Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  I should, at that moment, have stopped rooting around at the back of a drawer and said, ‘Don’t use the past tense.’ I should have climbed like some needy baby monkey onto his furred chest. I should have said, ‘Let’s go away on holiday and dawdle in bed until Housekeeping knocks at the door.’

  Instead I shrug my shoulders. ‘That was when I had nothing better to do with my time.’ And then, because the remark about undressing has hurt: ‘You didn’t really think the sex thing would last for ever, did you?’

  When I remember that exchange, I get a lurid mental close-up, an image of my mouth as it enunciates the nastiness. Bright red Cruella de Vil lips curling in slow motion to wring the full quota of sarcasm from my put-down. ‘YOOOOU-DIDN’T-THINK-THE-SEEEEX-THIIING-WOULD-LAAAST FOR-EEEEVER, DID YOU?’

  And Jake, being Jake, looks at me over the top of his book and says, ‘With you, actually, yes, I did. And still do.’

  23

  ‘Coffee is in order,’ said Winston, when we arrived at the Peace Palace the following morning.

  In the dim light of the Refectorium, he looked uncharacteristically washed out. There was a tinge of grey to his complexion, a hint of mortality peeping from behind the bravado. The pallor made the scatter of freckles on his nose stand out. I resisted a silly urge to lean forward and wipe them away. Maybe, I thought, presenting took more out of him than at first appeared. ‘You look tired, Winston.’

  ‘I am,’ he said, shaking a pill into his hand and downing it. ‘But I knew I would be, and that’s why you’re scheduled to take up the baton today. Gives me a breather.’

  Fifteen minutes later, I was rising to my feet, heart pounding, as silence settled on the Small Hall of Justice and all eyes turned to me. ‘Easy as pie,’ muttered Winston.

  ‘Commissioners,’ I began, ‘by examining the legal treaties, diplomatic evidence and the many maps history has left behind, we have conclusively demonstrated where the original border between these two countries lies.’ Brazen, but so be it.

  ‘We will now turn to the issue of subsequent conduct and show how the relevant governments, in their everyday administrative behaviour, demonstrated their unquestioning acceptance of this line through the decades.’

  My first piece of evidence was a 1940 report on a DDT-spraying campaign staged by the Italian authorities just before the colony was occupied by Allied forces. Malaria, I explained, traditionally claimed tens of thousands of lives each year. Despite the imminence of war, the Italian governor had decided to take action; DDT was seen as the miracle product of the day.

  ‘Roberto Petrucci, the governor of North Darrar, ordered a country-wide eradication campaign. This involved spraying the internal walls of every house, tukul, stable and barn to prevent the malarial mosquito from settling. This image shows a photograph of the notice posted on tree trunks, walls and lamp-posts, warning locals to tether their livestock in the open air and vacate their premises during spraying. They also leafleted every household.

  ‘In their survey, the Italians carefully listed the villages, towns, hamlets and isolated farms to be targeted. Let us see where those all lie.’ I nodded to Yohannes, who called up a borderless map of the region. A series of green dots appeared, which coagulated to yield a shape bearing a rough resemblance to the modern state of North Darrar. Over them, we imposed the black outline of a 1998 Michelin map, which, until recently, had been in standard use.

  ‘As you can see’ – I used my laser pointer to highlight a series of gaps – ‘this DDT outline does not match up exactly with a border that was, until the recent outbreak of hostilities, regarded as uncontested. The Italian authorities saw no point in spraying mountain areas so high and cold that no mosquito stood a chance of survival. But here in the west, south and east, the modern map’s outlines are confirmed and validated.’

  The commissioners sat with necks craned, staring intently at the screen, murmuring to one another. I steamed on, slowly laying a series of transfers on top of the existing map. Red, orange, blue: the places where electricity pylons stood, polio vaccinations were distributed, municipal taxes collected. With each layer, more white gaps disappeared, until the multi-coloured blob not only filled the Michelin map’s black silhouette, it slopped over the line.

