Crawling into the tent, he made his dispositions, removing his gaiters and boots to form part of his pillow, rolling out the slender mattress that would provide insulation but no real comfort, unfurling the sleeping bag and struggling to insert himself into it without collapsing the tent. He thought of Eva and smiled. He thought of her at advanced base, probably, by now, partaking of a predinner drink, choosing a light meal. He thought of her bathing and naked. He thought of her warmth under a comforter. He pictured her alone and waiting and promised himself he would not do this sort of thing again. If he ever got down the hill to tell her so. He thought of her waistline and curves inviting his touch, before a banshee wail of wind across the tent chased the image away and replaced it with the vision of a skinnier frame full of demons demanding appeasement.
Chapter Sixteen
PARIS. SEPTEMBER 2000
Du Plessis had second-guessed her. She had flown first to Paris. She had scanned her stored wardrobe for something more fetching than a black tee shirt and black jeans and black, scuffed boots. From the old days, from her former life as a model, she could have taken one of several designer items given as gifts after the shows and never discarded. Joe Shelby had never seen her like this, in her haute couture mode, and she laughed out loud at the idea of tottering towards him on a rocky mountain in strappy, patent leather high heels and a thigh-length tube of flimsy black fabric: Dr. Gucci, I presume. It would not have been out of character. On occasions she had appeared to him in hotel rooms wearing only his bush jacket, or only his high, suede snake boots. She had offered cabaret with Kevlar vest and a clown’s mask. She had amused him with Marilyn Monroe lips from the joke shop and a carnival wig in brassy blonde. She had offered him topless tennis on an overgrown court in the suburbs of Kampala. She had been his courtesan, his entertainer, enthralling him with disguises, weaving spells that sometimes veered too close to the edge, bound him to her as she tracked her obsessions. In the shelling of Sarajevo, in the incessant howl of the incoming Katyushas, she had danced for him, drawn sniper fire by pushing back the drapes, then laughed with a witch’s cackle. She had insisted on walking through Mogadishu chewing great wads of qat, forcing him to accompany her, when others sought refuge in armed convoys of technicals—pickups mounted with heavy caliber machine guns. She had won a photographer’s prize for a series of images showing the dying moments of a stick-bodied, monster-headed child in Uganda but only he knew she had kissed the infant full on blistered, flyblown lips as the last of life departed. Surveying her wardrobe, she decided to stick with what would raise the fewest alarms, offer assurance that she was different now.
She shed the excess baggage that might slow her—the replacement Kevlar vest, insisted on by the comic but never worn, the tripod and lights for portrait work, barely used, the scanner and laptop they made her carry for transmission of celluloid and digital images, the array of lenses that accumulated on whims. She was pared down now to a single overnight bag, a single, old Leica with one lens. She would take the earliest Eurostar to London, transit the city by subway, grab the early train to the nearest point north, a place apparently called Lancaster, and grab a rental for the last stretch. He would be proud of her because logistics was a shared passion. She recalled one time, especially, lounging by the pool at a hotel in Luxor, the story done, the pictures gone, another clash of faiths—Copts and Muslims this time—packaged and history. The alarm went up with a sat-phone call that summoned them on to the next folly, somewhere far away and mysterious, across the Turkish-Azeri border, uncharted territory for them both. The world, then, was small—no bigger than the paperback airlines guide that was his constant companion, his Bible, offering commandments enforced by platinum credit cards and the sheer will to arrive first. They scrambled, throwing pre-laundry socks and shirts, paperbacks and toothbrushes, film and notepads into carry-on bags. There was no time to shower, eat. They unhooked laptops, downloaded disks, ignored visa regulations. They stashed raw dollar bills and second passports with incriminating entry stamps from the enemy camp into money belts and hoped for the best. They left their hotel room festooned with wet bathing suits, half-drunk whisky, old notepads, empty film canisters that had once contained cannabis. They checked out faster than the clerks on the desk had ever seen anyone abandon their corner of papyrus and paradise and tombs and tourists. They hopped an EgyptAir schedule to Cairo then, with seconds to spare, headed out from that messy airport, first class on Turkish, to Istanbul, where the trail of likely connections went cold. So onward they hurried in a rental car for the fast Anatolian run, across the Bosphorus bridge and over the high ground at Bolu, swerving past overloaded taxis, roaring trucks. At Ankara, they dumped the rental, swapped it for a wheezing, prop-driven charter that catapulted them onto Erzurum and a wild, battered ride in a cab with holes in the floor so that their feet froze, and water in the gas so that the engine juddered in the blizzards. Finally, a walk on foot across the old Turkish-Soviet, east-west, badland frontier into Nakchevan for whatever icebound madness was on that day’s menu under the shadow of Mount Ararat where Noah’s Ark was said to rest. Fast, they went. Down and dirty. Hit the ground running. Harvest—images and soundbites. The soldiers came to the village. As ever. But it was always the civilians who were left to wash and wrap the disfigured bodies, dig the graves in frozen soil, rebuild burned homes, nurse children initiated into barbarity by the sight, scorched onto their retinas, of a father murdered, a mother raped. They told their stories with empty, cried-out eyes, women in headscarves and men suffused with the rage and shame and relief of having survived when others had not.
