by Jon McGregor
The many hands holding him tight and holding him warm and holding him safe above the good dark earth. We see the poppy heads, nodding and bowing in the breeze. We see the farmers coming to inspect their crops, walking slowly through the planted lines, treading on fallen petals, checking the curling crowns of the ripening pods. We see the farmers returning in the mid-afternoon to score shallow wounds in each pod and let the milk-white sap seep out into the warming sun, and harden and cool until the farmers come back and scrape blisters of blackened gum into tin cans dangling from their necks. As he lies there watching, waiting but. We see the gum scooped out of the tin cans and wrapped in leaves and laid out to dry in the sun, and pressed into dung-like lumps which are sold for good money to men who come rattling into the valley in old Russian saloons with loose floor panels which open up to swallow the merchandise and go clattering away again into the hills. The sound of the helicopters in the distance. The cars grinding over the mountain passes and turning off the road by an old hill-trail, the men slinging the black opium lumps into bags across their shoulders and walking a few miles to a pair of old iron shacks beneath an overhanging rock, where boys stripped to the waist are tending fires and oil-drums and squatting over fat sack-cloth bundles which ooze dark stains into the earth. We see the banked fires beneath the oil-drums burning all through the night, the boys stirring the mixture and scooping out twigs and soil and leaves. Other boys hoisting bags of fertiliser into the drums, stirring it up and straining the mixture through rice sacks and into vast cooking pots placed over other, smaller fires. More chemicals, more straining and pressing and stirring, as dawn lights up the horizon and an oily dark gunge is spread out to dry in the rising sun. Strange light falling through the fields. Golden light. Faces set against the sky and the sound of a helicopter somewhere and a voice saying Hang in there, pal, you’ll be all right. Boys’ voices chattering on in some language like Afghanistani or whatever it is, boiling up a kettle of tea and chewing on handfuls of bread, pressing the coffee-coloured powder into brick-shaped blocks the size of those pocket-dictionaries the officers use when they’re out in the villages winning hearts and minds. Or maybe the size of those fat satellite phones they use for calling down airstrikes but.
The poppy heads swaying suddenly in a strong breeze, pressing themselves flat to the ground as if ducking for cover, and the helicopter suddenly dropping out of the sky. Like a what like a fucking like a black mother goose but. What were they even doing in bloody Helmand. And all the warm hands lifting him through the air, over the field, into the belly of the mother, and the mother lifting high over the landscape, over the fields and the mountains and the roads and trails which wind almost invisibly through the valleys and passes, over the rock-sheltered pair of shacks where the bare-chested boys are bundling up dozens of paper-bound powder bricks and loading them on to dust-coloured mules who wait patiently in the midday heat before setting off in long ambling trains through the hills. And the mules keep walking steadily for days, guided by young boys who run and scramble alongside, waving sticks and shouting high-pitched commands which vanish into specks of sound no bigger than the distant birds of prey which spiral high above them, following the shape of sunlight and shadow across the valley each morning until a small group of canvas-draped shacks comes into sight around the last corner and a man ducks out through a low doorway, pulling a scarf down from his mouth and welcoming the boys, offering them tea, shaking their hands like men and already moving towards the mules to untether their loads. Behind him, inside the shacks, other men are crouched over pots and pestles and fires, pounding the pressed bricks back into dust and mixing the dust with vinegar, heating it over low fires before adding water and charcoal and washing soda, cooling and reheating and steaming the solution, passing it through filters and steambaths and pipes until finally a bright white powder begins to form in the bottom of a broad flat pan, and is carefully warmed and scraped and lifted out on to sheets of paper to dry. And by the time the powder is poured into clear plastic bags and weighed and sealed, the boys and their light-footed mules are halfway home, their pockets fat with money and their talk full of what they will do with it, the things they will buy their families and the savings they will put towards a scrap of land on which to grow poppies of their own, while somewhere overhead Ant still lies in the belly of the helicopter as it clatters over the landscape, angry and low, its shadow rising and falling as he looks up at the faces around him and feels the warm embrace of the morphine flooding through his broken body while men with headscarves and rifles and rucksacks full of heroin scramble over the hidden mountain passes which cross the border into Iran, making their way down to the roads where convoys of Toyota pickups are waiting to race across the plains towards the city, tensed for battle against the government soldiers who are waiting for them, soldiers who are now checking their weapons and sipping mint tea, listening to the evening’s briefing, watching the sun dip behind the mountains and wondering again why they would sacrifice their lives to interrupt this unstoppable flow of wealth passing through their land on its way to the marketplaces and backrooms of the city, to be packed and weighed and repacked and sold on to other traders, other smugglers, other men with weapons and suitcases and armoured cars who will take the cargo on through the fields and deserts towards the west, to the Turkish border and far beyond, while they stay here and watch the sun dip behind the mountains, and listen to the evening’s briefing, and watch through night-vision binoculars as shimmering Toyota pickups come racing towards them from out of the moss-green fearful dark.
