by Liam Brown
Occasionally someone would need the toilet and we would stop and wait while they took a piss or squatted down and took a liquid shit in the sand, not botherin to dig a hole or even wipe before they pulled up their pants. Then we would carry on. Coupla times Dog said he needed to stop. We kept goin, letting him soil himself. Figured he stank so bad it wouldn’t make a difference anyhow, ha.
After the second night we were dead on our feet. Seriously, we might as well’ve been walkin backwards. Eventually, I gave the order to stop. ‘Ok, that’s it boys. We’re takin a break,’ I said, pointin to a large boulder near to where we’d stopped. ‘We can sleep in the shade. Jus’ four hours, then we’ll get movin again.’
Cal and Doggie gave a quiet groan of relief as they dropped to their knees and started wrestlin with their bags. Jett though, remained standin. ‘Woah, now hang on there. With all due respect Sir, do you think it’s wise to leave no one standin guard?’ he said, shootin me a wicked grin. ‘An excellent point, soldier,’ I grinned back. ‘But who would act so selflessly in the interest of the team? Anyone?’
Nobody said anythin.
‘Anyone?’ I asked again. Doggie looked at his feet. ‘Ah, Private Doggerel. Good of ya to volunteer. Your country loves you. Now get to your post. Come wake us in four hours.’ Doggie stared at me, his big dopey cow eyes fillin with water. He started to say somethin, but Jett took a step towards him and he shut his mouth. ‘Thanks Dog!’ I yelled as he trudged off to keep watch. Then I bedded down under the rock with the others.
When I woke it was dark. I shook the others and crawled out from under the boulder. I couldn’t believe it. Fuckin Doggie had let us oversleep. I swore to God when I got hold of him I was gonna whip his ass good.
Only I never did get hold of him.
We called and called but there was no answer. Jett even went off huntin for him with a flashlight, but there was no sign of him. Then Cal noticed Doggie’s bag had gone. ‘Well that’s that,’ I said. ‘Damn coward’s run out on us.’
But that wasn’t that. Because a little later, when I went in my bag to fetch a drink I found my flask had gone. I asked Cal for a sip of his, but that had gone too. So had Jett’s. Doggie had left us. And he’d taken the water with him.
I sat in the waiting room downing plastic cups of mineral water. I must have got up to refill my cup thirty times in the half hour I’d been sat there, the loud rumble of the water cooler echoing around the walls as I crouched in front of the machine, studiously avoiding the eyes of the other patients until finally – finally – I felt the need to pee and rushed to the bathroom to fill my little test tube. After that it was just a matter of sitting there until my name was called, pretending to read twenty-year-old copies of Homemaker Magazine while I waited to be diagnosed with stomach cancer. Or ebola. Or any of the other ugly, painful and ultimately fatal diseases that matched my current symptoms – namely the need to throw up every couple of hours, along with a generalised feeling of impending doom.
Basically it was business as usual, only with added vomit.
As I sat there, I found myself thinking back to the rally the day before. I’d been exhausted by the time the march had finally finished – ready to crawl into bed and hibernate for a week. Dustin had other ideas though. It had taken over an hour for the crowds to disperse from the central square, leaving behind them a thick blanket of litter; beer cans, cigarette butts, wrappers, discarded flags and placards. Once enough people had filtered away I started to head in the direction we’d come from, back towards the shop. Dustin caught my sleeve though, tugging me back towards him. ‘Why don’t you come for a drink? I’m meeting some people later.’ I thought back to the last time I’d seen Dustin drunk. ‘You know, I’m still not feeling too great. I think I’ve picked up a stomach bug and… ’ Dustin started shaking his head ‘Oh come off it! Didn’t you have fun this afternoon?’ I gave a small, sleepy shrug. ‘Sure.’ ‘Exactly! Just like I promised,’ Dustin said, already beginning to pull me in the opposite direction. ‘Listen, the bar we’re meeting at is just down the road. If you don’t like it then you can leave, no problem.’ Dustin kept pulling me as he spoke, the rubbish crunching under my feet like fresh snow, or dead leaves. ‘But you will like it. These people, they’re not like the people who came out today. They were just here to party – to get drunk and high and feel good about themselves for a couple of hours before they go back to their boring little lives. They don’t really believe they can change anything. But the people I’m going to meet now… ’ Dustin grinned again. ‘Listen you’ll have fun, I promise.’
