So there was no connection to insist upon after all, Jonas a simple stick-man, without a face, a child’s approximation in whom they had no interest other than a means to let them sit down.
‘Do you want to know what happened?’ he shouted.
She ignored him.
‘Do you want to know what happened?’
A raise of the eyebrows and the face now turning to his, impatience trying to be cool. ‘What?’
‘I was beaten up by a man with no clothes. In the rain. Every time I got up he pushed me down. I got muddy.’
She nodded, slowly, and mouthed ok. As if choreographed, the four friends reached for their drinks.
‘He’s called Adam and he lives there. Adam. Adam. Like the first man. Can’t argue with that eh?’
‘Look mate.’ It was the male, on his left. He had an asymmetrical haircut, anvil-shaped. ‘We’re just out for – ’
‘I needed to be around people. Connections, you know, like we’re all sitting round this table.’
Soon after, Jonas was asked to leave. The bouncer’s tight white t-shirt reminded him of Fletcher. Maybe that was why he resisted the hand on his shoulder and pulled his arm back, knocking over a drink and insisting on paying for another, dropping the fiver as he was shoved outside.
The rain poured. He sheltered in a Chinese takeaway until the counter man insisted he order or leave.
Jonas chose a spring roll, dripping with grease that coated the inside of his mouth. It was an ugly taste, he told the man it was the ugliest spring roll he had ever eaten in his life. Ugly, said the man. Yes, ugly. Jonas wasn’t expecting art, not from a cheap takeaway, that would be absurd, but he certainly insisted on plainness. Ugliness was laziness, no care had been taken over this food and the establishment should at least strive for plainness. Don’t you see?
The counter man didn’t see. Jonas stepped out the door and was nearly bowled off the pavement by a skinny, whey-faced man pulling a little cart with a Dalmatian sitting in it. The man zipped into the next street, the Dalmatian leaning into the corner to retain his balance.
This was how the breakdown would happen. In the rain with the after-image of a Dalmatian on a cart. Maybe it had looked around with a goofy little doggy smile as it turned the corner, a Scooby Doo-like guffaw at Jonas Mortensen, the man who lingered, lingered and didn’t see. He hurried to the corner and watched man, cart and Dalmatian pass a group of people leaving The Pickled Shepherd. Not one turned to look at the strange procession. It might never have been. Yet they all stared at Jonas as he walked past them and into the pub.
Apart from a group of men in a window booth, Jonas was the only customer. He took an adjoining booth and stared at a pint he didn’t want. The gantry TV was showing a baseball game and there was nothing as boring as baseball, especially baseball with the sound down. He watched anyway, watched for decades and had a thousand more beers he didn’t want, and suddenly baseball made a perfect, solemn sense. Strip the pizzazz and the pose and it was a meditation, a prayer, religion itself. There was liturgy in those stats, allegory in the field-positions.
Jonas understood, he got baseball! He’d watch from this holy moment on, take his place in the church. He was so engrossed he only heard the voice the second time it asked the question.
‘Can you settle a bet?’
The man peering over the top of the booth had a moustache that made Jonas think of the police. ‘What about?’
The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where are you from then?’
‘Is that the bet?’
‘I said, where are you from?’
Another red face appeared, at the side of the booth. Jonas looked back at the TV. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Here mate, I’m from here.’ The man looked down at his friend and cocked his head at Jonas. ‘Another one. They just keep on coming and coming. Telling you, we have sucked Poland dry.’
‘Leave the bloke alone Mickey.’
‘You think I’m Polish?’
‘Yeah. I think you’re Polish. Must be a right dump. Leaving your home like that. A right… fuckin... dump.’ There was laughter when Mickey sat back down on his side of the booth.
Fat Xavier!
Jonas almost burst out laughing. He might have been intimidated if Mickey hadn’t reminded him of the pompous little owner of the vineyard in the Beaujolais. Fat Xavier didn’t like all you Scandy-men and sniped at Jonas for weeks. The fear in his pinched little rodent face when Jonas dumped a basket of grapes over his head still brought extreme joy, even now.