The same darkness from which the helicopter drops down into Camp Bastion, resting lightly on the ground for a moment while the many hands carry Ant out into the warm dusty air and across the concrete, the helicopter already falling away into the sky overhead as he’s taken through to a spotless operating theatre where the scrubbed-up surgeons are waiting with forceps and scissors and an electrical saw. And as they pour more drugs in through the hole in his arm, pushing him over the edge into a deep dark painless sleep, he sees, in a single whirling moment, what we all can see: this strange journey the seeping poppy gum takes across continents, from an Afghan field to an English city street, carried by mules and men and pickup trucks, through shacks and labs and mountain passes, across borders, through hotel rooms and teashops and dark-windowed cars, stuffed into bags and suitcases and petrol tanks, coffee jars, coal sacks, butcher’s vans, freight containers, arseholes and vaginas and crudely stitched wounds, forced in and out of desperate bodies, glued in under wigs and false beards and fake-pregnant bellies, squeezing into Europe through the narrow gateway of Istanbul and on through the transit routes of Kosovo and Macedonia and Bosnia, bloody Bosnia, shipments bought and sold by men with dark glasses at café tables looking over the sea, suitcases of money changing hands in backrooms and bathrooms, arguments settled by fists and knives and boys with borrowed pistols buzzing past on scooters, the cargo gathering weight and value and bloody narrative as it hurtles on through Italy and Germany and Holland and Belgium and France. And as Ant rumbles his way home in the hold of a Hercules, his leg cut down to a bandaged stump, he flies over an English Channel across which the heroin shipments are pouring, in fishing boats and yachts and speeding cruisers, in light aircraft, in the distended stomachs of human mules pacing uncomfortably up and down the decks of passenger ferries, in the backs of container lorries bringing the stuff in by the tonne to be driven on to warehouses and safehouses across the country, weighed and cut and bagged again on kitchen tables and workshop benches, sold on and split and sold on again, broken down into smaller and smaller batches until a bald-headed man in a baggy tracksuit gets out of a BMW on the Milton Estate, jogs up the concrete stairs of a towerblock to the ninth floor, knocks twice on the steel door, and walks in past a young man in a baseball cap who nods and closes the door behind him. And a few minutes later a boy in a grey hooded top comes out of the same stairwell carrying a bike, and rides off down the hill towards the railway sidings, down past
the police station and the hospital, over the canal and under the motorway and around the roundabout to the Miller’s Arms and the phoneboxes where Danny still waits, tutting at the damp ragged note Danny hands him and circling around on his bike before flicking a bag into the long grass and pedalling away up the hill, looking once over his shoulder to see Danny scrabbling across the ground for the gear and shutting himself in the phonebox with Einstein still jumping around outside, laying out his works on the crooked metal shelf and trying to keep his sweating shaking hands even a little bit still while he cooks up a fix in a blackened spoon, too much, holding his breath as he jabs the needle into the filter and draws up the coffee-coloured juice, too much, he knows it’s too much or he thinks it might be but so what he wants to make sure, so what he doesn’t care, pulling down his soiled trousers without waiting for it to cool and poking a new hole through the scabbing wound over his fem pushing in deeper in and feeling for the vein feeling for the blood feeling the pain the good pain that means he’ll be well soon that all shall be well and he draws back the syringe a little to see the blood from the vein to be sure he’s got the right place but there’s nothing there there’s nothing there he moves the needle he takes it out and puts it in and takes it out and puts it in and there’s nothing there so he pulls it right out and wipes it clean on his sleeve and turns to the window and