  ‘I …’ I had been about to say ‘I think,’ but stopped myself just in time. ‘You don’t think, you know,’ I remembered an LSE lecturer intoning, slamming his hand down on a textbook. ‘Never suggest uncertainty. You know, you know, you know.’

  Winston shot me an anxious glance, but I had recovered. ‘So it’s clear where the Italian colony’s uncontested limit lay, fifty years after its creation. Let us address whether anything changed after Mussolini’s Fascist army was defeated at Derden in 1941 and the colony fell into British hands.’

  On the screen, the commissioners were presented with a photograph of the first page of Captain Peter Lewisham’s diary, with my typed transcript running alongside.

  ‘We don’t really need the captain, do we?’ I had asked Winston in the run-up to the hearing. ‘We’re submitting all the sit reps. They’re pretty conclusive.’ The British administration’s situation reports were a month-by-month record of events across the captured colony. Unearthed in the public archives in Kew, they had yielded a satisfying quantity of place names and landmarks.

  ‘The sit reps are plenty, but they’re sterile stuff. Our captain is a card. Go to town on him.’

  So I talked the commissioners through the Great Guinea Fowl Shoot, Inquest on a Donkey and Lewisham and Co.’s sorties – drunk and sober – while omitting what was, for our purposes, a frustratingly inconclusive parley with the shifta chief. Amused smiles were playing around the commissioners’ lips – like children at bedtime they were enjoying having a story read to them – to be replaced by bleak expressions when Johnny was shot. Judge Mautner leaned forward.

  ‘This is fascinating detail, Miss Shackleton. But time is ticking by and perhaps you had better explain its relevance.’

  ‘What Captain Lewisham doesn’t say, nine-tenths of the time, is as important as what he does, Mr Chairman. When his jeep gets stuck in the mud on the road between Sherano and Buleb – a road that the other side would have you believe has always been in Darrar’s jurisdiction – he doesn’t behave like a sly trespasser, he makes as much noise as he can to get rescued. Because he knows he’s on the right side of the line. When he drives into Mederatu looking for spare parts, or to Acle to scout for game, he encounters no checkpoints. As he patrols the countryside, he never once receives a polite but firm visit from a Darrar mayor or policeman pointing out his error. His bluff confidence – the confidence perhaps only a British officer of his era enjoyed – is rooted in a certainty so solid he never bothers articulating it: he’s on home turf. And when he is presented with an opportunity to arrest a colleague’s murderer, he does us the favour of spelling this out. Johnny’s killer has moved across the border into Darrar, he tells his junior officer, beyond his reach. So, you see, every relevant regional authority in the fifties knew exactly where the border lay. There was no debate then. There should be none now.’

  I sat down, dizzy with excitement, longing to continue. ‘Thank you, Captain,’ I whispered to myself. Quietly, Winston placed a hand over my own, both congratulatory and restraining.

  One evening, I called Jake from my flat in Greenwich Village to explain that I’d had drinks after work and felt too tired to go up to Lake Cottage that evening. It was the third such conversation that month.

  His voice was quiet. ‘That’s a shame. I was looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Believe me,’ I slurred, ‘you’re not missing anything. I’m too pissed to make much sense. I mean that in the British sense.’ There was a long silence. ‘Jake, are you still there?’

  When he spoke next his voice sounded strange, uneven. ‘I’m lonely, Paula.’

  Suddenly I no longer felt drunk. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I never thought I’d ask you this,’ he said, with a
terrible weariness, ‘but are you having an affair? Have you met someone you want to be with instead of me? Please just say so if that’s the case.’

  ‘No! Of course not! How could you think that? Why would I bother hiding something like that from you? I’d just tell you.’

  ‘I no longer feel like I have your full attention.’

  ‘I’m just tired – you know how hard we’re working. God, this is awful, Jake, we sound like such a cliché.’

  ‘Well, that’s relationships for you. Nothing new under the sun. Every line I just said to you, my wife said to me at some point in the past. Fate teaching me a lesson, I suppose.’ His voice became brisk, matter-of-fact. ‘OK, well, drink lots of water, take half an aspirin so you don’t get a hangover, and we’ll talk tomorrow.’

