Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  Winston had prepared his dish, now he merely had to garnish it. He surveyed the commissioners, the diplomats, the UN personnel sitting at the back of the room, leaning slightly into his own brief as he did so, one hand splayed masterfully on his papers. ‘Any suggestion on our part of sleight of hand, of course, would be inappropriate, given counsel’s long years of legal experience. We are confident the other side will be able to offer some explanation for what was clearly a partial presentation. We look forward to hearing their account.’

  He gazed in silence at the other side. ‘You lied and cheated and you were found out,’ said his eyes.

  ‘Lunch!’ decreed Judge Mautner, bringing down his gavel with a flourish. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

  When it came to their rebuttal, opposing counsel did what they could. They claimed Suleiman Jama was just one of many witnesses they could have called; his departure in no way affected a host of other testimonies. The ‘incomplete nature’ of the Heriu Tekle letter had been a surprise to them, they said, but did marginalia really matter? Their voices, though, were pitched apologetically low, and they had the lethargic gait of men wading through treacle. As Judge Mautner closed the proceedings, I thought I detected a new expression on the commissioners’ faces when their eyes darted to counsel for the Federal Republic of Darrar: embarrassed compassion.

  26

  The team flew back to Lira within hours of the hearing’s end, while I stayed on. I needed a haircut and wanted to buy a few sweaters for Lira’s chilly evenings. But, waving Winston, Abraham and Yohannes off at Reception, I regretted my decision, feeling strangely bereft.

  That night Sharmila called. ‘Your friend came to the office,’ she said, ‘asking if you could get him some stuff in The Hague. I told him you were there to work. The power has been on and off, so I’ve had my hands full.’

  ‘Friend?’

  ‘You know, Gollum. The one with those awful shirts. He wants the latest Bollywood DVDs. He seemed to think The Hague would stock them.’

  I groaned. ‘I’ll make a token effort, but no more.’

  ‘Fine by me, sweetie. He’s your friend. Oh, just one small question. Is it OK if Steve uses that empty cupboard in your bedroom to stow some things?’

  ‘Is he moving in?’ My heart sank.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ Her voice was fluty and flirtatious. ‘He just wants a bit of space for overnight stuff. Toothbrush, shaving tackle, a few T-shirts. All my drawers are full. You know me!’ she chirruped.

  ‘I’d rather he didn’t, to be honest, Sharmila. I’ve got some confidential work-related stuff in there.’ That was a lie. But I’d be damned if super-size Steve, having already carelessly occupied Sharmila and the bathroom, would now claim my bedroom.

  Her voice went flat. ‘Fine. Well, safe trip.’

  Hanging up, I knew that she would immediately pass on this exchange to Steve. Over the next few days, just to show who was boss, the two of them would probably have sex on my bed, commenting as they did so on Paula Shackleton’s lesbian proclivities and speculating, giggling, on how desperately I needed to buy myself a vibrator in Schiphol airport.

  I slept deep into the following morning, eventually staggering, befuddled, out of my room. The hairdresser was a short stroll away, down a street lined with funeral parlours and wedding-dress hire shops. I felt a pang as I passed a couple of career women in patent leather heels and silk shirts, Prada bags brushing against one another as they gossiped, versions of the woman I used to be.

  By dinner time I felt perky enough to ask the Royal Delft receptionist to book the best restaurant in the area. Chez Bertrand turned out to boast two Michelin stars, and when I walked in, taking in the huge vases of lilies and snooty-looking waiters gliding through the tables like eels, I was glad I had bothered to smarten up. I sat at my table reading a John Grisham novel between courses, and it was as I was walking out, tipsy after a half-bottle of St Émilion and two grappa chasers, that it happened.

  I had collected my coat and was turning to place a coin in the cloakroom attendant’s plate when I spotted – it prompted the instinctive recoil of a slap to the face – Judge Mautner and Eddie Connors at a table on the other side of the dining room. Opposite them sat the US ambassador to Lira, Brett’s boss. For a moment, I thought it was just the three of them. Then I realised that there was a fourth diner. His back was to me but his face was clear in the mirrored wall. Henry Alexander. My sudden stillness must have been as attention-grabbing as a gasp because Connors looked up and his eyes met mine. We gazed at one another for what seemed like a long time, and then he coolly resumed his conversation.

