A Special Relationship (2 page)

‘Let go of the gun,’ the Brit demanded.

‘Fuck you,’ the kid yelled. So the Brit brought his boot down even harder. This time the soldier released the weapon, which the Brit quickly scooped up and had trained on the soldier in a matter of seconds.

‘I hate impoliteness,’ the Brit said, cocking the rifle.

The kid now began to sob, curling up into a foetal position, pleading for his life. I turned to the Brit and said, ‘You can’t …’

But he just looked at me and winked. Then, turning back to the child soldier, he said, ‘Did you hear my friend? She doesn’t want me to shoot you.’

The kid said nothing. He just curled himself tighter into a ball, crying like the frightened child he was.

‘I think you should apologize to her, don’t you?’ said the Brit. I could see the gun trembling in his hands.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ the kid said, the words choked with sobs. The Brit looked at me.

‘Apology accepted?’ he asked. I nodded.

The Brit nodded at me, then turned back to the kid and asked, ‘How’s your hand?’

‘Hurts.’

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘You can go now, if you like.’

The kid, still trembling, got to his feet. His face was streaked with tears and there was a damp patch around his crotch where he’d wet himself out of fear. He looked at us with terror in his eyes – still certain he was going to be shot. To his credit, the Brit reached out and put a steadying hand on the soldier’s shoulder.

‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. But you have to promise me one thing: you must not tell anyone in your company that you met us. Will you do that?’

The soldier glanced at the gun still in the Brit’s hands and nodded. Many times.

‘Good. One final question. Are there any army patrols down river from here?’

‘No. Our base got washed away. I got separated from the others.’

‘How about the village near here?’

‘Nothing left of it.’

‘All the people washed away?’

‘Some made it to a hill.’

‘Where’s the hill?’

The soldier pointed toward an overgrown path through the trees.

‘How long from here on foot?’ he asked.

‘Half an hour.’

The Brit looked at me and said, ‘That’s our story.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, meeting his look.

‘Run along now,’ the Brit said to the soldier.

‘My gun …’

‘Sorry, but I’m keeping it.’

‘I’ll get in big trouble without it.’

‘Say it was washed away in the flood. And remember: I expect you to keep that promise you made. You never saw us. Understood?’

The kid looked back at the gun, then up again at the Brit.

‘I promise.’

‘Good lad. Now go.’

The boy soldier nodded and dashed out of the trees in the general direction of the chopper. When he was out of sight, the Brit shut his eyes, drew in a deep breath and said, ‘Fucking hell.’

‘And so say all of us.’

He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Yeah – but I feel like a complete jerk.’

He grinned. ‘You
were
a complete jerk – but it happens. Especially when you get surprised by a kid with a gun. On which note …’

He motioned with his thumb that we should make tracks. Which is exactly what we did – negotiating our way through the thicket of woods, finding the overgrown path, threading our way on to the edge of swamped fields. We walked non-stop for fifteen minutes, saying nothing. The Brit led the way. I walked a few steps behind. I watched my companion as we hiked deeper into this submerged terrain. He was very focused on the task of getting us as far away from the soldiers as possible. He was also acutely conscious of any irregular sounds emanating from this open terrain. Twice he stopped and turned back to me, putting his finger to his lips when he thought he heard something. We only started to walk again when he was certain no one was on our tail. I was intrigued by the way he held the soldier’s gun. Instead of slinging it over his shoulder, he carried it in his right hand, the barrel pointed downwards, the rifle held away from his body. And I knew that he would never have shot that soldier. Because he was so obviously uncomfortable holding a gun.

After around fifteen minutes, he pointed to a couple of large rocks positioned near the river. We sat down, but didn’t say anything for a moment as we continued to gauge the silence, trying to discern approaching footsteps in the distance. After a moment, he spoke.

‘The way I figure it, if that kid had told on us, his comrades would be here by now.’

‘You certainly scared him into thinking you would kill him.’

‘He needed scaring. Because he would have shot you without compunction.’

‘I know. Thank you.’

‘All part of the service.’ Then he proffered his hand and said, ‘Tony Hobbs. Who do you write for?’

