Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  I had ordered a dignified beech coffin but in true Georgie style, she had turned up at Pierce Brothers a bit late, something to do with not getting her release permit from the coroner in time, and they never had time to put her in a proper coffin, so Georgie was there in a cardboard box. At first, Guislaine, Tash and I were horrified but then we softened and realised how little Georgie would have cared. She was nearly always late, usually because she had forgotten something vital, and you forgave her for it, even if it meant no beech coffin. We draped a towel and a bit of blue cloth round the box, Guislaine picked a rose and I a lily from the flower arrangements and laid them in the coffin alongside her.

  The three of us went up privately to say goodbye to her before anyone else came into the chapel. We had asked Pierce not to make her up but to leave her as she was. She did not look in death as she did in life. Her face was mottled and her complexion was different but she looked at peace, like a deep sea diver who had held her breath too long and then has surfaced in a calm and peaceful place. I held each of her little curled up hands in turn, tucked the lily in one and gave her a kiss.

  Then the doors to the chapel were opened and people began to step in from the garden in their ones and twos. Some we had met before, most we had not. She had a gift for forging close relationships; every one of the more than a hundred people who came in to the

  chapel, who hugged us, hugged each other and then went up in their ones and twos to say goodbye to Georgie, felt like her family.

  Jim Miller, the peaceful, compassionate, priest whom Georgie had met in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous, the fellowship that played such a big part in Georgie’s life as someone who had had a cocaine addiction and had with great courage got herself clean] and who had written his own service when he married her and Derick in the Joshua Tree National Park said a few words about Georgie’s spirituality. She was not a conventional Christian but she had a very definite God and she believed fiercely in an afterlife. Guislaine, Tasha and I then spoke for a minute or two each about what Georgie had meant to us. I thanked people for coming and said how Los Angeles had become her home and how the people in the room had become her family. I talked of her gift for bringing sunshine and laughter into other people’s lives but how she could not light up the dark place in her own soul.

  I told them that when Tasha came to tell me in the middle of the night that Georgie had killed herself, because it was Tasha who got the news first in England, I drove out to Oxfordshire, where Guislaine lived, to tell her. I arrived at three in the morning. Guislaine and I walked out into her garden and we looked up and the clouds cleared and we could see the stars and feel Georgie’s presence all around us. It brought to mind the lines from Romeo and Juliet –

  And when she shall die,

  Take her and cut her out in little stars

  And she will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  One by one people came up to talk about Georgie. Jeff Young, whose wife, my old and dear friend, Annie, was our Los Angeles mother hen during these difficult days, was first:

  ‘I have been to too many funerals in recent years, and said goodbye to too many friends but I have never been to something like this, something where there is so much feeling, so many people affected and so much emotion in the room.’

  Derick, the warm and gentle man to whom she had been married for two years, had driven down from San Francisco where he now lives. He walked to the front of the chapel and, with a quiet, remembering, smile on his face said, ‘I’m not much good at writing but when Georgia and I split up I wrote a story. I’ve never shown it to anyone. It told how this beautiful little bird would fly around singing every day until it got tired and came to rest on a stumpy old tree with long roots deep in the earth. “Look at those roots,” said the bird, “can you show me how to make roots?” “I’ll try,” said the tree, “if you can teach me to fly.” And for two years the tree tried to show the little bird how to make roots, and the little bird tried to teach the tree to fly . . . But it was not in their natures. The tree could never get into the air and the little bird tried but could never put down roots.’

  The next day there was a celebration of Georgie’s life in a hall next to a church in Westwood. In view of the short notice we had thought that only a handful of people would be at the celebration. The hall was the size of a tennis court. By the time her old friend and mentor, Andrew McCullough, whom she had met in AA got up to speak, all the chairs had been taken and people were standing three deep at the back and sides. There must have been three hundred in the room. I hugged more people in that afternoon than I had done in my life before. Guislaine, Tasha and I spoke to nearly all of the people in the room. We were so proud and so moved by the stories we heard.

