The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  “But I have to.”

  “Try Reuters.”

  “They’re out.” She shrugged.

  “But I have to file.”

  Shrug. “Sorry, I cannot.” She turned back to her book. I fainted to the fl oor.

  I came round because Valida kicked me, then she knelt at my side: “OK. But promise me you will not tell anyone else I let you,” she said.

  “Where are you now?” said Lucy. I said I was sitting in a café in the main square.

  “Is it pretty?”

  Pretty. It’s wide open to the hills; they can see every move I make. My stomach clenched as I looked up to the trees and the crags. Yet, lots of other people are sitting here, and they don’t seem to be afraid. Maybe this was Sarajevo before the first shell fell.

  The old town seems to have turned into one big café; table after table, in the view of the hills, basking in the September sun.

  Every time I look up, I feel sick. I’m making myself sit here, but I don’t feel happy about it. The streets are full of traffic, normal traffic, in traffic jams. I saw a woman run across the street, and my heart jumped – we’re in an exposed place – where the trams stop, just at the top of Bascarsija Square, although of course there were no trams for most of the war. The general started them again in the summer of 1994. The snipers used to fire into them but people used them anyway. At least they didn’t have to walk.

  I don’t blame the snipers for shooting at the trams. Maybe it was easier. But did they care by then? Telescopic sights are like a camera – one step away from the target. I’m not saying being a photographer is as bad as being a sniper. Even I don’t think that. Nobody could. Not even the Sarajevans. Although they hated us by the end.

  There are no snipers any more. They’ve all gone back to being pig farmers or running a shop or into the police, or training for the Serbian Olympic rifle team or driving taxis in Shepherd’s Bush (there is an entire taxi firm there staffed by Serbs from Nis, an über-Serb stronghold near the Bulgarian border. It was a nightmare during the Kosovo war because you’d end up having to defend NATO intervention or, if you were feeling cowardly, agreeing that Albanians really were absolutely impossible).

  The woman who was running was simply in a hurry. But just seeing her run, across that street, her flying silhouette against the chipped stone, with the mountains in the background, my breath drained shallow and I stepped back, looking for cover, for that split second before my rational mind took over. Then I laughed at myself, but I still stared up at the hills.

  They look beautiful today. High and green against the blue sky. Like a postcard, another Heidi day. Little red-roofed houses spilling up under the crags, and then, above, stretching up to the sky-line, where the old frontline used to be, the trees, where the Serbs used to sit and pick us off below. Like a video game. And poking out, everywhere, between the houses, the little minarets pricking the sky. I’m sure there are more minarets now than before. But then, I could never have stood here to count them back then.

  Lucy asks me if it’s pretty. I look around. The paving stones, the roses, the mosque fretted out of chunks of honeycomb, the long low rows of little Turkish shops, wooden shutters pinned back onto their rough stone walls, windows stuffed with those tall thin chased brass coffee grinders, tiny copper jugs, and fake Louis Vuitton bags, and the soldiers everywhere… I don’t know who they are anymore; I can’t seem to recognise their fatigues… maybe there are countries that weren’t here before…

  I say, in some surprise, down the phone: “Yes, yes it is.”

  Being here is like living split screen. Everything brings another memory back. Except that everyone seems to be doing the wrong thing. People are ambling along the streets; table after table of girls in dark glasses, with that dyed maroon hair, and blue-chinned men, sitting, sipping coffee. Some soldiers have just walked past, not patrolling, but strolling, to my surprise, hand in hand, carrying plastic bags from which protrude the end of a carved wooden pipe, the tassel of a fez – souvenirs. From their badges I see they are Turks… hence the hand in hand, of course. In many Muslim countries, even the butchest men do that; presumably because they can’t hold the hands of girls without being shot by their brothers or forced down the aisle.

  The streets are full of expensive German cars that sit in traffic jams on the once-deserted streets. Is this the town Amir tried to tell me about? My poor Amir. Would he recognise this? Would he be bringing up Nermina here? That’s what his baby was called. I never saw her. She was born just after he died.

  It doesn’t even smell the same. It smells of summer dust, and exhaust, and some kind of tree; the sweet scent of rubbish and cordite has long been blown away.

  I don’t remember the roses.

  Maybe they ate the roses during the war. Sarajevo rose consumption, 1992–1995: a report by the World Food Programme.

  I wish I wasn’t here on my own. I wish I was here with someone who’d find that funny. Who knows how weird it is that my mobile works.

  I must know people here. I lived here for years. But suddenly I can’t remember anyone at all.

  Hal would get that. At least, I suppose he would. Suddenly I missed him so sharply it actually hurt. I remember him saying to me, “Don’t you find it strange when you go back to London and all your friends are talking about curtain material?” At the wedding. Or maybe he said that here years ago.

  Hal. Fucking Hal. I still feel like such an idiot. Such a silly little girl. A stupid teenage girl with a silly teenage crush.