‘The
Boston Post!

An amused smile crossed his lips. ‘Do you really?’

‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Really. We
do have foreign correspondents, you know.’

‘Really?’
he said, mimicking my accent. ‘So you’re a
foreign correspondent?’

‘Really,’
I said, attempting to mimic his accent.

To his credit, he laughed. And said, ‘I deserved that.’

‘Yes. You did.’

‘So where do you
correspond
from?’ he asked.

‘Cairo. And let me guess. You write for the
Sun?’

‘The
Chronicle,
actually.’

I tried not to appear impressed. ‘The
Chronicle
actually,
actually?’
I said.

‘You give as good as you get.’

‘It comes with being the correspondent of a smallish newspaper. You have to hold your own with arrogant big boys.’

‘Oh, you’ve already decided I’m arrogant?’

‘I worked that out two minutes after first seeing you in the chopper. You based in London?’

‘Cairo, actually.’

‘But I know the
Chronicle
guy there. Henry …’

‘Bartlett. Got sick. Ulcer thing. So they sent for me from Tokyo around ten days ago.’

‘I used to cover Tokyo. Four years ago.’

‘Well, I’m obviously following you around.’

There was a sound of nearby footsteps. We both tensed. Tony picked up the rifle he had leaned against the rock. Then we heard the steps grow nearer. As we stood up, a young Somalian woman came running down the path, a child in her arms. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty; the baby was no more than two months old. The mother was gaunt; the child chillingly still. As soon as the woman saw us, she began to scream in a dialect that neither of us understood, making wild gesticulations at the gun in Tony’s hand. Tony twigged immediately. He tossed the gun into the rushing waters of the river – adding it to the flooded debris washing downstream. The gesture seemed to surprise the woman. But as she turned back to me and started pleading with me again, her legs buckled. Tony and I both grabbed her, keeping her upright. I glanced down at her lifeless baby, still held tightly in her arms. I looked up at the Brit. He nodded in the direction of the Red Cross chopper. We each put an arm around her emaciated waist, and began the slow journey back to the clearing where we’d landed earlier.

When we reached it, I was relieved to see that several Somalian Army jeeps had rolled up near the chopper, and the previously marauding troops had been brought under control. We escorted her past the soldiers, and made a beeline for the Red Cross chopper. Two of the aid workers from the flight were still unloading supplies.

‘Who’s the doctor around here?’ I asked. One of the guys looked up, saw the woman and child, and sprang into action, while his colleague politely told us to get lost.

‘There’s nothing more you can do now.’

Nor, it turned out, was there any chance that we’d be allowed back down the path towards that washed-out village – as the Somalian Army had now blocked it off. When I found the head Red Cross medico and told him about the villagers perched on a hill around two kilometres from here, he said (in his crispest Swiss accent), ‘We know all about it. And we will be sending our helicopter as soon as the Army gives us clearance.’

‘Let us go with you,’ I said.

‘It’s not possible. The Army will only allow three of our team to fly with them—’

‘Tell them we’re part of the team,’ Tony said.

‘We need to send medical men.’

‘Send two,’ Tony said, ‘and let one of us—’

But we were interrupted by the arrival of some Army officer. He tapped Tony on the shoulder.

‘You – papers.’

Then he tapped me. ‘You too.’

We handed over our respective passports. ‘Red Cross papers,’ he demanded. When Tony started to make up some far-fetched story about leaving them behind, the officer rolled his eyes and said one damning word, ‘Journalists.’

Then he turned to his soldiers and said, ‘Get them on the next chopper back to Mogadishu.’

We returned to the capital under virtual armed guard. When we landed at another military field on the outskirts of the capital, I fully expected us to be taken into custody and arrested. But instead, one of the soldiers on the plane asked me if I had any American dollars.

‘Perhaps,’ I said – and then, chancing my arm, asked him if he could arrange a ride for us to the Central Hotel for ten bucks.

‘You pay twenty, you get your ride.’

He even commandeered a jeep to get us there. En route, Tony and I spoke for the first time since being placed under armed guard.

‘Not a lot to write about, is there?’ I said.