uses the dark night as a mirror to focus in on his neck he clenches his jaw to make the veins stand out he chooses a vein and watches closely in the darkly lit glass and pushes the needle in to a good new vein a clean vein the blood billowing back into the syringe and he eases the plunger down down down and feels the gear charging through his body’s borders around his bloodstream through his heart and his lungs and his brain and it feels good good good he feels well again he feels whole again he feels sorted at last he feels what he feels warm and clean and wrapped up in silk and tissue and cotton wool he feels the way he felt when he first began he leans his face against the cold dark glass and looks out at the city at the lights at the passing cars the passing trains the orange-bellied clouds and the black star-pierced sky a flock of pigeons silhouetted against the neon walls of the shopping centre in the valley and he drops the needle to the floor and presses his hands to the cold glass and slides to the floor and curls up on the floor all this shall pass and he waits for all this to pass.
four
They cut his body open in a clean white room and take him apart piece by piece.
They come crowding into the room, and turn on the lights, and open the heavy steel door he’s been lying behind. The photographer from the flat is here, and the younger policeman, and the woman who combed her fingers through Robert’s hair. The older man with the thick tangle of dark hair is here, wearing a black suit, and the way he stands over Robert makes it look like he’s still in charge. And we still haven’t got an identity, he’s saying, asking, looking at the woman from the flat and another man with a notebook already out. They shake their heads, and they say that nothing’s really come up, no one’s come forward, there’s nothing to say this is even a case. See what you can do for us today, Frank, says the man with the notebook, and they all smile and start to laugh, and the doctor asks two younger men to take Robert through. They wheel him out to another room, and transfer him to another trolley, and wheel him into a room with sinks and counters and bright white lights and trays of sharply shining tools. We follow them, hanging back a little, wanting and not wanting to see what will happen now, and as we move into the room we hear the rest of them behind us, scrubbing their hands and arms and dressing in layers of protective clothing, the medical staff in green gowns and plastic aprons, thick gloves, rubber boots, and clear plastic visors which cover their faces, the others wearing white hooded overalls just as they did at the flat, and visors over their faces, and white rubber boots.
Fucksake. It’s only Robert. What can he do to you now.
They come through and they stand around his body, still safely bagged and sealed, and they talk, telling each other what they know about the case, reading the policeman’s report, studying the notes.
They shift him on to a large steel table with a sink built in to one end, and taps, and hoses, and extraction fans which begin to whistle softly as they talk.
They weigh him and measure him and take pictures of his shrouded body. They switch on the overhead lights, searchlight-bright and stark and shocking. We press close in around them. We want to see. We want to touch. The policeman checks the number on the lock, breaks it open, and stands back. The photographer leans in and takes pictures, and he keeps taking pictures while they unzip the body bag and pull it open. They unwind the plastic sheet from around his body, checking it for any fallen debris, any scraps of him or his life, and they place everything they find into plastic containers with labels which note the date and time and reference number, labels which should but don’t say things like: a piece of tobacco which fell from the last cigarette Robert smoked; a strand of someone else’s hair, apparently a woman’s, which from its position at or around Robert’s arm must have been there since the source rested her head against his shoulder; the blood-darkened larvae from a bluebottle fly, hatched from an egg laid on Robert’s skin, which wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside him.