He looked back at the TV. Baseball had slipped out of focus, once again the tedium of tubby men with bats. What would it be like to be Polish? In fact, he could even be Polish. What did it matter to be Polish, Norwegian, Martian, a funny little green Martian, so far away from home that his sense of identity was sure to be stronger than anything possible on earth?
Only when you stopped moving did it matter. That’s when people started asking questions. For a long time after leaving Bergen no one had. He worked construction and picked fruit in half a dozen countries and no questions, as if exile had stripped individuality and explanation, imposing a collective, instead, of stained hands and exhaustion, camp beds in fetid barns that angry men like Mickey flung open in the dawn with a near sexual relish.
The booth men were laughing at him again, Jonas who was every other who had come here and was yet to come: grafter Poles, Baltic nomads and coy Romanians, the dream curdled in the back of a locked lorry and two months at Calais to strangle the last optimism before the indifferent journey to work the fruit and building sites, wash dishes and clean toilets. Maybe they would visit a pub like this, a couple of drinks to chill out awhile, a few quid for themselves instead of being sent home. To listen to a bigotry even more demeaning for being amused rather than angry. Nothing to do but drink up. Drink up and leave.
Along the street Jonas threw up, barely breaking stride and walking on. He wandered the streets and passed the art gallery. It was hard to believe that the afternoon with Mary had happened, that he’d ever been in this city at all, this place of spring rolls and Dalmatians, baseball and bigots, buses to the whispering outposts and Jonas now waiting for his.
Mary wouldn’t be there when he got home. Past 10 pm now and she said she’d be round at seven. I’ll come round later, dress up for you... When the B4 appeared he watched it leave.
The old man at the River Hotel’s reception desk barely looked at him. When he finally did the pupils dilated, as if his vision was returning to the present from contemplation of a time long since passed. We’ve all got ways to go, the old man might have said and Jonas replying yes, I just need a night, a night before I go on. But the old man gave him the key without a word.
The mattress sagged. Too many dream-tossed nights. Jonas put his face to the greying sheet. A faint smell of sweat, stories and old memories. They drifted like dust in sunlight, none of them his. He closed his eyes, opened them. He saw strange faces, heard unknown voices.
Mary hadn’t phoned.
He didn’t know why he didn’t phone her.
He wrote a text message then deleted it. Eva made him. He always listened to his dead wife.
She felt close tonight, the blue drapes reminding him of the Himalayan Inn, Kathmandu. It was all in the setting, a lost heyday glimpsed in tired decor, when the carpet was unstained, the grouting china-white and curtains were proud to be drapes. Kathmandu, the end of their honeymoon, three weeks of Annapurna dazzle-calm to three days of culture stun in the crowded poor-streets. Diesel fug and smouldering rubbish. Mopeds and street horns, multicolour night-signs of bars and bazaars, restaurants, on and on through tourist Thamel.
Just the leavings: Eva, frozen with a bottle of Everest beer clutched in her hand, face contorted in a shriek, a cockroach on the sheets. How could the world move with all these leavings, all the friction they brought to bear, slowing us down? No wonder we come to feel so jaded.
‘Drapes.’
He said it ou
t loud, again and again, the word more odd-sounding the more he said it, separating the letters, the flat dr, long apes and lingering ess. Dr-appe-ss. Dr-app-ess. Eva was laughing but he suddenly felt weak, as weak as Anya on the floor of the Saab, who looked untouched but whose neck lolled horribly when the paramedics lifted her, lifted her so carefully.
Tonight, as then, no strength.
He sighed, and the room too seemed to breathe heavily. Rain pattered the window. He heard Mary knocking softly at the door, trying to get in, but this no man’s land was for ghosts only. He felt no guilt about this first woman since Eva. Turn over the stones, peer in each of those dusty cupboards, the only certainty is that there never is any certainty, just an on-going chain of assumptions and who really knows if the crack in the pavement is a smile or a frown.