  A few months later, we had what I shall always think of as the Last Supper. It’s the scene whose rewrite I keep imagining, the evening whose memory makes me shrivel, like a slug sprinkled with salt.

  I was already in a sulk when I arrived at Lake Cottage. I had worked through lunch, and an afternoon’s worth of caffeine and low blood-sugar had left me ratty and attenuated. I had driven up to the cottage in the Jetta to spend the Friday night with Jake, only to discover he planned to leave early the following morning. He had booked a week-long trip. He would visit Sophie at college, then head off hiking in the woods with an old college friend.

  ‘What? I wouldn’t have bothered coming if I’d thought you weren’t going to be here tomorrow. I’ve got a ton of work to do. You know how I feel about staying in the cottage when you’re not around.’

  He sighed. ‘I booked this trip two months ago, if you remember, after asking if you were interested in coming along.’

  ‘Well, forgive me if the detail escaped me. My diary is so crammed at the moment I can barely read the entries. A few verbal reminders would have been helpful.’

  He shrugged, doling out two servings of stew. We were a very modern household: Jake did the cooking and I complained about my day at the office.

  ‘I can’t change it now. Why don’t you take the opportunity to drop in and see Julia while I’m away? She’s back from Grenada and was asking after you.’

  ‘That will certainly be an unalloyed pleasure.’

  ‘Please be polite at least, Paula.’

  We ate without speaking. Laurel and Hardy lay at our feet, watching our lips with doleful expressions, pleading for scraps. The sound of our cutlery seemed unnaturally loud. He cleared the plates while I leafed through a mark-up of a purchase agreement. When I looked up some time later, he was sitting gazing at me. There was something in his eyes at that moment, a hard, cool reckoning, which frightened me.

  ‘Paula …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I warn you against a tendency I’ve noticed in a lot of people? To be more precise, a tendency I’ve noticed in most of the women I’ve had relationships with. I suspect it’s not a specifically female thing, but it does seem to have been a characteristic of the frighteningly smart, driven women I tend to be attracted to.’

  He had my attention now.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I think women like you see relationships, men, as puzzles to be deciphered. You’re intrigued, challenged at the start. You hold them up to the light, like crystals, looking for their fatal flaws, trying to work out how the various molecules slot together. And then, having found the weak spot, the crack, you apply pressure. You work at it and work at it until the thing breaks, and then you look at the shards in your hands and throw them away. Nothing stands up to that kind of relentless scrutiny. Nothing. Look hard enough and you’ll always find that fatal flaw.’

  Jake had a way of doing this. Removing all the anger from potential arguments and replacing it with sorrow, terrible regret and shame.

  I’ll have to think about this later, I told myself, work out if he’s right. Dear God, let him not be, because if he is, I’m doomed. ‘I hope that’s not true,’ I whispered.

  ‘And what I’m left wondering is whether there’s something fundamentally wrong with our relationship, some imbalance that can be addressed, in which case we can both work at that, or whether you just can’t help picking this apart because that’s who you are, and that you’d be pecking and pecking at it, however wonderful the relationship, whatever I did.’

  I dropped the purchase agreement on the table and hid my face in my hands, unable to look at him. ‘I don’t know, Jake.’

  He walked to the windows and looked out at the lake, then bowed his head and leaned his brow against the glass. He hadn’t intended to go this far, I guessed, but we were launched now. There was no stopping us as we toppled over our cliff, arms wrapped around one another in a throttling embrace.

  ‘This is beginning to feel a lot like my marriage. And I hate feeling that way with you. I can’t bear the idea of things just getting more and more petty and acrimonious between us. It’s so demeaning. I don’t know what’s happened, but some kind of rot seems to have set in. I think you should move out for a bit, back to your own place. You don’t seem to enjoy being here any more. Maybe you should examine that impulse, your need to get away from me. I think some time apart might be good for both of us. Maybe you should take the opportunity while I’m hiking to work out what you really want.’