The bar Dustin led me to was called The Hobgoblin. Although it stood wedged between a row of ultra-trendy Thai restaurants and recently refurbished wine bars, it was a stubbornly traditional pub – a hand painted sign of a demon swinging above the doorway and thick coils of ivy clinging to the crumbling brickwork. Apart from a small glow of light visible through the smeared front window, it looked almost entirely derelict. Inside was no different, and as I followed Dustin through the door I was greeted by a handful of empty wooden stools propped against a deserted bar. Dustin didn’t look phased however, and as I followed him to a small doorway on the other side of the room I had the impression he’d visited this place many times before.
The doorway led to a narrow set of stairs, the exposed brickwork curving steeply downwards, the darkness lit only by a couple of flickering candles – actual candles – long streaks of red wax forming thick stalactites below the rusted holders. ‘Jeremy has a real sense of theatre,’ Dustin said by way of explanation as we descended the stairs together, me clinging tightly to the back of his shirt, terrified I was about to fall and break my leg. I found myself vaguely wondering if I was being led to some sort of medieval sex dungeon.
At the bottom of the stairs the room opened up into a large basement with a low wooden ceiling, again lit only by candles. At the back of the room was a group of four suited men huddled around a small table, heads bowed conspiratorially. As I followed Dustin through the gloom the men turned around, revealing a silver laptop open on the table between them, looking strangely futuristic amongst the rustic brick and wood.
‘Ah, Dusty!’ said the man closest to us, his strange accent hovering somewhere between South London and South Africa.
‘Jeremy!’ Dustin said, rushing forward and pumping the man’s hand. ‘Great to see you again!’
Moving closer, I was able to make out Jeremy’s features in the candlelight, a mop of translucent white-blonde hair falling over his pale face. He looked like he hadn’t seen daylight for a few months. Even more interesting though was the screen flashing next to him.
From where I was standing I could make out grainy video footage of what looked like a school bus travelling along a rocky desert road. The camera pulled back, half a kilometre, two kilometres, and I realised why the image was so shaky. It was being shot from inside the cockpit of a helicopter. Suddenly there was a burst of light as a missile fizzed to life at the bottom of the screen, the camera tracking it until it made contact with its target – the bus. A huge fireball filled the screen then froze, looking like some sort of weird flower, its ragged petals blooming orange, red, yellow, black. Jeremy had paused the film.
I glanced up to find a strange look stretched across his sallow face. ‘And this must be… ?’ he asked, not taking his eyes from me. Dustin coughed awkwardly. ‘Um yes, sorry. Jeremy this is Lorna. Lorna – Jeremy.’ Jeremy kept staring at me for a couple more seconds, his eyes searching me, boring little holes into my skin. Then he blinked and his face cracked into a broad grin. ‘Good to have you here Lorna. Any friend of Dusty’s is a friend of the cause.’ I waved awkwardly, my eyes flicking involuntarily back to the screen where the explosion was still frozen. ‘Ah, so you’re enjoying our little home video eh?’ Jeremy said, following my gaze. ‘We’ve got hours of this stuff. Terabytes of it. But enough,’ he paused, bringing down the lid of the computer. ‘Come take a seat. Have a drink. We have lots to talk about.’
