The Girl in Green (18 page)

‘We're very close to Zakho. It's safer there. There's a shopping mall if you need anything.'

‘Pull in here first. Now, Jamal.'

Jamal makes the turn, but does not look pleased. ‘This is not a good town. It's a Sunni village. Close ties to the old regime. We do not have good relations with them.'

‘They'll love me. There's an intersection with a café on the corner. It has plastic yellow chairs. You park and wait for me there. I won't be long.'

Jamal pulls into town.

Two men are squatting on the side of the road with their feet flat to the ground, in the way of Asians. Their arms rest on their knees, and their sandals are as dirty as their hands. One of them is smoking a cigarette.

The men watch the car proceed down the road toward the centre of the village.

‘This is not a good idea,' Jamal says.

‘What are we doing here?' Benton asks Arwood.

‘We're going to have a Fanta. Now stay in the car.'

Arwood opens the door and hops out before the car comes to a complete stop or Benton can even reply.

Arwood has taken his rucksack and whatever was inside it.

‘Arwood?' Benton says through the window.

But Arwood isn't listening. He is looking at his watch as he hurries away.

With Arwood gone, Jamal stops the music. The car's engine is running. They are waiting. Neither of the men knows why.

15

When Benton started his work as a war reporter, he thought it would be daring, exciting, and even rebellious work. He immediately learned he was wrong. Like every other reporter in 1982 who was interested in war, he was sent off to the Falklands. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had an iron grip on the reporting, though, and the only authorised vessel for journalists was the HMS
Stanley
. When they were finally let off the ship, the journalists were led around by the Royal Marines like the sheep that populated the place, and were told where to film and not to film. Benton was thirty-one years old in 1982 — old enough to object, but too naïve to know where to direct the objection. He made the mistake of lecturing a lieutenant colonel about Roger Fenton and the Crimean War, explaining that, as a reporter for the
Times
, he couldn't possibly follow in the same footsteps.

The Royal Marines had no idea what he was talking about, and they were not bothered by their ignorance. The lieutenant colonel held up a finger, pointed with it, and said, ‘That's where you can shoot.' Benton refused. The Royal Marines — who knew exactly where to lodge their objections about Benton — complained to the
Times
. And Benton was sent off to Lebanon, which was very far away from the Falklands and the Royal Marines. It was a busy time to be in Lebanon.

Benton knew that Vanessa didn't understand the mental displacement that comes with being both here and there at the same time — how ‘here' and ‘there' become meaningless concepts. Of course, you can be in Lebanon and Cornwall at the same time, because you can be mentally present in more than one story. The only difference between here and there, really, is that ‘here' we are subject to the forces of gravity.

She took him for addle-brained, and once called him a modern-day Walter Mitty. In some ways, she wasn't wrong. He was distracted. He was forgetful. Even as a father to little Charlotte, he was seldom present in her life. What Vanessa got wrong, though, was that he was not a modern version of Walter Mitty dreaming of being a war journalist; he was a war journalist dreaming of being Walter Mitty.

Between 1982 and 1991, he covered Grenada, Honduras, the Iran–Iraq war, the American invasion of Panama, and then Desert Storm and the aftermath.

During that time, their daughter, Charlotte, grew into a ten-year-old. He remembered looking at her when he came back after the Shaaban Intifada. He didn't see her as a child anymore. He saw her as a kind of automaton. He looked at her in the doorway of their home, and looked through her skin to her skeleton: the jaw, the teeth set inside it; the shape of her skull, and what it would look like if she died now rather than later. It occurred to him that her life was continuing, right then, due to the successful firing of the smallest of electrical impulses telling her heart to pump again … and again … and again. How long could that last? How much faith and love can you invest in the hope that a little impulse will fire again … and again … and again?

We say ‘God bless you' when a person sneezes, because our forebears thought that, for a moment, the heart stops and the blessings of God, called forth by someone who cares, would start it up again.

God bless you.

God bless you.

God bless you.

Could he say that between every beat of her heart?

He couldn't see her as a child anymore — only as something that was, eventually, going to break.

Little Charlotte stood in the doorway without the resources to make sense of the expression on her father's face, wondering if she'd done something wrong. She was young enough to think that right and wrong were in play.

God bless you.

He kissed her on the forehead, pretended to smile, and went upstairs for twenty years.

Vanessa was harder to isolate. She wasn't a child. She wasn't a developing life force that could be moulded or conditioned. She was a grown woman with a mind that she asserted into their lives and into his own. She could interrupt his inner conversations. She knew how. What he couldn't fathom was why she bothered.

Eventually, the nothing he offered them accumulated. It gained as particles to a cloud, and as a cloud to a mass that developed its own gravity. It pulled Vanessa into it. Eventually, she rebelled, and decided she wanted more. So she took it.

Good for her. Bad for them.

In the Toyota, Benton looks at his watch as he and Jamal wait for Arwood to return. Charlotte is probably at the university lab now. Then she'll be having dinner with her boyfriend, Guy Waters.

Guy Waters. The man who will keep Charlotte safe and dry forever in a land of crystal blue so that she can grow old and die, starting now.

‘It's been a long time,' Jamal says. ‘Too long to buy a Fanta and Kit Kats.'

‘How long's it been?' Benton says.

‘Seventeen minutes.'

‘That's a long time.'

‘How did he know the chairs would be yellow?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Your friend. He said the chairs at the café would be yellow. Most café chairs are white. Only some are yellow. How did he know they'd be yellow? Has he been here before?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Have you?'