  ‘What you saw doesn’t, strictly speaking, break the rules,’ said Winston.

  I’d taken a taxi straight to the office from Lira airport, and Winston and I were sharing a morning coffee brewed in the kitchenette. The balcony on which we leaned overlooked the jumble of rotting tables and rusting machinery that decorated the back yard. Perhaps my ears were still humming from the overnight flight, but the old colonial apartment felt strangely muted, as if the staff were moving around on tiptoe.

  ‘I know. “Arbitration is not a court case”, as you keep saying. But I can’t believe it’s so different that ex parte communication is considered acceptable. What the hell were they talking about? And why wasn’t Rainier included?’

  ‘I’ll raise this with Him. Maybe He can pursue it high up. But it’s difficult to object furiously to something that doesn’t violate the agreed rules of engagement.’

  Winston looked recovered from the ordeal of the hearing, fuller in the face, the fatigue of a habitual over-worker once again held at bay.

  ‘So, what’s our next move, Winston? How long till the award? And what do we do while we wait for our suddenly slippery commissioners to make up their minds?’

  ‘It could take six months, though I’m hoping it’ll be quicker than that. In the meantime we prepare the case the other side was so desperate to foist on us, the who-started-it argument. Which allows us, finally, to use the material you gathered about Yala, showing a pattern of encroachment, so we can put the whole trigger incident in context. We’re also going to need to prepare for demarcation of the border by the UN mission once the award’s announced.’

  ‘What are we talking about? Barbed wire? A fence? Not a wall, I assume – too much territory to cover.’ How strange, I thought, that none of us had focused on this detail before: how the border that so preoccupied us would actually be marked.

  ‘Concrete posts, I believe. Which will require a fair amount of logistics. Digging equipment, concrete mixers and the like. The UN will have to liaise with the two governments on how many peacekeepers they can deploy in the border area and which roads they can travel. Kennedy has asked me to draw up a Status of Forces agreement clarifying the relationship between the UN and the North Darrar government. And, Paula, I’m afraid there’s bad news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re going to be doing all this one man down. When we got back there was an envelope sitting on Yohannes’s desk. He’s to report for military service. His assignment with us is at an end.’

  ‘You’re kidding! After all he did in The Hague? Can’t they see we need him?’

  He looked at his feet. ‘I suspect it’s a case of the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing.’

  ‘I thought office staff were off the hook. How can the government expect us to win their case if they don’t give us the personnel?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Buster and Kennedy, but I don’t expect to win. The military-service issue is more than a national obsession. Doing it is regarded as virtually a quasi-religious duty. When you try to discuss it with people in government you hit a wall. It seems the rules are tightening because, yes, I, too, thought our staff were exempt. Yohannes is very upset.’

  I’m upset too, I thought. Yohannes had been a stranger to me until the hearing. I had just begun to like him. The office’s muted atmosphere was suddenly explained.

 
; ‘And you, what’s your schedule?’

  ‘You know me. I’ll stay as long as I can.’

  My memories of the days that followed the police visit are blurry. I do remember being granted a strange kind of reprieve, although I couldn’t say when it descended or how long it lasted. Three days? An afternoon? All I know was that I felt befuddled, lost in the fog, but very happy. Jake was with me there, in Lake Cottage. He had heard my summons and I hugged him close. We had drifted apart in the previous months but now he was back. Reassuring, funny, warm.

  But then the phone began to ring. I ignored the first calls, but it wouldn’t stop. It rang and rang, each call an ugly interruption, breaking the harmony. They sucked me back into the world, kicking and struggling, and writhe as I might, I could not stop Jake slipping like egg white through my clenched fingers as I woke to this new, terrible world.

  When I finally picked up, it was Sarah, her voice wobbly and excited. ‘I only just heard. Why didn’t you tell me? Are you OK?’ At that moment, I hated my best friend, with a pure intensity, for ending my reprieve.