  Most of us go through life with close relationships with a dozen or so other people outside their families. Here were three hundred, all of whose lives had been intimately touched by Georgie.

  Andrew talked first. He told both of the magic Georgie had and also of how difficult she had found the everyday business of living. He then called people up to speak one by one, after which others came up to speak spontaneously, each for a minute or two. The stories they told had common threads. First, although many of the people had to choke back tears as they spoke, just about every one of the stories left us laughing. So many of those who spoke had felt themselves in despair through addiction; Georgie had come into their lives and had dropped everything to help them; so many had stories of how Georgie had taught them how to enjoy life and have fun and had shared her own very special style with them. Whether it was shopping for shoes, and that came up more than once, camping in the desert, singing in the street, driving down Sunset with six people crammed into her most precious possession, her battered old VW, or dancing on the beach, all the stories had laughter and fun in them. Above all the stories told of Georgia’s generosity; she had no meanness in her. There was not one person in the room to whom Georgie had not given of herself.

  And then her sister Tasha rose to her feet to sing Georgie’s signature song and as she sung there was not a person who could not hear and feel Georgie there in the room with us. And then one or two others picked up the song with Tash and by the time she ended three hundred people, tears flowing down their faces, were singing –

  Delta Dawn what’s that flower you have on?

  Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?

  And did I hear you say he was meetin’ you here today?

  To take you to his mansion in the sky-y.

  Georgie had left a long and lucid goodbye note behind her telling of her lifelong battle with depression. Throughout the note spoke her belief that she was going to an after-life – its last words were ‘I can’t wait to see Granny’ – and she would see us again. It had been found on her computer in the motel where she had killed herself and the coroner had passed it on to us. It began: ‘First of all let’s get one thing straight: I am doing the right thing. I asked God to help me do this and he said OK . . . Everyone always says how suicide is the most selfish thing you can do and I agree in the sense that someone else is going to have to clear up my stuff and I’m sorry, but, beyond that, I think it’s more selfish of people to go on demanding that I live in this much pain.’ She went on in the note to talk individually to people she had loved and with whom she had shared experiences.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have intensely experienced life, that’s for sure. And I think like in “Like Water for Chocolate” I have burned all my matches at once.’ And she said she would like to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered in the Joshua Tree National Park, the place where she and Derick had been married.

  Two days later, thirty of us, family and friends, drove the three hours from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree. We met for lunch in the Twenty-Nine Palms Motel, the funky oasis, all purple and orange, in the desert where we had stayed the night before Georgie’s wedding.<
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  After lunch we drove together into the Park. The Park is a place of solitude and quiet; it stretches to the horizon on all sides. It has a few roads leading between the small round hills that rise from the scrubby desert but most of all you remember it for the great rocks and boulders scattered everywhere, some the size and colour of elephants, some twice that. Tasha found a quiet and hidden place. We got out of our cars and walked for a few hundred yards. I was carrying Georgie’s ashes in a wooden box. No one spoke. We stopped on a great flat sand-coloured rock. I walked on a further thirty yards or so, placed the box on another rock, opened it and returned to join the others. We stood in silence for a few minutes thinking our own thoughts while the wind blew about us. Then Guislaine, Tasha and I walked together over to the box. After a few moments of private prayer we each took a handful of ashes and threw them to the sky. Andrew, who was watching, said it was as if the ashes danced away on the hot desert wind. They did. We returned to the others and then one by one or in small groups Georgia’s friends walked over to the rock and gave her ashes, dancing, to the wind.

  We had brought with us a frayed old overnight bag that I had given Georgie many years ago and that she took everywhere. Inside was her wedding dress, a filmy, yellowy-pinky thing, and two empty packets of Marlboro Red that I had taken from Georgia’s car when I went with Jeff Young to collect it from the motel. Guislaine, Tash and I walked the hundred yards or so to the nearest Joshua tree. A Joshua tree is like a stumpy palm tree with a spiky haircut. Where a palm tree has fronds, a Joshua tree has spiky leaves sticking out. Tasha tied the wedding dress to some of the upper spikes; Guislaine freed one end so the dress streamed out in the wind. I stuck the two Marlboro Red packets on the top spikes and left the overnight bag at the bottom of the tree so she could arrive at her destination with her usual luggage.