>
The conversation seemed to go on for hours, moving in endless, impenetrable circles. At first I tried to keep up, nodding or shaking my head whenever it seemed appropriate, but I quickly lost the thread altogether, letting the talk of secret surveillance and ‘incontrovertible evidence’ wash over me while I sat and studied the men as they talked. Everyone seemed desperate to impress Jeremy I noticed, looking to him for approval whenever they spoke while he sat at the head of the table, his fingers pressed together, a carefully crafted look of concern on his face. I don’t know why, but I found him almost unbearably irritating. Who did this man think he was? Sat down here in his ridiculous candlelit cavern with his co-conspirators, like bloody Guy Fawkes. It was all just so irretrievably… naff. And yet the others couldn’t get enough of it. Dustin in particular seemed ridiculously excited, his face screwed into a passionate scowl, banging the table with his fist as he spoke. I wondered if all revolutionaries started out like this? Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Che Guevara. Little boys, playing the part they thought the world expected of them.
As I sat there growing more and more resentful that I’d let Dustin drag me here under the pretence of ‘fun’, I gradually became aware that the others kept turning round to glance at me. Shuffling uncomfortably in my seat, I forced myself to tune in to the conversation, paranoid they were talking about me. Suddenly Jeremy clapped his hands together for silence. ‘Enough! But we are forgetting our manners. We have a guest with us – and a soldier’s wife no less… ’ I turned to stare at Dustin, who was refusing to look up, apparently fascinated by a spot on the table. Jeremy continued, turning to talk to me directly. ‘My apologies Lorna. Now if you can spare us a few more minutes I’d like to show you another video? I think you’ll find this one particularly… enlightening.’ Before I could say anything, Jeremy had re-opened the laptop and loaded the file he was looking for.
He hit play.
The footage was even shakier than in the first video, looking like it might have been shot from the back of a truck, the camera jumping up and down as it tracked across a featureless stretch of sand. After thirty seconds or so the image seemed to settle down as the lorry slowed to a stop and whoever was filming stood up and started walking slowly towards a rubbish dump. There was scratchy confusion while the camera strained to focus. And then I saw it.
What had looked from a distance like rubbish was in fact the littered corpses of thirty or forty men, gaping bullet wounds in the back of their heads, their hair and beards slick with blood. The cameraman continued to move forward through the field of bodies, stopping occasionally to zoom in on a particularly deep wound, or a vivid facial expression, one man’s mouth twisted into a stiff blue scream. To the edge of the frame the soldiers – for it was obvious now that that was what they were – could be seen bending down to check the bodies, picking them up by their hair and letting them slump back to the floor.
This went on for another minute or so, before the scene abruptly cut and then restarted with a close up of two soldiers. There was no sound on the video and the two men were opening and closing their mouths as if they were drowning, tears rolling down their faces.
I realised they were laughing.
The camera panned back slowly to reveal what was so funny. One of the men was holding a corpse by the hair. The corpse was a boy. The camera zoomed in again to focus on the large open wound on the back of the boy’s head.
Then I saw what was so funny.
One of the soldiers, the one holding the dead boy, had his trousers bunched around his knees. I watched as he forced his erect penis into the wound, the camera following as he danced.
In out.
In out.
While the soldiers stood around laughing.
In total silence.
Jeremy paused the video. ‘I think we all get the idea?’ he said, closing the lid of the laptop again. ‘And we have hours of this stuff. Weeks of it. Of course, you can imagine what would happen if this was to end up in the wrong – or should that be right – hands… ’ He paused, twisting to stare directly at me. ‘What about you Lorna? Do you think the world deserves to see this stuff? Do you think people have a right to know what’s really going on?’
I looked at him, a Tube map of purple veins visible under that paper white complexion, his forehead clammy with perspiration. I glanced over at Dustin, who had gone almost as pale as Jeremy, and then I opened my mouth.
And vomited straight onto the table.
I made an appointment at the doctors the very next morning.
‘Well Lorna, the good news is we’ve managed to rule out anything nasty. Your blood sugars are fine… ’
I looked up at the doctor, stunned not to be hearing the death sentence I’d expected.
‘… In fact, as it is I can’t see there’s anything wrong, apart from perhaps a touch of anaemia… ’
I shook my head, confused. It didn’t make sense. The vomiting, the stomach cramps – couldn’t this woman see I was dying?
‘… And the morning sickness of course. Some women do seem to get it rather bad I’m afraid, but hopefully it should start to level out soon. Do you know how far along you are?’