  Fall in the Hudson River Valley was magnificent that year, and I was grateful, because it seemed only right and proper that Jake’s departure from this world should be marked by that general, county-wide shedding of colour, vibrancy and light, as though Nature was joining me in stunned mourning. The bride has rose petals scattered before her as she walks down the aisle; Jake’s passing into darkness was marked instead by a carpet of apple-red maple leaves, yellow oak and coppery beech. I walked through the drifts, kicking leaves into the air as Laurel and Hardy gambolled, barking in excitement. To my half-mad ears, the susurration of dry leaves around my boots sounded like a whisper of loss from the Earth itself.

  Anxious and uncertain, the dogs had taken to joining me on the bed – I no longer bothered to banish them. As we sprawled in a rank jumble of heaving fur and dog breath each morning, scraps of consciousness swirled in search of an anchor. Half asleep, eyes squeezed tight, I would will the chaos to continue. I knew there was a reason to dread becoming compos mentis. But the fragments gyrated, found their niches in the jigsaw, awareness building bit by bit until – oh, hell – I was awake, all present and correct, Paula Shackleton, a woman with an unacceptable past and unimaginable future, who knew now that Jake was dead.

  My mind churned every day through the facts of the case, travelling the same way-stations of shock, disbelief, guilt, anger and blame, only to find itself back at the circuit’s start each morning. Doomed to trudge through the grey tedium of a grieving present, I longed to fast-forward my life and resurface six months later. ‘It’s all so tedious,’ I told my mother one day on the phone, prompting a disapproving, prudish silence.

  I needed to get away, but could not. I had to be there for the postman’s morning delivery. What was I waiting for? Why, a letter from Jake, obviously, posted just before he died, a serene, philosophical, typically ironic letter in which he told me not to mind too much, that he would love me for ever, giving me a precious formula of words I would learn by heart to take me through the rest of my pathetic life. A letter Jake could never have written because he had not expected to drive off the bridge that day. But I nursed the fond fantasy until even I had to admit the deadline for an envelope working its way through the US postal system had passed. Nothing would be arriving. There were never going to be any answers: that would be my punishment for having taken Jake for granted. I could already see the years of merciless self-examination that lay ahead. And they bored me rigid.

  Over my new excuse for breakfast – a cup of black coffee – I would stare at the calendar above the kitchen table, a glossy Japanese production showing the rolling hill towns of Umbria, which Jake and I had planned to visit. The calendar had undergone a strange metamorphosis, acquiring a new set of significant dates: 3 October, Last Supper; 5 October, Jake dies; 6 October, police come round; 1 November, Jake’s funeral. They had been hiding there all this time, masquerading as days like any other. I had breezed heedlessly through those perverse anniversaries year after year, never feeling so much as a twinge of premonition. Now they would be etched on my brain for ever, to be lived through each year with a wince.

  There were other dates hidden in the structure of that calendar, I realised, which I could not make out yet but which would one day become apparent. My parents’ deaths. My own. Which day was that, then? If I concentrated hard enough, would I be able to guess?

  The geography of my life was similarly strewn with booby traps. On my few trips to the village where Jake and I had done our shopping, I’d weave my way carefully from one side of the street to the other. No, not that bakery: that was where we always bought our wholegrain bread. The owner would be bound to ask after my ‘husband’. I’d virtually sprint past the entrance to the fruit and vegetable store, where the old codger behind the till had always talked French cinéma noir with Jake. No condolences, please. Anonymous Walmart: that was good – in the morning when the aisles were quiet and the likelihood of a chance encounter almost zero.

  I waited for the memories of Jake to start to flow, the memories that would bring me solace, little mental recordings of good times I could replay in my mind’s eye, like a wedding video. But there were none. They had made their excuses and left.

  ‘I don’t understand it. I can’t seem to remember Jake,’ I confessed, sobbing one night over the phone to Sarah, a large Scotch in front of me, scrunched-up tissues scattered around me like shrapnel.

  ‘You’re probably in shock.’

  ‘I can’t seem to remember his voice or the detail of any of our conversations. Is that possible? Can I have lived with this man for four years and not remember anything about him? He’s always been the voice in my head, but now? Nothing.’

