through the driver’s side window and whistled.

  I looked in over his shoulder. The insides had been gutted. The seats were gone, the seatbelts, the gearbox, the dashboard stripped. Even the bulb from the ceiling light. It was hollowed, and burst open. Like the shotgun casings left from when Jack would take me shooting in the scrub behind the house.

  I reached for the door handle, but Logan gripped my wrist.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You just can’t tell. We’ll radio the sappers when we get to the camp. They’ll come out for a closer look.’

  Instead Logan leaned over the bonnet, and with his right index finger wrote in the layer of sand that had accumulated since the vehicle had been abandoned: I was here. Winked and laughed.

  We pulled back onto the piste.

  I still had Logan’s cigarettes in my hand.

  ‘Got a match?’

  Logan handed me his lighter without turning. I lit a cigarette, and drew back, the first time in years. Since I was at school. Trying, and failing, to keep up with Jack.

  *

  The change was imperceptible. At some point we left the sand behind and found ourselves driving on a stone-strewn plain. It was as though the soil had subsided and left only this layer of stones upon this vast, bleak, flat country. The reign of the flat. Not the empty, but the flat. As if the sky above this land was so heavy it pressed all things hard against the ground. I looked for other objects: saw a boundless horizon, an over-full sky, the flat ground pocked by rocks. Then later, a shallow basin of scrub. Some trees, bony and sharpened against the sky. They reminded me of the desiccated scarecrows in the fields of the Lockyer Valley celery farmers during drought, only fiercer.