They take the plastic bags from his hands and his head, and as his face rises into the light we almost expect him to take a deep gasping breath, or to blink, or to say something like What the fuck’s happened this time? What the fuck have you gone and done? Which is how he always used to wake up, before. With a jolt. Like he’d heard something. Something like the closing of a door, or the ringing of a phone. His eyes snapping open and his voice going What the fuck is it now before he even quite knew he was awake. His voice thick and wet and slurred. Cranking himself up on his elbows and looking around the room to see who was there this time, waiting for someone to catch his eye and saying Will someone get me a fucking drink or what?
They take photographs. They cut slices from the ends of his cracked yellow fingernails and drop them into labelled plastic bags. They pluck hairs from the top of his head, from his eyebrows, from his nostrils, tearing them out by the root and dropping them into more labelled bags.
Should be more like this though but. We drape a freshly laundered sheet across a long wooden table and lay him out on that, dressed in his Sunday best. We put his head on a soft silk cushion. We weigh his eyelids down with pennies, and stuff his arse with cotton wool. We place flowers around him, and light candles, and put out chairs so that people can come and go all through the day and night to remember who he was and how he was and raise a drink and tell stories about his long eventful life. Like a what they call it a wake. Like saying remember this.
Remember the woman cutting hair at the day centre. Every couple of weeks she’d be there, with her combs and scissors and bottles of shampoo. Weren’t bothered about keeping it short or how it looked to be honest but just, being touched. Hands running through your hair. Someone taking the time. Someone holding up a mirror and asking if that was okay. Worth waiting for. Robert never went down there, never went anywhere, borrowed Steve’s clippers every few months and buzzcut it himself, made a right mess of it most times as it happens but no one ever said. Could do with someone trimming his hair nice now and not just tearing it out by the root.
And what about. All the cigarettes that have stained those fingernails. The layers of grease and dust and skin which have collected beneath them. Each moment of his life scraped up under there. The fabric of the armchair worn thin beneath his fidgeting hands. The labels of beer-bottles picked away from the cold wet glass. The way he would scratch at Yvonne’s back sometimes, when they were in bed together, each sharpened caress making her arch and shriek above him, and the way afterwards she would peer over her shoulder to see the marks he’d left on her, and laugh proudly, and call him a mean bastard, smiling as she said it, and roll off the bed to look for their cigarettes. The sight of her skinny arse as she walked away from the bed like that. Fu
cking, what was it. The two of them smoking together then, and later, once she’d left, the two of them smoking apart, in rooms a hundred miles away, their fingers yellowing and the memory of each other flaring to life each time they lit up, no matter what they did to avoid it, the drinking and whatever else. The way memories like that end up a part of you, and then pop out again with some movement or some bang on the bone. For example what. For example the number of times, years after she left, he would take his first drag on a cigarette and then find himself holding it out in mid-air, offering it to someone who wasn’t there. Who hadn’t been there for years. For example the way, in those first few months together, she’d only take a few drags before stubbing it out and wrestling him on to his back for another go. Fucking Yvonne. Where did she come from. Where the fuck did she go. And the blood beneath his fingernails that time, the only time. When he lashed out at her by mistake. He’d only wanted to warn her, but she’d moved at the last moment, and he’d caught her awkwardly, caught the skin just by her eye with his fingernails, felt the skin tearing he thought. And there was the blood on his nails, a tiny spot, a tiny fucking damn spot. It was only the one time, weren’t it. And it had been more or less a mistake. The pain in his head. Just a slap, fucking, not even a slap. Because if she hadn’t moved at the last minute. But the way she’d looked at him then, like something had closed off inside her. And her cheek, around where he’d caught her. Red. The ragged edges of the broken skin. The way she said You bastard, without smiling, without room for him to say anything back. Running the taps in the bathroom, and the smell of cigarette smoke curling out while he stood there and knocked on the door. Her muffled voice telling him he had to go and collect Laura from the school because she wasn’t going in this state.