  He spent that night on the couch and the following morning, after he’d driven off, I wandered the cottage, white-faced and weeping, making desultory, half-hearted efforts to pack my turquoise suitcase. Then I went outside and paced the lake’s circumference, three, four, five times. When I came back, I picked up the case, hurled it into the storeroom, and slammed the door. Not now. Not yet.

  I tried calling Jake’s mobile, but it went straight to voicemail. He had not left an itinerary. So I did what I knew how to do. As the wind rose outside, whipping scuds across the lake’s surface, I sat at the computer and worked the phones, researching my client, micro-analysing possible scenarios, building a prospectus. Trawling through the previous month’s searches on his computer, I began to piece together his proposed hiking route, identifying the hotels he had probably booked. I knew his tastes, his foibles: I would track him down. And then I would go and meet him. I had made a colossal, stupid mistake, but there was still time.

  24

  On day three it was the other side’s turn. They started, like us, with a speech from the foreign minister. If ours had chosen to emphasise North Darrar’s dogged struggle for self-determination and its peace-loving nature, theirs dwelt on the greatness of an empire stretching back into the mists of time, sanctified by mosque and Orthodox Church alike. Then His Excellency threw us a venomous glance.

  ‘We stand before you as innocent victims of an unprovoked attack launched on the night of June the seventh on the outskirts of the port of Sanasa. The timing of this attack, which led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, woundings and mutilations, tells you all you need to know about the character of the belligerent sitting opposite. It was designed to catch our army by surprise and cause maximum damage, and that is exactly what it did.’

  Kennedy was scribbling furiously on a notepad, tapping Winston’s shoulder as he did so. But Winston was already on his feet. ‘Mr Chairman!’

  ‘Mr Peabody, as you know, the commission functions as a trier of fact and law. Objections have little role, if any, to play. It is considered impolite.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, Mr Chairman, and I must apologise for violating procedure. However, this speech is prejudicial and extraordinarily inappropriate. A condition of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Tunis was that the origins of the conflict were to be excluded from this commission’s jurisdiction. If the other side brings in by a back door what it agreed not to bring through the front, the peace process is undermined. The issue of how this conflict began, and who bears ultimate responsibility, is to be decided by a commission to be appointed by the African Union. It has no place here.’

  ‘Thank you for your intervention, Mr Peabod
y. You are correct, of course, but I must make clear that I do not intend to encourage a habit of interjection, so please consider this an exceptional case. Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘please try to confine your remarks to matters properly before us.’

  Darrar’s foreign minister inclined his head ever so slightly. ‘It is difficult, Mr Chairman, because we feel so strongly.’

  Winston snorted softly to himself.

  The foreign minister talked the commissioners through a potted history so basic it could have come from a Baedeker tourist guide, then slipped the stiletto in once again: ‘Through the millennia, my country has aimed to live in peace with its neighbours. Whenever its army has gone into action, it has only ever acted in self-defence. And that is what happened when our loyal army fell prey to a premeditated assault by North Darrar’s troops, carefully timed to coincide with a head of state’s visit abroad.’

  Winston put his hands on the desk, jutted his elbows and raised his eyebrows, staring at Judge Mautner. ‘I’m about to stand and object again,’ the gesture clearly said.

  Judge Mautner looked tetchy. It seemed he had lost patience. With the wrong side. To Winston, he said: ‘As both teams are well aware, there is no jury to impress here, no public gallery. The commissioners are all legal experts with huge experience, fully cognisant of both the extent and limits of their official briefs, and no amount of grandstanding will sway us. Please continue, Your Excellency.’

  I was careful not to turn my head as Kennedy pushed back his chair and slipped away, walking swiftly to the exit. Winston wrote slowly on his notebook and slid the pad towards me. ‘NOTIFYING THE BOSS’. Then he carefully closed it.

  ‘We cannot let this continue!’ Kennedy exclaimed, fumbling in his overcoat for a packet of Marlboro. ‘They are massacring us, massacring us in there, and we are not even trying to defend ourselves.’