Then the turnaround. Another walk. Another cab, the price negotiated in zillions of worthless lira. In Erzurum a dingy, low-wattage hotel with a functioning telephone line and photographs of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the nation’s founder, behind the reception desk and spooks in the lobby. Twenty-four hours out from Luxor’s sunlight and palms and camels, and a story of ice and violence was already on its way to the comic. Using a Swiss Army knife, Joe Shelby hacked into the telephone junction box underneath the nightstand, hooking up with alligator clips to the wired world. Laptops hummed, phone lines zinged, compressing and bundling someone else’s conflict into byte-sized wads of data for real-time transmission halfway round the planet. The adrenaline carried through to the celebration. Realizing they had not eaten for a day, they devoured tough kebabs and sour wine in a half-lit, heavy-draped dining room, with only the ogling plainclothes men in their clumsy suits and slicked hair for company across the acres of brown velveteen chairs and unlaid tables. Then, just the two of them, crazy with elation in a frayed bedroom with creaking beds and heavy wardrobes. And her revealing that, all the time, throughout that entire passage through international airports, across frontiers, past guards and cops and soldiers and militiamen and spooks, she had been carrying a sacred gram in the false heel of a scuffed black boot and he laughed wildly, offering a platinum card for the ritual chopping and lining. High fives. Whoops. Comic praise: two stories in the same issue, from locations two thousand miles apart, both hot, fresh, exclusive. Praise indeed and the laudatory messages they called herograms. Sex intermittent but intense ’til the gray dawn and the brittle letdown: the airport socked in and the eleven-hour trudge back with barely a word of conversation across the drear, quake-prone reaches of Anatolia in yet another rental with newspapers stuffed down behind the radiator to force the engine to produce warmth. Erzincan. Sivas. A snowy moonscape of sheepdogs with spiked collars to thwart the wolves, and breeze-block cities and truck-stops where men on low stools sipped tea from small, round glasses in the small, cold hours and hunched over backgammon boards in their thick coats and flat caps. And the question, this time by the indoor poolside over burgers at the Ankara Hilton: where next? For you were only as good as your next story and the hunger for it needed constant feeding and renewal.
Mark those days, she thought. Fix them, for they are your shared memory, your common ancestry, your conjugating myth. Where other c
ouples might chart their memories in shared dinners or sunsets, vacations or concerts, their reference points were tragedies and horror stories, their passions magnified by the acts of witnessing and surviving. But it could not be thus again. Not after a farm in Africa finally taught her that death was a transition that offered no replays. Not after his illness showed him how little time he had to stitch a new being from finer cloth. No one could live forever the way they had done, courting burnout or worse. No one could remain on that treadmill of emotion and reward. No one could balance forever on that razor edge between jubilation and destruction. Perhaps that was what his body was telling him and signaling her to explain to him. She thought of a large, remote house with big, high-ceilinged rooms and roaring fires and surf pounding close by: Cornwall, California, Biarritz, Cape Town, wherever. Big rooms and studio lights, studies with books and laptops, solid, steady creation. Words and images as their tools, no longer their masters. No comic, no sat-phones, no last-second self-propulsion through time and space like rogue asteroids. She thought of helping him through wherever the disease led him, until death did them part—a death, finally, without violence. It was clear to her now that he had sought that tranquility, that peace, with his princess, only to find her incapable of delivering. After Rwanda, he had run from her because, deep down, he was crying out for peace, a kind of love that did not need corpses and adrenaline and gunfire to assert itself. And he had thought to find that in Naivasha and Mombasa and in Primrose Hill. But the princess had failed him, neither with him at the front line nor wholeheartedly at his side as he joined the casualties. He had not said it in so many words. But he had come to her, sought her out in Kosovo and Gaza, when the doctors had abandoned him to a destiny whose cruelty the princess could never understand. How could she share the pain of Joe Shelby’s descent when she had not been with him on the high peaks, on the summits of passion and risk? How could she understand the depths of his need when she had barely had time to know him at the heights of his power? In his condition, without hope, and quite possibly facing the end, it was natural that Joe Shelby should seek out the one person who had answered his needs in the crazy days and, more than any other, understood death with such clarity and intimacy.
As she packed, she slid the silver gram into the heel of her black, battered boots. On an impulse, surveying her wardrobe, she chose a flimsy, high-ticket, cocktail-hour item that weighed nothing and cost a ransom. And she still had the Marilyn Monroe lips.
Like Du Plessis said: when you’ve got nothing.