‘No.'

‘We are here for a reason that I don't know. Do you know the reason?'

‘No,' Benton says.

‘How well do you know him?'

‘I'm increasingly not sure.'

‘Something's not right. That man — over there, in the blue shirt. He's writing down my licence plate.'

‘Are we in danger?'

‘Yes. Yes, we are in danger. This is how it happens. There are rules. You break the rules, you are in danger. We are breaking a rule.'

‘What rule?'

‘There are places you go and don't go, depending on who you are. Your family, your religion, your tribe. You cross those lines, everyone knows. They know very quickly. Nothing travels faster than a whisper in Iraq. That is why the winds all have names.'

‘You're not responsible for the stupidity of your passengers.'

Jamal shakes his head. ‘You're not from here. You don't understand.'

‘Should I go out and get him?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I'll go to the shop. If he's in there, I'll get him.'

‘Yeah, OK. OK. But don't stay there. And don't go anywhere else. Come right back. I'll have to tell Märta. She's going to be very angry.'

‘I'll take care of Märta, don't worry. She knows Arwood can be impulsive.'

‘This car is all I have. I have a family. They need me to keep this job. Domiz is safe. I don't want to go to Baghdad.'

‘I'm going, and then I'll come right back.'

But Benton hasn't gone farther than two metres from the car before Arwood himself comes around the corner. He is clutching a white plastic bag with some bottles in it. They smack against each other violently as he makes for the car.

He opens the doors to the Toyota, and gets into the front seat rather than the back one.

‘Go.'

‘Where the hell have you been?' Benton asks.

‘Get the fuck in, and let's go.'

Jamal doesn't ask anything. He starts the car in second gear, and drives too fast on the uneven road that is split and cracked from the hard rains of last season and the season before. Jamal looks in the mirror every two seconds.

‘This is a big problem. Very big problem.'

Arwood is breathing hard. He is tapping his foot like a junkie at a bus stop.

‘Arwood,' Benton says as gently as possible, ‘I would like you to tell me what just happened.'

Jamal turns right onto Route 2.

Arwood takes an object from his pocket. His hands are moving too quickly for Benton to see what it is. It's metal. It looks like brass.

Jamal shifts into fourth gear as the road evens out. He is passing other vehicles. He is flashing his lights and honking.

‘I never thought we'd see him again, Benton. I really didn't. I went home afterward, and drank Jim Beam and played video games before my dad kicked me out. I bought a motorcycle. Got as far as Montana, and then started looking for work. Never occurred to me that the sonofabitch who shot her was still alive, living this parallel life in Iraq. I was an American kid. The world wasn't all globalised back then. Everything seemed so far away. Not anymore, though. I got so sick of watching all of it. Anyway, maybe if he'd been a private or corporal it would have been harder. But a lieutenant colonel, on the ground, in Samawah on 29 March 1991? How many of those could there have been? Turns out, the answer is one. So if you know the right people, and pay a little money, all of a sudden you've got a name and an address and a timeline. He got kicked out of Baghdad when the Americans did that de-Baathification shit, and went to stay with a cousin in the north near Dohuk and south of Zakho. Which, coincidentally — like I said — is the road we needed to travel to get to the girl. So, actually, some things are coinciding. We are at the nexus of some major cosmic voodoo.'

‘What have you done, Arwood?'

‘Something I was supposed to do a long time ago.'

‘Arwood, what have you done?'

‘What have I done? What I should have done twenty years ago. What you stopped me from doing. I put a bullet in the motherfucker. Now all that's left is saving the girl. And then everything will be fine. Everything will be the way it was supposed to be.'

16

Jamal's hands clutch the black wheel at the ten o'clock and two o'clock positions. He drives with the intensity of prayer. Before reaching Zakho, he turns left off Route 2 onto a road toward Dayrabun that takes them toward the Syrian border. It is a two-lane road. On the outskirts, they run into refugees again.

They have been silent in the car since Arwood's admission. It seems to Benton that Jamal's strategy is to get the day over with as soon as possible and try to forget it ever happened. Benton doesn't have a strategy yet.

Arwood is the first to break the lull. ‘They have to pay mules for passage across the border,' he says. ‘They walk with their children for up to eight to ten hours through the dark. Once across, they get robbed. Then they continue on foot, hoping to reach one of the camps. I don't even want to imagine what's going to happen in the camps when ISIL overruns them.'

They drive slowly against the flow of the river. Benton looks at the colours worn by the refugees. They looked brighter on television.

He could be home now. He should be home now. He should be with Vanessa. He should invite Charlotte and Guy for dinner. Investigate her life, not this. Ask her questions about her ancient shells that once lined the coasts of forgotten continents that let you walk from Damascus to Fowey.

‘Do you still have the gun?' Benton asks, after about twenty more minutes of silence.

Arwood smiles. ‘Guns aren't helpful out here. You need friends. I've got friends.' He looks at his Suunto GPS watch, and again at his map. He points to a dirt road leading south-west. ‘There,' he says to Jamal, then pointing. ‘That's the path. Go there.'

‘That's ISIL.'

‘We're in Kurdistan,' Arwood says. ‘ISIL is in al-Anbar in the western desert. They're south of here. Not up north.'

Jamal shakes his head. ‘That was then. Now is now. After the Sunni tribes unified with the Anbar Awakening, ISIL went to other places. With the Syrian war they have moved back to al-Anbar, but are also in many other places. Here and there. It's a big mess. A very big mess.'