  ‘Your mind is trying to help you by forgetting for the moment. Those things will come back.’

  But they didn’t. Or, rather, the only conversations that played back to me in high fidelity were the bad ones. My recall of the verbal ping-pong of our last argument was pitch perfect. But the touch of his fingers? The smell of his skin? The warmth of his body in bed? Even just one joke? How he kissed? That was all gone.

  I watched television obsessively, the schlockier the better. The only other thing that seemed to work was retail therapy. When I finally returned to the city I found I could rarely bear to spend more than five minutes at my desk. I walked for hours. The girls in the kind of SoHo designer outlets where clothes lie individually wrapped in tissue paper learned not to bother chatting to the gaunt-faced woman trying on the new collection. I instinctively bought and dressed as though preparing for a funeral. When I finally came to empty the cottage’s cupboards, I was confronted by a sea of black cashmere and silk. Only the best for Jake. He had always said I looked my sexiest when most severe.

  27

  On the morning after my return from The Hague I came downstairs to find Steve, enormous in his unyielding peacekeeper’s uniform, with his head in the fridge. He straightened when he heard me and turned in mid-yawn, snapping his mouth shut like a tortoise.

  ‘Looking for breakfast? I don’t think there’s much in there.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured that out,’ he said grumpily. ‘Don’t you guys ever eat? Vodka and cranberry juice seem to be as far as it goes. Get hammered, get laid, treat your urinary infections. Gotta love the new breed of woman.’

  He extracted a Tetrapak and poured himself a large glass of juice, shook the carton against his ear and threw it casually into the dustbin. Then he stood, juice in one huge, freckled hand, gazing out at the back yard. The household’s failure to provide him with a morning meal had clearly riled him: the set of his bull neck and shoulders radiated resentment. He watched in silence as Abraham drew up outside. I called a warning up the stairs, where I could hear Sharmila in the shower.

  ‘So, another busy day at the office, eh?’ Steve said, with heavy sarcasm.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Tell me. What I never really get about you lawyers
is,’ he spun round with a pretend-curious smile on his face – goodness, I did not like this man – ‘when you look at yourselves in the mirror in the morning, how do you justify what you do? I mean, you guys get to represent the government in The Hague, right? You collect all this evidence and stand up on your hind legs and somehow argue a case on behalf of North Diarrhoea, a shitty little police state that, when it’s not too busy fighting Diarrhoea, gets a kick out of arresting its own citizens. A government that started a war, made sure it went on twice as long as necessary, then jailed anyone who pointed that out. And they sign your pay cheques. Ever bother you?’

  I blinked. ‘It’s a bit early for this, isn’t it?’ Why was he arguing with me when he could have it out with his girlfriend?

  ‘Just wondering.’ His eyes were wide with fake innocence.

  ‘You’re on the UN’s payroll. That might keep some people awake at night.’

  He scoffed. ‘Not quite the same thing, though, is it? You can accuse the UN of incompetence, most people do, but it doesn’t make life so unbearable the locals will do literally anything to get away. You guys should see the reports that come across my desk. We just got another – a hundred and sixty refugees drowned in a boat that sank in the Mediterranean, most of ’em from here. I guess ignorance is bliss. Don’t ask, don’t tell, eh?’

  Sharmila was taking her time upstairs. I was stuck till she emerged. I debated going outside for a cigarette, then thought, No, I’ll take him on.

  ‘OK, let me run you through this, Steve. It’s not that hard. Think of the most heinous criminal in recent US history. Timothy McVeigh, perhaps? And as he’s walking out of the courtroom, where he’s just confessed to making the bomb that killed all those toddlers, someone steps out of the crowd and shoots him. He’s rushed to the emergency room where the surgeon fights like a demon to save his life. It would never occur to you to tell that surgeon what you just said to me. Because if you did, he’d say, “What are you talking about? This is what I spent years training to do. I do it very well, and this is what our society has decided is a fundamental human right.” So why is McVeigh’s lawyer any different? Why despise the lawyer and admire the surgeon?’