THIRLMERE. SEPTEMBER 2000
Jeremy Davenport led the way to the threshold of the dining room and in to dinner. The hotel seemed to have filled since lunchtime as the fell warriors found their way back in their Swedish and German chariots to their temporary stockade, shedding boots and parkas, swapping rugged outdoor gear for crisp checked country shirts with ties and almost formal, pastel dresses in pink and sky-blue with pearls—a companionable bunch, of a similar, prosperous late middle age, with similar interests in walks and meteorology, scrubbed and ruddy, or prim and powdered after a bracing day. Each table bore its sentry of opened wine commanding an expanse of pink tablecloth and shining cutlery, standing guard between couples whose years together left plenty of room for blank pauses, knowing looks, half-formed sentences started by one, finished by the other. They traded rueful stories of defeat by weather: couldn’t get above the valley today, not in this; visited the Beatrix Potter house, the Pencil Factory, Wordsworth’s cottage. Wind was like a knife. And the forecast’s no better. What else can you do on a day like this? You’d have to be a lunatic to go up on the High Fells, she heard one of them say. Or a blooming masochist, another said, suddenly hearty in the common admission of failure and frustration. You’d have to have a death wish.
He insinuated himself between the tables with her in pliant tow, heading for a setting for two, placed slightly apart from the rest. Even if he hadn’t been wearing an obviously costly sports coat, oozing Savile Row, above his tailored, tight corduroys, he would have exuded authority. The tan and the lithe, stalking movements, the way he held the chair back for his glamorous partner in her fawn silk blouse and understated gold jewelry, the arch to his eyebrows as he cast a falcon’s eye over his fellow diners, but smiled anyhow—noblesse oblige—all those elements combined to bring a short, deferential silence that gave way to whispers: aren’t they famous? Are they on TV? One of those breakfast talk shows? Celebrities, in any event. On furlough. Or something. Would the headlines say: Talk-show stars in secret love nest?
“Who chose this place? Isn’t it somewhat . . . you know . . . geriatric?”
“He chose it because he thought his parents might have liked it, because he wanted to see their kind of people, his kind. He said he thought it would be easy and convenient for me. He wasn’t booking it for you.” Her voice had risen sharply and he stretched his hand across the table to hers.
“Sorry. Sorry.” He had started his campaign badly and regretted it. Tread carefully.
“No. But you’re right of course, Jeremy. It’s not exactly St. Tropez. How’s Nairobi?”
“Nairobi’s Nairobi, I’m afraid. Carjackings and gun battles on the Ngong Road. But still fantastic for all that.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“I know. OK. Well, everyone’s still very impressed with your Forbes cover. And your Pop is still full of plans for this year’s Naivasha and a new line of mange-tout he’s made some deal with with Sainsbury’s or Safeway. And . . .”
“Did he see it? On CNN?”
The waitress intruded. A drinks order, perhaps? Before the meal? He plunged in with a fancy Sancerre, requesting her approval with an arched eyebrow. They ordered starters and mains. She drew another raised eyebrow from him with a request for a vodka and tonic. Double. Plenty of ice. Slice of lemon. He countered with Talisker. Straight. No ice under any circumstances.
“Big spender,” she said. “I remember when you thought two chilled Tuskers and a stick of biltong was enough to turn a girl’s head.”
“Not yours.”
“No. I think you saw me more in the candlelight-at-Main-Camp category.”
“You were never in any category. You were a one-off. Are.”
“And then I expect you’ll say they threw away the mold. Your chat-up lines are atrocious.”
“Who said I was chatting anybody up?”
“Touché. But you didn’t answer the question.”
“About?”
“About CNN. Oh. Never mind. It’s history. Let’s just try and have a nice time.”
The drinks arrived with fanfare. The same waitress as served coffee in the afternoon brought vodka and single malt whisky in appropriate crystal. The proprietor in dark suit and regimental-looking striped tie delivered wine in a silver ice bucket, displaying the label before opening it, presenting the cork for approval, insisting on a tasting.
“You know what Pop’s like, Eva. Of course he saw it. But he wouldn’t mention it. Least of all to me. He wouldn’t want to have it on the agenda. For your sake. And as for the rest of them, it’s just small-time gossip, hair-salon stuff.”
“That’s sweet of you. But I know what you’re saying. And you. What about you? How’s business?”
“Booming, but that’s not why I came here.” He paused and she looked at him inquiringly, not sure whether he had finished speaking, wrong-footed by the uncharacteristic lapse into silence. He was thinking: do I dare? There is still time to back off, run for cover, leave her without the scars that I bear. But if you want the Big Victory, then you must deploy the Big Lie. The plan does not work without it.
“I came here because I wanted to ask you to come back with me to Nairobi. For good. For ever and ever. Tonight, if you like. Or tomorrow. But just come back.”
She almost choked on her vodka.
—
They ate slowly, soup and something called organic salmon, guaranteed free of chemicals.
They toyed with
the idea of sticky toffee pudding as dessert, and decided on one order, two spoons. Intimate food. Love food. But not yet because there was too much to be said if it was ever to be said. Sometimes, thoughts build as rehearsals for speech, the lines honed and repeated, readied for utterance at some unspecified moment that would reveal itself, as now. And in her rehearsing lay a resolve to be honest, to spare no feelings, to cleave to the notion that only truth will bring healing—although that is rarely the case. She would be just as honest with both of them.
A Walking Guide Page 20