  We walked back to join the others. We stood together all of us and hugged and cried and even laughed as Georgia’s wedding dress danced and floated in the desert wind. Now she was free.

  To me, Georgia had an incredibly full life. Many people who live to eighty experience little and touch few. She was the same age as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix when they died, a year older than Keats and two years younger than Shelley. Her poetry lay in the way she led her life.

  29

  Breakfast in Baghdad

  Baghdad had so many memories for me. Walking up partridges in the date groves, skidding two and a half tons of ancient Rolls-Royce round desert mud pans, splashing in the pool at the Alwiyah Club, and the many evenings when Iraqis would sit around Ma’s dinner table laughing and telling us jokes as if the good times would never end. For them the good times had ended abruptly in 1958, and for the country as a whole the good times had never come back. Saddam had seen to that. What I remembered most were the Iraqis themselves, the gentlest and most civilised of the Arabs, in contrast to their big-talk cousins the Egyptians.

  Despite an abhorrence of what Saddam was doing to his own people, with the near-extinction of the Marsh Arabs and the persecution of the Shi’ites, I had followed the build-up to the American-led invasion of Iraq with dismay and had been out in the streets demonstrating against Bush and Blair and their plans. But by 2010 Iraq had ceased to occupy much of a place in the Western media, in contrast to the blanket coverage of the invasion and its immediate aftermath, so I thought I would go and have a look for myself. I went there in January at a time when everyone assured me Baghdad was ‘more or less back to normal’. Maybe I could have another swim in the Alwiyah Club pool.

  The flight to Baghdad left Istanbul at 3.30 a.m. The only other planes leaving around that time were going to Afghanistan and Islamabad. Lady Gaga was singing ‘Bad Romance’ on the airport video. One third of the passengers were tired and cowed middle-aged Iraqis loaded with sacks of duty-free goods and two thirds were shaven-headed English-speakers in jeans, grey sweatshirts and desert boots carrying rucksacks – fit, muscled men with ripples of flesh at the backs of their bare necks.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to the man next to me in shake-down. ‘What’s taking you to Baghdad?’

  He looked at me as if I were a five-year-old. ‘Security. We’re all security.’

  I thought about an alternative universe in which a plane from Zurich to New York contained one third cowed Americans with shopping bags and two thirds musclebound shaven-headed Arab youths on their way to America to make New York ‘secure’. . .

  After an uneventful flight I met Bartle and Zaab, my friends and lookers-after, who had set up an investment company, Northern Gulf Partners, in Baghdad. Bartle Bull was a journalist who specialised in riding across deserts and embedding himself in rebel armies, while Zaab too had a knack for popping up at the crossroads of history. Everyone said they worked for the CIA. I doubted it.

  ‘Hi, guy,’ said Bartle as I came out of customs. ‘Welcome to Baghdad.’

  Surreal did not begin to describe it. I’d been in Lebanon and Sudan in immediate post-war times, but they had been nothing like this. I was ushered outside to where three cars were waiting. Bartle got into one armour-plated four-by-four; Zaab and I clambered into the one behind. A third car followed as ‘chaser’. Six khaki-clad hard men sporting pistols, ammunition pouches and automatic rifles eased their way into the cars with us, clones of the people who had just got off my plane.

  ‘Hi, Miles, I’m Pete,’ said the boss clone, whose shaven head had sinister creases in it. ‘Flak jacket?’ he offered just as you might say, ‘Gum?’

  ‘Um, no thanks.’ I was already sweating, and the jacket looked heavy and hot. I noted that Bartle and Zaab were not wearing jackets.

  ‘Your call,’ he said, buttoning up his own and barking, ‘OK, roll,’ at the driver. I noted as we passed through the fifth checkpoint on the way out of the airport that there were almost no other cars on the road.