‘I’m sure we’ll both manage to squeeze something out of it.’

We found two rooms on the same floor, and agreed to meet after we’d filed our respective copy. Around two hours later – shortly after I’d dispatched by email seven hundred words on the general disarray in the Juba River Valley, the sight of floating bodies in the river, the infra-structural chaos, and the experience of being fired upon in a Red Cross helicopter by rebel forces – there was a knock at my door.

Tony stood outside, holding a bottle of Scotch and two glasses.

‘This looks promising,’ I said. ‘Come on in.’

He didn’t leave again until seven the next morning – when we checked out to catch the early morning flight back to Cairo. From the moment I saw him in the chopper, I knew that we would inevitably fall into bed with each other, should the opportunity arise. Because that’s how this game worked. Foreign correspondents rarely had spouses or ‘significant others’ – and most people you met in the field were definitely not the sort you wanted to share a bed with for ten minutes, let alone a night.

But when I woke next to Tony, the thought struck me:
he’s actually living where I live
. Which led to what was, for me, a most unusual thought:
and I’d actually like to see him again. In fact, I’d like to see him tonight.

Two

I’
VE NEVER CONSIDERED
myself the sentimental type. On the contrary, I’ve always recognized in myself a certain cut-and-run attitude when it comes to romance – something my one and only fiancé told me around seven years ago, when I broke it off with him. His name was Richard Pettiford. He was a Boston lawyer – smart, erudite, driven. And I really did like him. The problem was, I also liked my work.

‘You’re always running away,’ he said after I told him that I was becoming the
Post’s
correspondent in Tokyo.

‘This is a big professional move,’ I said.

‘You said that when you went to Washington.’

‘That was just a six month secondment – and I saw you every weekend.’

‘But it was still running away.’

‘It was a great opportunity. Like going to Tokyo.’

‘But I’m a great opportunity.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You are. But so am I. So come to Tokyo with me.’

‘But I won’t make partner if I do that,’ he said.

‘And if I stay, I won’t make a very good partner’s wife.’

‘If you really loved me, you’d stay.’

I laughed. And said, ‘Then I guess I don’t love you.’

Which pretty much ended our two-year liaison there and then – because when you make an admission like that, there’s very little comeback. Though I was truly saddened that we couldn’t ‘make a go of it’ (to borrow an expression that Richard used just a little too often), I also knew that I couldn’t play the suburban role he was offering. Anyway, had I accepted such a part, my passport would now only contain a few holiday stamps from Bermuda and other resort spots, rather than the twenty crammed pages of visas I’d managed to obtain over the years. And I certainly wouldn’t have ended up sitting on a flight from Addis Ababa to Cairo, getting pleasantly tipsy with a wholly charming, wholly cynical Brit, with whom I’d just spent the night …

‘So you’ve really never been married?’ Tony asked me as the seatbelt signs were switched off.

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ I said. ‘I don’t swoon easily.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ he said.

‘Foreign correspondents aren’t the marrying kind.’

‘Really? I hadn’t noticed.’

I laughed, then asked, ‘And you?’

‘You must be joking.’

‘Never came close?’

‘Everyone’s come close once. Just like you.’

‘How do you know I’ve come close?’ I said.

‘Because everyone’s come close once.’

‘Didn’t you just say that?’

‘Touché. And let me guess – you didn’t marry the guy because you’d just been offered your first overseas posting …’

‘My, my – you are perceptive,’ I said.

‘Hardly’ he said. ‘It’s just how it always works.’

Naturally, he was right. And he was clever enough not to ask me too much about the fellow in question, or any other aspects of my so-called romantic history, or even where I grew up. If anything, the very fact that he didn’t press the issue (other than to ascertain that I too had successfully dodged marriage) impressed me. Because it meant that – unlike most other foreign correspondents I had met – he wasn’t treating me like some girlie who had been transferred from the Style Section to the front line. Nor did he try to impress me with his big city credentials – and the fact that the
Chronicle
of London carried more international clout than the
Boston Post
. If anything, he spoke to me as a professional equal. He wanted to hear about the contacts I’d made in Cairo (as he was new there), and to trade stories about covering Japan. Best of all, he wanted to make me laugh … which he did with tremendous ease. As I was quickly discovering, Tony Hobbs wasn’t just a great talker; he was also a terrific storyteller.