  After that wedding, I built castles in the air. Adrian kept jabbing at me all the way to London, but I wasn’t really listening, I kept thinking about Hal. My perfect solution. I’d been waiting for my happy ending and here it was. He’d always liked me. I mean, he’d made a pass at me the first time we’d met – well, not the first time as that was in the UN base, but the first time we’d been on our own. I’d liked him; except of course in those days I had loved Amir so much more.

  Amir would have hated Hal. He hated him then.

  But Hal was alive and he was in London. But he didn’t like London either. He wanted to go back into the SAS. Maybe we could live in a little cottage in Herefordshire with roses round the door (which we would not be reduced to eating because of a siege, and even if we were, Hal could find me better things to eat) and I could write novels and have babies who’d have beautiful blue eyes. Maybe I could write thrillers and he could help me with the research. He could probably do DIY, even balance budgets. Every now and then he’d vanish for a bit, and then come back with exciting stories of what was really going on.

  That’s what I was thinking, in my pink fuzz, as Adrian drove me back up the M4. Not that he might come back with one leg, or half his face missing, or with mad staring alienated eyes, or not come back at all. Nor that, if he did come back, it wouldn’t be like Sarajevo: I wouldn’t be the one he’d shared it with.

  Adrian tried to kiss me, when we got to London, which he’d never tried before, in fifteen years, even though we’d always known we fancied each other. He was only doing it because of Hal.

  Perhaps that was why he was smiling, when I saw him at a party in Shepherd’s Bush the following month. He asked me if I had ever heard from “that guy?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one I had to pull you off at Lizzie’s wedding.”

  I blushed: “A bit.” I had heard from him, even though I hadn’t seen him. He kept sending me e-mails asking me to do things, and then not being able to make it because he had to rush off and do something else. I was pushier than I would normally be with a man, I suppose, because I was used to needing Hal for work. I cut him some slack because he did have the kind of life where he might rush off at a moment’s notice – I chose to ignore that he’d complained his life was rather dull.

  “Did you know Fred is the godfather of his new baby?” said Adrian.

  “What!”

  “Yes. He has a boy and a girl. The wife couldn’t leave the baby


  – that’s why she wasn’t at the wedding…”

  “So he’s married?”

  “I thought he was a close friend of yours.”

  “He was, in Sarajevo…”

  I thought I might be sick. I walked straight past Adrian and into the hall. I ignored two people who tried to talk to me. I picked up my coat and walked out into the street. When I couldn’t walk any further, I sat down on a doorstep and wept: with rage and humiliation at my own stupidity; at the shattering of my fantasy world; at the lost solution to my horrible life; because now Hal could never even be my friend. I had been perfectly happy, just to have him as a friend, someone I had known in Sarajevo, back as a friend.

  He hadn’t technically lied to me. But he definitely hadn’t told me the truth. I never asked him if he was married, but I had created opportunities for him to tell me he was. I had trusted him. Then I remembered Phil saying all those years ago: “Did he just say; ‘Hey babe, I’m in the SAS, how about it?’” Maybe that was it. Maybe he was like Adrian, used to women throwing themselves at him. Maybe I was just like every other stupid girl. With a stupid crush on some cardboard cut-out. It’s not surprising he lied. He’s been expensively trained to lie with taxpayers’ money, along with garrotting people, not washing for weeks, and carrying lumps of concrete. He probably lies as a reflex action to give himself time to think. He’s probably a psychopath. How could he lie to me? I knew him in the war. Maybe he thought, stupid woman, knew me in Sarajevo, seems to have weird crush. Not doing anything else tonight. Why not? A quick fuck. How well did I actually know him? I knew him for six weeks, six years ago.

  The next time he emailed me, I didn’t reply. He sent a couple more. Then they stopped. But I wanted to reply even though I knew he was married. There was this horrid whisper in my head saying, people get divorced all the time. Castles in the air are much harder to knock down – there’s nothing to swing the demolition ball at.

  It was a few months later that I bumped into him again. It was a book launch at the RGS. The United Nations: Better than nothing? by one of those pundits who get flown out to war zones when it’s nice and safe. It was full of other pundits, and the top echelons of soldiers and aid workers. Most of my friends were in Sierra Leone.

  I was drinking my glass of white wine thinking, when am I ever going to get to write my own book, is this like weddings, when I saw Hal. He had his back to the wall and was talking to someone who was obviously another soldier; their hair was shorter than anyone else’s in the room and the other one was wearing a fleece.

  They were quite close. I walked over and said: “Hello Hal.” His face froze halfway through his welcoming smile, as he took on board that I wasn’t being particularly nice.

  “How are you?” I didn’t smile and I didn’t move to kiss him hello.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but he was wary now.

  “Oh good.” Then I said nothing.

  “Do you know Ben?” he gestured to the other man.

  “No.” I nodded but didn’t smile.

  “So have you seen anything of Lizzie lately?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh…” Then he said: “Have you read this book?”

  “No.”

  “Are you still at that magazine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” There is a limit to how much you can make small talk with someone who won’t talk. “Are you all right?”

  I said, very slowly: “How’s – your – wife?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Oh.” Ben, or whatever he was called, glanced at Hal and left, muttering about somebody on the other side of the room.