  ‘This used to be a bad ride,’ said Zaab, ‘twenty minutes of white knuckles. A lot of the top Ba’athists lived in the big houses along the airport road and would fire rockets and guns at you. You had to go at 120 mph. But now it’s the safest road in Baghdad.’

  This was good news indeed, but, just in case, Pete turned on the siren to alert any local breakfasting Ba’athists that we were on our way.

  After half an hour of high-speed driving we penetrated three security gates and drew up at a pile of shipping containers in the secure Green Zone. The stack of containers was our hotel. I was originally going to stay in the Palestine, the old Meridien, but a car bomb outside the hotel a week earlier had closed off that option. My bedroom was a partitioned-off part of a container. No windows.

  Bartle, Zaab and I checked in and met for sweet black tea on plastic chairs in a dusty parking lot full of bulletproof four-by-fours bristling with electronic equipment. In the background was the constant clatter of US helicopters and the duh-duh-duh of machine-gun fire. I asked a passing American what the chopper noise and firing was about.

  ‘Sir, that is the sound of freedom.’

  ‘They’re just practising,’ said Zaab.

  At 6.30 p.m. Bartle, Zaab and I hopped into a four-by-four for a short trip through empty Green Zone streets to the biggest US embassy in the world: 1,200 personnel behind the kind of walls the Israelis use to bottle up the Palestinians. The embassy was utterly sealed off from the outside world. We were dropped at the wrong gate and had to walk 300 yards to the right one.

  ‘Watch out for incoming,’ said our driver as he left us.

  ‘Incoming what?’

  ‘Rockets and mortars.’ Of course. Silly me.

  I had steeled myself to run the passage of US security thugs at the gatehouse and was puzzled when three uniformed Incas carrying guns almost as big as they were asked politely in fractured English for our IDs. Inside the blockhouse more courteous Incas smiled and chattered incomprehensibly as they waved us into the metal detectors with elaborate courtesy.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked Zaab, pointing at the Incas.

  ‘Oh, the Americans outsource ev
erything. The guards used to be Nepalese and Fijians, but they got too expensive. Peruvians are cheaper, so they use them now. And cheapest of all are Ugandans. The Americans put the Ugandans on the outside of the wall in the most dangerous positions. They used to use Chileans too, but then the Chileans and the Peruvians had a football game that ended in a gun battle inside the embassy compound.’

  In the twilight years of the western Roman empire Rome outsourced everything to barbarians. And that was the end of them. The biggest embassy the world’s most powerful country had ever had was guarded by rented Incas. The embassy itself had been built by a Kuwaiti company.

  Our host at the embassy was an eager fresh-faced financial attaché – let’s call him Joe – who had arrived three weeks earlier from Moscow and couldn’t wait to get on with the job.

  We ate a memorably disgusting meal in the hangar-like mess hall washed down with iced tea, after which Joe gave us a tour. Fort Bragg must look like this: a giant indoor swimming pool, basketball courts, gyms, office blocks. Two differences from Fort Bragg. Between the buildings here were duck ’n’ dives, concrete shelters to dodge into when you saw an incoming rocket. And between the duck ’n’ dives were young, decidedly non-American girls in tight jeans loitering and chattering to each other.

  ‘They’re cute,’ said I to Joe. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Uh, contract interpreters.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I asked Joe how he was enjoying Baghdad and what he thought of it.

  ‘It’s great. Such opportunity. I’m working with people who need investment.’

  ‘That’s great. And what do you actually think of the city?’

  ‘What, Baghdad?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Oh, well, I haven’t been outside the embassy yet. There’s not much reason to do that. We like to stay behind the walls.’

  The next day we would visit the stock exchange, a couple of companies and lunch with a banker at the Alwiyah Club, where I had last been in 1957. I wondered how businesses in Baghdad would compare with the hundreds of companies I had visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. And I wondered what the Alwiyah Club would be like, more than half a century since my previous visit.