It’s incredible when you think about how much punishment the human body can take. I mean, people say the average human male needs 2500 thousand calories a day just to maintain a constant weight, so for a soldier you can triple that. Now in the last week all I’ve eaten besides a coupla dozen sandflies is a few mouthfuls of burnt cat meat and two or three poisoned berries, yet besides a bit of bellyache and bad breath I’ve hardly noticed the hunger. A few hours without water though, and I’d begun to shut down. My lips were raw and cracked, my tongue swollen in my head. This time I didn’t even bother suckin on stone. I knew the drill by now. I just had to keep walkin.
As the scenery cycled through white, brown, grey and beige, I realised with certainty that I was going to die out here. Even if we came across another oasis, hell, even if we managed to find the border, we would only be postponing the inevitable. Sooner or later, we would stop and we would fall. The birds would strip us of our meat and the sun would bleach our bones and eventually we would disappear as if we had never been; earth-to-earth, ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. Sand-to-sand ha. And the strange thing was, this time I didn’t particularly care.
As the three of us bobbed along in silence, even Jett seemin to have finally run out of steam, I found myself struck by the idea I was unravelling – as if a little piece of me had become snagged somewhere, at the oasis or back at the camp, or even further away maybe, an invisible thread stretchin out over the ocean, all the way back home to you. Either way, I couldn’t escape the feelin I was slowly being pulled apart, that with each step forward there was somehow a little less of me left to go on, that sooner or later I would simply disappear.
On top of this, I’d started seein things again. At first it was just random images – fragments, with no context or explanation. A cloud that reminded me of an old hat I used to wear, a rock that sorta resembled a dentist’s chair. Gradually though, the pictures began to fall into an order I could follow, the scenery givin way to a full-blown slideshow. My life, tricklin before my eyes. There I was as a baby, bonnie and full of life, exactly as I was in the framed photo on Mum’s dressin table, head-to-toe in scratchy home-knit, frozen mid-smile – wind she always joked – and there I was again, a six-year-old starin at that same picture through a crack in Mum’s closet, hidin from a hidin ha. The pictures accelerated, the years fluttered past: my first day at school, the first guy I knocked out, my first blowjob – all of the major milestones basically, until finally I reached your mother. Then time stopped.
Lorna.
Yup, that’s one thing I’ll say about your mum – of all the mistakes I’ve made, she’s definitely my favourite.
My private show-reel was interrupted by a loud scrapin noise, as if the projector had packed up. I blinked and I was back in the desert. The scrapin noise again. It was Cal. He was tryin to say somethin. He lo
oked excited. ‘We… made… it… !’ I followed his finger to where he was pointin and saw a thin black line stretchin across the horizon, slicin the sand in two. It was a fence. We had reached the border. It was my turn to make a noise.
Twenty minutes later the three of us stood on the other side. The fence, although made of razor wire, was only a metre or so high and we all managed to clear it in a single hop. Fuck knows who they were expectin to keep out. Midgets? Ha. Cal was the last to jump, and once he made it across, the three of us hopped around like fuckin idiots for a bit, high-fivin and gettin each other in headlocks and shit. Jett looked so happy I thought he was gonna blub. Shit, even I felt a bit choked.
After we finished celebratin we stood there for a coupla minutes and looked around. It was weird. For some reason I’d always figured things would look different on the other side of the border. But nah. The sun was still just as hot. The sand was just as brown and gritty. The horizon was still full of nothing but sky. Most of all I was still dying of thirst. I could tell by the others’ faces they were all thinkin the same thing. Cal was the first to speak. ‘So what now?’ I turned to Jett. ‘Yeah. So what now?’ Jett did a little squinty thing with his eyes, peerin off into the distance. He looked left, right, behind him, then bent down and picked up a handful of sand. I waited for him to pop a finger in his mouth and stick it in the wind. ‘So what now?’ I said again. Jett stood up. ‘Well… I guess we keep walking.’ I turned to Cal and nodded. ‘Yup,’ I said. Cal agreed. ‘Yup.’ And we started walkin.