  Hal didn’t say anything.

  “Is she here?”

  He waited for a moment before he said: “No.” I thought he was telling the truth because he didn’t look round the room first, but who knows? I used to be good at telling if someone was lying.

  “I’m surprised she lets you out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” He stared at me. I said: “Are you so stupid?

  Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” He shrugged and looked rather tired.

  “You lied to me. I hate being lied to. How could you lie like that to me?”

  He looked embarrassed but he said: “I didn’t lie.”

  That lit the fuse. “Well, let’s face it, you didn’t tell the truth.”

  “Come on, Molly,” he put his hand on my arm but I wrenched it away.

  “Don’t come on Molly me.”

  Then he said, in a very reasonable voice, as though trying to talk down an enraged Foreign Legionnaire, “I’m really sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you and I’m sorry you’re so angry.”

  “Well of course I’m bloody angry!” My voice was getting all high and wobbly. The next thing I knew I was being shepherded out of the room. We ended up in a dark corridor lined with photographs of men with beards, on mountain tops, or beneath man-eating trees. I knew I was just making a fool of myself, but actually, I didn’t really care. I mean, he knew. He’d tricked me into being this sad.

  “I nearly… I would never… never. If I’d known you had a wife…”

  “What can I say,” he looked panic-stricken. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was married. I was drunk. It was late. I shouldn’t have done it. But I did.”

  “You weren’t drunk when you kept emailing me. Unless you’re an alcoholic.”

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry you’re so upset. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Well you did.”

  “Please.” He swallowed his panic and held out his hand, and smiled his best smile at me. “Can’t you just forget that it happened? Or just take it as a compliment?”

  “No! It’s not a bloody compliment. It’s a fucking lie. I mean, you’re married. You can’t go round giving compliments like that. You’ve got two children!”

  “For Christ’s sake, just stop it. I’m sorry. I’ve said I was sorry.

  These things happen. For God’s sake.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Well maybe it’s about time they did.”

  “Oh fuck off!”

  I wanted to hit him, but that wouldn’t really work. I balled my fists up, like Vince, that psycho, who’d wanted to punch me, back in Jez all those years ago. Then I had to unball them to wipe away my tears. He looked at me in horror, and then suddenly with pity.

  “What is this about?” he said. “This can’t just be about me?”

  I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t trust myself to speak. I wiped my eyes, but that didn’t work, so I put my hands over my face. When I did speak, all I could say was Amir. “The guy in Sarajevo?… but that was years ago…” I didn’t speak, I just leant against the wall.

  “Didn’t he marry someone else?”

  “That wasn’t his fault.”

  “It must have been partly his fault.”

  “I should have been there.”

  Hal didn’t know what I was talking about. “He treated you like shit,” he said. The panic had left his voice; I was back as a problem which needed to be solved.

  “I treated him like shit!”

  “Molly, he shagged somebody else. Knocked her up and married her. If that isn’t treating you like shit, I don’t know what is.”

  “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?” He had the grace to look ashamed, momentarily.

  “Well maybe you both treated each other like shit, but he’s dead. He died a long time ago. He’d been married to that other girl for months when he died.”

  “He didn’t love her. He told me that the night he died. He wanted to come back to me. He said they were going to get divorced.”

  That did stop him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Why would you know? No-one knew. I wouldn’t let him. I sent him away. He went out onto Sniper Alley and he was shot. And, if I hadn’t, he’d still have been alive.” Those are facts. It doesn’t mat
ter how much anyone tells me it isn’t my fault. A sniping is so random, such terrible bad luck. Maybe the sniper… One minute later, even one second, he’d still have been alive.

  “They would have got him in the end.”

  “What! Why? Lots of people survived the war. Look at you, look at me. They never got us.”

  “But that’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he…” Hal stopped.

  “Because what? The Serbs didn’t kill everyone…”

  “But Molly, he wasn’t killed by the Serbs.”

  “Oh don’t give me that UN shit about Muslim snipers killing their own…”

  “He wasn’t killed by a sniper…” then he stopped.

  “Well how did he die then?” It was easier now I was just furious. “He wasn’t killed by a shell! I’d have noticed that! They’d have had to hose him off the road. Well, they didn’t. I saw his body!”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Well, what was it like?”

  Hal stopped, and then said something about not remembering exactly.

  “I don’t want to tell you the wrong thing,” he said. “It was a long time ago. I want to get it right…”

  “Tell me what?” I said. “You have to tell me…” I was completely at sea – I couldn’t understand any of this. It took another minute or so of prevarication, before Hal said: “I can’t remember exactly what happened. I don’t think I ever knew. I’m sorry. In a way, I don’t think it matters too much. But you must understand they’d have got him in the end.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. Somebody wanted to kill him, and… well, they did.”

  “What?… You mean he was murdered?” I winced myself – it’s such a melodramatic word, but war is full of melodrama.

  “If you want to put it like that…”

  “But who? Who would want to do that? Why?”

  Hal shrugged: “A lot of funny things happened in that war.”