He only wanted to stop. He came to the village to stop. As he told Lacey, slow down, stop awhile.
She was young and beautiful, all the time in the world. Lacey who liked him too. No one would get it. He’d learned what to expect and how there was no way back, no matter the sad siren call of a far-gone wellbeing. He thought of End Point when he first broke in. Standing in the living room, dust angling through watery light, the slow fading light of the life of the unknown former owner, hanging around because it still had no idea where to go next.
Eva was no help.
She was dancing now, over there by the bathroom door that creaked when he opened it. He bent to the hinge for a while, pulling the door back and forth, waiting for the creak, back and forth and Eva still dancing until finally he lay back on the worn carpet and looked up at the crack in the ceiling and waited for sleep that didn’t come, the cracks stretching as he stared, spidery zigzaggings always back where they started when he closed and opened his eyes.
He sat up suddenly. Someone else must be doing this, in a world of six billion a Japanese man could be sprawled on the tatami, staring up with eyes that refused to blink until he saw how complicated the web of cracks would become and finally get it, understanding that tracing every connection was impossible and you finally had to just let it all go.
What a relief, just imagine that incredible relief.
And they began to cry, Jonas and the Japanese man, as back and forth went the creaking bathroom door, Eva still dancing and a sudden image of the little shrine with photos and a daily candle that he had built to her and Anya in the Christinegård house before he finally had to leave.
* * *
Jonas woke cold on the hotel room floor. Light leached through the curtains and the room seemed poised, as if someone watching had just left. He had a crick in his neck and an erection that disgusted him as much as the taste in his mouth. He was sick on the carpet, the mess confusing him until he recognised last night’s spring roll. Half-remembered remnants, the whole of the previous day felt like that. Eva hovered, quietly faded and there was Lacey.
He felt guilty, the self-pity of a seedy hangover. He thought about her as his guts spasmed again.
Thirty
You, dead. Dead in the bazaar. Dust and blood on your face that is becoming Azidullah’s, coming closer, bringing me tea. We sit in a quiet room back at base and talk about aftermaths. I tell Azidullah how silent our aunt’s house was the night you disappeared, as silent as that other house must be raucous, your house of mud and clay in the mazy tumble of old Sangin. There you are lying, you who is she, under a white sheet but the face revealed, the relatives wailing, wailing as we did not do in our house, so different in the west, so much more sophisticated we think, when nothing is more civilised than screaming at death brought in the name of that so-called sophistication. You would shy away from them, from the police and the army, who come in their khaki and their black and white to poke their noses. Downstairs, I hear the questions again. I listen and I feel guilty. But they are not here for me. Today is not yesterday. I am not sitting on our aunt’s sofa with the plastic covering to protect it from my dirt, I am not being asked what I did that day, every hour of that day and why we were fighting, as if it was abnormal for brother and sister to fight. I am not watching a policeman study the cuts on my knuckles but it is just a fall from my bike and straight away the little glances and why should they believe me, why should they? Because I am lying, I sit on the sofa and lie about those cuts as easily as I tell the truth to the two men from military intelligence; bureaucracy idling, looking at its watch, just give it straight and simple corporal. And Azidullah pours me more tea. He places his forehead to mine and his hands on my cheeks. His concern is so very genuine. We drink tea, he and I. And I cry for you both, I cry for you both...
The one hundred count-back stopped the images at forty. They told Fletcher to think like a TV, just a matter of pressing off on the remote control. Bring on the black, the little red standby light.
He blamed the police. Sunday morning at seven am, it could only be the cops at the front door. He lay in bed until they stopped knocking, leaping up when he heard the door being opened half an hour later. Then Jonas’s voice, the Norwegian back from wherever he had disappeared to the night before. He was talking to someone, several sets of footsteps heading for the kitchen. Fletcher moved to the top stair. He could just hear the two detectives asking questions about the missing girl, the same questions in multiple ways, monotonously probing for the way in. He remembered the technique.
Then Azidullah came.