We talked non-stop all the way back to Cairo. Truth be told, we hadn’t stopped talking since we woke up together that morning. There was an immediate ease between us – not just because we had so much professional terrain in common, but also because we seemed to possess a similar worldview: slightly jaded, fiercely independent, with a passionate undercurrent about the business we were both in. We also both acknowledged that foreign corresponding was a kid’s game, in which most practitioners were considered way over the hill by the time they reached fifty.

‘Which makes me eight years away from the slag heap,’ Tony said somewhere over Sudan.

‘You’re that young?’ I said. ‘I really thought you were at least ten years older.’

He shot me a cool, amused look. And said, ‘You’re fast.’

‘I try.’

‘Oh, you do very well … for a provincial reporter.’

‘Two points,’ I said, nudging him with my elbow.

‘Keeping score, are we?’

‘Oh, yes.’

I could tell that he was completely comfortable with this sort of banter. He enjoyed repartee – not just for its verbal gamesmanship, but also because it allowed him to retreat from the serious, or anything that might be self-revealing. Every time our in-flight conversation veered toward the personal, he’d quickly switch into badinage mode. This didn’t disconcert me. After all, we’d just met and were still sizing each other up. But I still noted this diversionary tactic, and wondered if it would hinder me from getting to know the guy – as, much to my surprise, Tony Hobbs was the first man I’d met in about four years whom I wanted to get to know.

Not that I was going to reveal that fact to him. Because (a) that might put him off, and (b) I never chased anyone. So, when we arrived in Cairo, we shared a cab back to Zamalek (the relatively upscale expatriate quarter where just about every foreign correspondent and international business type lived). As it turned out, Tony’s place was only two blocks from mine. But he insisted on dropping me off first. As the taxi slowed to a halt in front of my door, he reached into his pocket and handed me his card.

‘Here’s where to find me,’ he said.

I pulled out a business card of my own, and scribbled a number on the back of it.

‘And here’s my home number.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, taking it. ‘So call me, eh?’

‘No, you make the first move,’ I said.

‘Old fashioned, are we?’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

‘Hardly. But I don’t make the first move. All right?’

He leaned over and gave me a very long kiss.

‘Fine,’ he said, then added, ‘That was fun.’

‘Yes. It was.’

An awkward pause. I gathered up my things.

‘See you, I guess,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said with a smile. ‘See you.’

As soon as I was upstairs in my empty, silent apartment, I kicked myself for playing the tough dame.
‘No,
you make the first move.’
What a profoundly dumb thing to say. Because I knew that guys like Tony Hobbs didn’t cross my path every day.

Still, I could now do nothing but put the entire business out of my mind. So I spent the better part of an hour soaking in a bath, then crawled into bed and passed out for nearly ten hours – having hardly slept for the past two nights. I was up just after seven in the morning. I made breakfast. I powered up my laptop. I turned out my weekly ‘Letter from Cairo’, in which I recounted my dizzying flight in a Red Cross helicopter under fire from Somalian militia men. When the phone rang around noon, I jumped for it.

‘Hello,’ Tony said. ‘This is the first move.’

He came by ten minutes later to pick me up for lunch. We never made it to the restaurant. I won’t say I dragged him off to my bed – because he came very willingly. Suffice to say, from the moment I opened the door, I was all over him. As he was me.

Much later, in bed, he turned to me and said, ‘So who’s making the second move?’