He was a captain in the Afghan National Army. A gentle man with three young children, proud pictures in a wallet. Nine years dead, Azidullah was still an occasional presence, the last time a winter night in Liverpool, Fletcher passing a mosque and the sound of prayer.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
Fletcher had started to repeat the words, to himself at first and then out loud. Azidullah was suddenly beside him, smiling, encouraging him, louder, louder. They were thrown out of a café, shouted at in the Toxteth halfway house. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, the two of them, all through the night, Fletcher falling asleep to wake with Azidullah again vanished.
They’d patrolled together, joint ISAF-ANA patrols. Smiley-faced info operations and sweets for the kids. Schools and food aid. Roll out the big sell to bemused locals, insurgents among them and who’s who, who the fuck is who? Always that cold fear but smiling Azidullah with the patience of the desert. Fletcher learned that the pat on his arm meant now we wait. His gaze would lower, contemplating the distance, waiting for the moment to give Fletcher his cue to continue. Reconstruction. Democracy. The next few words in a dialogue endlessly built and torn down. Enduring Freedom. The Afghans did just that. They endured until the foreigners took their freedom home.
Fletcher sat on the stairs as Azidullah did, leaning forwards, head angled, flattering the interest of the men in the kitchen who didn’t know he was listening. He considered moving further down but couldn’t rule out hitting a creaky stair. No reason to be careless, as Azidullah was careless to sit outside that teashop. The man on the moped put thirty-five rounds into him.
Fletcher memorised every question the policemen asked and every response that the Norwegian gave. Fixated concentration, he’d learned from his aunt. The Marines noticed it early. They called it an aptitude, said they needed soldiers who could listen. It was all about intel, like the detail filtering up from the kitchen.
Detective A told Mortensen that they knew Lacey had returned to his house after the midsummer party, an anonymous tip. Why hadn’t he told them? The Norwegian couldn’t say. He only managed a barely audible I see when told that they had checked with their Norwegian colleagues and knew about his conviction back in Bergen. Detective B couldn’t hide his derision; if the police knew then Mortensen could be damn sure the media soon would.
The police would get there in the end, thought Fletcher. But they once thought the same about him.
Thirty-One
‘I want a week off,’ said Jonas.
‘That’s why you’re calling me? It’s Sunday morning, Jonas.’
‘I want a week off.�
��
‘Whatever. In fact, take more. Take two weeks.’
‘A week is fine.’
‘Take more.’
‘Why?’
‘I want you to.’
‘A week’s enough.’
‘Why don’t you think about something more long-term?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just a piece of advice.’
‘I’m taking a week.’
Jonas ended the call, looking at the handset as if Boss Hogg might appear on the screen.
No way he was going to work. Think of it as a piece of advice. I hear you, boss, no finger needed to stir the tea-leaves to read how unusual accidents happen on a work site. Only forty minutes since the two detectives had left but Hogg already knew, clear as the day was blue.
Jonas sat on the bed. The police had been waiting outside when he got home from the hotel. A casual lean against a black BMW at seven thirty on a Sunday morning. Only cops did that. Someone passing End Point would notice, then a conversation in the shop, a couple of texts...
A swelling anxiety made him stand up. But standing just made him more anxious, meant he couldn’t process. It was completely ridiculous. So he sat down again, deliberately. The trick is to keep breathing. Another surge of adrenaline forced him back to his feet. Fuck it, he was anxious, he really was but he still didn’t know why he hadn’t told the detectives that Lacey had come back to his house after the Jonsok party. He just didn’t. They didn’t believe him.
Really, they said.
Really.
In his pocket, his mobile rang, as it had when he was showing the detectives inside the house. Don’t mind us, Sad Eyes had said. Feel free to answer. Jonas hadn’t then and didn’t now.
Mary again. Not one phone call the night before and now three since 6 am. She was probably furious at him for standing her up. Standing her up, like they were dating. He threw the mobile on the bed and started pacing round the room. He used to do this for hours in prison.
A Private Haunting Page 17