It would be the stuff of romantic cliché to say that, from that moment on we were inseparable. Nonetheless, I do count that afternoon as the official start of us – when we started becoming an essential part of each other’s lives. What most surprised me was this: it was about the easiest transition imaginable. The arrival of Tony Hobbs into my existence wasn’t marked by the usual doubts, questions, worries, let alone the overt romantic extremities associated with a
coup de foudre.
The fact that we were both self-reliant types – used to falling back on our separate resources – meant that we were attuned to each other’s independent streak. We also seemed to be amused by each other’s national quirks. He would often gently deride a certain American literalness that I do possess – a need to ask questions all the damn time, and analyse situations a little too much. Just as I would express amusement at his incessant need to find the flippant underside to all situations. He also happened to be absolutely fearless when it came to journalistic practice. I saw this at first hand around a month after we first hooked up, when a call came one evening that a busload of German tourists had been machine-gunned by Islamic fundamentalists while visiting the Pyramids at Giza. Immediately, we jumped into my car and headed out in the direction of the Sphinx. When we reached the sight of the Giza massacre, Tony managed to push his way past several Egyptian soldiers to get right up to the blood-splattered bus itself – even though there were fears that the terrorists might have thrown grenades into it before vanishing. The next afternoon, at the news conference following this attack, the Egyptian Minister for Tourism tried to blame foreign terrorists for the massacre … at which point Tony interrupted him, holding up a statement, which had been faxed directly to his office, in which the Cairo Muslim Brotherhood took complete responsibility for the attack. Not only did Tony read out the statement in near perfect Arabic, he then turned to the minister and asked him, ‘Now would you mind explaining why you’re lying to us?’

Tony was always defensive about one thing: his height … though, as I assured him on more than one occasion, his diminutive stature didn’t matter a damn to me. On the contrary, I found it rather touching that this highly accomplished and amusingly arrogant man would be so vulnerable about his physical stature. And I came to realize that much of Tony’s bravado – his need to ask all the tough questions, his competitiveness for a story, and his reckless self-endangerment – stemmed out of a sense of feeling small. He secretly considered himself inadequate: the perennial outsider with his nose to the window, looking in on a world from which he felt excluded. It took me a while to detect Tony’s curious streak of inferiority since it was masked behind such witty superiority. But then I saw him in action one day with a fellow Brit – a correspondent from the
Daily Telegraph
named Wilson. Though only in his mid-thirties, Wilson had already lost much of his hair and had started to develop the sort of over-ripe fleshiness that made him (in Tony’s words) look like a wheel of Camembert that had been left out in the sun. Personally, I didn’t mind him – even though his languid vowels and premature jowliness (not to mention the absurd tailored safari jacket he wore all the time with a check Viyella shirt) gave him a certain cartoonish quality. Though he was perfectly amiable in Wilson’s company, Tony couldn’t stand him – especially after an encounter we had with him at the Gezira Club. Wilson was sunning himself by the pool. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and suede shoes with socks. It was not a pretty sight. After greeting us, he asked Tony, ‘Going home for Christmas?’

‘Not this year.’

‘You’re a London chap, right?’

‘Buckinghamshire, actually.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Amersham.’

‘Ah yes, Amersham. End of the Metropolitan Line, isn’t it? Drink?’

Tony’s face tightened, but Wilson didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he called over one of the waiters, ordered three gin-and-tonics, then excused himself to use the toilet. As soon as he was out of earshot, Tony hissed, ‘Stupid little prat.’

‘Easy, Tony …’ I said, surprised by this uncharacteristic flash of anger.

‘“End of the Metropolitan Line, isn’t it?”’ he said, mimicking Wilson’s over-ripe accent. ‘He had to say that, didn’t he? Had to get his little dig in. Had to make the fucking point.’

‘Hey, all he said was …’

‘I know what he said. And he meant every bloody word …’

‘Meant what?’

‘You just don’t get it.’

‘I think it’s all a little too nuanced for me,’ I said lightly. ‘Or maybe I’m just a dumb American who doesn’t get England.’

‘No one gets England.’

‘Even if you’re English?’

‘Especially if you’re English.’

This struck me as something of a half-truth. Because Tony understood England all too well. Just as he also understood (and explained to me) his standing in the social hierarchy. Amersham was deeply dull. Seriously petit bourgeois. He hated it, though his only sibling – a sister he hadn’t seen for years – had stayed on, living at home with the parents she could never leave. His dad – now dead, thanks to a life-long love affair with Benson and Hedges – had worked for the local council in their Records Office (which he finally ended up running five years before he died). His mom – also dead – worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery, located opposite the modest little suburban semi in which he was raised.